A Short History of the Stuff I've Bought

When I look around my apartment, I can't help but notice how few things I've purchased for myself. Almost everything permanent (ie, not food and clothing) is secondhand or a gift. I was going to bore you with the details of what has been given to me over the years, but halfway through the list I realized I was boring myself. So I will spare you that particular torture!

Suffice it to say, most of my stuff was at one point the property of my mother, father, brothers, sisters-in-law, grandparents, friends, etc. The things that were gifts just for me are, of course, treasured for the thought that went into them, and the things that are second hand from these people are equally treasured, as I can't help but attach good memories to the objects through their association with those I love who used them first.

The whole point of this list though, is to highlight the things that I did buy for myself. Not the little insignificant things, like rings for the shower curtain...but the bigger ticket items that made a dent in my bank account for which I have no justification. These are not basic necessities; I bought them because I wanted them...there aren't many.

These are not listed in chronological order, but in order of importance to me, from least, to most.

1. Silver Hookah. I bought this from the Turkish booth at my favorite of summer festivals: Heritage Festival in Hawrelak Park. It's beautiful (though currently badly tarnished). I've only used it once, but it looks gorgeous on my desk, with the hose wrapped around my lamp. It brings back wonderful memories of both my university experiences, as well as my time at the festival with my dear friend Stef, which has become something of a yearly ritual. I don't really use it, but it still makes me smile when I look up at its intricate etching.

2. Acoustic Guitar. I used to play around on my mother's piano, and got to a point where I felt a deep love and affection for that instrument. However, though my mother has said I can have the piano, I have no place to put it, and no money to invest in its repair. So, missing music in my life, but not really wanting to buy an expensive piano since I technically already have one, I went to Long and McQuade and bought a guitar and started to teach myself how to play. I am currently at Level: Excruciatingly Awful. No really, I'm pretty bad. On the upside, I've started singing with more confidence, in order to drown out the clunking noises I make with the guitar. And however unimpressive my playing may be to me, it still makes me happy to play...although I don't play with enough regularity to grow calluses, and it doesn't take long for my fingers to wimp out on me.

3. Bright Red KitchenAid Lift-Stand Mixer. Ooooooh baby....Aside from one particularly hot pink bra, this is the sexiest thing I own. Normally something like $450 dollars at a place like Sears, Costco let me have this one for $199.99...and I love it. A lot. Guh...Excuse me...we need a moment alone....

4. So the last and most cherished thing I bought for myself isn't so much a thing as a collection. A collection of books, housed on shelves that I didn't buy (thanks Mom and Dad). Now, I won't pretend that I bought every single book on here, plenty of them were gifts...but for the most part, this is MY baby. This is where my heart is. These books are what really turn my apartment into a home instead of just a space I rent. The collection is a labour of love that started the day I gathered my loose change together so I could buy A Wrinkle in Time at a school bookfair and will end the day I stop breathing. When I look at these shelves, I see my life laid out; my interests, my loves and passions, the stages of my education. I see the way I've changed, the things I've left behind and the things I look forward to based on the changing genres of these books. I can remember how I felt upon first reading many of these. Some of them I bought and haven't read yet, but every one of the them is magical to me, and says something about my values and my character, as well as my interests. Not for a second have I looked at these books and thought, "Well, that was a waste of money."

Well, that's it. That's the list.

See, it's not that I don't like stuff. I really enjoy beautiful objects or useful machines (lord knows I salivate every time I see a Kitchen Aid pasta roller attachment), but I don't need a lot of stuff around me. When I stand in a home decor or appliance store, I look at everything and wish I had one of each awesome thing I see. But I don't buy those things, and it's not just that I don't have the money. It's that when I go home, to my adorable little apartment, I don't feel that I am lacking anything. No, I didn't pick out any of my own furniture, and no, I don't own a chef's knife, and if I should make pasta it would be with a rolling pin...because I somehow have two or three of those...not really sure how that happened...but my lack of fancy gadgets has in NO WAY stopped me from producing amazing food in my teeny tiny kitchen, and even the rarity of personally chosen home decor objects has not stopped me from using the gifts and second hand items I've received to create a space that is fundamentally Brenna: full of color and warmth.

Teaching me to think for myself was probably your first mistake...

I love living in the city.

This came as a surprise to me, based on my country upbringing. And, considering how often my parents *hint* that I should move back to the country, I think it came as a surprise to them as well.

But, having given it a little deeper thought (which I am generally in the habit of doing) I came to a few theories as to how a girl raised exclusively on a farm in the middle of northern Alberta should come to feel so at home with the hustle and the bustle of a city.

I blame my parents.

My parents were not born and raised on farms. Though they certainly have stories to tell about visiting their relatives in the country, they were both raised in a city, and lived in cities as adults, and there's no way their urban lives didn't influence the way they raised their children. So even though they eventually moved to the middle of nowhere, they still hadn't totally assimilated to country life by the time I came around.

When they would cook foods with Indian or Asian influences, they'd tell stories about the restaurants they'd been to in Vancouver, and the experiences they'd had with those people and foods and tastes.

When we sat in the evenings, reading in the living room, it was CKUA radio in the background, bringing together music from every corner of Canada, of the world, of time, in every musical genre imaginable.

We watched the Edmonton News in the evenings, and then the fabulous Canadian political satire shows, This Hour Has 22 Minutes, and the Royal Canadian Air Farce. When I was bored, I'd pick a book out of the library, from the books that my parents had accumulated over the years.

In short, my parents taught me to appreciate the variety and weirdness that exists in our world, whether they knew that's what they were doing or not. In foods, in books, in musical genres, in cultures, they taught me to seek out things that were different from what I already knew, to expand my own mind, and to learn from all these things.

Now...can you guess where (rural vs. urban) you can find a wider variety of weird shit?

I can't blame my love of the city entirely on my parents, though. Some of that has to be my own personality. For all they taught me to appreciate weird things, they could never force me to love them.

But I look around myself, standing in the middle of things like the Edmonton Street Performers festival, or the Heritage Festival, or the Fringe Festival, and the crush of people (weird people) and music (weird music) and the smell of food (weird food) makes me so inexplicably happy. That there exists so much in the world that I don't understand is exciting to me.

And even the people that live here that match me, demographically speaking, who speak the same languages and eat the same foods and listen to the same music and read the same books and have the same color skin and the same genitalia and sexuality as me...even these people, who match me statistically, are not living the same life that I am. We are totally different souls, and I am reminded of this all the time in the city. Every time I walk to work, watching the traffic roll past me, I wonder about the stories of the people in the cars. Or every time I sit on my balcony and listen to snippets of conversations I will never hear the end of, I am reminded that there are an infinite number of ways to live a life, and mine is only one.

It is a remarkably humbling and yet enjoyable feeling.

This city has given me so much to do and see and experience. It is a feast for an inquisitive mind. It is a bright tapestry of others' lives, and I love it. I absolutely love it.

Don't get me wrong, I'm sure at some point I'll write a post all about how much I love the country, because I do. See, I've got layers...like an onion.

The Great Pork Roast Adventure

I bought a new cookbook a few weeks ago. I had been eyeing "Donna Hay: Seasons" since Christmas when I received my most coveted of Christmas gifts: a Chapters gift card. I stood in front of it for a long time, but since it cost twice the amount of the card I had, I decided not to purchase it. But LO! Fate smiled upon the Brenna Bear! Where should this cookbook reappear but in the Winners, at half the original price! Huzzah! And though I was unemployed at the time, I could not just walk away from Fate.

As my sister-in-law remarked upon inspecting my purchase, "It's food porn!" And it really is. The food in each picture is highly styled, and the photography has a smoky, dreamy quality to it. It is interspersed with photos of landscapes and picnic set-ups. This is the kind of cookbook that inspires in me a desire to cook something more amazing than I have ever cooked before. And while some people buy cookbooks in order to be deliberately instructed, I buy cookbooks to fan into flames the burning embers of my culinary passions.

Okay, so my metaphors are a tad melodramatic.

After buying this book, I became employed again; a cash-earning, cash-spending member of society once more! I invited my brother and sister-in-law over for dinner to celebrate the end of my poverty, and so I could try out some recipes from my new book.

I got off work at 5:00 pm Saturday and walked home slowly. It was sweat-drippingly hot (a temperature I do NOT agree with) and when I got home, I spent some time sitting on my balcony reading and eating grapes and feeling very decadent and urban and sweaty. Eventually I put together a menu. In attempting to search for arugula salad recipes in a different cookbook, I stumbled across a Pork Roast recipe from David Tanis' book, "A Platter of Figs" that could not be ignored, and added it to my menu.

List complete, I looked up the hours for the Italian Centre on the south side, since the 52 bus stop is directly in front of my apartment building and the bus goes just past the Centre. Also, because their cheese is awesome. They were open until 9 and it was only 7. "Perfect," I thought to myself. Except that when I got downstairs and checked the bus schedule, the 52 bus was not going to arrive until 7:33. "Well, screw that," I thought, "I'll just walk down to the Save-On-Foods."

As I walked, I decided that if the Save-On didn't have the pork roast I was looking for, I would leave immediately and walk to the next 52 bus stop.

Save-On had nothing but chops and ribs. But, on the plus side, it was beautifully air conditioned in the store.

I waited for the bus, and made it to the Italian Centre at 8:15 pm.  And while they had most of what I was looking for, they did not have the elusive pork roast. "Don't fret, Brenna Bear! There was a sign for a Sobey's in the parking lot directly east of this building! Maybe the Sobey's will have your roast!" Now, laden down with fruits and veggies and cheeses and cans of coconut milk, I wandered over to the next parking lot, only to find that the Sobey's was actually a Sobey's liquor store, with no associated grocery store. "Wait, is that an M&M meat shop across the parking lot?" Yes, it was, but it was closed.

Now 8:45, I went to catch my bus back home, thinking I would drop off my loot and then make a bike run to the Safeway, or the actual Sobey's nearest my place. But, upon calling Buslink, I learned that the 52 bus was on an hourly rotation, and would not be there until 9:33 pm.  "Curse the heavens!" I decided to walk the three blocks east to see if there was another bus line that might take me home sooner. But what did I see on the corner of whatever avenue I was on and 104th Street? THE GREAT CANADIAN SUPERSTORE!

"They will have a pork roast!" I thought. And they did. HAL-LE-FREAKING-LU-JAH! By the time I left Superstore, I was carrying six bags of groceries and was more than a little tired. I got approached in the parking lot by a homeless man asking for money, and when I responded that I don't carry cash, he responded jovially, "Hey! We've got that in common!" I would have offered him food, but I didn't think raw pork or frozen phyllo pastry would be particularly appetizing to, well, anyone...

Instead of walking all the way back to my bus stop, I sat down at the nearest stop and learned that the number 6 to Millgate Transit Centre would be there in 15 minutes. I have no earthly idea where Millgate is, but I assumed that the transit centre would have a bus that headed north. At that point, I just didn't want to be on my feet anymore. I didn't even care how many transfers I would have to make.

I got on the bus, awkwardly pushing through with all my bags until I was across from the back doors. The bus moved two blocks. Two. And stopped at a red light. A red light that never turned green. Because the street we were on was blocked just past the intersection by a train that was moving unbelievably slowly. A train that eventually stopped on the tracks. The bus driver opened the doors so that we might not suffocate in the heat. Once again, "Screw this," I thought to myself. I hopped out and booked it back the five blocks to the 52 bus stop. It was now 10:15. The bus came at 10:33. I was desperately thirsty, but didn't want to risk missing the bus and being stuck there until 11:33. The closest thing I had to liquid among my groceries was Greek yoghurt or fresh lemons. I suffered through.

Eventually the bus came, and with only one random stop (for the bus driver to get coffee from the Starbucks on Whyte and 104th) I made it home.

Now, the whole reason for me shopping the night before this dinner, after an 8 hour workday and the start of a disgusting heat wave, was to be able to season the pork roast overnight. So after this miserable grocery excursion, I still had to put together this dish. I got finished at 1 am.

Late night Pork Roast Assembly

The next morning, I invited my friend and her husband to join us for supper, since I thought I had, maybe, just slightly, gone overboard by buying a 6-pound roast for three people.

In the end:

Arugula Salad with Tomatoes, Fennel, and Parmesan chips, with a Balsamic Vinaigrette

 Fennel and Rosemary Pork Roast

Spinach and Goat Feta Phyllo Pies with Tzatziki

Poached Peaches and Nectarines over Coconut Risotto with Vanilla Bean-Infused Honey

All of this with copious amounts of homemade Iced Tea.

I spent all day Sunday making this. And despite the sore feet and the pile of dishes (that I still have not gotten to), it was the best day I've had in a while.

I love cooking. There is a freedom that runs through my whole body when I cook. I cannot cook without music, and I frequently pause in my chopping, shredding, stirring, to twirl around in circles with my arms in the air. My heart feels lighter when I run my fingers through a pile of washed spinach, or grab a handful of velvet soft flour out of the bag. I massaged olive oil into the roast for an indecent amount of time. My feet are light, my hands are gentle, my face is relaxed when I waft a hand over a saucepan of poaching peaches. All my senses are ignited, lit up, dancing.

When I cook a menu derived from a cookbook or cookbooks, I marry together the part of me that is obsessed with timing and punctuality and order and measurement (and it's no small part: I blame my German heritage) with the looser, more creative and spontaneous side of myself.

There is no other act in this world that expresses so perfectly the person that I aim to be. There is no other act that shows so clearly my love for this world and the things in it. There is no other act that can transmit from me to you how much I love you.

And for that love, I will sacrifice my time and my dignity in search of Pork Roasts.

It's Like Riding A Bike!

It will come as no surprise to any of my friends that I really enjoy Facebook status crafting.  I enjoy putting weird little thoughts out into the atmosphere and hoping that someone will stumble across one and shake their head and think, "Oh, Brenna...whose bright idea was it to give you access to the Interwebs??"

With the arrival of warm weather, there has been a marked increase in the number of my Facebook statuses concerning my love of bike riding, and I've found that this love has outgrown the restrictive word limit of Facebook.  Thus: this.

I am currently riding a Nishiki Navajo bought sometime in...the nineties? Just a second, let me call my mother...

Confirmed! I was nine or ten, which would place the bike's purchase sometime between 1994 and 1995. Which makes this bike just shy of two decades old.  And, to clarify, I hit my growth spurt/puberty early, spent a few years in elementary school as not only the only girl with breasts, but the tallest person in class. Junior high came along, everyone else started growing, and I stayed the same. All that to say, I have not outgrown my bike.

I learned to ride on our gravel driveway, in the country. Gravel is just a bunch of pointy little rocks. Riding a bike on a bunch of pointy rocks. Which, when faced with the alternative (a cesspool of clingy mud) is still pretty godawful. But it means you really appreciate those few days in the summer, when it's been sunny enough for long enough that the road is totally bone dry, and the vehicles running straight down the middle of the road have created two perfect, gravel free tracks that feel as smooth as the newest pavement in the city. Still, even with those perfect days, I didn't do a lot of bike riding while I lived at home. Also, I began my horseback riding lessons at about the same age as receiving the bike, and that was clearly the superior mode of transportation in my young mind.

Years passed. I went to University without the bike. I went to New Zealand without the bike. I came back home and rode around in a truck with a Swedish boy, a pair of pink fuzzy dice and a hula girl named Esmerelda stuck to the dash.  No bike. I went back to University, spent a year in residence without the bike, and finally, when I rented a little house with my cousin, Darren, my parents brought the bike down.

There was nothing as nerve-wracking as that first moment when I was absolutely sure that everyone who had ever used the 'like riding a bike' metaphor were totally full of shit and I would never be able to pick this skill back up out of my childhood. This worry was allayed a few seconds later when I realized the "like riding a bike" metaphor is so overused because it is so apt. Still....having never ridden anywhere but a deserted gravel road, I wondered if I could navigate through people and vehicles without killing anyone (myself included).

Turns out, it wasn't a problem for me at all. I've never been a particularly 'road rage' type of person. I tend to take after my mother, and leave a good 30 minutes before I actually have to, so I never have that feeling of "OH MY GOD I'M GONNA BE LATE, GET OUTTA MY WAY, DON'T YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW IMPORTANT IT IS FOR ME TO GET TO THIS PLACE AT THIS TIME?????" Anytime something arose that caused me to slow down, I did, and I didn't worry about it at all. I took my time and I always got to where I was going.

But I couldn't have predicted, really, based on my non-bike-enthused childhood, that there would come a time when I went out every night on my bike with absolutely NO destination. That I now ride my bike purely for the pleasure of it? Because it feels good?? Because there is something beautiful and freeing in the speed and balance of this machine? That I see, hear, smell, feel the world differently, and more kindly, when viewed from the seat of my bike? That I can push and pedal and sweat until that moment when I stop my legs, pause my muscles, and allow the bike to keep my body moving forward: floating, flying...

God, the lilacs are blooming right now. And on my bike, I stop beside them, and bury my face into them, and inhale that little piece of heaven. When I kick off again, it's with a glorious grin plastered permanently to my face.

Sniffing the Ripe Tomato...

This summer is looking good.

You know what's amazing? Fresh herbs are amazing. Fresh cucumbers are amazing. Those peppers? Are sweet like candy.  I wish I had space on that balcony for an enormous greenhouse of my own, but in lieu of that, I guess a weekly trip to the Farmer's Market isn't such a hardship.

The thing is, I'm fairly convinced that most people don't know what a tomato is supposed to taste like. Even if you attempt to buy them during their actual growing season, the tomatoes you pick up at the grocery store are almost certainly being shipped from elsewhere by truck, and it just makes good business sense to pick them when they're hard enough to survive the trip without bruising. A simple chemical wash will turn them the nice red we've come to expect, without having to wait for pesky things like natural ripening. The resulting thing is an insult to the name 'tomato' and should be eaten by no one with taste buds.

And even buying from the Farmer's Market, there is something off. The taste is much closer to the taste that I remember, but there's always something missing, and I figured out what it was this weekend, as I was potting those herbs for my balcony. It's the smell of the greenhouse, warm and damp and earthy; tomato vines and pepper plants and trailing cucumbers, the blooms dried and clinging to the forming fruits; air clingy and thick and beautiful with the smell of "good, clean dirt," as my father says.

Every time I buy tomatoes, I smell them first.  That smell is there, but faint and weak and it disappears by the time I get home.  Frankly, I find the smell of a tomato vine as intoxicating as the smell of any flower. 

Of course, none of those smells compare with the smell of the sprig of sweet basil I'm playing with as I write this...Excuse me, I have to go make something delicious...

Raw materials

Raw materials recombined into awesomeness

All this to say, it's going to be a good summer.

The Wonderful Wooden Spoon

In 2005, I spent ten months living in New Zealand, and when I left, a girl I had met there bought me a few thoughtful going away gifts. A dirty magazine, a figurine of a puffin that was supposed to be a penguin, and a package of wooden spoons, among other things (and if she's reading this, I didn't take the 'other thing' on the plane, and thank GOD, because they searched my suitcase in the Christchurch airport).

I'm sure at some point I will talk more about my amazing experiences in that country. But this post isn't about the awesometasticness that is New Zealand and how we should all go there together someday. This post is about the wooden spoons. Because I love them. And I managed to talk about them so much in the five months I knew this random Danish girl that they became one of the key things she knew about me. That deserves its own post, right?

Wooden spoons are the foundation of my cooking. There is no utensil that I feel as much for, or as comfortable with.

It slides into the callouses on the middle finger of my right hand, callouses that have existed since I learned how to write with a pencil in elementary school, discovering how the stories I told myself in my head could be put onto paper. That callous has never gone away, in fact, university note-taking strengthened it further. And the slim neck of a good wooden spoon rests there as well. My fingers hold it the same way; it is familiar and light.

Of all the materials used in a kitchen today, wood is the one that evokes the most history to me. Studying anthropology, archeology, and history and having an overactive imagination, I cannot help but place myself back in time when I cook. (I wonder every time I cut into a clove of garlic, who was the first person to add this to food?) And when we, as a race, first started cooking--'Durr...add fire, make BBQ'-- There is no more perfect object for stirring and poking food than a nice young stick. The wooden spoon is a remnant of tens of thousands of years of poking shit with a stick. How can I resist its allure?

It never gets too hot to touch, no matter what boiling, bubbling brew I leave it resting in. When I lift a shallow scoop of sauce to my mouth to test, the wood never shocks my lower lip with a blistering hot surprise.

When I first remove them from their package, they are pale and slightly rough, and over time, they smooth down and take on the color of the meals they've assisted in making. My particular favorite is the yellow glow they take on from the turmeric in the curry. Like they're keeping the color for evidence; "Look where I've been, look what I've done!"

My favorite thing about them, though, is the sound they make. It isn't a cold metal screech or scrape, or a painful plastic squeak. They make a gentle hush when they sweep through a pan of sauteing onions, or a little pot of cheese sauce, or a crockpot of soup. And when they tap, they are firm but friendly, like an old friend knocking on your front door, "Hey, I'm here." There's no urgency in the tap of a wooden spoon. There's a calm reassurance. It leaves a warm and happy echo.

And when the food is done, and the kitchen cleaned and the usefulness of the wooden spoon SEEMS to draw to a close, you can always spank people with it! Which is always very satisfying.

Okay, breathe...

Okay, bear with me, I don't really know what I'm doing yet.

I talk a lot. And I used to write a lot as well. Now that my university career is over, I find less and less reason to sit at a computer and dig words out of my skull. That may sound painful, but I really, REALLY miss it. I know university term papers are often not the most exciting things to read, but I enjoyed writing them. I enjoyed thinking about the order in which to put my words and how to organize my thoughts. And while I tried not to allow those papers to become completely dull (I am an Arts student, after all), they weren't exactly personal creative ventures. After reading the blogs of a few friends, I considered that this might be a path I want to take, if I don't want to lose my writing skills completely.

Actually, I'm looking forward to writing in a medium that is not so focused on grammatical accuracy. I don't think my grammar is deplorable or anything, but when it comes to style, I might play a little fast and loose with the rules. Especially when I'm ranting. Because who can keep track of things like commas and periods when they're hopped up on righteous indignation? Am I right?

I have no idea what direction this blog will take, if it takes one at all, but it feels good just to have my fingers back on the keyboard. I sit taller when I give a damn about something.