ReallyGoodWriter | Food • Writing • Poetry Iambic Cafe

food & poetry, but mostly the poetry of food

Food • Writing • Poetry

It’s been a busy and beautiful week in Victoria. Little actual reading or cooking going on.. although much thinking about food, many walks, anguished glances at dehydrating garden, and even a little fence painting happening — until the clouds gather just in time for the long weekend. Funny, I think this might be the first time I’ve been in Victoria for Victoria Day in four years.

In talking to various people about various things, I have been surprised at the number of those who’ve never heard of the Slow Food movement. Even here in Victoria we have a proponent, although it is a fact that not many of my circle dine regularly at Sooke Harbour House.

According to its website, the Slow Food movement

promotes food and wine culture, but also defends food and agricultural biodiversity worldwide. It opposes the standardisation of taste, defends the need for consumer information, protects cultural identities tied to food and gastronomic traditions, safeguards foods and cultivation and processing techniques inherited from tradition and defends domestic and wild animal and vegetable species.

All very topical on Vancouver Island, where small food producers are trying their best to promote local and artisan products through such vehicles as the Small Scale Food Processor Association, and where Victoria flogs culinary tourism even as our surrounding farmland is being diminished by pro-development municipal councils.

There’s a Slow Food blog in Washington State which gives a helpful primer, and there’s information on the Canadian arm (fork? table?) on its own website; Slow Food Vancouver also has a website.

I was reading Adrienne Rich’s collection of essays, What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics. I thought she gave a very cogent summary of issues around form:

“Poetic forms – meters, rhyming patterns, the shaping of poems into symmetrical blocks of lines called couplets or stanzas – have existed since poetry was an oral activity. Such forms can easily become format, of course, where the dynamics of experience and desire are forced to fit a pattern to which they have no organic relationship. People are often taught in school to confuse closed poetic forms (or formulas) with poetry itself, the lifeblood of the poem. Or, that a poem consists merely in a series of sentences broken (formatted) into short lines called “free verse.” But a closed form like the sestina, the sonnet, the villanelle remains inert formula or format unless the “triggering subject,” as Richard Hugo called it, acts on the imagination to make the form evolve, become responsive, or works almost in resistance to the form. It’s a struggle not to let the form take over, lapse into format, assimilate the poetry; and that very struggle can produce a movement, a music, of its own.”

Last night’s dinner was Saffron Chicken. Very smooth, complex sauce, bright yellow from the turmeric, thickened, and slightly crunchy, with ground almonds. An excellent recipe which can be made well ahead of events and heated up when needed.

Turmeric may be the new snake oil. In recent years it has gained new currency as an anti-arthritis wonder food under the name of its active ingredient, curcumin. Long used as a food colourant and fabric dye (though it fades), it has been reported to be an anti-inflammatory and an anti-cancer agent; a cure for jaundice, indigestion, kidney stones, dysentery, sexually-transmitted diseases, cystic fibrosis, diabetes, stomach and liver ailments including Crohn’s and inflammatory bowel disease; even a preventative for Alzheimer’s disease and cardiovascular problems, and a treatment for poor vision. Externally it is used to heal sores and inflammations, including itching, Herpes, psoriasis, chickenpox and smallpox; as a depilatory, a cosmetic and to counteract aging processes. And as we saw in the movie Water, you can rub it on hotheads to cool them down!

Went to Mocambo last night where Tanis MacDonald and Elizabeth Bachinsky were on the bill. She’s touring the east with a pair of poets, Michael V. Smith and Jennica Harper, who also made an appearance, as did local and seldom seen poet/novelist Steve Noyes.

Meanwhile I had been meditating on how to use up some of my smoked salmon, left over from the great smoked salmon cheesecake enterprise of ’06. I settled on smoked salmon quiche, and last night’s Smoked Salmon Penne with Pepper Vodka which I made with cresta di gallo instead of penne, because I think it’s a pasta of much greater character. Right up there with my favourite, the aptly named radiatore. Here’s a low-ish fat version of that quasi-Russian pasta dish:

3 cups penne
1-1/2 tbsp olive oil
1/2 cup shallots, minced
3 tbsp white wine
1 c fish stock
6 tbsp low fat sour cream
6 oz smoked salmon, flaked or chopped
1 c cooked asparagus or sugar snap peas, in 1-2″ pieces
1-2 tbsp pepper vodka
Cook the penne until al dente, about 8 minutes. Drain and rinse and drain again.
Meanwhile, cook the shallots in olive oil until soft but not brown, about two minutes. Add the wine and bring to a boil. Add the broth, sour cream and some ground pepper; bring to the boil and then reduce, stirring constantly, until it has a thick, gravy-like consistency. Add the smoked salmon and simmer a couple of minutes. Add the vegetables and heat through. Remove from the heat, stir in pepper vodka and season to taste. Mix in the penne, heat gently and then serve.

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.

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?