Oil Sticks or Something

 Laura Calder is probably one of my favourite cookbook authors- her lemon pasta sauce is fantastic, and she has this honey and herbes de Provence chicken that is life changing. 

But there's this one recipe of hers I've thought about for probably a decade now. The only reason I can come up with for why it's in a cookbook is that she needed to fill up space in the appetizer section.   

I can't remember the exact name.  Probably it's in french anyway but it was something like Herbed Oil Branches or another equally ridiculous-yet-intriguing handle.

Anyway, here's the recipe, more or less:

You get some fancy olive oils and put them in little bowls.  Then you cut up tiny branches of rosemary or thyme or another woody herb, and you instruct your guests to dip the herbs in the oils and suck them clean.

Now I know what you're thinking because I am also thinking this, but no, I'm serious, it's an actual recipe. 

Okay so let me just get this off my chest.

The FIRST problem with this idea is explaining it to your company.  People in Canada are not super into sharing food Quite This Intimately with other guests.  I mean, we get a little nervous around fondue.  People eat from their 'own' sides off a plate of nachos.  This is going to be a tough sell, is what I'm saying. 

The SECOND problem is gravity.  You dip something in oil, and then you lift it out of the oil, see what happens next is the oil drips off! It drips off on tablecloths and cloth napkins and the other herb fronds and everyone's pants and hands and chins and...this becomes the exploding spaghetti with red sauce on a first date problem only with warm oil.

The THIRD problem is of course that woody herbs are strongly scented and flavoured so if the point is to sample a selection of olive oils, y'aint gonna taste much over, say, a big ole branch of rosemary.  Why not bread? What's wrong with a nice baguette???

FOURTHLY  have you seen how much fancy olive oil costs?? This could, no word of a lie, EASILY become a $100+ appetizer.   Easy.

And finally, DOUBLE DIPPING is going to tear its ugly head pretty early in the game no matter how civilized you believe your friends to be.  And it is probably better to just assume it's happening from the start.

Running Things

It's 6:30 in the morning and I'm commuting to work. I keep getting passed by joggers.  Finally I wake up enough to ask myself...

Who ARE these people??

Seriously.  They are almost always young, so not retired people.  They are obviously not disabled physically, and statistically can't all be disabled in a non- physical way, so these are working age adults who almost certainly have jobs. This is not a new sport for them - they are wearing special running clothes and shoes, and moving with ease and speed.  The clothes look expensive - these people have the money to purchase expensive clothes and shoes.  They are healthy looking, clean and fit, even the middle aged ones; they're eating well and often and they're frequently working out and obviously doing things like maintaining hair routines and such.

Despite the majority appearing to fall within child bearing/rearing age, they never have children with them.  No strollers, no kids on bikes alongside, no teens keeping up with dads, nothing.

And they're alone, always, not in groups or with accessories proclaiming allegiance to a running team or competition.  To all appearances these are 25-50 year old, well-to-do, employed people who are doing this for enjoyment or general exercise and not for team training.  

Which brings me back to the original question.   Who ARE these people? Who, at 6:30 in the morning on a Wednesday, in the prime working and parenting years, is free at for a run? No children to get ready for school, no lunches to be made or cars to be warmed up or commuting to do.  Or if there are children, then the resources to not care for them, at peak waking up time, on a school day.  And not just once but CONSISTENTLY.  Over and over again, extensive running time alone when others are working.  What jobs do these people have?  What lives must they live?  How much do those shoes COST??

I've decided they must be successful self-employed tech people.  Childless. Or maybe medical staff who work shifts in the afternoon and have nannies? Or professors, possibly.  Real estate agents.   Maybe they all look the same to me but are actually different people?

Another reality, running alongside my own.

I'm Not Fighting With My Gastroenterologist.

 I can't decide if I'm more miffed by my recent gastroenterology appointment, or by any number of other things - so let's just start with the doctor stuff.

I left a recent appointment with a pamphlet that essentially says I can't digest food properly anymore because 'people today eat too much processed food'.  And that makes me mad.  

1) Almost no one is able to eat a low-processed food diet in urban Canada.  For one thing, it would require access to fresh or naturally fermented/dried produce year round, which might be available but hardly within the budgetary constrictions of everyday workers.  I can get dried apricots at the grocery store, but they're processed with sulphites.  I can buy tomatoes in January, but they came from California in a polluting truck and were probably sprayed with stuff and coated with things and genetically modified to withstand the trip.  I can buy pickles, but they're not natural pickles - they're in a jar, with salt and sugar and citric acid to keep them crispy and lots of other stuff.  And were prolly made in Sri Lanka or something anyway.

2) Which brings me to the fact that unless you are consuming organic, heritage, non-gmo, local foods in close to their natural state...guess what?  You're eating processed foods.  You think bananas are supposed to look like that?  You think cows naturally evolved to give dozens of gallons of milk a day?  You think corn, what, comes out of the husk in cans or something?  Don't be absurd.

3) And just exactly what is TOO MUCH processed food even supposed to mean, anyway?  I can't eat homemade bread because the flour was, after all, genetically modified wheat that has been sifted, likely bleached, probably sterilized, bagged, and shipped to me?  I shouldn't have strawberries in the winter?  Or is this about sugar and salt?  Is this about the nefarious 'chemicals' of...whatever chemicals we're all worried about at the moment?

4) And FURTHERMORE, I would like to point out that I DON'T eat too much processed food ANYWAY, thankyouverymuch.  I'm not sitting on the sofa scarfing down a bag of cheezits for supper, ma'am.  I have oatmeal or eggs for breakfast, everyday.  I have a piece of fruit, some rice or vegetables, and some kind of protein for lunch - leftovers from supper, or maybe another egg, or a can of fish.  I have meat and vegetables for supper.  I drink tea, coffee, water and watered down cranberry juice.  That's it.  Every once in a while I have dessert.  Every once in a while I have a piece of toast or something.  Sometimes I have a handful of seeds or nuts if they're in the house.  I have a weakness for a cup of Ovaltine and some wine gums if they're hanging around.  Once a month I eat a few slices of pizza with my kids.

5) Hrumph.

Image credit: Marc Noorman via Unsplash

A Passage To India

I've finished A Passage To India.  Otherwise known by its alternate title - In Which Everyone Is Disappointed By Everyone Else: A Story About Sex Where Absolutely No One Has Sex.

And I should warn you - I'm going to spoil the book thoroughly for you.

We open with Adela Quested arriving in India with Mrs. Moore, ostensibly to see if she really likes Mrs. Moore's son Ronny enough to marry him.  And are introduced to Dr. Aziz, a handsome young Muslim doctor in Chandrapore who is much too flighty and poetical to know his own mind.  Aziz was disappointed in his first marriage to a woman who he thought rather plain and ugly and who nevertheless gave him three healthy children and acted the part of a caring wife until she died bearing child #3, at which point Aziz seems to have changed his mind about her and decided she was much too wonderful for him and he will never find her match.  He dumps his children on some relatives and devotes himself to being a doctor, writing poetry, making beautiful statements about things, and occasionally thinking about visiting brothels.

Miss Quested was disappointed by life in England, and is subsequently disappointed by Ronny, who elicits no passion in her whatsoever.  She's referred to many times as prudish, prim, and a cold fish - but I never really saw this in her character.  To me she seemed ignorant, or maybe harshly naive is a better reading.  Intentionally blind.  She wants to see 'the real India'.  Meanwhile Mrs. Moore takes her shoes off when visiting a mosque and because of this gesture earns the undying affection of Dr. Aziz.  As a favor to her, he arranges a picnic to the nearby Marabar Caves for her, Miss Quested (who had a moment of passionate hand-holding in the back seat of a car with Ronny and has agreed to marry him after all), and various other people including his new best friend the British Dr. Fielding.

Here let's take a side step.  Dr. Fielding and Dr. Aziz have essentially nothing in common but somehow seem to spend a lot of time together.  I can't help but wonder if Forster had any male friendships that weren't sexual in nature, because he seems rather at a loss for how to write this one.  And a great many thinly veiled moments of oddness exist between them.  Dr. Aziz joins Dr. Fielding as he gets dressed, for example.  Fielding mentions later in the story that it was irrelevant that Aziz visited brothels because everyone does when they're younger.  There's a lot of...well, no actually there aren't a lot of layers.  There's one layer, and it's laid on nice and thick.

So, the picnic.

No one knows what exactly happens to the two women during the picnic.  At one point Mrs. Moore feels claustrophobic in a cave and talks about people touching her.  When she gets out of the cave she discovers it was just the normal crowd.  The weird fleshy thing she felt on her face was the hand of a babe in arms.  All was nothing.  Aziz and Miss Quested and a guide go on to see the next cave without her and have a deeply awkward conversation where Miss Q asks Aziz if he has more than one wife, being Muslim and all.  And wants to know 'what marriage is like'.  He's insulted, and dips into a cave for a moment to collect himself.  When he comes back out, Miss Quested has gone down the hill to see a friend newly pulled up in a car.  The two drive off together.

On arriving home from the picnic, Aziz is arrested.  Miss Quested has accused him of accosting her in a cave.

At this point the deeply racist but tightly controlled narrative spins out and this is where Forster, I think, really comes into his own.  The only British person on Aziz's side is Fielding, who insists that Adela must be mistaken.  The pre-trial tensions rise.  Adela is apparently 'taken ill' and cannot see anyone.  She's haunted by an 'echo', which also mimics what Mrs. Moore says had bothered her in the crush of bodies in the first cave.  We're back to her thinking she can't marry Ronny after all.  Aziz is in jail, but then released on bail, and then arrested again for driving a car into a ditch.  Things are spinning out of control and the story ceases to make any real logical sense.  Is the vigorously anti British lawyer a good idea or not?  Is the Nawar Bandahur losing his title?  Is Mrs. Turton going to utterly and completely lose her ever loving mind over this frothing indignity to English femininity?

Wait now...Adela is saying no one ever touched her.  It was all just horrible.  Horrible.  But they just propositioned her.  Except she can't remember what they said.  But they broke her binocular strap.  Or, or maybe they didn't.  Could it have been the guide, and not Aziz after all?  Could she have been wrong?  Is she sick?  

The trial begins - on one side, the Indians.  Ready for a fight, and to defend Aziz.  On the other side, the British.  Already victorious before a word has been said.

And Adela stands up and declares she was wrong, it was not Aziz, it was no one.  She had hallucinated the whole thing.

Now of course everyone is furious with everyone else and nothing at all has been resolved.  Aziz is filled with hate towards the British and Adela in particular, who he claims would have been lucky to have been accosted in a cave at all, seeing as she's so ugly it might have been her only opportunity for human affection.  Mrs. Moore has gone from the intelligent and loving elderly lady and turned to a demented, bitter harridan of a woman who is turned into a saintly figure by the people of Chandrapore despite having left before the trial even began and conveniently died at sea, saving us all from having to deal with her abrupt about-face and her from having to deal with her other two exhausting unmarried adult children back in England.  Ronny, who stuck by Adela through her role as 'besmirched maiden', is struck by the thought that this woman is now everyone's enemy and also a turncoat so informs her that the engagement is off...again.

Fielding misses a parade in Aziz's honour and this is the beginning of the end for the two of them.  Things spiral downward in every corner.  Suspicion kills all the relationships.  Aziz cannot understand how Fielding could have offered Miss Quested refuge at the medical college when the mobs were out for blood post-trial.  He can't understand why Fielding would continually insist on Aziz releasing Adela from her financial responsibilities to Aziz in the way of court fees and payment for destroying his good name.  Fielding can't see how Aziz could be so ungentlemanly.  Aziz can't see how Fielding wouldn't tell him he was having an affair with Adela (he wasn't).  Fielding can't believe Aziz would accuse him of such a thing.  And on and on the tiny misunderstandings mount.  

And eventually, the inevitable.  Miss Quested has returned to Britain, of course.  And Dr. Fielding has been called back to England temporarily.  And Aziz knows...he just knows that of course the Dr. will marry Miss Quested. That perhaps that was why he had been so adamant that Aziz release her financially, so that he himself would get her inheritance.  And yet at even at the end we're not given a clear 'winner' or 'loser'.  The holy bees never attack those pure at heart, but they attack Fielding and his brother in law.  Fielding must be evil, then.  But it comes out that he never married Miss Quested after all, and Aziz has been petty and ridiculous all this time.  Aziz must be in the wrong.  Misunderstandings....misunderstanding...

Fielding was no cad - he truly believed in Aziz, and he truly believed that Adela had been honestly sick and hallucinated and shouldn't be made destitute in recompense for her mistake.  Aziz was no cad - he behaved honorably, and meant no harm to anyone, and attempted to please all around him.  The evil in the story was the situation itself, where community was naturally pitted against community and there could be no winners.  Where the only 'cross cultural' friendships had to end in death (Aziz and Mrs. Moore) or eternal estrangement (Aziz and Fielding).  There could be nothing else.

Of course the irony of it all is that in wanting to see the real India, Miss Quested sparked the most defining Indian thing of the time - the indignity of colonial rule.  

***********************************************************************************

By rights the story should end there, since multi-generational engrained prejudices tend not to be wrapped up neatly at the end of stories.  In this case, though, Forster gives us all a break of sorts in the final chapter.  Aziz and Fielding reconcile.  Aziz writes to Adela, finally forgiving her.  Things are not the same, but they are mended with the stitches showing.  I appreciate this immensely as I'm rather a completist at heart, but at the same time I fully recognize that it doesn't make a 'better' story.  It does give us a bit of hope, though.  Maybe that's a good starting point.

A Homeschool Reading Conversation With the 11yo

 The 11yo and I discussed books the other day on a walk.

"You see, there are books you want to read, and books you should read.  Sometimes the books you want to read are also good books that you should read.  And sometimes they aren't.  Sometimes the books you should read are books you also really want to read.  And sometimes they're not.

There are books that are 'good' books because they are beautifully written, and explore themes in insightful or eloquent ways.  But you may not personally like those books.  You not liking them doesn't mean you shouldn't read them, necessarily, because they may very well be books that are worth reading.  Books that should be read.  Even if they aren't everyone's cup of tea."

I sympathize with the desire not to read those books.  It's a standing joke that the only way I ever got through Thackeray's Vanity Fair was by pausing periodically to smack it against the radiator.  There are some titles that I really don't want to read and probably won't just because they will utterly destroy me.  I put titles such as Toni Morrison's Beloved in that category.  But I don't not read those books because they're bad books.  They're excellent books.  Books that should be read, and that readers (shall I be daring?) have a responsibility to read.

It's true.  The way that good, true, beautiful things are guarded from one generation to the next isn't just by collecting them in hermetically sealed vaults, but by experiencing them yourself.  If you can read, and enjoy the delicious freedom of literacy and access to all the free books you could ever read courtesy of your library, I would say that you have a duty not to squander that gift.  Read the good books.  Hide the stories in your heart.

Image Credit Alfons Morales via Unsplash

Day off, Giraffes, The Worst of the Great Readers.

Image credit: Daniel Hansen via Unsplash

1) I booked today off work because of having a medical procedure done yesterday morning and being informed that I shouldn't 'make any business decisions or sign contracts' for 24 hours afterwards.  Well, I don't really do either of those things at my job, but I also don't need much of an excuse to take a day off apparently, and so I got a long weekend.

And by long weekend I mean I went to pick up a free bag of cat food being offered through the local neighbourhood buy nothing site, then went to visit my 82yo mother in law for her birthday and ran an errand for her, and then came home and made a shepherd's pie, two loaves of banana bread, a pork cottage roll with vegetables, a stock pot of spaghetti sauce and the filling for cabbage rolls.

Honestly I felt fine anyway and could probably just have gone to work against doctor's orders, but as I said, I'm not one to look a gift vacation in the...mouth?  That sort of fell apart there a bit at the end, didn't it?

2) Best headline today?

Image credit: Jeremiah Del Mar via Unsplash

Asteroid half the size of a giraffe strikes

Earth off coast of Iceland

3) I'm not sure exactly how my book reading has fallen so very much to pieces these days. It might be that I usually read on the commute to and from work, and now I play a game of Wordle, and then a game of Quordle, and THEN sometimes a game of Semantle. None of which is a problem in and of itself but all together does not give me much in the way of reading time. Probably should stop playing word games and looking up recipes I'll never have time to make and gardens I'll never have space to grow and lessons I'll never be able to teach...and just read something edifying.

4) Actually I did successfully read one book this week (it sounds so strange to say that. One book. A solitary book. In a WEEK.) and it was Brother Andrew's classic - God's Smuggler. Not the first time I've read it but it remains riveting and fascinating and ranks up there with Father Ciszek's With God In Russia as one of my favourite mid-20th century Christian memoirs.
I'll go to bed now, at 8pm, and read a chapter of something before sleep. Probably. Sigh. It's a season.

Book Review - Winterhouse

 

Winterhouse was well-received in middle-school book circles, so when the current 9yo and 7yo suggested it as a read aloud, I said yes.  Here's what we thought!

The Good:

This is a very imaginative and interesting story with a lot of unique points to it.  You can tell that the author has researched his genre well, and is very familiar with other modern novels in the same age group - I'm thinking of Book Scavenger, Mr. Lemoncello's Library, etc.  The characters are fairly straightforward and don't necessarily grow during the story, but are good illustrations of their types.  I appreciated that between the two younger characters, the emotional roles were reversed from traditional tropes; the girl was bossy, difficult and authoritative while the boy was biddable, quiet and reserved.  The plot was intriguing and we honestly were not sure what would happen next, despite numerous clues and hints given, and there were lots of little rabbit trails that wound off into the distance, and that sort of thing appeals to us immensely.

The Bad:

I am usually pretty permissive about fantasy elements in fiction when it comes to children's books.  Magical creatures, witches and goblins and elves, make believe and pretend is all generally fine.  Which is good, especially if you're reading this level of book - because a lot of fiction for children involves elements of fantasy.

But where I start to feel uncomfortable is when the fantasy becomes dark, and it isn't always clear that it's still 'pretending '.  I felt this way, if you recall, reading The Boundless.  The line between fact and fiction was faintly drawn at points, and so when the story turned dark, it was harder to separate the truth easily in a child's mind.

And here we have the main issue with Winterhouse.  It wasn't dark in a deliciously creepy but child friendly way,  not was it 'traditional fairy tale dark', where evil is acknowledged to exist,  but is ultimately overcome by good.  This was just...weirdly dark for a kids' novel.  There's a coffin shaped box holding the half dead body of a dark arts practitioner that's carried around by her daughter in the hope of restoring the soul to the body.  The children are chased through the woods by that same disembodied soul, dark arts symbols are etched on a bridge, etc. etc.

Like so many modern books advertised for the 8-12yo set, the actual storyline is fine for the age group, while the content is probably too old.