Retirement: the pioneering, hand-raised food version

Now that I am retired I have taken it into my head that I must know how things are made, and so I have launched a campaign to make things at home that can be conveniently picked up at the local supermarket for a fraction of the price.  But, obviously, my versions  are organic, delicious…hand raised.  You can’t put a price on that. 

Home made chocolate hazelnut spread.  Nothing can beat it.  It’s actually mostly nuts, unlike  certain commercial products I could name.  Granted, it costs over 30 dollars for two jars if you’re using organic hazelnuts, and the hazelnuts don’t come pre-peeled, so you have to spend 2 or 3 hours roasting them, and jostling and rubbing them to try to get the skins off.  At this juncture the age-old question: what are husbands actually for? is answered.  But it’s hard to beat the final product. Creamy, hazelnuty….hand raised.  

One year we were travelling in Napa Valley, and we stopped at a famous restaurant and I had my first “Buratta and Heirloom Tomatoes with Basil on Toast Points.”  It was 25$ a plate.   I had to replicate it at home.   It was a shock to discover that buratta costs 20$ for one small lump in the shops.  I knew I could make this cheese for a fraction of the price, and the internet didn’t let me down.  For the cost of a gallon of organic, grass fed cow milk, you can make 3 lumps of burrata.  A savings of 50$!   Granted, I had to drive to the next borough for the cheese making chemicals, and there was the cost of the organic, hand knitted cheese cloth, and the 4 hours of time I take to make it that could have been earmarked for something else: writing the Great Canadian Novel, for example.  I bet Margaret Atwood doesn’t fritter away her time making cheese.

And if you have managed to produce the burrata, it doesn’t end there; you must also have organic, hand-raised heirloom tomatoes, and the finest toast points.  I’ve never been able to hand raise a tomato, so I go to the local farmers market where, from the price of them, I assume they’ve been hand-raised by members of the royal family.  And I make, using a recipe from America’s Test Kitchen, “Authentic baguettes at home”.  A process that takes upward of 50 hours.  Now, mind you, you aren’t slaving during the entire 50 hours, though there are many hours of folding and setting aside for 30 minutes, and the purchase of specialized equipment; a couche for example,  into which you put the baguettes for their final rise.  This was unavailable in Canada, so I had to importune a nephew to get me one in the States, which he was obliged to drive 180 miles to deliver.  Taking all this into consideration, my buratta , heirloom tomatoes and basil salad on toast points now costs 30$ a serving.  But it’s deliciously hand raised.

What pioneering endeavor would be complete without ginger beer?  Aside from the drive across town to the one person who carries champagne yeast, and the sturdy bottles with ceramic and wire tops, ginger beer is easy and very inexpensive.  We’ve made it twice, with only minor injuries, and it makes excellent gin mules. 

A caveat on the ginger beer…this is a product that continues to fizz, and can build up a lethal explosive power.  Yesterday my husband opened a liter bottle, and the entire ceramic cap blew off, ripping the wires apart that hold it onto the bottle, and jettisoning all but one quarter of a cup of ginger beer with the force of a Mount. St. Helen, all the way up to our extremely high ceiling.  In a desperate attempt to curb its murderous effect, he tried to tip the bottle towards the sink, which deposited ginger beer along all the kitchen walls and the floor, and of course himself.

We spent the next 2 hours trying to clean up, and then on the way to wash the ginger beer off himself, he thought he’d pop along to check the drier.  Getting into the spirit of our new pioneering lifestyle, he had read that you can clean your feather pillows yourself by washing and drying them, saving the cost of a trip to the dry cleaners. He opened the dryer, just to check, and the entire feather contents of the pillow burst out and showered him with a cascade of duck down.  We are paying our cleaner to come in for an extra day, and are now in the line up at the drive-through at MacDonalds, contemplating dinner.  I have found a site where you can make your own hand raised bubble bath.  I’m quite excited about it, but for some reason, my husband doesn’t want to know.

Summer, the Wasp Edition

    At this very moment, my husband is standing at our French doors, gazing out at the balcony.  It is a beautiful sunny, summer day.  When I say ‘standing’, I of course mean cowering, and the doors are locked and barricaded.  He’s been there for three days.  He brushes me away with irritation when I inquire how the project is coming along.  He can’t hear me anyway.  The shopvac he’s put on the deck to vacuum up a wasp colony has been on for the last 36 hours and is making a noise like a Mac truck trying to get up a steep hill.  I shrug and tell him I am going down to the shops, and I make for the door with my little shopping bag. 

     “Don’t go out there!” he shrieks, lunging at the door I’ve just opened. But then he changes his mind and pushes me out, slamming the door behind me, his eyes wild, watching keenly to see what will happen to me.  Periodically he opens the door an inch, and using the long pole we have to reach a high skylight, stabs at the planter from the safety of the house.  More wasps fly out.  There appear to be an infinite number of wasps.

     How did we get here?  I blame Youtube.  Early in the summer, perhaps under the cover of darkness, some wasps moved into one of our bamboo planters, or maybe it was late spring; I don’t know when wasps move, or how they know where available vacancies are.  But suddenly there they were, having children, setting up schools and workshops, enjoying salmon dinners with us in our outdoor eating area, coming in to the kitchen to see what we’d left out for them, swarming out of their planter palace when I water the bamboo to enjoy a bath, stinging me when I let the water get too cold.  I stop watering that part of the garden, and my other half takes up the duty, scoffing at my cowardice.

    First we read up on how to co-exist.  We sit outside trying to get them used to us.  My husband is browsing the net in his singlet and a pair of shorts.  ‘Try not to smell like flowers’ he reads.

   “You’re alright then,” I say.

   There’s a little piece of wood over the corner of the planter that he must have left during one of his little-pieces-of-wood projects, and the wasps fly in and out from under it.  One day when I’m sweeping the deck, I accidently knock the piece of wood askew and the wasps swarm out in a panic.  By the time they notice me, I’ve jumped away to the other side of the deck and am pretending innocence, but some of them, I can see from their expressions, are not convinced.  I regret the rose scent I’ve sprayed on that morning.  The rest of them, though, swarm and buzz around that piece of wood all day long, trying to figure out how to move it back.  That’s when I realize they aren’t that bright. 

    We reach a crisis point when the nice fellows painting the building come and ask us to move all the planters away from the walls.  We know then. They will have to go.   My husband finds a Youtube video about how to get rid of them without using poison.  It involves filling a shop vac with water and soap, and vacuuming them up.  It only takes 4 hours, he says.  At first he contemplates the karma of this, and plots a catch and release scheme, where he vacuums them up into a pair of my pantyhose, and then carries them into the forest.

    “What if they home?” I ask.  It’s only one of the many possible questions I could ask about this scheme.

    “Good point.”

    I ask to see the video and you can see the householder actually vacuuming up his wasps, providing a running commentary, but I am surprised that my husband is not put off by the five times the householder says things like, “They’re really angry now” and “Oh boy, they are mad!” accompanied by the sound of him tripping over something trying to back away.  It turns out that wasps aren’t all that keen on being vacuumed into a canister of soapy water.  They look around to see whom they can blame.  It also turns out that it is easier to vacuum up a nest that is hanging on the eaves, than one constructed inside a 4 foot by 1 foot planter.  Still, after the initial 4 hours my husband kicks the planter and nothing flies out.

    “They’re gone!” he exclaims proudly, like a homesteader turning back a grizzly.  We look in the canister.  Hundreds of gratifyingly dead wasps.  “Take that!” he says to their little floating corpses.  He’s obviously not thinking about Karma anymore.   A few hours later he’s standing on the deck in the sun with a cup of coffee and gives the planter another victorious kick, and hundreds of angry wasps fly out. They make for him like he’s an ambient teriyaki grilled salmon.  And that’s why we’ve had the shop vac running for three days, and my husband has not been out of the house.  I come and go as I please, though.  They know it’s not me.

    

   

FERMENTATION part one (following the Lost Cocktail Months)

It’s been a while, my dear singular reader, since I’ve reported in, and the reason is simple; I decided to fill my empty retirement days inventing cocktails.  It’s not a life-style conducive to a strict regime of writing blogs a couple of times a month.  But all that has changed.  I have a new hobby.

I woke one morning, with the day before me, and a fairly rugged head from experimenting with cocktails made with gin, limoncello, prosecco and grilled thyme, and I thought; I must change my ways; get healthy.  I’m going to take up fermentation. I will start with sourdough. It is how ancient man leavened his breads.  (Well, ancient woman, obviously, as ancient man was sitting around in the bush with his pals chewing sticks and pretending to be hunting.)  I want to get back to a simpler time.  I could feel my chest expanding with the fervor of a self-sufficient pioneering woman.

Apparently commercial yeast has only been available for the last 140 years. Before that we relied on plucking bacteria out of the ether to leaven things.   I don’t know if you’ve ever attempted sourdough with random ether bacteria, but the local Vancouver species are a bust.  They can’t be bothered.  They’re all down at the beach, or at the medical marijuana dispenseries. 

According to google, (ancient woman didn’t have google, I think smugly, so I’m already ahead of the game) you put some flour in some water, cover loosely, let it sit overnight, put some more flour and water in it, cover it loosely, etc, for a week.  After a week you have an enormous bowl of flour and water that smells of baby poo.  Your instructions tell you it should be bubbly and have an attractive sour scent.  You’ve used a whole bag of flour.  You throw it out.

 You consult a different google site.  It tells you to put flour in water, cover loosely, and the next day get rid of most of it and add more flour and water.  Do this for a week.  I should mention that flour and water that has sat out for some time develops a glue like quality that clings to everything; your person, your counter top, your sink, your floor, your utensils.  I read once that Ottomans built the bridge at Mostar using eggs.  They were wasting good breakfast food; they could have used this stuff.  After a week you have a small bowl of something that smells like nail polish remover and baby poo.  You throw it out.  You’ve used another bag of flour.

Your husband mentions that the sourdough bread at Terra Breads is very good, and that’s the bloody limit.  You go buy another bag of flour, a giant bottle of natural spring water, because you now think it’s the water that is the problem…it’s been killing the useful bacteria because it’s full of raccoon piss…and you go to the local homesteading store to buy a proper freeze dried starter.  You quell your feelings of guilt that you’ve given up on nature, but after three days, your flour and water is bubbling and smells lovely…like Terra bread.  You now bake every day.  Every single day...because you can’t think how to stop it.  Sourdough is unrelentingly demanding.  You have to hire a nanny for it if you go away for the weekend.

I woke up this morning and blearily plugged in the kettle, and there was the crock of sourdough, panting, eager, wanting breakfast and wondering what we were going to do today.  Will it be bread? Pancakes? English muffins?  I wanted to throttle it, but I’d only get my hands glued together and spend the morning trying to get them unstuck.  This is where I realized I hadn’t thought this thing through.  Ancient woman had to bake every day, because her large extended ancient family had to eat every day, and ancient grocers hadn’t developed super markets yet, so the only thing available to them was sourdough bread and some shriveled berries, and on a good day, roast raccoon. 

I’ve had my tea now, and I’m going to drag myself back to the kitchen, I’ll make some bread, and squeeze it into the freezer with all the other baked goods, but I confess, I’m looking back at a simpler time, when the only demand on me was gazing at our liquor cabinet and wondering what I could combine with ice and a wedge of lime.

The Writing Life....Fluffy Bathrobe Version

I HAVE always wanted to be a writer; I won’t deny it, but I have been protected from its effects by not actually writing much, and, if I did write, being reluctant to admit to it.  It sounds so self-aggrandizing, doesn’t it; ‘Hi, I’m Iona, I’m a writer.’  I mean inevitably someone would eventually demand proof, and a children’s book you wrote thirty years ago and a couple of poems in obscure literary journals just aren’t going to cut it. 

In the 80s I even got a Master’s degree in writing from the University of British Columbia, as a way of further putting off actual writing.  I was the nearly oldest person in my little pod for the 2 years I was there.  There was one slightly older woman who wrote terrifyingly good, intense short stories about working for the Canadian government as a fish counter and having to spend her time on Russian fishing boats throwing up.  I’m going to come out right away here and say I’m not willing to go to those lengths to acquire experience; my Russian isn’t good enough and I don’t like throwing up.

Another thing that put me off saying I was a writer, besides having an actual oeuvre, was going to a few literary parties.  These were back in the days when people still smoked.  Everyone there except me and the fish woman was young and intense, and clearly destined for literary glory.  They sat in the smoky dark in tight circles around empty bottles, pushing their hair out of their eyes with nicotine-stained fingers, declaring that no one over the age of 25 could really, really understand or write anything meaningful.  Fish woman and I had not been 25 for a good long while by then.  We drank vodka and ate sardines by the kitchen counter wondering if we’d been like that in our 20s.

My mother was a writer; she had two books published to prove it.  She was a woman who, in her advanced old age, divided her time between buying exciting modern gadgets and writing a three hundred page book about bears on actual paper, with a typewriter.   A disaster was inevitable.  One hot summer’s day she plugged in and turned on her brand new, high-powered, top of the line electric fan, and her little sitting room became an explosion of 300 un-numbered pages, which could never again be coherently reassembled.  She quit writing after that and devoted her time to “Dallas”, but I still have her disassembled bear book as a reminder of the futility of adopting airs, or doing anything with air, really.

But sooner or later we all succumb.  My publisher has just informed me that the hours I have spent in my fluffy pink bathrobe in the mornings writing have resulted in an actual purchasable book.  I’m afraid Dead In The Water would only confirm the fixed views of my young literary colleagues at the university, but it’s mine, and I wrote it.   With the help of a bowl of dark chocolate malt balls always to hand, I think I might just stay in bed and write another one.  It’s the sort of bohemian life-style we writers are famous for.

Retirement-the malt ball version...

     My main struggles with what to do with my vast amounts of retired time center around the following:

Getting exercise-this seems to take an inordinate amount of my time, and I pursue it doggedly in spite of my sister-in-law’s well founded warnings that it will bring me to an early grave.  Every week I discover through relentless reading of the pages of the New York Times, that there is some new formula.  A month or so ago it was interval training, where it was proven that if people can get their heart rate up to some gasping level for just five minutes a day, they will live longer.  I tried this, and so far it has worked; I am still alive.  Then it turns out the Japanese have a proven method that involves walking fast then slow at 3 minute intervals for half an hour 3 times a week.  No gasping involved.  The Japanese test subjects are all still alive.  I mix this in with a stretching program by a 65 year old former dancer with the National Ballet of Canada, an institution I attended when I was 13, in which the main component is to wave about like seaweed in a gentle tide.  I have ordered the disks and I’ve done that for a week now, and can report that life as a seaweed is quite agreeable.

Writing- I was reading a conversation between two writers yesterday and one was saying she likes to go into her room with a cup of tea and close the door and write, and she finds it most enjoyable.  The second was saying that she tries to capture the ephemeral, and she can agonize over one sentence for months.  I don’t have any stats on the mortality rates of writers, but I bet one of those options leads to an early death…ah…the kettle’s boiling.

Painting- I like wide open spaces, and if I can find the right green I’m never happier than when dabbling paint on a canvas, but lately I’ve illogically gone in for challenges, so I’ve been trying to paint a rather dark and claustrophobic stand of bare winter trees near our house.  My husband, the real artist, comes in, and with the enthusiasm that would characterize the father of a very small child struggling to find words of praise, says, “wow…look at you!” and like my art teacher before him exclaims how very much he likes this little understated section right here, which in fact is a corner of the canvas I haven’t painted yet.

Chocolate-you may question my assertion that this is an activity, but when your local Whole Foods discontinues dark chocolate covered malt balls, it becomes something like a full time job.  First there is going in to the store 4 or 5 times complaining to different people about the lack of malt balls, in the hopes that they will think I am four or five different people and that there is a groundswell of protest so they bring them back.  Then there is the search in all other stores for a similar product, then there is time lost in trying to come to terms with who I really am with no malt balls.  Then there are the listless attempts to replace the malt ball experience with expensive dark chocolate mint patties and 85 % French chocolate.

And finally there is what to do with the large case of malt balls you find yourself with when Whole Foods cottons on to the fact that it’s just been you all along, and they order you a case to get you off their back.  Our apartment, while generously proportioned in vast amounts of open, high-ceilinged, unheatable space, is short on places to stash cases of malt balls.  However, I am happy to report that you can google how to store masses of malt balls.  A site called “StillTasty” looks like telling you how to store anything.  It suggests I store them in heavy duty freezer bags in the freezer.  I will now spend my afternoon shoveling malt balls into freezer bags, and emptying my freezer of all other food (StillTasty would frown at how long I’ve had some stuff in there anyway) in order to store my malt balls. 

I need hardly point out that I wouldn’t have time for these important activities if I wasn’t retired.