Chilly spring days.
The damp seeps greyly into your bones and the sky wants desperately to drizzle.
The time has come for soup—for ginger’s comfortable warmth, the sweet-familiar smoothness of carrots, and the salty bite of miso. O heavens, how I love these cloudy days!
Thirteen Ways of Looking at Kale
(With apologies to Wallace Stevens. And also to Stephanie, who once wrote a similar ode to spinach.)
I
Among twenty bustling market stands
The only worthwhile thing
Was a bunch of kale.
II
I am of two minds
Like a fridge
In which there are two bunches of kale.
III
The kale dances in delicate ribbons,
Intimate part of dinnertime.
IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and kale
Are whole.
V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of waiting
Or the beauty of fulfillment,
The kale on my fork
Or just after.
VI
Eagerness fills empty bellies
with painful delight.
The promise of the kale
haunts us, now and ever.
The mood
Traces the leaves
Indelibly edible.
VII
O children of Quebec,
Why do you imagine rich poutine?
Do you not see how the kale
Joys the stomachs
Of the cooks about you?
VIII
I know noble flavors
And lucid, inescapable tastes;
But I know, too,
That kale is involved
In all I eat.
IX
When the last leaf disappeared,
It left a space
For sadness on my plate.
X
At the sight of kale
Growing in green rows,
Even the bawds of candy bars
Would sing its praises.
XI
She rode through Lincoln
on an old tractor.
Once, frenzy seized her
And she mistook
The leaves of mustard plants
For kale.
XII
Summer is coming.
The kale must be growing.
XIII
It was lunchtime all afternoon.
There was kale
And it was beautifully fresh.
It sat lightly
In our thankful bellies.
Imagine a morning like this one.
The air is cool, the sky stretches impossibly high above in lovely blueness. There are birds singing, and Beethoven is coming from somewhere. Even though it’s still early, there are children laughing in the park, their mothers sitting quietly, soaking in the sun.
The breeze smells of spring, of the crabapple blossoms that have turned the neighbourhood into a fairyland. You sit reading in the snowstorm of petals, wishing for words to describe their perfect scent. The neighbour’s puppies interrupt your musings as they leap onto your lap, smothering you in kisses and silky fur.
Can you imagine anything more beautiful than spring?
“You’ll have to teach me to bake gluten free.”
My younger sister is the unchallenged baking genius of the family, at least when it comes to desserts. She’s received multiple marriage proposals for her molasses cookies, and can give advice on piping. Piping. That is, in my books, the height of baking sophistication.
So when she asked me to teach her some gluten-free recipes for us to share this summer—we’ll be neighbours for most of it, something I am looking forward to very much—I was excited, but also a little intimidated. After all, I’m only just learning the ropes myself. Gluten-free baking often seems like alchemy—four or five different kinds of flours, mysterious substances like psyllium husk or pectin, substitutions left, right, and centre. I’ve had some successes (most recently pizza dough, which will appear soon!) and some horrific failures. My Dutch Boterkoek for Easter Sunday was both distastefully greasy and so crumbly that you had to eat it with a spoon rather than a fork.
With the prospect of sharing my baking on a more regular basis, I am feeling all the more inspired to explore, to perfect my alchemy as far as possible.
In the spirit of experimentation, I wandered far from the recipe in this experimental cake, baked for no particular occasion. Perhaps my hundredth post can provide sufficient excuse? Or reading Lucan? Or simply the fact that it is spring?
On the other hand, chocolate needs no excuse.
Spring has come late to Montreal this year.
Less than two weeks ago, I could look out my window and see flurries of snow. Not long before that, a blizzard erased all the dirt and grime of spring snow-melt, painting the mountain a brilliant, blinding white.
But now it is indisputably spring, and well worth the wait.
As the daffodils, tulips, snowdrops, blue-eyed grass burst into a riot of colour, as the trees turn fuzzy, and the birds remember how to sing, it feels as though all the beginnings and endings are happening at once. Yesterday I took the last exam of my undergraduate degree. Time for rest, change, transitions. This time next year, I will be thousands of miles away from the trees I see blooming outside my window today. This time next year I will not be walking down Sherbrooke with a cake in one hand and a daffodil in the other, thanking a friendly panhandler who has exclaimed, “C’est belle, ta fleur!” This time next year I will not be exclaiming over asparagus at the Atwater Market.
Whatever wonders the next turn of the seasons will bring, for now, I am enjoying the wonders right in front of my nose.
O, elles sont belles, les fleurs.
C’est belle, la vie.
O world, I cannot hold thee close enough!
Breakfast is a strange beast, sometimes.
On hurried mornings I used to compose variations on toast. Toast, almond butter, and banana. Toast and jam with yogurt. Toast with eggs—poached, scrambled, fried. Toast with avocado and soy sauce. Once, to my roommates’ collective horror, sardines and pickled carrots on toast.
Now that toast is off the menu, I’ve tended, boringly, towards oatmeal. Imagine, then, the breakfast-time panic, when, in the midst of exams, the grocery story quite suddenly runs out of gluten-free oats. The horror! One cannot simply skip breakfast, or exist on a diet of omelets and naught else.
And so, strangely and perhaps fortunately, I have been forced, in the rush of morning exams and last-minute papers, to take a little more time over breakfast.
Here are a few of my discoveries, one sweet, one savoury. Enjoy them slowly, while trying not to think about how much of your thesis remains to be written.
A sunrise, a risen Son. The first crocuses of spring outside my door. How can I keep from singing, shouting, dancing?
I danced in the morning
When the world was begun,
And I danced in the moon
And the stars and the sun,
And I came down from heaven
And I danced on the earth,
At Bethlehem
I had my birth.
Dance, then, wherever you may be,
I am the Lord of the Dance, said he,
And I’ll lead you all, wherever you may be,
And I’ll lead you all in the Dance, said he.
I danced for the scribe
And the pharisee,
But they would not dance
And they wouldn’t follow me.
I danced for the fishermen,
For James and John -
They came with me
And the Dance went on.
Dance, then, wherever you may be,
I am the Lord of the Dance, said he,
And I’ll lead you all, wherever you may be,
And I’ll lead you all in the Dance, said he.
I danced on the Sabbath
And I cured the lame;
The holy people
Said it was a shame.
They whipped and they stripped
And they hung me on high,
And they left me there
On a Cross to die.
Dance, then, wherever you may be,
I am the Lord of the Dance, said he,
And I’ll lead you all, wherever you may be,
And I’ll lead you all in the Dance, said he.
I danced on a Friday
When the sky turned black -
It’s hard to dance
With the devil on your back.
They buried my body
And they thought I’d gone,
But I am the Dance,
And I still go on.
Dance, then, wherever you may be,
I am the Lord of the Dance, said he,
And I’ll lead you all, wherever you may be,
And I’ll lead you all in the Dance, said he.
They cut me down
And I leapt up high;
I am the life
That’ll never, never die;
I’ll live in you
If you’ll live in me -
I am the Lord
Of the Dance, said he.
Dance, then, wherever you may be,
I am the Lord of the Dance, said he,
And I’ll lead you all, wherever you may be,
And I’ll lead you all in the Dance, said he.
—Sydney Carter (1963)
Two months have passed since I last cooked with a spoon in one hand and a camera in the other.
It seems far, far longer.
These past two months have been the most intense I have ever passed through. Life has become so concentrated that days, though they fly by at breakneck speed, contain enough information, experience, joy, for several weeks of normal life. Is life ever normal? Does it keep intensifying?
But now I am back. At least for a heartbeat, I am finished with late-night rehearsals, early-morning flights to all corners of the continent, days spent running from pillar to post. I am back to the ordinary insanity of schoolwork, exploring my beautiful city, making messes in the kitchen. Back to the homey noises of my roommates moving around the house, the front door slamming, the neighbour’s dog barking. Back to writing, back to spring, back to singing down the streets on the way to school instead of rushing on the metro.
What better time to get back to bread?
Aside from one unfortunate gluten-free brick purchased in a moment of weakness, I have not tasted bread since my last bagel in August of last year. I’ve announced many times, “tomorrow I am going to try making bread,” but nothing has ever come of it until now. Oh, heavens. That first bite was like a moment earlier this month when I walked out of the airport in San Francisco and smelled the eucalyptus-filled breeze for the first time in the better part of a decade—I hadn’t realized how achingly I missed it until it was back.
Life rule #1: when your life feels hectic, make sure you have good snacks on hand.
Life rule #2: when your life feels hectic, take time each day to read poetry. Yeats is on my mind this week:
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee;
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
These are the days you pull round your shoulders like a quilt, familiar and warm. Time for nourishment, and inspiration.
