the cassandra pages

FIsh Friday: Spaghettini with Clam Sauce

 

For some reason, I've never made clam sauce before, though I love it. This is the red (tomato) kind; maybe sometime in the winter I'll make a white clam sauce. This recipe is also from Marcella Hazan's "Essentials of Italian Cooking," and it couldn't be easier.

The recipe calls for starting with clams in the shell, in which case you scrub them, steam them until the shells open, take out the meat and chop it into small pieces. When I went to Marche Kim Phat last week, I saw they had frozen bags of shelled clams, so that's what I used and they worked fine. However, you don't get the fragrant clam juice that way, so you need to use some bottled clam juice or a cube of fish bouillon in the sauce. I added a little white wine, too.

3T extra virgin olive oil
1 1/2 t finely chopped garlic
2T chopped parsley
2 C canned Italian tomatoes or 6 fresh ripe ones, chopped with their juice (peeling is optional, in my opinion)
a couple of anchovy fillets, finely chopped
salt
hot chili flakes
1 lb. pasta

Heat the olive oil on medium heat in a saucepan, add the garlic, saute until golden. Add the parsley, coating it with oil, then add the tomatoes and their juice, anchovy fillet, and your clam juice or fish bouillon. (Use your judgement - add a little water or wine if it looks like you need it, but remember the tomatoes will render a good amount of juice as they cook.) Stir, turn down the heat to low, cover and simmer for 25 minutes. (At this point, adjust the "wetness" again - if you need to thicken it, either boil the sauce down a bit or add a couple tablespoons of good-quality tomato paste.) You can prepare the sauce to this point ahead of time and reheat it.

Meanwhile, cook your pasta according to package directions so that it will be done when the sauce has finished cooking. Serve with a green salad and a hot crusty loaf of French bread or an Italian ciabatta.

Add salt to the sauce if needed, and some chili flakes to taste. Now add the cut-up, cooked clams, remove from heat, and toss with your cooked pasta, adding a little olive oil on top.

Film Gluttony

The Montreal World Film Festival began yesterday with an opening gala - we didn't go - but tonight we'll start on our annual movie-binge, which should clear our heads from all lingering dust remaining from the summer of cleaning and moving, and replace it with the excitement and drama of a world tour. Tonight we plan to see two films, a French movie by Tony Gatlif ("Latcho Drom") about a Roma family during the Second World War, and an American art film called "Redland" about a family's desperate wilderness frontier life in the 1930s. Sounds like a grueling and interesting evening; will report.

After the heat of last week, the days have been progressively cooler, and riding my bike up to the studio this morning, it actually felt like fall. It always happens, right around September 1 - that first day when autumn unmistakably arrives, and then there's no going back, in spite of the hot days we'll probably have in September. Apples will soon supplant the peaches, and chrysanthemums the late roses and lilies, and I'd better get ready for it. But damn, that's going to be hard!

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While we're speaking of upcoming events, I want to mention that there are only a few more days left for submissions to qarrtsiluni's "Words of Power" issue, which Dave Bonta and I are editing. The submission period closes at the end of this month, and the theme description is quoted below. We'd especially like a few more visual interpretations of the theme to consider - photography, artwork, multimedia - but your poetry, prose, flash fiction and other writings are more than welcome. Thanks!

Call for Submissions: Words of Power

29 07 2009

In magic, to have said is to have done.
—Eliphas Levi

Again this fall we’re taking the helm ourselves, not for want of volunteer guest editors, but because we had such a blast with last fall’s Journaling the Apocalypse issue that we resolved to do it every year if possible. The submissions period is from August 1 to August 31, and publication will begin around September 15.

This time we’re looking for words of power: curses, spells, charms, prayers, incantations, mantras, sacred scriptures, explicit performative utterances, oaths, or legal instruments. Submissions may consist entirely of such super-charged language, or may riff upon or explore such language. Submissions of visual art may of course take a more figurative approach to the topic; images of amulets and other power-objects, for example, would be welcome. But otherwise we urge contributors not to interpret the theme too broadly. Please don’t just send us a piece of writing that you think is powerful according to some subjective evaluation. We’re looking quite specifically for language freighted with mana and/or executive force, or writing about that kind of language. If you’re not sure whether something qualifies, feel free to query.

Please limit written material to no more than five items per submission, with individual pieces not exceeding 3,000 words. Please refer to the general guidelines before submitting, and note especially the recommendation to query us if we don’t acknowledge receipt within two days — occasional server hiccups and email glitches are a fact of life on the internet.

We look forward to reading your words of power with an unusual admixture of excitement and trepidation. This issue could be a real test of our editorial juju!

—Dave and Beth

Malukhiyah

Wishing a blessed Ramadan to all my Muslim friends and readers.

Yesterday we had to go to the northeastern part of the city, near Anjou to pick up a package, and on the way back we decided to stop at Sami's, a well-known Montreal wholesaler of fruits and vegetables. Sami's is an Arab company, with one large warehouse-like store at the Jean-Talon and another major warehouse in the Chabanel district near Marche Central. But when we walked into this east-end store, we couldn't believe our eyes. The photographs don't begin to convey the vastness of the warehouse, or just how much produce was on display in these towering piles. We had almost no money, and Sami's only does cash transactions, so we pooled all our coins and finally found a cash machine so that we could take advantage of the stop. Extra-virgin olive oil for 4.99...vine-ripe tomatoes for 99 cents a pound...yellow peppers for 1.35...

Sami's also carries all the roots and herbs needed in the cooking of the African and Latin American communities, as well as Middle Eastern ones. I love seeing the stacks of fresh mint, piles of parsley and dill, thyme tied into great bunches. Yesterday, though, I was stopped by this display of leaves and their name in Arabic: "malukhiyah" - these are the Egyptian mallow leaves that are the basis for special dishes loved by Egyptians, Syrians, and Lebanese, and it is this leaf that my father-in-law was always asking for, but I never found. We brought him a frozen package once, but he, of course, dismissed it as inauthentic. If he were alive now, I'd bring him fresh green almonds and malukhiyah, try to follow his directions for cooking the herb with chicken, and endure the insults when he tasted it. Instead, all I could do was to picked up a sheaf of leaves, crushed one and hold it to my nose, and then gently put it back onto the pile like an offering.

Yesterday I began writing about him again; it's time to pick up the pieces of that story and fill in the blank areas: he'd be 100 years and two months right now. I see him clearly in my imagination, eating malukhiyah and gazing out at the Mediterranean, lost in contented thought.

(Does anyone here know how to cook malukhiyah, or have memories of eating it? I'd love to hear from you if you do.)

Fish Friday: Thai Shrimp/Papaya Salad

I make variations of this main-course salad several times every summer; it's perfect for nights when it's too hot to cook, and it looks so beautiful that it's great for heat-weary guests. We had it last Sunday, actually, when a friend came over for a late dinner, and the three of us sat out on the terrace in candlelight, eating this salad and a loaf of good French bread. Follow it with some sorbet or ice cream and a little dark chocolate for dessert and everyone will go to bed happy. The original recipe is from a great 1993 cookbook called Pacific Flavors that's now out-of-print; I see there are still some used copies available at Amazon. The 1990s California-Asian-fusion food styling looks really dated now, but the recipes are excellent.

All I'm going to do here is give you a construction guide; choose whatever pleases your taste and looks best in the market.

FOR THE SALAD:
-- Mixed greens, washed and torn into pieces; might contain some radicchio or red-leaf lettuce for color and some frisee, arugula, and/or watercress for texture

--Cooked shrimp [5-6 med large per person] OR scallops, chunks of cold, cooked firm-fleshed fish, or even chicken. I've never tried it with grilled tofu but it would probably be good.

-- Papaya chunks, OR mango, cantaloupe, even peaches or nectarines (Don't use too many fruits together, last time I used papaya and cantaloupe, I often use just mango)

-- Red, yellow, and/or orange peppers, cut lengthwise into strips

-- cold, blanched and rinsed snow peas or sugar snaps (you could also use cold broccoli)

-- cold cooked corn cut off the cob (try to keep some sections of kernels together by cutting fairly deeply)

--lightly toasted pine nuts OR almonds

FOR THE DRESSING:
Thai dressing should taste sweet, salty, spicy and sour all at once, but the proportion is up to you. I'd suggest starting with 3 T lime juice; 1 1/2 Thai fish sauce [substitute tamari or soy sauce if you can't get fish sauce or don't like it]; 2T canola oil or 1T canola + 1T sesame oil; 1/2 t Chinese chili sauce (a thick paste that comes in jars) or asian hot sauce (the more liquid red stuff that comes in bottles) or hot pepper flakes to taste; and 2 t brown sugar. (You can also use maple syrup.) Whisk or shake all of that together and taste it, and start adjusting the flavors until you like it. Just don't make it too sweet; the salty/hot/lime-juicey flavor wants to be clearly discernible. Depending on the size of your salad, you may need to make a bit more or less.

On a large flat platter or shallow dish 14" - 20" in diameter make a bed of mixed greens, torn into pieces. On top of the greens arrange your choices of ingredients. I always include some shrimp or chicken, some kind of fruit, something green, and some combination of colored peppers. The corn is nice if you've got a leftover ear or two. You can arrange everything formally or scatter the colors abstractly on the greens; usually I do it the latter way. Whatever you do, aim for a pleasing mix of colors and forms and textures. Then add the nuts, and finally drizzle the dressing over everything. Don't toss the salad, but bring it to the table that way, and let the guests serve themselves. They will love looking at it AND eating it!

On the Click Track

Via Yule Heibel, this article is the best explanation I've seen of the brain chemistry behind our addictions to Twitter, texting, email and other types of seductive/obsessive behaviors.

Swart Caviar of Shot

Opening Seamus Heaney's "Opened Ground" last night, I turned to the Glanmore Sonnets, and what should fall under my eyes but this. If you'd like to read further, all ten of the Glanmore Sonnets are online at The Poetry Foundation. These are the fifth and sixth poems in the sequence, and what beauties of the English language they are.

V.
Soft corrugations in the boortree’s trunk,
Its green young shoots, its rods like freckled solder:
It was our bower as children, a greenish, dank
And snapping memory as I get older.
And elderberry I have learned to call it.
I love its blooms like saucers brimmed with meal,
Its berries a swart caviar of shot,
A buoyant spawn, a light bruised out of purple.
Elderberry? It is shires dreaming wine.
Boortree is bower tree, where I played ‘touching tongues’
And felt another’s texture quick on mine.
So, etymologist of roots and graftings,
I fall back to my tree-house and would crouch
Where small buds shoot and flourish in the hush.

VI.
He lived there in the unsayable lights.
He saw the fuchsia in a drizzling noon,
The elderflower at dusk like a risen moon
And green fields greying on the windswept heights.
‘I will break through,’ he said, ‘what I glazed over
With perfect mist and peaceful absences’—
Sudden and sure as the man who dared the ice
And raced his bike across the Moyola River.
A man we never saw. But in that winter
Of nineteen forty-seven, when the snow
Kept the country bright as a studio,
In a cold where things might crystallize or founder,
His story quickened us, a wild white goose
Heard after dark above the drifted house.

Would-be writer, October, 1995

I've been re-reading some old journals. Here's a paragraph written when I was in my early 40s, before I was doing much serious writing, and long before blogging. Which just goes to show you can't predict much of anything about your own life.

I read someone like Hemingway and say, “What do I know about that is worth writing about? I know nothing exotic or foreign or adventurous in the usual sense.” All my adventures are inward, and how many people really want to read about that, at least directly? But you can write about the inward journey by putting it into an outward context. Well, I don’t know. I’m not sure how to do any of this. I just know I want to. These are doubts I have to face down. Talking to an old girlfriend I remembered that I do know about one thing, which is small town life. I know a lot about that. But I read something the other day and the descriptions went on for pages and pages and I thought, well I guess this is how you end up with a book, you just elaborate forever. It’s not that it wasn’t interesting or well-written, it just wasn’t necessary. I think I might start and be done in twenty pages; going on like that would feel like a room filled up with finished canvasses - wasteful somehow. So much of what is written and published today seems superfluous to me, not important, not interesting and certainly not even an attempt to be literature. Well, if I keep thinking about it I’ll figure it out.

It's hot here, like it is in the rest of the northeast. Yesterday the cathedral was nearly unbearable, and we all sat and fluttered fans or the service leaflets in front of our faces; when we stood up to sing a psalm I could feel rivulets of sweat running down my stomach and legs. Afterward, one of my friends said that she used to have elderflower water in the summer; it came in a small bottle and if you patted it on your face and neck it would cool you off immediately. I'd never heard of that, but thought we might be able to find out how to make it, and sure enough, my friend V., who was also in on that conversation, sent me this today. I'm not in the country and it's too late for elderflowers, but maybe next summer?(BTW, the picture at the top of the linked page is NOT of elderflowers, which actually look like this.)

I used to make elderberry ink when I was little. Which is one of those things I do know something about, and could probably build a story around. As I've learned over time, it doesn't really take much.

FIsh Friday: Grilled Fish, Romagna Style

If all the subsequent recipes come out as well as this one, we will be very very happy eaters up here.

My first recipe comes from Marcella Hazan's "Essentials of Italian Cooking," the Italian equivalent of Julia Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking." This 1992 volume combines two earlier books, and I like it very much for its simplicity and comprehensiveness, and the emphasis on the best, absolutely fresh ingredients. Regardless of where we all live, the world has become much smaller, and it's possible now to find ingredients that were unavailable or even unknown when I was learning to cook several decades ago. However, there's nothing exotic about this meal - it's the essence of summer, with an Italian twist.

According to the author, this is how fish is often grilled in Romagna, on the northern Adriatic coast. It couldn't be simpler, and although I've cooked marinated fish steaks before, the secret here is the inclusion of bread crumbs during the marinating process, which hold the marinade and then form a delicious crust on the outside of the fish. You can use a whole fish or, as I did today, fish steaks - this was a very nice 1-pound piece of swordfish. I served the grilled fish with an Italian potato salad (potatoes cooked quickly, cut in 1/4 inch slices, tossed with 3 T red wine vinegar, kept at room emperature and then tossed with olive oil, salt and pepper before serving); quickly boiled green beans with olive oil and lemon peel, also at room temperature; and fresh tomatoes with basil, balsamic vinegar, and a little bit of sugar. Add a chilled white wine and a little bread to sop up the juices and you'll be in fish heaven.

So: first wash the fish steaks in cold water and pat them dry with paper towels. Sprinkle them with quite a lot of salt and pepper. In a flat dish (I used a pyrex pie plate) whisk together 1/4 cup good quality extra-virgin olive oil and the juice of half a lemon, plus some finely chopped fresh rosemary, or 1/2 teaspoon dried. Put the fish into this mixture and turn it over a couple of times. Now take 1/4 cup plain, fine bread crumbs and coat the fish on both sides - pat it onto the fish so it will stick, and carefully turn the steaks over and do the same thing to the other side. The crumbs should absorb some of the oil. Now let them sit for 1-2 hours, turning them once and re-patting the crumbs to form an even coating.

When you're ready to eat, preheat a charcoal grill or a broiler - I used our regular electric broiler in the stove - and let it get hot - 15 minutes for an inside broiler, white ash on charcoal or wood. Grill the fish 4-5 inches from the heat, basting with any leftover marinade - I cooked these 3/4" steaks 5 minutes on the first side, 4 minutes on the second. Serve immediately, garnished with more rosemary sprigs or lemon slices if you want. It was the most succulent swordfish I've ever tasted, and J. agreed!

Surfacing: is it fresh or salt water?

My absence here, other than the space filled by Herr Mozart, has been due to busyness, at first, then fatigue, and then a bit of depression. I hope I'm coming out of the latter, or pulling myself out, would be more accurate, since that's what it feels like. I figured I might have some trouble once we got up here and had time to think, and it happened. Now I hope the determination to be and feel OK will continue.

Yesterday we had a lovely visit from fellow blogger and New Hampshire-ite Margaret Evans Porter (Periodic Pearls) (above) and her husband, who were in Montreal for their annual summer trip; the beautiful Ontario yellow plums made yet another appearance at lunch on our terrace and Margaret and I talked about writing and blogging while our husbands took photos and ate olive bread from the local bakery, chicken salad made by yours truly and a green salad made by J.,  with a chilled Quebec rose followed by Arabic coffee, fruit, and homemade almond-hazelnut biscotti. Yumm.

The day's food-and-blogging theme continued in the evening when we went to see "Julie & Julia." Having grown up with Julia Child on TV, and her cookbooks as a kind of bible of technique when I first had a house of my own and the desire to learn more in the kitchen, I loved it.  Today, thinking about how Julie cooked and blogged her way out of her doldrums, I wondered if cooking and blogging at least one recipe per week might be a good and restorative project for me in this food-crazy, food-abundant city. Classic French food is, of course, one obvious option, but in our cholesterol-challenged household that might not be the, um, most prudent choice. ("One can never have too much butter...")

 

Last week, while registering a car at the motor vehicle bureau across the street, we discovered Norref/Odessa, a relatively nearby entrepot (warehouse) of a major fish distributor and wholesaler. They have everything, fresh from the ships: whole and filleted poisson; every kind of fruits de mer (shellfish) you could want; and lots of prepared and specialty items like my favorite bright green seaweed salad. I've wanted to explore fish cookery in more depth for a long time, and in addition to Julia's classic books I have a large number of ethnic and seafood-specific cookbooks, pplus, fo course, all the resources now online. This affordable and beautiful poissonnier is the missing link, so perhaps that's what I'll concentrate on -- but in general it seems like an international focus would be the most appropriate for Montreal - what do you think? A different ingredient or country each week? If any of you readers have other ideas, let me know - what would YOU like to cook and/or eat?

Meanwhile, music continues to console. I'm working on Bach's 5th Partita, which is a new one for me, and it's coming along.

Mostly Not Mozart

Like the author of this article in today's NY Times, I too have harbored a deep-seated resistance to old Wolfgang from my earliest days in music. As a young pianist I played "easy" Mozart - the variations on "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" come to mind immediately and refuse to leave...and as a young flutist I practiced and practiced the Mozart flute concerti in preparation for the dreaded annual NYSSMA competitions, where music students from New York State's high schools performed solo works, scales, and sight-reading for judges who then gave us a score and critical evaluation. I think the terror I felt during those examinations will forever be linked with Mozart in my mind, but that isn't the real reason I disliked his music - it was the repetition, especially (as the Times article notes) in the left hand, and predictability.

Later on in life I discovered Mozart's vocal music - the operas, masses and requiems, the incredible concert arias, and my reaction went in exactly the opposite direction -- I fell in love. This split affection continues to this day; I can barely sit through a Mozart piano concerto, but am in raptures when listening to or performing almost any of his works for voice; perhaps it's the difference (she suggests mischievously) between music he wrote to please his father or patrons, and the music he wrote for love.