An Amuse Bouche

Last night I went to my friend Taylor's grandparent's house for Thanksgiving dinner, it was pretty special. We drove to this area called Lantzville where they lived. It was so picturesque. Picket-fences, stone lawns, horses in the yard. What's weird is that it was a 5 minute drive from the biggest most hideous mall in the city, and here were Taylor's British grandparents tucked away in the faux English countryside. His grandmum, Brenda, was telling me that almost all of the food, including the turkey and lamb, was homegrown. The herbs, the veg, the edible flowers in the salad, the salad itself! The turkey had been grown and slaughtered by their neighbours, the neighbours had thanked the turkey for giving it's life before they lopped it's head off. Same with the lamb. It was unreal. I spent a lot of time talking with Brenda, she moved to Canada during the IRA riots in the 70s. She was a nurse and saw some wild stuff, she described a scene involving some Irish protesters shacked up in an abandoned building giving birth to a baby, on their own, and Brenda arriving to see the baby still attached by the placenta or whatever. Brenda invited me to come back and work in her garden. Definitely gonna pursue that.

Here is a bread that I made for the dinner, as well as a jar of strawberry jam. I'm addicted to collecting these Classico jars. I boil the labels off. My roommate eats a lot of it, I have five jars, I think. I actually bought some sauce once just so I could have the jar. Is that wrong? Whatever, don't judge me!

We had this dinner at school on Thursday, it was called a Sensory Tasting and I guess the idea was to give the students an education in fine-dining, which fork to use first kinda thing. Every single student I've talked to told me things like "the dinner was alright" or if I asked if they were excited..."nah, I'd rather be in bed".

Here are just some of the menu-items: salmon ballotine with scallop and lobster lentil salad, handmade caramelized onion tortellini in a duck consomme, hazelnut crusted sweetbreads (Google 'sweetbread' if you don't know what it is) with mushroom risotto, braised lamb shanks and grilled lamb-rack with couscous, and a chocolate orange brownie cake. Now, it was my first time trying most of these foods. I was damn excited going into this thing, the prospect of all these new flavours, ingredients, cooking methods, what would I like, what would I hate...I'd never had risotto before, one of the most palatable and popular dishes world-wide...and the best my classmates could muster up was that they'd rather be in bed. I have a really really difficult time with the idea of people pursuing something they barely have any interest in. I remember giving some of my friends a hard time for rushing into college right out of high school. I can't even talk about it, it makes me furious. I'm at a point where thinking about food can keep me up at night. Getting an idea and not being able to let it ago until the thought of it is perfect.

The dinner was great, I sat with the headchef. I kind of met her personally a few weeks ago, I was having a really rough-time with some students in my group and I was basically at the breaking point of living in res, listening to noises coming through five different walls as I watch the hours tick away before I have to wake up. I went to go talk to her about the possibility of me transferring my credits to Algonquin College for my second semester, and she actually talked me through it. She told me stories about being in Europe and how she missed her boyfriend. Anyways I sat with her and we started talking about mushrooms and Anthony Bourdain and Thomas Keller and meat-butchery and I got so excited my voice actually cracked mid-sentence talking about umamis.

There are two tickets waiting at the Vancouver airport for me and Mag. On December 17th I'll be back in Ottawa for two long, quiet weeks. I need to start making a list of who to visit, damn I miss my friends.

Vote tomorrow.