Recipes for Trouble

I never tasted cheddar cheese, that staple of Canadian households, until I was in my late teens. It was probably at my highschool friend Martha’s place, portal onto all things anglo. It seemed exotic, yet strangely plain.

I grew up on European cheeses. Cheeses selected solemnly by my father at the farmer’s market: Gorgonzola, Roquefort, Edam, Gouda, Gruyere. Huge, creamy or crumbly hunks of cheese, wrapped in brown paper, eaten without any embellishment, the minute we returned from our Saturday shopping.

Since then, I’ve ben on a lifelong quest for continued cheesey satisfaction. And it’s not just about the cheese. The fromagist/e must be a tiny bit of a pedagogue, willing to explain the particular characteristics of an obscure cheese I’ve never tried. At the very least, cheese tasting must be ungrudgingly allowed (with the taster having the discretion to never taste more than three or four). The cheeseman or woman must be willing to cut smaller, 100 gram pieces for a hungry girl who lives alone, and must be above that cheesey trick of cutting three times as much and saying, blithely, is that OK?

I was excited when a particular cheese shop . Le Fromagerie, opened up near my house on College Street West near Ossington, of all places. But my experience with this elegantly appointed shop (and, to be truthful, that of some of my neighbours) has at times been disappointing. We occasionally feel shamed, for arriving too early on a Saturday (even thought the doors are wide open, the hour coinciding with opening hours posted), for not knowing the provenance of the baguette, for forgetting the name of the cheese we desire. It’s no fun skulking home with $20 worth of cheese and egg on your face. Maybe we need to have thicker skins? After all, this shop has introduced me to Chevre Noir and Bleu d’Auvergne, and they carry great pastry and scrumptious green olives…but I wanted more

So i was more than excited, thrilled, actually, when I stumbled upon the modest booth of Monforte Dairy at the brand-new Trinity Bellwoods Farmers Market. There were tiny plates of artisanal cheese laid out to taste. There were pre-packaged slices of cheese with the prices right on them. There was a calm, gracious woman (who, I later found out, is Ruth Klahsen, the owner of Monforte, herself a classically trained chef – now cheesemaker).

And there was the cheese.

I tasted the haloumi, first, a Middle Eastern cheese I’ve often noticed listed as a recipe ingredient but never knew how to obtain. I’d imaginedit to be a very plain cheese, but Klahsen’s version tastes lemony, somehow, as though one is tasting the very pasture the sheep graze on. All of her cheeses are made of sheep’s milk – local, Mennonite-produced sheep’s milk, to be exact (Klahsen is herself of Mennonite extraction).

I ended up buying two of her aged cheeses: Paradiso, a washed-rind Italian cheese with a creamy-yet-chalky texture and a sweet butter taste with a bit of a tang, and Placere, more of a French cheese, very much like chevre, coated with rosemary, savory, chili pepper and jumiper. These cheeses are extraordinary, stellar. Out of this world! I tasted them last night, alone, before going out. I wanted them to myself! They made me happy, in a fine, secretive, sensual way. (Tomorrow, I’ll generously share them, with The Guitar Player – but knowingly, smugly).

Monforte has its heart and its politics in the right place. Their mission includes fair trade with Mennonite farmers, slow food movement principles, and tithing. Ten percent of their profits go to Doctors Without Borders/Medicins Sans Frontiers.

Run, don’t walk, to Monforte Dairy’s booth: at Trinity Bellwoods Farmers Market (Tuesdays, 3-7pm), or St Lawrence Market (Alex Farm Produce, three Saturdays out of four), both in Toronto. Check their website for other outlets in Toronto or across Ontario. They are based in Stratford – who knows, maybe they welcome visitors…

Have you tried Monforte cheese? Do you have any cheesey stories of your own?

9:12 a.m.: Yogurt with fresh Ontario strawberries and Harbord bakery granola, washed down with a latte, alone, on my deck.

11:47 a.m. Dimsum (har gow, turnip cakes, deep fried shrimp and mango thingies, spiced ribs, many kinds of dumplings, green tea) with The Guitar Player and friends Terri and Cap, at Rol San on Spadina, just before the Dyke March. It was a lovely, gentle way to begin a hot, steaming, over-stimulating day.

4:20p.m.: Sangria and a “Rhett Butler” (cranberry, pomegranate and vodka) on the patio of Hair of the Dog Pub, after the Dyke March, brought to the table by a very happy Guitar Player. [We'd marched with the "honoured group", Dykes Planning Tykes, which was surprisingly thrilling for GP, herself a very unsentimental but devoted lesbian mom].

6:45 p.m.: Nacho chip with Terri’s special salsa and guacamole, at a lesbian potluck BBQ. A wonderful respite from the crowds, in a garden tended by two of my most admired queer musicians, full of vegetables, bordered by roses.

7:42 p.m.: Lesbian potluck in Connie and Rachel’s backyard, continued: Grilled maple syrup salmon, potato salad, and Greek salad made by The Guitar Player and Yours Truly. Finished off with a free Indigo Girls concert off of Wellesley, and several thousand elated, stoned, exhausted, proud, cynical, idealistic, clean-and-sober, young, old, middle-aged, uninhibited, dykes.

I think I first read about it in a primary school reader. Dick, Jane, Mother, Father, and Spot went on vacation. It was a ruthless, vivid regime. The colours blazed. There was a beach, and a beach ball. A picnic was required, its potato salad and ham sandwiches part of a rigid, summery normalcy. Perhaps there was, on alternate summers, a Farm, with Grandmother and Grandfather and a panoply of dull farm animals. I submitted to these stories as though to ancient Greek myths. Improbable, I thought, yet perhaps full of their own allegorical teachings which I hoped to someday understand.

My parents did not go On Vacation. Summer was full of its own specific, repetitive labour: weeding, lawn-mowing, pie-making, garage-cleaning. My father, the distracted academic, would make vague promises of an end-of-summer trip to an unnamed cottage, or an imagined lake with a sketchy cabin at its perimeter. By mid-August he’d throw up his hands and admit to not really having given it any thought.

“Let’s all go to Upper Canada Village,” he’d say, with faux-heartiness, and by way of consolation.

It was better than nothing. It was fascinatingly dreary. Women in aprons and bonnets churned butter, relentlessly. Men in overalls worked furiously at their anvils. We watched them as though we were spectators at a zoo, thus marvelling at our own twentieth century good fortune, our Mixmasters and our Canadian Tire stores. For my father the concentration-camp-survivor, this was, perhaps, a friendly simulation of earlier horrors, of dirt and hardship and hard beds that, in a different way, reminded him that a there were worse things than six children and lifetime sentence to the suburbs.

Am I my father’s daughter? I struggle with the notion of vacation. Freelance writer and contract academic labourer for so long, paid vacations were never in my purview, and if they weren’t paid for, I reasoned, they must pay for themselves. Like my father, I have used gigs and conferences to stand in for vacation. Thus have I voyaged to Istanbul, and Turin, and to Dallas, Texas.

This summer is rather different. I just published and promoted a new book. I begin a steady gig in August. While not exactly a paid vacation, this summer has been designated (by myself and my bossy friends) as a time of repose. These friends and lovers impose their own, well-meaning, loving legislation. I struggle earnestly to comply.

Mornings are easy. A latte and a rattan chair on my deck combine into a compound sentence that is undoubtedly the argot of vacationing. I can easily extend this sentence into a paragraph that takes me to lunch and its luxurious preparation. Cold soba noodles with tofu and a sesame oil dressing. Greek salad. Tuna salad with dried cranberries. These, surely, are the vocabulary of vacation fare!

Still, there is unease caught at the back of my throat, a surfeit of words unwritten, of aspiration untended.

From time to time, a friend or a lover takes me firmly by the hand and leads me into the very portal, the langourously beating heart of vacation. Five hot, slow, fragrant, delicious days in Fanny Bay. A trip to a funky cottage. Or, today, a bicycle trip and picnic to Toronto Island with M, a fellow epicure. I shall bring my picnic knapsack with its gingham napkins and its goblets. We will eat great food: dolmades, brie, Greek salad, M’s spicy fish, rhubarb-strawberry pie.

Still, I wonder: how do other artists, academics, and freelancers of various stripes deal with vacation…

We left at dusk. Highway 401 glittered with semi-trailers and trucks of various persuasions. Hardware. Chickens. Fruit.

The car was full of dogs, clothes, books. And food. Bags of food. Fresh tuna loin. Pineapple. Yams. Rhubarb. Chicken. Mint chutney. Cherries. Cherry tomatoes. Eggs.

She told me all the beautiful things I’d see at the cottage: a river, trees, canoe and kayaks. But, being The Guitar Player, she left out a few things, too. No plumbing. No shower, no running water. “I didn’t want the outhouse to be a deal-breaker,” she admiited later, somewhat guiltily.

Had I known, I might not have planned to make grilled tuna with fruit sauce, coconut rice on the side. I might not have baked a cornmeal-rhubarb cake. I might not have promised cherry pancakes for breakfast.

The cooking was slow, and involved a muggy, dark cottage kitchen, and endless hauling of cauldrons of water from the river. I made the cake on one of the hottest evenings of our trip, and then the old 1940’s oven wouldn’t cool down for hours, so that we slept fitfully, a fan roaring noisily beside us.

The days were slow, too, exquisitely so. It had been a year of 5:30 a.m. alarms, a year of books and notes and impossible deadlines. A vacation at a ramshackle cottage on a river, somewhere between Kaladar and Napanee was a gift to heal the memory of those drab days.

We swam naked in clean green water flecked with gold. We kayaked the dark edges of the river, clambered on pre-Cambrian rocks to find a mossy knoll fit for a picnic of cheese and crackers and fruit. The cake was moist, delicious, with an interesting crumb. We ate our grilled tuna as the sky got smokey and purple, and the water turned pink and then gold with the setting sun. The leftovers became a salade nicoise for lunch the next day.

The Guitar Player turned into a kid that week, running with the dogs, building me a bonfire, and singing up every song she knew.

What did you cook up or eat while on vacation?