Saturday 21 April 2012

Today I am rustic



I guess it stands to reason that with all the nostalgia I've been experiencing and memory searching I have been doing lately that I feel a little rustic. These rustic vignettes stimulate those memory glands to search for hidden memories, sensations, textures. They trigger our own personal reveries, even if staged for rustic effect. Sometimes the stuff of memory, sometimes the stuff of dreams. A glint of metal, of rust, or weathered wood become doorways into imagination and longing.
























xo Jo

Friday 20 April 2012

willowhisp: one part butter, one part sugar, mix well with nos...

willowhisp: one part butter, one part sugar, mix well with nos...: Following on the heels of Michael Ondaatje's memories of food and childhood, I had my own nostalgia for times past, to childhood and the...

one part butter, one part sugar, mix well with nostalgia



Following on the heels of Michael Ondaatje's memories of food and childhood, I had my own nostalgia for times past, to childhood and their link to the food we ate at the time.

I began thinking about my Great- Aunt Nellie's doughnuts. They were delicious. They were nothing like the doughnuts you buy in a store today. They were light, somehow more ethereal. They were not sweet, but more like a bun- slightly crispy on the outside and perfectly airy on the inside. And we ate them dipped in salt, or spread with a little home-made jelly. They would taste equally good with something savory, like beef stew, or curry for that matter.

I don't have clear memories of eating the doughnuts with my Auntie Nellie, or of Nellie for that matter, oddly. She passed away when I was very young- 5 years old or so. She was my grandmother's youngest sibling. I have this fuzzy image of her in longish, below the calf-length skirts and babushka, her back bent over working on something-- weeding the garden, picking vegetables, shooing the chickens. I can't visualize her face in these memories. I don't know if this is her, or simply the image I have created of her. It is interesting how the stories and memories of my grandmother, my mother, my aunt have merged with mine, become somehow not just passed down from one generation to the next but almost inherited through the genes, an integral part of the fabric, warp and weave of my own personal memories.

The thought of these doughnuts brings back very sharp memories of the things, places and people around Nellie, places where and people with whom I spent a large part of my childhood. Even today, I can close my eyes and visualize her farm house, the oil cloth table cloth with red strawberry print on it, her amazing wood stove, and most wondrous of all, the water pump in her kitchen. You had to prime it and pump like the dickens to get the water to flow. That was her source of water. As a child, I thought this was the most wonderful water delivery system one could imagine, that everyone should have one. As a adult, a mother now, I can't imagine living in those conditions. She raised two kids there herself.

But the memory of the place is sharp and dynamic. I can hear the loud lazy buzzing of a fly trapped against the window in the relentless August heat. Through the window I can see the chicken coop. I can smell the naptha from mothballs. It is an odd collision of sensations. It is a happy place in my memory, even though the site itself was fraught with difficulty and sadness. For me it was a place of learning, discovery, imagination and freedom from adult rules- hello water pump! Once the house was no longer lived in, it became a place to explore, play in, imagine. We searched for treasure in its abandoned state. We butchered chickens just outside its door. We used the old kitchen water pump to wash off the blood.

Apparently, these doughnuts were a favorite with the threshing crews, and my grandmother used to make them too, as did Nellie's daughter-in-law, Mavis. It is from her that I probably actually remember eating them.

Of course after thinking about them, I had to make some. And I'm sure glad I did.



Here is the recipe that I believe was hers. I found it in a little recipe book that I started for myself about 20 years ago, handwritten, badly, and not cited. If any of my cousins spot any errors, let me know.

2 1/2 tsps of yeast
1 cup warm water

2 whole eggs, 4 yolks
1 cup sugar
1 cup milk
1 cup butter
1 tblsp vinegar
1/2 tsp salt
enough flour to make a soft dough

  • combine the yeast and water and let it sit until frothy
  • meanwhile, beat together eggs and sugar
  • add the butter to the scalded milk, let cool to lukewarm and add to egg and sugar mixture. 
  • add vinegar and salt. 
  • add yeast mixture and combine. 
  • add enough flour to form a soft dough (I estimate this to be between 3 and 4 cups of flour)
  • let dough rise for 2 hours or until doubled in bulk. 
  • punch down, role out and cut out doughnuts. 
  • let them rise again. 
  • fry in peanut oil until golden.
enjoy



xo Jo

Thursday 19 April 2012

Egg Hoppers, with or without the egg. Thanks Michael.

So I just finished reading Michael Ondaatje's The Cat's Table, which may or may not be an autobiographical or fictional account of his own voyage from Ceylon (now Sri Lanka, of course) to England when he was 11 years old.

I visited Sri Lanka in the 90s, and I've always loved reading Ondaatje. The English Patient is his most famous novel because it was made into a major Hollywood film, but In the Skin of the Lion is also a fantastic novel, and his poetry, in particular The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: Left-handed Poems, and There's a Trick with a Knife I'm Learning to Do: Poems are two of my favorite works of post-modern poetry. Elimination Dance/La danse eliminatoire is irrationally funny to me. I love his writing.

He is also roguishly handsome:



Anyway, in The Cat's Table, the narrator, whose name is Michael, and may or may not be the author as a young boy, reminisces with one of the other soon to be ex-patriots about the wonderful Sri Lankan food, as immigrants are wont to do. Food is such a powerful receptacle and carrier of memory and identity. These poor souls have not even been a week out of port before they are missing Sri Lankan food. And with good reason. It is some of the best food in the world. They talk about eating Egg Hoppers, a singularly Sri Lankan dish. I had Egg Hoppers in Sri Lanka, and it is true that they are wondrously divine and culinarily mysterious. And after reading that chapter, I wanted some too.

Knowing that they are notoriously difficult to make, I decided I would attempt to tackle them in my Canadian kitchen, as I stared out into an April snow storm. I felt like a bit of a fool. I mean, most self-respecting Sri Lankans would not do  this. They would never be so arrogant as to make them-- not when the Egg Hopper man who sells them just up the street makes them so perfectly. And they are not something that you generally plan to make. They are the kind of food that you kind of just suddenly want- and need- so you run out and get one from that ideally situated Egg Hopper man- fresh and hot off the grill. With or without the egg.

Fool that I am.

The first thing to realize about Egg Hoppers is that they may or may not have an egg in them. You can order them with an egg, but you don't have to. The essential part of them is the Hopper, or more correctly, the Aappa- a delicate but hearty coconut rice crepe. They had me at the words coconut and crepe.

They take a lot of planning ahead to make. The batter must be allowed to rise for 8 hours. So, if you want them for breakfast, prepare the batter the night before so that the batter can rest and rise overnight. If you want them for supper, prepare the batter in the morning.

You would think that with two little kids I would have something better to do. And I do. But this was more fun than vacuuming and washing diapers. Yes, I wash diapers.

Here's what you do:

Make a yeast sponge:

      2 tsp yeast granules
      1 tbsp sugar
      1/8 cup lukewarm water


once it is foamy and active, add it to:

4 cups rice flour ( I didn't have 4 cups of rice flour, so I ended up using 1.5 cups of rice flour, 1.5 cups of potato flour, and 1 cup of quinoa flour. I don't advise doing this as it altered the taste too much- just use rice flour)
1 cup lukewarm water 

1 cup lukewarm beer

mix well

Drink the remaining bottle of beer and let this batter sit until it has doubled in quantity,  for approx. 8 hours. Finish reading The Cat's Table.

When the batter is ready- it will look like this:


now add:
1 13 oz can of coconut milk + maybe 1/2 can of lukewarm water, depending on whether your batter needs to be runnier.
2 tbsp sugar


 and mix it well.

Heat a bit of peanut oil in a wok over medium heat. When the wok is warm, ladle some batter into the wok. And swirl it around. This is the magic part.



Continue to cook it until it looks like this in the pan:


and like this when you take it out and flip it onto a plate:



Now, if you wanted your Hopper with an egg, you needed to add it before you remove the Hopper from the pan.

I prefer my hoppers with other accompaniments. For instance, I actually used some more of that darn left over Easter turkey made into butter chicken (well butter turkey, I guess, but no one would know what I was talking about) and poured it over the Hopper. I also ate one Hopper straight up with chutney, and one with Salsa Verde. Why not? It was delicious, if culturally hybrid. And I was hungry.

And for a moment- just a moment, I was transported back to that dreamy, troubled jewel of an Isle in the Indian Ocean.

xo Jo