Recipes for Trouble

The road home was long and full of words and music and silences. There were farmhouses and cornfields and roadside diners. And there was lots of good food if you were willing to stop and try something new.

Just out of Wakefield, a smokehouse: “Boucanerie Chelsea”. They smoke everything here, from lobster to sturgeon to, of course, salmon. I wish I’d been more daring but I went for their maple smoked salmon since, if I had my way, everything would be smoked, dipped or marinated in maple syrup. It was sexy and delicious and I ate it all week.

We counted ten, or was it twelve, chip wagons between Wakefield and Toronto. Someday I’d like to try them all. But somehow we ended up at the same one I’d been to a year before, The Chip and Dale Chip Bus, fifteen minutes west of Kaladar.

There’s a very kindly woman who doles out your chip order like you’re the only person in the world (when in fact there was quite a crowd)…and check out the sign for homemade carrot cake, $2.50 per!

The poutine was the best I’d ever had, no shit. Cheese curds fresh from the nearby factory, and I’ll bet the spuds were local too.

You can get jam too: it’s one-stop-shopping at Chip & Dale’s.

Someone had recommended we check out Perth. I said to The Girlfriend: There’s. Something. About. These. Anglo. Ontario. Towns. Makes. My. Throat. Tighten. Up. There were lots of serious grey stone buildings, including one that housed Mexicali Rosa’s, doling out some pretty mediocre Mexican food but the restaurant itself was sweetly perched on a canal and somehow we enjoyed our kitschy salad with grilled chicken inside of a taco bowl.

All he way home, I longed to find a roadside stand selling fresh corn and finally, like a vision, it appeared. Brocolli, potatoes and zuchinni too, and an honour system for paying. The corn, when I cooked it later was exquisite, and happily lacking that sickly sweet candy flavour that store corn has.

We took the old highways again and so found a shady picnic table for our dinner, facing a river twinkling in the slow, gold twilight.

We watched the ducks wend their way home.

I’m sick of cancer.

Not my own. I don’t have it. Not yet, anyway. The stats in this country are 1 in 4. An epidemic, really. An environmental disease, I believe. What do I do? I eat broccolli. Quinoa. Blueberries. I take my vitamins. I drink wine, eat cake. I play the odds.

Too many of my friends, family, and friends-of-friends have been struck. I’m sick of cancer of the larynx, ovarian cancer, Hodgkin’s non- some-thing-or-other-lymphoma, and multiple myeloma, to be exact. Not to mention: breast cancer, breast cancer, breast cancer.

It’s always the same routine. They tell me over the phone, in a casual tone of voice best used to report a cavity. They’re trying to be kind, they don’t want to shock.

I choke up. They wait patiently for me to recover my composure. They are gentle with me, and yes, patient. They know what’s coming next.

I don’t cry. I ask: What stage. What’s next. And: Are. You. Doing. Complementary. Treatments. What. About. Nutrition.

They love that one. Like having to undergo chemo’s not bad enough, now they have to eat cruciferous vegetables and ground flax seed too.

Or, as my mother sometimes says before my visits. Here. Comes. Bootcamp.

I hang up the phone and cry my private tears. Then, I go online.

Yogurt. Broccolli. Garlic. Ginger. Tomatoes. Watermelon. Blueberries. Sunflower Seeds. Shitake mushrooms. Carrots.

Immune boosters. Anti-oxidants. Anti-inflammatories. I make a list, just for them and their cancer.

They humour me. They smile. They say: I’ll. Look. It. Over.. My mother allowed herself to be talked into a juicer. The Textile Artist let me cook for her. They’re still alive. The fact that they are strong, determined Slavic women with centuries of survival behind them didn’t hurt.

Another phone call, last night.

I grew up with this person. I was planning on getting old with this person in my life. This dear friend, who shrugs when I finally do cry and says, Hey, it’s like my ma likes to say. No. One. Gets. Out. Alive.

We laugh. We finish our breakfast and walk out into a soft gentle summer rain.

I’m not ready to lose this friend, not yet. Not. Yet. I chant to myself. Not yet. Not yet. Not yet.

Photos by Lydia.

It was all very mysterious, getting to Wakefield.

The plan was to visit my sister, who lives in Gatineau, and on the map it looks like you could walk to Wakefield from her house in ten minutes.

Must buy a new map!

We left Friday evening of a long weekend. 401 jammed; we got there via shadowy old highways and then via the spaghetti of freeways that connects Ottawa to Quebec. We crept into a dark B&B called La Grange (The Barn) at 1:30 a.m., and found ourselves in a small, pristine and adorable room, devoid of the usual flowery flourishes that can make B&B stays so terribly kitschy.

As it turned out, Wakefield and my sister’s pad in Gatineau aren’t really that close. The Girlfriend had to drive twenty-five minutes each way, which she did with sweet resolve. I. Like. Your. Sister. she said. I. Don’t. Mind. Staying in Ottawa would have made more sense. But then we might not have discovered this sweet funky little town, with some damn good eatin’ to boot.

Pipolinka, the town’s organic bakery, was one of our first stops before going hiking at Lac Meech. Great bread and baguette but also mushroom pate to die for, fab tabouleh made with quinoa, and something I’d never seen, a vegetarian tourtiere, (a traditional Quebecois savoury pie usually made with pork).

Oddly, you couldn’t find cheese in Wakefield, but you could get yourself a delicious meal at Chez Eric, made from local (or at least regional) ingredients like my Lake Erie bass atop sauteed mushrooms, rapini and chanterelle mushrooms. My sister and The Girlfriend both had lamb burgers and they hearted them. My only complaint was the lack of side dishes: my brothy, mushroomy fish dish would have been perfection with a side of mashed potatoes to soak up the jus - and who serves $15 burgers without a few sweet potato fries?

Ah, but it was all so summery. Even the rain, streaming outside our B&B window, making everything a green blur.

There were blueberries from a roadside stand, a covered bridge, my sister taking pictures of absolutely everything, a river, a hike up the side of a mountain with waterfalls where trails once existed, a swim in a dark blue lake, and a picnic of bakery finds.