AFTER-TRAVEL REFLECTION & CREATION

A week ago today I was on a flight from Istanbul to Toronto, having flown out of Tabriz (in northwestern Iran) two days earlier. In my checked bags I had a kilo of honey, some dried apricots, halvah, a selection of sweets from Yazd, sour pomegranate fruit leather (called robb in Iran), fresh pistachios, a second-hand Farsi-language cookbook, and a bundle of small kilims, as well as my well-worn clothing. My other luggage weighed next to nothing physically, but was a rich load: memories, emotions, early understandings, jam-packed notebooks, and digital photos.

I’ve been thinking about this process of travel, memory, and story. People have different ways of remembering. Mine tend to be visual: I have pictures in my mind after a trip. They’re not so much of actual events. Instead they are images generated by my thoughts about events or people or places. I would call them secondary images of events. At the same time I also have hundreds of photos, moments preserved, you could call them.

Because my memory works with past experiences, digesting and processing them in sometimes surprising ways, in the weeks right after a trip I like to keep that set of mental pictures uninfluenced by the “reality” of the photos I have taken. Once that digesting and processing is well underway, many memories have reshaped themselves as stories or vignettes that are informative or tell a small story in themselves.

When I then look at the photos I often notice the gaps between my (processed) “memories” and what I see in the details of the shots. The differences between them interest me. Sometimes they are due to the fact that I failed to notice certain elements of a scene, perhaps because I was caught up with other details, or with an emotional context that kept my focus elsewhere. Sometimes the differences are because I have subconsciously “forgotten” inconvenient, or ugly or uncomfortable details…

At the moment I am still early on in the digesting process. Stories and cross-connections, ideas about place and people, food and attitudes, are still taking shape, and will be for the next month or two. I’ll try to help that process along by doing recipe work. I find that as I draft recipes and shop and prep and cook, I often become more sure about the importance of particular details, or I get a flash of memory or insight.

This is why I am such a believer in developing and testing my recipes on my own to start with. It leaves me with a free head and imagination…so that unbidden thoughts can surface freely.

All of this probably sounds rather abstract and perhaps unreliable or fabulist to you. After all, am I not, in writing cookbooks, supposed to be transmitting information rather than invention?

Well, yes and no. I am not a journalist, digging out “the truth” in a factual literal sense. Yes I want to get the recipes right and to give them full honour and respect. But there are other truths that story-telling and imaginative reconstruction and reflection can elucidate. The aha! as I realise what anxiety or concern lay behind a comment someone made to me, may take me weeks to arrive at. But when I am able to understand the human, emotional, and social dimensions of a situation, then I think both the story-telling and the recipes gain strength and reliabilty of a deeper kind.

I hope that those of you who have had the stamina to read this far can make sense of what I am trying to say. I’ve been thinking about the connections between the “facts” on the ground, be they in Burma or Georgia or Iran, and the emotional reactions I feel or sense in a place. I admit that they are complicated.

It’s here, in the human complexities of place and perception, that I find the juiciest excitement and the largest potential for creative understanding. The trick is to not worry and to not force the pace. Sometimes at this stage right after a trip I begin to get impatient. I want to be further along in synthesizing my understanding. But things take the time they take.

And so, in the meantime, I plan to try making Tabrizi kofta, and sangak (bread baked on a bed of pebbles) and dizi, and more. I’m trusting that the same process of subconscious story-shaping that has happened before, most recently with the Burma book, will take over and allow me to create a rich and reliable set of stories and recipes in this new book of mine.

All I need is some tolerance and understanding from friends and family as I look or act a little dazed or distracted…

THIS WOMAN'S THOUGHTS ON BEING A FEMALE PERSON IN IRAN

NOTE: I wrote this last night, but had no way of posting it until I arrived with my aged laptop in Istanbul a couple of hours ago...

Well here I am on the last evening of my time in Iran. I’m in a rather basic hotel room in the historic trading city of Tabriz, in the northwest corner of Iran not far from the borders of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Turkey. Tomorrow morning I have a Turkish Airlines flight to Istanbul, and two days later a direct flight to Toronto.

As you probably know, Iran still has substantial firewalls to block access to social media like Facebook and Twitter, and to many other sites too. In that way it feels a little like Burma did during the time I was making trips there for my Burma book, from early 2009 until late 2011. But in Burma not only were there firewalls, there was also virtually no access to cell phones or to wi-fi, and very few internet cafes except in Rangoon/Yangon. When I found an internet cafe in a town, I’d go and ask the young guys there (it was always young guys) to help me bypass the firewalls so that I could get access to my e-mails. Yahoo was blocked; Gmail was generally easier. And they’d always manage it, by using something I heard called a “proxy”.

Fast forward to Iran now in late 2013. Social media have continued to evolve, and so have cel phones. Iran has both. And many people here are on FB and Twitter. How? you ask. Well people download a proxy server for themselves (a sophistication not available to most people in Burma a few years ago) and then they can fly over the firewalls. 

I had no proxy server (failed to deal with the issue before coming) and no way of downloading one once I was here (because of course access to that is also blocked), until I got to Kerman, in southern Iran. A nice guy I met there who is IT-proficient helped me download Puffin, a proxy server, onto my smart-phone. He did it using his tablet and bluetooth. 

And suddenly after two weeks of blocked access I was reconnected to Twitter and Facebook. The whole process - of restriction and then evasion of restriction - reminded me of all the attempts by governments, from China to Iran to Burma and more, who try to shut off their citizens’ access to the rest of the world. It used to be possible to enclose people behind an “iron curtain” or just a flurry of propaganda. But now there are ways the determined can push through electronically. Perhaps only North Korea has managed to lock its citizens away. At least so we’re told. 

Anyhow, once Puffin was flying me over the firewalls, one of the first messages I tweeted was to the president of Iran, who is actively on Twitter. I suggested that people in Iran could have better access to his tweets if the firewalls here came down.

That is of course true, but what’s also clear from my time here, and from things people have told me, is that Iranians in general are brilliant at “work-arounds”. They don’t take no for an answer, but instead figure out alternative routes to get what they want or need. And so people here who want to be online and connected are managing to do so, despite the government. Still, if the firewalls came down many more, I imagine, would get confident and engaged with social media and the wider world.

Other work-arounds here have to do with the dress code restrictions. Women are still by law required to cover their head and neck when out in public and to dress “modestly”. The definitions have changed over time, loosening in the nineties, then tightening again when Amedinajad came into power, and now softening again. In general they mean at a minimum wearing a headscarf tied or crossed under the chin, and a “manteau” a garment that goes down to the knees or nearly, over trousers.

Many or most women dislike the restrictions. In less-conservative places, such as Teheran and Shiraz, women, especially those who come from more moneyed families, wear light wispy scarves, and often set them way back on their hair. And their versions of manteau are equally gestural, brightly coloured and very form-fitting, often worn with fashionable high heels. 

All the emphasis on the face, as the only free and clearly visible aspect of the woman, has led to another perhaps predictable result: plastic surgery is fashionable and very unremarkable, almost expected, among young urban women. They have collagen to pump up cheekbones, the lips are made fuller, and the nose is “fixed. The result is that noses with a white strip of bandage on top are a common sight. There’s also a lot of make-up, thickly applied, from foundation to eye shadow to lipstick. And eyebrows are plucked out completely and then redrawn in pencil, or tattooed on, in a higher wider sweep. 

Women in more conservative families or communities wear a black or dull-coloured manteau in the form of a loosely fitting trenchcoat closed up to the neck, with black pants and socks or stockings and black shoes as well as a scarf or other hair and head covering. Over that many wear a chador, usually black, a long one piece cape like a nun’s veil from another era, that rests on the top of the head and floats/drapes down to the ground. It’s open in the front, has no fastening, so women clutch it closed with one hand in front of them, or hold it in their teeth sometimes so they have both hands free.

The result is that in conservative towns, and at some shrines and mosques where it’s compulsory that women wear a chador, the women become a flock of black creatures... It’s disturbing to think about and to see. Only when you get close and are talking to a woman in a black chador can you sense her personal distinctiveness. Otherwise the outfit erases her, just as nun’s habits were designed to do to the women who wore them.

The wonder is that women here manage to function with confidence and strength in public, despite the censoriousness of the laws and the special police who enforce them.

I stayed two nights with a family in a village ten days ago. There were two daughters, aged 14 and 11, both alert intelligent people. I watched them dress for school the last morning I was there, a Saturday, the first day of the school week. Niloufer, the younger one, still in primary school, wore pants, a long manteau top, and a kind of pink wimple of stretchy knit material that framed her face and covered her hair and neck completely. Over that she wore a looser head-covering, a kind of scarf. The older daughter was entirely in black, as the school requred of girls her age: pants, manteau/trenchcoat, wimple and scarf over the hair, and on top of all that, a black chador to the ground. Her liveliness drowned in all the black coverup.

That kind of clothing requirement in school that tells girls to cover up and hide their bodies must cripple some. I remember how gauche and uncertain I was about my physical self, about what was acceptable or “ok”, when I was a teenager. But unlike these girls and young women,  who have not since early childhood been out in public with their hair floating free (just imagine!) I had never been told that it was my responsibility to hide my hair, my neck, my arms.

Of course as a women visitor here in Iran, I had to follow the rules. They have eased up, as I said above, or at least they are not as strictly interpreted and enforced as in earlier times.  I didn’t want to give offence. That’s how I felt at first.  But once I realised that most people disliked the rules, I didn’t worry about offending custom.  I was instead aware that I could be chided for having my scarf on so loosely (and incompetently let me admit) that “too much” hair was showing.

And finally it happened, that a man in authority insisted that I correct the thing he reproached me for: the front of my hair was showing too much. It was at a very holy place, the holiest place in Iran for Shia Muslims: the Shrine of Imam Reza in Mashad. (He is the eighth Imam, and was murdered not far from Mashad. About twenty million people visit the huge shrine complex every year.) I was outside, not yet in the grounds, and had asked directions of one of the guys who keep an eye on things, not guards exactly, but officials. He gave me a censorious look and gestured to his hair, to show me where I was at fault. Ony once I had adjusted my scarf did he answer my question.

The encounter was a small thing. But how would it feel if I had been born and raised here, and perhaps was especially sensitive to criticism, or just not confident? Surely it would make me over-compliant, anxious to make sure that my tenue was correct at all times.

And indeed, even unworried, after my first few days in Iran I found myself taking on the habits of the women here: you reach up and feel your head on top to check whether your scarf has slipped back. Then you feel with your fingers along the edge of the scarf, where it meets your face, and check that no hair has strayed forward and that the edges are even. It becomes a tic, endlessly repeated. A time-lapse of women in a bus or at a restaurant or in a car, or in a classroom I suppose too, would show a pattern of check, recheck, adjust, readjust, going on all over the female landscape.

Wild. And taken for granted by the women of Iran. They have to take it for granted or it would surely drive them around the bend. In any case they have more important thngs to worry about: They are doctors and teachers and filmmakers, mothers and grandmothers, sweepers and cooks, secretaries and managers, most of them managing all the cooking and other household matters as their second or third job. And they are strong.

AFTERWARD: In the plane this morning, as the doors were closed and we started to move off, there was a rustling sound here and there as most of the women passengers, including me, removed their headscarves and shook out their hair. And then of course most also shed their manteau, emerging, in some cases, with very skin-tight outfits of various kinds...

A BEGINNER'S VIEW OF ISTANBUL

A rather embarrassing number of weeks have passed since I last posted here. No excuses really. But I’m now in Istanbul, rather dazed by the lovely complexities of the city. And to anticipate your questions: no I have not yet been to see the Hagia Sophia (which I did see the only other time I visited Istanbul, long ago in 1982); nor any of the offerings in the Istanbul Biennal; nor much else except outdoor walking, ferry, bus, and light rail routes, and small restaurants of various kinds.

First to the transport: Where I live, in downtown Toronto, a large rich city of nearly 3 million, we have not built a subway line for a long time, and have only added a few tram/streetcar lines. In Istanbul, a large very complicated terrain loaded with historical obstacles, they’ve gone from 45 km of track to 145 or so and are headed for 400 km by 2020. Impressive. And it shows. I mean yes the traffic is snarly, but there is a dizzying number of transit options to cope with people’s need to move up and down hills and over large stretches of water. All of it can be done using a prepaid card, like the Oyster card of London or the Octopus card of HongKong, that gets scanned each time you enter a new mode of transport. It’s all much smoother-running because of the easy scanning: no tokens, no tickets…

Just to give you an idea: I am staying in an airbnb not far from Taksim Square (of May demos fame). To get to, say, the main tourist places or to the ferries, I walk up to Taksim, then take the funicular (underground cable car) down the hill to Kabatas, then get straight onto the tram, which carries me along the shore (past two or three huge cruise ships, big boxy apartment-buildings on the water) and over the new Galata bridge. From there I can walk two minutes and catch a ferry across the Sea of Marmara to Kadikoy, on the Asian side, a fifteen or twenty minute trip. And there, as I had been told before I left, is a lively market neighbourhood, fabulous walking streets and beautiful food scenes all around.

So that’s where I went yesterday nooontime (after spending the morning at the consulate of Iran, waiting, then getting instructions and forms, and then waiting again to hand everything back in; they tell me the visa will be delivered on Monday morning).

I’d been over to Kadikoy the previous day for a wander around, in company with an immersethrough friend B who happened to be in Istanbul for the first two days I was here. We rambled following our noses, choosing the most interesting looking streets, and got lost without knowing we were lost (or caring).

Some of the fish in the market – Jake Tilson looked at the photo and says they are a kind of bonito – had their gilled pulled out and kind of separated so that they looked like dark-cherry-coloured flowers, very beautiful in a massed display. There were fresh hamsi (anchovies) all silver gleaming, and other fish I know nothing about and could only admire for their beauty. And there were ripe figs, large and small, as well as pale to deeper red pomegranates, always with a few broken open to show their juicy promise. Several shops had heads of leaf lettuce arranged in rows, each topped by a small bundle of red radishes, like a small bouquet, the red an almost shocking contrast to the bright green.

In the midst of all the plenty was an enticing-looking bookshop full of books in Turkish with beautiful leather bindings. Of course we went in to look. And when we asked, Yes, down a steep flight of stairs were books in English and French and more in Turkish. I found a Virago edition of a fantastical novel by Naomi Mitchison called Travel Light in which Constantinople plays a small role. Later, as we found our way back to the ferry again, I wondered out loud if I could find my way back to the bookstore again.

That was two days ago. When we went back to Kadikoy yesterday, though all the same market loveliness was on display, we were less observant, for we were on a mission to find Musa’s restaurant Ciya. We also wanted to spot a lachmacun place called Halil that the deeply knowledgeable Robyn Eckhardt of Eating Asia had told me about. After asking a couple of people, we found ourselves on a street we recognised from the day before. First we found Halil, and then, right opposite the bookstore – aha! – was Ciya.

We feasted at Ciya (I hadn’t eaten before leaping out the door for my visa and was starving). And it was like the best kind of home cooking, with layers of flavour and care, that’s the only way I can describe it. Of course I am too unknowledgeable about Turkish cuisine to tell you in detail, but the lamb with quince was wonderful, the kibbeh was perfect, the wheat berry and cheese stuffing in the vine leaves was fresh on the tongue… I am hoping to get back there, perhaps on one of the evenings I have on my way through after Iran… (And I have promised myself a visit to Halil too.)

After the luck of my first two days in Istanbul, today was more bumpy. I looked up a resto I wanted to try, Google sent me to a strange suburban location, but so what? I thought. There's light rail to nearby. In fact, no, there's not, because it has been torn up and is being replaced with a metro line. Meantime, take a bus said the man. I did, but it was very far, and then it turned out that Google had sent me to the right street address, but in a different quarter, not the right one. I was miles from where I wanted to be. I should have phoned first, of course, to check. But it wasn't wasted time, I said to myself firmly as I stood in a crowded bus hoping I was headed the right way on the return. I got to see parts of the city I'd never have been to, and to see how hard life is for loner-distance commuters.

All of this reminds me of the not-knowingness of travel. I have spent most of my travel time recently in Burma and Thailand. And while Burma was a layered puzzle that I have only barely begun to get familiar with, I did at least have some clue by the time I’d finished work on my book.

In Turkey, and even more so in the next weeks in Iran, I am again starting from scratch, and in a more visibly complex environment. At least here, thanks to Ataturk, who moved Turkish into a western alphabet, I can read the street signs and sound out other signs to try to make sense of them (taksi, bufe, etc). But in Iran I will be as illiterate as I was in Burma at the start.

That illiteracy forces me to use other cues, to be observant of details. You might almost say it forces me back into fuller awarenes. Just as, on that first trip to Kadikoy I noticed lots of market details because I was tuning in to what was before me, while on the second, as a hostage to a map and directions and a fixed goal, I noticed very little, so the illiterate is alert to more, whereas, when reading is an option, we tend to not see much beyond the signage.

Do I revel in my ignorance and the not-knowingness of my situational illiteracy? Yes, in many ways I do. It’s humbling (never a bad thing) and I like it as a reminder of how much I usually fail to notice. I always hope I’ll stay attuned to that reminder, and keep trying to tune in, even when I am in familiar surroundings. But mindfulness is easier to talk about than it is to practise, don’t you find?

KNEADING MEMORIES AS IRAN TRAVEL BECKONS

Last week at the Kneading Conference West was a huge treat. I like being physical, and the bread- and cracker-making that I did for various workshops – along with wonderful Dawn Woodward of Evelyn’s Crackers, with whom I co-presented – was satisfying, and tiring too of course. We did a lot of baking for a tasting of (freshly milled whole grain) single varietal wheats, so interesting. I can't wait for next year's tastings. 

Meantime there were lots of other pleasures: exploring the amazing orchards at the Agricultural Research Center in Mount Vernon; talking, eating, and drinking with friends old and new; and cooking too. Best flavours? Hard to say, but the Alchemy apple that Dawn and I shared, forbidden fruit from a survivor tree at the Center, ranks very high. (It has Cox Pippin in its ancestry, so a firm-crisp bite, but it also has a sweetness and complex flavour. Just a dream.) High ranking too for the freshly shucked kumamoto oysters at Taylor's, that we ate sitting by the water last Saturday afternoon….

Now I’m back in Toronto, the moon is about to be full, and my trip to Iran via Istanbul is less than two weeks away. Can’t wait. But meantime, as the moon shone straight into my room through a crack in the curtains at 4 this morning, I started to run through the to-do lists that whirl in my head but that I still have difficulty remembering to write down. They include small things like shopping for black socks and a manteau or two for Iran; larger issues like learning a little Farsi, and preparing some language pages on the (old laptop) computer I am planning to take with me; urgent tasks like preparing for the talks and presentations I am giving this weekend at Savour Stratford, some of them Burma-related, some wider; and travel detail issues like what bag will I take, how much money to bring (there being no access to cash once I am in Iran, just like Burma until recently, so at least I have an idea of what’s involved), what shoes? and the trivial fusses that go along with packing decisions.

Hmmm…no wonder I sometimes feel scattered.

Yesterday morning though I had a wonderfully focussing experience. I went for a heart ultrasound to give my doctor a baseline (and yes, I have an active-person’s slow pulse and good blood pressure, and all looks very healthy I gather). Have you ever seen images of your heart beating? Or listened to the wonderful syncopations? It was thrilling and awe-inspiring to watch the regular pumping, see the “flapping” of the valve (can’t tell you which one), look at the heart’s structure from different angles. And there was a bonus: The very nice and experienced cardiology tech was teaching a student as she did the tests, so I learned a little about what they see and what they watch out for. As I walked out of the hospital and down the sunny street I was exhilarated, as high as I was when, years ago, I walked home from having a pregnancy ultrasound.

Life is mysterious, and the heart in each of us keeps us going. Best to have respect for it, treat it well, and keep it healthy, for it’s working without a break…

Now, as I round the corner on this blogpost, I look up and realise that there’s bright sunshine outside, and blue sky. The cat is asleep in the corner, in a patch of sun. It’s time for me to get moving. The writing and other sedentary “activities” of home, after the lovely physicality of the Kneading Conference, leave me feeling flat. The obvious answer is to remember to get my blood moving. And so I’m heading out now, heeding the call of the lovely September sun and the always interesting life on the streets of Toronto.

FOOD & TALK AND MORE FOOD & TALK

I have an image that keeps popping back, of an honour guard of tall blooming hostas, marching down either side of a front walk in the village of Middleburgh. I passed them Friday as I was nearing the end of the long drive from Toronto to a farm near Rensellaarville, at the edge of the Catskills. By then I was tired and impatient to be out in the air rather than driving. But somehow, as happens occasionally, I noticed them clearly and then the snapshot memory of them stuck in my head. They made me smile in their vigour.

All it takes is some upbeat or light-hearted nudge sometimes, to take us from flatness or tiredness and remind us to stay alert and engaged. And on Friday the hostas did the trick.

Soon, after a stop at a rural junction to ask directions of two guys in a truck, and another directions-seeking chat with some guys outside a bar five miles further, I reached the red-barned farm where Molly O’Neil’s Longhouse Food Revival was about to start. What a pleasure to step out of the car onto green grass, see the wood-fired oven burning and young people working hard making last minute preparations for the weekend, and catch sight of other early arrivals and dive into conversations.

Now it’s Sunday morning. The big day is done, with its public performances and discussions and its many smaller conversations in the interstices; and with its feasting. Whew! Thanks to all the chefs and cooks who managed to feed a cast of hundreds with such grace and imagination and deliciousness. We had slow-roasted goat (the goats came from the Berry farm up the road); an Ethiopian cabbage and carrot dish with a side of berbere, a helping of (the Indonesian) rojak, Persian jewelled rice, and much more (including Sorel, a spiced hibiscus liquor now made in Brooklyn), then saffron ice cream, and other sweets… That was just dinner.

But even if we’d had only simple bread and cheese and raw vegetables I would have been very happy, for it was the conversations I had with friends old and new that juiced the day. Thanks, everyone! I think many people caught sight of new ideas or perspectives, or were encouraged to pursue the projects they were already embarked on (there were a lot of young people, and not-so-youngs here, all involved in some way in writing about and working with food, food journalism, food research and ideas, etc, in every kind of medium). That’s the best thing about coming together with others. It’s not so much direct learning, but informal contacts and the sparking of new thoughts, in unexpected ways.

I’ll put on music on my way home, to keep me company in the car, but my real company will be the conversations that I play back to myself, and the ideas they may lead me to as I reflect on them.

On another note, I was reminded again this morning, by Ariel Dorfman's piece in today’s New York Times, that this year, on September 11, it will be forty years since the coup that ousted Salvador Allende and killed and maimed so many in Chile and beyond… 

HEADING INTO NEW CHALLENGES & SAYING FAREWELL TO SUMMER

The school children and their teachers are back in the classroom and the weather is giving them a little help: it’s grey and cool here in Toronto today. Do you remember that little pit of anxious anticipation when you were a kid? Do you remember wondering what you were going to wear on that first day? On the second question, I remember the details of only one year: what I wore to the first day of grade six, a favourite cotton dress of fresh green and white. Hard to understand why some memories stick…

This big turning point in the year is always so freighted with anticipations of all kinds and regrets about the end of summer’s long days and ease. Last night – the eve of the change - as I have in the past, I had friends over for supper. The youngest is headed into grade two, and was a little anxious, but fundamentally happy and fine. The eldest was headed to school today as a teacher. Several more start university responsibilities in a week or two. And the rest of us just reverberated, mostly privately, with memories and echoes of Labour Days past.

All this was against a backdrop, or perhaps I should say foreground, of delectables: slices of charcoal grilled pork; small grilled Pakistani-style sliders; mizuna salad, oh so fresh; sticky rice, a mix of black and white that was chewy and satisfying (I just had the rice leftovers for breakfast); a chopped mix of grilled tomatillos, eggplant, and onions that was terrific, an improvisation; sauteed shiitakes; sliced heirloom tomato; parboiled yellow beans in vinaigrette, unchopped so we could eat them one by one in our fingers; boiled potatoes cut into large wedges and wok-fried with a little sliced fennel in turmeric-tinted olive oil. There was a pause while my prebaked pate sucree crust was topped with chopped peaches (the last of summer probably), wild blueberries, a little sugar, and a small amount of yogurt-egg mixture scented with nutmeg and dried ginger and then baked at 375 to a custard-tart loveliness.

And then there it was, a farewell taste of summer fruit to send us on our way into the school year, the travel year, the work year…

Some new things to announce: The Burma book is now available as an E Book, and so are the three regional Asian cookbooks that I wrote with Jeffrey Alford. There’s a deal on in September for each of the three that I’ve been asked to tell you about. Here’s the link: ecookbook-club

My pre-approval for my visa to Iran has come through. I’m hoping to go look and eat and taste and photograph food and markets and people etc in the month of October. It is so exciting, and yes of course also a little anxiety-making, given the tensions in the region. I can’t wait. But if I get to go I won’t be posting anything for the time I am there. I’ll leave a laptop in Istanbul, where I’ll have some days at either end. And meantime I’m trying to figure out my packing needs etc. All advice welcome, especially anyone who has been recently and at this time of year. I know about the need for a manteau and headscarf, of course…

And before that there’s the Kneading Conference West ( kneadingconferencewest) from September 12 to 14, in the Skagit Valley in northern Washington State; the Stratford Food Fair called Savour Stratford on September 21 and 22, where I’ll be doing various talkings and demos etc (culinaryfestival) ; and on this coming weekend the Longhouse Food revival in Renselaarville NY (SW of Albany 35 miles or so (longhouse).

It really does feel like the end of summer ease and flexibility and the start of a new work year!