Love Apples

Fall Summer Fault.

This is the time of year that has me all sorts of split because:

1. I love autumn more than I can say. I go weak at the knees with the scent of fallen leaves, the hearttripping beauty of the colours, the crisp air, the skies that stretch forever.

The dense nostalgia that has my ears straining to hear geese flying, wishing for somethings lost or never gained, also has me in a unique state of restlessness. Yet it's less so than my usual, if only because I need to be still-enough to take in a season that has one very aware that in a short time it will be gone.

I've childhood poems. To Autumn. I come by this honestly.

1a. I often wish nostalgia = away. So exhausting, so sticky, so done.

2. I'm still hanging on at the last strands of summer. Don't Go-o-o-o. I need just one more bursting berry, one more moment of drowning in your plenty.

And so from the faultlines of my soul, where I prepare for pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving next weekend, a final homage to summer 2008. Peach cobbler, made of Quebec peaches. More butter than you'd guess. And on the plate, lots of cool pouring cream.

Summer Squash Custard.

Normally I just grill them, and pray the bore will scorch out of them.

Summer squash, yellow, as I used here, or green (zucchini, courgette--take your pick of names) so abundant and asking for love, even as if by mid September, I'm hard-pressed to muster it.

And on this day, for someone delicate coming for lunch, I knew that my usual dispatching with branding-iron scars wouldn't do.

I remembered that Saveur had recently reminded me of a Barbara Kafka recipe. My take goes like this:

Blanch 1.5 kg squash in 1/2 centimetre wide long thin strips in well-salted water, all of 25 seconds. Dry them on a wire rack for a few hours.

In a baking dish whisk together 3 eggs, 1 1/2 cups cream, some 1/2 to 3/4 cups Parmigiano and with a few thyme or chervil leaves, and freshly-ground pepper--two more twists of the mill than you'd think. Lay the slices in on their sides so their skin-on edges peak through the custard. In a 450 oven until golden and set, which might take as little as 35 minutes or 45, depending on the configuration of your baking dish.

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.

Pickling Day.

I've never fully committed to pickling. There are definitely moments when I'm taken with the idea of it. I think it's that in it, I hear the sea calling, and the salt that sucks life out, and with it, oddly, preserves to give it later. What's not to stand in awe of, what's not to want to master.

Perhaps I should admit to myself that I'm afraid of pickles. Not their safety: whereas I trust very few people to give me jam, I think you'd have to work at getting pickling wrong.

Is it the unnatural crunch? Perhaps the pervasive wet that leaves me parched? And both these may well be a part of it, but I think it's the brine that holds this mystery for me. Murky magic.

Nonetheless: Pickling day. Packing the vegetables in the jar is fun. They squeak a bit as I urge them into slightly unnatural shapes. And foremost: I get to participate in ancient ritual. That alone should satisfy. Should.

Copyright 2008. All rights reserved for photos and text.

Gift Plums.

The wife and granddaughter of the contractor who built the flat came by with this armful of plums picked from their backyard.

Gorgeous, fragrant, just a day shy of perfectly ripe.  I feel plum butter coming on.

Plum Tree.

It was one of trees that came with the house. If I fall in love easily in broader life, it's all the more true for trees. And so with the plum. Even as I had to admit, if only to myself, that it was a problem.

It was tall. I always thought it looked mournful, though perhaps it was that I sensed its eventual fate. The thing was its plums--plums produced in massive numbers. They would fall everywhere, below it and astonishingly far afield. But for all their collective heft, and their power to overtake us, there was never once among them a full-sized, mature, plum. Instead we had these flattened, wrinkled, ovals. Though (to me), still gorgeous in their purple waxy skins.

Much was done for it. Tree doctors consulted; books pored over. And there was much talk--some cavalier, some with wringing of hands. I knew a decision had been made, even as I didn't hear until some weeks after it was chopped down.

I gulped when news finally reached me. Okay. I know, I get it, don't tell me again: we had to. God, why am I such a baby.

I was told then too that it had already been cut into logs that would cure into fuel for our summer outdoor fires. This tradition was started when I married R. who needed a way to participate in our family evening socialising, even as he then had few words with which he could make it flow. Wine, flames and an iron became medium to his message. It soon became law: "I'm going out, but I'll meet you at the fire." "I'm finishing some work, but fire at 8.30!"

For many years now the plum wood provided hot dense heat. Every time it was mentioned that a log was from it, I tried briefly to visualise which limb or which part of the trunk it might have originated. It always felt nostalgic, even as it was stupendous, crackling, hot company.

I think this was the last fire it will give us, though we might still find some lengths of branches mixed in with the other wood.

I'm crap at goodbye.

Guerrilla Gardening: The Fig Tree

I've had a few days to think about it, but I still have no real explanation for how this happed. Strange too that whilst we all acted so in, we were also so out of, character.

But there's no question how it started. We were all sitting around the table at the restaurant. My aunt brought us another chapter to this several-year long comic saga about how people in our neighbourhood keep offering her fruit trees, most often figs, for her garden. She has long ago decided that they're the last thing we need.

We're all familiar with how these tales go. We all laugh at how this one, too, unfolds. We find it funny to think of neighbour X trying to foist another generation of baby fig on her. People do, I've seen them. My aunt is so generous with gifts from her garden, and from her kitchen, they wish to return the favour. And I know what a gift it would be… figs are to my mind a very embodiment of perfection. But this we're not meant to heed. The central conceit to this story is that they are the superfluous, and that running away from them is exactly what's good and right, and that the whole chase is hilarious.

She's a good story teller. She knows too what it's like to run away from heartfelt and generous offers--and she's seen people run away from her too when she's brandishing something plentiful that needs eating. But more than anything this is a story of controlling one's destiny and, by extension, that of one's garden.

No fig tree, however lush and sensual, is worth a challenge to this, we'd all so far thought. Yet as we're sitting there, it's not so much that a single gauntlet fell, it's a sudden, albeit silent, revolt. I've heard it said that revolutions can happen in an instant; now I've seen it.

I first notice R. looking at me. No words pass from him to me but I read his mind, and respond in English "You're not serious. She'll kill us." I add that I won't even consider this a moment longer until he's secured my cousin's assent. I'm shocked when I find out that in this flash, he's received such assurance already.

The three of us only get to talk freely much later in the day. Giggle more than talk. But we pick the spot, decide to make it an espalier, decide which nursery to check out. I make sure we all understand how seditious this is. They're gleeful in how they answer. Ok then, one for all and all for one. We're getting a fig tree and we'll plant it the next day.

The next evening I know my cousin succeeded in buying one when he comes home from work and instead of coming in, he mimes to me through the screen to go over to his place. Excitement builds. By how we act about it, you might think we were throwing my aunt a surprise party, not a putsch.

I see the tree. It's spine-tingling love at first sight--22 tiny figs already attached. R. finds us. We all agree it's the most perfect tree we've ever seen. We make sure the adults as we still call them even as we've been that too for more years than not, are occupied elsewhere. A hoe is got; a hole dug--the conspirators have accomplished their mission: once it's in the ground, she'll love it too.

The moment arrives. We call her. She looks and squints at what we're pointing too. She sees it for what it is. She declares us mad and grins and laughs, and enjoys the shift in her realm--one that comes from within.

The Cups, the Wine: the Ritual.

It never feels like there are so many of us in this house in summer. Until you set the table. And then you see it--a lot of plates, of silverware, of goblets; a lot of food; a lot of wine.

The elders are non drinkers. But when their grown children are around, they sip a glass along with us, one of a growing list of things that they follow us on--I love how open they are to the experience of us.

Wine shops are not on our usual market axis. Plus wine needs thinking through. Every year we start this afresh. We meant to remember the great finds from last year, but we don't. And so the ritual begins again.

We buy different bottles. Our criteria in choosing them are based on some distant knowledge, and led by covers to their book. Good area? Yeah, I think it is. Good year? Erm, well... I forget. Good producer? I think we bought something from them last year, only I don't recall if we loved or loathed it.

We bring them home in a plaid wheel-behind shopping trolleys. We line them up on the table in the garden. We get paper and pen. We get glasses. We sit around them. We pour, we talk, we grade on 5 (5 being strongest, just like report cards here a the time we were kids). There is no pretence at knowledge we don't have, no taking ourselves or the task overly seriously. There's only teasing one another for tastes we find facile, and defending with mock solemnity the vital importance of our pet principles. We feign shock when someone disagrees. Or sometimes we defend a choice just to not have a fan stand alone.

Once they've all been tasted, one a warm summer's night in Budapest has fallen al around us, we remind each other how we grated, we taste the ones in the lead again. A winner is declared! Glasses are raised. We all forget that we disagreed about that very bottle a few minutes ago. Now it's time to congratulate ourselves and each other. Time to acknowledge that it's the one we just knew we would end up choosing right from the first. I keep hoping that the winemakers are people who would understand what power there is in these joys.

It marks a beginning to our time together. And if by next year we forget which wine it was again, we don't forget this.

Golden Raspberries

I'm often taken with the sense that children make of the world around--what innate wisdom it holds, and yet how many structural flaws it has. As we spent summers in our home here in Budapest, I thought all things summer as being from here, of here. It was something of a crushing blow--and a simultaneous relief--to find out that these were treasures the rest of the world were in on.

Eating some things in this house, in this yard, is a Proustian falling into them that have me remember all the summers, and have me instantly feel most myself. Just now it was a handful of golden raspberries. The ground beneath my feet awakens to it, and mouths to me that it holds it all.

There are a thousand reasons why I don't live here year-round. And among the hundred practical ones would be added that whilst home is here, home is elsewhere too. (And how could I bear saying goodbye to North American eating apples?? And to good nan bread takeaway around the corner from my house?)

Nevertheless in these moments, when I'm eating here in summer when I'm eating summer here, where it feels a sin against nature to ever leave again.

Rhubarb Pink.

We only planted the rhubarb last year. I didn't grow up eating it, but I did grow up thinking I would want to. It was pink. That was all I needed to know to like it.

By this year, it became clear that it liked us too. It grew as though it knew what it was doing. Few things impress me more than a confident reach.

I couldn't return the favour. I didn't know how to trim it, but in service of good fences make good neighbours I needed to. (Or as it turns out, pull it, not trim it, as per my mother-in-law's wisdom.) In fact all I really knew was this: Stem good, leaf bad. But where exactly is the cutoff point? Plus do you cook it for long, or in a flash. How much sugar does it want? And will it turn into item no. 456 of things I like in the abstract--like-to-make, like-to-give--but don't actually like to eat. I don't need another of these in my life.

But even as I was having these thoughts, it was staring at me.

Ok! DO something! it says.

It has to be a compote. Something that would keep until after we came back. But to strawberry, or not to strawberry; that is the question.

I tend to distrust mandatory combinations. I'm not sure that oranges and dark chocolate do anything for one another: they both turn up at Christmas and people confuse this as meaning more than it does. I love prosciutto; I love melon, but although they're traditional allianced, I’m not sure it wasn't an arranged marriage that they've decided to make the best of. And I'm pretty sure it's the case here too.

M. is a friend of my mother's. He was a huge culinary influence over my early life. He has a tendency to grand pronouncements that one isn't inclined to disbelieve. And so: "peaches and strawberries need something to lift them, else you grow sick of them in minutes." I had no idea what he meant, but I knew it would end up to be true.

It hasn't of course. I can eat them by the large basketful. I would never tire of them. Strawberries are red juice goodness, peaches are a lesson in perfection. But as I had strawberries on hand that needing doing with, I declared it true for the day. Pink and gentle. Still better in the ideal, somehow, than in the execution, but I was still quite taken with it.

Redemption in a Thimble.

I couldn't begin to write an exhaustive list of everything about which I seem keen to feel guilt. The no-fail top hits:
Guilt for not being outside on a sunny morning
Guilt for not using cosy-making rain to curl up with books
Guilt for letting peaches go off

I've guilts enough to circle the earth. Yet one I didn't used to have, has, I find out, been given to me in marriage: the guilt of passing wild-foods by.

One of the things that most struck and amused me when R. and I started going to Prince Edward Island to see close family friends was to have R. and our friend M. be in total, silent, agreement about what to do when confronted with berries in situ.

Fifteen years ago. In the car.
R.: "Is that a Saskatoon bush? Yeah, it is! With a LOT of fruit."
M.: "I've some bowls in the trunk."
Tori: "Erm. But aren't we going to be late?"
Normally-attentive R. and M. ignore me utterly.

I've since learned that to R, wild foods mean hold the presses. As a kid, my mum could often be heard saying: "A day's never the same once you've gone swimming." I find the truth of this staggering to this day. Now in my life with R., I get to add that a day will change direction--jam will want cooking, fingers and lips will want staining--after an encounter with wild berries.

In New Brunswick some weeks ago, scouting beaches for a family picnic, we came across some raspberries. Screech to a halt. Stand in a ditch. Doesn't matter if they're sour: a moral imperative has newly-indoctrinated-me declaring them a feast. Look at me!! I'm a member of this tribe!

Then, a few days ago, we're out walking. Near the end of the trail, we came across bushes of thimbleberries: a real test, as thimbleberries are all talk and no action: they might announce themselves juicy and sweet, but they're flat and fibrous. I couldn't help but laugh at us as we were standing there with our mouths full.

Tori: "You know, this isn't food, right?"
R.: "Heathen."

Locavore Interrupted

We'll be off in a few days to Europe. We're eating the kitchen bare before we go. The process of paring away the foods a person actually eats reveals some things this person ought never know about herself or her refrigerator.

We have about 3 kg of Reggiano in there: wedged, powdered, and shredded. Not that that's so staggering in itself, except that in the last few months I've more than once dashed to market to pick some up at hugely inconvenient times, while clearly we'd had some tons all the while.

And I see that we will again be throwing away most of a litre of Styrian pumpkinseed oil, even as I know that our return suitcases will have a few bottles of it again (I promise we'll use it!! Won't it be delicious with asparagus next spring? Won't it won't it??? PLUS it's good for you!!!)

Other questions are being begged: how much plain Dijon does one small family need? Ditto anchovies? Am I at all capable of opening a jar of jam again once it has already been opened, or do I believe the fridge door is the place they should go die after one use? How did I ever think goji berries were food when I knew they smelled horrible (though on the other hand, they do taste Horrible). I should just add these questions to my ever-growing hints list that lives under the header What Exactly is Wrong with Me? so I won't be as surprised next year.

Normally this before-you-leave ritual is sad for how starved it leaves you for coherent meals. This time, it's a mixed blessing. This year for the first time we'd taken a serious stab at (fork at?) urban gardening. R. built boxes, we had irrigation hoses brought in, we nabbed opinions from a structural engineer who thought we were artless in our chatting to him about how much weight our roof could bear. We got my sister to help haul bags of earth and manure up several flights of stairs (what's family for?). We went wild planting lettuces and other greens. It's turned out to be one of the best things we've ever done. Such satisfaction over what everyone who kept droning on to me about their gardens must have always known, only I wasn't listening then. Now we're eating it as bare as we can, only I'm sad to leave it. When a neophyte and wildly inadequate gardener leaves her plot, does it keep growing?

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.