Resolutions Close to the Bone

There are many beautiful restaurants in Vancouver, but my favorite place to go is still Aphrodite's, which serves beautiful fresh, organic food in a lovely heritage building. I always take a browse through Banyen Books after I eat lunch which is very inspiring and calming. That's exactly what I did today before I headed down to the beach at Point Grey Park to gaze at the horizon.

Every year I make 100 resolutions for the New Year. Yes, 100. I do a stream of consciousness exercise and get them down on the page. I've done it for years. This year my resolutions follow some general patterns, so I have broken them down into 12 main points.

1) Accepting the aging process with humility, grace and dignity.
2) Recycling more, consuming less.
3) Creating more, consuming less.

4) Learning more about gardening.
5) Stepping up my cooking reperatoire.
6) Being more tender and understanding with people.

7) Forming a creativity support circle.
8) Blogging and writing honestly and close to the bone.
9) Cleaning the clutter out of the house.
10) Reach a higher level of professionalism in my work.
11) Lose the frickin' weight and get fit!
12) Be more focused within my goals.

So there you have it. Small steps. Good luck with your resolutions and Happy New Year!

Of Porridge, Stollen, and Mead

I have been sleeping in this week. My son wakes me up and asks for a "proper breakfast". He's mimiccing my words. "Porridge?" I ask, and I am thrilled he says yes. I happen to have some coarsely ground organic wheat berries that the kids in his class milled with a pedal mill from Our Community Bikes. It cooked up in about ten minutes and he absolutely loved it with almond milk and brown sugar. Great. I have been eating low fat yogurt, pears or apples, and chia seeds for my breakfast.


However, I must confess I have been indulging in winter treats. Arggh. It gets me every time--all that butter in the Christmas cookies and stollen that I love so much. As my Hungarian friend says, it adds rings around the middle like a tree expanding with its yearly growth. It's dark. It's cold. I want to crawl under my electric blanket and dream, perchance to catch a glimpse of the next big step I'll take in my life. I can go for walks here in Vancouver almost any time of the year, but this is the time of year where I miss the cross-country skiing and skating of living in a cold climate. (Well, I miss apres ski hot cocoa even more.) I've been yearning for a family Christmas in a big old country lodge in Alberta or the Eastern Townships where you can ski and eat and then take a plunge in the outdoor hot tub under the stars. Expand and contract those blood vessels! I'm getting invigorated just thinking about it.

Yesterday I set off like a mad squirrel on a secret mission in search for stolen on for half price after Christmas. I love the mouth-feel of the sweet crunch of the icing sugar and granulated sugar covering the rich, nutty bread with its rum-soaked raisins and soft marzipan heart. After dinner, Peter and I slice piece after piece of it, with ceremonious and tender reverence. It's so good. We also opened a bottle of Tugwell Creek Melomel, which is one of my favorite festive treats. It's not sweet enough to have with the stollen, so maybe we'll have to open a bottle of port too . . . .

Christmas Morn

Up with the dawn to open our stockings!!! We startled our Christmas mouse and it ran under the Christmas tree and just about gave Peter and I a heart attack. Ules was too focused on his stocking to notice. This year it was very touching because Ullie gave Peter and I gifts and was very excited for us to open them. He made a calendar for his dad and he picked out a top from Smoking Lily for me. Peter gave me some Tugwell Creek mead and I got some fancy tea and an eco-purse from my sister. Mom and dad are buying us a new couch--yay!!! It will be the first time I have ever bought a piece of new furniture.

For breakfast we had Terra Breads cherry and chocolate panetone made into French toast and spread with a locally made chocolate hazelnut spread. It would have been great with some whipped cream and cherry preserves.

This is a little superhero Djeco stamp set I found for Ullie.

This is the art set I gave Ules with a book on how to draw fantasy characters. Peter's reading the rule book to a big game our son wanted--War of the Rings.


I've been making up hot almond milk with cinnamon, cardamom and nutmeg topped with a big eggnog marshmallow from Butter bakery. It's very soporific. We opened our gifts, had breakfast, and then I settled in for a long winter's nap!

This is the snow family Ules made in Bear's class. The snow boy has stolen all the candy canes. Merry Christmas!

Solstice, The Internal Shift

You don't always have to mark an occasion with an elaborate ritual, or even a simple one. This year I really felt an internal shift during solstice, as if the season itself rotated somewhere deep inside my heart. The evening of the 21st of December I felt anxious and restless. I worried about next year and the pressure to re-invent myself as an artist, to build up from where I've left off this year. Comments other people said came back to haunt me. Should I have trusted that person? What did that phrase really mean? I was second-guessing my professional and personal relationships. I felt overwhelmed by the task ahead, given the lack of arts funding and the weakened respect for artists in an increasingly conservative climate.

The next day I got out of bed to get breakfast for Ules and then walked down the hill to get a physical therapy treatment. It was a beautiful and gentle foggy morning, with all the edges of the city softened and buffered by the mist. Joseph gently worked on getting me to ease the tension out of my painful lower back, my solid neck and shoulders and clenched jaw, and the clouds started to lift, literally and metaphorically.

In the afternoon I made stuffed acorn squash for a potluck, toasting the hazelnuts for the stuffing, releasing their fragrant oils. We walked to our friend's house with a bottle of cava and two pans of squash warm out of the oven. "Can I come too?" a neighbor joked as we stopped for a red light and she caught a whiff of our offering. We took Ules and his friend to the light show at VanDusen gardens and I watched the babies in strollers break into smiles as wide as their chubby faces after their toques which had fallen over their eyes were pulled up to reveal thousands and thousands of tiny lights wrapped around trees, fences and bushes. (I like the floodlights better, myself. I say go for the drama.) The boys drank hot chocolate and we picked up a bag of kettle-popped popcorn to go.

Back at our friend's house we feasted on recipes a la Nigella Lawson. Fun party food with a retro flair--spicy popcorn and pecans, cocktail weinies with mustard, and monte-cristo type sandwiches. My squash was from the wrong decade, so it wished it had worn a different party dress, being more Partridge Family than Mad Men. I didn't get the memo, people! There was a suave leek and potato soup and a nice zippy coleslaw with both green and purple cabbage. Dessert was from the Fanny Farmer cookbook "with the gold cover"--some kind of toffee meringue butter square that we all lusted after. It was the first party of the season that I felt I'd over-ate, which is always a good sign! A sign of Christmas past, anyway. We kvetched about the approaching 5 ring circus, worried over H1N1, joked about H1N1, and warmed our tootsies by the fire. Lovely. My friend gave me a big hug when we left and even though my son was having a complete meltdown because he was over-sugared and tired, I felt warmed and more hopeful.

Today I'm on the upswing again. Lois invited me to make cookies and heck, she'd already made them so we ate them with her beautiful thick and rich chai--chewy citrusy speculaas and spicy pfefferneuse. We compared recipes. She decided to put ground almonds in her pfefferneuse. Lois's son said that my version would be more like his oma's if they were aged and made rock hard. Ha! I played with Lois' delicate new grey kitty called ash and we watched her new video production about the Means of Production projects from this year. Being with Lois always makes me feel better about the world at the best of time, but as we sipped our nip of Grey Monk Optima I thanked the stars for having such a great friend. A showed up with a Polaroid camera and took a picture of Ash and I which I now have on my fridge to remind myself that the world is turning towards the light again. May you all feel the warmth and lightness of solstice in your lives.

Solstice Domesticity

A couple of weeks ago we hauled the fake tree out of the porch and assembled it. We've been decorating it intermittently ever since, with parties and Christmas concerts in between stages. We've been to a Caribbean party with rich and rummy puncha crema and goat water(!). We've had 100 mile borscht, bread and squash soup with mulled wine and Cherry Point blackberry port. We've had mac and cheese with roasted ham hock out of a crock pot. Presents have begun piling under the tree. Cookies have been filling tins and mysteriously emptying again. Yesterday I made pfefferneuse and Viennese hazelnut crescents. Tonight we're going to see the lights at VanDusen Gardens and tomorrow I will be going on another cookie making adventure at a friend's house.

Thursday is Christmas Eve and it's one of the first times we've ever been alone as a family on that occasion. What should we do? Which traditions should we keep and which should we "simplify" or lose all together? Most importand of all, what shall we eat? I make a list of ingredients: wild rice, crab, oysters, prosecco, homemade bread . . . avocados, persimmons, and spinach for salad. What about dessert? I want eggnog pie but neither Peter or Ules would eat that. Maybe a rustic apple cranberry tart? Whipped cream, port, and a local blue cheese with honeycomb. Then we've got to assemble the wifesaver for Christmas morning, but it will have to be so small. What will I cook it in--a loaf pan? Maybe we'll have French toast instead. This is how I'm passing my holidays so far, with visions of comestibles dancing in my head. Maybe I'll make myself an whole eggnog pie for Christmas!