Reflections on the Meaning of Blogging

Malpeques on the half shell with garlic, bread crumbs and bacon.

It's the last day of 2008 and I'm in a bad mood. In fact, it's the third day of my bad mood. Part of it is hormones. Oh yes, the pull of the moon. Part of it is that I feel I haven't been accomplishing as much as I wanted to this holiday. I do some of my best work on "holidays." This time I feel I've just been skimming the surface. This year I want to go deep.

Blogging has been fun for me. I've done it on occasion for several years, but this is the first time I've had a blog of my own. I'm actually a very private person and sensitive to other people's need for privacy, so I've had to negotiate what I do and don't want to reveal. Well, we do that every day anyway, don't we? Being a performer means I love to have a public persona, albeit one that is carefully created, sometimes scripted and always protected.

What I love about blogs is the way that they reveal the domestic space as a site of creativity that was once invisible except when it was being co-opted and commercialized by people like Sartha Mewart. Women (and some men) have once again claimed back the domestic space as their own sweet DIY domain. Also, the line between the personal and the profession gets blurred sometimes, which intrigues me. I like that messy, liminal space.

But back to me and my big fat bad mood. It's a beautiful, sunny day out there and I have misanthropic daydreams. The world seems cruel, pinched, and full of impossibilities. A therapist would proabably tell me today is not a good day to make value judgements, that I should work my way into neutral territory. Well, fuck it. Today is my day to tear my garments, howl at the moon, and blog about it.

Chai Shortbread and Cherry Almond Truffles

Here I am, catching up on my Christmas baking posts. These are the chai shortbread cookies I like to make because the smell of the baking spice masala really makes me think of Christmas. This year I ground up the cardamon by hand so that you get hits of it in certain bites of the cookie. I also made a chocolate version, substituting melted dark chocolate for some of the butter in the recipe. One of my relatives is allergic to wheat, so I made one batch with spelt and rice flour.

For the chocolate truffles, I learned from a chef that you need to blanch the almonds to make almond paste so because moisture content is very important. Roasting the almonds makes the oils "split" from the meat. So here I just put about two cups of almonds in a pot of boiling water to cover.
After five minutes, you drain the water, pour cold water over top, and drain again. As you can see here, it's easy to pop the nut meat from its skin. In fact, f you're not careful the nut can fly across the room when it pops out of its skin. Ules helped out with this.


I didn't measure anything exactly, just put the blanched almonds in the food processor and added honey, dried cherries and kirsch to taste until the mixture was sticky and I could form marble-sized balls with it. I used about 1/3 cup kirsch, 2/3 cup dried cherries and 1/3 cup honey. I didn't cook the mixture because the chocolates aren't meant to have a long shelf life. (Keeping them refrigerated also helps them last longer.)

Once again, I didn't fuss withe tempering the 70 percent cocoa solids Baker's chocolate. I just nuked it until most of it was soft, then stirred it until the rest of the chunks dissolved. (I think I did actually manage to fluke out and achieve temper this time.) I didn't dip the chocolates the way you are supposed to--just rolled the almond paste balls in a shallow bowl of melted chocolate and placed on waxed paper. This just saves time and none of the chocolate is wasted, however in the end the shells were a bit too thin. Next, I popped the chocolates in the back porch (in lieu of a fridge) to firm them up. The flavors in the almond paste actually meld and tastes better after a few days, so making the paste ahead of time would be a good option for next year. You could use orange peel and Grand Marnier to flavor the almond paste, you could use walnuts or hazelnuts instead of the almonds--there are lots of possibilities. I'll confess I tasted so many kinds of marzipan chocolates this month before making these that I could barely eat them. Which in my case, is probably a good thing!

Seeking the Pollen Path

"We are stardust, we are golden
And we got to get ourselves back to the garden.

--Joni Mitchell, Woodstock

"Remember always to walk in the pollen path of peace and of blessing. Be still within yourselves, and know that the trail is beautiful. Whenever you are in danger walk carefully and quietly. Your feet will be blessed with pollen and your hands will be blessed with pollen. Let your mind and voices go forward on the pollen path."

-- The Pollen Path: A Collection of Navajo Myths retold by Margaret Schevill Link


Performance artist seeks spiritual path: that's how my personal ad would read right now, and the path always leads me to one garden or another. In fact, my life in Vancouver is lived in a series of gardens and the pathways between them: UBC Farm, The Means of Production Garden, various community gardens and the plot in my own back yard. As this year closes, I am already planning my traffic patterns for next year, which days of the week I will travel to which garden. I am making sketches of the costumes I will wear, the seeds I will plant and the gestures I will perform. Our new artist collective is planning to create a series of projects for 2009, for which we are laying an imaginary framework and support system. We've written proposals and we've opened a bank account in the hopes that money for community art projects in the garden will fill it enough so that our ideas can be planted, tended and come to fruition.





It's winter. I miss the MOP garden, but even though it is covered with snow I have to go and visit the dead sunflowers, the bare willow branches, and the benches and hard furnishings now upholstered with soft, yielding snow. I make a rough map in my mind of where I'm headed, grab my camera, my bus fare for the way home and I'm off. I decide to start at Shaktea tea house because it's close to me and it's a public place that's dear to my heart. I find some stunning Chinese lanterns to photograph along the way as well as some red rose hips in the snow and dead cosmos from this past fall. In some places the snow covers the sidewalk and in others there is room for "single file only." By the time I arrive at the MOP, the wind has whipped the snowflakes up so that the children tobogganing look as though they are sliding down the hill in a snow globe. Snow flakes stick to my camera lens and my knees are feeling stiff and cold. Time to catch the number three bus to Main Street and the number twenty-five up the hill.












At home I warm up my comfort bag in the microwave oven and make hot peppermint tea. I heat up a latke from Solly's bakery and eat it with Liberty yogurt and smoked salmon. The latkes are crunchy around the edges and salty, with perfect potato goodness. I curl up with an Agatha Christie Mystery. Simple holiday pleasures. I love to walk and take photos. I love to curl up on the couch with a mug of hot tea and a book, but am I getting stuck in my ways, and too comfortable for comfort? At this time of the year especially, I crave spiritual renewal. I have a tradition of writing down one hundred new year's resolutions as quickly as I can, without thinking too much about it. (You should try it!) All those little steps towards becoming a better person--some change has got to happen along the way. I make diet and exercise plans, organization strategies and try to do some goal setting with a sense of the "big picture" in mind. Maybe this will be the year I lose the weight, learn to dance like a goddess and get my house in order. By this time next year I'll be so enlightened I'll have to wear shades. Ha! We'll see. Wish me luck!

Burning Pudding

We've been gifted with a seemingly endless supply of snowflakes this Christmas. We walked to grandma and grandpa's house through snow that was sometimes two feet deep. Yes, dear reader I fell on my butt twice. The first time I had turned to look at a cedar waxwing, took a step backwards and poof, down she goes. The second time I just simply tripped and went ass over teakettle.

The sun was setting over a white city when we arrived. Their back yard is filling up with snow just as ours has, but as you can see gran and gramps actually own a snow shovel.

A spectacular seed head graces the entrance to the garage.

Once we got settled inside we had bubbly in front of the fire while we opened our gifts. I ate one of my cadeaux--a rose-flavored chocolate from Chocolataas. Very good.

Meanwhile, the turkey suntans on the barbecue.

Et voila! The bird, she is ready to be eaten.


Brussel sprouts, mashed potatoes, squash, and cranberry sauce fill us up to the top of our silver hats. This is the first year I have ever received a nail clipper in my Christmas cracker.


Doused with rum (or what is brandy?) the sacrificial pudding goes up in flames. We eat it with the strangely inappropriately named hard sauce.

ETA: Ules assures me it was brandy.

Christmas Chaos

On Christmas Eve we feasted on oysters and duck, then we watched a very strange movie called The Hogfather--Stanley Kubrik meets Harry Potter. Ules loved it. The cast is quite good, but the show needed better editing (in the writing and images) and stronger directing. The art direction is excellent. I did like the theme: humans need imaginary figures to believe in because it is a part of an evolving mythology and spirituality that makes us whole. It seems appropriate for our son't first post-Santa Christmas. Yep, he's figured it out.

Everyone rose early to open their stockings and presents. This year the theme was books and board games with Make and Craft magazine publications playing a major role.

We listened to CBC radio all morning, and the whole of Handel's Messiah. I made chick pea flour pancakes, which we ate with Peter's scrambled eggs and an almond and olive spread I love called "Scarpetti". We nibbled on Christmas oranges, shortbread, and chocolate and pored over our treasures.

White Car in Snow

You can see from our back stairs how the snow has been piling up this week. Our back yard in filling up like a snow terrarium.

I love the snow, and I like sweeping it away. Do you know we still haven't bought a snow shovel after eight years?


Car, what car?

Peppermint Bark

I admit that I used to hate mint combined with chocolate, but now I like it, especially at Christmas. I find white chocolate marries particularly well with peppermint. We are giving away bags of goodies this year and so we decided to make a mixed white and dark chocolate bark. I happened to find a box of organic candy canes (hello?!) and organic peppermint flavoring. The chocolate was Baker's because we are on a budget, but for a treat the dark chocolate was 70 per cent cocoa solids. I'm sorry, I decided not to temper the chocolate. If I win the lottery I'll buy one of those chocomatic appliances that keeps the melted chocolate in perfect temper-- until then, if it melts in your hands, just lick it off!

We put the candy canes in a plastic bag and banged it up with a rolling pin.

I used a package of white chocolate and three squares of the dark chocolate, melted seperately in the microwave and sprinkled with a bit of the peppermint flavoring--a little goes a long way. All you do is pour the white chocolate in first, spread it evenly over the waxed paper and dollop the dark chocolate on top. I didn't make a pretty swirly pattern, but you could. Sprinkle the candy cane bits on top and put it in the refrigerator until it firms up.

Then you break it into pieces by hand and put it into cellophane bags. We kept some for ourselves and Ules and I have been fighting over it all morning.

Merry Christmas everyone!

Catching Up

These photos were actually taken before our big dump of snow. I am very behind in my posting, but that's part of holiday hibernation--catching up on those niggling little tasks that just take pure time and patience to complete. A week ago the trees were still bare and I was noticing wasp nests in the high branches of some of the magnificent old trees in Vancouver. "My heart is laid bare, like a wasp nest in leafless branches," I thought and I planned a whole post of photos of wasp nests in trees. Wouldn't you know it, I couldn't find any wasp nests to photograph before it snowed.

Next year I plan to record these seasonal changes, the minimal and the dramatic shifts. That will be part of a project on studying bees and their relationship to climate change. So yes, the New Year's resolutions start now. I make a note. Take photographs of wasp nests in early December.

The snow has created travel chaos for some, so I was relieved that mom and dad didn't fly here on Sunday as planned because they would have been trapped in that holiday hell. Still, we miss them. It's awfully quiet here. Today we will bake cookies and make chocolates. Our kitchen will be transformed into a Christmas factory powered by sugar-seeking elves. Stay tuned for stories from the factory floor.

Christmas Concert

The grimacing snowman was created by the kindergarten class. I think it looks like The Penguin from Batman. The hat kept falling off and the scarf got dragged down in someone's coat. A comedy of errors that charmed the audience.

I love our Christmas concert because it is not afraid of the C word, but proudly celebrates Hanuka, Kwanza, and Winter Solstice as well. It is a celebration of color, song, fellowship, and peace. Okay, I'll admit that the song that made me cry was the theme song from the Beijing Olympics because one of the boys performed the lyrics in sign language for his mom.

This year we will have a quiet Christmas because of dad's illness. He feels terribly guilty for the change of plans. "I wrecked Christmas," he says. I tried to reassure him that everything will be fine. We'll just have another Christmas in February.

Vancouver is a snowy Lotus Land today. I look forward to doing Christmas errands, trudging slowly through the white stuff. Have fun in the snow! And if you need a giggle today, check out the cute animal song video here.