Grace

I can see how it would be possible in some post-apocalyptic world to describe the way my day is unfolding today to someone and have them not believe anything could ever be so easy. Or even to describe it to my grandmother.

I am on my balcony, using my laptop on a warm May day. I am working on an article at my leisure and chatting to a few friends as they come and go on their computers in three different cities.

Two men just came and replaced my toilet. They're gone now and my bathroom's clean. There are the makings of a tasty dinner thawing out in the kitchen, ice water in the fridge and I am listening to a radio station out of Austin, TX.

Sitting in my desk chair, with an ottoman, surrounded by glass panels to waist height, at the perfect height above the ground to see what's happening in my neighbourhood and in the sky but not so high as to be in the grip of the wind and not so low as to be in the midst of the street action - it's pretty easy to be me today.

Everything's clean, nobody is complaining. I'm not rushed or worried. Life is a pretty good place to be if you're me today. Even 20 years ago my lifestyle would have seemed impossibly indulgent. Yet, by most people's standards, I lead a very modest life.

I know there will be times when this won't be nearly enough. There are already people I miss and places I want to be,obstacles to be overcome, problems to be solved. Change is in the air and it's welcome but it is nice to see this moment as the people who came before or those who come after might see it; I know where I am, I know what I want and it's feeling as though I'll be able to reach it from here without having to die trying.

That's a good feeling.

Ok, Oil

I am no expert on oil wells or drilling or underwater engineering so I want to be clear here, this is my opinion and it is based on common sense, gut feeling and the lessons taught to me by First Nations Elders over the years.

There are certain things I accept as being true and some of my argument does rest on those things. Primarily, I am writing it out here and now to keep myself from putting it on my FB page, to kill off the urge to reply to a friend's comments on FB and also to keep it and the feelings it generates from seeping into my other work. I don't know if this happens to other writers but I often have to clear my head before I can sit down to something that pays - and clearing it in private, for some reason, does not work. How's that for a neurosis? I'm managing it by publishing here, where nobody reads it. Works for everybody, I think.

Anyhow - here are these certain things I accept as being true:

The earth functions as a unified whole. Geographic or climactic change in one part of the world will have an impact on all of the other parts even if that impact is not immediately apparent to us.

The things we do not know far outnumber the things we know.

Deposits of oil or minerals have changed the nature of the earth to an extent where their continued existence in situ contributes to how the rest of the planet functions. This means - oil deposits have a purpose and are useful to the planet and we are, in all likelihood, ignorant of that purpose and that use. (safe to say, it probably isn't to run cars.)

We are an organism on the planet and our actions contribute to the growth of the planet as a complex organism however, we are not more nor less important in our biochemical presence than any other organism - what gets us into trouble is that we think we are more important in the biological sense and we tend to use our brains to try to prove that and so we get into a lot of mischief.

I also believe (and this is the most contentious one, I think), that there is a Creator and that the way the world runs is designed to a certain extent to teach lessons through consequences. Hit your brother - he will take your cookie. Stuff like that. G-d to me is like the benevolent force that runs through all of us, through your consciousness and through the earth itself, not a Daddy but the sense of right and wrong. I believe in that and to me, that's non-negotiable. That force is the voice that and suggests to us that we do not hit our brother in the first place. Once the brother is hit, consequences are in play and there is no stopping that part. Gotta have free will - but you have to live with the outcome of it too.

With these issues in place as my personal foundation, I have to say, I do not think Top Kill or the Junk Shot are going to work to stop the leakage of oil from the rupture in the floor of the ocean in the Gulf of Mexico.

First of all - ask your gut. Does it seem reasonable to you that piling mud into a burst artery is going to stop that artery from bleeding out? Doesn't seem reasonable to me. How about throwing little pieces of garbage into that cut? Another crappy solution that only looks at the oil gushing out and doesn't seem capable of understanding that the oil is under pressure from a much larger system and that pressure will continue to overwhelm the bits and pieces of gunk we throw at it.

Secondly, it's time we learned new ways of coping with our messes. The old ways aren't working. This incident is giving us the chance to see that reacting in panic doesn't work. Once all the panic-stricken, childish responses have been exhausted, we will have to actually sit down and think about how this is happening and what kinds of things we actually can do that will help us to fix the mess and solve the problem on our end.

This means we need to find a way to get the oil out of there. It's not going to stay in, that much has been proven. So how do we get it out?

It will require a lot of calm, sensible, engineering skill to think this one through but it seems to me that there must be some way to bring the stream to the surface where it can be captured and piped out - probably to be used for its original dubious purpose, but anyway, away from the damage it is doing to all of the people, (fish, birds and wildlife included) that it is hurting right now.

So there are my thoughts on the subject. Junk shot - won't work. Top Kill - no way. Dome? you're kidding, right? We have to actually do the work and fix this one from the ground up. I wish us luck and a measure of common sense. And now I can go back to work - my deck is cleared.

Zeitgeist

Over the last week or two, it seems as though everything I've felt compelled to discuss has turned up a day or two later as a major issue in the news. First, it was water. I found myself thinking about the way water moves between the three countries in North America, wrote about it and then an article popped up - Canada legislated against water exports.

A similar situation occurred with the tar sands - thought about it, wrote about it and the next day a bank quite close to my house was fire-bombed, apparently to draw attention to how dirty the tar sands are, the next day, a group of environmentalists went to the media and launched an organized protest against the proposed pipeline set to bring the finished product of tar sand mining and processing from Alberta to Texas. (A project I think would be ill advised on all sides, at best.)

I don't believe in anything spooky or supernatural. I think that anything that happens to me in my life is completely normal and probably happens to everybody else the only difference being; I write it down.

Given that these are not issues that suddenly spring into being and given that there must be some indication in the common discourse, I do wonder what tips a mind like mine off to what some people call "the zeitgeist."

I have not been part of the social stream in Ottawa for quite a while now. Out of choice, I've been spending most of my time alone. There are a number of reasons for this, some fall into the personal category that must be put aside for the benefit of others but for the most part, my decision to withdraw from social life in Ottawa comes from my own, personal preferences at the moment.

For the years I was with Jesse, forced socializing was a common occurrence. We spent time with his family, with his friends - constantly. As the relationship wore on it became increasingly difficult for me to spend time with my friends, he didn't like them and we always had other obligations to his family. By the time we were finished with the obligatory socializing, I was done - too wrung out by being "on" all the time to give any more of myself to anyone. The experience was both isolating and exhausting. I never had a minute to myself - now I do.

I'm not a hermit, I get out to go to events, I speak to people in public, in the elevator, at work and in my building. I am not anti-social but I don't enjoy the questions about why I've been out of circulation, don't enjoy the small talk that goes with that re-entry and my political views about Canada, being what they are, I don't engage in the rah rah hockey stuff that passes for social mores around here. I don't want to get defensive about it - we all go through phases. This one's mine.

Anyway, I mention that because at this point in my life, I read the Canadian news when I have to. I listen to the CBC maybe three times a week. For the most part, I read the New York Times, the Atlantic, The New Yorker and I listen to NPR. Most of my time is spent writing. I stay current with issues that concern my writing and have finally reached the point where I'm allowing myself to let the rest go. Canada isn't going to fix itself to suit me, getting worked up over it doesn't help anyone.

Regardless of the relative isolation from Canadian affairs I have managed to be somehow right in the midst of the zeitgeist. How is that possible? I'm not eagerly lapping up Canadian current affairs - are these things I feel compelled to address just so obviously critical to this very minute that everyone else seems to need to address them too? Are we all on some collective thinking track where certain subjects rise and fall at predetermined times like subjects in an elementary schoolroom?

Do we all actually function like variable cells in one single organism? What makes the zeitgeist?

Crusty.

I have a few things on my agenda this morning. Aside from carrying on with my Dante project and making some headway on a new, possibly book length, piece. There are the usual tasks of keeping up with the topics I write about (so as to minimize the chances of looking like a boob in print.) answering emails, sending out queries, figuring out which queries to send and all of the good stuff that while kind of boring by themselves result in the interesting occurrences that make life a good place to be.

No-deadline days are hard to describe. There's nothing I absolutely must accomplish today but there are many, probably dozens, of things I need to accomplish by the end of this month, this week, this year. What this means to me is that I have to find my own way through, there's no boss to tell me how those things need to be worked out. So what begins by feeling like a free day can, if I'm not careful, end up being a lost day with all the stresses and accumulating pressures that go along with it.

Still, it's a sunny day and I'm at my desk. That makes me happy.

On the other hand, the city seems to have discovered my neighbourhood and its very slow process of subtle gentrification. I think most of us who live here have been quietly enjoying all the interesting little shops that have sprung up, the block-party style events, the feeling of neighbourliness that comes with not being the richest people in town but being the most culturally diverse, hands down. As a community we seem to value our proximity to the river, the market, chinatown, downtown, we place a premium on things being both economical and worth the effort and expense of acquiring them. You can buy hand made soap and Indian food, organic produce, chrome hubcaps, vintage clothes, upscale sex toys and holistic pet products in this neighbourhood, you can buy lots of art but you can't buy designer clothes but you can buy an ipad (or order one for when they get to Canada) so it's changing and I suppose it would be foolish to think we could keep the secret forever.

They're replacing the plain cement sidewalks in my neighbourhood with wide, brick walkways and little, Charlie-Brown style treelets that will, no doubt, grow along with rents, property values and taxes. There's lots of new construction on the western edge of the neighbourhood. Most of it involves tearing down the little clapboard houses that really were nothing to look at and replacing them with "tasteful" "custom designed" homes, most of which are coated in a thick layer of taupe plaster or stone facing.

They match the new sidewalks pretty well.

Problem is, for me anyway, I like to work at home and the jackhammers are going from 7 until 6 every day now. I tell myself they can't go on forever, and they can't but while they were annoying a week ago, still blocks from my apartment, they are now pretty maddening as they approach my back lane. Thank goodness for earphones and a decent computer.

That's my whine for the day - I really came here to talk about pie.

My friend Shannon decided to make a pie yesterday. Nearly as soon as she announced this on Facebook, comments on the difficulty of piecrust began to trickle in. Everybody, it seems, thinks making a crust is hard.

As the daughter of a chef, I've been cooking since I could reach the counter. With the exception of a few years in late adolescence when I declared I could not and therefore would not cook - I've made most of my own meals and cooked for friends and family pretty much non-stop from the age of 15.

My parents divorced when I was 13 so my father's influence shifted somewhat. Anyway, I think my sister and I may have discouraged my father from cooking for us long before that. Starting when I was around six, when he would prepare absolutely perfect poached eggs for both of us and we would reject them.

These eggs were no simple task. To poach them he would fill a stainless saute pan halfway with water and white vinegar, he would then watch until the bottom of the pan was perfectly furred with a layer of medium sized bubbles. Before these bubbles lifted off the surface, he would take two or maybe three eggs and slide them, one at a time, from a china saucer into the water bath. Then the flame would be turned down to maintain the perfect temperature. He would make gentle waves in the water with a slotted spoon, washing the hot water over the tops of the eggs to ensure an even temperature and appearance.

During this time, the toast would be in the oven becoming perfectly crisp and a dark golden color - not brown, gold. The toast would come out seconds before the eggs were ready and be covered with a slathering of butter that would melt, perfectly. Then the eggs would come out of the pan, one at a time and he would slide them, carefully onto a perfectly laundered, fluffy white towel where he would dry them gently one at a time.

Once the water had been dried from the eggs, the eggs would go - one each onto their pieces of buttered toast. Which would then be plated and served to us with a flourish. At which point we would both say, "ick. do I have to eat the yolk?" and roll our eyes.

All of this took place quickly enough that those eggs on our plates were invariably piping hot, the yolks were always just cooked to a thickish yet still runny consistency and the whites never had a single raw spot or water blob.

Every once in a while I can reproduce those eggs and when I do, I think about that kind of effort and artistry and I am a little glad that I got to learn these skills young.

Poached eggs are difficult. Pastry is easy.

Pastry does not require perfect timing. It can be stopped and repaired at almost any stage, it follows strict and basic scientific principles and people's standards for pastry are so lamentably low that even if you blow it completely, they'll still eat it and smack their lips in pleasure if you give them some.

However, because everybody tells everybody that pastry is hard to do, pastry becomes hard to do.

I felt terrible for Shannon who struggled, cheerfully, with this last night and I wished she still lived a few doors down the street, I would have gone there and showed her not to believe the stories she hears about pastry.

As it is, I've noticed most of the recipes written out there seem to go along with the assumption that pastry is hard.

So, for my friend and anyone else like her. Here are some basic things I've learned about pastry-making:

What it takes:

A pie crust requires flour and fat (and sometimes a tiny bit of moisture) . Anything else you add because you like it. You need two cups of flour, any kind. As a general rule, if you have enough flour in your bowl to cover the bottom and sides of your pie pan to a depth of about 1/4 inch - you've got enough. You can eyeball it. It's ok.

What you do:

Wash your hands. Take off your rings. Clear a big space on the counter - you are going to make a mess.

Put the flour in a bowl, add any salt, sugar, cinnamon or any other dry dusty stuff that adds whatever taste or substance you like to the mixture then. Mix it around. Use your hands. Be stingy with the amounts of extra stuff you add - it's the crust, it's not the star of your culinary show.

Measure out a generous 2/3 cup of fat. Shortening, Lard or butter, even margarine, anything works as long as it's fat. Pastry chefs swear by lard. I use half butter, half whatever else is on hand but it has to be a pure fat - cream cheese will not work and I don't think those heart-smart spreads would work either but I could be wrong. Your goal here is to mix the fat into the flour and make pockets of fat (NOT STEAM) so that the layers of flour will be forced apart and yet remain dry and be discouraged when they want to form strings of gluten. Gluten is the enemy of a good crust.

Cut the fat into the flour. You can use two knives to do this or you can use a pastry cutter. I've gone through a few pastry cutters, I prefer the solid blade type to the wire style. I don't use either anymore. I start with two knives and finish with my fingers. If you decide to use one with wires you will have to leave your fat out to soften a bit, refrigerated fat will bend the wires and make your pastry making life hard.

Everybody talks about how everything has to be cold, cold cold. This is not true. I once watched in horror as a friend of mine mixed soft butter into flour and then used tap water to make her pastry. She patted it out by hand straight into the pan and yet it was delicious. One of the best crusts I've had. That taught me that all of these rules should be used as guidelines, in moderation.

That said, cold is better than warm. Anything colder than liquid will work. (and in fact, some people don't even follow that rule - there's a recipe at the end of this post, that proves it.)

People who write cookbooks will bullshit you endlessly about this. So will your Grandmother, your Mom, your Auntie - fact is, those of us who get it sometimes don't mind that others don't. This seems to be particularly true of people who write cookbooks. (It's not because we don't love you, really. We just want you to love us more.)

So mix the fat into the flour, using your hands at the end if you like. Mix until you have little fat balls coated in flour all through the mixture. Your little fat balls should be the size of the freshwater pearl beads you see in craft necklaces or maybe those tiny little frozen peas you can buy, or orzo - slightly smaller than a kernel of corn, bigger than rice, get it? And relax, you can use your hands to do this, it's ok. Just break up the big pieces of fat into the flour.

Now you add the water. The reason you're doing this is because it is hard to get the stuff to stick together and still stretch over your pan with just fat and flour. You're giving up some ground to gluten here in order to get the stuff to go where you want it to go and stay there.

Mix just enough water into your bowl to get it all to stick together. That's it. That's all.

Punch it around a little and knead it for a few seconds - not long, this is making the gluten you'll use to make the dough do what you want. Less is more.

Now, leave it alone for a second and take out your flour again. Scatter flour all over your clean counter.

Return to your dough.

Slap it on to the counter and roll it out in as round a sheet as you can manage.

Put the sheet, whole, into the pie pan and press it in gently to make sure everything will be covered. Now cut around the edge of the pan. Leave a wide margin cause crust shrinks when it cooks.

Press it down, cover the whole pan. Does not matter if it is sloppy or neat. Prick all over - hundreds of times, with a fork. Prick prick, prick - you are the Norman Bates of forkland here - it should be dotted all over. Do not tear. If you make a mistake and it tears, patch it with the trimmings - not the end of the world. It's food, you don't have to live in it. (save the scraps and bake them later with cinnamon and sugar or jam or whatever - people will love them.)

Here's where the cookbook writers and recipe freaks will get you again. All that junk about dry beans and parchment and pie weights? Ridiculous. Do you think your Nanna had any of that stuff? No, she did not. Do you think the guy who makes the truck stop pies does any of that frou frou stuff? No, he does not. And yet these are the two people who will make you the best pies you will eat in your whole life. Be like them; ignore the chi-chi, frilly, affected instructions you read anywhere. They are pulling your leg.

Now - assuming you've preheated the oven, you can bung the thing in there for five or ten to prebake. If you haven't preheated the oven and/or you don't have your filling ready, you can put it in the fridge until you're ready to prebake it.

Once it is light gold, it's ready to come out and be filled. No, you don't have to do it right away. The idea is just to get the thing half-baked so there's less chance of it being soggy and unpalatable later. If you're doing a top crust, that's the part the crust lovers will remember anyway so doing this is just your way of being an especially considerate cook.

Pie filling is way harder than pie crust. Don't let anybody fool you into thinking it isn't.

Once you have this down, (say you've done it three or four times), you can start experimenting. I put cheese in crusts I use for quiche sometimes. Made a lovely tomato tart by using butter and well aged cheddar cheese for my fats (exclusively) and then filling the shell with fresh tomatoes, basil and thinly sliced spanish onion from the farmers' market. Wouldn't do this every day, it's terribly fattening but it was unspeakably yummy. And you can use it as a main dish or as a side dish to take the place of rice or potatoes or pasta if you're having company for dinner.

You can add sweet stuff for sweet pies, herbs for savoury pies - don't be scared. It is all easy.

Easy as pie.

Here are some recipes.


http://whatscookingamerica.net/piecrst.htm


Now I have to get to work.

Where are we going? Why are we so eager to get there?

I really shouldn't open my email when I'm writing but like most of us, I am easily distracted, prone to procrastinate and I like reading things that are addressed only to me.

The article posted right after this entry just came into my inbox and I read it. Wish I hadn't.

Ten years ago I might have thought this was an interesting move. Twenty years ago I would have thought it was exactly the right thing to do. Now, I think it is a sign of everything wrong with the world and this continent and the country I live in more than anything else.

Are we really so incredibly stupid that we think we can call the world's water a national possession? Do we really think of this planet as a commodity and nothing else? Do we really believe we have the right to assign a monetary value to how people think about water? And do we think water won't flow where it flows? Do we think there will be no resistance to this? No retaliation? Are we ready to pay $10 for a grapefruit? Do we think Texas created its water problems by being so much more reckless than we are that they just squandered it?

These all sound like stupid questions to me. Of course we have to think about fresh water resources as part of the natural landmass that is north america. Of course we benefit from the milder climate to the south and we eat because of that climate. Literally. Of course we are idiots if we think we can cage a river or a spring as we would a dog or cat and expect it to kneel down to us. And of course the Americans are going to be upset when they read that Canada has decided they are bad people who drink too much water so we're going to make sure we don't give them any more to waste.

When climate change exacts its toll and California goes dry, where will we go for the fresh fruit and vegetables we eat all winter? Will we build greenhouses? At what cost?

And it's not as though we're any better at conserving the stuff than the Americans are. The tar sands require an expenditure of 2 - 4 gallons of fresh, drinkable water for every single gallon of crude produced. Some of the water is reclaimed, most ends up in tailings ponds. Call that a responsible use of water? Cause I sure as hell don't. (and that's just the direct water cost, that doesn't include the cost of trucking the stuff, building and supporting temporary settlements in the north, where it's winter almost all the time, the damage done to the native communities who live in the area, the fact that the people who actually own that land never get a penny of these profits because it is - as I have said a thousand times, all owned by the crown - and on and on and on.)

As far as water, carbon, asbestos and virtually every other environmental time bomb is concerned, Canada is the problem not the victim and I think it's time we started taking some responsibility for that and looking to work with our family to the south not against them.

Mind the Gap

How powerful is your mind?

Mine gets out of hand sometimes. When I try to ignore something that's really bothering me, the non-verbal part of my mind, my body, whatever you want to call it, rises up and demonstrates, by metaphor, what's really going on.

I sometimes wish I could control it better and sometimes I wish I would learn more from it but the truth is, there are two parts of my mind at work at all times. The rational, conscious, controllable part and the irrational but deeply pragmatic, unconscious and unmanageable part. I usually keep that part leashed and that suffices to keep the metaphors and physical demonstrations to a minimum.

Yesterday, the difficult part got off the leash and struck me down with a serious asthma attack.

Of course, that part is harder to control when you're not really sure what it's getting at. It will surprise no one to hear that I am having serious misgivings about the political structure of this country and I am quite concerned with the potentially disastrous impact that very seriously compromised structure could have on North America. My concerns about this are not limited to the social context although they certainly began there, they extend to the natural environment as well.

In Canada, the Prime Minister, (as we've all witnessed) is able, if he understands the system well enough to pretend he doesn't understand it at all, to wield practically absolute power. The Prime Minister is the head of his party, his caucus does not ever vote against his policies - they can't. He also appoints and therefore controls the Governor General who is the Queen's representative in Canada and our Head of State.

This means the PM commands the power of the Crown and the Crown owns Canada.

As I have explained before, all real rights to land in Canada are the property of the Crown. All it takes it one PM with an agenda that runs counter to the interests of the environment or the population to wreak havoc on the land. Since we are the northernmost country in North America, we are stewards of the great majority of natural resources flowing south. Water being the most important of these.

As the oil fields destroy watersheds in the North, rivers in the south begin to run dirty or dry. The Americans grow food for export, an industry that requires a great deal of water, and we buy it, consume it and carry on doing whatever the PM wants us to do with our natural resources.

For me personally, the fact of this kind of existence has reached the point where it bothers me enough that there are times when it literally makes me sick.

In Victoria, when the situation got to be too much for me, I ignored it. Eventually, allergies manifested. They were not allergies to things you'd find anywhere however, they were and are, allergies to pollens found in abundance only on the west coast. Pacific grasses.

Now, things here are preying on my mind and I am feeling helpless and unheard, despite publishing on the issue of property rights with some frequency and indicating what it means to Canadians that we really do not have a meaningful stake in what happens to the land under our feet, things seem to be getting quite a lot worse. And to add to that, people seem to know even less about their rights and responsibilities as citizens of this continent.

Apparently, I am more upset about that than I realize. Yesterday, I couldn't breathe.

My physical body/mind is always the first to know. When relationships fail, long before I know I am unhappy, my ability to be physically responsive disappears. In the same way people will get headaches when they don't want to go somewhere or suddenly feel ill when faced with a particularly frightening confrontation - I, like many people (probably most people) seem to manifest these large symptoms in response to large issues.

I have my personal reasons for being somewhat uncomfortable in this particular setting, of course, but it does seem to be the big issues that get the big response. And in my case, my body does not seem to care much whether they are issues about which I can reasonably or measurably effect change.

So the question is this; does recognizing the body's unconscious demonstration of dissatisfaction give one the power to remove it or does it just give the unconscious mind more power to express?

Honest to goodness, if I never saw another birch tree again at this point, that would be just fine with me. And so it follows that if I never had to think about Canadian politics again, I would be a happier, healthier woman. Given the fact that I make my living as a reporter, that seems unlikely.

Can we ever achieve mastery over the thoughts and feelings that roll like tides over and through us at the sub-verbal level? Was that Jung's holy grail? And how do you let go of concerns that you've grown up assuming are vitally important? How do people reconcile all the lovely things about an individual life on this beautiful planet with the things we do daily to destroy it?

I should have taken that job as a fashion editor when I had the chance.