Dinner is served – pass the chopsticks please

Do you think our dinner met the Canada Food Guide requirements for servings of vegetables?

I always feel quite virtuous when I'm working on a home-style stir-fry. Standing there chopping all those vegetables definitely feels worth it when they're all arranged, waiting for the wok.

A couple of months ago, I wrote about wok cooking and I shared the two cookbooks that first introduced me to Chinese/Asian-style cooking.

I give these books every credit for helping me with the basics for last night's dinner – the marinade for the chicken which becomes the sauce in the wok which becomes the vehicle to accompany those vegetables to cover the rice!

I used chicken breast cut into one-inch chunks. To the bowl, I added lots of minced garlic, fresh chopped ginger, then a bit of safflower oil, rice vinegar, pomegranate molasses, chili oil, sesame oil, fish sauce, oyster sauce and soy sauce. I can't tell you how much – I've been making this dish for a long time and I've figured it out over the years.

After the chicken sits in the marinade for awhile and when the rice is almost done – a sticky rice, usually Cal-rose here – it's time to heat the wok. I don't like it smoking hot but let's say moderately hot.

I use safflower oil for this part also and, of course, I throw in the veg in the order of the length of time they need to cook. When the veg are tender crisp (I usually hold the broccoli florets out until the bitter end so they'll stay nice and green) I push everything aside and dump in the chicken and the marinade. I let the chicken monopolize the centre of the wok for a few minutes. I stir it. It doesn't take long to cook.

Because stir-frying is an intense experience, I didn't take any photos of each separate vegetable being added; neither did I summon my photographer. But before you knew it, we had reached this point. The rice is in the small pot.

The last step is adding the vermicelli. It's a rice vermicelli that I'd poured boiling water over five minutes before adding. The second last step was adding a tiny bit of corn starch, stirred into a small amount of cold water.

And here it is, just before it was placed into a serving bowl and taken to the table.

There were accolades all around and if I do say so myself, it was quite tasty.

Fiddleheads awaken memories of the farm by the Nashwaak

My mother was born and raised on a farm in Durham Bridge, New Brunswick. The farmland ran right down to the shore of the beautiful Nashwaak River, a fast-flowing, usually quite shallow stream that flows into the St. John River at Fredericton.

When we were kids, the farmland was still in the family; our auntie — Mum's oldest sister — and uncle lived at the top of the farm, near the road. By that time, our uncle had retired and the farm was worked and hayed by a neighbouring farmer but we were still allowed to roam the land.

We never visited our auntie and uncle without taking the walk down to the "old house." Just below our auntie's house, we climbed a fence and crossed the railway track. (At certain times of day — we listened for the whistle — we sat on that fence and watched the train go by. The engineer, the conductor, the porters — all the trainmen — waved to us and it was always a highlight.)

After crossing the tracks, we walked or slid down a small hill and crossed the brook that flowed through the property. There were stepping stones in the brook and you could see tiny fish swimming by as you crossed.

On the other side of the brook, it was just a few steps until we were in an open field. From there, we could see the old house, the barn and the big trees that stood between them. There was a hay-wagon track that we walked on, through the edge of the field and the purple vetch, clover, daisies, buttercups, dandelions.

This looks something like the barn from my childhood although it isn't it.

We used to go into the barn and up into the hay-loft but I think there came a time when we were warned the barn was no longer safe. I did love all that beautiful hay.

The old house was not the original house where my mother had grown up. That house had burned down after she'd left home but they rebuilt and this was the replacement. Mum didn't have a sentimental attachment to this old house and she was was always quick to point out that the original house was much grander. Although no one had lived there in many years, this house still had things inside — furniture, dishes, kitchen utensils — most notably, a pump organ in the living room that could still be played.

I can still smell the musty atmosphere in that house and we never stayed inside too long.

Right near the house, between the house and the barn, were two big trees with a hammock strung between them — not so much a hammock as a metal swing that would easily seat three people. It would need to be cushioned but we were little and happily sat on it and never noticed discomfort.

Off to the side, at the edge of the field was what Mum and her sisters and brothers called "the old line fence." I presume that was the boundary of their family's farm. There were trees and shrubs along the fence and we used to crawl under them to get some flowers: trillium, lady slippers and bloodroot grew under there. It was shady and cool and usually damp.

trillium

lady slipper

bloodroot

I wouldn't know the bloodroot by its flower but we did sometimes pull them up to see how they got their name.

bloodroot root

I was talking with some friends recently about memory. One of my friends remarked on some of the things I'd written about our nursing days — about psychiatry and the operating room — and said I had a remarkable memory. I think I do have a pretty good memory but I also think it's all in there, if only it's awakened. For example, today I began to think about picking fiddleheads in the spring along the banks of the Nashwaak River.

Photo by Nathan Wilbur

My mind was wandering as I cleaned a bowl of fiddleheads for dinner. I remembered exactly how it felt to look for the little ferns that were still tightly coiled and how they sounded when you snapped the stem. We always had rubber boots on because the fiddleheads grew where the river had overflowed its banks and then receded and it was always a soggy outing. We always filled several big paper grocery bags. Looking back, I presume when we got home, Mum would clean them (they're kind of a pain to get really clean), blanch them and put them in little bags for the freezer.

It was thinking about the fiddleheads that led me along all the other paths that I've described and once I started, the memories became as clear and sharp as if I'd walked that hay-wagon track just last week.

The brain is an amazing place.

And here are my fiddleheads, as I was cleaning them and just before I popped them into the pot to steam for dinner. To be served with a bit (or a lot) of butter and a generous squeeze of lemon juice.

The past and the present at Shelburne Museum and Farms

A word of explanation: I was doing some work on my archives when I came across this piece and was stopped by the words "Donald Trump" in the first paragraph. I also saw the words "the new age of vulgarity." It seemed worth reading and even more when it turned out not to be about Donald Trump at all.

This piece was written in 1989 after a trip to Vermont that Dan and I took that summer. It was our first time to visit Shelburne — the Museum and the Farms. We loved it and we've been back a couple of times, most recently in the summer of 2013 when all three of us went.

This column was published in The Daily News September 26, 1989 and the photos are from early August 2013. They seem to go well together though.

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Nowadays, we read — usually with contempt and disgust — about the shenanigans of the very rich, the likes of Leona Helmsley and Donald Trump and Malcolm Forbes. It seems there's a new age of vulgarity and that people with vast wealth have lost all notions of graciousness.

But if the Helmsleys and Trumps and Forbes and their ilk are tasteless and ostentatious — and they are — they're certainly not the first generation of American big spenders.

In Vermont recently, we stayed in Shelburne, a small town in the northwest corner (near Burlington) set on the shores of Lake Champlain.

Shelburne is famous for two big attractions: the Shelburne Farms and the Shelburne Museum. Sounds pretty ordinary, doesn't it? But as examples of spending huge amounts of money and as tourist attractions, which is what they are now, I truly found each of them to be one of a kind.

The Farm is a 1,000 acre agricultural estate built in the 1880s by Dr. William Seward Webb and wife, Lila Vanderbilt Webb as their summer residence. (Both the Webb's and the Vanderbilt's money came from railroads.) Dr. Webb bought up many small Vermont farms to accumulate his land because he wanted to found a model farm and develop new methods of agriculture that would be of use to his neighbouring Vermonters.

His farm was fashioned by Frederick Law Olmsted, the landscape architect who designed New York's Central Park, with every lane, every rise of land, every tree part of a careful plan.

The barns were designed by the best-known architects of the day, with special attention paid to the buildings that could be seen from the house so they would blend easily into the grounds and the foliage.

And the house. The house has 110 rooms, rolling landscaped gardens, a lily pond and a spectacular view of Lake Champlain and the Adirondack Mountains on the other side. It took one railway car of coal a day to heat.

The coach barn, which is the most attractive outbuilding since it's fairly near the house and Dr. Webb didn't want to offend his guests with an ugly structure, once housed 150 vehicles — every possible carriage, coach and sleigh that was available at the time.

Today, the farm is still working and is managed by a foundation. The house is an inn and restaurant, the rest of the estate is a tool for teaching and demonstrating the stewardship of agricultural and natural resources. The farm is famous for its cheese — it has a large mail-order business — and I can vouch for the excellence of that cheese.

Just up the road a piece is the Shelburne Museum, lifelong project of the Webbs' daughter-in-law, Electra Havemeyer Webb. Her project is described as “a collection of collections” and I can't do any better than that.

At the age of 18, Electra came home with her first cigar store Indian. Her mother said, “What in the world have you done?” She replied, “I've bought a work of art.” It was the beginning of a collecting mania that continued for decades until she finally needed a place to put all her stuff.

So she started to drag buildings from all over Vermont to house her various collections. Today, there are 40 buildings on 45 acres containing an enormous amount of Americana — not just cigar store Indians but carousel animals, dolls, antique furniture of all sorts and ages, quilts, tools, paintings, a complete old railway station and a private car of the sort that rich people used to travel in, a Lake Champlain paddle steamer (for which she built a series of canals and a railroad to move it overland from the Lake), the last covered bridge in Vermont and a lighthouse (both of which she had dismantled, moved and rebuilt, board by board). And I've only scratched the surface.

Even with all this, to me the most amazing thing is that after Electra died, her children wanted to make a monument to her. So they took apart her New York City Park Ave. apartment — walls, ceiling, floors, furnishings, everything — and moved the whole thing up to Vermont and into a house they'd built for this purpose. You can go in and take a tour and see how the really rich lived and you can also — right in this small, Vermont town — look at priceless paintings by Renoir, Rembrandt, Monet, Manet, Corot, Goya, Courbet, Degas and family friend Mary Cassatt.

These are fascinating experiences and there seems to be something more acceptable in the way the Webbs spent their money, compared to how the very rich today spend theirs.

But I suppose it also doesn't hurt to remember that while the Webbs were living their memorable lives, a great many people in the United States were living in abject poverty: immigrant women and children were virtually slaves in the garment districts, there were many homeless and unemployed, there were people working to reduce the 80-hour work week, and black Americans were just one generation away from official slavery.

I guess there were worse ways to spend a fortune than the Webbs chose, but surely some of it could also have been spent in better ways.

Flowers, cake, good quotes: a happy birthday for me

I've had my birthday so I'm a little bit older today than I was yesterday. I suppose that's the case every day; it just seems more obvious on one's birthday.

I love my birthday. I feel I can do as I please — or not — and I can say, "Well, it's okay I did that because it's my birthday." I let myself get away with so much. The day after the birthday is such a let-down. Back to best behaviour, as much as I can manage.

I looked at my daily horoscope in The Globe and Mail:

IF TODAY IS YOUR BIRTHDAY

A Venus-Pluto link on your birthday means no one will be immune to your charms. Both in your personal affairs and in your work you will find it easy to persuade others to hand over what it is you desire.

It reminded me of a conversation I had with my hairdresser this week. I can't even remember the context but during our chat — and there were others around in the salon — she said, "Sharon, I can't imagine anyone not liking you." I told her she might be surprised. There are people who probably don't like me, I said. "But why?" she asked.

"I'm a bit if a know-it-all," I said.

"But we learn so much from you, "she said. "Who wouldn't like that?"

"Other know-it-alls," I said.

It was my best line of the day.

William worked the night shift last night and brought the beautiful tulips home with him. They were awaiting me when I came down and I thought they were spectacular.

They've been opening as the day progressed.

The book is new poetry by my old friend and former co-worker, Sue MacLeod. She's a wonderful poet and I look forward to reading her new work.

I had lovely/funny cards from friends and family. The one in the photo is from Dan who manages to out-do himself every time. Look how sweet it it, with the little bows. This wasn't a milestone birthday for me but he checked around, looking for something special to relate to my special day. He found this quote from Dr. Sheldon Cooper, the genius theoretical physicist from The Big Bang Theory.

“The best number is 73…. 73 is the twenty-first prime number. Its mirror, 37, is the twelfth and its mirror, 21, is the product of multiplying (hang on to your hats) 7 and 3…. In binary, 73 is a palindrome: 1-0-0-1-0-0-1, which backwards is 1-0-0-1-0-0-1.”

It was the perfect quote for my birthday — and I sometimes identify with Sheldon too. Not with the genius, more with the compulsive control freak.

Dan had printed out the quote and placed it over the quote that came with the card. He made it so I could lift the Sheldon quote to see what was underneath. And underneath, there was:

Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life. Picasso

Dan thought that after I'd just written two blog-posts about misogynists — here and here — I might not want to be confronted with Picasso at the very beginning of my birthday. The quote is good though and I did acknowledge that, in spite of everything, Picasso made some fine art so it all worked out.

Cousin Dale joined us for dinner. We went to Eliot & Vine, a newish restaurant in Halifax, right in our own neighbourhood. We had a lovely evening and some tasty, photogenic food.

Dale and I both had the scallops as a first course — with leeks, prosciutto and bacon dust(!), with a fried quail's egg.

For Dan, it was the salad with fried haloumi, apple, pine nuts, micro-greens, with a lemon-thyme vinaigrette. He loved it.

William went with the carpaccio with horseradish aioli, pickled radish, arugula. It was supposed to come with nasturtiums but I notice William didn't complain at their absence.

The main courses in a restaurant are like the second and third born children in a family — there are never as many photos of them. By that time, there are too many dishes on the table and the novelty of photographing the food has worn off. Suffice it to say, we had more food and we enjoyed our evening a lot.

We came home for dessert because, along with the flowers, William had brought home a cake — a luscious Black Forest cake. I was serenaded and then invited to blow out the candles.

And did I make a wish?

You bet I did.

Through a feminist lens: Solving the patriarchal puzzle

I should never write, "I'll be back tomorrow." It's tempting Fate.

Two days ago, I wrote A bad book, a dispiriting trial — connecting society's dots — about a Mick Jagger biography, the Jian Ghomeshi trial and the suggestion that everything is connected.

I knew exactly what I wanted to say but as often happens, I got bogged down and made the whole thing much more complicated than it really is.

I've looked at the world for many years through a feminist lens. In all those years, I can't tell you how many times something awful happened and people believed that it would cause everything to change. "This is a turning point!" "Things will be different now!"

Most recently, this happened with the revelations of the violent behaviour of Jian Ghomeshi and the subsequent trial. There's so much righteous anger right across the country, renewed this week as his sexual assault trial scheduled for early June was exchanged for a peace bond.

I've heard it too many times and I seriously doubt anything is going to change. Women will still be sexually assaulted; if it's taken to the police, the same barriers will be in place; if by some miracle, it ends up in court, women will be revictimized and the lawyers and judges will come out looking like swaggering bullies. And the guy will get off.

The reason is that our society has accepted and normalized the kind of sexual "relationships" that exist when there is a vast imbalance of power. The young women who testified against Jian Ghomeshi in his first trial did not behave the way victims of sexual assault are "supposed" to behave. They kept in touch with him after the attack. They flirted and wanted to see him again.

This book is trashy and it happens that I was reading it during the same time Jian Ghomeshi was on trial. One day, I read this, about an evening Jagger was with a very young model named Nicole Kruk. They were watching the movie Mrs. Doubtfire:

At one point in the film, star Robin Williams is being made up to look like an older woman and complains this his skin looks "saggy — like Mick Jagger's." Kruk laughed at the line, but Mick was clearly agitated and started biting her — hard.

"He was pretty rough," Nicole said. "It was like I was a piece of meat." When she looked in the mirror the next day, she was "horrified. I looked like I'd been in an accident, and my nipple was bleeding and sore." Kruk conceded that although she told him to stop, she found the whole experience "exciting."

. . .The next morning, Nicole called Mick and told him that she looked like she'd been "dragged through a hedge backward." He laughed and promised to be more gentle, but when the model jokingly threatened to sell pictures of her bruised and bloodied body to the papers, he suddenly turned quiet.

She was 22-years-old. He was the the most famous and powerful rock star in the world and he was 52. He was sneaking around with her because he was married but she stayed with him during that leg of the tour he was on.

There are such stories throughout the book. If, as he claims, Mick slept with over 4,000 women (and quite a few men) over the years, Christopher Andersen tried to get quite a percentage of them into this charming biography — not by name, of course, because how could he? And in the context of Mick Jagger on tour, what difference would the names make?

His wives and a couple of his higher-profile girlfriends all remark, quite off-handedly, that he's a misogynist (which so much of his music confirms), that he has a basic contempt for women. As he got older — he'll be 73 this year — the women in his life got younger and younger. Throughout his 60s, his conquests were much younger than his daughters.

Mick Jagger leaves me cold and he always has. I'm not sorry I read this book though, especially right now. It's one more piece of the puzzle that is our society's attitudes around sexual assault and the lines that so many people seem unable to draw.

Mick Jagger is a rock and roll idol to millions of people around the world. People pay — collectively — millions of dollars to hear him and his ancient band-mates make music. Hell, even I walked down the street in the rain to see the Stones — although I wouldn't have paid.

The Establishment in Great Britain (led by Tony Blair) fussed until he was given a knighthood (although I'm gratified to see that Her Majesty passed on the "honour" of bestowing it.)

When I see this picture, of Mick with his father and two of his daughters, I can't separate him from the violent offender who has got away with so much — and been so handsomely rewarded.

My point is clear, I'm sure. The stories about the many many women in this Mick Jagger book are the same stories as in the Jian Ghomeshi trial — and they're all our stories.

One shocking event — or two, or ten, or more — will not change attitudes around sexual assault.

In a patriarchal society, these attitudes are completely normal.

A bad book, a dispiriting trial — connecting society's dots

On the evening of September 23, 2006, it was pouring rain in Halifax. I went out on to our front verandah, to watch the rain come down.

Suddenly, from down the street, I heard the amplified sound of a remarkably familiar voice:

"Hello Hal-ee-fax!"

I came inside and said to the boyz, "Get into your rain gear and grab the umbrellas. We're taking a little walk."

The Rolling Stones had stopped in Halifax as part of their A Bigger Bang Tour. They were playing on the Halifax Common, a much-loved green area right in the middle of the city.

The Common has a few ballfields, a skating oval, a cricket pitch and lots of meandering walkways. People like to take their dogs there and dogs who are taken there regularly get to know the other dogs and look forward to seeing them.

There was a lot of controversy around the Stones' concert. It's 10 years ago now and there have been a few concerts on the Common since but this was the first big one. People worried — and why wouldn't they? — that the 78 tractor-trailers full of materials to build the stage and bleachers, more heavy trucks full of equipment, a whole construction site, and then, 50,000 music fans would do irreparable damage to the Common. Worse if it rained, of course.

Let it be known that since 1965, when the Stones first came to North America, I have always said, "I wouldn't walk across the street to see Mick Jagger." In fact, I walked across two streets — Windsor and Robie — to get from our house to the concert site. I figured as long as they were right there, we might as well join the crowd.

There were lots of people out on the streets on our way down. The rain was not dampening people's high spirits. It was a party.

The meanies who had organized the concert had erected a high fence all around the Common and lined it with a dark opaque material to keep folks like us from seeing what was happening. By the time we got there though, other obliging Haligonians had already pulled it all down so we had a pretty good view. I had mostly come to see the gigantic stage and it pretty much left me speechless.

Look at this. It's several storeys high. That's a giant screen. This was just down the street from our house!

It took 100 roadies a full week to build this thing and to set up and it took several days after to get it all down and packed up. There definitely was a lot of damage to the grounds but grounds are resilient and they fixed themselves up eventually.

I've been thinking about this because I recently read the book, Mick: The Wild Life and Mad Genius of Jagger by Christopher Andersen.

My best line as I was reading this book was the day I said to Dan, "Every time I pick up this book and read a few pages, I feel as if I have to take a shower."

It's not a very good book but I read it during the time that Jian Ghomeshi was on trial. I'll come back tomorrow and tell you why the book about Mick and the trial of Jian are two sides of the same coin.

Celebrating the mothers of my life

In most — not all — households, for better or worse, it's the Mother who's at the centre of the swirling maelstrom known as the family. Her relationship with other members of the family — particularly those who are younger than she is — is complex. It's multi-layered and ever-changing. It's often infuriating, usually melodramatic.

For daughters, it reaches some kind of an apex when we hear ourselves say, "I don't want to turn out like my mother," and we realize as we're saying it that it's already happened.

In the end, if we had a good mother — and probably more of us did than not — we're grateful to have turned out like her. Not exactly like her, of course. Let's be realistic and not get too sentimental.

I hope you've had a great day, whether you're a mother or not.

Here are some of the mothers of my life.
,

My mother (above) was very fastidious and never went out unless she was at least a little bit "fixed up." She's not wearing one of her stylish outfits here but you can see, even for a drive to the shore, she's wearing white trousers and a pretty multi-coloured blouse. (I, on the other hand, seem not to have taken too much trouble with my appearance.) That's Dad over there too.

We can all hear Dan's Mom's voice in this photo (above): "What do you think, Daniel? Am I right?"

Dan's younger brother, John, with their Mom. Must have been the '80s. See their glasses?

My sister Marilyn, with baby Lisa who was born in Scotland.

William was a little intimidated by his Nana — she wouldn't have had it any other way — until he figured out that where he was concerned, she was a pushover. They had a lot in common as you can almost see by the facial expressions of each of them.

Mum loved being a grandmother — "Nanny" — and sweet little Lisa was her first grandchild. You can see they were adorable together.

I celebrate my own motherhood too. I took a lot of people by surprise when I became a mother. When William was little, some people — meaning well, no doubt — would refer to me as his grandmother. He didn't like that and he would declare, indignantly, that his grandmother was in Mississauga. He's more tolerant nowadays.

This photo was taken today in Mahone Bay, NS. He had worked overnight and he willingly got out of bed before his sleep was over to take part in the Mother's Day dinner ritual. Who could ask for anything more?