naomi duguid

curious about the world, an insatiable asker of questions...writer, photographer, storyteller, traveller; author of BURMA: Rivers of Flavor (pub date Oct 2012)

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about

about
- Naomi Duguid, traveller, writer, photographer, cook, is often described as a culinary anthropologist. She is the co-author of six award-winning books of food and travel: Hot Sour Salty Sweet: A Culinary Journey Through South-East Asia; Seductions of Rice; Flatbreads and Flavors; HomeBaking; Mangoes and Curry Leaves; and Beyond the Great Wall: Recipes and Stories from the Other China. The books explore home-cooked foods in their cultural context, with recipes and photographs as well as stories.
  
  Her latest book Burma: Rivers of Flavor celebrates the food cultures of Burma in recipes, stories, and photos, and will be published in October 2012.
  
  Naomi is a contributing editor of Saveur magazine, has a bimonthly column “Global Pantry” in Cooking Light magazine, writes a weekly blog, www.naomiduguid.blogspot.com, and conducts intensive cultural-immersion- through-food sessions in northern Thailand each winter (see www.immersethrough.com).
schedule

schedule
- TRAVEL AND APPEARANCES: SEPTEMBER TO DECEMEBR 2012
  
  I’ll be updating this as I know more. For now here is the bare bones of my fall, starting
  with the Kneading Conference West, near Seattle, and then on to book tour events.
  
  SEPTEMBER
  
  Thurs to Sat, Sept 13-15 - Kneading Conference West, Mt Vernon WA. I’m giving a
  Keynote talk and also presenting two workshops. The whole conference looks very rich.
  Do come if you’re in the area.
  
  Mon Sept 24 - San Francisco 6 pm Omnivore Books on Cesar Chavez Street: talk and
  book-signing
  
  Tues Sept 25 - San Francisco, Asia Society dinner at Betel Nut restaurant. Food from
  BURMA prepared by chef Alex Ong and staff, and a talk with photographs by me.
  
  Wed Sept 26 - Corte Madera, at Book Passage, 7 pm: BURMA talk with photographs
  
  Thurs Sept 27 - Seattle, at Book Larder, a culinary bookstore. BURMA talk with photos
  
  Sat Sept 29 - Kingston ON Talk with images at 9.30 am, at the Kingston Festival of
  Authors
  
  OCTOBER
  
  Mon Oct 1 - New York City, at Porsena restaurant, a dinner from BURMA to celebrate
  the book, with chef Sara Jenkins
  
  Wed Oct 3 - New York City, at the Rubin Museum on West 17th, 7 pm talk as part of the
  regular Wednesday event Himalayan Happy Hour
  
  Thurs Oct 4 - Greenwich CT, at the library, evening BURMA talk with images
  
  Fri Oct 5 - Miami FL, at Books & Books, photo talk about BURMA, and exhibition of
  Burma photographs in the gallery there
  
  Sat Oct 20 - Montreal, at Appetite for Books
  
  Sun Oct 21 - Toronto, Toronto International Festival of Authors, 1.30 pm BURMA talk
  with photographs
  
  Thurs Oct 25 - Houston TX - cooking class at Central Market, a full dinner from BURMA
  
  Sat Oct 27 - Austin TX - Texas Book Festival, 1 pm demo at the cooking stage
  
  Sun Oct 28 - Austin TX - cooking class at Central Market at 6.30 pm
  
  Mon Oct 29 - San Mateo CA, cooking class at Draeger’s at 6 pm
  
  NOVEMBER
  
  Thurs Nov 1 to Sat Nov 3 - St Helena CA Worlds of Flavor Conference at Greystone,
  the Culinary Institute of America’s Napa Valley campus; present at two Friday sessions;
  and in the Marketplace on Friday evening
  
  Sun Nov 4 - Toronto ON, conversation with the great Mexico scholar and author Diana
  Kennedy, at Harbourfront’s Day of the Dead celebration, at 2 pm
  
  Mon Nov 5 - Ottawa ON presenting at Books on Beechwood
  
  Tues Nov 6 - Burlington ON, breakfast presentation at A Different Drummer
Posts

Posts

Profile
- WELCOMES & FAREWELLS: A BALANCING ACT
  
  Jun 17, 13
  
  I had imagined that I’d be in the car driving out to the airport right now. My younger kid Tashi, now a tall 22-year old, is due back from Southeast Asia today. But his flight is delayed an hour and a half. And so as a kind of test of my ability to settle in to writing when I have some adrenalin expectancy flowing, I’ve decided to write a short blogpost in the time I have before leaving for the airport.
  
  I’ve just had a piece in Lucky Peach, the seventh issue, the Travel issue. My article is about travelling with kids, about why? to do it (many reasons, including that it leads to remarkably rich travel learning for you, and also for your kids) and when? (as soon as possible and often). And now here I am waiting to greet my kid at the airport.
  
  Adults raise kids, yes, but kids also teach adults, and raise them, stretch them, help them grow. I am very grateful, even when sometimes the process hurts a little.
  
  Almost all parents feel those pangs when their kid goes away, whether it’s to some kind of summer camp, or to university, or on a long trip, in fact even on a short one. I try to imagine a time when both my kids will be living elsewhere, in a town or city or country far away…I try to picture appreciating contact with them without pangs or neediness. I think it’s something I will need to work on for the rest of my life.
  
  Because the truth is that I enjoy my kids enormously. They are very nice people, great to talk to, full of good sense, humour, open-eyed appreciativeness, and insightful ideas and judgements. And I’m lucky: they are very tolerant of me, of my tendency to impatience with technical glitches or other impediments. They can laugh at my quirks without meanness or needing to score points of some kind.
  
  I am grateful for all of it. But it leads me back to the need to let them go and to be clear with them that I am happy to see them making their own way in the world, wherever it might lead them.
  
  I was given that freedom and encouragement by my parents early on. It was a lucky thing too, that they encouraged my autonomy and confidence, for they died young, leaving me strong enough to keep moving forward, rather than a puddle of tears and anxieties.
  
  Now here, at another place on the arc of life, it’s my job to be as clear-minded and un-self-indulgent as I can be with my kids and with myself too. I need to take pleasure in their company and also be happy when life takes them to other places and people and ideas.
  
  And so this process of welcoming Tashi back from his travels is just another way-station on this road I am travelling with them, a life journey of arrivals and departures - theirs and mine, long and short - a mix of wonderful and worrisome and everyday. Many other people are on the journey with us, members of our extended family of friends and relatives, a web of cross-connections that sustains us all.
  
  What a privilege, to have the freedom and the confidence to follow our curiosity while knowing that there are welcoming harbours to return to….
- EARLY JUNE INTENSITIES
  
  Jun 10, 13
  
  Yesterday at lunch, a group of friends and I raised a glass to the day’s clear skies and sunshine, greeting summer weather and basking in its warmth. We were eating sticky rice, marinated chicken hot from the charcoal grill, asparagus ditto, lightly dressed local salad greens, and a trio of made-by-my friends Thai dipping sauces as side-condiments. And we were eating with our hands, most of us, sensually and happily.
  
  But alas we were prematurely optimistic, for today we’re back to drizzle and chill. The garden is happy, I suppose, in its greeness, but the cool temperatures are holding back the basil and chiles and eggplants, which still look a little shell-shocked even two full weeks after being transplanted. We tend, here in eastern Canada, to bemoan the fact that we have a very short spring season and leap straight from chilly into summer heat. This year is the great corrective, more like English spring than our usual, and lasting several months for a change. Perhaps this means that asparagus season will be extended, and salad greens will going on being tender for longer, rather than being heated into tough and bitter leaves by intense heat. The trick is to look for the side-benefits, right?
  
  I wrote last week that old friends of mine were going to throw an engagement party at my house last Saturday and that I hoped for cool weather so the peonies could stay fresh until the party. Well I perhaps wished too hard, for we had very cold weather all week. But one happy consequence was what I’d hoped for: the two ancient peony bushes in my back garden are still in full aromatic white and pink bloom, spalshy against the bright green of ferns.
  
  The engagement party was huge, and a huge success, for the weather gods smiled, the catering, by Dawn and Ed of Evelyn’s Crackers, was spectacular (all Thai, a lot of it vegan-friendly; the beef and chicken were locally sourced), the DJ’ing (two turntables, the works) by Ben Rothberg was astonishing and wonderful, and everyone was feeling celebratory, and happy to reconnect with the huge network of friends and family of the bride-to-be. Whew! The dancing went on until three… I owe my neighbours big-time for their patience.
  
  A side-bonus to all the work of party prep is that my house is wonderfully clean and organised. There’s nothing like a deadline (and an obligation owed to someone else, rather than just to oneself) for getting chores done well and thoroughly. I feel spring-cleaned to the max.
  
  And I’m also feeling a little wiped out today, as I try to gather my thoughts after the intensities of the week and the weekend. Time seems to be flying by suddenly. I have only two more classes to teach of Foods that Changed the World (I’ll miss the class; it’s been great); right after the last class comes the summer solstice; soon after that I leave to go to the Oxford Symposium, a huge treat; and by the time it’s over we’ll be well into July… I find that when I’m tired my thoughts tend to rush ahead to anticipate, and when they do, time telescopes so that I feel the days rushing past beneath my feet dizzyingly. It’s not a useful way to feel.
  
  The solution I’ve discovered is to retreat to the age-old technique of making lists, by hand, with a pen or pencil, on a piece of paper. It slows down that rushing forward, anchors me in the present, and generally makes me more realistic and calm. I think I’m due for another session of list-making!
- MAY COMES TO AN END & SUMMER BECKONS
  
  May 31, 13
  
  Here it is the last day of May already. It’s been difficult to remember which month we’re in, for we’ve had everything from balmy heat to thunderstorms to snow and frost, all in the flowering month of May. Today we’re back at balmy, almost tropical, with soft humid air and a weighty heat promised.
  
  It’s also the day, as I sit here waiting for the kettle to boil, that I say farewell to one of the treats I brought back from Georgia (yes I declared them at customs!!). It’s a “moraba” of carnelian cherries, given to me, and made by, Elena’s ninety-year-old grandmother in Kutaisi. Carnelian cherries are tart, elongated slender fruits, a strong red, brighter than most “regular” cherries. And moraba is the Georgian word for a way of preserving fruit in sugar syrup. The point to a moraba is the fruit, yes, but also the syrup, flavoured by the fruit over the months since it was put up, which is delectable. A spoonful is enough, a taste hit, that in this case has tartness from the cherries and sweetness too from the sugar in the syrup they were preserved in.
  
  So as I say, I have come to the bottom of the moraba jar: there’s about a tablespoon, perhaps a little more, of syrup left, and I’ll use it, as I have used the rest of the jar every morning this month, to make my morning hot drink, by putting it in my big mug and filling it with boiling water. The aroma of cherry will come wafting up in the steam. The trick will be to enjoy it without regret for its passing…
  
  Time for me to get hold of enough canning jars so that I can make cherry moraba when they come into season. How to find carnelian cherries? If I get lucky, I will, otherwise some kind of tart cherry will be a good substitute.
  
  The wisteria vine which has been twining along the fence, pulling at it and being pruned back by me, had a generous flowering this year of long draping aromatic white flowers. They’re pretty well over too. Meantime the columbines, of many colours, are dotted around the back garden, self-seeded (though I help them along by scattering seeds from the pods after flowering), the irises are out, and the peonies, two ancient bushes side-by-side, are rounding into fat buds and showing a little pink.
  
  I’d like a little cool weather to slow things down, so that the peonies are fresh and full next weekend. That’s when our wonderful friend Kaya is being feted here by friends and family, and somehow full-bloom peonies seem like the perfect festive early-June touch.
  
  Meantime, after flooding rain earlier in the week, the city is looking green and fertile. Cool bowers of shade on the treed streets in the downtown neighbourhoods make me grateful to those who planted the trees decades ago.
  
  I was out early this morning, before the heat, trying to clean up the small back garden. The flagstone path that winds through it is very overgrown with clover and also with young garlics. I usually go along and grab handfuls of the garlic greens to cook up with dandelion greens as part of breakfast. But now some of them have to go. I’ve pulled them up and plan to grill the tender garlics and their long greens this evening at a friend’s place. And why? It goes back to the party for Kaya.
  
  As parties often do, it is prompting me to take hold of things a little, never a bad plan! And so the garden should look a little more orderly, or perhaps I should say a little less disorderly. And the ground floor too will get itself cleared for dancing. That’s what I have on my to-do list for tomorrow, to try to knock off most of the decision-making and rearranging and stashing of things, so that it’s not all left to the last minute.
  
  It’s an interesting process, this getting ready for a party that someone else is having in my house. My mind keeps wandering to questions about food and other logistics, and then I bring myself up short and remember that none of those things are my responsibility. I’m looking forward to being a guest at the party…
  
  Meantime I’ve been reading widely about Akkadians, Medes, Persians, that whole complicated history and geography of the region I’m now obsessed with. The tarragon in my garden came back green and lush and that’s a good thing, for Georgia re-imprinted me with a yearning for it, fresh, with everything! I wish I had a walnut tree, and a hazelnut, and what about persimmons, figs, cherries, apricots? They all grow happily in much of Georgia, and are the backdrop to a lot of the food in the region, Armenian, Georgian, and Azeri, as well as Persian, Kurdish, etc.
  
  How lucky I feel, that these distinctive patterns of cooking and gardening and farming and preserving should be such a fascinating and informative entryway into other places, other peoples. So much to learn. Life is way too short, don’t you think?
- THOUGHTS AT FULL MOON DAY: DAILY CHOICES
  
  May 25, 13
  
  I’m sitting here listening to Arcade Fire on my computer. It’s Friday early evening, bright and cold and windy, a very unusual May 24. Tomorrow is full moon, a seriously important day for buddhists, for it’s the day Buddha’s birthday is celebrated all over the Buddhist world.
  
  I’ve been thinking about context and how it affects our perceptions and reactions. I’ve also been marvelling at how it seems possible for me (and I presume this happens to others) to make a problem, or find a problem, however well things are going. Let’s start with that.
  
  I am just finished with some tight and pressing deadlines and am now in the clear, able to get started on dreaming about and working at my next book project and other ambitions too, from the garden to sketching to seeing neglected friends.
  
  You’d think it would make me feel light and free and very happy. And yes, I felt that way right as soon as the time pressures were over. But then I fell into worrying about what I should do each day. I no longer have the coercion of tight deadlines to keep me moving steadily and methodically from one task to the next. That was survival mode and it worked well.
  
  Now I find myself trying to optimise, because I have the luxury of choice. But it means that I hesitate and get fussed about what I should do first, or whether I should go for a run or do a household errand now and work later or vice versa, and on and on. It’s not very interesting at all. And I’m sorry if this description is tedious. It just seems important to raise this. Is it human nature at work here?
  
  I assume the answer is that I need to impose a structure on myself that resembles the coercive deadline-situation structure. My efforts at optimising are just a way of insisting on exercising moment-to-moment choice. If I could settle into the harness of a structure, it would simplify a lot. And then I wouldn’t be fussing and anxious about my moment to moment decisions.
  
  On the other hand, the unplanned moments of the day, the unfilled spaces, are the fruitful ones, often. They mean there’s room/time to talk to a friend who has a problem, or to daydream my way into a new story idea or a fresh way of seeing a familiar problem. That’s part of my rationale for improvising my schedule through the day.
  
  Another more disciplined way of working would be to cram or jam the work obligations etc into one pre-determined part of the day, a defined chunk of time, thus leaving the ret clear for these other more fluid and open-ended possibilities. I confess that I have never managed, for more than a couple of days at a stretch, to impose “artificial” constraints in that way. I am task driven, rather than structure- or discipline- or rule-driven.
  
  That being the case I need to just chill a little on this pressure to optimise, to forgive myself when the day feels unproductive, and to not have the heightened amped up expectation that every day will be a knock-out.
  Is this what growing up is supposed to teach us?
  
  I guess I am stuck in an “optimistic child” mode, where each day or week or month feels full of rich possibility, with elastic time into which can be crammed all sorts of delights. And that’s fine, as long as I don’t get tied up in knots trying to optimise all the time. Rather than focussing on what I don’t get done, I need to move from task to task, without second-guessing myself.
  
  I aked a friend in the market about how he works his way through his days. He’s got some have-to-dos at the start of the day, but then he moves into a mode where he just does whatever chore or task presents itself next, a kind of fluid flow. He doesn’t worry about the decisions, the order in which he does things. And my issue of trying to optimise was a foreign idea to him.
  
  He’s a model to emulate, for sure, in his easy matter-of-fact “enjoy the day as it unfolds” attitude. And he sure is productive, whle making it look effortless.
  
  The other idea I wanted to think about in this post is how context affects perception. It’s a truism, sure, but worth remembering. I started reflecting about it a couple of days ago when the weather suddenly turned extremely cold. In a coat and sweater and scarf and socks and shoes, warm pants too, I still felt assaulted by the cold and wind as I walked outside. I realised that this reaction was just like the one described by winter-hating friends who have never become used to the cold. And yet, if it had been January and the weather had been just the same, I’d have found it balmy, pleasant, a wonderful treat.
  
  This is not about my emotional or intellectual reaction to the cold (though I have to admit that wearing layers of wool on May 24 feels all wrong!). It’s that my body was in another mode, summer mode, and as a result every chilly gust of wind inflicted a kind of pain. In winter we tighten up and brace against the cold, so as not to feel its assault. Without that kind of self-sheilding, we’re vulnerable to it.
  
  And so context is everything. It’s not just about whether the temperature feels cold for this time of year as opposed to January. It’s also about expectations, both emotional and physical. So much of our reactions, physical, emotional, social, is determined by our expectations. Of course this leads me to wander into that whole other realm to do with expectations, which is how we manage ourselves when we have disappointed expectations, because a person or a situation fails to come up our expectations of it.
  
  But that’s for another day…
  
  One thing the hit of cold has done is remind us all what a blessing warmth and sunshine are. And here in Toronto, as I finish this post on Saturday afternoon, the sunshine is beckoning, enticing me outside to beathe in its generosity.
- PAUSING TO BREATHE IN THE SCENTS OF SPRING
  
  May 21, 13
  
  I’m feeling light as air this evening. The weather is soft and kind, with showers every once in awhile to keep us moist and the scents of flowers heavy as I walk down the streets. The tall magnificent chestnut trees on Henry Street have all their candles out – tall spikes of white flowers touched with pink, that lightly perfume the air. I have walked under them for years, but this evening for the first time I reached way up to a bottom branch and took the liberty of breaking off one tall candle of a flower. So lovely. I sniffed at it as I walked on up the street and then discovered that my cheeks and chin were smeared with golden pollen.
  
  The sky was smeared with tangerine and golden pinks as I walked past the lovely open space of King’s College Circle this evening after my second Foods that Changed the World class, this on eon wheat and rice. I must get out at dusk more often I caught myself thinking. It’s a time of mystery and promise, especially on a warm mild night.
  
  My lightness is about the beauty of everything at this time of year, but also because I’ve passed through another portal, the Cilician Gates of income tax prep, for this year. Why does it weigh so heavily? Is it the feeling of being called to account? Or is it just the idea that someone is looking over our shoulder? Or is it a basic fear and dislike of numbers, addings-up, and organising tedious paper? Whatever…
  
  I pulled together my records and typed things out on four or five pages. It all seemed to make sense to the wonderful Ian, who does my taxes every year. This time, because everything needs to be translated into Canadian dollars, my first page started with a listing of the exchange rates of US dollars, British pounds, Australian dollars, Burmese kyat, and Thai baht…. It all brings a touch of faraway into the tedium of accounting. Anyhow, I am delighted to have done with this stage. Yes!
  
  Now I just need to get peppers and tender herbs into my garden, and maybe some cucumbers. I've been eating dandelion greens, asparagus, sorrel, chives, and other herbs, for awhile now. Each bite is so renewing somehow, still full of life because fresh-picked.
  
  And there is also work to be done, pleasurable most of it. For example I need to be ready for the last four sessions of Foods that Changed the World. The class is great, lively interested students of all kinds. Next week is olives and olive oil; peanut and peanut oil. It will take us from the Mediterranean to Peru and Senegal, and to Vietnam too. I so enjoy engaging with food ideas and with the world through food What a privilege to be able to teach it to engaged students.
  
  And now with heavy eyelids it’s time for me to head upstairs to bed. I’m hoping to sleep the sleep of the just, with the heaviest of my deadlines now over with. I’m still not clear why tax accounting weights so heavily, nor why it should come in the spring, when otherwise everything feels so wonderfully optimistic.
  
  I hope you too have the opportunity to stop and smell the flowers this week. It’s a good time to be mindful, for this full moon (May 24 or 25) is celebrated as Buddha’s Birthday, a huge holiday in Thailand and in Tibet, among others. Let’s have that sense of new life and beauty springing forth ignite our feelings of optimism and our energies. Enjoy the light and all the fresh new life that’s emerging and blooming…
- STRIDING FORWARD THROUGH THE CHANGING SCENE
  
  May 13, 13
  
  These days, in damp and drizzle and wind and hail and chill, the streets of Toronto are paved with gold, and green-gold and white and pale pink and pink-red….the tiny yellow-green maple tree flowers, the cherry and plum and apple and flowering almond blossom petals, that are being washed and blown to the pavement by rain and wind. It’s a dazzling show for those like me who are walking people. The vivid colours are kind of hallucinatory as I rush along; today I was in a hurry to get out of the cold.
  
  The other day I was hurrying along petalled streets to see a young friend whose first baby was born at the end of March. It was my first sight of her. Olivia is of course downy-soft and adorable, her little fists clenched under her chin as she sleeps, her gaze direct and alert when she’s awake. I took her mother some books, kid books, to get her library started. I imagine them later with perhaps crayon lines and marks in them, and fingerprints. Every child needs a store of books. I’m no good at buying clothes or other things; I never know what’s needed or wanted. And anyway, babies grow like weeds, so todays large garment is tomorrow’s giveaway. I’d rather give books.
  
  And that got me thinking about permanence and impermanence. Those flowering trees, fragrant or not, give us a moment of heart-stopping beauty, and then it’s washed away. The tree remains, a reminder of a moment, and it promises us another next year. So too a book gives us intense moments of pleasure, or connection, and later on its presence on the shelf reminds us of those moments and perhaps invites us to open it again and reread it. Kids of course love the familiarity of the already well-known book. They will ask to have the same book read over and over, weekly or nightly. We lose some of that impulse when we become autonomous readers. We seek out the new.
  
  And yet at the same time there are some books that I go back to and reread, as a kind of soothing technique, a remnant of kid-impulse I think. They are mostly books that I read as a kid or teenager: the Complete Sherlock Holmes, in two volumes, is one candidate for rereading, perhaps every three or four years. For my kids it’s the Philip Pullman books, and some of the Harry Potters.
  
  Perhaps it’s age, and the perspective it can give as I gaze back in time, or put my head into an earlier year’s place and gaze forward, but I am more and more aware that one of the things that keeps me feeling alive and well is an ongoing effort to keep a sense of balance as things around me change. Those can be the seasonal changes, that remind us of fragility and loss, even as those first blossoms are emerging on the trees. Or they can be the announcement that a friend or the parent of a friend has only a limited time to live, or the demolition of a familiar building on a neighbourhood streetcorner, or the closing of a bookstore, or the purchase of a new piece of technology that is complicated and needs to be mastered.
  
  All change can be disorienting, or anxiety-making, even just as we contemplate the possibility of change, let alone when it shocks us with its suddenness.
  
  I love through-lines, stories that continue across generations or across continents and oceans. I like other people’s family stories, the history of long-term friendships, I like thinking about the long-term cross-linkages in my own family and in my life. That idea of some kind of continuity is precious. And for me perhaps it’s what helps me keep my balance in the day to day changing scene, helps me enjoy the dynamism of young people’s ideas and the liveliness of their open horizons.
  
  And so as the tulips fade and the petals fall from the flowering fruit trees, rather than regretting their passage, I love the anticipation of the next phase of the year: rhubarb and sorrel and tarragon now my garden, tender asparagus now coming into the farmers’ markets, and then after that the generosities of summer. Yes!
- MAY BLOSSOMING AND THE GROWTH OF A NEW PROJECT TOO
  
  May 07, 13
  
  It’s extraordinary how happy a little soft fine weather with fresh green leaves and flowering trees can make me feel. And I’m not alone: as I walk or pedal down the streets of Toronto many people seem to have a smile on their face and a lightness to their step. Springtime, this late greening springtime, is so renewing to the heart and spirit.
  
  This time last week I was having my last full day in Georgia. And it was truly full, for I was whisked east to wine country by Irakli Nikolashvili and his friends to visit the vineyard he has with his uncle and cousin, and then to eat a remarkable and of course delicious Georgian feast at his aunt and uncle’s house. Imagine skewers of veal grilled over vine clippings, several pkhalis (like a vegetable pate, but more wonderful), stacks of khachapuri, tkhemali sauce, pickles of various kinds, and more, all washed down with local wines…
  
  I’d been in the Telavi and Gurjani area ten days earlier, but then it had been cold and rainy: The flowers were beautiful and the landscape green, the colours popped in the grey, but it was very cold and the mountains, the mighty Caucasus mountains that frame the north side of the valley, were entirely hidden by heavy clouds.
  
  This time there they were, the mountains, wreathed in tendrils of cloud and majestically tall, snow-covered, a true barrier. Behind them lies Dagestan and slightly farther west is Chechnya. The rich fertile valleys of Georgia are like a paradise in comparison with the harsh high-altutude mountain gorges and heights of the Greater Caucasus. Those mountains also mark the border between Europe and Asia. Russia is Europe and Georgia is Asia.
  
  It’s hard to take in, for Tbilisi’s downtown has the graciousness and the esthetics of a European capital. And the Greeks were at the Black Sea coast in ancient times. Wine-making and wine traditions go back millenia in Georgia.
  
  And yet there is no olive oil, no olives in the traditional cuisine. And very little lamb is eaten, except in the mountains, and little rice. There are leavened flatbreads, baked in a tandoor, or cheese-filled and baked in a home oven or on the stove-top even. And there are corn breads as well as gomi, which is a little like polenta. There is a Garden of Eden's-worth of fruits and nuts, especially walnuts and hazelnuts. And there is a huge array of distinctive inventive foods and flavour combinations.
  
  I’ve been thinking about this question of distinctiveness. It’s much more familiar in the settled cultures of Europe and Asia than in places of immigration and mixing such as Canada and the US. On the other hand, Georgia, like many small countries that lie between major powers, has been invaded and controlled by many different rulers.
  
  How is it then that the people have retained a sense of who they are? There’s pride in the language, yes, with its many local variations; and there’s of course the Georgian Orthodox church, which is a marker of culture and gives a strong sense of identity and belonging. (Christianity came to Georgia in the 4^th century; before that people were a mix of animist and Zoroastrian. The Jewish community in Georgia also dates from long ago.)
  
  All this complexity and all these lovely local mysteries and histories are fascinating to me. I feel lucky to be able to delve and to try to understand, with the help of friends and of chance-met strangers too.
  
  The other day I was in Javaheti (in southern Georgia near the Turkish and Armenian borders), in the town of Akhalkalaki. While the friends I was staying with were it church (it was Orthodox Palm Sunday) I went wandering around the town. The population is mostly Armenian with a fair sprinkling of Russians and very few Georgians. Street signs and all other signs were in three languages, three different scripts: Russian, Georgian, and Armenian. A beautiful massive snow-covered mountain filled the eastern horizon. In town all buildings were low, one-story houses mostly of stone, a little sombre. When I started exploring the bazaar was not yet open and there were few people out in the streets. The wind whistled along them and the bright sun made sharp shadows in the clear high-altitude air (the town is at over 1700 metres).
  
  But I came on the sign for a bakery, so I headed down a flight of stairs into a cavernous basement area. At the far end the baker and her assitants were getting ready bake the next batch of loaves. She was Armenian and spoke excellent English. She was making not lavash (there was a stack of lavash that she’d made the previous day) but instead a version of Georgian “puri” or leavened flatbread, that is distinctively from Javakheti region. The dough had been shaped into rounds which had risen into soft mounds. She made a hole in the centre of some of them. Others she brushed with water and then she and her assistant used their cupped hands to make a circular dent in the centre of each mound, which they then cross-cut with the edge of one hand to make three more deep dents.
  
  The pierced loaves were then stretched to make a large oval doughnut shape, slipped onto a peel and into the oven. The dented breads were one by one stretched over the back of their hands into a long oval, placed on a floured peel, and slid it into the hot stack oven. I’d never seen that particular shaping technique, which gave the breads a distinctive pitted central surface, nor could I have guessed how they achieved it without having seen them work.
  
  I felt so lucky to have come on them just as they were shaping the breads. It’s these small accumulations of good luck that I rely on when I travel. They slowly add up, piece by piece, to make a picture of a place, a culture, a tradition. Later I met another baker, a village woman who was Georgian and who told me that the doughnut breads were known as kokora while the Georgians call the pitted flatbreads lavashi
  
  And so now, home from my first trip for my next project, I feel well launched on it. The Persian World is my working title for an exploration of the culinary cultures that have been influenced by Persian traditions, cultures where there are traves of the Persian legacy.
  
  I am thrilled to be reconnecting with the cross-currents and complexities of Central and West Asia and the Caucasus. I’m looking forward to learning a lot more about breads, pulaus vegetable dishes, and the brilliant ways in which fruit and nuts are incorporated into the cuisines in the region. In the coming two years I am hoping to be able to travel to Iran, Azerbaijan, Armenia, as well as to several places that, like Georgia, I visited long ago in 1989, when doing research for the Flatbreads book.
  
  Please pass along any suggestions you may have about books and other resources you think might be useful. I will need all the help and insight I can get, as well as traveller’s luck of course.
- GENEROUS LIVING IN THE MOMENT - NOTES FROM TBILISI
  
  Apr 30, 13
  
  After a full two weeks in Georgia I am more aware than ever of how much I have to learn, how rich and deep this country’s food culture is. And of course I should write in the plural, for though there’s a shared pan-Georgian approach to feasting and hospitality and a respect for good food, there are also very different dishes and ideas about what to serve when and how, in the many different regions of this small country.
  
  Still that diversity is not where I’m headed with this post. Talk of specifics will have to wait until I have digested my experiences here, pun intended and very appropriate. Meantime I want to talk about living generously. And also about appearances and assumptions…
  
  Late this afternoon I went with Tamar to the apartment of a family that we both had met only last week. They are all friends of the remarkable cheese-maker Ana. We’d met them at Ana’s farm just outside Tbilisi, a place she is working to transform into a kind of food Eden. (She’s well on her way: the south-sloping terrain is green-grassed, with ploughed patches that are her vegetbale plots. There are several walnut trees, apple and plum trees, hazelnuts, etc. And the soil is rich and clean.)
  
  Today, though, we were far from idyllic green fields and fertile soil. We were in the Tbilisi suburbs, in a tall apartment-block landscape like that of many ex-Soviet towns. The blocks are charmless on the outside, access is usually through a cement entryway that leads to a chipped concrete staircase, and perhaps also to an elevator that may or may not work. Today’s place was like that.
  
  We traveled up to the fourth floor and then walked into the apartment of our hosts. It wasn’t luxurious or flashy, no, but the difference once we were through the door was spectacular. There was warmth and charm. The table had been set with plates and glasses and clay ewers of Georgian wine, as well as with many of the dishes that were to be part of our meal: Emereti khachapuri (cheese-filled flatbreads made of leavened slow-rise dough filled in this case with cheese made by Ana); plain puri (long Khaketi-style bread batons); two kinds of Mingrelian adjika (condiment sauce that is an intense hit of flavor) red and green; leafy green salad dressed Khaketian-style; chicken roasted with coriander and garlic…
  
  Warm late afternoon light came pouring in the windows, as our hosts brought more dishes to the table. Then we all sat down and began eating. A Georgian feasting meal is called a supra. This one was a mix of dishes from Khaheti in eastern Georgia and from Mingrelia, in western Georgia. The adjikas and also an unbelievalbly delicious pork dish made with various organ meats cut small and braised in a little oil flavored with red adjika, were from Mingrelia, home of Irma, one of the women who had cooked the feast.
  
  Gia was tamada, or table-host, and he proposed the first toast of the evening, the classic opener, to God. And we went on from there to eat and drink and tell stories. Several late arrivals were specially toasted in welcome. And as they were still eating the singing began. It was not Georgian polyphonal music but instead Georgian popular songs, accompanied first by Gia’s guitar and then by Tina at the pinao. The music, the joking, the food explanations (translated for me by Tamar), the pleasurable moving from one rhythm to another during the meal, were all unselfconscious. The room was warm with ease and an in-the-moment delight.
  
  Nothing about the outside of that apartment block, or its neighbours and cousins all around the outskirts of Tbilii, gives any hint of the warmth and beauty that each apartment may contain. Perhaps there’s extra inner warmth espceially because of the bleakness of the outside?
  
  And as we travelled back home in a taxi I thought too about the unhurriedness of the meal and the evening. It wasn’t happening in furtherance of some goal or ambition, it was just itself, a gathering of people for a meal and the warmth that it would give.
  
  So often in North America it seems to me we are rushing on to the next thing, rather than taking our time. It’s true not ony of many dinners but other social engagements as well. I am certainly part of the rushedness, impatient to get on to the next thing.
  
  Here in Georgia I don’t get that sense at all. An enormous effort goes into preparing food and laying a generous table for friends and family and occasional strangers from afar like me. Even there, though the work (almost all of it done by women) is long, it happens not in a rush but with a kind of easy stamina. It will be finished and supper will be ready when it’s ready, not at some exact pre-appointed time. The waiting time will pass with conversation and joking around. It’s all part of a kind of rolling-with-the-punches unstructuredness that I find relaxing and welcoming.
  
  And so the externals become less and less important. People dress with care and a great sense of fashion. The centre of the city is elegant, reminds me of Paris. But they don’t worry about the grey look of their apartment buildings or the dreariness of the entryways to home. What matters is the genuine warmth of the heart that people bring to the table. And that has a radiant glow to it.
  
  Happy May 1 tomorrow everyone…
- GEORGIA ON MY MIND
  
  Apr 19, 13
  
  Of course I’m referring to Georgia in the Caucasus, remarkable country of great history, distinctive cuisine, rich agricultural and vinicultural traditions, and complex linguistic and cultural roots.
  
  Twenty-four years ago I came here for the first time to learn about flatbreads. I was very ignorant. And so I was astonished, was completely blown away, by all the rest of the food, as well as by the breads. Now at last I’m back, and able to take a few more baby steps into the wonders and mysteries of Georgia.
  
  I’ve now been in Tbilisi, the capital city, for two days, eating and asking questions and taking photographs, and asking more questions. It’s just after mid-April, the trees are in leaf and some, like the quince I saw yesterday, and the chestnut outside my window, are in flower, but it is bone-chillingly cold, with rain and cloud and low temperatures too. It’s hard to feel loose-limbed in a damp wind. On the other hand, there are a lot of warming winter dishes that feel exactly right for these temperatures. I’ve been eating my way through them since I arrived.
  
  On my first day here I went with friends to visit the cathedral in Mtskheta, not far from Tbilisi. On the way we stopped at one of the restaurants that serve the very traditional Georgian dish lobio, cooked kidney beans in a clay pot, accompanied by mchadi, corn breads. It sounds like plain fare, and it is, delicious, satisfying, and warming.
  
  We had cheese with our mchadi and lobio, but many in the restaurant did not, for right now it’s Lent here. Most Georguan Christians are Orthodox, and Easter for the Eastern rite this year is Sunday May 5. Many people fast during Lent. In the Orthodox tradition that means not eating meat, fish, milk products of any kind, or eggs. The Ethiopians, whose church is also part of the Orthodox tradition, have the same approach to fasting. In Orthodox Christianity, for those who are strict, there are oveer 200 fasting days in the year.
  
  I know of many of the Ethiopian dishes that inventive cooks have come up with for the fasting days. But I hadn’t really thought much about the Georgian approach to fasting, and which dishes might have resulted. Now I’m learning, little by little.
  
  The basics are easy, for Georgia is rich in wheat and nuts, and fruit too. A person can go a long way on various combinations of those, perhaps helped by a little honey. A small agriculture- and food-focussed Georgian NGO called Elkana that started in 1994 has published a booklet of recipes of traditional foods, using traditional ingredients. Many of them turn out to be fasting dishes. They start with wheat berries, for example, toast them, or soak them, or just boil them until soft, with a variety of flavorings. Almond milk is permittd, and so it has a big role, as do walnuts, a Georgian staple. They’re both a delicious and satisfying alternative to cheese and milk or yogurt.
  
  Other of the recipes in the booklet use lentils or other dried peas – old staples, many of which are no longer easilly available here - as a base and add oil, aromatics, nuts, and vegetables. Elkana is interested in promoting traditional crops, many of them what Elkana calls "forgotten crops" - to help with agricultural sustainability as well as cultural rebuilding (years of Russian occupation, as well as revolution and war, have had destructive effects on many deep-rooted Geeorgian traditions). Religion was of course discouraged under the Soviets. It has experienced a resurgence, especially among the people of the “lost generation” (now aged 50 to 70).
  
  But many who are now fasting for Lent are not relying on traditional recipes and foods but instead on manufactured “fasting foods”. The grocery stores are full of substitutes for butter and cream, all made with oils. It’s rather like vegetarians buying “vegetarian hotdogs” I suppose, but a little sadder in a way, for it’s a loss of traditional attitude as well as of knowledge.
  
  After all, there is a notion in fasting, surely, that it’s about deprivation leading to mindfulness. You live and eat more plainly for the fasting period. But now in modern Georgia, with more properity and a more open society, people are of course making new choices. They are fasting, but in a modern way, buying cakes and other treats made specially for Lent that resemble in looks and texture the cakes of the rest of the year.
  
  And this drives traditionalists a little crazy, I gather.
  
  Yesterday I spent a late afternoon with a remarkable woman in her mid-eighties named Eteri. She had a distinguished career in chemical engineering and is also a fabulous thoughtful cook who has deep roots in Khaketi, a food-rich region of Eastern Georgia. Every year she makes a huge array of preserves and sauces, fortified wines, fruit juices, and more, all put up in jars and stored in her cold room. It was in talking with her that I realised how aggravating the new “fasting foods” are for those who care about Georgian traditions.
  
  My time with her, tasting (her adjika, tkhemali sauce, fresh tomato sauce, quince juice, wine, cognac, lobio, and more) and talking, as well as my conversations with wonderful food-focussed Tamar, with whom I’m staying, are immediate reminders of just how rich and inventive the Georgian culinary culture is. I am just beginning to get a glimpse of what’s here…
  
  AN AFTERWARD:
  A day after I posted this, I now have a clearer sense of Elkana, for I spent a good part of the early afternoon with the plant scientist who now heads it, and man named Taiul Berishvili. He told me about Dika and Sori wheat, both of them endemic to, or landraces of Georgia, and he gave me a small sample of each. I'd like to take them to Steve Jones at the University of Washington, when I go to the Kneading Conference West, just in case he isn't familiar with them.
  
  It is extraordinary to be this close to the "cradle of civilization", the place where wheat evolved from simple einkorn and emmer into durum and also varieties of triticum aestivum. Georgia has a lot of food heritage to protect and nourish. The country has already had a fight with Monsanto...
  
  Today I also met a remarkable cheese-maker. But I'll write about her in another post. She has already sent a link to my Facebook page, a short video that shows the amazing process of making the local strong cheese, a treasure she is reviving.
- FRESH EYES IN ISTANBUL AND BEYOND...
  
  Apr 16, 13
  
  Once again I’m teetering on the brink of the known-to-me world. I’m in the airport in Toronto, waiting for my Turkish Airlines flight to Istanbul. I’ll have an overnight and a morning and then will head back to the airport to catch a flight to Tbilisi. It all feels so exciting.
  
  But I am out of touch. To most people these days who travel at all, Turkey and Georgia seem fairly ordinary, an extension of Europe. They skype and FB and tweet about being here or there, and none of it seems momentous or difficult.
  
  After years of travels to Burma for my BURMA book, a place where there was no ATM machine or accessible-to-me cel phone to the outside world, and very limited internet access, I feel I’ve jumped into a new generation of travel. I’m not used to modernity in travel and feel like an old-fashioned person catapulted into a new travel generation. All this has happened in the last five or six years…
  
  +++
  The above was written yesterday, in Toronto. Now I’m in the lounge in Istanbul airport, sipping a very good double espresso and waiting until it’s time to head to the gate for my flight to Tiflis, as Tbilisi is known in Turkish.
  
  Yesterday’s arrival here was a short course in the international-hub nature of Istanbul, a real wow. This is the gateway to Central Asia and also has a foot, and more, firmly in Europe. It’s an enticing combo. But to go back to the arrivals, as a Canadian I needed to get a visa. There are 37 countries listed as needing a visa, including Norway, USA, Yemen…an eclectic list. But Sweden and France get a by, and so does Brazil. It cost me $60 and is a ninety day multiple entry visa, which will allow me to come back through here on May 1.
  
  After the visa line came the passport control, divided into Turkish and “all other countries” lines, snaking through barriers. The line moved very quickly, at a continuous walking pace, and was a snapshot of the people that stream into this country these days. There was a whole batch of Turcomen women, in long dresses, all rich blues and wine-reds with small-flower patterns and embroidered borders. They had the gold and steel teeth of the ex-USSR, and headscarves that bared the beautiful bone structure of their faces as well as their ears, all with gold earrings. Then there were Russian speakers, the women in lipstick and tight trousers or elegant skirts with patterned stockings, the men tall and imposing. Among these were scattered Europeans, mostly older prosperous looking couples from Norway, France, Germany. And then of course there were a lot of people I could only guess at.
  
  The passport control was quick and amiable, and then the rest was easy: a taxi to my small hotel, and I was done.
  
  The rainy streets last night were full of hurrying people, stopping in to the green-grocer for green almonds (slightly furry little green ovals) or fresh fruit (so much on display) or tomatoes, or into the butcher for a cut of meat for the night. The woman who cleans the hotel I was at took me in hand and pointed out several small fish restaurants nearby as she was on her way home from work. I picked the liveliest looking one. Grilled sea bream was my choice of main. It came with half a lemon for squeezing on. And I ordered a salad. It was large, enormous and beautiful in a glass bowl and was not tossed but left for me to toss or taste as I wished. It had everything in it: parsley, basil, dill, and tomatoes, grated carrot, cabbage of two colours, and a little shredded lettuce, as well as slices of cucumber and carrot at the side. The server drizzled on olive oil and pomegranate syrup and then as I ate I squeezed on lemon juice and added a little salt.
  
  I like eating alone in a new place. It gives time to reflect, and to digest - pardon the pun – all those first impressions, or at least some of them. I know I’ll forget this newness as I return here on more trips into the region. Certain things, from airport layout to how taxis work, become habitual and we cease to notice them. This first beginner’s mind time is precious.
  
  And so today in the pouring rain I walked the few blocks to look at the Sea of Marmora, grey in the dim light, and yet still magical as an idea… I don’t want to lose the sense of magic that these places steeped in myth and history - yet very much alive and modern right now - evoke in me.
  
  I guess my version of a traveller’s prayer is, “let me never take anything for granted, and may I always have a sense of wonder”.
- APRIL DISTRACTION
  
  Apr 11, 13
  
  What is going on? I ask myself, as I realise that once again I have been absent from this blog for two weeks. The answer is busy-ness. Why should that stop me writing? After all, one can always make time for things, even if it takes extra effort.
  
  The answer is I think that writing, communicating ideas, requires first some clear time to develop the ideas. In other words, I am not making enough time for reflection.
  
  And the result is a little sad. Not only am I not getting renewed enough to write here, but I am also a little scattered and disorganised in other areas.
  
  All of which, in turn, makes me understand that good memory, good travel, good writing, and good relationships all require the same thing: enough time and consideration, reflection and attention. When I am rushing around (most recently to give a talk at Cornell, then to write a couple of small articles, then travel to San Francisco for the IACP conference and to give a BURMA demo; then travel back to Toronto to be on a panel at the Terroir conference; then give an interview and two BURMA talks this week), I have no "still pool" in my head or heart for reflecting, assessing, contextualising. This is not only not good, I think it is dangerous in some way.
  
  For without time to reflect and remember, it is too easy to lose track of what is important. I find I am rushing to meet my commitment to give a public talk or whatever, and thereby neglecting friends or failing to tune in to them.
  
  But I firmly believe that it is our relationships with family, friends, and even casually met strangers, which are the most valuable contributions we make to ourselves and our society. And so if I am so focussed on the next task that I fail to lift my eyes or turn my attention to the human landscape, I am failing in some important way.
  
  As I write now, I am fighting back intrusive thoughts and anxieties about my "to-do" list. "Get down!" I say to it in my mind, as I might to an importunate leaping puppy. "Let me be present to these thoughts and not distracted!" It's a bit of a struggle, for sure.
  
  And now, to yield for a moment to thoughts of the to-do list: It includes the small bits and pieces I need to take care of before I leave on Sunday evening to go to Georgia, that is, the Caucasus. I fly in to Istanbul, then the following day to Tbilisi. Can't wait.
  
  And I sure hope, as I spend my two weeks there eating and looking and photographing, and engaging with people, that I can retrieve a sense of focus, so that I can give the trip, and the people I meet, the honour and attention they deserve.
  
  Please wish me luck.
  
  AND A NOTE ON BURMA: The Burma book was honoured with the "best culinary travel book" at the IACP awards this week in San Francisco. I am thrilled. It has been nominated for a James BEard award too. That result we'll hear in early May, in New York. The other two nominees are remarkable solid popular books: Maricel Presilla's Gran Cocina Latina; and Yotam Ottolenghi's book Jerusalem. It's an honour to be nominated with them.
- SPRINGTIME POSSIBILITIES, & A SWEET TREAT
  
  Mar 29, 13
  
  I feel full to bursting with ideas and thoughts. That’s partly due to my once again having left a large number of days between posts and writing here. But it’s also perhaps because it’s springtime, with sharp light and new energy, and fresh thoughts, all of them seeking expression.
  
  I’m caught with a lot of possible entry-points. One of them is my aunt’s birthday a couple of days ago, that took her to 91. She’s not in a place where she can appreciate it, having slipped into some verison of dementia a few years ago. And yet she lives on, walking and eating and responding a little to smiles and simple stimuli. Another is the distracted place I find myself in, with projects that take my thoughts in opposite and complicated directions.
  
  I am giving a talk on Burma at Cornell, another quite different demo-talk at the IACP in ten days, also on Burma, and yet another in Toronto on April 11. In between there is a story to write that takes me back to a butchered moose. And as a backdrop, I am waiting around until Nou-Roz (Persian new year) is over, so that I can hear whether or not I have a visa to Iran. If I do, I then need to sort out travel arrangements, including the finding of an appropriate “manteau” or light overcoat, the basic decorum required of women along with a head scarf.
  
  This is not a complaint, quite the reverse. I am just trying to describe the kind of time travel and geographic and idea disorientation that sometimes grips me. It’s like a kind of drug trip or stoner experience. And that would be fine – “just enjoy it by letting go” – except that I also need to be solid, straight, focussed, in order to meet some deadlines and not mess up.
  
  Still, it’s all fun too, that life can throw up all these sometimes contradictory messages and rhythms. It’s a learning and adapting process.
  
  This evening I went to see a film. And it, the fact of it, was a huge reminder that it’s valuable if we can push ourselves beyond the boundaries of what we know and into taking chances and risking ourselves. The film is by my friend Kathy Wazana, and called THEY WERE PROMISED THE SEA. It’s a documentary that looks at the exodus of the Jewish population from Morocco after 1956, and especially in the early 1960’s despite their reluctance to leave, and the deep unhappiness of their Muslim neighbours to see them go. The picture of Muslim-Jewish neighbourliness and collaboration in daily life, including music, is powerful.
  
  Kathy took on the film project even though she had never made a film before. Yes she had help and advice from friends and professionals. But the fact is, she embarked bravely to make what is a wonderful powerful and persuasive film, just because she felt it should be made. She has unearthed an important and unacknowledged part of Arab-Jewish history, and has made everyone the richer.
  
  ***
  I wrote the above last Sunday, and now here it is already Friday. I’m back from Cornell, about five hours each way with the border wait-time (under half an hour), and stimulated by the conversations and interactions I had there. It is a treat to be with people who engage seriously with ideas. There were religious studies people, rice scientists, a government studies person, Southeast Asian specialists of other kinds…there at my talk, and a dinner the previous night, because they have an interest in Burma. I felt very welcomed, very lucky to be there.
  
  Still no news on the Iran visa. And that means that I will probably end up using my April travel window to go to Georgia instead. Each starts with a direct flight to Istanbul (Turkish Airlines flies out of Toronto, so lucky). And Georgia gives visas on arrival, thank heavens, so that last minute planning should be OK.
  
  In this mishmash post of the fragments on my to-do list, I should mention too that the BURMA book is headed into a second reprinting. I'm thrilled that people are finding it accessible and engaging. This time I’ve been able to make some some corrections and tweaks, which feels good. They come from new understandings I’ve gleaned about beans and peas, the dried ones that are cooked and eaten for breakfast in Burma.
  
  And finally, last, but not least, I owe a recipe for my simple skillet cake to a reader who wrote to me several weeks ago, because I had referred to it in my “Global Pantry” column in the April issue of Cooking Light magazine. Here then are instructions, in a shorthand version of the recipe:
  
  The cake is shallow, and not hugely sweet, so it gets eaten at all hours of the day and night as food rather than sugary treat. I usually put chopped apples on top; you can leave it without, or top with cooked rhubarb, leaving out most of the wettest juice, or with berries... It's a very forgiving cake. That's the point.
  
  Preheat the oven to 400 fahrenheit. Oil a wide cast-iron skillet (9 inch or 10).
  
  In one bowl beat ¼ pound softened butter with 1 cup sugar (I like to use brown) until smooth, add 1 cup plain yogurt and beat a little (you can instead use canned coconut milk - my Global Pantry suggestion - with the juice of 1 lemon, an acid for the baking powder to work with), then whisk 4 eggs in a separate bowl and add them. Add a dash of vanilla if you want. Set aside.
  
  In another bowl combine 2 cups flour (I use a mixture, usually 1 cup whole wheat pastry floour and 1 cup some blend, or else all-purpose or whatever you want), ½ teaspoon salt, ½ teaspoon baking soda, 1 teaspoon baking powder, generous cinnamon, a dash or more of powdered cloves, and stir.
  
  Whisk the wet again and then add to the dries and stir just until everything is wet.
  Pour into the greased skillet, and if not topping with fruit, sprinkle on some brown sugar for crunch.
  Put into the top third of the oven.
  If topping with fruit, put in the oven and let cook while you core and slice four or five apples (I leave peel on, or partly peel them) or pears, or either with a few frozen berries… and mix in a bowl with a little brown sugar or maple syrup, and perhaps a squeeze of lime or lemon juice if you want.
  
  After 15 minutes lower the heat to 385.
  If topping with fruit, add it now: take the skillet out, gently strew the fruit on top, staying clear of the edges, and put back in to finish baking.
  
  The cake will take 50 minutes, not quite an hour. Check it at 45 minutes…the edges will be starting to pull away from the sides. Do the skewer test, to make sure the centre is cooked.
  
  Take out and let stand for ten minutes. Run and dull knife around the edge to make sure there are no sticking places, then place a large plate over and turn over, so it sits out on the plate. Use a second plate to turn it over, so it is fruit side up.
  (If you didn’t use fruit, you might want to leave it upside down; you have a smooth surface if you want to ice it…; that said I usually prefer to have it right side up).
  
  Happy spring, Easter, Passover, Holi, and Nou-Roz to all…
- BURMA FOOD & TRAVEL GUIDANCE & ADVICE
  
  Mar 14, 13
  
  It’s a week plus since I flew into Toronto from Hong Kong on the last leg of my journey from Chiang Mai. And then I left town for two plus days of escape, so that really I feel I have just re-entered. Those first re-entry impulses: laundry, cleaning the kitchen, looking at bills and other mail, have now been exercised and it’s time to get down to work.
  
  Because of the BURMA book, and because a lot of people have decided to head to Burma in the last year, I’ve had a steady stream of people asking for advice. Mostly they are very nice with their requests: “some ideas about where to stay, where to eat, what to eat…” is the usual request.
  
  And so here I am writing a very straight blogpost, to give some basic info, opinionated, of course, on my views of what where when and how? to travel and eat in Burma. The advice will fall out of date fairly quickly at the rate things are changing, but still the restaurant names should mostly be useful.
  
  Before I get started, I’d urge any of you who are interested in local food to have a good close read of my BURMA book. I’m not talking about the recipes, though they can be very useful as a guide in a new country and culture. (For example it's useful if you understand about shrimp paste as an element of flavour, umami-giving, and come to appreciate just how those curries and salads are made.) No, I’m talking about the section in the front that gives general information about the structure of meals and eating through the day, as well as the annotated bibliography at the back of the book.
  
  And so I am assuming that you know that the main meal of the day, centred around rice, is usually eaten at noon. Go looking for a good Burmese or Shan restaurant for your noon meal, and be prepared to eat widely and well. The snack on the street or in noodle shops or tea shops the rest of the time.
  
  The exception to this occur mostly in Rangoon, where there are a number of restaurants that serve big rice-based traditional meals in the evening, mostly I gather because they have become used to serving ex-pats or people eating in an ex-pat pattern.
  
  The general rules for looking for food in another culture or place are always:
  Notice what time of day people eat particular dishes or kinds of meals, and then copy them.
  Go looking for food markets in the early morning.
  See if there’s an evening market to explore.
  If you taste something you don’t like, ask yourself why you don’t like it. Then try to figure out why or how it tastes good to others. It’s a useful exercise in understanding the elements of a cuisine and traditional eating and cooking patterns and practices.
  
  All right, now here’s a small list of nice eating etc ideas, mostly about Rangoon:
  
  In Rangoon/Yangon, be sure to stay somewhere reasonably central so you can walk around; tho taxis work fine)
  
  Yegyaw Market in the east end (the extension of 49^th Street north of Bogyoke Road), is small and easy to get hold of. Once you’re familiar there (try the fried doughnuts of many kinds) then you might want to poke along the huge market downtown, that runs south from the Kali Temple that is on Mahabandoola; the street market open-air part is the most fun, but in the rabbit warren of the market building there are amazing sights.
  
  Scott Market (also known as Bogyoke Market) is for souvenirs, pearls, jade, etc shopping. Closed on Mondays. Check out Yoyamay upstairs in the SE corner, for amazing textiles; and next door the lacquerware shop, for antique lacquerware. A great place.
  
  I love tea shops, and especially I love Mercury Tea Shop, on Anuwratha Road on the south side at about 46^thStreet. Go in the morning for flatbreads and beans; or have a dosa…I like their black coffee (it comes with a wedge of lime). Skip the steamed dim sum type things.
  
  Other Rangoon noodle stops include any busy-looking mohinga stand out on the street on Mahabandoola or Anuwratha or a sidestreet, especially west of 40^thStreet; or else a vendor selling noodle salad. The latter will have a net-covered display of all kinds of noodles, including pale yellow “tofu” that is a Shan tradition and is made from chickpeas or other beans, and is, like the rice noodles, completely gluten-free. Noodle salads are a common and delicious snack at any time of the day, dressed with lime juice, roasted chopped peanuts, herbs, chile powder, and lots more.
  
  And then there’s Osaka, a great little noodle shop open 5 am to 5 pm, on Bo Myat Thun Street, about 1 ½ blocks north of the railway line (four blocks or so north of Bogyoke Road). Order the shwe daung khao swe, coconut milk sauce-bathed pork on home-made (made in the shop) noodles, with broth alongside and great condiments; and the people there are very sweet.
  
  For a spectacular sit-down meal, on any evening but a Sunday, head to Myit Sone (means “the confluence”, as in the confluence of the Irrawaddy River in Kachin State) for a Kachin feast. Have the pounded beef, a Kachin fish curry, potatoes, the steamed mixed vegetables…anything the sisters suggest to you. It’s a completely different cuisine, and a real discovery. Myit Sone is at 22 Baho Road, opposite the Chinese embassy.
  
  The other evening place to eat, this time central Burmese food, is Feel Myanmar near a number of the embassies and very close to downtown (124 Pyidaungsu Yeiktha Street). You can pick out your dishes, food is made fresh all day, including for the evening; there is a huge range of choices, a relaxed generous vibe, and lots of flexibility. And if you’re fine with being in a tourist-oriented place, the Padonmar Restaurant on Kha Yae Bin Road has a lovely garden setting, a pleasure in the evenings in dry season.
  
  Most other big rice meals are to be found at noontime, when traditionally the food is very fresh-made. Try Aung Thuka near the Savoy Hotel, or Khaing Khaing Kyaw (the latter takes reservations). For Rakhine (Arakan) food, with lots of delish seafood options, head to Minn Lan at lunchtime (closed the 23^rd of every month). There are a number of branches of Khaing Khaing Kyaw and of Minn Lan; your hotel can help you find the closest one.
  
  If you head out of town, I have a few recommendations. Mostly, look for the early markets; ask about market days and schedules. And be sure to find a stall with a good view and sit down for some mohinga or other noodles.
  
  In Bagan, eat your noontime rice meal at the famously excellent open-air place under the tree in Old Bagan (and rent a bicycle to get around). Be sure to buy the local palm sugars (flavoured with coconut or with sour plum powder) and also the tamarind flake candies; you’ll be happy to have a stash to give away to friends.
  
  In Yaunshwe (Inle Lake) where the markets operate on a five day schedule, get yourself informed about the places and days. Eat at the markets, on dry land or on the lake. Look for the delicious rice steamed (in a lotus leaf) with mashed potato and fish; and the darker coloured steamed rice that has been mixed with blood and then cooked. Try the steamed rice dumplings and ask around for peanut soup. Out in the lake, Heritage Restaurant is an upmarket elegant setting that serves an excellent lunch; reservations recommended (ask your hotel for help). The Four Sisters guest house by the river has a good dinner, simple grilled fish usually, prepared with a light hand; quirky people but nice.
  
  In the rest of Shan State, Hsipaw for example, and also in the far eastern Kengtung (ChiangTung) north of the Golden Triangle, eat Shan noodles for breakfast: rice or egg noodles with a tomatoey meat sauce and fresh greens and herbs on top.
  
  And for hotels etc in Rangoon and elsewhere:
  In Rangoon I stay at the nice-people-but-not-beautiful Eastern Hotel on Bo Myat Thun; the East Hotel seems OK too, more central, but is more expensive .
  
  In Bagan I stayed a couple of years ago at the Aung Mingalar (near the bus station) and liked its location and the people; reasonable price too. The market in Nyaung U is great, and busy, but now there are touts because of greater tourism. Just ignore them and head for a noodle soup near the back. Take a trip to Pakkoku, by boat or road (now that the bridge is built) where things are quiet and not at all touristed in the market.
  
  In Yaunshwe (Inle Lake) the Gold Star is another hotel in the unfancy but perfectly nice category, and not too expensive. It’s also a great location, an easy walk to everywhere; rent a bike to excursion around. The same goes for the Four Sisters, which is small and less money than Gold Star.
  
  In Hsipaw, Mr Charles still seems to be the best place; in Myitkyina, in Kachin State, if it ever opens again to travellers, the YMCA is very basic and a great place for conversation about all kinds of news; in Hpa’an in Karen State, the Soe Brothers is another very basic warm-hearted landing place; in Mrauk U (another place that is closed at the moment) plan to stay four or five days at the Prince Hotel, rent a bicycle, and take your time.
  
  Enjoy! and take things as slowly as you can...
- THOUGHTS AS WE MARCH INTO MARCH
  
  Mar 01, 13
  
  Here it is already March 1. Lots of birthdays around this time, including my lovely mother-in-law Ann (Feb 28) who died over twelve years ago, and my father Adrian (Feb 29) who died in 1969 at a too-young age. There are lots of still-alive people, close friends and some relatives too, to celebrate as well, but they should probably remain anonymous…a lovely collection.
  
  The turn into March feels momentous every year, perhaps a little like the turn into September. It’s not yet the end of winter, but the promise is there, of springtime and renewal.
  
  Of course I am writing all this with pictures of winter and spring in my mind’s eye that don’t at all match what I see out my window. For I’m in Chiang Mai, where it’s already hot, with a haze from stubble-burning greying the sky and thickening the air. On the other hand, this dry season blending into hot season is also, like winter, a kind of dead-plants time, that will end with the “spring” that early rains bring, greening the ground and the trees.
  
  Meantime the first durians have appeared in the markets, a little stenchy in an inviting way, and mangoes and papayas are showing up too. Yum. Every season has its disadvantages and its compensations. I’m inclined to focus on the compensations, especially the seasonal foods, for they need to be appreciated while they’re available.
  
  And I leave here on Tuesday, so my awareness of the glorious fruit that I’m about to miss is acute!
  
  Toay I dropped by Akha Ama coffee for a cup of some of the best coffee anywhere (no, I know I’m not an expert, but I have to say it…) and there was Lee, the man who started it all. He’s Akha, young and loaded with creative imagination and energy, and some years ago he persuaded his family and his village to start growing coffee commercially. They’re doing very well. I can only imagine the strain and effort it took to persuade the village to embark on all this. After all, the Akha haven’t survived for centuries by being pushovers or flighty adopters of each new thing that comes along. Instead they have been tenacious survivors, brilliant and thoughtful agriculturalists with a rich material culture.
  
  And now here they are growing world class coffee in Northern Thailand.
  
  I wonder what this will all look like in five years…
  
  I stopped in for coffee because I was in the area, having pedalled out to Niemenhamen soi 13 for a meeting at the best Friends Library. They are the sponsors and arrangers of my two BURMA book speaking events tomorrow. The afternoon session is small, at the Library (which has very little space). In the evening there will be more room – it’s at Documentary Arts Asia. Garrett of the Library and I met today to talk about room arrangements, food (he is doing most of the cooking, with help from friends), and the timing of the events.
  
  It was hard for us to get focussed on those details, since we had so much else to talk about, mostly centred around the current crises in Burma – the war in Kachin State and the ongoing Rohingya situation in Rakhine (Arakan) – and the seeming failure of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi to be effective or even speak out with any clarity, about either. There seems to be a problem, and perhaps it’s to be expected, that the qualities that made her strong and dynamic as a persecuted opposition leader in a kind of internal exile are not ideal for dealing with the complex realities of ongoing politics. A leader needs people who argue and disagree with her/him, and needs wide-ranging discussion. She also needs a team to deal with the day to day practical details, handlers of various kinds. But Saw Suu apparently refuses to have handlers. And a leader needs to develop sophistication and strength in a team, so other people can carry part of the load and develop necessary skills. This also seems not to be happening.
  
  It is heart-breaking to see how let down by and mistrustful of Daw Suu the non-Bamar peoples of Burma have become. It weakens the country.
  
  Of course there is often let-down after the first euphoria of success or freedom or election. But this is deep distrust and dismay. It makes all of us who worry about Burma feel great concern.
  
  So if you are interested, I suggest that you read news from the Irrawaddy and from Mizzima. Both are independent papers, published outside Burma.
  
  I hadn’t intended to write about all this. It is a subject people talk about amongst
  themselves, but not out loud in public much, not yet.
  
  Instead I had intended to write about the people I saw today at the Haw market in Chiang Mai: the older Shan woman who works at the soup place I like, who walks awkwardly on legs a bowed from malnutrition in her childhood and yet works non-stop; the young women of various kinds in their platform shoes teetering through the market; the Muslim woman by the gate with a wooden leg and a baby, waiting for alms from passers-by without asking or even looking up; the mountain-grown vegetables green and bursting with life; the many languages, most opaque to my ear, though I recognise northern Thai, Yunnanese, other Chinese, Shan, Burmese… It’s a rich brew, every Friday morning, this market opposite the mosque. There are stories and stories, I am sure.
  
  And like most things in life, all I can do is look inquiringly, try to tune in, and know that all I am seeing is the surfaces of things. For each of us has our own story and perspective, and how much of anyone else’s can we hope to understand?
- A SENSE OF WONDER & BELIEF
  
  Feb 27, 13
  
  The gecko in the corner of my room high up near the ceiling has just given another chik-chik-chik-chik-chik, loud and percussive in the predawn quiet. He’s interrupted the silence several times in the last hour, as I’ve been lying half-awake here in my corner room in Yaunshwe. When I first woke, it was just after four. I looked out my window and saw the almost-full moon in the western sky, red from the smoke-haze of the season, like a planet from another world. And then it slipped behind the high hills that rim this valley, and was gone.
  
  Now it’s 6 am and in the distance I can here the putting purr of boats, the early ones heading down the river to Inle Lake. They’re going to pick people up and bring them back to town and dry land. Or else they’re heading early to Indein, the place where today’s largest five-day-market takes place. Tomorrow the market is here in Yaunshwe. I’m sorry to have to miss it: we leave by plane tomorrow morning to get back to Rangoon.
  
  Yesterday’s market was by the five buddha temple in the lake, so everyone who was there had come by boat: the P-O from their hillside villages (down to the shore by ox-cart or on foot, or in a crowded open-backed truck, then onto long black wooden boats); the Intha from their houses in/on the lake, houses on stilts or on small carefully built islets of hard-earned dirt. The market was large and airy.
  
  I’d been before, in 1998 with my kids, but at that time part of the market was a “floating market” with people on boats selling soups and snacks and trinkets. There’s a photo in Hot Sour Salty Sweet that I took there, a man’s tattooed hand holding a bowl of soup… But when I arrived and saw no floating market I started to doubt my memory. Was I losing it? Was this the same place? But then where was the floating market?
  
  When that kind of memory-doubt strikes, it’s always a relief when I learn I am not crazy…things do change after all, and in this case they have. Too bad. The floating market was lovely.
  
  ++++
  The above was written while I was in Burma, at Inle Lake. Now it’s a couple of days later and I’ve flown, via a night in Rangoon and a last dinner there with my lovely Burma food tour group, back to Chiang Mai. Here there is more reliable internet, and an easy space to get rested and re-organised. Travelling with a group of people, and moving every two or three days, leaves little time for reflection. And so once again there has been a long gap between posts here on my blog, for which I apologise.
  
  Full moon day on Monday ws a big deal in both Rangoon and here in Thailand, maha budjia day. I went to Shwedagon early on Monday morning with three other people, walking east from our hotel for about ten minutes. Our destination gleamed gold in the dawn light high on a hill ahead of us. Up the long set of steep steps we went, after leaving our shoes at the bottom, expecting to find the calm atmosphere of an early Monday morning at the top.
  
  Wrong. It was intense, peopled, celebratory up there. There was a buddha procession all lined up on a red carpet with fantastic musical accompaniment, a sequence of cymbal, deep conch horn, louder blare and drum that was oddly compelling. The buddha was gold and calm looking, being carried on a small palanquin by white-clad young men. Troupes of nuns were standing watching in their pale pink and vivid orange robes, shaved heads smooth and rounded. And monks of all shapes and sizes in dark red were walking or standing, crowds of them.
  
  I crossed through the procession as it stood there, then joined the clutter of people who were walking slowly around the giant gold chedi. Behind me I heard the procession start moving. What a wild morning scene it was.
  
  I stopped at the dragon (Saturday-born people’s) shrine to make offerings of water (pouring cupfuls on the buddha and on the dragon) and to drape onto the buddha the jasmine flower garland I’d bought on the way up. And then I rejoined the crowd, slowly walking on the cool marble, looking and wondering at it all.
  
  Every time I am at Shwedagon I notice at least one new-to-my-eyes thing; the place is so full and complex that one can only take it in a bit at a time. On this last visit I “saw” for the first time a standing buddha, slender, atop a platform. The statue was gold, graceful and very pleasing. But that appreciative response made me pause.
  
  For each thing I look at at Shwedagon I see with my western foreign eyes, not with the eyes of a “believer”. And so my first and primary response is an aesthetic one. I am drawn to a statue or drawing or mural or tilework, or I’m not. But if I were a simple believing buddhist, surely my first reflex on seeing that buddha statue would be one of awe and worship; would aesthetic judgement enter my reaction at all? It’s the same question that arises in Europe, when we see a, say, medieval wooden carving of the Virgin. We make a judgement about its beauty, its line and feel, and are also impressed by its antiquity, however it looks. Surely the peasants and others from the era in which it was created would have had little or no aesthetic response, but instead one of worshipfulness…
  
  And this brings me to the article that came out about a week ago concerning the repair and renovation of a temple/gompa complex in Nepal’s remote Mustang region. There’s a controversy about the work that is being done (funded by foreign donors). The foreigner who is in charge began with an attitude from his training, which was to preserve what was there, in however dilapidated a state. But he changed once he had spent a lot of time with the villagers and monks. They wanted frescoes repainted and brightened, renewed and restored, not just conserved.
  
  There’s been a large dispute. The man in charge said his view had changed because he had come to realise that the villagers’ needs and point of view should come first. He had decided that the western art-conservation approach was not appropriate to the situation, which involved a living much-used place of belief and worship, not a museum piece.
  
  And so when I see bright neon lights sparkling behind a buddha figure at Shwedagon, or garish new paint at Wat Bupparam near my place here in Chiang Mai, I try to put my head in the place of the worshippers, rather than staying locked in my place of aesthetic judgement. It’s especially when the judgement is negative (“why did they make this so ugly?”) that I feel I need to put my imagination elsewhere, to try to understand another point of view, another way of seeing and relating.
  
  When my aesthetic response is positive - that excited appreciation of something lovely - it cannot be repressed, nor should it be I think. It’s the feeling I had when I first saw the charming marble reclining buddha in a temple at Sagar, in southern Inle Lake. There’s a sense of delight and wonder. Time stops. And that response is not far from religious, is it?
- OUT & ABOUT IN RANGOON
  
  Feb 16, 13
  
  It’s Saturday evening in Rangoon. People are out and about drinking and doing karaoke, eating hotpot out on the sidewalk, or just strolling in the warm air. What then am I doing sitting inside typing on this keyboard?
  
  Well I think I’ll move to a small café nearby, so I can have a snack and a beer as I write this. But I do need to be writing, for life is about to get a whole lot busier in less than twelve hours. A good friend named Min is coming by for breakfast at 8 tomorrow morning, then I have some further research for an article to do mid-morning. And after that there’s the move to the Summit Parkviw Hotel, where I will meet the Burma immersethrough food group tomorrow afternoon and head out with them before sunset to Shwedagon and then to supper.
  
  It’s strange to be here as a tourist and yet at the same time have a rather full work agenda. For over three years I made regular trips to Burma to do work for the BURMA book. And during that time I was rather single-minded, with a sense of urgency, on every one of those trips. I avoided local ex-pats and also anyone who was “connected”, not wanting to lean on anyone, or be a parasite. I needed and wanted to find things out for myself (for better or for worse!).
  
  Now that work is done. I have the tour work coming up of course, but I have also had almost a week of hanging around in Rangoon. And that has produced all kinds of interesting encounters with ex-pats, Burma specialists, and others. I have learned a lot of gossip, and heard about deeply interesting Burma-based research in linguistics, agriculture, and more. I’ve also seen an incubator kitchen in action and heard other food-related projects being explored in talk.
  
  Some of this stuff is entirely new, a product of the changed political and social landscape here. Some of it has been going on in one form or another for while, but I have not known about it because of my wilful avoidance of ex-pats and connected Burmese. I have no regrets, I have to say. Hearing now about exciting ideas and projects in Burma is like watching the desert bloom after never dreaming it could rain a drop.
  
  And at the same time of course, this energy and forward movement is happening in a fragile place and space. There’s still fighting in Kachin State, and huge perhaps never-resolvable tensions and hatreds in Rakhine State. Daw Aung San Suu Kyi was at the photo exhibit I went to late this afternoon after the book launch party. She was there as its patron and as a judge in a photo competition. The press of people wanting to see her, photograph her, get a whiff of her fairy dust, was a little dismaying. It’s natural I suppose, this elevation of a remarkable person to icon status.
  
  But it can’t really be doing her any good, can it? Like everyone else, she is only human, and the strengths that saw her through isolation, harsh choices, and house arrest, may not be ideal attributes for a leader who needs to build a strong political party. Do people dare to disagree and argue with her? Is she getting tough talk form anyone?
  
  I sure hope so. For the isolation of a person who is idolised is a dangerous thing, and it must also be so lonely in some ways.
  
  Here I am coming to the end of these thoughts. I never made it out to a café. Instead I am sitting in the charmless lobby of the Eastern Hotel, sipping beer between sentences, and listening to the casual chat of the guys on staff. I love the sound of human voices speaking a language that I don’t understand. There’s the comfort of voice without the intrusion of meaning. What more can a tired person ask for?
  
  The sound of other humans reminds us that we are not alone. And the absence of comprehension leaves me free to think my own thoughts, shape my own sentences. What a pleasure.
- LION DANCE MOMENT
  
  Feb 16, 13
  
  The sky is limpid, pale blue with touches of pink-tangerine. Sunset was half an hour ago. Once the sun had disappeared the sky to the west was a glowing orange - not red, not pink, orange – bordered with the purple-blue line of the steep Shan hills that run north-south and frame this lovely Inle Lake world.
  
  I wrote that short paragraph a few days ago, when I was staying by Inle Lake for three days with the valiant group of people who came on my first immersethrough food tour to Burma.
  
  But we were busy, engrossed with travelling on the lake, exploring around, cooking, talking…and so I did not manage to write anything more. My apologies for the long gaps between postings here. I last posted at the full moon, and since then the old lunar year has ended with the arrival of the new moon.
  
  Of course in all this time I’ve had many thoughts and ideas, things I have for a moment looked at in my mind’s eye as I thought, aha, that would be a good thing to talk about in my next blogpost. But unless I write ideas down or act on them fairly quickly, they vanish into the ether. All I’m saying I guess is that this long gap does NOT mean that I have more to say right now. It may be somewhere in my head, that messy stack of undeveloped thoughts and ideas, but they are not retrievable at will. When they choose to surface or show themselves, as I hope they do, at least some of them, then I’ll have more to work with.
  
  For now, sitting here in Rangoon, in the charmless but confortably familiar lobby of the Eastern Hotel (the place I stay when I’m here on my own; with the group we stay at the Summit Park View near Shwedagon), with the familiar faces and voices of the long time staff around, I’m happy to be sipping a Myanmar beer and eating a ripe avocado spoonful by spoonful. My only seasonings are salt and a squeeze of lime juice. It’s part of my renewing and recharging day. After a week of large convivial meals, I needed a break in the pattern. That meant a simple nan-piar with black coffee this morning, a rice with chickpeas in it and fried egg on top for late lunch, and now this green supper.
  
  Today is a holiday in Burma, “Union Day”. There are many closed shops, and a wonderful shortage of traffic on the streets. They’re even less busy than on a Sunday. And people are out walking with their little kids, strolling through the local markets and visiting temples.
  
  At around noon I walked up to Osaka, a little noodle shop that makes fabulous Shwe daung khao swe (noodles topped with a light coconut milk and pork dressing, with a good broth and plenty of interesting condiments and pickles), only to find it closed for the holiday. I can’t blame them. After all, usually they are open seven days a week, from 5 am to 5 pm. On the walk back, I strolled through Yegyaw Market, quiet today but still open for business, bought some laphet thoke makings (fermented tea leaves in two forms, plus the nuts and crunchies mixture that goes with them), then started across Bogyoke Road.
  
  But there was a large crowd gathered on the side of the road, clearly waiting for something to happen, so I walked over to have a look. It was like a medieval or village festival in feel, as the crowd stood quietly and expectantly waiting in the shape of a large hollow rectangle. In the centre were 16 or 20 poles, in pairs , some about three feet tall, some more than five feet, each topped with a small flat metal surface. A supple coordinated-looking young guy was walking on them, stepping from one to the next, then pausing, testing its stability. Sitting on the ground, holding onto each pole to keep it steady, was a crowd of young men, all in red king-fu club tee-shirts and loose pants.
  
  Aha! Suddenly I understood. This was prep for a lion dance. With all of the poles tested, the guy and his partner, each wearing pink-and-silver-patterned leggings, picked up the fluffy fluncy lion dance lion costume, pulling on the head so that its long-lashed eyelids fluttered, and swishing the body as they settled under the “body” covering.
  
  The drum started, first enticing, then exciting, as the lion twitched and glanced around, the crowd still, attentive, unmoving. Then suddenly the lion leapt up onto the poles, one leg on each, swayed, nodded and rolled its head, then leapt again. It crouched, wiggled, looked back over its shoulder… And so it went on, as the drum intensified in volume, then paused, shifting the pace, then picked it up again: all artistry and willing suspension of disbelief. It was magic and enthralling, not just the lion, but the complete engagement of the adults and kids watching.
  
  Chinese New Year has never looked so good to me. And the about-to-vanish-in-modernity charm of Rangoon still lingers… There may be traffic jams now, and SIM cards for cell phones (I just bought my first Burmese one today), and money-change emporia, and ATMs (all very recent changes, in the last few months), but people are not yet jaded, and they don’t take pleasures and treats for granted.
  
  It’s all a reminder that we can all do with a pause to appreciate whatever treat or privilege or pleasure we receive in a day. Often in my rush to move on to the next thing, I forget to take that moment to savour things.
  
  The lion dance moment.
  
  Happy year of the snake. May it help us all shed our old skin of stale dry habits and see life and people and the world generally with fresh vulnerable eyes.
- A CLEARING HEAD UNDER A CLEAR BRIGHT-MOON SKY
  
  Jan 29, 13
  
  The waning moon, still bright, fat, and full-looking, has made its way up past my line of sight as I look out my east-facing windows. The sky is clear now: gone the haze and high cloud of this morning and afternoon, swept away by a short torrential rainfall just after sunset this evening. I’ve never seen rain here in January before. It’s almost unheard of. And no complaints, for it has freshened and brightened the air and washed away the dust. I expect tomorrow will be crisp and clear.
  
  What a wonderful prospect, especially since I’m heading north to the countryside not far from Fang, about three hours’ drive from here in Chiang Mai. I’ll be with the people who have joined me for this year’s immersethrough session. It’s a congenial and collegial group of people, so conversations are wide-ranging and interesting. Yes there are food questions and questions relating to what we come across in the markets (the huge wildly lively and crammed-full wholesale market – Muang Mai – this morning for example), but we also end up talking history and politics and travel, finding cross-connections between our interests.
  
  And so the journey north past rice fields (where there’s irrigation) and plots of garlic and shallots (where there’s not), and towering green limestone hills, will have layers of idea and conversation and story too, the landscape of the group travelling through the landscape of northern Thailand. It’s a pleasing idea.
  
  Tonight we walked back from a restaurant on the west side of the old city, after a supper of issaan food that included grilled fish, grilled chicken, greens, som tam, and a brilliant tom yum soup aromatic with fresh herbs. The air was humid and there was the smell of wet pavement. The old city was very quiet, with only a few people walking apart from the seven of us, very little traffic, and a mere scattering of people at various restaurants and cafes. Chiang Mai is so liveable…
  
  I haven’t written here for a disgracefully long time. I’m not sure why that is. I mean, yes, I have been busy with various deadlines and with preparing for the immersethrough session. But that can’t be the whole answer. Somehow my head has been full of details in a way that hasn’t allowed for the thinkng, mostly unconscious, that seems to be what lies behind the posts I usually write, and that I enjoy writing.
  
  This isn’t the first time this subject has come up here. But it is a reminder that we seem to need to catch up to ourselves. What I mean by that is that if we draw too heavily on our resources – not getting enough sleep or downtime or whatever – then eventually the debt, the arrears, will have to be made good. We’ll be forced, by illness or incompetence or whatever, to let our bodies or minds heal or rest or catch up, whatever the appropriate term might be in the circumstances.
  
  And so it is that I think the busy-ness of last fall’s BURMA book tour, plus the lovely intensities of the holiday season, are still reverberating in my head and memory, taking up space if you will, and not allowing fresh and new thoughts to form and create themselves.
  
  I hope this phase is over and that I can return to the easy assumption that there will be time in the coming days for reflection and for generating new thoughts. I sure hope so.
  
  None of this should be read as a complaint, more as an acknowledgemnt of incapacity. It is strange to think that even with the airings-out and exercise that have come with several long energetic bicycle rides with friends recently, I still haven’t managed to find a clear productive head, at least until now.
  
  One of the immersethrough people said to me tonight, “By the end of the day you must have a lot of narratives going round in your head.” Yes, he hit the nail on the head, though I had never thought of it in exactly that way. It’s other peoples stories which I find fascinating. They go on reverberating for me. And I guess when I’m in changing and peopled situations, as I was on book tour, I end up with a lot of stories that reverberate and take up space.
  
  This is why people meditate, or isolate themselves, to get clarity. But I do love the society of others, their stories and ideas and emotional reactions. And that’s why the idea of sitting and meditating for ten days at a Vipassana retreat, something that a number of friends have done and have urged me to do, just doesn’t appeal.
  
  Does it mean that I am in flight from myself? Are other people’s stories just a way to hide from my own realities and weaknesses? Perhaps. But they’re also an endlessly interesting and warming reminder of the textures of human existence. Nothing beats that!
- EXPECTATIONS OF LIFE
  
  Jan 21, 13
  
  I’m sitting on a comfy version of a sofa, but it’s an exec class seat on Air Canada, a result of having the good luck to be upgraded at the lat minute. I’ve been fed and watered and I’ve had a long nap. It’s a strange thing to be out of time and place like this. Far below in the dark lies Siberia, with its great rivers, its harshness and beauty, but up here in this compartment of cocooned people, there is no sense of the real world, just the sound of fans and a sprinkling of dim lights where people sit reading or watching their individual screens.
  
  This gated community in the sky is a zone of privilege. I feel lucky to have been able to upgrade, using my accumulated points. But what about everyone else? I am much more often in economy, trying to sleep sitting up and feeling cramped, wondering when I dare disturb the people next to me so I can get up and have a pee. The difference between the two is a matter of small degree though.
  
  For everyone travelling by air, in whatever “class” is still immensely privileged. We’re all in the of people with enough access to resources (our own or others’) to buy a plane ticket. It’s humbling to think that a huge proportion of the global population will never be on an airplane.
  
  The above was written on my flight to HongKong a few days ago. I’m now in Chiang Mai, getting shed of my jetlag. My head is clear enough, I think, to at last finish this much delayed post; apologies for the long gap since my last one:
  
  Those earlier paragraphs reflect the fact that I’ve been thinking about the things we take for granted, and how that affects our view of the world and our expectations.
  
  I’m now trying to imagine my way into my next book project, The Persian World, as I am calling it for now. I’m travelling in my mind’s eye to Georgia and Armenia and Turkmenistan and more, as well as to various places in Iran… There are political impediments and technical problems with some of my travel ambitions, but basically I can and do imagine going to these countries and spending time there trying to understand the warp and weft of the food traditions there.
  
  It’s only when I’m out and about (for example on tour with the Burma book last fall) meeting people who hold down responsible jobs, etc, that I get reminded that for most people there are many obstacles in the way of imagining travel. I’m not talking about money, strictly speaking, for many, especially in the developed world, could if they put their minds to it make travel a priority and save for that rather than for a car or other tangible purchase. What I’m talking about is the settledness that comes with meeting day to day responsibilities to family and friends. We tend to fall into patterns. It’s the obvious way to cope with responsibility, and patterns can also be familiar and comfortable.
  
  And one thing about travel, especially budget travel, is that it reduces predictability and works against pattern. It demands a certain preparedness to go with the flow that is very difficult for most people, especially once we get past our first youth. And I know this because it happens that sometimes I am reluctant to leave. If ever I am tired or feeling low, especially when I am in Toronto and comfily settled in with family and friends, I sometimes feel that I’d like to just stay put.
  
  I think that the pleasure I take in NOT knowing what tomorrow will bring is a sign of perpetual adolescence. Somehow I want to find out each day rather than knowing ahead of time what it will bring. And when I am tired I don’t have the energy for adolescence!
  
  There’s a bit of a disconnect between having responsibilties, for example the need to meet deadlines, and my perhaps immature liking of unstructured days. Luckily I hate being late – whether for appointments or meet-ups or with writing assignment deadlines – so my sense of obligation will always trump my wish to shape my days and months freeform. That sense of obligation keeps me adult enough to function responsibly, is how some might put it!
  
  Where does that leave me right now? Well I have a small article to finish in the next couple of days, and there’s the work of preparing for the next immersethrough session, which starts here in Chiang Mai on Sunday. But otherwise this week I’ve got time to catch up on this blog, at last, and to do some reading too.
  
  Then on February 2 I fly to Rangoon and the next day the fifteen people arrive who are coming with me on the first Burma Food Tour. We have an itinerary: Rangoon – Bagan – Inle Lake area – Rangoon. It’s eight days in three places, joined by short airplane hops.
  
  But the exact way we’ll be spending our days, though planned, is also a little unpredictable. The reason is partly of course that tourism in Burma can still be a little bumpy. But it’s more that we are trying to engage with Burma through food. The local guides are used to rather set itineraries, and to people wanting restaurant food, a certain predictablity in other words. But we want to improvise, eat street food, explore markets… and to be open to possibilities that present themselves.
  
  All this means that I’ll be reporting back here on how things go, and that I’m hoping the people who come on this tour get the same pleasure I do from the unexpected. Burma is coming out of a long isolation. It’s a difficult time of transition and we have the privilege of being there to see the country as it evolves. But a work in progress is not a finished sleek production; it’s a work in progress, fascinating and frustrating too, and richly interesting.
  
  A slice of life, in other words…
- LIVING ON THE ROLLER-COASTER OF LOSS AND LUCK
  
  Jan 02, 13
  
  Freshly landed in the new year, I want to talk about losing and finding. I'm thinking about this because of something that happened today.
  
  It's an important subject to explore, always relevant I think, because of the difficulty I usually have letting go when I lose something that I treasure (a scarf, an earring); the difficulty I have accepting the death of a friend or the loss of a friendship; the difficulty - and this will perhaps seem extremely trivial to you - of changing plans or ideas in midstream when things go awry or other people change their minds.
  
  All these situations, some trivially small and others huge and very painful, demand a suppleness and some equilibrium. It takes work to navigate them or digest them. And it's an ongoing life-pursuit for many of us, I think. For it often feels as if just as I get reconciled to one loss, another comes and crashes in.
  
  But I've come to realise that there are equally surprising and unexpected "finds" or positive gifts or bonuses that turn up in our lives. Don't you think so? It's just that we don't often look at them in the same way. We're happy to have the good luck to meet someone special who becomes a close friend. Or we catch a break somehow, an unexpected break and then say briefly, oh that was lucky, or thank heavens ..x.. happened when we didn't deserve that good luck. Then we move on.
  
  With losses, on the other hand, we linger, the pain goes on, we carry the resentment or unquiet spirit of loss with us for hours and days and sometimes years.
  
  In the superficial loss situation, where I struggle to accept that I truly did leave that precious shawl behind in the car lot and that it's gone forever, there's a nausea. It takes a real effort to push it back down and to really just let go. I've found though that if I remember to mark, or remark on, the occasions where a "find" or a good luck thing happens, then I am forced to acknowledge that things often do balance out, that sometimes the unexpected works in my favour. And this acknowledgement helps me accept the harshness of loss.
  
  This is all a rather clunky introduction to a simple story: Today I hustled up to Yorkville to meet a friend for coffee (I had left the house a little late and so had to walk-run for much of the way). The paths across Queen's Park and across the university playing fields were snowy, hard packed, and uneven, which made the rushing along a little precarious. It was a beautiful cold clear day, with sharp shadows of bare tree skeletons cast on the white white snowy expanses I was hurrying across.
  
  Some time later as we sat chatting and drinking our coffee, my friend and I, I realised that somewhere in my rushing I had lost an earring. Ah...the perils of winter, and of long hair that catches earrings, and of chilly air that seems to encourage them to slide out. Too bad. And so I managed to shrug off the loss, more or less, with a slight lingering nagging feeling of nausea.
  
  On my way back home nearly two hours later, walking at a more thoughtful pace along a well-shovelled university pathway I saw a small gleam. It was my lost earring. A miracle? Not really. But a lucky find...the fates smiling and giving me a chance to remember to feel grateful for finds and good fortune, instead of clinging only to the remembrance of losses.
  
  I guess in life we end up with more loss than gain, if we're being literal, for death awaits us all. But just as it does no good to dwell on that fact, it is useless and often harmful to focus on what's broken and can't be fixed or what's lost and can't be retrieved. (I know, easy to say and hard to do...for sure.)
  
  But that's life: an ongoing changing and evolving tapestry, with gains and losses, unexpected treats and shocking and disturbing catastrophes. It's up to us to navigate all this, like a skiier on a steep mogul-filled hill, with grace and, with practice and luck, some elan too.
  
  Happy new year to all...
- LOOKING FORWARD TO NEW HORIZONS & BIDDING FAREWELL TO 2012
  
  Jan 02, 13
  
  It’s been more than two weeks since I flew back from Southeast Asia to Toronto, and that same amount of time since I posted a blogpost. Disgraceful, you might well say. I enjoy writing here, thinking on the page, so to speak. So what is it that’s caused this lacuna? I ask myself.
  
  There are the obvious reasons: jetlag and disorientation after the flights from Rangoon via Bangkok etc, and the busy-ness of seeing friends after a travel gap, with the added intensity and expectations that come during the Christmas season.
  
  But it felt like there was more to it. I think I was more wrecked by the whirlwind of book tour than I was prepared to acknowledge. I’m not complaining, especially not after having had the chance to recharge in Chiang Mai, but somehow the deep tiredness, more emotional than physical, continued long after and left me empty of initiative for ideas. I displaced my energies into baking and cooking and seeing friends, but could never quite feel the deep juiciness that I love to feel when I sit down to write here.
  
  And now at last that richer energy is back, as of two or three days ago. I rejoice.
  
  On this last day of the year that marks a dozen years since 2000, that’s been a leap-year/election year and a year that for me was all about the BURMA book, I’m feeling mighty grateful to be alive and in good health, with projects to look forward to and friends to rejoice with.
  
  The holidays have been multi-layered. In our house we don’t have any particular holiday ritual. The only rule is that no-one gets imposed upon, in fact basically the only rule is that there are no rules. It makes things very relaxed, somewhat shapeless, and very pleasurable.
  
  This year we ate a huge meal with friends, family-style, on Chrstmas evening, beginning with PEI oysters and some extraordinary shrimp, moving on to a Berkshire pork rib roast with brilliant crackling, as well as several Burmese salads (the grapefruit salad was especially delish with the pork), and then following up with a choice of sweets that included mince tarts and pumpkin pie, as well as home-made chestnut ice cream. Are you having indigestion reading this list? I am.
  
  And all week we’ve been snacking on various biscotti, made from my recipes in HomeBaking. Cooking was part of my way of dealing with patchy tiredness from jetlag. I made jars of mincemeat a week ago, using homemade candied peel, suet, currants, sultanas, chopped apple, lemon and orange zest and juice, and a good splash of brandy. Some went into the mince tarts, some has gone as presents, but I have to confess that there’s one open jar in the fridge that I dip into every once in a while - with a clean spoon, I swear - to take a lovely rich and intense mouthful. It’s like an over-the-top version of the classic scoop-a-finger-into-the-peanut butter jar, and to me way more tempting and delicious.
  
  So it is that most of us emerge into 2013 having to loosen our belts and opt for those less-fitted garments that allow us to breath easily. The wonderful sereendipitous ski that I had in the city a few days ago, up ravines etc, after our huge snowfall last Wednesday-Thursday, was not enough to work off all this indulgence, nor was the fabulous dancing we all did last night.
  
  But so what? It’s not worth worrying about weight and tight clothing. Life is too short to focus on such trivial “first world problems”. I prefer to turn my imagination to wider less me-centred horizons, those which beckon endlessly, and remind me that the world is an infinitely fascinating place, where people of all kinds face intractable problems and conflicts and try to do so with courage and dignity.
  
  So I’ll close with a wish. Sorry if it seems preachy or pretentious, for it’s heartfelt: May this coming year bring more justice and more peace: more negotiation and less conflict, more respect and less arrogance, to us all.
- MEMORIES OF INLE
  
  Dec 13, 12
  
  I was up just before dawn in Yaungshwe this morning, dressed quickly in the chilly damp air, breakfasted wrapped in my shawl, looking out at foggy streets dotted with the occasional monk on his morning round, then climbed into a car to go to Heho airport, an hour’s drive to the north.
  
  After about half an hour, as we started climbing up the curves of the steep road that leads to the upland where the airport sits, we emerged from mist. Looking back I could see, framed by the long lines of morning-light-etched hills to the east and west, a soft billowing white cloud, lit by early sun, that hid the lowlands. Underneath it, I knew, lay fields of rice stubble and dried stalks of harvested corn; children heading to school in their white shirts and green lungyis; men and women on small motorcycles heading to market or to work, others walking out into their fields, carrying a machete or knife or mattock; the occasional oxcart with high wooden frame, pulled with slow deliberation by a pair of white oxen; villages of wooden houses set on stilts, and a few houses made of cement and built on the ground; small teashops already busy with morning customers, the steam rising from their handle-less cups of tea. And a little farther away, the river leading to the lake was already alive with long powerful boats, headed out to pick up loads of tomatoes from the Intha villages on the lake, or loads of tourists from the hotels out there. On the lake itself, early fishermen would be out in their small narrow wooden boats, paddling them out to their nets, or already out there and paddling standing up, one leg wrapped around the paddle, leaving their hands free to work with the nets. Farther out still, people would be streaming in boats and on foot or oxcart toward whichever lake-side village has its market today.
  
  The markets operate on a five-day cycle, moving from village to village in sequence. Pa-O people, who mostly live up in the hills, travel down to buy meat and fish; and to bring vegetables to sell. The Intha are there with strings of small eels, as well as larger fish and dried fish. men gamble in one corner, and at the edge of the market a blacksmith hammers at a red-hot implement, dipping it back into water to cool it, perhaps, then checking the trueness of the edge and hammering some more. Standing nearby, his helper (often a grown son or daughter) will be working the bellows. It’s an ingenious design, those bellows:. Two fat lengths (four feet or so) of bamboo are set on end. From the bottom small hoses lead to under the coals of the fire. The helper has a pole with a wad of cloth at the end, and slides them alternately up and down the bamboo shafts, driving air down under the fire. The alternation means the fire gets a regular even supply of air and stays steady. And the bellows work is relatively effortless, as well as being nicely far from the heat of the fire.
  
  I’ve now got a sample of the rice liquor made by a Shan guy south of Inle Lake; it comes as 20, forty, and sixty proof. I have a bottle each of the twenty and forty, smooth-tasting and delicious. His still arrangement is another ingenious design, made of cermaic and bamboo, simple and effective. I’d like to take the Burma food tour people to visit him, as well as to a village market or two.
  
  All this is such a lesson in ingenuity and creativity, as well as in the food basics that our manufactured world can hide from our sight.
  
  I’m sorry to be leaving, and happy to think that I’m due to be back here in February. Then, too, I’m sure I’ll come on more local technologies that are new to me. There is so much to learn here in Burma.
  
  Next step, after Rangoon, is the trip home, via a night with good friends in Bangkok. Toronto with its chilly air and festive lights feels far away still, but it’s approaching fast in my mind’s eye... I’m looking forward to reconnecting with Dom and Tashi and with friends, all of whom I’ve seen little of in this busy fall of book tour travel plus Southeast Asia time.
  
  The warmth and conversation of my extended family of friends is so precious. And it’s while heading home that I most often take the time to reflect on its wonderfulness.
- LETTING THE BRAIN REST...
  
  Dec 04, 12
  
  The western sky is an extraordinary pale green shading lower to warm yellow and further down into almost orange, with dark purple trailings of cloud here and there to give it contour. Here in Chiang Mai it’s just past six oclock and time for night to fall.
  
  Many people here have already closed the shutters or sliding metal doors on their shops and businesses and headed home for a well-deserved rest. Others, especially bars and restaurants, are just opening for business.
  
  It’s “well-deserved rest” that I want to talk about here, “down time”, to use another term. Several days ago I read a posting by a meditation guy about our brain’s need for down time or repose. His argument is that our brains are designed for long pauses where nothing much happens, a time to reflect and be centred, rather than engaged in active “seeking”. He’s starting from the premise that the way humans lived in the time before cities developed involved long periods when nothing much happened, and where there was no stimulus for the brain. He says if we time-machined back to that time, we’d be bored silly.
  
  And he argues that meditation techniques were developed by the great religions precisely when humans developed cities and started living in stimulating environments. He says we are born with the urge to seek stimulus. And in the modern era we can go on doing that 24/7. Just as the modern easy availability of sugar (another thing we are genetically programmed to want and seek out) leads many to over-indulge, so the easy availability of distraction, of things to want and seek for and obtain, leads to over-indulgence and is damaging to our health. The article is here: http://www.wildnessandwonder.com/2011/06/downtime-for-the-brain/
  
  I’m not sure of his science or his reasoning from the Paleolithic, but I do agree that taking a pause from the hamster wheel of running in endless circles checking Facebook and links and then Twitter then circling back around to Facebook with perhaps a stop in to check personal mail, and so on, can dull the mind and lead to a kind of self-loathing. And of course it also cuts deeply into the capacity to get any original thinking or work done. At least that’s the case for me.
  
  A long while ago I wrote about the need to allow ourselves “buffer days”, days when we don’t work and don’t put pressure on ourselves to produce. I’d argue now that there’s an urgent need to give ourselves a holiday from the button-pushing stimulus seeking that our laptops or smart phones entice us into. There are days when I have lots to get done, and so I am not tempted into the round-robin described above. But on days when I’m at a loose end, or procrastinating about getting started on a project, I’m vulnerable to getting sucked into the whirlpool. And then an hour or two later I realise how much time has passed, and I feel a little nauseated.
  
  I wrote all the above two evenings ago.
  
  Since then I have taken several breaks from the hamster wheel, and it has felt so good. The most outstanding brain rest was the long bicycle ride I went on yesterday with three guys who pedal a lot here in Chiang Mai and know good countryside routes. We ended up covering about 110 km (over 65 miles), on what was a beautiful but very hot-in-the-early-afternoon day. Whew!
  
  I was immersed in conversations occasionally, but was mostly in a nice undemanding zone of pedalling and looking at the places I was passing by: fields of rice stubble with lean lop-eared white cattle grazing, often with an egret perched on their shoulders; hamlets and villages with shady trees and wooden houses and small village markets; clumps of tall graceful bamboo; and in the distance beautiful hills/mountains, cleanly etched on the near horizon. A perfect day, except when the heat bouncing back up off the tarmac at around 1 pm started to make me feel a little queasy.
  
  (Perhaps I wasn’t coping as well with the heat because of our lunch. We stopped at “the pig place” as they called it, on a small road off the road to Pai. There the poeple roast/grill whole pig, one at a time, then cut it in portions and charcoal grill it a little more. Unbelievably delicious, as was the nam jiim sauce they served in it (a touch of coriander seed in it) and the som tam. Meat at midday is not recommended when there are over 50 kilometres to cover in the hot afternoon! But it was so special that it was worth the discomfort of a little queasiness an hour later.)
  
  I cannot imagine sitting still for long periods and meditating. But moving meditation, being out in my body and centred there rather than in restless thoughts, sure seems like a good way of having brain “down time”.
  
  Other options, pleasurable ones, are a little less kinetic, and also wonderful: singing, drawing or making some other creation, walking, swimming... Even getting lost in a good book can still your brain’s searching.
  
  While I was on book tour this fall I failed to take the pauses I needed, I got swept up in the buzzing to-and-fro of schedules and other people’s expectations. The one exception was when I was in St Helena for the CIA’s Worlds of Flavor conference. The conference itself was intense and charged, but each morning while I was there I was able to swim lengths in a lap pool, getting up at 5.30 to swim in the calm California-scented darkness. It was healing in ways I didn’t realise at the time.
  
  Now as I pack up for a short trip into Burma and then a flight back to Toronto for a month there (I’ll be back in Chiang Mai in mid-January), I’m imagining forward as I try to decide what to pack and what to leave, and at the same time in a small way mourning the fact that I am leaving just as I’ve found ease and restedness.
  
  AFTERTHOUGHT: It’s the King of Thailand’s 85th birthday today. When I went out for coffee near Chiang Mai Gate this morning, almost everyone was wearing yellow in his honour. I read on Twitter and elsewhere that many people are lined up in Bangkok to see him, or planning to watch the ceremonies on TV this morning. And on the King’s birthday the rule is that no alcohol is served, so though restaurants are open, straight bars will not be.
- LIGHTS IN THE SKY AND ON THE WATER
  
  Nov 29, 12
  
  I’m sitting on the floor up here in my airy ninth floor corner apartment in Chiang Mai. I have sound in three-D here, and what is it? First there’s the rhythmic beating of a gong at the Pa-O wat (buddhist temple) across the street, sometimes with cymbals too, as a clashing under-over note. Then there’s the bang bang, at irregular intervals, of fireworks. Smetimes it’s a “pop” loud and sudden, sometimes there’s a whistle and then a bang. There’s very lttle traffic noise though, for many streets around here have been closed off, for tonight’s big parade. Last year I was down by the parade watching and photographing; this year I’m keeping my distance
  
  All this is Loy Kratong in Chiang Mai. Twenty-three years ago at my first Loy Kratong here, things were smaller...there were some big exploding whooshes of fireworks in the sky, bright bursts of colour, and there were the little scary firework “bomblets”, firecrackers in a string, that people would toss out into the road. But there weren’t many cars and crowds were manageable. Like so much else in Chiang Mai and Thailand, Loy Kratong has gotten bigger and more modern in many ways recently.
  
  But up here I’m low-tech: I just have two little ceramic candles, out on the ledge of my little balcony.
  
  And last night, after making kratongs in the afternoon with two neighbours, using rounds of banana stem as base, then wrapping each round with banana leaf, anchored with pins, and decorating the top with flowers and folded banana leaf and candles, I carried my two to the river. I went with a friend early. We sat at a little restaurant on the far bank, at a table near the water, and watched the sun set and the lights of floating kratongs make their flickering way down the river. Finally it was our turn. I lit the little candles on my kratongs, then launched them, one by one. As I watched them totter away on the dark water, heading downstream, they seemed like little freshly hatched baby turtles, or any fledgling, precariously setting out.
  
  They were like the embodiment of our hopes and fears, fragile, vulnerable, optimistic nonetheless, in fact rather valiant.
  
  That was last night. After watching the scene for a good long while, we made out way through incredibly thick traffic and crowds, oh so grateful to be on foot, over the bridge, past arade, and thence into the relative peace of the lane I live on.
  
  All this evening the moon has been coy, draping herself in gauzy cloud one minute, then peering out in a silvery gleam, then completely veiling herself in thick cloud the next moment. But now she’s out, the sky is clearing, and the moving golden yellow lights of fire-paper lanterns are sliding upward across the sky. Oh now there are some bursts of red and then sparkling white-silver from fireworks to the east, and here’s a zinging whine of something... But the backdrop is the floating moving constellations of fire-in-the-sky paper lanterns. And if I look closely I can see their ghosts, the blackened husks of expired paper lanterns as they drift slowly, like tired phantoms, back to earth.
  
  Suddenly, a pair of very loud bangs make me jump. I can’t imagine how people who have been in war of any kind ever tolerate this festival; there are so many explosions large and small, unexpected bangs and pops.
  
  In the distance I can hear the music that accompanies the various floats in today’s enormous elaborate parade. They pass down Thapae Road, then north along the river. The sound is carrying up to me from the river, born by the breeze in irregular gusts.
  
  How peaceful I feel up here, not distant, but just at a calm remove, looking out at and listening to the panorama of light and action. Meantime the two ceramic candles are bright on the ledge before me, flickering with a strong golden yellow light.
  
  Above the moon seems cool and very silvery in comparison to all this man-made yellow flame. She’s got an aureole now, pinkish, the haze caused by the fireworks’ smoke perhaps...or just the remnant of damp air from the quickly disappearing clouds.
  
  The breeze has freshened. I think the wind has changed. Perhaps finally dry season with its clear skies and crisper temperatures and dry air is finally ready to start. Hallelujah!
  
  And there’s another reason to feel grateful: tomorrow, November 30, my older kid will be twenty-five. To think, speaking of vulnerable fledglings, that he has grown up to be such a strong and capable wonderful person - it seems miraculous to me, another cause for optimism as we light our candles in the dark and admire the glow of the moon above.
- THE TEXTURES OF MEMORY
  
  Nov 26, 12
  
  This day twenty-two years ago was momentous: my second boy child was born the morning of November 27 in Toronto. His older brother was three days short of his third birthday at the time.
  
  I remember their birthdays of course, without even having to think about it; what parents don’t keep a connection to their kids’ beginnings?
  
  But memory about other events is fickle and uneven, “unreliable” may be a better description. We’re told that each time we remember something, it’s not like we’re going into a cupboard and reading a file folder, then putting it away again. Instead, neurologists tell us that each time we retrieve a memory, we reinscribe it, which shifts and changes it. I always thought the changes in my memories were just the result of slippage, intentional and subconscious deletion of less interesting or perhaps more troubling bits of the past. But this new description of memory makes everything seem much more fluid, and memory like a log-rolling contest, with slippery surfaces and shifting “facts”.
  
  Why do I care about memory? And why am I thinking about it now? The answer to the second lies in the fact that I’ve just been reading the Tony Judt book The Memory Chalet, as I mentioned in my last post. The book is the device he uses to distract himself from an intolerable present: in his case his long nights imprisoned by ALS and unable to move. All he can do is think. And so he thinks about the past, uses it as a springboard to shape thoughts and story. Then in a second use of memory - a second application of memory skill as it were - he uses a mnemonic device adapted from the “memory palace” technique of the Middle Ages to pin down in his mind the “writing” he has done in his head, so that he can remember it in the morning and dictate it.
  
  That act of actually transcibing/writing is the way we pin down the moment. If we take notes, in the moment or soon afterward, we are already sifting and selecting, but less so, and we are more likely to be “accurate” about what took place. The longer we leave our note-taking or writing, the more we’re apt to weed out bits, and also to alter our recollections, shape them, consciously and unconsciously.
  
  But I’m not so interested in the issues of “accuracy” here. That’s a huge issue though for people assesssing the worth or weight of eye-witness testimary for example. (And indeed it does seem to me that eye-witness evidence must have been inherently more accurate in the days before universal literacy enabled people to be distracted on their own by written stories and images. How much more inaccurate have memories become recently, with the distraction and fragmentation of attention caused by electronic media of various kinds?)
  
  I’m more interested in the process of remembering, in how we do it. For example, I remember mostly in images, pictures in my mind’s eye you might say. If you tell me about a transaction or incident, if I’m asked later to repeat what you told me, I’m most likely, rather than repeating exactly what you said, to give my own version, based on the picture that your story made in my head. It will be fairly accurate in feel and in the details, but the words won’t be a quotation of yours. And each time I tell it, I assume from what the neurologists are saying, I am unconsciously shifting the story, giving varying emphasis to its elements.
  
  Tony Judt’s pieces in The Memory Chalet begin with a remembered incident or setting, most often. The factual accuracy of his starting point isn’t particularly important to us as readers. Instead its importance lies in its role as a trigger for Judt’s analysis, or, put another way, as a springboard for his thinking.
  
  And that brings me back to my first question, why is memory important? Of course we’re oriented by our memories, and often reassured by them. They can keep us company. For example, for me my memories of people and places and events are like a huge undulating tapestry, an entertainment that I can turn to when nothing else is going on, or escape to when I’m stuck in a tedious situation. I can look at them from a variety of perspectives: I can situate myself inside them in a form of present tense, or look retrospectively at them with after-knowledge. It’s rather like the variety of choices of point-of-view that a novelist has when telling a story.
  
  I’m not sure if other people do this too, and if so, how frequently.
  
  But in all that, how important is it that I get the facts or details “right”? Surely it’s not vital. What’s more important it seems to me is the meaning I draw from my memories. Occasionally I find myself re-analysing a moment or a transaction or even an era in my life, seeing it from new perspectives. That can be very exciting (and equally, can be disturbing, when I realise something that I had failed to understand at the time for example).
  
  By now I’ve got a lot of life-lived material to “work” with. And that fact, of having a rich store to reflect on and puzzle over, is for me one of the important aspects of memory.
  
  In the shorter term, in everyday life, I also rely on memory for a different kind of context. Many people are good at remembering people’s names, but I am not one of them. Instead my signposts are dates and times. My year is in some ways structured by birthdays and other anniversaries. They colour the months and give meaning to particular dates. For example, November starts with the week in which my mother died, now thirty-five years ago (unbelievable...both long ago and fresh), and ends with the birthdays of my two now-grown kids. In between come birthdays of friends far and near, of various ages and connection. Each of them sets off a nice “ping” in my head, a reverberation of images and feelings associated with that person. These reminders colour my days and thoughts, mostly pleasurably.
  
  It’s the same with years: I look back and calculate how many years it is since I was in a particular place (for example I was thinking about Hanoi last evening - 23 years ago is when I was last there, yikes!), or what age I was when a particular public or private event happened, from the election of Reagan to the birth of a friend’s child.
  
  It seems to me that all these ways of thinking about the past are a form of contextualising, a way to give meaning to and gain understanding of both the past and the present. In that sense, in doing this memory-merging and memory-analysing, I’m a working historian of my particular individual passage through life. And from that personal historical analysis, hopefully I gain some insight into other people’s situations and attitudes.
  
  Is everyone else doing this kind of thing in their spare moments? It’s fun to think so. I like to imagine each of us working on our particular life-tapestry, examining stitches, holding different bits up to the light, making the odd repair now and then.
  
  It’s all a particular kind of seeking of wisdom and understanding, I think. We each have our views of what life is about, what we want to contribute or achieve. And those views and ambitions evolve over time for most people. In any case making the effort, engaging with our memories and trying to tease out meaning and connection, for me this is an always-fascinating and -fruitful pursuit.
  
  Perhaps that’s why I am so drawn to the Judt book. There’s consolation in thinking that in my dotage, assuming I still have a brain to think and remember with (and of course this is why all we Boomers are so obsessed with a fear of dementia), I will have the resources to entertain myself with my own thoughts and memories. I hope I have the chance to gain greater insight into world events, and at the more intimate scale, into other peoples’ actions and interactions...
  
  Meanwhile, here in Chiang Mai, as these layers of thoughts have been rolling around in my head, I’ve been enjoying each day in the soft air of an unseasonably warm November. I’ve been pedalling around on a rackety rented one-speed bicycle, have had a rather intense evening at the Writers’ Bar - and expect to have more - talking about Burma and other emotionally intense international issues, and have been hanging around chatting to friends on the soi and getting caught up on everyone’s news.
  
  Yesterday I drove north with generous friends to Chiang Dao for a meal at a secluded peaceful restaurant called Chiang Dao Nest, a favorite of theirs. It’s an unlikely setting for a cordon bleu menu: there are stands of tall graceful bamboo, birds singing and twittering in the trees, and no traffic or other urban sounds. My prejudice against eating “western food” while in Southeast Asia melted away as soon as I tasted the house-made pate, lush and greed-inducing. And then there was a memorable salad nicoise, and a coconut milk creme brulee. Astonishing.
  
  I was glad to have been pushed out of my rigid attitude toward eating “foreign food” here. It's a reminder that I do need a push from time to time, no question, to oblige me to stay open to new ideas and possibilities. After all, the unexpected makes life so interesting...
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- @eatlivtravwrite I'll put a loose recipe for the nam prik on my FB fan page
  
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- @shalsroy for sure...to talk and eat and talk some more; meantime there's Twitter
  
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