Recipes for Trouble

Succulent, fragrant, fleshy.

Blushing.

Juicy.

I crave them. I stalk them in health food stores. I stroke them and sniff their skin and then secretly take them home.

At this time of year, I am obsessed with blood oranges.

They tell me about spring. They take foods I eat all the time and infuse them with flavour and excitement.

They make me want to cook, to invite folks over, to have delicious smells swirling through the house.

My pal Nomi came over for dinner last week. I made an appetizer salad of mixed greens, sliced roasted beets, chopped blood orange, walnuts, and blood orange dressing. We had other things, too - chicken tagine, dried fruits dipped in chocolate, vanilla ice cream - it was quite a feast! But that salad stole the show, and set the stage for a long, luxuriant, evening’s worth of conversation: about our activist histories, about Nomi’s work at a women’s centre in the suburbs, about my new girlfriend (henceforth to be known as The Guitar Player), about Nomi’s children and grandchildren.

Later in the week, I made dinner just for myself. It’s a lovely thing to do: choose the freshest piece of fish you can find, and the first asparagus of the year. Imagine how that could contrast with soba noodles you bought at a tiny Japanese shop on Queen Street West on the coldest day of the year. You had just ducked in to get a minutes’ warmth but then you remembered how much you love buckwheat noodles and they stayed in your cupboard for a month, waiting to be written into a script.

Do you have any favourite recipes for blood oranges?

Soy, Ginger & Blood Orange Trout

This recipe comes from an excellent food blog, Beyond Salmon (“Everything you ever wanted to know about buying and cooking fish”) by Helen Rennie. She writes:

“ You can put this dish together within 5 minutes, pop it in the oven and the results will be so delicious and impressive that you can serve it to the fanciest dinner guest and get rave reviews. It’s that good”.

2 trout (or salmon) fillets
1 inch piece of ginger, grated
2 T Japanese soy sauce
juice & zest of 1 blood orange
1 clove of garlic, grated or finely minced

Preheat oven to 375. In a small oven proof dish, lay fish fillets skin side down. In a small bowl or measuring cup, mix together the soy sauce, orange juice & zest, garlic and ginger. Pour over fish and broil for 5-10 minutes or until fish is just done. Remove from oven and serve.

(Note: If making this for one, you can either halve the recipe, or freeze one of the marinated filets).

Beet and Blood Orange Salad

4 medium beets
3 tablespoons olive oil
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper
1/4 cup blood orange juice (from about 1 blood orange)
1 tablespoon maple syrup
1 tablespoon white or red wine vinegar
1 medium red onion, thinly sliced
3 blood oranges, peeled, cut into1/4-inch-thick slices
1/2 cup chopped walnuts
About 2 cups mixed greens, including arugula, for a slight bitter tang.

Preheat oven to 400°F. Slice beets thinly and toss with 1 tablespoon oil, 1 teaspoon sea salt, and 1/2 teaspoon pepper. Arrange on baking tray and roast for about ten-fifteen minutes.

Whisk orange juice, maple syrup, vinegar, and remaining 2 tablespoons oil in large bowl to blend. Season vinaigrette with salt and pepper.

Arrange beets oranges, sliced red onions, and walnuts, over mixed greens. Toss with dressing and serve.

The thing about writing a memoir is, it gets you thinking about roots.

You get to worrying. What will my family think? How will friends and various exes react? And what about the Divas of the Church, those notorious Ukrainian ladies about whom I write with love, but also with humour and irreverence? Will they go after me with carving knives and caustic commentary? Will I never eat their homemade cherry squares again?

In one part of the book, I write: “Roots can nourish, but they can also develop a bitter taste”. I’m talking metaphorically here, musing on the traditions of my diasporic culture and how, if not allowed to change, they represent only stagnation; no new ideas or ways of being allowed.

But Elif Shafak, author of the controversial novel The Bastard of Istanbul, has a refreshing take on the dilemma of a writer caught between the old world and the new. She said, in an interview with the Toronto Star’s John Freeman (Friday, February 9 2007):

“There is a metaphor I like very much in the Qur-an, in the Holy Book, and it’s about a tree that has its roots up in the air. When my nationalist critics say you have no roots, you are a so-called Turk, I say, no, but I do have roots: they’re just not rooted in the ground. They are up in the air.”

Freeman reports on a younger generation of Turkish writers who are using the novel “to reimagine their society from within.” From within: does he mean, from within the culture? Or from within themselves – imagining a culture from the heart, and not from what external appearances might demand?

The thing about being an artist is, you never know if what you do changes anything. I only know: making art has saved my ass, time and time again. My writing knew queer, before my body did. My pen, my computer keyboard, my sketchbook, my camera, helped me construct a trail that led me out into the world, turning my roots upside down.

Last December, as I was feverishly working on a draft of my manuscript towards a deadline, I had an odd, unsettling dream.

The table of contents page of my food memoir gets caught in the furnace of my mother’s house, setting it on fire. I try desperately to rescue my family. My youngest sister, an infant in the dream, comes running towards my open arms, but then runs past me, and perishes. The only survivors are two distant relatives, whom I hardly know.

I survive the fire. I save only myself. Distant others save themselves.

I was staying at my mother’s at the time. I told her about the dream. She shrugged, nonchalantly, and then fried me some eggs for breakfast, buttered rye toast on the side.

As I made my ma some carrot-apple-beet juice, she told me her dream. Being in the kitchen, in bathrobes and slippers, our hands focused on food preparation, made these topsy-turvy stories easier to tell.

“I dreamt I was getting married again. I had met this guy. I didn’t know him very well. But he seemed nice. The priest from the church in Edmonton was going to officiate.”

I laughed out loud, delighted at this sudden glimpse into my mom’s unconscious - so loose and free! - and at the thought of this amiable guy, about to do a trip down the aisle with my mother.

New ways of being and thinking, flowing like liquid mercury, in the night.

Upside-down, indeed.

“Whatever occurs is neither the beginning nor the end.”
-Pema Chodron

Marge Piercy has written about ‘writer’s cats’ - the special feline friend that will snooze on your desk all afternoon as you wrangle a phrase, sculpt a paragraph, coax a chapter into full flower, or over-mix your metaphors (as I’m doing right now) into a soupy mess. Either way, the cat is by your side, eying you balefully as you sigh, cut, paste and delete. At some point she might walk over to the printout of the draft you’re agonizing over and sprawl luxuriously in top of it, as if to say:

“It’s only paper. Chill.”

Grrrlfriend-the-cat was a stray: she found me in the Kootenays of British Columbia as I took a walk in a forest, one beautiful, gilded summer evening. She was mewing impetuously; I took her home. I was spending the summer there, writing, and since no one responded to the Lost Kitty posters we put up all around that rural community, she became my companion - for thirteen years.

When she got sick last summer no one thought she’d last this long. But she rallied enough to fly with me across the country, spend a summer on a porch of an old Vancouver house greeting anyone who happened by, and then return to Toronto for her last winter.

This weekend she called it quits. Stopped eating. Could barely walk anymore; fell into a peaceful sleep, still breathing. When I came home that evening I found she had somehow, miraculously, hauled herself onto my bed. She wanted to spend the night there, next to me. As I petted her before falling asleep, I felt an uncanny, and almost joyful sense of mutual understanding, between human and animal: it was her time.

My lover and I spent much of the next day with her, being close by, talking, cooking, eating, reading. She died in the night.

It’s different than the passing of a sibling, a parent or a friend. It is a lighter sort of passing, but profound nonetheless. It is absence, rather than loss. A companion is gone from my life.

Someone suggested that my anticipatory grief (I was disconsolate earlier this week!) is also a way of anticipating, and working through, other, future losses.

Pema Chodron, a Buddhist nun, writes: “Death in everyday life could also be defined as experiencing all the things we don’t want…. Having a relationship with death in everyday life means that we begin to be able to wait, to relax with insecurity, with panic, with embarrassment, with things not working out…”

So anyways, I’m making soup today. Sunday soup, a grounding ritual for me. I’m working on a deeply flavoured chicken stock, and trying out a new recipe – creamy chicken vegetable soup from everybodylikessandwiches.blogspot.com.

Life – beautiful, full-flavoured, complex and uneven – goes on.

Photos by Laurie Bell.

Once, on an icy winter night, I saw a girl on the College streetcar with a big heart-shaped box of chocolates on her lap.

It was a week after Valentine’s day. She was at the very front of the streetcar, and that box straddled her crotch, and her spread-out legs. I can still remember what she looked like: pale face, long black hair, heavy eye makeup. Black leather jacket, a plaid skirt and tights. She was eating the chocolates one by one, slowly, dreamily, and rather sullenly, too, I thought. Did she buy them for herself, on sale, at Shoppers Drugmart? Did someone give them to her, and was that person now long gone? I’ was alone that Valentines, had gotten through it stoically. The girl with the heart shaped box on her lap was all I needed to turn the corner on a crappy week: her soulful performance was a valentine just for me.

One Valentine’s Day, when I lived in Montreal, my upstairs neighbour Ormand invited my friend Sheena and myself for dinner. It so happened that all three of us were involuntarily single at the time. The plan was to drink several gin martinis amid the opulence of Ormand’s over-stuffed apartment, eat his shrimp curry, complain about ex-lovers, and make disparaging comments about relationships in general. Sheena knew this could only end in tears. So she brought over a chocolate layer cake festooned with our names, with hearts, and symbols of queerness – triangles and entwined women’s and entwined men’s symbols. It wasn’t just a cake, it was a political statement. That cake transformed our bitterness. We toasted to friendship several times that night, to passionate queer friendship that, as we drunkenly affirmed, outlasts every affair and one-night stand.

-Excerpted in part from Comfort Food for Breakups: The Memoir of a Hungry Girl

Happy Valentines.