Better than a sandwich

Stuffed peppers are usually cooked, but a long time ago I had a relative of this excellent raw lunch/snack and here is my version, which will stuff two small/medium bell peppers. I recommend red or orange as I prefer the sweetness. Gets a bit gooey if it has to travel, but will survive reasonably well till lunchtime if you refrigerate it. Or you can pack the stuffing separately from the pepper and stuff it when you are ready to eat. It makes a good sandwich filling or spread for toasted English muffins too.

1 medium carrot (about 3/4 cup) grated
3-4 oz cheddar cheese (about 1 cup) grated
1 small green onion, minced (optional)
1/2 rib of celery (about 1/3 cup) diced
1/3 cup mayonnaise, or to taste: just enough to glue everything together
Salt and pepper to taste

An interesting side note about peppers. Bell peppers contain a recessive gene which eliminates capsaisin, the compound responsible for the ‘hotness’ found in other peppers. Capsaisin is the active ingredient in some topical analgesics used for arthritis treatment, such as Capzasin-P.

Caryl Churchill’s play, A Number, is playing at the Belfry in Victoria at the moment. Her most famous play, Top Girls, is being broadcast on Saturday as the BBC Saturday Play. Worth a listen, and available for a week after broadcast.

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Mslexia, Kathleen Jamie and the University of Gastronomic Sciences

Just got my copy of the Apr/May/Jun issue of Mslexia. The annual poetry competition closes April 28, so you might squeeze in if you hurry. The theme for the next issue is Travellers’ Tales, and the one after that I’m sure will speak to a lot of us here on the Wet Coast this year: Rain. The Making a Poem column this issue features the Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie:

“I don’t believe in writer’s block. I think you write the things that are given to you to write and then you wait for the next thing that is given to you to write. In between are what we must call fallow periods. That’s the only word for it. I hate the idea of flogging yourself in production, producing stuff for the sake of it.”

Meanwhile, I’ve been thinking about going back to school and getting another master’s degree. The University of Gastronomic Sciences offers one in Food Culture: Communicating Quality Products. Based in Italy, the program includes rigorous field seminars to learn about the production of the best foods and wines of Italy, France, Spain and Northern Europe. Sounds like a worthy academic goal, no? The price tag, room, lunches and travel abroad included, is a trifling 21,000 Euros, or just a sliver of prosciutto under $30,000 Canadian. Well, we have till July to stew on it.

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Suet, treacle and some other things

Canadians who have acquired British cookbooks may sometimes need to know equivalent ingredients or measurements. Here’s a site that offers quite a bit of information, although not an answer to the question that still stumps me: what in a Canadian grocery store can equate to shredded suet for making mincemeats, dumplings, pastries and puddings? The suet offered by grocers in Victoria when I asked included bird suet (studded with birdseed!) and chunks of fat pared from beef cuts.

The official word on suet as sold in England is that it is made by grating the hard white fat which surrounds the kidneys, although there is also a vegetarian version, which according to the label is made of hydrogenated vegetable oil, wheat flour, sunflower oil, pectin and sugar. Lard and shortening are the wrong consistency: too soft and greasy. I haven’t experimented to see if they actually work in the finished product, though. I did find mention that hard coconut fat might be the answer. Further experimentation clearly needed in this area. Stay tuned.

Or apparently I can order vegetable suet through A Bit of Home, which happily is based in Toronto so no issues with customs, GST and duty. Everything from self-raising flour to jelly cubes to PG Tips pyramid teabags. Disappointing not to see Cornish Wafers, or Mackerel in brine which are – besides the cheese, the yogurt, the stunning produce selection, the extravagant selections of cream, of marmalade and of sugar – among the things I miss most about living in London.

I must make a return visit to the lonely little UK shelf in Market on Yates, which stocks a similar selection to A Bit of Home. I scored a 500g jar of Marmite there last year for around $18 – which is still cheaper and easier than flying over and slogging back with it in the overwrought luggage.

In The Boy from the Chemist is Here to See You, Paul Farley painted a memorable portrait of black treacle, loosely equivalent to molasses in North America (I’m happy to see that Treacle also appears in New British Poetry):

Funny to think you can still buy it now,
a throwback, like shoe polish or the sardine key.
When you lever the lid it opens with a sigh
and you’re face-to-face with history.
By that I mean the unstable pitch black
you’re careful not to spill, like mercury

that doesn’t give any reflection back,
that gets between the cracks of everything
and holds together the sandstone and bricks
of our museums and art galleries…

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Chicken salad and the mysteries of poetic craft

In a weak moment I bought one of those pre-barbecued chickens, basted in salt and lathered with a toxic red substance. Still, it left me with enough cold chicken for a good old chicken salad, a food that – like tuna casserole – was mysteriously absent from my upbringing and which I have embraced in later life. Here’s a perfectly straightforward recipe, based on one from the Fanny Farmer Cookbook:

2 cups cooked chicken, skinned and chopped
1 chopped green onion
1 rib celery, chopped
1/2 cup mayonnaise
2 tbsp plain yogurt
1 tbsp wine vinegar
Salt and ground pepper to taste

Combine mayonnaise, yogurt and vinegar and blend well; add seasonings. Toss chicken, onion and celery with dressing until well mixed. Serve as a salad, on a bed of greens, or as a sandwich filling, on toasted English muffins. Why mess with simplicity? Have it with a lovely bowl of Edamame, drizzled with sesame oil and dusted with salt.

It hardly needs saying that Mark Strand is not a chicken, or a salad, nor even simple, but interesting to know he is Canadian-born (PEI). I first came across his name as co-editor (with Eavan Boland) of the form poetry anthology, The Making of a Poem. He’s also published a handy little book of essays on poetry called The Weather of Words. I’m finding it heavy going, but there are always moments in any such collection, and so I soldier on. I thought this, from the start of Notes on the Craft of Poetry, was an interesting take on it:

“Each poem demands that I treat it differently from the rest, come to terms with it, seek out its own best beginning and ending. And yet I would be kidding myself if I believed that nothing continuous existed in the transactions between myself and my poems. I suppose this is what we mean by craft: those transactions that become so continuous we not only associate ourselves with them but allow them to represent the means by which we make art… To a large extent these transactions I have chosen to call craft are the sole property of the individual poet and cannot be transferred to or adopted by others. One reason for this is that they are largely unknown at the time of writing and are discovered afterwards, if at all.”

He quotes Orwell’s rules of good writing, and questions whether these or any rules can really be applied to poetry: “For the poems that are of greatest value are those that inevitably, unselfconsciously break rules…”

His argument against craft is that it cannot work as a defining or diagnostic concept, because poetry “cannot be understood so much as absorbed.” He seems to be an advocate for mystery, arguing that we not attempt to impose a structure on the process of creating poems, because to do that is to imply a common purpose for poetry, which it eludes, because a poem’s purpose “…is not disclosure or storytelling or the telling of a daydream; nor is a poem a symptom. A poem is itself and is the act by which it is born. It is self-referential and is not necessarily preceded by any known order, except that of other poems.”

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Skating into form

I spent some time excavating my magazine basket, and came across a copy of The Writer’s Chronicle from December 2004. I must have picked it up at the Vancouver AWP conference. There was an interview in it with Annie Finch, talking about her shift from free verse to form, a transition she says took her 20 years to make.

“I wanted to be challenged more deeply as a poet, by a more profound kind of anguage resistance, and in the end I found only form could offer me that. I got tired of feeling that the content was overpowering the words themselves; I wanted more ‘opacity,’ to use Charles Bertstein’s term.”

She began using form while doing her MFA in Creative Writing, in spite of rather than because of the guidance she found there:

“…people kept saying, ‘this poem would be a lot better if you wrote it in free verse.’ But I was set on training myself to use form well, so I just kept on with it.”

She has several different strategies for choosing a form for a particular poem:

“When a line drifts into my head, I often recognize it as a certain meter or sense that it would be a good refrain line for a certain form, or a good chant line or part of a final couplet, that sense of where it might fit can be part of the sense it gives me. So, often the poem brings the structure with it… But sometimes it’s the opposite, especially with a form I am not very familiar with yet: a poem will bug me for years, and it just won’t be finished, until finally I hammer or coerce it, or let myself be coerced by it, into its right shape… And there’s a third way too. I am not one of those poets who turn up their noses at the idea of using a particular structure on purpose; the shape of some of my favorite poems came first. For example, when I wrote A Carol for Carolyn for Carolyn Kizer… I wanted to write a carol for obvious reason, and I wanted it to be in amphibrachs before I even started, because that was the hardest meter I knew and I wanted to write her something special.”

A pressing engagement to hunt Easter eggs yesterday, followed by a beautiful lamb dinner, meant I only had lunch to cope with, having been wallowing in blueberry muffins since breakfast. I was startled to find a fresh skate wing in my local grocery store, which got me thinking about the last time I’d had skate in black butter, which must have been about six years ago, at my only visit to Sheekey’s: a memorable meal — and not cheap. (We even got to do a little celebrity spotting, because Janet Street-Porter was dining there that night.) Skate is the perfect fish: delicate, easy to cook, and, for all intents, boneless. Even the recipe was easy to find. So to complicate life a little bit, and because my rosemary bushes are in full bloom and begging to be used, I also made a lemon risotto which I spiked with a handful of asparagus, just because it’s spring.

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