Skip to content

2006

Haiku, shrimp dumplings and weird Weight Watchers cards

Want to talk Haiku?
Petals fall on Vancouver.
Poets everywhere.

The annual Haiku Canada conference will be held in Vancouver over the Victoria Day weekend in May (19th -22nd) at UBC. Check the website for more information.

Last night I thought I’d try something that looked long and involved, but wasn’t as complicated as I’d thought: Sopa de albondigas de camaron from the excellent Coyote Café Cookbook. I had embarked on the whole sordid exercise because I lost my head in Austin and came back with a bag of dried ancho chiles from the wondrous larder of Farm to Market Grocery and happened to have chipotles in adobo sauce in my cupboard for some puzzling reason.

The soup was, to my tender northern palate, very hot (spicy) indeed. Personally I would reduce both the number of chipotle chiles and the cinnamon/canela, which seemed to overwhelm the delicate little dumplings in a somewhat aggressive way. I found another recipe for this dish which has slightly simpler ingredients, no cinnamon, and a much milder chile content. Anyway, what I made was delicious once my tastebuds got over the shock: the burn became agreeable, and the broth was tart and tasty; the dumplings tender and plump with contrasting flavours and texture. I was – fortuitously rather than strategically – wearing red when I ate it; otherwise I would have needed a bib to avoid the sartorial staining I could see was coming when I pureed the deep red ancho, which added more colour and flavour than heat; it was the chipotle chiles that set the thing on fire.

And now for something rare and amusing from the darkest recesses of Weight Watchers history. Bonnie sent me this yesterday. Read all of them if you dare. Strange and frightening foods; more interesting and oddly coloured food photographs than you ever imagined possible, with many interesting and perplexing props. And great commentary.

That old launch of mine


So.. the launch was a lovely elegant affair in a lovely elegant building, adorned with fantastic art and incredible furniture.

Note the throne they seated me on and the special little signing mat, and the height of the table which meant supplicants practically had to kneel for audience.

Here you see the back of Pam Porter, winner of this year’s GG for Children’s Literature, whose own poetry collection is due out any second now from Coteau and will doubtless sparkle brightly with a light all its own.

And here’s a gaggle of gastronomes nibbling on that ever present smoked salmon cheesecake. More photos another time, perhaps, once I’ve seen more of them.

I caught the cooking section of CBC’s North By Northwest this weekend; apparently Ricardo Larrivee is Quebec’s answer to Jamie Oliver (and way prettier, IMHO). He was by some curious coincidence making a vegetarian lasagne with eggplant caviar — which latter substance was one of the items I made for the launch. I wonder if I can use leftovers in a lasagne?

One for the birders, and a bit about smoked salmon cheesecake

Neither food nor poetry, at least not poetry yet, and nothing too edible spotted… I have been taking an introductory birding class, and here’s what they tell us we saw on our last field trip today, a rainy, cold morning in Beacon Hill Park:

Glaucous-winged Gull
Mallard Duck, male and female
American Wigeon, male
Northwestern Crow
Violet-green Swallow
Barn Swallow
Vaux’s Swift
Great Blue Heron
Chestnut-backed Chickadee
Red-breasted Nuthatch
Hermit Thrush
American Robin
Rock Pigeon
Common Bushtit
Golden-Crowned Sparrow
Song Sparrow
Eurasian Starling
House Finch
Spotted Towhee
Wilson’s Warbler
Townsend’s Warbler
Yellow Warbler
Western Tanager
Orange-crowned Warbler (heard)
Downey Woodpecker, male
Spotted Towhee
Winter Wren (heard)

Plus I saw a raven when I got home; I’d seen four of them being chased all the way down the Gorge Waterway by a flock of crows just yesterday. The best part of our field trip was seeing where the heronry was: we spotted about 20 nests in a single tree, several of them with herons in situ. Apparently they counted over 90 nests in that area last year.

Meanwhile, I thought I’d point you to a terrific smoked salmon cheesecake recipe, which I employed to much critical acclaim at the launch. It’s not hard to make but important I think that you not overcook it, so I reduced my oven to 300 instead of the 350 the recipe recommends. Also I substituted bottled (roasted+peeled) red peppers for the green peppers called for. Refrigerate it for a couple of hours before serving (one of those wonderful things that you can make the day before) and it will firm up nicely.

Sundae yummy sundae

I don’t eat much ice cream but… every so often I get a yen. A yearning. A downright craving. Believing prefab chocolate sauce is not only a dangerously stupid substance to keep in the house, it also doesn’t taste very good, now that my palate has been trained to high quality chocolate bars. So the obvious solution is to melt down a high quality chocolate bar – or as much/little of it as you need. Melt it on low heat with a dab of butter and thin with cream or milk and dribble in a bit of quality hooch like armagnac or calvados. Cool it a few minutes – while you toast some almond slivers in a frying pan – and then lavish it over the ice cream, add some whipped cream and the almonds and hey presto, we’re good till the next time.

Wednesday’s launch of Cartography was grand but I’ll save the word on that till Brian my ace photographer is able to share some of the snaps he took. Suffice to say I am snacking on leftovers, including some of that there smoked oyster pate which I made in happy memory of my first attempt back in February at the writers colony in Saskatchewan. I recommend it paired with Hardbite Jalapeno chips…

Sharpen those pencils

A couple of submission opportunities have crossed my inbox lately.

The “Words for Wilderness” prose and poetry contest, sponsored by the Washington Wilderness Coalition (WWC), seeks work that comes from the heart of the wilderness and the writer. It can include both personal work that revels in the experience of nature as well as writing that explores political aspects of civilization’s relationship with wilderness. Winners will read their work at an event in late June. Deadline May 17, 2006

Seal Press, an imprint of Avalon Publishing Group, Inc. is seeking articles by women for a couple of new collections of essays about travel. Greece: A Love Story (deadline June 1st) needs essays on the Greece that lies behind postcards; and Go Your Own Way (Deadline: May 15, 2006) is seeking original, personal stories by women on the experience of traveling alone in all corners of the globe.

Flax, linseed and poetry in Chicago

When did linseed become flax? I often get startled looks when I call those little beggars in the Red River Cereal linseed, but I sure wouldn’t dare call the oil version by that name, because we know linseed oil as a furniture polish, traditional oil for cricket bats, and paint solvent, not as the trendy and expensive wonder-supplement we call flax seed oil.

The source of all this is a plant whose full and proper name is Linum usitatissimum, as we might have guessed by the names of other of its products, linoleum and linen for example. It is also grown as an ornamental plant in gardens, its sky blue flowers opening only in the morning. Other uses include dye, paper, medicines, poultices, fishing nets and soap, as well as a handy plug for drains (wrap it up first though eh?). If you’re not keen on sardines or cold water/oily fish, ground flax seed or flax seed oil are particularly good sources of Omega-3. It’s not something I’ve seen used as a central ingredient in cooking – its flavour is pretty nondescript – but you can add it for nutritional and/or decorative reasons to a number of baked goods, soups, grains etc.

I was leafing through my new copy of PN Review which includes a review of the University of Chicago’s recent exhibition The Making of Modern Poetry. The show’s over now, and on the wrong side of this continent, but I liked the reported response by John Ashbery to an acceptance by a literary magazine of his poem Europe, exclaining it was “the best news since the Treaty of Utrecht“.

In my wanderings on the U of Chicago site looking for information on the exhibition, I encountered Poem Present, where you can, if you have QuickTime or an MP3 player, hear and view past readings, including a reading and lecture by Robert Creeley who visited the university the year before he died. What a wonderful world.