Skip to content

food

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.

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…

Toasting poetry

Just sitting around adding a layer of cookbooks to the layer of poetry books on my desk. A gift from the gods — well, from Susan in Calgary really — arrived in my mailbox yesterday: the gastro-biography Toast, by that most laid back of the British celebrity chefs Nigel Slater. Pretentious is certainly not a word you could use about someone who describes his mother’s chronically burnt toast thus:

“It is impossible not to love someone who makes toast for you. People’s failings, even major ones such as when they make you wear short trousers to school, fall into insignificance as your teeth break through the rough, toasted crust and sink into the doughy cushion of white bread underneath. Once the warm, salty butter has hit your tongue, you are smitten.”

Meanwhile I peruse recipes of a non-toasty nature as I have been smitten myself by an insane plan to cater my own book launch. Will I never learn? I think it was finding a caterer who charged $69 for a smoked salmon cheesecake that unhinged me. So I and my crispy assistant Miss Vicky will take care of things.

I’ve picked up another half-read book. This time it’s the always unpredictable and hugely successful anthology Staying Alive, edited by Bloodaxe’s own Neil Astley (check out his controversial lecture, Guile, Bile and Dangerous to Poetry). I was surprised – favourably – to discover Gwendolyn MacEwan among the contributors; and Anne Michaels, P.K. Page, and lots (7 poems!) of Alden Nowlan. One or two of the section introductions are more confusing than the poems — I have long been baffled by Astley’s assertion that Elizabeth Bishop’s Chemin de Fer could “be read as a ‘coded’ account of female masturbation.” Huh?!? Still, the poems themselves are ones to be grateful for and it is a wonderfully broad selection.

Good spreads

I used to use Epicurious a lot, until they started littering their site with pop-up ads, including the kind that crawl up your screen till you click them away. But I recently revisited them and either my pop-up blocker works better these days or they’ve done away with the ads.

I see Epicurious’ editor has a blog now (you have to sign up for their mailing list to comment though) in which she discussed one of my favourite things from England, Marmite, and observed that taste preferences are somewhat polarised on the matter. There are those of us who think it is an indispensible item for the larder, and those who would only use it to poison the slugs, all of which is tastefully documented on Marmite’s own site.

Personally I think a lot of those who try it once and gag are simply using too much, in quantities appropriate to something milder, like peanut butter. But it’s very concentrated so must be spread very thinly to enjoy it properly; I think using lots of butter is also important. And it is a wonderful thing to have on hand to flavour soups and gravies: totally vegetarian and wheat-free to boot. Marmite has an interesting marketing campaign; what other brand actually sells sloganed (“J’déteste Marmite”) t-shirts to its detractors? And who buys them?

Once when I visited Amsterdam, a helpful local suggested I buy pindakaas as a good typically Dutch treat to take home. I had to tell her we already had peanut butter, which I suppose other countries might claim as typically theirs as well. Interesting , this proprietary pride in snack foods.