Author: carin

this is not a review: comfort me with apples, by joe fiorito

~ carin ~ 2 Comments

 
 
Love.

Go ahead. I dare you. Just try to read Joe Fiorito’s Comfort Me With Apples and see if you don’t end up in love. Because it’s not possible. Chap or chapette, you’ll be in love with him. I guarantee it. (Okay, I don’t guarantee it, but there’s a strong possibility…)

It’s not a new book, just newly discovered—also not exactly a cook book, nor exactly anything else; the man simply writes about food. And in such a way that I haven’t stopped cooking or eating since discovering it.

Yes, alright, another exaggeration. But it’s true that I can no longer cook or eat the same way. I mean, when in a simple essay on oranges he tells you—

“…You can put orange peel into beef stew along with your bouquet garni. You can squeeze a little juice in your fresh tomato soup; add a little orange zest while you’re at it. Or try this…peel two oranges, finely slice the peel, blanche it in boiling water for two minutes, and drain. Sautee a finely chopped onion in four tablespoons of olive oil. Add the drained peel to the oil, along with a cup-and-a-half of pitted black olives. Remove from the heat. Cook a pound of spaghetti in a pot of salted boiling water until it’s al dente. Dress the spaghetti with the olive oil mixture, add four more tablespoons of oil, and be grateful the Moors invaded Italy.”

—how can you not immediately want to put on your coat and walk to the nearest orange purveyor, purchase a dozen, make stew and soup and boil up some spaghetti, and when that just happens to change your outlook on life and entire DNA for the better…well, how can you not fall in love?

In another essay he reveals how a nun’s peculiar answer to his childhood question: What does my soul look like? led him to hate all cereal except oatmeal (and only then in the form of cookies). And then he gives you the instructions to make a batch. No recipes in this book and few precise measurements—mostly he just tells you how to do things the way he would if you were in the kitchen with him, chatting and sipping wine. And somehow things work out beautifully, the way they always do in happy kitchens.

I’ve been waiting for the perfect Sunday morning to make the popovers he describes in ‘Breakfast in Bed’—

“…Wake early one Sunday and smell the person sleeping next to you. Do it. Lean over. The side of the neck will do, just below the ear. Take a deep breath. The knowledge of this scent is lodged in the deepest part of your brain.

“…Now go to the kitchen. Throw two eggs into a bowl…”

And the perfect Friday night to re-enact his piece titled ‘A Plate of Spaghetti’, which begins:

“Today you’re going to eat, drink, sing, read—and act—Italian. I want you to start by going to the film store to rent Fellini’s ‘Nights of Cabiria’…” And ends with: “Whisper the last words of Puccini’s ‘Nessun Dorma’ as you fall asleep…all’alba vincero—at dawn I will win. And you will. You’ll have leftovers. Spaghetti arrabbiata is wonderful for breakfast.”

He writes about sushi and Halloween apples, the importance of the right knife, the woman who hummed while she ate and how he married her, how to make the best potato salad, chicken soup, pork chops (I’ve tried the chops, they’re truly amazing); he compares chili dogs to alligator shoes, discusses food myths and food in movies, considers his last meal, his worst meal, and the piece that confirmed my adoration for this man’s work, ‘Museum Food’—which is too long to transcribe but, trust me, it’s a gorgeous piece of writing and a gorgeous testament to food.

Impossible to read this book and not come away with a deeper appreciation for the connection between what we eat and how we live, between food and people, music, sights, art, books, sound, neighbourhoods, joy, sadness, seasons. (And we all know the connections are there; I can’t rub a piece of thyme between my fingers and not be transported to my mother’s kitchen where a roast is the oven on a Saturday afternoon in winter, juices heavily infused with thyme from her garden, picked fresh from under the snow.)

All of which leaves me deeply in love—okay, maybe just deeply grateful for the reminder that food isn’t so much about eating, but about everything around the eating, everything that precedes it.

And everything that follows.

_______________________________________

—Purchase Comfort Me with Apples online at Blue Heron Books.

happy solstice

~ carin ~ 2 Comments

The moon this morning.

So perfect and heavy and all bare naked and bright-eyed again at 7 a.m., like last night didn’t happen, like it wasn’t a bit of a tart, shades of red all over her, showing off behind the earth’s shadow until the wee hours…

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trees i have known and loved and some i’ve pined for…

~ carin ~ 6 Comments

 

1.  Earliest tree memory: pear tree (no partridges), back yard, age seven or so. Rope. One end tied to branch mid-way up, other end tied to bucket in which sits a bowl of mum’s potato salad. The oil and vinegar kind. No mayo. Me climbing enormous tree. (Proof that memories are distorted; pear trees are tiny.) Me sitting in crook of tree, hauling up bucket, eating potato salad while surveying neighbourhood—particularly Mr. Deluca next door, whose garden is full of car parts instead of flowers, which therefore makes him odd in my book.  Because eating potato salad from a bucket in a tree and staring at the neighbours isn’t…

2.  Living on that tiny island in the Caribbean. No pine, no spruce. We decorate a houseplant. Xmas Eve on the balcony; it’s late and so dark. Ten thousand stars. Then a lone trumpet. Someone’s playing a trumpet down in the valley. Silent Night. Not another sound. Not even wind ruffling palms, not even surf lapping against shore. The whole world has stopped to listen.

3.  For years at the tree farm with a handsaw when the kids were small. Crunching through snowy trails, arguing about which one to kill. Tears because someone wants the twelve-inch Charlie Brown and someone else wants the seven-foot so-perfect-you-may-as-well-go-fake specimen. Every time we end up with neither and give it a name: Quasimodo, Shadrack, Prickles. When the holidays are done the tree carcass has become part of the family and so can’t go out on the curb for pick-up with all the other trees. We place it in the yard, out by the compost, chop it up for firewood years later when we can’t remember which one it is—Shadrack, Prickles?—but we burn its fuel with gratitude and a kind of nostalgia nonetheless.

4.  Sitting at my desk, working, when a very large truck arrives on the street and men get out and hover about the neighbours’ thirty foot spruces that separate our yard from theirs. The men cut branches from the trees, lower branches only, which opens things up, makes more room on the driveway, makes perfect sense.  But then they keep cutting, higher and higher branches until it doesn’t make sense anymore. Too high. It’s getting stupid and ugly. I’ve stopped working, am transfixed, staring out the window as one of the men straps himself into something, a safety belt, climbs trunk with chainsaw. Saws top off tree. Saws top off tree. It falls into the middle of the street with a thud just like death. It feels like death. But then, it is. I want to run outside, scream, cry, ask why? But I can’t move. I’m just stunned that this can even happen, that these trees—there are two—can just be executed because (I find out later) they shed too many pinecones on the driveway and lawn.

5.  Alberta spruce. Cute and petite when we moved in. Two feet tall. Eventually got so big you had to shove it aside to get to the front door. Often covered in snow or rain. Finally got ridiculous. So we cut it down and with a bit of trimming, voila, this year’s specimen is born. Front lovely. No back.

6. “We had Christmas with the usual one-sided tree from the boy scouts. “If you shove the thing up against a wall,” daddy said, “who the hell’s going to notice?”” –excerpt from The Work in Progress

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bus therapy

~ carin ~ 2 Comments

Is there a name for a fear of school buses?

Because I have that.

Whenever I see one I think of an unfortunate grade five field trip to Martyr’s Shrine in Midland, which involved lunch en route. The details are unimportant—let’s just say it was a long time before I wanted another egg salad sandwich.

I blame it entirely on the bus.

I remember heat and diesel fumes and kids screeching and shouting and black leather seats stuffed with something like concrete and how you could feel every pebble and bump on the three hour road trip.

All of which made it difficult to read.

I hadn’t yet learned that reading in a moving vehicle makes me woozy. Or that the whole point of everyone singing was to ward off the woozy in the first place…

There was much ewwwing in my direction after the egg salad. Mortifying of course, but there was also less general shouting and screeching, which at least improved the ambience a titch.

Yin yang.

I remember almost nothing of Martyr’s Shrine. It may be a big white building, it may be orange stripes. I think there are stairs and flower beds and I do recall a pile of canes somewhere and being told they belonged to people who’d come and been ‘cured’ by saying a prayer. I don’t remember doing so but if I’d been smart I would have taken the opportunity to say a little something for the trip back.

It seemed eons before I saw another school bus—or maybe I was just blocking them out. Then a few months ago, I notice I’m on some kind of Laidlaw route—following, passing, waiting behind, at least a dozen school buses each morning—each one a reminder of egg salad gone bad. I braced myself for life in a very uncomfortable world.

Oddly though, as time goes by and, annoying as the bloody things are with their little stop-sign power trips, habit of driving the speed limit, and the way they linger at railway crossings—which is so creepy and only makes everyone else wonder if they know something we don’t—it’s actually turning out to be a good thing, a kind of exposure therapy. The more I see them from the outside the less I think about their butt-numbing acoustically horrible bump bump bumping endlessly stopping and starting and stopping and starting and stopping and starting diesel spewing nausea tub insides.

So, yeah, the more the merrier, I say.

In fact, I can hardly remember the whole Martyr’s Shrine fiasco. Martyr’s Who? What egg salad?

See?

So nice to be moving on.

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good news for the creative genius who doesn’t need to eat

~ carin ~ 2 Comments

“How, specifically, does motivation affect creativity—both the generation and the editing of ideas? It matters where the drive comes from. All driven writers focus on their work. But people driven by intrinsic motivations such as curiosity and enjoyment have a relationship to the product of their work different from those moved by extrinsic motivations including praise, money, and a constantly varying world of punishments. Someone who is fascinated by language attends to details and to the overall texture of a writing project more than she will if she is writing simply to satisfy the public. While strong intrinsic motivation increases creativity, surprisingly, adding extrinsic motivations—even positive ones—can actually decrease creativity. If that is true, paying a writer may paradoxically make him writes less well. Reward may encourage the writer to stop work as soon as he or she has completed the minimal amount necessary for the reward, resulting in what the economist Herbert Simon calls satisficing. Extrinsic motivation may also have a negative effect on creativity by distracting the subject’s attention from the task to thoughts of reward or punishment.” —from The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block, and the Creative Brain, by Alice W. Flaherty (Houghton Mifflin, 2004)

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flying mammals on my mind

~ carin ~ Leave a comment

“Does his first venture into prose herald a change of direction in his life? Is he about to renounce poetry? He is not sure. But if he is going to write prose then he may have to go the whole hog and become a Jamesian. Henry James shows one how to rise above mere nationality. In fact, it is not always clear where a piece by James is set, in London, or Paris or New York, so supremely above the mechanics of daily life is James. People in James do not have to pay the rent; they certainly do not have to hold down jobs; all they are required to do is to have super-subtle conversations whose effect is to bring about tiny shifts of power, shifts so minute as to be invisible to all but the practised eye. When enough such shifts have taken place, the balance of power between the personages of the story is (Voila!) revealed to have suddenly and irreversibly changed. And that is that: the story has fulfilled its charge and can be brought to an end.

“He sets himself exercises in the style of James. But the Jamesian manner proves less easy to master than he had thought. Getting the characters he dreams up to have super-subtle conversations is like trying to make mammals fly. For a moment or two, flapping their arms, they support themselves in thin air. Then they plunge.”

 —From Youth, by J.M. Coetzee

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how i found summer at minus fourteen without leaving town and how you can too

~ carin ~ 2 Comments

1.  Open a box of Jello.

2.  Wet index (or other) finger.

3.  Stick finger into Jello powder.

4.  Stick finger into mouth.

5.  Presto. Instant Lik-M-Aid—and just like that I’m back to pre celsius temps—something in the low 80’s with a gentle breeze—decked out in baggy yellow shorts and a striped tank top, a bandaid on my knee, another on my elbow, reading Richie Rich on the porch or riding my sister’s green two-wheeler hand-me-down that was so big I had to choose: pedal or sit. Impossible to do both at the same time.

(Incidentally, I notice it’s now called Fun Dip and comes with a dipping stick, which is depressing because you know this change occurred to avoid having children stick germy fingers into their mouths—to which I say how are they supposed to develop immune systems if they aren’t occasionally putting fingers into their mouths?? Especially during summer—the universal Lik-M-Aid season—when the more multi-coloured your index (or other) fingers are, the healthier you will grow!)

6.  Take your fingers out of the Jello powder—you’re a grown up, for heaven’s sake! It’s winter. Get over it. Boil water. Make Jello. Eat it in the bathtub.

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