September 24th, 2010

People in real life

I am an enormous fan of people in real life, which was why I was very glad to welcome Nathalie and Julia to my house yesterday as part of the “people around in the daytime” collective. We met for the purposes of pie, a date set ages ago, and it did not disappoint. Neither guest argued (to my face) with my pie’s alleged status as “best in Toronto”, which was kind of them (and maybe even genuine? Seriously. I make good pie. It is the one thing I’m pretty much 100% confident about). There was also cheese, and wine, (and Lesley Stowe crackers–  I could eat these until I died) which pretty much certified the afternoon as the very best ever, and we talked about books, and writing, and blogging, and Harriet fell in love with Nathalie’s five-year old.

It’s nice that somebody in my family goes to work so I can have this kind of life, and I was kind enough to save him leftovers.

September 22nd, 2010

There is no such thing as a canon

All the books of my dreams are coming out in the UK this fall: I want to read Comfort and Joy by India Knight, Started Early, Took My Dog by Kate Atkinson, and Burley Cross Postbox Theft by Nicola Barker (which is epistolary and about a postbox, if a book could be so full to bursting). I am going to read Room by Emma Donaghue, which seemed like the most wretched book imaginable when I first heard of it, and I still think so, but too many intelligent readers have convinced me to go there anyway. I have just moved Alexander MacLeod’s Light Lifting (which I keep calling Lift Lighting in my head) up near the top of my to-be-read stack, due to his Giller nomination, and Robert Wiersema’s review. I am going to be rereading Nikolski, We Need to Talk About Kevin, and Small Ceremonies in the coming weeks. Also from the Giller longlist, I think I am going to read Lemon by Cordelia Strube, and the rest I’m not really fussed about. Because I already read This Cake is for the Party, and it was wonderful, and Jessa Crispin has given me permission to shrug off everything else: “There is no such thing as a canon — what you should read or want to read or will read out of obligation is determined as much by your history, your loves, and your daily reality as by the objective merits of certain works.” Rock on, and bring on the old dead British ladies then with their hideously outdated Penguin covers and pages smelling of must.

In others, I am going to the Victoria College Book Sale on Saturday, but with a budget (how novel) and also, I am obsessive-compulsively fiction writing lately, which is wonderful, because I thought I lost the knack with the advent of my child, but I’m at 10,000 words and haven’t yet thought about giving up because the whole piece sucks (and the thing about having once completed three drafts of a bad novel is that you learn that just barrelling through to the conclusion won’t necessarily work out okay in the end, but at this point I still feel like there might be some worth in bothering).

And also, there is a pie in my oven. And on Saturday, that oven will be replaced with a new one that doesn’t require a barbecue lighter to start.

July 4th, 2010

Pie in the sunshine

Will you tolerate another picture of a pie in the sunshine? This time a cherry pie (my first! Hulling is tedious, but the pie is delicious) in stars because I don’t have a maple leaf cutter. Purchased with cherries from our farmer’s market, which supplied much of the deliciousness we partook in this weekend. We had a wonderful Canada Day in the sunshine, with friends for dinner, and then spent the rest of the weekend soaking up the city. We went to Trinity Bellwoods Park on Saturday, and I’d forgotten about wading pools, which meant that Harriet had to go swimming in her clothes. She was all right with this, however, and also got in lots of swinging, and sliding, and crawling in the grass. A similar day was had today at Christie Pits, where we also watched an old-time baseball game, went swimming in the city pool (not just wading, and we were equipped with suits and towels), and then played afterwards underneath shady trees. The parks in this city are better than any backyard you could dream of. It was a whole weekend as good as the pie.

The one problem with all this goodness, however, is Harriet’s “separation anxiety”. Quite a difference from last year at this time when Harriet didn’t like anything, she now doesn’t want to leave anything she encounters– she cries when we take her out of the swing, when we take her out of the pool, when she has to get off her bike, when her dad leaves the house in the morning, when the UPS guy leaves the house after having me sign here, when she has to put her ball down, when anybody (including complete strangers) is playing with a ball and she can’t have it, when we get to the last page of Over in the Meadow, and heaven forbid I take my keys out of her mouth, and suggest she not eat my credit card. She’s also taken to pointing at things she wants and screaming in a way that shatters eardrums. I now understand why sign language might have been useful (but still, not I how might have implemented it into life).

She does take things hard, does Harriet. She has never ever left a  playground and not had eyes streaming with tears… Though she really is a happy kid, recovering quickly from her traumas. At left is a photo of us taken last week by Star reporter Vinnie Talotta, which is pretty much our Hats most of the time.

Anyway, I am very busy lately working toward an upcoming deadline, and I’ve also gotten involved in a reading project (which I’ll tell you about when the time comes) that involves me having to read 20+ books in the next two months. This means my library books are way backlogged, and some even due back without having been touched, and my summer rereading project has totally stalled. I should be able to step up some in the days ahead, however, and I look forward to reading Katha Pollitt’s Learning to Drive, rereading Joan Didion, and writing up a post about our next meeting of The Vicious Circle and this month’s book, Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle. And updating you about my ongoing obsession with bananas, of course. You’ve probably been waiting for that.

May 21st, 2010

The most beautiful thing I have ever created…

…is this pie, obviously. Whose butterfly cookie-cutter top (idea stolen from a pie at Madeleine’s) breaks my top pastry sheet into pieces, which is what always happens anyway, but at least in this case, I get to do it on purpose. The pie’s innards are Ontario rhubarb, non-Ontario strawberries, and plenty of the one thing that makes rhubarb so delicious– sugar! And the whole thing was so delicious. A fine way to start the Victoria Day long weekend, and just the thing after an afternoon in the sunshine.

August 17th, 2008

An affinity for pie dough

I’ve been baking pie all summer, having decided it was a very good way to honour summer fruit (and keep some around for the dead of winter), and also because it has never once been so hot that turning on the oven has been ridiculous. (I was also inspired by watching Waitress.)

This summer I’ve made strawberry rhubarb pie, strawberry pie, raspberry pie, peach pie and blueberry pie. Each of these pies has also had its filling run into the bottom of my oven (which I never clean) and so a smoke-filled kitchen has become the usual. Each time the pastry has been delicious.

As you can see by the photo, when I bake I make a mess. I do clean it up afterwards, of course, but what you can also see by the photo is my grandmother’s rolling pin. I know very little about the origins of said rolling pin, and it is quite likely she picked it up at Zellers in 1998, so it is probably not a valuable heirloom. But I find that I like that it was hers, I like that I roll out my piecrust with it, the pin she would have rolled her own piecrust out with. Genetics aside, my grandmother and I never had a whole lot in common, and so I appreciate the connection that is this.

In my family, people like to take one another apart to figure out how we were constructed. My mania for pie-making, for instance, my mother wonders about, for she’s never had much of an instinct for pastry. I think she wonders if I was a changeling, and so it brings her some comfort to attribute it to an atavistic pie gene instead. To tie it back to my grandmother, but I resist this. Mostly because I am twenty nine years old and would like to believe that I am a singular creation, not the product of anything, nor susceptible. I am ME, and I bake pie because I do, and also because I really like to eat it.

My grandmother was good at all grandmotherly things, very dutiful and I’ve saved the notes she wrote me when I was younger, admonishments, some of them, to be a good girl. Never a demonstrative woman, it was through these gestures, like her pies and like her cookies, that my grandmother showed her love. And so it is unfortunate that I, in addition to pie-baking, have always had a talent for delightedly irritating people of my grandmother’s sensibility. For asking questions like, “So, if your name is Helen, then your nickname must be “Hell”, right?” You can see that I’ve always been adorable.

I took my grandmother’s rolling pin when we cleaned out her kitchen after she died, mostly because I didn’t have a nice one. I didn’t think much of it, pie after pie, for such a long time– that my hands, like her hands did, are rolling out the dough. That object, the rolling pin, had been in her cupboard and that it lives in mine now. I never suspected that we’d come to have this much in common, this affinity for pie dough, and it took me awhile to admit it was anything in common at all.

These things creep up on us, I think, the innumerable ways we can be wrong about ourselves, who we are, and the whole wide the world around us. The connections discovered, too late it seems, but maybe not. The bits and pieces we carry, how they can become invested with meaning, continuing life on and on.

August 10th, 2008

You can’t control it all

This weekend, I found myself in the ridiculous predicament of only having delightful things to have to do. Not counting the things I didn’t have to do, like go out for lunch with my husband, take a long long walk up to the Type Books location in Forest Hill. But that my to-do list contained the following: 1 Bake two blueberry pies; 2 Finish knitting cardigan (which has been on-going for ten months; 3 Finish rereading the brilliant The Girl in Saskatoon and work on interview questions for Sharon Butala; 4 Continue work upon my own story (which has just reached 25,000 words; 5 read the entire newspaper (sans any mention of the olympics, of course, which made the whole experience a lot shorter).

You can’t control it all, though. The list didn’t include being awakened at 3:55 am by a massive explosion that shook our house and turned the sky a fiery orange (and do note how far away we live from where the explosion occurred). A blast so powerful it made my husband roll over in his sleep (and this is remarkable, mind you). Nor did the list include me not going back to bed until past sunrise (after listening to the radio in my cold and darkened kitchen [it was thirteen degrees, news and weather together] searching the internet for more news and finding only a livejournal forum [which proved quite informative, actually]). Oh, it was frightening, it really was and we are so fortunate that devastation was remarkably contained and that so few people were hurt.

June 24th, 2008

Fun with Ichigo

For the second year in a row I’ve found my bookish pursuits in line with the season. It was almost a year ago that I first read Animal Vegetable Miracle, and I’m now reading The Perfection of the Morning, having finished the mesmerizing Prodigal Summer just before it. Both books inspiring a yearning to get closer to the earth, and so I did when any earth loving city dweller does for such a connection in the month of June–I ventured out past the suburbs.

Around our house June is one of the best times, full to bursting with fun and fetes, the sunshine and the solstice, and then the strawberries. I don’t have faith in a lot of things, but the very fact that delight manages to grow itself on trees (or at least bushes) suggests to me the world’s inherent goodness. The amazing abundance of summer time and sweet things, and all of this is well celebrated with a trip to the strawberry patch.

I went on Saturday with our friends Carolyn and Steve, and proceed to pick far too much out of fear of not enough. It was a gorgeous afternoon, well-spent toiling in the fields in suburban fashion. Ten litres I picked, an entire bucket and more, and I also acquired some new freckles and aches in my old lady knees.

Afterwards we came back to my house and the toiling continued (for a woman’s work is never done, moan moan, but of course, as usual, I did my suffering in silence). Carolyn and I made batches and batches of jam (albeit freezer jam, as our preserving ambitions still have some way to go). We used an obscene amount of sugar, and then ran out of sugar and had to go buy some more.

Soon the fridge was full of jammy delights the kitchen resembling a strawberry explosion. Dripping down the cupboard doors, staining counter tops, a couple of grubby finger prints up and down the telephone. Piles and piles of dirty dishes and utensils, and then, for fear of not having dirtied absolutely everything (and because it is one of my favourite things to do), I baked two strawberry pies. One for eating that evening (and it was delicious), the other put away in the freezer for a while. I intend to do as much with every fresh fruit appearing all summer long, and then come winter have a defrostable treasure trove of summer fruit goodness.

September 12th, 2007

I made a pie instead

The Poet’s Occasional Alternative — by Grace Paley

I was going to write a poem
I made a pie instead it took
about the same amount of time
of course the pie was a final
draft a poem would have had some
distance to go days and weeks and
much crumpled paper

the pie already had a talking
tumbling audience among small
trucks and a fire engine on
the kitchen floor

everybody will like this pie
it will have apples and cranberries
dried apricots in it many friends
will say why in the world did you
make only one

this does not happen with poems

because of unreportable
sadness I decided to
settle this morning for a re-
sponsive eatership I do not
want to wait a week a year a
generation for the right
consumer to come along

from Begin Again Collected Poems, 2000