Nothing much inspired the creation of these tarts, aside from the fact that I had figs and I wanted to eat them nearly just as they were… though maybe with a bit of cheese or cream and why not some sugar… and rosemary as well? The result were these very simple tarts, entrusted with the honourable role of vehicle for fresh figs.
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The potential importance of reading a variety of news sources didn’t occur to me for a long time – at one point I thought it was sufficient I wasn’t reading the Canadian equivalents of Fox News (i.e. Rebel Media and potentially the Toronto Sun). But we know Canada is a country of systemic racism and all the other -isms. By definition, that extends to newsrooms where it has an impact on who is in the newsroom, as well as on what news is reported, what news is not, and how the stories are conveyed.
Continue readingWhat people hear, see and read in the news drive the public consciousness and narrative. And when that news is being reported through the lens of whiteness and internalized oppression, it becomes distorted.
Hadeel Abdel-Nabi, The Sprawl
These tarts have a pairing of two strong flavours that manage to hold up against each other: tart raspberry and toasted black sesame. Black sesame tart shell filled with caramelized white chocolate and black sesame mousse, topped with raspberry jam, raspberries and a black sesame brandy snap.
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What is food blogging like in a pandemic? My blog oscillates between the asinine and, occasionally, trying to be a bit of something else. Today is another trying-to-be-a-bit-of-something-else sort of day.
You’ve probably noticed that there is a theme strung throughout the constant inundation of pandemic updates. While each individual headline isn’t a surprise, it is remarkable how clearly COVID-19 has broadly articulated inequities. Which is to say that COVID-19 is wreaking havoc on the more vulnerable and marginalized.
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(A cringe warning – this post is about self-consciousness, something I am well acquainted with! Do feel free to scroll very quickly past to the recipe.)
Dear future self,
There is one key piece of advice that emerged from the small group discussion we had that I think is rather important for you (and for me right now as well) to hear again (and again): no one else is going to remember your embarrassing moments.
The times that your answer is totally off in left field – or you don’t even have an answer. Or the times that you start to get nervous while presenting and you suspect that there may be a slightly audible tremor in your voice. Or the times that you respond lamely or laugh at the wrong moment or make a joke that falls flat.
Maybe if it happens all the time they will remember (I suppose the flat jokes are my only jokes), but the single fleeting moments will be forgotten because, to be quite honest, they are utterly inconsequential!
No one will remember them. Except you, that is. You who does tend to run these select memories over and over in your head like a mobius strip-cassette tape… all while liberally imagining other’s thoughts to feed the part of you that relishes feeling terribly bad about yourself. You remember way more than enough for everyone!
You know what? You can probably let it go. And embarrassing moments will continue happening so often as you go forwards that your only option will be to let it go – and if you can do so a bit faster, everything will go a bit easier as a result.
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I recently attended Here are the Fragments, an immersive, self-directed theatre experience at the Theatre Centre about Dr Chauvet, a black immigrant psychiatrist who is diagnosed with schizophrenia later in life. It tackles topics of intersecting identities, as a racialized minority, as a psychiatrist and as a patient, all while bringing attention to the underlying impacts that colonialism and racism can have on health and the treatment patients receive in the health care system.
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Sometimes I question myself – how do I still not have a go-to recipe for most things…such as a pate sucree? Every time I tend to use something a bit different – either because I start looking at different reference recipes or I start making up my own based on ratios (which themselves change, varying from 3:2 flour to butter like a shortbread to 2:1 flour to butter). Or I look at my previous posts and then start adapting those adaptations depending on what little bits of egg I have left in the fridge or how much butter I want to use…
Perhaps another reason I never settle on one recipe is because I’m constantly switching up how much whole wheat flour I use, or I try to make as little pastry as possible for the project and end up needing to roll it very thin– which works better some times than other times. I’ve been making more tarts recently though, so perhaps that will push me to finally settle on a tart dough.
A surreal night began when a man walked onto the subway carrying a small coffin, taped shut. He sat down, nestling it upright between his legs where it reached the level of chin. Indeed, people need to transport coffins somehow, and public transit is an accessible choice.
In a story this would be a premonition of something. This being my life, I thought that was all it was to be.
Then I encountered Eva. An hour before midnight, on the walk home from the subway station, she nearly slipped on a patch of ice several steps ahead of me, then turned and waited for me to catch up.
She wore an ankle length golden brown fur coat and a matching brown-hued keffiyeh on her head. Her birdlike face was small, pale, thin, and wrinkled, and she peered at me with wide blue eyes.
Did she ever blink? Now I can’t remember.
“This dreadful ice! I was just telling those lovely folks about it—” she flung her hand in the direction of the corner store behind her—”They’re Chinese. Are you Chinese?” she turned to look at me, then a second later smiled widely, “Am I Chinese? No! I’m Scottish!” she declared. “By ancestry.”
Then she returned to the ice, continuing, “This reminds me of that dreadful year with all the ice. I fell and broke my foot right here.”
Thanksgiving was never really induced much of holiday-sentimentality. It always took me by surprise (first realizing that there was a day off, and then realizing it was Thanksgiving) and nothing much seemed to happen apart from the rare year when my grandpa bought a cheap turkey–though that often happened after Thanksgiving when the sales started–and then we were having turkey broth (oh the horror) for months.
Urban gardens and community orchards are never quite how I envision they should be–something like an orchard out of a juice commercial on television, laden with ripe fruit. The reality is that most ripe apples are out of reach, the remainder are green, mainly nibbled and even more loll at the foot of the trunk, hidden in the grass or nearby bushes.
What make these orchards different is the closeness. The fruit, though sometimes it may be difficult to nice, is quite abruptly there. It is a closeness that extends not only to hidden strawberries and dry saskatoon berries, but to the hail-pockmarked and bruised apples littering the ground. It’s probably only something I started appreciating recently when the kind lady who lends her time at the community orchard passed us a bag full of windfall apples she had collected from the ground this past fall.
