Love Apples

Montreal j't'aime: Breakfast.

It was cold this morning. I felt all sorts of unsure about going out for coffee, even as I told R. I would. There is coffee at home. And I always say I'll bundle up, but somehow I can't do it. And now I've dug my own credibility gap within myself, so I know I'll be going brrr. And sure enough, brrr.

But then there's this--. Walking into a café where the air is made of butter and yeast and warmth. There are people speaking to one another joyfully, oblivious to the harshness of Monday, of losing the Grey Cup yesterday, or frozen puddles. Croissants and a man playing the accordion. I know instantly that for the rest of the day, they'll be no such thing as cold.

Bouchonne's Marrow Escargots: Love & Friendship.

Where have I been?

Ah yes: Food fog.

I'm tripping over my fingers to tell you of all the blissorgasmbliss bits crossing my tongue over the last days, with bliss friends visiting.

I'll start with where we had a starter on Friday: Bouchonné marrow topped escargots. I can never understand people dismissively stating that escargots are merely a vehicle for garlic butter. And your point is...? But marrow trumps this by a quantum scoop.

If the marrow looks pink in the photo it still can't look pink enough. Bouchonné serves it underdone. This had never occurred to me to do, something that puzzles me in retrospect.

A minerally crisp white wine. The compelling waitstaff who I wish would just pull up a chair. A great start to an evening.

Bouchonné is at 9 Fairmount East, on the northeast corner of St-Laurent. +1.514.273.8846.

October Market

I feel we're both anticipating mourning, the market and I. Each time closer now.

Evidence should tell me it's just me--the market ready for a rest. Then again, I look at the green tomatoes, the chard. Somewhere an eternal spring.

I hate myself for the drama I feel. Yet how do I let go when it's another year I didn't hold completely, didn't fully take in.

I'll try again.

Fig Jam. Homemade. Near-Homegrown

It had been an inauspicious start of a trip to the market. Not only did I leave the house late, and became ensnared in shifting construction, but a parade (a parade!) came between me and my Jean-Talon freshness. Plus someone took the most strategically perfect street-parking spot.

I meant to dash across the aisle to buy vegetables for supper, and get home to the gentler chaos of home. But mid-sprint, as though in a roadrunner cartoon, a golden hoard at the stand of a local producer slowed my sprint to dreamy slow-mo. A big sign that tells me Figues the Rougemont. Rougemont? Figs. Grown 50 kms from Montreal!

They were kadotas. The table was heavy with them. Ripe to overripe. Begging me.

The man had had the look of despair of selling the day's last. Seeing the dilated pupils of my suddenly-bedroom eyes was happy news to him.

I had about 4 kgs figs once cleaned and stemmed. Added some sugar, maybe 1 kg. Lemon juice, about 1/2 cup, with perhaps another 1/4 cup water to get things started. After a bit of cooking, put about 1/2 through the food mill, and left the other half to fend for themselves. After some cooking, the colour wasn't as joyful as I'd hoped, and the flavour lacked relief. R. came up with the most inspired idea to fix both--last fall, a local cranberry producer from the Atwater market had given us some powered unsweetened cranberries that we'd so far only quizzically stored. It made for a great addition here: it carried with it dense red pigment, real zing, and a fair amount of natural pectin. I'm not sure the pectin was needed, and more lemon juice with perhaps some zest, would have served the same way to lift it all. But this is absolutely perfect stuff.

Plum Plum Tart: A Continental Bridge.

R: People will find it weird that you put food on the floor.

Tori: They won't--they'll only see the plummy and gold tones, and how they love one another.

R: Er. I think that's likely to be what you see.

Tori: [Starts humming.]

***

I only decided to make a plum tart after I'd come home from market. I had bought some Mount Royals, round, dark, wet --meant for breakfast.

As soon as the tart thought occurred, I felt like 1) It HAD TO happen, 2) There was no way I'd have enough plums. (Though come on, Tori, focus, at least *weigh* them: oh well there you go: you don't even have half of what you need. Damn. Damn. Curse-rather-than-weep.) and 3) It was too late to go out again before my desperate need to serve it as part of dinner with friends.

I told myself to let it go--there's plenty of food--but I again had this sense that I needed to make it in order to declare myself home. To ground us all, really.

And if this sounds melodramatic, trust me, it was. (Have I mentioned jetlag? It was jetlag made me do it!!) I was feebly flailing hoping this would make plums spring up from the ground.

But then in the middle of my ineffectual twirls about the kitchen, I opened a cupboard in that distracted one does for lack of what else to do.

Cue floodlights, lyre strains, wing flutters: There was before me a jar of plum preserves I had just made last week, but already forgotten about. It was made with thoughts of deep winter. Instead it lit--that home serving this home--a more symbolic bleakness.

Half a jar went in. SO good. A triumph of the unreasonable.

Copyright 2008. All rights reserved for photos and text.

Home.

Jetlag's a bitch. Though, then again--I do get a lot done when I wake up at 3 a.m.

I quickly get to first orders of business after sorting laundry, mail, newly-acquired books into distinct piles that mimic efficiency:

1) put up a bread
2) get coffee
3) go to market.

I hear how the rain ("The rain!") has made it a hard year for green growers. Though with how flush the markets seem, I reach this first by asking.

I'm sorry for the wet. I'm happy for the recent sun and warm. And I know that this place can start feeling like home again once I've checked in with my household gods, and those that provide for them.

Copyright 2008. All rights reserved for photos and text.

The Rant & the Tart.

THE RANT
I don't have much of sweet tooth; most sweets make my teeth ache. And as I've been losing the same five pounds for the last ten year, if it's not going to be fantastic, I don't want it.

Yet the world insists I surely do.

There's this weird pressure to yearn for cakes, pastries, desserts, no matter how blah. Most danishes should evoke fear, not lust. I keep saying this aloud, and hearing back from friends and family who look upon me with a pity that gets summed up with: "there's an atavistic appeal that's deeper than this thinking. Poor Tori, you must be missing that gene. Now do you mind standing over there? you're ruining my buzz."

I can bake; I know recipes by heart; I'm here capable of swissarmy precision; I intuit the science behind it which steers me clear of much trouble. Most of the time, fresh from my oven with what I'm willing to spend on ingredients trumps super-equipped kitchens and the years of training of most pastry chefs. So, unless I can be convinced it's special, I don't trust it. And NB, special isn't defined by the vertical, the precarious-looking, or foam.

The vast majority of the time I can taste rigid mouth-filming Crisco, waxy chocolates, pasty fillings, floury custards. I understand that there are multiple practical and economic reasons for these choices, but these doesn't make me want to eat what they produce. Please don't line the shell of lemon tarts with chocolate just because it keeps the crust from getting soggy over the too-long period you want them to stand assembled. Or if you must, mark it with C for Compromise--I can love best-I-could-do-today, but at least we'll all understand that I get to stop after the first bite.

THE TART
One of the dreams I have for my life is that I would have the personality of someone who likes to wander around town aimlessly, ready to make discoveries. I have so far to go on this path (er, not-a-path), that I mostly despair. But a few days ago: !!!. I was between two purposeful activities, and I could have gone from one to the next, but instead, I walked into a patisserie. Well, alright, this mayn't have been 100% aimless, as I'm always on a search for the perfect raspberry macaron that will make me forget Lenotre--yet it was unlikely that Seraphin on St. Laurent would end the search.

But it did have Pastel de nata, those small Portuguese custard tarts. They looked gorgeous. I found out they were 6 for $5.50--Deal of the century.

I brought them home. Loved how gently they were laid in their box, without paper-doily fuss. Made tea. Put a tart on a plate. It did look gorgeous, with even strata visible in the crust, and beautifully caramelised custard.

But even as I was falling in love with how it looked, I could predict what would come next:
-Cue Satisfying Crunch.
-Follow by an unpleasant awareness of greasy-yet-drying all over my mouth.
-Finish with a decidedly unlush flat custard that registers like a prop to the crust, rather than integral to it.

Not the worst I've had, not by a mile. But still.... Yet somehow I fell into them anyway. And had two more in the same sitting. Atavistic echo not-so removed that day, it turns out.

On Pessimism, Optimism, and Green Sleeves.

In June--on St-Jean-Baptiste to be exact, Quebec's Fete Nationale--I mocked my very good friend P. on something he revealed. The four of us were having a picnic on the mountain. It was a luscious wet-warm evening, and we were all drunk on deep breaths of the outdoors, a day off, the official beginning of summer. Well, those things plus Manhattans. We'd made celebratory toasts with each round; inevitably there came one to the holiday, at its deepest meaning. It was I who spoke the words: "To the Longest Day of the Year!!" Joyful noises followed, but then P. looked down into his glass, and spoke of it as a depressing thing: "I can't help but think how each day from now on will be shorter than the last." And so immediately came the next toast from me, just as golden-pink light bathed us all: "To P. and eternal optimism!!"

The incident came back to me yesterday, with the realisation that I teased him in the way one does when the thing is not only true of the teasee, but also the teaser. I see the extent to which I'm just the same. M y mother, R. and I were on our weekly stroll in the Botanical Gardens. My mum was directing us passed the arboretum to a patch of lotus flowers that she hoped would be in bloom. (Were they ever!) On our way, we came across what looked to me from a distance to be the fuzzy greens that surround chestnuts.

I love to handle chestnuts. There are countless photos of me, young and old, in Budapest, holding them up to the camera. And so, as though on automatic pilot, I walked over to pick some up, to coax them out of their sleeves, to absent-mindedly find my way to play and worship at this altar of my childhood.

As I got closer I saw these weren't chestnuts at all. The cream-coloured nuts were surrounded, but not covered, by the spiny green casings. I looked up at the tree, and didn't recognise it, but the handy sign on the trunk announced a hazelnut. I'm not even certain these are the kind we eat, but this didn't stop me from runaway fantasies of all that I would bake with hazelnut come autumn. No real-life hazelnut could make me as excited about them than this unruly clump of promise.

Undoubtedly it is a flaw that I find more valuable the promise of something, than its fulfilment, no matter how perfect. Yet perhaps just now, I don't mind, save that I need apologise to P., for pretending even for a second to be anything but in total agreement with him on the subject. Plus, I should have said what's blatantly so, it's a kind of optimism just the same.

Mile End Je t'aime: The Cupcake.

In the morning, R. and I walking around the Mile End.

I was struck by the sight of a man--a strong, proud, going-places man--standing holding a small dainty cupcake: vanilla-vanilla by the look of it, topped by three red raspberries that looked oversized if only for how tiny their pedestal.

I don't know what struck me as so very incongruous--I've known plenty of the strapping that turn to molasses before tiny treats--yet something made me stop. I also don't know where I get the audacity. (My audacity was once all borrowed, but increasingly, I find it to be mine.) But I asked him as though I knew him:

"So, where'd you get that cupcake?"

"You want it?"
"Who wouldn't. So, tell me."

"It's the yard sale across the street. You get one if you buy something."

My eyes followed to where he was pointing. I felt my heart splinter with a sudden growth spurt.

"Before I go over, may I take a picture of you with it?"

"You want to blow it up into a poster above your bed?"

"Er."

***

I'd seen sales there before. Yard sales without a yard, in the space between a store and the sidewalk. Today, lots of shoes, mainly trainers. Some kids' clothes. A daunting cloud of wires connected to what looked like an eight-track player but I guessed to be a videogame. Nothing I needed, but I settled on something to serve as a ticket into a blissful new innocence.

As I was leaving with it, I saw someone eying my cupcake. It was my turn to point.

Of Canary-Yellow Bouquets, & Lino.

It was made into a breakfast omelette. It tore a bit, and I didn't care. I don't normally eat a large breakfast, but anything Lino tells me to do, I do.

Yesterday, I was at his stall at Jean-Talon Market. I was buying black cabbage and then everything else in a 20 metre radius. He gave me this mushroom. He knows that anything he puts into my hand I'll love and eat, most of the time right then and there.

We had been talking about age, and how shocking it is to be changing along with the world around us. It's a conversation I've been finding myself in the middle of a lot lately. 37; I think I'm saying goodbye to my youth, even as the rest of the world has probably assumed I had already given how grownup my life looks from the outside. Lino and I simultaneously say that our 20 year old selves are what we wake up with. In the course of the morning, there's always a mini-surprise.

He told me that I looked 20 to him. I told him I loved the lenses he looks through. He told me that he didn't have flowers, but he did have something close. He carried it like a corsage.

Close to flowers. Much more romantic.

Destination La Mer: Char.

I'm sure that much of my day-to-day life sends the nuns of my schooldays spinning in their graves--starting with what's happened to my handwriting, and careening from there--but one thing that might soothe them back into slumber is that my house has a tradition of fish on Fridays. Only let's not tell them that this has everything to do with the wealth of the arrivage overnight on Thursday at La Mer fish market.

Oftentimes Montreal resists giving away its true self in anything larger than a morsel. La Mer, situated in a zigzag of boulevards that in no way suggests the fine or the subtle, tells you nothing more from the outside. And you *know* you're in trouble when the best you can offer in answer to "Where?" is "You know, next to the CBC." Yet after a dozen visits one comes to feel it as a fully-formed version of a Montreal. To a Prince Edward Island fisherman I met a few weeks ago, who drives in his own catch, it's the only Montreal.

The whole of the fish market is refrigerated. In summer clothes, and stubbornly refusing the down jackets on offer at the entrance, this makes for an extra thrill.

In the last few weeks, char from Cap Chat on the Gaspé coast has been abundant, just, today, from coastal New Brunswick, to warm R.'s heart.