Intro

No quotes about history, no deep thoughts on some random subject… This week, I’ve been working through edits on my thesis. Since beginning my thesis, a new edition of the Chicago Manual of Style has been published (number 18!). It’s this dictionary-sized guide that provides the reassuringly nitpicky details like how many authors’ names justify using “et al” and whether punctuation marks go inside or outside quotation marks.

But instead of all that, I bring you a picture of a potato from our garden, dug out and cleaned just this week.

Or this satisfying comparison of the space pictures in photo albums take, versus the space they occupy in photo boxes. Ta-da!

A few more pictures, and some recipes (because no matter how important a list of references is, the family must eat! and me too!) and we’ll call it a week, alright?

Texture

Yesterday we happened to park in front of this pole, and for the sake of contrast, I’ve included the sleek aluminum pole we also parked in front of, somewhere else…

I was going to wax on about colour and texture, when I realized that the first picture with the wood grain reminded me of a book I used to pore over when I was young, titled The Prairie Alphabet (here on Youtube). It is illustrated by Yvette Moore, in the style of hyperrealism. Listening to it being read on Youtube and looking through the pictures, I feel reminded of something comfortingly familiar. It’s a lovely book… I like how, the introduction concludes: “Some people say there’s not much to see on the prairies but we say we have more time to see it.”

In the kitchen

About once a year, I make this “Chinese Five-Spice Slow-Cooked Pork Shoulder” from the Food Network cookbook Making it Easy. It’s served with egg noodles, and we’ve also added Deb Perelman’s cabbage slaw to the plate for a little contrast and crunch. As advertised, it’s easy. It’s also very tasty and very tender.

I don’t always succeed in my little kitchen. For example, I seem to have bad luck with the simplest of cookies… These ginger cookies are more like a ginger puddle and that was after refrigeration. The previous batch was in fact a ginger lake that extended to all four sides of my baking sheet. And it’s not the first time ginger cookies have turned into ginger puddles in my kitchen! Advice seems to be: beat the butter and sugar for a longer amount of time… like 5 to 7 minutes. I say I just need to find that magical recipe that delivers something like the ginger pillow of my imagination. (See imagination on left, reality on right…)

Meantime, there’s these Vegan Amaretti Cookies that turn out perfectly…

Oh! And I should mention that I made a “Banana Cake with Tahini Fudge” this week and served it to my husband’s mom and sister and they loved it! “The best banana cake I’ve ever had…” someone might have said. See, I don’t invent these flavours… I just go looking for recipes.

I was listening to the podcast “The Dinner Plan” and the guest Maddy DeVita explained at one point the difference between being a person who cooks for friends and a person who is hired as a private chef as basically a transition “from using recipes and really leaning on recipes to looking at something […] maybe a photo I’ve seen on social media or a recipe that I think sounds interesting and really being able to combine those things and take elements and pieces. And I think going to culinary school and working as a private chef and the sheer amount of reps you get in of just being in the kitchen, allowed me to really grow […].”

I really like it when a person is able to clarify a distinction I suspect, but hadn’t confirmed up to that point. I’m a person who leans on recipes!

Postcards

This week there was a day when the Red River was like glass and all around was reflected the reds and browns of the ending fall.

Berries, pretty, in stages of decay…

And these trees that frame themselves so nicely on my walk…

Happy Sunday!

I love history

When I was 20, I didn’t know that I loved history. When I was 30, I had minored in history. Now, past 40, I’m developing opinions about history. Sometimes I wonder whether I should gather all these history-related ideas together into one blog post, but I think not. I’m thinking as I go… isn’t it better to be invited on a hike and admire the view as you go along than to have a friend present you with with an album of their souvenirs? Blogging is like inviting you along…

I like it when I find myself nodding along with what a podcast guest is saying. This week it was to Paul Kingsnorth on the podcast Honestly with Bari Weiss (here). To establish your values, he argues, you need “people, place, prayer, and the past”. About the past, you can ask yourself: “What’s your sense of the past, your sense of history? How can you live that? How can you honour your ancestors, pass things on to your children?” I think about this often and enjoy the challenge it presents.

What kind of challenge does thinking about history present? The first one is relevance. When I say relevance, it makes me think of people who say that history is boring and I so I think about the things that make history boring (like cliché) and the things that make it interesting (story) and I glow incandescent when I hear academics broach these themes exactly. I thoroughly enjoyed stumbling upon this interview between Dan Wang and Stephen Kotkin on Youtube (here).

Cercle Molière

Last weekend we attended a play at the French theatre, the subject of which was Pauline Boutal’s life. (I read her biography earlier this year and I’m so happy I did - I doubly enjoyed the play!)

Going to plays in French was my husband’s idea, and this one was the first of this season… I don’t know why or how I managed to have such low expectations of theatre, but my gosh, I found myself discreetly crying actual tears. The actors disappear after we applaud at the end, and in the emotion of the moment, applause felt too little, too small an act… they deserved hugs! A round of drinks on the house! Cheers to their talent, more cheers for health and a long life!

Reading

I finished Art Work by Sally Mann. It contains lots of quotes. Lots of lovely-long sentences. Advice given as if she suspected her reader might roll their eyes, but also as if she knew she had the authority to give it (that is, sometimes the tone felt self-deprecating, sometimes haughtily impatient). I liked her stories… the terrible renter fiasco, the incredible trip to Qatar. Dear Mrs. Mann: more stories please?

The thing is, I really enjoyed reading Hold Still (mentioned here in 2018). The image of a person’s death being like a library burned to the ground has often come to mind, and it’s from the end of that book. She writes:

I have long been afflicted with the metaphysical question of death: What does remain? What becomes of us, of our being?
Remember that song by Laurie Anderson in which she says something about how when her father died it was as though a library burned to the ground? Where does the self actually go? All the accumulation of memory - the mist rising from the river and the birth of children and the flying tails of the Arabians in the field - and all the arcane formulas, the passwords, the police recipes, the Latin names of trees, the location of the safe deposit key, the complex skills to repair and build and grow and harvest - when someone dies, where does it all go?
Proust has his answer, and it’s the one I take most comfort in - it ultimately resides in the loving and in the making and in the leaving of every present day. It’s in my family, our farm, and in the pictures I’ve made and loved making. It’s in this book. “What thou loves well remains.” […]

Love! The world needs Love!

In the kitchen

This week, I made Zaynab Issa’s “Ultimate tuna melt” from her cookbook Third Culture Cooking and the kids told me not to lose the recipe. Very high praise!

For dessert: Apple Pudding Cake. Delicious!

Enjoying

Freakonomics podcast is doing another series and I’ve been delightedly pulled-in. All Stephen Dubner’s research into horses has reminded me of when I was young… I read Black Beauty and wanted a horse. I was a child in the middle of Saskatoon with no concept of what horse-ownership entailed. My dad discouraged the idea. He said horses could have a temperament. I figured he’d not read Black Beauty.

My mom also liked horses, but from a distance. Her brother had worked with horses. We watched National Velvet together… I knew about the Triple Crown and Secretariat and nothing about The Adams Family. In teenager-hood, I read Monty Roberts’ book The Man Who Listens to Horses (which, in my flawed memory, was titled “The Horse Whisperer” but Google refutes me). Mom and I were fans of people who could perform feats in animal behaviour. Then I grew up and horses left my mind. These podcasts are a nice (current!) revisit to that world!

Writing

Really liked this substack post by Gen Zero titled “Everyone is a strategist and No One is a Writer” (via) especially this concluding bit:

As we focus on how marketing is done, substantive questions of the world itself get sidelined.
Implicit in this focus on marketing is a focus on everyone but oneself.

I’ve noticed oak galls in the past and even mentioned them here but never gave them any further thought. But woah! Wasps are involved! What a lovely substack post! (Via)

Christmas approacheth

I admire a person who can make craft projects feel almost un-craft-like. I’m not sure how to explain it except that Naomi Vizcaino - with her references to the past and the originality of her ideas - makes her project ideas feel especially artistic. (TikTok)

Postcards

Here is my dog, not barking at another dog.

Here is milkweed with floss so soft I think of a grandmother’s hair.

Here is a view of the fallen tree across the river.

Here, through a tangle of trees, I spy some that seem almost decorated in the sunlight… red berries, leaves that shimmer…

And behold! Captured here is the first snow!

Happy Sunday!