Recipes for Trouble

This week I wondered, what are you supposed to do with this feeling art can give you? What if it follows you, to the office, to the classroom? What if it exceeds the space of a page, or a room?

I read a novel this week, A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore, that exceeded its rectangular papery space each time I picked it up.

“Regret - operatic, oceanic, fathomless - seemed to stretch before her in every direction. No matter which path she took regret would stain her feet and scratch her arms and rain down on her, lightlessly and lifelong…”

This book made me want to write, made me thirst for the river of words that could, if there was time for it, come out of my pen.

I went to an art gallery this week, for the first time in months, saw a show of Micheal Snow’s recent work. One piece, “Condensation - A Love Story” was a projection of a kind of time-lapse of weather in a Nova Scotian cove. Sun flew across field and ocean and then receded into a curtain of fog and rain; light remerged, and revealed the cliffs to have different colours before rain shrouded them again. I felt moved by a natural world so enduring and fine.

I saw a Play, Cloud 9, by Caryl Churchill, that failed to move me despite enormous resources and a cast of highly experienced and talented actors. I saw a one-woman show, Everything I’ve Got by my friend Jess Dobkin, and got to enter into a magical world of unicorns, vaginas, clown cars, and lavish artistic imagining.

Seen any good or bad art lately? How did it make you feel?

Days in the city have been marked by pale, blank skies, temperate weather and a damp chill. A new semester begins, and the hallways of my workplace are feverish with students. No marking yet, so there are tiny bits of time to cook, or read a novel, between writing and festival submissions and the day-to-day admin of a part-time artist’s life.

There is good food in this city, and people to share it with. Izakaya (Japanese tapas) at the freshly-minted Guu on a chilly night with The Librarian. A room full of noise (the wait staff shout greetings and orders in unison), and eager smiling people at long wooden tables. We adore the BC tuna sashimi, the grilled black cod with miso and white wine sauce, and the grilled oysters with spinach, garlic mayonnaise and cheese. A few days later, hole-in-the-wall Mexican with The Tennis Player: pozole soup, enchiladas with mole sauce, and a colourful melange of Christmas and Mexican decorations.

And a tuna salad sandwich, shared with The Queer Organizer as we take a pause from skiiing in the hills near Mansfield, in the fresh, astringent air, is as delicious as anything I’ve eaten all week.

I’ve been making salads, too. A Waldorf-ish quinoa-apple salad; retro mushroom and spinach; a beet-fennel-carrot slaw. I cook wholesomely and earnestly, in this first month of a new decade: sweet potato and chickpea curry; pasta puttanesca. Tomorrow I will make minestrone soup, and later go to an Indian Harvest Dinner for which the Diasporic Filmmaker has requested perogies. I will walk through Trinity-Bellwoods Park to the Czech deli on Queen Street to purchase them, and then I’ll fry them up with onions and serve them with sour cream.

A good week of food and friends, in a troubled world.

The hospital’s on a barren, windswept city corner, abrupt, austere, final.

The entrance is bare bones. It greets you uncertainly: there’s no reception, just someone behind glass who quickly turns away from you when you arrive, and buzzes you in. Nowhere to ask anything, not that you know what to ask. Not even a gift shop to soften the transition from the world of the living to the world of the ill and dying.

She looks oddly beautiful, even though she’s lost weight, even though she is ninety-four and about to commence, as a someone once described it, her ‘last immigration.’

She is the last of a generation, the generation that came here on wagon carts and ships and trains, wearing numbers, or sheepskin coats, boxy suits, fedoras, or tattoos. She is the last of our archive, not that any of them ever told us much beyond how terrible it was there and how bad it was here. Much of her story will die with her. And by story I also mean recipes: her torte, her perogy dough, her mushroom sauce.

We thought there was more time, to ask the questions, to write the answers and recipes down.

We sit and talk, the daughter and I. She sleeps, mostly, her mouth open. She sleeps more and more, the daughter says. The daughter is here every day, all day. When the mother awakes, the daughter leans over her and they exchange radiant smiles. The daughter is already heartbroken, I can see this.

I am introduced, a relation, or, an intruder from an alien planet, the planet of the healthy and the living. She strains toward me, and she kisses me on the cheek. Somehow, she knows I am family and she knows to kiss me goodbye.

Back on the street, on the corner of Church and Bloor, I gasp for air, over and over and over. I will take the subway home. I will make pasta for dinner. I will watch TV, hours of it.

The next day, I will visit a friend and her new baby. The baby sleeps more and more, says the new mom. When the baby awakes, it makes eye contact, appraises me steadily, its mouth a tiny, delicate O.

Three Christmases in three cities. Three weeks, five beds, twenty people to buy small and large gifts for. Two turkey dinners, three Sviat Vechir (Ukrainian Christmas Eve) feasts. One tasting menu, one high tea (thanks, Blue Eyed Stranger!).

My shortbread, my mother’s rugaleh, Marika’s pampushky (sweet yeast buns with plum jam), Lida’s star-shaped cookies, The Anti-Poverty Organizers’s ginger cake with poached pears. A cheese fondue, a chocolate fondue. The Swimmer’s excellent appetizers, The Feminist Lawyer’s cream of spinach soup with Stilton. The Bird Watcher’s homemade baguette. Chocolate, chocolate, and more chocolate.

I’m borrowing a page from The Vintage Queen, who has decided, in her lovely blog Proper Tension, to choose a different activity every month to do for thirty days.

I’ve been in a salad rut for awhile. Piles of greens, walnuts, and what ever fruit is lying around. Not bad, but salad can be so much more.

Thus the 30-day salad challenge was born.

I’m inspired by Mark Bittman’s (The Minimalist) 101 simple salads list, as well as by a newly acquired cookbook, Feast of Greens, and all of the ideas people are giving me.

Three days in, here’s where I’ve been:

Day 1: Steam a chopped up head of broccoli. Cool in ice water, then toss with 1-2 cloves crushed garlic, 2 tablespoons balsamic, 5 tablespoons olive oil. Add in a few slivered sundried tomatoes and some pine nuts or slivered almonds. (adapted from Field of Greens). Banal, comforting, healthful.

Day 2: Grate carrots, toast some sunflower seeds, and toss with blueberries, olive oil, lemon juice and plenty of black pepper. Sweet, sour, crunchy, soft. (Mark Bittman). This one’s a keeper - but it doesn’t keep. Eat it all in one serving.

Day 3: (I ate this, but didn’t make it. Does that count?) Fruit compote, a salad of reconstituted apricots, prunes, apples, pears, in a simple syrup spiced with cinnamon. A Ukrainian Christmas Eve tradition.

What salads are you eating in this month of resolutions, detox, renewal, and new beginnings?