Coffee-crusted ribeye steak on risotto-style barley with cremini mushrooms and asiago cheese, red wine reduction, candied carrots, and pickled carrot greens

I’ve recently turned my Tumblr into a food blog.

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This was playing on CBC Radio 2 this morning when I woke up, and I assumed it was a Leonard Cohen cover I hadn’t heard yet. Appropriately it’s his son, finally letting his father’s influence show.

Playing notes

Cohen switches things up a lot throughout the song. Don’t always play the high E string, and throw in some hammer-ons to get the sound right. The G/F#, G/B, and A7sus4 chords are transitional, so you can leave them out if you’re having trouble.

The chords

Capo VI

C: x32033
G: 320033
Em: 022033
D: xx0233
G/F#: 2x0033
G/B: x20033
A7sus4: xx2233

Intro:

C G

C                                    G
    I know what you look like in the morning
                         C
Your kisses are soft and warm
                            G
I can draw you with my eyes closed
                                     C
See you with nothing on but the radi-o
                                    G
I know how many years of French you took
                                    C
Your favourite movies, your favourite books
                            G
I know what really gets you going... glowing

  Em             D                      C
I know where you go with your beautiful friends
  Em            D          C
I know what you taste like when the night ends

G                                          Em
   I know the kind of thing that makes you laugh
                                      C
The way you tilt your head for a photograph
                              G       G/F#
What other guy knows you like that?

G                                        Em
   And I can name the first guy you ever kissed
                               C
I can name the perfume on your wrist
                              G       G/F#
What other guy knows you like that?

    C     G/B
Oh, Anne
    D     A7sus4
Oh, Anne

C                                      G
   I know what you want by what you're wearing
                            C
The kind of night you're preparing
                                      G
I know what your hands do when you're kissing
                                         C
Your number one and number two favourite positions
                     G
I know how your skin glistens... listen

  Em             D                      C
I know where you go with your beautiful friends
  Em            D          C
I know what you taste like when the night ends

G                                          Em
   I know the kind of thing that makes you laugh
                                      C
The way you tilt your head for a photograph
                              G       G/F#
What other guy knows you like that?

G                                        Em
   And I can name the first guy you ever kissed
                               C
I can name the perfume on your wrist
                              G       G/F#
What other guy knows you like that?

    C     G/B
Oh, Anne
    D     A7sus4
Oh, Anne
    C     G/B
Oh, Anne
    D     A7sus4
Oh, Anne

  Em             D                      C
I know where you go with your beautiful friends
  Em            D          C
I know what you taste like when the night ends

G                                          Em
   I know the kind of thing that makes you laugh
                                      C
The way you tilt your head for a photograph
                              G       G/F#
What other guy knows you like that?

G                                        Em
   And I can name the first guy you ever kissed
                               C
I can name the perfume on your wrist
                              G       G/F#
What other guy knows you like that?

    C     G/B
Oh, Anne
    D     A7sus4
Oh, Anne
    C     G/B
Oh, Anne
    D     A7sus4
Oh, Anne

The video

Something I wrote for my niece.

I’ve redesigned my portfolio.

About halfway home, parked next to the mailbox on the super short block between these parallel streets that started with F, I could see a car parked beneath a rare streetlight. There were five men in the car, and one sitting in the back right was turned around staring at me. I started getting very nervous, but for some ridiculous reason I didn’t even cross the street and just kept walking.

When I passed the car’s rear bumper, the driver’s side door opened and a very tall man stepped out. He was speaking to me in French, but I was still shaking off my former Nova Scotian lack thereof and only caught a few words: “knife,” “killed,” and “danger.” I out-of-mind frantically apologized in awful Franglais and asked him to repeat himself; if I was being threatened I figured it was important I knew the terms. “Oh you’re English,” he said. Then he gave me a pamphlet and started talking about God.

On the pamphlet’s cover I saw “Jehovah’s Witness.” My mind slowly started coming back and I heard the tall man talking about how the stabbing represents the lack of God in today’s society, and was telling me about their church just down one of the parallel streets. My panic immediately turned to ecstatic joy, I enthusiastically shook his hand, and told him that I would definitely see him on the weekend; anything I could do to leave immediately. I had to stop a block later because my legs were shaking.

The first Jehovah’s Witness I met was in elementary school. We were at the age where boys chased girls, but when we caught them we didn’t know what to do because we still thought they were “icky.” This new girl moved in next door to the girl with leukemia; the thing I remember most about her was a complete lack of punctuation. She would write an entire page of words without commas or periods. She also decided that I, specifically, needed to be chased—but when she caught me, she knew what to do. Unfortunately it wasn’t the kind of thing they make growing up movies about, but incredibly strong punches to my arm. For years I thought the main tenants of being a Jehovah’s Witness were violence and a lacking punctuation.

When the Christian element left our family for good, my Mom fully rediscovered her Judaism and started taking my brother and I to synagogue. We had the distinction of being Lower Sackville’s only Jewish family, and when my brother graduated to high school I was the only Jew at Cavalier Drive Elementary. They were legally obliged to put up Chanukah signs for my benefit alone.

Before that we used to celebrate Christmas and Easter—I liked Christmas. Unlike Chanukah, it was gifts sans prayer; but Easter always confounded me. A jolly fat man travelling the world giving presents made sense, but a giant bunny who left chocolate eggs in a basket filled with plastic tinsel never did. Then there was that one year that I had a dream the Easter Bunny left me a Mario tee-shirt and I was so excited then equally disappointed when I woke up and it wasn’t there. It took me a few months before I truly believed someone hadn’t put it there, then removed it before I woke up as some kind of evil prank.

In grade seven I did particularly well on the Pascal math competition and was ranked 7th amongst Nova Scotian students. First place was a girl who went to my synagogue. It was decided that I was going to have a Bar Mitzvah, and that meant learning at least basic Hebrew, so I went to a few classes with First Place. One day before class we were all hanging out and First Place was telling about the week earlier, how she made out with someone in the coat room at a funeral. For the rest of the night I couldn’t think of anything but “people actually make out in coat rooms?! At funerals?! And they’re better than me at math?!”

My first experience with religion was a family friend, Tina. She was a Christadelphian and taught Bible studies, so I learned about the Old Testament. It didn’t go so well for since I couldn’t get past the idea of Adam and Eve populating the world. I was old enough to know that incest was wrong and couldn’t understand how an entire world’s worth of people could be formed that way and still be healthy. “Once Able was killed, that left Adam, Eve, and Cain. Did Eve and Cain have a baby? Isn’t it wrong to have a baby with your son? After the flood, didn’t they have to start all over again? How is it possible that everyone isn’t a genetic abnormality?”

In University I took a course on The Bible as Literature, and it was one of my absolute favourites. I didn’t write a single paper afterwards that didn’t include The Bible in the Works CIted list, and all those allusions I never understood suddenly made sense. In class the professor would read a bit, and then we’d discuss its implication within the world of literature. One day we did the book of Job and it was time for discussion. I’d never read Job and was confused so I raised my hand:

Me: So God and the Devil were just hanging out one day and decided to make a bet?
Prof: Yes
Me:Then God tortures Job, kills his animals, destroys his home, and eventually his family?
Prof: Yes
Me: And by the end, because he never lost his faith, God gives him newer better everything?
Prof: Yes
Me: His original family is still dead?
Prof: Yes
Me: So the moral is have faith in God, and one day you might get rewarded with a better family?

One summer the family headed to Kingston for my cousin Natalie’s Bat Mitzvah. I hadn’t been to Synagogue for about seven years at that point, but while I wasn’t feeling the whole “religion” thing, I still automatically covered my head when I heard Hebrew. Natalie’s awesome and I was happy to be the proud cousin until I was informed it was an Orthodox synagogue—men and women weren’t allowed to be in the same room. The idea is that women menstruate so they’re dirty, and they distract men from their prayer. I wanted no part of that and spent most of the time looking after our dog, Shaina, outside.

At one point I got sick of it all and decided I wanted to see my cousin on stage. I went sneaking around until I found a room occupied only by a very Orthodox-looking man: curly hair, beard, and sideburns. He looked startled and slightly ashamed when he turned around, but I quickly explained that I was just trying to find a way to see my cousin. Turns out he was Natalie’s grandfather (we’d never met) and was also looking for a place to see her, so we took turns peering through a crack in the door while the other kept watch. I officially renounced Judaism the week later.

The day the Mormons came to town I was home alone with Shaina, waiting another hour or so for my friend to come pick me up. Shaina was yapping from the doorbell so I picked her up, opened the door, and was greeted by two of the most clean men I’ve seen in my life. They wanted to talk, and I was bored, so I said “sure.” We spent the next 45 minutes in my door frame talking about religion, the entire time I had Shaina in my arms.

I have a healthy respect and curiosity for all religions and, in between cheesy jokes about “how lucky we are that they had cameras back then!” I learned a lot. But I was bored and listening only goes so far, so I started asking a lot of questions. I developed a theory, based only on what they told me, that their text actually referred to three separate deities. One was adamant that I was wrong, but the other said “yeah…” and was very silent for a while. Later on I was questioning their reasoning behind their faith, and why they were Mormons. I was comparing similarities between other religions, mentioned a few inconsistencies of their’s, and spoke about parental pressures. Mr. Yeah from before stopped his silence and started asking me questions about my interpretations. He kept saying things like “that makes a lot of sense.”

At this point the other guy looked vaguely panicked and said they had to go. He wanted to give me a copy of their Bible, but I refused telling him that I’d never get around to looking at it and didn’t want to waste the paper. But, luckily, I had an extra copy of the Torah (this was a bluff, I had no copies) if he wanted to explore some of the themes we had been discussing. There was a fumbling of ties, and he eventually refused on the same grounds I gave him. A couple days later I was headed to school and saw them walking down the street towards out house. “Mom! Don’t bother answering the doorbell, it’s just the Mormons!” I found out later that night they skipped right by our house and never visited again.

In college I wrote for the school newspaper. My first column was a silly examination of the Ten Commandments and how their moralistic implications were largely irrelevant in today’s society. The fact that it made any kind of sense, let alone poignancy, was a complete fluke, but I suddenly had strangers asking if I was “that guy who wrote that article on the Ten Commandments” and saying it was the only thought-provoking thing in the entire paper. So I was offered a regular “thought-provoking” column and was promoted to co-editor. I ended up refusing to keep office hours, wrote puff pieces for the local tattoo/piercing parlour in exchange for free work, and used my credentials to interview a few of my favourite musicians and authors. Then I resigned.

Also in college, I met a friend named Dany. He was very Catholic and an amazing illustrator—we used to have long discussions about faith and art. Even though I didn’t believe a word he said—and he knew that—I was the only person who respected that his beliefs were real to him, and I was the only person he could talk to about it. I once wrote an article comparing Jesus (real) cool to Fonzie (tacky) cool and, as a present, Dany drew me a two-part comic strip involving me, Jesus, and Happy Days. It finishes with Jesus yelling “hurts doesn’t it, bitch?!” at the crucifixion (future Jesus and I were visiting on my time-travelling couch) and blaming it on me.

A couple years ago I was headed to a band practice and saw a largish man get on the bus. I knew, even though I had an acoustic guitar already crushing me into my seat, he was going to choose the seat right next to me. Sure enough I was soon engaged in conversation and was trying to describe the kind of music we played. Then he asked if I played any gospel music, so I tried steering the conversation elsewhere and asked what he did. Turns out he was studying Christianity and was working as a missionary, so we started talking about God.

I made a few jokes about the way he was describing things, and we had a surprisingly fun conversation—he had an excellent sense of humour which downplayed the whole “he’s trying to save me” angle. At one point I looked up and realized I’d missed my bus stop, so told him I had to go and “I totally blame you for making me miss my stop.” He laughed, shook my hand, and said “and God blames you!”

I still have no idea what that means, but of all the times people have tried to “save” me it was easily the most entertaining.

Original post.

When I was really young, we had a rule that you couldn’t leave the table until dinner was finished. This usually worked out well as the Cosby Show was on at 6:30pm and, provided something going horribly awry, I’d get to watch my favourite show. The only cogs came on the nights we were served beef. The rest of my family finished eating like usual, but I’d stay at the table until well past 7:00pm, sometimes long enough to hear the closing credits of whatever show ended at 7:30pm. For some reason, I just couldn’t swallow. I’d chew, chew, chew, and nothing. It was assumed I was a fussy eater, but I was physically unable to swallow.

I was a very lonely child, and always felt a strong connection to my dogs. At 14, I had the dubious honour of being the only family member to have witnessed both of our previous dogs die (one had a seizure, and the other was a hit and run). I always had a hard time dealing with my pets being gone, and always felt tremendous guilt—especially for the second one, Cindel, who I promised would make it as she struggled for her last breaths.

As I got older and more aware of what I was actually eating, it became increasingly difficult for me to separate what was on the plate from the animals I liked more than my human friends. I brought up the idea of vegetarianism to my Mom, a former 60s flower child, and she told me that if I wanted to do it, she’d fully support me and do it too. I was about 95% sure I wanted to stop eating meat, but I wasn’t able to make such a lifestyle change. Then that Simpsons episode where Lisa goes vegetarian came on—I figured I could leave that last 5% to coincidence, and I stopped eating meat.

My high school cafeteria was terrible. Worse than Sodexo terrible. The only decent thing they served was chicken nuggets, but they were rare and I never had enough money when they were available. Well, the day after deciding to go vegetarian, I had two dollars in my pocket and instinctively went to see what they were serving—chicken nuggets! I felt a rush of joy immediately followed by this pit in my stomach because I knew I wasn’t going to eat them. That was the last time I craved meat for a long, long time.

Being 14, shy, and vegetarian means a lot of shit from the people around you. I still ate milk and eggs, and it was a game to try logic’ing me into eating meat. In response I developed a very thick skin and a very vulgar response involving menstruation. I also became the self-righteous asshole most people think of when they hear “vegetarian.” It wasn’t just that I stopped eating meat, but I had to tell everyone why they had to stop, too.

Luckily, that phase didn’t even outlast high school, and I mellowed out considerably. I took that attitude that I didn’t care what you ate, just don’t force your opinions on me and don’t kiss me without brushing your teeth. I still got shit from the people around me, but I couldn’t think of a good reason to care anymore.

My Mom was never a foodie. There were a few dishes she made that were great, but it was mostly bland and healthy. We were a very poor family, so edible and nutritious food on the table was remarkable. But I was also a diabetic, meaning that I equated food with obligatory medicines, and I developed a very unhealthy relationship with eating. Meals were grams of carbohydrates, not flavour. The blander the better, because I could just shove it down my throat and go on with my life.

As I got older, I learned how to cook so I could make things taste the way I wanted to—generally tasteless. I knew how to cook better than most of my friends (in University I had a friend who would buy whatever ingredients I asked for just so I’d cook meals he could eat), but unless I was cooking for someone else, my food was 100% utilitarian. I knew technique and I loved the act of cooking, but I had no passion and still hated eating.

About five years go, something changed. I have no idea what happened, but I remember Mom coming to visit and watching in awe as I licked a plate of spaghetti clean. She’d never seen me voluntarily finish a plate, let alone enjoy it to the point that I wanted more. I still didn’t like eating, but I’d grown to respect taste.

I also started watching a lot of cooking shows, particularly the ones like Iron Chef and Good Eats where they focused on ingredients. I’d sit wide-eyed as the chefs butchered whole pigs, served raw fish, and killed shellfish moments before cooking it. When Anthony Bourdain ate that still-beating cobra heart, I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the screen. It wasn’t that it made me hungry, but I was fascinated about how the non-dietarily restricted ate and composed meals. Meat-eating friends asked how I was able to watch the stuff without feeling sick—more than once I was asked to turn programs off so they could eat in peace.

One of the moments I always dreaded was when people found out I was a vegetarian and would respond with “oh, me too!” I knew that nine times out of ten, I was not going to get along with this person. For the life of me I can’t think of a single vegetarian friend, and no one I’ve considered a best friend is vegetarian. The sad truth is that most vegetarians are the judgemental asshole I used to be, unable to see past their own nose. I’d see adults acting the way I did as a confused 15 year old, and I just could not understand.

Vegetarianism is supposed to be thinking about what you’re eating, not arbitrary decisions. If you don’t want to put it in your body, don’t put it in your body. If the things you don’t want to put in your body happen to be meat, fish, and poultry, then you’re a vegetarian and that’s that. The label is supposed to come after you’ve made the decision, not before. If you’re judging what other people are eating, you’ve probably missed the point.

I was growing increasingly fascinated with the non-vegetarian world. When I’d eat out with friends, I’d do my best to make them order the most difficult to pronounce and raw things on the menu because I wanted to know what it tasted like, but I still didn’t want to eat it. I’d gleefully defend anyone being attacked by the aforementioned self-righteous asshole vegetarian. In general, I was a confused mess and mostly still am. While I still hated the act of eating, my new respect of ingredients and love of cooking meant I was eating really good, and really tasty meals. But I also knew I was judging what I was eating without reason, and that’s not OK.

Much like Lisa was a convenient push to vegetarianism, getting sick was the push I needed to move away from it. The years of curiosity combined with grasping at any straw that might make me feel better left me with the decision that I was going to try fish. I had no emotional attachment to fish, and I wanted to try it. For about a month I thought about it daily, trying to rationalize my decision or get some sort of clarity, but nothing came. The last 15 years had completely destroyed any chance I had of making an adult decision about vegetarianism.

So one day I pulled the trigger and headed down to Whole Foods. I still don’t know why I chose Whole Foods, I only go there when I want something ridiculous like truffle butter, but there I was walking to the fish counter. At the last second I freaked out and was overcome with an awful paranoia that I was about be be “caught” and ejected from some imaginary guild of vegetarians. They’d never let me back if I tried fish! So I calmed myself down and forced a single pre-wrapped fillet from the self-serve area in to my basket, then headed for the cash.

I got home and, like I always do when I want to cook something unfamiliar, looked up how Alton Brown does it. I got out a cast iron pan, seared the flesh side, flipped, and threw it in the oven to finish. I had absolutely no frame of reference for how it was supposed to look or taste, and I ended up with an over-cooked dry mess. But, more importantly, I didn’t feel any guilt. My stomach hurt a bit as it got used to this new protein, but otherwise I felt fine. Better than fine really, because I knew this was the start of something new.

The next day I headed down the the Granville Island Market and marched up to a fish counter. One thing I’d always wanted to try was cheeks, and in front of me was a whole tray of halibut cheeks. I bought a couple, asked the guy behind the counter how to cook them, and went home to eat. They were delicious, and I didn’t even overcook them! The Granville Island Market’s become my inner child’s candy store, and every time I go there I try to find something I haven’t had before. If the person ahead of me turns their nose, I take that as a sign I should buy whatever they’re looking at. My enthusiastic curiosity gets rewarded with excellent cooking tips, good prices, and the knowledge that most places will sell you smoked salmon trimmings that cost about four times less than their lox cousins, and taste about four times better.

Health-wise, I gained weight for the first time since I was a teenager. My formerly carb-heavy diet switched to protein-based, and I felt better because my meals were better-rounded. Not miraculous I FEEL AMAZING! better, but just enough to know that I made the right decision. I still haven’t gone past fish, but I don’t feel any need to right now and I’m OK with that. My dislike of eating is now in constant battle with the mad desire to try any and all fish that I haven’t tried before. Somedays I even eat because I want to eat, not because I have to.

Just last month, Mom (still a vegetarian) was asking about my health and what effect fish might have had on it. I knew she wasn’t feeling great and was wondering if she should also start eating fish, but I also knew she didn’t want to. When she became a vegetarian it wasn’t just to support me, but also to relive a previous lifestyle that she had to abandon due to financial issues and responsibilities to her children. I knew that I could easily begin to start convincing her to eat fish, but I didn’t.

The reality is that eating fish didn’t make my health better at all—I’ll be seeing another specialist, and inside another organ, in April. I was of the mind that eating fish is a good thing, and I found myself at that intersection between self-righteous asshole and human being again. But I knew that if it wasn’t her decision, it wasn’t going to be a good decision. Over the past years, I’ve gotten her into cooking almost as much as I am, but the difference is that she thoroughly enjoys eating vegetarian food and actually constructs nutritionally responsible meals. She won’t judge you for eating meat, but she has absolutely no curiosity about how it might fit into her life; so I told her the truth.

There was a disappointment that I couldn’t offer a miracle cure, but there was also a joy that I wasn’t offering something she didn’t really want. Then we went for dinner; I had grilled salmon, she had salad with a cheese side, and it was all delicious.

Original post.