Category Archives: cooking

One name lit my brain on fire

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It’s been a while since I have been in this creative space. When the lodge I work at closes for the season, my first desire is to get back into the kitchen to make weekly freezer crockpot meals for our local food bank, and, most recently, soup for our local Hospice. It is a true passion of mine.

But my other passion crept stealthily back into my consciousness after a name appeared in a Facebook post and captured my attention. I have been mentally preparing to write a new novel this winter, and, although I have begun writing the first chapter, I had no idea where this story would go. I rely on my characters to lead that charge. Once I saw this name, I knew this person was going to be an integral part of the story.

I have five white boards in my living room, all dedicated to absorbing and displaying information that will become important in the stories I write. When I scribble my ideas onto the boards, I have no idea how or when the ideas will take shape, I only know they will be a key to developing the twists in the story.

When this name wormed itself into my brain, I stood up and, in a panic, looked for my dry erase markers. I had recently cleaned my living room and moved the markers to a new spot in my house and could not remember where I put them. I became the human equivalent of a Roomba, bouncing off furniture and changing my trajectory. I became so agitated that I finally went into the kitchen and spewed my thoughts onto the white board on my fridge that usually contains my shopping list.

I freed the beast. The name is catalogued and waiting to share their story. I’m not going to mention the name in this post because that would defeat the shocking twist at the end of the story, even though I currently have no idea what that twist will be. That is for the character to tell me and guide me along as they tell their story.

My brain is on fire. I don’t see sleep in my near future. And, as always, I give my nod to the writing Gods who are constantly sending me bits of information to pique my curiosity and keep me looking for those subtle messages they send in the strangest ways.

You know you’ve met your people when….

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The calendar has finally turned the page into September. There are many reasons for me to smile after writing that line. This means the lodge has slowed down enough so we can all have two days off in a row to catch up on our rest. This means the temperature is dipping down low enough at night that sleep is enjoyed under a fuzzy blanket while the windows are still open. And this means it is soup and stew season!

I recently saw a post on Facebook written by a woman who has come to the realization that her 1971 slow cooker has finally admitted defeat and is no longer able to keep its temperature. The collective messages were those of sadness and unwavering support. We, being soup and stew people, felt the loss as much as she did.

As a helper, by nature, I immediately sent her the link to my latest slow cooker purchase that was designed to not only cook on a consistent low temperature, but had the added feature of being able to brown meat and sauté vegetables before turning the dial to cook on that same slow temperature for six to eight hours, producing the most melt-in-your-mouth meals you could hope for.

These are my people. These people who mourn the loss of a piece of kitchen equipment that has lived through generations of their families. These people who remember Aunt Jenny’s crockpot beef stew decades after Aunt Jenny has passed, but still put the same ingredients into their slow cookers to honour her memory, and enjoy the familiar taste of her stew. These people who enjoy summer to the fullest, but secretly wait for soup and stew season to start again.

The end of another year

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This blog site has been sadly neglected, and I wanted to end the year of 2024 by adding something to this space with the hope it encourages me to spend more time here in 2025.

This past year has certainly had its ups and downs, but it has also given me many moments to reflect, and to understand how every single thing I have experienced has given me the opportunity to grow as a person, and as a member of my small community.

My greatest joys of 2024 have come from my family, my friends, and my ability to give back to the people in my community who struggle, for so many reasons. My freezer crockpot meal program that benefits the clients of our local food bank is my biggest joy. Every Sunday, from November to April, volunteers come to the lodge and help us prepare meals, and the reward of knowing that families will have a home-cooked, nutritious, meal once a week is so heart-warming.

Recently, I have been making soup for our local hospice, Andy’s House. Knowing that residents, families, and staff, will have a warm bowl of soup to enjoy during the most difficult time in their lives gives me a great sense of peace.

The calendar year of 2024 may have been filled with challenges, but it has taught me that I still have the resolve to rise to those challenges, and meet them head on. After many physical and emotional setbacks, I am ready to tackle 2025 with the strength and tenacity I had in my thirties.

To all of you still willing to follow my musings, I thank you. Whatever 2025 has in store for the world, I hope we can embrace it with compassion, understanding, and humility. I don’t usually make resolutions, but this year, I resolve to continue to be kind. Happy New Year to you all.

Soup’s On – Part 3

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Wow, if this blog and I were friends in real life, I would have understandably been given the cold shoulder for not holding up my end of the bargain in our shared communication. It has been over two months since I paid any attention to this cherished space and given myself permission to get lost in its warm embrace. I could blame a myriad number of outside circumstances, but the only thing I have to blame is myself.

It is so easy to become so consumed by life that we let our simple pleasures fall to the wayside. Between work, drafting novels, and spending time volunteering for our local food bank, I lost sight of the things that truly bring me back to myself. Creating things in my kitchen, especially soup, is the easiest way for me to feel grounded again. But, until today, I have regarded my kitchen with indifference. It had become just another room in my house, and I had forgotten how much of my heart beats within its four walls.

Not only does creating something from scratch remind me of my dad’s reckless abandon in the kitchen, making soup sparks a different part of my creativity, and sharing those soups with my family brings me great joy. Like my writing journey, I never know what the voices in my head will tell me to do, but almost every soup is something exciting and new. No two soups, even if I make the same thing again and again, are ever the same because I don’t follow a recipe. That is true freedom.

My writer’s brain has been blocked this week, but taking the time to put my skills back to work in my kitchen has dislodged the obstacle that was quelling my creative writing. There is a reason my characters like to cook, and that reason has reminded me to get back to basics and start from a familiar place to allow myself the freedom to put my trust back in the voices in my head. They are not controlling my brain, they are merely shining a light in a direction I had not anticipated.

Two soups are now being slow-cooked into submission in my kitchen, and the neurons of my writing brain have lifted their noses to deeply inhale the aroma of motivation. Everyone is familiar with the adage ‘stop and smell the roses’, but in my case it is ‘stop and smell the soup’. Just that brief moment of taking the time to allow the familiar smells to permeate my senses has opened a new door into the book I will soon finish writing.

When we were children, my mom’s way of letting us know dinner was ready was to yell ‘soup’s on’. Well, the soup is on in more than one way in my house. The crockpots may be filled with delicious ingredients, but my brain is now filled with a profusion of ideas to get this book finished. Soup’s on, indeed!

Filling my cup

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This is the high season in the hospitality world for resort operators. While the start of the season was extremely stressful having to have so many safety procedures in place, we are succeeding on a daily basis and giving those who had been isolating in the larger urban areas a chance to socially distance while relaxing and unwinding in cottage country.

For most of the month of July, I have spent my energy filling cups that did not belong to me. My cup had a small reserve, enough to keep me putting one foot in front of the other and do my job to the best of my ability, but it waited to be filled with the things I needed to bring me back to me.

During the busy season, I get one day off a week. Yesterday was that day. Instead of going out for socially-distanced visits, I chose to stay home and fill MY cup. I allowed myself to sleep in. I cranked show tunes while I cleaned my house and I got back into my kitchen for the first time in a long time. I love to cook, but Covid-19 had all but squeezed the life out of every molecule that gave me the desire to create food, until yesterday. It was a small step making Vegetable Soup, but it was a step in the right direction.

Each day I make an effort to fill my cup is a day I am headed on the path back to myself. Each moment I choose to find the beauty and the fun in the things I did before the coronavirus took over the world is an achievement I find worthy of celebrating. Life may not be normal for a long time, but those moments I can bring as much normal and joy back to me is a small victory.

As I type this post you are reading this morning, several hummingbirds visited my feeder and my juvenile groundhog friend, Chunk, munched on the quarter of a watermelon I left out for him. Life really is about the small things and those little moments filled my cup. I’m ready to start another week and face the challenges that may loom in the distance.

 

 

 

 

How live-streaming helped me live again

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Covid-19 has taken a huge toll on me, not physically but, mentally. After cresting the half-century mark last year, I am blessed to be able to say I had never struggled with anxiety or depression. What I would have first described as a distraction slowly burrowed into my brain and riddled me with emotions and a sadness I had never had to deal with before. Having been an extrovert by day and introvert by night, I became overwhelmed by the isolation that came with being advised to stay at home and only go out in public when necessary.

Looking back on the past few months, I should have known I had been affected more than I care to admit. The things I loved to do in my spare time became a burden and I forgot the pleasure I felt when I cooked a wonderful meal for myself or sat down at my computer and let words cascade down from the heavens to help me write the novel I am working on that has been untouched since March. The passion I once had for my hobbies became non-existent and that made my sadness feel even more powerful.

But life has a way of kicking us in the pants and it chooses interesting ways to send us compelling messages that cannot be ignored. I spent forty minutes watching a live stream on Patreon by someone I greatly admire. During his video, he emphasized how important it is to put ourselves first and to take time each day to do small things that bring us back to ourselves. His message couldn’t have been louder or clearer. I had been so focused on things that had nothing to do with me that I had all but forgotten to focus on myself and the things that are important to ME.

I have not posted on my blog since April 27th. It pains me to say that. This space has always been my sacred space. This space has let me be myself and free the words that want to be freed whenever I feel the desire to let them loose. But those words have been muted by the blanket of stress I have let weigh me down. NO MORE! Today I take back my power. Today I let the words oppress my thoughts and unleash themselves. Today I will create a spectacular meal for myself because I am the number one thing in my life. If I don’t take care of myself, how will I ever have the energy to take care of anyone else? Thank you, Jamie Lambert. Your words did not fall on deaf ears.

 

When I can’t cope, I cry and then I cook

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A lot has happened in my little world over the last three months. I won’t bore you with the details as most of those have been documented in previous posts if you want to go back and read through them. Imposed quarantine and my immense fear of the Coronavirus aside, the calendar year of 2020 has felt like a battering ram and I am the feeble wooden gate, splintering with every blow.

I have always been the person who was very quick to hatch a Plan-B. I don’t dwell on the details of what just happened. My brains kicks into overdrive and I immediately search for a plan of action to move forward. But something in the way my neurons have always fired in the past has recently changed. For the first time in my life, I feel completely overwhelmed and uncertain about where I go from here and that, for me, is the true sign of how affected I am by what is happening in the world right now.

I try my best to process all of the information presented online but when those reports become too staggering to deal with, I purge my accumulated emotion and I cry. I make no excuse and I don’t fault myself for my behaviour, I just cry. Once I have released the intensity of those feelings, my focus shifts and I want nothing more than to be in my kitchen. I have recently renamed my kitchen my “solace room” because it is the only place where I can feel a true sense of peace.

Today is no exception to that rule. My dueling crockpots and my Dutch oven will be filled with a myriad number of items that will produce the combined aromas of onion, garlic, bacon and a collection of other ingredients that will eventually become an assortment of soups and stews I will share with others. One person, in particular, will have his freezer filled with these items as a dear friend has just been diagnosed with advanced brain cancer and is awaiting the plan for his course of treatment.

So, this morning, I am shutting out the socials, and the rest of the planet, to bring my focus into a world I can control, into a world where I can be helpful even if it is on a very small scale. And as the onions caramelize and the bacon is rendered, I know I will cry more tears today because it is what I need to do. I can only hope when this pandemic is over and we are able to live our lives again, I can say I was able to recognize the best parts of myself and know that I gave everything I could to make things a bit better for the people I love when they needed it the most.

 

 

Every now and then, I follow a recipe

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Although I was able to attend the gift opening portion(s) of the day, I missed Christmas dinner and the family fun that followed. It seems one of my Christmas traditions is to get sick during the holidays and this year was no exception. I could have handled the sore throat and cough, but the fever did me in. I am always hot but, when I asked for a blanket on Christmas day, my brother knew I was sick. The pellet stove was cranking out some warm air, the oven was set to an ambient temperature to cook the bird and I was wearing jeans, a sweatshirt and a blanket. On a normal day under those circumstances, I would have become the victim of spontaneous combustion but I was still shivering. I left before dinner began and after a couple hours on my couch watching Christmas movies, I drifted off into a twelve-hour sleep.

The fever finally broke shortly after one o’clock today. I didn’t have a lot of energy but I knew I needed to muster what I had to spend some time in my kitchen. I had an order for an Apple Streusel Cheesecake and I had three pounds of mushrooms in my fridge waiting to be finely diced and made into my mother’s famous mushroom soup.

It’s no secret I love making soup. More often than not, I channel my father’s method of throwing a bunch of ingredients into a pot and turning it into something wonderful. I love to experiment with flavor combinations and have created an amazing Cauliflower, Pear and Blue Cheese soup that is outstanding. But I cannot “wing it” with my mom’s mushroom soup. The cocky wannabe chef in me has tried, on many occasions, to make a mushroom soup that would compare but I have fallen short every time. Today, I opened the recipe book and followed it step by step. The result is divine. Both the smell and the taste transported me back to the kitchen I knew and loved as a teenager.

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This weekend, I will be given the turkey carcass and whatever leftovers remain to make what I like to call Christmas Soup. Every leftover, minus the turnip, becomes a part of this delicious soup my dad used to make after our festive holiday dinners. Turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, peas, gravy – all of it gets thrown in with the freshly made turkey stock to make the best turkey soup ever! There have been years when the leftovers were almost non-existent, so I made a fresh bowl of stuffing, a new pot of mashed potatoes and created a gravy so the soup would be perfect.

If my dream of having a soup truck ever comes to fruition, I am sure the only soup sold on the truck that is made from an actual recipe will be my mom’s Mushroom Soup.

Applying my salve

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Like most people, I lose myself sometimes. I get so caught up in the emotion around me I forget the things I should be focused on. Nothing brings me back to myself like cooking. I find great solace in my kitchen. The world around me disappears and my existence is renewed by the smell of a combination of ingredients that transport me to a place I had professedly forgotten.

Life has a funny way of throwing countless distractions in our direction and it is up to us to tune out those interruptions and concentrate on the things we value most. Family and friends are always at the top of my list and cooking has consistently been the thread that weaves together all of the important people in my life.

My fondest childhood memories are richly steeped in the images of our family kitchen and my love of cooking was absorbed through osmosis. Whether it was my mother methodically following a recipe, my father taking every ingredient from our refrigerator to see what he could randomly create or my brother making delicious crepes from scratch, cooking has always been the one thing that holds a piece of each of them close to my heart.

Last night I got home from work and knew the only place I yearned to be was in front of my stove. Nothing else mattered. As much as I wanted to tackle the “to-do” items on my list or write the next five hundred words in my novel, cooking was the only avenue that would afford me the true escape I needed. The onions were chopped, the bacon was rendered and my house began to, once again, smell like my home.

In a collection of minutes, the chili was simmering on the stove and the cheesy beef tortellini was set to cook in my crockpot. All was right in my world and the chaos of the universe outside of my existence had been laid to rest for the evening. Cooking is the salve that heals my wounds. Whether it is a simple salad dressing, a comforting stew, a tasty casserole or a perfectly cooked sous vide piece of beef, cooking will always have enough positive energy to undo anything negative in my life.

 

 

 

 

One foot in front of the other

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I am in awe of how quickly new habits can be formed. As my fiftieth birthday approached at the end of March, I made a few monumental decisions. I got a tattoo, I had a small, intimate dinner with friends and family to celebrate the day and I made a promise to myself to eat better and move more.

It’s easy to make promises to yourself and it’s even easier to break them but I have held myself accountable and have been keeping those promises to myself. Gone are the days when I would skip breakfast and unintentionally miss lunch as well. When I don’t add fuel to my body in the morning, it stops reminding me I’m hungry and I can go for extended periods of time without feeling the urge to eat. All of that has changed.

I am now setting my alarm an hour earlier than usual to walk a minimum of three kilometers before I get ready for work. I am back to making breakfast smoothies every morning with healthy, and somewhat unique, ingredients. Super foods like spinach, beets and cinnamon are mixed with yogurt, bananas and frozen fruit to create a tasty morning treat. And I am very cognizant of filling and emptying my water glass many times during the day.

As I continue to put one foot in front of the other, not only on the road but in my eating patterns, I have noticed a difference. The scales may not completely share my enthusiasm and they seem to report numbers I feel are incorrect but I feel different. I feel better. And my clothes are feeling looser than they used to feel. That means much more to me than a number on a scale.

It is just after 11:00 pm and, as I finish this post, I am setting my alarm for 5:45 am so I can try to get in the four kilometer walk that seems to be my new morning habit. I will return from my walk, have my coffee, make my smoothie and feed off the energy I gain from my walks. I will replay the compliments from friends who see a difference in me. And I will quite possibly put one foot in front of the other to walk back into the kitchen to throw my scales in the garbage!