Recipes for Trouble

I was waiting for some news.

News that would change the contours of my life. News of something I wanted and dreaded so much it felt like my heart would break out of its skin. Like I would go mental!

The Buddhists would say, return to the breath. But I decided to return to soup. I pulled out a recipe I’d been meaning to try and I went at it with fevered concentration. The radio was on: a civil rights activist on refugee detention camps in the U.S.; the tinny, defensive voice of an embedded reporter in Afghanistan; something about sheep. I just kept making soup. Flavours building upon one another: onion; cinnamon; basil. A swirl of tomato, the slow melt of lentils.

The call came a few days later.I was in the photocopy room at the university where I’ve worked as contract faculty for the last two years. (see this article by Wayne Arthurson on exploitative working conditions in universities). I was making copies of an article in the April 2 issue of McLean’s Magazine. It was titled, “It Hurts When You Call Me Professor”. I picked up the phone.

I got the job.

I went into my office, closed the door. I let out a huge gasp. I danced around the room. I called my friend Terri: we shrieked at each other over the phone. She’s known me for fifteen years, the entire span of my sessional teaching career. She knows what this means. For the first time in all my years of academic labour, I will be fully renumerated for my work. I’ll be supported in my research. I’ll be able to provide students with a better learning experience. My job won’t stop and start every four months. I’ll have benefits. I’ll have colleagues. I won’t have to go on unemployment insurance in the summer.

I went back into the photocopy room and kept making copies of that article, to hand to friends, colleagues, to pin to my door. I don’t want to forget. I will never forget.

That evening, I called my mother and surprised her with the news. Her voice softened into relief. She kept repeating: “I’m so glad”. She sounded like someone whose daughter had finally made it safely to shore, after so many years navigating the treacherous, wide open seas.

This weekend, I will gather with friends who are as happy, relieved, and proud as I am. We’ll drink, embrace, be silly, and dance.

Yesterday, I was with The Guitar Player at Dufferin Grove Farmers’ Market. The dazzling displays of kale, mesclun greens, blood oranges, wood-oven-baked bread, organic perogies, wild mushrooms, and sweet potatoes mingled with the woodsy, earthy smells of spring: it made her hungry. I remembered I had some lentil soup in the fridge. My tongue slipped, in unconscious acknowledgement of the monumental events of the past few days.

“C’mon over and have some mental soup,” I said.

Hearty Lentil Soup

This recipe is adapted from Cook’s Illustrated Magazine, where it was repeatedly tested and refined. In this (semi-vegetarian) version of a soup you may have made many times before, the lentils don’t get mushy because of the way in which the lentils are ’sweated’ when they go into the acidic tomato base. To brighten the flavour, I impulsively added a handful of finely chopped seeded kumquats I had on hand - you could also throw in a 1/4 cup chopped orange segments - if you do the kumquat thing, omit the lemon juice at the end. This is the best lentil soup I’ve ever made.

1 large onion, chopped fine
2 medium carrots, chopped fine
3 medium garlic cloves, smashed & chopped
1 tspn ground cumin
1 tspn cinnamon
1 tspn ground coriander
1 14 oz can of diced tomatoes
1 bay leaf
2 tablespoons minced fresh basil or thyme
1 cup lentils (black, brown or green), rinsed
1 tspn salt, pepper to taste
1/2 cup dry white wine
41/2 cups low-sodium chicken or vegetable broth
11/2 cups water
11/2 tspns lemon juice
3 tblspns minced fresh parsley leaves

Saute onion and carrots in lg stockpot until soft. Add garlic and spices; cook, stirring contantly, until fragrant, about 1 minute. Add tomatoes, bay leaf,, cook until simmering. Stir in lentils, salt and pepper to taste; cover and simmer for about ten minutes. Uncover, increase heat to high, add wine and bring to simmer. Add chicken broth and water; bring to boil, cover partially and reduce heat to low. Simmer until lentils are tender but still hold their shape, 30 to 40 minutes, depending on the type of lentil you are using. With a hand-held blender, puree some of the soup. Stir in lemon juice and parsley and heat until hot, about 5 minutes.

Love doesn’t always appear in a form you recognize. My friends and lovers are family too; sometimes the meals they cook nourish me more than even Baba’s endless feasts. I am this family’s self-appointed bearer of memory, recalling the absent spaces, recording the recipes, searching for the glimmer of devotion, the aroma of happiness, the back beat of bitterness. Between recipes and stories, I will ask myself a thousand times: who owns these memories? How is it that each of us remembers in a different way?

from Comfort Food for Breakups: The Memoir of a Hungry Girl

It arrived in the mail, express-mail to be exact. I was all alone. I was nervous. I opened up the envelope, took a deep breath. There it was, red and juicy and new. It had that fresh, papery, inky, new-book smell.

My fourth book.

I was all alone. I picked up my book. It looked strange and luscious at the same time. I opened it. Did I really write this? The pages were crisp and clean. After all those months - years, really, of scrolling through the text on a computer, or of typed dog-eared manuscript pages, lines crossed out, typos corrected in the editor’s red pen - this felt bizarre. The weight of it, in my hands; the angularity. The finite, material reality of it. There’s no changing, denying, or witholding it. It belongs to the world now. My fourth book.

So now it’s yours, too: to read, reinterpret, use, talk about, quote, critique, review, lend, borrow, buy, laugh with, cry over, disagree with, be comforted by….

Available in Canadian bookstores now!

In Toronto, you can find it in excellent indie bookstores like This Ain’t the Rosedale Library, Another Story, Pages, Toronto Women’s Bookstore (it’s in the big ones too, but you know who your friends are!). Vancouverites will find it at Little Sister’s Bookstore and Barbara Jo’s Books to Cooks for certain, but I’m sure People’s Co-op Bookstore, Duthies and others will have it too. In Edmonton, go to Audrey’s on Jasper Ave., or that lovely one on Whyte Ave.

Bookstores in the U.S. should have it in a week or too. And, you can order it online, from anywhere in the world, at amazon.com.

Or,come to one of my launches and buy a copy there! I’ll sign it for you! I’ll chat with you!

I can’t wait to see you there!

COMFORT FOOD FOR BREAKUPS WESTERN CANADIAN TOUR:

Toronto: April 19, 7-9 pm, Mitizi’s Sister, 1554 Queen St W.
Edmonton: May 15, Audrey’s Books, 10702 Jasper Avenue
Vancouver: May 24, Barbara Jo’s Books to Cooks, 1740 West 2nd
Courtenay BC: Sometime end of May/early June, TBA

Photo by Laurie Bell

“Sensual vitality is essential to the struggle for life.”
-Adrienne Rich

Each week, I write myself into a new skin.

The week, wilting with exhaustion by Wednesday, folds into itself today, and regenerates.

“…putting up there in public words you have dredged, sieved up in dreams, from behind screen memories, out of silence - words you have dreaded and needed in order to know you exist…” -Rich

And I write, I keep writing, if only for this blog. Writing - about the tender, spicy scallops with eggplant confit we made for dinner last week, or the warm cup of sun in a snowy field on Sunday, from which I drank, voraciously - restores the molecules of my body. Writing keeps me real. Writing keeps me.

The pizza The Guitar Player made for me on Sunday - I was working too hard, towards a deadline, to even think what ingredients there might be in the cupboard - bready, like focaccia, with pesto and cherry tomatoes and boconncini - was a love letter, more meaningful than any words.

But the words are necessary too, grasping at nothing, or everything.

The avocado, cucumber, cherry tomato (there were a few left over!), lime and parsley salad I managed to create out of the refrigerator’s scant offerings yesterday was a small victory. A glass of Portuguese wine. A conversation with a friend, about work: “You always figure things out. You always find a way. You always do.”

A pattern of branches on snow, like an art installation.

This city’s jagged, constructed horizon.

A snow angel.

Moroccan Grilled Scallops with Eggplant Confit
(lifted from the spring issue of LCBO’s Food and Wine Magazine)

This turned out to be delicious but quite rich-tasting. If I made this again I’d halve the amount of spices that go on the scallops, to let their sweet taste come through in better contrast to the acidity of the confit. We had it with Moosewood Cookbook’s (Moosewood at Home) coconut rice, which was fantastic, and Beaujolais-Villages wine, which was light and lovely.

1 medium Sicilian eggplant (I have no idea what a Sicilian eggplant is. I used a skinny Asian one because it was all I had in the fridge, and it was fine).
1/4 cup olive oil
2 tsp ground ginger
2 tsp paprika
2 tsp ground cumin
1/4 tsp cayenne
1 tsp grated lemon rind
1 cup chopped onions
1 tbsp chopped garlic
2 cups chopped tomatoes (can be canned)
1 tbsp lemon juice
2 tbsp chopped parsley
12 large scallops (we used twice as many medium-sized ones)
2 tbsp butter

1. Preheat oven to 450 degrees

2. Cut eggplant into 1/2-inch thick slices. Brush with oil, bake 20 minutes until soft, remove from heat, cool and dice.

3.Heat remaining 2 tbsp oil in a large skillet over medium heat. Add onions & garlic, saute for 2 mins. Add 1/2 of spice mixture, cook another 30 secs. Add eggplant & tomatoes, stir together, reduce heat, cook slowly for 25 mins until thick and tasty. Stir in lemon juice, parsley - season w salt and pepper to taste.

4. Sprinkle scallops with remaining spice mixture, season w salt & pepper. Heat butter in nonstick skiller over med-high heat. Sear scallops, 1-2 mins per side.

5. Spoon eggplant mixture onto separate plates, top with scallops.

Serves 4.

I heard a cheesy thing on TV, somewhere between Oprah and Ellen: “Life isn’t cured, it’s managed.”

The Guitar Player and I are still at it, cooking our Friday night meals. It’s something for us to look forward to, all through a busy stressful week. It’s something we don’t want to give up, we love it so much. So if one or the other of us gets snarky, the other is , like, Hey, I don’t want this to wreck our Friday night.

It’s helping us manage the electrical field of our emotions, and the crazy way love can trigger all kinds of circuits, currents and live wires.

Last week we decided to make homemade ravioli. My film, Flesh and Blood: A Journey Between East and West, had just been accepted into a film festival in Turin. Italy was on our minds.

The Guitar Player felt quite strongly that we should make the dough ourselves. However,since reading Bill Buford’s food memoir Heat, a gripping account of his apprenticeship with chef Mario Batali and other related foodies, including the formidable Betta from a dour mountain village in the Appenines, I was too much in awe. Buford lovingly describes Betta’s memories of making pasta with her aunts:

“Every December they gathered round a kitchen table and made pasta, a warm, noisy convocation: banter, gossip, high hilarity, storytelling, the smells of food, a fire burning, everyone’s fingers busy. Making the tortellini, Betta said, was always social […] and as a child she felt privileged when these older, cultivated women asked her to join their circle. She was twelve years old, and the tortellini she made were her first homemade pasta – no small feat. They are complex, tightly-layered pieces of food sculpture […] “My learning to make pasta was learning how to grow up and be a woman.”

I talked The Guitar Player into using wonton wrappers instead.

We adapted a recipe I’d seen on Chow.com. The Guitar Player likes to follow a recipe exactly, and only then figure out some adjustments. For me a recipe is a melody, to which harmonies are added as you cook. We compromised. I added a touch of cream cheese and blue cheese to the squash filling; we stayed true, more-or-less, to the plainness of the broth-like brown butter sauce.

The Guitar Player’s delicate, roughly textured hands went to work, gracefully creating filled pasta squares.

The dish, in the end, was lovely, tasting of earth and Italy, but also of home.

Squash Ravioli with Chestnuts & Sage Brown Butter Sauce

Serves 4

For the ravioli:

1 medium squash (use butternut, delicata, or kabocha)
1/2 bunch thyme sprigs
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
Pinch of nutmeg
1 tbslpn blue cheese
2 tbslpns. good-quality cream cheese
1/2 vanilla bean, split lengthwise and seeds scraped from the pod
36 wonton wrappers
1 egg, lightly beaten for egg wash
1 tablespoon butter
1/4 pound roasted chestnuts, peeled and sliced

For the brown butter sauce:

1 clove garlic, smashed
5 tablespoons butter
¼ cup white wine
15 to 18 small fresh sage leaves
½ cup low-sodium chicken broth
1/4 cup grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese

Instructions

1. Heat the oven to 375°F. Cut the squash in half and remove seeds. Season with salt and pepper, and place cut side down on a rimmed baking sheet that’s been sprinkled with thyme sprigs and vegetable oil. Bake for about 45 minutes or until squash is completely soft. Set aside and allow to cool.
2. When the squash is cool enough to handle, use a spoon to scoop the flesh from its skin and place in a large mixing bowl. Discard skin. Season squash with the nutmeg, vanilla bean seeds, salt, blue cheese, cream cheese, and freshly ground pepper. Mash this mixture by hand until it is well blended but still slightly chunky. Put the mixture in a colander set in the sink, and let the excess liquid drain off for about 30 minutes.
3. Form the ravioli by placing about 2 teaspoons of the squash mixture on a wonton wrapper. Brush the edges with a pastry brush dipped slightly into the beaten egg, and place another wonton wrapper on top. Be sure to remove all air pockets and seal the edges well. Make five ravioli per person. To prevent the ravioli from sticking together, dust them with flour and don’t stack them. Bring a pot of well-salted water to a boil over high heat.
4. Melt 1 tablespoon of butter in a medium frying pan over medium heat. Add the chestnuts and cook until they are crisp and golden. Drain.
5. To make the sauce, place 5 tablespoons of butter and the smashed garlic in a medium frying pan and cook until the white milk solids have browned. Deglaze with wine, scraping up any solids and letting the liquid get syrupy. Add the sage and chicken broth, and bring to a simmer. Reduce until sauce is slightly thickened, and season with salt and freshly ground pepper. When the water is at a rolling boil, add the ravioli (only about four or five at a time) and cook until tender, about 3-5 minutes.
6. To serve, place a few tablespoons of grated cheese onto each dish and top with three ravioli. Spoon the brown butter sauce over the ravioli and garnish with chestnuts.