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Little Boris, big Ted and a whole bunch of rapini

Hard to blog these days: too many distractions. World Cup, dog walks in the glorious sunshine, weeds glaring at me from the stony margins of my garden, and now little orphan Boris (*no* idea why that photo suddenly loaded..?!) who is lodging here for a week while he gets over a nasty cold. Like Anton the wonder dog he is from local rescue society Animals For Life.

It’s been hard to make time to read these days. Still, even with Boris gnawing at the corners of the book and purring remorselessly, I managed to get through the first chapter of Poetry in the Making: An Anthology of Poems and Programmes from “Listening and Writing”, a rare old (1967) Ted Hughes book I found on ABE. In his note to teachers in the first chapter, he shines some light on the magic of writing exercises. Time limits of, say, 10 minutes “create a crisis, which rouses the brain’s resources: the compulsion towards haste overthrows the ordinary precautions, flings everything into top gear, and many things that are usually hidden find themselves rushed into the open. Barriers break down, prisoners come out of their cells.” With all that rushing it’s hard to still the internal critic, let alone an external one, so I liked the way he raised a hand to that: “As in training dogs, these exercises should be judged by their successes, not their mistakes or shortcomings.” Woof to that.

And woof to vegetables of many names. When I innocently picked up a bag of something labelled Rapini, I was in for an interesting journey. Aka Broccoli Raab, it may also be labelled raab, rapa, rape, rapine, rappi, rappone, taitcat, Italian or Chinese broccoli, broccoli or broccoletti di rape, cime de rape, broccoli de rabe, Italian turnip, turnip broccoli, rabe, broccoletto, or broccoli di foglia. Rapini works for me.

Originating in the Mediterranean and also China, it is actually a descendant from a wild herb. Although it looks and tastes like it, I discover that it is not a member of the broccoli family. It is, however, closely related to turnips! It is grown as much for its long-standing, tasty mustard-like tops as for their multiple small florets with clusters of broccoli-like buds, which never form heads. When you buy it, it should have bright-green leaves that are crisp, upright, and not wilted. I looked at some recipes – though in the end I thought, like most vegetables, it was nice either raw or simply steamed and tossed with lemon and butter.

Laureates, Bohemians and how do you like them onions

The City of Victoria has appointed its first Poet Laureate: she is Carla Funk, Vanderhoof’s most famous daughter. In a city crawling with poets, I found it a little surprising that only eight threw their names in the ring (no, I did not). Perhaps the $1500 a year stipend dampened their passion.

According to a city development planner quoted in the article, Victoria stands at number 3 in North America on the Bohemian Index which ranks artistic and creative occupations of our residents. Actually that’s not entirely correct: in the information I found, we rank number 3 in a list adjusted for size – i.e. cities of 250,000 to 500,000 – behind Santa Barbara CA and Sarasota FL, and just above Madison WI and Albuquerque NM.

One of my favourite magazines is BBC Good Food, which I always pick up when I’m in England, or occasionally when I’m feeling flush in Canada. An issue from April 2005 surfaced in the magazine basket, and I read all about onions. We are told that we tear up when cutting onions because of allicin, although I found conflicting advice and more conflicting advice that the problem substance is actually a sulfide that breaks down into a volatile gas called syn-propanethial-S-oxide.

Whichever it is, the sulphuric compound produced when you slice the onion reacts with the moisture in your eyes to produce trace amounts of sulphuric acid, and the tears we produce to wash it away simply aggravate the problem.

The good news from plant chemistry is that “Allicin and syn-propanethial S-oxide have strong feeding deterrent activity toward herbivores such as insects.” Unfortunate that it doesn’t deter the feeding effects of carnivorous insects, but at least it supports folk wisdom about the benefits of planting garlic and onions around your rose bushes.

You can reduce the tearing effects by chilling onions before cutting. Alternatively, the Onion-USA site advises that the cells that release the sulfuric compounds are concentrated at the base of the onion, so you should cut the top and peel down without trimming off the root end until the last possible moment.

Or, like me, you could make sure nobody is around when you’re cutting and use a pair of safety goggles. I used to have a handy onion chopper that was no more than a jar with a chopping blade, and that worked well too. Looks like there are lots of variations of these devices on the market these days.

Fast food and dead metaphors

Well, he talks so much that inevitably some of what he says is going to be rubbish. But bless him he works hard and has fired up a lot of people about food and eating well. Here’s my quote of the week, from Anthony Bourdain: “Fast food institutionalizes low expectations.” From an interview last January in Tyee Books. (He continues, “I said once that McDonald’s is like crack for children. And eating in proximity to clowns is never a good thing.” True words.)

I heard a radio program a couple of years ago where a Vancouver chef tried to do a Jamie Oliver and show kids how much better freshly prepared food was, by making macaroni and cheese from scratch and then letting them do a taste test. Just as Jamie found, many (most?) of the kids preferred what they were used to, namely Kraft Dinner.

Obviously. If your taste buds have been fine tuned by processed cheese powders and high levels of salt, why – indeed how? – would you be able to address the subtleties of real cheese? An authentic macaroni and cheese certainly won’t have the neon colouring or the gluey consistency these kids are used to either. They were trained to like this stuff by the people who bought and served it to them, without regard to the long term implications to their palates or health.

Just as we’ve been trained to expect cheap food, no matter the consequences. We have spawned and nurtured the Costco-Walmart generation, demanding bargains without regard to the quality of the cheap food, the environmental cost of shipping it from the cheapest markets, the crippling effects on local food production in poor countries, and the damage to local food production, processing and distribution industries in our own countries. I wonder what it is we buy with the money we save buying cheap food?

One thing I bought myself was a ticket to England for the writing retreat in Yorkshire, where I happened upon the second issue of The Poetry Paper, published by The Poetry Trust. In it, Donald Hall meditates at some length on dead metaphors, tagging his own with [DM] as he writes:

When we speak, when we write letters or newspaper headlines, we use dead metaphors and we understand each other. The dead metaphor is not a criminal activity – but it is an activity at odds with poetry. If a poem is to alter us, or to please us extravagantly, it requires close attention from both poet and reader. Close attention to language is the contract [DM] that writer and reader sign. The terms of the contract require that each word be fully used – so that its signification, implication, association and import may impinge upon us, move us, and reward intelligent attention.

He is evidently on the side of the fence [DM] (yikes it’s infectious!) that says poems cannot be translated into other languages – because their art lies in their multiple meanings and freshness.

Translation is a useful scam, so that languageless readers may gather notions of what Cavafy or Tu Fu are up to, but Frost’s ‘poetry is what gets lost in translation’ is a definition of poetry. Poetry lies in the minute shades [DM] that distinguish among words commonly known as synonyms. Poetry happens in the differences between the words listed together in Roget: ‘chaste, virtuous; pure, purehearted, pure in heart; clean, cleanly; immaculate, spotless, blotless, stainless, taintless, white, snowy; unsoiled, unsullied, undefiled, untarnished, unstained…’

He gives the nod [DM] to writing groups or at least friendly poem exchanges during the editing process.

Illness provides ten thousand wounds [DM] to the language, which Hall’s Index would nurse back to health [DM]. The dead metaphor is a cancer [DM] in the poem’s language which only revisionary scrutiny can cut out [DM]. We are crippled [DM] when we use ‘crippled’ except in its literal sense… It’s only in revision that we uproot [DM] the dead metaphors that inspiration provides – or we may need the help of friends… The brain notoriously overlooks its own errors while it discerns the errors of others.

Soho Square, June 2006

What it looked like on a sunny lunchtime in early June. (And what it looks like the rest of the time.)

Nineteenth try lucky — finally it posted! Why?? Why?? I don’t understand. As you see I tried everything. I guess Blogger just gets cranky with image files every so often and calls a halt.

My previous unedited posting read as follows: I have had to admit defeat: photo posting on Blogger no longer works for me, so I’m having to go through Flickr (which worked after several tries). On Blogger, I’ve tried everything I can think of – tweaking internet options, clearing cookies and temporary internet files, rebooting, uploading from files and urls, adding the url in the Edit Html box. Nothing works. Searched the help files and googled the problem. We must put it down to bad blogger photo karma. Any other suggestions for cures would be more than welcome.

Skate update, and more on poetry reviewing

Since my first triumphant experience with skate wings in black butter, back in April, I tried cooking it again and was appalled by a penetrating ammonia odour coming from the fish. What was going on? Had I added too much vinegar, causing some toxic reaction? Delia mentioned nothing about this possibility in the book I was using for my recipe.

So I did a little further research and here’s what I found. Apparently skate, like shark, can become contaminated by the urea both species carry in their skin. Not all pieces of skate will have this: the ammonia odour comes from poor handling when it’s first caught and processed, and you should be able to smell it in the raw fish. Ideally you should sniff the fish before you buy it – impossible to do through a grocery store’s shrink-wrapped packaging of course. Better to make your purchase through a fishmonger if you can find one; and of course they’ll be least likely to sell you improperly prepared fish, so safer all round. (I guess this would be more of our self-inflicted damage from allowing mass-procurement supermarkets to take over food handling from knowledgeable specialists.) However, if you do find yourself with an ammonia-scented morsel, you can rescue the day by soaking it in lemon-infused water for 30 minutes to remove the smell (and taste). I guess that’s one more reason skate is a sadly neglected fish… but try it anyway.

After discussion about the tone of poetry reviewing in Canada, I came across some interesting reading from the archives of Chicago’s venerable Poetry Magazine where they once had a major fisticuffs over poetry reviewing. Plus ca change..

What passes for food in airports

I had some time on Monday evening – a couple of hours right around supper time to be exact – to meditate on the lack of edible food in our public places, in this case the Calgary Airport.

Having disembarked for my stopover – a tiny packet of pretzel-like substance my only sustenance during the four hour flight from Ottawa – I was looking for something freshly cooked or remotely resembling fresh edible food. But what a wasteland it is for the connecting traveller, with most so called food outlets already scraping up their leavings to shut down for the day at 7pm, or already closed. Unless your tastes run to donuts or foul smelling sandwiches, or greasy steamtabled chinese style food, or nasty looking pasta, you will roam the hallways hungry and without so much as a single decent retail outlet to distract you. There was no longer even a Dairy Queen to brighten the horizon.

The one sit-down restaurant – Montana’s last time I was there, but now replaced by Kelsey’s (no real change there since the same American company owns Harvey’s, Swiss Chalet, Second Cup, Milestones, Montana’s, Kelsey’s and Toast Cafe) – served me food and drink so utterly vile on my last visit that I was moved to write a letter of complaint. The response from the company was to offer me a coupon to dine with them again. As if.

Speaking of ownership, I read in the Guardian an article about corporate ownership changes to ethical companies including Green & Black’s (Cadbury), Rachel’s (Dean Foods), Ben & Jerry’s (Unilever) and the subsequent decline in their ethical rankings. Even the Body Shop is no more the lone voice in the cosmetic wilderness, since it’s been sold to L’Oreal! It’s so hard to keep up. Another good reason to try to give your custom to the dwindling number of locally owned operations wherever possible.