Archive for April, 2009
OK, what happened here? It seems I (likely in a sleep and food-induced stupor) saved last night’s post instead of actually publishing it. It’s nice having each day blur into the next, and to not really be expected to keep on top of things, but it means I generally don’t. Keep on top of things, that is. But I do have tanned feet with flip-flop lines, and am adapting nicely to island time; when we went into town (past a tree that was born in 1202) to the municipal building to pay something or other yesterday, it was refreshing to find it closed for lunch. I am spending my days without a cel phone or even much contact with clocks, save for the cast iron sun dial in the neighbour’s yard, that is as accurate as we need to be.
The week hasn’t been completely devoid of stresses, but some are good ones: I’ve been invited to take part in a very cool new project, something that I can’t share with anyone yet but puts me in the company of some of my very favourite food bloggers. Ones I’ve always aspired to be like if/when I grow up. I’ve been thrust into a group with the cool kids, and I’m half-expecting an email to the effect of “we’re sorry, we thought you were someone else”. So nerves coupled with contracts and phone calls from lawyers in LA have not really been in keeping with my goal of rest and relaxation, but I’m not complaining. W, who appears to have a raging case of three year old boy PMS, has not exactly been facilitating this goal either, particularly this afternoon when I had to half carry, half coax 55 pounds of wet, sandy, runny-nosed boy up and down 500+ stairs that wound through the rainforest from the beach back to the car. Who needs pilates or jazzercise? (Note to self: do more pilates. For real this time.)
But I did manage a nap yesterday. It was by far the most delicious thing I’ve had all week. And these past two days I’ve had some pretty delicious things.
My Mom was here for a week before we arrived. She told me the day I got here that she had what she considered to be the best meal of her life a few days before, at SoBo, and had already been back for seconds. It was a halibut dinner with mashed potatoes, roasted veg and some sort of memorable sauce… sounded fine, but I was far from convinced. So we went for dinner. (After my nap – my most heavenly day yet.) Both my Mom and Dad ordered the fish, so I couldn’t really, could I? I mean honestly, we can’t all have the same thing. So I ordered the special – a torn bread and roast chicken salad with pine nuts, Parmesan and goji berries, a smattering of baby spinach, champagne vinaigrette and an inky balsamic reduction. Fantastic would be an understatement.
When it was long gone they brought my appetizer – a shrimp and crab cake shaped sort of like a burger, and about the size of one, with slices of avocado and whole rock shrimp and piles of crab meat. It was good, but paled in comparison to the halibut. Honestly, this dinner was perfection on a plate; crispy-edged just-caught halibut over perfectly mashed potatoes, with roasted asparagus, red, purple and orange carrots and beets and wilted greens. But the sauce. I cannot adequately express the sauce, a deep, intense, burnt orange sauce that was at once familiar and elusive; when I asked what it was again, I was told it was fresh carrot juice and orange (not much, mind you), cooked down and then enriched with butter and cream. It was neither creamy nor buttery, but rich, complex and brilliantly intense. Just look at the colour of it! An orange-carrot sauce would never ever sell me, but this was pure genius. And it went perfectly with everything, from the fish to the greens.
For dessert, I had to have another butter tart. But I asked if I could photograph their strawberry-rhubarb pie; it was just too beautiful.
One Year Ago: Curried Shrimp Fried Rice
April 30 2009 | eating out | 21 Comments »
My Mom and I have concluded that these are, in fact, the Best Butter Tarts Ever, better even than my Grandma’s, and that’s saying a lot. (If she was around to actually make them her presence would trump these, even when eaten beside the ocean before going for a paddle in the kayak, but sadly she’s not.)
We finally made it over to SoBo in the late afternoon… we left W in the tub under the charge of my Dad and popped into town for a cup of fish chowder and a chicken burrito, thick with slabs of melting avocado (much better than guacamole would have been, I think) and big enough for the two of us to share.
The fish chowder was a relief – it’s the sort of thing I’ve been meaning to eat since arriving here – but it was far spicier than I recall it being last summer, and when my Mom pointed out the fact that I was wincing with every bite, I decided not to finish. Boo.
But the butter tart. Oh, the butter tart. The perfect degree of runniness inside, chewy-gooey around the edges, with raisins and a flaky all-butter crust. I’ll be back tomorrow morning when they open at 11 for more. And if I see Lisa, I may just implore her for the recipe.
Meanwhile, you can try my Grandma’s.
One Year Ago: Spaghetti Pie and Chocolate Dipped Cheesecake Lollipops
April 28 2009 | eating out | 16 Comments »
A clown taught my mom how to make bubbles. Who could possibly be a better authority on the subject? She can’t remember who he was, or at what event she had occasion to chat with him. But she can remember his instructions: 1 part Dawn liquid to 8 parts water, and a small spoonful of oil – canola or olive – to stabilize/elasticize the bubbles and incite a shimmery, swirling, gasoline sheen. About a tablespoon of oil when you’re using a cup of Dawn, he said. The use of Dawn is vital; other dish soaps aren’t nearly as bubble-inducing.
Far superior to dollar store bubble liquid (and cheaper, when you do the math); a small salsa jar produced hours’ worth of stretchy bubbles, the kind that are made by holding a large wand out beside you while running or twirling. (You can still get the wands at the dollar store.)
And still no SoBo. I’ve been paying particularly close attention to a high-maintenance, defiant three year old with gastrointestinal issues that has increased time spent in the tub (him) and doing laundry (me) and made me nervous about venturing too far out at the beach. He asked for spaghetti for dinner and so I complied; it was a good way to start chipping away at the surplus of veg we loaded up on in Nanaimo and don’t want to have to haul back in the car. So we ate spaghetti with onions, peppers, zucchini and crumbled up leftover hamburgers. Spaghetti! By the ocean! My Mom and I headed over to SoBo to pick up wedges of Key lime pie for dessert, but found it closed – it’s only open for lunch on Mondays and Tuesdays so we went to the Sugar Shack for ice cream cones instead. Strawberry (with sprinkles) for W, dark chocolate for Ma, mango sorbet for Pa, and Moose Tracks – vanilla with chunks of chocolate and peanut butter cups – for me.
One Year Ago: Spaghetti with Spinach
April 27 2009 | leftovers | 13 Comments »
I haven’t been fully awake since arriving in Tofino, but haven’t managed to sleep much either. I’ve been hanging on the edge of full consciousness, spaced out, feeling like I could curl up and sleep for two days. In this state I’ve had little interest in cooking despite the fresh air and open kitchen, and haven’t prepared anything beyond oatmeal for breakfast and toast with peanut butter. If my Mom wasn’t here, I’m sure I’d let myself live on eggs on toast and spoonfuls of peanut butter all week. I think I may have coming-home syndrome, something I’m not all too familiar with having spent the majority of my adult life in the same city as my parents, and as such not really ever having the opportunity to really come home to the house I grew up in to stay and sleep and be cooked for and taken care of, an experience I always envy when my friends go home for Thanksgiving or Christmas. When I walked in the door here I almost (very unexpectedly) burst into tears of relief, partially because it was just me and my Mom and Dad (and W, of course… nothing against Mike or my sisters, brother in law, nieces and nephews – it was a riot spending a week here last year with all 13 of us, but you know how that kind of “vacation” can be) and partly because although it’s a brand-new house, not yet finished, it smelled exactly like my grandparents’ house on the Detroit river in Windsor, something my Mom could not detect and I still can’t explain.
Today, after coffee and muffins at the Earth Day festivities in the park and ice cream cones in town, we spent hours at Chesterman Beach, digging channels in the sand for water to run between tide pools and open ocean, walking in the wind, climbing on rocks, and came home too tired to bother with anything more than what we could scrounge around the kitchen. My mom made bacon sandwiches spread with guacamole left over from dinner out before we arrived. And more toast with peanut butter.
But this evening we were invited to the neighbour’s living room for a partial dress rehearsal of Annie, Get Your Gun, which said neighbours, who are in their late eighties, are performing in the upcoming talent show in two weeks. They promised popcorn and beer, but we decided to doctor up a wedge of brie to bring along. With limited pantry stores my Mom spread the brie with marmalade and topped it with chopped walnuts, which we (OK, she) toasted in a skillet with a little butter, salt and pepper. We popped it into the oven while changing into something a little less slovenly, and it was quite phenomenal.
And now here it is after 11 (midnight in Calgary) and the whole house is asleep; I should be too, but there is the small matter of this blog, and part of me really wants to sneak outside and lie on the deck and look at the stars. Then again, there was a rather large chew mark in the garbage bin this morning, that I’m quite sure was not managed by squirrels.
Hey, I’m not really one for horoscopes, but I met Georgia Nicols in the green room at Vicki Gabereau years ago (remember the Vicki Gabereau Show?) and I just really liked her a lot. The January after we met she emailed me my horoscope for the year, and it was surprisingly accurate, and not in the vague way so many horoscopes are, and so I subscribed to her weekly email-out. I just got it. Want to hear what she has to say for me (Scorpio) this week?
Before I say anything, get more sleep. The Sun is as far away from your sign as it gets all year, and the Sun is your source of energy. Your tush is dragging! Pamper yourself and get more rest…
That Georgia is so smart. I think I may just start living by my horoscope.
One Year Ago: PB Banana Wrap and a Latte
April 26 2009 | sandwiches | 17 Comments »
I came to Tofino to hang. To spend time with W checking out tidepools and turning over rocks. To take a deep breath of green, walk on the beach and in the rainforest, read books and maybe even nap in the afternoon. Falling asleep late the night before we left, my brain flipped over 5 words like a smooth stone in my hand: read. walk. eat. sleep. visit. (W being the common denominator, of course.) I do have some assignments to work on, but only enough to occupy small chunks of time while he plays with his Grandma & Grandad and my attention to the laptop goes unnoticed.
But it appears that for a three year old attached to his dog and his dad, taking two airplanes and a car to get to a house that smells weird and has unfamiliar furniture, and is very far away from the Christmas lights strung around his bed, his stairs and his bathtub and the bird feeder out the kitchen window in his own backyard, is neither decompressing nor stress-relieving. It has put him seriously out of sorts.
After a particularly dramatic freak-out at the garden centre, he crashed hard and slept through dinner, leaving my Mom and Dad and I to pull together a fairly utilitarian meal. My mom made the burgers of my childhood, minus the oat bran: extra lean beef, shaped into patties straight up and broiled on the broiler pan until well done, served on poufy white kaisers from the Co-Op with ketchup. Steamed asparagus, naked, and greens with whatever veg could be scrounged from the fridge. (My Mom and I ditched half our buns halfway through dinner; the meat-bun ratio was way out of whack.)
When I was a kid, I liked to bake cakes. The One Egg Cake from The Joy of Cooking was my go-to recipe, and it may or may not have been the one I was making on the day I preheated the oven, then discovered a broiler pan full of bubbling beef grease when I went to slide my batter in. When I took the hot pan out I fumbled with the too-big, too-stiff oven mitts and didn’t get a good grasp of both top and bottom; in my haste I let go of one side and dumped boiling fat from my knee down my shin.
Perhaps that’s why I’ve never used a broiler pan to make burgers. Or maybe it’s because I’ve still not had a broiled burger I particularly liked.
We had store-bought angel food cake with (more) strawberries for dessert, trying to make a dent in the giant plastic clamshell from Superstore. The sun was just starting to settle when W stumbled into the room and wrapped himself around me the way a cat does when trying to escape something particularly fierce, working its way up your neck, across your face, and eventually winding up on the top of your head. Grandma made him eggs and toast and he released my head and climbed down, and ate it on the floor, like a cat. He may just enjoy being in Tofino after all.
One Year Ago: High Tea
April 25 2009 | leftovers | 13 Comments »
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