Go Ask Alice...

I didn’t hear about Alice Waters until after I got to San Francisco. It was a little embarrassing at the time, but in retrospect, it seems appropriate. I wasn’t supposed to be dating, but anyway, there I was, talking with a girl I’d met...well...in a bar, and telling her about my crazy decision to move out to San Francisco (on a bus, with just a rucksack) to become a chef. She seemed impressed, and then said in that knowing mix of world weariness and mild condescension which is unique to big city folk, ‘Oh, you must have moved out here because of Alice.’ I didn’t know it yet, but she was right. My urge was to say ‘Of course’ for fear that a mere legal aide might realize she knew more about this mysterious and apparently important figure than an actual (if a bit naïve) aspiring chef, but (thank goodness) I was honest, and as a result she ended up loaning me a copy of the Chez Panisse Café cookbook.



By the time I actually met Alice Waters, briefly, a few years later, I was finally and well aware of her influence and symbolic sainthood as the de facto founder of ‘California Cuisine.’ I had also thought long and hard about what I would say when I finally met her. My opportunity came after having the honour of serving her a ‘Farmer’s Market’ dinner (five courses, each centered on the product of a single farm) with Eric and the rest of the Millennium crew. She and Cecelia Chiang (whom Alice has described as ‘the Julia Child of Chinese cuisine’) had attended the event as the guest of Millennium’s apparently well connected and always lovable owners (in addition to being the best possible advertising for the vegan diet), Anne and Larry Wheat. After the meal, Eric and I were ushered out to hold court at the table, but before I had a chance to dazzle her with my charm (or pester her with my shameless hero worship, whichever you prefer), she leaned in close with a conspiratorial smile and said ‘Slow Food. It started in Italy, we’re bringing it to California, look it up, read about it.’ I had finally met the inspirational queen of West Coast Cuisine, and she had high jacked my chance to praise her with a teaching moment.



To read about Alice Waters is probably not unlike reading about a Joan of Arc or a Mother Theresa. Her ability to stay ‘On Message’ in the numerous articles and books written by and about her is impressive. From the reader’s perspective, she seems to live the life of a food puritan, always knowing the provenance of every pear, the story of every stonefruit, the very chicken which begat the egg. She sets an example in her every action, or so it would seem. I am fascinated by the disconnect I seem to feel when examining such people; it’s almost as if it would be sacrilege to report on a shortcoming, because they are so important symbolically to the communities for whom they speak.



My first ambition was to be a preacher. I was raised in the Baptist church and I had an excellent pastor, Dr. Dick Maples: a wonderful teacher, a genuinely nice man and a good shepherd. The good Doctor’s charisma was buttressed by his knowledge and wit; some of the best comedy timing I’ve ever learned was in the Sunday morning sermons he delivered. Dr. Maples was also the man I went to in my teen years when I realized I was losing my faith. He was patient and did not judge me. He answered the questions with the best of his theology, pointing out the most positive parts of his faith, and often even changed the subject to the politics of the day, about which we were both pleased to discover that we shared many views. He didn’t push me or browbeat me; he just focused on the positive and tried to be a good example.



Chez Panisse was founded on the principle, inspired by a trip which Waters had taken in France, of serving only fresh, seasonal, local food, and nothing else. The menu was a fixed price, the staff was well paid, the space was crafted by artisans, and the food was prepared by hand. These days, we’ve all heard of such restaurants, or restaurants that have aspired to such goals, but at the time, it was a revolution. The once humble converted home in Berkeley still serves its fixed price dinner nightly in the downstairs dining room with its open kitchen and has even expanded to include an upstairs Café with a more diverse menu, and another stand up Cafe (Café Fanny) a few blocks away; all of which have stayed true to a vision of local, seasonal and organic foods.



But Alice’s Restaurant started as an idea not just to reinvent the restaurant industry (which it has), but to change the way people think about food, or about their relationship with food, with each other, and in actuality, with the planet itself. In fact, it is safe to say that if you have heard of organic food, Chez Panisse is a likely reason. It was not ground zero (but it was close) for the organic movement, environmentalism, or the fair trade movement or even for the sense of community awareness that typified the West Coast youth politics of the heady decade from which it sprang. But it was an institution that brought those philosophies together under one roof with an ambition rarely seen outside of a church, a nonprofit group, or a political party. As such, it did become ground zero for a retooling of the industry for which I have felt my calling: the art and lore of breaking bread, of life through food, of giving and sharing at the hearth and at the table.



Alice Waters is rarely described as a great businesswoman (it took seven years for the little idea to turn a profit, and even then it was under someone else’s hand) or even as a great chef, a title she herself has eschewed. In fact, she was once famously criticized by a prominent French chef who said, ‘That’s not cooking, it’s shopping,’ a quote I have heard her repeat as high praise. Even the night I met her, she was late for the dinner and even answered her cell phone during the meal, an irony not lost on us as Chez Panisse was also famous for being one of the first restaurants to require diners to turn off their cell phones. She is not a saint, as she has often been described, but a human, with all of the flaws which that condition entails. But in the same way Dr. Maples deftly steered the subject away from the Spanish Inquisition or the fate of Ghandi’s soul in our discussions, I rarely dwell on Alice’s shortcomings when I think about her importance as a symbol.



By living her principles and pursuing her dreams to the best of her ability, Alice has helped to create a movement that has gone from California Dreaming to the fastest growing sector of the food industry in North America, and is quietly but assuredly changing the world in the process. But even in recent interviews she has not once rested on her laurels. Her new projects include a foundation, a prison garden program and an idea inspired by driving by a public elementary school in her neighborhood called the Edible Schoolyard Project, which seeks to share her principles with a whole new generation of eaters through hands on involvement in the production of their own school lunches. If that won’t change the world as we know it, then I don’t know what will. Alice is not a perfect person, but she is a perfect inspiration.



Slow Food, a movement started in Italy in 1986 to protest the building of a McDonald’s at the base of the Spanish Steps in Rome, has grown to become an international advocate for traditional foodways and recipes, biodiversity through heirloom seeds and livestock varieties, organic and small production agriculture, even wine and cheese-making; or, in more general terms, an advocate for the preservation of the pleasure of taking our time and appreciating life, food, and the act of sharing. Instead of dividing its membership into producers and consumers, it uses the terms producers and co-producers, thus implicating all of us in the process of change. As she predicted when I met her, Alice Waters did bring Slow Food to the US; in fact, just this year she helped to coordinate the largest celebration of American food in history; her ‘Slow Food Nation’ event boasted an attendance of 50,000 people in downtown San Francisco around a victory garden in the Civic Center Plaza.



I had a chance to dine at the Café during my San Francisco years. It was a treat, so simple that at first glance it seemed almost unimportant; but under scrutiny revealed many truths: care, attention to detail, sincerity, honesty, belief in the product and its importance. A chicken dinner became a little prayer on a plate. Ultimately, I did not become a preacher, but I did follow my heart. I did listen to that still and quiet voice inside me that said, ‘go forth and do good works.’ I often ponder the nature of what it means to be good. I think, in my heart, it is to think in terms of the community over one’s self. It is to do what is best before what is easy. I never did become a preacher, just as most boys never become astronauts or firemen, but I did find my faith, and through the organic movement and our restaurant, my voice. As for Alice Waters, I mentioned that I had thought long and hard about what I would say when I finally met her. I would have said thank you.



On the inside flap of the Chez Panisse Café cookbook, Alice is quoted as saying: ‘[We had] an ideal: to create a community of friends, lovers, and relatives that spans generations and is in tune with the seasons, the land, and human appetites.’ That ‘delicious revolution’ sounds pretty good to me.

the Giant Puffball and the Sacred Grove

Last week, the branch kitchen was invaded by a monster: a giant puffball mushroom, easily twice the size of my head, came rolling in, being pushed along by a regular customer who knew that I would appreciate it. Puffballs, when very fresh, are a tasty treat. They are a bit unusual in texture, but are excellent at picking up marinades, as their flesh acts almost exactly like a sponge. I enjoy grilling large slices of it, like a steak, finishing it in the oven and then, since it has little flavour of its own, serving it with a bright spicy sauce. For this one, we used seasonal local tomatillos and chilies for a salsa verde. My reason for favoring this particular preparation for puffballs (as a steak) is a holdover from my vegetarian days, when mushrooms were my meat. My love of wild mushrooms began a few years back, when I was working in California.

Millennium Restaurant, the vegan mecca where I earned my stripes, is a unique place, and at its center is a culinary mad scientist named Eric Tucker whose incessant curiosity is overshadowed only by his senses of wonder and of humour. I have often said, to those who will listen, that only twice in my life have I been seated in a restaurant, read the menu, and said, “I completely understand what this chef is trying to do.” The first time was in 1996 when I sat in Millennium’s dining room and was astounded to find that someone else did not think vegan food had to be boring, staid, or one dimensional. Descriptions jumped off the page; each dish seemed to contain twenty different elements and to be bursting with ideas. Lotus root pickles, smoked tofu, miso glazed eggplant, seitan medallions...I had been cooking vegetarian food for several years at this point and searching incessantly for a kindred spirit who believed, as I did, that vegetarian food could leap off the plate and attack the diner, that it did not have to stay in the world of careful banality, that it could be good, good for you, good for the planet, and wildly creative all at the same time. I had found my man.

Within a few weeks of that meal, my relentless pestering paid off and I found myself employed at what for me, at that time, was my dream job. To Eric, vegan cuisine was not different from any other kind of cooking. He approached it as an exciting, innovative high end cuisine from which one had simply chosen to subtract all meats and dairy. He never considered it to be a hindrance; in fact, if anything, it was a challenge. He thought of his cuisine as being like an ethnic cuisine, and in the same way that a Chinese restaurant does not apologize for its lack of hamburgers, he never apologized or felt shorted for the choices Millennium had made in regards to the use of animal protiens. One of the results of this creative and innovative approach to cooking was a new way of looking at the world of ingredients that would often serve only as a props or a bit players for the main course in a conventional restaurant. An example of this was in the examination of the world of chilies. That which could have been simply a seasoning or an ingredient for someone else became, under a culinary microscope, an entire exciting obsession that revealed the capsicum families’ incredible variety; from the sun-ripened red bell pepper’s almost sickly sweetness to the habañero’s heat of near psychedelic intensity, chilies that were bright with every color of the rainbow, and chilies that had textures ranging from steak-like to brittle, even chilies and peppers whose broad array of aromatic qualities is rivaled only on the spice routes of ancient India and the Middle East. Chilies were not the only ingredients we studied whose special qualities were revealed to blossom under closer scrutiny. We also explored the worlds of meat substitutes which came from millennial-aged traditions in Asia and plumbed the depths of the spice rack and the fascinating world of many other heirloom vegetables, grains, oils, and even wines, beers and spirits...

But as amazing as all of the voyages of discovery were, the most fascinating, by far, was the Kingdom of Fungi; aka, mushrooms. Mushrooms are interesting for a number of reasons: for vegetarians, especially vegans, they are a vital source of necessary B vitamins which are not found in plants. This is because mushrooms are not, in fact, plants; they exist in their own kingdom, neither plant nor animal, but rather, having features that are actually a bit of both. This biological kingdom includes not only mushrooms but also yeasts, the magic creatures that bring us not only bread, but also those wines, beers, and spirits we were talking about earlier. It even includes molds, a much maligned and misunderstood set of creatures that while often being the very symbol of blight, are also the source of some of our world’s most interesting flavours. But the kings of this kingdom are undoubtedly the mushroom: the mighty fruit of the mycelium, a world that can bring years of new joys and pleasures, a world whose gateway is the little white button, that once pushed, can carry you from the satisfying earthy meatiness of a portabella, through to the cinnamon perfume of the chanterelle, down into the incredible beefy flavor depths and satisfying texture of the porcini, even all the way to an ecstatic place found far beyond simple food-- the worlds most sought after culinary/mystical experience--the truffle.

Our wild mushroom purveyor in those days was a woman named Connie Green; a character who on the one hand was obviously an efficient and urban businessperson, but on the other, much like the product she peddled, shrouded in a sort of mystery and magic. Something about her persona carried an aura of secret knowledge that brought to mind gypsies or a ‘twig in the hair’ priestess from some ancient pagan rite. Yet somehow, she always seemed down to earth and quite capably modern. Her world was not a simple, hippy-dippy world of woodland creatures and fairy tales; in fact it would be more accurate to say that she lived not in, but rather on the edge of the forest. The mushrooms she brought came to her through a community of pickers who were described at times as shadowy or mysterious...strange, nameless fanatical types who camped and picked and lived in the woods for months at a time—and while Connie regularly met with these folks and dealt with them on their own unusual terms, she also answered phone messages, sent out regular and professional faxes and order sheets, and appeared on our decidedly less than mystical doorstep in the urban wilds of downtown San Francisco without fail, always with the requested fungi in hand, fresh, well cared for, and professionally packaged. I appreciated her attention to business, of course, but to be honest, it was the world to which she seemed to hold the keys that really fascinated me. Somehow, through this weekly exchange of modern arcana for mycological treasure, I became at first interested in the world of wild mushrooms, then fascinated and finally hooked. A new and exciting obsession began to emerge from the forest floor of my imagination and I found myself looking more closely at the strange bits of knowledge that seemed to be sprouting everywhere around me, from the lawns and wooded parks of my neighborhood, to the pages of my cookbooks and magazines, where once overlooked mentions of mushrooms now seemed to pop up like a fairy ring on a grassy field the morning after a rainy night. I eventually went so far as to purchase and start memorizing a field guide, in fact, the field guide for California mushrooming, it was a bible of sorts, under the title ‘All the Rain Promises and More’ by David Arora.

Once a year, Connie and one of her contemporaries, Todd ‘the King of Mushrooms’ Spanier, offered an opportunity for interested amateurs, mostly cooks and the like from various San Francisco area restaurants, to join them in a hunt. When that opportunity finally came to our restaurant, I rushed to be first in line. A bus was rented, a time (very early) was set, and the foray was on. That hunt, my very first, was in one of the primeval Redwood forests that still manage to cover some small part of California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains. I will never forget tramping through those cool damp woods under Connie and Todd’s careful instruction, seeking the elusive ‘mush-rumps’ on the thatch-y humus bedding which was the floor of that quiet, bright, and pine scented cathedral. That sacred grove, where for one perfect morning, I wandered smiling and fulfilled, seeking and finding treasures in the mist, and I did it all with the contentment of a true and natural creature, while time slowed, crawled and finally stood completely still. I will never forget the elation of my first finds, Boletus Edulis, known in the culinary sphere as the porcini or the cêpe, and in the mushroom hunting world, as the King Bolete. These rich heavy mushrooms are the lions of the mushroom world, unparalleled in their unique combination of both weight and flavour. In addition, we found chanterelles, also considered to be a choice find, even preferred in some circles to the King Bolete. The ‘chanties’ were big and golden, fat and strongly scented with cinnamon, frankincense and musk. That day was easily one of my finest moments; it has inspired a lifelong passion and has given me reason to return to the woods again and again from California, throughout the Pacific Northwest, in Colorado, Texas, New Brunswick and Ontario, as well as many other places, even in the mountains of Italy and France. I rarely travel without a mushroom hunt in mind. It has turned me into the type of person who smiles when it rains, smiles knowing what treasure the rain will bring. I was, and still am, hooked. Of course, there is one other reason to remember that day (I was at the time young, single, and definitely looking), for I was accompanied by not only a couple of my fellow employees from Millennium, but also by a beautiful intern who had arrived to work with us from Ottawa, Ontario (of all places) just the week before.

The second time I sat down in a restaurant and said “I understand exactly what this chef is trying to do” was here in Kemptville at Amanda’s Slip, the restaurant that preceded us here at 15 Clothier Street East. Again I was right, and the work there turned not only into a great learning experience, but when AJ (the previous owner and the chef in question) got ready to move on, it turned into not only a home base for my foraging forays, but a home for myself and that beautiful intern, now my wife, Nicole.

So now you know why when the puffballs, or for that matter, the boletes, morels, chanterelles, candy caps, almond, russula, honey, hawkwing, lion’s mane, hen of the woods, or any of a thousand other varieties of wild mushrooms come rolling along, I smile. I love the taste and the smell and the excitement that only a wild mushroom can bring...but mostly, I love the magic of a place in my life, my memories of all those cool damp mornings, but especially of one morning, a perfect morning I spent wandering, seeking, finding and falling in love, one fine morning spent, and spent well in a sacred grove.

John Lennon

Mom liked Frank Sinatra. Dad liked Hank Williams. That left Rock and Roll up for grabs. My brother and I split it down the middle: he got the heavy metal, and I got the pop. Oh yeah, we were all allowed to appreciate each others choices, but lets face it, at some point, around say, age 13 or so, there comes a time when a kid needs their ‘own’ music. My parents were not unaware of the Beatles; they were, after all, alive from 1964 to 1970 when the Beatles were shaking up the cultural landscape like a 7 Richter point earthquake... they just weren’t a ‘part’ of it. Which is good, because, as I mentioned before, that left it open for me. I think it started, officially, with a posthumous Lennon original ‘Nobody Told Me There’d be Days Like These’ and its accompanying video on MTV, a Paul McCartney song ‘Take it Away’, and a Thompson Twins cover of the Beatles classic ‘Revolution’. Martha Quinn, one of the original veejays, summed it up in a 30 second song intro, ‘...song was written by the Beatles...band comprised of John Lennon and Paul McCartney...’ After having Martha’s help in putting 2 and 2 together, remembering those late night snippets on the oldies station of ‘Blackbird’, ‘Yellow Submarine’ and ‘Let it Be’, I slowly, cautiously, began to fall head over heels in love with this band. As luck or fate would have it, my next trip to Half Price Records and Books yielded a treasure I have not encountered in the 20 plus years since. I bought, that day, a copy of no less than 6 different Beatles albums (on vinyl, of course), all at regular (‘half the cover’) price. I have not walked past the B’s in a record shop since and have yet to replicate, or even observe the opportunity to replicate such a score. The plumpest and juiciest fruit in the bunch was an immaculate copy of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band, an album that in less than an hour, armed with little more than a decent set of headphones and a stick of Jasmine incense, completely changed my musical taste, in fact the way I listen to music, to this day.

Before that spin, I never knew that music could be so completely immersive an experience. It seemed like more than just music, it seemed like I was getting to know these songwriters and performers on an intimate level. In retrospect, such coherent (arguable, I know) emotion from such young men was almost like permission to experience strong feelings myself. This was a timely message for a boy entering adolescence, and I did not take it lightly. In the ensuing months, the Beatles edged out other interests to become not just ‘my music’ but ‘my thing’. From my stringy curly attempts at the moptop haircut, Lennon specs (clear glass, non prescription...it was the 80’s), to a wardrobe pulled in whole and in part from each respective Beatles era, a favoritism for madcap British humour, a burgeoning and encyclopedic knowledge of Beatles trivia, lyrics and song orders, my love for all things Beatle became an obsession. A Beatlemania. It seems a bit odd now, heck, it seemed odd at the time that an 80’s kid would become such a complete fan of a group which had reached its creative peak 3 years before his birth, but having walked these many miles in these Beatle boots, I now know that I am far from alone and am, in fact, not even among the inner circle of the most obsessive of the ‘young’ fans.

Other young dudes were easily as obsessed as I was, but with other forms of arcana. I was a Beatles geek, but my cousin had a box of baseball cards from which he could spout off endless bits of statistical information; another cousin was a car nut and spoke fluently, years before his chance at a driver’s license, about the importance of horsepower and torque ratios. We all found our ‘thing’ and we all, I think, gained something from it. The baseball cousin is still rattling off his numbers in a successful government job and the car nut has moved from hot wheels to hot rods, finding his pleasure and escape in the fast lanes of life.

For me, the Beatles had a strong message. Humour, hope, love, general positivity, optimism...all these excuses to smile...they were more than just a warm and cozy blanket. With well rehearsed musicianship and lyrics which at their best were poetic and at their worst were at least a fun foray into some dynamic of wordplay; with fearless emotion, and fearless intelligence, and all accompanied by unequalled success, they showed a kind of cultural leadership that few others have even aspired to. They had a grace in their success; I still see Ringo get choked up in interviews, emotional and grateful for the life he has led.

John was ‘my Beatle’. His acerbic wit (my favorite collective Beatle trait) was the model for the others and in most biographies he is understood to have been, for at least the early years, the ‘leader’ of the collective. But at some point in the late 60s he did something few other public figures have done. He transformed. We, as a species, do not often allow our heroes this luxury. Very few television shows would survive a switch from comedy to drama, pop stars a shift from rock to country, sports stars a shift from football to hockey, politicians a shift from left to right; but right at the height of their fame, that’s exactly what John Lennon did, and essentially we, by proxy, as a culture did as well. Lennon’s shift was not as clearly delineated as the above examples, but it was just as extreme.

Early John Lennon was funny, yes, ambitious, yes, but also cruel, jealous, more than a little sexist (‘Run for life, if you can little girl...’), and publicly, at least for the most part, he was non-political. But in ‘68 or so, all that changed. The public Lennon became not only political but hyper-political: outspoken on issues ranging from the peace movement to women’s rights. He began to feel, I believe, that he had a responsibility to use the public voice he had been awarded for the causes he came to see as important. Celebrity is an amorphous cloud and is often only gently tested for the fear of losing it. John Lennon may have had the biggest ego alive for his blatant disregard for his chance at the loss of his fame, or he may have just not cared. I think it was the latter, I think he changed. Whatever may have led him to his particular road to Damascus is certainly a topic for discussion (Yoko? Drugs?), but the fact that he transformed is difficult to dispute.

I think that this was important to me and to us as a culture for a couple of reasons. The lesson I took was that if I identified a flaw within myself (sexism, racism, homophobia, etc.), that I did not have to cling to it like some Shakespearean tragedian. The fact that our culture still accepted and rewarded Lennon with attention after his changes also taught me that life would go on if I were to change.

We could use a little of that leadership in the world right now. Day after day I read articles where politicians parse words in sleazy attempts to escape the label of ‘flip-flopper’ or worse. I say it’s time for politicians and public figures to quit being so married to mistaken ideals and to stand up and say “I was wrong”; to step away and admit a mistake and move on.

While some may disagree, I am glad that celebrities now feel free to use their public personas in causes which move them (so much so now that it has become a cliché) because every one of those voices is a shout compared to our whispers, and though it is sometimes hard to understand all the shouting at least some important things are being heard. Bono’s work for poverty elimination and third world debt forgiveness may seem shrill in the present, but every step he helps the NGOs he speaks for and with to take will be treated kindly by history. It’s easy to laugh off political comments by Matt Damon, the Dixie Chicks or even Jessica Simpson as silly or misplaced, but they inevitably are speaking for a group that almost certainly would otherwise go unheard. When it comes to political discussion, the silence of dissent can be deafening, and our world can only improve by allowing every point of view to at least be heard.

I would say that John and Yoko’s sometimes silly, but always heard campaign for peace gave heart and courage to a generation of protestors and helped to end the Vietnam War. Though some may have wanted another course for that storyline, the bleeding stopped and the boys came home. Now here we are again facing another generation of angry hawks who think that we can kill our way to peace, and for all the bluster and talk on the 24 hour news networks, the comedy shows, the Rock and Roll arenas and even on the campaign trail, the clearest and most eloquent voice for peace, is still heard loud and strong even while it is nearly 28 years silent.

Imagine.

The branch will celebrate the life of this cool dude and incredible songwriter with a (first annual) birthday party on Thursday, October 9th, beginning at 7:00pm. We will have a few local musicians and me taking turns singing songs from the great man. Feel free to come join in, if you’d like to perform, call ahead and tell us the song(s) you’d like to play so we can plan ahead and not do too many versions of the same ones. And of course, we’ll save Imagine for a sing-along at the end.

more recipe fun...

Lots of people wonder why pumpkin pie is so much better made with a canned filling than with a fresh Halloween-style pumpkin; one is bright orange and smooth, the other gray and stringy...it seems like one of those few exceptions to the rule that fresh is better than pre-prepared. It’s probably because what we call a pumpkin these days is a variety originally selected for its seeds instead of its flesh, whereas the canned stuff comes from a fleshier, less seedy pumpkin, possibly even a squash (?!), but for some reason squash pie just doesn’t sound quite as good, does it? One of my favorite squashes for pumpkin pie and lots of other uses is the sweet, fleshy smooth skinned (read ‘easy to peel’) butternut squash. Here I’m trotting out the ‘global flavour’ side of our ‘Global Flavour, Local Colour’ motto with a Thai influenced ‘pumpkin’ coconut curry that is sure to impress! At the restaurant, we use local food as much as possible, and we easily source ingredients like the squash, onions, chilies and herbs right here at the Kemptville Farmers’ market! When we do buy from abroad, such as with most of our Asian ingredients, we always choose certified organic; you may find some or all of the ones used here in your local health food store.

Thai Pumpkin Coconut Curry Soup

Serves 4-6 as an appetizer

1 medium butternut squash, peeled, seeded and cut in to large cubes (about 6-8 cups)
1 small yellow onion, diced
1 tablespoon toasted sesame oil
1 small Thai chili, whole (chop it or add more than one if you are looking for more zing)
1 1-inch piece of ginger, peeled and sliced thin
2 stalks of lemongrass, sliced thin (or substitute 2 packets of lemongrass tea)
½ bunch (about ½ cup) cilantro, chopped, includes stems and (washed) roots
Zest and juice of one lime
1 tablespoon turbinado sugar
2 cans coconut milk
2 cans water
¼ cup Ume Plum vinegar or Thai fish sauce, or salt to taste if neither is available
Thai Basil (or substitute sweet basil or sweet basil and mint) to garnish

Method:

In a pot, cover the butternut squash with salted water and simmer until just soft. Strain and reserve the cooking water.

In a separate sauce pan, combine the onion, chile, sesame oil, lemongrass and ginger; sauté lightly. Add the remaining ingredients (except for the squash and the basil garnish) and bring the mixture to a light boil, reduce the heat and simmer for at least 30 minutes, and up to one hour. After simmering, use a large strainer and a separate bowl or pot, and strain out the liquid, pressing on the bits with the back of a large spoon to extract as much flavour as possible. After straining, you may discard the pressed out bits. Combine the strained liquid with the cooked squash, thinning with the squash cooking water, as needed, to form the desired soup consistency. Over medium heat, bring the combined ingredients to a simmer, taste and adjust seasonings and serve as is, or puree with a hand blender for a more refined presentation; garnish with the fresh basil leaves.

Recipe Fun!

New Zealand has done an excellent job of marketing its lamb to the world, which is a shame, as we in Ontario are blessed with an even better quality of lamb, actually grass-fed and explosive in flavour as opposed to the feedlot ‘beef light’ flavour of New Zealand’s finest frozen multi-thousand mile travelers (yes, that was me calling them out!). I especially love the lamb from British and African transplants Tim and Roshan from Aubin Farms in Spencerville (available at the Brockville and Kemptville Farmers’ Markets), it has a rich earthy flavour, and although I do love the spice, it really needs very little to bring out its special qualities. It tastes like food, real and hearty, and is a great way to herald in the long cool winter months. To me, it doesn’t just taste good, it tastes like Ontario. October is still mild enough to bring out the smoker (at least it is for me...), but you wimps out there can follow the same steps, skipping the smoker and going straight to the oven for an extra couple of hours to execute a simple braise. Fortunately, our local lamb is good enough that it will still present an excellent meal! This recipe is a tribute to Tim and Roshan Aubin’s African years, my Texas years and our shared Canadian present...

Smoked Lamb Shoulder with Corn Pudding, Mint-Apple Chutney and Braised Greens

1 large lamb shoulder, bone-in, about 3-4 pounds
3 tablespoons salt
3 tablespoons prepared mustard
3 tablespoons ground chilies
3 tablespoons Sucanat (brown sugar)
3 tablespoons fresh rosemary, chopped
Wood chips
1 cup apple cider vinegar
1 cup apple cider

Preheat the broiler in your oven. Soak the wood chips in water for 30 minutes; I use local wood such as black walnut, apple and maple. If you are using a charcoal or wood smoker, start the fire first and allow to burn down to a steady even bed of coals, internal smoker temperature should be no less than 250 and no more than 300 degrees Fahrenheit. Combine the spices and herbs and rub the paste all over the lamb shoulder. On a cookie sheet or in a roaster, brown the shoulder under the broiler, depending on the heat of your broiler and how far the rack is, it should take about 10 minutes per side. Turn off the broiler. Drain the woodchips and wrap in foil with some holes poked in it or place on an old pan right on to the coals or the electric coil (if using an electric smoker). Place the meat on a rack as far from the coals or coil as possible and over a drip pan, close the smoker lid and allow to smoke for two hours, keeping a close eye on the smoker temperature and quantity of smoke and adjusting wood, charcoal or chips as needed. Near the end of the two hours, set your oven temperature to 325 degrees. Remove the lamb shoulder and place in a roasting pan. Add 1 cup apple cider vinegar and 1 cup apple cider, cover and braise in the oven for at least 2-4 hours, or until the bone lifts out of the meat with no resistance.

While the lamb is cooking, prepare the Corn Pudding:

2 tablespoons butter, softened
6 eggs, lightly beaten
½ cup coarse corn meal
½ cup flour
1 cup freshly shucked sweet corn
1 cup sharp cheddar cheese, grated
1 teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon ground black pepper
4 cups milk
A pitcher filled with water

To present the plate as it is shown in the picture, you will need 6 oven safe six ounce ramekins or small heavy cups and a pyrex or roasting dish that holds them all comfortably (they must sit evenly). Use the butter to grease the ramekins. Combine all the other ingredients in a mixing bowl with a wooden spoon. Divide the mixture into the ramekins and place in the oven (325 degrees, with the lamb). On the oven rack, to avoid spilling, fill the dish around the ramekins with the water in the pitcher, as close as is possible to the top lip of the dishes. Bake in the center of the rack for 1 to 1 and a half hours, until the puddings are set. For an easier presentation, bake the pudding in a single dish, following the same steps (the water bath promotes even cooking), and allow your guests to serve themselves at the table (trust me, this is how I would do it at home!)

To serve, allow the puddings to cool in the dishes for about 20 minutes, and then turn out onto the plates to present, they may need a little encouragement to loosen them from the sides of the dish.

Mint Apple Chutney:

1 1-inch piece of ginger, peeled and minced
1 tablespoon curry powder
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 hot chili, minced
6 apples, peeled, cored and diced
¼ cup apple cider vinegar
¼ cup sugar
2 teaspoons salt
½ cup mint leaves, loosely packed

In a saucepan, sauté the ginger and curry powder in the vegetable oil until aromatic, add the remaining ingredients, through the salt and simmer for 30 minutes, or until the apples are soft. Chop the mint and stir in before serving.

Braised greens

In the south, we boil greens to death, usually with a hunk of salt pork and onions. These days, I like to leave a little green in my leaves...

1 large bunch braising greens, such as Swiss chard, washed, stems removed and chopped
½ onion, sliced thin
1 tablespoon chopped garlic
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
Salt, pepper and lemon to taste

Bring a large pot of water to a boil. In a separate pan, begin to sauté the onion and garlic in the vegetable oil over medium heat. Blanch the greens in the water for 30-45 seconds, until they just begin to soften, lift them from the boiling water with a strainer or slotted spoon, drain well, then add them to the pan with the onions. Cook the greens, stirring, for a minute or so; then season to taste with salt, pepper and lemon, and serve immediately.

The Ogg

I have always been terrible at receiving gifts. As a child, my difficulty would manifest itself as my being spoiled: gifts would appear, and I would frown, even throw temper tantrums, ‘this isn’t what I wanted!’ It is not the givers’ fault, they can’t know that I was ruined by a gift giver with whom they would be hard pressed to compete.

As an adult, I have been taught well to have good manners; I am gracious and pleasant, I smile and think back over the process and the importance of the ritual of giving and receiving gifts and how sharing is a way for us all to express our humanity. In our rush to keep up with life, we don’t all have the time to pick the perfect gift for each of our loved ones, but even a simple gift says something. With this in mind, and well aware of my own shortcomings when it comes time to pick a gift for someone else, I do my best to be gracious.

But, in fact, I dread receiving gifts. I live in fear that in the split second after the gift is open I will hurt someone’s feelings with an involuntary eye movement, glancing quickly down or to the side before looking the giver in the eye and offering my thanks. In that briefest of moments, I still find myself removed, questioning the necessity of the expenditure, or even, I am shamed to admit, the quality of the product, but I know these thoughts are just adult manifestations of that childish tantrum. I am gracious, but it is a learned reaction, and rarely spontaneous. I find myself, instead, removed and thinking back.

Two weeks ago now, we lost my Uncle Don. As a young boy, I remember this strange and marvelous bachelor uncle who would arrive at family gatherings like Gandalf the Grey and immediately be set upon by all the children in the area. He never fought this attention, unlike the others of the ‘grown up’ persuasion; he would revel in it and give us all his time and careful, honest attention for as long as we required it.

He was a good man who had been forced to overcome challenges. From a minor birth complication in infancy to a learning disorder in his school years he was stalled a bit, a situation complicated even more by losing his father and having to grow up a bit quicker than he had hoped. In the end, he never followed the path that many others do, into a routine of marriage, static career and suburban ‘normalcy’. He served in the navy, worked for the university, but eventually settled into a life of occasional odd jobs and a series of inexpensive ‘home-like situations’ as opposed to the house, the car and the 2.5 kids that so many of us seem to seek.

He was creative and very good with his hands. He became a well loved and excellent teacher in the Boy Scouts. He was a ‘Mountain Man’, joining with a group of others who reenacted frontier era camping from the flintlock musket to the handmade clothes; in fact, the last time I spoke with him, he said that he and his group were planning to ride and camp along ‘The Continental Divide’ (aka, ‘The Great Divide’).

He had an uncanny knack for recycling (before it was fashionable) and could piece together just about anything one could imagine out of the odds and ends that made their way onto the grounds of his various compounds, storage sheds, campsites and trailers. He built a car, not once, but twice, out of spare parts from other vehicles, wood, scraps and even bits of worn-out appliances. Not ‘go-carts’, mind you, but street legal, registered and inspected ‘Ogg-mobiles’ (as in Donald Ogg) that traveled far and wide and provided, I’m sure, many a chuckle and smile, and perhaps, even a bit of admiration and envy along the way.

One Christmas, I’d say that I was about 7 or 8; there among the shiny papers and gaudy ribbons was a simple metal box, a gift from my Uncle Don. Like its contents, the box was fashioned by hand, cut with tin snips and folded to fit together like a shoebox. Inside were a series of puzzles and a handwritten note explaining rules. The puzzles ranged from a simple pile of nails with one nailed into a block of wood (the object is to balance all of the loose nails on to the fixed one, this puzzle alone took days for my brother and me to decipher), to a pair of horseshoes joined at the ends by welded-on lengths of chain with ring around the narrow part of the chains that could be removed and replaced without breaking a weld (although we considered that method many times in our journey to discover how). There were many others as well that, all told, provided hours of entertainment and joy over the course of the following weeks, months, even years, as they came back out to challenge new friends with their deceptive simplicity. Simple handmade puzzles that undoubtedly came together out of his legendary piles of ‘junk’ that my parents and his other siblings (unlike we, the nephews) simply couldn’t seem to understand were obviously piles of treasure. Simple puzzles that took time for us to solve and took time for him to fashion; even in his absence from us then, his attention spoke...speaks...volumes.

That precious box of puzzles is easily at the top of a very short list of presents I can even remember from my childhood. Uncle Don was not a wealthy man in the conventional sense, but he had a wealth of time and with that commodity, he was the most generous man I’ve ever known.

As I am now rapidly approaching fatherhood, I (and we all) would do well to remember his lesson: it’s not the gift that counts, it is the giving.

And please, if you should happen to give me a gift, and you do see that split second glance to the side, down, or even out across the Great Divide, please, don’t take it personally. It’s not your fault; anyone would be hard pressed to compete.

Thanks again for the giving, Uncle Don.

Gordone...

I learned how to make love in college. Professor Charles Gordone said it in the plainest language possible, and it suddenly made sense. He said making love to a woman is not something you do in the bedroom; it is something you do all day every day. It is how you look at her, how you talk to her, how you breathe around her. Wow. That’s what I call teaching.

I never set out to be a college theatre major. I was involved in theatre in high school: I took it as a fine arts credit 2 years in a row, studying its history and structure, and was cast as an actor in a number of plays as a member of the extracurricular club. I even participated in a couple of local theatre productions as a bit player, doing mostly character work, playing several roles in a single play or basically any role that involved heavy makeup, difficult costume changes or funny accents. I found the whole process great fun. Theatre productions become micro-realities with all the folks involved sharing story arcs literally behind the scenes that begin, peak, and end, usually in parallel with the production. It is a safe world for creative types, where acting out is the expected, rather than the punishable, behaviour and where the short and transient friendships can feel as deep and as plausible while much less threatening as the ones on the outside. My high school theatre teacher, Dr. Doug Street, was a hero to me, as a student of all things 1960s, his pedigree was impeccable. He had lived in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco in the right set of years and had even played drums for some psychedelic rock outfit. He was the real deal; where other high school theatre groups were learning Shakespeare and Broadway musicals, we were studying Mamet, Beckett and Ionesco. I, however, was probably not his favorite student. These days, I would have been quickly diagnosed as ADD and doped up with some exotic cocktail to keep me on the straight and narrow, but back then I was just what folks liked to call a “problem child.”

Three times, Dr. Street gave me a chance to play a large role in a student production and for both the second and third of those times I let him down by failing a class (not his) and becoming “academically ineligible” to perform. I didn’t get any more chances. He liked me though, and enjoyed my writing. He even gave me a gift of a book of Leonard Cohen’s poetry; in fact, I only found out years later that this talented poet was a musician (and a Canadian!) as well. In remembering Dr. Street now, I am surprised to realize how much he may have affected and influenced my life (San Francisco, Theatre, Cohen, Canada...a handlebar mustache...). Teachers are like that.

As a burgeoning rock star in those years I also followed Jim Morrison’s lead and read pretentious literature such as Nietzsche, Sartre and Carl Jung of which, I can now admit, I understood only a fraction. When I (finally) graduated high school and, after a break, decided I should probably go to college (you know, just in case the rock star thing didn’t work out) my inexplicable commitment to my pretentious reading list made me think I should pursue the discipline of psychology...after all, who could be better equipped to tackle the academic problems of the intricate workings of the human mind than a troubled, creative, angst-ridden, Jim Morrison wannabe with a short attention span?

So anyway, I guess just to have something else to do while failing my Introduction to Psychology course, I took a theatre class as a fine arts credit.

Dr. Charles Gordone was not a typical professor. I can say that with some authority as I spent the next two years of my life trying to soak up everything I could from the great man. I still know that walking into that class on a whim was one of the best things that ever happened to me. He was not Dr. Street, who, for his pedigree should have been the more flamboyant of the two, where Dr. Street had been studious and careful, Gordone was a bundle of energy and a character through and through. He was a flashy dresser on a conservative campus (Texas A&M), a proud black man with a white wife who had sought out a small town, probably BECAUSE he wanted to raise eyebrows. He was a courageous quick thinker, a fast talking street smart mixed race superman from Cleveland who had MADE IT in New York (as America’s first Pulitzer Prize winning black playwright) then spent the next 30 years telling his story. I am one of the lucky ones who got to hear it. And be taught.

The class that caught me was a method acting class. As a ‘veteran actor’ I figured the class would be a breeze. Fat chance. Gordone ran us through the paces and no-one got to sit down until we had given him something real. There was crying, real anger, and real exhilaration. A duet scene I performed for a final grade in that class is still marked in my mind as probably my only great performance, all done under the driving constant rapprochement of a dedicated teacher. I followed his first class with another and another, scoring well enough in each that it became logical for me to switch my major to theatre to take advantage of my finally well positioned GPA. But by the third semester I was busily failing Introduction to Theatre as well.

Gordone was a fierce mentor. He spoke of nurturing the creative spirit as a duty. He would not let the small group of us who followed him from class to class get away with anything less than our best creative effort. And he kept talking along the whole way. He talked about fearlessness and love of beauty; he talked about racism and stupidity; he talked about the great people he’d known and his pride. And he talked about love. He gave me the little nugget above that has carried me for all these years as a grateful student.

I never got that Theatre degree. I’m pretty sure that not everyone is suited for college life or is meant to have a diploma that says we learned what we supposed to (or jumped through the hoops we were supposed to.) But neither did Dr. Gordone. According to what he told us, his degree was awarded for achievement. And trust me, he earned it. To my knowledge, he never published another play after his Pulitzer Prize winner “No Place to be Somebody”, but his art lived on, lives on, in those of us he taught.

He once told us a story about how he, a savvy urbanite, had ended up in Texas; he said that he and his wife drove south until they saw cows, then parked and started looking for work. I’m sure it was a bit of an exaggeration, but it was obvious that he had intentionally chosen a challenging environment in which to settle so he could feel like he was making a difference. I can’t help but identify with that decision sometimes as I look around our small town, and think of the challenge we have taken on.

Teaching is a noble profession. I’ve got two teaching parents, a sister and a grandmother that taught. We are all lucky to have people who are willing to share the gift of knowledge with us and who affect us in ways we may take years to understand. I never did get that theatre degree, but I was lucky to have met and learned from Dr. Street and Dr. Gordone, both of them, as theatre teachers made me a better chef, a better artist and better man.

Dr. Gordone died in 1995. When he taught me, jumping around the classroom with an energy I envy now, he was already nearly 70 years old. He only gave the audiences of the world a small part of his great work, but to those of us who had the honor of being his students, he gave the rest.

The Grease, The Egg and The Man in Black

We knew we were moving, but we didn’t know how. Then Nicole handed me the article. A guy in the South of the city was running his diesel engine on recycled vegetable oil. Nicole and I are not the types to leave a big footprint on this earth, we often buy recycled and used products; we share or use public transit and always have, we don’t see the point of the big box store spell that seems to hold most of the world in its thrall. Moving across country, possibly to another country was going to be a challenge to our ideals, whether we liked it or not, on at least some level. Crating up our worldly possessions and transporting them was bound to be costly, involve the burning of fuel, the organization of pick up and delivery at both ends, and to top it all off, we didn’t even know exactly where we wanted our trip to end. Recycled veggie oil pushing the whole adventure seemed like a perfect compromise, and I immediately became a convert.

Within a few weeks of reading that article I was throwing myself completely into the new project, reading books and researching ‘SVO’ (Straight Vegetable Oil) conversions on the internet, I was also lucky to meet a fellow traveler who had successfully taken his converted Volkswagen rabbit across much of north America, making the pipe dream seem like less of a pipe dream, and more of a pipe line (couldn’t resist it...). Now, this was several years ago and there are a couple of details to note here. One was that a key to our strategy was using recycled veggie oil; I am no longer convinced that biofuels can save the planet, but seriously, recycling cannot be all bad. And another was that I would be doing the conversion myself. Now, I am not an auto mechanic, I am a chef, but by necessity, and coming from a family of do-it-yourself Texas jimmy-riggers, I have managed to pull off a few interesting mechanical feats. Not enough, mind you, to seriously consider it a vocation, but enough that I have managed to develop what is probably a massively disproportionate sense of overconfidence in matters relating to such things. Success, even modest success, can be a dangerous drug.

The first task was finding the truck. We scoured the want ads for weeks with no luck and then one night, browsing eBay, I found the truck. It was described as being in decent shape, a former commercial fleet vehicle (regular maintenance, right?) which the current owner had purchased in an auction. It was a diesel, which was key, but (...there’s always a ‘but’...) it was also in need of a new transmission (‘otherwise, in good condition!’). There were two weeks left on the auction, and the reserve was 600 dollars. After weeks of looking at diesel trucks in the multiple thousands of dollars range, it seemed, for that split second, like a deal. Click. Two weeks later we had the truck for 600 dollars, no one else had even placed a bid, which really should have told me something. For some reason, the seller had an amazing look of relief on his face as the truck was towed away. The new tranny was about a thousand bucks, but afterward, it fired right up! I drove it home feeling lucky, what a deal! Then, of course, in the first week, the starter blew (300 bucks...). Then the glow plug array shut down (150 bucks...). Then we needed new tires (900 bucks!). Then, then, the valves were diagnosed as shot, which of course, meant a full engine rebuild. Soon, my “bargain” truck had turned out to be, well, you know...a diesel truck in the multiple thousands of dollars range. Click.

But after all that, we did have the truck. And it was a working, living breathing monster, ready to cart our worldly goods hither and yon.

Our next step was the fuel conversion. I won’t bore you with the details. Which is to say; I won’t entertain you with the humbling process by which I finally came to understand my limitations as a mechanic. In the end, we were only a month late in leaving and it only took us two more weeks after that before I had the guts to flip the switch and finally, for the first time, admit to some small degree of success. The conversion was a kit purchased online through a company called Greasel (now called Golden Fuel Systems) and the long hours of advice and guidance they provided on the phone (usually held in one hand with a wrench in the other) was invaluable and a key to my success. Along the way we also acquired a camper trailer, one of those cute old 50’s style things we called ‘the Egg’, which was our hotel room, camp kitchen and storage room for the trip, as well as the domain of our companion, Opus, a long haired grey male cat. Opus, by day, rode calmly in the cab of the truck in his carrier, and in the evenings, when he wasn’t guarding our tiny mobile home, looked forward to his leashed walks around the various campgrounds of what were eventually 21 states and 3 provinces.

We had fun; I’ve got loads of memories from that trip. We traveled as far to the Northwest as Vancouver Island to eat at the Sooke Harbour House, a world class destination and a highlight of my lifetime restaurant experiences. We paused or stopped in various places I’d always hoped to see throughout the Northwest and the Rockies, including the Redwood forests in Northern California, the cities of Eugene, Oregon, Olympia and Seattle, Washington, and Jackson Hole, Wyoming in the Grand Teton National Park. We also saw lots of Colorado and a bit of New Mexico, before we paused in Texas to visit my family, offload some of our possessions, filter some more oil and regroup. The second half of our trip took us up through the Midwest with a stop in Chicago to visit a cousin before we crossed into Canada to stay for a while. The border patrol in Detroit took one look at our ‘Beverly Hillbillies’ alternative fuel arrangement with its various heated fuel lines, duct tape, boating accessories, water heater insulation and various barrels of veggie crude (not to mention our hand-painted pickup and our oil-slicked vintage 1950s camping egg) before sending us back to US soil. We were shocked and dismayed but after a little soul searching and with some advice from a seasoned border crosser or two decided to try again on the other side of the lake. The slightly more redneck friendly border patrol agents at the upstate New York border had a different take on our alternate fuel system and laughed at the response we had gotten to it in Detroit and gave us a pass, saying, ‘whatever gets you down the road!’

The veggie oil experiment was not a complete bust, but I don’t like to take too much credit for its impact on the planet. In the end, we only had a few long stretches of recycled planet saving vegetable based fuel burns, interspersed with a lot of stretches of good old fashioned dinosaur juice pushing a lot of weight a lot of miles without a whole lot of breaks. Some unanticipated challenges arose, such as the importance of heavy filtration, and the time it took to accomplish that. Also, the awkwardness and sheer dumb luck needed to procure good quality veggie oil while we were in transit, and the messy, messy, smelly oiliness that inevitably coated every surface of our lives and possessions throughout the whole process. But we didn’t do it because it was easy, to paraphrase JFK, we did it because it was hard. Our ideals had made us want to at least try something. But more often than not the challenges proved for us to be too great to overcome within our timeline and limited budget, and while the veggie oil, when we found it was technically free, it was not easy to find; whereas, petroleum diesel was everywhere, taunting us with its ease of access and for the effort, comparatively low cost. Now, to be fair, we did know about some of the challenges we would be facing on our trip in advance and had always planned to supplement our veggie oil supply with biodiesel, its processed cousin, which is available commercially and works just like regular diesel (no conversion necessary). We had a map of biodiesel pumps across the breadth of our journey and sought them out, even detoured out of our way to use them. But they are few (though growing in number) and far between, and even though it is heavily subsidized, the cost was much higher, usually as much as 20 cents to the gallon. Frankly, by the end of our trip, petroleum or ‘dinosaur’ diesel was what kept our show on the road. Our veggie oil adventure was not an unqualified success, it was an exercise, an experiment, and, we hoped, another hand in the hard work of clearing a path that leads away from the fossil fuel economy that seems, in my mind, to be at root of a series of messes (ever heard the Middle East? Global warming?) But in the end, I think what it turned out be was a fact-finding mission on our part, and facts are not as pleasant as we’d like to think.

Much of the rhetoric that comes out in support of biofuels, especially ethanol, seems to imply that our lifestyles can continue, uninterrupted from one fuel source, petroleum; to another, in this case, ‘bio’ or plant based fuels. Some enlightening statistics have shot holes though this argument. From the numbers I’ve seen, even as productive as the grain belt of the US is, its entire production, if converted to fuel crops, could not even come close to keeping up with our current, much less our future fuel needs. And that’s not even taking into account that some of that grain belt production should be, you know, feeding us. Not to mention the tough reality that this new biofuel focused agriculture would push the chemically intensive, pesticide, herbicide, and genetically modified monoculture beast that ‘Big Ag’ has become to even more extremes doing untold damage along the way. Sadly, by my reckoning, biofuels are a false prophet. They are a feel good solution, but not the truth. Without some sort of sea change in our world view, this process leads down a scary road. I mean, we haven’t used all the oil yet, but we will, doing untold damage in the process no doubt, but it won’t stop there; if we don’t face the truth and change, then what is next? Will we use up all the other available carbon in our hunger for more power? The fact is that the truth is a bitter pill. In the real world, we will have to stop using as much fuel. We will have to drive less, fly less and accept that everything is going to cost more. We will have to get off the grids that control our lives or convert them to clean renewables like wind and solar power. At least until some Prometheus brings us a new gift of fire from the gods to power our lives. And I do believe it will happen, is happening. Kinetic energy, wind and solar, even some aspects of hydrogen offer glimmers of hope, and honestly, in the end, I think it will be something even better, even simpler than all these things. Modern science has made it clear that energy and power are all around us, and I believe that all we need is the right creative mind to figure out how to unlock it. But until then, we’ve got to face the facts, and the fact is that our answers are not going to be found at the gas pump.

The truck broke down the day that Johnny Cash died. We were stuck in New Hampshire for the night. The transmission again, I guess all that trailer hauling was a bit too much for it. After that we nicknamed it Johnny Cash in honor of ‘the Man in Black’. Even without the significance and coincidence of the great man’s untimely demise, the nickname was appropriate; before our trip, Nicole had hand-painted the truck with black Rust-o-leum and, perhaps even more obviously, because we’d dumped so much Cash into it over time. But for all of our problems, (and I haven’t mentioned all of them, trust me) the truck had become a bit of a friend and just as much a companion and a part of our story on our trip as Opus. But that was its last stop for a while. We stored it in New Hampshire until the following summer when I flew out to pick it up and drive it to Texas where Nicole and I had moved for the year before we settled in Canada for good. The truck drove me back to Texas solo, and then drove all of us back to Canada for one last anxious border crossing, this time from Maine into New Brunswick, and also completing our just over a year long circuit from coast to coast. After our arrival, we eventually settled into Kemptville. The truck had developed an oil leak and started running rough, it also needed snow tires (more cash) and there was also a fee to consider involved in properly importing it. Reality set in, and we bought a smaller more efficient car. When the last of the boxes were moved, we parked old Johnny until I had enough time or enough cash to get him up and running again.

Tim Aubin was a rose farmer in Africa. He always says that he used to run the farm with one finger, pointing it at this guy or that with instructions. Now, as a small farmer in rural Ontario, he says that more often than not, he finds that finger pointing back at himself. Years ago, he and his wife Roshan decided to take their future into their own hands. Together, they operate Aubin Farms, one of my favorite local farms, one look at their farmer’s market table and you’ll know why. After years of life in the “Big Ag” game, Tim likes to keep things real. They don’t use pesticides or herbicides; they strive to keep a closed cycle, or a waste-free farm. Everything on the farm that is not eaten or sold is used somewhere; from the sheep’s wool for blankets to the vegetable trimmings Roshan uses in her variety of delicious pickles and chutneys and what little is left or can’t be used anywhere else that finds its home in the compost heap and becomes the nutrition for the next round of crops. As a chef, the incredible quality of their product is reason enough for me to admire them, but as a human, and someone with more than a few environmentalist leanings, the choices they have made that have brought them to where they are fill me with such deep respect and admiration that I have trouble voicing it. Nicole and I left San Francisco to find a place to raise our family. To find a place where we could walk to work, shop locally, and live a lower impact life. Aubin Farms has quickly become an important part of that life. Their table was an anchor at last years Kemptville Farmer’s market and their food has fed dozens of our guests and as importantly, it has fed us. It’s the kind of food that looks better, tastes better and smells better than you can find anywhere else. It is local food, and it is what we are all about. Low food miles? We’ve got ‘em. Tim also picks up the compost at the restaurant; something that seems so natural, that our trimmings would go to nourish his next crop which we’ll soon be happily buying. One day earlier this year he asked me about the old truck out back, beside the compost bins. ‘It runs,’ I said, ‘It leaks oil and needs snow tires, but it’s carried me over many a mile.’ Two weeks later he made me an offer. A good old fashioned real farm offer and I swear I wouldn’t have taken ten thousand dollars for that truck from anyone. But from Tim, an offer of trade was more than enough.

Sunday June 8th marks the first day of our local farmer’s market in conjunction with the Dandelion Festival and our very own street party VegStock, an all afternoon musical event on a big stage right out in front of the restaurant. Come say hi to all our farmer’s market vendors at their new location between the Court House and the water; stick around for some tunes, some barbecue and some Beau’s Lug Tread beer. And be sure to say hi to Tim and Roshan, and wish them luck with their new truck.

Chemistry

“So you wanna be a rock and roll star?” Yes, Roger, I do. In fact, I was about 90 percent sure up until about 1996 that no other job would do. It didn't seem (at the time) all that unrealistic either...I’m not the most talented singer or songwriter or anything, but many of my heroes had achieved (in my mind) the nebulous prize of stardom not with talent alone, but with the right combination of talent, charisma, determination and sheer luck. I had determination in spades, a measure of talent and an admittedly self-perceived modicum of charisma, and luck? Luck can happen to anyone, right? So I figured I was a cinch. Pop stardom, in my theory, is about anticipation...It is the ability to look around the corner, guess what people will want to hear in six months, then work night and day perfecting it. If you guess correctly, the world will be waiting for you...and if you guess wrong? Well, you can always try again. I gave it a whirl. In those days, I used to wake up wondering how in the world I could be the one, the one voice in the crowd that would be heard. I used to fill every moment of down time chewing on lyrics in my head, trying to write the line that would stick, the phrase that would attack and keep on attacking until every last ear had been consumed. I tried so hard to say what people wanted to hear. Me and the boys had a band, and we tried real hard...you know the story. Jonathan quit, Bruce got married...here's the twist: Bruce got divorced and tried again, this time with a sense of urgency.



I moved to Austin in 1992 with intentions of regrouping the band that had formed the centerpiece of my high school pipedreams and finishing the story we'd all started to write all those years before. The core members had moved there and were still heavily involved in music. We had some talent, but more importantly, we had chemistry. I've jammed with people everywhere and everywhen since those days and have come to realize how precious a commodity that was. Chemistry is that magic thing that happens when you've got a few people jamming and something clicks, suddenly, you're out of the moment, it's like another person is there jamming with you, you know what everyone else is going to do, when they're going to do it, and it all sounds good. It sounds like hoodoo, but once you've had it, there ain't no going back. Every time I played with Kevin and Brandon from the first time back in high school I felt that feeling.



I've sometimes described music as an affliction, a recurring disease that attacks me anew every few years. I forget it's there for months at a time and then one day, WHAM, I've written a whole song and am dragging out my guitar and dusting it off to figure out the chords. These days I actually practice regularly just so I don't have to build my calluses back up when the mood strikes. But back then it was like a state of being. All I wanted to do was sing some how, some way, every single day.



I had another ace in the hole, as well. Kevin Allen, my guitarist and best friend in those days, was (and is) a bona fide guitar hero. This character would be sitting on the couch practicing guitar when I left for work in the morning and would often still be there, practicing when I got home eight hours later. For the record, he’s still playing; his band is recording their 6th full length record and in a successful 10+ year career, has toured just about every corner of the globe.



When I moved to Austin to regroup, it was on Kevin's invitation. He called me up, out of the blue, and asked me to come up to Austin to jam. I was at a low point, and his invitation sounded like the hand of an angel intervening to save me from harm. As we started to get to know each other again, a lot of that familiar chemistry came back. We grew into a five piece, and one day, practicing on the porch, we borrowed our landlord's name (Odus Krumly) and we had a band again.



Brandon, ever the oddball, suggested that we try a new direction, eschewing our punk, pop and psychedelic roots and forming a real country band. None of us had ever performed, or even regularly listened to country music, but growing up in Texas, all of us had been raised on the stuff. The idea was to try something new, to challenge ourselves and to stretch. Since country music was also not near and dear to us (at that time) we also felt no obligation to treat it with any respect. Our approach was brash and comedic, but as we delved deeper into the history and technique of the genre, it was eventually tinged and then filled with respect. I realized that what I originally thought of as witty parodies were actually quite true to a thread of country music that celebrates a smart-alecky turn of phrase like few other types of music, and that my voice was actually well suited to the style. As I often say, Texan is my first language. What had started as a parody became a journey of discovery and soon I was seeking out early recordings by Hank Williams, Johnny Cash and Bob Wills. I was also thrilled to find many of those artists in my father's record collection, a discovery that brought me closer to someone I'd sometimes had trouble relating to in those years.



I always think back on those days with fondness. It all seemed so right. The songs were fun and fresh, the timing seemed right, and the dream was coming alive.



So what happened? Well, we still had to practice. We had to get shows and record demos. We still had to do the hard work of being musicians. This is what many people who have never been inside this world never see. Music, good music anyway, is hard work. I thought I had the will and determination, but then I started to listen to another voice in my head that was questioning my choices. I started to think about not what to say that would make me popular, but what to say that would make me feel good about what I had just said. And then one day it just stopped, the songs dried up. I had nothing left to say.



In 1996 I made a decision to devote my energies to cooking. I've written before about how I was discovering that cooking could also function for me as a creative outlet, but less than a year after leaving Austin and moving to San Francisco, something else happened. I began working with a cool guy, another former musician with a sense of humour and an oddball demeanor. We started talking about food in new ways and playing with ideas in a familiar way. We were jamming...and we had chemistry. Eric Tucker, the chef at Millennium taught me a lot more than how to be a good chef; he taught me that cooking could be just as fulfilling and just as creative as music had ever been. Within a couple of years of working together, we did a spot on the Food Network, published an internationally released cookbook and "played gigs" (read: catered for high profile events) in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Philadelphia. We had more than a few brushes with various types of celebrity, cooking for movie stars, musicians of note, even political names. I was actually living out my rock star fantasy in the cooking world, something I'd never even imagined...who knew? When I first started cooking the closest thing we had to a celebrity chef was Julia Childs, hardly an adequate predictor for the likes of Ramsey, Bourdain, Legasse, Flay and numerous others that were setting out to make chefs into household names in the years to come. My brushes with this culture were bizarre and comedic, with Eric and I laughing at the culture the same way the guys in Odus Krumly laughed our way through our Country Music, it was fun and fresh and our dream was coming alive.



When the time came, I outgrew Millennium, the same way I'd outgrown the music scene in Austin. Another relationship with a special chemistry beyond what I could have imagined became and still is the best jam session for me yet, with my wife, Nicole. These days, she and I have settled in a small town south of Ottawa and started our own band. Brent and Jenn Kelaher, our business partners, are jamming along with us and the branch is a special place for reasons all those other jam sessions could never have touched. We are saying something we think is important; that thing that I could never communicate in my songs is at the very core of what we do here, supporting local foods, organic farmers and the importance of community. Doing not what we think is popular, but what we think is right. And just as everything is starting to settle into place, the music is back in my life again as well, less like an affliction this time, and more like an old friend.



In 2006, ten years after I'd written a song any better than a two line jingle, it came back. I was doing laundry one minute and the next thing I knew, it was two hours later and I was putting the finishing touches on 'Walkin Sam', a song for my father, the guy whose music collection had finally helped us mend the troubled relationship of my teenaged years. The song is about charity, goodwill and community and finally gave voice to the things I couldn't seem to say all those years before. I've been writing regularly since then, and it's good to be in a place where that feels right. At the branch, in my cooking, in my writing and in my music, I can finally say what I need to, not what I feel like I have to.



Music, cooking, writing, all these things are connected for me. They are creative, special; they help me to reach across what is small in physical space, at times, but can be an incalculable distance when measured in understanding. The food is a way to give nourishment, to show care; the music, a way to provide joy; the writing, a way to let other people know that they are not alone...that someone else has thoughts that tumble through their head, has stories to tell and hopes and dreams to share. And that chemistry, the jamming, and the music that comes when it's working...to me, when you hear that other person, when you feel that magic, like I do almost every day at the branch, that's just how you know it's right.

Global Flavour, Local Colour

“Bruce, you must visit Italy, It Is Your Home.” Those words came to me from an eccentric and charismatic gentleman of great taste named Sante Losio. I met him through his company, Fiume wines; he was importing great organic, Italian wines and our restaurant, Millennium, had one of, if not the largest, best and most thorough exclusively organic wine lists in North America. On the evening in question he was enjoying his first vegan fine dining experience, and like many new diners at that restaurant, was learning that vegan and fine dining were not mutually exclusive terms. I was asked to join him for dinner that evening as the most logical liaison between our food and wine list. While working as Sous chef for the restaurant, I had also been enjoying the “job” of learning about wines and specifically our particular wine list, even to the point where a great deal of decision making regarding it had become my domain. In fact, it had been my suggestion that we take our list, which had been well represented for organic selections up until that point, that last step to becoming a specifically organic themed list. I even wrote the mission statement which they still use:

Millennium is committed to providing the highest quality epicurean experience with a minimum impact to our environment. Naturally, this mission extends to our wine list. Many people are unaware that wine made from organically grown grapes is not a new product that exists only in fringe markets. "Organic" is simply a new name for an artisanal farming method; in fact, the great winemaking regions of Europe would not have survived the centuries without the practice of sustainable agriculture. There are many names on our list that may not be familiar to you, but even more surprising will be the names that are. Many of the world's top wine producers are coming clean about "clean" farming and this list will grow to include the finest of their wines. To the best of our knowledge this is the most comprehensive completely organic wine list on earth which, in our opinion, makes it the best wine list as well.

Of all my accomplishments in the industry, outside of the branch, I am probably the most proud of that achievement. As I have written on this blog and as I wrote in “The Artful Vegan,” Millennium’s second cookbook of which I was a co-author, bringing the knowledge and understanding of organics to any larger audience was, and is, my life’s work.

Sante Losio is a fellow traveler in this journey; his commitment to organic wines was deep and heartfelt...an emotional act by a rational man. Sante, his heart, and his family are from Italy. When I share the anecdote of our meeting with friends, I imitate his rich Italian accent, but cannot reproduce the gravitas or the intention behind the words. For Sante to tell me Italy was my home was for him to claim me as one of his own, a comrade, a brother in arms.

When I was buying wine at Millennium, Italy had over 54,000 hectares of organic vineyards compared to a few hundred in the entire U.S. Italy is also home to a movement called Slow Food, a name which speaks for itself. Though I am not Italian, outside of the vegetarian world, the majority of my fine dining training is in Italian kitchens; I am proud of this experience and feel (I hope fairly) that it gives me an insight in to at least a small bit of Italy’s culture. In my experience, the Italian cooking tradition values flavour over presentation, freshness over technique (without diminishing the importance of presentation or technique) and quality of the basic ingredients above all else. Italian chefs are brand snobs, quick to ask which canned tomato or tinned anchovy were used, which prosciutto, which parmesan... This is to say, I don’t think it was my technique that impressed him. I think it was our ingredients.

Millennium could be described as an extension of the farmer’s market. Our produce was some of the best in the world. Northern California has a long growing season, rich soil and an even richer recent history of organic farming. From the 60s to the present, what started as a handful of environmentalists ‘returning to the land’ has turned into a giant industry where small farmers are celebrated and elevated to positions of honor in a thriving food culture that values variety, flavor, freshness and a loving hand over the thrift, travel-ability and consistency of size and color that seems to govern the majority of the North American vegetable business status quo. And in that market, Millennium, a vegetable-focused restaurant, was monster; we bought directly from farmers and producers who were at the very top of their game, and, thanks to the unwavering leadership of our chef, Eric Tucker, were toe to toe with the top restaurants in California when it came to one on one farmer/chef relationships.

In my experience most people have forgotten or never experienced the difference the qualities that good local organic vegetables bring to food. I’ve heard people who taste these foods say ‘it tastes like something I had when I was a kid.’ And it does, it tastes like a memory of how good food used to be.

After meeting Sante, I was invited to participate in the first Italian Organic Wine Conference (a precursor to EcoWineFest) in Los Angeles as a judge. Our visit also included a dinner that paired these wines with a five course white truffle dinner. White truffles from Alba in Italy are one of the most prized foods on earth, often costing thousands of dollars per pound. If you’ve experienced them, you know why, if you don’t, I can’t possibly explain it. As a result of this event, and our meeting, Millennium was asked to participate in a series of dinners in the San Francisco area also featuring white truffles with a five course dinner and wine pairing of our own. I’d love to share that menu with you, but all I remember are a yuba braciole (it’s a long story), an Italian Merlot by Fasoli Gino, and a porcini flambé, which we presented in the dining room with bright, giant leaping flames. I also remember the overwhelming aroma of truffles seeping in and out of every pore of my being. I was so elated by the evening that I, to this day, value it as the single greatest cooking experience of my life.

When preparing for a wine pairing dinner, in this case a wine and truffle pairing dinner, there is a creative or brainstorming session that precedes the event. We smell, taste, discuss, imagine and relate. We open our minds to ideas that help us deepen our understanding of the wine and of the foods involved. What food makes this wine better? What is about this wine that makes this food better? We are creative, yes, but here's the thing, we must also look to tradition. We want to explore something new, but to do that well, we must also look back to the classic pairings and learn; there’s usually a reason some wines are never paired with some foods as well as a reason why some wines are always paired with others. To not acknowledge and learn from that would be to pretend that we, like the industrialist posing as a farmer, knows what is best without regarding the importance of what has gone before.

Millennium often offered dinners that paired excellent wines with our unique food; it was a great way to not only showcase our creativity, but to celebrate a small winery which usually meant celebrating both a farmer and an artist (two of my favorite things) at the same time. The synergy of wine and food, combined with the opportunity to create something new by their combination is also one of the most satisfying aspects of the trade of cooking. I remember each of these events fondly, as they were, more often than not, also a milestone in my personal journey.

Another milestone in that journey came when I finally followed Sante’s advice and visited Italy. Nicole and I spent three weeks in 2003 visiting Venice, Milan, and working on small farms in Tuscany and Piedmont. We were in Tuscany for the olive harvest and our hostess graciously treated us to a taste rivaling that of the white truffle, a fresh pressed olive oil at the source. I’ll never forget that flavour or the sweet herbaceous smell produced by burning the pruned branches from the ancient olive trees mingling with the salty Mediterranean air. We watched the sunset over the sea each night and worked each morning in a grove that had been tended by human hands for longer than the entire history of the country of my birth. Later, in Piedmont, we spent an entire day peeling chestnuts for a chestnut butter that, when it was finally ready, made the hours of burnt fingertips being torn by stubborn shells seem nonexistent.

Thanks to Sante’s advice, I had learned something about Italy by visiting. I learned that it is a place where tradition and an understanding of food are crucial. The farmers of an area know how to make the best products that can be produced by their patch of soil, because they’ve had generations of trial and error to sort it out. How egotistical it is for us to think our “industrial” farming could be superior to the techniques arrived at in this manner! The followers of traditional foodways know that the best drop of oil is the first, that the chestnut butter will be worth the work, that the best wine is made from a certain local grape, and that the cheese from this cow on this hill will need this much salt and that much time to age.

After visiting Europe, I came back to Canada with a vision; an idea of an old world restaurant in the new world. The branch is not an Italian restaurant. I do make fresh pastas and breads, I’m even curing my own prosciutto; but I also serve recipes from around the world, North America is not the old world, it is a melting pot of cultures and to not acknowledge and celebrate the wealth of recipes we have to choose from would be just as silly as eating at a McDonald’s in Paris. But we can acknowledge the old world and it’s tradition in another and perhaps more meaningful way: in our ingredients.

As I said, the branch is not an Italian restaurant, but I do serve spaghetti and meatballs, a dish which is at once Italian and new world, almost a symbol of the place at which those two worlds collide. My spaghetti is not Rusticella D’Abruzzo, arguably the world’s best product of that class; rather it is organic and Canadian, and still excellent. My tomatoes are not from San Marzano, they are Thomas’ Utopia, an Ontario company. My meatballs are made with local beef and my cheese is not from Parma, it is from the Oxford Mills Creamery, about 10 minutes from the restaurant’s back door. It is a simple dish, exactly like you’d find anywhere and yet nothing like one you’d find any where else; it is not expensive, and in many ways it is the perfect expression of my philosophy: simple, honest, local, comforting, at once traditional and completely new, and prepared with love and care.

When I met my business partners Brent and Jenn Kelaher, I knew I needed to prepare a meal that would show them that I had the chops, and that partnering with me would not be just some crazy idea. I could have wowed them with one of the baroque vegan presentations from my cookbook; I could even have presented white truffles with a porcini flambé. But instead I served them...you guessed it, spaghetti and meatballs. Nearly two years have passed since that meal and we are all still pushing forward and sharing that vision with whoever cares to see it. It is a vision of new world food with old world care; a bit of tradition with a dash of creativity, or, as we like to say, global flavour and local colour.

Later this month, I am excited to announce, we will be presenting our first wine pairing dinner with Featherstone Vineyards, an Ontario winery that seems to share some of our vision. They are an insecticide and pesticide free vineyard (unless you count Amadeus, the vineyard’s falcon and in house pest control system...) They’ve even taken the gutsy move of cellaring some of their wines in Canadian oak. I’m looking forward to celebrating their courage and craft and to enjoying an evening none of us will forget.

I still appreciate what Sante said, and value our friendship, but these days, in retrospect, I think he got it just wrong...what he should have said was “Bruce, you must visit Italy, learn from it, and bring it home!”

working copy, Valentines menu, 2008

Feast of Freya, 2008

pre-game:

Barcelona nights: marinated olives, toasted almonds, roasted peppers, anchovies, figs and dates stuffed with house-smoked bacon
(fino sherry)

first base:

Arugula salad with grilled blood oranges, pine nut brittle, lavender-vanilla aioli
(riesling)

or

Wild mushroom cappuccino with truffle foam
(gamay noir)

second base:

Oysters agrodolce: 3 fresh Malpeque oysters moistened with chocolate sweet and sour sauce, barbecued on the half shell and served warm
(pinot grigio)

or

Teriyaki lamb brochette: honey-soy glazed Aubin Farm lamb, grilled and served over arame, burdock and carrot kimpira with wasabi and sesame “seven secrets” oil and pickled ginger
(sake)

time out:

Lemon-ginger sorbet with poppy seed and rosemary biscotti
(prosecco)

third base:

River Bend Farm duck breast, pan seared with Uncle Bruce’s magic love dust (coffee, chili, mustard seed, fennel seed, coriander and peppercorns) served with port-raspberry demi-glace over a love nest of crispy shoestring fried leeks, potatoes, beets and parsnips
(cabernet)

or

Halibut poached in a lemongrass, damiana, ginseng and coconut love potion served over jasmine rice with bamboo shoots, bok choy, hearts of palm and grilled pineapple
(gruner veltliner)

home run:

Chocolate-chili mole cake with a molten chocolate center, avocado sorbet and smoked cherries
(port)

or

Saffron crepe with rosewater ice cream, pistachios, mandarins and spiced sugar twists
(icewine)

For My Mom

I love quiche. There, I said it. I loved it before I heard the expression “real men don’t eat quiche.” Admittedly, I hid my love for a short period after I heard that phrase but eventually I outgrew the need to prove my manhood by meeting some silly ideal propped up by someone who had obviously never tried my mom’s quiche. My mom makes a spinach quiche that will stop your heart dead in its tracks. Perfect flaky Crisco crust, layers of onions and bacon, Swiss cheese, and a custard of eggs, spinach and cream cheese. She sprinkles on paprika for color and bakes it just right. In my considerable experience eating her quiche, she’s never made a dry one, an under-salted one, an over-salted one or a runny one. It is always just right. And I’ve never seen her use a recipe. She has one, mind you, she made me a copy when I moved to California, seeing as how I wouldn’t be able to eat hers out there. I couldn’t bring myself to do it though. Oh, I’ve made my Bruce variations, Vegan ones with olives and tofu, vegetarian ones with smoked peppers and fried breadcrumbs to replace the bacon. Even now, back in the omnivore world, with good organic bacon and the finest cheeses in the world at my fingertips. I still, rarely if ever can bring myself to make mom’s quiche. And no, it’s not just my fear of Crisco; there are plenty of good organic non trans-fat shortenings available. There’s one ingredient I don’t have and can’t replace. You know what it is. Mom’s love.



You’ve all tasted it; if not mom’s, maybe dad’s...maybe your favorite aunt or granny. I don’t know who cooked that magic meal for you. But somebody did. For me it was my mom.



Earlier this month I went back to Texas to visit my family. My folks laid out a spread from the moment we arrived and tried to take us to every restaurant, BBQ joint, taco stand, kolache house or burger and fries pub that they could to impress us with Texas’ greatest asset. We were groaning and shopping for bigger clothes but couldn’t say no; it was too much, but too good. At one point, I told Nicole, this is how they show us love. It was a simple true statement, but I didn’t realize until I said it out loud how true it was.



Our first great relationship in our lives is with our parents; by bringing us into this world there is a tacit agreement that they will provide food and shelter, keep us warm and not let us shoot our eye out with a BB gun. Parenting is nature’s original charity. It is, although potentially rewarding in increasingly theoretical ways (the statistical decline in the percentage of children taking care of aging parents being an example), and will always be a huge investment with no guarantee of return. Well, other than the overwhelming sense of relief and accomplishment most parents seem to feel when their teenager finally moves out of their house. Parenting is, by many measures a series of gifts; food, shelter, clothing, bicycles, slinkies, Legos and puppies, as required by the child, over time. But food, or nourishment and the ability to grow, is the first and greatest of these gifts.



If survival is the body of our primary instinct then parenting and procreation are its legs. In my mind, it is no coincidence that we associate these two primary human biological functions with the mysterious and difficult to precisely define word (feeling? emotion? concept?) love. And just as parenting is so tied to the providing of food, it is no coincidence that our love for our mates is also characterized by rituals that revolve around eating. Think about it: “Dinner and a movie?” “The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.” “Bringing home the bacon.” Meeting the parents over dinner, the wedding feast... Food and love are so closely tied together in our nature that it is impossible to separate them.



While I was in Texas I got to see my niece and nephew who are approaching 3 and 5. They are beautiful, intelligent and boisterous little spoiled brats; manipulative, aggravating and impossible not to love intensely. Food is the ultimate bargaining chip with these adorable monsters. A well timed ice cream or ‘eggy’ can mean the difference between a world of love and a world of pain. I’ve definitely noticed in my own relationships how most fights begin with hunger and end over a decent meal. Food and love are built of the same biological stuff.



When my mom bakes a quiche, she brings something to it that no McDonald’s deep fryer can ever provide. Charity. An open heart. An honest and careful desire to provide sustenance to someone to whom she made a quiet promise many years ago when she realized she was about to meet a new and lifelong friend. Man, I love quiche.



--Chef Bruce