I didn’t know much about Julia Child before this month.  I recognized her name and image because even in rural Nova Scotia, with only three TV channels in the 80s and 90s, she was a celebrity chef.  But other than recognition, I didn’t know much else.  And perhaps many 30-something’s wouldn’t have known if it wasn’t for the books “My Life in France” and ”Julie and Julia”, which in the last few years have introduced MtAoFC to a new generation.  Both of these books were featured in the movie, “Julie and Julie” (that I still haven’t seen), reaching an even wider audience.    If you only have time for one book, I recommend “My Life in France” as the better book (Julie Powell’s crises of turning 30 grew tiring after the first hundred pages).  “My Life in France” was coauthored by Julia Child and Alex Prud’homme (her grand nephew).  It tells Julia’s pretty incredible story of arriving in France, discovering French cooking, ingredients and markets, going to cooking school, starting her own cooking school and the gruelling process (which she totally loved) of putting together a comprehensive cookbook for an American audience.

If you have never cooked from MtAoFC I recommend giving a couple of recipes a try.  It is easily found at libraries or used bookstores.  I imagine that many of the recipes are even available on the internet.   I made a garlic soup (way better than it sounds), scalloped potatoes, and a spinach soufflé, and they all turned out wonderfully thanks to the meticulously detailed directions offered by Julia Child.  And any meal with as much butter, cheese, egg yolks and heavy cream is guaranteed to be good (unless it is liver – the consensus of our cookbook group was that if the rich sauces in MtAoFC can’t make liver good, nothing can).  And with more calories on offer from a recipe or two than any one or two people should consume alone, it an ideal cookbook to use when cooking with members of your community.

a big worm courtesy of pfly / flickr

In my apartment there are two Rubbermaid bins. Often they are tucked away under a table or bathroom counter. Every once and a while a visitor will notice them and ask why they have holes drilled into their sides. After I respond, the reactions vary from disgust and sometimes edging away from the bin to excitement and asking to have a look inside. In my 5 years of vermicomposting I’ve gotten used to the range of reactions that those bins can generate.

Not everyone is comfortable with worms or composting, and in our overly sanitized and convenient world it isn’t surprising. Why not send your kitchen waste to the curb and then drive to a big box store to buy pre-made compost? Well, first of all it costs money. Tax dollars to pick up, ship and process all that food waste and then your money to buy the compost. Second, food waste is a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, including the shipping and processing if you live in a place that has curbside composting and methane, a greenhouse gas 21 times as potent as carbon dioxide, when food waste forced to undergo anaerobic composting (without air since it is sealed up in a trash bag and often buried).

Living in an apartment or condo without a backyard limits composting options. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t join the composting community. If you are flush with money and have a space for a new appliance, there is the Red Dragon electric indoor composter.  The main issue with this product is energy use, which is 60 kwhr per month or 720 kwhr per year.  If you live in a place where the energy mix Is mostly renewables (like BC) and are willing to take the financial hit, this might be a great option.  It is really fast and takes a very wide range of organic waste.

The other main option for indoor composting is vermicomposting or composting with worms, which is cheaper and more space efficient. Once set up the worms are pretty low maintenance, they need to be fed once a week and a couple of times a year the compost (or worm poo) needs to be harvested. They don’t smell, they don’t try to escape and they don’t attract pests, unless you do something really wrong. Once I got the hang of knowing how much, often and what to feed them they’ve not smelled like anything other than great compost (not rotting food). The only time they tried to escape the bin was during a heat wave one summer when the temperature felt like +40 with humidex, which had made me escape the city already. And by rinsing or freezing all food before giving it to the worm, fruit flies and other pests haven’t been an issue. If you are interested in getting into vermicomposting, there are a lot of great resources and if you know someone already doing it, odds are you can pick up some free worms from them.

The book opens with the author’s story of struggles with own curly hair and peppered throughout the book are “curl confessions” that I instantly could relate to. The core idea in the book is that curly hair is different and that as a person with curly hair reading this book you are not alone. In fact there are at least 6 types of different curly hair that all have different style and maintenance requirements. I easily identified my hair as corkscrew curls. Curls that contract as tightly as a French Poodles if cut too short – Check. A high frizz factor – Check. Hair that appears thickly textured when you look at it all together, but is baby fine and delicate when looked at in a single strand – Check. Hair that soaks up as much conditioner as you feed it – Check. A spring factor of 9-12 inches – Check. It was an amazing feeling to finally have someone, even if it was a far away author, understand my hair after feeling alone when it came to hair for so long. And it jived with my wish to choose products that were lower impact, non-scented and just cheaper. And through this book, now in its second run, and the connective powers of the internet (such as http://www.naturallycurly.com/) there is a curly community emerging.

Now, back to the no washing and no combing part because that is where people get hung up when I start talking about what I’ve done and perhaps it is the reason you still are (or perhaps aren’t) reading this.  By no washing, I actually mean no shampooing (referred to by the author as no-poo). But in turn I have started cleansing my scalp and all my hair actually needs is lots of conditioner (as much as it can absorb, which turns out to be quite a bit) rather than being stripped of moisture and natural oils by detergents in the shampoo. And while conditioning, I detangle my hair with my hands, so no combing or brushing is need later when it would disturb the natural formation of the curl and create a halo of frizz. It is all part of the “curly girl method” (there is a chapter each on kids and guys at the back of the book, but overall the book is pretty focused on the experience of women).

So if you are a curly girl (or curly guy that is OK reading a book with “girl” in the title), I would recommend taking a look at this book and the online communities that have come around since perhaps that last time you looked.

–

Masthead photo courtesy of Monkey Mash Button

Check something (if not many things off) your bucket list.
Our time on earth is limited.  We all have lots of things we would like to do someday but it is so easy to let the routine of busy schedules get in the way.  If you don’t have a bucket list of things that you want to do someday, make one, and then prioritize a couple of things that you can do this year.  It will help with the mental preparation for the end of the world if you know that you have a few less things outstanding.

Explore apocalyptic/dystopian scenarios through novels and film.
While the earlier debate in this series of computers vs. zombies may have you convinced of how the end will come, it seems to me that there are lots of other options for how the world could end.  It could be a flood, it could be a nuclear winter, it could be a plague, it could be World War III, or it could just be the end of the world as we know it with corporations, governments, the media, and/or all of humanity changing how we live in terrible, horrific ways.  Thankfully, the human imagination has explored countless scenarios already through the genre of dystopian novels and film, and even has the sub-genre specializing in apocalypse.  Wikipedia has compiled extensive summary, so check out a few to see what we might be in for.

Prepare a community asset map.
When the apocalypse comes, you will not be alone.  You need to look around you to think about how your community will cope.  And this shouldn’t be an exercise in who is the best candidate to be the “Piggy” on your island.  Instead, I would suggest that through your networks and neighbourhood there are many strengths and opportunities that you haven’t yet discovered.  You need to look around you in a positive way to maximize your chances during the apocalypse and work together to leverage the skills, knowledge and resources that are on hand or can be developed.

Develop outdoor skills.
While the world is ending, odds are food, water, energy, transportation and many of the other things that we enjoy in our everyday lives will stop being as readily available to us.  Plus zombies tend to congregate in urban centres. One of the best ways to prepare for this is to head outside and start learning skills like building fires, sleeping outside, purifying water, traveling by human power (hiking, skiing, canoeing), and protecting food stores from wildlife.

Begin a physical training program.
It might come down to survival of the fittest, so a key part of apocalypse preparation should be physical conditioning (as tempting as it might be to live on a diet of beer and cheese the last couple of months).  You might need to doing some outrunning, some climbing, or some squeezing into awkward spaces if you want to survive. So the generally recommended mix of cardio, strength and flexibility training is likely a good baseline for end of the world preparation. Zombies are slow, but persistent, so focus on endurance training.

Pack an apocalypse emergency kit.
Most of us aren’t even ready with a 72 hour emergency kit that the federal government recommends for natural disasters.  So that isn’t a bad place to start and there is already a great Gumboot post on this.  Since we don’t know how it is going to go down, it would likely pay to have the kit remain fairly light weight and portable in case you need to be on the move.  The bonus is that it shouldn’t be prohibitively expensive and if you already have camp gear most of it can play double duty. Thinks about adapting this kit to include tools practical to both dig gardens and for zombie defense.

Have a plan for December 21.
A combination apocalypse and solstice calls for special plans.  Whether it is a grand party or more low key celebration, you should do have something to do that day to keep you busy up until the end, however it might come.  It is a great chance for reflection, celebration, and exploration of the potential if tomorrow does somehow come.  And most importantly, a time to feast and share.

And in the off chance that the Mayans were wrong, by using this list you still have done something you’ve always wanted to do, explored a genre of literature and film, got to know the strengths and potential of your community, are in better shape, explored the great outdoors, have an emergency kit on hand, and had the great party.  Not a bad way to spend 2012.

Getting (and Sleeping) Outside.

I wasn’t always a fan of spending time outside in winter until I started running a few years ago and kept on running right through winter.  (Check out Jim’s past post on the lonely community of winter runners).  I then realized that being outside in winter makes those dark vitamin D deprived months a lot better. Sure there aren’t seemly endless hours of sunshine and instead there are layers of every type of clothing imaginable, but there also aren’t sunburns or mosquitoes.  This year, Jim and I are taking our quest to embrace winter a step further with our plan to complete a whole year of camping every month.  And after sleeping outside on Dec. 23 and Dec. 24, with temperature dipping close to -20C the first night and waking up to a white Christmas the next, I can say that I’m looking forward to more outside time in the months ahead.

Seasonal Hobbies (and hobbies that adapt to the season).

When I’m not outside in winter I enjoy being curled up on a coach with cat on my lap, watching TV, which I do way more of in the winter (I’m re-watching The Wire right now).  Two additional hobbies make this better, knitting and beer.  I’m a seasonal knitter and it wasn’t until last week that I picked up the needles again, which coincided with Toronto’s first substantial snowfall.  It means that when my tendency is more towards hibernation than outside, I end up with something cozy coincidentally makes winter better.  Beer, which I’ve recently started brewing, had to undergo some adaptations for winter, which we’re still working out.  The brewery has moved from friends’  backward to our apartment for the winter, where our back deck’s overhang and ground-level bathtub (for the beer chilling) means we can brew through the cold months.  And as long as we figure out how to adjust for the higher evaporation rate in winter we’ll keep ending up with amazing beer.

Tomatoes, Endings and Beginnings

And finally, what would one of my lists be without a reference to tomatoes.  I’ve just cooked my last fresh tomatoes a couple of days ago. That’s right, tomatoes that I grew on my back deck that have been slowly ripening wrapped in newspaper in the months since they’ve been picked in the fall.  They were delicious.  And while that should make me sad, it is only a mere month and a half until I plant tomato seeds again.  In the meantime, I have cans of crushed tomatoes, homemade salsa, pizza sauce, and ketchup for the down-time in mid-winter.

What makes you happy about winter? 

Food Charters are still fairly new.  Toronto has had one since 2000, Sudbury since 2004, and Vancouver since 2007.  In the past three years at least half a dozen other communities have adopted them and even more are starting to work on them.  When a food charter is adopted by a municipal council it becomes a public document to guide decision-making.  It also can be endorsed by other organizations and form the basis of partnerships to work toward common goals.  In many ways, the food charters adopted so far look fairly similar.  I imagine the small steering committee that I’m on could sit down and write it over an afternoon and it wouldn’t look that different from what we are likely to end up with.  But while having a statement of shared values might be the obvious outcome that we want to achieve, an even more important outcome is the relationships that the process of co-developing a Food Charter will forge.

One of the things that I like most about the Food Charter process so far is it has been a tool to bring together stakeholders from a range of different backgrounds, including health, agriculture, environment, tourism, processing, retail, transportation, local, regional and provincial government, social equity, poverty, waste management, and education.  Individuals and organizations that have never been in the same room before have come together to discuss the Food Charter.  To me, this means that even in the main goal of getting a Food Charter adopted doesn’t happen right away that’s OK.  The relationship building that is occurring during the process of meetings and community engagement is already incubating new projects.  Even after one public meeting an action plan to go along with the charter started to emerge and at the top of that list was the need to collaborate, cooperate, network and share.  A new food community is budding and I’m looking forward to being a part of it.

Making bread isn’t new to me.  As a grad student I made bread a lot, even keeping a sourdough starter for a while.  But my schedule was more flexible then, I often worked at home and could adapt my schedule to the rhythm of whatever bread I was making.  That isn’t the case now that I work a regular 8:30 – 4:30 job.  Add in a morning run, commute time, and making dinner and there isn’t much flexibility or time left over to accommodate most bread recipes.  Bread needs to fit my schedule, not the other way around.  And that is where this no-knead bread recipe fits in.  I can mix the ingredients before work, let it rise during the day, shape it for a second rise when I get home, cook dinner as it rises, and it bakes as I’m relaxing. Most of the work is doen by time.  The recipe has been around for a while and was introduced to me a few years ago by a friend in Kingston (who does a bread CSA).  And it wasn’t like it was from an obscure source; it was originally published in the New York Times.  So I am by no means that first who blogged about it (go ahead, Google “no knead bread” and be amazed by the reviews and variations), but I’m going to go ahead and do it anyway. 

So why is this bread a recipe for community?  First of all, it is accessible.  There isn’t any complicated skill involved in getting amazing bread with this recipe.  You need to know how to stir, fold, turn on an oven, and wait for intervals along the way.  Kneading, which is the hardest and messiest part of a lot of bread recipes, is cut out of the equation.  Second, it connects us with our past.  Not that long ago, a lot of bread was made at home or locally in smaller batches.  And that is how it has been for most of the 10,000 years or so that people have been making bread.  The process of turning the basic ingredients of flour, yeast, salt and water into bread and witnessing the steps of that transformation has inspired and astonished us for millennia (like in Christianity, where bread represents the body of Christ).  And thirdly, this bread is one that you can share with your community.  Sure, you won’t believe this when you’ve devoured the first few loaves before they’ve had a chance to fully cool off.  But, as it becomes part of your routine, you will begin to share the bread you’ve made and the recipe with your community.  Enjoy!

No-Knead Bread – New York Times

Adapted from Jim Lahey, Sullivan Street Bakery
Time: About 1½ hours plus 14 to 20 hours’ rising

3 cups all-purpose or bread flour, more for dusting
¼ teaspoon instant yeast
1¼ teaspoons salt
Cornmeal or wheat bran as needed.

1. In a large bowl combine flour, yeast and salt. Add 1 5/8 cups water, and stir until blended; dough will be shaggy and sticky. Cover bowl with plastic wrap. Let dough rest at least 12 hours, preferably about 18, at warm room temperature, about 70 degrees.

2. Dough is ready when its surface is dotted with bubbles. Lightly flour a work surface and place dough on it; sprinkle it with a little more flour and fold it over on itself once or twice. Cover loosely with plastic wrap and let rest about 15 minutes.

3. Using just enough flour to keep dough from sticking to work surface or to your fingers, gently and quickly shape dough into a ball. Generously coat a cotton towel (not terry cloth) with flour, wheat bran or cornmeal; put dough seam side down on towel and dust with more flour, bran or cornmeal. Cover with another cotton towel and let rise for about 2 hours. When it is ready, dough will be more than double in size and will not readily spring back when poked with a finger.

4. At least a half-hour before dough is ready, heat oven to 450 degrees. Put a 6- to 8-quart heavy covered pot (cast iron, enamel, Pyrex or ceramic) in oven as it heats. When dough is ready, carefully remove pot from oven. Slide your hand under towel and turn dough over into pot, seam side up; it may look like a mess, but that is O.K. Shake pan once or twice if dough is unevenly distributed; it will straighten out as it bakes. Cover with lid and bake 30 minutes, then remove lid and bake another 15 to 30 minutes, until loaf is beautifully browned. Cool on a rack.

Yield: One 1½-pound loaf.

The session at Excellence Canada offered examples of how workplaces across the country are taking steps to better address metal health as part of their workplace health and wellness programs that have more traditionally focused on physical health. The activities and topics covered were broad reaching during the discussion, including identifying risk factors in organizations, employee access to benefits when experiencing mental illness, and approaches for how organizations can help their employees cope with challenges and stress in the workplace. The Bell Mental Health Initiatives was one of the projects covered. It is a $50 million commitment to enhancing the lives of Canadians by increasing awareness, understanding and treatment of mental illness across the country by focusing on anti-stigma, care and access, workplace and research. When large corporations like Bell are undergoing a paradigm shift with mental illness (or at least want to brand themselves as having done so), it is a good indicator of how far we’ve come.

The Rendezvous with Madness Film Festival is another indicator. The festival has been around for 19 years. The film I saw was “People in White” and told the stories of psychiatric patients through reenactment with other patients (and a handful of actors representing the stories of real patients. It showed the complexity of the doctor-patient relationship and raised questions about power dynamics and treatment method. It opened a discussion about how realistic these relationships were depicted and how dramatically things have changed in the couple of decades since the festival started, including that such a film that focuses on the stories of patients never would have been told until recently. The venue for the film screening was Workman Arts, an organization dedicated to working with artists with mental illness and promoting art that creates greater understanding of mental illness. It was inspiring to hear how far this project has come and how they have observed and reflected the changing perceptions of mental illness.

–

Masthead photo courtesy of floodllama

Like many things gasoline is complicated.  It has enabled us to live the lives we are now – as a cheap, portable fuel that drives us, our lifestyles, and our economy.  And while the local (as in where we extract oil from) and long-term (as in climate change)  impacts can be devastating, our adoption of gasoline powered engines was considered a cleaner alternative to horses and coal.  And, as I recently was reminded at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, the discovery of gasoline resulted in a significant decline in whaling at a time when whale population depletion was getting critical.

But as you likely already know the ending of the story isn’t looking as good.  Oil is a finite resource, prices at the pump are climbing and climate change is already happening.   Whether these crises significantly affect the way we live in 30 years, 60 years, or even in 100 years, is yet to be seen.  And all the driving we do takes away time from our family, friends and community.  The time we’ve relied on gasoline for how we live, move around and feed ourselves will only be a short blip in human history yet it seems completely normal to so many of us.

To not end on a negative note, even though I’ve generally been feeling pretty blue the last couple of days, I’ll quote the band Po’ Girl and their song “Gasoline” that I listened to on my slow drive home on the 401 today.

Gasoline gasoline
It’s dragged on too long
What should have been
A weekend affair
Cause there are stories to be told
And that’s what we’re made up of oh
All the stories in our hearts cause in our hearts
Is what we are

—

Masthead photo courtesy of Rennett Stowe

Once the Lonely Planet or some other off the shelf travel guide was my only tool to plan trips. But increasingly, the paper books have given way to the Internet. Odds are by now you already know about the many travel websites offering deals and feedback from a community of previous vacationers. If not, you should look into it. This is increasingly the way most people I know make their travel decisions. But beyond the basics of the where to stay and what the key attractions are the Internet is offering way more. For Jim and I this means that we are getting to know and even starting to contribute to online communities around two of our current main vacation interests: canoeing and beer.

The traditional guides for canoeing in Ontario are park maps and a single prolific author on canoe routes, Kevin Callan.  These are still great resources to access, but choosing the right trip at the right time of year is the key challenge in planning a successful trip. Online paddling communities, such as Canadian Canoe Routes offer a forum to share trip routes, provide advice, and learn about seasonal differences in a region. Other sites like Virtual Algonquin and Algonquin Map provided more specific details on Algonquin for our trip planning this summer and fall. These resources have meant we were able to get off the beaten track in August when some parts of the park get booked to capacity and let us know when to check out the most popular lakes, like Canoe Lake, without being steamrolled by the crowds.  As new canoeists, it meant were were able to have multiple great vacations in our first year.

Travel guides for good beer seem to be few and far between in published form. But online there are thriving beer communities offering advice on the best places to get pints in whatever town you might be in.
My favourite is Beer Advocate – offering listings and user ratings for breweries, eateries, bars, retailers and u-brews. It offers a crash course in great craft beer no matter what city in North American you are in.  Another great resource is The Beer Mapping Project, helpful for thirsty travelers to get acquainted with the local beer landscape.  And there are what seems like countless more resources, recommendations, and reviews out there to guide the way to better beer rather than large scale commercial brews that I could just as easily find in the bar around the corner from where I live.

The Internet is now my main gateway to traveling. It lets me get closer to communities that share my interests and gain more intimate knowledge of a space that I will only be in for a short period of time. And very little of this knowledge, advice or tips would be available to me without the previous travelers or generous locals that took the time to share and document their experiences. Bon voyage!