cooking cooking cooking

tonight i made gnocchi from scratch with homemade almond pesto. in the last week or so i have made fresh barbeque sauce (twice), two types of soup, veggies burgers, french toast, apple sauce, muffins, whole wheat bread etc... why do i want to labour for hours over a brief meal between the baby's pre-bed crankiness, being sucked dry, tip-toeing out of the room, possibly having a cold plate waiting for me or a dry, overheated version of what i had cooked? i'm not sure. but every couple nights i do something fairly ambitious and generally i really enjoy myself. i have always liked cooking and valued a good homemade meal from pure ingredients, but it wasn't until a few months ago that i started to understand what it means to create a dish.
two friends of mine and my partner are all restaurant cooks in places that seem to value quality, creative, from-scratch cooking. although my partner has been a cook off and on in various places over the several years i've known him, it wasn't until he got into the kitchen at caffe mariani in saint henri where we live that his skills truly solidified. i think it started with soups. i never understood the importance of a rich soup stock before this.
i think the birth of sebastian has inspired me as well. our days are simple and usually slow, laid back. we need to get outside and walk, so we stroll to the market and pick up produce. i have time to consult the cook books, meditate on new dishes, concoct whatever i decide on. healthy eating has always been a priority in my life, but is especially so now because i am breast-feeding the little guy and want to make sure i'm giving him the best i can.
alex and i used to cook from scratch often when we lived in victoria. the city offers such an abundance of local, fresh and organic food from greens to bison. after we moved to montreal i felt uninspired by grocery stores' pitiful organic isles complete with styrofoam, plastic-wrapped vegetables. the one thing quebec has going for it is a lot of province-grown food; for that i've been grateful. we're fairly frugal people and have no qualms with spending extra time labouring over a meal to save money here and there.
my favourite cookbook these days is from rebar in victoria, b.c. it's an excellent restaurant and their cookbook is so widely owned and delicious. i've had it for years but only in the last few months have i really delved into the recipes. some of my favourites are the greek red lentil soup, the rebarbeque sauce, the carrot cake, and the peanut sauce. i think the trick to following through with home cooking is to have a huge collection of spices; the fresher the better. food tastes a hundred times better if you don't skimp on the herbs and spices.
a typical veggie janine soup stock:
in a big pot cook in oil carrots, onion, garlic, celery, whole pepper corn, sea salt, coriander seeds, whatever else you want. add a lot of water, apples, herbs etc... boil then simmer for as long as you can bear, about two or three hours. strain the solid, keep the juice. i have a bag in the freeze that i add veggie scrapes to as i cook for the days i make a big batch of stock. i freeze in glass containers and defrost it in the fridge when i'm ready to make a new batch.
now, to relax with some red wine and chocolate...

maggie and dolly

margaret atwood and dolly parton from atwood's essay 'on being a woman writer.'

"mama, in this house we carry our babies."

i woke up this morning with a failing lower back (a common issue in my life well before pregnancy due to a snowboarding accident then being hit by a car on the same hip) due to yesterday's jaunt in mile end with sebastian in the baby carrier and said, "no more carrier. only stroller." i end the day defeated, saying begrudingly, "no more stroller. only baby carrier." i can't help but narrow my eyes at the not-so-little creature babbling on the floor beside me. sebastian is only three and a half months old but already weighs in the 16 lbs range, in the ninetieth percental for weight. he was born a reasonable size, seven and a half pounds. maybe big breasts equal big baby, i don't know, but my milk's made this kid balloon to an almost unmanagable size. what's more, he's not developed enough in other ways to be treated like a 16 lb baby, such as a reliably strong neck (he's almost there) and flexible hip joints (also almost there). for now he fits awkwardly in the ergo carrier and still needs to be strapped onto the front of my body, not the back, which i imagine is more managable.
aside from the fact that the city of montreal is appallingly unsupportive of wheel accessibility (for example, three of the sixty or so metro stations have an elevator from the platform to the street, the rest require negotiating at least one flight of concrete stairs, if not more), sebastian has taken to yelling and crying when i strap him into the car seat which fits into the stroller. last week, when this all began, i walked the full forty minutes to mama-baby yoga with him in the stroller screaming. i took him out once under the overpass to clench his little body above my head and yell back, so aggrivated, guilty, frustrated. the sound of the highway above me drowned out my voice. i put him back in and kept on rolling. it was the only time he stopped crying the whole way. luckily he doesn't understand being yelled at yet. he actually smiled for a brief moment when i held him up in the superman position which we often play in. yelling is not something i ever want to do to this kid. so this afternoon, after hours of trying to leave the house, as i pushed him around the block as he cried, i could feel the blood rushing up, frustration starting, and i decided i had to accept the baby carrier. i went home, lugged the kid, the car seat, the  folded stroller up three flights of narrow stairs, took a deep breath and strapped him onto my front. the only sounds he made were little attempts at conversation with the things he saw along our walk.
"baby carrying" is a part of the philosophy of the continuum concept which, to be honest, i hadn't heard of until i watched away we go, written by dave eggers and his wife vendela vida, in which maggie gyllenhaall's character is portrayed as the nut who thinks strollers are a reason for all the shitty people in the world. i'm wary of wide-sweeping parenting philosophies in general, and continuum is no exception. i guess i feel like with the birth of my son, i was born a mother. on the rare occassion that i've felt a lack of confidence in my motherly intuition, it's involved someone else meddling in my mothering affairs. enough said. 

how the winter gallops

here comes another montreal winter. here comes the dark horse.
how i talked myself into staying a couple more seasons in this city i don't know. they say the snow will fall soon; the windows are icy with freezing rain. last year was my first "real" canadian winter. before then the coldest day i'd endured was minus twenty five at whistler snowboarding. when i'd had enough i ducked home, back to the damp rain forest of the west coast. i didn't mind last winter in essence.
there were some good times. every saturday for a couple months fabienne and i would meet in the plateau then make our way to mount royal. the hill was full of cross country skiers, well-known queboise actors (who, natuarlly, i had no recognition for but still found exciting when pointed out), dogs, kids on sleds, ect... for an hour or so it almost felt like i was out of the city, something i constantly craved.
one day in december in ottawa i was alone at my in-laws. it was minus seventeen, i braved a walk for a can of tuna and everywhere a sharp orange sunlight hit the bare trees in the park, the frost on the roads, and when the wind shook the branches tinkled.
in the early spring i walked alone to the lachine canal one afternoon. the sun was bleak, the sky was grey, the ice of the canal was soft and unimpressive. i paused on the bridge and looked out at this landscape which had always reminded me of how far from home i was and suddenly for whatever reason i stopped feeling alienated for a moment and realized that this strange place had entered my sense of identity. i could no longer entirely idenitify with the west coast because here i was day after day looking out over this forgein place. montreal had replaced something in me. i didn't like it, but i couldn't deny it. i felt a strange sense of pride for my home of the last year.
for the most part, though, the winter was hard. i became pregnant in november and spent several months sick, exhausted, unemployed, lonely and homesick. until a month or two ago when i contiously decided to expell this association from myself, a mere photograph of a snowy landscape could make me dry heave. i didn't think i could face another winter like that.
this winter's circumstances are much better, and come march we're heading homeward.

white chickens

here it is. another attempt at blogging. i have higher hopes for this one than the others. lately i've caught myself in running inner dialogues that i wish to write down without fiction, owe up to inspirations instead of transferring them to characters and plots. it's not that i value fiction any less, just that i care to challenge my writing by attempting creative non-fiction for a while. so, here it goes.