You go through life with lots of moments that change the course of things... You know what I mean, you dawdle a little too long at the mirror and miss the train that breaks down or you make the extra effort to be on time, and the car breaks down.
Despite my gluttony of sweets and unashamed love of baking and creating new confections I've always managed to stay on the good side of things, health wise. Yeah, there's extra pounds, but you can never trust a skinny cook I always say.
So it was more than just a little overdue perhaps when reviewing recent blood results to have the good Doctor ask, "Oh dear. Are you diabetic? Your readings are nearly three times normal!"
But there is hope behind this reading. The test results also indicated that my blood had clotted at the time of the taking, so that may also have skewed things, therefore was up bright and early to visit my favorite vampire this morning to take repeats...
Feeling (not unjustifiably) a little like a paper target and the whistle of the bullet is closing in... will let you know in a couple days!
Tuesday, 22 March 2011
Sunday, 20 March 2011
PBS changed my life
I know how fortunate I've been through life. I've learned through bitter lesson why not to take anything in life for granted. And this sense of gratitude fills all the chambers of my heart. Even the place where my dream kitchen lives.
I learned to cook watching PBS. It's the american Public Broadcast System where independant ideas are brought without agenda or corporate influence - the poorer cousin to the BBC if you will as there isn't a compulsatory fee for having PBS, but there are many, MANY telethons and appeals on a yearly basis to beg, wheddle, guilt you into giving and provide ongoing financial support in exchange for the pleasure of their programming, broadcast without any commercials. It's the refuge of classics such as Masterpiece Theatre, Colin Firth's Pride and Prejudice, Sesame Street, This Old House (anyone else remember Bob Vila?), Justin Wilson - the frankly scary backwoods cook who could reel yarns bigger than the trout he was "cooking cajun". Nova, a science program which was much more accessable and enjoyable than what most science teachers could offer.
But for me, there were few like the incomparable Julia Child. Through her I learned it was part of the process that you could make mistakes and still have a lovely meal. Her sense of fun and the unashamed way she loved food inspired me to be adventurous and let myself learn how to do things by trial and error.
My husband Tony thrilled me by finding Julia's The French Chef on DVD and giving them to me as a present. It's fun to re-live the golden days of when her programmes came into my Saturday afternoons when I would spend the day in the temple of my mother's kitchen. I was glued to those b&w images, watching Julia's hands flying over a chopping board. The suppleness of her wrists folding meringues through batter. The power in her shoulders as she hoisted platters laden with a bounty of creations you just knew smelled the way you could imagine all of Paris smelled in the early mornings... butter and sugar and cinnamon and love.
So here I am, still devoted and with the help of modern technology, still watching and learning from Julia on my saturday afternoons a lot of miles removed and many years later. I've found there are still things I'd either missed or wasn't ready to take in on her shows. But this could also be because as the years go by, and the tasting dishes from around the world pile up, I realize there is so much more I do not know about food and the world than what I have already achieved - and my how exciting it is to look forward to meeting the challenge in getting to know them all!
Bring on the lemongrass and galangal root, look out Thailand - here I come!
I learned to cook watching PBS. It's the american Public Broadcast System where independant ideas are brought without agenda or corporate influence - the poorer cousin to the BBC if you will as there isn't a compulsatory fee for having PBS, but there are many, MANY telethons and appeals on a yearly basis to beg, wheddle, guilt you into giving and provide ongoing financial support in exchange for the pleasure of their programming, broadcast without any commercials. It's the refuge of classics such as Masterpiece Theatre, Colin Firth's Pride and Prejudice, Sesame Street, This Old House (anyone else remember Bob Vila?), Justin Wilson - the frankly scary backwoods cook who could reel yarns bigger than the trout he was "cooking cajun". Nova, a science program which was much more accessable and enjoyable than what most science teachers could offer.
But for me, there were few like the incomparable Julia Child. Through her I learned it was part of the process that you could make mistakes and still have a lovely meal. Her sense of fun and the unashamed way she loved food inspired me to be adventurous and let myself learn how to do things by trial and error.
My husband Tony thrilled me by finding Julia's The French Chef on DVD and giving them to me as a present. It's fun to re-live the golden days of when her programmes came into my Saturday afternoons when I would spend the day in the temple of my mother's kitchen. I was glued to those b&w images, watching Julia's hands flying over a chopping board. The suppleness of her wrists folding meringues through batter. The power in her shoulders as she hoisted platters laden with a bounty of creations you just knew smelled the way you could imagine all of Paris smelled in the early mornings... butter and sugar and cinnamon and love.
So here I am, still devoted and with the help of modern technology, still watching and learning from Julia on my saturday afternoons a lot of miles removed and many years later. I've found there are still things I'd either missed or wasn't ready to take in on her shows. But this could also be because as the years go by, and the tasting dishes from around the world pile up, I realize there is so much more I do not know about food and the world than what I have already achieved - and my how exciting it is to look forward to meeting the challenge in getting to know them all!
Bring on the lemongrass and galangal root, look out Thailand - here I come!
Saturday, 19 March 2011
Do you remember?
Eating green peas in an avocado kitchen..
It's like a silent film reel, looping only a few seconds but I know it's my first real memory. I'm sitting on a chair pulled up to the kitchen table, my chin just about level. There's an over sized cartoon-like child's spoon in my right hand. And I am watching intensely the wobbly peas heading towards my mouth. To the left, at the head of the table is my foster father. He's stripped off what was probably a blue collar shirt and is enjoying the meal in work trousers and a clean white vest. Just a little blip and his head is thrown back with a silent whoop of laughter. His teeth strong and straight and as white as his undershirt.
I don't know who he was or anyone else around the table. I know there were others, it was a table for six. What made him laugh, what made this memory stay with me over any others one can never be sure. I just know it's me, my first self-aware moment, eating peas. In an avocado coloured kitchen.
I was born in one place, grew up in the "New World" and ironically now love in the "Old World", several time zones removed from where I started. And at each place the memories I have seem to always come back to food. What takes me to my birth place? Coffee Crisp candy bars and little raisin butter tarts from Tim Hortons.
My growing years? Fresh made sweet italian sausages, unctuous mile-high slices of fresh made cream pie from any real diner, meatloaf with ketchup and mashed potatoes, fudgesicles, Bryer's ice cream (any flavour!), waiting in line out to the parking lot during lent for a fish fry from Davidson's - where it comes to you hanging off both ends of the platter.
In the here and now? Thai Chili Chicken in peanut sauce, roast joints of beast with amazing yorkshire puddings the size of a fist, brilliantly spiced and layered flavours of a true Indian Byrani, the passion of Antonio Carluccio and his love of Italian flavours found in every plate of his food, the buttery sugary crunch of a warm Welsh cake in the kitchen of my beloved in-laws in Merthyr Tydfil. And there are hundreds more for all stages of my life I could tell you about. In depth. With step by step instructions. And photo's probably...
I don't know if everyone has this strong of an ability to experience taste-memories out of nowhere. I get the tickle of a flavour or an aroma and I'm instantly transported to a place or time from nowhere. Not just the flavours get me, but I can be anywhere and suddenly I'm cooking something. It's time to whip up a creamy cheese souffle or the perfect mushroom risotto - AND SUDDENLY, I'M DOING IT. Step by step. In my head.
It isn't right really, is it?
But there you go, and so, if you need a tip or a recipe or a flavour profile, I'm your gal. Not only can I answer questions, give menu suggestions and walk you through step by step, but I can introduce you to any number of cuisines to open your horizons and widen your repertoire and relationship with the wonderful world of food!
It's like a silent film reel, looping only a few seconds but I know it's my first real memory. I'm sitting on a chair pulled up to the kitchen table, my chin just about level. There's an over sized cartoon-like child's spoon in my right hand. And I am watching intensely the wobbly peas heading towards my mouth. To the left, at the head of the table is my foster father. He's stripped off what was probably a blue collar shirt and is enjoying the meal in work trousers and a clean white vest. Just a little blip and his head is thrown back with a silent whoop of laughter. His teeth strong and straight and as white as his undershirt.
I don't know who he was or anyone else around the table. I know there were others, it was a table for six. What made him laugh, what made this memory stay with me over any others one can never be sure. I just know it's me, my first self-aware moment, eating peas. In an avocado coloured kitchen.
I was born in one place, grew up in the "New World" and ironically now love in the "Old World", several time zones removed from where I started. And at each place the memories I have seem to always come back to food. What takes me to my birth place? Coffee Crisp candy bars and little raisin butter tarts from Tim Hortons.
My growing years? Fresh made sweet italian sausages, unctuous mile-high slices of fresh made cream pie from any real diner, meatloaf with ketchup and mashed potatoes, fudgesicles, Bryer's ice cream (any flavour!), waiting in line out to the parking lot during lent for a fish fry from Davidson's - where it comes to you hanging off both ends of the platter.
In the here and now? Thai Chili Chicken in peanut sauce, roast joints of beast with amazing yorkshire puddings the size of a fist, brilliantly spiced and layered flavours of a true Indian Byrani, the passion of Antonio Carluccio and his love of Italian flavours found in every plate of his food, the buttery sugary crunch of a warm Welsh cake in the kitchen of my beloved in-laws in Merthyr Tydfil. And there are hundreds more for all stages of my life I could tell you about. In depth. With step by step instructions. And photo's probably...
I don't know if everyone has this strong of an ability to experience taste-memories out of nowhere. I get the tickle of a flavour or an aroma and I'm instantly transported to a place or time from nowhere. Not just the flavours get me, but I can be anywhere and suddenly I'm cooking something. It's time to whip up a creamy cheese souffle or the perfect mushroom risotto - AND SUDDENLY, I'M DOING IT. Step by step. In my head.
It isn't right really, is it?
But there you go, and so, if you need a tip or a recipe or a flavour profile, I'm your gal. Not only can I answer questions, give menu suggestions and walk you through step by step, but I can introduce you to any number of cuisines to open your horizons and widen your repertoire and relationship with the wonderful world of food!
Sunday, 27 February 2011
Beginnings of a Beautiful Friendship
I wasn't always this person. I was the typical teenager; unaware, uninspired and unable to even cook my way through my mother's leftovers. Things change. Lives change and we grow up and if we're really, REALLY lucky, we get to slip out from under a blanket of ignorance into the wider bigger world that exists beyond childhood's doorstep, beyond hometown borders. That's what happened to me. But not in the way you might think... My love of cooking all started when my brother "borrowed" my bike.
You see, I've always been a saver. All the way back to age five and my first pair of Buster Brown mary-jane shoes. There was a beautiful gold plastic savings egg filled with penny candy that was a promotional aphrodisiac for children to beg, whine and otherwise erode parental resistance to buying them something - surprisingly, knowing my mother, it worked!
So there I was, saving pennies and dimes and eventually the occasional bits of paper gained at birthdays and holidays. As soon as I was able to read, my mother took me to the Marine Midland Bank so I could open my first savings account. Into the bank would go the money until eventually I'd managed to hoard an astronomical hundred plus dollars!
When I reached teenhood I realized the importance of replacing the "banana" bike of my childhood with something sensible to use for my daily "commute" between home, school and my after-school job cleaning at the bakery in our local grocery store. And given my lifetime of hoarding I could easily afford something quality like one of those new and expensive 10 speed bikes everyone was talking about.
It marked a watershed moment in my personal history as it, A) was my first major purchase [being it cost a cool hundred and twenty bucks or £53.44 - hey that was a lot of money in those days!] and B) it was the first time our family was shopping at a newly-built, but strangely named place called WAL-MART!
Now I have an older brother who was also in his teens. His talent was legend in that he crashed every used junker car my folks bought him, therefore he was always on the lookout for the next big thing in transportation and - having crashed his newest used junker car just the night before - he went straight to our mum, whining that he needed my bike to get to work (all of a whopping half-mile or so). It was a short, but heated, exchange. Me handing over the keys to the bike-lock with a stern warning about how HE would would be responsible to replace it should anything happen to it. Needless to say, I never saw my bike again...
It's really a wonder he didn't kill me that next day, given how hungover he must have been and how loud my reaction was to not find my bike. The folks claimed the loss on their homeowners insurance, which covered half of the value of the bike - and it was an uphill battle to get the rest.
I got told off for demanding he give me the balance. I'm guessing my mom scrapped up the remaining amount and gave it to him to give to me, possibly just to shut me up (I did sort of want to be a Lawyer when I was younger, all that arguing and quoting facts and asserting my rights to recovery of lost property may, I'm realizing, have been at the root of it... hmmm).
So now, with a fist-ful of money and the seasons changed to winter, (it took a lot of whining to get his half) my priorities had shifted. When next we visited WAL-MART there were a collection of lovely newly downsized "portable" televisions available. And so I decided to treat myself to a 13" b&w TV (colour was far too expensive) to enjoy in my bedroom, thereby never having to sacrifice being able to watch programs such as The Patty Duke Show or The Munsters with so unappreciative an audience as my folks who insisted Bonanza and C.H.I.P.S were far better entertaiment.
But this is where things begin to make sense because it was in this time that I found PBS or the Public Broadcasting System. And it's here that I began seeing programmes that tapped into a vein of facination with all things hands-on like DIY in This Old House - I can, to this day, tile any bathroom in the world given the number of times I watched the experts do it! And I can throw mud with the best of them; mud being the skim coat you apply to newly nailed up wall-board to cover joints and nail holes and create perfect corners for smooth walls to which you would plaster, wall-paper or paint over.
And most special to me was a lady there in the PBS wilderness who was loud and big and beautifully sensible and creative and passionate and good, I mean really GOOD, at teaching people to be more adventurous and creative in the kitchen... and so began a tender and precious friendship with all things food related.
I found my cookery goddess of all times, Mrs Julia Child - all because I was made to lend my bike to my reckless brother... See, it's true - sometimes when one garage door closes, it truly can open a window into a whole new world that stays with you for a lifetime!
You see, I've always been a saver. All the way back to age five and my first pair of Buster Brown mary-jane shoes. There was a beautiful gold plastic savings egg filled with penny candy that was a promotional aphrodisiac for children to beg, whine and otherwise erode parental resistance to buying them something - surprisingly, knowing my mother, it worked!
So there I was, saving pennies and dimes and eventually the occasional bits of paper gained at birthdays and holidays. As soon as I was able to read, my mother took me to the Marine Midland Bank so I could open my first savings account. Into the bank would go the money until eventually I'd managed to hoard an astronomical hundred plus dollars!
When I reached teenhood I realized the importance of replacing the "banana" bike of my childhood with something sensible to use for my daily "commute" between home, school and my after-school job cleaning at the bakery in our local grocery store. And given my lifetime of hoarding I could easily afford something quality like one of those new and expensive 10 speed bikes everyone was talking about.
It marked a watershed moment in my personal history as it, A) was my first major purchase [being it cost a cool hundred and twenty bucks or £53.44 - hey that was a lot of money in those days!] and B) it was the first time our family was shopping at a newly-built, but strangely named place called WAL-MART!
Now I have an older brother who was also in his teens. His talent was legend in that he crashed every used junker car my folks bought him, therefore he was always on the lookout for the next big thing in transportation and - having crashed his newest used junker car just the night before - he went straight to our mum, whining that he needed my bike to get to work (all of a whopping half-mile or so). It was a short, but heated, exchange. Me handing over the keys to the bike-lock with a stern warning about how HE would would be responsible to replace it should anything happen to it. Needless to say, I never saw my bike again...
It's really a wonder he didn't kill me that next day, given how hungover he must have been and how loud my reaction was to not find my bike. The folks claimed the loss on their homeowners insurance, which covered half of the value of the bike - and it was an uphill battle to get the rest.
I got told off for demanding he give me the balance. I'm guessing my mom scrapped up the remaining amount and gave it to him to give to me, possibly just to shut me up (I did sort of want to be a Lawyer when I was younger, all that arguing and quoting facts and asserting my rights to recovery of lost property may, I'm realizing, have been at the root of it... hmmm).
So now, with a fist-ful of money and the seasons changed to winter, (it took a lot of whining to get his half) my priorities had shifted. When next we visited WAL-MART there were a collection of lovely newly downsized "portable" televisions available. And so I decided to treat myself to a 13" b&w TV (colour was far too expensive) to enjoy in my bedroom, thereby never having to sacrifice being able to watch programs such as The Patty Duke Show or The Munsters with so unappreciative an audience as my folks who insisted Bonanza and C.H.I.P.S were far better entertaiment.
But this is where things begin to make sense because it was in this time that I found PBS or the Public Broadcasting System. And it's here that I began seeing programmes that tapped into a vein of facination with all things hands-on like DIY in This Old House - I can, to this day, tile any bathroom in the world given the number of times I watched the experts do it! And I can throw mud with the best of them; mud being the skim coat you apply to newly nailed up wall-board to cover joints and nail holes and create perfect corners for smooth walls to which you would plaster, wall-paper or paint over.
And most special to me was a lady there in the PBS wilderness who was loud and big and beautifully sensible and creative and passionate and good, I mean really GOOD, at teaching people to be more adventurous and creative in the kitchen... and so began a tender and precious friendship with all things food related.
I found my cookery goddess of all times, Mrs Julia Child - all because I was made to lend my bike to my reckless brother... See, it's true - sometimes when one garage door closes, it truly can open a window into a whole new world that stays with you for a lifetime!
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