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Victoria

Say cheese

GK Chesterton did, at length, and spawned a memorable quote:

Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.

And then there’s Clifton Fadiman, who observed:

A cheese may disappoint. It may be dull, it may be naive, it may be oversophisticated. Yet it remains cheese, milk’s leap toward immortality.

And if you have feta and parmesan cheeses on hand you might enjoy, as I did recently, some Potato, Artichoke and Feta Cheese Latkes.

Went to a couple of readings lately, which were indeed mysteriously cheeseless. On Friday, Acorn-Plantos winner Christine Smart read with the always excellent Don McKay

at the Red Brick Cafe in Sidney, where we had some very pleasant accordion music to enjoy in the before after and interval periods.

And then on Saturday to the Rona Murray Prize-giving, where we heard from the 8 shortlisted poets. DC Reid was introduced by organiser Peter Such

and Barbara Pelman read,

and so did Patricia Young, whose lizard poem shared the prize with an excellent villanelle by Marlene Grand-Maitre.

Snow, sun and BC books & magazines

We had a shock snowfall on Saturday

but were back to normal (aside from snow on them thar hills) the very next day

and now it is just onward chilly spring.

I went to a reading on Sunday by four local writers in celebration of B.C. Book and Magazine Week. David Leach, Kerissa Dickie and John Threlfall were scheduled readers, and we got a surprise poetry boost from John Barton as one other reader couldn’t make it. A cold room, sparse audience and much discussed dearth of alcoholic beverages at the bar (it being Sunday, this being Victoria) made it less than cosy, but I reckon there are worse ways to spend a Sunday evening.

Liking London

A week or so ago I attended a reading by Ekstasis authors, in celebration of the Pacific Rim Review of Books. Richard Olafson introduces…

Among others, our excellent Saskatchewanian Glen Sorestad read, and so did the wondrous Yvonne Blomer.

I’m enjoying the bee-keeping course a lot. Here’s how you wrap up your hives and throw them in the back of your truck to take them for a drive. If you listen closely you can hear them hum…

And now, here I am on the other side of the pond once more. I arrived yesterday and after a reviving nap and shower bustled off to the Olivier to catch Much Ado About Nothing, which was nothing short of awesome. Zoe Wanamaker, Simon Russell Beale and everyone — all wonderful. Sets, staging, music, dancing — all wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. I laughed, I cried, and I particularly enjoyed the reaction of the many school kids in the audience, who hooted and hollered and clapped upside down and backwards at the end.

I settled in that evening to a gorgeous box of booty from Ottolenghi – roasted aubergines with braised shallots, coriander, chili and green tahini; roasted beets with sunflower seeds, chard, chervil and maple sherry dressing; some soft, tasty new potatoes in mustard sauce; and a couple of slices of char-grilled fillet of beef with dijon mustard, coriander and honey sauce. With a glass of Barbera to wash it down. Looks like I will just miss the publication of Ottolenghi’s new cookbook, but we can still catch some great recipes in the Guardian.

Carrie has sent forth the challenge to participate in NaPoWriMo over April (National Poetry Month) which sounds like an excellent idea. We poets can show those novelists what’s what, eh?

Sweet Mama, what a week

Not a monumental one, but a week in which food and poetry converged at last.

Some good food coverage on CBC, including a week on hospital food, a whole series on food issues in the new India, and an interview with Michael Pollan.

I spent one morning of slashing rain interspersed with bright sunshine driving up the Saanich Peninsula to my favourite grocery stop, Michell Brothers Farm, where I loaded up on leeks, tubers, squash and other winter vegetables. Then on to Dan’s Farm Shop to pick up a Farmer Dan’s Chicken and some organic chicken sausages, and then home to puzzle over my bounty. I had some leek & yogurt soup with dried mint, (using a broth made of my last Farmer Dan’s Chicken) which was fabulous and just as I remembered it.

I am looking forward to eating the Sweet Mama squash which Michell’s grows. My clever cousin, who had encountered it first in New Zealand where they ate it with roast lamb, told me to slice it into wedges and roast it, with or without other vegetables or a Sunday joint, which I have been doing – it’s wonderful, including the skin, very sweet and moist. Michell’s sells both Sweet Mama and Buttercup which looks almost indistinguishable, which got me to wondering about it.

Apparently it is a kabocha (Japanese pumpkin) variety. It can be cooked in Mirin, soy sauce and broth and if you ignore the advice about skinning it, eaten whole that way, a very waste not want not recipe, or you can make it into soup – though you’ll probably have to sacrifice the skin (thinner and more tender than most squash I’ve found, and also tasty) for aesthetic reasons. You could also use it in a pumpkin risotto.

The bad news for growers is that it’s a hybrid and according to at least one source, can’t be grown through seed saving.

I went to Planet Earth Poetry last night, for the first time since my return. It was the first reading of the new year and the place was heaving with youth and energy. There was a lengthy open mike, of good standard – including Linda Rogers, Barbara Pelman, Yvonne Blomer and Pam Porter – all of whom recently had Christmas poems in great big pages of the local paper. Then as ever the young scamps who’d just come to read or hear their buddies in the open mike disappeared and paying seats opened up for the main acts. Sina Queyras flew in from Montreal and young performance poet Martin Hazelboweer paddled over from Vancouver. Queyras had a satisfying revenge poem, The Tummy-Flat Girls, about some of her more resistant ex-students; it showcased well an interesting poetic quirk, a kind of list form (or ok, let’s call it anaphora) which seems to feature in pretty much all her poems.

All kinds of water

Hard not to start the year in a state of environmental angst. Water is always topical here on Vancouver Island: we either have too much or too little at any given time.

In this our water-fronted, rain-sodden wintertime in Victoria, it’s hard to look ahead to our annual drought season, or to grasp the issues around water waste through the year. So I was interested to hear Costing the Earth this week, which was about how each of us can make a small change to our lifestyles – including being more aware of water use – to improve our record on consumer waste, which contributes to all kinds of evil.

One of the things they talked about was the concept of embedded water – how much water does it take to produce, for example, a single pint of beer (170 litres). Meat is, as usual, the worst enemy: a hamburger (150g) takes 2,400 litres to produce, because of the water needed to raise the animal it comes from. That of course is before you factor in the climactic damage caused by clearing Amazonian rainforest to grow soya to feed northern hemisphere cattle.

The commentator spoke to an environmental activist who was so horrified by what he saw when he visited the Amazon some years ago, he came back to London and changed his life. Among the other things he did was to install solar panels – yes, in London – to heat his water, power his fridge and generate electricity in sufficient quantity to make him the first individual to sell power back to the national grid. He gathers rainwater from his roof to use for flushing his toilet and washing the floor, and meets 75% of his water needs that way.

Over and over the commentator asked, what about China? We could all bend backwards, lower the thermostat, keep our heating off when we’re not in the house, buy less of the things that will go to waste — and meanwhile the Chinese are striving for all they’re worth to be big wasteful consumers just like us.

And the answer was, set a new consumer/environmental standard for those who aspire to a good standard of living. And in doing that, remember that “every single small action you take does make a difference.”

Another bit of trivia I was reading about: the British Medical Journal‘s discounting of the 8 glasses of water a day rule that used to cause us all to have a glass, if not a beaker, of water at our desks over the last decade or two.

“There’s a lack of medical evidence showing you need to down this much water daily,” says the Globe & Mail.

This common prescription can be traced to a 1945 medical recommendation that stated: “A suitable allowance of water for adults is 2.5 litres daily in most instances. An ordinary standard for diverse persons is one ml for each calorie of food. Most of this quantity is contained in prepared foods.”

If the last, crucial sentence is ignored, the statement could be interpreted as an instruction to drink eight glasses of water a day. Evidence suggests you can meet all your fluid needs through food and other beverages including juices, milk and even caffeinated drinks.

And finally, maybe if we don’t have to drink so many glasses of it, we can cut our use of bottled water – with its embedded packaging, transport and retail costs – and go back to the tap. Gosh, who remembers drinking fountains?

Something for the new year

A lot of you expressed envy at my departure for Italy to study food for a year, and to anyone of that mindset in the Victoria area I offer glad tidings: my classmate Don Genova is offering a course at UVic called Food Culture: Fast Food to Slow Food which covers a lot of the sorts of things we learned in Italy. It gives you the opportunity to meet local food producers and doesn’t incur the cost of travel to Italy (though you might feel a need to go once it’s over!).

Here’s Don’s blog/podcast site if you want to get a sense of who he is. He’s a good speaker and he knows everyone, so I think it will be a great class. (And no, I’m not getting a commission, though I have certainly offered to be his assistant!!)

Anyone not in Victoria will perhaps enjoy looking at the scenery (from a walk along the Gorge on Boxing Day) and wishing you were here…

But it’s not all fun and games in Lotusland. We do have a police presence here, and environmentally-minded transportation for them. We weren’t sure what crimes were being fought at this point but it may have been that one of the fisherfolk needed help with a dodgy lure..?