Recipes for Trouble

We were in a car, grey wet sky and the faint stain of mountains behind clouds visible through the car windows. I had no idea where we were going.I’d been on a plane for five hours. Got four hours sleep the night before.

We drove on and off of various ramps, veered past fast food joints and suburbs teetering uncertaintly on the edges of highways. Arrived at an industrial park in the heart of Richmond, on the outskirts of Vancouver. A sign with the name Hakkasan.

She’d researched and planned this for weeks. She’d read about some Asian chef with an innocuous tiny restaurant in Richmond. He’d been discovered by a famous food writer. People began to flock to his restaurant, he couldn’t deal. The place closed down, he opened this one. It was rumoured to have some pretty good contemporary Asian food.

It was such a carefully planned food adventure. No one had ever done anything quite like this for me before.

We settled in. Waves of flavour, aroma and texture flowed towards our table. Stuffed curried whelk. Prawn with vermicelli. Panko-breaded pork chops, a savoury custard on the side. A fragrant soup inside of a coconut shell.

We glanced at each other, sighed. She had a delighted, contented smile on her face.

There were a hundred different tastes in my mouth. I could feel muscles relaxing, that had been tense for months. I could feel myself landing, brought to awareness and stillness by sensation and the complex salty spicy sweet language of food and love.

Stories. I want stories.

You see, I’m about to get on some planes, see some loved ones, some liked ones and some tolerated ones, and engage in the bittersweet, aggravating, soul-warming, rich, shallow, crazy, predictable, surprising, labour-intensive rituals of the season.

In between I’ll be doing some course prep, some marking. Christmas, for academics, is fraught with the semester behind and the one just round the corner.

What are your seasonal stories?

What is the most uncomfortable, enjoyable, absurd Christmas, Hanukah, Diwali, solstice or Kwanzaa meal you ever ate?

How do the Christmas lights make you feel? What are you doing solstice eve?

What are you baking, cooking or eating this season?

Is there a certain taste, spice or smell you long for? Did the shortbread end up being dry as sand, did your latkes satisfy?

Are you en famille?

Are you in exile?

Have you managed to create your own queer, irreverent, or politicized celebrations?

Do you love to wrap yourself in peaceful solitariness and ignore the whole damn thing?

Thank you for all of your lovely comments, anecdotes, food recommendations and recipes this past year. And thank you for quietly lurking and reading. With this blog I do feel connected to a larger human story.

But right now, I need to be fed.

So please, be my Scheherazade, and tell me a story (so I can prolong this blog’s life into the new year!)

To-do lists as interminable as the December night is long. Fifty emails a day. Dirty dishes piled up, a basket of clean but mangled laundry on the floor of my study. Marking hell.

My mother says, as she always does when I get to this point: You. Have. To. Throw. A. Party.

And so I do. A very tiny one. Four people, including me.

The morning of the dinner party finds me with no real plan of action. Not to mention massage and hair appointments taking huge bites out of the day. At the massage therapist’s office, I burst into tears for no good reason, except exhaustion.

By the time I get the hair salon, we’ll call it Haute Coiffure, I am red of eyes and grey of face. My colourist, we’ll call him Antoine, usually an aloof and intimidating sort, takes one look at me and raises an eyebrow. Antoine and I never dish, hardly even speak. We don’t really get each other. But I’ve been getting my hair cut at Haute Coiffure by his boyfriend – we’ll call him Timi – for twenty years. So Antoine and I treat each other with wary respect, like in-laws at a family gathering.

I tell Antoine about the by-now-dreaded dinner party. He frowns as he prepares his palette. And then he’s off and running. He gives me suggestions for easy starters and easier mains. He absolutely forbids me to make dessert. He narrates his recipe for stuffed squash as though it’s classical poetry. He lovingly describes an arugula-walnut-pomegranate salad he made recently. As he talks, his angular features soften and his eyes glow. This is a man for whom food is a language of the heart. I finally get a glimpse of the guy Timi has loved all these years.

As he’s putting the finishing touches on my hair Antoine says gently You. Can. Always. Do. Takeout. He tells me about an excellent sushi place that delivers.

I do finally make it to the supermarket. I buy all the ingredients for bastilla, a middle-eastern meat pie. I buy a pomegranate, too.

I cab it home with all my groceries and the cab driver asks me if I’m OK. I tell him about the impending dinner party and he declares that my best bet is a roast. He describes the dry rub he and his wife will make for a leg of lamb that evening. His voice is full of pleasure and anticipation.

My guests arrive, happy and excited to be fed. There is laughter, joking, flowers, delicious wine. I make a pomegranate-walnut salad. The bastilla is sweet and savoury, soft and crisp. I prepare no dessert but at the last minute fill martini glasses with ice cream, raspberries and Grand Marnier.

My mother was right. By the end of the evening the load I’d been carrying around has dissolved. There’s a happy debris of dishes and wine glasses, and a few pomegranate stains on the tablecloth.