Recipes for Trouble

Ever been to a potluck? Five bowls of hummous, ten salads, one dessert? I haven’t been to a decent potluck since the mid-1980’s. A little while ago, I was invited to a potluck dinner where I was asked to bring a dish for ten people, a bowl, a fork, and a cushion to sit on. I politely sent my regrets.

But this week, I went to a potluck that blew all the others out of the water.

I’d been invited to speak at a benefit for Spezzatino Magazine. “Spezzatino” is Italian for a stew with small pieces of meat. It’s also the name of this Toronto-based food magazine that raises money to provide healthy food to people in need.

The Tennis Player accompanied me. We did not know what to expect. The invite said 6:30. Should we eat beforehand, plan for a drink afterwards? I’m so glad we went hungry.

The event was held in the recently refurbished Artscape Wychwood Barns. We entered a beautiful, high-ceilinged room, home of the amazing Stop Community Food Centre, which provides nutritious and culturally appropriate food to low-income people. It does this in a multitude of ways: a food bank, a green house, community cooking and advocacy to name just a few.

Delicious aromas greeted us. This was no ordinary potluck. Farmers, vintners and foodies of all stripes had arrived bearing salads made from freshly picked greens, soups, casseroles, organic chocolate, and a plethora of desserts. One generous dude brought bottles of wine from his vineyard, and set up a bar in the greenhouse. A huge pot of spezzatino drew people like moths to a flame.

Make. Sure. You. Try. The Poutine. Outside. said Krista, the organizer, rather distractedly. Poutine? Outside? We grabbed one of the takeout containers piled on a table and wandered confusedly into a courtyard with a garden full of cabbages. I felt a bit like Alice in Wonderland. I half-expected a rabbit to rush past, muttering to himself.

Oh. Wow. Look. said The Tennis Player, awestruck. I followed her gaze. There, glowing in the dark like a drug-induced hallucination was a takeout truck covered in lumberjack plaid with the words Smoke’s Poutinerie emblazoned on it. Smoke’s is the Julia Child of poutines. It was recently mentioned by Calvin Trillin in The New Yorker food issue.

We approached the truck warily, hopefully, glasses of wine in hand. Two unbelievably cheerful men filled our containers with artery-clogging love: pulled pork poutine and country style poutine (slow-roasted chicken breast, double-smoked bacon, sauteed mushrooms, caramelized onion – and of course, cheese curds, gravy and fries).

The rest of the evening was quirky and slightly chaotic and heartwarming. Spezzatino made a donation of $15,000 to Stop. Farmers, food activists, and even the poutine guy told food stories. I read a story about perogies from my book, Comfort Food for Breakups: The Memoir of a Hungry Girl. The Scrabble Player, who also showed up, said to me as she left. This. Was. Incredible. Please. Invite. Me. To. All. Your. Foodie. Events. All. Of. Them.

It was an evening unlike any I’d been to, where foodie-ism and food security, sensuality and politics, good food and good intentions, mingled together like the most delicately flavoured yet robust stew.

Starting to think about Christmas shopping? Buy someone a subscription to Spezzatino, Toronto’s most beautifully- designed and well-written food magazine. Wondering whom to make your end-of-year charitable donation? Make a tax-deductible donation to Stop. You can do it right now by clicking here. Got time but no extra cash? You can always volunteer at the Stop Food Bank (416 652 7867 ext 249.) , or organize a healthy food drive on your block.

I have a dreadful recipe book, called The Frugal Cook or somesuch thing. It’s usually a bad sign when I pull it off the shelf.

It practically opened right up to the tofu meatball page. Which is uncanny, since there was a leftover 1/2 block of tofu in my fridge. If I didn’t get to it that night it would turn on me, and rather aggressively at that.

The entire doomed process took half an hour, including making a (rather tasty, if I do say so myself) tomato sauce, and a steaming tangle of wholewheat spaghetti.

There they were, tiny balls of tofu-ey yucchiness, fried into submission. I felt I had a responsibility to those tofuballs. Onto the delicious pasta with tomato sauce and parmesan they went.

They were oddly sweet and oddly bitter, and their texture resembled cottage cheese. Remember cottage cheese? It was the diet food of my adolescence.

I ate around the sinister beige golf balls and occasionally took a tiny bite. It’s like I was ten and had a hippie mama in a hemp dress and a patchwork apron standing over me wielding a bat. I finally left most of them on my plate. The rest of the tofuballs went to their inevitable compost grave.

November. Marking, meetings, brain like mush. Not the best month for cooking, but a girl’s gotta stay healthy.

What do you cook/eat/takeout when you’re in the weeds?

We meet once a month. Eight fabulous woman writers. Wine, bread, cheese, gossip. One or two or three of us present our work, which is then hotly discussed and debated. Sometimes, we can’t agree: should there be more detail, or less? It hardly matters: there’s fierce belief in the air. And then, if there’s time, we write. Someone throws out a writing prompt or two, meant to get us started. This one stayed with me for days:

Where do you rest?

I rest in Facebook, gmail, the blogosphere. I take breaks without ever leaving the computer screen. Someone I’ve never met is “baking Christmas cookies. Wtf?” A woman I barely know is “happily going to her studio to work”. My niece “needs a couple strokes of really good luck right now..”

Richard Grusin writes, “We become simultaneously both the subject and object of contemporary media.” We are constantly seeing and being seen. We are public and private, always and everywhere.

I wonder: where did I rest before social networking? Did I spend more time in cafes, art galleries, the street? Or was I simply at that same computer screen (OK, different computer), working? Why can’t I remember?

Fifteen years ago there was no email. We used the phone. If we had to phone all the people we now email in a day, we’d fall to the ground, exhausted.

Where do you rest?

When I go to Gambier Island for a month, as I have done the past two summers, all I do the first week, is sleep. I sleep in, write for an hour, have a nap, write for another hour…you get the idea. I sleep like a professional, like it’s my job to sleep. I tell the next-door- neighbour, I. Can’t. Believe. How. Tired. I. Am. I. Can’t. Stop. Sleeping. and she says gently, You. Must. Need. It.

The bedroom in that house on Gambier has a window facing the forest. Deer sometimes saunter by, peering in at the window, like it’s their personal drive-in movie.

I sleep very well in that room.

Where do you rest?

The other months of the year my dreams are full of careening cars, lost lecture notes, a film shoot for which equipment was never booked, snarling children, and deadlines long overdue.

Sleep is not always rest.

And rest is sometimes, too, the act of cooking, of washing and chopping the purple-and-orange organic carrots I got at the farmer’s market that day, , the rinsing of basmati rice, sauteeing onions in a big, wide pan, the radio with its accompanying sizzle of ambient news.

How do you rest?