Category Archives: 2021 Archive

INVISIBILITY

POSTED: March 1, 2021

Sometimes I enter writing and poetry contests. And occasionally I even submit to various literary journals and other publications when there is a call for submissions. It is an important thing to do, given my relationship with the publishing industry. I submit, which gives me something to do, and they reject, which gives them something to do.

Occasionally one of those publishing tricksters will actually accept my work, which puts the whole nature of the relationship in peril and makes me question the otherwise perfect harmony of the symbiosis.

So recently I saw a call for submission from a literary journal I like very much, and one that has not broken the perfect relationship of submission / rejection. It was on the topic of Invisibility, something I have some familiarity with, being largely unpublished.

The submissions could be in a variety of forms – essay, poetry, prose.

Some ideas on the topic were swirling around in my head one evening when I headed off to bed to be comforted by The Collected Prose of Elizabeth Bishop. Bishop of course is the Pulitzer prize winning Canadian/American poet. Her prose is not as well known but much of it is based on her own life so reading it is really a window into who she was, and where she came from. But I am rambling again.

While brushing my teeth some elements of a poem started to gel, and I scribbled them down on a pad I keep handy for just such occurrences.

A busy Covid schedule kept me from returning to the task for a few days but I then sat down at my cluttered desk to come back to it, and appropriately enough – the little piece of paper with the scribbled poem was invisible. And this is another aspect of invisibility I have familiarity with. Something that is there but not seen.

Like everyone on the planet, I have characteristics. I have a colour, I have an age, some gender characteristics and I present in a certain way, at times revealing my heritage, character, and perspective, and at times not. When I am with others who share many of my visible characteristics I blend in or disappear as we all look the same to at least some.

When I am with others who don’t have some of those visible characteristics – I am seen. Sometimes in a good way, often not.

I was having a drink with a friend about a year ago, when we could still do that, and he was telling me about a role he had played about a year earlier in a very popular Bollywood film. He is a part-time actor, part-time barista, and full-time gadabout, and was living in Mumbai at the time. He showed me on his phone the credit he had in the film: “OLDER OVERWEIGHT WHITE MAN AT BAR #7”. Yes, that certainly is something for the resume!

As I age, I have come to respect the thoughts of my aging friends (particularly female friends) who have long talked about their invisibility. Once you are over a certain age you seemingly disappear to the general public, and certainly as a creature with any sexual content. It is the reason eyeglass companies and hair colouring salons stay in business. It is a way for people over a certain age to say to the public – “Hey you, look over here, I have red glasses, matching red shoes and blue streaked hair and I am not what you are pre-supposing about me – I am an individual, with thoughts and ideas and a character. And yes, maybe I am even a bit attractive.”

And what of that poem. Well, that’s the thing about invisibility – if you can look beyond what you see, sometimes you find some amazing things. In my case I found that little sheet of paper on my desk, right where I left it. Here is the poem.

SEEN, BUT INVISIBLE

Just about a perfect specimen.

Tall, well proportioned,

Relaxed but confident.

The look was complete.

The shoes, the shorts, the open shirt.

The youth.

Our eyes connected

And as we moved

Closer to the door

My expectations ran ahead

And my plans were with them

For a future ahead. To relive the past.

“Let me get that for you ma’am”

The door was opened,

And the dream was closed.

Django

As always, I am good with people reproducing my work, but please attribute it to me.

CHICKEN CACCIATORE WITH MUSHROOMS FOR VEGETARIANS?

Posted: Feb 15, 2021

I did a little review of the book, JAMIE OLIVER 7 WAYS several weeks ago. As I make it through the recipes some that are particularly good I will do a little shout out on. I have made about a dozen of the recipes from this book to date and one that stands out for me (I have now done it a few times) is in his Mushroom section – Chicken Cacciatore with Mushrooms.

My experience with cookbooks is that most recipes you make the first time faithfully to the recipe. The next time you adopt it for your own tastes or what you have available. If it is something you enjoyed or saw some potential in, and are going to make it a third time you don’t pull out the recipe, but just reproduce it for memory and that’s when you really start to find which ones will come back into your repertoire regularly and you start to adapt them to you, instead of taking what’s offered.

In this dish, Jamie seasons up six chicken thighs, throws them in a large pan with a lid with a tablespoon of oil for ten minutes. After flipping them a few times, he then marries them up with a couple of handfuls of ripped apart mushrooms, about four sprigs of stripped but not chopped rosemary, half a cup of red wine, a couple of red onions finely chopped, and a jar of roasted red bell peppers and keeps it on the burner for about ten minutes. He then puts in a couple medium cans of plum tomatoes, bakes it in the oven at 175 c or 350 f for about an hour. It makes four servings and it’s a good dish, but I found the first time it needed to be put on a little bed of rice to really flesh out a meal.

For me what I found I enjoyed more was rough cutting those onions instead of finely chopping them, and adding a can of mixed beans (lima, kidney, pinto, black). The effect is a bit of a really quick mock cassoulet. This way it also doesn’t need anything else if it is your meal, other than perhaps a nice piece of baguette or two.

This variation also allows you to throttle back on the chicken thighs. There was a time when vegetarianism was a binary thing – you embrace it whole hog – (oops -whole potato?) or you remain a Fred Flintstone type of carnivore. But today, the merits of vegetarianism are not lost on many of us who still eat meat, but have dialed way back on, or eliminated our red meat, and go with a pretty small portion of any kind of animal protein on the plate. So, a dish like this lets you find that place on the carnivore- herbivore spectrum you fit. Perhaps those six chicken thighs can be four or three. You are still getting lots of protein in those beans we have added. At four thighs, this dish is producing four servings so that is a good way to get that animal consumption down but keeping your proteins and complex carbs up.

Next time I am going to see about substituting some big (chewy protein) Portobello mushroom strips or some tofu for the chicken.

Django

BETTER WITH TIME: A REVISIT

POSTED: FEBRUARY 1

As you know from previous posts, I am quite taken with the things to be learned from others and I am always astonished with the nuggets of knowledge or insights that seem to fall out of some people.

Lately I have been observing the ages of the people I admire. Some of the athletes, musicians, artists, writers and advocates that as kids we would call our heroes were usually older than us by at least ten years, but in recent years I have replaced many of those heroes with many who are much younger than I am. A few anomalies exist of course as at times I am impressed with the ideas from people much older than me. People like Malcolm. He is old enough to be my dad, and I can soak up a lot just being around a person like that.

It is also true that sometimes when around these people others are not as noticed yet may also have amazing thoughts and ideas. So when Malcolm’s partner Martha was strolling by En Plein Air one day I was pleased to get to spend some time with her over a coffee. It is always a bit stressed and weird these days maintaining a couple of meters, especially on a boat, but the interaction, in whatever form we can get it, is even more cherished in these times. I think she was out for a bit of change of scenery. Malcolm is quite a thinker but a bit intense and living with him and his various ponderings, prognostications, and pontification’s I would think would could be a bit of a challenge.

She had dropped by when I was writing the post Better With Time and she asked me what I was up to and I let her read it. Most people I have day to day contact with don’t read my posts, or don’t admit to it, as its kind of close to home – like having a personal relationship with your doctor, therapist or parole officer. Other than those I am close to I don’t even reference this website as my writing is not for everyone.

She read it, told me she enjoyed it and we went on to have a good conversation about lots of other things. That was about two months ago.

Today she strolled by for a coffee and with some specific thoughts in mind. She had been reflecting on that Better With Time piece and wanted to share some observations on the notion of “Better with Time”, but not with the same ideas but very different ones. She was thinking specifically about her relationship with Malcolm in all its various phases and all the changes they have been through and how their relationship has grown and become better over their time together. They had met in academia and she had been a graduate student and he was her prof. so the phases of that relationship with this older man have taken a variety of forms.

It was a rambling chat and one that totally engrossed me as she was very candid in her thoughts.

She described her time with Malcolm to me in its various phases of the relationship: Life as a student, life as a muse, life as a partner, and most recently, life as a parent. The challenge of being the younger, less experienced one, and often in the shadow, to being an equal and then with the aging process being the one to make the key decisions and hard choices. I expect this is a common evolution in relationships of people of significantly different ages. That crazy imbalance on some fronts that with the passage of the years and the experiences shifts the balance beam.

Her description of the evolution of their intimacy was quite detailed as well, not in a graphic way but as a poignant description of two younger people satiating the needs as a physical pairing, who age together and the relationship both physically and emotionally evolving in a similar way. [ I am hoping that descriptor was cryptic enough for underage readers to not understand]

When she left, I scribbled down a short poem (almost a haiku, but without enough attention to the syllable count) on the topic of that intimacy intertwined with their relationship and got her thumbs up before posting hit here.

Better With Time

Began as boxing

And the relationship too

Became Ballet.

Django

JAMIE OLIVER SEVEN WAYS

POSTED: January 15, 2021

I usually have a bunch of ideas on the go for my posts. Some are things I will start and then let sit and simmer for a while as if they are a stew, or bouillabaisse, while others just slop out. For some time I have had a little post on the go on cookbooks. The range of topics they can cover, some weird ones I have seen, some recommendations etc. The problem is that I have gotten off track on a regular basis – that pesky U.S. election last year for example.

So now I am off track again and that’s because of Jamie Oliver and Jacques Pepin. They both have new cookbooks out and I have borrowed them from the library and am consuming them like mad.

Now this discussion of Jamie’s new book Jamie Oliver Seven Ways, is not a very objective review. I love this guy. So the most critical I get with him is in comparing one of his books that I LOVE in contrast to another of his books I might LIKE.

Janice and Jim’s daughter Jade does book reviewing for her regular gig and brings lots of insight and depth of knowledge to bear so the reader is not only introduced to the book but often many of the same genre or focus or at least a few that she will use to compare and contrast. So I am going to try to do that as well.

So where do we start? He has written twenty-four books including this one. Of those, some are just his regional diversions – Italy, America, Great Britain, Food Escapes etc. I like those as reading about the area as a bit of a travelogue and intro to the regional or cultural aspects of cooking.

Some are theme based: Superfood, Christmas, Friday Night Feast, Save with Jamie, Ultimate Veg. These are all good reading and interesting and fall into my LIKE category. He does as good a job as most current celeb chefs on these topics.

But where this guy really comes alive is in teaching self confidence in the kitchen and that just oozes out in his books on bigger themes. In this regard three of his early ones really stand out.

The Naked Chef, from 1999

Happy Days With The Naked Chef, 2001

Jamie’s Kitchen, 2002

Jamie at Home, 2007

Jamie’s Food Revolution, 2008 (UK) 2009 (everywhere else)

I referenced earlier Janice and Jim’s daughter Jade, the book reviewer. Several years ago when she had just moved into her first condo, a very small studio unit, she would come home each Sunday to Janice and Jim’s big kitchen and make a dish or two to get her through much of the week for her main dinners. She worked from Jamie’s Happy Days With The Naked Chef. It was when the movie Julie & Julia had just come out and those Sundays were called Jade & Jamie Sundays.

Most of those other books I referenced in the LIKE Category were written during the period 2004 to 2016.

Then in 2017 he wrote the book that I think he will be known for long after he is gone. It is the one that I recommend to anyone who has not spent much time in the kitchen and really wants to enjoy themselves and produce some great meals with not a lot of effort: 5 Ingredients – Quick & Easy Food. If you are buying just one Jamie Oliver book – this is it. If you have the space and money for a second one – Happy Days With The Naked Chef would be the next one to get. Later in this piece I will do a bit more of a ranking of his books.

So where does this new one fit in? Well I think Jamie scared himself a bit with the 5 Ingredients book. He was on a regular thing producing good cookbooks on various themes and running a business and being a good dad and all that and then that 2017 book just flowed out of him and bam – he was back at what he does best – building confidence in the kitchen in lots of people new to this cooking hobby. In it he takes five conventional ingredients and makes a fabulous dish.

Since the launch of the 5 Ingredients book he has put out four books the last one being Jamie Oliver 7 Ways. It is really (and he acknowledges this in his intro) a sequel to 5 Ingredients and building on many of the same elements. Instead of starting on the premise of only using five ingredients in a dish he has identified the 18 ingredients most of us keep on hand and then packaged each of them up in chapters with seven recipes featuring each of those individual ingredients.

He has structured the book with a good index at the front organized as : Fakeaways, Onepan wonders, Traybakes, simple pastas, Salads, soup & Sandwiches as a quick reference to the recipes. But the body of the book is built around each of those 18 ingredients most of us have: Broccoli, Cauliflower, Avocado, Chicken Breast, Sausages, Salmon Fillet, Sweet Potato, Eggplant, Eggs, Ground Meat, Potato, Peppers, Shrimp, White fish Fillet, Whole chicken, Mushrooms, Steak, Pork.

The list would suggest a lot of carnivore dishes but the reality is that about half are vegetarian.

What also makes it attractive is that for the most part he is focusing on ingredients that are not expensive, prepared using simple cooking techniques and as always teaching a lot of “cheats”, those shortcut tricks that every person who has prepared thousands of meals commercially has learned. Traditionally for example cookbooks from celebrity chefs never referenced a freezer for anything other than chilling your sorbet. Well Jamie gets it – we are busy or we live in places that don’t always have fresh components on hand and being able to take something from the freezer to make a great meal is a lifesaver.

For some time Jamie’s books have been formatted with the text on the left hand page showing the ingredient list, the technique & description and a generous image on the right page, and that format continues with this book. On the bottom of the page with the text the components of Fat, protein, sugars etc. are detailed.

So what’s left to tell you? Well, at this point I have made several of the dishes and they have all been crowd pleasers.

The image below ranks Jamie’s books from my perspective.

Ranking Jamie’s Books

I have a few other posts I am working on but sometime in the next few months I will review Jacques Pepin’s new book. I am just starting to try some of the recipes.

Django

YEAR END LETTERS

Posted: Jan 1, 2021

Well, this crazy year is almost behind us. I know for many that it has been an exceptionally bad one.

I don’t believe that we are all in this together. Some have died from Covid, some have been affected by their friends or relatives passing, and others have lost their jobs or their businesses. Many have had delayed surgeries or critical diagnostics on other medical issues. Yet some have prospered or hardly been affected. There is a lot of inequity in the world and that has been highlighted over the last nine months. So, I don’t really think we are all in this together, and for most of us it is difficult to look back at those nine months with any fondness.

But I am wired as an optimist and because of my circumstances in life, both good and bad, that silver lining seems to just jump out at me. Most real friends have become closer. In most families and friendships, petty differences or old grudges have been put aside and most of us have shared in this experience, not equally but shared some common experiences.

It is at this time of the year that I report on the various emails I have received and answer some questions that come up. I do respond to every email I receive, but the one-off types of questions I just respond to individually and if something comes up that has been raised by two or more readers, I respond here. If you look at my last emergency post about two weeks ago, that was a time sensitive response to two people looking to make Christmas dinner for the first time.

The questions below are my rewording of questions that have been posed by more than one reader, and in some cases rephrased to capture the general topic.

HOW DO I PRONOUNCE DJANGO AND CIARA?

This only comes up with people who have only seen this website as anyone I meet in real life hear our names pronounced. Django has a silent D, so it is: JANG – GO

Ciara is Irish and her name has a fine heritage in Irish Gaelic as dark or dark haired, and to some a warrior princess. That is certainly how I think of her as well. Ciara is pronounced: KEE – RAH. The pronunciation of it is significantly enhanced and more authentic after a couple of pints of Guinness.

YOU ARE GETTING BETTER AT PUTTING IN PICTURES BUT WHY ARE THERE NOT MORE OF YOU, CIARA AND EN PLEIN AIR ?

When I worked with Sven, and Justin and Amy, we were involved in activities that had us placed on lists by some pretty questionable countries and those lists don’t go away with time. This all predates 9/11 of course, but the events of that day just made things worse for anyone who had already been flagged. I was just the cook and general helper in the whole operation so was not a target for these countries we had smuggled people out of, but I still have problems travelling and my experience with this has me keeping as low a profile as I can reasonably do, while still functioning and growing as a person. So, in my case when I have had to supply a picture for writing contests, Jim has stepped in and supplied his photo. I appreciate him doing it, but it is a bit insulting as he looks a lot older, and more tired than I do, but it’s not for a fashion shoot. LOL.

Ciara for the longest time was hiding out from her abusive ex-husband and kept a pretty low profile for that reason. He is now gone but his family are still pretty focused on her demise, so she has continued to keep her exposure low as well.

But there is a third character here that you mentioned. En Plein Air has the same problem I do – She is a very distinguishable boat in design and scale, but we try to keep her identity confused by changing her name periodically, and when I show the rare image of her here, it is not in a colour she is currently wearing.

So, I will continue to try to have photos, but that’s why you won’t see many of Ciara, En Plein Air or me.

WITH COVID, A LOT OF US ARE STUCK INSIDE, BUT YOU CAN SAIL AROUND. WHY ARENT YOU DOING THAT?

Ah this is an easy one. Yes, its true that this is the longest we have ever been moored in one place. There are two reasons for this. First, while we made some very good money when we did the run with the doctors at the beginning of Covid (see posts in March and April, 2020) and that put more money in the bank that I have ever seen, my finances have always been for immediate consumption to put a polite spin on it. I am rarely ahead by much. With this situation of Gerhardt and Gabrielle buying our groceries and Malcolm and Martha paying for wine in exchange for me doing the food prep and cooking of the lunches and dinners, our only costs are for our moorage and a few incidentals. To offset those costs I give a demonstration cooking class each week and Ciara does a little med clinic for people living at the marina on a pay-what-you-can basis. The result of all this is that at this point we are not eating further into that lump of cash we got for the doctors job, so at this rate could live here indefinitely!

The second reason we are here is because these are emotionally scary times, and we have a little community we are now part of and that feels really good.

WHATS IN STORE FOR 2021?

Well, some things we can say with certainty and some, well not so much. But here goes.

Stay healthy. At the end of most of the big wars, there were both military people and civilians who died after peace was declared. There are now some vaccines about to be administered and I don’t want to step on a land mine before I get the vaccine. So vigilance will continue to be practiced.
Roll with whatever Covid dictates. I don’t know when I will get a shot of the vaccine, when lockdowns will stop, and when I will feel comfortable hugging again. But Covid sets the agenda and the schedule, and if it turns out that we are in a hot zone and can move to an area that is not, perhaps that’s what we will do, or will just lock down again.
At one point in 2021 Ciara has to go back to Ireland – something to do with her medical accreditation and several months ago I agreed to drop by the police station in Cork to do a statement regarding her Ex’s suicide. But that depends on Covid as well.
In terms of posts, I am working on some book reviews – Jamie Oliver Seven Ways and Jacques Pepin’s new cookbook. I miss getting to move around and so I am going to do a few more pieces on travel – the first one will be on Cap Brun. Beyond that I have some more stories and poetry I am working on.
Sales in the Django store have gone much better than planned, and I am working on two interesting additions for 2021. One is in a trial production run right now but a little held up because of Covid. Stay tuned for that.

PICTURES FROM READERS

Now I don’t get a lot of emails, but every now and again someone will send me a picture or two of images of things they have from The Django Store. If you have bought from there and want to send a picture, please do, and next year I will post them here. If you want to write you can find me at djangobisous@bell.net

Django Apron James H. Kars, Canada

Flag Image Patrick C. Key West

So that’s it for 2020. Stay safe and see you on the other side. My buddy Jim’s new favourite saying is “2021 is going to be a real shot in the arm.” Well even a blind squirrel finds some nuts sometimes, so perhaps he will be correct.

Django