Katie- ready to , hunt, play and eat!

I was house-sitting in Ormstown on a large piece of land with two dogs: an old and subdued healer, Chancy, and a young and rambunctious Husky-German Shepard cross, Katie. There are many food favours and negotiations going on all the time. We were told by the Masters of the house, a spunky and tiny French bomb of energy, Ariane and British husband, Eric, to help ourselves to any food in the house (except the frozen steak and kidney pies Eric has to drive way out to get and are the nostalgic fix he needs). Of course, when they got home, there was sauerkraut, homemade ham, Parkins biscuits (he had the Golden syrup to make them and I had the fresh ginger to sex them up), British malt vinegar pickled red cabbage and poached fish. We too wished to thank them for the time at their cozy, wood-heated, solarium-lit, deluxe kitchen and jacuzzi having place nestled in their 50 acres of land full of trails and a joyful steam that dances through. The food seals the pledge of trust and appreciation of each party. Food also concerns the dogs. They are fed at the same time every day. They are also rewarded with treats when they behave well and come when they are called.

Nordic nuts and soup made with squash and wild local mushrooms. The abundance of the gatherer’s table

Chancy is old, blind and has battled cancer. She is small, but she still has the power over the young and free-spirited Husky. Chancy’s approach to food is to beg at the table with the pathetic pleading eyes of a destitute orphan. Katie, however, is very independent, employing a can-do approach. She hunts mice and birds daily and has been sprayed by 3 skunks, quilled by 3 porcupines and I saw her with a racoon in her mouth one of the days I house-sat.

Katie’s instincts are very close to the surface. She is as free-roving as she is attention-seeking and curiosity and exploration of the outside world are in complete harmony with her need for camaraderie in the pack. For Eric, however, I think the adjustment to such an independent and demanding dog has been hard as he is used to dogs that hang-on their Master’s lead. I thought this was well-illustrated in a story that played-out between the two of them. Katie, sniper extra-extraordinaire, came home proudly with a hawk one day. The hawk was still alive and suffering in her jaws. How could a hawk be caught by a dog!? Eric pointed out that hawks do not have any natural predators, and so may have been napping complacently on the forest floor or on a low branch. Whatever happened, Katie capitalized on her chance. Katie couldn’t care less if the bird was suffering, but to the human sensibilities, this was already a problem. Eric finished the job and then brought the hawk out into the forest to rest in peace indefinitely.

The next time Katie went out, she came back with the hawk in her mouth. To Eric, this meant he would have to revise his strategy, so he went and buried the hawk in the woods. Lo and behold, Katie found it, dug it up and brought it back. The battle continued. Eric threw it in the stream, and somehow Katie tracked it in the stream and brought it back again. Eric was bedazzled. This dog was slick…and determined. Eric ended up freezing it and putting it out with the trash and then it was game over. I listened to this story in awe and with shocked “No!”s every time the tension moved up a level with the: “she found it again and brought it back!” What was the tension? What was the battle? It seemed to me the battle was that Eric didn’t want Katie to kill things or bring dead or dying things home, and Katie I believe, wanted Eric to accept the bird and eat it. The two did not see eye to eye. Eric feeds Katie and gives her treats, but that is a one-way street. Eric does not eat what Katie brings him.

“She Found it again!!!”

And again!!

This is the irony of Master and Servant- with food the Server is often Master. It depends on the arrangement, but the one who has the capacity to gather, prepare and serve food often has the upper-hand. They have the capacity to give and give what they want the other to have. We need food to live, so giving someone food to eat is no small affair, it is giving them life. The server may even feel their feathers have been ruffled if the served tries to feed them.

Here I am wearing the dress my Mom made me and eating my first large helping of Christmas dinner. I am being served and I’m loving it, but we are incredibly vulnerable and dependent at this age and have almost no power!

 Money changes this dynamic and restaurateurs and those in the food industry depend very much on the coin from the customer. This is a case where the client who is being served holds the power, even if it doesn’t always feel that way in very uppity and sometimes intimidating restaurants. Restaurants are like a stage where people come for an experience. Both the waiters and the client step into roles and “act” in this unreal world, but there is an exchange and both hold power, but the client a little more as they do not need to eat in a restaurant, but the restaurant needs money from clients. Restaurants create a hype or build on a real or feigned image of not needing clients as they are so in demand. This gives them the wield of choosing their clientele or the hand that feeds them…ironic, no?

Futurist meal- sculpted meat and  “esthetic food” just to see and not to eat (satay and its representation) . What happens to power dynamics around food when one nourishes themself with spiritual or esthetic food? What happens to sex when it becomes an idea: a spiritual, energetic, visual or intellectual exchange? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurist_meals

 Think about your lovers, friends, parents, children. Who feeds who? Who holds the power? The person feeding or getting fed? Is it a one-way transaction or two-way? When we love someone, we naturally want to feed them. We want to keep them close to us with food. That’s why mothers keep bringing food even after their children have left home. The feeder is investing in the future of the fed. Feeding the other also gives them purpose and the joy of seeing the other eat, even if they hate to cook! The person being fed gets to devote their time to play, work, healing, things other than food preparation.

Food isn’t always a “master/servant” dynamic, it can also be a potlatch or gathering and pooling of resources, like my dinner club. Here we try oysters, smoked venison, smoked white fish, smoked scallops, berries and dried berries, caviar and arctic char sashimi that didn’t fit in the photo. This is what happens when all are contributing!

When we refuse food, eg. hunger strikes, anorexia, not eating food that is offered to us or only parts of it, there is a power-struggle. We are protesting another’s behaviour, not sharing their values, taste or what they are “laying on the table” or not accepting their control over us or we are fighting for control over ourselves. It is a strong statement when we do not take what the other is dishing out, preferring hunger and debility.

Gathering the sylvestre apple, the first apple brought during French colonization, now wild and uncultivated. There’s an ebbing and flowing between wild and cultivation and between serving and being served, love and control, dominance and affection

My futurist representation of baked stuffed apples

Please think of your close relationships and how food figures. How does food bond you to others or drive a wedge and who is the person you like to be fed by and feed the most? What do you like to be fed and by whom? What do you try to express when you cook for others: abundance, down-to-earth, no-fuss, opulence, health, tradition? What do you refuse to eat? Why? Food for thought….

I really wrote this article so I could put this song on my blog! (Dogs, Housewives and sex- they capture exactly what I wanted to say in a song!)

Letting the child in you out of the bounds of convention is the key to creation and true passion.

For most people, the key to unblocking creativity is to get your inner child to feel safe enough to come out and play. The creative child needs to know that she will not be chastised because her creation is not organized, presentable or adult enough.

Lately I’ve been encountering some blasts from the past that reminded me of what drew me to food and cooking in the first place. The first was this plastic play kitchen that I saw taken out to the curb with the trash. It was sitting abandoned in the rain in Mile End with in its mid 80’s My Little Pony colours. I didn’t actually have one of these, I would actually cook in the real kitchen, but they seemed like the promise of something really great. Like those Magic Ovens where you mix the powder with liquid, put it in the oven and cake comes out. Amazing! I had a magic trick set as a child, but I didn’t get as into it as I did experimenting with food.

The abandoned play stove. Come on, revive it in your adult life.

I also saw an automated kitchen from the 70’s at a Museum in Germany this summer. It was the promise of all of the magic of the kitchen for adults. You don’t have to be the mad scientist in the laboratory, the kitchen can do everything itself…and you get all the credit! It turns out that automated kitchens never took off. People didn’t want to be cut out of the equation. They wanted to do the work. Samsung has come back with a bigger and badder automated kitchen that tells you what to do, keeping you in the process it plans and facilitates and you execute and confirm. It will order all of the food from the grocery store with your okay and guide you through the process. The automated and play kitchen evoke the promise of miracles and something magic happening. The kid’s kitchen is creative, but the automated kitchen is the adult creativity killer.

Sorry it's blurry, but I wasn't allowed to take this photo. The 1970's Automated Kitchen: promising you don't have to be creative or make mistakes, the machine does it all for you!

 This Christmas, as I made curry powder and paste for my loved ones, I remembered that I have been cooking Christmas presents since I was 9 years-old. I baked shortbread cookies and decorated them in secret when my mom would be gone curling. I would vacuum-pack them and I had my my secret spot in the deep-freezer. I produced a different baked good each week for 3 or 4 weeks and gave a bag of frozen baked goods to each of my Aunts. I did this for a few years. I guess I followed the example of my Mom who made little jars of Roasted Garlic Dijon to put in stockings and my Auntie Janet, who made jalapeno jelly (Red and Green), but I did what I wanted to do on my own! I was so proud when I would give the bag of frozen cookies to my Aunt’s. Frozen cookies were accompanied by a  variety of arts and crafts and brought them in a box that I declared top secret and off-limits. My Mom would say to the people in the family with puzzled eyes and a creased forehead, “I don’t know. I didn’t help her. She did it all on her own.” I like the kitchen best when it feels like arts and crafts made for the ones you love.

I also did a food collage in September with images from Sel et Poivre and Saveurs culinary magazines from the 1980’s. At first, flipping through I thought, “boy this is dated”. But the more I looked, the more I felt these deep heart pangs of nostalgia. I started devouring cookbooks when I was about 5 years-old. That was in 1987. The images in Sel et Poivre were of what seemed the ultimate culinary ideal at the time (some kind of 80’s glamour with the French still holding the podium.) Saveurs explored world cuisine, and me being from the West Coast I grew-up with Japanese, South East Asian and Indian cuisine being more my traditions than North American stuff. They say that in food there is a constant tension between the familiar (what we ate in our early childhood) and novelty (discovering food). Our personality and mood tends to position us on the spectrum daily- when lonely or sad we crave the familiar when joyful and exuberant the novel. My familiar was very novel to others and my personality and mood constantly pushed me to try new things.

I started cutting and pasting my collage furiously. I mapped out my gastronomic timeline. My love of garlic, fish, seafood and spices was imprinted in my pre-embryotic soul, being represented at the bottom of the long ascending imagescape. My mom (represented as a barbie in a vintage knit dress) showed me soufflés, clams and poached eggs. There was a breakfast-in-bed tray to remind me of the farm breakfasts served to me on a tray at my Grandma Jean’s: Farm eggs, fresh thick farm bacon, tomato slices from the garden, cottage cheese, buttered toast and chicken-in-the-mug (chicken bouillon).

Here is the true culinary influences in my life: some cultural, some people, some innate...No justification, this is where I come from!

Then there was Indian bread, rice and curry photos, as when I was 6 years-old I started getting baby-sat by an Indian family and I ate Indian food every day for a few years.

Here is my familiar: apricots (from B.C. fruit stands), garlic, clams, mom, poached eggs and home-made ice cream.

Later came Coulibiac, one of the first dishes I ever made at Nuart. Herbs and perfumed oils are represented. There is Spanish Garlic soup which I made regularly and then saw again when I worked at Casa Tapas in another form. I also went to Spain and worked briefly at El Centro Gallego and so put a leg of Serrano in for good measure. I weaved in the Korean barbecue apparatus, Chinese, Italian and Japanese fair and scenery, and I put in other symbols of the people and events that had deep affective ties to certain foods and periods in my life.

This is the end of the last period of my life, there was a clash of influences and currents and hiding from the world was no longer possible. There was sex, rivalry, booze and the split. My food relationships had to be redefined. I had to eat alone for awhile....digest.

This exercise was fun and liberating. It made me remember where I came from, and how important food was in my ties with the people I am closest to. It also reminded me that my culinary journey has been very rich and varied. I am also very proud of my gastro/culinary roots. The path I’ve tasted or cooked in my life is my own. No one can disqualify it. It is unique- and so is everyone else’s. Our past is not dated or flawed it is a series of pieces in our evolution.

Here are some wonderfully decorated cookies from kids that I gave a workshop too. Everyone had fun and all pieces were original and spontaneous.

Four tips to keep the love and creativity in the kitchen:

1. Remember that kitchens are places of magic, creation and transformation. They are safe for anyone to come and play in- especially the creative inner child.

2. Food is only as fun and exciting as the people you share it with. It is a gift.

3. Remember where you came from and what you instinctively loved to cook, smell and look at. Those are your roots and tools and they are in you to inspire you. You do not taste things like anyone else and you do not even taste the same thing the same way from moment to moment, so do not try to be anyone else. Just be who you are naturally and instinctively now.

4. Challenge yourself. Cooking shouldn’t be intimidating. Try things out. You’d be surprised what seems daunting, but is actually very simple. You’ll also be surprised how crafty you can be at saving or adapting something. If it is a flop, that’s experience under your belt. Own your mistakes and your inspiration!

Beautiful Sushi made by first-timers during family cooking workshops at Riverview Elementary School. Yet again, beautiful and unique!