PAUSING TO BREATHE IN THE SCENTS OF SPRING

I’m feeling light as air this evening. The weather is soft and kind, with showers every once in awhile to keep us moist and the scents of flowers heavy as I walk down the streets. The tall magnificent chestnut trees on Henry Street have all their candles out – tall spikes of white flowers touched with pink, that lightly perfume the air. I have walked under them for years, but this evening for the first time I reached way up to a bottom branch and took the liberty of breaking off one tall candle of a flower. So lovely. I sniffed at it as I walked on up the street and then discovered that my cheeks and chin were smeared with golden pollen.

The sky was smeared with tangerine and golden pinks as I walked past the lovely open space of King’s College Circle this evening after my second Foods that Changed the World class, this on eon wheat and rice. I must get out at dusk more often I caught myself thinking. It’s a time of mystery and promise, especially on a warm mild night.

My lightness is about the beauty of everything at this time of year, but also because I’ve passed through another portal, the Cilician Gates of income tax prep, for this year. Why does it weigh so heavily? Is it the feeling of being called to account? Or is it just the idea that someone is looking over our shoulder? Or is it a basic fear and dislike of numbers, addings-up, and organising tedious paper? Whatever…

I pulled together my records and typed things out on four or five pages. It all seemed to make sense to the wonderful Ian, who does my taxes every year. This time, because everything needs to be translated into Canadian dollars, my first page started with a listing of the exchange rates of US dollars, British pounds, Australian dollars, Burmese kyat, and Thai baht…. It all brings a touch of faraway into the tedium of accounting.  Anyhow, I am delighted to have done with this stage. Yes!

Now I just need to get peppers and tender herbs into my garden, and maybe some cucumbers. I've been eating dandelion greens, asparagus, sorrel, chives, and other herbs, for awhile now. Each bite is so renewing somehow, still full of life because fresh-picked. 

And there is also work to be done, pleasurable most of it. For example I need to be ready for the last four sessions of Foods that Changed the World.  The class is great, lively interested students of all kinds.  Next week is olives and olive oil; peanut and peanut oil. It will take us from the Mediterranean to Peru and Senegal, and to Vietnam too. I so enjoy engaging with food ideas and with the world through food What a privilege to be able to teach it to engaged students.

And now with heavy eyelids it’s time for me to head upstairs to bed. I’m hoping to sleep the sleep of the just, with the heaviest of my deadlines now over with. I’m still not clear why tax accounting weights so heavily, nor why it should come in the spring, when otherwise everything feels so wonderfully optimistic.

I hope you too have the opportunity to stop and smell the flowers this week. It’s a good time to be mindful, for this full moon (May 24 or 25) is celebrated as Buddha’s Birthday, a huge holiday in Thailand and in Tibet, among others. Let’s have that sense of new life and beauty springing forth ignite our feelings of optimism and our energies. Enjoy the light and all the fresh new life that’s emerging and blooming…

STRIDING FORWARD THROUGH THE CHANGING SCENE

These days, in damp and drizzle and wind and hail and chill, the streets of Toronto are paved with gold, and green-gold and white and pale pink and pink-red….the tiny yellow-green maple tree flowers, the cherry and plum and apple and flowering almond blossom petals, that are being washed and blown to the pavement by rain and wind. It’s a dazzling show for those like me who are walking people. The vivid colours are kind of hallucinatory as I rush along; today I was in a hurry to get out of the cold.

The other day I was hurrying along petalled streets to see a young friend whose first baby was born at the end of March. It was my first sight of her. Olivia is of course downy-soft and adorable, her little fists clenched under her chin as she sleeps, her gaze direct and alert when she’s awake. I took her mother some books, kid books, to get her library started. I imagine them later with perhaps crayon lines and marks in them, and fingerprints. Every child needs a store of books. I’m no good at buying clothes or other things; I never know what’s needed or wanted. And anyway, babies grow like weeds, so todays large garment is tomorrow’s giveaway. I’d rather give books.

And that got me thinking about permanence and impermanence. Those flowering trees, fragrant or not, give us a moment of heart-stopping beauty, and then it’s washed away. The tree remains, a reminder of a moment, and it promises us another next year. So too a book gives us intense moments of pleasure, or connection, and later on its presence on the shelf reminds us of those moments and perhaps invites us to open it again and reread it. Kids of course love the familiarity of the already well-known book. They will ask to have the same book read over and over, weekly or nightly. We lose some of that impulse when we become autonomous readers. We seek out the new.

And yet at the same time there are some books that I go back to and reread, as a kind of soothing technique, a remnant of kid-impulse I think. They are mostly books that I read as a kid or teenager: the Complete Sherlock Holmes, in two volumes, is one candidate for rereading, perhaps every three or four years. For my kids it’s the Philip Pullman books, and some of the Harry Potters.

Perhaps it’s age, and the perspective it can give as I gaze back in time, or put my head into an earlier year’s place and gaze forward, but I am more and more aware that one of the things that keeps me feeling alive and well is an ongoing effort to keep a sense of balance as things around me change. Those can be the seasonal changes, that remind us of fragility and loss, even as those first blossoms are emerging on the trees. Or they can be the announcement that a friend or the parent of a friend has only a limited time to live, or the demolition of a familiar building on a neighbourhood streetcorner, or the closing of a bookstore, or the purchase of a new piece of technology that is complicated and needs to be mastered.

All change can be disorienting, or anxiety-making, even just as we contemplate the possibility of change, let alone when it shocks us with its suddenness.

I love through-lines, stories that continue across generations or across continents and oceans. I like other people’s family stories, the history of long-term friendships, I like thinking about the long-term cross-linkages in my own family and in my life. That idea of some kind of continuity is precious. And for me perhaps it’s what helps me keep my balance in the day to day changing scene, helps me enjoy the dynamism of young people’s ideas and the liveliness of their open horizons.

And so as the tulips fade and the petals fall from the flowering fruit trees, rather than regretting their passage, I love the anticipation of the next phase of the year: rhubarb and sorrel and tarragon now my garden, tender asparagus now coming into the farmers’ markets, and then after that the generosities of summer. Yes! 

MAY BLOSSOMING AND THE GROWTH OF A NEW PROJECT TOO

It’s extraordinary how happy a little soft fine weather with fresh green leaves and flowering trees can make me feel. And I’m not alone: as I walk or pedal down the streets of Toronto many people seem to have a smile on their face and a lightness to their step. Springtime, this late greening springtime, is so renewing to the heart and spirit.

This time last week I was having my last full day in Georgia. And it was truly full, for I was whisked east to wine country by Irakli Nikolashvili and his friends to visit the vineyard he has with his uncle and cousin, and then to eat a remarkable and of course delicious Georgian feast at his aunt and uncle’s house. Imagine skewers of veal grilled over vine clippings, several pkhalis (like a vegetable pate, but more wonderful), stacks of khachapuri, tkhemali sauce, pickles of various kinds, and more, all washed down with local wines…

I’d been in the Telavi and Gurjani area ten days earlier, but then it had been cold and rainy: The flowers were beautiful and the landscape green, the colours popped in the grey, but it was very cold and the mountains, the mighty Caucasus mountains that frame the north side of the valley, were entirely hidden by heavy clouds.

This time there they were, the mountains, wreathed in tendrils of cloud and majestically tall, snow-covered, a true barrier. Behind them lies Dagestan and slightly farther west is Chechnya. The rich fertile valleys of Georgia are like a paradise in comparison with the harsh high-altutude mountain gorges and heights of the Greater Caucasus. Those mountains also mark the border between Europe and Asia. Russia is Europe and Georgia is Asia.

It’s hard to take in, for Tbilisi’s downtown has the graciousness and the esthetics of a European capital. And the Greeks were at the Black Sea coast in ancient times. Wine-making and wine traditions go back millenia in Georgia.

And yet there is no olive oil, no olives in the traditional cuisine. And very little lamb is eaten, except in the mountains, and little rice. There are leavened flatbreads, baked in a tandoor, or cheese-filled and baked in a home oven or on the stove-top even. And there are corn breads as well as gomi, which is a little like polenta. There is a Garden of Eden's-worth of fruits and nuts, especially walnuts and hazelnuts. And there is a huge array of distinctive inventive foods and flavour combinations.

I’ve been thinking about this question of distinctiveness. It’s much more familiar in the settled cultures of  Europe and Asia than in places of immigration and mixing such as Canada and the US. On the other hand, Georgia, like many small countries that lie between major powers, has been invaded and controlled by many different rulers.

How is it then that the people have retained a sense of who they are? There’s pride in the language, yes, with its many local variations; and there’s of course the Georgian Orthodox church, which is a marker of culture and gives a strong sense of identity and belonging. (Christianity came to Georgia in the 4^th century; before that people were a mix of animist and Zoroastrian. The Jewish community in Georgia also dates from long ago.)

All this complexity and all these lovely local mysteries and histories are fascinating to me. I feel lucky to be able to delve and to try to understand, with the help of friends and of chance-met strangers too.

The other day I was in Javaheti (in southern Georgia near the Turkish and Armenian borders), in the town of Akhalkalaki. While the friends I was staying with were it church (it was Orthodox Palm Sunday) I went wandering around the town. The population is mostly Armenian with a fair sprinkling of Russians and very few Georgians. Street signs and all other signs were in three languages, three different scripts: Russian, Georgian, and Armenian. A beautiful massive snow-covered mountain filled the eastern horizon. In town all buildings were low, one-story houses mostly of stone, a little sombre. When I started exploring the bazaar was not yet open and there were few people out in the streets. The wind whistled along them and the bright sun made sharp shadows in the clear high-altitude air (the town is at over 1700 metres).

But I came on the sign for a bakery, so I headed down a flight of stairs into a cavernous basement area. At the far end the baker and her assitants were getting ready bake the next batch of loaves. She was Armenian and spoke excellent English. She was making not lavash (there was a stack of lavash that she’d made the previous day) but instead a version of Georgian “puri” or leavened flatbread, that is distinctively from Javakheti region. The dough had been shaped into rounds which had risen into soft mounds. She made a hole in the centre of some of them. Others she brushed with water and then she and her assistant used their cupped hands to make a circular dent in the centre of each mound, which they then cross-cut with the edge of one hand to make three more deep dents.

The pierced loaves were then stretched to make a large oval doughnut shape, slipped onto a peel and into the oven. The dented breads were one by one stretched over the back of their hands into a long oval, placed on a floured peel, and slid it into the hot stack oven. I’d never seen that particular shaping technique, which gave the breads a distinctive pitted central surface, nor could I have guessed how they achieved it without having seen them work.

I felt so lucky to have come on them just as they were shaping the breads.  It’s these small accumulations of good luck that I rely on when I travel. They slowly add up, piece by piece, to make a picture of a place, a culture, a tradition.  Later I met another baker, a village woman who was Georgian and who told me that the doughnut breads were known as kokora while the Georgians call the pitted flatbreads lavashi

And so now, home from my first trip for my next project, I feel well launched on it. The Persian World is my working title for an exploration of the culinary cultures that have been influenced by Persian traditions, cultures where there are traves of the Persian legacy. 

I am thrilled to be reconnecting with the cross-currents and complexities of Central and West Asia and the Caucasus. I’m looking forward to learning a lot more about breads, pulaus vegetable dishes, and the brilliant ways in which fruit and nuts are incorporated into the cuisines in the region. In the coming two years I am hoping to be able to travel to Iran, Azerbaijan, Armenia, as well as to several places that, like Georgia, I visited long ago in 1989, when doing research for the Flatbreads book.

Please pass along any suggestions you may have about books and other resources you think might be useful. I will need all the help and insight I can get, as well as traveller’s luck of course.  

GENEROUS LIVING IN THE MOMENT - NOTES FROM TBILISI

After a full two weeks in Georgia I am more aware than ever of how much I have to learn, how rich and deep this country’s food culture is. And of course I should write in the plural, for though there’s a shared pan-Georgian approach to feasting and hospitality and a respect for good food, there are also very different dishes and ideas about what to serve when and how, in the many different regions of this small country.

Still that diversity is not where I’m headed with this post. Talk of specifics will have to wait until I have digested my experiences here, pun intended and very appropriate. Meantime I want to talk about living generously. And also about appearances and assumptions…

Late this afternoon I went with Tamar to the apartment of a family that we both had met only last week. They are all friends of the remarkable cheese-maker Ana. We’d met them at Ana’s farm just outside Tbilisi, a place she is working to transform into a kind of food Eden. (She’s well on her way: the south-sloping terrain is green-grassed, with ploughed patches that are her vegetbale plots. There are several walnut trees, apple and plum trees, hazelnuts, etc. And the soil is rich and clean.)

Today, though, we were far from idyllic green fields and fertile soil. We were in the Tbilisi suburbs, in a tall apartment-block landscape like that of many ex-Soviet towns. The blocks are charmless on the outside, access is usually through a cement entryway that leads to a chipped concrete staircase, and perhaps also to an elevator that may or may not work. Today’s place was like that.

We traveled up to the fourth floor and then walked into the apartment of our hosts. It wasn’t luxurious or flashy, no, but the difference once we were through the door was spectacular. There was warmth and charm. The table had been set with plates and glasses and clay ewers of Georgian wine, as well as with many of the dishes that were to be part of our meal: Emereti khachapuri (cheese-filled flatbreads made of leavened slow-rise dough filled in this case with cheese made by Ana); plain puri (long Khaketi-style bread batons); two kinds of Mingrelian adjika (condiment sauce that is an intense hit of flavor) red and green; leafy green salad dressed Khaketian-style; chicken roasted with coriander and garlic…

Warm late afternoon light came pouring in the windows, as our hosts brought more dishes to the table. Then we all sat down and began eating. A Georgian feasting meal is called a supra. This one was a mix of dishes from Khaheti in eastern Georgia and from Mingrelia, in western Georgia. The adjikas and also an unbelievalbly delicious pork dish made with various organ meats cut small and braised in a little oil flavored with red adjika, were from Mingrelia, home of Irma, one of the women who had cooked the feast.

Gia was tamada, or table-host, and he proposed the first toast of the evening, the classic opener, to God. And we went on from there to eat and drink and tell stories. Several late arrivals were specially toasted in welcome. And as they were still eating the singing began. It was not Georgian polyphonal music but instead Georgian popular songs, accompanied first by Gia’s guitar and then by Tina at the pinao. The music, the joking, the food explanations (translated for me by Tamar), the pleasurable moving from one rhythm to another during the meal, were all unselfconscious. The room was warm with ease and an in-the-moment delight.

Nothing about the outside of that apartment block, or its neighbours and cousins all around the outskirts of Tbilii, gives any hint of the warmth and beauty that each apartment may contain. Perhaps there’s extra inner warmth espceially because of the bleakness of the outside?

And as we travelled back home in a taxi I thought too about the unhurriedness of the meal and the evening. It wasn’t happening in furtherance of some goal or ambition, it was just itself, a gathering of people for a meal and the warmth that it would give.

So often in North America it seems to me we are rushing on to the next thing, rather than taking our time. It’s true not ony of many dinners but other social engagements as well. I am certainly part of the rushedness, impatient to get on to the next thing.

Here in Georgia I don’t get that sense at all. An enormous effort goes into preparing food and laying a generous table for friends and family and occasional strangers from afar like me. Even there, though the work (almost all of it done by women) is long, it happens not in a rush but with a kind of easy stamina. It will be finished and supper will be ready when it’s ready, not at some exact pre-appointed time. The waiting time will pass with conversation and joking around. It’s all part of a kind of rolling-with-the-punches unstructuredness that I find relaxing and welcoming.

And so the externals become less and less important. People dress with care and a great sense of fashion. The centre of the city is elegant, reminds me of Paris. But they don’t worry about the grey look of their apartment buildings or the dreariness of the entryways to home. What matters is the genuine warmth of the heart that people bring to the table. And that has a radiant glow to it.

Happy May 1 tomorrow everyone…

GEORGIA ON MY MIND

Of course I’m referring to Georgia in the Caucasus, remarkable country of great history, distinctive cuisine, rich agricultural and vinicultural traditions, and complex linguistic and cultural roots.

Twenty-four years ago I came here for the first time to learn about flatbreads. I was very ignorant. And so I was astonished, was completely blown away, by all the rest of the food, as well as by the breads. Now at last I’m back, and able to take a few more baby steps into the wonders and mysteries of Georgia.

I’ve now been in Tbilisi, the capital city, for two days, eating and asking questions and taking photographs, and asking more questions. It’s just after mid-April, the trees are in leaf and some, like the quince I saw yesterday, and the chestnut outside my window, are in flower, but it is bone-chillingly cold, with rain and cloud and low temperatures too.  It’s hard to feel loose-limbed in a damp wind. On the other hand, there are a lot of warming winter dishes that feel exactly right for these temperatures. I’ve been eating my way through them since I arrived.

On my first day here I went with friends to visit the cathedral in Mtskheta, not far from Tbilisi. On the way we stopped at one of the restaurants that serve the very traditional Georgian dish lobio, cooked kidney beans in a clay pot, accompanied by mchadi, corn breads. It sounds like plain fare, and it is, delicious, satisfying, and warming.

We had cheese with our mchadi and lobio, but many in the restaurant did not, for right now it’s Lent here. Most Georguan Christians are Orthodox, and Easter for the Eastern rite this year is Sunday May 5. Many people fast during Lent. In the Orthodox tradition that means not eating meat, fish, milk products of any kind, or eggs. The Ethiopians, whose church is also part of the Orthodox tradition, have the same approach to fasting. In Orthodox Christianity, for those who are strict, there are oveer 200 fasting days in the year.

I know of many of the Ethiopian dishes that inventive cooks have come up with for the fasting days. But I hadn’t really thought much about the Georgian approach to fasting, and which dishes might have resulted. Now I’m learning, little by little.

The basics are easy, for Georgia is rich in wheat and nuts, and fruit too. A person can go a long way on various combinations of those, perhaps helped by a little honey. A small agriculture- and food-focussed Georgian NGO called Elkana that started in 1994 has published a booklet of recipes of traditional foods, using traditional ingredients. Many of them turn out to be fasting dishes. They start with wheat berries, for example, toast them, or soak them, or just boil them until soft, with a variety of flavorings. Almond milk is permittd, and so it has a big role, as do walnuts, a Georgian staple. They’re both a delicious and satisfying alternative to cheese and milk or yogurt.

Other of the recipes in the booklet use lentils or other dried peas – old staples, many of which are no longer easilly available here - as a base and add oil, aromatics, nuts, and vegetables. Elkana is interested in promoting traditional crops, many of them what Elkana calls "forgotten crops" - to help with agricultural sustainability as well as cultural rebuilding (years of Russian occupation, as well as revolution and war, have had destructive effects on many deep-rooted Geeorgian traditions). Religion was of course discouraged under the Soviets. It has experienced a resurgence, especially among the people of the “lost generation” (now aged 50 to 70). 

But many who are now fasting for Lent are not relying on traditional recipes and foods but instead on manufactured “fasting foods”. The grocery stores are full of substitutes for butter and cream, all made with oils. It’s rather like vegetarians buying “vegetarian hotdogs” I suppose, but a little sadder in a way, for it’s a loss of traditional attitude as well as of knowledge.

After all, there is a notion in fasting, surely, that it’s about deprivation leading to mindfulness. You live and eat more plainly for the fasting period. But now in modern Georgia, with more properity and a more open society, people are of course making new choices. They are fasting, but in a modern way, buying cakes and other treats made specially for Lent that resemble in looks and texture the cakes of the rest of the year.

And this drives traditionalists a little crazy, I gather.

Yesterday I spent a late afternoon with a remarkable woman in her mid-eighties named Eteri. She had a distinguished career in chemical engineering and is also a fabulous thoughtful cook who has deep roots in Khaketi, a food-rich region of Eastern Georgia. Every year she makes a huge array of preserves and sauces, fortified wines, fruit juices, and more, all put up in jars and stored in her cold room. It was in talking with her that I realised how aggravating the new “fasting foods” are for those who care about Georgian traditions.

My time with her, tasting (her adjika, tkhemali sauce, fresh tomato sauce, quince juice, wine, cognac, lobio, and more) and talking, as well as my conversations with wonderful food-focussed Tamar, with whom I’m staying, are immediate reminders of just how rich and inventive the Georgian culinary culture is. I am just beginning to get a glimpse of what’s here… 

AN AFTERWARD:
A day after I posted this, I now have a clearer sense of Elkana, for I spent a good part of the early afternoon with the plant scientist who now heads it, and man named Taiul Berishvili. He told me about Dika and Sori wheat, both of them endemic to, or landraces of Georgia, and he gave me a small sample of each. I'd like to take them to Steve Jones at the University of Washington, when I go to the Kneading Conference West, just in case he isn't familiar with them. 

It is extraordinary to be this close to the "cradle of civilization", the place where wheat evolved from simple einkorn and emmer into durum and also varieties of triticum aestivum. Georgia has a lot of food heritage to protect and nourish. The country has already had a fight with Monsanto...

Today I also met a remarkable cheese-maker. But I'll write about her in another post. She has already sent a link to my Facebook page, a short video that shows the amazing process of making the local strong cheese, a treasure she is reviving.