I’m drinking merlot rose and have just finished a bacon blue cheese burger that was a homage to perhaps the most memorable burger I’ve eaten in my life (more than once) in Hanoi, Vietnam.
(What, is anyone surprised that the Vietnamese – whose street food is often a multi-step complex process involving high level cooking techniques – make better North American style food than the North Americans?)
I decided to make the burger while in the grocery store. I had picked up a bottle of inexpensive rose (it’s a public holiday), and was craving a blue cheese burger but wasn’t sure the local burger restaurant would deliver exactly what I wanted. And I wanted to drink my rose while I was eating the burger and the shop had both very fresh rolls and decent blue cheese. In the shop, I also bought a limited edition lemon Kitkat (did you know that Kitkat is the only chocolate bar Aldi couldn’t reverse engineer and replicate? The wafers are too complicated, apparently). They also happened to have a respectable Samyang noodle selection and it’s been a solid year since having any spicy Samyang noodles so I was feeling Very Pleased with this whole shopping trip.
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I don’t know what it says about anything but my diet (and fridge) look very different from what I grew up with.
To my recollection, grocery shopping happened monthly – with a maximum top up every two weeks. Staples were shelf stable or freezable: Campbell’s soup tins, processed cheese slices, taco kits, tinned pasta sauce, creamed corn, frozen peas. I have no particular childhood memories of bread; a lot involving 4L buckets of ice cream. Cookies were something that came in rows in a package.
I assume that afternoons spent playing in the garden at the farm eating barely washed fruits and vegetable, warm from the sun, explain fending off scurvy and rickets.
Leaving, in my late teens, I wanted to try everything, as fast as possible.
I remember the first time I ate sushi – simple rolls sold once a week at my university bookstore, that I assume were made by a Japanese student making extra cash because it came on a single platter each week and there was nowhere else in the city to regularly get it, for $1 per piece. I learned how to make curry in a spice market where a man mixed a masala for me as I stood there and he explained to me the order in which you should cook the ingredients. I quickly found hummus, falafel, shwarma, and the luxury of baba ganoush. A kind restaurant owner taught me that truly good fresh pasta is enough with just a bit of fresh garlic and good olive oil. Eventually, I made friends who would lead me to the food they grew up with and I found myself stalking dim sum cart ladies (not literally, I mean, unless they have really fresh egg tarts), considering the merits of cooking pretty much everything over different types of fire, and eating raw minced beef on a roll with mustard somewhere in a desert.
There is still an eternity left of beautiful new food. I only learned about mangosteens in the last year, and it turns out I have a major affinity for durian after all.
Now my kitchen is a perpetual state of confused and happy. I have some leftover cabbage in my fridge and I can’t decide if I should ferment it or make some cheaters okanomiyaki (good luck finding the bonito flakes here, if you have them get in touch). I have a type of traditional cured salted fish that smells vaguely like fish food, but tastes like heaven, currently served in some Michelin starred restaurants here and in France (I like it thinly sliced and on heavily buttered toast); I was awkwardly excited to find it in a little general store one weekend. Condiments range from something Portugese-African, to a type of sweet hot pepper I’ve only seen here bottled by a little old lady along a highway, to German mustard and fish sauce and miso and pickled everything.
In some ways, I’m really grateful for how everything has ended up. Spending a lot of time on a farm as a kid (I have early memories of killing chickens, throwing bales and herding cattle, in case anyone wants to check rural credentials) connected me to where food comes from and probably made me less afraid to try new things. Life wasn’t meant to be served on faux-sterile styrofoam trays. Growing up in an age before the internet, and before real food globalization, made everything arguably more vivid later. If you start with a number of varieties of processed cheese, although processed cheese is a technically fascinating food, everything that follows is a kind of small ecstasy.
(Someone asked me once what they should eat in my country, years ago. The answer was terrible – donuts maybe? Pierogies? Those are appropriated from Eastern Europe! Sorry about that.)
There are some things that just aren’t done the same in most other places.
Marinara sauce, Domino’s style (i.e. sweet) and garlic breadsticks. Creamy jalapeno cheese anything. Peanut butter and chocolate. Thinner, crispy, smoked bacon. Lightly fried ring donuts with medium roast drip coffee. Fluffy pancakes with thinner syrups. Butter tarts and Nanaimo bars.
Today I made fresh jalapeno mac and cheese with crispy bacon and breadcrumbs on top, the proper kind with a roux and tempered egg, roughly based on the Pioneer Woman’s recipe. Smoked paprika to amplify the bacon, a bit of fresh German mustard instead of the powdered option.
So perfect it needed a note about it.
I spent my day off pubcrawling, specifically a fish and chips and Mid event, predominantly in the company of those who get a seniors discount. War horses telling battle stories, about a time when only common sense governed the pubs and taverns.
They tell me about the “mad postie” who took his chainsaw to the supporting column out front, threatening to cut down the pub. About the owner who would refuse to open after so many days on a bender, having a party for one in the cellar, eventually drawn out by police in search of beer. They talk about women from thirty years ago, and three generations of bar patronage.
We are home before dusk, tipsy on all sides, and I can’t help feeling I need to reread Bill Bryson and compare notes.
Probably the second straight week of rain. We meet it with a food offensive; red wine beef stew, yeasty bread, mushroom leek risotto, trays of muffins, a curry chutney cassarole. The groundwater is full, all the dry rivers bubble after years of drought. We put on our wetsuits and float down the brown sand river on an inner tube. We give in and buy a small heater after the regular temperature in our house dips to being able to see our breath mid-day every day. A big storm two nights ago makes every roof in town leak, we wake up to a steady drip on the bed, move the bed over, go back to sleep. The giant aloes and trees are flush, the birds don’t seem to mind the rain and endless species of all sizes and colours parade across the lawn taking worms without fear. Laundry is infinitely delayed.
HAVING STUFF and NOT
I pretty much have the same amount of stuff I showed up with. I feel compelled to list new stuff which may be annoying so just skip ahead.
Acquisitions: underwear (result of laundry losses, more lost since), long sweater (made here in women empowerment project, birthday cash), skirt (made North, same story), dress (gift), beach bag (gift), two tank tops (one a gift), pair of shorts, handbag, two scarves (gifts), two bracelets (one a gift), flipflops<.
Other than this, I bought a small hairdryer, a brush, two pillows, a wireless modem, and a tiny tent. Also, a small stack of books, mostly used, swapped in and out before I found the library. Everything but the hairbrush and one book will be eventually disposed of.
The stuff remaining feels like the right amount, like life properly edited. These are the things and they are enough, like the accessories collection that comes with a doll. Here is her mug and her towel and her shoes and her hats. And she likes them! Everything! Maybe that’s it – due to the editing, everything I own makes me feel good. Instead of thirty shirts of which five fit well, two shirts that fit very well.
But the human urge to get and own and have stuff doesn’t really subside in the face of this satisfaction. Right. Mine manifests in two ways. One sort of healthy, one sort of bizarre.
The healthy is in the kitchen. Rarely making the same thing twice, compulsively using up and acquiring completely new flavours. Electronic information means nothing available is beyond use, no technique cannot be cross referenced, no ingredient any longer intimidating. There are cheap and cheerful options, mostly in the spice aisle and produce section, and more substantial investment pieces like good cuts of meat and bottles of oil. All of this consumption is, in turn, consumed, and there is room for something new. I easily get the same amount of satisfaction buying interesting groceries as I do buying clothes.
The more bizarre is facilitated by the fact that magazines here more often than not come with free products, generously sized. In the past ten months: press on nails, sunglasses, deoderant, a full tube of whitening toothpaste, makeup remover wipes, gum, eyeliner, coffee, nail polish, a skipping rope, various department store moisturizers, lip balm, full tubes of mascara, serums, and dayplanners. More than one sample is not unknown.
For however much my conspicuous consumption has decreased in the past few years, I am obsessed with Stuff Free in Magazines. This mostly makes no sense. My hypersensitive skin hates the new moisturizers and most cosmetics either don’t work for me or I am too lazy to bother. I think I have spent about ten minutes skipping and I give the coffee samples to LG because they all contain powdered milk.
But perversely I love the tiny bottle of nailpolish the same colour as in the Prada ads, the untested mascara variants, the small vials and potions. The thrill of trying something new, invariably mostly fragrance and promises, without the remorseful purchase hangover and bottle glut.
And, the thing is, if I do like something, a generous sample size is usually enough. I like small packaging, I like portability, and I am always oddly satisfied to empty a package of its product rather than find it two years later still three quarters full.
I recognize that this sample collecting and hoarding behavior is symptomatic of both a consumption oriented culture and probably the innate human desire to gather things. It is not environmentally friendly and most of what is acquired is probably full of questionable chemicals and worse science. I know that I feel like a goon in lip gloss. I know that it means the tiger is not tamed and the model of careful material completeness described above stands in opposition to my desire for whatever Decelor is shilling. I read the hardline stuff out there advocating for dropping all of the consumer culture but I can’t help but wonder if some of us aren’t wired for that, if some of us don’t inevitably get bored, if those people don’t somehow get pleasure from some small thing and what their small thing is.
I think eventually I will get bored and get a new small thing.
Sometimes I read things where people say they either don’t cook or don’t like to cook and even though I know people are different from one another it sort of baffles. I get not being motivated to cook when it’s freezing and you have no groceries/you live alone/you work too much and the idea of not being able to eat as soon as you get home or the dishes that will result from preparing a meal are deflating. But… to never see something and wonder if you could make it? To never look at beautiful ingredients and imagine how they would look and taste combined? Can. Not. Process.
Martha Stewart was on Oprah a couple of weeks ago. She’s not well known here, I’m not sure the show ever aired. She looks, well, older than she did ten years ago when I used to watch her between high school classes. I tried to explain to LG the impact Martha Stewart had on my life, her North American empire. It’s been years since reading a copy of her magazine or seeing the show, but Martha Stewart was responsible for introducing me to the idea that food preparation was just a series of learnable, simple techniques and a little creativity. The woman instructed on eggs and pastry, and introduced me to the idea of herbs and spices. Not the fifteen-year-old dried out bottles of flavorless dust that my English heritage had bestowed upon me, standing guard upstairs in the cupboards, but living flavours. Martha is not the be all end all, I no longer feel a need to own a library of her instructions, but she was very important in developing my love for food in all ways.
Continue reading
Recent culinary adventures. It’s a cliche, but recently, sushi rolls. A mild coconut-pumpkin-chicken curry. Fresh mussles pulled from the rocks at low tide, cooked in a white wine lemon sauce, on top of some caper-butter spaghetti. Fresh salsa laced with baby coriander grown in the front yard. Chili con soya faux-carne and spaghetti bolognaise. Poached eggs and herb butter toast for all! A recent favorite is soy-chai quick oatmeal (oats cooked in soymilk with a cardamom pod and cinnamon, warming the milk with the spices in gently before adding the oats). A variation: cardamom, cinnamon, a little bit of late arriving dark chocolate with some chili flakes. Salads involving figs, preserved green figs being the best.
The price of groceries here allows a new level of expirimentation that is hard to justify at home, an average dinner for two with real protien comes in at about $1.50 to $2.50 per person, the most exotic at $3.50. We cook over an open fire about once a week, maybe Friday night.
Spices here are generally inexpensive and accessible, but for whatever reason garlic is very expensive and sub par. Similarly, tomatos are inexpensive but lacking in variety and often in flavor.
There is a secret ban going on against lunch meats, due to general gross chemicals and being overpriced. Okay, German salami (especially wild game salami) remains welcome at any time, but black forest ham and processed turkey breast have been summarily dismissed. There is no need to eat freaky-deaky preserved meats. I know I need to drink more wine while here, enjoy it, but it has been hard to shake the wine snob aversion that developed during college. Talking about, reading about, thinking too much about a bottle of old grapes… eh. But starting at a couple of dollars per bottle, it seems tragic to not test out stuff that also gets exported so when I find myself somewhere else paying far more I can pick out something worth the taxes that will at least be palatable.
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Since leaving, I have had a disproportionate number of people say things like “it’s great you are following your heart!” or something along those lines. This always feels sort of odd, maybe because it gives an outside perspective on expat life that is easy to forget about. First, life here does not feel overly foreign to me, for whatever reason. I get considerably more culture shock when I visit the United States than I do coming here; though this wasn’t always the case, it was a reality by the time I came back this time. Second, living here wasn’t exactly some lifelong dream or fantasy, it was just something I decided to do, the same way someone else moves from one big city to another. What I consider a ‘normal’ move, though, is more like 20,000 km than 500 km these days, I guess. I decided to do this the same way I’ve decided to do everything else in my life, from picking my second degree to picking my university, it just seemed like an attractive obvious opportunity… so I took it. Third, living abroad for a few years is almost a rite of passage for someone my age from a similar socio-economic background here; emigrating completely is another popular standard. A large number of young people here also date, or end up married to, foreigners. It’s how we do.
Anyways, it should be stated, for the record: I did not hop off the plane, wind rustling my scarf, declaring a new era had arrived.
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[At the moment, in limited internet capacities, loving The Hairpin. Reading it is like a flashback to the dawn of the internet when I realized that there were other sarcastic, funny, feminist women out there just waiting to be found if I could make it out of the backwoods. The era before writing was generated on a schedule, for ad revenue, but was instead painstakingly html’d and put out there because people felt like they had something they couldn’t not say. Double negative, imperative. It also reminds me that one of the first things I will do if I wind up living in a big city again is to connect with the feminist community because it’s full of smart funny chicks.]
I can actually feel how good that last layover may be, already. Imagine it. Taste it.
I’ll leave New York at 11 pm and try to sleep for most of the 13 hours. There will be a couple hours layover time before the next 11 1/2 hour leg. Finally, familiar territory. Morning coffee at a familiar chain, browsing my favorite newsstand, waiting a few hours for a short commuter flight that will take me to L.G. and the only airport that always feels like I’m coming home.
NYC is mostly a visit of convenience. It began as a one night layover waiting for shoulder season and turned into a family holiday. I’m more than content to shuttle between Broadway shows and Central Park with my parents, especially when I’ll be otherwise homeless and can crash in their conveniently located hotel room that will be much nicer than whatever budget dorm I was going to suss out. My mom is excited and planning.
For my last trip home, Canada Day Weekend, I’m going by train. My days of North American bus trips over three hours may be done. It’s been a minute since a good train trip and the idea of rolling along these fields as a sort of goodbye, for awhile, is pleasing.
All of this goes a long way towards breaking up the monotony. Being a student for so long, I’m best at four months and done by eight.
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The lentils with bacon were outstanding. I ended up dumping the lentils into some miso onion soup I’d made yesterday for a hard, fast boil. Meanwhile, I started to fry the bacon. When it began to turn clear, I added roughly sliced carrots and more onions, cooking until the onions were clear. In retrospect, there could have been more carrots and – sacrément! – less bacon (the French inflection being in honor of the French lentils themselves and the great service done to elevate the lentil). I was working with about 100 grams to two cups of lentils and a cup of carrots and onions, maybe a third of a cup of white miso.
Anyways, when the bacon and vegetables were ready, I added them to the watered down onion soup lentil mixture and simmered the whole thing for just over an hour. All the liquid was just gone when I checked and the bacon (well, the fat mostly) made the lentils soft and delicious. It’s actually better cooled, the whole thing is the stuff of memories and was incredibly easy.
Miso and onions (fry in a little oil and then deglaze the pot bottom with water or wine) by far make the best “stock”. I’m less satisfied with the white miso than the thick dark brown stuff I’d had my hands on last summer, but the same effect is possible. The key seems to be taste testing and not adding too much or too little – mostly because it’s salty stuff. I like to get the miso mixing into the onions before deglazing but I’m not really sure it makes a difference. I’ve had a lot of carnivorous guys declare this “the best soup I’ve ever had.”
Yesterday, portabellas were ridiculously on sale, I think they must have overstocked. I had a grilled portabella panini last night (with sundried tomatos, two year Quebec cheddar, a running favorite right now for value/flavor, and olive tapenade I’m trying to use up now that I’m cream cheese free). I clearly need to work on my mushrooms, as it was edible but not satisfying. I suspect the remaining portabellas are destined for a little pasta this week as I take another run at mushrooms.
Discovered one of the groceries is stocking really good strawberry gelato tubes. It’s been surprisingly easy to let ice cream go, but the craving for something rich and frozen remains. The little bit of lemon juice make these a current favorite, followed by the cupcakes down the street with their slightly salty buttercream icing…
Underthecurrent 