Edible Tulip

The Joy of Apricots

I love bulk stores. I have a wonderful health food bulk store a block away where I buy my sesame oil, nori wraps, bulk soba pasta, organic tofu, organic milk, epsom salts, natural deodorant (and no, it doesn't really work but I try it anyway), almond butter, bulk honey, thai-mati rice, herbs and spices, soaps, havla, turbinado sugar and bottles of warm distilled water. I also love anything that is seething, thriving, en masse, in flock, a jumble, basically in bulk. One bright red lentil is just one bright red lentil. But a whole enormous canvas bag of red lentils is a sea of beauty. Same with apricots.

A favourite afternoon snack with herbal tea for years has been dried apricots and raw almonds. A biteful of a bit of both. Tender and chewy and sweet blended with a crunchy slightly salty nutty cohort is the way to go. As I looked around tonight for recipes with apricots (aside from the stewed chicken and lamb dishes) I saw that apricots indeed go perfectly with almonds. I found an apricot and almond biscotti recipe I've been putting off since before Christmas. And I found a few side dishes of grains with apricots and almonds that look interesting. I've posted below one that I culled from the epicurious site. I think the commentary is always helpful with a dish. Here the guinea pig cooks offered additions of lemon zest, cardamom and cinnamon - all excellent choices where almonds and apricots are concerned.

The Relinquished

I've lost my appetite lately so I'll speak through flowers.

"The transformed speaks only to relinquishers. All holders-on are stranglers."
Rainer Maria Rilke, Uncollected Poems

Sometimes to validate pain and loss people think their lives or their selves need to become better because of the experience. Otherwise it's too hard to find meaning in something that only feels traumatic. I keep hearing this from other people: well, you'll LEARN from the experience, or you'll grow from the experience, or you'll become a more compassionate person because of the experience. I say it to myself too because to accept it solely as despair with no meaning feels unbearable to me. I've been living in a quasi-state of excessive sadness for months now. I have tiny ephemeral dreams of moving away, of isolating myself from any more drama, of converting my beliefs and relinquishing my desperate wants into something tangible and pure. I'm holding on and it's strangling me. I'm becoming the strange strangler.

Flowers teach us about cycles. They are a beautiful and fragile moment in time. They bloom in faith knowing that it precipitates their own death. It's all about relinquishing.

Grapefruit Moon Restaurant (or I ate a BLT!)

Grapefruit Moon occupies a corner storefront in an otherwise non-descript block on Bathurst Street north of Bloor and south of Dupont. I'd been there nearly a decade ago meeting an old friend late at night for red wine and midnight reminiscing but I haven't been back since, so, yesterday, when my brother suggested the spot as a place where we could eat a late lunch with my visiting mother (mostly out of convenience since it's merely a block from his house), we concurred.

It blurs the line between diner and cosy restaurant with bar stools lining the kitchen counter and little tables (about 7 of them) set up against the opposite wall with two tables in both window nooks. It's dimly lit even at 3 in the afternoon suitable for the hungover musician/artist/boho/grad student scene it seems to attract. The three of us sat at a formica table by the window and I tried to ignore the refuse from the morning eaters on the floor beside me (ham bits, avocado chunks and large pieces of tomato in dressing). The brunch menu offers various egg dishes and several sandwiches with sides of salad and home fries. I decided to start myself off with a caesar and lo and behold "Caesar Boy" was in the house! My order brought a very talkative excitable young man over to the table doing the pointed gun hand gesture and winking at me. He had a pen with an enormous pink feather in it behind one ear. And he asked if I'd heard about him. Well, no, in fact I hadn't. He seemed to think his caesar sensibilities had earned him a reputation in this town. 5 minutes later he appeared with a glass rimmed in a dense mixture of salt and pepper, filled with a red thick clamato with visible amounts of horseradish floating gleefully, a lemon wedge and a lime wedge, a hanging monkey with two hot pepper rounds on it, some ice and a straw. It was spicy and a touch sweet and a great compliment to my toasted BLT and home fry/salad lunch.

Mom also had the BLT on rye and my brother ordered "the Hoser" (peameal ham on toasted multigrain) but got a sandwich of avocado and tomato while a woman ordering take-out in turn took out the hoser.

The Impervious Egg

While researching and writing an article about eggs (Easter time as street date and all), I uncovered some strange egg lore. I personally agree that eggs seem to taste better when they're farm fresh and picked up out of a basket still warm. But so much of our concept of taste is mythologized around our experience with our food that I know how much better things taste when they are hand picked but I wondered nutritionally about the differences between eggs.

Curiously, brown eggs carry exactly the same nutrition value as white eggs and the colour of the shell is solely related to the colour of the laying hen. Organic eggs are laid from hens that eat organic feed. Omega eggs are laid from hens that are given flaxseed supplements. Brown eggs cost more than white eggs because of the inverse cost to the farmer to feed red hens which tend to be larger than white hens. Eggs also got caught decades ago in a defamation suit about cholesterol which nearly plundered the egg industry. But really, eating cholesterol doesn't raise your cholesterol: your liver produces cholesterol and it generally comes from sugar created out of eating grains. Eggs are one of the purest sources of protein you can find and they are packed with excellent vitamins and minerals. Plus they are fairly low in calories - roughly 70 calories for a large sized hardboiled egg. Week old eggs are MUCH easier to peel (I learned the hard way) than fresh eggs (where the shell comes off in tiny peckish annoying bits and pulls off chunks of the hardened egg white).

I'm into eggs lately. They make excellent brunch dishes scrambled with swiss chard and roasted garlic and they are so easy to add to lunches that lack a certain verve. I also find eggs to be an exceptionally pretty item of food - a fragile shell enveloping a bright yolk and a milky exterior. Buying eggs for me now comes down to the politics of the hen rather than the nutritional value of the egg. If hens are kept to produce eggs at an unnatural rate for a consumer (that'd be us) to eat in luxury than I suppose the least they deserve is the opportunity to live out their dream which is to roam and to scavenge and to peck at their barn mates.