The books are finally here! Real books, lovingly designed objects with heft and that new-print smell of paper and ink--yes, I inhaled them, so what? It was quite the thrill. And if you like your books more ephemeral, an e-version is available.
So much experience is contained in this collection of essays about hard subjects, with a beautiful foreword by Kim Jernigan. I'm proud to have had a small part in this project, the joint brainstorm of co-editors Lisa Martin-DeMoor and Jessica Hiemstra. Tribute must be paid to the heart, skill and insight they brought to the editing process. More than that, I can't wait to meet them *IRL*, because although ours was a virtual collaboration, after many months it feels like friendship. I have the sense that I already know some of the other contributors--totally wrong, of course, but that's the power of an essay.
I can't describe the book better than Lisa does on her Writer in Residence website--check it out. Note also that a Toronto launch will be held October 10th at Type Books (they of the wondrous videos) on Queen Street West, with events in other cities to come.
You can order How to Expect What You're Not Expecting directly from the publisher (TouchWood Editions) here, or from your favourite local bookstore or Amazon or Chapters.
* Is In Real Life's moment already over? I hope not. There's a new film out with that title, so I embrace IRL for now, whatever real may mean when we're all done tossing it around.*
Tomorrow marks two weeks since we left our daughter in a distant city to begin university, and I'm still not used to her absence.
Here she is.
School started for the younger kids the day after our return, providing much busywork to distract me from the missing person problem. And then there was scurrying related to my return to work and our eldest settling into the local university after being in Toronto for two years. Then last weekend: New York! Writing conference! (more on that soon), so there hasn't been time to grapple with our shifting family math.
Close readers will have realized that since one daughter left and one returned, the household actually has experienced zero net change in the #kH calculation (kids living at home), but it doesn't feel that way. Unsettled is how it feels. Transient. We have no routines established for this strange new configuration of people.
The thing is, I'm used to our old numbers--counting one-two-three-four heads at the beach when the children were small, routinely fudging hotel reservations because no one accepts six in a room, six bodies nearly filling the van. I need time to adjust.
So after the drop-off in Halifax we're back in the car (a little roomier without Sarah and her possessions, which made some passengers happy, but I wasn't one of them), headed home. Deep into New Brunswick we stopped at an odious fast-food joint (starts with M) packed with people. Labour Day weekend, everyone on the road to somewhere, and bonus, the world's slowest service. Customers massed five-deep waiting for orders. A guy in a tank top rifled bags on the counter, checking other people's meals. His naked armpit hovered over our partially-filled bags, which was, frankly, distressing.
When I picked up our order, I had a little fit--it was incomplete, and would take forever to fix given the crowd. I told the teenager behind the counter that an error had been made--we needed six meals, not five. She (reasonably) asked what was missing, but I couldn't tell her. I tried to match family members to items and kept messing it up. She remained pleasant, considering how busy they were--unfailingly polite, as we went back and forth repeating the same lines. Eventually, one of my kids sidled up to whisper, "Mom, Sarah's not here." Oh. Facts already known finally landed. Not their mistake, mine. I apologized, of course, and pretended all was well. At least I provided some entertainment. The kids shrieked with laughter for miles and miles, every time I wailed "Only five!" A text or two may have been sent to the absent one.
Our travel plan was to have a little holiday before the separation. We took the long way, spending a few nights in PEI (in a lighthouse! Okay, faux lighthouse, kind of sketchy but clean) with a final detour to Cape Breton Island before circling back to Halifax. While I can't recommend an extended drive with dorm-room furnishings--we were jammed--I can recommend my kids as traveling companions, should you be in need of some. Good travelers, they are. Gems.
A final note: since surrendering our girl to Dalhousie, I've sent her a pair of rubber boots, exchanged messages, talked on the phone and booked her flights for the holidays. Absence isn't what it used to be.
The course I was teaching ended last week, and my final marks have been submitted. Let summer begin--all three weeks that are left. Already, nights are chilly and a few orange-tinged maples have appeared. Time is short, using it well my challenge.
First, sleep replacement therapy is in order. Then, getting the kids ready for back-to-school, the fifth season of the year. Our most recent high school graduate must be transported far, far away to university in Halifax. We're making a family holiday of it, exploring the Atlantic provinces and a bit of Quebec en route. I've been throwing provincial tourism guides and maps at the kids, trying to get them to pick sightseeing stops and help plan a route, but no luck so far. They're resisting my stealth geography lessons. Unless we make a few reservations soon, we'll be sleeping, all six of us, in the van. Which is more togetherness than anyone can take.
Meanwhile, since Peak Produce (nothing like Peak Oil) coincides with my freer schedule, it's time to re-energize the Unprocessed Project. We've maintained some good habits (tomato sauce, granola and most baked goods made at home from scratch, weekly) and abandoned others (bagels! They take forever to make and the results vary wildly). With a few batches of jam successfully "put up", my next trick will be to preserve pesto, salsa, tomatoes, plums and peaches. I've purchased Bernardin jars and have relied, so far, on recipes from their website.
Canning still feels like a time-warp to me--a routine homemaking chore for my grandmother, whom I watched preserve fruits and vegetables many times--and something I never wanted to do myself: so boring. I imagine the folks at Bernardin sadly charting the canning supply sales slump over the years, watching their clientele die off, and then suddenly . . . locavore/hipster revival. The marketing department, all two of them, scratch their heads: didn't see THAT coming. I wonder how long it will last. Canning is satisfying, but a hell of a lot of work.
So, reboot. As I type, bread dough is rising, chocolate-chip granola bars are cooling, and fresh ricotta is resting in the fridge, soon to be used in baked ziti. (Incidentally, both the bread and the granola bar recipes come from author Carrie Snyder's blog. I've made a lot of different breads, and this one is unfailing. The granola bars mix up quickly. They don't last long around here.)
ricotta draining and, at left, the whey
DIY ricotta has been a pleasant discovery in the Unprocessed process. It's simple to make fresh, delicious ricotta at home with just a few steps. I found recipes online and ended up using this one from Epicurious but they all call for varying proportions of whole milk, heavy cream, salt and an acid such as lemon juice or vinegar. Simply boil the milk, cream and salt; add lemon juice and lower heat; stir until the mixture curdles (a few minutes); and drain in a colander lined with cheesecloth. That's how ricotta happens.
The first time I made this, the kids were mystified and disgusted by the glop of slop draining in white mesh, which I didn't realize they had never seen before. What IS this, they said, fingering the gauzy fabric. Didn't I feel like a pioneer, explaining cheesecloth to them. Gather around, my children, and imbibe a little Home Ec history with your wholesome unprocessed food. Cheesecloth: you can still get it in the grocery store, so someone must be using it for something.
The recipe says to discard the tangy whey, but it has nutritional value, so why waste it? I found online articles detailing several uses for whey, including in breadmaking. Today I substituted whey for half the water in my bread-in-progress. Was that a wise decision? We'll see.
boiling milk, cream and salt
curds form
okay, eww--make ricotta when there are no witnesses around
finished ricotta mixed with herbs--a filling for stuffed shells or lasagna
Welcome to the fledgling long weekend, the Canadian holiday without a name. Or, more accurately, the holiday with too many names. In Ontario it used to be (still is?) known as Simcoe Day, but most people simply say "the civic holiday". The need for an August day off is universally recognized, and I believe it's a Canadian trait not to get too worked up about the finer points of colonial name politics. Finding a lake and sitting in it trumps all.
We're about to head to a relative's cottage, but just an overnighter due to one daughter's work schedule and the desire to get something done around here, for once. We will soon cram ourselves, the dog and supplies into the van. I'm encouraging everyone to charge their devices, preparation being the key to survival. Pod up, siblings.
Speaking of siblings and survival, two birds sat for their portrait yesterday. The third disappeared from the nest almost immediately after hatching, and the fourth egg didn't hatch. A 50% survival rate doesn't seem so great, but I admit that the whole wild kingdom is a mystery to me.
Nothing like a baby to change your life. We're on hatch watch here at the bird sanctuary. The first baby robins made their appearance this morning, and apparently I don't really mind that their mother's nesting killed my flowers. It seems I'm over that.
Three chicks have hatched, one to go.
The nest location may be less than ideal from a human perspective--an arm's length from our front door, only five feet from the ground--but that makes it a perfect spot for observation, no ladder required. We spent the day checking in, even dragged visitors to the porch to see. As we've done in previous years of too-close nests (although this one takes the extreme proximity prize), we have roped off the entrance to minimize traffic around the newborns.
The door is barred, the dog puzzled.
The adult robins tend their young, seemingly unperturbed by our presence. According to this Wikipedia (fount of all facts) entry, robins raise two or three broods each season, with each "clutch" consisting of 3-5 eggs (henceforth I shall refer to my kids collectively as a clutch). I wonder now if these are the same birds that nested in our garage earlier this year. Could it be that this latest nest was built even closer to human habitation on purpose, to ward off predators? Mothers are shrewd that way.
There's nothing more common than a robin; a nest filled with blue eggs hardly counts as an earth-shattering discovery in our parts. Still, just as people bored by babies in general may one day discover a source of endless fascination in their own particular babies, so it is with our robins.
The storms are missing. Every day this week, severe weather events have failed to arrive as predicted, confirming my bias against meteorology and its practitioners. Might as well shoot craps, I say. Meanwhile, we sweat, we swear. We swear especially at the Humidex number, repeated endlessly as if it were useful information. The misery measurement: all it does is torque the psychological impact of July.
After my class early this morning, I cycled home in the oppressive heat, the long ride I wrote about a couple months ago. Family logistics made this a necessity. My daughter needed the car, and my son needed a ride to canoe camp, so she dropped me off with the trusty clunker bike. I looked at the sky and figured, yah, storms, although it's hard to believe the boy who cries wolf. Dark clouds shadowed me the whole way, and I beat them. I sweated but didn't swear. The trails in Peterborough are brilliant, winding through wooded shade and along the river. It was hot, though. And long, did I say long? I was a red-faced mess at the end.
My son has spent the coolest week on and in the river, taking part in a camp program offered by The Canadian Canoe Museum, a coolio (and air-conditioned) Peterborough place to visit. He comes home every day with wet hair, the only chilly person in this overheated household.
Here's an underwater clip to cool you vicariously, dear reader. This was taken by my daughter at the Lakefield beach a couple weeks ago. Normally electronics and water don't mix--she has lost a phone, camera and i-Pod in various lakes--but this camera was purchased specifically for its ability to swim.
Check out fish-kid. How does he smile without getting a lungful of water?
No, this post isn't about the willfully blind gutting of the long-form Census by the current Canadian Government (please note: the "H-word", "H-word Administration", or any variation thereof shall not appear in this blog). Nor is this about the Snowden revelations: the outrageous wholesale appropriation of private communications by the NSA and their agents, the informatics industry. Those are rants for another day.
So I apologize for a possibly misleading title: Preserving
Data. I love double meanings, in writing and in life. Here are two examples randomly drawn from my clogged memory for your
reading pleasure: one a novel--Enduring Love, by Ian McEwan (I almost admire that double-edged title more than the book, which is good but not his best), and the other a song--God's Comic, by Elvis Costello.
In fact, let's invite younger Elvis Costello into
the blogspace. Enjoy. (Technical difficulties with the embedded video? Click here for the YouTube link.)
Wow, that was a serious digression.
What I intended to detail is my nascent efforts to preserve local food as we enter the height of summer. The Unprocessed Project bug infects me still in spite of a weak will, time-pressed schedule, and weather too hot for baking.
Last year, I stocked the freezer sporadically with produce from our garden--mostly tomatoes, pesto and zucchini--but the garden is hit or miss, not big enough (or laboured-over enough!) to feed six people. The kids and I picked 35 lbs. of strawberries at a local farm, which took almost no time with all of us picking. For a few days we were rich in strawberries: we ate lots fresh and froze several bags; I also made jam for the first time. The jam was a huge hit. (It contains an appalling amount of sugar, but at least we know what is in it--just sugar and fruit.) I gave away several jars, and the remainder didn't last the year. Neither did the pesto or tomatoes. At the moment, all that is left from last summer is one bag of shredded zucchini that will soon be turned into bread or soup.
Unloved zucchini aside, I realized that if we were serious about this venture, we had to ramp up production. Here's what has been achieved so far this year.
Preserving, data on: Rhubarb--2 2-cup bags (from the farmer's market--our rhubarb patch is new; we're trying again to grow what everyone else seems to take for granted as an unkillable country plant)
Strawberries--two expeditions (with children) to the wonderful, laid back McLean Berry Farm, where we picked 45 lbs. the first time, and then 5 lbs., resulting in:
--7 6-cup bags in the freezer (slightly depleted already for smoothies and baking)
--14 250 ml jars of jam (2 given away, 1 opened)
Raspberries--4 lbs, and later 5+ lbs. (picked by my lovely eldest daughter, who drove up to the farm on her own while I was away last weekend), resulting in:
--copious fresh berries in yogurt and muffins
--7 250 ml jars of jam; and
--3 2-cup bags in the freezer (minus 1 that I had to use to complete the batch of jam)
Beautiful, eh?
I'm hoping these quantities, plus freezing/canning Ontario blueberries, peaches, plums, etc. as they come into season, will fill the larder until next year. I suppose a purist would eat fresh fruit and vegetables only in season and then wait out the winter, drawing on the blah squash, pumpkins and potatoes that can be stored in a cold cellar, rather than "processing" everything in the name of an Unprocessed Project--oh, the irony. Home preserving, however, involves minimal processing. No wonder canning is enjoying a renaissance: recycled containers; local, natural food; control over ingredients (preserves, not preservatives). It's extremely satisfying.
Next will be tomatoes. I've never canned them, although I watched my paternal grandmother "put up" tomatoes many times. We're going to try salsa, crushed tomatoes, and sauce. I use a lot of tomatoes in my cooking and would be thrilled to a) support local farmers by purchasing a bushel or two or their harvest; b) steer clear of produce trucked from afar and grown under the worst possible labour conditions (detailed in Barry Estabrook's Tomatoland, reviewed by the NYT here); and c) avoid consuming bisphenol-A (BPA) that is reported to leach from the white plastic lining of commercially canned goods.
That white lining no doubt represented an advance in its time, aimed at solving the problem of botulism, and now we're going back to simpler ways. How the world turns.
