Recipes for Trouble

The fall equinox arrived this week. The night, stretching its arms and legs, getting longer, bolder, casually snatching minutes from the day.

Still, there is a sultry whisper of heat in the air, and an encore of black eyed susans, geraniums,
and unnamed pink and white flowers in my yard.

The other night, I bicycled to Ossington in the lingering golden light of 6 p.m. Everyone looked pretty, strolling the sidewalk, catching a last breath of summer on their bare arms and faces. We all know what’s coming - cold and snow and layers of clothes.

I was meeting The Girlfriend at Pizzeria Libretto. The place has been getting rave reviews since it opened one month ago, so we were a bit reluctant, worried it’s beeen swarmed by richie-rich foodies from King Street condo land. But we wanted to try.

I was early, and there was no lineup (not yet) so I locked up my bike and sashayed across the street to the Crooked Star It’s a charming, slightly shabby bar with and ironic atmosphere and a generous wine pour. I ordered my glass of red at the crescent-shaped bar and headed out to the patio to catch the day’s twilight performance.

Oddly, there was a guy shucking oysters out there. I thought maybe I’d stumbled onto a private party. I pondered faking my way in. But no, I was legit. We want to celebrate the end of summer. It’s a neighbourhood thing said pleasant-faced Oyster Shucker Guy. He handed me a raw shucked oyster . It looked like an eye blinking in the fading light. I ladled on some mignonette, applied a wedge of lemon and swallowed it down.

I sighed, deeply: the ocean in my mouth, briny, wild, sharp and somehow sweet at the same time.

Those oysters are from PEI said Oyster Shucker Guy. I know the folks who farm them. Very old school. They go out in a boat and pull the oysters up with giant tongs. I could see it, the boat, the tossing waves, the hauling in. I gulped back another oyster, this one from new Brunswick. I watched people drift in and out of the patio. Japanese, Caribbean, anglo…a swirl of languages. I love how multicultural this city is.

My cellphone blurted at me. We’re on the list said The Girlfriend. I’m on the corner looking for you. I took a last sip of wine and found her across the street, wearing a confident smile and a blue shirt the exact colour of a summer sky. We took deep breaths and headed into the pizzeria, where once had existed a Portuguese grocer who sold also terracotta pottery. I have a lovely pie plate I bought from him, trimmed in blue filligree. I wonder where he is now.

We ended up at a long communal table. I panicked at first: it had been a day of many conversations, of lecturing and of posing and answering questions. The noise in the pizzeria was daunting.

You. Should. Try. The. Mushroom. Pizza. said the man next to me. It’s. The. Best. His wife nodded enthusiastically. Between them sat their two kids. One was colouring, the other, maybe age 4, was looking at her Margharita Pizza with great skepticism, like she wanted to send it back and demand Mac ‘n Cheese instead.

We did indeed order the pizza al funghi. And the salad with grilled peaches and champagne vinaigrette.

We’d been having a tough time of it lately. Misunderstood intentions. Misdirected anxieties. And work, the work of relationship, at the moment when an autumn chill sets in, you feel it in the evening and you’re not ready for it, please, no, not yet. Intimacy, love, and the superhuman strength it requires. Love is more than what it gives you, sang Veda Hille in a song whose name I can’t remember now.

We took our first tastes of the pizza and grinned at each other. The young dad next to me looked over at us, pleased. I thought I saw the little girl roll her eyes.

A crisp, tasty crust made with local organic flour. Tallegio and Ontario mozzarella cheese, a lively mix of herbs (tarragon? fennel? the guy next to us surmised). And the mushrooms, tasting of deep, dark autumn forests.

Tangy greens, luxuriant in our mouths. There’s. Some. Interesting. Things. In. This. Salad. said The Girlfriend. She cooks very simply, this one, enjoys distinct, clean flavours. The rustic Italian slow-food approach is perfect for her.

This is a pizzeria with a manifesto, a kind of Dogme 95 of pizza “The pizza, at the end of the cooking process, will emanate a characteristic aroma, at once perfumed and fragrant,” according to rules set out by the European Union and the Vera Pizza Napoletana Association (on their website).

And their kitchen is as ‘green’ as they can get it. They convert kitchen grease into biodesiel fuel. Green electricity, fair trade coffee.

We left happy - blissed out, actually. The evening air was blue, purple at the edges. I Think That Pizza Could Get Us Through The Winter I said.

Happy Fall.

I don’t know exactly how far Dufferin Grove Organic Farmers’ Market is from my house. A four-minute bike ride. Six blocks or so. All I know is that it has shaped and changed my eating habits, for good.

I go every Thursday, now. I go if I’ve had a good writing day (Thursday is Writing Day), I go if it’s been crap. Rain or shine, summer or spring.

The market is bordered on on side by its on kitchen garden. Tomatoes, nasturtiums, zucchinni, herbs: for the pizzas, cooked in a wood-burning over and sold on Thursdays, or for the Friday community dinners. Sunflowers grow with abandon, their faces dark against the blue sky. I see lots of young moms, babies held casually in one arm, a bag full of chard and squash in the other. This place is important for them, a site of community. I catch a basketball that strays near my bike and hand it back to the clutch of young Asian and Black boys who haunt the basketball court and play fanatically, day and night. They thank me sweetly.

Sometimes I run into people I know, like The Painter. Hi, she says, rather shyly. Hi I say. I’ve. Been. Writing. All. Day. Now. I. Can. Barely. Form. Words.

I. Know. she says. Painting. Same.

OK so I don’t go for the conversation! I go for the bread, the tomatoes, the peaches. I go for the funny booth with the funny dudes. Did. You. Want. Arugula. says one of the farmers, too me. Oh. My. God. I say. You. Read. My Mind. Well, we’re sold out he says. Damn you. I say. Shoulda got here sooner. he says. Some. Of. Us. Have. To. Make. Art. I say.

When I get home, I fall upon the multi-grain bread I bought, baked in those same wood-burning ovens. I make Sausage and Rapini Stew, adapted from that liquor store magazine (Food and Drink). I don’t think their recipes are that shit hot. Or maybe it’s that the rapini tasted bitter. But as I chop and stir, I realize that at least half of my ingredients, on any given day, are from farms within 100 miles of my home.

Does that make me a demi-locavore? I tend to find the 100-mile diet fad a bit precious, an amusement for the privileged classes. I think it’s the idea of it, its ethical heart, that’s important. I’m all over buying locally when and if you can. I know the faces of the farmers who make my food. It’s such a grounding ritual, to go to market.

It’s a privilege to receive the earth’s produce in that way, country to city, hand to hand.

Sausage & Rapini Stew

1 onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
glug of olive oil
1/2 bunch rapini, trimmed (you could also just use broccolli - less bitter)
2 cups tomatoes
a small amount of tomato paste
sprinkle of red pepper flakes
3 Italian sausages, casings removed
Chopped yam, pattypan squash and/or carrot, as desired (I threw in green beans too)
Basil & thyme

Saute onions in olive oil, add minced garlic & pepper flakes. Shmoosh up the chopped tomatoes in a food processor or blender until a fine lumpy mess and add to onion mixture. After about ten minutes, toss in yams etc (if using), rapini, then sliced sausages, adding in some tomato paste if the thing needs thickening. Throw in the herbs, salt & pepper to taste, simmer about 20 mins or until veggies are tender. Serve over polenta.

Fall is liminal.

Liminal means ‘of the threshold’. A site we pass through, a place of becoming. Borders are powerful, painful, unsettling. You might get stopped, you might get questioned. You might sail right through but then realize you forgot the language. Or you thought you knew the language, but realize you’re rusty, can barely put together a sentence, let alone a poem.

Fall is now the time I put down my paintbrush, fold up my tripod, put ideas on hold.

Like a river that’s been diverted by a dam, my creativity pours into my course designs, my lectures, my ways of being in a university. There is a displacement, of identity, and of real, material things: books, films, stories that may or may not get made or told.

It’s a strange and unsettling transition.

In my culture, the role of artist is pretty much respected. When I went to Ukraine for the first and only time, I was amazed by how, when people asked me what I did and I replied with: “I’m an artist/writer/filmmaker/video artist “(choose one, or choose all), people didn’t stare or say, Ah, yeah but what do you really do, or How on earth do you make a living.

They nod. It makes sense. It’s plausible. It’s respectable.

Last night I watched a doc on TV about a group of women who created a play, Body & Soul. At one point the director, Judith Thompson, asked them to write about the one thing that makes them angry.

I had no problem choosing one thing. It makes me angry that it’s so difficult to be an artist in this country. And I’m one of the lucky ones. My brother’s penchant for making art every day no matter what (he was a busker musician) was one of the things that contributed to his ill health and ultimately, I believe, to his passing.

There’s something lost, when you can’t make art every day, a kind of flow. Here’s Tibetan Buddhist and chef Kimberley Snow talking about a certain state she achieves within the daily practice of cooking. I’ve substituted writing for food.

If you let yourself quietly be with the writing, something else does take place, something outside the usual range of the senses, another order, another way of being. The it takes over. The me is gone.

And just as an aside (since we’re facing a federal election once again), I’m particularly pissed off at the current Conservative government’s recent cuts to arts funding. Now, let it be known that this is a process that was begun by the Liberals just over ten years ago. Canada’s art funding, once a mere 1% of its federal budget, has, over the past 11/2 decades, been cut in half.

If you want to even maintain a level of arts funding; if you want cool indie films and film festivals and a diverse ecology of art galleries and performance venues and places where non-corporate artists can get support to make films - go to your election town hall meetings and ask the hard questions about arts funding. And, vote NDP. They get it. (OK , end of aside).

As for me, I’m subsisting on a diet of one or two days per week of writing. It’s going to have to be enough, for now. Don’t know that I’ll achieve that other way of being for the next eight months. I’ll be living on the borderland of art. I’ll be making something out of nothing. I’ll let creativity be my guide - in teaching, in relationships, in how I sort out my schedule. It’s about trying to provide for the soul’s nourishment and survival. And, hopefully, learning something about life’s strange twists and turns, its stable places and its liminal places, along the way.

The first night, we were kind of excited.

What do you think it will be, I asked The Girlfriend. Strata? Bacon and eggs?

Oh. I. Hope. It’s Omelette. she said sweetly, innocently. I. Love. Omelette.

We fell asleep in our cute yellow B&B room, dreaming of omelette.

We woke too early, afraid of missing the 9 a.m. breakfast call. As a result, we were just a little cranky when we realized breakfast was actually a three-course meal. Parfait glasses held an unidentifiable cold gruel, adorned with blueberries and mint leaves. At least the second course was recognizable: French toast with local maple syrup and sausages.

But still, were in Prince Edward County, a region noted for its wines, its good eating, its cheese and its gourmet cuisine. That day, we would eat local aged cheddar, homemade pickle relish, a multitude of heirloom tomatoes at a tomato tasting, steak and ale pie, and panfried pickerel. Not to mention all manner of local wines. Why then, would you fill your guests’ bellies with rich and unnourishing food?

We skipped the next day’s breakfast, saying we wanted to sleep in.

But curiosity got the better of us, that third fatal morning.

It was a weekday. Maybe. She’ll. Keep. It. Simple. I said, with weak optimism.

No such luck. On the little blackboard where the host - we’ll call her Laura - listed her breakfast menu, we saw, as we groggily took our places, a phrase that struck fear into our hearts. Southwestern Sausage Bake. With Sour Cream, Guacamole, and Salsa.

Who the hell wants to look at guacamole this early in the day, she muttered to me as we stumbled over to the sideboard to get our coffee.

It was as dreadful as the name predicted. Wizened grey sausage pieces peeked out of the tomato-cheese topping, and lurked everywhere in the “casserole”. Egg was clearly an afterthought. It was a 70’s nightmare: hard, rubbery, downright bizarre.

On top of which, we had to endure conversation with two 60-something couples from small towns. One of the husbands, we’ll call him Mr. Doughboy, insisted on regaling us with descriptions of every single thing he’d eaten the previous day.

By the time we got back to our room we were nauseous, and shrieking with laughter.

We didn’t eat again until dinner time, at a pub on the way home.

Next time, we vow, we’re renting a cottage , or an ‘efficiency unit’. Or, we’ll stay at a hotel and grab breakfast in a diner, where eggs are eggs and sausages are sausages and they occupy separate sides of the plate.

I hunted down a reasonable approximation of a recipe for Southwest Sausage Bake, for your amusement.

Any scary B&B breakfast stories out there?

Southwest Sausage Bake
(Shamelessly lifted from Taste of Home)

This layered tortilla dish is not only delicious, but it’s a real time-saver because it’s put together the night before. The tomato slices provide a nice touch of color. I like to serve this crowd-pleasing casserole with muffins and fresh fruit.

SERVINGS: 12

TIME: Prep: 15 min. + chilling Bake: 1 hour + standing
Ingredients:

* 6 flour tortillas (10 inches), cut into 1/2-inch strips
* 4 cans (4 ounces each) chopped green chilies, drained
* 1 pound bulk pork sausage, cooked and drained
* 2 cups (8 ounces) shredded Monterey Jack cheese
* 10 eggs
* 1/2 cup milk
* 1/2 teaspoon each salt, garlic salt, onion salt, pepper and ground cumin
* Paprika
* 2 medium tomatoes, sliced
* Sour cream and salsa

Directions:
In a greased 13-in. x 9-in. baking dish, layer half of the tortilla strips, chilies, sausage and cheese. Repeat layers. In a bowl, beat the eggs, milk and seasonings; pour over cheese. Sprinkle with paprika. Cover and refrigerate overnight.
Remove from the refrigerator 30 minutes before baking. Bake, uncovered, at 350° for 50 minutes. Arrange tomato slices over the top. Bake 10-15 minutes longer or until a knife inserted near the center comes out clean. Let stand for 10 minutes before cutting. Serve with sour cream and salsa. Yield: 12 servings.