Recipes for Trouble

I’m delighted to post this guest blog by Sandra Alland, a Scottish-Canadian poet, rabble-rouser and bookseller, currently based in Edinburgh- MB

Ah, Scottish cuisine. Now there’s an oxymoron for ye.

But seriously, here I am in Scotland – the land of great, fattening snacks like chips’n’cheese and chips’n’curry (mmmmm), jack potatoes (huge potatoes with cheese and sour cream or other fatty stuffings), fish’n’chips, chip butties (which are French Fry sandwiches), haggis (deep-fried sheep guts), deep-fried battered hamburgers, and more deep-fried everything. Once my lover ordered chicken, and they deep-fried a whole frozen chicken before our eyes. Yum.

Luckily for my heart, I haven’t been eating out much, because the prices aren’t exactly like Toronto’s Kensington Market, where we lived up until one month ago. But money aside, nothing can make you homesick for Toronto like a Scottish supermarket. No bins full of delicious fruits and vegetables, ready for the plucking. No buckets of spicy almond-stuffed olives to scoop from. Here everything is packaged and repackaged. Even coriander! A tiny wee bunch of coriander comes with a plastic twist-tie, then it’s sealed in a hard plastic container, and then wrapped in a plastic bag. Broccoli is in Styrofoam and plastic. Cream, if you can find it, comes in a plastic container with a shoddy plastic lid.

The only things I have found not wrapped in plastic are:

huge green beans
apples
Clementines
bottles of wine

And who do I have to blow around here to get a lime and some black beans? Five aisles of jewellery and kids’ toys, but no limes? I am not known for my cooking, but I am secretly quite good at certain things. One of them is guacamole, which I had to make with pale wilted coriander and lemon juice last night. A lemon is not a lime! But it actually still tasted pretty good, if I do say so myself.

the view from Sainsbury’s

One thing I will say in Sainsbury’s (that’s the supermarket) favour is that they carry a large selection of organic and fair-trade food, and a lot of local produce - way more than you would ever find in Canadian supermarkets (and for cheaper). And there are other options – Leith Walk is an area of town full of small shops and international foods (I dream of finding black beans there today), and every Saturday there is a local farmer’s market on Castle Terrace. Both of these alternatives still come with too much plastic, but slightly less than at the Sainsbury’s.

It’s strange to be rediscovering my connection with food preparation here in Scotland. But certain changes have led to me finding myself with little money and lots of time on my hands. In Kensington Market, I also had little money, but no time. It hardly mattered, because I could just run downstairs and buy a delicious Trinidadian double for $1.25, or one of the best falafels in the city for $2.00. Or a huge sit-in meal at Pho Hung for $4.00. There is a Chinese take-away just downstairs here, but the cheapest thing on the menu is £8.00.

So my lover and I have been a little more housebound, food-wise. For three years in Toronto, s/he did most of the cooking. In three years, I think I made a total of:

35 meals of reheated, store-bought pirogies (I know, Marusya, I know!)
85 salads
15 breakfasts of eggs and toast

Did I ever make an actual meal? In my defense, I did a lot of dishes and all of the laundry, and my lover wears at least two outfits a day, so it was a lot of laundry.

Now s/he’s working 9 ½-hour days, five days a week, and I’m only working eight-hour days, twice a week (plus my writing of course). So suddenly it dawned on me that maybe I should cook something. I’ve made a delicious chicken stir-fry, burritos (with that yummy guacamole), and crepes so far. That is more than I’ve cooked in 10 years! And I’m actually liking being a wife-band (or is that a hife?). I haven’t enjoyed cooking since I cooked for 12 people at a construction site in Costa Rica for four months in 1996. Yesterday at work in the bookshop where I work, I actually glanced at the cookbooks.

A lot of my enjoyment I owe to Edinburgh… it’s a much calmer city than Toronto, so you can actually take the time to have a nice glass of organic fair-trade Portuguese wine, put on some tunes, and relax. The rest of my enjoyment I owe to my new flat, particularly the open concept kitchen/lounge. In this new kitchen with high ceilings and a big window that lets in the way-more-present-than-you-might-think Scottish sun, I can listen to music or talk to someone while I “work.” It’s divine.

So when are you coming to visit?

Sandra Alland is a writer, multi-media artist, micropress publisher and activist. Her most recent book is the stunning poetry collection, Blissful Times, published by Book Thug. For more info on Sandra and her books, go to www.blissfultimes.ca or click on this link.

Have you ever been on a roadtrip?

Did your parents ever stuff you with your siblings into a station wagon, metal cooler in the back, bags of Old Dutch potato chips in the front, a comfortable bed in your past and nothing but lumpy motel beds in your immediate future? Did you sip Fanta from a straw while watching flat prairie landscapes, the world sliced neatly into blue and yellow, spin monotonously past? Did you kick your little brother and then say you didn’t? Did you read Cosmopolitan magazine in the back seat of the car, even though you were only 14, because it was all they had at the supermarket checkout in Moose Jaw Saskatchewan and your mom was too tired to notice or care, and was that where you learnt about the most foolproof mascara ever, and how to win (and keep!) a man?

Did you see the Rockies for the first time from the window of a Volvo?

Did you stop at a Husky restaurant in Alberta and have fried perogies and pie?

This time, it was all about the chip wagons. And it wasn’t quite a family road trip, though it felt like one. And there was a sweet dog named Sorrel. And we only drove for about four hours til we got to our campsite on Lake Mazinaw, though, coming back, it took almost twice that long, what with Dairy Queen drive-throughs, several beach stops and one last full-service chip-ice cream - blueberry-homebaking wagon, where the wild blueberries went for $7 a pint, and whose blueberry tarts I will forever regret not buying.

There is a kind of inherent pleasure to leaving town, camping, and being on the road, that smooths away whatever kept you irritated and sarcastic in the city. There is an implicit goodwill and cameraderie to setting up camp, taking turns with meals and washing up that may have gone missing elsewhere. There are deep conversations and giggly, silly ones, and, of course, there is the food. The Teacher’s Sicilian pasta, piquant with saffron, pinenuts, and, oddly, deliciously, cauliflower. The Hair Dude’s incredibely simple, incredibely delicious vegetable-tofu curry with coconut rice. The Librarian’s satisfying huevos rancheros with her signature tomato and tomatillo salsas. My chicken brochette with Turkish muhamarra sauce, adapted from 101cookbooks.com (recipe below).

There is always a campfire. There are near-feral children, unleashed from school and schedule, running wildly and beautifully through forests, long past bedtime. There is a sunrise, there are birds. And then, finally, there is the long, winding, poignant, complicated road home.

Heidi’s Grilled Kabob Recipe

From Super Natural Cooking, Muhammara-Slathered Kabobs, page 102.

Notes:
-If you don’t have a grill, the kabobs can be cooked on a baking sheet in a 350°F oven for 30-40 minutes.
-Heidi’s original recipe calls for extra-firm tofu in place of the chicken I used.
-The muhammara sauce is also delicious as a dip. This recipe will leave you with some extra.
-I found Heidi’s marinade a bit mild and ended up using a leon-mustard-soya marinade instead.
-If I made this again I’d add other vegetable in with the mushrooms, like red pepper and summer squash.

Muhammara Slather:
1 tablespoon crushed red pepper
flakes or 1 small red chile

1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
3/4 cup walnuts, toasted
1/4 cup bread crumbs
1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil
2 tablespoons pomegranate molasses
1/4 cup tomato paste
2 to 3 roasted red peppers
1/2 to 1 cup warm water
1/2 teaspoon fine-grain sea salt

Kabobs
2 red onions, each cut into 6 wedges
3 lemons, each cut into 4 lengthwise wedges
12 ounces boneless chicken breast, cut into 12 equal-sized cubes
12 mushrooms
extra-virgin olive oil, for brushing
fine-grain sea salt

Special equipment: 6 wooden skewers

Prepare a medium-hot grill; if the temperature is right, you should be able to hold your hand a few inches above the grate for 4 or 5 seconds.

In the meantime, make the muhammara. Using a hand blender (preferably) or a conventional blender, puree the chile flakes, cumin, walnuts, bread crumbs, olive oil, pomegranate molasses, tomato paste, and red peppers to a smooth, even consistency. Mix in the warm water in increments to achieve an easily spreadable consistency similar to a thick yogurt. If you¹re going to use it for dipping, you might want to leave it a bit thicker. Stir in the salt and adjust the seasonings if needed.

When constructing kabobs, I don¹t bother soaking wood skewers in water. I just load them up with food from tip to tip, which seems to solve any problems with the wood igniting. Onto 6 medium-length skewers, thread an onion wedge, a lemon wedge, a cube of tofu, and a mushroom, then repeat. Brush each kabob generously with olive oil and season with salt. Put the kabobs on the grill and cover. Cook, rotating regularly and brushing with olive oil every few minutes, until the onions are tender, about 12 minutes altogether.

To eat, slather with the muhammara, slide off the skewers. and squeeze the juice from the roasted lemons over everything.

It rained, most of the time I was there.

West coast rain is powerful: the air turning to liquid, the colours an impressionist palette of blues and greys. You find your resolve melting, your initiative fading. It’s fragrant; monotonous; soulful. If you’re around it long enough, it changes you.

For some reason we didn’t cook as much as we usually do. I made a gazpacho, but we ended up eating my her leftover (ambrosial) vegetable soup, while watching a cheezey Hollywood movie and sipping on homemade wine. The next day, the rain continued to pour, so I demanded, and got, potato pancakes. My mother’s are wondrously crisp and flavourful: lots of oil, lots of onions. Plenty of sour cream to go with.

Then there was my mother’s strawberry-rhubarb pie. For me, a dedicated pie-maker, it can almost make me cry, to have someone else serve me a wedge-shaped piece of heaven. If I can get her to share the recipe for her streusel topping I’ll pass it on here.

What are a mother and her grown-up daughter to do, in all that rain? We each had our novels. We watched hours and hours of Food Network: I logged three reruns of Iron Chef!

I took her to Dockside Grill, for chowder and crabcakes. The chowder was mediocre, but the crabcakes were crunchy and soft in all the right places, and deliciously seafoody. The rain washed over the marina as we ate, and made the boats look vivid and innocent.

The rain can be beautiful. The rain can test your patience. The rain can make you go over things you regret, cause you to miss your lover, make you forget the best parts of who you are.

The sun comes out eventually. I hopped a ferry to Sidney Spit and walked along miles of sand and horizon, grateful for all of it, rain and sun.

My mother made cherry perogies for me to take home.

“Messages for the bees are passed along the subconscious pipeline, shifting them from one person’s dreams to another until a memory becomes a daydream related over a cup of steaming tea at breakfast.” - Yolanda Doolittle’s Journals, 1916

A simple, sweet afternoon, communing with art and bees, at Van Dusen Gardens in Vancouver.

I saw and smelled labernum groves, catalpa trees, allium, lavender and roses and raspberries.

My friend Lori is a lady who wll pass your messages, your troubles and your hopes to the bees. A wonderful, quirky and imaginative performance artist, she has of late taken on the persona of Madame Dolittle, modelled on Yolanda Doolittle,a Victorian figure (fact or fiction?) who communed spiritually with the bees. She calls it The Beespeaker Project. Dressed in Victorian garb, Lori/Dolittle appears intermittently at farmers’ markets, festivals and gardens (this month, at Van Dusen Gardens), to remind us, in her wise and poetic manner, of the power, beauty, and value of bees - now, in North America, an almost endangered species!

“Whether you suffer from and seek relief from anxieties, ailments, sorrows, lost objects, or simply wish to share the gratitude of your recent joys, Madame Dolittle will pass your messages onto the honeybees.”- from Madame Beespeaker’s business card.

I shared a picnic with Lori and her partner in love and art, Peter, in the gardens, next to the hives and just beside a verdant vegetable garden, most of whose produce goes to low-income people. We ate sushi, bean pate, bagels and dried mulberries, and talked about feminist art, parties with a single-ingredient theme (my suggestion to Lori: a honey party!), recent food experiences, and bees, of course.

Then Lori showed me other artworks that are appearing in the gardens as part of the Second Site Collective’s show that runs to the end of July (with “sporadic interventions” in August) - check this link for Beespeaker and other schedules.

Delicate artworks intervene electronically and visually into the lives of plants. Robin Ripley mends wounded leaves.

Ken Gregory creates prosthetic devices, “Sun Suckers”, for flowers.

Lori Weidenhammer lets you listen to the bees and then listens to you. Send your hopes and concerns to beespeaker@gmail.com.

Any honey or bee stories to pass on?