Dinner with Julie

Mama & Papa Burger

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 »

Coconut Shrimp, Fish & Chips and Strawberries

I apologize for the tardiness of my post; ran into some technical glitches last night, not the least of which involved me falling asleep in an extended attempt to get W to, then waking up in the middle of the night with my contacts fused to my eyeballs and my Mom asleep on the couch waiting for me to come back out to finish my post. I did not have the gumption at 2 am to figure out how to get my photos from my banged-up laptop onto my Dad’s computer, the only one that seems to be picking up a signal, and sporadically at that.

I’ll keep this short in an attempt to get it up while I have a connection, and at in reasonable time, considering we are on the absolute west coast Canada. It was an enormous relief to land on the island, and walk out of the Playskool-sized air terminal onto a dewy green lawn surrounded by trees overflowing with pink blossoms. We drove to Tofino snacking on toasted almonds and that lemony parsley hummus (which just keeps getting better and better) scooped up with chewy, grainy, seedy bread we picked up as soon as we got off the plane.

But the final stretch was a little too bumpy and up-and-down, especially when driving with my European Dad, and with age seems to come an increased sensitivity to carsickness, and so by the time I arrived and the ground stopped spinning I had lost my appetite for SoBo, which is generally first on my Tofino to-do list. Instead, when we went into town for some fresh fish to cook up for dinner, we got lured into Big Daddy’s Fish Fry, which was empty and waiting for its Friday night rush. A little disappointing to be honest, particularly considering the $36 price tag; the coconut shrimp were tasty but greasy, the fish smaller than usual, and the fries had the texture of wet paper towel. For dessert, we made an attempt at strawberry shortcake with chunks of raisin scone and fresh berries; I’d like to say they were the earliest fruit of a local farm, but really they were beautiful, watery and tasteless strawberries from California. Ah well. We’re in Tofino, which trumps everything else. The food can only get better from here.

April 25 2009 | leftovers | 58 Comments »