Tag Archives: Django Bisous

THE NEW MILLENNIUM

Posted: March 26, 2017

What a letdown. My watch didn’t stop, the computers still worked and everything seemed about the same. The start of the decade was a bit of a dud after all the hype, but we did not need drama as our work was getting scarier. Amy and Justin had to lie low at many of our ports and we had to alter our usual routines and captain Sven and I started to take on various roles that were way above our pay grade.

With that said I loved being part of a team doing something meaningful. My time working on the cruise ships feeding the already overweight was a good time and had no heavy responsibilities but did little for the sense of self-worth or accomplishment. In my life on En Plein Air while I was not told any of the specifics of the “cargo” we moved I knew they were all individuals who were on the run for a variety of reasons that ranged from challenging injustice or human rights abuses, or for reporting on those kinds of issues or in a few cases simply for being gay. The last time I had felt that I was part of a team doing something that mattered was when I was 17 and in high school and one summer working for a small hospital in a small community in Eastern Ontario. I was a porter and third ambulance driver. I knew I was a very small cog in a big machine but one that relied on all its little cogs to save peoples lives or to make their lives more comfortable. If you are going to spend your day working at something its nice to work at something that matters.

But I am off on telling you about me. Let me tell you about the Janice and Jim for a bit so you can put yourselves to sleep and then I will wake you up for more about my life later.

Janice, Jim, Jade, and Jason had spent the changeover to the new millennium on a ski and snowboard holiday for about a week at Mt. Tremblant, Quebec. If you have not been there I would recommend it if you are in North America. It does not rank with Gstaad or Kitsbuhl etc. as a cute ski village but in the North American context, it is nicer than most places and not a bad spot in the summer as well. It is only a couple hours north of Montreal.

The next decade for them saw massive changes. All for the better I think. In January 2002, Jim, on his 48th birthday retired. Well, that’s how he tells it but I know there was more to it. He had a large successful operation and two operating partners and a company that was the big financial partner. Their company had been successful because of some wonderful alchemy between Jim and one of his partners, John, but there was some animosity with the other partner which eventually led to that partner making the move to buy Jim out. Jim was at a stage to try to do less but that was not in the cards and his “retirement” was actually a not very friendly parting of the ways with the one partner.  Within a year the company was in bad shape and merged with a smaller competitor. I know he keeps up a great relationship with some of the old team and particularly his old partner John but I never hear of the other partner so I guess that’s a comment.

At the time with two kids in high school, Jim set out to reinvent himself. I won’t bore you with all the details but over the rest of the decade he designed, started, ran and then sold a cooking school which still runs (see links we love) invested in a record label which also still runs (see links we love), really got into cooking in  a big way,  and each year would buy and renovate and lease-up a storefront property in Toronto. Over the years he did fourteen of them. Once he was home with the teenagers Janice went back to art school, The Ontario College of Art, in Toronto where she pursued her passion and discovered a new one – poetry.

By the end of the decade, Janice had finished her art degree and was studying poetry while having lots of art success, both kids were off at university and Jim was up to his eyebrows in the cooking school and things were evolving just fine for them.

So back to me. After the events of September 11, 2001 things got a lot tougher for Amy, Justin, Captain Sven and I.  Every port was now tougher to access and traveling by water which had always been largely ignored was now scrutinized. Everyone was a potential terrorist. We would be stopped regularly both while in port but also while in international waters and regular inspections would occur.

It was getting so something would have to change and Justin asked me to design a flag for us to fly occasionally when in port and to be used on a bag so the cargo could find us. I am not a super creative guy so I put together a flag that I thought looked pretty cool but it was soon abandoned as it looked much like the flag of a former state of the Soviet Union. Something was needed that looked familiar but was not from anywhere so I just modified the flag from where my dad and grandma are from in France – Brittany, but I needed to abandon that one eventually as well. Finally, I came up with one that passed all the tests.  I used some colours I had from three t-shirts I had and sewed them together originally by hand for the first one then later had a friend in London sew up both a bag with the flag on it and a really nice large flag. I have an image below but will do some specifics on it at some point in a future post.

By 2004, the heat was really on, we were being stopped all the time. We knew it was not us alone that were being stopped, searched etc. and in all our years at it, we had never had the secret compartments found it was only a matter of time till it would happen.

I knew in June 2004 something was up. Captain had never hugged me and he gave me a big bear hug and said “friends everywhere” then left. Earlier in the day, Amy had kissed me and Justin had hugged me and shook my hand “burn the passports” was his last comment.

We were moored at that point in Helsinki and the next day it was all over the news. A recreational keelboat had exploded about a half-mile out and three people were reported dead. I knew it would be them.

Several days later I received a call from a lawyer in London asking me to visit him. I explained what had happened and he acknowledged that this was about the same thing. This boat is a big thing to move around on my own but over the next week, I managed to make it to Hamburg and then with bad weather forecast traveled by train to London.

He would not meet me at his office so we met at a small café close to his office and overlooking the Regents Canal, very close to where Amy and Justin had kept both a safe house and a barge.

He was elderly, quite nervous and talked very quickly. “So the first point is that Amy, Justin, and Sven are dead.  And the second point is that the people you knew as Amy, Justin and Sven are alive.”

“How?” my face must have asked.

“They have friends everywhere.”

“The third point I need to tell you is that no one will be coming for the boat. It’s not yours but no one has entitlement to it. Keep it, use it, and when you are done, sink it. The boat, like the three people you worked with, do not exist.

It is not saleable as it is not owned. “

“What else do I need to know?” I asked

“Well, nothing really. The world is getting more complex and is increasingly in conflict with itself. You did some good work for a good cause and that is now part of your past. The ongoing existence of the boat helps keep up the deception of the boat being just a nice old yacht if you just use it and it is no longer on the radar of so many states and interests.”

I left the coffee shop in a bit of a daze. I knew we had been doing good stuff but wondered what life was to be like for Sven, Amy, and Justin. And how would I keep and maintain this boat?

When my parents died they left me a small annuity I get each month. It is for $762 per month CDN until I am 95. While working for Amy and Justin I had saved most of what I earned as well as my money from my annuity and invested and at that point had 72,000 Euros and the Canadian annuity coming in each month.

I was an orphan again but at least knew that somewhere those three people still existed.

The remaining six years of the decade were tough ones for me. After meeting with the lawyer I had to address what to do and where to take the boat. En Plein Air was moored in Hamburg but it would only be a matter of time until they wanted more details of its ownership. Captain Sven had told me about a firm of hired captains that could be trusted and the contact person to speak to. When I mentioned Sven’s name they said they would have someone come to help sail it south without charge. The guy could have been Sven’s brother. He helped me get it back to Croatia where It would be warmer year-round for me to work from. Since that time I have basically stayed largely in port, rented the boat to tourists as a place to stay as a bed and breakfast. I do my cooking, have a few local friends and my life was on the uptick until I started having strange neurological and motor skill problems.

I had mentioned that I periodically go back to Canada for several reasons. In 2014 I went back to deal with my banking and a few other things and discovered that I had an event that mimicked a stroke – similar to the ones I had before but worse. I ended up in the hospital and after the immediate shock of getting through it found myself in the waiting room to see the Neurologist at Toronto East General. And that’s where my story links up with Jim again. I have described it in the new section I have just created called  ABOUT.  If you see your self reading many of my posts and you haven’t read the ABOUT section, then go get yourself a coffee or a glass of wine before reading further.

EN PLEIN AIR: LIFE WITH AMY & JUSTIN

Posted December  14, 2016

If you have been reading the previous posts you will know that I was sort of “handed off” by my employer Walter, with a captain named Sven to this couple Amy and Justin to do the same duties on their boat as we had done for Walter on his trawler and then at his townhouse in Brussels. It was December 1994.

This boat was both massive and incongruous. Now I am not a boat nut the way Sven was so I will relate the description he would rattle off and then try to explain it the way I understood it.

It was a twin headsail ketch with a full-length keel. So for those of us who are not boat people, it had two masts, one in the back third of the boat and the main one at around the midpoint in the boat. From the midpoint of the boat back about a third of its length to the rear mast, (basically between the two masts) a large pilothouse consisting of a lot of glass breaks up the deck. Its from here that a skilled operator can maneuver this monster regardless of the weather. It was essentially a motorsailor – a boat that is both a sailboat and a powerboat with a design that is dedicated to both capabilities but with compromises for each.

En Plein Air

 

 

I was to learn over the next few years about its history, mainly after Sven would have a few drinks and like to wax on about such things. It was designed and its construction started in the late 1920s at a shipyard in Brooklyn, New York and was to be a luxury yacht for personal use.

There were actually two under construction at the time. One was for a large industrialist and the other was quietly being built for an unknown buyer.  While never confirmed this second buyer was widely thought to be the shipyard owner and there was officially only one being constructed. Sven speculated that the second one was being done quietly as the designer and the industrialist both thought that it was a custom “one-off” that they were having built. When the big financial meltdown hit in 1929, the shipyard was in a financial mess and the industrialist reneged on the contract and both that custom designed one that was much further along as well as its clone,  sat in the shipyard waiting for someone with cash to resurrect one of the two projects.  That financial strength came in the form of a fellow who had a long history of bootlegging.

The deal was struck for him to buy the one that was not as advanced but that they would strip out parts of the other one to make the transaction work. A separate shipyard was even used as the new buyer was quite secretive and the builder had some of his own secrets to bury.  The reason for this seemingly strange approach was that the new buyer wanted the boat to be a meter (almost 40 inches) longer than originally designed. He also wanted a variety of other modifications including hidden storage facilities, and mechanical equipment that was much larger than a boat like this would usually have. He could not afford to have it sitting in low wind conditions so needed a sailing vessel that had extensive power available.  It was just over 59 ft in length, had oversized water tanks, oversized engine, and large battery storage.

By early 1932, while not finished at that stage it was seaworthy enough to leave the shipyard under power, with masts intact but no sails, no interior finishing and under darkness. By April of that year having been finished in the Caribbean, it began its work life.

For many years “En Plein Air”, as it was christened, moved up and down the Atlantic from Jamaica to the United States. The ship was named by the bootlegger’s girlfriend, a painter. While the French art term translates to “in the open air” the owner liked the name as it suggested to him “in plain sight” as he could sail seemingly with impunity with contraband in its hidden compartments.

By the mid-1930’s the need for the black market transport of alcohol was not necessary but still continued because of the lucrative trade in avoiding taxation and duties until the late 1930s when the owner died under murky circumstances and En Plein Air was sold to a European wine producer who wanted her as a luxury yacht.

Lying in a dock in northern France, early in the occupation of France by Germany it was several months until it became clear to the drydock owners that the owner was not coming back for her and once again she was sold by the shipyard to a private owner for not much more than the value of the storage costs and repairs to that point.

The new owner was not known but the boats new function was.  In the early days of the occupation of France by the Germans while there was conflict there were as many supporters of the “collaboration” as those who saw it for the occupation it was but thought their lives would be better without a conflict. In contrast of course as time went on what became known later as the resistance was quietly building its strength. En Plein Air was one of many boats that had been reconfigured slightly to allow the smuggling of goods and people. This boat with its two major hiding spots, oversized engine, oversized fuel, and water tanks as well as other hidden storage spots took little modification for its new purpose. At the time it flew various flags, had its name painted over many times and moved about the Baltics, around the north sea and  Poland, the Netherlands and France, and as far south as Spain and North Africa. This was all related to me by Sven, a bit of a naval history nut, and immensely proud of En Plein Airs heritage.  He related it with great zeal and I have no reason to doubt the details.

The boat was in impeccable shape operationally and cosmetically kept to look in questionable repair. With only Captain Sven and myself to man it, the sails were up only on the open sea on a straight haul, so anywhere near a port or high traffic areas, we were under power.

Its purpose now in the 1990s was largely the same as during the war – transport dissidents, journalists and others at risk in a very volatile time. When most people in western democracies during the 1990s were enjoying unprecedented wealth, there were a series of conflicts in the world that were becoming more acute every year and while transport by plane was desirable the old fashioned movement by small boats was still the easier approach, at least at that time.

We had several ports all of which were not in the main centres but in smaller communities close to Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Southampton, Marseille, Helsinki and Dubrovnik. There were a few others that we would go to occasionally but these were the main destinations.

And this brings us to Amy and Justin. They were about my age or a little younger so about 40 when we started working together, but unlike me, unbelievably fit, and very focused. While they represented to be a couple they were not very affectionate together and seemed more like working partners than a couple. While attractive they both had fairly non-descript qualities. She was about 1.68 metres ( or 5’6”), medium brown hair, blue eyes and slim. He was about 1.8 metres (5’11” ) and a more muscular build but still slim with a fairly shaved head hiding a receding hairline.  They were both Caucasian and on the pale end of the band.  Other than when at sea Amy and Justin did not stay on the boat and had other accommodation or safe houses in each of our ports.

The routine became quite clear after a short while. Either Captain Sven or myself would be told to find new clothes. “New” meant either new from a store or high quality used clothes which we would wear and wash over a period of time. Whoever was the designated one of us, Sven the larger or me the average size, would wear them all the time and be seen on the deck or around the boat or in the local market buying food at whatever port we were in.  If a female was needed Amy would do the same routine and would have a few wigs she would wear as well. Then one day Justin would take the clothes and we would be told to stay below decks and our clothes would show up with new people in them strolling onto the dock and to the boat, usually with local grocery bags to carry their few possessions. We would go back to wearing those clothes for a day or so and be seen on deck and around the port then we would be off with our cargo of dissidents, journalists, or gay people on their way to another destination.

Sometimes in international waters “the cargo” would be out of their hiding spots but always below deck based on the risk of satellite and drone visuals but when we were leaving or arriving into port at least six hours before,  the cargo would be “put on the shelf” in the two hidden spots.

When the boat had been built originally it was extended by over a meter but the designed interior space had actually been reduced in total length by almost a third of a meter so the effect was not noticeable, even when the plans were consulted, but the two ends housed hidden rooms that were two .65 meter (or over two feet) in length and almost the whole width of the boat, although the one at the bow was pretty tiny given the shape so it was the aft hiding spot that was the workhorse.

A flexible pipe to and from each compartment supplied fresh air in from the main cabin which could also be used to talk to them, and a flexible tube out of each one with a small fan like a computer fan pulled the stale air out and to the engine room. The only access to the two compartments was like a jigsaw puzzle. A trim piece on the floor at the entry to the fore and aft cabins stayed in with gravity and dowels and when lifted, then allowed the tongue and groove floorboards in that cabin to be removed one at a time. This allowed the whole wall (in the case of the one at the bow) and a portion of the wall (in the case of the stern) to be tilted out from the floor and lifted out. So with a carpet on the floor, the sequence would involve a series of steps not contemplated by someone standing on that carpet and the closest we ever saw someone come was to remove the carpet looking for some form of a door, or looking for some hidden door in the removable wall, and when not finding one moving on to other spots on the boat.

There were about half a dozen other small hiding spots, that ranged in size to hold something the size of a loaf of bread down to one that would have not have been large enough to hold two decks of cards. They were all hidden the way jewelry boxes with hidden compartments work.

You can probably tell from my description above there were actually five of us involved in this crazy endeavour – four humans and a pretty cool vintage yacht. Under sail, Captain Sven could get her going pretty well and under power (no sails) she would cruise all day long at about 8 knots (15 km/hr, 9 mph) and Sven could take it up for shorter bursts to almost 12 knots (22 km/hr, 14 mph). These speeds, of course, were not enough to outrun looters or government boats but quick enough to move out of areas fast enough to not be noticed and to get somewhere without the extra time needed.

One of the coolest parts of the boat for me, other than the hidden hiding spots was the power. The boat, when in France in the 1930s had been changed from American to European power, but sometime before Sven and I were brought on it had a major retrofit of all the electricals. Things that could be low voltage were low voltage. There was a wind generator that fed a set of batteries, and a generator that ran on methanol. Actually Sven scolded me one day when I used this description as it actually doesn’t run on methanol, it uses the methanol and has some kind of “methanol-reformer” that used the methanol to convert to something else. This generator from Vancouver could run for days on almost nothing and only gave off a bit of distilled water as its exhaust. I used its water “exhaust” to water the plants on my little potted herb garden on the boat!

But beyond this amazing generator, the switching from a company in Germany was the most impressive. The switches were automatic and would figure out when the batteries were getting too low and would turn on the generator. The boat engine did not have any kind of generator on it so the electrical power for the boat came entirely from the batteries or the generator so there was no additional drag on the engine to generate electricity. So when we would be in port we would never run the engine to generate power, it was the solar or wind generators feeding the batteries and if they were running low the generator would kick on and supply the power as well as charge up the batteries.

I never knew who Amy and Justin worked for, but knew that Walter was somehow involved and when Sven was pushed on it would only comment “They have friends everywhere”. This is also what he said when I first noticed their array of passports and assumed they were fakes. “No, they are all obtained from the passport office of each country and under different names. They have friends everywhere”.  It became a common explanation for much of their arrangements. I carried two passports myself, one originally from France and later the Eurozone and one from Canada as a dual citizen. My father had been French and my mother a French Canadian. Captain Sven was Danish and had only one passport from Sweden for some reason.

I had a food budget and was always paid in cash and was supplied with cash to pay for everything. There was also a small stash of cash kept in an “obvious” hiding place in case we were ever boarded by looters (I don’t want to romanticize them by calling them pirates) when at sea so they would find the stash as our hidden treasure and not be looking further. We kept several expensive-looking watches and a couple of fake diamond rings and two credit cards with limited capacity on them for the same purpose in that spot. The real stash was in one of the smaller hidden compartments on the boat.

Whenever we were in the U.K. I would make arrangements with Captain to leave the boat to go to do a bank deposit of my wages and once or twice a year would go ashore to have a checkup and some dental review.  For the first couple of years, I would try to see my grandmother Bebe once or twice a year until she passed in 1996. Otherwise, I went for about a decade essentially on or near the boat.

Part of my role was security. We kept no conventional guns on board but kept a series of modified defensive tools on hand. About every twelve feet we were within arm’s length of one of our modified flare guns. They were essentially sawed-off shotguns dressed up to look like flares. In the kitchen, I had been provided a hand blender that was equipped as a stun gun. In all my days on the boat while we were overrun by looters several times we never had to use any of these but Captain did a regular drill while at sea to test the equipment. When he first introduced me to it all I was joking about James Bond and he became all serious and reminded me that looters would kill for a pack of cigarettes and most of the authorities we were outmaneuvering,  while more professional than the looters,  would still have no remorse in killing us all,  while in,  or close to, International Waters. As a result, when we would be in potentially bad situations I kept my hand blender close and at times slept with it under my pillow.

At least once every sixteen to eighteen months or so we would be in a safe port and the same crew would show up, no matter which port, put up tarps, do some work on the boat while we were ashore and there would be a new name on her. Its bad luck to change the name of a boat so these were painted on top. Captain used to always tell me “she knows who she is and knows she’s only acting”.  He was quite deep it seemed to me, especially when I would be drinking.

Ah drinking.  I did a lot of that, but only when in port, and only when we did not have “cargo”. So we would go for periods of time when it would be quite a dry time and then a bit of overindulgence. I never saw Amy or Justin drink. I think it was partially because when in port an important part of their job would start when ours would be in hiatus. And then it would be time to get some new clothes, and sometimes cut and bleach or color my hair, and do it all again.

So I went off on this diversion to tell you about my life with Amy and Justin that started in the 1990s. At one point in a future piece, I will relate the significance of the flag we sometimes flew.

The whole time, other than security, or helping Sven on manning the boat when in transit, my role was to feed our cargo. Sometimes they were malnourished, and always underfed and my cooking was very focused all during this time on nutrients, protein, and hydration. When the cargo would leave us, I would pack from one to three days of food for unrefrigerated overland travel. At some point in a future post, I will set out some tricks I learned for getting nutrients and protein into a person quickly.

In previous posts, I have related what we were doing at the end of the decade. Well at new years 1999, in contrast to a decade before, I knew exactly where I was. We were about to leave the Mediterranean on a typical run from the Dalmatian coast  to Helsinki, our longest run, and  as we cruised  under power by Gibraltar to the north and Tangier to the south and watched the fireworks, Captain and I shared a tea on deck with a full and quiet cargo on the shelf, and stayed ready for what might come.

LIFE LESSON: HOW TO MAKE FRIES FOR A BELGIAN

Posted Aug 4, 2016

In some of the upcoming posts I will be diving into the crazy life I took on when I left Walter, so before we head down that much more serious rabbit hole, I thought I might stay up in a lighter place and talk about some of the cooking I did for Walter and his guests.

Every Tuesday (there were only a couple exceptions to this timing) Walter would have a small dinner party. Sometimes it would be eight or ten but was usually only four to six guests. They were not always exclusively Belgian guests but they were almost exclusively people based in Brussels for their work so had caught the “fries addiction”.

Some stereotypes exist for a reason. Regardless of what else I would be serving for a meal, the assumption was that there would be some fries on the table, like cutlery or table linens, and a chef who could not impress in this regard was at best a cook, and certainly not a chef. The first time I tried to do fries for one of Walters dinners there were a lot of raised eyebrows. Everything else could be fabulous but without the fries – well, what a letdown.

Jim related to me a similar problem from the cooking school he and Janice had (see the Links We Like).  There would be times where an extended family would come for a private evening where the focus was a traditional holiday or occasion and the culinary focus was to be a dish that was “just like grandmas”. Invariably Grandma would be at the dinner. The chef would be provided with the recipe a few days before the event and sometimes a terrine or plater from the grandma in question to make the dish seem to be just the same.

The first few times it was a disaster. Grandmas recipe might call for a teaspoon of rum and her practice had been to put in half a cup! Beyond this it was also politically incorrect for the dish to be as good as Grandmas – that would be a blasphemy!

So what became the standard practice was for the house chef to simply say “ I would love the opportunity to interpret and do a variation on this wonderful recipe” which let grandma off the hook if it was better than hers,  as everyone could rave about it but still say its not as good as hers and the chef could be sure a great meal would be produced and enjoyed.

My experience with Walters guests was much the same. I couldn’t live up to the expectations for the Belgian fries, so I did roasted (not fried) home fries, with lots of different dips and it was always a hit.

What follows is the most popular dish and variations on the meals I would do at Walters. We would usually have some canapes and champagne or prosecco as the guests would arrive, a soup or appetizer starter then roll into the entre with the vegetables, followed by a homemade ice cream with homemade biscuits or biscotti for dessert with espresso. While there were many variations and different dishes served over the few months I was there, a very popular one was the pork tenderloin so that’s what I have described here. The home fries were the only constant for every dinner party!

    HERB ENCRUSTED ROAST PORK TENDERLOIN & HOME FRIES 

Working at Walters was quite a treat for me. The kitchen was not always rocking like a boat, had lots of counter space, many specialty appliances and lots of refrigeration. These, of course, were all things that I had not experienced for a while, as most yachts, even large ones, don’t dedicate a lot of space to the kitchen.

Pork Tenderloin, Veal Tenderloin  or Beef Tenderloin

All three of these meats work and depending on the size of your guest list, and of your budget, each of them has their merits. So if it’s a dinner for two I would do a smaller pork tenderloin, or if a group of four, then two pork loins, but if it’s a group of six or more going to the loin of beef or veal is often the better route. Some guests also have issues with pork which will also help you decide which meat to use. In general, there are cuts of beef I like better so most of the time when doing this recipe I would go with the pork even if it involves multiple tenderloins if there is a larger group.

  1. Trim off any excess fat, wash the loin, and dry completely with a paper towel.
  2. rub with olive oil, or go 4.
  3.  coat with herbs. This can take on many forms and depends on your taste. In general, I always like to use fresh herbs for my cooking but for this kind of treatment I prefer dried herbs with two exceptions. Finely chopping a sprig or two of fresh Rosemary per pork tenderloin, and a couple sprigs of Tyme as well is a great route to go. or If like me you are functioning in a small kitchen most of the time you can use a premixed type– eg Italian (usually with oregano, rosemary, thyme, and basil, but some have garlic and other herbs) or Herbs de Provence –(which adds to the Italian mix several other components: savory, marjoram, and lavender) but ultimately you are the one in control and may choose to go heavy on one type or another. Once the herbs are on make sure you rub again with oil as you want the herbs to be soaking up that oil and sticking to the meat.  As you do the dish more often you will also experiment with specific tastes – finely chopped garlic (two or three cloves per tenderloin), or going exclusively with thyme mixed with the zest of one lemon per tenderloin. When doing this one I would often grill slices of lemon and use them as a garnish on the finished dish with their grilled mushy juices adding flavour to the pork pieces.
  4. an alternative to rubbing with oil then adding the herbs is to put the herbs in a small bowl dry, then just add enough oil to make a paste of the oil and herb mixture and then put this on the meat. When you are familiar with it, the technique works well but usually results in a much more robust coating of herbs than the other way.                                                                     Pre-Coating: I have found that when working with beef, after coating with herbs, having it sit, covered in the fridge for several hours or even overnight before bringing it out and having sit at room temperature for about 20 minutes (while your range pre-heats) before cooking is really worthwhile. But unless it is preferable for dinner scheduling this pre-coating and sitting time is not as beneficial with pork tenderloin. In some kitchen settings I would just roast directly on a roasting pan and turn it after about fifteen minutes  but I prefer to cook the loins on a rack off the floor of the roasting pan and to then pour as much water as  possible into the pan below the rack leaving at least one centimeter (1/2 inch) between the water and the  rack.   This helps keep the oven area moist as well as giving more air circulation around the roast. The outer surface of the meat will still crisp up, but the effect is to have an even moister final product than otherwise. It also makes cleaning up that roasting pan a breeze.
  5. Place pork tenderloin or multiple tenderloins in a preheated oven at 175c (350f) for about 50 minutes.  Now oven temperatures are an interesting thing. The higher you go up, of course, the shorter a time needed. So if you are in a scramble time-wise you could preheat to 204c (400f) and just go for about 30 minutes, or to 260c (500f) and shave it down to about 20 minutes.                                                                                                                  So why, with so many options did I start with the suggestion of 175c (350f) for 50 minutes? Well because: most of us are the only person working in the kitchen; are not serving just this one component; are working with        equipment that is not perfectly tuned and prefer to make the whole process more forgiving. When a piece of        meat that has been cooking at 175c (350f) for something like 45 minutes to an hour is removed from the oven it continues to cook but not much, while a piece that was cooking at 260c (500f) that is removed will continue to  cook while resting, making the judgment of serving time much more difficult. Many home cooks or                        recreational  chefs don’t have exceptional equipment and a variety of products are not recommended for oven    use at really high temperatures. This is particularly true of non-stick finishes that will often top out at a                 recommended 175c(350f).                                                                                                                                                           Working with a beef tenderloin is a bit different both because of the dimension of the loin as well as the proper cooked point to be achieved. A typical time for the beef will be 45 to 60 minutes at 425f.
  6. Time, of course, is just the starting point – the real test is the internal temperature of the tenderloin. If you have a thermometer or your range is equipped with a probe, you are trying to get the internal temperature of the pork tenderloin to about 65c (150f ) or a little lower for the beef loin to 60-62c (140-145f)
  7. A lot is often made about “resting” and there is no question that the meat will benefit from a ten minute resting time (particularly the beef) but the reality is that you don’t need to build this into your time. Just get it out of the oven and work away on your final prep, serving the various components etc. For most of us mere mortals that takes about ten minutes.
  8. Cut into slices at a thickness you like – eg 1 cm or 3/8 inch. In general, cutting it in thinner slices is more formal and wider is more casual. Then layer/stagger a serving on the plate, much like toppled dominoes.
  9. You can accompany the dish with gravy but the herbs and the roasting produce a nice product without it and an easy one to add is a chutney, mint jelly or hot pepper jelly on the side for the pork, and a chutney, or horseradish for beef loin.

Roast Home Fries

This is a foolproof, dead easy recipe that can be dressed up or down as needed. On most occasions, I like to work with white potatoes, not the yellow fleshy ones but all of this is personal preference. I also don’t remove the skin so part of the exercise begins at the market in choosing nice looking potatoes. I don’t go by weight – but by the size of nice looking potatoes available and that will tell me how many I need per person. A typical one that is about 8 to 10 cm (3-4inches) long is enough for each person but you will want to do some extra as the taste of these encourages gluttony.

  1. give them a good scrub under running water with a brush then cut the potatoes in half lengthwise, then cut each of those in thirds, again lengthways. This will yield a total of six long pieces per potato with a profile (if viewed from the end) of a triangle.
  2. put the pieces in a stock pot to just covered with water and bring to a boil. Turn off the burner and let sit for five minutes. Check the potato pieces with a fork – you don’t want them to go soft.
  3. drain and let sit out of the water to dry for a few minutes.
  4. place in a large bowl, add a glug (a “glug” I have found to be about a tablespoon but can be up to two tablespoons) of olive oil, whatever amount of salt and pepper you are liking and turn over lightly with a big spoon– we’re not trying to beat up the potato slices, just to get them covered with oil and seasoning.  Using Canola Oil or a vegetable oil instead of olive oil will get them a bit crisper if that is how you like them. I will usually use Canola oil if its available for this reason.
  5. put the seasoned potato slices on whatever you have – parchment paper or Silpat on top of a baking sheet, or sometimes I will put them on a rack on top of a baking sheet. It all works.
  6. these will then go into the same oven you are cooking your meat in but depending on the thickness of the pieces it will often take less time than the meat so you will manage the timing of when they come out based on how they are looking.

Turn them at the midpoint or when you see one side getting a good roast patina. When they are ready,  get them out, cover with foil until the other components of the meal are ready.

Variation – you can do a much more elegant looking product (and save yourself a step) by cutting the pieces thinner and not parboiling them in the boiling water first. If they are cut thin enough  (eg  I cm or less than 3/8 inch) you can just oil and season them and put them straight in the oven.

Other Vegetables

I really love roast vegetables but with the meat being roasted and the fries being a big roasted item I would usually just steam some brussels sprouts, or broccoli or some nice heirloom carrots or slice up some fresh tomatoes to compliment.

Dips for the Roast Homefries

So this is where I really solved the problem of Walters guests – the fries snobs. While they were allowed to like the home fries because they were sufficiently different than what they were familiar with, setting out a number of dips put it into the category of “better than expected”. Yes, I put out a conventional aioli, but also put out tomato salsa, maple syrup, an orange roulade or jelly, a mixture of Dijon and mayonnaise etc.

Walters kitchen was also an example of Djangos Kitchen Rule #2 – “work with the tools you have”. Walters kitchen had lots of counter space so I was not restricted. It also had lots of specialty tools on hand – a deep fryer, a rice maker, an ice cream maker, both a large and small blender, air fryer, panini maker, pressure cooker, so I was certainly spoiled in comparison with my usual kitchen situation. But my point is this – often a specialty appliance can be used in many ways. A rice maker is also a great tool for making tapioca or rice pudding. An ice cream maker is not just for making deserts – use it to make a nice palette-cleansing sorbet which adds some elegance between courses.

Even major appliances are often not appreciated unless, like me, you are coming from a small kitchen on a boat. That second oven or warming drawer set at about 160f is great for warming plates or keeping various cooked foods warm.

One of the biggest things I notice with kitchens on land is the abundance of refrigeration and freezer space. Use them. A nice salad can be made ahead and sit in that huge fridge. That cavernous freezer is great for buying meat on sale, freezing and having on hand. No, you can’t keep it there forever, and yes, it is better to work with fresh, but for most people buying the better cut of meat on sale and freezing it is a very good approach. You will also find that many time-consuming recipes may lend themselves to making the second batch and freezing.

 

 

So this little culinary diversion has kept us from getting back to the story of what my life with Amy and Justin was like. Stay tuned, it will be my next post.

THE BOATING SEASON IS SHORT IN THE NETHERLANDS

Posted April 16, 2016

A lot of people boat recreationally and many live on a boat year-round in the Netherlands but the recreational boating season is much like most northern climates. It starts in the early summer and by mid-September, the rain, work, school, and temperature all gang up on the recreational boater and its time to wrap it up.

A couple of posts ago I was telling you about my summer as a chef and babysitter during the summer of 1993. It had been a great experience and a wonderful summer up until the cruising holiday the family took and my trip to Rennes to see my grandmother and my trip to Canada.

When I made it back to Harlingen and my duties on Marc and Lottes boat,  the season was winding down fast. In the last week of  August, the twins were heading off to university and the girls were getting ready for school. Marc and Lotte kept me around for a couple of weekends in September when they would entertain other couples but the income from only working two days a week was getting eaten up by having to buy food, and my camping rental. I was also pretty despondent and confused flowing partially from the death of my parents but more from the overall disappointment that I hadn’t been a good friend to my old friends, a good son or grandson, had no real ongoing friends and was only a step or two above a vagrant financially.

So when Marc and Lotte said they would like to chat with me I was pretty sure it was to wrap it up but was surprised to learn a friend of theirs with a huge yacht was interested in having a liveaboard chef that would start immediately. I was thrilled and that weekend met Walter, his Captain Sven, and his thirty-meter steel trawler with an amazing kitchen. The whole intro Lotte and Marc went through was all focused on how trustworthy I had been with their kids. There were a few references to the food and my timeliness etc. but it seemed to all be about my honesty. Later I would learn this was Walters only real criteria.

It’s a bit embarrassing when someone asks you if you need a hand moving to your new digs and you realize that you can carry everything you own on your bicycle. I rolled up my tent and bedroll and my few clothes and rode my bike to my new employment and lodging which was at a nearby, very private,  marina.

Walter was a quiet controlled man who measured all his actions. Everything was done with ease and with reserve. He was tall, balding and about ten years older than me it seemed so would be about fifty. I had no idea why he would need a chef but the employment was to be for a three-month trial, starting then at mid-September until close to year-end.

It was a bit of a surprise to go shopping that day and be told by Sven that we would be on the move the next day, heading down to Brussels where we would be based for the next three months. Brussels gets cold in the winter so I was pleased when after only about a week we transferred to Walters townhouse in quite an expensive area of Brussels. I was never to go back to the trawler as the next few months were all spent at the townhouse.

For about three months at the townhouse, my routine was fairly well …routine. Every day I would make breakfast for Walter, usually two soft boiled eggs on dry brown toast with fresh-squeezed orange juice and a little fruit cup and one espresso and the three papers that would arrive in the night or very early in the morning. He would be up early and work out while I was preparing breakfast, then he would eat alone while reading the papers and head out to work. Captain Sven only showed up a couple of times a week and explained that he worked for others as well.  A driver picked up Walter and took him to work and after a few inquiries, I  never did learn what he did for a living.

Every Tuesday evening he would have a small group to dinner and after serving the first and second courses I was to go off for a walk and return by nine when I could serve dessert and coffee. It was always the same and became clear that while the participants were different each week it was always a business meeting of some kind as at about the point I would arrive back to serve desert the conversation would turn to the personal conversations that at most dinner parties would happen much earlier in the meal.

By 9:30 or so everyone would be gone and I would be doing clean up.

Walter, for so controlled a person, seemed at times to be very forgetful or sloppy. A billfold with lots of cash was sitting on the back of the powder room toilet, a laptop left out on the terrace on rare warm September afternoon are two times I remember in particular. Each time I would pack them up and put them in Walters study for him.  Later I learned that these were tests of my integrity. When I learned this later I also suspected it was another test when four of the dinner guests and Walter went to the hospital with one of the guests with an allergic reaction and one woman stayed behind who became very friendly and wanted to go into Walters bedroom and I needed to be quite clear that was not going to happen. She was very nice and it had been almost a year since I had been with a woman but Walter had some pretty strict rules about behavior in his house and I wasn’t about to let someone down who had given me a fresh start.

During the few months in the townhouse, Swen who had begun our relationship on only a cordial basis had become much more friendly.

I liked the life I had with Walter. It was very predictable and gave me the opportunity to save some money and to write to my Odie each week. Beyond those letters to Odie, I also started writing letters to my parents. Ok, a little weird with them dead and all but it was a good way to say some things that I should have said when I was a kid, when I was a teenager and when I was an adult. Some things that I was sorry for. Some things that they should have taken better control of and some things that I wished had just happened differently. I didn’t have anywhere to send the letters of course but the letters were a very good tool for me. They were also part of my time at Walters where I was rebuilding myself. I still only owned my bicycle, my kitchen knives, and my clothes but my little account from Canada was growing each month and I was putting away most of what I was making working for Walter. Each day I would grocery shop and prepare a nice meal for Walter and occasionally Sven would join me in the kitchen for a meal as well. A housekeeper would come and go periodically and sometimes I would send home some scones or muffins for her and her family.

When I had started it was made clear that by the end of the year or so the contract with Walter would end but I also had the sense when I first was hired that it had the potential to continue in some form afterward.  I learned what form that would take one Tuesday night in mid-December. There were just two dinner guests that night but I had been asked to set five places and to prepare not the usual five courses but just three and to join Walter, his two guests, and Sven.

Walter had not told me ahead so I was in my whites and it seemed a bit strange at first. A proposal was laid out for Sven and me to leave Walter and join this pair who would have been a few years younger than me on their boat for an ongoing position. It became clear over dinner my whole time with Walter had been a test, and presumably, I had passed. Sven seemed to be in on the plan but I had come to trust both him and Walter so it was with this background that just over a year from being fired and left on the dock in Amsterdam I was on what was about my fifth job that year. For the second time in four months, someone was laying out my future for me. I wasn’t sure if this is how I should let my future unfold but they seemed like a nice couple, it was an ongoing position and otherwise, I would be unemployed. The next day after making Walters breakfast, Amy and Justin picked Sven and me and my bike and pack of gear up in a large van and we went to their boat. Sven it seamed had already taken his gear there.

MAKING RISOTTO WITH KIDS

Posted: Aug 24, 2015

No, I don’t mean risotto with a side of kids but working with kids to prepare Risotto!

For those of you who have been following along this is an extension of my last post “1990’s: DJANGO STARTS TO GET IT TOGETHER”, where I was working for a family during the summer of 1993 in the Netherlands and enjoyed teaching their kids to cook.  So if your not into cooking or are a good cook already and won’t learn much from this than go do something else. The rest of you – follow me.

Most kids, especially by the time they are teenagers, are quite astute and if they are interested in a topic will grasp ideas and instructions very well. I have never had any kids and not spent a lot of time with them other than that summer in 1993 but I was really impressed. Intelligent ideas, inquisitive perspective, a steely sense of right and wrong – we should all be more like teenagers!

I know that Janice and Jim had a lot of fun doing the cooking school they had,  and one course that Jim and his chef designed was “College Survival”.  The idea was to cover in the space of five evening classes, a quick course in equipment, hygiene, and cooking techniques. Their experience with Risotto and young people was much like what mine had been.  We have compared notes and some of my future entries here will shamelessly borrow on their experience with their cooking school as well.   Time for a little plug – check out the link to the cooking school in the LINKS WE LOVE section.

The amount of time I have spent in North America in the last couple of decades has been limited but I think that pizza, mac and cheese, and burgers are still the staples of teenage diets there. European kids like pizza as well but really enjoy a variety of pasta dishes and sauces and risotto is a pretty popular one with them.

One of the things I love about this dish is that you can mix it up so much. We all think of using Arborio, but there are other kinds of rice that are fat, starchy and medium grain that will also get you that creamy texture: try Carnaroli, Roma, Vialone, Violone Nano and Maratelli.

What works so well with kids is that you can also put one “sous chef” on the rice and stock mixture while another is working on the prep of the toppings or ingredients.

 

But it all starts with the stock. At the end of this piece I have included some detail on preparing a good stock. I have worked in big kitchen operations on cruise ships that resemble food factories and in small little kitchens on private yachts with limited counter space and even less fridge space and after doing this for a few decades a few rules keep floating to the surface.

This is probably a good place to introduce DJANGOS KITCHEN RULE #1 – IF A COMPONENT FOR  A COURSE IS AVAILABLE THAT IS VIRTUALLY AS GOOD AS YOUR OWN, BUY IT AND SPEND YOUR TIME AND ENERGY ON SOMETHING THAT WILL MAKE THE DISH SPECIAL.

Ok so that may not be the epiphany of the century but too often we spend our time trying to see if we can make a component of a dish ourselves that takes a lot of time and energy to not really be appreciated by the guest. You need to find the sweet spot in each recipe that combines the efficiency of buying something prepared vs. the taste and quality of the result. The cost factor of course comes into this little equation as well. Most people who make phyllo pastry or puff pastry the first time will quickly realize that unless they are doing it all the time or for a large group – just buy it frozen at the grocery store and focus on what you are doing with it.

So if you are living in a place with great grocery or specialty stores available and have limited space go buy your vegetable, chicken or beef stock. If it’s not readily available or you have the time and interest go to the bottom of this piece and work away on producing a good stock. Personally, I do both. When I have the time I will produce a great stock and it will be the basis for a great risotto, and other times I will have some that I made at an earlier point in the freezer to pull out but sometimes it just doesn’t work out to make it and I will buy the stock. One of the benefits of buying the stock is that you can now focus your attention and limited time on more interesting components to add to the risotto or sit on top.  On the rare occasion I have lived on land and had a conventional kitchen, I have found freezing your homemade stock a great way to go, but most of the time my freezer space on a boat has been pretty precious.

Whichever way you go you will have to choose one of those three types of stock and the choice will come down to matching the stock with the protein or vegetable that will be the feature of the risotto: we will make a butternut squash risotto with a vegetable stock, a seafood risotto with a fish stock, a beef risotto with a veal stock and a duck risotto with a chicken stock, for example. Otherwise, the flavours just become jumbled. Of course, vegetarians are going to use a vegetable stock for everything.

So once we have our stock, here is what we are going to do to prepare the Risotto.

The grocery list is below the ingredients.

Before getting going on anything, turn the kids on to kitchen hygiene. Get them to wash up before handling food, and every time they have handled raw meat or fish, and get the utensils or plates that have touched those raw products into a designated area or sink or dishwasher for clean up later. They won’t know if you don’t teach them and getting them into good habits first thing is the way to go.

I like to set up two large stock pots. One will be for our finished Risotto and one is for the stock.

  1. get started by peeling and chopping fairly fine the onion, garlic, and the celery
  2. Put your stock into the first stock pot and put on a low- medium heat. We are really just preheating or warming this stock, not trying to boil it. The only purpose this stock pot is for is heating the vegetable, beef or fish stock so if any of my explanation is not clear – everything else is being added to the other pot
  3. Preheat the second large stock pot (or if don’t have two you could use a saute pan or fry pan) to medium-low heat
  4. add the two tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil to this second pot and about 15 ml of the butter
  5. add the finely chopped shallots or onion, the celery and garlic and sauté in the second pot, for ten or fifteen minutes. It’s better to do them at a lower temperature but have some control of the exercise, especially when working with kids or teenagers.
  6. get the rice into the second pot and saute for two to four minutes. Make sure you stir the rice at this point
  7. this is where I would typically add a glass (cup) or two of white wine, and once it’s largely absorbed or evaporated off you can move to the next step.
  8. So from this point, you have a wonderful task available for your sous-chef (child or teenager). Have them ladle (about a half cup size ladle) one scoop of stock into the rice mixture and stir to help the stock be absorbed by the rice. When it is largely absorbed into the rice give it another ladle full and continue with this process until all the stock has been added. This process is going to take about twenty or thirty minutes or more.
  9. Meanwhile, during this process of adding the stock to the rice mixture, you or your other sous chef can work on the other components that will either be added to the dish or sit on top.   (see comments below)
  10.  when the stock is all added and absorbed the rice should be al dente, just chewy to the bite, you can also decide if you would like to add another half cup of dry white wine (sauvignon blanc for example). It’s not usually done if you added it earlier but if you did not put in earlier it does add to the flavor and sweetness to put some in at this point. If you are poor the way I have been for most of my life I would not put it in earlier as much of it evaporates and putting in half a cup at this point gives a nice flavour.
  11. at this point its time to add our unsalted butter and Reggiano Parmigiano cheese and any of our mixtures we are mixing in. (See comments below)
  12. then plate up with your toppings and serve in heated bowls.

Common additions to put into the risotto are: grape tomatoes cut in half, asparagus cut at two cm (three-quarters of an inch)  lengths, mushrooms sliced or ripped and sauteed, chicken or pork cut into bite size pieces and grilled.

Common toppings are: Sauteed portobello mushroom slices, grilled jumbo shrimp or prawns, sautéed or grilled scallops, boiled or steamed lobster tails, boneless skinless chicken breasts or duck grilled and sliced on top.

Sometimes when we would go shopping together Isa and Tess would really get into it and be looking for different flavours and textures and when their older siblings would go shopping for us the envelope would really get pushed (anchovies and capers, sundried tomatoes and spicy meatballs, grilled squid with strips of grilled fennel) but it was a great way to include the older ones who had little interest in cooking but extensive interest in eating. I was successful at getting Luna to plant a potted herb garden on the back deck of the boat with Italian parsley, basil, thyme and rosemary and one or more of these would regularly find their way into the food we would make. Lars ended up quite pleased with himself when we made pesto near the end of the season with the fruits of our basil plant that was looking more like a small tree!

A Note on Salt: traditional risotto recipes will have salt added through this process and will use salted butter. Today the appetite for salt is considerably reduced from the past and as there is already salt in the cheese most of the time I will wait until the end to see if we are going to add any salt to the dish. It’s easy to put it in later and impossible to take it out!

If you are going to add pepper you would usually use a white pepper.

GROCERY LIST (for risotto as a main course for six)

  • 1 liter organic stock, such as chicken, fish, vegetable – or make your own – see below
  • 1 large onion
  • 2 cloves of garlic
  • Five or six shoots of celery (about half a stock)
  • 100 g Parmesan cheese (3.5 oz) – when grated it turns into about half a cup
  • 2 tablespoons olive oil
  • unsalted butter
  • 400 g risotto rice (14 oz)
  • dry white wine or vermouth (optional)

THE CHEATS

As we go forward with more recipes you will learn that I love to share “cheats” or tips that largely come from commercial applications of food prep or just from my experience working in small spaces with future meals in mind.

Some of these relate to logistics and planning. In a commercial context, a chef or a cook is always thinking of the second or third day of the components of a meal.   A roast chicken or turkey the first day becomes chicken sandwiches or chicken soup the second day and also becomes the basis for our chicken stock. So whenever you are having a chicken, turkey or fish build in the leftovers and time to prepare your stock.

Another great cheat with making risotto is to have more ingredients on hand and to do some arancini balls that you can freeze for a future meal. At a future post, I will go through a recipe for Arancini balls.

 

MAKING BEEF, VEGETABLE AND FISH STOCK

The core of a good soup, sauce or risotto is a good stock, whether beef, vegetable or fish.

Always rinse chicken and fish bones in cold water to wash off blood and reduce impurities in your stock. It is important to use fresh bones.

A stock or broth is a semi-clear, thin liquid flavoured by soluble substances extracted from meat, poultry, fish and their bones, and from vegetables and seasonings.

 

Beef Bones-There are two different types of stocks for beef.  A white stock can be made from beef or veal bones. Cooking the bones without browning them first will make a white stock. Browning the bones in the oven on the stove top before cooling them will make a brown stock.

 

Chicken and Fish – Remember to wash chicken or fish really well in cold water before beginning.

 

 

Mirepoix– Aromatic vegetables are the second most important ingredient in flavouring a stock. The basic flavouring for mirepoix is carrots, celery, and onions. Other ingredients that can be added to a mirepoix are vegetables such as mushrooms and tomatoes. Tomato products provide both flavour and acid to a stock. It can also provide some colour that might be undesirable in some stocks. When making a white veal stock, we would not add a tomato product.

 

You can adjust the combination of vegetables in a mirepoix to get a desired flavour or colour for your stock. For example, increase the amount of carrots and your stock will become darker. Increase the amount of onions and celery and the stock will be lighter.

Note: Your vegetable stock will take on the flavours of the vegetables used so choose the ratio of vegetables wisely so your vegetable stocks flavour will complement the dish.

The size of the vegetables is also an important factor when cooking a stock. A beef or veal stock need to be cooked for several hours and the longer it is cooked the darker the stock.

  • Chicken stock need only be cooked for one hour or so to extract all the marrow and nutrients from the bones. A fish stock can be made in 30-45 minutes.
  • Vegetable stock can be made in 15-30 minutes. It is important to note that vegetable stocks were not part of classical French cuisine. The increase in demand for vegetable stocks has arisen from the increase in vegetarians. Making a good and consistent vegetable stock comes from practice.

 

Scraps-meat scraps can be added to a stock to provide additional flavour provided the scrapes are low in fat, clean, wholesome and appropriate for the stock being made. For instance, you should only use beef or veal scrapes when making a beef or veal stock. When making a vegetable stock, caution should be used in the amounts of strongly flavoured vegetables such as asparagus, broccoli, cauliflower, and Brussel sprouts. These vegetables each have a strong flavour and will overpower the stock if too much is used.

Starchy vegetables like potatoes, sweet potatoes, and winter squash will make a stock cloudy.

 

Seasoning and Spices-Salt is usually not added when making a stock, however, using a slight amount will help to extract marrow and flavouring from the bones. Herbs and spices should be used only slightly. You can either put the herbs and spices in the mix and then get them out with a fine strainer but if you like your stock to be a bit more dense and you are using a more course strainer you should put the collection of seasonings and spices in sachet or cheesecloth bag tied up so that it infuses the stock but can then be easily pulled out later. It is also a way that you can see how the flavor is evolving as you are preparing your stock and pull the little sachet or cheesecloth bag out part way through the process. Common herbs and spices used when making a stock are, black peppercorns, thyme, basil, parsley stems, bay leaves, cloves, garlic, apples, star anise, and cinnamon.  The combination and amount of seasoning is based on the type and amount of stock being prepared.

 

RECIPES

 

Preheat oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Brown bones (do not burn) in a roasting pan. When brown, add tomato paste to bones and mirepoix to roasting pan. Continue to roast for an additional 10 minutes. Add bones and browned mirepoix to large stock pot. Cover bones with cold water. Add all the other ingredients to the stock pot and bring to a boil. Deglaze the roasting pan with red wine and add to stockpot. Once boiling, reduce to a simmer for three to four hours. The longer you cook the stock, the darker it will become. Skim any foam (impurities) from the surface. Strain stock. This stock will keep for up to three or four days.  If you have freezer space it is great to freeze some for future use.

Brown Stock-Beef Stock

5-6 kg (10-12 lbs)  Beef or veal bones

10-12 L (10-12 qts) Cold Water

Mirepoix:

500 g ( 1 lb)Onion chopped

250 g  ( 8 oz) Carrots chopped

250 g  (8oz) Celery chopped

Sachet:

1 Bay leaf

¼ tsp or 1 ml Thyme

¼ tsp or 1 ml Black Peppercorns

6-8 Parsley Stems

Note: After the stock has been strained add cold water over the bones again and cook for an hour. This mixture is called a remoulage or remi. It is a weak brown stock but is excellent as a starter for your next brown stock.

 

White Stock-Chicken or Veal

5-6 kg  (10-12 lbs) Beef or veal bones

10-12 L (10-12 qts) Cold Water

Mirepoix:

500 g ( 1 lb)Onion chopped

250 g  ( 8 oz) Carrots chopped

250 g  (8oz) Celery chopped

Sachet:

1 Bay leaf

¼ tsp or 1 ml Thyme

¼ tsp or 1 ml Black Peppercorns

6-8 Parsley Stems

Rinse chicken bones in cold water. Add all the ingredients to a stock pot and bring to a boil. Once boiling, reduce to a simmer for one hour to one and a half hours. Skim any foam (impurities) from the surface. Strain stock. This stock can be kept in the fridge for 3-4 days or frozen.

Vegetable Stock

1 lb. or 500 g Onion chopped medium dice

8 oz. or 250 g Carrots chopped medium dice

8 oz or 250 g Celery chopped medium dice

1 Tomato roughly chopped in ¼’s

Sachet:

1 Bay leaf

¼ tsp or 1 ml Thyme

¼ tsp or 1 ml Black Peppercorns

6-8 Parsley Stems

Add all the ingredients to a stock pot and bring to a boil. Once boiling, reduce to a simmer for 30 minutes to one hour. Strain stock. Keep in the fridge for 3- 4 days or freeze.

 

Note: For a mushroom risotto stock add mushroom stems to the stock for flavour.

 

 

 

 

THE 1990’S: DJANGO STARTS TO GET IT TOGETHER

Posted: March 24, 2015

Well, that title is a bit over the top, not totally accurate and a little pretentious to refer to me in the third person, but yes, by the back half of 1990’s things were going better for me.

They did not start out that way. A cruise line that will go un-named decided to make an example to the staff by firing me for a long series of complaints about my behavior. At that time the cruise lines were all trying to fight each other for creating “a whole environment” for the passengers and part of that was to upgrade the staff. Up until then, it had been that if you behaved yourself and you were off duty and were discrete about it you be in the pool or go to one of the bars. No more. The new ships had much nicer kitchens and cafeterias on the lower decks just for the staff and more places to hang out with other staff members but if you were not to be on a deck for a reason as an employee doing something for a passenger (increasingly being called a “guest”)  than you were not to be on a guest deck.

So, it was in this environment that a young crew member had convinced me to go for a jog with her (something I would not characteristically do, so you can appreciate how nice she must have been) on the exercise deck. That was the excuse for getting rid of me. She got off with a warning, but I wasn’t even able to finish the cruise. Just me and my backpack on the dock in Amsterdam.  It was November 1992.

I thought that I had done alright with my finances at the time but had no idea what life was like when you had to pay for a place to live and for groceries. Living on the ship and being provided food every day was just a way of life for me. While my pay had been acceptable, I would blow most of it when between cruises and when you are only off the ship for a few days you don’t really gear up for buying groceries, preferring to just eat at restaurants or take out. During the previous decade, I had saved a grand total of $3,250.00. I had no idea how bad an achievement this was but I quickly learned that a few thousand dollars will not take you far, especially in Amsterdam.  Within weeks I had moved further north to the port of Harlingen in Friesland province on the coast of the Wadden Sea. While a nice enough historic town and place to summer today, it has a long history as a seaport and still counts fishing and shipping as major employers. As a cook, I was able to find various short-term gigs as the cook on working ships till the spring when I met Marc and Lotte.

Now as a little background, working as a cook in various jobs, particularly around large private yachts is a good gig if the yacht is large enough and if the season is long enough. The boating season in southern Europe, and North Africa or the Caribbean can work year round but getting up into France, Belgium and the Netherlands, the season ends with a thud in mid-September.

The positive part is that like other northern climates the summer gets jambed into about twelve weeks and often the pay can be very good, albeit for a short time. It also gets you out of those southern locations that are so nice in the winter but sweltering in the summer. So that spring I knew that I would need to take the best paying job I could find to start to build up a bit of a cushion for making my way back to the warmer weather when the fall would hit the Netherlands. The job was posted at the posting board near the port as a CHEF/COOK, but when I spoke to them it was very clear that it was a chef and babysitter role.  But Marc and Lotte were nice, the boat was amazing and fifteen euros an hour for 10 hours a day for six days a week could really add up. The math was dampened a bit by having to live at a nearby campground and buy my food for one day or two days a week but otherwise, the money I would save would hold me over for several months down south when the season wrapped up. My life was very much feast and famine at the time. So I took the gig – Chef, and Babysitter!

To say babysitting four kids sounds pretty ominous but the reality is that two were almost 17, twins – a girl and a boy, Luna, and Lars, and the other two were 14 and 13, both girls – Isa and Tess.  They were all pretty good kids and the twins I really didn’t have to do anything for other than feed. We were docked on a large canal in the old town, so there were lots of things to do but unless the younger ones were with me or with their parents or one of the twins they were not allowed to be off the boat. Isa and Tess were good kids but a boat, any size boat, is not big enough for teenagers to spend the whole summer and I spend a lot of time trying to find ways for them to be entertained. Their parents’ boat was a 22 meter (so about 72 foot) power yacht, only about four or five years old and was very well equipped.  While a boat of that size sounds large, once you put a few full-size mammals in it there was not a lot of extra room. They were all large Dutch people. The twins were both taller than me and even Isa and Tess were over 1.75 meters (5′ 9″).

During the middle of the week, we were docked and it was the kids and Lotte and like clockwork, on Thursday night Marc would arrive for three or four day weekends.  The weekends were when I would get some time off. I would prepare some things for them on the Friday or Saturday morning and they would head off for the day and evening and occasionally overnight, and rarely for two days and by Sunday or Monday morning, I would be back on board working on a big breakfast. It was a bit tiring as one of the girls would always be wanting something or me to take her somewhere in town and on my time off, living at a campsite was not ideal. Most people who are camping are off on holiday and cutting loose a bit. It’s not that they are doing anything wrong but for them, every day is a holiday and for me, I would have to be up pretty early to be out on my bicycle to get groceries, load up my panniers and get to the boat. I was also one of the few tents in the campground and the various caravans and trailers were all big looming structures around me.

After the first couple of weeks, however, we discovered that the twins liked the task of taking the car to go to the market to shop for me. After I showed them how to spend time at the market and how to choose produce, fish and meat they were pretty good but would often come to the boat with some off-list items to challenge me or with some pretty dreadful cuts that they thought were a bargain.

The younger girls both liked doing art and seemed to have an endless supply of art equipment and supplies and would work on that and sometimes would go into town with one of their older siblings to buy more supplies, books, and music.

The other big activity I got them onto was cooking. That was a sweet deal. I ended up with two “sous chefs” who seemed pretty keen. One of the things they loved to make for their parents and older sister and brother at the beginning of the summer was homemade pizza. I would make up the dough and they would do the rest. But part way through the summer I showed them how easy it is to make risotto. What is really good about risotto is that it is all happening in slow motion – so no issues of critical timing etc. It also lends itself to doing it several ways. The first couple of times we just did a fairly plain one but by the end of the summer I would just do the clean up while they would do the meal and it would have lots of variations.

I set out to include my recipe for MAKING RISOTTO WITH KIDS here but it was getting a bit long so it will appear as my next post.

ON ADDICTION

Posted: Dec 11, 2014

In my last Dispatch and Ramblings about life in the 1980’s, I talked about a course that I went to for friends, partners or relatives of people challenged by mental health issues and addiction.

It had an effect on me at the time but has come to have a greater effect on me over time. It is one thing to sit in a class and work through issues and problems in dealing with someone who is dealing with these challenges but a whole different level when I would go to the Monday night group sessions. The group sessions were run by a couple volunteers, one with an alcohol history and the other with a drug history. They were typical group sessions where no one is judgemental but you are in a supportive group talking about your day to day issues in helping someone who is addicted and your personal problems flowing from your relationship with that person.

When you are young and partying with people your age it is very different than hearing from the anguish of the mom of a young person knowing their kid is living under a bridge somewhere with a needle in their arm. Another one that bothered me was a young guy who would talk about how his high school life had been, going on his bicycle most nights to the local bars to find his mom and try to get her home.

So why am I going on about this? Well for two reasons.

First, if you are dealing with this kind of thing today there are a lot of programs to help those with mental health issues and addictions and lots of programs to help you if you are the one trying to help that person on your own. The internet, of course, will have an amazing array of material available but stick to credible medical sources. Your local library will have lots of books on the topic but a good starting point is Codependent No More by Melody Beattie, published by Hazelden.

The second reason is to tell you that one thing that helped me was to write about it. I wrote a bunch of letters to my buddy and several to myself to reinforce what you need to do, to cope.

And here is a poem that came out my memories of those sessions and my thoughts on all of this. One of the constants that seemed to come out with various people at the group, whether the person they were dealing with had issues with dope, or alcohol or gambling was denial.

I wrote it in 2012.

 

                                                  HONEST DENIAL

                                                     I am a drunk,

                                                     not an alcoholic.

                                                     I am sad,

                                                     not depressed.

                                                     I enjoy life,

                                                     but not all the time.

WHAT THIS SITE IS ABOUT

For most of my life, I have lived as a bit of a nomad, just roaming from one thing to another and not really settling down. A few years ago I ran into an old high school buddy. We were sitting in the waiting room to see a neurologist for what later that day we learned was the same condition. He had lived his life as a “straight arrow” – went to university, went to university some more, still more university (well you get the idea) then on to marriage, a successful career, and business, kids, houses, cottages – a nice life. While all this was going on, over those same four decades I was traveling around, enjoying myself but not really focusing on anything other than what I was doing that day. No kids, no commitments, no meaningful relationships, and absolutely no wealth or comfort. I was never “on the street” but that was always a possible PLAN B for me.

So, we both ended up in the same place – with a stress-based neurological condition. Mine comes from a history where others have set my priorities, a sense of never knowing what will happen to me and no job security.  His stress comes from taking on lots of stuff and not knowing how to let go. A bit of a strange situation of polar opposites needing to be more like the other to survive.

In a fit of spontaneity (not his strong suit) my buddy Jim comes up with a plan to have me keep an online blog for him and his partner Janice which gives me something to focus on and maybe make a little money and a way for him to stay in touch with people without sliding into the dangerous world of social media! It is also a way for him to have me put down some things from his life that are important to him. More of this will be explained as we go.

That leads us to the organization of this website. What follows is a description of how it is designed to work and the key components.

Almost everything on the website begins as a post in DISPATCHES & RAMBLINGS. This is the core section of the site and is where I get to rant on about whatever I want. I called it that because some things I think are important to share and deserve to be written down – the Dispatches aspect as if I am on the front lines of something, while the Ramblings are, well my ramblings – less focused thoughts.

So everything starts out in the DISPATCHES AND RAMBLINGS section and then is reproduced in the other sections where appropriate. So a recipe will appear first as a D&R post but simultaneously show up in the category FOOD & RECIPES.

Most of the site content starts in relatively current time as I only started this site a few years ago but looks backward to cover some old ground (right back to the 1970’s) as a way to explain some things. In the DISPATCHES AND RAMBLINGS tab there is a drop down if you want to become a Django Bisous aficionado and go back to read posts from when we first started this website adventure.

A pretty robust category is called JANICE & JIM. Jim is my old buddy and his wife is Janice. She has always found me to be less than the best influence on Jim but recognizes he now needs to be a bit more like me. Jim likes to tell the story from that day at the neurologists’ office when he went in for his appointment first and the neurologist told him that he was too uptight and “needed to let his crazy out” and his response was to tell her “my crazy is in a chair in the waiting room”. We have always had a bit of a conflicted relationship.

This pair, Janice and Jim,  for being straight uptight white folks are OK and recently, now that Janice doesn’t try to shoo me away as much,  I have come to like and at times even admire them (well only a bit) for what they have done. So in this section, I tell their life story as well as a bit of a blog of what they are up to. Its a bit scattered because:
a. I write it,  b. they don’t tell me everything, and  c. some of their shit is boring.

It is really an alternative to them writing their own blog but they have to put up with my editorial. You can’t see me right now but you should picture me hunched over, wringing my hands and with a nasty glint in my eye!

Janice is a published poet and Jim and I really both like to write prose mainly but a bit of poetry as well. In PROSE & POETRY, I collect the posts that are based around pieces I have written, as well as some that Jim has written. I am not published (other than one recent poem in spring 2020)  like Janice but my poetry and prose is a hobby I am increasingly pursuing. Jim writes too but not well and while he submits stuff to journals and contests is quite frankly just wasting his time and money. But its good therapy for him I think.

For most of my life I have worked in various roles in kitchens, well not kitchens really – more the food processing factories of cruise ships, the small galleys of ships or the tiny food prep areas of private yachts, barges, and other working ships and boats. The category FOOD & RECIPES collects the posts on food topics I love in this regard. Sometimes it is just me chattering away about a great meal I have had but more often it’s a bit of a ramble on my thoughts on cooking.

The PORTS & OTHER TRAVEL section is not a comprehensive or exhaustive detail of what to see and do in a particular place but a collection of posts I have done as a personal account of stuff I like in the places I know well. There are many places in the world I have not been and probably will not make it to, but there are some I really enjoy and like to share images and ideas from my time there.

Beyond the categorization of the various posts into these categories there are a few that stand on their own and did not originate in the Dispatches and Ramblings – This About section,  Links We Love, The Chef Upstairs (which is still under construction), TorontoART and The Django Store.

  • The LINKS WE LOVE is where Janice, Jim and I all put in links to friends websites or other stuff we like and there you can see the links to their kids – Jade and Jason too. Janice is more social media savvy than Jim and she maintains her own social media accounts and those links are there as well.

 

  • THE DJANGO STORE. Well what can I say – we just launched this in July 2020 and if you plan on doing all your fashion shopping here you are in trouble, but if you want to “fly the flag” this is the place to get it.

 

  • I am working on two sections to add that are freestanding ones that are pretty beefy, so that’s why they haven’t made it here yet. The first one that we are actively working on is THE CHEF UPSTAIRS. Something of a preamble to The Chef Upstairs section I posted on July 7, 2020.  The second is TorontoART, which tries to catch some of the spirit of a website Jim and Janice had built for the Toronto art community and when Jim wound it down about a year ago it had over six hundred members.

 

That is the end of my intro to my website. If you poke  around the site long enough you will learn how I live, what I am about and much more than you ever wanted to know about my buddy Jim! As we go I will put the various posts into archive sections by year so if you just want to check out the current ones just go to Dispatches and Ramblings and they are posted in reverse chronological order but if you are really interested in going through a case of wine then you can go all the way back to the original posts from the archives and work your way through. Enjoy.

Django

I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT HAPPENED TO THE 1980’S

Posted: August 13, 2014

A decade is a long time and if you are young and hardworking and have any smarts at all you can really make things happen and get ahead. For me, that did not happen until the 1990’s.

For the 1980’s I worked the cruise ships – always in the kitchen. For the most part, they were the big cruise lines. The joy of working for the big operators is that it’s a bit like being in the military. They tell you what to do, they feed you, house you and give you a bit of money. Even on my time off, I didn’t really have a home base. I would share with other shipmates a furnished apartment where I had nothing but my backpack I had brought from the ship. One of my Kiwi shipmates had been working the cruise ships for about eight years and had a tattoo on her bum that summarized the whole program:

WORK, PARTY, SLEEP, REPEAT

 

I really did not understand what my life had become. Only if I had a toothache would I get my teeth looked at. If I had an illness I would see the ship doctor. Otherwise, my life could be summarized in that young woman’s tattoo and I literally and figuratively cruised along with a bad diet, way too much booze, and what I realize now, no real focus. I would visit my parents a couple times a year, well sometimes only once a year, and my grandmother in Brittany at least twice a year but sometimes more often.

The vibe on the cruise ship was also a bit over the top. Most of us had some level of addiction – drugs, alcohol, gaming, sex, food, risk-taking. If you have read Anthony Bourdain’s expose on the restaurant kitchen culture in Kitchen Confidential, you will have some sense of the manic, drugged up world of the kitchen staff in a lot of restaurants in those days. But the people in Bourdain’s book all got to go home at night, not still hang out with the same people they had been with all day. The bully you were living in fear of would be there at night and at that point with a few drinks in him. Women who were being sexually harassed during the day would be expected to be around these same weasels at night.

The only positive part to that was the rough justice that was liberally dished out for the worst of the jerks who would be bugging the girls. The walk-in freezers had a lock on them and while it would take a few lads to do it, throwing in the worst offender for a bit of time would usually reform not only him but others who were perfecting their bad behaviour as well. And of course, the stories were then repeated of various people who had lost toes and fingers to frostbite when left in the freezer a little too long. YIKES.

The addiction part was not solved as easily. Today most of the cruise lines recognize addiction and mental health issues and have programs and support. Today as well with so many well educated, talented young people looking for work the percentage of new hires who are pretty “damaged” already is lower I think.  But in the late 1970’s and through the 1980’s – it was a crazy environment, and the line between addiction and not was whether you could get your shift finished.

Many cracked. After a news story was published about our cruise line in a major, respected magazine with an image of a number of staff members washing a deck while others were handing guests towels came out with the caption Happy Workers Going About Their Day, about a dozen of my co-workers had T-shirts made with Happy Addicts Going About Their Day on them. Two were fired, and the rest of the T-shirts were confiscated.

In 1988 I was sufficiently concerned about one friend that on a break between cruises I took a free course in Miami on “Helping an Addicted Loved one”. The whole idea was how to cope with a partner, child, parent, sibling or co-worker who has an addiction. It was an eye-opener. In the world I was in,  drinking a bottle of wine, or ten or twelve beers a day was not considered over-indulging so you can imagine how out of control some of the drinkers were. And rarely was it booze or dope alone. The magic formula for most of my friends was some combination of the two. I went to the course to learn to help a friend but realized how deep I was in myself and for a couple of years whenever I would be in Miami on a Monday night would go to a group session run by volunteers for people who had taken the course and were still grappling with someone important to them who continued to live with addiction.

The friend whose problems had triggered me going to the course was eventually fired but was hired by a competing cruise line immediately. I had hoped that he might have gotten some help but he was right back into the same situation and was not coping well. That cruise line, like most of them at the time, was trying to manage this environment that was not healthy, to say the least, and would eventually need to be cleaned up or it would take them down. Earlier I referenced the employees at the cruise line I was at being fired for having T-Shirts that said Happy Addicts Going about their Day. That story of course was repeated like wildfire in the industry and the cruise line my friend went to, in trying to get ahead of the same problems on their ships tried to make light of it and every member of staff was issued a T-Shirt that said “Work Hard, Play Hard, Don’t Fall Off The Ship”.  It had a mixed response. Most staff members saw it as a lame attempt to manage a virus with a band-aid. About a month later it was viewed as a failure when a thirty-year-old member of the laundry staff jumped to his death off the ship wearing that T-shirt. I was upset for his family but relieved to learn it was not my friend.

It may sound like I was becoming a normal person and managing my own intake and partying. Unfortunately, my experience from that course, the Monday night group sessions and losing a few friends over the years had only had the effect of slowing me down enough to be alive today. I was still barely straight enough to go to work each day.

I didn’t hear from or speak to Jim and Janice all through the 1980’s. What they were doing was much more “traditional”. During that time that was a derogatory term for me. “Comfortable” fit into that category as well. Janice built her fashion business, Jim rose through the ranks working for others, and they start to buy and renovate houses on the side. They had their first child, Jade, in 1985 and their second, Jason, in 1988. Then with everything going well, Jim left his job to set up his own company with two other guys. It took a while to really get going but during this time they built a cottage, did a few more house moves and renovations and by  the end of the decade  they are really doing well, and the business is on a good footing and Janice had wound down her business and is home taking care of the kids.

And at new years 1989 what was I doing? Well, I don’t remember but based on how the decade had gone it’s a reasonable guess that it would have been like a decade before – with a group of fine young creatures partying like the night before.

WHAT HAPPENED IN THE 1970’S

Posted: April 3, 2014

I am new to this website business and not familiar with the best way to relate some of the ideas and stories that Jim and Janice and I want to get down, so I am just going to jump in. If you have read the ABOUT section, you will know how this site came to be and why it covers the topics it does. If you haven’t read that you should probably do that, or you will be a bit lost and it might be helpful to read the first post as well.

Today I am going to look back to the 1970’s as a bit of a way for me to get warmed up and a way to introduce you to some of the characters you will be reading about here.

That ten-year span was a time of massive change for Jim and me. I started it in early high school and finished it as a full-time drifter. He started it in high school and ended up with a few degrees.

The first part was with Jim in high school. Neither of us was very good at the high school thing in Ottawa but enjoyed music, partying, fighting with parents, trying to figure out why the world was so screwed up. Jim had a pretty tight string on him for a while coming into high school after that summer incident.

In the summer of 69 before this decade began he was involved in – well caused – a nasty incident and it sort of scarred him and certainly did not help his relationship with his parents.  In an earlier post I wrote about it so check out the piece here or in the PROSE & POETRY section called My First Post and you will find the piece “Summers End”.

He was an average to bad student and I was a worse one. It’s not that I wasn’t any good at it, but I was just always screwing up. So, there was always a bit of summer school involved for me and sometimes for him as well. We had a great group of friends and I don’t know if any of us appreciated just how good we had it then.

Now for anyone who has read the ABOUT section they will know that I am also to be reporting on Janice. I did not know Janice until Jim met her many years later, so I can only relate what I understand her life was like. She was a very good student, liked sewing and music and art and skiing both in the winter and water skiing as well. Her dad had been in the Canadian military, so they had moved around a lot until he left that and went into business and they settled down in Ottawa and had a cottage near Perth. Jim’s family had a cottage in that area as well. In the summers I would usually just go to summer school and hang out.  Janice had a brother who was only a year older and a sister a few years younger – still does.

None of this sounds very memorable, does it? Well, where the plot thickens is when Jim and I and our friends finished high school in 1973. Jim had been the school track star and ran for a club in Ottawa as well. He did not make the team for the 1972 Olympics and realized he was never going to amount to anything. It put him kind of adrift for the next year as we finished grade 13. Yes, for those Americans, Europeans or millennials reading there was once a grade 13! It was a year for the female students to mature some more and for most of the male students start to mature and focus on getting their grades up.  The universities were all gearing up for us – we were this mass of humanity all about the same age – the baby boom and colleges and universities were expanding like mad and if you had a pulse and a blood type you could get in and get some level of scholarship or financial aid. Even with that Jim, another buddy, and I decided that we would go to Europe with no particular idea of returning. With that said our other buddy was fully expecting to come back to go to university at the end of the summer but Jim and I were open-ended about our plans.

We had been touring around Europe, splitting up for a few days and then meeting up at rendezvous point and traveling together for a while and then splitting up again. It worked well, and we had some great times together – getting kicked out of Ibiza, arrested in Monaco, staying in hostels and making friends. It seemed everyone was traveling then, and we met people from everywhere.

But near the end of August Jim had another life-changing event. He had a job in Munich being the photographer for an Israeli doctor who was writing a book on the Holocaust. Touring around Dachau on a rainy day in August he learned some things that set his thinking on risk and life for good. How he relates it is that while the Holocaust itself was unique, the survivors share a common set of ideas with others who have been through such traumas. The Armenian slaughter by the Turks for example. Someone can take all your possessions, your titles and dignity, and even your family and your health but if you have your memories you keep yourself intact. Life is a collection of memories. Memories are depression proof, inflation proof, portable and your own. So, the trick is to have as many experiences as you can and put them in your memory bank. Don’t fear failure, fear not trying. Keep moving forward. It all adds to your memory bank.

I am probably not doing justice to this, and while some of this sounds self – evident it certainly was a life changer for him. Coming out of that experience he called his parents from Europe (quite a costly endeavor in 1973) told them to accept a spot at Carleton University if there was still space and to choose some courses if he did not make it back in time. They were a bit taken aback as the relationship with them was mixed and it did not sound like the son who left for Europe just months before.

At that point, my relationship with Jim took a big departure. While we both went to university, for me it was an extension of high school and never really stuck. By what would have been second-year university I was roaming around the U.S. and fell into a job working on a cruise ship in the kitchen. By the end of first year he was a top student always in the top ten of his classes. He had worked as a security guard all through first year working midnight shifts then going to school during the day. Driven. I mean really driven.

During this time Janice (who is a year younger than Jim and me) finished high school and after a false start at college ended up in Fashion Design College where she excelled. Jim and Janice met when she had about one more year of college to go and he had about one more year of his first degree to finish. A year later they were married in ’78.

Now at this point and through the back half of the 70’s I really did not know Jim at all. There was no internet, I was working the cruise ships and he and Janice were blasting away on their life together. He did a graduate program then more graduate work then went into a doctoral program. She finished her fashion design program and after working some jobs in that industry set up a clothing line in Toronto.

On new years eve of 1979 they were living in Toronto and were poor with a fledgling clothing line, Jim’s doctoral program had been discontinued and I was with a group of fine young creatures throwing up on the side of a ship.