newly opened phlox blooming white, aromatic in the evening, with Jackmanii clematis behind

Though our evenings are still long and soft, glowing to the northwest well after nine as the sky darkens to deep blue, we can already feel that we’re heading back to the darker side of the year. This yin and yang at an annual scale, and then our daily pattern of light and dark, are fundamental rhythms, as essential and familiar as our heartbeat or the ins and outs of our breath.

Within those reliable alternations we create many patterns over our lifetimes as we learn and grow: We pursue education and strive at work in many forms, we meet new people and engage with old friends, we cook familiar dishes and explore ingredients and possibilities we hadn’t known of until recently, we read books and enlarge and enrich our idea of the world. There’s a resilience in this process of dynamic adaptation. It gives us a few tools for dealing with change and loss, but we’re not really prepared for shocking change and catastrophic loss.

the day lilies are like an honour guard, crowding against anyone walking along the path

I’ve been pre-occupied for a long time by thoughts about grief and the stress of change and loss. We face these things in our personal lives and now we’re looking at them in a world-wide context. We’ve been warned for years about the coming environmental catastrophe. But now it’s staring us in the face. Each year recently we’ve seen catastrophic climate-change evidence: heat waves, floods, huge fires and smoke-laden air, water shortages. Change and loss are knocking at the door. When patterns shift course, we’re forced to adapt, and it’s often painful. Our institutions are not very adaptable, nor is our built environment. The least well-off among us are the most vulnerable.

As the US-dominated old order crashes and burns, we don’t know what will come next. I hope things will improve for many as the global south finds more autonomy. But meantime the senile Caligula (Francesca Albanese’s label), using the US military and US-dominated financial institutions, is capable of wreaking even more havoc.

It’s like being on an airplane in a violent storm. We are shaken, lifted, dropped suddenly. Will we come through it safely? It feels increasingly unlikely. There’s no certainty.

in a crowded streetcar earlier in the week I saw this woman, with her injury boot (maybe a snapped achilles?) and her flashy fashionable boot on the other foot. Nearby there was a nearly 90 year old woman with a cane who needed help, a tall man with a walker who was very shaky on his feet, and a disabled older woman who needed help getting on and off. It was a reminder that injury and disability, the “not-normal” happens to all of us

With no control over the larger picture, I try to take solace and find my footing in the immediate, as I often do here on Substack. That means engaging with the details of daily life, from random encounters on the street to conversations with friends, from the beauties of the garden as it grows, blooms, and dies back, to small details in my kitchen explorations. I’m grateful to have enough curiosity about things large and small that every day feels fresh.

a perfect lunch last week: toasted rye from Dawnthebaker (Evelyn’s Crackers) with butter and sardines, eaten in the shade

KITCHEN EXPLORATIONS with talk of currants red and black; potato salad made with stir-fried vegetables; sesame-dressed vegetables

In the last two weeks I’ve picked the red currants from my small bush, in two or three passes. I found myself eating them in hand, like that, gorgeous colour and lively flavour. I tried eating them with an old raw milk cheddar from Quebec – wonderful. So then I tried them with Mountain Oak, an aged gouda from Ontario – also an excellent match.

red currants with Mountain Oak; and the spectacular combo of mango sorbet with red currants

The black currants need even more careful picking than the red ones. The delicately stemmed little clusters have six to eight berries each, of which the first two or three are perfectly ripe, then come two or three reddish halfway ripe ones, then one or two translucent berries, pale ivory with veining that makes them look like miniature gooseberry cousins. It can’t be profitable to pick a bush over three or four times. So how to commercial growers manage? Fresh berries are labour, however you look at it. But what a reward! I will do another pick tomorrow.

black currants up close: leaf, stem cluster in all stages of ripeness; a picked bowlful. If you’re making cucumber pickles, a leaf or two in the jar will keep your cucumbers crunchy

Meantime I combined the first two picks of black currants in a small pot with a splash of water and a little sugar and simmered them until they burst and thickened. Each mouthful is tart and funky and wonderful. I keep the jar in the fridge and take a taste every once in a while, on its own or smeared on a little toast.

The chiles on one plant (I’ve lost the label so I can’t tell you the kind – too small for cayennes) are ready, green and rather small. They have good heat. I’ve been mincing one or two to include in cooked vegetables. The other day I stir-fried snow peas from the farmers market, after pulling off their strings and chopping them crosswise. They went into the wok after I’d softened some sliced onions in hot oil flavoured with mustard seed and fennel. A minced green chile went in too. And then the whole combo got turned out of the wok into a mass of cooked peeled and coarsely chopped new potatoes. I added torn basil leaves and chopped garlic scapes, uncooked, They give a good crunch and a green garlic hit of flavour too. A generous splash of cider vinegar and an extra glug of olive oil, plus an adjustment of salt, and the dish was done. Leftovers were a perfect bed for my fried eggs the next morning.

potato “salad” dressed with stir-fried snow peas etc

eggs over leftover potatoes, with a little leftover lettuce too

Another recent pleasure has been a a sesame-dressed vegetable dish that you can serve like a fresh pickle. My friend Gord, whose cucumber recipe guided the Japanese pickled cucumber recipe in my Miracle of Salt book, brought over one version of it. And later I made another, which I’ve kept in the fridge for a few days, bringing it out as a side-dish/extra flavor with our evening meal. It’s a variant of the sesame seed flavoured dishes called goma-ae in Japan. Proportions are to taste. I used a combination of asparagus and broccolini. Gord had used spinach and asparagus. I’d like to try young carrots next, perhaps paired with broccolini or even with barely blanched radicchio.

sesame-dressed veg (Gord’s version) as a side with egg noodles topped with a sauce of slow-simmered mixed mushrooms

I chopped the broccolini into one-inch lengths, and the asparagus about the same. I brought a small pot of salted water to a boil and dropped in the thicker broccolini stems, and almost a minute later the florets. After another forty five seconds or so I scooped them all out with a spider and set them in a bowl to cool. Most advice is to add ice cubes to cool the veg and stop the cooking. I think that spoils the flavour. I repeated the parboiling with asparagus, starting with the thicker ends and adding the tips a little later. Again about a minute or a little more was all that was needed.

While they cool you can toast sesame seeds (about ¼ cup) in a dry skillet over medium heat until aromatic and turning colour. Keep shaking the pan so they don’t burn. Place them in a suribachi (Japanese mortar) or another mortar and grind them. It doesn’t matter if some of them remain whole, but you want most of them broken. Turn them out into a bowl, add about one tablespoon soy sauce and one teaspoon of sugar. Stir and then taste. You may want a little more soy or sugar. I like to add a generous squeeze of lemon juice or lime juice. You could include a little miso… Pour the sesame dressing over the vegetables and stir well to coat them. Let stand for an hour or more. Refrigerate if the wait will be any longer. Serve at room temperature.

summer in Toronto, with shady places to sit and read or sip a lemonade; this is Sonndr, at the corner of Dundas West and Shaw

Jackmanii clematis climbing and hanging

The return of summer, even this year’s cooler version of early summer, has transported me back to late June last year, with its dread and sorrow, and its oceans of love. These surges of feeling take over, raising my heart rate, and thickening my throat. I try to breathe into them rather than fighting them. That steadying breath feels like the key to moving forward and retrieving equilibrium.

nasturtium colour and leaf detail

I visualise Tashi’s lightness in my mind’s eye and use those imaginings to try to shed the heaviness of my feelings. From an early age he gave thoughtful advice; somehow he continues to help keep me on track.

With the World Cup on screens all over town, the daily cityscape feels a little muted. But in my small garden life goes on vigorously. I’ve trimmed the wisteria back, the first of many efforts to keep it managed, and have also pruned the waving prickly fronds of the wild rose, now that its tender white petalled blossoms have dropped off, leaving their small green hips to fatten up. The honeysuckle is still in full bloom, invasively draping itself over the fence into the neighbours‘ yard.

the garden after rain, seen from the second floor

I harvested some elderflowers this week for making cordial and have just done a first pick of my red currants…You’ll find the instructions for my version of elderflower cordial below, in Kitchen Explorations.

KITCHEN EXPLORATIONS with goji leaves, fresh peas, and elderflower cordial

The farmers’ markets here continue to educate me. Last week I bought fresh goji leaves (leaves from the plant that later in the summer produces goji berries, aka wolfberries) from Lily at Trinity Bellwoods market. She told me that her mother uses them in pork soup, and that they should be cooked with plenty of fat and never eaten raw. I haven’t yet used them in pork soup or pork congee, but two days ago I fried them quickly with some spicing (nigella and fennel seeds) and a few cherry tomatoes, then ate them as a base for my morning fried eggs. They were delicious, slightly sweet greens with an edge of bitter.

fried goji leaves, topped with eggs

The word on goji leaves is that they are loaded with minerals including calcium, magnesium, zinc, iron; in Chinese medicine they are cooling to the body and calming to the mind. I’m going to try drying the rest of my goji leaves to use for making goji tea.

I’d bought a small quantity of new peas at the market on Tuesday and that evening asked the young friends I had over for supper if they could shuck them. Yes, they said, but in fact they didn’t know what I meant. They’d never eaten fresh peas. The beauty and fresh flavour of new peas were a revelation. Perhaps worth the work!

I’d made another batch of new potatoes dressed with cooked greens. The peas were a beautiful dribbled onto the spuds.

Last week I wrote about the elderflowers frothing on my small tree. Several friends mentioned elderflower cordial and that gave me the necessary nudge to try making it. I used the recipe I’d asked for from Jeremy Cherfas of “Eat this Podcast” as a guide, and adjusted it a little after reading through various other recipes online; the River Café recipe was particularly helpful.

the elderflower tree from above; close-up of gathered umbrels; debris after 24 soak

ELDERFLOWER CORDIAL

Making elderflower cordial is a 24-hour process that requires very little work. Even the gathering of the elderflowers is a matter of minutes, once you have a tree in flower nearby. Use scissors or secaturs to snip off the umbels, as the wide flat-topped elderflowers are called. Choose fresh-looking flowers that are just coming into bloom and avoid tired ones that are starting to shed. I had a large pot I dropped the flowers into as I cut them.

ingredients:

25 to 30 elderflower umbels

2 (preferably organic unwaxed) lemons

1.5 litres boiling water

About 900 grams raw sugar

(optional) heaping teaspoon citric acid

I trimmed off the stalks close to the flowers, rinsed the flowers quickly in cool water, and placed them in a wide bowl.

instructions:

Use a sharp knife to shave the zest off two well-washed unwaxed lemons and add the zest to the elderflowers. Cut the pith off the lemons and discard it, then slice the lemons, discarding the pits, and add the slices to the bowl. Boil water and add 1.5 litres (6 cups) of boiling water to the bowl of flowers and lemon. Cover with a lid and set aside to steep for about 24 hours.

Strain the liquid through a coarse tea towel of muslin into a pot. Add 850-900 grams/2 pounds of raw sugar and the citric acid if you wish. Stir to dissolve the sugar as you bring the mixture to a gentle boil over medium heat. Simmer for about 5 minutes.

Meantime sterilise 2 or 3 jars and lids. Pour the hot liquid through a funnel into the jars and top with the lids. You should have about 2 litres. Serve over ice, diluted with water, or use in cocktails.

the bunny (or perhaps there are several who all look alike) is still around, very tame and eating well; seen here on the front walk by my bicycle

elderflowers galore

The elderflowers are almost fully out in layers of frothy white on the small tree we planted three years ago. And there’s a cascade of honeysuckle flowers along the side fence of the back garden. They attract the bees and other nectar drinkers, among them, yesterday, a stunning tiger swallowtail butterfly. I sat with on the shady side of the garden and watched the butterfly open its wings wide, in gorgeous display, as it fed on the honeysuckle blossoms.

honeysuckle with butterfly at the upper middle

Meantime the black currants are fattening and their green is starting to darken to black. The same for the red currant bush, with its load of slightly smaller berries. The currants are a reminder that my being here, rather than traveling on my way to the Oxford Food Symposium, has a positive side: I’ll be around next week, when the currants should be fully ripe. It’s a small unexpected compensation for my disappointment.

As you can probably tell, I’m working at finding the positive in my changed landscape, rather than mourning the loss of my trip to the Symposium (and my plan to visit Shetland and Orkney). I’ve been remembering my first time in those far-northern places. It was November 1974. The North Sea oil had not yet started flowing, but work was going on to lay the undersea pipelines to the platforms. I stayed at a bed and breakfast in Lerwick where we were served unbelievably hearty breakfasts of fried bread, bacon, eggs, and perhaps potatoes too, I’m not sure. I just remember how welcome and warming all the bacon-fat was, for outside the air was damp and the wind penetrating. One of the other people staying was the guy in charge of laying that pipeline, so he had stories to tell. The Shetland I saw in those short chilly days (sunset was before 4 pm) was peaceful. Folk talked about how they expected they’d have to lock their doors once the oil started flowing...

And back to the present day in the garden: another small pleasure is the little bunny who has started to visit. He’s cautious but persistent, a persistence that I’m sure is related to the tender leaf lettuce growing near the garlic. He also nibbles other leaves, but I’m not sure exactly which ones.

curving garlic scape, with some mustard leaves on the left

The two short rows of garlic I planted very late last year are now producing scapes, decorative curved green stems that carry tiny garlic seeds in a small pale capsule. They’re a gift to the cook, a harvestable bounty. I love snapping them off, the stem green and strong and firm enough to break crisply. (And you need to break them off so that the plant puts its energy into making a big garlic bulb you can harvest later, rather than into the seeds.) I don’t have a huge number of garlic plants (there’s one scape per plant), so I tend to chop the scapes and include them in stir-fried dishes or curries, for their fresh green garlic flavour and texture. At farmers markets they’re now available by the handful; try using them as a base for pesto.

The cool weather and the generous rain we’ve had recently mean that there’s still asparagus in the markets and everything else (cucumbers, potatoes, tomatoes, etc) is a little late. I’m not complaining. I’m grateful for the high-pressure weather system that is now giving us bright skies and relatively cool temperatures (lows of 16 and highs of 23). It’s invigorating, an invitation to cycle or walk or work in the garden, or to just sit out in the shade with a book listening to the birds.

evening sky at solstice

KITCHEN EXPLORATIONS: rescuing new potatoes from over-cooking, exploring agretti, and simple fish cookery

I bought my first new potatoes last week, a delicious very tender-skinned variety called Georgia, from John and Inge at Wychwood Market. They were freshly dug, with the fine clay dirt still on them. I put them in a wide pot and washed them rubbing them together vigorously and rinsing them off in three or four changes of water, until it ran clear. They went onto the heat with a little cold salted water and some fresh mint. Once the water boiled I covered the pot and lowered the heat.

But then I got started working on somethiing else, and of course left the potatoes cooking too long, so they were overly tender. Oops! No chance of firm lovely new spud texture here. And there was another issue: A bite of one small potato taught me that all my scrubbing had failed to clean them fully. The skins were so papery that the fine clay did not wash off completely. I had to strip off all the papery peel.

With the potatoes so soft, a hot cooked dressing seemed like a good idea, so into hot olive oil I tossed mustard seeds and nigella and then some fennel seeds, as well as a chopped green cayenne chile with seeds stripped out. Then in went a sliced red onion, followed, once it had softened, by chopped dandelion and mustard leaves from the garden. I used a little fish sauce as well as salt to season, then pressed the potatoes to crush them lightly. I added the cooked greens, plus a splash of cider vinegar, and tossed them all together. Chopped mint leaves went on at the last minute.

The leftover potatoes were a perfect base for my breakfast of eggs over leftovers the next morning.

One of the less common vegetables in the market these last two weeks is agretti, an Italian green (Soda inermisi) that looks like fine fronds with thin leaves like supple everygreen needles, that can be stripped off the slightly tough stems (and then scatter everywhere). Agretti has a lightly salty mineraly taste. (It was traditionally used in Italy and other places in the Mediterranean to make soda ash, used in glass-making). It’s been a new discovery for me.

You can eat agretti raw but I like it lightly cooked. A few days ago I added it to mushrooms late in the cooking. I’d loosely followed the method I learned from a cook in Azerbaijan to make the mushrooms (you’ll find the recipe in my Taste of Persia book). Start with a little olive oil in a skillet, add the chopped mushrooms and saute them briefly, then add some water and let them simmer. They release flavour into the broth. When there’s still some broth left, as it concentrates down, you add butter to enrich it. You can also include some dry wine and perhaps a splash of soy sauce for part of your seasoning. About a minute before I took the mushrooms off the heat I added a handful of agretti stripped from its stems. I loved the fine green needles in the dark mushrooms.

mushrooms cooked with agretti

I’ve also included agretti along with chopped garlic scape and some asparagus in a simple fried rice, made with leftover brown jasmine. It adds a little sparkle.

And finally, more on cooking fish. I cooked a lake trout fillet with a lot of sliced red onion, frying the onion gently until very soft, before adding the trout, which I’d smeared with a little shio koji. I do it skin side down for about 2 minutes on medum-high with the lid on so it steam-cooks a little, then turn it over for about a minute, and it’s done.

trout fillet with onions

The previous night I’d had some fresh halibut, a big treat. I stirred some home-made red miso into warm water, and started by adding sliced ginger to the pan in a little oil. The halibut went in skin side down. I poured the miso broth over and covered the pan to et it cook for about three minutes or so. Then I flipped it over for another short two minutes, before turning it out. The ginger-inflected miso was a wonderful complement to the fish, and didn’t overpower it.

halibut coated in the miso sauce with pieces of ginger; and gorgeous new local cucumbers

There’s loveliness everywhere, if we have eyes to look.

a shot of an asphalt truck in the neighbourhood, with a glimpse of the Cecil Street synagogue (now a community centre) behind, taken yesterday

and here’s the moon, halfway to full, a couple of nights ago, peeking through the huge maple tree that frames my view to the west

the rose in delicate blossom; the back wall of green ivy with clematis in vivid bloom

Toronto is filled with FIFA visitors, with streets closed, downtown sidewalks crowded, and café and bar patios packed. The games showing live on all the screens around town are a chance for everyone to forget the horrors of world news and their personal precarities, if only for a brief ninety minutes plus stoppage time.

At the pop-up flower market today at a park downtown there were brilliant colours everywhere, and a feeling of light joy as the crowd circulated, many of people already clutching two or three brown-paper wrapped bouquets.

Some complications here mean that I can’t go to the Oxford Food Symposium next month. It’s a hard truth that has weighed me down all week. It felt strange at first to feel more actively burdened by that setback than by my grief about Tashi’s death. But I’ve realised that the first sense of loss (when an expectation is confounded or a plan cancelled) can be very painful until the reality is integrated into an updated sense of the future. The disconnect between expectation and reality is an intense hurt that recedes once the mental landscape is rewired and adjusted.

Today things have shifted. Everything feels easier and less heavy as I start to picture different scenarios for the summer and fall.

shifting views in the the garden

I’m led, perhaps inevitably, to the truth of the Buddha’s insight that pain is caused by attachment (because attachment almost inevitably leads to loss or to disappointed expectation). The advice is to cultivate detachment, a calm frame of mind, unexcited by attachment and passion.

But surely it’s possible to love and be attached, whether to living beings or the status quo or future plans, and then to learn how to navigate the inevitable losses and disappointments that follow. Surely it’s possible, with luck and effort, to learn to ride the waves of life (not that I’ve ever surfed, but it’s a helpful metaphor here I think), with their unexpected thrills and highs and their sometimes crashing-down depths. Most people keep paddling in tough life situations and try to ride things out. Sometimes that feels impossible, for sure. But we seem to be hard-wired to try.

I was reminded yesterday evening of how much trauma and suffering many people undergo, and how much tenacity they need to survive. I was at a gathering to celebrate our friend Robina Aryubwal, who has now earned a Masters Degree from York University, after living for eight years as a refugee in Pakistan, and then finally arriving in Canada ten years ago with her parents and younger siblings. She talked about her childhood dream of getting an education, and how that was interrupted and frustrated by the Taliban and her family’s subsequent flight from Afghanistan into Pakistan. She never gave up. And nor did her family.

It’s been illuminating this week to think of short-term disappointments and setbacks as grief-inducing losses, losses that generate feelings that are echoes - call them younger cousins - of the enormous grief we feel at the death of someone we love. That deep grief surfaces unpredictably, a reminder of love. It did the other day when I was given a card listing the names of all the people who had donated to the CJC (the Community Justice Collective in Toronto) in honour of Tashi, as we’d suggested in his obituary. The names brought tears and a surge of grief and gratitude.

grief and gratitude: poppies in Toronto this week

KITCHEN EXPLORATIONS – with talk of Thai salads and cheese rehab as strategies for leftovers

Last Wednesday I was expecting three or four extras for supper. We had some beautiful lamb chops in the freezer that I moved into the fridge in the morning to defrost. And I put a batch of sticky rice to soak, a mix of white and black rices that then turns a gorgeous purple after soaking and steaming.

steamed sticky rice waiting to be grabbed by hand

I also had leftover grilled pork sausage from the night before that could be transformed into a Thai salad. The strategy is a simple and useful one whenever you have leftover meat or fish. You need shallots, fish sauce, a few Thai chiles or substitute heat sources, the juice of 1 or 2 limes (or substitute lemons), and a splash of rice vinegar. I like to slice the shallots thinly, mince the chile(s) and then put them in a small bowl with the sauce: roughly equal amounts of fish sauce and acid (the citrus plus vinegar). After 20 minutes or more the shallots have taken up the sauce so that when you add them to your sliced sausage or other meat (you could also use age-tofu), they flavour everything beautifully. Top with chopped coriander leaves (cilantro) or mint leaves or rau ram, or a mix. (The other evening I had fresh coriander leaves from Footsteps Farm.)

Because the sausage salad needed some balancing crunch, I made a second small tasty salad-ish dish of chopped cucumber dressed with sesame oil,, a splash of soy sauce, and a splash of rice vinegar, all topped with chopped mint from the garden. The salads were great scooped up with small handfuls of sticky rice.

The lamb chops were marinated in pomegranate molasses, plus a little fish sauce and salt, and then charcoal grilled. And of course we had a huge pile of asparagus, simply dressed with olive oil and fresh lemon. We ended up eating the asparagus and the small lamb chops in hand too. Summer evenings with friends don’t get any better than that.

The day before I had found myself with a neglected bunch of asparagus, not in good enough shape to be eaten straight. How to use it best?

I trimmed off the tired stems, leaving shorter pieces, which I cut into roughly 1-inch lengths. In the end I resorted to an easy stand-by: Italian egg noodles. I began by cooking chopped red onion in a skillet with olive oil scented with a little fennel seed. Once it had softened I added the asparagus. After a brief sautee I added a little water, raised the heat, and covered the skillet. A few minutes later the asparagus was done. It went onto the just-cooked pasta and I tossed them together, along an extra drizzle of olive oil. Then I added some grated and finely chopped parmesan.

Like the asparagus, the cheese was a salvage/rescue operation. I had an end of parmesan in the fridge that should have been used earlier. It was too hard to grate comfortably, but it yielded to a cleaver. I sliced it and then chopped into ever-smaller pieces with the cleaver, so that they were fine enough to melt when tossed onto the asparagus pasta. It was a win all round.

I’m always thrilled when these clematis unfurl

Today the first peonies arrived. The ants have been climbing over the buds for a week and now their work is done.

peonies of subtle white tinged with pink, on a bush that was in the bedraggled garden when I first bought the house in 1984… I moved the bush from one side of the garden to the other in 1988, but otherwise have done nothing with it except speak encouragingly to it from time to time

I saw the moon late Saturday night as I went to bed, a white orb impaled on the spike of the CN tower. It had a pearly white luminescence, perhaps because the air was super-clear, swept clean by cooling north winds.

my sheets dried quickly in the fresh dryness brought in by the north wind

In the bright sharp daylight, which has continued this week, the tall trees’ intense new green feels clearly etched, heightened, against brilliant blue skies.

That sense of extra definition, extra clarity, reminds me of the first time I got eyeglasses for my short-sightedness. I was ten years old and in grade six. I’d sometimes have to walk up toward the blackboard to read it more easily. It was a normal thing to me. I had no idea of how the world looked to other people. It was only when I was wearing my new glasses, as we were driving home from the opticians, that I saw with the extra clarity that 20-20 vision gives: the veining on the leaves in the trees amazed me.

The habit of not seeing well stayed with me somehow, despite my glasses. If I looked attentively at something I could see it clearly. But perhaps living with my mild short-sightedness for several years had dulled my visual expectations. I never developed an attentiveness to fine details. I tend to notice people’s feelings or their style or energy, rather than the specifics of their appearance. I still find it easier to recognise someone I see on the street by the way they walk or the way they carry themselves than by their facial features.

It makes me wonder about the many ways in which we tune in to other people, or fail to tune in.

seeing the larger scene in Grange Park; noticing the details of the fluffed out blossoms on the chestnut trees

I meant to post here at the full moon, but now it’s already Friday. My excuse for this delay is that I had wonderful distracting visitors for nearly a week, all people I love dearly. Tashi’s older brother Dom was here from Vancouver with his spouse F and their child, my four- year-old grand-daughter A. She’s terrific. I loved being out in the garden with her, finding flowers for her to pick and weeds to pull, and I loved watching her play on her own with blocks or small toys, keeping herself company. Sometimes she’d boss people around as she organised us into games whose rules only she had a grasp of…

The arrival in the house of this unselfconscious source of energy, confidence, and imagination was a full-moon tonic for everyone. There was laughter, and there were meltdowns, there was a whirlwind game of hide and seek, there were excursions to the playground in Grange Park…

Tashi with Amira in late 2022

And we felt ripples and waves of sorrow at Tashi’s absence, pain and deep regret that he was not with us to rejoice at A’s growing capacity for engaging with the world.

pale columbines, self-seeded, in the back garden this week

KITCHEN EXPLORATIONS - more on eggs with salad greens

I wrote briefly last week about the pleasure of a breakfast of fried eggs on leftover salad.

eggs over leftover salad

That combo gave me a taste for leafiness; now I want it every morning. Today, with no leftover salad to work with, I picked tender leaves from the small lettuce plants in the back garden, rinsed them well, shook out the water, then dropped them into a bowl. While my eggs fried gently in a cast-iron skillet, I added lightly buttered toast (from Dawnthebaker’s bread) torn into pieces to the lettuce, along with a sprinkle of salt, a drizzle of EVOO, and short splash of cider vinegar. As I tossed them all together I realised I’d just made a simple variant of bread salad. There is nothing new under the sun, truly.

here it is, the bread salad hidden by the eggs

I slid the fried eggs onto the salad and propped another piece of toast and a stick of Comte against the side of the bowl. The salad was barely dressed. The pieces of toast were there to absorb its juices and any yolk that ran once I’d broken into the eggs. Each bite gave me sweet egg, and the light tart edge of vinaigrette to balance it, all buffered by the toast. Perfection.

Notice that I’m back talking about tart-acid as an essential element.

I used half of the second piece of toast to wipe the bowl thoroughly and topped the other half with the slice of Comte. Those bites of tart intense salty cheese on toast were the perfect finish.

Welcome to my late-spring version of an ideal breakfast (“late-spring” because once it gets hot the lettuce leaves won’t be as tender and perfect; I’m imagining summer tomatoes in their place).

If you like a hit of sweet at breakfast you could skip the cheese and perhaps instead have a lick of jam on the last piece of toast.

two aspects of late spring in Toronto: a gorgeous spirea bush in bloom near the University of Toronto; a cyclist in Kensington Market taking a break by the painted wall of a building owned by the admirable Kensington Land Trust

gleaming green leaves after Saturday’s rain, and flowers finally out, three weeks late

But the irises in the back, usually very prolific, are astonishingly bare. The leaves look healthy but we’ll have very few tall bloom-laden stems this year. That’s probably because I failed to thin them last fall, though I’d intended to because they were jammed tight and needed lifting. The autumn was all about Tashi and inside necessities, not about gardening. I managed to get the garlic planted extremely late, and to spread some manure onto the vegetable patch, but little else.

This spring I’ve already planted another rhubarb (I love it), some lettuce starts and nasturtiums, several tarragon plants, plus chervil seeds. I pulled loads of weeds on Sunday, the ground soft and the job easier after our rainy Saturday. Things are starting to look a little more organised. But I still have a few cherry tomato plants, assorted chile plants, some basil, and other odds and ends to put in. The (self-seeded) columbines are in flower all over the place; I need to find the space to insert my new starts between all the existing life.

columbine coming into bloom by the black currant bush; Star of Bethlehem near the day lilies

I have trouble finding the ruthlessness necessary to take hold of messy areas in the garden. The result is a crowded lively green space, with untidy edges, that gets increasingly overgrown as summer progresses. (My grandmother, a wonderful gardener, who made her garden in far northern British Columbia a colourful inviting paradise, would find my reluctance to move plants around incomprehensible. If she walked into my back garden today she’d think the whole thing needed to be taken in hand and she’d immediately start to “clean it up”.)

The garden is a continuing lesson in uncertainty. The level of unpredictability each year is pretty high. It would be so even if I were a methodical or orderly gardener. But I’m not: I make the occasional note to myself about plans, or where I planted something, but then forget the notebook exists or cannot find it.

how does one wisteria vine produce two different colours of flower?

This week both white and purple wisteria blooms hang decoratively from the vine on the fence. The currant bushes look like they’ll plenty of fruit this summer, but the small elderflower tree, now in its third year, is looking less than vigorous. I had hoped to have plenty of blossom that I could pick to make elderflower cordial (see the wonderful instructions in Elisabeth Luard’s substack here), but that’s looking unlikely.

Fragility and uncertainty are everywhere. There’s an awareness out in the wider world that we can’t take anything for granted or assume continuity. The garden delivers similar messages: the fragile elderflower bush, the irises not producing their usual forest of blooms, a clematis that’s struggling where once it thrived. Some of this reflects the neglect and distraction of last year. Some is the variability of nature: a heavy-snow long winter and a cold spring.

I can’t disentangle the causes, so I just need to accept and adapt. Those are words that also help me chart my course with the weight of this grief. I’m convinced that I mustn’t fight it. I need instead to find ways of living with it, breathing it in.

I don’t want to lose my grief. It’s very precious, shaped by my love for Tashi. I hope I’ll eventually be able to integrate it completely, so it becomes part of me, a weight that I carry with confident muscle. That possibility feels remote right now, with grief still a powerful wave that can tear me open or flatten me with dread.

a fading tulip streetside on my walk with friends this week

KITCHEN EXPLORATIONS: mango & smoked trout, grilled asparagus, fried eggs over green salad

As you know I’m especially interested in tart-acid-sour, that spectrum of flavours that give life and sparkle, and often depth too, to our food. With a beautiful version of smoked trout available at Wychwood Market, and good mangoes available, I’ve been combining the two. (It’s a mild echo of a Cambodian dish of green mango with smoked trout; there’s a recipe for it in Hot Sour Salty Sweet:.)

I break up the trout into small bite-sized pieces, peel and chop one or two mangoes (ripe but still with some acidity), and finely slice a shallot or two. I like to immerse the shallot pieces in fresh lemon or lime juice with a splash of fish sauce before I assemble the dish; that way they bring extra acidity and seasoning to every mouthful. I toss it all together, salt it lightly, then grate on black pepper and top it with finely chopped sorrel and mint. (They’re both in my garden; you could use different herbs of course.) Put it out as an appetizer, or as one of many dishes in a meal of intense flavours. It’s an excellent dish for a potluck.

We’re still in full asparagus season here; we eat it every day, greedily. Although I usually do the simple thing of laying it in a skillet of boiling salted water and cooking it until barely done (then dressing it in a simple combo of lemon juice and olive oil), the grill is another great option, if you’ve already grilling another element of the meal. As I do with many other fresh vegetables, I toss the asparagus in a light mixture of olive oil and fish sauce before it goes onto the grill. Highly recommended.

frying eggs (one pullet, one full-sized); eggs over salad, with my favourite chopsticks, bought in Lhasa forty years ago

And finally, another thread in my ongoing thoughts about eggs. With piles of tender greens available in this long cool spring we’ve been having, green salads are another daily treat in my house. We sometimes have leftovers of dressed salad, or washed, dried, but unused greens. Both are great candidates for my breakfast of fried eggs on leftovers. The only question is what utensil to use for eating the combination. I prefer to eat salad with chopsticks. Usually I eat my eggs over rice, or over other leftovers, with a spoon or spoon and fork, Thai-style. I’ve tried both options with the egg and salad meal... neither is ideal, but in the end I prefer the chopsticks (by a narrow margin). Let me know if you try it. And if you have a clear utensils preference, which option you find best.

Graffiti Alley off Queen Street has many vignettes. I was there the other day after an easy supper with a dear friend at the Jamaican restaurant on Portland called Chubby’s

These two sides of our lived experience coexist: the death of those we mourn and the expectation of new life and growth. How do we manage to hold conflicting thoughts at the same time? How do we live in incompatible realities simultaneously? It’s contradictory and extraordinary. And sometimes it takes a huge effort of will.

At one moment I can feel a familiar spring thrill as I pick my first rhubarb of the year from the small clump in my back garden, and then in the next minute suddenly feel walloped and aching as I flash on images of Tashi as a child in the same garden.

the greening back garden, two days ago

Life cycles, moon cycles, seasonal changes in the garden: all these help me remember that new growth keeps coming even as petals fall from the apple tree and the compost pile rots. I can regret the fading tulips and apple blossom as I rejoice at the buds on the columbine. I’m impatient for the lilies of the valley to bloom and scent the air, (they’re now two weeks late) and for my wisteria to be draped in trailing blooms.

view north toward the city, from partway along the spit

A bike ride yesterday, on the sunny warm holiday Monday (Victoria Day in Canada), was a reviving tonic. We pedalled down to the lake and out the long spit of Tommy Thompson Park, with its lively assorted bird life and views of the city back across the water. We stood at the point looking out at the lake and noticed small brown-headed black birds poked around in the grass and dirt; we learned later they were cowbirds. As we cycled back, a cormorant, black and prehistoric-looking, flew over us with a long piece of grass straw trailing from its beak. Red-wing blackbirds perched decoratively on tall rushes. There was movement everywhere, and bird voices, screeching, trilling, honking. On the grass slope beside a large pond alive with the chant of spring frogs were sleeping swans, their rounded glowing-white shapes like alabaster sheep.

crabapple tree still blooming; its petals by the lilies of the valley (not yet in bloom!)

KITCHEN EXPLORATIONS: with talk of haddock, halibut, dandelions, onions…

I’ve been cooking fish more frequently these days, once or twice a week, and loving it. My only rule is to make sure it’s not over-cooked (err on the side of under-done is how I think of it). I have two fish stories to tell you. Both of them also involve dandelions, for ‘tis the season!

Last week I took two haddock fillets out of the freezer. What to do with them? I’d bought several new onions, round and white and crisp, at the farmer’s market, as well as a sheaf of cultivated dandelion leaves. Once the haddock was fully thawed, I sliced an onion, chopped some ginger, and washed and chopped the dandelion.

sliced fresh onion, with ginger

I started olive oil in the cast-iron skillet, and when it was hot, tossed in mustard seed. Once it started popping I lowered the heat and added nigella seed and the minced ginger. I lowered the heat a little more and added the onion. I stirred it as it softened quickly. In went the chopped dandelion, with a splash of fish sauce and a sprinkle of salt. Once the greens had wilted, I pushed them aside a little and laid the haddock fillets onto the pan. They cooked for about a minute on each side, with the lid on, and they were done. I served them in a bit of a jumble with the dandelion and onion, with a wedge of lemon alongside. The onion’s sweetness worked beautifully with the dandelion, a combination to remember.

haddock cooked with dandelion and fresh onion

The other fish story, from yesterday evening, is about cooking halibut, such a wonderful fish. I’ve cooked halibut in a cast-iron skillet in a couple of different ways, including simmering it in a light diluted-miso liquid. This week, inspired by Nancy Jenkins recent Substack post about Raie au beurre noir (Skate in Brown butter), I finished the halibut in a quick brown butter sauce.

I’d started by spreading some shio koji on top of each of the two pieces. Half an hour later I heated a drizzle of olive oil in a cast-iron skillet over medium heat and added a pinch each of mustard seeds, nigella, cumin, and turmeric powder. Once the mustard seed had popped I lowered the heat a little and tossed in a handful of chopped garlic chives from the garden. They wilted quickly, helped by a small splash of fish sauce and a sprinkle of salt. Then onto them went my two halibut fillets. I put on the lid and let them cook skin side down for a couple of minutes, then flipped them over, put the lid back on, and let them cook another two minutes. Flipped back, they had a final minute or so of cooking with the lid on. I lifted them out onto a wide plate, then added about 3 tablespoons of butter to the pan. As it melted slowly I stirred in a generous splash of apple cider vinegar. Following Nancy’s suggestion in her recipe, I scraped the bottom to make sure the sauce had picked up any bits left by the halibut. The sauce thickened and started to darken a little in colour as I stirred it occasionally, for about two minutes (Nancy warns against letting it get too dark). Then I poured it over the fillets.

the halibut, sauced and ready to serve

I love the finish and the flavour this simple sauce gave the fish. Alongside it we had freshly cooked local asparagus along with small potatoes boiled in salted water, then peeled and lightly crushed/flattened. A neighbour had given me some dandelions pulled from his place in the country. After I’d chopped chopped off the earth-caked roots and given the leaves a thorough washing in at least four changes of water, (the dirt clings unless you swish them around vigorously in a basin of water), they were ready to be chopped and then cooked in olive oil with a little garlic and cumin, plus salt and fish sauce. Once they’d wilted I added them to the potatoes. I topped them with chopped sorrel and mint from the garden plus a sprinkling of salt and a drizzle of olive oil.

halibut, dandelion-dressed potatoes, asparagus, eaten out in the garden in soft warm air; spring rejoicing

I should add that for the most wonderful fish explorations by others, if you have an opportunity, head to Mhel, a restaurant on Havelock near Bloor.

and on the subject of rhubarb, here’s my first handful of rhubarb from the garden, chopped, and then cooked, sweetened with a little maple syrup, and ready to be eaten (I ate it all).

cherry blossom close-up; more jazzy than the delicate crabapple blossoms

I’ve written here recently about feeling flattened and at a low ebb. The shift in my universe with the loss of Tashi has made the whole world feel unreliable. I’ve been sticking fairly close to home, not traveling far afield physically or emotionally, not feeling confident.

The unthinking trust in ourselves that many of us learn as children, if we’re lucky, can vanish when we’re shocked by trauma or overtaken by grief. There’s a kind of shutting-down of reflexes, a narrowing of the horizon, a weighty focus inward rather than outward. You may have experienced versions of this state.

I’m still learning about all this. And now I’m seeing it partly in retrospect, for things are starting to shift.

cherry petal “snow” beneath the trees; a glimpse of other visitors

Early last week, I went on a walk with friends in High Park to see the cherry blossoms on a very grey and overcast day. In the flat light the trees radiated a glowing energy, a kind of steady brilliance. They looked more startling and beautiful than I’d ever seen them. There was an unreality to their loveliness, their shining glowing whiteness, that stopped me in my tracks. It felt other-worldly, a touch of grace. Perhaps that respite on Tuesday is what gave me the confidence and energy to drive myself out of town on Friday.

on our way to the cherry trees we walked past the pond, with its ducks and merganzers, its bulrushes and beautiful light

On Saturday there was an all-day Sacred Harp singing event scheduled at the Dettweiler Meeting House, more than an hour’s drive west of Toronto. I had thought I’d get a ride out that morning in someone else’s car. And then a more muscled ambitious me started to imagine a different option. What if I drove myself out of town the day before to stay with my friends Karen and Nick? It would give me a chance to see them and to have an easy drive to the Saturday singing on small roads.

This stirring of fresh confidence was exciting. And so was my excursion. It was like a reawakening. My friends have a complex of bird feeders behind their house and have become avid bird-watchers. In the early morning I sat on their back step for well over an hour watching the birds and listening to them: effortless liquidy sounds, throat-clearing squawks, breathy whistles… and lots more. It was entrancing. I could see the silhouettes of the birds as they moved around farther away, flitting, darting up tree trunks, looping through the air. Those that came to the bird feeders were easy to admire in detail, the woodpeckers, showy cardinals, elegant red-breasted grosbeak, big-bodied blue jays, and more….

My drive to Dettweiler through farmland and small towns went smoothly. And the singing was, as always, a deep pleasure. Occasionally I found myself in tears, stirred the emotion of singing with others. I returned home invigorated, joyful, and full of energy.

What had made my little excursion special? First there was the arrival of enough imagination and confidence, so that I could picture myself doing the trip. But after that? I think it was watching the birds attentively, with no thought other than noticing and appreciating each moment.

delicate willow blossoms

Is this like tree-washing? Was it Mother Nature refreshing my eyes and spirits? I don’t think it was exactly that. It was instead an experience that actively pulled me into the life in front of me, in all its beautiful movement and sound. This kind of transport can happen with art or music, or with animals or children, or with plants in a garden.

ferns unfurling beside High Park

The important elements, I think, the necessary conditions, include an unrushed length of time and an open or receptive mind that is thirsting to be transported. In my dulled state I’d been unaware of my thirst, so this re-awakening is a wonderful surprise.

KITCHEN EXPLORATIONS – rhubarb tkhemali sauce; endive-mushroom lusciousness; asparagus!

Rhubarb is now in season. My small clump out back is nearly ready for a first pick, and there’s lots available at the farmers markets in Toronto. Rhubarb is an excellent substitute for other tart fruits, for example in the dazzling Georgian savory sauce called tkhemali, which is usually made with tart plums. (There’s a tkhemali recipe in my Taste of Persia cookbook.)

Last week we had a couple of guests for supper. I’d chopped up some rhubarb and simmered it with a little water until it was tender. I’d added only a little sugar to take the extreme edge off its sourness. We had lamb chops to grill, a green salad, and rice. I added minced garlic to the cooked rhubarb, along with a little salt, some blue fenugreek powder (now available at Kalustyan’s in NYC and by mail order), ground coriander seed, and some powdered dried red chile. The combination of spices and herbs instantly transformed the rhubarb into tkhemali, like magic. It was perfect with the lamb.

the radishes at the markets are dazzling at this time of year; Sosnicki’s stand at Wychwood Market

On Sunday a bunch of us gathered around a table for food and wine and conversation. Among the dishes (contributed by various people, and made with locally grown meat and produce) were a muhammara made with hazelnuts instead of walnuts (see Sami Tamimi’s recipe here on Substack); charcoal-grilled marinated lamb chops, sliced; seared duck breasts, sliced; a huge green salad; a pile of asparagus spears, both white and green, with a gribiche sauce alongside; and a beige-looking dish of endives, mushrooms, and rice. It was all delicious and fun.

Perhaps surprisingly, several people told me that they’d loved the plain-jane-looking casserole most of all. What’s it called? someone asked. “Monique’s casserole” was all I could tell them. Maybe you’ve run into a version of it somewhere? Please let me know.

It’s a simple enough dish to make, with casual proportions. A Swiss friend named Monique showed it to me long ago. You need plenty of Belgian endives, separated into whole leaves; coarsely chopped mushrooms; and some raw rice; as well as butter, salt, pepper, and some good cream. The idea is to use a heavy pot and fill it with layers of the ingredients until it’s packed full. Then the lid goes on tightly and it bakes in a 300F to 350 F oven for about an hour, or until the rice is cooked through and the endives are collapsed and soft. At that point you stir in a generous amount of cream before serving it hot.

More specifically, once you have laid down a first layer of endive leaves and sprinkled on a handful of chopped mushrooms and a generous sprinkling of rice, you add dots of butter and a little pepper and salt. Then you repeat the layers, as many as you have room for, ending with a top layer of endive. I tend to sprinkle on a little water for luck, but usually the rice cooks simply in the water given up by the endive leaves. (If you want to use brown rice as we did last night, then you need to soak it for a couple of hours ahead and also add a generous half cup or so of water to the pot.)

grilled asparagus; and simply blanched asparagus, with lake trout, leeks, and smashed spuds

Speaking of simple, is there anything better than fresh local asparagus? I add it to a skillet of boiling salted water and lift it out when barely tender. It continues to cook for a few minutes after, as I dress it with good olive oil and generous squeezes of lemon, plus a sprinkle of salt. Perfection. Another option is to oil it lightly, sprinkle on a little fish sauce or salt, and then grill it over medium heat. You’ll need tongs. During this asparagus season I expect I’ll be eating it almost every day. With gusto!

And a note: I’m fed up with the whole idea of Mothers Day. Let’s abolish it. Every day is mother’s day, really. The sentimentality and tokenism (plus the commercial cashing-in) that hang around the day are aggravating. Plus the words “Mothers Day” are a painful reminder for anyone who has lost a mother, or for any mother who has lost a child. I’m for full abolition.

the lovely bare bones of early spring landscapes soon vanish under new growth; this is beside High Park

front garden down the street

This week brought us a brilliant full moon on May 1, a day to remember the labour movement and the work of humans of all ages all around the world.

after the farmer’s work comes the miller’s and the baker’s; mill and baking tools at Evelyn’s Crackers, Dawnthebaker’s bakery

Saturday I was awake early, in time to see the just-past-full moon, tinged with gold-pink, sliding down the western horizon. Heart-stopping.

The week before last I was home almost every day because Tashi’s older brother Dom was here and friends were coming by to visit. It was a treat to have a flow of people and conversation, embraces, talk of Tashi, and tears too.

I’ve realised in the days since Dom left that I’ve slipped back into the patterns I had last summer and fall, when Tashi’s friends, all our friends, were frequently here to see him. There’d be one or two or three or more extras for supper, or stopping by in the afternoon. I was always home. It was the place to be, where time with Tashi and others was precious, imperative. In those weeks it was hard to leave the house, except for necessities. And even then…

they look to me like they’re calling for help

The week of Dom’s visit somehow put me back into that pattern and that mindset. I felt an urgency about being here and present. Once Dom left, the feeling stayed. It was difficult to get myself out, except for pre-booked things (such as a wonderful pair of films at the Hot-Docs festival on Monday evening and another on Thursday evening). Dawnthebaker helped me break my cooking-supper mode by suggesting we go out on Tuesday night to a family-run Vietnamese restaurant on St Clair West called Tan Dinh Quan. And the next day we drove out of town to eat a leisurely late lunch at Fat Rabbit, a terrific restaurant in St Catherines.

at Fat Rabbit: lamb ribs, and on the right a brilliant version of beef tartar

All of which is to say that I’ve not been house-bound, in fact. But I am still mentally tied to home. It’s fascinating and a little worrying to see how easily I’ve fallen back into feeling I need to stay home.

In other eras I’ve been very prepared to walk out the door at any time of day. Now I’ve lost that unthinking lightness. I want to retrieve it. And I’m grateful to all my friends, who encourage me to come out and play, to break pattern, to loosen my tightened sinews.

The tightenedness is a ghostly holdover from last summer and fall, as Tashi was failing. I can still go out easily if I’m needed somewhere: an appointment to keep, a commitment to a friend. In other words, obligation will pull me out. But otherwise an unthinking sense of obligation tethers me here.

moon shadows on my balcony Friday night

I would like to feel less encumbered by dread. I can call it a holdover from the intense times of last year, but it feels active and powerful, not a mere echo. This is grief, grief that is very tangible and that has undeniable physical consequences.

As I try to find the words to describe all this, I am forced to look the situation in the eye. I have to admit that perhaps part of me fears unconsciously that if I let go of the sense of urgency I will lose touch with Tashi. I know perfectly well that he’s dead and gone. But his echo is everywhere. I think it’s difficult for me to leave the house lightly because I am physically still so tuned to listening for him.

I don’t want to try to shove these feelings in a cupboard. I want to live with them, acknowledge them, breathe with them. Surely they’ll eventually give me energy to move forward into new possibilities…

KITCHEN EXPLORATIONS with rice disgrace and black bean sauce stir-fry

I had another kitchen first this week, not a good one. I burned a pot of rice, an insult to rice farmers and to the kitchen gods.

It happened from inattention. In the middle of the afternoon last Thursday I thought I’d get a pot of rice made. For some days there’d been no rice leftovers in the fridge for me to top with fried eggs in the morning. I was going out for supper, but I planned to put the cooked rice in the fridge, ready for the next day.

full-moon bonus, a double-yolk egg, still cooking, with some spinach, for my morning meal

It’s foolish to start cooking rice and then leave the kitchen and get immersed in a book. I forgot all about the rice until I smelled toasted grain. Yikes! The small pot of brown basmati was burned underneath and dried out. I rescued the rice in the centre but had to throw out the scorched grains that were stuck onto the bottom of the pot and up the sides (wishing I had a pig or chickens to give them to). I put the salvaged rice in a glass container in the fridge (and left the pot to soak overnight).

The rice was going to need massaging in some way to be edible. What to do?

The next evening, with a large duck breast in the fridge, I made a quick stir-fry of sliced duck and chopped dandelion, with minced garlic and home-made black bean sauce. (I keep a big jar of it in the fridge, made from the recipe in The Miracle of Salt.) I added a little water to lengthen the sauce, so there’d be plenty of liquid for the rescued rice to soak up. But I thought the rice needed more help than that to be edible, so I threw some chopped small greenhouse cucumbers into a hot wok, then lowered the heat and added the rice and a generous splash of water. I hoped that the fresh crunch of the barely cooked cucumber would enliven the rice, and that the added water would soften it enough…

one of the quickest easiest dishes to make: stir-fried duck and chopped dandelion greens with black bean sauce; and the rescued rice looking a bit sad

The duck was delicious; the rice was passable. And the eternal truth is that you must never leave the kitchen for more than a minute or two when there’s a pot of rice finding its way to done.

forced rhubarb, glowing pink, in the raw, and gently cooked for an early taste of spring

back garden hyacinth that returns each spring

Tashi’s older brother Dom, who lives in Vancouver, was here all week until Friday, his first visit since the Christmas holidays. It was great to have time with him. But now as we are fully into spring, with its brilliant new leaves, plum blossom and tender pink and white cherry blossoms brightening the city, we both feel burdened afresh by bereftness. Our first spring without Tashi is a hard reality.

first cherry blossoms this year, by Robarts Library

Friends dropped by each day in the afternoon for conversation. There were cookies and other things to snack on. The afternoon visitors would sometimes, and pleasureably, overlap with those coming for supper. People of all ages were here because Dom was visiting, and because Tashi’s presence and absence draws them to the house. It’s lovely for me, a treat, a balm, a gift. I am very grateful that threads of love and friendship continue among us all, connecting us still.

hellebore in the back garden

[And a recommendation: There’s a wonderful account on Instagram called @thegrieftable. The posts are short videos by a woman who lost her son and who is clear and analytical about the ways in which our bodies and minds express and respond to grief. Highly recommended.]

earliest stages of horse chestnut leaves and flowers, just emerging; new life to sustain us

KITCHEN EXPLORATIONS: talk of leftovers and lamb, plus nettles

Because of our many visitors, it’s been a week of cooking for a small crowd each night, a reminder of the patterns of last year. I realise that I developed reflexes then that I can still rely on: the scaling up of dishes, the stretching what I’ve cooked when extra people turn up, etc. But on Thursday I misjudged quantities. And that meant that there was no leftover rice. I cannot remember ever reaching the bottom of the rice pot at suppertime. It feels like a rule that there should always be plenty, with extra left at the end of the meal, so that I know everyone has eaten their fill. And I love leftover rice and depend on it. But this time the rice pot was completely empty. I felt a bit embarrassed.

I love this lane art, by Bickford Park. He’s not embarrassed, just cruising!

Do you aim to have leftovers? Or do you hope that everything works out evenly and tidily? I’m interested to know how other people think about these things.

I remember during university that I’d sometimes be invited for Sunday lunch at my aunt’s house. She’d make exactly enough: a small roast of something that was precisely geared to providing for those at the table, with nothing left over. Perhaps my aunt knew that her husband disliked leftovers. Perhaps she didn’t want the hassle of putting them away afterwards..

At the time I wondered how she managed to judge her quantities so exactly.. But since then I’ve come to understand that of course guests restrain themselves and share fairly, if they’re reasonable people and not starving. Everyone gets fed adequately, even if portions aren’t generous. But if there are no leftovers, there’s no way of knowing if people had enough or are still hungry at the end of the meal.

slow cooked lamb, cut up after cooking and waiting to be dished out

Because of the visitors we expected through the afternoon, I wanted to make something simple for that Thursday meal, something that required little care and attention. The answer was slow-cooked lamb. I had a small fresh shoulder roast and another small unlabeled lamb roast in the freezer. They fit side-by-side in my heavy Staub pot, so I loosely followed the recipe for that’s in my Salt book. There the roast is rubbed with a mixture of chopped ingredients that are then pounded in a mortar or ground in the processor: preserved lemon (I used plain lemon because I’m out of preserved lemon), garlic, rosemary, anchovies, olive oil, salt. The lamb cooks in a heavy casserole with the lid on at about 350F, bathed in some wine and with carrots added partway through. The whole thing takes two hours or more, but with no attention or work needed, so it’s ideal when there’s a crowd. Once the lamb is done it’s easy to cut it up. It’s a good idea to have rice t soak up all the lovely juices/gravy.

roast carrot & radicchio salad with sorrel; roast cauliflower

I took advantage of the oven being on to roast a sheet pan of cauliflower drizzled with olive oil and fish sauce. The cauliflower went out as a separate vegetable. I roasted carrots too, then combined them with chopped radicchio to make a salad. The dressing was a blend of tahini and yogurt, with a little lemon juice, olive oil, and salt. Chopped sorrel newly sprung to life in the garden was a nice extra on the salad.

If people were hungry from a shortage of rice, there was ice cream in several flavours plus a cherry tart with hazelnut frangipane that Dawnthebaker baked once the lamb and vegetables were done.

How lucky and warming to sit for supper with a room full of people talking, laughing, discussing, that a year ago would have included Tashi. Life goes on, enriched and enriching.

star tulip in my neighbour’s front garden

and nettles:

Yesterday afternoon several of us picked young nettles at our friend Carole’s place. We wore gloves, had no bare skin in contact with the nettles, and seem to have avoided getting stung. the picking was very easy for the plants were very small and tender. They broke off easily, and then each of us had a bag to drop them into. I’ve used them in a tea, but I had never gathered them early in spring, when they’re best for eating.

young nettles where I was picking; fresh nettles at shome the next morning

This morning I went online to a foraging site, foragerchef.com to get better informed. The best way to get rid of the stinging (caused by structures in the leaf called trichomes, according to foragerchef) is to either quickly blanche them or else steam them. I wanted to compare the methods, so I did some of each. They’re beautiful, brilliant strong green, once steamed or blanched.

steamed (for about 3 minutes) on the left and blanched (in salted water for about 1 minute) on the right

Now I have a stash of nettle greens to use for making pesto or perhaps a soup, or a frittata or omelet. These processed greens can be frozen, apparently, for longer keeping. I’ll do that with some of them.

Impatient to work with them, late this morning I heated a little olive oil gently in a cast-iron skillet and added a chopped garlic clove. I chopped some of the steamed nettle finely and put it in with the garlic. I added butter to the pan (yes it sure does make a smoother fried egg) and fried two eggs. Breakfast of the greens and eggs with toast was delicious… I already feel very rewarded for the nettle-foraging and processing!

these lovely signs of life to keep us sane in tax prep time

And that means I’ve been reminded of the shape of last year, the times I was able to walk down to Baldwin Street with Tashi for lunch or, one time, for a rare and remarkable dinner at our terrific north Thai restaurant Larb Muang. There’s the payment from the day that we went to have a pedicure, taking an Uber west along College Street to get there, getting our neglected feet tended to as we chatted, and walking part of the way home, until he ran out of energy.

While we were living each of those days, I was living in the present, and so was he. It’s only with this forced retrospective look across the weeks and months of 2025 that I am consciously remembering the sequence of events that we and he lived through. I don’t want to linger on them. They were painful.

But thinking back to the moments of pain and difficulty obscures the way in which we stayed remarkably present and in the present. Somehow I managed not to think forward to the next downhill step with dread, or back to an earlier time with yearning. Either of those paths would have taken away from the lived immediacy of each precious day, the reality of the now.

When I think back on it, there was a huge privilege in being able to live that way, not anxious about, say, medical expenses, or about anything else, because the rest of the world paled in comparison with the warmth and focus of our daily reality. At one level we were in a worst-case scenario, so there was no need to look for worries elsewhere. At another we were completely enclosed in a safe trusting human landscape that had Tashi at its centre and was peopled by a wonderful array of loved ones.

I don’t know where I’m going with these thoughts, except to point out my realisation that there are positives to extract from this painful time. The most important one I think is that it taught me how to be present, absolutely present.

The challenge now is to keep hold of those lessons, those skills. Life will throw more curve balls: we know this life ends for us all, and that the path to the end is rarely a straight clean easy one. Our job is to find a way to accept that and to appreciate what we have rather than angst-ing about possible catastrophes, or worse, yearning pointlessly for some ideal life or perfect situation. It’s interesting, the task of figuring out how to adapt to the now. There’s no single strategy of course. But there’s great motivation, because staying as present as possible, attentive and alert, feels like the juiciest way to live.

Young children do this naturally, don’t they…

the path to understanding? snow-coated garden only two weeks ago

KITCHEN EXPLORATIONS – cooking fish, fresh chopped herbs, frying eggs

The other change these days, as the weather brightens and I grow into more energy, is that I’m cooking supper less often. I’m out and about with friends one or two evenings a week for the first time in over a year.

oysters at Rodneys (the relatively large Cotuits (from Massachusetts) were a lovely surprise and the Merasheen Bays (from Newfoundland) were also new to me); two shots from the fabulous Mhel: chef Young Hoong Ji with our sake choices, and one of his brilliant small dishes, mustard greens with flavoured miso and yari ika, topped with pine nuts

All through last year there were extra people for supper many nights of the week, friends coming to spend time with Tashi and then staying on for a meal. There was a lovely casual flow, and little or no formality or anxiety about social arrangements. It was easy to be flexible. I liked the challenge of improvising meals. I just needed to make sure I had enough food around to work with, in case extras turned up. And they were always welcome; the gathering around Tashi of his community of friends was a blessing for us all. (I don’t like that over-used word, blessing, but I can’t find another.)

I am getting used to buying smaller quantities of food these days, and I’m enjoying having a less-full fridge. My choice of foods is wider. Tashi didn’t like fish or any seafood, and because he had a very acute sense of smell, fish cookery in the house was painful, a loud smell.

offerings from Footsteps Farm at Wychwood Farmers’ Market a week ago: fresh spinach by the handful, and an array of winter-stored vegetables too

Which brings me to a recent pleasure: poaching fish fillets in a mild miso broth. A thin fillet of lake trout cooks quickly and easily in an oiled skillet, but thicker pieces, say halibut from Nova Scotia, or fresh pickerel fillets, now available here in Ontario, need more time and a gentle steaming or poaching.

The other day, with two fresh pickerel fillets from Fisherfolk, I spread a little shio koji on each before they rested for half an hour to come to room temperature. I minced some ginger and stirred a heaping tablespoon, perhaps a little more, of home-made soybean/red miso (see my Miracle of Salt book or use store-bought miso) into about a cup/250 ml of warm water. It takes a little work to dissolve it completely. (Meantime I’d chopped some small leftover boiled potatoes, fried them to brown in olive oil over medium-high heat, and turned them out into a shallow serving bowl.)

the pickerel partly cooked, needing a little more time with the lid on; at the side a partial view of my favourite metal spatula

As I pictured the meal that was taking shape it was looking a little beige. There was a solution in the fridge, fresh herbs from a store in Kensington Market: a bunch each of tarragon and coriander (cilantro), as well as some small green onions (scallions). I chopped up a generous handful of the coriander, a couple of green onions, and added some of the tarragon leaves to the mix. To turn it into a fresh chutney, I added some squeezes of lemon juice, a pinch of salt, and a few drops of good soy sauce. A more meticulous cook would have minced the greens more finely…

The fish fillets were long, so I needed to use my widest cast-iron skillet. It went over medium heat, then in went a small amount of olive oil, just to coat the pan, plus the minced ginger. Once it was hot, I added the fillets skin side down for about a minute, then flipped them and cooked the flesh side on the pan for a bare half minute. I flipped them back, poured on the miso liquid, and covered the pan. After a couple of minutes I lifted the lid and spooned some of the broth over the fish, then covered it again. Less than a minute later they were done and could be transferred to a wide dish with their cooking broth.

miso-poached pickerel, fresh chutney, fried spuds, and some broccoli raab for more green

The fish was delicious and perfectly cooked. I’d tried the miso broth technique with chunks of halibut a few weeks ago, but even with that proof of concept, I was relieved it worked well with the fillets. None of this is rocket science, I know, but fish can be intimidating, rather like pastry, because it feels easy to mess it up.

I guess I’m encouraging you, and reminding myself, to take chances and try new things.

A small question about frying eggs:

My go-to morning meal is one or two fried eggs (over easy) over leftovers. (#putaneggonit is a frequent hashtag on my Instagram feed.) Until now I’ve always used olive oil (EVOO) to cook my eggs. But the other day I thought I’d try butter. I don’t love the taste of melted butter but was curious about whether there’d be a difference.

olive oil-fried eggs over leftover potatoes, with the leftover fresh chutney; and on the right butter- fried eggs with toasted hazelnut rye from Evelyns Crackers

I found that the bottom surface of the eggs was smoother and happier with the butter. Perhaps I had the heat a little lower, because I was afraid of burning it? Could that have made the difference? And so a couple of days later I tried again with butter, and again the texture of the underside of the egg was smoother and more slippery. Do you have any thoughts about this?

crocus and first columbine leaves in the garden yesterday

Once I acknowledge this absence, this hole in my universe, there’s nowhere to go except to tears and bereftness. Then the intensity subsides, I pick myself up metaphorically, and I start thinking about tasks I need to do, or plans for supper, or whatever.

We can’t live every minute, every hour, with the awareness of the void or the emptiness of absence. But it’s there and intermittently comes back to hit me hard. Is my psyche, my body, my subconscious, learning from these repeated blows inflicted every time I come up against the raw truth of this void? It doesn’t seem so. Each time feels as raw as the last time: utterly unacceptable and unbelievable.

I think that in the early months after his death I felt like he was still around in some way. In some ways his death felt like a continuation of the last eighteen months of his life, when he was living here with me. I felt immense grief, but there wasn’t a sharp sense of absence.

hanging out in the living room

Things have changed over the last few weeks. Maybe the arrival of spring signals that Tashi’s last year of living and suffering is truly over. Now I feel his full absence. The solid tuned-in Tashi we had for years, the fab guy with humour and grace and thoughtful loving judgement, is gone. It’s unbearable right now, this heavy fresh sense of loss that’s like a first contact with another layer of reality.

Have I just been skating on the surface of grief until now? Am I at last swimming in the sea of grief? And feeling the waters threatening to submerge me completely?

Or maybe, to stay with the metaphor, it’s that I can’t touch bottom. I am adrift in deep waters, and I am forced to admit to myself that I’m here forever. Tashi is not going to reappear, to rescue me from this sense of loss. He is truly gone.

I should be grateful to be in touch with this terrible reality, rather than gliding in a pretend world of fake all-rightness. This is life. Life is joy and also pain. It’s discovery and also loss. We hide it from ourselves and from each other in the day to day, so that usually it’s impossible to know whether the people you walk by on the street are feeling safe and contented or are instead suffering acutely from grief or fear and anxiety.

the mouth of the Don River, downtown Toronto beyond

I remember feeling numb when my father died. I was eighteen, in first year university at Queen’s in Kingston, Ontario. He was forty-eight and died of a heart attack in London. His company paid for my brother Peter and me to fly to London to join my mother. There was a funeral and a cremation. It was all unreal, like something seen on a stage or through a plate glass window. And around it was the stage set of London in the late 1960’s, with the hip fashions of King’s Road a short block from my parents’ apartment.

I was tempted to stay away, to not return to my small first-year life of classes, friends, details. Two weeks earlier, during the Christmas holidays with family friends, someone had talked lovingly about Majorca. Now in London, I imagined taking off to Majorca to see the almond trees in bloom, and from there?...whatever. It was a seductive idea.

But my practical self realised that I needed to be grounded. I was afraid that if I went traveling I’d be lost after the first momentum of departure. Looking back now, I’m grateful for my caution, though sometimes I imagine the paths my alternative life might have taken.

I flew to Canada and went back to class. Professors, unasked, excused me from assignments. I probably didn’t thank them. I just lurched through the rest of my year. And I don’t think I ever properly reflected on the loss of my father. I was so aware of my mother’s determination to not fall apart that I didn’t stop to look at what his loss meant to me and for me.

My brother and I didn’t really talk about it either. Perhaps we felt that talking about it would make it unbearable. We didn’t have the tools. (And in those days no-one rushed in with suggestions about therapy.) It’s as if keeping our grief and loss in a cupboard, as a truth we knew but couldn’t handle, was the only way we could hold ourselves together.

My brother was two years younger and a much freer person than I was. I tended to be the more compliant literal-minded older child. He was rather like Tashi in many ways, physically co-ordinated and at ease in the world, with a natural unselfconscious charm. That year, with our parents away in London, he’d been boarding at the house of family friends and finishing his last year of high school. He flew back on his own from London a few days after our father’s funeral while I stayed on a little longer. I never imagined until later how alone he must have felt flying back and returning to high school, fatherless at the age of 16. Now I weep for him too.

I next saw him and my mother in late March, when we had a service to bury my father’s ashes at Beechwood Cemetery in Ottawa. It all seemed unreal, that the three of us were together but my father was gone, ashes to pour into the ground in the springtime.

Four years later, almost to the day, my brother died in a sailing accident in the Strait of Juan de Fuca, off Vancouver Island. He was twenty.

I got a phone call on a Friday evening from Dunnery, the friend he’d been with. He was calling from the Canadian consulate in Port Angeles in Washington state. He and Peter had bought a sailboat at a police auction; it had been used for drug smuggling and needed repairs. They’d been working on it and decided to take it out for a sail. But the boat popped a leak, or the keel detached or something. I don’t remember. When the boat started sinking they’d tied some balsa wood together to keep themselves afloat in the water. The water was very cold. By the time they were picked up they’d drifted into American waters; my brother was dead and Dunnery unconscious.

I drove out to my mother’s place to tell her. I put my arms around her, pulled her onto her bed, and held her tightly as I told her. It was so unimaginable. No warning, nothing but the brutal fact of Pete being dead and gone.

I flew out to Vancouver and traveled on to my uncle’s place on Vancouver Island; my mother decided not to come. Pete’s body was shipped from Port Angeles to a funeral home there. I went with my uncle to the funeral home to make arrangements. I remember deciding not to go into the next room to see his dead body because I didn’t want that to be my last image of him.

There was a service a couple of days later at the little Anglican church in Comox, down the street from my grandmother’s small house. Pete had spent time there, loved our Grandmum (who was then 84) and our uncle and cousins very much, and they him. It was awful, a terrible time for us all.

Why am I thinking about this now and writing about it? What is going on? I have told the story of my brother’s death rarely, telling Dom and Tashi about it, for example, and a few friends. But now I’m feeling it. It’s part of the stream of deep feeling that’s taken hold of me. Each loss has become part of the next one. At last I am engaging with past losses, it seems, looking them in the eye with more capacity and understanding than I had at the time.

It’s possible to drown in loss. Perhaps survival, especially when I was young and had less understanding, required me to just keep moving, maintain some momentum, rather than risking being crushed by the weight of it all.

As I ride these waves of emotion, I find myself consoled by familiar patterns, from my live Zoom yoga class each weekday morning, to a weekly long conversational walk with friends, to Saturday trips to Wychwood Farmers’ Market and frequent walks to Kensington Market for food, to a pattern of various friends coming by for supper here and there each week. These are the things that help me put one foot in front of the other, both literally and metaphorically. I am very grateful for all of it.

street art off Spadina Avenue in Toronto

KITCHEN EXPLORATIONS including blackcurrant syrup & leftovers-optimism

And speaking of patterns, I still depend on leftovers topped by one or two fried eggs for my (mid-)morning sustenance. Leftovers are usually rice or potato with perhaps some cooked vegetables and/or pickles or a condiment of some kind. With that I generally have a large mug of hot lemon with ginger, turmeric, and black pepper.

Recently, as I sorted through my jars of jam in the basement I came on the last of the large bottles of blackcurrant syrup that I put by a couple of years ago. It’s from a recipe for creme de cassis in Jane Grigon’s marvelous Fruit cookbook. You soak the black currants with red wine, then process them, then squeeze the juice from the pulp, add sugar and simmer the liquid down until it thickens noticeably. The recipe calls for the addition of alcohol at this point. But when I gave my good friend Dina a taste of the syrup her reaction was immediate: this is too delicious to mess up with alcohol! I left it as a syrup. Lately I’ve been treating myself to hot blackcurrant drink with a wedge of lemon rather than my usual hot lemon drink. Highly recommended.

In the evening my patterns vary. This week I made a meat sauce for pasta (whole wheat fusilli). I started with mustard seeds, nigella, and cumin seeds in hot olive oil, then about 5 crushed garlic cloves and two red bird chiles, and finally a pound of Andreas’s ground lamb from Wychwood Market. I stirred it in, breaking up clumps, and soon it had all changed colour. I added most of a bottle of passata plus a chopped up large out-of-season tomato that I’d bought days earlier in a fit of bad judgement. The pot simmered gently for a good while to a lush texture, seasoned with a splash of fish sauce and some salt (I usually work with 1 teaspoon salt per pound of meat, then adjust the seasoning to taste once the sauce has cooked awhile).

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For supper a few days later I made fried rice with leftover brown jasmine. I started with oil poured into the hot wok and tossed in some green Thai curry paste (store-bought). Once I had mixed it well into the oil, I lowered the heat and added several crushed cloves of garlic and nearly a cup of finely slivered raw cabbage. It took 4 or 5 minutes of stirring and cooking for both the garlic and cabbage shreds to soften. I raised the heat and tossed in the leftover rice. I stir-fried it briefly to break it up, added a few dashes of fish sauce, then stir-fried it a little more., pressing it against the hot sides of the wok. In went a large double handful of freshly washed and coarsely chopped spinach (also from the farmers’ market). After a couple of minutes of stir-frying the spinach had cooked to a bright wilted green. I turned the mass of rice out into a shallow bowl, squeezed on lime juice generously, sprinkled on some chopped coriander leaves, and it was ready. The leftover reheated tomato sauce was a surprisingly good side accompaniment to the rice.

Working with leftovers is a wonderful reminder of the transformative power of cooking and imagination. It takes a little optimism, of course, but so does most cooking. And in that optimism and the food it transforms, I find new energy for the coming days

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first bloom in my backyard; a lift of the heart

This talk of the weather is not interesting, my apologies, but feels necessary because in a pathetic fallacy kind of way, it feels like it’s mirroring the awfulness of the news cycle.

Until very recently I’ve felt as if I have less forward momentum each week. Surely this is wrong. Surely with the return of the sun at the equinox I should have been retrieving energy and life. Instead there have been days when I’ve retreated into a kind of still place in myself, a kind of holding tight. It never got me anywhere. So I’d start reading various Substack writers I respect, whose words and ideas take me down rabbit holes that sometimes lead to understanding and clarity, but most often these days to anger at the way the world is being held hostage by dishonest and greedy power structures. And then there’s the terrible fact of the suffering of ordinary people in Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, and elsewhere who are being bombed, killed, traumatised

unharvested remnants of last year: rose hips battered by last winter’s snow and cold

When I was on book tour with my Taste of Persia book, in the fall of 2016, I remember that when I spoke at events in various US cities I emphasised that the people of Iran were not the same as the Iranian government, and that it was necessary to distinguish between the state on the one hand, and the people who live there on the other. They had not chosen their government.

The same holds true today. If a foreign government is repressive, it doesn’t mean other countries should start bombing schools, hospitals, and the humans who live there. The daily news of war crimes committed against civilians is sickening; we’ll look back on this era as a horrifying failure of humanity and of our international systems

when I’m in retreat with a book or other reading, I’m often warmed by this quilt I brought back long ago from Gujarat

Helpless bystander is not a role I want. It has felt like a doubling down of the feeble state that grief brings in waves. It’s disabling and disheartening. I wondered where or how to find lightness, or even the basic energy needed to initiate fresh thoughts or plans for each day.

But then late last week I was rescued, pulled out of my stuck state.

I began to leaf through Kaveri Ponnapa’s new book, called Coorg the Cookbook, that had arrived by Fedex.

It was beautiful and intriguing. I started to look for recipes to try. Soon I was making notes and lists of ingredients I needed to have on hand. They included lots of red onions and shallots, fresh curry leaves, frozen grated coconut, rice flour, tamarind, and plenty of fresh coriander leaves (cilantro). Once I’d stocked up (I found everything on my list in Kensington Market, a short walk away), I could launch into cooking.

large red onion; and the slightly tired remnants of the bunch of curryl leaves I bought last week

Since I rarely follow recipes and instead usually improvise with the ingredients I have in my fridge and pantry, this shift to exploring Kaveri’s book turned me back into a beginner in the kitchen. What a gift. Being a beginner always gives fresh eyes.

fresh eyes help me notice the beauty in ordinary kitchen moments

There’s real meaning in this food, anchored as it is in a culture and a geographic landscape. Exploring the recipes is a wonderful way to connect, even from far away, and that feeling of connection, however tenuous, is invigorating.

Kaveri’s recipes: pork with two layers of flavour, before being mixed and then slow-fried; sesame chutney tempered with curry leaves

On the other hand, making someone else’s recipes for the first time changes my process in the kitchen, slows it right down. Even with clear instructions (and Kaveri’s recipes are very clear), when I follow a recipe that’s new to me I usually feel slow and inept. I have no reflexes for timing or sequence. I read ahead, I prep, I check back about the order of ingredients, I check timing again, and so it goes, a slow methodical first-time walk to a final dish. It’s humbling to be inept and slow.

But there’s no anxiety about the result. I know I’m in sure hands, so the whole process is also relaxing. Following the recipe means that, like an apprentice, I am doing what I’m told rather than having to make decisions about what to do.

All of which is to say that this exploration of Kaveri’s recipes from Coorg has given me fresh energy and joy. I am so grateful.

new energy pulled me out onto my bike at last; the cold weather and winds had discouraged me

KITCHEN EXPLORATIONS – the magic of curry leaves, and more

And it’s a good reminder that embarking on making a series of recipes from another culinary culture can refresh many things: our kitchen reflexes, the ingredients on our shelves and in our fridge, the condiments we have around, our state of mind…

I’m going to start with curry leaves. With many of the books I’ve written there’s a particular ingredient I feel needs to be more widely known and enjoyed. In the case of Mangoes & Curry Leaves, about the Subcontinent, it was of course curry leaves.

If there’s a South Asian grocery accessible to you, you’ll should be able to find them (I haven’t tried ordering them online). They usually come as a bundle of leafy branches bound with an elastic band and protected by a plastic bag. (In the photo farther up the bunch is small, the remnant of the bunch I bought last week.) Store them in the fridge or another cool place. The leaves fall off the stems easily, so the bag is helpful. You can also buy a small curry leaf plant and grow it up into a bush indoors, perhaps putting it outside in warmer seasons.

Curry leaves are a much-loved ingredient in many of the cuisines of southern India and Gujarat. (If you haven’t already, I’d encourage you to do some exploring of them via cookbooks.) And once you have fresh curry leaves in the fridge, there are also many other pleasurable possibilities.

eggs with curry leaves, over some tomato remnants and leftover rice

The last few days I’ve been tossing them into the skillet before frying the eggs that go on top of my morning meal of leftovers. They hiss and sizzle in the hot olive oil and give off a wonderful aroma. I also used them a few days ago to temper a little tomato sauce/chutney. I had simmered coarsely chopped tomatoes with garlic and a couple of chiles. Once they had softened and blended, I heated oil in a small skillet, dropped in mustard seeds, then cumin seeds and curry leaves, and used the flavoured oil to temper the chutney.

Even if you don’t taste the curry leaves strongly as you eat the dish, the aroma that fills the kitchen when you cook them is its own reward.

A couple of nights ago I was cooking for a couple of friends, using mostly ingredients I’d bought that day at Wychwood Market. I boiled small potatoes unpeeled and served them plain. I slow-simmered some chopped washed small leeks with fresh green cayenne chiles, then added a few chopped anchovies before serving. To stir-fry hanger steak (in my very large wok), I started with curry leaves and mustard seed in the hot oil, before tossing in red chiles and a chopped onion. Once it had softened, the sliced meat (I’d rubbed it ahead with shio koji) went into the wok with a generous handful of chopped pea shoots and some chopped radicchio. A few turns and tosses, a splash of water and another toss or two and it was done.

refried spuds with curry leaves, with poached salmon and spinach

Last night I sliced the leftover small potatoes and reheated them with garlic in hot oil flavoured with mustard seed, nigella, red chiles, and fennel, as well as curry leaves. I already need to replenish my stash of curry leaves! (Alongside there was simple cooked spinach dressed in lemon, soy, and sesame oil, and a luxurious piece of Atlantic salmon from Fisherfolk that I poached in a miso flavoured broth with some pea sprouts and chopped ginger).

I’ll write next week about some of Kaveri’s recipes. The ones I’ve made have all worked beautifully. They include a rasam (often called Pepper Water in English), a fascinating and new-to-me rice flatbread (what a gift for people who need to avoid gluten), and a tart-sweet sesame chutney (a condiment I now want to have around all the time; see the photo earlier), plus several very delectable meat dishes. And there are more recipes on my “to try” list.

in the west Annex last Friday

a lift of the heart this afternoon: my first sighting of crocus and dwarf iris in Toronto this year

I began writing here last year, at Nou-Roz, the Zoroastrian/Persian new year. I had decided that I needed an obligation that lay outside my immediate situation, which was that I was living with a dearly beloved adult child who was undergoing palliative treatment for his brain tumour. Tashi had just finished a six-week course of radiation. I was hoping he’d have a good summer. But I didn’t want to write about him or about all that. I thought that instead I could try to keep myself grounded by exploring thoughts and stories related to food and life.

Tashi in September 2020, a year before we knew his days were numbered

In late November last year, two weeks after Tashi’s death, on what would have been his thirty-fifth birthday, I wrote about him here for the first time. And since then I’ve been trying to acknowledge to myself and others the ways in which I’m living and feeling in a transformed world. It turns out that the course of grief, like the course of life, is a very unpredictable variable road. Each week brings me fresh understanding.

In the last while I’ve been feeling rather foggy. Realising I needed a break from my patterns, a week ago I took the train from Toronto to Ottawa to visit a friend.

As we rolled east along the shore of Lake Ontario, I saw the bike path and the sandy inlet where I’ve gone swimming while out for a long summer bike ride with friends. But in this season, from the train, it looked like a stage set rather than a lived-in place. There were no people. The sand on the shore looked wet and packed firm. It was like a model or a painting, not a living breathing place. No wind. The only animation was the false one of our passage which made it move out of sight.

My friend Lianne picked me up at Fallowfield station and drove to her house out in the country. I was there three nights. As always, it was very relaxing staying with her. I didn’t have to decide anything or be in charge of anything. And I was content to just let go. She made meals. I helped a little but took no initiative. We went for a long walk in the woods on crunchy snowy paths, her dog frolicking and exploring all over.

sun and sharp March shadows on our walk in the woods

Friends came for a potluck feast lunch one day, and the next morning I drove into the city to see other people dear to me. Despite those commitments, I was able to let my mind drift. I existed more and more in the present. I had little to no anxiety about plans or obligations. Everything felt simple and natural.

breakfast in Lianne’s kitchen: fried eggs over salad left over from the potluck

In the train on the way back I read a Simenon Maigret published in French in 1967; it was a diverting way to time-travel while train-traveling. Outside the window the cold pre-spring landscape rolled past: soft pale straw-coloured corn stubble in rows across curves of dull brown soil striped with snow, small farmhouses and buildings huddled low, and lines of trees at the top of low ridges, their bare branches silhouetted against the sky in traceries reaching up and out.

Perhaps it was the sensation I had on the train that I was like a package, a parcel being moved across the landscape, that gave me the gift of a kind of passivity. That, in turn, led me into what feels like acceptance. The edges of my mind, or perhaps my defences? softened a little. I was left with a mushier head-space, with less capacity for decisions or decisiveness of any kind. Engaging with any question of where or when or why to do a particular thing seems impossible right now. I don’t have the muscle for it. There’s a lovely lack of striving.

And that tells me how much I must have been striving these last months, without knowing it.

there must be a story behind this fallen phone pole…

Somehow the short trip to Ottawa, an exit from my normal space and patterns, has enabled me to recognise that I’m deeply exhausted. Normally I like to engage with people, to understand where they’re coming from, to explore ideas with them. But right now I am withdrawing. Leaving a room feels better than entering a room. That’s entirely new for me.

I am more weepy, softer, more vulnerable to all kinds of emotions. I feel a sense of relief. This is a new state of being. I don’t want to lose it. My question now is, if I find the muscle to help me take hold again with more energy, can I also keep the door open to this openness and vulnerability?

rainbow socks knitted by Lianne: a lovely encouragement to take things a step at a time

KITCHEN EXPLORATIONS with pasta, fried rice, and more

My tiredness and passivity meant that when I got home from the train trip on Wednesday mid-afternoon - a slightly chilly walk up from Union Station - I was a bit disoriented. I dumped my small knapsack and shoulder bag and retreated to the chaise longue with a book.

A while later there was the question of supper, so I had a look in the fridge (with very little enthusiasm I confess). I figured that perhaps the leftover dal spruced up with some spinach, plus a fresh batch of rice (brown jasmine), and a lake trout from Fisherfolk that was in the fridge, would work well. And there were some green beans I could quickly cook and dress with a vinaigrette.

I felt very inept, fumbly, without reflexes, as if I’d been away a year rather than just three days. I’m sure it was because I’d let go of my attentiveness and focus. I was blurry inside and out. The result was that the fish was OK but could have done with another one minute in the pan, the rice was OK, the green beans were under-salted, and the dal lacked vitality. Though I felt a bit badly that supper wasn’t better for my house-guest and friend, lively and lovely artist Sarah Khan, I wasn’t distressed. It felt kind of inevitable.

The next morning I suggested that we might go out for supper that night. I think it was a way of avoiding decision-making in the kitchen. But heavy rain arrived in the afternoon so that the prospect of heading out to a restaurant was unappealing. “I’ll make supper!” said Sarah. I felt a sudden relief.

She liked the idea of pasta, so she chose the one she wanted and decided she’d oven- roast the root vegetables we had: carrots, sweet potatoes, and parsnips. And then she’d figure out a sauce for the pasta. I withdrew happily to the other side of the counter and started to prepare for an interview I’m doing next week.

It was very restful to be out of the role of decision-maker, to leave everything in Sarah’s capable hands. I’m not sure if she’d imagined that I’d help or guide things, but in any case, I did not.

The meal was delectable. She’d made a sauce with ingredients she’d found: a bunch of spinach, a shallot, the leftover green beans, garlic, a few anchovies, and a jar of passata. She’d spiked the sauce with berbere powder so that it was warmingly savory and she’d cooked it down so that it coated the long thick country style pasta beautifully. The root vegetables were tender and aromatic, and a small chopped salad of pea shoots and radicchio was refreshingly green and crisp.

thank-you Sarah!

Then two nights later, suddenly, the kitchen became familiar again to me. I felt a surge of good happy energy as the wok heated. Decisions and gestures flowed easily. The brown jasmine rice left over from Wednesday’s supper became a generous heap of fried rice, enlivened with red curry paste, five cloves of garlic, the leftover roasted root vegetables (chopped a bit smaller), plus chopped spinach. I finished it with generous squeezes of lime juice plus fresh coriander leaves. Alongside we had bavette grilled outside over charcoal, plus a beet salad. I’m relieved to have found my footing a little.

the fried rice left in the serving bowl after everyone had had a first helping

And the sight of long-buried plants re-emerging, the first tips of my rhubarb showing above ground, the straggle of tulip leaves shoving their way through, is always encouraging, a kind of “yes we can!” It’s OK to weep and grieve, to be distracted and fuzzy. And it’s possible, in fact necessary, at the same time to celebrate the return of spring.

the traces of winter are slowly fading; remnants of paths across Kings College Circle at the University of Toronto

but it’s hard to find my footing right now

I somehow had assumed that I’d be feeling a little lighter once spring arrived. Instead I am weighed down almost more now by the reality of the loss of Tashi. It’s feeling heavier than ever. And beyond that, the wider world is also a place of deep grief and loss. At the start of the fourth week of the US-Israeli war against Iran, focused attention, creative energy, and any kind of optimism are all in very short supply. What a harsh way to enter the season of hope

there’s still beauty; but it’s imported and ephemeral right now

The other day I went to a two-hour lecture by Professor Timothy Snyder on colonialism and empire that drew on Arendt and Fanon and others, as well as on his own wide and deep historical knowledge and understanding. He talked about imperialism as an element of character (and culture), the way it shapes the mindset of both the conquerers/rulers and the conquered/subjects. Those thoughts resonated with me afterwards: the assumption of the militarily powerful that they can shape the world as they wish, as we’re seeing with the disorganised mindless launch of this war. And then on the domestic front in the US, there’s the assumption by the senile president and his fascistic enablers that the populace, as well as the country’s institutions, can be cowed into obedience.

I’m left with these scattered thoughts: Violence seems to be seductive and addictive. It sucks people into a feeling of excitement and necessity. How do we counteract this? The steeply rising price of gas and other fuels should have a sobering effect on war-enthusiasm. Will people in the US rise up against the war? The US and Israel seem to have underestimated the capacity and will of the Iranian government to resist military coercion (whatever the cost to the Iranian people). The instigators of this war are like the schoolyard bully who has misjudged his target’s strengths and finds himself no longer in control of the situation.

Meanwhile the humans on the ground in all the countries involved, the families, the elderly, the nurses and doctors, the people of every kind who are caught literally in the crossfire, are all vulnerable. And the waves of fear and grief that must be surging across the region are unimaginable. Then there are cultural losses: libraries, churches, mosques, architectural treasures, and more, as well as catastrophic environmental damage.

The West condemned the Taliban’s destruction of the Bamian buddhas as barbaric. What do we call these current bombings?

where does this all lead us?

KITCHEN EXPLORATIONS, from anchovy-garlic sauce to brown rice polo sabzi

While the news out in the world remains horrific, I’ve had an unexpectedly positive week in the kitchen.

As often happens, one happy discovery arose because one night I was stuck with no good plan for supper, and then an idea for improvising turned out to be solid gold. Here’s how it went: I had brussels sprouts and I had taken a small package of merguez out of the freezer. Merguez are (delicious) Moroccan-Algerian style spiced lamb sausages, and these came from our friends at Black Sheep Farm in Grey County. The weather had turned cold and snowy for the umpteenth time this month, so oven-roasting seemed like a good plan.

just before the pan went into the oven

I sliced each brussel sprout into five or six (they were quite large and very firm) and laid them onto a large baking sheet. The merguez fitted along one end, pricked by a fork. I drizzled some olive oil and fish sauce on the sprouts, then they went into a 400F/200C oven for about half an hour. I had imagined somehow tossing the brussels sprouts with some pasta. And maybe adding chopped merguez. But how to make a sauce?

Perhaps if I chopped some anchovy and garlic and cooked them in olive oil? I checked the index of Marcella Hazan’s The Classic Italian Cookbook, (published in 1980) under “anchovy” and there I found a simple sauce that gave me confidence and guidance. It was simply chopped anchovy (no garlic) cooked in a generous amount of olive oil, mashed until pulverised, thickened with grated parmesan and pecorino, and used to cook broccoli florets.

I chopped the garlic and anchovy, cooked them in olive oil in a large cast-iron skillet, mashing them with a spoon as they softened, then stirred in a generous amount of grated parmesan and black pepper.

garlic and anchovy in olive oil

Finally I added the oven-roasted brussels sprouts to the sauce in the skillet. Once the pasta was cooked (whole grain mafalda; other small pastas would be equally good), the brussels-anchovy sauce made an excellent coating and flavouring. We ate the merguez separately, simply cut into short lengths.

and after roasting

Brussels sprouts turn a dull green when cooked, but we know that brown food is delicious. This combo was a shining example of that truth.

Later in the week, on Thursday night, the eve of Nou-Roz, I was expecting a total of five people at dinner (we ended up being six). I thought we could make it an anticipatory and celebratory Nou-Roz-tuned meal. We had fresh lamb shoulder from Andreas of Bushbeck farm. And I had bought fresh herbs so I could make polo sabzi, a greens-loaded rice dish that is classic at Nou-Roz.

I have made polo sabzi several times with brown basmati instead of elegant white polished rice. It’s always gone well but has never been perfect. (My friend Serge Madikians, who is Armenian-Iranian and was the chef owner of the restaurant Serevan in the Hudson Valley, says that when making polo, once you put the lid on the rice to finish steaming you must send a little prayer that it will be perfect.) This time it was: fluffy, beautiful, with a great tahdig.

I used about 3 cups organic brown basmati from Lundberg farms and soaked it ahead in salted water for about an hour. I started cooking the rice about 2 1/2 hours before I hoped we’d be eating. The method for polo is always a first cooking of the rice in plenty of boiling salted water (as if you were cooking pasta), but only until it is slightly softened, still not cooked through. I use the same tall pot that I use for pasta. Cooking times are longer of course if you’re using brown rice. (The full instructions for classic sabzi polo using polished rice are in my Taste of Persia book and are beautifully described in Nancy Jenkins’s recent From the Kitchen Porch post.)

While the rice was boiling I washed and chopped some chives, tarragon leaves (stripped off the stems), coriander leaves and stems, and flat-leafed parsley; they made a big handful of greens. It was also the moment to make the saffron water: a generous pinch of saffron pulverised to a powder in a mortar and then stirred into about ½ cup warm water.

I prefer making a crust (tahdig) with a mix of yogurt and an egg, so in a bowl I stirred together a scant cup of plain full fat yogurt with one egg. Once the rice was softer but not cooked through (it took more than half an hour), I drained it in a sieve in the sink. I scooped about 1 1/2 cups of the drained rice into the bowl of yogurt, stirred to mix it all together, then added the saffron water.

The tall rice pot, cleaned out and empty, went back on medium-high heat. I added about 1/4 cup olive oil (or you can use ghee) and a splash of water (yes it sizzles) and then dropped the yogurt-rice mixture onto the oiled surface. It spread out naturally. I sprinkled on about a quarter of the chopped herbs. Then the remaining rice and greens went on in alternating layers, two or three of each, to make a conical mound. I used the long handle of a wooden spoon to poke six or seven holes in the mound, then dropped 7 or 8 small pats of butter onto it. As a kind of superstitious step to ensure there’s enough moisture to finish steam-cooking the brown rice (this isn’t necessary with white basmati), I always sprinkle on about ¼ cup of hot water. The last step is to wrap the lid in a cotton cloth and seal the pot closed. I raise the heat for about a minute (to help set the crust), then lower it right back down to lowest heat and leave it to cook for about an hour.

Before you remove the pot from the heat, you need a wide pot, or your sink, filled with about 2 inches of cold water. Lift the rice pot off the stove and place the bottom of the pot in the cold water (this helps encourage the bottom crust to detach, though it’s not a guarantee). After it rests there for a couple of minutes, you can turn the rice pot upside down over a platter to empty out the rice and the bottom crust. Or instead, as I do, you can spoon the rice out onto a platter. The bottom crust may stick a little: use a metal-edged spatula to ease it off the pot. Mound the rice on the platter and place the pieces of tahdig on top or around the edge.

The lamb shoulder, cut into steaks and marinated in pomegranate molasses and fish sauce, went on the charcoal grill about twenty minutes before we expected to eat, then rested before being sliced.

It’s a good idea to have a fresh salad or pickles or both with a meal like this. We had a green salad as well as oven-roasted beets that I’d chopped and dressed with a yogurt-tinged vinaigrette

salad, polo with tahdig, beets, and grilled lamb; an assertion of spring

yesterday morning’s view out my window

March has been playing its usual unsettling game of snakes and ladders: two days of warmth and people out in t-shirts, then clouds and rain and umbrellas, then a hard frost and heavy coats and mittens, then those fat spring snowflakes tumbling down followed by some melting snow later yesterday, and today bright cold with frozen crunchy snowmelt underfoot.

reflections in meltwater, ice, and last year’s leaves, earlier this week

It’s exactly four months (one-third of a year) since November 14, the day Tashi died.

And exactly two weeks ago the US and Israel started a barbaric war against Iran, murdering civilians and destroying their treasured past and their present. No-one seems prepared to try to stop this madness. It’s as if, once launched, a war has a right to exist.

I need to start a file called “rants” where I dump my paragraphs of distress and rage and frustration. For that’s what comes out first when I sit down to write here on Substack. And then finally I come to a solid place that I want to inhabit and explore here.

local undulations: cobbled front yard

This week I’ve been thinking about the moments when I forget that Tashi is gone and I for a milli-second have an impulse to tell him about a random encounter, or imagine the look on his face when he hears a piece of news. They’re followed instantly by a sink of the heart and the gut, a quick sharp letdown. No, he’s gone. It’s a kind of death by a thousand cuts situation, unpredictable cuts inflicted when reality and my reflexive thoughts are out of synch.

Perhaps there will always be these moments. Perhaps it’s impossible to truly absorb the painful truth. And that may be a measure of how deeply we connect to our most beloveds. They are built into our bones and muscles. Their image, their living presence, stays imprinted in our subconscious, or somewhere just as deep.

The veil of subtext, of a sense of hidden possibility, and of a kind of unreality, is sometimes very disorienting. Sometimes I feel as if I’m looking at the world through distorted glasses. It seems askew and unreliable. I have the sense that maybe there’s something lurking just out of sight around the corner. Perhaps it comes from my knowing there’s an essential missing, but without my having truly integrated that reality. It’s like having a kind of blurry double vision.

I used to see double when I was a child, whenever I was tired. I’d had a couple of eye operations before I turned two, to correct my strabismus. Usually my eyes stayed in focus without my making any special effort. But if I’d been out in bright sunshine or had had a long day, they’d slide into a double image. It was kind of restful, I realise now, as I think about it. I’d retreat into a sort of vagueness. Perhaps I’d get a vacant look on my face. I don’t know. My mother would usually notice immediately that my eyes had gone out and from across the room she’d signal to me to pull them back into focus.

The temptation with this loss of Tashi is to let things blur, without trying to pull myself back into focus. I’ve done some of that, for sure. It can be restful. But I don’t want to retreat into passivity and inaction. I want instead to retrieve energy and lightness. Even if that’s going to be only intermittently successful, it’s worth the effort. The return of longer days will help me get there, as will fresh leaves on the trees and growth in the gardens. Being out in the world, moving and breathing and noticing, that’s what’s life-giving, that’s what can help me find fresh focus and lightness.

if the snowdrops can push their way up through dried leaves and debris…

When I got back from Thailand nearly four weeks ago I couldn’t face dealing with practicalities, including my accumulated mail, for over a week. Among the bills and statements was a card that had been mailed in New York City just after Christmas but hadn’t arrived until mid-January. In it was a kind letter expressing love and condolences for the loss of Tashi. I was very touched but found myself unable to reply to it until today, when it suddenly felt easy. Who knows how these things work? It seems like pathways forward become clear in odd and unpredictable ways. Perhaps some never do. We’ll see. (For example, the clarity I need to access in order to do my 2025 taxes has not yet manifested!)

But at least I’ve been working on plans for ImmerseThrough trips to Georgia (in late September of this year) and northern Thailand (January 2027). In the last few weeks I’ve been talking with my friend and colleague Tamar, who lives in Tbilisi about this fall’s trip. We’d like to include a few days across the border in Armenia, as well as generous time in Georgia. (All of this may be a pipe dream if the warmongers keep pursuing their murderous goals.)

fried eggs with leftovers (in this case grated beet salad) plus generously buttered toasted rye bread, is a heart-warming encouraging way to start the day

Next week, with the new moon, we come to the end of Ramadan. Nou-Roz is a few days later, on March 20. Unlike Ramadan or Easter, it’s set by the solar calendar rather than the lunar calendar. It’s the Iranian/Persian/Zoroastrian New Year celebration of the return of the sun, that falls on the first day of (northern hemisphere) spring. How wonderful if the war could wind down at Nou-Roz.

lilies from St Lawrence Market, brought by a dear friend

KITCHEN EXPLORATIONS - halibut, celery root, oven roasting, and Pi Day

The other day, with two well-loved friends here for supper, I cooked halibut, two thick pieces totalling about 550 grams (just over a pound) that I’d bought frozen from Fisherfolk at Wychwood Market. (They bring it in from Nova Scotia.) I’m always worried that I’ll not do fish justice. Over-cooking is the big risk. I defrosted it in the fridge during the day and then brought it to room temperature just before cooking.

I wanted to try using diluted miso as a cooking medium. I dissolved a heaping tablespoon , perhaps a bit more, of shiro (pale/”sweet” miso) in about ¾ cup (175 ml) warm water. I cooked a little minced ginger and minced shallot in a cast-iron skillet over moderate heat (in a splash of olive oil). Once they had softened I lowered the heat. When I added the miso liquid it sizzled slightly as it flowed to cover the whole surface thinly. The halibut pieces went in flesh side down for just over a minute. Then I flipped them and they cooked skin side down, with the lid on so they could steam a bit, for another nearly four minutes.

I served the fish with a drizzle of the cooking liquid on top. The halibut slid into beautiful flakes and it was not overwhelmed by the miso. Whew! I failed to take any photos. Sorry.

The rest of the meal included a dal (a mix of urad and masur/red dal) cooked earlier in the day for over an hour until soft, then tempered with spices and chopped cauliflower ooked in oil. There was also a lightly dressed salad of roasted celery root and chopped radicchio.

We’re lucky to have Ontario-grown celery root (celeriac is the other name for this large bumpy vegetable) still available (it doesn’t seem suffer much in storage). Celeriac needs to be peeled (a potato peeler works well, or a small sharp knife) before being sliced. I slice it fairly thinly, cut the slices crosswise so they aren’t too big, toss them with olive oil, sprinkle on fish sauce, and then roast them on a baking sheet until tender. Celeriac takes a while to soften, always a bit longer than I expect (allow 45 minutes to an hour at 400 F/200 C).

Then what? I can imagine you asking. I like to combine its sweetness with some bitter. That could be chopped dandelion stir-fried with a little garlic, cumin, mustard seed, and perhaps some minced chile if you’d like extra heat. Local farmed dandelion, a classic spring green, is now available here, so that’s a good choice.

Another possibility is chopped raw radicchio or endive. (I found some imported radicchio from Mexico last week; I’m avoiding US produce these days). The radicchio-celery root combination calls for a well-seasoned (salty enough) dressing with a bit of a tart edge, say yogurt, cider vinegar, and a little olive oil, or instead tahini diluted with warm water, plus some pomegranate molasses. With the latter dressing you could use a good soy sauce for part of your seasoning.

It’s true that most root vegetables lend themselves to being cooked in the oven, from beets and carrots to potatoes. It seems useful to talk about them now, because we’re still mostly in the “hunger gap season” with root vegetables plus cabbage our main source of vegetables.

I slice potatoes (peeled if the peel is thick), drizzle them with olive oil , sprinkle on salt, and put them into a 400 F/200 C oven until tender and touched with brown (usually about 45 minutes; it depends on the variety of the potato and the thickness of the slices). Carrots, scraped clean, get the same treatment except that I usually slice them lengthwise into batons. Beets go in whole and unpeeled, on a baking sheet and sheltered under aluminum foil so they don’t dry out.

And finally today is “Pi Day” (if you write your dates American-style, with the month first, it’s 3.14.). I forgot about it this year and never even thought to try making a pie.

here’s a glimpse of two small pies, tartlets, made by Dawnthebaker, both of them genius: rhubarb cardamom custard, and Shaker lemon

frost-burned neglected rosehips

Of course I’m continuously waylaid by mourning Tashi’s absence. That grief is now a familiar, a presence. So is the horror of Gaza. But these days there’s even more.

How can any of us feel OK or focused when the illegal US-Israeli war against Iran is taking all our oxygen. It’s obscene, crazed. And murderous. There’s no principled motivation, just opportunism and propagada everywhere. They’re bombing Isfahan. What a nightmare.

The world seems to be heading to hell. And along the way hundreds and thousands more in Iran as well as in Palestine and Ukraine and many other places will suffer violence, death, displacement, starvation, and impoverishment. How can anyone cheer this on? My friend Nancy Harmon Jenkins, much wiser than I, titles her most recent Substack post “War is Not the Answer!” She’s so right.

There are ways to actively protest what’s going on. But the first essential I think is to resist the hysteria and the sense of dislocation created in us by the 24-7 news cycle that brings us wars and propaganda. My first reaction to it all is to rant and rage.

But if we lose ourselves in rage or despair, then the forces of disorder, the bad guys, have won.

Surely a better approach, though it’s a challenge, is to stay in touch with our humanity. We can try to stay grounded by connecting with other people, both friends and strangers, and by being attentive to the natural world. Another access is through human creativity: art of all kinds including painting, drawing, music, poetry, film, etc.

street art just off Spadina, south of Dundas, in Toronto

The full moon this week with its trail of bright planets, was one reminder of larger wonders. There was a lunar eclipse just before dawn, when the moon was low on the western horizon. I felt driven to get up early to try to see it. I wasn’t sure I could find a clear line of sight to it. Bundled warmly I walked to Kings College Circle at the university, five minutes away. As I walking across the snowy expanse of the circle I was thrilled to see a small group of five or six other optimists, black shapes on the white snow, standing still and looking west.

And yes! The eclipse was visible, though barely. It was a veiled pale persimmon colour, rather than brilliant (because we were looking at it through the thick atmosphere near the horizon, rather than higher up in the sky). But it was a thrill, still, to see it. I felt light at heart walking home, as the eastern sky slowly brightened into dawn.

Another lift this week came from South African artist Willian Kentridge. His work is always a tonic and a reminder of a larger view. He uses many tools, including video, charcoal drawing, metaphor, a strong sense of history and justice, and music, to explore big ideas. His series of nine half-hour films, A Portrait of the Artist as Coffeepot, which premiered at the Venice Biennale in 2024, has been on show here in Toronto; I finally got there this week. (It has now closed, but is available on MUBI.) I’d seen the first four of the films at the Biennale. On Friday I watched the last five. then stayed around to watch first two, to see what I’d missed first time round. What a pleasure.

At one of the breaks between segments, an acquaintance who was there with a young friend asked me if I had any thoughts about how to keep a clear head in the noise and distraction, the bombardment of the current news cycle. It was that question which led me to the train of thought that I’m trying to follow in this post.

The ideas that Kentridge explores in the films through drawings, words, song, question and answer discussions with himself, torn paper sculptures, and more are still reverberating in my mind’s eye. They’re helping to keep me steady. Art can do that, as can cooking for friends, meditating on grief, eating with friends, conversation with strangers on a streetcar or while waiting at a store or on a subway platform. All these can remind us of human connection.

So can looking for signs of spring in a slowly melting landscape. Yesterday there was a sudden warming, from freezing to plus 12 C/ 50 F. On my way to Wychwood Market in the early morning there was a soft damp fog that made the world beautiful and mysterious. It was transporting. So is the sight of sturdy green hellebore leaves in the back garden, flattened by the weight of the snow that has burdened them for months, and now ready to grow towards the sun. In other bare patches there are small sharp-edged iris leaves and other small green tips growing upward. A thick layer of crusted snow still covers the area where the rhubarb should appear, and the crocus.

and babies and children can help ground us, if we’re lucky enough to have time with them

KTCHEN EXPLORATIONS – wok cooking for spring, and a try at bread pudding

I’ve been turning to the wok more often these days. The cold outside makes charcoal grilling unappealing, but the sense of coming spring means I am less inclined to rely on the oven to cook both meat and vegetables, as I have been doing almost all winter. So instead of putting a sheet tray of root vegetables and/or cabbage wedges along with a little marinated chicken or pork, into the oven, I find myself chopping ingredients for stir-fries.

Last weekend I was expecting two extra people for supper and I had about 1 ½ pounds of frozen pork shoulder and some delicata squash to work with. I put on a pot of brown jasmine rice to get things started. I cut the squash in half, scooped out the seeds and pith, then sliced it into thin half-moons (thank heavens for sharp knives). I sliced the pork and tossed the slices in a bowl with some shio koji paste and several splashes of soy sauce. There was onion, garlic, and ginger to chop too. Amazingly we have local spinach available, these days from Nith Farms. I washed and coarsely chopped both that and some bok choy leaves that were hanging around in the crisper.

The dish came together easily, perfuming the air: I heated the wok over a high flame, added olive oil, then tossed in the onion and ginger, followed soon after by the garlic. In went the pork, and after several tosses to expose it to the heat of the pan, I added the squash slices. They stir-fried together with the meat for several minutes before I added about a cup of hot water. As it bubbled to a boil I popped on a large lid for a minute or so until the squash had softened in the steamy heat, then added the bok choy and spinach and stirred it in. Another minute or two later the dish was done and turned out into a serving bowl.

the pork and delicata stir-fry over rice, with a side of beets (from a batch I’d oven-roasted the previous week), dressed with a vinaigrette

At the last minute one of my expected guests couldn’t stay for dinner. That meant we had the stir-fried pork and greens not only for supper that first night, but also as reheated leftovers a couple of nights later. I love good leftovers.

I took the same approach last Thursday when a friend from out of town was coming for supper and to stay overnight. My meat this time was two small duck breasts, totalling about 1 pound. Again I rubbed the meat with shio koji and some soy sauce. But this time I turned to a jar of black bean sauce that was in my small ferment fridge (There’s a recipe for it in my Miracle of Salt book.) It was a special batch that I’d made without chiles, so that I could use it when cooking for a friend who is allergic to capsaicin (the heat-giver in chiles). I mixed about 2 tablespoons of the black bean sauce with a little oil and with one minced bird chile. The only other flavourings I used were chopped shallot and some garlic (on the theory that more is always better).

The greens I had were fresh locally grown pea sprouts, and more spinach. I coarsely chopped those and set them near the stove top.

Once the rice was done (brown basmati cooked with a little chopped onion and some salt), I added a few small pats of butter to it.

The big wok went onto high heat. Olive oil went in first (I could/should have used goose fat but forgot). I added my aromatics, then soon after, the sliced duck. I turned it a couple of times then added the black bean sauce mixture, stir-fried things together a moment, then added the greens and stir-fried it all together vigorously, with the addition of a little water along the way. Duck gets tough if it’s cooked a long time (like beef), so I needed to get everything done quickly. It all came together perfectly, with the addition of a small hit of fish sauce…

the greens have just been added; I paused to take this quick shot

and a first try at bread pudding

The other exploration this week was bread pudding. We don’t seem to be eating much bread these days. On Thursday I realised I had a half loaf of bread that was two weeks old, a delicious rye bread with quince from Dawnthebaker. I sliced it, chopped it (trimming off very tough corners), and put the cubes of bread to soak in milk.

Dawn had told me that she soaks her bread pudding bits (remnants of various kinds of leftover baking) for 24 hours. I didn’t have that much time (I wanted to have the bread pudding available for suppertime), so after they’d soaked a couple of hours I put the whole mass (including the soaking liquid) into the food processor. The grinding was bumpy at first, but then I went on processing it too long I think. Oh well.

Next time I’ll grind it less, so it still has some lumps and texture, rather than being smooth, or perhaps if I chop it into smaller chunks, after the long soak it won’t need any processing. I poured the slurry back into a bowl, whisked four eggs and added them, then stirred in spices, sugar, maple syrup, and a bit of salt (amounts and proportions are below). I poured the thick batter into a lightly oiled bread pan, placed it in a water bath, and put it in a 325 F oven.

Ninety minutes later it was done, in a soft bread-pudding kind of way. It took more than an hour to cool to firm. I was pleased with it, as a first try. The flavour was excellent, the texture moist. But next time, if I have leftover bread, I’ll do a long 24-hour soak.

bread pudding recipe for guidance.

It bakes in one large loaf pan. Of course you can make a smaller batch and use a smaller loaf pan. Just reduce amounts in rough proportion. And play with warming spices that you like best.

About 4 cups/1 litre container of chopped leftover whole grain bread

Soak bread cubes in 3 cups milk and 1 cup water (ideally for close to 24 hours), then briefly process to break pieces down a little more so you have a lumpy slurry.

Preheat the oven to 325 F/165 C

Then add and stir in:

4 large eggs whisked well

About ½ cup maple syrup

1 tablespoon powdered ginger

1 teaspoon cardamom powder

½ teaspoon powdered cloves

½ teaspoon salt

1/2 cup or so quince jam or marmalade

About ½ cup turbinado or similar sugar

Pour the batter into a lightly oiled large bread tin

Place it into a water bath (1 to 2 inches/3 to 5 cm hot water in a wide ovenproof pot); shallow enough that it doesn’t risk slopping into the bread pan

Place into the preheated oven for 90 minutes or until a skewer inserted deep into the cake comes out clean

Sprinkle on about ¼ cup turbinado sugar. Let stand to cool for an hour or more before slicing. Serve with ic cream or whipped cream or on its own with tea or coffee.

mist and melt: the Wychwood neighbourhood ice rink melting last Saturday morning

snowy back yard, with sharp shadows and signs of melting

The annual cycle of changing light, as the sun gradually moves further north in these months of late winter and early spring, is always thrilling, but also entangled with memories of other springtimes, other seasons of hope or fear. Hope is positive, but also implies uncertainty about whether the wished-for thing will happen. And fear is the flip side of that: a dread that a possible bad thing will occur.

[An aside: Along with many others, I’ve been dreading the possibility that all this talk of negotiation with Iran was a smokescreen that was designed to lead to war. And so it has turned out this morning. I’m enraged and distressed that huge numbers of people will suffer for the satisfaction of the orange bully in DC. And I’m also angry that the Prime Minister of Canada spoke in support of the illegal bombings and other acts of war of today. He should be ashamed and embarrassed.]

cigarette butts by a doorway on Bloor Street; each is printed with a health warning

At this time last year the suffering I was aware of was more personal. We were near the end of Tashi’s six-week course of radiation, prescribed when his brain tumour became active again. Every weekday we’d drive the short few blocks to the hospital, anxious to be on time for his radiation appointment and then we’d take the elevator down to the basement. There I’d wait with him until he was called, then read a book while he was wheeled away to have radiation beamed onto his head.

In those endless weeks of snow and cold, getting to and fro was very difficult. Tashi could manage walking the short distance to the curb and easing himself into the car, but he needed a wheelchair at the hospital. He was so exhausted from the radiation. And yet he joked, we joked together, we gossiped, and when we got back from the appointments in late morning we’d watch TaskMaster or QI on his laptop as distraction.

Friends would come by, Tashi would chat on the phone to his brother or to friends, we’d have people over for supper, or dropping by at other times to say hi. That whole concentration of friends and visitors, calls, and notes, was a wonderfully intense and sustaining web of energy that carried us along all last year.

I wondered whether there’d be a falling away of people after Tashi died in mid-November and after the holidays were over. I wondered how we’d all reconfigure ourselves in the new year.

Now I’ve returned home from five weeks away, a bit unsure about how to move forward, how to be, in this changed house, this changed landscape. I had wondered at Christmas if I’d hear from the lovely collection of Tashi’s friends who’d become part of my life. And while I was away I worried about them too. How were they coping?

It turns out that we’re still very connected. Since I’ve been back many of them have reached out about plans and/or have come by for supper. I’ve learned that through the winter they’ve also been keeping in touch and watching out for each other. It’s lovely to see, and a relief. It’s an example of how to be. They’re not running away from the intensities and pain of last year but instead integrating it all as they move forward. These (mostly) thirty-somethings have wisdom and lived experience of love and grief beyond their years.

Other friends of mine have also been in warm touch with me, checking in, figuring out when we can meet for a walk (yes, even in the cold), a meal, a coffee, and conversation. I feel lucky to be so embraced in their understanding. It’s not that we’re always talking about Tashi or grief or feelings, but all of that is an acknowledged backdrop to our lives, not a walled-off territory. And it will continue to be.

a glimpse of the hockey rink at Ramsden Park, as I walked to a meet-up with friends

This week for the first time in over a year I felt the impulse to bake. I was due later that day to a gathering of friends, an informal potluck, and instead of bringing cheese or pate, I could imagine committing to baking something. I decided to make an olive oil cake, loosely following the easy recipe in my Miracle of Salt book. I decided to double the recipe (one cake to take to the potluck and the other for home), and I needed to make some substitutions: Instead of the brined roasted ground walnuts of the recipe I chopped some store-bought roasted salted pistachios; and instead of chopped preserved lemon I used the liquid from a jar of Seville orange marmalade that I made last year. Half the batter baked in a loaf pan, as the recipe asked, and half in a cast-iron skillet. (The recipe is below, in Kitchen Explorations.)

I loved the feeling of freedom I felt while making those cakes. It was as if a weight of responsibility, debilitating inhibiting responsibility, had lifted itself off my shoulders and mind. Why? How? The passage of time perhaps. Maybe also I’m somehow better able to disregard normal expectations? There was no anxiety about the outcome. Of course I cut a small slice off both versions of the cake, to check it. But I wasn’t worried about it.

Today at Wychwood Market I found myself telling the little story of this week’s cake(s) to a chef friend of Tashi’s, a lovely guy who moved to Toronto last summer and is figuring out what comes next. He was one of the Tashi visitor contingent all summer and fall. As it turned out, my story resonated with him because he’d had a parallel experience. He told me that at Christmas he’d realised he no longer enjoyed cooking. Cooking had always brought him joy, but suddenly it was gone. An absence.

Then about eight weeks later he decided to try making fesanjun, a Persian dish he had no experience with. The experience was a real pleasure. And today, he said, he’d started to think about doing a braise of some kind for dinner tomorrow. Slowly slowly life and lightness were returning.

I told him about my strategy for trying to avoid “should” and “ought to” right now. I am trying to cook or bake or do anything else only if it’s something I feel I really want to do. There’s no energy for forcing things against the grain. We agreed that part of the trick to staying light (when cooking, but it applies elsewhere too) is to avoid the weight of expectations, our own or those of others.

My job now is to leave myself room to rediscover joy and lightness as I recover from the heavinesses of last year. The grief is heavy, but I’m slowly developing the muscles and the reflexes to carry it with more ease. And for all of us who grieve, as those muscles come, so does an ability to retrieve pleasure and lightness in other things: baking, painting, writing, political activism, cooking for ourselves and for others…

KITCHEN EXPLORATIONS including chilled mandarin segments, a recipe for olive oil cake, and poached pears

I came across a photo on Instagram recently that showed mandarin orange segments in snow. The writer (who was it?) explained something she’d learned from MFK Fisher’s writing: that if you dry the segments in a warm place, say on a rack over a radiator, so the fine skin dries out to paper thin, and then you place them in snow, they taste extra sweet. I did that today (scraped snow from the back yard into a bowl), and yes they become very sweet and juicy. They’re also pretty splashes of warm colour in the snow, and a consolatory delicious set of bites in this extended cold and snowy winter.

The olive oil cake recipe is simple, as I said above. The oven is preheated to 350F/175C. Oil a standard (8 by 4 inch/20 by 10 cm) bread tin and line the bottom with parchment paper; or instead oil an 8-inch/20 cm diameter cast-iron skillet. (If you wish to double the recipe, as I did, double all ingredients except the baking powder, which should go only from 2 to 3 teaspoons).

the skillet cake version that I kept for the house

In one bowl mix together 1 cup whole grain wheat flour (I used Maris Widgeon from Dawnthebaker; Red Fife or another non-bread flour is fine) or instead unbleached all-purpose flour, with 1 cup/200 grams turbinado sugar; ½ cup/50 grams finely chopped brined walnuts (I substituted chopped salted pistachios), 2 teaspoons baking powder, and a pinch of fine sea salt. In another bowl whisk together ½ cup/120 ml plain whole milk yogurt, 3 large eggs, and 2 to 3 tablespoons tart marmalade liquid or finely chopped preserved lemons.

Add the liquids to the dried and stir well to blend and moisten all ingredients. Then stir in ½ cup/120 ml extra-virgin olive oil until completely incorporated. It will seem unlikely that it can blend in, but don’t worry, it will. Pour the mixture into the greased pan and bake in the centre of the oven until done, 50 to 55 minutes (10 minutes less if using a cast-iron frying pan rather than a loaf pan). Stick a skewer or fine knife blade into the centre of the cake; it should come out clean.

Let stand for half an hour or more to cool before slicing. You can lift it out of the loaf pan onto a plate, or ease it out of the skillet, once it has cooled.

and poached pears: When I had the impulse to make the cake, I had first imagined including some poached pears eitheer in the cake, or as a topping. I’d bought pears from Milan of Bizjak Fruits at Wychwood Market. They were hard after months in storage, but I imagined they’d ripen into some flavour after a few days, or perhaps be even better if I poached them. I heated a little water, stirred some sugar into it, along with cardamom seeds and some powdered cloves, then added slender long wedges of pear, unpeeled. They simmered awhile, then sat cooling in the spiced thin syrup. In the end I didn’t include them in the cakes. I thought they’d make the flavours too complicated. But they are delicious eaten with a dollop or two of yogurt or kefir (or ice cream, as a friend pointed out). Yesterday I had them for breakfast, along with two modest slices of the cake. A great combo with coffee.

pears in their poaching liquid; breakfast bowl of pear, kefir, and cake wedges

Finally: Last week I had dinner at Jennifer McLagan’s place. She is a brilliant cook and her books are rich with insight, clear excellent recipes, and loads of information. For dessert she made a pavlova topped with pomegranate seeds. Here’s the slice I ate with pleasure!

I encountered this beautiful bare willow on a walk in Vancouver

I love having hand-carry only. There’s no waiting to drop luggage or to pick it up on a carousel after landing. The trick on the plane is to be self-sufficient. I like to have a small sub-bag that I lift out of my hand-carry and have with me in my seat, with books, headphones perhaps, and maybe spare socks. I also make sure I have a shawl and a generous coat or jacket because planes are often cold and drafty. Everything else can be stashed above, leaving me maximal legroom. I always choose a window seat, because it seems to me that I get an inch or two more space there, with the possibility of stretching at least my outside leg out straight. None of this is important for short flights, but for anything over three hours (and certainly for long trans-ocean flights) it can make a huge difference.

I had wondered how I’d feel arriving back at the house after five weeks away. Tashi felt less immediately present in the house as I walked in. The space felt more neutral somehow. I no longer expected to see him around a corner. But he’d been in my head and mind’s eye a lot, because often during my trip I’d imagined telling him about something interesting or quirky that I’d seen. Then each time that impulse would fade into the fact of his absence.

another reality of arrival

Close friends have asked me whether the time away was good, or how my trip was. It didn’t feel like a trip so much as a stepping away from a complex reality into a sort of empty space. And that was a help, that break of pattern and change of place. I have good friends in Chiang Mai whose loving concern was a balm. And the break in patterns of thinking was also restorative. It prepared me for the return home, for the daily living in changed circumstances.

I’ve already this week had time and conversation with some of my close Toronto friends, whose focused attention and care have been warming and relaxing. I’m so grateful

Vancouver’s Pulpfiction Books, used book paradise, where I found a Murakami for the plane

I also had one encounter this week, during the interval at a concert, that was a reminder of the shifting burden of this grief. It was with a guy whom I rarely run into. He asked how I was and I said something neutral like “doing OK.” And then after a few sentences he said, “and how are your kids?”

I remember long ago, when I was twenty-two, being in this kind of situation. My brother Peter had died in a sailing accident in British Columbia. A few weeks later in Ottawa I ran into a friend of his named Mary who’d been out of town for a year. As we were saying a quick hello she asked where my brother was these days. I chickened out, completely. I simply said “I don’t know where he is right now.” I never saw her again, so I don’t know how or when or whether she ever learned that he’d died.

But in this case, perhaps feeling tougher and more able to deal with a response to the news of death, I said something like, “Tashi, my younger one, died in November; it was a brain tumour. It has been a brutal year.”

In that situation the first thing that usually comes out in response is an “I’m so sorry.” All expressions of sympathy, even that simple familiar phrase, take dealing with,. They’re weighty and demanding, even when tender and loving. But in this case, perhaps with the best will in the world, the person went on to engage with the news. He didn’t know Tashi personally, so it was just clumsy and awkward, wrong-footed. It’s hard to describe how cornered I felt, sort of suffocated in formalities and meaninglessness. It was a taking-away of meaning, a subtraction. I fled.

I’m not sure why I’m writing about this here, apart from a general need to unload. These break-points in life are so complex, not just for the people who are on the front line, the primary grievers, but also for those who deal with them, the outsider friends and acquaintances. There’s the natural human urge to commiserate and express sympathy. But without a ritual language beyond the plain clear “I’m so sorry” things can get awkward, painful, burdensome. As the consolers, we want to assure the grievers of our sympathy, in order to embrace them, to help them feel strengthened by our loving concern. (Of course if we’re instead doing it just to perform concern rather than genuinely feeling it, we’re really burdening the griever and being jerks.)

As a person grieving I find a simple expression of sympathy is a welcome acknowledgement of loss and pain. But when people try to build a conversation on top, it often goes astray and becomes exhausting and pointlessly painful. Close friends and family don’t say much, don’t need to. We all share a knowledge of how horrible the loss is. We can easily move together into funny stories of shared experiences to lighten our shared load. But those less intimate have nothing useful to work with. Religious language of consolation works for some people but sounds like empty platitudes to me. An insult.

I guess my takeaway advice to those wishing to express sympathy is to keep things intentional, warm, and brief. Think about the person grieving and what they might need/want, not about your own performance

someone to grieve for right now; an unidentifiable street person on West Broadway in Vancouver

Have you had these experiences? In either role? What’s your take on this?

KITCHEN EXPLORATIONS ON RE-ENTRY, including crepes, stir-fried rice noodles, and feasting with friends

I arrived back in Toronto last Tuesday evening to a perfect return-home meal of sliced bavette, cooked dressed greens, and tender sweet potato. The house was warm and welcoming.

best arrival meal: slices of charcoal-grilled bavette with sweet potato and dressed greens

The next morning I found myself thinking about what to make for supper, the first time in five weeks that I’d had those thoughts. There were chicken thighs in the freezer. Simon Thibault, who did a great job of house-sitting through endless cold and snow storms, had tidied my spices and my fridge, eaten some supplies and rearranged others very helpfully. He’d also bought a cabbage, some radicchio, and some greens.

I discovered two partial packages of rice, brown basmati and forbidden rice, that needed finishing. I washed and cooked them together, with a scattering of chopped onion. It worked fine. The mixture gleamed black, especially after I added dabs of salted butter at the end of cooking.

I put wedges of cabbage drizzled with olive oil and fish sauce on a heavy baking sheet, along with the chicken thighs that I’d marinated for half an hour in a blend of pounded ginger, garlic, salt, and dried chile powder (in the absence of fresh chiles). The method is a very loose adaptation of the Kachin chicken recipe in my Burma book. The chicken and cabbage went into a 400F/200C oven for about half an hour. Once they were done, I chopped the cabbage and sliced up the chicken, then drizzled it with the lush pan juices.

Meantime, for fresh crunch and colour I’d chopped some radicchio and pea tendrils and made an improvised dressing of yogurt, olive oil, rice vinegar, and a dash of soy sauce. It needed a sprinkling of flake salt once tossed.

partway through supper: the radicchio and pea tendrils, the cabbage, and the black rice

On my first morning home I had had pancakes on my mind, so I’d walked out in the snow, shivering at the change of climate, to shop for eggs and milk. That evening after supper I whisked 4 large eggs with about 2 cups whole milk, a generous pinch of salt, about 2 tablespoons vanilla sugar, and enough whole grain flour to make a thin batter.

I am not a Christian but I have a long-standing cultural awareness of the major elements of the Christian calendar, including Lent, probably because of its importance in the kitchen and at the table. In most Orthodox churches, Lenten fasting means no animal products at all: no butter, milk, or eggs, as well as no meat. There may be a few days when fish is permissible (I remember 13 years ago being served fish on Palm Sunday at the table of the bishop of Javaheti in southern Georgia). Many western Christian churches do not have Lenten fasting. Those that do, as I understand it, tend to restrict merely the eating of meat from animals and birds.

These restrictions are the reason why traditionally people have celebrations and festivals just before Lent: think Carnival, and Mardi Gras (“fat Tuesday’) or Shrove Tuesday (the day you confess your sins and get shriven - cleansed of them - before the start of the 40 fasting days). Pancakes and crepes are a classic dish for Shrove Tuesday. I had missed making them this year on the day itself because it was the day I was flying home.

On Thursday morning I stirred the batter again, placed two cast-iron skillets over medium-low heat, wiped each with olive oil, and then made the crepes. Each one takes very little time. I use a ladle to scoop up a little batter, lift the skillet off the heat with my other hand, tilt the pan slightly and continuously as I pour on the batter, attempting to encourage it to flow into a round shape, then place the pan back on the heat. In about a minute the crepe is ready to be flipped over. They were fine tender pancakes in the English style, using Maris Widgeon whole-grain flour milled by Dawnthebaker. I failed to take any photos, sorry! I think I was too busy dancing the skillet dance and imagining the good eating that lay ahead.

I like stacking only two crepes on a plate, delicate approximate rounds. I squeeze on a little lemon juice, add a small drizzle of maple syrup, then loosely roll the stack up and eat it in hand. And then I stack another two and repeat… I can report that crepes delayed a day or two are just as pleasing as those eaten on the official day.

the open butcher shop scene at Sanagan’s

After my crepe breakfast, I headed to Kensington Market because a good friend was coming for supper that evening. I had some vague ideas. And when I found there were fresh rice noodles available at the tofu shop/factory, the meal took shape in my head. I bought two pounds of noodles and then stopped for a bunch of coriander and a few other veg at Kensington fruit Market. At Sanagan’s, my local butcher, I bought a scant pound of hanger steak.

weighing out the rice noodles at the tofu shop

I ended up cooking the whole meal in the wok, starting with the hanger steak, sliced, rubbed with a little shio koji, then added to the wok with chopped chives after the chopped ginger, bird chile, garlic, shallots, had softened. I stir-fried the meat with the addition of a little water at the last moment, then turned it out into a bowl, rinsed the wok into the meat. The wok went back on the heat to cook chopped bok choy, pea tendrils, and spinach with a little garlic. Finally came the turn of the rice noodles, a tender tangle, which went into the hot oil in the wok with some pea tendrils for a few minutes of stir-frying to soften to full tenderness.

I put the noodles and the cooked greens in one large bowl and tossed them together. The meat and gravy went out separately. I made a small bowl of vinegar lightly sweetened vinegar to use as a condiment. With the help of a couple of extra people who dropped by, the whole lot was eaten; no leftovers.

And finally, last night, Saturday night, we had supper for seven, with chicken and potatoes from Footsteps Farm (at Wychwood Market) oven-roasted (the chicken smeared with shio koji and suffed with a lemon). Alongside there was a radicchio salad with kefir dressing made by Dawnthebaker, a chopped salad brought by another friend, and some dal I’d made (urad and masur together, tempered with minced onion and ginger, powdered red chile, turmeric powder, and freshly toasted and ground cumin and coriander, and topped with chopped coriander leaves).

It was a lovely feast of conversation and flavours. It gave me a real feeling of arrival, and the start of a retrieval of equilibrium

a reminder that flowers will return: morning glory blooms at Free Bird Cafe in Chiang Mai

Toronto is still covered in snow my friends tell me. I’m due to land there this Tuesday, February 17. On that date the new moon rises, and with it come momentous endings and beginnings.

It’s a lunar calendar trifecta: the start of two fasting seasons, Ramadan and Lent, and the end of the painful year of the snake. I’m hoping, aren’t we all? that the year of the horse brings us better news.

Valentine’s Day, yesterday, was the three-month anniversary of Tashi’s death, already one quarter of a year in the past and still so present and immediate. It feels very recent and yet far away too…days of numbness and hurt and flattened energy.

I had a phone call yesterday with my dear friend (and Immersethrough partner) Tamar, who lives in Tbilisi (the luxury of WhatsApp!). She told me that in Georgia the Saturday before the start of Lent - yesterday - is the day for mourning and remembering the dead. It was evening in Tbilisi when we spoke. Her family had already laid the table and lit candles for their departed. And so, after our call, she and her son added another candle, for Tashi, and lit it. Light in the darkness is a gift, a reminder to keep our eyes and hearts open

first tender life in Vancouver

I flew into Vancouver last Monday evening, in rain and drizzle, the ground sodden. And because I’d been softened by four weeks in Chiang Mai, the damp penetrated my bones, despite my wool coat and several merino underlayers. But the chill here is nothing compared to the deep cold and snow of Toronto.

Last year in Toronto at this time every weekday morning we’d climb into the car and drive the short distance to the hospital, in cold and snow, for Tashi’s radiation treatments. The appointments began in late January and continued until early March, six weeks that left him exhausted, truly wrecked, and then led to serious blood clots in his lungs and a brutal week in hospital. This year the Toronto winter brought even more snow and more cold. I could picture the scenes that must have been happening daily at the entrance to the cancer hospital as patients and their families struggled to get to their appointments

That’s the thing about tough experiences. There’s an intimacy with suffering that can later give us an empathy with others. Does it help anyone who is struggling that I am imagining their situation and feeling for them? They can’t know. Perhaps the person who is helped is me: my experience has pushed me into thinking of others, has taken me out of my narrow personal preoccupations and into the larger world.

I don’t want to sound religious here. I remember listening to a sermon at my cousin Andrew’s funeral. The minister tried to persuade us that, as Job’s suffering had been necessary, so also it was somehow good for Andrew that he suffered (appallingly) as he died of bone cancer. I found the point of view outrageous and couldn’t wait to flee.

In my last week in Chiang Mai I pedalled out west of the old city to Free Bird Café one morning for breakfast. The café runs as a social enterprise hub, with clothing donations for refugees and others fleeing Burma, and fund-raising of various kinds, and serves a vegetarian menu of largely Shan and Burmese dishes, plus a few western items.

Free Bird Cafe Shan noodles, stirred, with fried Shan tofu triangles

The young guy working at the counter that morning had come across the border about two years earlier. He was Intha and had grown up on Inle Lake in one of the villages that “float” in the lake. Here he was, a young person displaced by the military coup and ensuing civil war in Burma, putting in his day’s work with grace and competence.

So many people in Chiang Mai and in Toronto are from somewhere else, and often they did not choose to be displaced. How many of them have the freedom to return home, or to choose to live elsewhere?

On my last morning in Chiang Mai, I felt so easy and light, packed and ready, that I went for an early walk around the neighbourhood, noticing small things, loving the light. There were soft dreamy clouds slowly billowing and swirling in the tender pink of the dawn. The monks were still out on their rounds

noticing small things: cat on motorcycle at the local wat

I stopped in for a last bowl of jok, velvet-smooth, with tiny meatballs and the sharp hit of fine threads of ginger, and said my farewells.

jok stirred up; a great start to a very long day

HERE & THERE IN VANCOUVER

I’m hanging out with dear ones in Vancouver, but that also involves lots of walking and talking, as well as eats here and there. I made a pilgrimage trip to Tommy’s Whole Grain on Powell. It was an easy bus ride from where I’m staying, and a warmer day than my last visit, in January two years ago, when temperatures were in the sub-basement (minus 20C!). It was great to see Tommy again and to eat his food (a small quiche and a veg hand pie). The tender aromatic whole wheat pan loaf I took home has already vanished down various throats.

Tommy’s breads…

A few days ago, after a meet-up at Siegel’s Bagels for Montreal smoked meat in a bagel (it really hit the spot), we went for a walk westward along the waterfront, with pale water and giant houses, plus wheeling seagulls, for décor. Supper that night was at Saba, a Yemeni restaurant on Granville. I had a delectable slow-cooked dish of okra, potato, and lamb with a fresh lime drink to wash it down. The restaurant seems to be thriving (it was packed) despite serving no alcohol.

bagel awaits; Saba’s lamb and okra stew with flatbreads beyond, and lime juice

I’ve spent a few mornings reading and working in Ele Café, on Broadway at Laurel, an airy calm space with a fabulous list of teas, some enticing not-very-sweet pastries, and good coffee. And on several long walks we dropped by tiny Fife Bakery on 3^rd west of Main for coffee and a sausage roll. I enjoyed the surprise of the heated toilet seat in their washroom!

early camellia in Vancouver