Author: carin

sweet: the rest of the story

~ carin ~ 6 Comments

Things didn’t start well.

I’m referring to yesterday’s great sour cabbage experiment.

Frankly, I didn’t think we’d ever get past the sauce issue. Peter and I were in two camps from the get-go. One of us (who shall remain nameless) wanted tomato, the other opted for a gorgeously rich and traditional meat sauce. But as I hadn’t previously considered details such as ingredients, we found ourselves sans the required ham hocks and smoked sausage and were forced to settle on the tomato version. Which, as it happened, we also didn’t have the ingredients for but running out to No Frills for a can was easier than going to the ham hock purveyor much farther afield. (The ridiculous thing is that normally the cold room is filled to the rafters with jars of homemade tomato sauce but without a bumper tomato season in the past year or so, the shelves are bare. Plus I recently did a serious thinning of old preserves after remembering a scene in Larry’s Party where the mother-in-law dies from eating some home-canned green beans…)

Did I mention we were out of paprika?

I will say this, the eight dollar pickled cabbage head was a joy to work with. Not too salty nor too sour, just the right size, and the leaves were nice and loose, easy to fold and tuck.

Unfortunatley it wasn’t until I’d made about half a dozen that I remembered they’re called cabbage rolls for a reason. Mine looked like cabbage hambugers. Peter said not to worry, they were fine, he preferred a meatier version anyway; we’d simply rename them, he said. We’d call them cabbage packages.

Right.

I was just thankful we’d already given up on the Moroccan element.

I rolled the last few into a slightly more recognizable shape, bunged them into a pot—or no, sorry, I carefully layered them between more of my sour cabbage leaves, then slopped on the wretched tomato sauce (I firmly believe it’s all about the sauce; that’s what flavours the meat and the rice, no? And if you’re using a can—a can for pity’s sake—well how on earth can anything good come of it?? But we were in a pinch so I’ll shut up about it…), then Peter poured us each a glass of wine while they cooked and by some miracle my mood improved and the package/rolls actually turned out tasting much better than they looked.

Much, much better.

In fact, I’m suggesting you don’t look at them too long…

Okay, that’s probably long enough.

~

sweet

~ carin ~ 5 Comments

I know it looks bad.

It looks (slightly) better in person. Mostly I’m (very) hungry when I see it in the veggie aisle at Soeby’s.

A pickled head of (sour) cabbage. Product of Ontario. This alone makes me happy, being as how there’s little at this time of year that’s from this part of the world. Still, I’ve never seen anything like it and have no idea what to do with it. I assume it’s a version of sauerkraut, which I happen to love but have only ever seen in a jar—I’m thinking I could cut it up and use it the same way. I don’t see a price but how much can it be? It’s cabbage.

I add it to the mesclun and mushrooms, the avocado, bananas and Canadian shallots in my basket and then at the check-out the cashier says, um, you know this stuff is very expensive, right?

What, the cabbage?

Yeah, she says and offers to weigh it and tell me the price before she rings it in.

Okay. Should I sit down? I ask.

Eight dollars and forty-seven cents, she says.

Eight dollars for a head of cabbage?

She smiles apologetically, nods. I can tell she’s been through this before; there have been unpleasant words uttered about the price of this cabbage in previous lines.  She waits for me to utter a few myself but I’m completely intrigued by now—what is so magical about this cabbage that makes it this pricey? I have to taste it for myself.

I’ll take it, I say.

She looks concerned, but rings it in. Then: what are you going to do with it?

The question feels like a test, like if I get it wrong, a mechanical arm might descend and take it back.

Well, I tell her, hoping for the best… I thought I’d cut it up and saute it with onions and butter and bits of bacon. Like sauerkraut.

She tilts her head and politely refrains from saying what she’s so obviously thinking.

What, is that a bad idea? What should I do with it?

It’s for cabbage rolls, she says. That’s what people buy it for.

(Remember I’m very hungry.) I smile.

I love a chatty cashier. Love it when you get recipes while you’re looking for your Air Miles card. Cabbage rolls! Of course. I’ve never made them before but I get home, look up some recipes. Settle on the Yugoslavian version in my Old World Cookbook, only with a Moroccan twist that I’m leaving to Peter.

So, tomorrow (unless a probably necessary intervention takes place): Moroccan Yugoslavian cabbage rolls with Italian tomato sauce and Canadian shallots and  mushrooms.

—To be continued.

~

things i saw

~ carin ~ Leave a comment

An older couple in a green van eats lunch and throws bits of things to seagulls at the lake. When the guy notices me watching, he smiles, starts showing off, tries tossing the bits so that the birds will catch them mid-flight. When they do, he looks at me, beams like he’s just performed a circus act, like maybe I should applaud. Take a picture of that, lady…

A young lad, fifteen maybe, sits on the edge of a bench at the library, earbuds in place, arms resting like dumbells on thighs, body hunched forward as he texts madly, seemingly unaware that his bright blue plastic library card is in his mouth…

A full grown deer dead at the side of the road. Police and animal control people hover. I don’t stop, don’t want to intrude, appear nosy. How stupid. Because I’d like to know what happened, pay my respects. It’s a stretch of road where speed couldn’t have been an issue. But what else? Who would intentionally hurt a deer? I keep seeing that beautiful face, the lolling tongue.

the text(ure) of words

~ carin ~ 4 Comments

I’ve been thinking more than usual about words recently, about their placement, the choices we make in which of them we read, what and how we write. And why. How they tumble from between our lips or hands in conversation, how we listen to them, or don’t. And how, in this increasingly Twitterish, texty, Like-says-it-all world, in which (for the record and for the most part) I happily participate—I’m feeling a little nostalgic for a slower way of communicating.

Then, amazingly—in the middle of all this mulling—the universe does what it does so well, accommodates me, by placing in my path a book that not only slows me down but stops me momentarily with its beauty and simplicity and utter confounding complexity. 

The Black Book of Colors (a children’s picture book, which is—as the best of that genre are—so much more than a kid’s book) is written in both braille and visual text on black paper with raised black line drawings, also on black pages. The book, in fact, is entirely black so that on opening its black covers I find myself challenged to see colours not as a sighted person, but as a blind one. 

Colours, I am told, have sounds, taste, textures, smells. 

Well I sort of knew that already, but then it’s easy to attach a smell to a colour you’ve seen, but how do you do that when you’ve never seen red? What, then, does it sound/taste/smell/feel like? (according to the book’s narrator, it feels like a scraped knee)

I’m left in awe of the difficulty braille must pose to someone newly blind, how sensitive their fingertips would have to become, and how calloused and thick and impatient mine are. How one would have to slow down, and of all the benefits that come with taking ones time. I think of what I’m missing as I’m bombarded with a barrage of text every day—ads, billboards, signs, litter-ature everywhere and unavoidable. Subliminal. All that energy I, we, use in automatically translating those trillion words into what they mostly are: rubbish.

There’s something to be said for experiencing words without distraction, allowing them time to sink in rather than bounce off us or inspire an instant reaction of the oh-so-(yawn)-glib kind, to let ourselves ‘feel’ them instead, one word at a time. Not to impress, not to throw back out there, but to mull. To savour. Maybe even allow the things to rattle around our brains long enough to change us in ways we don’t even know…  

“But black is the king of all the colors. It is as soft as silk when his mother hugs him and her hair falls in his face.”  —The Book of Colors, by Menena Cottin, Groundwood Books, 2008

~

feeling with the eyes

~ carin ~ 1 Comment

“When I first knew Gertrude Stein in Paris I was surprised never to see a French book on her table, although there were always plenty of English ones, there were even no French newspapers. But do you never read French, I as well as many other people asked her. No, she replied, you see I feel with my eyes and it does not make any difference to me what language I hear, I don’t hear a language, I hear tones of voice and rhythms, but with my eyes I see words and sentences and there is for me only one language and that is English. One of the things that I have liked all these years is to be surrounded by people who know no English. It has left me more intensely alone with my eyes and my English. I do not know if it would have been possible to have English be so all in all to me otherwise. And they none of them could read a word I wrote, most of them did not even know that I did write. No, I like living with so very many people and being all alone with English and myself.”

—from The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, by Gertrude Stein (pub: Harcourt, Brace—1933)

~

delinquent paths

~ carin ~ 2 Comments

So I have a labyrinth in the backyard this year…. Doesn’t everyone? Really just a series of paths I’ve paced out in the snow, all connected, most of which follow the regular paths underneath, but some—and I love these best—run like delinquents straight through the middle of perennial beds, through the tall grasses, behind the spruce, across the veggie garden. Places I normally don’t walk. (There’s something very freeing about traipsing cavalierly over ice-encrusted earth where in just a few short months tender asparagus will present itself for my dinner.)

Cheap thrills, I know.

It wasn’t planned; I made this accidental circuit one night when I didn’t feel like going out for my usual walk through the neighbourhood. I wasn’t in the mood for cars and street lights so I walked in the yard instead under Orion’s Belt, up to my shins in virgin snow.

Only afterwards did it occur to me that I suddenly had my own personal head-clearing, right-outside-the-back-door well trodden walking ‘circuit’. I’ve come to love how I don’t have to plan A Walk, that I can just throw a jacket on over my bathrobe, stick my feet into boots and do a quick ten minutes before breakfast.

At first, of course, I felt like an idiot walking in my backyard. I think that’s what gave it the labyrinth vibe—the way it reminded me of years ago at Trinity Bellwoods Park in Toronto, how I’d been a minute into the labyrinth there, wondering when the magical life-transforming meditative qualities I’d read about would kick in, when a group of teenage boys showed up. As I tried to focus on my steps, they got comfortable, leaned against a wall, laughing and pointing. Apparently I was a scream.

I so desperately wanted not to care, to be already transformed, above such piffle. Instead I found myself concocting a plan where I’d make a quick and dignified exit, muttering just loud enough… something about that damned earring—where could it have gone??

But I’m not a very good actor, so I kept walking. One foot in front of the other. And then the other. Again and again and so on. Finally, finally, finally, as I made the last turn to come out, I realized I wasn’t thinking about the boys anymore, in fact I couldn’t remember when I’d stopped thinking about them—I hadn’t even noticed they’d gone, that the place was quiet. For how long, I had no idea. 

It was the first time I’d tuned out. In a good way.

A testament, I guess, to the power of the labyrinth, essentially the absence of destination that lets the mind relax. Also a repetitive quality helps, a constant looping back and forth. 

Qualities my own faux labyrinth has in spades.

True, it takes time to get past thinking the neighbours might peek through the hedge and call someone, but I love how eventually I forget about them, and most other things, and just walk—just following my own circuitous, well-trodden paths between Echinacea stalks, behind the blackberries, down this way, then that, turning right, left, along the cedar fence, criss-crossing the patio, past the bird feeder, the serviceberry—knowing it’s there but seeing none of it—and back again.

At least until the snow melts. After which, it’ll all disappear into a distraction of well-behaved stone paths that beg to be followed, perennial beds too crowded to walk through, things to cut and trim and pull and plant. Not to mention the big invisible sign over the asparagus that reads: Trespassers Will Go Hungry.

Until then, consider me occasionally and happily tuned out.

~

things i saw

~ carin ~ 6 Comments

A girl, maybe four years old in a pink snowsuit, lets go of her mum’s hand and lies down next to the sidewalk where the snow is thin and crusty and streaked with black from cars. She flaps arms and legs in a vain attempt to make an angel. Her mum doesn’t stop her, doesn’t fuss about black snow; just stands and watches and laughs. Lucky girl.

I see two crows shouting the odds outside my window, and bird breath—little puffs of steam with every caw-caw. 

An employee at the Salvation Army store goes through books on the shelves, now and then tossing one into a cardboard box… I watch as Nora Roberts’ Summer Pleasures is pitched. Thwunk. She sees me looking and says some stories are not compatible with Salvation Army principles.
Sex? I venture. Or just bad writing? 
Sex, she says, her face screwed up in disgust.
How can you tell which ones have it?
She reads the back, she says, sometimes she has to read more, she just gets a feeling, god directs her to the steamy ones.
She seems to enjoy her work.
 

Note: do not look for this potboiler at your local Sally Ann.

east friesan black goes with brownies

~ carin ~ 2 Comments

In honour of my friend Chead’s birthday, I’m sharing what might be the world’s best brownie recipe. (Drink with east friesan black tea for happiest results. Add maple sugar crystals to tea for bliss.)

Katharine Hepburn’s Brownies

1. Melt together 1 stick butter and 2 squares unsweetened chocolate and take the saucepan off the heat.

2. Stir in 1 cup sugar, add 2 eggs and 1/2 teaspoon vanilla, and beat the mixture well.

3. Stir in 1/4 cup all-purpose flour and 1/2 teaspoon salt. (In the original recipe, 1 cup chopped walnuts is added here as well.)

4. Bake the brownies in a buttered and floured 8-inch-square pan at 325 F. for about 40 minutes.

—courtesy of Laurie Colwin’s More Home Cooking

Notes:

—I bake for exactly 40 minutes in a pre-heated oven. The second the timer goes off, I take them out and let them cool (thoroughly) in the pan before cutting.

—Some people prefer pecans to walnuts. You know who you are.
~