I joined bakers from around the globe making sweet doughs and breads this weekend. Baking Sukkar Bi Tahin, Beirut Tahini Swirls, is a pleasure. I added orange zest and Fiori di Sicilia to the tahini filling for the first time. Sometimes I just open the bottle of that essence and inhale. This pastry is insanely good with a strong cup of tea or coffee. The dough is rolled and folded and develops flakiness. I have made them so often I’ve personalized the process.
 
***
 
The missions, shelters, and foodbanks are sharing images of the elderly. It reflects their users. Covid and the cost of living have made life precarious for seniors living on a public pension. This is not a new problem; I remember a neighbourhood senior man from my days working in kitchens in Stratford — a WWII veteran. We helped him how and when we could.
 
This is a municipal, provincial, and federal issue. Meaning, it’s all of our problem. I’m all for building housing for families and improving transportation and infrastructure, but where do insecure and homeless seniors fit into the scheme? You can't imagine how many women are among them. Sidelining anyone is a moral issue. Feeling loved and cared for is as simple as a cooked meal or a bag of groceries.

***
 
I’ve been wearing my grandmother Theo’s maple leaf pin on my jacket. It feels right for so many reasons. 
 
The willows along the Humber River had a chartreuse aura on Thursday morning. Fleeting, impossible to photograph, but easy to stop and admire.

Saturday evening dishes and Joseph Campbell's The Power of Myth.
 
***
 
Sometimes two songs together sound like a close dance.

The era my professional cooking is grounded in:
 
I put a chef jacket on for the first time in 1985. I was an apprentice in a French restaurant with a chef-owner from Lausanne, Switzerland. Fortunately for me, André Donnet looked toward Europe. I was free to dream of staging in France and eight years later it happened.
 
I matured through the 90s during the New York and British invasion (that’s what it felt like to me in my mid-20s to 30s) and I was influenced by a young Jean Georges Vongerichten at the Lafayette and JoJo, Joel Robuchon at Jamin, Lydia Shire at Biba in Boston, St. John, Sally Clarke, The Quilted Giraffe, Mark Miller, Alastair Little…
 
Some of the chefs I admire:
 
Eugénie Brazier, I hope soon you’ll know all the reasons why. Fernand Point for his joie de vivre, abundant spirit, and his respect and admiration for women. This is something I wrote about them a few months before going to writing school.
 
Deborah Madison. Who can forget Greens? I was a vegetarian for a long stretch of time in my teens and it was formative. My favourite station to work in a restaurant kitchen is entremetier.
 
Joyce Goldstein...Judy Rodgers…Peggy Smith…Lindsey Remolif Shere…Barbara Tropp
  
Professional cookbooks that are precious to me:
 
River Cafe Blue Book. I have a British edition full of memorabilia. As soon as I got it I knew I would stage there and five years later I was getting off the Tube at Hammersmith station. That spring morning walk along the Thames to the restaurant is a tattoo on my memory and spirit.
 
Chez Panisse Cooking. Paul Bertolli with Alice Waters. the Gail Skoff edition. Again, crammed full of love with pages falling out from how much I have cooked from it. Also, a former student gifted me a copy of Patricia Curtains, Menus from Chez Panisse (signed for me) and it is a book that I sometimes fall into visually.
 
The Natural Cuisine of Georges Blanc. Extraordinary and revolutionary. It vividly expresses a love of family and place.
 
White Heat. I have a first British edition bought in 1990. Shook is how I felt at the time — in the first year of cooking school.
 
La Varenne Pratique by Anne Willan. It should still be in print. My bible for most basics. It was the companion text to Escoffier at chef school.
 
Food writing that changed me:
 
Elizabeth David’s An Omelette and a Glass of Wine. Christmas 1991 was alive and magic because of it. I read a chapter in it for research this past week.
 
The Unprejudiced Palate by Angelo Pellegrini. A charming and wise voice for immigrant Italian culture and cooking in the Pacific Northwest.
 
Kermit Lynch’s Adventures on the Wine Route. Read it as a first-year student on the urging of a wine instructor. Many of us have made the pilgrimage to his shop in Berkeley.
 
Jeffrey Steingarten in Vogue. I shared so many of his articles with my Larder students.
 
What do I cook now?
 
Vegetable and vegetarian side dishes. I like having a few things in the fridge that improve with time. Dishes that I can shape shift with other ingredients over a day or two. I made the carrot and chickpea curry above last week with a watercress, mint, and coriander salad. It was vegan and a tight-budget pleaser.
 
Funky dinner salads with canned, fresh, or smoked fish and shaved vegetables and crispy rice — thank you for the inspiration Daniela Galarza.
 
Anything I can marinate in Shio koji — chicken is *swoon.*
 
Fisherman’s Sauce made with too much garlic and anchovies.
 
I love to bake and will forever be grateful for the quality of my professional pastry training. It set me apart from a lot of cooks.
 
What is my ideal season?
 
I could not do without all four Canadian season. But as a proficient canner and jam maker, I’m built for May to October. What tastes better than raspberries, apricots, black currants, Brandywine tomatoes, asparagus, flat green pole beans, Lacinato kale, and Hubbard squash. The pleasure of opening a jar of something special on a February day when I’ve stopped believing in everything.
 
What historical figures would I like to cook for me?
 
Myrtle Allen, Alain Chapel, Robert Carrier, Penelope Casas.

***
 
My mom had a Cricut machine and made a scrapbook for me. I was going to crop the congratulations out and then I realized it’s perfect. That’s me in grade seven accepting a prize for an essay I wrote for the Maitland Valley Conservation Authority. It’s wild how long I’ve thought I wasn’t a writer. *laughs*
 
Slow Down.
 
***
 
I needed love this week.
 
I’ll listen to any song with a horn section and a woman in a leotard and leggings. Snoh Allegra is this generations Roberta Flack — a sublime voice and a seductive tempo.

​I saw this video on Instagram from film production talent in Hollywood. The billionaires behind the big studios have bet everything on AI. People who write, edit, and work in production are no longer needed. Trained individuals with a wealth of experience 20 or more years deep, in their 40s and 50s at career peak, have been made redundant with little notice. For greater shareholder value and to brutalize unions.

Look at their faces when they tell you what they could lose. They are the tip of an iceberg.

Now, think of your favorite movie and the long screen roll you sometimes sit through at the end because you’re so shook and need to recover from a moving or challenging experience. Most of that talent was told to take the yellow brick road to the private sector, like it’s the Wizard of Oz. Meanwhile, Covid and the cost of living have stripped many people of their financial buffers. 

Going to the movies is high up on my list of good things. What is better than being embraced by a good story with a room full of people? At a showing of the newly remastered Thelma and Louise at TIFF not long ago, we laughed, cheered, and groaned every time Darryl appeared. Who can forget the shot of the note hanging in the door of an open microwave, back lit by the tiny light in the dark kitchen, with a beer in the shadows, sometime after midnight, while the phone rings. The fury you feel for Thelma. That scene started as words on a page. Callie Khouri wrote it.  

I want the people who make movies and television to have good lives. I want the same thing for people who write books, features, and newsletters that I enjoy. To have enough for themselves, and their families. To earn from a talent seems like a reasonable expectation. Why can we believe in billionaires and not this? 

***
 
My friend Voula took me to a concert on Thursday night with her daughter, Maxine, and niece, Emily. The talk across generations before the show was a pleasure and we danced ourselves into a sweat along with a crowd of people and Zaho de Sagazan who left the stage a couple of times to step into the crowd and dance and sing with us — a brilliant intimacy. I associate the colors in the picture on the left with the energy of the night and people. I was surrounded by French conversation on the 29C Dufferin bus going north after the show. 
 
It’s ice cream and a walk season. 

I laughed real good a few times listening to this Seth Rogan interview. It’s also a story of community. Sam Fragosa is a master.

***
 
I went looking for a love song for Canada this week. We need it. Radiohead came in soon after and fit like a glove.