Week 13 :: (The Rabbit Hole, And Back Out Again)

It's hot outside; inside, too. The summer heat does funny things to the appetite. Inadequately recognized thirst results in reaching for sugary things to boost energy; and other than that, appetite often becomes diminished as the heat saps all the strength from one's body.

I am two days past a medical emergency, too, and so my body is still sloshing with the IV fluids, my brain buzzing with the slow come-down of powerful painkillers and of neurological disturbances. Once the pain of a severely disabling migraine passes, the senses take a while to come back. Speech and words lag a bit; things taste a little funny.

The road to changing my diet resulted in self-neglect; ruling out foods, avoiding others, the alluring cycle of non-consumption. A dangerous road for me.

Later today (it being early Monday morning, now that I think of it) I'll be off to the grocery store to gather some ingredients and spend a happy hour or two making a meal. It's been over a month, I think, since I actually cooked a full meal for myself as I used to, and I'm excited. Comforting foods. Things to soothe a broken heart. Things to quell fear, foods to appreciate after a weekend of nausea.

Week 12 :: (The Simple Things)

The format of this blog has changed, as things tend to do, after a while. Life gets in the way. I get too ambitious; then the guilt of my inability to keep up with myself kicks in, and I find myself meandering through my kitchen, tapping jars of lentils and peering into containers of grains and feeling rather dejected.

The funny thing about cooking--as with life--is that nobody really teaches you the simple things. I can't describe how many times I've articulated frustration that I don't know how to cook different types of rice, because though I've eaten basmati more times than I can count, I still have no idea how to make it properly. There's that embarrassment, too, of not wanting to admit that as much as you consider yourself to be a good cook--that you still don't know how to make something as simple as rice. The self-deprecating thoughts "but-you-should-know-this, it's just RICE, for heaven's sake" soon ensue, and before you know it, your plans to make a delicious biryani, or a mushroom risotto, or even just a midnight snack of plain rice are completely shattered. You end up reaching for a packet of crispbread, rather resentfully.

I feel the same way about my heart sometimes. Nobody teaches you how to manage your emotions, how to calm that fear that bubbles up in the middle of the night, how to preserve the sacredness of your soul. Those are the simple things, the building blocks of our emotional and psychological well-being. I am talented and skilled with words; adept at research; competent at math, gym, and so on. I've been taught well. But I wish that I had learned the simple things. I wish that there had been classes for how to love yourself, how to remember that you are more than grades in a report card, how to look in the mirror and feel content, how to deal with hurtful words, how to contain fear, how to contain happiness, how to just BE in the world.

So, back to the rice. I just attempted to make some basmati. It didn't turn out as I had expected it to, though I followed the directions. But that's life.

I am learning, though. Grains of love and all.

Week 11 :: Appetizer (Singing the Body Electric)

I have been sadly absent from the kitchen as of late, having been kept busy with the preparations for my sister's wedding. I have been eating out more. Too much sushi. Too many light green tea Frappucinos.

Life keeps piling things up, and the next thing you know, you're eating Double Sour Skittles for breakfast instead of your usual half-cup serving of oatmeal with flax seeds. It's not so much that I feel some sort of moral inferiority for having eaten little pebbles of high-fructose corn syrup instead of long-lasting carbohydrate-flakes, though admittedly, there is something really poetic and Dickensian in the consumption of oatmeal. It is the most literary and humble of foods...not to mention I'm one of those people who actually enjoys the taste and texture of plain oatmeal, which, apparently, makes me an oddity.

Really, though, what I have let go of in the past few weeks - and likely the past month or two - is my strong drive to re-build my body's health and wellbeing. I find that I am exquisitely sensitive to additives and preservatives; I haven't had a diet beverage in a very long time, because one or two sips into it, I find my head pounding and a wave of heat and dizziness rolls through me.

So it's back to the basics, and back to what I know and love. I'm grateful that when I was growing up, my mother taught me what really GOOD food is - rice, whole wheat pasta (and this was in the EARLY days of WWP, before they learned how to make it taste like something other than cardboard), miso soup, oatmeal, fresh vegetables. My mother taught me that lentils are little medallions of ancient wisdom; she taught me that rice can be savoured grain by grain; she taught me that nothing is as wonderful as a rivulet of juice running down your chin after that first bite into a summer-fresh peach.

I had been a vegetarian for many years of my life; in the past two or three years, as I worked to regain health after a spate of illness, I reintroduced meat and fish into my diet - rather sparingly, maybe once or twice a week. I ate more yogurt, more cheese (my bones are more than grateful).

Now, as I venture back through vegetarianism into dietary veganism (and no, I'm not entering into a debate about this term, because I think it's an old debate), I search not for the high moral ground that some of my vegetarian acquaintances attempt to embody (in spite of their use of other toxins, drugs, etc.); I am on the hunt for something more. I want to know food. I want to love it exquisitely, to know it from its very source. I want to take more time to prepare my foods; to tenderly wait for rice grains to blossom. I want to understand how a garbanzo bean knows itself.

This isn't a declaration of some radical change in lifestyle; it's a deepening of a practice of faith; faith in self, above all. It's an experiment in nourishment. I care about the world, and animal cruelty, but my god - how many souls and hearts have been lost in the search for everything else? I can't afford to lose myself in yet another cause at the moment, and since food has been such a long and drawn-out source of difficulty for me, it IS the thing I must devote myself to. I can debate the ethical merits of playing a piano with ivory keys later (not that I have any interest in doing so). And I may, after this month-long experiment in strict vegetarianism, simply return to a lacto-ovo lifestyle, or indulge my sushi-love with pescatarianism.

I digress. What I'm beginning to realize is that I have been poisoning my body: too much Facebook, doing exercise for reasons of self-hatred rather than of self-care, too many negative thoughts. I thought that because I neither drink or consume drugs, that I was doing alright. A body fed by toxins of any kind reflects them deeply.

I want to hear the hum of my cells renewing themselves. Whitman wrote about "singing the body electric" - and maybe that's more erotic a description than the consumption of legumes and grains and vegetables really deserves, but it seems fitting, somehow.

Week 8 :: Appetizer (The Fidelity of the Roll)

I consume Japanese food more frequently than I had ever imagined I would. I never tire of the cornucopia of options available at any given time; the subtle differences in maki rolling techniques; the surprising delicacy of nigiri; the comfort of gyoza; the refreshing tang of sunomono; the soulfully healthy and tantalizing mouthfuls of goma-ae.

At this point, I can't count the number of places I've gone to eat sushi since the year began - there are three wonderful restaurants in downtown Port Coquitlam alone (Koi, Sushi Café, Asahi); Sake Maki and Isshin Sushi on Commercial Drive; L A Sushi and Take Sushi in Burnaby...the list includes more, I'm sure...and I've yet to go to the much-adored Toshi's on Main Street.

What I love the most, however, is going to a sushi restaurant with a new friend in a new part of town. There is a staunch fidelity to one's local, oft-frequented sushi nook that makes even the most novice sushi eater puff up with pride when they bring you into their homebase. I love when they eagerly point out the restaurant's signature rolls, or comment on the buttery smoothness of the sashimi, or rave about the quaint décor, or this, or that.

It's heartwarming to see the prescence of that kind of loyalty in an age where the price of many restaurants excludes the possibility of frequent eatership - and the dull quality of fast-food restaurants does not make one generally proud or excited to be frequenting those sorts of places. And there's a certain sadness, too, when you move away...or when a sushi restaurant closes...there's a sense of grief for the familiarity that you treasured, the sort of lingering sense of comfort that you derived even if you popped in only briefly to pick up some take-out.

But for now, given that I am staying put, I can't wait to re-visit some of my favourite places in the next few weeks, with that sense of homecoming that envelops you after you've been away for a little while.

Arigato!

Week 7 :: Dessert (A Culinary Soundtrack)

It's rare that I cook without listening to music. I admit, rather shamefully, that I had gotten into a bad habit of cooking whilst watching television, something that makes me feel as though I am not being mindful of what it is that I am doing. That aside, music of some sort generally comprises a significant portion of the little ambiance that I try to create in my kitchen each week.

Different tasks require different soundtracks, as is to be expected. You cannot whip your egg whites into submission if a calm Mozart sonata is playing; nor can you coax a hollandaise sauce into its delicate balance if you are aggravating it with some frenzied Rachmaninoff. Sometimes, of course, cooking requires silence, but since I do not feel like engaging in a musical debate about the merits of John Cage's 4'33", let us continue with the aforementioned proposition that food is best cooked with some sort of appropriately matched music.

In my own haphazard logic, I find it more appropriate to match my music to the techniques that I am using the most, rather than to each ingredient. This week, as evidenced by the stuffing, the chicken, and the cake, baking featured rather prominently.

Although baking appears to be one of those cooking techniques that affords you the convenience of "setting it and forgetting it," it really requires, when you are baking multiple things at once in an oven of constant temperature, a keen eye and a subtle intuition into the rising and falling of the dishes in the oven. The foil cover on the stuffing swells to make its own convection cocoon; the cake breathes deeply and puffs out its chocolate bouffant; the chicken hisses and bubbles, shuddering slightly as it nestles itself in a warm foil jacket.

The delicate interplay of intensity and delicacy that is inherent to baking requires music that is similarly structured. As such, I've chosen to match Mozart's Clarinet Concerto in A Major (K622 - Adagio) to this meal. The strings and clarinet begin together quietly, as the meal adjusts to the warmth of the oven; then the strings sweep, gaining intensity, revealing the melodious potentiality of the clarinet, who then ventures out on its own in short bursts, constantly supported and reinforced by the lines of the strings. At 1'59," the clarinet triumphs, just like that moment when one finally notices the cake batter rising unexpectedly and grandly, with all the pomp and circumstance of any French emperor.

The strings and clarinet exchange breaths, until 4'59," when the strings swell gloriously, preparing the meal for the final delicate caramelizations and the quiet crispnesses that manifest themselves. At 6'00," the dishes are pulled gently from their warm cavern, and they let out several small, content sighs as they prepare to cool on the counter.

Week 7 :: Main (Christmas in July)

Week 7 :: Interlude

Things are rather hectic over here at the moment, and, unfortunately, I have been rather remiss in getting any sort of cooking done. I have, however, been writing presentations and paper proposals, so my absence in the kitchen has not been in lieu of mere shilly-shallying.

I have, however, in the past week, eaten two delicious brunches in Vancouver, and so will be posting thoughts about those really rather soon. If I can't find the time to cook, well, I'm more than happy to let others do it for me.

The unseasonably chilly weather is inspiring me to plan a "Christmas in July" meal, which I shall be cooking this Tuesday, if all goes well. Trying to add a Southern twist to it; research, research!

much love,
LPG