Christmas album
The week in suppers: festive edition
**Monday’s menu: Cranberry-bean soup. Fried rice with kale.
**Because: The crandberry beans got very mushy in the pot and looked just like bean soup. I added carrots, roasted red peppers, fresh thyme, and pepper, and called it Little House on the Prairie Soup. (In those books, Ma always makes the best bean soups.)
**The reviews: Fair to middling. Who wouldn’t love Ma’s bean soup? Apparently several of my children wouldn’t. Maybe Ma’s wasn’t so peppery. (Honestly, it’s brothy, rich, and delicious.)
**Tuesday’s menu: Dahl. Paneer with tatsoi. Baked rice.
**Because: “Paneer” was requested as a special holiday meal, but I had some in the fridge all ready to go. Made it an Indian theme overall.
**What is tatsoi? I don’t know, but it looks a bit like baby spinach. It cooks up less delicate and more spicy than spinach, but it’s locally grown and worked as a good green addition to the meal.
**Wednesday’s menu: Black bean chili (crockpot). Leftover rice. Cornbread.
**Because: I love my crockpot. This entire meal comes from my freezer and/or cupboard and/or cold cellar. I am digging into the stores and making sure I use up every bit before springtime. That’s what it’s for! (Yes, I need reminding.)
**Thursday’s menu: Soups (leftovers). Biscuits. Cabbage salad with tahini dressing.
**It-was-a-nice-thought: We ate by candlelight to celebrate the solstice. It looked perfect and beautiful for a moment, and then everything went rapidly downhill. Cranky children, complaints, “it’s too dark to see my food,” and bingo, the romantic plan crumbled.
**Quantities: I doubled the biscuit recipe, and had way too many leftovers. Never good to come out of a “leftovers” meal with more leftovers than you started with.
**On repetition: I made the tahini dressing because once I find something I like, I make it until we’re all bored of it. This is also known as “getting into a rut.” But it was still really good the second time around. I added grated carrots and rutabaga to the cabbage. Yum.
**Friday’s menu: Devised, prepared, and served by someone else (my dad and my step-mother). Hurray! Happy holidays!
**Saturday’s menu: Christmas eve at brother and sister-in-law’s house, potluck-style. Meats, cheeses, crackers, olives, paella, cookies, smoked salmon, etc. etc. etc. until we’ve nibbled ourselves into a pleasant food coma.
**Sunday’s menu: Eighteen pound turkey. Classic bread stuffing. Brussel sprouts. Mashed potatoes. Pan gravy. Pumpkin pie. (pictured above)
**Forgot: To cook up the cranberries.
**Achievement: Totally dairy-free meal.
Let it shine
This is my favourite turn of the year: when the days begin to become incrementally longer rather than shorter, and the light is on its way back.
For a brief moment, I loved our family’s attempt at a candlelit dinner on the eve of the winter solstice, several days ago. Light in darkness. Shadow all around. Soon after this photo was taken everything fell to pieces, of course, and I loved that quite a lot less; also it lasted much longer. But that seems the nature of the holidays: chance moments of calm, bits of brightness, shards of reflection.
Wherever you are, whatever you celebrate, and wherever you can find it, I wish you light, rest, and glimpses of peace during your holiday.
Mission impossible
I spent an afternoon earlier this week attempting to sort through our six bins of Playmobil and reassemble castles and families and scenes. There’s a reason I titled this post “Mission Impossible.” I wasn’t doing it because I’m short of projects, of course; I was doing it because CJ was home sick and desperate for someone to play with. So we dragged out the Playmobil. All of it. If you’d been listening in, this is how our “playtime” would have sounded: “Stop sorting, Mommy! Make your guy talk to my guy!” And then I’d make my guy say, “Let’s find my missing candelabra base. We can go on a deep sea mission to the bottom of this bin and ….” Deep sigh from CJ.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I’m not good with the playing.
My proudest accomplishment of the afternoon was the completion of one room in a princess castle. One room. It is now on a high shelf and everyone who looks at it has to sing “Aaaaaaaah” in an angelic tone while gazing appreciatively. Or maybe that’s just me. In any case, no one is allowed to touch it. Oh wait. Isn’t that the whole point? Of having TOYS? Maybe Albus was on to something when he came into the living-room later that evening and began vrooming the newly restored Playmobil car (with doctor and doctor’s teeny-tiny kit that includes a teeny-tiny flu shot needle) through my carefully sorted piles. Let’s just say the doctor might be in the wrong profession. She should have been a smash-em-up-derby racer with jet-pack engines and maybe a flame-thrower or two. Can you hear the heart-breaking sound of plastic items being explosively scattered across a wooden floor? I’m sure it was fun on the pure level of play, but I become momentarily deeply discouraged. My carefully sorted piles! Tossed asunder!
There’s a lesson in here somewhere, if I care to extract it. But is that the kind of day it is? A day for lessons? No, today, I’d rather skip the moral of the story, down my cup of coffee, gird my loins, and head out into the horror that is the streets of uptown: thick with people driving their cars around and around as they seek for a parking spot and grow increasingly grim and hopeless (and mentally act out the Playmobil doctor’s wreckless acts of destruction). Merry Christmas! I’m going to walk instead. But wow. I need some girding, some serious girding. I’m in the homestretch of preparations. I can do this! I can find and assemble every piece of this Playmobil holiday!
Wait, what were we talking about?
What I’ve been up to …
What a weird and wonderful week it’s been. I am positively bubbling with creative energy. And, right about now, caffeine. Which might explain the rapid-fire typing you’re hearing.
Yesterday had a stinker of a start. Well, not the very early start, which was spin class, and which, though I never quite got into it, still kicked off the day with a rush of happy endorphins. But then I got home. And discovered that CJ was refusing to go to nursery school, again. And you know, he’s been sick, so I wasn’t sure. Maybe he was still a bit off? Okay, kid. I’ll give you another day. Even though that means cancelling my morning plan to go record a song at my brother’s studio. Fine. Except it wasn’t fine, and I wasn’t fine, and I had to go to the basement and throw laundry into the washer and yell things and slam the door and perform other unpleasant and completely immature venting activities. It put a pall on the general everyone-heading-off-to-school-and-work part of the morning. I have a rotten temper.
It’s all about the expectations. I’d expected and planned to do one thing, and when plans suddenly shifted, I was disappointed. And frustrated. And facing another housebound day with a less than willing spirit.
But I came around, in a moping sort of way, to acceptance, and went on with the changed plans. When suddenly the phone rang–it was Kevin. His morning appointment had to be rescheduled. “I’ll come home and look after CJ, and you can go and record.” “Seriously?” “Seriously.” Well, off I went, let me tell you.
Proof that a stinker of a start doesn’t mean the whole is ruined. Remember this. Remember, and leap for the unexpected opportunities that parachute into your hours.
Why didn’t I take my camera? My brother’s new studio is filled with light. It’s an old Mennonite schoolhouse, one big room, and I sat right down at the piano to get loosened up. And then we recorded. Just one simple song, a lullaby. I wrote it for a character in Juliet. In fact, I’m pretty sure I wrote it as my character. Because my brother Karl is such an amazing and talented producer, as well as a musician, I know we’re going to have a beautiful song at the end of the process. It’s exciting. And I found myself up late last night perfecting more songs as my character. It’s weird, but I can write songs as her better than as me. Maybe it gives me the distance necessary to be vulnerable, to allow myself to tap uncritically into emotions and even a particular style that I can ascribe to her. Maybe it’s like writing a poem in a persona. I won’t question it. It’s working.
This morning, I surfed the creative wave toward a different shore. It helped that CJ trotted merrily off to nursery school–unquestionably healthy again. PRAISE BE. This morning, my friend Nancy arrived with coffee to share, and her camera. She is working on a new project that she calls “ipowr,” or “Intriguing People of Waterloo Region,” and she chose me as her first subject to interview and to photograph. I couldn’t resist photographing her too, plus it put me at ease to stand behind the lens. A nice way to warm up, perhaps for both of us. Less pressure. The photo above makes me think of a villa, a place both stark and soft, and somehow old-fashioned. The crop doesn’t quite do it justice. You can see the original here.
And so that is my yesterday and my today. I am basking in creative activities that would seem outside of my comfort zone. But neither feel like a stretch. Instead, both are extensions of what I’m already doing. And I’m brimming with appreciation for this quiet time between major projects, when I can do and try anything.
The world is full of beauty and light.
I am teetering on the brink of over-caffeination.
It’s all good.