Not An Essayist

This is the new cat, who has been adjusting to our home nicely, but who really needs to stop eating too much kibble in one sitting and then puking. The baby hasn’t even been born yet, and yet I am dealing with so many mammals’ bodily fluids for the past 2-3 days.

May is often a beast of a month for me—a bad-luck month—but in the last few years, November has really been giving May a run for its money as the bad-luck time.

This church has the strangest aesthetic—medieval monastery ruins crossed with 1950s suburban Cape Cod style, with a little Tudor Cottage stucco-and-beam thrown in for good measure.

Vegetable Soup with Tomato, Peanut Butter and Coconut Broth

sesame or vegetable oil, soy sauce
1 rectangle of tofu
1 onion, finely diced
2-3 sticks celery, chopped
7 medium tomatoes, seeded, skinned, and chopped
salt and pepper, or soy sauce
1 inch ginger root, peeled and minced
2-3 garlic cloves, minced
1 cup fresh cilantro leaves, minced
1/2 tsp red pepper flakes or good dollop of sri racha sauce, or both
2 Tbs peanut butter (crunchy)
2 carrots, sliced into coins
1 bunch broccoli, trimmed and cut into smallish florets
1/2 can coconut milk
1 Tbs lime juice

1. Dice the tofu and toss in soy sauce and sesame oil; bake in the oven @ about 425 degrees until done to your liking. I prefer medium tofu to firm, and it takes 45-60 minutes.

2. Seed and blanch tomatoes; peel off the skin and chop up.

3. In the soup pot, saute the onions and celery until transparent.

4. Add the tomatoes; season with salt, pepper, soy sauce. Cook until the tomatoes have reduced.

5. Add the ginger, garlic, cilantro leaves, and red pepper flakes or sri racha sauce. Add the peanut butter and reduce to a simmer; cook for 10 minutes more.

6. Add the carrots and broccoli and cook briefly; try to retain their crunchiness.

7. Stir in the the cooked tofu, coconut milk, and lime juice; make sure the soup is warmed through. Serve.

**this recipe still needs a little work. It’s fine, but I think it could be better.

This is mostly a note to self—I have a bad habit of using decent recipes once and then losing them forever in the intertubes unless I have written them out on an index card. (Conversely, I have at least a dozen index cards I’ve never used and probably will never use. Also, I am aware that the photo is not super, but it is a photo.)

So, starting from this recipe for Zucchini Stew, I made a few changes to make a Zucchini-Vegetable Marrow Stew:

olive oil
1/3 of a cup red lentils, cooked in boiling water until softened.
2 medium zucchini, diced
1 vegetable marrow
3 small onions, half roughly chopped and half finely diced
2-3 cloves garlic, minced
3 biggish beefsteak tomatoes, skinned and seeds removed, chopped
1 yellow and one orange bell pepper, seeded and chopped
About 10 cremini mushrooms, diced
salt and black pepper to taste
roughly a teaspoon of red pepper flakes
about a cup of basil, chopped.

1. Recipes will usually leave this out, but it’s a fair bit of work on its own, so I’m indicating it here: boil water, put the halved and seeded tomatoes into the water for about five minutes, tops, drain hot water and add cold, and then remove the rinsed tomatoes from the water and peel the loose skin off. Chop and set aside.

2. Slice the marrow into discs, toss with oil, and roast in a 400 degree oven until both sides are well done. This can be going on while you deal with the rest of the stew.  

3. In the stew pot, start by frying the diced zucchini in the oil, until you are satisfied that enough water has been cooked out.

4. At that stage, add the onions and mushrooms, cook a few minutes.

5. Add the peppers, garlic, and red pepper flakes, and cook for about a minute.

6. Add the tomatoes, salt and pepper. Add the cooked lentils. When the liquid is bubbling, turn down to a simmer.

7. I simmered it for some time, but after 20-30 minutes, the tomatoes will have liquified enough to add the roasted marrow and half the basil. Cook another 10 minutes, to blend the flavours, and then mix in the remaining basil.

8. Serve on couscous or rice. Garnish with olives or hot peppers, a bit of sour cream or grated parmesan. (Although I ate it without any garnish, and it was fine). 

I suddenly took it into my head to google “spag bog,” a bit of English slang for some kind of cooked dish (in Bridget Jones’ Diary) that I’d never understood. It turns out that it’s just a peculiar short from of “spaghetti bolognese.” In Canada, or at least among people and restaurants I know, we don’t even call it spaghetti bolognese—it’s spaghetti with meat sauce.

One of the results for that search turned up an  older article in the Sun detailing a poll about the average number of dishes in the average British person’s cooking arsenal. Apparently, “Brits stick to just FOUR regular dishes.” That really doesn’t seem like a lot, considering that the poll counts a burger and chips, steak and chips, fish and chips, and sausage and mash as completely different dishes—I’m a little dubious about whether a cook limited to four dishes makes his/her own burger patties or mixes a batter from scratch for the fish. 

At any rate, the article allows me to feel a little smug. The soups in my dinner rotation alone outnumber four recipes. (Although I don’t make my own stock—I’ve tried a few times but would rather use water than go to all that trouble for so little flavour.)

Sarnia’s been on my mind this morning.

I grew up downriver from Sarnia’s Chemical Valley, and went to high school there. The bus picked me up very early; one morning, I thought I was against-all-odds witnessing the northern lights, but it just turned out to be an exceptionally high flame burning off waste at what was then Polysar, outside of Corunna.  

I don’t really like to look into the details of what corporate shenanigans might have done to the environment there, but I occasionally, compulsively, dig up the details. Collectively, the industries located in Lambton County and surrounding areas have demonstrated a pretty cavalier attitude towards the citizenry and land- and waterscapes.

The responsibility stretches in a lot of directions; in addition to the chemical and petro-chemical industries, coal power plants line both sides of the St. Clair River, and the shipping industry has done some pretty sketchy stuff, too. The discharge of ballast water from ships is the likely culprit for the zebra mussel infestation throughout the Great Lakes, now. My mom had some rather alarming memories  of swimming in the river as a child; she claimed that when the ships made a particular kind of noise, you had to book it out of the water, or your feet would be covered with some sort of black gunk.

Other issues are well-documented.

*  Lambton County’s mesothelioma rates went through the roof in the eighties and nineties, and many of the cases were traced back to asbestos exposure at the Holmes Foundry, which was contracted to or owned by Ford Motors and AMC in the sixties and seventies.  [A 1996 Letter in the Scandinavian Journal of Work, Environment and Health cites Lambton County in its discussion of elevated mesothelioma among employees of the petro-chemical industry, as well.] Some other cancers occur at a higher-than-expected rate among the general populace, as well.

*  I was pretty young when Dow chemical spilled 11000 liters of dry cleaning solvent into the St Clair River, creating “the Blob” that just kind of hung around the river bed for years afterwards. It’s been cleaned up relatively recently, but the waterway is generally permeated with chemicals. The St. Clair River is an ongoing “Area of Concern” in the Great Lakes Waterway (for reasons that include “bird or animal deformities or reproductive problems”). Further down the waterway, Friends of the Detroit River, the Michigan Department of Community Health and other organizations posted signs and distributed fliers just last year outlining which fish from the Detroit River were safer to eat, thanks to their relatively minimal chemical exposures. 

*  Relatively recently, residents of Aamjiwnaang First Nation, immediately South of the densest cluster of industrial facilities in Sarnia, have been documenting some alarming phenomena. The most publicized concern involves the statistically significant disparity in the rate of male to female live births that stretches back to the early nineties.  The Aamjiwnaang Health and Environment Committee, along with the Occupation Health Clinic for Ontario Workers, Sarnia Chapter, collaborated with Ecojustice circa 2007 on a 32-page report on the consequences of cumulative air pollution exposures in the region. The report cites significantly elevated hospital admissions for respiratory and cardiovascular illness (page 9) in Sarnia, when compared with relatively nearby communities like Windsor or London, Ontario.  (On page nine, as well, the 39% rate of stillbirth/miscarriage and the approx. 10% rate of “kidney problems” also gave me serious pause.)

* Even nearer to where I lived for nineteen years of my life, a facility called Chinook operated. It closed entirely in the last few years, following a 2007 court case where they plead guilty to several charges related to discharging ammonia into the St. Clair River for eight days.

*  When I was searching for information about what Chinook actually manufactured (I never knew, when I lived within 10 kilometers of the plant), I stumbled across a 72 page document of “Findings and Actions By Company Facility” the document a 2004 Environmental SWAT Team’s inspection sweep of the Sarnia area. Chinook’s “Issues of Concern” include

several unapproved sources of emissions to air without Certificates of Approval, inadequate laboratory analysis records, incomplete registration of wastes, and potential contamination of area ground waters.

Chinook was a pretty little fish in a big pond; there are 27 other facilities, all of which have “issues of concern” ranging from relatively innocuous (such as clerical/documentation concerns, missing contingency plans, or the “Unapproved installation of three fume hoods” at Bayer) to reporting issues, poor maintenance, “fugitive emissions,” exceeding approved emissions, and a whole range of problems with hazardous waste and its storage.  And just because there are “Certificates of Approval,” it’s pretty obvious that what they approve is often far from ideal.

I shouldn’t have skimmed all that; now I feel like I am made of poison, too.

I like the turn of phrase mimi smartypants’ daughter uses for her cat’s mental illness—“brain difficulties.” That sure is an accurate way to describe what it feels like.