Recipes for Trouble

Last night I dreamed the strangest dream / I’ve ever dreamt before / I dreamed that all the world agreed / To put an end to war.

“Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream”, by Ed McCurdy, heard this morning on CBC Radio.

I’ve been talking to my students about it for months.

We’re studying news, you see. And what’s on the news every night? Warplanes and tanks. Body bags. Dead and injured Iraquis and Afghanis. War and more war. I /we can’t not talk about it.

October 26 was an international day of protest against wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

It was good and it was hard. Good to be among folks who share my rage against these unjust wars, and in particular, Canada’s immoral, costly descent from peacekeeping (itself a contested concept) into agression. The many ways in which our national media have often, too often, become a propaganda arm of the government.

Hard to see that only a thousand or so of us took the time to march.

Good to see all the young people, all the old people, all the Middle Eastern protesters, all the homemade signs.

Hard to march down empty streets in the medical and financial districts; good to march down the busy shopping distruct along Yonge.

Someone gave me a button: Education NOT Occupation.

Yes, that too.

The educating in my classroom works both ways. My students are smart, most of them fairly politicized. I’ve discovered they don’t believe what’s on the news, not really. I showed them a film (Control Room) about the early days of US invasion in Iraq, and about Al-Jazeera, the Arab news service. About the differences, conversations, and, sometimes, surprising agreements between Al-Jazeera and American standard media. I expected restlessness, irritation. I only planned to show a 5-minute excerpt. But the students were rapt; I left the film on for over half an hour. We had good, deep discussion that day. I learn as much from them as they do from me.

Yesterday, hours after the march ended, friends came over for dinner. We had good local cheese and pate; tomato pie and salad; pumpkin cheesecake for dessert. I mentioned I’d been to the demo.The youngest among us (The Queer Organizer’s daughter) said she wants to be a World War Two Historian when she grows up. I read everything I can get my hands on, she said. Well you have to study for a long time to get a job like that, said her ma. I. Have. said her daughter with a confident smile. I. Have. Been. Studying. It. For. A. Long.Time.

She’s fifteen years old. Her parents have been activists since before she was born. I have no doubt she’ll do something very cool with those ideas.

Maybe it will take a long time. But maybe our students and daughters and nieces and nephews will do things differently.

Stranger things have happened.

I can still taste all the flavours of San Francisco.

Frog Hollow’s peach pastry: never had nuthin’ like that before. A tiny cornmeal-banana-hazelnut-fig cake from Boulange (a fabulous organic patisserie and cafe in Hayes Valley, that I dearly wish had a Canadian franchise). The glass of wine I had at Firehouse in Livermore; we couldn’t pronounce the Italian name so we called it “Temper Tantrum”. Tiny exquisite cheese plates at Absinthe.

Shuna’s desserts (but more on that later). Tartine (more on that later, too).

And the lovely flavours of friends, old and new, their humour and their politics and their sexual proclivities, gathered around various restaurant and cafe tables.

After my deliciously flavourful afternoon with the Queer Baker, I headed back into the City to prepare for my reading at Femina Potens Gallery in The Castro. The Femme Author and I changed into the appropriate clothes whilst chatting about writing and sex, and I’m happy to say she may have outshone me in her luscious red boustiere. A drive through a rainy, misty night found us in a warm gallery packed with queers. A gaggle of very sweet women, who call themselves the Queer Food Collective, dished out soup, pate, and cocktails. Gay Ukrainian Writer Boy was there (I. Wouldn’t. Have. Missed. This. For. The. World. said he.) Writer Boy loved the whole scene,and lamented that there’s no equivalent cultural space for gay men in San Francisco.

That audience was a distinct pleasure to read to. They laughed and sighed in all the right places. They traveled with me to my Baba’s house in Edmonton and joined me at my Christmas Eve dinner in Toronto. They lived through all the breakups with wry, knowing smiles. You’ll do several ok readings to arrive at one like that, where everything: the food, the understanding, the ironic solidarity, is in place. You wrote the book for many people: your mom, your friends, all the foodies you’ve never met. But this audience, these queers: you wrote your heart out for them.

Seattle author Inge Muscio read after me. Eccentric and smart, she read passages from her books to do with food that were alternately moving and politically savvy. She cracked us all up with her account of being asked to read at the Starbuck’s Literary Stage at Bumbershoot, and the way she jammed her performance: a sacred circle of mugs from independent coffeshops around her as she read; free bags of coffee from said shops, thrown into the crowd, and a hilarious fantasy about being a dominatrix for the CEO of Starbuck’s.

The night ended at La Mediterannee, a modest Middle Eastern cafe at Noe and Castro, where I had a tangy, tender pomegranate chicken and treated my friends to their various vegan and vegetarian choices. Top, bottom, butch, femme: the sexiness of the night’s literary fare had us revealing this and that. It’s crazy I said. Everybody. Here. Is. Into. Kink. I said. All. Kink. All. The. Time. Gay Writer Boy just rolled his eyes melodramatically and helped himself to some of my food.

I had promised The Guitar Player I’d have lunch at Chez Panisse, birthplace of the North American slow food movement, but I never did.

I never went to Diesel Bookstore, either, nor did I check out Market Hall or dine at Cactus. The Guitar Player’s instructions were exceedingly and lovingly specific, like she wanted to plant all her food memories in my body.

The Queer Baker met me outside Chez Panisse at the appointed time. When I admitted to my failure as a high-end foodie she shrugged goodnaturedly and said we should go take a peek anyway. It is the Vatican of all things local and sustainable after all. The staff was charming, genial, and the Arts and Crafts furnishings and decor felt restful and warm. “You all seem so happy,” I said, somewhat ironically, to the server. He smiled unironically, and said, “It’s the food.”

The Queer Baker and I had never met face-to-face. She has a food blog I admire for its loose sultry prose style. I like how she writes about baking, like it’s the most natural thing in the world to come home after a twelve-hour day in various kitchens and bake a cake, the way someone else might write in a journal or strum a guitar.

Turns out she’s generous and quirky just like her writing. Took me to The Cheese Board, a worker-owned collective of thirty people all making the same wage who sell an impressive variety of local and international cheeses. I got a lovely sheep’s milk cheese to go with the walnut bread i’d got at Farina, and this sustained me for several mornings.

The climax to the day’s food tour was a visit to an extraordinary ice cream parlour, Ici. They serve homemade ice cream, sorbet, candy, and cookies made with local organic ingredients and surprisingly cheap.

Co-owner Mary Canales spent nine years as pastry chef at Chez Panisse (I’m hoping this might mollify Guitar Player), and, popping into the kitchen (The Queer Baker knows her!) I found her to be as charming as her ice cream. I’m no ice cream fanatic but this stuff redefines the genre. I had apple spice sorbet in a handmade cone, but I also got to taste honey lavender and pink peppercorn. The chocolate ice cream sandwich with earl grey tea ice cream will, alas, have to wait for another visit.

I had a revelation that day. I’m no purist. I’ll never be one to sit alone in a fancy restaurant and carefully, seriously, assess the food. Being a foodie, for me, is about relationships: with friends; with other food bloggers; with queers who cook, and people who write; or who want to talk about writing;and have a deep need to discuss it, over delicious food.

Food and books and words and food.

San Francisco can feel like a mirage. There’s all that fog, blurring the beginnings and ends of days. There is queer and feminist and leftist, on storefronts and in people’s conversations, even in restaurant menus. (And I think: what happened, in Canada, to those words? Those words that have become so secretive, so difficult to locate, so confined to kitchens and ghettos, and theory).

San Francisco can feel like one big meal. And I’m not being metaphoric here.

There was a foot-long felafel, filled with eggplant and marinated vegetables and tahini and of course felafel balls, in a hole-in-the-wall that The Femme Author took me to after picking me up at the airport. All of it wrapped in crispy flat bread, heated on a grill. There was the fish and the vegan food at Weird Fish, after whiskies at The Lexington, a longtime lesbian bar.

How do foodies do it? How do they go to another city and eat meal after exquisite meal?

Last night The Gay Ukrainian Writer Boy took me on an Italian-themed food crawl. (OK, it was only 2 places but at the end of it we crawled home).

We started at Bar Bambino, a somewhat pretentious restaurant with a lovely outdoor heated patio, edged with bamboo trees. The butch waitress was a self-taught sommelier, giving us solemn and apt advice on the regional Italian wine list. The Sicilian “fruit bomb” she recommended to me was truly a fruity velvety pleasure. Writer Boy ordered an appetizer pecorino cheese souffle with bread and huckleberry sauce. We loved its subtlety and softness, the way it slid down out throats like a cloud. I told the butch waitress i was a food blogger from Canada, that I loved the food at Bar Bambino and planned to write about it. Oh Great. Famous. In. Canada. she sniffed haughtilyand turned on her heel. That gave us a slightly acrid aftertaste but we soon forgot about it and went gaily on our way, sweet, intense conversation warming us as we walked.

Farina is a restaurant in the Mission District that serves only Ligurian food. Liguria is a southern region of Italy, its dazzling, ochre-tinged western Riviera. I wrote about the food I ate there, the micro-regions, the foccacias for which its known, in Comfort Food for Breakups. This place was all of that and more. In contrast to Bar Bambino the wait staff was casual and fun. The chestnut gnocchi with pesto and sour ricotta was smoky-tasting and exquisitely tender, in both flavour and texture. Writer Boy’s yellowfin tuna carpaccio was a silky slinky dance down the throat. The foccacia with cheese, tomato and anchovy was jolly, celebratory. I felt like I could tell the folks at Farina about my food blog and they wouldn’t laugh, but I didn’t.

Writer Boy ordered the milk fritters with blood orange sauce and citrus salad, based on our sultry waitress’s advice. If you eat only one thing at Farina, eat that. With an espresso, in late afternoon.

Oh and did I mention the bread? Whole grain with walnuts and a cake-like crumb. I bought two loaves, for Writer Boy and Femme Author. It set a new record for prices I have paid for bread but I didn’t care.

It was misty and warm when we left Farina at midnight, saltwater lightly flavouring the air. We got on a bus together, too tired and satsified to talk anymore. Writer Boy got off at Divisidaro. Who knows where he went after that….

Tonight, I read at Femina Potens (see sidebar) with Inge Muscio.

And, coming soon, my experience at Tartine.