Recipes for Trouble

It was a crazy menu: olive tapenade, oven-roasted tomatoes, grilled pineapple, chicken skewers, pork belly, and carrot cake.

The event was called “Savouries”, part of Litfest, Edmonton’s creative non-fiction writing festival. Their slogan this year was “Brain Food.” I had been invited to read that night, (and the day after, and the day after that), along with 3 other writers. I brought my mother, my girlfriend, and a couple of friends along. The place was packed, but my mother stood out from the crowd, with her fitted fuchsia jacket and matching scarf, and the vivid, appreciative way she savoured every single word. At one point, as one writer, Jennifer McLagen, floridly praised the virtues of fat, I’m pretty sure I saw my ma punch her fist in the air, like a dude at a football game.

The carrot cake was from my book, Comfort Food for Breakups: The Memoir of a Hungry Girl, the pineapple and the chicken from the delicately designed and written food/recipe book Chow: From China to Canada, Memories of Food & Family, by Janice Wong. Leanne Faulder, food columnist for The Edmonton Journal, told a hilarious story about her first experience of baking pie (the food didn’t always match the readings, but I’m sure there’s mention of oven roasted tomatoes somewhere in her writing!)

My mother’s brain is pretty much hardwired to The Food Channel. When I’m visiting her, we sit and talk and eat in the company of Rachel Ray, Christine Cushing, and Iron Chef. As I like to say, it’s our porn. It’s also an enduring language of communication among women.

A few days earlier, I’d gone (again) to see Julie and Julia with my mother and my dear friend The Ukrainian Foodie. Afterwards, as we ate salmon bisque in my mother’s kitchen, I watched the two of them debate their different borscht-making technique, for all the world like scholars discussing the nuances of an obscure but hugely important document. There was deep courtesy, and excited curiousity in the way they spoke. In a deeply feminine, and deeply familiar way, they were piecing together an oral history, updating and hybridizing it, and preserving their families’ and their peoples’ memories.

It was lovely to read to the crowd at Kids in the Hall Bistro that night. When an audience is that committed and onside, the reading and the listening overlap, blur. I could feel delight in the air; all my words had to do was emerge, where they became transformed into shared experience, no matter how different my history was from the the rest of the people in the room.

I finally went to see the film Julie and Julia. I had been putting it off: I feared disappointment, deeply.

I own a venerable hardcover edition of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, passed on to me by my mother, like a family heirloom. I’ve read the book Julie and Julia by Julie Powell, I’ve read Julia Child’s memoir My Life in France. Food blogger and memoir writer, I entered that cinema like a scholar about to encounter a sacred, primary text.

Alone in the theatre with about 7 other women, I laughed, sighed, groaned, gasped, and even cried, like any fan.

Later, after the buttery glow of the film had worn off, I thought about how eagerly the film engages in myths of the artist as solitary genius, with Julie Powell’s appearance in The New York Times and subsequent book deals the ultimate proof of her success. The film, like so many pop cultural artifacts, had moments that simultaneously conveyed the airy stuff of fantasy and the grit of authenticity.

In my world, blogging (and even writing books) is an endeavour with contradictory affects: solitary, exciting, frustrating, comfortingly relational. A blog is a public practice, which is one of the things that makes it different from just writing in a journal. A blog can be a bit of a burden, like having a newspaper column except there’s no money in it and you don’t get seated at the best tables in restaurants (indeed, in the film we do see Julie fretting about what her readers will think if she doesn’t report what happened when a famous editor bails on dinner). A blog is a regular practice, a discipline, a kind of ritual for both writer and reader. And, it is a community endeavour (a blind spot in the film).

For all its quietude and isolation, my blog has brought people to me – chefs and cooks, foodies, queers, other East Europeans. I have even been courted by someone who read the entire blog from start to finish and then commenced a lavishly written email correspondence composed in the language of food.

The “Julie” part of the film captures some but not all of this, as when she lies in her blog for the first time, for fear her boss might read it, realizing for the first time the tension between public and private inherent in social media. But it’s not quite lying that one does to resolve this tension. It’s more about developing a delicately crafted and nuanced voice that acknowledges a diversity of readers, some more invested than others. We all do it now, whether it’s a Facebook status update or a blog entry.

The “Julia” part of the film is fulsome, deeply sensual. I appreciated the emphasis on Julia Child’s search for meaning as a 50’s/60’s housewife. I know women in 2009, in comfortable marriages, discomfitingly haunted by this quandary. I loved the large bodies and appetites of main female characters (it’s still taboo to be female and admit you love to eat). I enjoyed the robust sexuality of the Childs.

After the movie I drifted home on a wave of pleasure and good humour – almost as though I’d just eaten an incredible dish of sole meuniere. It’s no work of genius, this film, but it does capture a zeitgeist, a particular moment when food, writing, and an alternative female sensibility, have converged.

Now I’m writing a book based on my food blog. I’ve been joking with my friends : Think. About. Who. Should. Play. You. In. The. Movie. Version.

I am a fairly unthankful person.

I don’t wake up in the morning with gratitude for the sun, the coming day, the people in my life. I don’t have a “gratitude journal.” I don’t say things like, “everything happens for a reason,” or even (my mother’s favourite line) “It could be worse.”

But when The Scrabble Player organized a Thanksgiving weekend at her cottage, I was grateful. The Librarian and I, with whom I have spent perhaps a dozen Thanksgivings and Christmases, were experiencing a bit of a rift.

I was grateful for the wide blue sky, and the puffy Simpsons-esque clouds on the way there. Country roads were framed by orange and red leaves, like something out of those jigsaw puzzles we did as kids.

I was ridiculously grateful for Thanksgiving dinner that I didn’t have to make (or at least I didn’t have to make all of it!): an organic turkey from The Croquet Expert’s sister’s farm, roasted mashed potatoes, wild rice/oyster stuffing, incredible gravy, and tsimmes by yours truly.

I was even grateful for The Square Dancer’s Ritz Cracker Cake (recipe coming soon). I watched him frost that cake with Betty Crocker French Vanilla frosting from a container, as reverently and carefully as though it was a gateau from Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

There’s nothing like an old, mature friendship. In a poem I can’t seem to locate, Adrienne Rich writes about ‘the film archive of friends’. I’ve known The Scrabble Player for many years, which allows us a nuanced silliness, and, a layer beneath that, a deep appreciation for each others’ different qualities. I’ve known The Librarian for even longer. Someone once said about us: You. Finish. Each. Others’. Sentences.

Seems to me friendships are a lot like books, with chapters and plot lines and rising and falling action. You can’t always know what the next chapter holds. You just have faith that the narrative will get you there.

Tsimmes

This is a Jewish side dish traditionally served at Passover. I’ve discovered it goes great with turkey so I make it at Thanksgiving and Christmas too. Too many times, The Anti-Poverty Organizer has had to dictate this recipe over the phone because I am often traveling and without my recipe journal on these occasions. I have finally archived it here.It is originally from Molly Katzen’s Moosewood Cookbook, although not the original version I have.

Part 1:
Grease an 8″ square baking pan and mix the ingredients below directly in the pan:

2 lg sweet potatoes, chopped
2 lg carrots, chopped
1 lg apple, chopped
1 lg onion, chopped
20 pitted prunes, sliced
Juice 1 lemon
1 tspn salt
1/2 tspn cinn
2/3 c fresh squeezed orange juice

Part 2: Topping:
Mix the topping in a separate bowl (reserving the butter) and then place it over the mixture in the baking pan. Then arrange the slices of butter over top.

1 sweet potato, grated
2 beaten eggs
1/2 c matzo meal, wheat germ or bread crumbs
1/2 tspn salt
3 tblspns butter, cold, in thin slices

Bake, covered, for 1 hour in a 350 degree oven, then uncovered, for another hour.

Puttin’ in the Ritz Cake

1 box plain Ritz crackers
1 pkg Skor chips
1 can Eagle condensed milk
1 container Betty Crocker French Vanilla frosting

Grease a 9”x9” cake pan.
Crush the crackers with a rolling pin while they’re still in the bag.
Reserve 1 tablespoon of chips. Mix remaining chips, cracker crumbs and milk in the pan.
Bake at 350 F for 15-20 minutes. Cool and frost. Sprinkle with reserved chips.

A couple of books ago, The Short Story Queen and I got talking about why we keep writing. We were frustrated with the fragility of infrastructure, the vagaries of distribution. I made a wry comment about the micro-press that had published a book of mine. It had just come out but you couldn’t find it online, not even on their catalogue. When I mentioned this to the publisher she was nonplussed. Just have people email me and I’ll send them books. she replied merrily.

It’s. Like. We’re. Selling. Homemade. Jars. Of Jam. I said to my friend.

It’s amazing anyone continues to paint, film, compose, write, etc. said Short Story Queen acerbically. We’re. Addicts. That’s. What. We. Are.

I wrote back to her: I wouldn’t say we’re addicts exactly. We’re true artists in the sense that we just do it anyways. I think about my brother Roman, out there on the street every day with his bandura.
Making music for him was about at the same level as breathing, an essential service to the self, and then beyond that, a simple gift to others.

Last Saturday, at the all-night art festival in Toronto known as Nuit Blanche, the whole city breathed art.

My buddy The Anti-Poverty Organizer and I drifted through the Financial District to see the works curated by Jennifer Fisher and Jim Drobnick, of DisplayCult. It was past midnight, full moon, and the streets packed with an all-ages audience.

Shauna Dempsey and Lori Millan’s “Wild Ride”, a midway with daredevil rides and screaming customers – smack in front of The Bank of Montreal – made apt and poetic metaphor of the recent financial crash.

An elite group of drinking and smoking men and women played Monopoly with real money, cocooned inside a financial institution (“Monopoly With Real Money” by Iain Baxter). We could see them if we pressed against the glass. It reminded me of 17th century Dutch and Flemish paintings of wealthy bankers.

We ended our tour in Union Station, Toronto’s 1920s-era railway station, modeled on New York’s Grand Central. The artist, Heather Nicol, had filled the main hall with colour, shadow, fog and voices. People lay on the ground and gave themselves up their senses. This station, which I’ve rushed through a thousand times, catching trains, leaving trains, became defamiliarized. Beautiful. Strange.

Everything was up for grabs. As I entered the subway at Yonge and Queen I noticed a small crowd of young people gazing at The Bay’s window display, arguing heatedly about whether it was art, or not.

You decide.