An image locked in a dream
Is blurred from all sides. Like a pale ghost
It cannot be seen, nor grasped, nor shown.
And everyone creates their distant truth
From the fully fractured lie.
Our prism eyes are dazzled by facets
Distracted from the [w]hole.

I can only feel your touch,
And taste the spiced wine of your mouth
In moments when I’m close enough to pull full focus,
And lick at your lavender skin.
Here, words are more than voices on air
And memories are made
Beyond imagining.

This poem started as a single idea, but I am no longer certain if this poem is one, or three? After one and a half hours of work, is it a unified message, or a triumvirate of messages blended into a whole? Or is it spread so thing as to have lost meaning entirely? If you have any thoughts on this poem, or any other on this blog, I would love to hear from you. Drop me a comment, start a discussion, point out a conundrum…

The new gods are hidden behind a glaze skin deep
And what we think ideal is a living, fragile mask.
How far do you run, how shallow do you dream to find instant perfection?
False hope cannot be shed like snakeskin.
Born of your fear to reveal to yourself
The true needs, the luscious growth, of your own desires.
(12/08/11)

Dried Flowers

Love blooms, suffocated on a dying wind.
The strangled fear of loss translates
into ecstasy -

Words we don’t dare whisper aloud but pump lifeblood into
To give clarity to an image our eyes flutter to see.
(13/08/11)

Compulsion

It isn’t inspiration.
There are no flutters here that taste of joy.

This need is more primal and destructive.
A heartbeat compulsion -
Naturally inspired,
yet unquestionably, always right.
(12/08/11)

This recipe is one of my own design that is based around the recommendations of the Joshi Detox Diet. If you try it, I would love some feedback.

Baked Rainbow Trout with Quinoa

Rainbow trout fillet

Corn chips, crushed

1 small onion, diced

olive oil and a dash of sesame oil, seasonings

finely diced fresh spinach

Brush fillet top and bottom with olive oil and a little sesame oil
I tried a few other light marinades for flavour by basting each along different parts of the flesh (jerk seasoning, lemon pepper gave me three fish samplings in one dish)
Dice an onion to throw into the spices and corn chip spinach mixture. Give it a shake to coat, then remove the onion. Coat fish with the mixture of crushed corn chips, spices, lemon pepper, diced fresh spinach
Add lemon and limes and fresh cilantro to the top of the fish
Wrap in tin foil
Bake at 350 for @15 mins
The fish is done when it is light pink and flakes with a fork
Serve with quinoa (President’s Choice quinoa with chick peas and bulgar is really tasty and convenient)

So, even though I felt massively over-full after sushi, with 4 lbs that sat around my innards for days – I found myself wanting Pho on Tuesday, after running wild getting things done for 7 hours. Pho is probably my favourite food – I could eat it… often! I tried the Chicken broth Pho with chicken, vermicelli rice noodles, and vegetables. Most of the ingredients are detox friendly – but I suspect that the broth was the regular beef-hock broth, and not chicken broth based…

To Be Continued…

Send me a comment and let me know how this works out for you.  Do you make a favourite homemade sauce? I’d love to know how you approach it and for you to share a recipe. More importantly, have you ever made fresh pasta with flours other than durum semolina (or other wheat based flours)? I am planning to try a gluten-free, wheat free version using brown rice flour and rice bran – but haven’t yet. I am especially interested in corn flour recipes, and I have to check out spelt as well? Know something? Have some tips? Let me know!

Ed’s Homemade Pasta (My compliments to my friend Ed for his knowledge and gastronomic skill)

½ cup white flour
½ cup semolina flour
2 eggs
¼ tsp salt

Mix the flour and egg mixture together until firm, but not sticky. Break into four to six
sections of appropriate size, then mold each into a ball.
Let sit 20-30 mins
Use plenty of flour to keep dough from sticking.
Flatten out a ball by hand, and pass it through the pasta maker on setting 1 four times.
Properly support the dough during each pass, so it does not stick together under the
machine.
After each pass, fold then flour the outside of the dough very lightly until smooth and
ungrainy.
Lay each strip on a lightly floured counter top and divide into strips of appropriate length
for linguini or spaghetti.
Pass each strip through the linguini (preferred) or spaghetti setting

Cook about three minutes in boiling, salted water. Drain and toss with olive oil. Serve
immediately.

I opened with sashimi, had sashimi as my main, and included sashimi in my dessert course.  The fresh salmon was my staple, and I sampled the tuna,  mackerel, and the surf clam often, gearing up as I am for home-cooked seafood feastival in the Gaspe in a few weeks. I was aiming to eat the equivalent of an entire raw fish by the end of the meal – and I certainly felt like I met my quota.

I tried the vegetable Udon in soup, and found it delicious, but I should have been able to tell by the weight of it in my stomach that the noodles were wheat based. (I don’t know why I thought they were rice noodles – as they would be in Thai or Vietnamese dishes!) I should have stuck to the miso soup… (No, I should have asked before I started the meal – but ) Oh well, it could have been worse – there was SO much rice – in almost every dish, the sushi, the maki (rolls), the temike (hand rolls wrapped in seaweed), and of course, I knew the teriyaki would be slathered in rich, sugary, delicious sauce, so it was out. Even my old favourite shrimp tempura was  a no no.

Chicken Stirfry with Vegetables

I was saved in the end by this teppanyaki dish. These little stir-fry plates were wonderful, seared bits of meat with vegetables in a delectable sauce. The chicken stir-fry with vegetables was quite a sizeable portion, and the salmon was more of a morsel, nicely prepared with little fresh onions and lettuce on the side. It is very likely that there was sugar in the sauce, but since I wasn’t sweating the soya sauce and wasabi, nor was I worrying in the least about my udon issue – I really enjoyed the end of the meal – but I knew I had eaten too much!

Oh well, making up for it this morning with an extra long walk and one  round of yoga, and one set of physio exercises. I can certainly feel a consistent twinge in the muscles that seem to be the core of the problem, along the left side of my back and around to my ribs. Geting the twinge is one thing – targeting and strengthening the area using the physio exercises is a little more… work and pain.

Alive
Like childhood powdered candy,
Or the harvest moonrise.
I am awash in a warmth
That spreads like candlelight in a cave

Two days of helping a friend prep for a move was easier than I thought – there was virtually no food in the house, so snacking on almonds was a perfect remedy, and there was enough creative problem solving, busy-ness, and good conversation, that I was on the go from the moment I arrived. I had just enough snack food to keep my energy levels up, and even found an alternative on the Greek takeout menu that wasn’t too bad… sea bass and rice, with the (unfortunately) wilted, overcooked vegetables was just fine, so long as I ignored the tasty shrimp, potatoes, and taztziki. I never would have finished the souvlaki platter of 2 skewers, potatoes, rice, vegetables, and salad in one sitting anyways. I did have half a glass of a nice 16$ bottle of white that I had been saving for a celebratory occasion…
Tonight’s challenge was an invite to a summer barbeque and dinner party, put on by my Dalkeith connection – who throw a wonderful evening of conversation and culinary delights every year about this time. As it was a potluck, it made for a good opportunity to get around to learning how to make Gallo Pinto. I used the following recipe for my first attempt, which you can find here:

Gallo Pinto (beans and rice) Recipe
1 lb (450 gr.) Black beans. Fresh are best but most likely you’ll find them dried.
8-10 sprigs cilantro (coriander leaf) fresh or frozen, not dried!
1 small or medium onion
½ small red or yellow sweet pepper (optional)
3 cups (700 ml) chicken broth or water
2 cups (350 ml) white rice
½ teaspoon (2.5 ml) salt
1 Tablespoon (15 ml) vegetable oil
1-3 Tablespoon oil to fry the Gallo Pinto

Note to aspiring chefs: In a hurry? Used canned beans! I planned ahead to some degree, but making this dish took a good 4 hours, and that doesn’t include soaking the beans for 12 hours overnight in water! I have a new respect for the humble bean – but I had cans in the cupboard – why spoil the adventure and add canned calcium chloride to my body just to save time?

It turned out quite well, but I had to add a pile of hot sauce (Grace Foods Jamaican hot sauce in this case) to provide a level of spice that I thought was adequate.
I would have loved the sausage, snack foods, dessert, and potato salad with sausage, but a few chicken legs and Gallo Pinto with some fresh vegetable salad was more than enough. I am four lbs down, 20 kms + up on the speed walking side, and on track in all other areas.
You’ll find if you try a program like this, that your appreciation for different foods increases as you have to provide yourself opportunities to create new recipes or eating patterns, which leads to various cooking adventures. Tomorrow will probably be fresh vegetables in a broth of some kind. And I have setup a sushi night tomorrow, long planned, with friends. I think I’ll be eating a lot of fresh, raw fish… but I’ll have to check the contents of some of those rolls… What do you think – am I nuts to engage in this as a kickoff to my summer? What would it take for you to try it?

(modified from Joshi’s Holistic Detox, 60)

So you can imagine the need for my frenetic activity over the past few days… What do you crave when you abstain for your own greater good?

Saturday's dinner party main: homemade linguini carbonara

Tomorrow’s challenge – homemade pasta with fresh spinach and garlic pesto, using brown rice flour and… bran flakes? Saturday’s dinner party was a great success with homemade linguini carbonara from scratch (well, I neither raised nor killed the pig for the bacon, nor did I milk the cow for the cream sauce… so the challenge is finding out how this turns out when I make it without wheat products…
Hey, it’s 5 a.m. now. I can think of things I’d rather have enjoyed during the past 45 mins – but writing is pretty high on a list that usually gets pushed out of the way by other timewasters.