2017 Expectations

Expected a towel - got a smile! (Cafe Sabarsky: NYC)

Expected a towel - got a smile! (Cafe Sabarsky: NYC)

January 1, 2017. 8:10 a.m. Horton’s drive through – on the way to visit my mom with coffee and her favourite donut (old fashioned plain). “We don’t have that donut. We have no donuts – we just opened.” (The website for this location noted their holiday hours and said they were open 24 hours.) And so 2017 begins by not meeting expectations – and expectations apparently have something to do with “happiness”. (More on that in a moment.)

Happy New Year??

Well at least it’s a “new” year. I was among those happy to see the end of last year. By now you’re likely tired of the moaning over 2016 so I will aim to focus more on looking forward, but… must admit that “pooping” on 2016 was a bit cathartic.

I first became aware of the “f*ck2016” hashtag on the John Oliver Show that aired about a week after the US election.

Since then, that hashtag theme was (over)used by every imaginable media source – some trying to counter-balance the excruciatingly painful happenings of last year by inviting people to share positive things about 2016. 

I do buy-in to the idea of "gratitude journals” – though I don’t record my lists. A frequent insomniac, I sometimes try to lull myself to sleep with gratitude lists. Professionals advise thinking of at least three things. My lists can be much longer. If they begin with “I slept through the (last) night” that’s already a good day. I can make the list long-ish by identifying every little micro event of the day – a perfect cup of coffee made by Mr. KB, stoplights synchronized to green, finding the sweater I want to wear, hearing from a loved one, a great meal... I remain convinced that the gratitude focus is a good idea, but – and perhaps this is my own failing – the list is not always effective in determining the overall rating for the day / week / month / year.

For 2016, the death toll of notables in the arts alone lasted almost 20 minutes (CBC Lives Lived) – even though most names got only a few seconds airplay. The compilation aired on December 28 – and did not include Debbie Reynolds who died hours earlier. With three days left in 2016 – what more could happen? A “GoFundMe” campaign was begun to protect 94 year old Betty White from the curse of 2016. She made it through! [Update: DOD December 2021 RIP]

More importantly, we cannot ignore the (non-celebrity) strife experienced by humans all over the planet.

The planet. Brings to mind the UN. Did you know they publish a United Nations World Happiness Report? Some years ago they declared that “the pursuit of happiness is a fundamental human goal,” and designated March 20 as World Happiness Day

So there you go! Be happy in 2017! – especially on March 20. (Although, before then we have to get through Blue Monday – January 16 - apparently the saddest day of the year - though that claim was part of a travel marketing campaign - haha!)

As promised, a word about the role of expectations. Some experts - most notably the psychologist Martin Seligman - postulate that there is a "happiness equation". (Not to be confused with the book by the same name, written by Neil Pasricha from “Book of Awesome” fame.)

I’ll take a pass on offering a synopsis, and dissecting the related debates. In brief, the idea is that happiness (or unhappiness) exists in the zone where reality collides with expectations. It must be said that drawing the conclusion that “low or no expectations is the key to happiness” is incorrect and unintended.

"The strategy with the best promise for enhancing happiness is one that has little to do with managing expectations. Rather, it has everything to do with how one responds after a 'below expectations' event has occurred. This strategy involves spending as little time as possible ruminating about the negative consequences triggered by the 'below expectations' event." (Source)

Similarly another writer urges us to "…not be in the story of how it should have been. But to live in deep acceptance with how it is. I think the only time we can really be unhappy is when the way we think it should be and the way it is are different. So keep finding the ways that 'the way life is right now' is full, and full of joy…” (Source)

Walnut roll / Beigli - ok..., but...

Walnut roll / Beigli - ok..., but...

Macarons with dulce de leche filling - made by me!!

Macarons with dulce de leche filling - made by me!!

Since this is a food (not philosophy or psychology) blog let me note that the difference between “what is” and “what is hoped for” – aka happiness – is front and centre whenever I’m in the kitchen. This Christmas I tried old family recipes. A few are still not quite right  - the beigli - aka walnut roll. Yet others turned out great - my mom’s liver stuffing and creamed peas, for example – which I’ll add to the blog soon! [Update: here's the recipe for Hungarian Liver Stuffing.]

I scold myself for being a bit discouraged when my attempts to resurrect old family recipes are not optimal. Ridiculous to imagine first time will be perfect. One day soon, I’ll share my experience making macarons, under the tutelage of Mardi Michels. On her blog and in her course, she talks about how she worked on her macaron recipe, sometimes weekly, for several years!

So in 2017, I will aim to be “Zen”, “in the moment” and will make sure I feed the right wolf.

"One evening an old Cherokee told his grandson about a battle that was going on inside himself. He said, 'My son, it is between 2 wolves.  One is evil: Anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority and ego... The other is good: Joy, peace, love, forgiveness, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith...' The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, 'Which wolf wins?' The old Cherokee simply replied, 'The one I feed.'" (About)

Ok 2017 – bring it on…

P.S. Here's a recipe that is guaranteed to meet expectations and make you happy - Hungarian Cabbage Soup - I think I might declare this to be the year of the cabbage! [Update: Better late than never, I have declared 2018 to be my "Year of the Cabbage" and several blogging friends have joined me on this project. For Janaury 2018, my first cabbage recipe is Hungarian Cabbage Rolls.]

P.P.S. Don't you think that life is better with a soundtrack? My absolute favourite group is Pink Martini and their "Get Happy" album is my driving soundtrack. I especially like the "Happy Days Are Here Again / Get Happy" duet done by China Forbes and Rufus Wainwright. Hard to find a good video of that (so buy the CD!), but I was astonished to learn that the original duet was done by Judy Garland and Barbra Streisand. Listen and be "mellow happy". (Advance to 1:09 to get right to the song.)

Click on the word "Comments", below, to share your thoughts about 2017: Happy New Year. If you enjoyed this read, please take a second to click on "Like"!

[This time last year... Backward and Forward]

The (Late) Great Pumpkin

I’m late. (Not in that way, silly.) White Rabbit late. White Rabbit - known for this ditty in the Disney version of Alice in Wonderland. “I'm late! I'm late! For a very important date! No time to say hello, goodbye! I'm late! I'm late! I'm late!”

It is this “elderly, timid, feeble, and nervously shilly-shallying” character [Source] that Alice follows down the rabbit hole into Wonderland, and in the last month or so I have been down a sort of rabbit hole of my own. The net result being that I posted no recipes or blog entries for all of October!

Yet I was surrounded by inspiration – the most noteworthy being pumpkins - everywhere – first for Thanksgiving and then Halloween.

Once Halloween's over, some Jack-o-lanterns get one last hurrah in November 1st Pumpkin Parades. Others land in garbage bins if they have not already been smashed in the street. As to what becomes of the hundreds of unsold pumpkins at every retail outlet – perish the thought. The pity of wasted pumpkin is that it is very nutritious – a source of fibre, a long list of vitamins and even more wondrous nutritional gifts in the seeds (also known as pepitas). 

That Spanish word is a tip off that pumpkins are native to North America (especially Mexico and Central America) and found their way abroad with the help of European explorers. Pumpkins are now cultivated on every continent except Antarctica. [Source]

Oh my how they’ve changed. The classic smooth, deep orange, ready-for-carving specimens now sit on racks next to pumpkins white, blue or covered in warts. Officially they may not all be pumpkins – although that depends on whether you use the terms “pumpkin” and “squash” interchangeably. Pumpkins fall under the umbrella of winter squash, most designated as a variation of cucurbita. There are so many varieties of winter squash, which unlike summer squash, do store well. I recently wrote about friendly farmer gifting me squash that I had not even seen before. Here’s a comprehensive guide to the squash you may be seeing at local markets.

The summer squash familiar to most are zucchini. I wonder if you have ever seen or used the summer squash called marrow – not to be confused with spaghetti squash? It looks like a large, fat, pale green zucchini and is used in the iconic Hungarian tökfőzelék - creamed marrow with dill. The word főzelék sort of translates to “creamed” – a “lame” word which to me never captures or communicates the eating experience. In Hungary this is so popular that the marrow is sold already cleaned, shredded and packaged in bags with the appropriate amount of dill. This is the first year we found no marrow anywhere – one farmer said that they simply did not flourish – perhaps suffering from pollination failure – oh those precious bees.

How do we use pumpkin / squash?

Roasted or as soup seem to be the most common uses. We often treat squash as a vegetable, but officially they are fruit and can be used in many sweets beyond the cliché pumpkin pie. For the record, here at KB, we enjoy pumpkin pie – but I let the 13th Street Bakery/Winery make that for me. 

And as someone with freckles, I should note that people have claimed that a pumpkin facial can fade freckles… maybe that’s a myth promulgated by the Anti-Ginger Movement – yes, "gingerism" (bullying of red heads) is a thing. Mind you, not all redheads have freckles.

While I do not usually share recipes that I have not yet tried and tested, here are some pumpkin / squash ideas I’m considering:

No piece on pumpkins would be complete without mentioning pumpkin spice (and the return of the pumpkin spice latte). Food Bloggers of Canada recently pulled together a round-up of pumpkin spice recipes. You can buy this spice mixture in bulk stores, or mix your own following the recipe included in the round-up.

I’m not even sure why I have been collecting pumpkin ideas. I hardly need them since I just won Allison Day’s newest book – Purely Pumpkin. I think of her as a “local” since she’s from Hamilton, and enjoy her blog Yummy Beet. Her first book - Whole Bowls - nicely captured a recent trend of combining healthy grains with everything your body and soul wish for “The Whole Bowls Formula page lists the required portion of each component (protein, starchy vegetables or fruits, non-starchy vegetables, grains, cheese and crunch or garnish)".  [FBC Review] I have not had a chance to make anything from her new book, but top of the list are Sticky Toffee Pumpkin Spice Pecan Truffles, Morning Glory Pumpkin Muffins (inspired by Detour Café in Dundas) and the Pumpkin Pie Smoothie Bowl.

Pondering pumpkins reminds me of how often pumpkin is now “sneaking” into recipes. Like Jamie Oliver who tricks his kids into eating their veggies by shredding carrots into a spaghetti sauce, many nutrition conscious recipe developers are playing creatively with pumpkin and squash.

A cake, for example, has wet and dry ingredients and in many carrot cakes the “wet” is oil. One recipe I peeked at calls for 1 ¼ cups – that’s 2475 calories for that one ingredient alone! My “go to” recipe for carrot cake comes from the health conscious Podleski Sisters who use only ¼ cup of oil and one cup of pumpkin puree.

My latest favourite “stealth pumpkin” treat is Pumpkin Date Spice Cookies from Mairlyn Smith - and that's the recipe I am linking to this blog post. Am willing to bet that, like me, you'll be making these often!

Squirrel! That’s me being distracted a bit. Before signing off, I am reminded of a CBC radio segment where the host was complaining about her Halloween porch pumpkin being destroyed by squirrels. She said she’d lived in her house for twenty years and had never seen this before. You really need to do this - into Google, type squirrels and pumpkins, and check out the image and/or video results. 

One more thing on the subject of squirrels – another CBC radio nugget. On a segment inviting questions, someone asked “Why do we never see baby squirrels?” So true!? Why have we never asked that question!? The expert answered that baby squirrels are born blind and may not venture away from the nest until they are 10 weeks old. At that point they are large enough that we “see” them as adults. They’re sort of “teenage” squirrels and their only distinguishing feature is that they do crazy things. So next time you see a squirrel swinging from a vine, or having an erratic race with some invisible buddy - or maybe chewing into a pumpkin - you know why.

Click on the word "Comments", below, to share your thoughts. What's your favourite pumpkin or squash recipe? Any squirrel stories? If you enjoyed this read, please take a second to click on "Like"!

[This time last year: "A (Clean) Apple a Day..."]

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Cooking Backward. Cooking Forward.

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My recent KB kitchen time was devoted to something a bit unusual - for me. 

I spent time using up food that was crying for attention, approaching its “best before” time. Squash everywhere – butternut, acorn, delicata and pattypan (of unusual size); zucchini, French butter pears, plums, kale, bananas and more. 

During harvest time, it is tough to resist all the “eye candy” at the market, and easy to come home with an overabundance of food. (And - no complaints - but we also know a farmer who often showers us with veggies.)

Waste not, want not. I hate to throw out food staples not used, or cooked food not eaten. 

So why did I say it is a “bit unusual” for me to use up all that food? Because I tend to cook forward, not backward.

Let me explain. (And I will be curious to know what your cooking style is!)

I first heard the phrase "Cooking Backward" listening to a Grub podcast by Tiffany Mayer of Eating Niagara. She’s a super talented food writer, creatively and engagingly keeping people abreast of food matters in the Niagara Peninsula, publishing in various media (and she has a book). She also contributes her expertise to Food Bloggers of Canada. In Episode 2 of Grub she interviewed Jeanine Donofrio, author of the book and website: Love & Lemons. [Sept 2016 Update: Love and Lemons just won the Editor's Choice Saveur Award for "Most Inspired Weeknight Dinners".]

Cooking Backward. As described by Donofrio, with this approach to cooking, the ingredients are the starting point, and the cook’s task is figuring out what to do with them. Skill in creative improvisation, or intrepid experimentation rule the day. For those lacking both - and seemingly this includes her mother (Donofrio jokes that her mother is a “To the T” recipe follower) - Donofrio offers her cookbook - organized by vegetable since ingredients are the starting point. 

Cooking Forward. Donofrio does not use the term, but the implication is that her mom “cooks forward”. Her mom, I am guessing, is my age. I too tend to cook forward – start with recipe, go to store with shopping list, and follow recipe.

More specifically, my starting points tends to be:

  • what do I / we feel like having? (Influenced by the season, mood, occasion etc.)
  • there’s a new recipe that I want to try

In cooking forward, the blueprint for an imagined outcome is the starting point. This is not to say that I don’t improvise. I have the confidence to go with the flow, handle mistakes, make substitutions, modify methods – but most of the time the starting point is a recipe guiding my cooking journey. 

My forward cooking tendency makes me a poor CSA candidate. Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) membership means that each week you get a bushel basket of whatever the local farmer has harvested. I love the concept, and support “buy local”, but for me CSA is too much pressure. Every week, a bushel full of stuff demanding that I do something with it?! Cook it, freeze it, preserve it. (BTW Batch is a great new book on preserving.)

Let's have a bit of fun with these ideas. It seems to me there are three Cooking Forward (CF) styles:

  1. CF:BTB – start with a recipe and do it "By The Book";
  2. CF:AMS – start with recipe, but Adapt, Modify, Substitute;
  3. CF:CEFT – start with a recipe and/but Change Every F@#$ Thing. (Many food bloggers talk about negative feedback from CF:CEFT cooks, who dare to post a blog comment complaining about the recipe results.)

For Cooking Backward (CB), the starting point is the ingredients – you have them on hand for one reason or another. You either match what’s on hand to a recipe or you use what you know about cooking principles and end up with a dish that you could potentially say you invented. I propose there are types of CB:

  1. CB:OTF – cook with no recipe, “On The Fly”, improvising;
  2. CB:BTR – match ingredients to a recipe, but play and “Break The Rules”;
  3. CB:BTB – match ingredients to a recipe, then follow it “By The Book”.

Trust me to complicate things. I have taken two approaches to cooking, expanded them into 6 styles. Are there more? How about this? When trying to replicate a food memory for which I have no recipe, I juggle playing with ingredients, with cherry-picking ideas from tons of recipes – experimenting until I get it right. Could we call that style “Mash-Up” (MU)? (I proudly managed this with my Almond Rings recipe.)

Lastly there’s the kitchen performance that appears to be “without a net” - when you make something with no recipe in sight, because you are “following” a recipe burned into your memory after years of practice. (It reminds me of the first open house visit to the Grade 1 class of KB son #1. He casually pointed to a book on display and told me “I can read that book without looking!”) Let’s call this last cooking approach LTM (for Long Term Memory.)

In defense of cooking forward – it minimizes wasting food. Every food brought into the kitchen has a known and imminent destiny.

Cooking backward would come in handy in the event of an apocalypse. Imagine all recipes destroyed – you could be that person who can forage and cook and contribute to survival. What? Apocalypse!? You never engage in catastrophic thinking? Crikey, if someone is more than an hour late coming home, my fretting is channeled into planning for disaster – funeral details and so on. (Is this just a mom thing? a female thing? By the way, did you know that the code name of the funeral plan for Winston Churchill was “Operation Hope Not”?)

In addition to its apocalyptic usefulness, I get the feeling that cooking backward is considered to be more creative, so I feel pressure to say that I can handle cooking backward – especially if I can match ingredients to a recipe. But I know I do not come close to many fellow bloggers who perform magic in the kitchen. One that comes to mind is Ginny from The Spicy Eggplant. She has even blogged about “playing with food”, and I have told her that I think her introduction to cooking would make a great movie!

Cooking backward would have ancient roots, and be characteristic of farmers and peasants. It seems like the noble, virtuous way to cook. And yet, there are also early roots to the habit of recipe writing. Wikipedia claims that the oldest cookbook, Apicius, is from 4th / 5th century Rome. Recipes were often closely guarded secrets, as portrayed in the novel by Elle Newark – published as The Chef’s Apprentice (also published as The Book of Holy Mischief). It is set in Renaissance Venice – I am a sucker for any fiction set in Venice. I dare you to name a title I haven’t read [wink].

Is cooking backwards or forwards a style preference or an age-related thing? Is it nature or nurture? I should be good at backward cooking – only two generations removed from peasants and farmers. I grew up in a house where we made sausages and smoked them; where preserving was routine – pickles, pears, peaches, cauliflower, tomato sauce, and plum butter (aka – lekvar). I treasure all the mason jars, but am not doing much to fill them. 

Mom's basement: Capping gadgets and old beer bottles used for bottling tomato sauce.

Mom's basement: Capping gadgets and old beer bottles used for bottling tomato sauce.

True. Minutes after finishing this post, nice farmer delivered more squash!! Am not getting ahead. Backwards it is!!

True. Minutes after finishing this post, nice farmer delivered more squash!! Am not getting ahead. Backwards it is!!

On the other hand, my preference for using recipes may be linked to a long history of following instructions – I think, I hope, not in a bad way. I grew up watching my Dad assemble Heathkits. I assembled models – the largest being the USS Enterprise – the aircraft carrier, not the Starship. I made my own clothes – from patterns. I did paint by number. I studied piano following the Conservatory method. The pay-off today? I LOVE assembling IKEA furniture! And yet… something about all this suddenly sounds a bit unsettling, perhaps even psychologically unhealthy and restrictive. Geesh – maybe there’s therapy for these kinds of childhood experiences. Sign me up for “Fun 101”! Or… lead me to a kitchen – forward or backward.

BTW, in case you’re interested, so far my Cooking Backward session yielded the following results: (Curry) Butternut Squash Pear Soup (I played with a recipe from a talented fellow blogger - Maria of She Loves Biscotti - and used up two ingredients!), and Banana Bread, Party Plum Cake, Zucchini Bread, and Festive Kale Salad. I am still trying to decide how to use the pattypan.

Backward Cooks may be more likely to create and play. We know they blog - and some even get cookbook deals. Thanks in advance to the Forward Cooks who, in search of that perfect tested recipe, might visit this site and leave a “Like”.

Click on the word "Comments", below, to share. What style of cook are you? Any recommended Venice books? If you enjoyed this read, please take a second to click on "Like"!

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Too Many Staples

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A room of one's own.

It took me a long time to actualize Virginia Woolf's advice. The room - my room - has a desk. The desk has drawers. One drawer contains the box of staples which (thanks to the wit and wisdom of James Collins) reminds me of my mortality.

I love his “staples” story - “Let Me Count the Days”. Pause now to read it, or promise you’ll come back for guaranteed reading pleasure. Like mine, his drawer features a box of Swingline staples. With droll insight, he outlines his calculations - a distraction fueled perhaps by writer's block or simple procrastination? I'll offer a summary - 4850 staples, divided by 15 used per year, equals 323 years!

He realizes he will not use them up in his lifetime, and admits to similar problems with the books he has accumulated and possibly even pickles. He concludes - "Staples, books, pickles …. When do you realize that you are going to die? When you realize that, in the remainder of your life, everything is countable." Not cheerful, but then the message is - make each day count!

Like Collins, I have several “too manys” – too many staples, pencils, stickie note pads… and… wait for it… too many recipes! Even if I live another couple of decades, I could make a new recipe every single day and never exhaust the collection.

In the last five decades I progressed from the wee recipe box, followed by the green notebook, the black binder, and the hanging folders. This does not include the cookbooks and “keeper” magazines. 

I lost in the work / life balance game and “a well-ordered house” was a casualty. I swore that I’d spend my first year of retirement cleaning house, but I have not yet impressively applied myself to that task. Shuffling the contents of drawers, I have stumbled across “to do” lists (literally from the last century) - “organize photos” (not done…), “organize recipes” (getting there… ). Ultimately, the recipes I really, really want to keep and use (and pass along to next generations) will have to make it to the blog.

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Ah, my blog – IMHO a serenely organized digital collection. But the outcome masks the journey, and I am betting there is not a food blogger out there who is not surrounded by scattered piles of notes and recipes and books, and perhaps even a BuJo (aka a Bullet Journal – yup, that’s a thing).

Chaos. Chaos and clutter – the enemy of KonMari devotees. But does chaos / disorder have any redeeming qualities? 

"...order and disorder are both common states... Why hasn’t the human yearning for order, over the millennia, triumphed over messiness in society?... Maybe what we disparage as messiness—maybe this physical state contributes to a varied world, and perhaps it’s variety that’s most important in shaping human thinking and action…." [Source]

And guess what, research is showing that people "who worked in the untidy room were much more creative overall, and they also produced more “highly creative” ideas. In other words, they were more likely to break away from tradition, order and convention in their thinking." [Source]

Let’s pause to underscore that. Chaos = Creativity. Picture photos you’ve seen of the studios of famous artists – a mess, right? Even Einstein weighs in on this. “If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?

On a bad clutter day, let that be a mantra. On the other hand, I will not deny that there are parts of my mind that long for order, for release from the burden of "stuff", and for the tranquility of minimalism - and not because it is a trend. 

Some say the generation behind me values minimalism – though others insist this has more to do with the lower incomes associated with precarious employment and student debt, than an ascetic. Extreme critics suggest that minimalism has become tyrannical, oppressive and conformist, and an indulgence of the rich, describing "minimalism’s ban on clutter as a “privilege” that runs counter to the value ascribed to an abundance of objects by those who have suffered from a lack of them — less-empowered people like refugees or immigrants." [Source]

I did not experience "The Great Depression", but grew up in an immigrant household. Maybe that accounts in part for why I often hang on to some things, thinking maybe one day there will be a catastrophe or scarcity and I will need it!

Back to food. How odd, and fascinating, that writing about food may ensue from disorder, but the making of food demands order. There is no chef who does not value mise en place – invaluable for replicating food in a fast-paced restaurant. But even "culinary creators" work in ordered environments - their kitchens often resembling laboratories – from which emerges culinary innovation. (Think of Magnus Nilsson, Rene Redzepi, Heston Blumenthal, Ferran Adria.)

Where does that leave me? The game of work / life balance is now replaced with order / disorder balance, and the hope that the chaos of my desk fosters creativity, while the order of my kitchen results in cooking success. And it leaves me with too many recipes… and too many staples…

Bringing order to my recipes will remain a quest. I am, after all, a bit of a “quest girl” – always hunting for some ingredient, some recipe that will replicate a food memory. Fitting that I should end this blog post by sharing a successful quest – my hunt for “Portuguese Buns” which in fact turned out to be “Portuguese Muffins” (Bolo Levedo). Now that’s a story – and a taste sensation. Click here for the recipe

Postscript - a therapeutic read for those feeling bad about cluttered / "homey" houses.

Click on the word "Comments", below, to ask questions or share tips. Would love to hear about your chaos, creativity thoughts. If you enjoyed this read, please take a second to click on "Like"!

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