Chills down to my toes

Bacon reminds me of the mother of an ex-partner of mine.

I hadn't fathomed meeting her the way I did. I imagined I would hop off the plane, well-dressed and fresh-looking, and charm her with my sense of humour and dimpled smile (indulge me.) She'd like and approve of me and hopefully we would become friends. But traffic from Tallahassee to Tampa had been unusually brutal that day, with several accidents lining the highway. By the time my partner picked me up and we had dinner, stuffing ourselves stupid on ribs and pulled pork, fries and coleslaw -- it was late and everyone had gone to bed.

Instead we met while I was still groggy and disheveled, and looked anything but fresh. I put a brake on my neuroses and decided to just own it, crazy bedhead and all.

Her lean body was wrapped in a slinky, leopard-print robe and her straightened blonde hair lingered around her shoulders as she drank her black coffee. As I went to shake her hand, she hugged me. "We hug around here," she said, lips breaking into a loose grin, and in the time that I knew her she turned me into one, too. It seems ridiculous to associate greasy, nitrite-filled meat with one of the most elegant women I've ever met, but sparkling wine also reminds me of her, thanks to her penchant for drinking it routinely around the pool after dinner, so I suppose the two cancel each other out.

And the watermelon. Once, as we sat around the large dining table playing a game of Sequence, she breathed enthusiastically, "If I know there's a watermelon in the fridge, I will get up at 3am and eat all of it."

Where does the bacon come in, you might ask? No, don't go believing she was as much a bacon afficionado, the way she was watermelon, sparkling wine, peel and eat shrimp, and a bowl of warm, creamy grits. It was the manner in which she cooked it: flat, on a foil-lined baking sheet, in the oven. "Easy clean-up," she said to me one hot Plant City morning as we drank our coffee and put breakfast together. Not only was she lovely, as it turned out, but she was a mean cook. It's easy to clean up, certainly, but the bacon doesn't curl up the way it does in a greasy pan.

She taught me the value of letting a man win sometimes, which shells to search for and how to heal a jelly fish wound. And one day, as I expressed growing concerns over my inability to land employment, she glanced over at me and said, "I know," as sympathetic to my pains as my own mother. It was the verbal equivalent of a bear hug and the liquid equivalent of an Old Fashioned. I couldn't tell whether it was the sparkling wine going to my head or the comfort this woman so readily offered, but I felt lighter.

There is nothing particularly innovative about bacon, or watermelon, or sparkling wine, or wonderful women who slip into leopard-print robes to crack a few eggs into a hot pan or buy you a black, cowl-necked sweater because they thought it would "look so sexy on you." But I wondered how I might be as I got older, what habits I might adopt, what I might come to value. This was a woman who clipped up her hair as she waded in the ocean in search of specific shells without regard for the laws of beach combing, whose face lit up when she'd tasted something truly delicious, who kept a spare bottle of sparkling wine in the fridge when she left the Sunshine State so that when she'd return, she'd be able to promptly pour herself a glass and sit by the pool in the damp heat of the Florida night.

As Betsy, R.W. Apple Jr.'s wife allegedly said after biting into a slice of cherry pie, "I have chills down to my toes." It seems to me it chilled Johnny, too, since he included the snippet in the article. Reading it gave me chills down to my toes, made me want to dip the tines of a fork into the sweet filling and pull on the plump fruit, holding it on my tongue until the sweet-tart flavour seeped fully through my tastebuds. And like these women, I'd like to live a life that gives me chills down to my toes, that tastes so delicious I can only sigh and smile like I've gone to a heaven where the pool water is always warm and there's an abundant supply of chilled, sparkling wine, and ladies confess to leaving their warm beds in the middle of the night for sweet, red watermelon.

Baked Raisin Oatmeal with Bacon

Adapted from Bon Appetit and Sugar-Free Mom

6 strips of good-quality bacon
2 cups unsweetened applesauce, preferably homemade
2 large eggs
1/4 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup agave nectar or honey
1 tsp sea salt
3 tsp baking powder
5 cups old-fashioned rolled oats
2 tsp ground cinnamon
1 ripe banana, mashed
2 3/4 cup milk (I used unsweetened almond milk)
1/4 cup ground flaxseed/flaxseed meal
1 tsp real vanilla extract
1/2 lb raisins
1/2 cup roughly chopped walnuts (optional)
1/4 cup almond meal/ground almonds (optional)

1. Pre-heat oven to 350F.

2. Cook the bacon -- preferably in the oven!

3. In a large bowl, combine the eggs, agave nectar/honey, applesauce, banana, and vanilla. Mix well to combine.

4. Add the brown sugar, oats, sea salt, baking powder, cinnamon, and flaxseed. Mix thoroughly again to combine.

5. Finally, add the milk, raisins and walnuts. The mixture will be fairly loose.

6. Grease a 9 x 13" casserole dish and pour in the mixrture. When cooked and cool enough, crumble the bacon or chop into pieces and sprinkle over the top. Top with almond meal, if desired, and any additional raisins. Bake, covered, for 45 minutes, or until an inserted toothpick comes out clean.

Something bold

Dear reader, it’s been a long while since I’ve waxed on longingly about a fruit. In the early days of Aubergine, the yearning was a bit of a constant. Red currants and Montmorency cherries provoke immense excitement, the likes of which may end in you riding mechanical bulls or jumping out or airplanes. Unlike red currants and cherries, though, my lemon love is big. It began somewhere around lemon meringue pie and swerved around the dinner table during the fourth grade, where I’d bite down into the sour flesh and bitter pith with astonishing regularity (I have the poor enamel to prove it – an interesting badge of honour.)

Lemons make for a beautiful and inexpensive table display. Their juice brightens soups and stews. Salt-cured (otherwise known as preserved), they’re fantastic in African tagines. And quite frankly, while I love chocolate as much as the next girl, hand me over a lemon-flavoured dessert and I’m as good as yours. I should probably keep that last tidbit to myself.

And so this weekend I went about making lemon curd, and the following Lemon, Almond & Cornmeal cake. When I first removed the cake from the oven, I thought the recipe had called for entirely too much butter. The parchment was drenched in grease and the cake seemed perhaps too moist. But trust me, it dries out, and the butter ensures it stays moist (does anyone actually like this word?). The crumb is loose and seems to dissolve on the tip of your tongue, and the lemon is obscenely bold. I’ve eaten this cake warm and alone (the cake, I mean) and I’ve eaten it in the company of co-workers, dressed with a dollop of crème fraiche. I’ve eaten it for dessert after dinner and with afternoon tea. It’s the kind of recipe you want in your repertoire, the kind of thing you’d serve to good friends on a Saturday, the kind of thing you fall in love with whether you are ten or twenty-six.

Find the recipe over here at Simple Bites (I used regular lemons in place of the Meyer ones.)

The past is a foreign country

The English writer Leslie Poles Hartley once said that "the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." As I spent my evening reviewing old conversation exchanges between my graduate classmates a few years ago, I could feel myself light up again. Those years were like pages pulled from The Dead Poet's Society, students clambering around to order pints and debate wildly about literature and politics, global warming and human rights. I sat across the round kitchen table from my roommate, where we drank bottomless cups of coffee and tea and talked, quite literally, for hours. It's still like that. And I laughed a lot.

I've been back from Varadero for a week. Everything seems different though nothing has really changed. One cold afternoon -- cold for Cuba, at any rate -- my sister and I walked down to the beach clad in jeans and sweatshirts, while the ladies by the pool wrapped themselves up in rented beach towels, trying to soak up some sun without turning blue. She took a few shots and I waded calf-deep in the water as the waves lapped at my skin, the edges foaming up around my ankles like a poorly poured pint of beer. The air felt warmer down on the shoreline. As we dodged the higher waves and attempted to save the beached jelly fish, my defenses dissolved.

If you are a girl who stands at barely over five feet and can barely pass for eighteen on a good day and still fits easily into children's clothes, navigating the corporate world certainly presents a challenge. A few months into my role, my boss, over coffee, mentioned that I let people walk all over me and advised I become more assertive. But until I stood in the sand, now knee-deep in the gulf, I hadn't realized how far down that road I'd gone. How much of my spirit I'd compromised in trying to prove myself to others, in trying to defend myself. I traded my passion for academia for a steady job and a good paycheque, and while I've never regretted it, I do regret how cold I've become, how willing I am to keep people at arm's length. Back then, we were provocative dreamers and foolish and made mistakes. We taught classes with our tails between our legs and wrote our theses frantically, hoping our ideas would amount to something substantial. And I believed in the value of what were doing, in the beauty of it, even if its purpose was immaterial. Particularly because its purpose was immaterial.

If I took one thing away from Kerouac and Twain and Montgomery and Munro, it's that life is, at its very best, an adventure; even our geography shifts and moves with the years. The most wonderful thing about life, to me, is that we get to live our all of our years. We can indulge ourselves in a night of electrifying conversation with friends and family, feasting on great food and wine. We can eat street food in Vietnam or see the Taj Mahal or walk the shoreline of a beach in Cuba, deserted at the end of the day, trying to be as present as possible. Wondering what's in store for 2012.

"He regarded a country's food as the story of its people, its culture and its history, without which one couldn't hope to understand or report on a place," Catherine Collins writes of her stepfather, R. W. Apple Jr., in the Editor's Note of the exceptional Far Flung and Well Fed. He ate fish sandwiches and drank delicious bourbons and doused his biscuits with gravy; he sought out the best espresso Italy had to offer and remarks how the Triestines claim that the fish on their side of the Adriatic tastes better than the fish on the Venice side because the sea bottom near Trieste is rocky rather than sandy. I read the book on the beach that week while sipping on Johnnie Walker Red and savoured it, trying to keep the words on my tongue. He was a man who really lived, unabashedly, merging the past with the present and the future, some kind of time machine sandwich. As I flipped to the final page, I thought, yes, the past is a foreign country, and they do things differently there. And I'm glad I went back, because it has made me more present.

And cheesier. Obviously. Some things don't change.