Help, I need an assistant

Wow do I ever need an assistant!?!  Now I know what you are thinking.  How can I possibly need an assistant when I am only one person working on a single cookbook one step at a time?  Well, that is exactly why I need an assistant!  Why should I be the only one suffering through all this tedium?  Why should be I be the only one standing at the water cooler with no one to gripe to about all my work?  Okay so my watercooler is my own kitchen sink!  Why should I have to have a sore back, tired eyes which are quickly developing squint lines, aching sides and stiff fingers from all this typing?  Why shouldn’t I have some perky, young, overly-ambitious assistant to pawn all the boring jobs off onto, who I can become insanely jealous of their exciting social life and a little darkly paranoid that they are going to take my job someday and probably do it even better than I do!

Okay so why the sudden complaining?  I am spend over four hours today already typing out email address of news organizations, magazines, news services so when I finally finish the cookbook I can send out press releases announcing that I am done!  I did some research and found out of course there are lots of services to send my press releases out for me, probably to more sites that I can imagine, for only a measly, bargain basement, run out the door for the crazy discounted price of $2500 for a single press release.  Yup, just one page can cost you that much money.  So I said to myself well back to the drawing board and I have started doing some research on my own to build my own email list.  Unfortunately, do you have any idea how many newspapers alone there are in the United States, United Kingdom and Canada to start let alone the rest of the English speaking world!!  Let’s just say I will be transcribing these addresses for weeks.  When I finally have the list complete, it will be probably be more valuable than the actual cookbook!  Maybe I should sell it rather than recipes.  Just so you have a picture of the tedium ( and I hate this kind of work with a deep seated almost pathological hatred) first I found a website that lists, by state, every newspaper in the United States.  So I start with the first state, open it up, and there is a list of newspapers in that state.  Then I have to click the hyperlink for each one, search their home page for their contact us page, then click it, copy the email address for the news or food editor into my Word document, then go back all the way to the list by state and go onto the next one.  Newspaper by newspaper, state by state, till I get through the United States and then it is on to the United Kingdom and Canada.  Can you imagine the glamour!?!  I will be at this forever.  I think this is one of those, I just have to do it, things to make this adventure successful, but wow, is this boring!  Any volunteers to join me in some mindless work!

Swimming in salmon recipes

Well here is the excitement in my life this afternoon.  I am sorting through salmon recipes.  Aren’t you jealous?  Pretty regular afternoon around here.  We did some cleaning, I have been working on recipes and we talked about some more firm plans for the kitchen.  It feels really good planning for our future.  Tonight we are going to join friends for a surprise birthday party for a good friend, Ranjita.  She is turning the big thirty and we are going to a great restaurant.  It used to be a manor house, a country seat in the late 1800s and is now converted into a magnificent restaurant.  I am really looking forward to celebrating and I have of course already drooled all over the menu online so I am certain the food is going to be delicious!  It should be a fun night tonight and then up early tomorrow to meet my parents and take them to see our new home.  We only have an hour with our agent to get some measurements and show them around so afterwards we are going to take them out for brunch.  My guy has to go into work in the afternoon for a meeting, bit of a pain, so I will have the house to myself tomorrow afternoon. Sounds like the ideal time to have some uninterrupted, serious, get some work done time!  And of course play in the kitchen making Sunday dinner.  Hope you are having a good weekend.

A load off my mind

Today is turning out to be a pretty good day.  First, we have arranged with our real estate agent to go back to our new home for a visit on Sunday morning.  We can only have an hour but I want to go back and get the exact measurements of the kitchen so we can start designing our dream renovation.  It is kind of a small space so we have to think of innovative ways to maximize the space and make the kitchen as functional and as beautiful as possible.  There is already a built in pantry which will lessen the need for some cupboards and this is the first time that I will have a basement and lots of storage for my excess cooking pots and pans!  I can spread out for the first time. And can you imagine this is the first house I will have lived in throughout my entire life that has two bathrooms?  And I grew up in a house with four kids, two parents and one bathroom!  Seems positively inhumane but we survived happily.  Hopefully my parents will be able to come down to the city this weekend to see the house with us since they haven’t seen it yet.  They were pretty excited when we told them last week so it would be lovely if they could come down.

And the other great news I received today is this:  I got to chat with an old friend who I haven’t heard from in probably nine months and he can help me with the layout of the cookbook!  My friend Todd and I worked together for years.  We went our separate ways but have stayed friends and Todd is an expert in publishing.  He was the production manager at the company for which we worked and he is a genius with Quark and InDesign.  Yup, that’s right, InDesign the program that has been plaguing me and giving me sleepless nights.  All I can picture is me muddling through using the program and in the end completely screwing it up and the cookbook coming out printed all wrong.  Todd has offered to help me and check my work so I am suddenly feeling much more confident and relaxed about it.  A big load off my mind.  And if I am a complete loser in figuring it out, Todd has said he is happy to help in any way he can!  Creating and producing this cookbook is really making me realize how talented all my friends are in so many different ways and how together we can all make it happen.  I have never felt more supported in something in my life.  I truly have amazing friends

Snorkel casserole

So last night, I went with my dear friend Maryann and Julia out for dinner.  Just the three of us, just to catch up.  We had a marvelous time, as we always do, laughing, talking.  We had a good meal and suddenly the evening was over.  And here is my question:  when did a bowl of spicy Shanghai noodles with crisp vegetables and a delicious glass (admittedly an oversized one) of deep red Sangiovese wine suddenly cost 35 bucks, 40 with a tip?  Seriously, I remember when 4o dollars was my grocery bill for the week.  Don’t laugh we all remember those days, the days where cheap pork steaks riddled with fat, after being marinated in soy sauce and cooked in garlic, were a gourmet treat, where we had fifty different ways to prepare Kraft dinner, where soup could be stretched by constantly adding water to the kettle! All kidding aside, I remember running out of money at the end of the semester at university and eating peanut butter and jam sandwiches for lunch and for dinner for a month till school ended.  

But you know, I imagine every family has a story of a crazy recipe that your mother served that somehow became a family favourite.  In our case, it was something my mother called snorkel casserole.  I have no idea where the name came from except maybe she dreamt it up while looking down at hungry faces standing in the kitchen fresh in from playing outside.  I asked my mother once about it and she remembers it clearly.  There was absolutely nothing in the cupboards to make for dinner and three days till payday and there she was faced with two young children and my father to feed that evening.  So with the creativity of all mothers, she rummaged through the cupboards and threw together a casserole. And what a crazy combination it was:  a couple of sliced onions on the bottom of the disk, some frozen peas tossed in, a couple of potatoes sliced and put in the pan, a handful of white rice and strangely a can of Campbell’s vegetable soup and a half a can of water poured over it all.  Mom fried some breakfast sausages found at the back of the freezer and laid them in rows over the top and baked it all for an hour.  When we pulled up our chairs for dinner, my mother announced that tonight for dinner we were having snorkel casserole so dive in. And you know what it was really tasty; it quickly became my brother’s favourite dinner and even now he will make it as an adult for himself, long after my mother stopped.  I always laugh at that dish, but I know every family has a similar story, a story of bare cupboards and your mother’s ingenuity and a new family favourite is born.  Feeding your guy on a dime and prayer.  Last night I laughed to think how fortunate I am right now that I can toss down two twenty dollar bills for nothing more than a bowl of noodles and fermented grapes.  Times of changed but I know the day will come when my cupboards are looking equally bare and payday is a few days away and I pray that I will be as committed, ingenious and resourceful as my mother and that I can do it as cheerfully as she did, smiling, as she put snorkel casserole down on the kitchen table.    

The glories of peanut butter and jam sandwiches

I learned yesterday that the average child will eat over 1500 peanut butter and jam sandwiches before they graduate from high school!  Now admittedly, this is probably a uniquely North American behaviour and taste but one that was certainly true for me!  How many of us can remember those peanut butter and jam sandwiches, taken from your lunch bag and eaten at your desk in grade school, seated on hard green formed seats, that green metal tube traversing from your seat to the table, the top of your desk scratched and etched by fellow class mates of years past.  Open the now wrinkled wax paper and taking out your sandwich, the white bread slightly squished, the peanut butter warm, the jam escaping from the sides, the taste delicious!  Even now nothing speaks of comfort food more to me than a PB sandwich or toast with peanut butter and jam.  Despite tasting foods from around the world, and filling my cupboards with goodies both exotic and local, I still reach for peanut butter and homemade jam, made by my mother’s hand and now even by mine, slathered on bread and enjoyed with a cold glass of milk.  A timeless classic!

Hippo beef: a dormitory favourite

I had lunch today in the lunchroom at the office.  I carried my lonely little salad across the office and sat down at a table in the lunchroom.  Already eating, I looked up when someone sat down at my table and, to my surprise, I had no idea who they were.  By the end of hour, however, we had become fast friends. It has made me think today of university, those golden hued days of memory, of setting out for university, those lonely terrifying first weeks when you are anxiously approaching each day worrying if you will succeed at school but more so worrying whether you will find a new circle of friends, the terrifying exhilaration of living away from home for the first time, so many firsts, first year, first dorm, first friend, first groove.  Today in the lunchroom I couldn’t help but be reminded of the dining hall at my dorm at school.  I remember those endlessly high brown brick walls, the abstract art on them, placed more to fill the space than for any artistic merit, the rows upon rows of Formica topped tables, collapsible chairs repeatedly filled by the hungry and just as quickly abandoned, forlorn until being refilled, an endless cycle of meetings and break ups, all encircling food. 

Now as a food lover, the dining hall was a heavenly place for me, even if the food wasn’t always first class.  Our food provider was named Beaver foods, not an auspicious start to a culinary experience since typically the only beavers I came in touch with were lifeless and smashed on the side of the road.  But I have to admit to falling in love with the endless parade of new dishes presented to the weary, the hungry, the aimless student class.  I also came to recognize the patterns as we saddled up the trough as the semester progressed.  Hip of Beef, unfortunately presented on the sign advertising it with an apostrophe leading to colloquial references to hippo beef, was Thursday’s offering, breaded nondescript fish served Fridays, Monday were leftovers not so cleverly disguised as Shepherd’s pie.  Always there were the faithful offerings of fries with gravy, soups of last night’s vegetables.  While on holidays even now, I am instantly transported back to school whenever I eat a sandwich sold in a plastic triangle container.  You know what I mean, a sandwich, mass produced with egg salad or tuna or roast beef and hard, processed cheese, served cut diagonally, its innards splayed forward at which the world can gawk, its crusts pointed back into the plastic corner, and then the whole thing covered in vacuum sealed see-through plastic like a window-adorned coffin with the drapes pulled aside.  I ate endless sandwiches presented to me thus and that bread always had a slightly stiff texture, as though it had been embalmed with formaldehyde, a corpse of a sandwich rather than a fresh one. 

But it was the companionship of that hall that amazed me.  It was where you made your first friends, over a plate of spaghetti. It was the first easy place to take a roommate from your dorm or friend from class when your friendship wasn’t yet strong enough for a restaurant or a movie, your uncertainty with them and your conversations was covered by the noise of the dining hall. It was a cheap first date with that special someone, a place where you could both escape from a bad date easily, where going Dutch only involved swiping your meal plan card, where again any awkward silences were covered by the din of the hall. I remember friends who I would see every day, but only ever in the dining hall, never in dorm, never class, never out of class, only in the dining hall, friends of circumstance, routine, class schedules and shared tables.  But there were part of the fabric of that place, as much as grey hippo beef congealing in gravy or the constant scrape of chairs being pushed back. Today’s easy conversation with a work colleague I had never met over a salad brought from home in a plastic Tupperware container reminded so strongly of the old days, when making friends was as easy as swiping your meal plan card, scraping back a chair, plopping down your plastic tray covered in food your mother would never prepare for you and launching into conversation. 

Just a wonderfully ordinary day

A new week has started and to be honest it has been a fairly ordinary day so far.  I just had a great salad of spinach, oranges, blueberries, blackberries, almonds, raisins and sunflower seeds.  I love playing with the ingredients of my salads; hey if it tastes good, I am more likely to eat my greens!  Today’s task: spend two hours transcribing recipes.  I have decided to give myself mini-goals, since they are easier to achieve.  Focus on what I have to do today, stick to the plan and tomorrow will take care of itself. Weeknights will be best for working on the cookbook now since the weekends will quickly get filled with moving, packing, choosing paint colours and massaging knots and strains from my guy’s shoulders!!!