I walk out of The Odyssey full of waves and salt and battles and fire and sand and passion, and learn that Dolly Parton has died. The news comes in a text from my friend, the one who shares my love of bluegrass music, the one who sat in the third row with me many years ago when Dolly Parton came to town, our eyes glossy with awe and delight. We love Dolly’s lyrics, her skill, her gentle tenacity, her storytelling.

Last weekend, before I watch The Odyssey, before I hear the news, I spend a rainy morning on the sofa1 reading Lily James’s Heart the Lover. It’s such a treat to read in “one big gulp” as my friend Eshun calls it, rather than little sips here and there. It gives the words time to sink in. The air is thick outside, but still I sit with a wool blanket covering my toes and a mug of hot coffee in my hand. The book is written in the first person present tense, even though the narrator is looking back over her youth, college years and present life. Telling the story this way brings scenes to life. We’re living in a cold student apartment huddled around the heater in the living room. We’re listening to The Talking Heads, to Prince, and sipping percolator coffee in a dirty student kitchen.

Later that week I read Sonya Walger’s Lion, also a story looking back on life but told in the first person present tense. We are in a hot and sticky apartment in 1980s Buenos Aires, smoking cigarettes. We are skydiving. We are in London eating olives and squeezing a lemon wedge over fish. There’s an immediacy in being on a journey with these characters. The perpetual present pulls you into a scene and presents you with a life that isn’t yours but you too are there with them. I am inspired to write this way. To create a feeling, an energy. Dolly has this ability. We connect with her because she takes us into a moment where her understanding of life pulls us together as humans. Right now.

As the days pass, people around the world pay tributes to Dolly, each one sharing songs that mean something specific to each one of them, at different points in their lives.

I think of Dolly when I tumble out of bed and stumble to the kitchen and pour myself a cup of ambition. The clickity-clack of a typewriter is the backdrop to these moments, a staccato pace that tells me it’s time to get up to my little room and get writing.

I think of Dolly when I hear Whitney Houston’s cover of I’ll Always Love You with the sax solo that inspired my youngest to take up the saxophone for those two short, sweet, awkward years.

I think of Dolly on long drives, remembering when the podcast series Dolly Parton’s America carried me the 1000kms from Quebec to Nova Scotia in a snow storm after my dad had a cardiac arrest. I think of my dad listening to the podcast through corded earphones while recuperating, with stories of Dolly’s life drowning out the beeps and coughs and conversations in his shared hospital room.

I think of Dolly when I remember my kitchen in London, with the portable CD player on the metal shelf by the cookbooks that played Just Because I’m a Woman: Songs of Dolly Parton on repeat. It is a tribute album, a compilation of singers from Nora Jones to Shania Twain to Alison Krauss, all performing their favourite Dolly Parton songs. I test ice cream recipes to those songs. Juice recipes. Pizza recipes. Sautéed onions will forever hold the flavour of “Two Doors Down” performed by Me’shell Ndegeocello. I give that CD player, along with all my other incompatible UK electronics, to my neighbour when we move back to Canada. Dolly’s CD is forgotten inside. I wonder if it kept my neighbour company too?

I think of Dolly when I drink from my big grey water bottle. Last year my sister gave me a sticker of Dolly’s face, an illustrated rendering of her younger self, perhaps from her “Coat of Many Colours” days. Dolly’s hair rolls up and down in yellow waves. She’s wearing a western shirt with an embroidered flower on a blue collar. There are dimples on her pink cheeks. I put the sticker on my water bottle so I can listen to her say, there you go honey. Take a minute. Have some water, in her loving, Dolly way.

I think of Dolly now as I play her music in my kitchen. These late August days are liquid. My body has sunk deep into summer while life ticks on around me. I see tall weeds outside the kitchen window, thriving between the cracks in the pavers, left wild since I tended to them in June. Some have white blossoms. Blue. Dandelion yellow. Dolly says, “when a flower grows wild, it can always survive, wildflowers don’t care where they grow.”2 So I leave them there and tend to other things around me. I pull out expired cottage cheese containers. The dregs of almond butter. A forgotten jar of sun dried tomatoes. Old salsa. I compost the food. I wash the containers. I want to stay in the kitchen with Dolly, to listen to her melodies, to savour her stories, right now and forever.

This summer I’ve been journaling quadrant style, via inspiration from Molly Wizenberg who was inspired by the cartoonist Lynda Barry. The idea has evolved as it has trickled through the prompters, and now for me it looks like this:

Divide a page into four. Write the date and your location at the top of the page. In the top left quadrant record what you’re doing at that moment. In the top right record what you’re noticing. In the bottom left write down what you hear, and in the bottom right draw a quick sketch of what you see. This style of journaling is a gentle way into the page, a formula to follow that quickly puts pen to paper and flushes out the textures, sounds and feelings of the moment. It also suits these erratic summer days, where, as Molly says, “I can keep up the habit without a lot of effort in a few stolen minutes on the bus or over breakfast.”

Molly suggests using a steno pad or any non-fussy ringed pad of paper that you won’t take too seriously. This exercise isn’t supposed to be a work of art, rather a user-friendly practice that will hopefully lead to a journaling habit.

I didn’t follow the rules. An accordion-style hard-covered journal wrapped in silk has been sitting on my book shelf waiting for a rainy day, a special day, a day worthy of thoughts wrapped in silk. I found myself reaching for it, pulling it apart, and drawing lines to make quadrants on the pages. I began by using my black fountain pen, the one I’ve also been saving for special occasions, but the thick cotton paper absorbed the black ink in big blotches, so I switched to a 01 Micron art pen, also saved for special art moments, all while asking myself, if not now, when?

The top right quadrant is the one I find most interesting: Noticing. This could be the crow’s nest in the elm tree outside the window, the woman in fluorescent pink shorts walking her pug along the sidewalk, or the purple smoothie in the mason jar at the corner of my desk. But looking back over the pages, I see that when I write from the quiet of my studio, I record what I am noticing inside myself. July 21th - a calm this morning, a forced slowness that is working for me. July 30th - the joy of this little room, the want to be here. August 19th - happy to be home.

Which brings me today, my 27th wedding anniversary. Twenty seven has always been a favourite number of mine. In a past essay from 2019 titled 27 Things,1 I wrote about my connection to the number, then listed 27 things that I had learned and wanted to remember at that point in my life. I’ve just read over the list and feel tender towards myself from 2019. I was leaning into my senses, looking for creative structure in my life, for calm, and according to #22 on the list, was finding flavour in interesting places like pickle juice. I am grateful for this list, I needed these reminders. But I would like to add one more thing:

28. There is something very special about having a room of one’s own to write and make art.

I’ve been writing about life and food all over the house for most of the 27 years I’ve been married. You need to live in order to write about life. You need to cook and eat in order to write about food. Going out into the world is fodder for the work, and knowing when to turn down the living and the eating in order to do the writing has been my biggest challenge. It’s a fine balance, one I think I’ve finally found. My little room is on the second floor, next to my husband James’s office. My walls are painted the palest pink, Sherwin-Williams Cultured Pearl; James’s walls are sage green. He has plaid curtains; I have wooden shutters and a ceramic horse on my shelf splashed with gold. He has a photograph of a ship hanging above the printer. I have a painting of a bearded iris2 over my desk. We are together but separate, working away on our own things, same but different, side by side. I can call out and request a coffee when I hear him heading downstairs. When I ask him if he’d like to watch The Odyssey to celebrate our big day, he shouts an enthusiastic yes! through the wall. It’s the perfect set up.

Homer might call this a version nostos, the ancient Greek concept of homecoming. I am no Odysseus. I haven’t fought battles, blinded a cyclops with a burning wooden spike, or endured the wrath of Poseidon in order to get home. But I have found this place after all these years, my sense of nostos, in the top right quadrant of my silk bound, accordion journal.

Subscribe now

As we climbed a slow hill somewhere between Moose River and McPherson Mills, I saw a black bear in a blueberry field to the right of the road. It was seated with its body turned upward towards a farmhouse at the top of the field, like the woman in Andrew Wyeth’s 1948 painting Christina’s World.1 Christina was said to be Wyeth’s neighbour, Christina Olson. Olson had a degenerative muscular disorder which left her unable to walk. In the painting Olson is inclined a field, turned upwards toward Wyeth’s farmhouse. Some say its a scene of determination - Olson was against using a wheelchair, preferring to pull herself through life - others wonder if the subject is yearning.

I slowed down to take in the scene, asking my twelve year old nephew, a nature enthusiast_, if he could see the bear from the back seat. He said he could, but that black bears are all around his home in North Vancouver, so not to slow down on his account. I paused anyway, because the road was quiet and free of cars, and I wondered - was the bear yearning, or was it in mid-crawl, turned upward with determination? We were 800km, a 9 hour drive, from Wyeth’s farmhouse in Cushing, Maine where he painted Christina’s World. But the land is similar, rural and coastal with harsh winters, lush summers, and wild blueberries growing in the same acid soil.

Later I thought of Alden Nowlan’s poem Atlantic Coast: Summer, where a bear is described as being ‘groggy with blueberries,’ - a new perspective on my roadside scene.

Nowlan was born in Stanley, Nova Scotia in 1933, on a stretch of dirt road he later referred to as Desolation Creek. His mother was fourteen when he was born; she later left the family. His father worked sporadically as a manual labourer; Nowlan wrote in secret well into his twenties. His words shine a different light on the Atlantic Coast, one where grimness and beauty and perhaps hope and determination can coincide.

Atlantic Coast: Summer

It’s summer yet but still the cold

coils through these fields at dusk, the grey Atlantic

haunting the hollows and a black bitch barking

between a rockpile and a broken fence

out on the hill a mile from town where maybe

a she-bear, groggy with blueberries, listens

and the colt, lonesome, runs in crooked circles.

Was the bear in the field yearning, determined or groggy with blueberries? Who knows. But I liked the scene I saw from the car - brown bulk against the green - reminding me that it’s almost blueberry season, and soon it will be fall.

From the Archives:

Blueberries for Sal, September, 2018

My kitchen smells like curry and simmering blueberries. It’s a surprisingly nice combination: masala, turmeric and coconut in one pot, jammy blueberries in another, wafting up and melding into one. I like it so much I add a pinch of cardamom to the blueberries. I used to put those little seeds, native to southern India, in blueberry smoothies; the two flavours are good together.

I’m cooking with my sister Sally. We’re two Wednesdays in to what I hope will be our weekly batch cooking sessions together. Sal had an infection in her heart over the summer. She’s on the mend, after 42 consecutive days of antibiotics administered through her left arm, but she is still a little tired, and not sure how energetic her next steps should be. Time, and tests, will tell. In the meantime, we’re cooking and dividing it up. Pasta sauces. Curries. Chillis. Salad dressings. Blueberry Grunt – the things that make weeknights easier and Wednesdays more fun.

The Blueberry Grunt was a special add on. Desserts weren’t part of the repertoire, but I had a stash of wild blueberries from our weekend in Cape Breton, and Sally and blueberries go well together.

Blueberries for Sal was a favourite book in our house when we were little. Sally loved it for obvious reasons. I loved it because it involved the wild outdoors; a fun, mischievous child; a bear family and blueberries – all the things my little tomboy self connected with.

The story is all about getting ready for winter. A mother and her little girl set out to Blueberry Hill to pick blueberries. Wild grasses, boulders and low wild blueberry bushes cover the wind-blown landscape. The book is black and white, but I know it’s late summer, and those little bushes will soon turn a cranberry red. Sal’s mother tells her not to eat as they pick; they need to can the berries for winter. Meanwhile a mother bear and her cub also set out to Blueberry Hill. Sal and the bear cub meander away from their mothers as they eat and explore. Eventually they realize they are following the wrong mother (I loved this part – gasp!). I won’t give away the ending, but trust that by the end, Sal and her mother are canning blueberries, and the bears are full for the winter.

Sally and I aren’t saving wild blueberries for winter. We’re more bear-like, more immediate. Last weekend my younger sister Lee served me a bowl of Wild Blueberry Grunt, topped with cream. She and her family are living in the Margaree for the fall, surrounded by ocean, salmon, rosehips and wild blueberries. I stood and ate it at the counter, like a bear. She picked the berries from bushes hiding amongst the tall grass in front of her house. If you look carefully, she said, the little blue berries will come into focus.

So I started picking. Then I subcontracted my kids to pick as well – grass, leaves and all. Before we left, we had 4 cups worth.

And this is why I have blueberries for Sal.

Blueberry Grunt is a stove top or camp fire dessert where blueberries are simmered in a pot with sugar until nice and jammy. Dough is spooned on top, a lid goes on, and steam cooks the dough, dumpling-style. Apparently the simmering berries make a grunting sound as their steam pushes through the dumplings. I’ve yet to hear a grunt, but maybe this happens over a campfire, when tinfoil covers the pan, a fire is licking below and people are extra hungry.

Cape Breton Wild Blueberry Grunt

4 cups (500g) blueberries (preferably wild)
1 cup (180g) sugar
1/2 cup (125ml) water
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground cardamom seeds (optional but worth it)
1 tablespoon lemon juice

For the topping:

2 cups (320g) flour
1/4 cup (45g) sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons butter, cut into small pieces
1 cup (250ml) milk

cream, to serve

Combine berries, sugar, water, cinnamon and cardamom in a large saucepan (or fry pan – either will do, as long as it has a tight fitting lid. Or use tin foil). Bring to a boil, then simmer until reduced slightly and berries become a little jammy. Add lemon juice and give it a stir.

While the blueberries are simmering, whisk together the flour, sugar, baking powder and salt. Add the butter and roughly stir together, then add the milk. Stir until flour is no longer visible but mixture is still a little ‘shaggy’. Scoop into balls (golf ball -sized) and drop onto blueberry mixture. Cover tightly with lid and leave over medium-low heat to steam and grunt for 15 minutes. Don’t lift the lid. When the timer dings, prod a dumpling with a fork to make sure it’s cooked through. You want tender and fluffy, but not raw. Put the lid back on and simmer for a few minutes more if necessary.

Eat warm, with a swirl of cream, while standing at the counter.

I have a seaweed story for you today, an episode from the early days of The Food Podcast. I remember writing the script in our old kitchen, the wooden one at the back of the house. In that small room sat a washing machine, a dryer, stove, fridge, counter, sink, cupboards and a small table. When we sat down to eat, one of the boys would drag in chairs from the dining room and we’d squish together around the little table. The dining room, with its big windows and beams of south-facing light, sat empty most of the time. It was a formal room, not cozy, not what we needed at the time. Now that dining room is our kitchen and it’s the heart of the home.

Two of the boys are now out in the world. Our youngest has one year left before finishing high school. Boys have grown and time has passed since we stitched this episode together, but still, seaweed swirls beneath the surface of the ocean. I’d like to say we’ve been fuelled by seaweed through it all, that their vitamins, minerals and trace elements have given us the strength that both we and the environment need. But the truth is that our seaweed diet is limited to the furikake sprinkled on poke bowls, the nori snacks sold at the corner store, and the seaweed salads at our local sushi restaurant. There’s room for improvement.

I am grateful for these old episodes - for the reminder of the goodness of seaweed, and also for the window into my life in 2017. Listening back is like cracking open a photo album, each memory leading to another, like mossy rocks guiding us across a stream.

I hope you enjoy this change of storytelling while I take a little time away this August. You can listen to the episode HERE via Substack or over HERE via Apple Podcasts.

Until next time,

Lindsay

PS - last week my friend Ori came over for a visit. Over tea (licorice and peppermint) we talked about what we’ve been working on, and she pulled out a cyanotype of a photograph she’d taken of her favourite sailboat in Marriots Cove. The boat’s name is SEAWEED! Ori and our friend Andrea are deep into cyanotype making- they print off photographs or find foraged objects and through a process of paper, water, science and sun, gorgeous Prussian blue images emerge. There are many cyanotype tutorials on line that I’m going to explore. Here’s a good explanation of the process using leaves and flowers from Kew Gardens. I’d love to try a cyanotype of a frilly seaweed, perhaps Irish Moss from the Northumberland Strait. Stay tuned…

I’ve been swivelling around this morning, enjoying my son’s desk chair. Last week he carried it up to my study from his corner of the basement where it has sat unused over the summer months. I feel like a young Michael J. Fox in the opening montage of the ‘80’s sitcom Family Ties, rolling across in his high school bedroom in an office chair with efficiency and confidence. I spin around, reaching for this, opening a drawer, grabbing a book, then swivel back to my desk.

While swivelling around the room I found a little Moleskin journal from fifteen years ago buried in a drawer. Inside are the usual memories - notes on books I was reading at the time, ideas for podcast episodes, grocery lists, three pages of shark drawings by one of my boys, and notes jotted down in the dark at an author talk given by Diana Gabaldon. Gabaldon had filled the Rebecca Cohn Auditorium that night. She read from the original Outlander book, answered questions about her writing process and later signed books to a line of women that snaked through the lobby, down the hall and through the art gallery below. But what caught my attention most that night was when she told the audience that she wrote Outlander - a story that jumps through time to Scotland under the Jacobites, France and later the Americas - at her local library in Arizona. She didn’t travel to Inverness, Scotland, to capture the essence of the place. She didn’t sail a merchant vessel to France. She didn’t visit crumbling castles, dank prisons or stride across the Scottish moors to understand life in eighteenth century Scotland. Instead, she travelled through books.

My writing was scratchy that night, but I think my quote from Gabaldon reads, “the only thing you can’t learn in the library is how a place smells.” For that, she had to use her imagination.

I decided this message from my tiny notebook was a cue to swivel around, stand up, go outside and inhale the city. The timing was good - we had planned to walk the three blocks to Stillwell, our neighbourhood beer garden, for dinner.

Once outside I take a deep breath. There are notes of cannabis. Linden trees. The neighbour’s roses. Tar from street construction. Green compost bins. Car fumes. And then as we turn through the open doorway of Stillwell1 between a thrift shop and Dairy Bar,2 the scent of pints and grilled hamburgers greets us. We settle at a pink table, me camouflaging in my pink canvas shirt, and order our favourite thing on the menu - the grilled halloumi sandwich topped with cherry tomatoes, peppery arugula, crinkle-cut pickles and pickled red onions. Under all of this goodness is a thick, soft pita and a herby yogurt sauce, the secret ingredient.

I order this sandwich every time we go to Stillwell. There’s something about summer air combined with the textures and flavours of this sandwich, and the green sauce that drips conveniently into the basket below. Afterwards I dip my finger into the drops and taste for research purposes - yogurt with a hit of cumin and a touch of heat. Is there a scent? Happiness.

Back at home I try to make the sauce. We’re grocery shopping, meal planning and prepping for a week away at the cottage, and I want to fold this sandwich into the rotation. I know zucchini aren’t in this thin sauce, but in an effort to squeeze as many vegetables into our meals as possible (and to use up the amassing glut of zucchini) I thinly slice one and melt it down in a pan with a teaspoon or two of olive oil, three cloves of chopped garlic, a good pinch of chili flakes, sea salt and a ½ teaspoon of ground cumin. I want to hear the sizzle but not burn the zucchini, so I turn up the heat to medium low, stirring occasionally, and just let everything melt down for about 15 minutes. Later, when the mixture is cool, I will spoon it into my little food processor, add 1/2 cup thick Greek yogurt, whatever soft herbs I have - about half a cup of parsley, mint, and or dill, and I’ll blend it all together with the juice of half a lemon.

Doesn’t that sound like it would be good spooned on a warm pita with all the toppings of my favourite sandwich? We’ll eat this version on a picnic table by the ocean, wild roses lining the wooden deck under our sandy feet. Someone nearby will be cutting grass, someone will be grilling hotdogs. It’s a community of cottages, clustered together along the ocean where evergreens grow on a diagonal, tilted by the wind. I can’t tell you how it will smell exactly, but these words and a little imagination will hopefully transport you to this moment, to this meal.

Subscribe now

This morning I unwrapped a fresh bar of soap, rounded and oval like a fresh, white goose egg. I inhaled notes of almond extract, lily of the valley, clothes on the line and apple blossoms. The pale green box simply said “almond oil soap,” but I know there was more to it.

The soap dish is an old ashtray plucked from the give-away pile at our family cottage - pale yellow translucent glass dish rimmed in glass balls. Floating within the dish is the last bar, now reduced to four pieces of withered shims of soap. They look like the ends of parmesan cheese, mishapen, still useful but awkward. If they were parmesan ends I would store them in the freezer and pull them out to add to soup or stews or a simmering bolognese. An Italian grandmother would probably tell me to make a soap scrubber from these ends by placing the slivers of soap in the toe of a panty hose leg and tie the end off with a knot. Or make pretty shaped soaps by grating what’s left, being mindful of fingertips, melting the shaved shards down and pouring the now liquid soap into small molds like tiny muffin cups or little silicone hearts from the floppy tray in the back of the cupboard. She might also suggest the shims as a chalk replacement. Soap works as chalk on a mirror (for romantic messages) and fabric when tailoring. Or one can simply press an old sliver on to the new bar, like a barnacle on a rock.

In the end I tipped the old bits into the garbage, washed out the glass ashtray and just started fresh. There is a time to keep and a time to throw away, I told myself.

I am now sitting in my new little studio study, a room of my own, writing all of this down. I can smell the new bar of soap from here, lifted by the breeze from the bathroom window and carried down the hallway to me. The scent lingers, as do the words I’ve just written, “there is a time to keep and a time to throw away.” I’ve kept the yellow glass ash tray. Behind me is the wooden desk too small for my laptop but still useful, passed down from my mother-in-law Rose. There is a lithograph on the wall of four little chickadees sitting on a floppy evergreen branch, also passed down from Rose. Downstairs there’s a china cupboard. Silverware. An oil painted by my Gran of ghostly ships under a navy sky. The WWII food tin.1 My grandfather’s copper pots. And in my bedroom, my grandmother Vivian’s pendant in the shape of an owl.

My parents’ house some of their parents’ things too. A wooden plant stand lined with tin, made by my grandfather. A dining room table and six matching chairs. Two wicker swivel chairs situated in their kitchen window, just the way they sat in my grandmother’s living room window overlooking the Bedford Basin. They both have siblings who have also shared in the inherited objects. I have siblings, so does James, who will house more of these things too. But Rose was an only child, and only cousin, and everything over the years has slowly travelled from the UK, across the ocean, to her in Nova Scotia. She has paintings, china, tea sets, end tables, serving platters, desks, desk chairs, two sideboards, military swords, silverware, a thimble collection, porcelain dolls, washing basins, washing basin stands, plant stands, framed photographs, and best of all, dollhouses.

Rose’s dollhouses - 9 in total - were passed down by her Auntie Amy. Amy lived in a small house on a tiny street in a seaside town in the South of England. She wore wool skirts, cardigans, fastened her white hair at the back of her head, had a little white dog and spoke in a soft, singsongy voice. Over her lifetime Amy furnished each dollhouse with furniture, bedding and drapes specific to the period of the house. There are tiny copper pots, oil paintings, serving dishes and cutlery. Babies in cradles, chamber pots, pianos and sideboards. Whenever I peer inside one of the houses I see something new. Last time it was a tiny bar of Pears soap, about the size of the tip of my thumb.

Last weekend while packing up the car at Rose’s, my husband James found a tiny object wedged in the cracks of the trunk amidst bits of dead leaves and dog hair. He handed it to me, saying his mother would know where to put it. I peered down at this little thing, small enough to nestle between my fingers. It was a miniature ivory wine goblet, the size of my baby fingernail.

Rose walked the tiny goblet over to the dollhouse - a pink Georgian centre hall plan with black gingerbread trim. James had delivered it earlier in the spring to Rose’s summer home in Chester. She asked him not to worry about wrapping up each room in tiny bubble wrap, but to just pack it up, whole. The little ivory goblet must have slipped through an open dollhouse window and landed in a crevasse of his trunk. Rose opened the front of the house, cracking the facade in half, and gasped. The move had been hard on the house; each room had been ransacked. Tables were upturned, rugs were in disarray, paintings were dangling off their tiny nails, babies were falling out of cradles. She put the goblet on the kitchen table and decided to tackle the job another day.

I ask Rose if she finds it heavy, carrying the legacy of her family’s things. She shrugged and said she likes the memories around her. She has also said, however, that she could never downsize - who would possibly take all this stuff?

We carry these things, gifts from the past, sometimes with tender nostalgia, sometimes with overwhelm. It’s difficult to know when to keep and when to throw away,2 and when to give ourselves permission, and the grace, to do so. It’s also a privilege to have to make these decisions. I have a friend whose maternal family comes from east Germany. She taught me that an inheritance of material objects implies your ancestors have not been displaced; much of her family’s material possessions had been left behind during WWII. Inheritance for her is something she is trying to create for her family, moving forward. She told me this while sitting at her wooden table surrounded by a mix of fabulous chairs. I know her children will want them someday.

Last weekend I made no-churn ice cream in Rose’s kitchen. I used a jar of lime curd I found in the cupboard and swirled crushed raspberries through the mixture before freezing. The result was a marbled cloud, set in a loaf tin. We ate it from Rose’s Blue Willow teacups just after the sun had set over Mahone Bay. I Imagined the journey of these teacups, likely leaving Aunty Amy’s tiny English house individually wrapped and layered into cardboard. “They came from HomeSense,” Rose said with a shrug.

To make a no-churn lemon curd ice cream, turn to Kelly Neil’s recipe here. Kelly calls for her homemade lemon curd, but Rose had lime curd and we use what we have. We also had a pint of fresh raspberries on the counter, so I mashed about ⅓ cup of raspberries with a pinch of salt and two pinches of sugar (salt is nice here because freezing weakens flavour) and marbled it through the ice cream mixture with the tip of a knife before freezing. So pretty.

Instead I’m writing from my bed with a sprained back. I’m not sure what I did; it could have been an enthusiastic move at the gym, a spin at dance class, the pot hole that jostled things, or heck, maybe it happened reaching for a bottle of shampoo in the shower. All I know is that here I am, watching leaves from the ash tree sway in the breeze outside my window between moments of scrolling through images of summery food. Beams of afternoon sun are streaming across Dottie who is stretched out, so limber, on the floor.

Oh Dottie. Earlier this week, before I went down, I drove back from the cottage with the dog but without her tin of food. I have lots of time, lying here in bed, to explain the gravity of this situation. So here I go.

We keep Dottie’s food in a tinned steel mess container issued by the Royal Army in WWII to keep food stuff dry and vermin proof. The tin belonged to my mother-in-law’s father, where it sat in their kitchen on the outskirts of Birmingham, housing bread and biscuits and other things needing mice-proofing. Now it lives on the floor in the corner of our kitchen, filled with Dottie’s dry dog food - Purina Pro-Plan Sport, specifically. It houses enough for a week’s worth of meals, and saves us from dragging the giant bag - the kind that looks like a lifeless dead body in your arms - when we travel. We tip portions of the bag into the container, top it with Dottie’s container of meds, then close the loud, heavy, metal lid. It’s not just vermin proof, it’s Larbrador proof as well.

On top of the lid are two metal handles that rotate on a rudimentary hinge. Pinched between the handles are three recipe cards reading EATEN BREAKFAST / EATEN LUNCH WITH MEDS / EATEN SUPPER, a system that James devised to let family members know where Dottie is in her feeding schedule (the cards are essential - Dottie will tell you she hasn’t eaten, lying with her eyes, her face, her body language). We drag this tin, with the paper feeding system and the meds, everywhere we go. Last weekend it went to visit Rose, then it went back into the car and travelled to the Northumberland Strait. My sister keeps food for her dog at our shared cottage, all summer long. She doesn’t drag food around, or have to wedge a hoodie between the tin and a seat to keep the metal from clanging as we bump along back roads. But we stick to this system, dragging this bulky relic everywhere Dottie goes. It helps us remember to pack the most important thing of all: Dottie’s meds. Without them our sweet five year-old yellow lab will wet the bed.

The incontinence began at age two, shortly after she was spayed. We would find Dottie waking up from a nap, laying on a wet dog bed, staring at us through embarrassed eyes. We’d wake up to wet sheets after Dottie had snuck up on our bed in the night, only to fall asleep then wet our bed. There were soaked sofas. Soaked kids beds. Soaked beds at friends’ houses. We always let her out to pee throughout the day and before bed. She clocked thousands of steps a day in a beautiful, wooded park. Her stitches did split open after her spay surgery and James and I had to rush her to the emergency vet hospital, intestines on display, but that surgery healed well and she had seemingly forgotten the trauma of it all. What else could be going on?

I took Dottie back to the vet to find out. Dr. Croft met us in an examining room and squatted down to greet Dottie with a treat. “Are you having trouble with your estrogen, Dottie?” she asked as our normally shy dog rolled over for a belly rub. “When we took out your ovaries and uterus, your estrogen plummeted!” Dr. Croft explained. “Us ladies understand these things,” she said to Dottie, now stretched across Dr. Croft’s lap. “Estrogen is responsible for strengthening and toning the sphincter muscles that keep the urethra tightly closed,” she told me, sensing my need to understand as well. Sphincter. She tracked my eyes as they drifted up and out the window, lost to a Wayne’s World “Sphincter says what?” moment. “There are actually over 60 sphincters in the body,” she said, snapping me back into focus. “We’ll give Dottie some meds to help boost her estrogen and that’ll hopefully get things back in working order.”

Dottie is now on Proin, an estrogen replacement in the form of large, chewable pills. We’ve played with one pill a day (there was leakage.) We forgot one day (that was a disaster). We’ve tried two pills a day (Dr. Croft thought that was too hard on her liver). For now we’ve settled on 1 ½ pills at lunchtime (see above card that reads EATEN LUNCH WITH MEDS). At $2.25 a pill it’s worth it, for the clean sheets alone.

This is why I panicked when I forgot the bulky tinned steel container with her meds and the feeding schedule attached to the handles at the cottage last weekend. On Monday morning, pre-back injury, I lugged a new bag of dog food from the pet store, then put in a request with Dr. Croft for a few emergency pills to tie us over. I’ve just received word that my mom has rescued the tin from the cottage and is bringing to us as I write. She could barely lift it. The tin is the size of a small rectangular suitcase, the kind my grandmother used as a carryon for train travel, the same one my boys later filled with Playmobil and carried around for years. Except Dottie’s tin was meant to be carried by a soldier at war. It’s not practical. But we are a “use what you have” family.

And wait a second, perhaps this is why I am a bad back person?

So if you happen to have fresh cherries and ice cubes in the freezer, do me a favour: place them in a bowl and go sit outside in the sunshine. Or make a cold salad with cucumbers and melon. Or crawl into this July scene from my camera roll a few years ago. Inhale the lemons and dangle red currants, glistening in the afternoon sun, from your earlobes. Who knows what I was making that day. It doesn’t matter; it’s a feeling we are going for here.

I’ve started labelling these stories by their date. It’s a clinical way of doing things, there’s no romance in months and numbers. I’m doing this because I often chip away at writing, starting on a Monday with an idea, adding a little on Tuesday, honing in on Wednesday, and adding flourishes by Thursday. But if I begin on a Monday and don’t jump back in until Thursday, as I sometimes do, and have given the story a vague title like Breadcrumbs, or Smoky, or Patti Smith, I often can’t find the file in my Google Drive. I need to flow in and not get distracted by muddlement. By random ideas. By Patti Smith.1

So here I am on a Monday, labeling this story July 10th, a Friday, the day this story will hopefully be simmered down, tasted, adjusted for salt and served up at midnight. I will call the story something else by then, a title I grab quickly from the text and fire it up top. Sometimes it’s punchy, sometimes perfunctory. The Substack algorithms likely have something to say about these titles, but I don’t pay attention to that. I just want to inject it with enough helium to lift the story up and out of my computer. Goodbye little moment, I say. Let me know where you land.

Today’s little moment begins with two paws on my chest. The sun is streaming through the narrow window above the bed. If the light is pink against the white washed walls of my cottage bedroom, I know it’s before 6am, and no Dottie, I say, it’s not time to get up. This morning the glow is sharp and white, at least 7am. I sit up and stretch my arms above and around, move my head left and right then lift my chin to the ceiling, willing my neck to soften. I think about the dance class I took last week, taught by my friend’s daughter. My dance skills ended in 1984 when I quit highland dancing lessons; this class is a stretch for me. And speaking of stretch, my stiff neck was a problem in the class, a clear give-away of my age, of my injuries. Pivot on your feet, our young, bendy teacher said, and spin by leading with your chin. Let your hair snap around. Have fun, be playful. I pivoted like an automaton. It was pathetic. And then I thought of that moment a few weeks in Barcelona, when I was struck with awe in the Sagrada Familia, wowed by the stained glass windows stretching 150 feet above me.2 I spun beneath the glow, my head facing the ceiling, neck supported by my hand. When supported I was free to marvel. So I cup my neck, imagine the dancer within, marvel, and slide out of bed.

Dottie walks ahead of me down the stairs to the beach. I’m wearing a bathing suit covered by a plaid flannel house coat, the one that lives here on a hook in my bedroom all year round. Yesterday’s storm brought a wide, smooth beach, pulled clean by low tide. The sand is soft under my feet. Dottie drops a stick in front of me, the wood soft and smooth from the ocean. I throw it, again and again, then leave the plaid flannel on a rock and wade into the water. My brother-in-law has cleared a path through the rocky zone to the soft sand further out. Thank you, I say, as my feet touch soft sand. I wade deeper and the cold water stings my skin, still warm from bed. I lay back and float, silencing my scream as my body adjusts to the cold. I don’t linger long; a fat, purple jellyfish is pulsing nearby. I break the spell and we climb back up the stairs, Dottie and I, my feet sandy and mind fresh. I am a dancer. I am bendy. This is the magic of cold water - it will shock you into illusions of possibility.

I put a pot of water on the stove for poached eggs. I add a splash of vinegar and think about what to have for lunch - perhaps I’ll cook up the frozen peas I used as an ice pack on the drive to the cottage. Throw in some mint and lemon, sea salt and parmesan cheese, as I was taught to do in the Avoca Café cookbook many years ago, and spoon the mixture over toast. Or if I get organized, I’ll eat it with grilled scallops, a favourite companion of peas and mint. We’ll see.3

I drain the eggs on a clean towel, then spoon them onto a slice of brown bread toast, warmed in a frypan with butter. The toaster hasn’t been replaced since it caught fire a few summers ago. I prefer fried bread anyway.

I eat the eggs, perfectly soft from their 3 minute bath, and sip hot coffee. The morning light has diffused through the room by now, pale and uniform. It’s time to get writing.

I open my laptop and write this down, pausing now and then to stare at the ceiling and to stretch the ropes in my neck. I want to be soft and playful, all the way to July 10th.

I have a new eye mask, the kind that hovers above the eyes so you can blink without the fabric getting in the way. I barely know it’s there. This is a new sensation for me; I have never been an eye mask person. The dim light of morning or the glow from the hallway shining through a closed bedroom door doesn’t bother me the way it bothered my younger sister. She is a peaceful person, calm and friendly by day. Bedtime is a different story. I once walked by her bedroom late at night when she was sevenish, me tenish. The short hallway was lit by the glow of the bathroom light, which I had left on. Her door was open, just a crack. From the depths of her bedroom I heard a scratchy, urgent voice, something I now connect to Gollum from The Lord of the Rings, the Hobbit whose personality was split by the corrupting power of the Ring. “Shut the door tight,” the voice hissed from the darkness. The crack of light had awoken her, and the nighttime version of my sister was not happy about it. She now wears an eye mask every night, the kind that hovers above the eyes.

This brings me back to my new eye mask, brought along in anticipation of sharing a room with my dear friend Victoria while away in Spain. Victoria and I have known each other for thirty years. We’ve shared milestones, ups and downs, travel adventures and have witnessed each other’s specific sleep routines. Victoria, like Lee, is an eye mask person. So in the spirit of roommate respect, we both wore masks in the event that one of us wanted to turn on a light, move around, look at the glow of a phone, that kind of thing. And we both had nice masks, the kind that float above the eyes. What a treat.

One night I awoke and knew, deep down, that I would be up for a while (such is the wisdom of this age and stage of life). The only answer to this kind of insomnia would be a gentle audio book in my ears to lull me back to sleep, so I reached for my airpods and phone. But my phone wouldn’t light up. I tapped at it, as quietly as I could, willing it to come alive, but alas, nothing. Had I forgotten to plug it in? How could it be completely dead? I blinked in the darkness, unknowing. That’s when I remembered I was wearing an eye mask, so comfortable, so modern, that I didn’t even know it was there. I laughed, as quietly as I could, and eventually fell back to sleep.

We are still laughing about this.

The next day, despite the fatigue, we set out for a long, sun drenched walk through Palma. Palma is an ancient city that has long served as a trading crossroads linking North Africa, Europe and the Middle East. Paprika, saffron and sea salts have defined the flavour of this place. Lemons, oranges, olives and almonds too. We walked westward along the bustling marina, climbed through a pine forest to Castell de Bellver, a 14th-century Gothic fortress. The sun was hot. We stopped for water, bandaids and to stand under the shade of a bougainvillea, then wound back down into town again. Along the journey we walked through neighbourhoods. We passed a woman coming home with grocery bags. We passed palm trees. Cats. Climbing oleander. An outdoor padel court and a sparkling blue pool, empty in the midday sun. We closed the loop of our 15,000 steps in the centre of town at a gelataria, chosen because of the line winding out the door. It gave us time to pursue the flavours, but I was there for pistachio. I love pistachios - roasted, unroasted, shelled, unshelled, as a paste whipped into icing,1 blended into vinaigrette and ground into pesto. I love the cream coloured shells that protect the vibrant green seeds inside.2 The papery purple skins that protect the green seeds. The pale green tone of my new pistachio-toned shirt. The creamy dogwood flowers that sing against green leaves, blooming throughout Nova Scotia right now, sharing the same colour palette as a shelled pistachio.

Our server smoothed one scoop flat across the surface of the cup with her palette, then spooned another scoop of pistachio on top. I loved the contrast of shapes and precision - a wild pale green dollop against the flat base. We ate our gelato in the shade of a sandstone building across from Llotja de Palma, a towering gothic structure where spice traders once met. Pistachios must have been traded here. It’s the flavour of this place.

I’m home now, far away from gothic architecture, but I do have a jar of pistachio cream in my kitchen. It’s a decadent, vibrant ingredient - roasted pistachios whipped with sugar and cream, and it makes food sing. Last weekend our cookbook club met for an Italian-inspired gathering. We ate creamy minestrone from The River Café Cookbook and a green lasagna made with layers of fresh green pasta. There were fat tomatoes and fresh mozzarella topped with thick balsamic, and a vibrant chopped radicchio salad tossed with, yes, a pistachio vinaigrette. So the love affair continues; I’m making the vinaigrette. I’m shelling pistachios. I’m swirling the pistachio cream on the spoon. I’m blending them both with garlic, basil, parsley, vinegar and olive oil. And now I want to paint this scene. I want to get to know these nuanced tones and textures- vibrant green crinkled seeds, pale green smooth seeds, their mauve and amber papery skins, their hard, creamy shells. Colours and textures that require looking. Really looking. Taking off the eye mask and opening the eyes wide kind of looking.

Thank you to Chef Michael Howell and Lia Rinaldo (both of Devour! Food and Film Fest fame) for sharing this recipe with me. Lia tossed the vinaigrette through the chopped salad below. I could eat it right from the spoon.

Pistachio Vinaigrette:

1/2 cup shelled pistachios

1/4 cup white wine vinegar

3/4 cup olive oil

2 garlic cloves

1 teaspoon pistachio paste / cream

1 tablespoon parsley

1 tablespoon basil leaves

1 tbsp honey - or to taste, depending on the sweetness of your pistachio paste

salt & pepper to taste

Blend all ingredients in a blender until smooth.

I called my dad last Saturday morning while I was out walking with my dog, Dottie. As I crunched along the path through the park, he told me that he had woken up early, as he often does, and expected to see my newsletter there in his inbox. “It felt a little lonely,” he said, “not seeing it there.” I took a week off while I was away, I explained, but that didn’t soothe a dad who was up early, looking for a story. The following day was father’s day, and I woke up feeling the urge to whip off a quick story, a little gift to him to fill the gap, sent off schedule, a surprise.

I would tell him about our visit to Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia on our first day in Barcelona. We arrived in the late afternoon and Barcelona felt soft, like it was just waking up from a nap. The air had lost its searing heat, and the tone of the city was calm on the cusp of the nighttime thrum. We joined the clusters of tourist (14,000 on that day alone) plugged into audio tours looking upwards, sideways and all around, trying to decide where to fix our eyes. I settled in the western corner, drawn by the stained glass casting a kaleidoscope of red, yellow and orange across the shapes and surfaces below and high above me. I spinned beneath the glow, my head facing the ceiling, my body almost touching those around me, my mouth agape. Did Gaudí know that one day the only empty space in this city would be 150 feet above the tourists? Is that why he fashioned a vaulted ceiling into a canopy of colourful trees, so we could look up with wonder?

I would tell him this because my dad loves the notion of wonder. He is a curious person. He is moved by beauty, music, books, flowers, and the birds at his bird feeder. This moment when awe strikes - whether in La Sagrada Familia or at the bird feeder - makes me think of the artist Mary Pratt, who didn’t call this feeling wonder, she called it an erotic charge. Pratt settled in Newfoundland with her artist husband in 1961 and had four children by 1964. She was the caregiver of the children, the homemaker. Her studio time was limited. But when she saw something in her domestic life that filled her with passion, love and desire - jam jars glistening in the light, scaly fish in the sink, a bowl of cherries - she took a picture and sent the film to Toronto to be developed. Three months later, when the film came back to her home in Newfoundland as slides, she viewed the images through a light box in the hopes that she would remember that initial jab of enthusiasm that compelled her to take the image in the first place. And when this happened, after the children were asleep, she painted. It was a love affair with vision, she once said in an interview with the National Gallery of Canada. And once that love affair began she said, “all of the windows and doors opened and there were images everywhere that ground themselves into me.”

I would tell him how the light of the Sagrada Familia opened all the doors and windows in me for the rest of the trip. That love affair was even in Pan con Tomate, the tomato bread we ate at every meal in Barcelona. The recipe is simple: bread, sliced tomato, sliced garlic, sea salt and olive oil, but each restaurant serves it in their own unique way. Sometimes toasted bread arrived with sliced garlic and tomatoes, and we were invited to rub the garlic and cut tomato across the textured surface of the toast. Sometimes it arrived already dressed with garlic, a thin layer of tomato pulp with a swirl of olive oil and a hint of sea salt. One time the bread arrived soft, untoasted, already dressed. And towards the end of the trip the garlicky tomato pulp was served on thin, rustic crackers. We used every last bit of cracker to scoop up a green salad of thinly sliced avocado, soft herbs and harissa.

I would tell him about the corner store we stumbled upon on our last night in Barcelona filled with wine, cheese and tinned fish. We were in front of the store facing the other side of the street, looking up, way up, as is the way when photographing one of the many whimsical Gaudí-inspired apartment buildings of Barcelona. But then I noticed what was behind us - a soft pink stuccoed building with sculpted corbels supporting elaborate balconies - a neoclassical style I’d later learn was a reaction to Gaudí’s modernism. Beneath the balconies on the ground floor was a beautiful old corner store with a post-it note on the door that read, €5 to come in and only look. I imagined the owners of this shop, working here on this corner since 1926 as tourists gawk and stare at the neighbouring buildings and treat their shop as a museum. So I pushed open the glass door, heard a bell chime, and said hola to the man in a brown uniform behind the counter. A debonair gentleman sat perched on a stool at a white marble counter, quietly sipping a glass of cava, one blue espadrille resting on the encaustic tiled floor. Colourful tins of fish were stacked on wooden shelves in front of me, so many colours, so many varieties, accessible by opening small glass fronted doors. I would tell my dad how I opened one of the doors and selected a can of sardines for him, inspired by the CBC article he sent me a few weeks before about the rise in popularity of tinned sardines. The subtitle read, “What was once grandpa food is now considered affordable luxury.”1 I thought about how sardines were ruined for someone like me who grew up watching Oscar the Grouch on Sesame Street flinging sardine skeletons from the dregs of his home, a garbage can. But then I remembered the sizzling plate of sardines we devoured at a beachside restaurant a few days before in Sitges just south of Barcelona, spooning them over garlicky tomato bread with sea salt and olive oil, and knew I had shifted over the years, I had grown up. So I bought a few cans of sardines2 that day, swept away by the beauty of the store and the gentlemanly luxury of it all, and flew home with them wedged between my sandals and bathing suit.

I would even tell my dad about our swim in Sitges after our meal of sardines and tomato bread. We arrived in the middle of Gay Pride festivities. Bodies filled the town dressed in drag, dressed in costumes, in leis around necks, wigs on heads, chains dripping on hairy chests, pleather shorts on tight butts and cigarettes between fingers. It was 30C. By five pm we - a group of five women, all over 50 - were stretched out in bathing suits on the beach, contemplating a swim. I would tell him this because he doesn’t know the beauty of being this age, this gender, on a beach full of naked men. We were completely free, safe, and best of all, invisible. Men of all shapes and sizes cruised by as we discussed our lives, our thoughts on religion, the catholic church and Spanish art, all while eating chips and sipping agua con gas. I was in awe, in wonder, of how the nudity slipped away, how it became part of the background of this place called Spain.

I would tell him all these things, quickly, before the day began, because I had jet lag on my side and stories in my head. But then Dottie wanted to go for a walk, and the irises in my backyard needed admiring, and the booming voices from SailGP echoed off the harbour and drifted up Morris Street calling me to come and watch, and laundry, so much laundry, needed doing, and before I knew it, the day was gone.

I’m now sitting in my little room,2 executing a post mortem on the event. It sounds morbid, naming the critique of an event after an autopsy, but it’s important to note what made it great and what we can tweak for next time while the body is still fresh. I begin with hostessing details:

- Lindsay, make sure you have milk and cream ready by the coffee twenty minutes BEFORE people arrive, not five minutes after

-bring an apron, if not you’ll end up in a faded Thelma and Louise number found at the bottom of the tea towel drawer

-allow more time for lunch, and more time for walking after lunch

And perhaps not a post mortem item, but I also scratched down,

-make Christine’s tahini and chocolate pots de crème

Christine made the little desserts the night before and slid them into the fridge before I knew what was happening. This meant that after a generous lunch3 of salads and seared scallops as fat as tea biscuits, she stole away and topped each dessert with a quenelle of whipped cream and a crumbling of sesame snaps. It was a ‘fast-fancy’ moment, as Christine would call it - velvety smooth milk chocolate custard with a hint of sesame served in my mother-in-law’s gold-rimmed tea cups.4

Earlier that morning we explored early food memories. Certain scenes were fresh in my mind, like the chewy granola bars my sister Sally and I had seen on American television commercials and desperately wanted them for ourselves. I have no idea how we watched those commercials with the three local channels on our television, but we were obsessed. Every Saturday after highland dancing lessons we’d walk home via the grocery store and comb the packaged snacks aisle, me in a maroon Sassoon sweatshirt and leg warmers, Sally in a yellow sweatsuit. Hard, crunchy oatmeal bars were all we knew as tiny consumers. Someday this new taste sensation, laden in something malleable to make the ingredients soft for months of the shelf, would come north to our east coast city and we wanted to be there the moment it happened. This was the early ‘80’s; Sally was nine, she even had a purse.

Over lunch last weekend, as I savoured the smooth chocolate custard topped with a crunch of sesame, my early memories of scouring for American groceries were replaced with something else- sesame snaps. I knew about those thin little crispy sweet wafers sold in single-serving plastic packages growing up, but I rarely ate them. Were they too in the packaged snack aisle of the grocery store? How were those little packets sold anyway? I can’t recall, but I do remember snacking on a pack in my boyfriend’s university dorm room one afternoon. I had found them on his desk, innocuous enough, and helped myself. It was the perfect post-lecture crunch and sweetness I needed. “My sesame snaps!” he cried as he walked into the room. I didn’t know they were his favourite snack and a rare delight sent by his mother in Ontario. By then the grocery borders were wide open and most things, including sesame snaps, had reached our east coast grocery shelves. I found a replacement package at the corner store near campus. That was the last time I ate sesame snaps.

And now that sweet, crunchy taste was taking on a new role in this dessert: teasing out the tahini in the chocolate custard and adding crunch to the whipped cream on top. And this, I thought as I savoured each delicate bite, is the power of food as a tool for memory. A simple thing like chewy granola bars or crisp candied sesame seeds can take you to another place, another time, and another version of yourself.

Here it is friends, Christine’s Tahini Chocolate Pots de Crème from her latest book, Easy Does It. Christine calls this sort of dessert fast-fancy. My sister Jessie made it earlier this week for a family dinner and wow, it was fancy and fast. I sat at my kitchen counter in a lovely reversal of roles, watching as she whizzed chopped milk chocolate and tahini with the warm custard and poured the mixture into little glass cups. And like Christine, when it was time for dessert she pulled the little cups out of the fridge with ease and grace. Such a hit.

TAHINI CHOCOLATE POTS DE CRÈME - from Christine Flynn’s latest book, Easy Does It

Makes 8 Pots de Creme

2½ cups (625 mL) heavy cream

6 egg yolks

2 tablespoons (30 mL) sugar

Pinch of salt

9 ounces (255 g) milk chocolate

2 tablespoons (30 mL) tahini

Whipped Cream and Toasted Sesame Seeds to serve (or Sesame Snaps!)

In a medium saucepan over medium heat, combine the cream, egg yolks, sugar, and salt. Whisk to combine. Using a spatula, stir briskly while the yolks thicken. Continue stirring until the mixture coats the back of a spoon. Remove from heat.

Place the chocolate and tahini in a high-speed blender. Pour the cream mixture over top. Turn the blender on low speed and gradually increase the speed to high. Let the blender run on high for about 2 minutes, until everything is fully combined and smooth. Divide the mixture evenly among 8 individual ramekins, martini glasses, or cups. Place them in the refrigerator to set for at least 4 hours or overnight.

Top with additional whipped cream, toasted sesame seeds and/or a dusting of cocoa!

My head is swirling today. I want to write about asparagus, how I love to eat them this time of year but I find their stiff bodies tough to paint. I want to write about the flavour of spinach, not bland baby spinach but the big, flat leaves that need to be washed of dirt and grit and taste like summer. How Hetty Lui McKinnon’s recipe1 for gnocchi with spinach and feta is an inside-out spanakopita taste sensation. How the class I am teaching with Christine Flynn is this weekend and all I can think about is what I’ll make for Christine for dinner the night before (gnocchi with spinach and feta?). And most of all, my mind is drifting to a moment a few weeks ago when I made a public commitment to create a dedicated studio in my home for writing and painting, just for me.

It happened when my aunt Sandra and I stayed with friends Andrea and Dave for our annual creative retreat,2 this time on the South Shore.

Their house belonged to Dave’s late mother. There are signs of her in the dining room table,3 the napkin rings, the cut glass decanters and the plush arm chairs woven with gold. Layered in and around the family objects is Dave and Andrea’s art collection. It’s hanging on the walls, in the mugs we held, the books on the shelves, the tapestry on the bed, and the red striped curtain that swooshed in and out in the warm wind.

For a few glorious days we drank coffee, ate peanut butter toast, vegetable chowder and spanakopita gnocchi. We wrote, painted, stitched and walked fast under the blue morning sky while the sun danced like diamonds on the waves. And when we came back we dove into whatever we were working on.

Over coffee one morning Andrea asked where I worked at home. If you’ve been here long enough you’ll know that my office has traditionally been a big wicker basket filled with art supplies, a laptop and my journal that travels with me wherever I go. This rhythm has taught me to create in different spaces, to grab the time I have, to be fluid, to be open. It has also taught me to produce short spurts of writing, small paintings, little moments, little scenes, always scattered here and there. It’s not conducive to a writing practice, so last year, I began writing at a small desk in our guest room. Dottie stretches out on the bed beside the desk and together we hang out in this little room at the top of the stairs, peeking out at Morris Street when we need a break. I’ve grown to crave this time and space, this private little corner.

I explained all this to Andrea, and she said, yes, but where do you paint? I told her how I loved seeing the made bed when I walked into the room, a touch of order in the disorder of a busy house. How no one ever sleeps there but isn’t it nice to see a bit of calm when you’re writing? And because of this orderly bed taking up the rest of the room, painting still happens in fits and starts, and my studio is that wicker bag and the kitchen island.

I continued to sip my coffee from a mug made by a local artist in a ceramic studio probably not taken up by a bed. I pulled a blanket over my knees, woven by a woman in a PEI workshop, likely without a bed. I looked at Sandra who was quietly stitching as we spoke. Sandra is a weaver, a textile artist, a woman with a studio that occupies her whole living room. When I was little she lived in what was once a small church. She made us hotdogs in the vestry and we played in her studio where the pews used to be.

Andrea looked at me in the way only a good friend can. It is time to get rid of that bed.

Since then I’ve been combing through classifieds for second-hand tables. Googling artists’ studios for inspiration. Asking artists what they like best about their studios. Do they stand to paint? Sit? What about their shelving solutions? Do they have a squishy desk chair?

Have I disassembled the bed? Not yet.

Earlier this week I awoke to ’s newsletter and savoured it over coffee. At the bottom of the newsletter Maggie links to favourite books, articles, songs and podcasts she’s enjoyed that week. This week she included a writing prompt from the Irish poet Pádraig Ó Tuama.4 The prompt was to write a pantoum, a Malaysian form of poetry explained thoroughly over on Ó Tuama’s Substack post, but here’s the gist: a pantoum is made up of eight lines of poetry, then each line is arranged in a sequence, turning eight lines into a 16 line poem. Ó Tuama provides eight prompts for eight lines:

<sup>1. Today, it is
2. and I …
3. although yesterday I ...
4. As I write, I
5. When I was younger I …
6. I couldn’t have known …
7. and anyway…
8. I had a dream that…</sup>

And then the formula for scrambling (but listed vertically):

^{1,2,3,4 2,5,4,6, 5,7,6,8, 7,3,8,1}

So with my head swirling, still thinking about asparagus and spinach and Christine and Andrea and Sandra and what it means to be an artist, I quieted my mind, picked up a pen, and gave this prompt a try. It was magic.

1. Today, it is time to build this space.

2. and I am hesitant because it requires change

3. although yesterday I did something new and nothing bad came of it

4. As I write, I see I am capable of using a pen, to feel it on the page, to let the words flow

2. And I am hesitant because it requires change

5. When I was younger I spent my days outside

4. As I write, I see I am capable of using a pen, to feel it on the page, to let the words flow

6. I couldn’t have known that someday I would crave this room, this space, this pearly-walled clam shell

5. When I was younger I spent my days outside

7. and anyway, it’s time to build this space

6. I couldn’t have known that someday I would crave this room, this space, this pearly walled clam shell

8. I had a dream that I forgot my suitcase on the plane, I tried desperately to get it back. Does this mean I need to get this work done?

7. and anyway, it’s time to build this space

3. although yesterday I did something new and nothing bad came of it

8. I had a dream that I forgot my suitcase on the plane. I tried desperately to get it back. Does this mean I need to get this work done?

1. Today, it is time to build this space.

The air was warm and hazy on Sunday night, so James and I decided to walk the 45 minutes home after eating out with friends. We headed south on Gottingen, west on Almond, then south on Agricola, taking in a city unfurling after a long winter. Flowers in window boxes, maple leaves, patios, beer gardens, and cyclists were out in full force. We stopped at the corner of West and Agricola to look up at our first apartment on the top floor of a slate blue Victorian home. I remembered how the sun would stream through the south facing kitchen, how the fire station was visible out of the corner of our bedroom window, and how the wooden floors were as glossy as a bowling alley. We loved it.

Along one side of the living room and curving up the other was a brown pleather sectional sofa that I found at a second-hand furniture store. The owner said it came from an airport lounge, likely around the time that pleather was at its peak. I was working for a film company at the time, driving around in a rented cube van full of film equipment while location scouting, prop scavenging and coffee fetching. I paid $50 a section and piled as many as I could into that van. James and I carried each section up the back stairs to our attic apartment and filled the living room with pleather. Friends spent many nights crashing on that sectional, sometimes a few at the same time. It was surprisingly comfortable, my friend Jill told me, except when the heat of the morning summer sun would warm the pleather and she’d have to peel her face from its surface.

Jill and I met for breakfast a few days a week that year on West Street, always at Steve-O-Reno’s across the street from the production office where I worked. Steve Armbruster was an American, a surfer, and a lover of coffee. He brought espresso-based drinks and coffee culture to Halifax at a time when drip coffee at home or Tim Hortons on the road was the norm.

Back then the Steve-O-Reno’s aesthetic was glass bricks, floral murals painted on mustard walls, black and burgundy linoleum flooring, smoothies made with lots of pineapple and egg sandwiches called Egg-O-Reno’s with alfalfa sprouts and thinly sliced red onions. We’d sit in the corner on a church pew next to the other regulars - the elderly man with the bow tie, the couple who worked downtown, the architecture students with their thick black glasses, the man in a fedora who sold roses - a community of people choosing to start their day in the burr of coffee grinders and the din of conversation. Our order was always the same: toasted bagel with cream cheese, strawberry jam on the side and coffee with cream and sugar. Basically a strawberry cheesecake for breakfast, as Jill would say. The windows would fog on rainy days, and when it was sunny and warm, we’d balance on metal chairs along the sidewalk. On weekends we’d gather with more friends to sort out jobs, new cities, relationships and heartaches. A year later James and I would move to London, but Steve’s remained our touchstone when home, the fixed meeting spot, our regular.

Steve died in January of 2017, and the café was purchased by the father / daughter team Maria and Tom Rose. This weekend Steve’s is moving around the corner to where Zwicker’s Gallery used to be. I worked at Zwicker’s for a few years while at university. I know this building, with its white bricks and burgundy awning, its three floors, the warrens of rooms lined with art, the framing workshop in the back, and the grey gallery cat who slept on the mahogany chair in the office. The building is yellow now, and soon it will be a café.

We walked past Steve’s on our way home that night. By then the sun was setting and a chill had wrapped around us. We moved closer together and headed the few blocks further to our home on Morris Street. This is what happens when you end up living in the city where you grew up - a walk is never just a walk, it’s memory lane.

I went to Steve’s for lunch yesterday with Jill and our friend Lynne. We sat on a church pew under the wallpaper that Maria put up shortly after she took over the place. We watched as people ordered a Egg-O-Reno, one last time before it moves around the corner to its new location. The place is more feminine now, more refined, but the same seed oatcakes are sitting behind the glass, the smoothie selection is written in chalk on the board above the cash, and glass bricks add a touch of light. We no longer order bagels with cream cheese and jam; it’s all about the Egg-O-Reno now, this time with baby spinach instead of alfalfa and an English muffin slicked with Dijon. We’re growing up.

I’ve recently discovered something about myself that I have come to accept. In order to sit and write longer than it takes to make an egg sandwich,1 I have to get on zoom and write with a bunch of strangers from all over the world. This is called co-writing, or an accountability hour, or, as I call it, a focused blitz that will likely lead to further writing, because once there, why stop? The intention isn’t to share your work with others, it’s simply to say hello then put yourself on mute and write for an hour with the knowledge that you’re on camera with other people, also on camera, writing. Presumably no one is looking at you- they too are writing- but this performative detail keeps me showing up for others with enthusiasm and teeth brushed, in a way I will not show up for myself. I was this way when running early in the morning when the boys were little. I had a friend waiting in the cold darkness of the early morning, and I couldn’t let her down. It is this way with the gym. I have friends waiting for me, I can’t let them down. And so it goes with dog walks. Coffee dates. Sunday dinners. When someone is waiting, I organize myself around that time and show up with aplomb. When someone isn’t waiting, when the structure is absent, time stretches and slackens and before I know it, my window is smaller, or worse, it has gone.

So here I am, sitting in front of my computer on a zoom call with strangers who have also signed up for this time slot to write with strangers.2 My desk is in the corner of the guest room at the front of the house. The maple tree outside my window is bursting with fresh, chartreuse coloured leaves. Soon the leaves will obscure the crow’s nest, just at eye level. But for now I can see the jagged, scratchy sticks nestled perfectly in the crotch of the tree. A man places pylons over pot holes on the street below while his truck idles beside him. Cars rush past. And here I write, because I said I would be here, because I signed up and paid and I have friends waiting for me. I haven’t met them yet, but in my head, they are friends. Whatever it takes for me to sink into this moment longer than it takes to make an egg sandwich, despite the leaves and the cars and the birds and the blue sky above.

Every morning when we log on, the host greets us with a cheery voice and encourages us to ‘drop in the chat’ our intentions for the hour. Comments flow in quickly: I’m making revisions on my novel. Exploring a scene. Researching medieval medicine. Writing a substack. I scroll over the comments, enjoying the diversity of writers and the warmth that comes with this shared experience. This morning, just before I turn back to my writing, a comment catches my eye: I am writing my cookery column. It was posted by Elisabeth Luard, Elisabeth with an S. The word ‘cookery’ implies the writer is English. It must be her.

Elisabeth Luard is an English food writer I’ve followed since reading her memoir, Family Life, in my late twenties while living in London. That book, her words, have had a profound effect on my life. In the summer of 2021 I re-read Family Life, and wrote about the experience (while making hodge podge with my mom and sister) in my notebook.

And as it often goes with writing, I scrap my intention (to work on a larger project that someday I will hopefully be able to share) and instead I write about this moment, writing on zoom with Elisabeth Luard.

—

From August, 2021 -

I’m re-reading a book called Family Life, a memoir by food writer Elisabeth Luard. I was twenty-eight when I first read it, curled up in a window seat flying home to Nova Scotia for a summer visit. I was working at a cookbook store in London at the time, and chose the book from the shop’s new-to-me food writing section. It was an angsty time in my life; I was a journalism graduate working in a bookstore, overwhelmed by a city filled with purpose and possibility. I felt like I was watching a game of schoolyard double-dutch, swaying slightly as the ropes came around, but not sure how to jump in. Then my eyes locked on the back of Luard’s memoir, the part where she says she didn’t start writing until after her kids had grown, after she had lived a little. I remember burning through the pages on the plane, delighted by her bohemian ways (she sent her children to school on a donkey when they lived in Andalusia) and crying quietly when tragedy struck. As we exited the plane, a woman seated nearby asked what I was reading. “I want to feel all the things you were feeling,” she said.

This time around it’s different. I understand the nuance in Luard’s writing; the furtive references to her husband’s drinking, the poverty that I originally read as frugality, the life adventures that were undoubtedly shrouded in loneliness. I also notice the similes when describing her children: “when in hot water, they hung together like unstirred macaroni.”

My kids are hanging together around the pot of simmering vegetables, wondering what protein will be served alongside the Hodge Podge. “It’s a perfectly good vegetarian meal, we’ve always served it all by itself,” explains my mother. They laugh as they root through the freezer for frozen sausages. We’re evolving as a family.

Over Hodge Podge and grilled sausages, my sister reminisces about her childhood as a double-dutch champion. She had the rhythm, and once she jumped in, she could stay the longest. “But once you’re in,” she said, “you can’t get out.”

Luard gave me permission not to jump in. Permission to try another way. Permission to enjoy the seasons, and to eat Hodge Podge with sausages on the side.3

—

Before we sign off from writing together, we post our progress in the chat. The comments flow by quickly, but the last comment, written by Luard, lingers -

Fermentation. Happens to prose when let to its own devices, if you’re lucky. And patient.4

On Monday night I was invited to have dinner with a friend who was in town with her mother for an east coast visit. Although they are from Edmonton, I met them both at a literary food festival at Ballymaloe House in Ireland almost ten years ago. When we met it was Ireland in May - wild garlic carpeted the woods and wisteria clung to Ballymaloe House like heavy, purple clusters of amethyst. But the air was damp and cold. I had packed for a festival - my attempt at smart and professional- and I ached with cold. On day two I slipped into the farm shop and purchased a wool turtleneck sweater that pulled me through the rest of the trip.

I wish I was wearing that sweater as I walked down Morris street to meet my friends. It was a foggy evening, cold and wet. A cruise ship cloaked in mist was pulling into the harbour, its bulk so huge that it filled my view of Dartmouth. Seagulls squawked and swirled overhead. The air smelled earthy and heavy with salt. Yellow daffodils lined the sidewalks saying finally, we’re here. It was a Nova Scotian, Irish moment.

My friends were seated at the restaurant when I arrived, mother in a thick sweater, one she was glad she had packed, and daughter in a thick grey Petite Knit that she had made herself. They had had a great week on the south shore visiting Lunenburg, the swirling winds of Hirtle’s Beach, wool shops and cafes, and even though they’re from Alberta, our damp, late spring had crawled into their bones. They were cold.

Over steamed mussels and lobster hushpuppies we discovered that we had Christine Flynn in common. I’m not surprised; our respective Instagram, cooking, teaching, cookbook-loving and knitting venn diagrams would someday overlap. As we ate Christine was probably teaching a knitting class in Mahone Bay, or sliding a pizza into a woodfired oven in Lunenburg. That girl gets around, inspiring us as she moves through the world earning a living as a chef and artist.

I woke up the next morning to sunshine and the daffodils in our backyard trumpeting towards the sky. On my counter was Christine Flynn’s new book, Easy Does It, cracked open to Coconut Broth with Noodles, Sweet Potato, and Leftover Protein. I had been leafing through the day before in an attempt to organize myself for a week of meals. Our house is full again, the door is revolving, and I’m back in the ready position looking for flavour, for shortcuts, and most of all, for protein.1 There are 4 chicken thighs in the fridge needing to be eaten. I have sweet potatoes. Coconut milk. A jar of pepperoncini leftover from last weekend’s romesco sauce and pickled jalapeños bobbing around in the back of the fridge. Using what you have is also Christine’s way, which is why I like this book.

From the introduction -

Easy Does It is about doing more with less. Less effort, less time, less fuss, less waste. It’s about knowing which corners are worth cutting in the pursuit of mouth-watering food. This book will teach you to find the sweet spot between utilitarian cooking and giving up your free time to toil away on long ingredient lists and complicated instructions. My hope is that you learn, as I have, that deliciousness and efficiency can co-exist in the kitchen.

Christine’s confident voice is woven throughout this book. It’s in her lush food styling, the drizzles of peppery oils, in her sauciness, in punches of colour, in her clothes, red nails, the anchor tattoo on her index finger, in her three girls and their dresses. If you peek further into her life through the lens of Instagram, you’ll see Christine’s voice as a knitter, a sewer, a lover of music and cooking outdoors. You’ll see her two year old in a tiny liberty dress, sewed the day before, holding a chicken. Christine knitting a cream coloured sweater with vertical fish circling the neck, and later wearing the sweater, drizzling a hot honey vinaigrette over salmon.2 Christine is a chef. Her grandmother taught her how to knit, her mother taught her how to sew. It’s this life, one of craft and beauty and humour with years of flavour baked into the fabric of it all, that gives Christine this voice, this authority, this understanding of how and when to make shortcuts in the kitchen.

I wish Christine’s voice was in my kitchen when my boys were making carbonara for mother’s day. Carbonara is tricky. What they saw as bacon and egg pasta is actually a delicate, velvety sauce of eggs and parmesan that will slip gracefully over spaghetti only if the pasta is boiled then promptly drained and tossed with the just browned pan of garlicky, white-wine simmered bacon.3 If this order is thrown off, it’ll be scrambled eggs with bacon and spaghetti for dinner. I have to admit I winced when I spotted my eldest son about to drop the pasta into the pot of boiling water long before the bacon had been chopped or fried. In a selfish bid for a better meal I slid in gently, suggesting he wait for just a minute, and helped him with the bacon. Wouldn’t this scene have been better if Christine had been to the one to tell him?

Anyway, we all learn.

That chicken still needs eating, so tonight I’m going to hit that sweet spot between utilitarian cooking and giving up your free time with Christine’s coconut curry.4 When the curry is simmering I’ll use my extra time to pick up my knitting again. Last week I had to pull out half the sleeve; I winged it when I shouldn’t have, and now I’m paying the price. Where is Christine’s book on knitting? I’m here for it.

PS - there are a two spots left in the food writing class I am hosting with Christine. We’d love to see you there!

4

Christine shared the recipe with us. 💅

Coconut Broth With Noodles, Sweet Potato, And Leftover Protein

90.4KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

I’m sitting at the kitchen island watching my adult son make a toasted egg sandwich. He fries two eggs in olive oil and when the yoke is almost cooked through, he adds a pinch of salt and a few grinds of pepper. There’s a spatula on the counter, left over from an egg sandwich made by another brother earlier that morning. He picks it up and uses it to fold the eggs in half onto themselves, over easy. Two thick slices of brown bread pop from the toaster. He squeezes Kewpie mayonnaise onto both sides, then uses the same spatula to lift the eggs from the pan and balance them onto a piece of toast. A handful of baby spinach goes next, followed by a slice of ham and orange cheese, the kind I don’t like but is a favourite in this house for moments like this, then he tops the sandwich with the other piece of mayonnaise-covered toast.

I don’t know when this twenty-two year old, recently home from university, started cooking for himself. I do know it began with eggs and the feeling of agency they brought to all three of my boys. The learning curve went something like this:

-a tiny body couched on the counter, cracking an egg into a bowl with butter and sugar while ‘helping me’ make cookies

-learning that a large piece of egg shell is the best tool to scoop out a rogue piece of egg shell floating in the mix

-a dust pan and a pastry scraper are the best way to clean a broken egg off the floor

-and several years later, learning to heat butter or oil in a cast iron pan, crack and egg into the hot pan, and fry and egg

-and, how to leave a clean pan for the next person

Was the first solo egg sandwich made at age twelve? Thirteen? Seven? I can’t remember. Fifteen, I can say for sure, is when the language of ‘gains’ kicked in. Eggs meant protein, and the more protein they ate, the bigger the muscles. This was around the time my job title in the kitchen shifted from CEO to consultant. I no longer had to steer the ship, but could instead gently course correct with lines like “don’t forget to wash the spatula and wipe out the pan,” and, “why not add a little pesto to the mayonnaise?” It was a beautiful shift.

While he eats his egg sandwich I ask him about liquorice. I am sipping my favourite tea, Tea Pig’s Liquorice and Peppermint. It is soothing and naturally sweet in a gentle, not black-liquoricey way. I am not a black liquorice person. My sister loves it. My parent’s love it. My sister-in-law burned through the candy aisles of Selfridges on our recent trip to London in search of a bag of liquorice to tuck into her purse for the trip home. And my son, the one here in the kitchen with me, loves it too. So I ask, how would you describe black liquorice to someone who hasn’t tasted it before?

“Sweet earth,” he says, dreamily, as he wipes out the pan.

And this, I realize, is a mother’s day moment, an early gift. I have raised a guy who can make an egg sandwich, a guy who can articulate his cravings in a succinct, confident way, and a guy who wipes out the pan.

The making of sponge toffee -

Last week I made a batch of dukkha.1 Since then I’ve been sprinkling it over hummus, onto boiled eggs, and tossing it with steamed broccoli and a swirl of olive oil. I like the crunch of the nuts and seeds peppered with pops of surprises - fennel, coriander seeds, cumin and black pepper. There’s a sweet heat to this batch, a personality, a texture. Why not, I thought, add it to the sponge toffee I said I’d make in last week’s newsletter? I pictured eating shards of the golden honeycomb-like shards with a cup of afternoon tea, the golden toffee matching the golden rim of my tea cups.

So this afternoon, I heated water, sugar and corn syrup together in a big pot and let it bubble away until it reached 250F on my glass candy thermometer. I stirred in a touch of honey at this point, let the syrup climb to 300F, took it off the heat then stirred in baking soda and watched the magic happen. It grew, it foamed, it bubbled away. I stirred it gently with a wooden spoon, just enough to combine the baking soda, then I poured it into the prepared tin and immediately sprinkled on the rest of the dukkah. This step is optional, of course, but I have to say, a few hours later I smashed it into pieces and enjoyed a few shards, and wow. What a taste sensation.

Sponge Toffee (also known as honeycomb, hokey pokey, sea foam candy, sponge candy, dalgona candy) is a smaller version of Anna Olson’s recipe - watch her make her sponge toffee over here.

Ingredients -

1/2 cup water

1 ½ cups granulated sugar

¾ cups golden corn syrup

1 Tbsp honey

2 ½ tsp baking soda

Directions

1. Grease and line a 9-x-9-inch (23-x-33 cm) pan with parchment paper so that the paper comes up higher than the sides.

2. Have the honey measured in one dish and the baking soda in another dish. Have these on hand, along with a sieve, by the stove before you start cooking the sugar.

3. In a large* saucepan, place the water (water first allows the sugar to dissolve evenly), sugar and corn syrup and bring the mixture to a boil over high heat, stirring just once or twice to ensure everything is dissolving evenly. Continue boiling, without stirring, until the mixture reaches 284ºF (140ºC) on a candy thermometer. At this point, stir in the honey, and continue boiling until 300ºF (150ºC) is reached (the liquid will only be a pale amber colour, not caramelized fully). Remove the pot from the heat and using a wooden spoon quickly sift in the baking soda mixture, stirring quickly and vigorously to make sure it has been incorporated, but once the baking soda is no longer visible, stop stirring so as not to deflate the toffee. Quickly scrape the frothing mass (it will keep growing and growing!) into the prepared pan and let it set (do not spread it) until cool – this can take up to 2 hours, and it will continue to grow a little more before it sets.

3.5 Before the frothing mass sets, why not add Dukkah - optional! I used this recipe.

4. After a few hours, crack the toffee with a rolling pin to break into bite-sized pieces.

5. The toffee will keep up to 4 weeks in an airtight container.

6. *You need a large saucepan to factor in room for the sponge toffee to expand.

PS - I’ve posted a little info on Instagram about the food writing class I’m teaching with Christine Flynn on June 6th in Chester. Grab one of the last spots over here, we’d love to see you there.

We arrived in England just in time to catch ceanothus in bloom. I spotted the tight, purple blossoms stretching across a white stuccoed cottage as we wove through the narrow lanes of deepest Devon. The owner had espaliered the evergreen foliage, encouraging the branches and blossoms to grow flat against the house, arms outstretched in surrender.

I remember the name of this English perennial only because we had one growing outside the back door of our flat in London. James and I had never owned a property before, never tended to anything beyond the tiny terracotta pot of Heather on the windowledge of the attic flat we rented when we first moved to London. Its little blossoms were so pink when we moved in, a pop of colour against the January grey of our new city. I later spotted pots of Heather in the parking lot of our local hardware store, stacked on pallets next to the paving stones and watering cans. Heather, a symbol of good luck, is hearty; it can withstand the peaty, acidic soil of the Scottish highlands, the neglect of a big box store, the loneliness of a life lived on a windowsill outside an attic living room. By the time we were packing up to move eastward to our new flat across the city, the plant had borne witness to our life: daily comings and goings, dinners from Portobello market eaten in front of the television, friends sleeping on the pull-out sofa, my mom rearranging flowers on the table after my miscarriage… all while the Heather faded from pink to burnished rust and back to pink again.

The new flat had a burnt out mattress leaning across the curb out front. An overland train rumbled across the street. Stuffed garbage bins from the two flats above us stood inside the gate. But the back was a different story. An overgrown walled garden stretched long and narrow outside our back door, just like the rows of neighbouring gardens to the left and the right. Thick, lush, rope-like vines twisted up and around a wooden structure, over the shed and stretched toward the kitchen window. My mother-in-law rolled up her sleeves on her first visit and pulled at the never-ending ropes until a garden came into focus. I did the same to the patch of bushes in the front, hacking away at branches until there was enough room to hide the bins and stash my bicycle under a canopy of green. A man walked by as I was snipping one day and stopped to say, “the bloom follows the blade. Carry on!” He was right. By early April little surprises popped up - wisteria dripped over the shed, bluebells popped through cow parsley along the gate, and bright purple ceanothus buds stretched along leafy green branches by our back door. Someone had once loved this garden.

I had memorized the word ceanothus by then, sounding out the syllables in a bid to remember. See-an-o-sis, a blue blossomed lilac, a tolerant, drought resistant tree, as happy in California as it is in England. Our ceanothus, like that little pot of Heather, also quietly witnessed our London life: the family of foxes who lived under our shed, cubs wrestling in the evening sun, someone hopping the back fence to steal a bicycle, chorizo sausages on the grill under the twisted vines, opening the kitchen window to feel the sun on my face as I healed from an appendectomy, and six months later, sipping coffee in the window with a baby in my arms. The bloom follows the blade.

—

We parked the car down the lane from the purple ceanothus stretching along the white thatched cottage. Bluebells carpeted the churchyard across the street, a pheasant called in the distance.

We ate lunch at a pub, ducking our heads under its 17th century doorway. There was vibrant green wild garlic soup topped with their tiny, star-shaped blossoms. Hedgerow greens with pickled turnips and grilled goat’s cheese. Mussels steamed in cream and cider. And for dessert, wedges of sponge toffee, something we kept seeing at the end of every meal while in England. Sometimes dipped in chocolate, but most often just a simple wedge with its cross section of airy bubbles on display. I let it melt in my mouth, a burnt sugary moment amidst the soft purples of an English spring.

Back at home and am craving the texture of sponge toffee. Sponge toffee (also known as honeycomb, hokey pokey, seafoam candy, sponge candy, dalgona candy…) is made by heating sugar, honey (and/or corn syrup or glucose) until it hits the candy stage - 300F/150C. When this happens, the pan is taken off the heat and baking soda is added with a frantic stir. The heat of the sugar causes the baking soda to break down, releasing C02 which creates thousands of foamy bubbles in the sugar. This airy mixture is then spread into a pan to cool. That’s it! I’m playing with a nutty, sweet savoury version. Stay tuned for a recipe next week…

In other news -

Wonder’neath, a Halifax art society bringing practicing artists and local residents together, is having an auction. My tulip and forsythia watercolour will go live on May 2nd. Other donations include a weaving from my aunt Sandra Brownlee and art from friends Gillian Frise, David Hayden and Andrea Dorfman. What good company to be in.

Bid away my friends!

And last but not least - Chef and writer Christine Flynn and I are hosting a one day food writing retreat, open to all writing levels, on Saturday June 6th in Chester, NS. Together with our shared experiences we will help you discover your own food stories through writing prompts, selected readings, reflections and shared stories around the table.

This one day retreat includes a light breakfast, refreshments throughout the day, lunch from Christine’s latest book, Easy Does It, and a copy of the book for everyone to take home.

Please head over here for more details. We would love to see you there!

Our photographer was standing on the top of a ladder looking down through his camera onto a plate of food below. Around him were reflectors, foam boards, and a horizontal arm. In my hand was a small cutting board with tweezers, a spray bottle, and bits of ingredients. It was a lot of kit for a simple plate of food, but such is the way when photographing a cookbook. We, the food stylists and authors of the book, were fussing around with the ingredients, moving julienned carrots and mirepoix-ed red chilis here and there so they looked better from the bird’s eye view above. Music was playing. Props were lined up on a table along the wall, waiting to be used as we moved through the shot list. The kitchen - a stove top, grill, counter and fridge - stretched along another wall, overflowing with ingredients. I loved this part of the job - the camaraderie in the studio, the music, the magic of shared creativity working together for a common goal.

We problem-solved together, just as we were doing that day, tweezers in hand, and photographer up on the ladder. The dish needed a pop of colour, a soft contrast against the sharp ingredients below. The photographer, from his overhead view, spotted the bouquet of fennel with long, frothy fronds stretching along the kitchen counter. “Why not a few of those greens,” he said, seeing the fronds not as an ingredient but as a tool for texture and colour. “Better not,” one of us said, “too misleading.”

*

“Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter, it absolutely must go off.”

These words are attributed to Anton Chekhov in a 1889 letter to a colleague. Chekhov, the Russian master of the short story, valued simplicity and clarity. He was mindful with his words, his props. He made sure they had a role. This piece of advice - do not mislead the audience by introducing something into a scene that is not used later in the story - is known as Chekhov’s Gun. It sounds like foreshadowing, these literary tools can be confusing. But unlike foreshadowing (a hint at what’s to come) Chekhov’s Gun is a promise. A promise to us, the audience, that what is revealed early will return with purpose.

Chekhov’s Gun doesn’t have to involve a gun. A quick online search will kick up many examples of the metaphorical tool in film and television: the clock tower in the 1985 movie Back to the Future that later becomes the focal point of the movie’s climax. The claw in Toy Story 1, which re-appears in Toy Story 3 to save the day. And best of all, the bulletin board in The Usual Suspects.

I’d also like to add the sesame seeds on top of the green beans I served last weekend, which were tossed in a dressing made from sesame paste.1 The sesame seeds were the promise, the sesame dressing was the follow through. A stretch? Perhaps, but it follows the unwritten rule that food stylists, cooks, and recipe writers follow. Don’t trick the audience with a garnish that doesn’t make sense to the rest of the dish. A garnish can be complimentary (say, blueberries crowning a stack of pancakes) but it shouldn’t be misleading. No shell of a lobster claw across the surface of a chowder that doesn’t include lobster. No wispy fennel fronds on top of a salad that doesn’t include fennel. A garnish is a promise of what’s to come.

The salad above is a fridge clear-out. We’re going away to the UK for a week and there are ingredients that need eating. A blood orange. Pea shoots. A head of romaine. A small bulb of fennel. An onion that is sprouting upwards toward the afternoon April light. The light, admittedly, is grey. Rain has been coming down all day; it’s not really salad weather. So to warm things up, I thinly slice what I can salvage from the red onion, and slice another white onion. I melt a olive oil in a pan with a tablespoon of butter over medium-low heat, and stir the onions into the oil and butter until they’re glossy. I add a good pinch of salt, a teaspoon of brown sugar, a splash of balsamic and stir the onions, every so often, until they’re very soft and caramelized, about 20 minutes. While the onions cool I chop the remaining ingredients and make a vinaigrette. When the onions are cool I toss everything together. It’s bright and crunchy, with a tang of citrus and a deep umami warmth from the caramelized onions. I consider garnishing with fennel fronds, but they’re not at their best, so I put them in the compost. No one likes a wilted gun.

For the vinaigrette, I whisked together:

2 tablespoons of apple cider vinegar2

The juice of a lemon

1 teaspoon maple syrup (or honey, or a pinch of sugar)

¼ cup olive oil

Salt and pepper to taste

Extra vinaigrette can be saved in a jar in the fridge for at least a week - least until I get back.

My mom and I got down to a little spring cleaning over the weekend. We used the square meter method my friend’s mother taught me when I was learning to care for our first backyard. “Don’t get overwhelmed by the weeds weaving through your garden, your lawn, and crawling up under the shingles of your home,” she said. “Instead focus on one square meter at a time. Take care of that space then move on when you’re ready.” I take this wisdom all over the house, into the kitchen, my underwear drawer, the dark recesses of the basement, and even use it in my writing too.

So there we were, me on the floor, my mom on a chair, going through the square meter in front of us: the top of her desk, the left side drawers and the small area on the floor beside it. We recycled bits of paper, threw out what we could throw out, filed away favourite Christmas cards that she wasn’t ready to part with, and matched a fountain pen with its ink pot. My desk at home looks exactly the same: collections of thank you notes ready to be written, thank you notes received, old pens, new pens, envelopes filled with papers and receipts, old journals, new journals, a hole punch, a stapler. We are both committed to written correspondence, something, in my case, that has almost ground to a halt since the advent of the smart phone. But still the writing paraphernalia adds up.

In the bottom left drawer we found her journals, sketchbooks and the well-worn chocolate brown Filofax I gave my mom in the 1990’s. Filofax is a 100 year-old UK company, the first personal organizer, according to the website, with a ring mechanism to house a ‘file of facts.’’ It’s hard to say when I gave it to her; the diary pages inside had been replaced many times over the years. Inside the back flap were a few photographs - my mom with her sister, my sister and grandmother, then another of me and James, my then boyfriend now husband, dressed for a university winter formal. I would have been a fourth year student at the time, based on my date and short hair. Earlier that month I had my hair cut from the middle of my back to above my ears. Why? I am wearing a black-knit off the shoulder dress my mom bought me for the event. James has a faint scar around his eye from a ski accident the previous winter. I look like a 21 year-old mother channeling Princess Diana. I put the photo in my pocket, inhaled the leather Filofax then slid it back into my mom’s desk drawer. This is how it often goes when tidying: the square meter expands beyond the corners of the space and pushes up into the intangible world of sentimentality.

*

Nigella Lawson opened her new column in the Financial Times with the line “I am not a sentimental person.”1 I’ve known this about Nigella2 ever since she wrote in the headnotes of a Christmas recipe, probably twenty years ago, that she prefers to stand over her kitchen bin when opening Christmas cards so the cards can easily be disposed of as soon as she reads them. I took her advice when Pippa Cuthbert and I first put a cookbook proposal together. We stuffed envelopes, licked stamps, sent the proposal to fifteen publishers, then I stood over my own kitchen bin as the rejection letters began to trickle in (I stopped mid-toss when opening the 15th letter - it was a yes!). The satisfying sense of efficiency did balance the pain.

After Nigella’s strong opening line in the FT, she goes on to say that despite her lack of sentimentality, she does feel a “cozily reassuring sense of the rightness of things” that she is writing for the same publication where her very first piece of writing was published, a book review, way back when. That was before she became a food writer, before she published How To Eat in 1998, and just about the time that my hair was growing back below my shoulders.

I first picked up How To Eat at a Heathrow Airport bookshop shortly after it was published. The title was so confident, so clear, but it was the author’s photo that hooked me: a stunning woman standing in her minimal kitchen, staring at the camera unsmiling as if to say, I am a home cook, not a chef, and I’m owning it. Her second book, How to be a Domestic Goddess followed shortly after I moved to London. I poured over her playful way with words, her practicality as a mother feeding children and her determination to let grief (she lost her mother, sister and husband to cancer) squash her desire to enjoy food and celebration. Nigella’s vocabulary and sensuousness were brought to life in her cooking shows that followed. We watched her lick her fingers, pull cookbooks from her delightfully stuffed shelves and enjoy midnight snacks, lit only by the glow of the refrigerator. More cookbooks, television shows, apps, marriages, and life challenges have happened since, and now, she finds herself back at the FT.

Through it all, what I have always loved most are Nigella’s words. Her column tells her story as a food writer: where she’s been, what’s happening now, and what distracts, delights and overstimulates her in the world of social media. As I read I wrote down lines like - “the innocent optimism and brazen energy of youth,” or “the internet turns food into garish performance art,” followed by “nor am I in any position to sneer: I contribute to it after all.” And then combinations of words like - “emotional hinterland” or “answer that poser,” the latter which, after having to look up, is a question. And then she leaves us with a simple recipe for rice pudding, something to soothe the eater and the cook. It’s not sentimental, but all senses are activated. It’s sensual, it’s human.

Which brings me back to the square metre of tidying, and how it’s time to step away from the books, the online newspapers, the memories and sentimentality and just focus on these words.

Subscribe now

I put a pot of water on to boil as soon as he pulls out of the driveway. This is the way it’s always been: he can’t stand the smell of hard boiled eggs and I love an egg salad sandwich, so whenever I have a long window of time in the kitchen without him, I get to work. This small acts of aromatic kindness might be the secret to marriage.

Friends and family members are gathered at one end of the kitchen island. They are drinking coffee, knitting, discussing books just finished,1 provincial politics and the incredible winter surfing at Lawrencetown Beach. Purple tulips fall over a dish of salted butter and a sliced loaf of Luke’s sourdough. They love the sesame seeds baked into the thick crust and the tender, almost damp texture of the still-warm loaf. I love the din of conversation in the room, the contentment of a Saturday morning.

When the water comes to a gentle boil, I lower six eggs into the bubbles and set the timer for 12 minutes. I’ve learned many ways to make hard boil eggs over the years (steaming, starting with cold water, starting with hot water, the list goes on)2 but I prefer this method - boiling water, lowering the eggs, setting a timer, draining - because I can tune out. While the eggs boil and the timer keeps time I can do things like chat and chop a bundle of green onions for the egg salad. So that’s what I do. And when I notice I still have ten minutes plus cooling time on the timer, I wash my hands, take a sip of coffee and sit down to knit.

I’m working on oatmeal coloured sweater, a linen and wool blend, for my long-armed, broad-shouldered son Charlie. So far two of his birthdays and a Christmas have passed since I’ve started this project. “It’ll be finished,” I once promised, “before a birthday, before a Christmas.” A mother can’t always specify which one.

When the timer dings I set a colander in the sink, drain the eggs, tip them into a bowl filled with ice water and leave the bowl on the counter to cool. The morning sun dances over the speckled eggs, bright against the brown earthenware bowl. I take a picture, then rummage around a deep drawer filled with mismatched Tupperware in search of a container large enough to hold the eggs. I put the eggs into what I eventually find, fill the container with water, snap on a lid and shake vigorously.3 The water crawls under the cracked shells, gently loosening and teasing them away from their cooked whites. I continue the job, peeling the eggs in the water, and am left with six perfectly peeled hard-boiled eggs. I slice one in half and discover a perfectly cooked yolk.

Conditions have to be perfect for devilled eggs - a husband away, shells that don’t pull at the whites when peeled, yolks that aren’t rimmed in green; it’s usually all too much. But if eggs mashed into a salad is the goal - without expectation or pressure - we might get devilled eggs, by accident. I recognize this truth, so I open the cupboard, pull out my glass plate made especially for devilled eggs, and I pivot.

I scoop out the yolks and add them to the bowl with chopped green onions. I add a heaping tablespoon of mayonnaise, a teaspoon of dijon, a good pinch of salt and several twists of black pepper. I mash everything together, adding a touch more mayonnaise until the mixture is nice and smooth. And because this is a special, serendipitous egg moment, I spoon the mixture into a piping bag and pipe yellow rosettes back into the sliced eggs. I top the eggs off with pea shoots and lower the plate into the sunlight next to the remains of the sourdough and the drooping purple tulips. It’s a ta-da! moment, a fun surprise. I sit down, eat one or two, then pick up my knitting.

And this, I see, is the reason why this sweater is taking so long.

PS - Jessie Sheehan’s pistachio chocolate cake recipe has been swirling around the family these last few weeks, and will make an appearance again on the Easter table this weekend. Pistachio paste is key here. See if you can find it. A handful of crushed Cadbury eggs along with the prescribed crushed pistachios are a nice Easter addition. The cake is just a 8x8” single layer ‘snacking’ cake with a generous fluffy layer of icing that only has to stretch across one surface. The result is thick and decadent, and once you’ve secured the pistachio cream, is an easy cake to pull together.