Perspirational Stories

As long as I’ve lived in Montreal, which, including winter return visits totals around 30 years, I’ve recognised that this is a city that knows its winters. It’s comfortable, even happy with its winters. People gripe about the weather, but in the end, even on a day with a temperature of -25C (-13F) and a windchill of -35C (-31F) they go about their business.

I have few gripes about the winter here. I like the clear delineation between seasons (well, perhaps not so clear any more) and a day such as the above, if rare, doesn’t bother me.

But (and you knew there was going to be a but! I always try to preface a good rant with a seemingly rational, measured couple of paragraphs! It makes me seem rational and measured!) what the fuck is up with the heating of every indoor space when everyone is dressed in North Face Nuptse goose down (rated to forty below zero!)?

You come in from a howling minus-twenty gale, actually comfy in your rabbit-fur hat and vast, down-lined coat, face covered with your kashmere scarf and hands toasty in your Patagonia gloves, stomping around in your heavy Sorel boots, and you get on a heated bus. Or step into any Metro station. Or walk into Eaton Center.

Within seconds, you’re perspiring profusely, desperately regretting your zeal in winterwear. But guess what? Before you know it, just when the sweat is actually dripping down your back and into your long underwear, you’re getting off the bus! Or emerging from the Metro! Or stepping into the howling gale between the concrete canyons of de Maisonneuve!

Okay, the shopping centers I can understand. There are hundreds of employees who need to work all day. We don’t want to be putting them in coats. But a bus? The bus needs to be heated so the bus driver can stay warm? The Metro? Those slovenly pigs in the booth need to be warm?

I hate going out some days. The colder ones are the worst, but not because I dread the cold, but because I dread the heat.

Yesterday, when the wind was blowing at a fairly brisk clip, rendering the ambient temp at around -5 C (23F), I was so hot at my neighbourhood Metro grocery store that I took off my coat then and there and walked the five or so minutes home with only my T-shirt on my upper torso. I got a bunch of weird looks, but let me tell you, it felt good!

Every time I get on a bus in winter I head for the nearest window and slam it open as far as it will go. Let the goddamn bus driver freeze. This is Montreal, not Palm Springs.

Last Vacation Thoughts (I promise)

I’m in the middle of reading His Way, an unauthorised biography of Frank Sinatra by hack writer Kitty Kelley. It’s kind of like reading a National Enquirer article on only one subject for nine hours.

But then I got to thinking: wouldn’t YOU love someone to write an unauthorised biography of you? Something that included all the shady details: that furtive coupling in the 1984 Datsun hatchback when you were obviously already practically living with Jadyn. Wouldn’t that be cool? You just provide all the sordid details in a ten-hour long interview and then the guy writes it up, Enquirer style.

Could be a burgeoning business: unauthorised biographies for hire. You heard it here first.

Travel Stories Part XVØ

Much like Blork, I too was on the road recently. Travelling to my destination with my 5-year-old son, it was Bliss in Montreal; the American customs guy waved us through, not even asking for the letter from “his mother” (the term I now use to refer to my ex-wife.)

And then, Houses of the Holy! At the gate, the agent calls me and I’m delivered two boarding passes to First Class. Add to this that the stew in First Class was a Japanese from the same city that my son spends his time in when he’s there. We were soon all three babbling happily in local-area-inflected Japanese while she plied me with Sauvignon Blanc. (Me: “Okay, this is my last . . . “ She: “Well, it doesn’t have to be!”)

But pay the piper we all must, and these days, paying the piper is coming back into Canada, whether it’s through Vancouver or YUL.

I was almost dancing on the luggage carousel last night when I flew in from SFO (not first class) because the immigration dude had waved us through. No questions about where His Mother was or anything like that.

And then Tai-chan lost the customs form. It was in my laptop bag and I’d asked him to watch the bag while I looked for our bags on the carousel, and he said “I’m holding it, Daddy!” so everything was minty. But somehow, his little hand must have removed the customs form, because when I piled on the last bag, it was gooooone. Nowhere on the floor, which was a scrum of cattle seeking their bags, so I resignedly wheeled through to the endpoint—the person who collects the forms and lets you on your way to your loving relatives’ arms . . . and prayed she’d take pity.

She didn’t. It was the Little Room. The dreaded Little Room . . . where they might as well be shining a spotlight into your face as they interrogate you. “Describe the area through which you went through immigration . . . be careful, because I need you to describe it exactly . . . was it to the right? To the left? No, it couldn’t have been the left, sir, because people with children are guided to the right . . . think again, sir . . .” (this is literally almost verbatim as to how this interrogation proceeded, I kid you not.) You can recognise the Little Room (it's actually quite large) at YVR and YUL because they have a large bank of mirrors--one-way mirrors--behind which they retire to ("Be right back") to observe your behaviour while they're not there (and to sneak a smoke, I'll warrant.)

You can imagine the Death Ray that I was aiming at my poor quailing son after this (after 45 minutes of this) but afterwards I realised that it was karma, mere karma that on my fourth entry back to Canada in a row, I get the Little Room. It was not his fault.

You win some, you get the Little Room.

Cuts Like a Knife

While trolling the Web I noticed a post from someone on a "chef" site who mentioned that they had just purchased an expensive Henckels chef's knife and then purchased an expensive Henckels electric knife sharpener. This is analogous to purchasing an inkjet printer in many ways; the printer is cheap but the cartridges are horrendously expensive.

So Henckels wants you to purchase their expensive chef's knife and then quickly wear it down to a nub (it would only take a matter of months if you used their electric sharpener) then buy another one.

I have other beefs with Henckels, so to speak. What are you supposed to do with a chef's knife? Well, slice things, but far more, chop things. And the way to chop a lot of things is with the rocking motion--you leave the tip of the blade on the board and rock the rest of it over the food (and not your thumb, which I happily did yet again this week.)

Trouble is, the Henckels has a bolster on the blade--that's the thick metal girdle, or heel, that comes out from the bottom of the handle to form a thick ridge all the way to the cutting edge.

That means that if you use an electric sharpener, which is insane to begin with, you're going to end up with a chef's knife that is developing a gap between the heel of the blade and the board.

In fact, this will happen even if you use a stone (as I do) or a steel (those tubular metal rods with rough surfaces that butchers seem to love.) And that's exactly what happened to my Henckels after a couple of years. Then I found my garlic wasn't getting chopped as well.

So it seems silly to get a knife with a bolster and sillier to get an electric sharpener.

I have a Kasumi "Damascus steel" knife that's light yet deadly (it's not a santoku but is shaped pretty much like a regular chef's knife, but without the bolster.)

And I use a stone with one medium-coarse side and one fine. I find that it delivers a far more accurate edge--because you're carefully controlling the angle of the grind--than a steel, where your hand is going to twist slightly (unless you're a pro, which I'm not.)

A good article on chef's knives can be found here. And an excellent article by our very own Barry can be found here.

The guy says "when I run my finger along the blade I can actually feel it curve upward . . ."

Ouch. That really proves his case that he's not the sharpest knife in the drawer.

More Vacation Scribbles

Since I’ve been in California for the holidays, I’ve been immersed in foodie stuff, although I haven’t felt hungry for the past few days. I made an absolutely brilliant batch of garlic dills the first day I arrived. I’ve now taken to dragging around a food diary. It’s absolutely essential when you make stuff. You think you won’t forget, but you always do.

When that magical moment hits, when you really nailed the curry, that’s when you’ll be glad you wrote it all down. So I’ve finally worked out all the proportions for the dills—believe me, even 1/6 of a cup of salt can make a huge difference—so now I’m confident I can replicate it over and over, thanks to my food diary (really a tiny battered dollar-store notebook with its own pen.)

A couple of other foodie things have entered my universe, although I actually detest the word “foodie” and will never claim to be one.

One is the Bill Buford book, Heat. I read rave reviews of it here and there, so I was curious to pick it up. It’s actually one of the oddest books I’ve ever read. It’s like this middle-aged guy decided to get into professional cooking all of a sudden and applied to work for free at Mario Batali’s Babbo restaurant. So far so good, from an interesting point of view. You get a perspective from a non-career dude, and one who’s actually a journalist by profession. But when you actually get into the book, it seems like it’s just one stream-of-consciousness narrative from a sometimes drunk writer. He hops all over time, doesn’t mention his two kids even once throughout the whole book, and I was convinced he was gay due to his writing style until he finally mentioned that he had a wife.

Very different from Anthony Bourdain’s tautly-constructed style. Bourdain has a true writing talent and organises his anecdotes in a meticulous, word-spare fashion that neatly builds, shocks, amazes, and resolves in a true writerly manner, yet one is not constantly reminded that he’s writing. A chef homeboy, unabashed and unvarnished. But Buford’s book just left me feeling like he should have maybe smoked less weed during the writing of it.

And tonight I finally saw “Sideways.” Of course, as anyone connected with food should be aware, this was a landmark “foodie” picture. Well, maybe a landmark “winey” picture. As foodie pictures go, it was absolutely first-rate, never losing sight of the story and realism. Which reminds me of another foodie picture, Dinner Rush. That was so involved with food that you knew some major food fans had a hand in it, kind of like Francis Ford Coppola’s movies, in which he worked as much of his love of food and drink into the script as possible.

But this tiny immersion into the foodie stuff that I’ve experienced lately (I actually got a panini grill for Christmas! Damned if I know what to do with it. And a Jamie Oliver Flavour Shaker) reminds me that I really despise those who take food to ridiculous extremes—ever heard of fennel pollen? El Bulli and gastro-molecular cooking? I rest my case—and that food should be what it’s supposed to be—nourishment. Let’s keep the goddamned art out of it. Plaster a canvas with Gouda and green peppers if you want art. Leave my bowl to its lowly misery of mac and cheese.

Now to the matter of the six fondue sauces that I drunkenly promised my sister-in-law for the Great Fondue Party of 2006 . . .

Vacation Thoughts

For most of my life I’ve wanted to Be Somebody. The trouble is, I’ve never known who. I always wanted to be someone else. I always wanted to be able to do the stuff that someone else did. Anything that was remotely cool, I wanted to be able to do. How could these people do this stuff, and how could I do the same thing?

The conundrum, now that I see it for what it really is, is that I wanted to do everything, not just one thing. I wanted to do everything well. I discovered an ability to spell very early on; I liked words and their power on the page. I’ve always read like a maniac, but surprisingly, despite my love for reading and love for writing, I just can’t conceive of writing a book. That’s what authors do! And I’m not an author.

When I was a teenager, I wanted to be a musician. I really, really wanted to be a musician. Coincidentally, I also wanted to be a painter. I actually invested real time—countless hours for a teenager—to practicing music and art, and it wasn’t something forced upon me—it was by choice.

But somehow, the best guitarists were too talented. I practiced and practiced and practiced and they were always much better than me. They had that . . . thing, that good guitarists have. That I don’t have. I became a bass player, but shadowing me was always Jaco Pastorius. In the face of such genius, what can you do?

I went to art school. At least here, from sheer perseverance, was something I could do. I specialised in pointillism, an extremely time-consuming form of self-torture that involved creating drawings just by tapping dots of ink on an illustration board.

Looking back, my ambition was highly unrealistic. Mainly I realised that these things are the only thing these people do. Ordinary people don’t want to write and paint and be professional musicians. Being great in all of these fields is a task for a Goethe, or a Dante.

So why is it that I’m so pissed off that I haven’t perfected the art of cooking rice? Why is it not perfect, time in, time out, every grain fluffy yet tender, moist yet firm? Why is it? Why the hell is it?

Because if you can tell me, I’m just positively keeling over to know.

Huh? Why?

Five-Year-Old Pizza

He rolled out the dough, spread the sauce, grated the cheese and put on the toppings. I'd say he has the makings of a top chef. The pizza was excellent, considering it was made by a half-boy, half-frog . . .