WARNING: JEW OPERATING HEAVY MACHINERY IN AREA. USE EXTREME CAUTION
GARDEN OF EATING
It’s 22 degrees here today under blue skies. I know you get tired of reading that, but I never get tired of writing it. The wild part of our backyard is changing every day now. The fruit trees are either in flower or they’re beginning to fruit. I spend about fifteen minutes a day out there now, studying the branches, staring at the progress of various flowers, watching buds open to reveal either a studding of flowerheads or a tiny spear of leaves that, within a month, will create a shady canopy over this part of the backyard. 
(That's a fig-studded branch above; to the left are the first apricots breaking free of their flowers.) The grape vines are sending out silvery-green new shoots, the ground is covered in a carpet of wildflowers, and here and there, there are wild onion or leek laying their green feathery leaves over the ground. In a few days, I’m going to dig up a bunch of these and transplant them to the vegetable patch.Ah, the vegetable patch! Not fair to call it a patch, either: I have a proper garden for the first time since my late twenties, which was the last time my father used the big space beside our cottage to grow tomatoes, cukes, strawberries, peppers, and the like. I’ve tried so many times in Toronto to make a garden, but from the tiny, shady strip on Montrose Avenue to the chestnut-shadowed backyard on Muriel, we’ve never had any luck with much more than beans and basil. Not this year. I’ve just spent the last three weeks tearing out artichokes (down from 40 plants to 10) and turning the soil, taking out huge patches of grass, all to get ready for the big show, which begins this week with the planting of potatoes, carrots, beans, radish from seed, basil, coriander, and parsley from seed, and transplanted leeks & onions (there are wild versions of both plants growing in the backyard; I'm going to dig them up in their soilballs and domesticate them ...) I have a box behind the shed with brand new strawberry sets in it, and I’ve built Anne a lettuce patch on the right side of the garden. In all, there’s about 60 square metres of arable earth waiting for us to put whatever we can dream of in it. Below the artichokes is a chunk of earth that’s going to wait for tomatoes (a few more weeks), which will have carrots and basil interplanted. The carrots are good pest companion-plants (the carrots and tomatoes will protect each other from bugs), and the basil is a good intercrop. The potatoes and beans are good companion crops as well. Later, there’ll be spinach, red pepper, cucumber, climbing peas, more herbs, a couple horseradish plants at the corners for pest protection, and maybe a couple of surprises. There’s a hunk of 1-metre square earth at the bottom of one of the two rows of artichokes that might become a single big squash plant, we’ll see.
Where did this green thumb come from, ask ye who know me well? It’s a submerged, vestigial thing in me, I can't explain it. But I like to see something start off as a seed and turn into something. Anyway, what's a red pepper plant if not a natural novel? You put in the seed, something interesting starts to happen (if you're lucky); the shoots of green and leaf seem pretty worthwhile, but then it gets ever more complex. Flowers! Fruit! Bugs! (We call that "a reversal" in the narrative arts.) You can even mark time with it. And then the third act (ripening) ends with a shocking twist: murder. But we just call it salad.
I’ve tried so many times to do something worthwhile in Toronto vegetable beds, all to no avail. Living in Little Italy was pure torture, too, as my elderly neighbours elided all semblance of living space in their backyards to grow these massive gardens in dark black soil. I can remember one of them, a guy about eighty years of age and at least four feet tall, appearing at my fence as I hand-mowed the little amount of grass that grew in front of our house on Montrose. He asked me if he could have the grass to mulch his tomatoes and I put it into the bag he was lugging around the neighbourhood. I’m sure my grass contributed to the growth of a few massive veggies, but that’s as close as I’ve come in the last two decades to growing my own food.
On Monday, as you can see from the pic above, Jacques lent me his rotocultivateur after I’d proven my mettle in his absolutely massive vegetable patch on Saturday morning (where I received my first gardening “lesson” from him and his friend Jean). Jacques’ garden is 150 metres from his front door and he’s growing just about everything under the sun in what is more like a small field than a vegetable garden. I mean, the man is growing marrow for God’s sake. Parsnip. Salsify. You got room for salsify in your garden, you’re almost an actual farm. Plus, he has tons of little trees growing various fruits and nuts. It’s inspiring. The three of us toiled under the last of the grey skies that had infected the region over the last couple of weeks (more, mournfully, on which later).
I was the grateful recipient of tips on how to plant potatoes, how to deal with snails (apart from snailbait, you take them out of your garden—where they like to gorge themselves on lettuce and strawberries—and you mercilessly crush them beneath your hobnailed boot), and some forbidden pairings. For instance, you never plant potatoes and tomatoes together, nor do you rotate them in the same soil, since they’re susceptible to the same kind of worm. Garlic, onions, and shallots stunt the growth of beans. And here’s a cool one: young dill improves the health of your tomatoes, but once it matures, it stunts the fruit. Finally, I was grateful for the instruction on how to use this bull of a machine ...
So yesterday, I turned over my soil, having enriched it with compost and stale baguettes. Charlot has since eaten about half of that bread, thus proving he is part vegetable. Whether you like it or not, I’ll keep you posted on my legumial progress.
But now, let us rewind a few weeks and catch you up.
WE WENT TO THE CANARY ISLANDS
Tenerife, to be exact. Do you really want to know everything we did? It’s an island. We stayed in a hotel in a zone tricked up for tourists 30 years ago called Playa de Las Americanas, which seems like a brilliant name for a new tourist area, except for the fact that Las Americanas (as well as Los Christianos, right beside it) is choked, swarmed, overrun, and infected by Brits. Average age: 214. So it’s a kind of retiree paradise, which caters to them with “real” English breakfasts, tea shops, and all the really horrible British newspapers with unisyllabic headlines like "Soused Sot Kills Tot." Not the height of culture, is Tenerife. But if you ever want to see what ruddy skin looks like burnt to a crisp, Tenerife is the place to go. (If you poured a little bit of glaze over the men, they'd be indistinguishable from baked hams.)
But I obsess. We had an amazing time. We stayed at a hotel called La Bitacora, about 1 km from the beach, and it had a brilliant pool, and a buffet that we didn’t get sick of until the fourth day, and we sunbathed and read about four books each, and walked the fairly commercial town itself a whole bunch of times, a couple time to play minigolf, and a couple times to escape the buffet. There’s not much narrative here, though—the days sort of bleed together.
We did take one day and rented a car to go look at the rather spectacular island, which has as much gentle as unforgiving beauty, being a volcanic island with a lot of inaccessible inland (what is accessible is either used for tourism or banana plantations, see left). We drove north around the edge of the island under high bright skies, and then turned inland where it rained heavily and a crown of fog descended on everything. When we got to the other side of the mountains, we found ourselves in a lovely authentic little town called Puerto de la Cruz, which had a stunning little town square. And miles of hotels. The rest of the time, our days were like this:
The pool at La Bitacora. No reserving of chaises longues allowed (Unless you're British and over the age of 70, in which case you're allowed to reserve your chair with a towel as early as 6 am)
Happy boys on their balcony
Minigolfers in minigolf paradise
Anne describing the size of something
One of my very cute boys at poolside
Max & Papa on the beach (nice lips, huh?) (His, too)
Volcanic cliffs of Tenerife
Mama & Ben at supper
Papa & MaxWe swam, we ate, we loafed. Max tried to learn some Spanish. Here he is explaining how the Spanish word for “more” is “mohre”:
(In case you didn’t get that, they spoke plenty of English at the hotel.)
Not much more to tell here. It’s sort of a footnote, albeit an incredibly enjoyable one. Anyway, we know you’re more interested in this story:
SPRING VISITING SEASON IS UPON US!
And what better way to initiate it than welcoming Tante Julie and Oncle Ron to Narbonne! We’d all been counting the days and hours (with Julie’s help, who has a very accurate how-many-more-sleeps clock at her house) and, at last, they descended the train, and so began a week in the bright, beautiful sunshine of the south of France.
Um, what I mean is, as you can see from the video, the weather was stunning when their train pulled in, as it had been for much of the preceding three weeks. But the next morning, not so much. And the day after that, well, a little grey and rainy. And … um, for the entire week. Cold, dark, rainy, windy. Right up until they had to leave us a week later. And half an hour after their train left for Paris that morning? 20 degrees and gorgeous. As it has remained ever since. Narbonne can be a hard mistress. We felt bad that Julie and Ron were here to see the dark side of the weather. There is sun 300 days out the year here, so we were a little bitter that they got ten percent of a year’s supply of shitty weather all in one week.
But did that dampen our pleasure? Did we enjoy our beouf bourguingon and café au laits any less? Drink red wine with reduced joy? Go exploring with any reduction in fervour? Play fewer games of Up and Down the River? Nay, we did not. Screw the clouds.
It was a wonderful week. Some of the highlights are best presented pictorially, so forge on.
Almost all of us in Albi (the missing number if behind the camera)
But that’s not what Ron got. It turns out there’s an “americano” cocktail that’s made from vermouth, campari, and soda water. And when you order it at 10 am in the market of Narbonne, they figure you need a strong one. So there it was, glinting in a collins glass and the both of us thought it was pretty funny, especially me, who didn't have to drink it. Ron got it in him, though, God bless him, and that was hard owing to the persistent giggles. Then I carried him home. Where’s one’s camera when it’s needed? In case you wake up one morning and a coffee just isn’t enough, here’s the recipe for an americano, Les Halles style:
* 1 shot Sweet Vermouth or Noilly Prat Red
* 1 shot Campari
* splash of club soda
* Garnish: orange slice
Pour over ice into a collins glass. This will give you a drink of about 150ml of almost pure alcohol. Good morning to you, sir!
More of the same weather greeted Julie and Ron when they took a couple days to visit Nîmes, the Pont Du Gard, and Avignon, and it sounded like they survived it. Julie has unwisely offered to be a guest-blogger here at Ontheviadomitia, so I hope in a couple of days to add a post from her and Ron that tells you all about their time here, including their culinary experiences in Provence, which I think you will be amused by. I’ll preface those stories by saying that we have learned here in France that it’s actually okay to criticize wine—whether in a restaurant or at a domaine, because anyone who drinks wine must know what they’re doing, and wine can be very personal. But when you are served a dish in a French restaurant, it arrives perfect. So beware if you don’t like it …
Another reunion!
On the weekend, Ben had a hockey tourney in Toulouse, and the four of us tootled out to Albi, another dot on the map we’ve never visited. It was quite a surprise, this stunning little jewel. It lends its name to the “Albigensian Crusade” which was struck to eradicate the breakaway church of the Cathars in the 13th century. The Cathars were a hyperstrict sect of gnostic Christians who were deeply antimaterialist and attracted a lot of followers in the south of France. Rome started to get pretty uneasy about it all, and over seven decades, starting in early 1200s, they set about annhilating them all, and eventually succeeded. In Albi, a new catholic church was built to monumentalize the defeat of the Catholics and it’s more of an enormous fist than it is a church, on purpose. One of the most disturbing and beautiful cathedrals in France.Albi is another of those places we might never have visited, but it’s a great small city, about the size of Narbonne. Its proximity to Toulouse, however (it’s 80km north) gives it a slightly more cosmopolitain feel than Narbonne has. It may be in the middle of nowhere, but it’s cultured, busy, and full of little surprises, like Le Papillon, the restaurant recommended to us by our hotel owners. Run by two Californian ex-pats, it’s a strange, modern-cuisine oasis in the middle of the monolith that is French food. These two guys, one an ex-lawyer, the other a guy who never cooked before coming to France, are educating the locals in such things as burritos, unusual savories, different soups, and new approaches to the old ways of doing things, such as frying a whole fish in tempura. Some folks won’t have anything to do with it, but they report a growing group of regulars and the food was marvellous. The other nice thing about Albi is that it clearly has a gay population, and in choosing our hotel, we lucked into the gay mafia and got great advice on what to see and what to eat. Narbonne is in desperate need of a few players from the other team to bring the cultural and culinary goods up to snuff. If you’re gay and you’re reading this, please come to Narbonne. There’s only so much a minor Canadian poet can do by himself.
Ben had a hockey game in Toulouse on Sunday, where it spat a vile greasy rain and all the restaurants were closed save one: an Indian restaurant and not merely a passable one. Someone was looking down on us. Butter chicken? Mmmm. The game itself was one of the best we’ve seen played between two teams of this age. You’ve read of the kind of hockey played in the south of France: picture the puck as a magnet and the players as iron filings. It looks more like rugby than it does hockey, and Narbonne’s teams tend to be beaten by scores that look more like the odds that the Leafs will ever will the Stanley Cup again. But this Sunday, augmented by players from Castres and Toulouse, the boys put on quite a show against Barcelona and beat them 5-3. Poor Ben, though, got his only good chance on goal on a breakaway in the second period that got buzzed dead at shift change when he was all alone coming over the blue line. Bad timekeepers!
The Monday, we kept the boys in school and the four adults lit out for the windy cliffs of Leucate. We had a disgusting lunch in town, and then went out to the abandoned falaise and walked in the insane winds. Despite our fears of being blown out to sea, we had a wonderful walk, exploring the ruined walls of old pastures and being held up by the gusts. Then we got back out to the car, which was parked at the end of the middle-of-nowhere road, and found a parking ticket on the windshield for 35 euros. This is extra funny if you know that I’ve been parking illegally in town for eight months and have never been fined. But drive half an hour out on an unkempt, empty road to the windswept netherworld of the Leucate falaise, probably visited once a day by humans, and you better look out for the gendermerie hiding in the gorse. It probably cost the Leucate municipality 50 euros in gas and salary just to have that yo-yo drive out there and make sure no one was breaking the law. Whatever law it was we broke. We still have no idea.
Julie & Ron at Leucate
A very sexy pair (wind was about 80 MPH)We went into Fitou for a wine-tasting afterwards, which was our second wine-tasting of the week, the first being at the much-adored Chateau de la Negly, who make one my favorite wines here, La Falaise (no relation to our parking ticket location). They also make two very expensive wines, one called Portes du Ciel, and the other Les Clos des Truffiers. They can't open bottles of these wines for degustation, but they can suck a little of the unbottled stuff out of the barrel it's aging in and give you a little from a giant glass dropper. Which our friendly oenologist did. The Portes du Ciel was really lovely, but still very alcoholic and juicy; the Clos Des Truffiers, however, was like encountering a rose still clenched in its bud. It was way intense, very heavy and dark in colour, almost syrupy, and too heady to drink, but you could tell, no matter its youthful battering-ram energy, that it was a great wine. It's a fist now, but when they bottle it (we were trying the 2006) and it opens, it's going to be a grand vin.
A wine-tasting adventure at Chateau de la Negly
The spoilsTuesday night was cassoulet night for Ron and me (the girls begged off peasant food; the bouguignon was their nod to tradition for the week). We’d agreed a nice autumnal meal was in order given the weather they’d had and he and I went to the supposedly famous Castelnaudary cassoulet stall in the market and picked up a crock of it. I love cassoulet, but I’m fully aware that it’s a small step from a rich bean stew studded with fragrant meats to a mushy pot full of gristle and hard-to-identify bits of crunchy badness. This one was somewhere inbetween, and as I sat across the table from Ron, who was smiling courageously as he worked his way through his serving, I knew this was probably the last cassoulet he’d ever eat. That might be the case for me too: I woke at 5am the next morning feeling like a dead porcupine was making its way through my guts. This feeling lasted for four days. So my next cassoulet is coming to my table at an authorized establishment, no more buying it from Les Halles.
I can’t report very well on Wednesday because I was mostly in agony and spent a lot of it in bed. But I hear a lot of cards were played. We kissed Julie and Ron goodbye at the train at 8 am Thursday morning. Ron and I cried bitterly in each other’s arms, gripping each other for dear life, as Anne and Julie shook hands and Julie said, “Thanks Sis, that was fun. See ya.”
The house felt pretty empty. But it smelled better. Ron: pack more socks next time, would you?
OUR NARBONNE
In the panic to get the story of our lives into this blog, I begin to feel sometimes that I’m letting the portrait of this wonderful city fade into the background, and there’s really so much to tell of the profoundly joyful dailiness of this place. As March gets warmer and even brighter (sorry Jules & Ron) people are creeping out of their hidey-holes and beginning to live in the streets again. We’ve always done this, all year round so far, because this place is liveable every day of the year to us Canadians. But the Narbonnais really only spread their wings from April to early November. The other four months, they kind of hibernate. And when we got here last August, we lived among them truly, drinking in their joie de vivre and watching them play. But it’s been a good four months since we’ve felt that vibe here, and we’ve gotten used to Narbonne being pleasantly sleepy. Now, though, we begin to sense their cocoons opening again. Little girls are drawing chalk hopscotch pans in the back alleys. The skateboard kids are doing their thing on the Quay des Barques. Within a couple of weeks, the three riverside snack stands are going to open. And the real sign of spring: the local putt-putt train is back at its depot, ready to take people around to see the sights of town. (Including, I must add, the newly reopened Musée de Lapidaire, the home of the much-longed-to-be-seen artifacts of the Roman wall. We took Julie and Ron there to see it. It’s in a church repurposed to hold these ancient stones, made up of stele, decorated stone, and funerary monuments. It’s a huge cold barn now lined with alleyways of stone to about four metres in height. And it’s entirely unsigned, undocumented. You have no idea what you’re looking at. And then, half an hour into your visit, they dim the lights and project a sound-and-light show on all four walls of the church, a spectacle they seem to be very proud of, created by two Italian fellas, and which has nowt to do with the artifacts you’re standing, now in the dark, among. Strange beyond comment.)
So the real life of Narbonne is blossoming. There is even more kissing in the streets. And as our time here continues, we belong more to it. A case in point is the slowly thawing love affair between myself and André Seguy, the 61-year-old grandson of the founder of Seguy Boucherie in Les Halles, the best butcher shop in Narbonne. Presiding over the freshest beef, lamb, and pork in town, M. Seguy is a large, slow-moving man with the half-lidded eyes of an alligator. I shop for my meat at his stall exclusively. When I first started patronizing his shop, he or one of his countermen would serve me without a by-your-leave, and sometimes, a prized local standing behind me would be served before me. Then, after a couple of months, M. Seguy began to recognize me. I began to tell him what I was making, and he would choose my meat for me. When I made my bourguinon last week, he cut me two kilos of shoulder, weighed it, then cut what must have been an extra half-kilo and put it into the paper for free.
But our relationship has just moved into an important new phase. The Jean I referred to above, with whom I gardened last weekend, is André’s younger brother. I mentioned this to André yesterday, who was delighted to learn that I had met his kid brother (age: 48) and was friends with Jacques Hemon. Then he wanted to know if I lived in Narbonne (he must know I do, but I gather this was the time to ask) and we actually sort of gabbed. Then he gestured me over to the other end of the counter and took out a slab of a rubbery-looking terrine. “Home-made,” he told me. “The best in the market. Try it.” He cut off a slab. It was fromage de tête, ie, a pâté made from all the parts of a pig’s head that are edible but you can’t really put on a plate. Cheek, tongue, ears, skin. It looks exactly as it sounds. And it’s held together by a yellowy gelatin to complete the aesthetic home-run.
I’m Jewish, okay? But I eat bacon and sausage and pepperoni and cappicollo and mortadella and what have you. I’ve never really had a taste for pork chops or ham, but there’s no good reason why I shouldn’t eat it if offered it. However, I’m pretty sure no matter how liberal my fellow Jews might be about eating off the uncloven hoof, I think there may be a genetic/tribal proscription against pork noggin. Give your average reform Jew a banquet-burger and stand back. Slices of pig ear in aspic, get out the smelling salts. So a kind of racial moment of truth was at hand for me in front of M. Seguy, as he waited for my reaction. I put the quivering, fat-pocked, glistening chunk in my mouth and chewed.
And here’s the thing: it was delicious. It really was delicious. And I almost puked as I swallowed it, thinking of what I was eating. I must have done a pretty good job of showing my delight, though, because M. Seguy wrapped up the whole slab and put it into my bag. “Fait cadeau,” he said, smiling.
It’s true love now. But I hope he has other goodies he feels like sharing with me next time.
OUR FRANCE
Not to venture too far out on the political limb, but I’ll close this massive post with a few words on our Dashing Leader, M. Sarkozy. Even in a country that still adheres to the old fashioned forms of etiquette, Sarkozy has provided a spectacle even the non-tabloid papers of France can’t resist. He campaigns for office with an obviously long-suffering wife at his side, gets elected, is dumped by the grimacing wife almost immediately, takes up with a middle-aged, but still-firm Italian model, is seen canoodling with her on every beach and every café patio in France, and then marries her, but not before (so reported some papers) he wrote his ex-wife in secret and told her if she’d come back, he’d cancel the wedding. Sarkozy sued the papers that printed this particularly juicy bit of information and it was retracted, but I imagine he sued not because it was untrue, but because there was some threshhold of foolishness even he didn’t want to be seen stepping over. This, combined with the man’s intolerance for anything either non-American or non-French—as minister of the interior, he called a French minority group “scum”; he later declined to campaign for the presidency in the south of France where most of them live—makes him look sometimes like a Monty Python Nazi, but for some reason, the detail that really made me wonder if the man was a genuine menace happened last week in Belgium. The European Union is governed in six-month blocks by one of its member nations. Right now, it’s Slovenia; in June, France will take over the helm. But it’s still Slovenia’s gig, and at a formal EU leadership dinner last week in Belgium, the current Slovenian president presided over a meal to all the member delegates that comprised a selection of delectable Slovenian national dishes. But Sarkozy threw a quiet fit and demanded an omelette. They had to go out and find him eggs to make him one. For this reason alone, you can be sure we’ll eventually return to Canada.
And yes, Charlot has learned to fly ...
