ReallyGoodWriter | Food • Writing • Poetry Iambic Cafe

food & poetry, but mostly the poetry of food

Food • Writing • Poetry

Well Wednesday’s been and gone and so has the Vancouver reading. The Peter Kaye Room was a nice space to read, in a really stunning building (Battlestar Galactica set?? who knew?)… although the partition-weight walls mean you’d better hope you don’t have anything too entertaining going on nearby. Unfortunately for my poetry chickens, the woman who was holding forth on her backpacking trip to a large and grateful audience next door launched into her best jokes just as my reading reached its emotional apex. (I guess on the scale of distraction this is still preferable to the drunks and lunatics who occasionally press body parts to the glass or wander mid-stanza into Mocambo readings.) And when my foot got stuck to the electrical tape holding down the microphone cable, that got audience members wondering what kind of personal dance steps I was perfecting behind the podium.

But other than that I was pleased with the evening. Friendly responsive audience and a satisfactory huddle round the book table, heroically managed by my cousin Deb. Many family members there, and my family of friends (and thanks, Tom, for photo-documenting the event). Celebrity visitors included writers Leona Gom and Heidi Greco and Brian Andre and Allan Brown.

I noticed Bob Dylan features set lists from his concerts on his website so I thought why don’t poets? And here’s mine in case you want to sing along:

(from Old Habits/Crosswords)
Boston School of Cooking Cookbook
(from Cartography)
Craft
Anniversary
Making Sense
Tales
Journeys
Vegetables
At It Again
Suitcase
YEG to YVR
After the Fall
Leaf Cutter Bees
My Kitchen
(from new ms.)
Ache and Pain
London Plane
Hard Cold Realty
(from Creating the Country/Crosswords)
Another Life to Live at the Edge of the Young and Restless Days of Our Lives

On the food side of things, Ana took me round some excellent foodie places in Park Royal, including Whole Foods, a terrifyingly large and pricy American natural/organic foods supermarket chain (with branches in the UK and of course Canada). Although dazed by the lighting and swooning from all the beautiful displays, we were able to wrestle a gorgeous chunk of aged gouda into the shopping basket before we fled into the rain. Heaven on earth.

She’s lent me a promising book – Italian Food Artisans: Traditions and Recipes – which helped ease the trauma of missing the ferry back to Vancouver Island by a niggling 8 cars, followed by a tedious two hour wait for the next sailing. The joys of living on an island.

Now I’m packing my bags for a trip to Lumb Bank, followed by London – where I’ll hear Marilyn Hacker speak and attend a Troubadour reading – before swinging by the League of Poets meeting in darkest Ottawa. Expect intermittent but internationally flavoured posts for the next couple of weeks.

Here’s a swift, simple dessert I found in a wonderful little book, A Sussex Cook’s Calendar, that my dad picked up when we all stayed in a darling thatched cottage with a cat-slide roof in the village of Steyning. I have modified the recipe ever so slightly and converted it to North American measurements. I’ve seen similar recipes where you pan fry the bananas in the butter and rather than baking, then de-glaze the pan with remaining ingredients.

If you’re putting them over the ice cream, and you don’t like the long droopy look of banana slices, you could halve or chunk the slices, then garnish with a sprinkling of dark or demerara sugar.

Baked Bananas (for 4)
4 firm bananas
Juice of 1 lemon
Juice of 1 orange
1/4 c brown sugar or maple syrup
1/4 c butter
2 tbsp Cointreau or Grand Marnier
Cut bananas in half lengthwise; place cut side down in a buttered baking dish. Mix fruit juices and sugar/syrup and pour over bananas. Dot with butter. Bake uncovered at 350 degrees for 15 to 20 minutes until just browning. Serve warm over or under ice cream.

This morning while dog and I waited for the rain to lift, one of those rambling chains of thought and random googling led me to the website of Cyphers, a long-running literary journal edited by a group of Irish notables who have attracted the likes of Eamon Grennan (one of my poetry heroes). My search had begun with the name Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, one of the editors, whose 2001 collectionThe Girl Who Married the Reindeer, published by the excellent Gallery Books (they publish Grennan as well) I happened upon in our very own Munro’s Books. It’s a wistful book, speaks well of loss and transition, and paints a good picture:

In Her Other Ireland

It’s a small town. The wind blows past
The dunes, and sands the wide street.
The flagstones are wet, in places thick with glass,
Long claws of scattering light.
The names are lonely, the shutters blank —
No one’s around when the wind blows…

This is the time of year when I start eyeing the barbecue and readying myself for an annual cook-out. I don’t do much barbecuing, because (or consequently?) I have a smallish charcoal bbq which is a lot of bother. So I found some nice looking ribs and that got me to thinking about Texas bbq, and I found a helpful site that suggests you can parboil them in seasoned water for a speedier finish. It had started raining anyway, so I tried it: parboiled the ribs for about half an hour in water flavoured with onion, garlic, cloves and bay leaves; assembled a sauce with tomatoes, onions, mushrooms, green pepper, garlic, cloves, bay leaves, fig balsamic, chipotle chiles,brown sugar, soya sauce, Worcestershire and some home made plum chutney; cooked the ribs for about 1.5 hours in a 325 oven, and they were falling apart in loads of lovely spice. Not Texas bbq of course, but good ribs.

Perhaps I’ll have to have some authentic Arkansas barbecue when I’m in London, at Bubba’s, in Spitalfields Market, if I can pass up the awesome lamb burgers they serve there. The choice has been made for me in the past, as they only buy small quantities of Welsh lamb for the burgers, and they tend to run out when the market is busy. Which seems to be all the time.

So just when my words about not knowing anyone who dines at Sooke Harbour House fall from my fingers, I get invited to dinner there. It is very good food, and they certainly go to great lengths to make it look very pretty, as you can see from photos – capturing only three of the four courses we were offered. The salad I thought was a dish that would go with any outfit. I especially liked the herbal wall that surrounded the moat of sauce (TOO many ingredients to name here) beneath the island of grilled halibut. Perfectly cooked fish: hard to beat. I did not check to see if the head dress – perching on my lavender ice cream which surmounts a couple of rosemary dumplings adrift in a wild berry sea – was edible. But most things were so I wouldn’t have been surprised.

To give you a sense of the style of the menu descriptions, had we been there on Thursday we could have had as a starter a warm smoked sablefish served with asparagus, sundried tomato, chervil, bulgur and caramelized onion bundle, sauteed gooseneck barnacles, daikon miso foam and Grand fir oil. At least there is a stunning ocean view to rest your eyes upon while you try to work out what all that would taste/look like exactly. Last night a couple of eagles drifted by, a blue heron, and one harbour seal on an evening fishing trip.

After dinner we checked out the art which is hung on every public wall – an informal gallery really – and then the garden which surrounds the building; lots of borage and calendula which are popular ingredients in many of the dishes. I had read that you won’t get a lemon with your fish because it’s not a local product, but I was glad to see they had apparently stretched the line for a few staples such as flour and sugar.

There was an interesting experiment – the 100 Mile Diet – done recently by a pair of Vancouverians who ate only local produce (from within 100 miles of their home) for a year, and they mentioned in a radio interview that wheat was the most difficult thing to give up, although they eventually did find a wheat farmer and were able to have bread and pasta again. Their website gives Canadian and American readers a tool to find the 100 mile radius round their homes if they want to try it too.

Nigella Lawson’s How to Eat is, I discovered, the subject of a blog along the lines of the Julie/Julia project. I had received the book last year and thought it was time I cracked the cover and tried something. I happened to have a bag of black beans in the cupboard so I made South Beach Black Bean Soup. It was very good, particularly after letting it sit for a day and then adding a squeeze of fresh lime, some chopped coriander (cilantro) and a dollop of sour cream. Didn’t have any red onion but might try it with that later. I did find myself yearning for heat, and the tabasco helped. But it seemed… wrong somehow to make black bean soup without chiles. Anyway, it’s a good one for vegetarians and coeliacs.

I spent a little time today browsing The Poem, a spare and readable site, which describes itself as “a taster of contemporary poetry in Britain and Ireland.” I enjoyed Christopher Logue’s “Rat O Rat” – one of the little beggars just strolled along my fence the other day and gave me a haughty look – but the one that follows it “from New Numbers” is an amazing narrative gem.