Tag Archives: The Guardian

Silence

The audio that accompanies this article in The Guardian broke my heart, and I’m still thinking about it, especially when I hear a new seasonal visitor has returned to nest in the forest near our house. I’m not sure why we humans are continuing to ignore warnings that we have very little time to change how we live to ensure future generations of humans and other species can have a livable planet.

I think part of the problem is that the people who wield the most power in the world live in large cities. Some of them possibly have country homes as well, but they do not have a healthy relationship with nature and therefore don’t care about it beyond what it can give them; they try to control it, bend it to their will, extract from the natural world things that will make them more and more money. It is difficult to care about what you can’t see.

When I lived for a brief time in London in the mid-80s, I knew a young woman who had just moved to the UK from the Cayman Islands. Maria and I both shared much of the excitement and challenges of coming from a small place and living in a massive city, but she had a physical challenge I didn’t have: she was often uncomfortable because she had never worn shoes for any long period of time. She grew up walking on bare feet in sand, not because they were poor, because they weren’t, but because they didn’t need shoes. She found the cobbles and pavement of London hard and noisy, wearing shoes and socks constricting.

She said couldn’t get the sense of the land, couldn’t feel a part of the place without her feet in the sand, in the soil. She was homesick in part because she missed her family, but just as much because of the loss of a connection to the land and the freedom of living so closely with the natural world. To be honest, I didn’t know what she was talking about. Who wanted to live in a backwards rural setting any more? I certainly didn’t. Give me history and theatre and art and Oxford Street and pubs and life!

I lost touch with Maria, but I would bet she returned to her home, and so did I.

I hear a robin.

Take Down The Statues

Gary Younge explains in The Guardian why he thinks all statues erected to honour notable people should come down. I had started to write my thoughts on this last night after Charlottetown City Council voted yesterday to remove a statue of Canada’s first prime minster, Sir John A. MacDonald, after much debate and controversy, but Gary says it all, and far better than I ever could. Take them all down; the future hates our statues.

Moroccan Harira Soup

My go-to soup for forever has been a spinach and chickpea soup from one of Bonnie Stern’s HeartSmart cookbooks. It is very simple and quick to make with pantry items. It is what I fall back on when I don’t know what else to make for lunch.

Jane Jeffes’ beautiful Moroccan harira soup could just knock the Stern soup out of first place, though. I made it today and it was delicious, simple and uses things I always have on hand (I don’t always have fresh cilantro, but almost always have parsley either fresh in the garden or in the freezer). Most soups and stews benefit from sitting for a day and letting all the flavours mingle, but this was super soup right off the bat. It should be unbelievable tomorrow. Sorry, chickpea and spinach, you had a good run, but we are all about the warming spices now!

Courgette My Love

Feeling a bit “squashed” by zucchini? Only two of my summer squash plants made it through the hens picking most of the garden to death, but, really, there have been plenty of zuccs to go around with only two plants!

Thankfully, The Guardian has a cornucopia of courgette recipes. Just made Nigel Slater’s recipe for sweetcorn cake (I didn’t read the part where it makes two cakes, so ended up with one, which was fine), and last week make this rather odd-sounding but completely delicious Creamy Courgette and Tarragon Cobbler. Both vegetarian and easily made vegan and gluten free.

A pro tip from my mother, who used to grow and freeze oodles of corn: cutting corn off a cob is a lousy and potentially dangerous job, so cook your corn on the cob, then pry the kernels off using a fork. They come off the cob easily as you run the fork along, and stay pretty much whole, so no waste. You also don’t slice your thumb off, which makes everything better. I also find steaming corn is better than boiling it, and that’s what I did for the sweetcorn cake recipe.

Vegan Creole Rice

I subscribe to The Guardian because I deeply value their news reporting, but I also really love so many of their food writers and recipes!

This vegan Creole rice by Meera Sodha is delicious and pretty easy. I’ve made it a few times and it is so reliable. Last night we had it with some Mighty Mushroom Bites (oh, the plastic packaging, but so good and vegan!). Tonight I’ll take the leftovers in another directions and serve them with some of Ranald MacFarland’s sausages.

Recipe hack: use bottled roasted peppers if you can’t be bothered to char your own. If you don’t have the jasmine rice they prescribe, buy a little and try it. And now that you have jasmine rice, try a Kylie Kwong fried rice recipe.