Toronto

Our first Canadian pitstop. Ate at Sotto Voce, a Little Italy wine bar with an open kitchen. Small menu but good fare: some pasta dishes, risotto, buffalo mozzarella salad caprese. And had garlicky gyros in the afternoon while walking around the vibrant neighbourhoods. Breakfasted on plates of no-nonsense pancakes with Canadian peameal bacon and maple syrup at the retro Fran’s Diner, a Toronto institution. And let's not forget our highway snack of crunchy sour cream doughnuts from the ubiquitous Tim Horton's chain.

Reading, and leaving, Ann Arbor

Something melancholy from Charles Baxter's novel The Feast of Love, set in Ann Arbor. It's a moody meditation on love, and reading it feels like walking around a neighbourhood at night and imagining all of the conversations and love affairs and broken hearts in each house.

In February the overcast sky isn't gloomy so much as neutral and vague. It's a significant factor in the common experience of depression among the locals. The snow crunches under your boots and clings to your trousers, to the cuffs, and once you're inside, the snow clings to your psyche, and eventually you have to go to the doctor. The past soaks into you in this weather because the present is missing almost entirely.

It was February when I read Feast of Love, fed up with the cold and the grey and salt-stained shoes and jeans, but the winter gloom wasn't a patch on how I feel now. I'm sad that I won't see Ann Arbor in summer, when the undergraduates vacate the town and the arts and music festivals fill the streets with locals. I'm sad I'll no longer have the run of an elite university, its visiting lecturers, its libraries and its cultural programs. I'm sad to say goodbye to so many new friends, whom I cannot imagine having to live without. And I'm sad that all hope of going back to a better workplace is gone - looks like it's going to be the same old disheartening place and no amount of inspiration gained here can change that, or my prospects there.

Enough self-pity: we're on the road for the next two weeks seeing Toronto, Montreal, New England and Boston. We'll visit cheeseries in Vermont and walk the Maine coastline and hopefully see some gorgeous countryside before we have to leave the USA. And the food is promised to be great.

It's all over

Gerard graduated alongside the rest of this year's Knight Wallace Fellows on Thursday. Certificates were awarded, champagne was served, the class gift was presented and yet it felt like a wake as we tried to fight back tears during Tony, Jamie and Fara's valedictories. Everybody moved numbly around the house at the function following the ceremony, trying not to become overwhelmed by the feeling of loss and regret and disbelief that the end of the year had arrived. Or was that just the blogger girls, Julia and me?

The next night's prom was a better send-off where we showed if we were going to have to leave Ann Arbor, we'd do it with a bang. Nothing like vigorous dancing with dear friends to primarily 80s pop in the grown-ups' house to make you look like an idiot feel young again. We even had a Prom King and Queen. And a chillout lounge, with a psychedelic iTunes display from my laptop projected onto the ceiling. I took no photos, but the curious can see the fun thanks to Julia and Lisa.


I'd had lots of fun putting together the right playlist, from 867-5309/Jenny to You Spin Me 'Round, with a bit of Cuban salsa, Turkish pop and Buenos Aires-inspired tango grooves from the Gotan Project thrown in to fully represent the fellowship year.


Drew put it best in an email the following day: "So I woke up this morning a pumpkin. The fellowship's over, and my fairy godmother's left me high and dry." Damn you, Father Time.

Coneyheads

Amidst all of the new beginnings of spring, the Fellowship year is drawing to a close and everyone is battling their own grief and gloom. We've had the last-ever seminar, sat in last classes with cherished professors, and soon there'll be last meetings between new friends. For a bit of relief, Gail and Foley hosted an evening of excess - all around a late-night visit to a hallowed hotdog parlour in Detroit.

The fun began with Gail's pitcher of pink cosmos in frosted glasses before 10 of us boarded a stretch Hummer limousine, complete with disco lighting, mirrored ceiling and walls, TV screens, stereo system and drink chillers. We'd been issued with "travellers" to sip on for the 40-minute drive to Dearborn's Crave Lounge, a chic bar with gorgeous orchid-strewn sushi platters and towers of pink fairy floss. All gauzy white curtains, long low couches and glowing aquariums of jellyfish. We had beers, saketinis and French martinis and eyed off the beautiful people in their bright white shirts before returning to our Hummer for champagne and a ride to Detroit's Greektown Casino and, before too long, Lafayette Coney Island for the last call.

In Detroit, hotdogs are called Coney dogs and this landmark is open around the clock for squishy chilli dogs with mustard and dices of raw onion, served on Formica tables under glaring flourescents. Graham even ate six of the blighters.

By that stage I was so enamoured of the Hummer I actually kissed its bullish black hood. Thanks to Gail for the pix. She and Foley really are the ultimate hosts and hedonists. Will we ever have as much fun again without them?

Spring zing

I'm so glad Easter Monday isn't a holiday here, as my favourite produce market was open again (I never seem to plan ahead well enough). So there I was, desperate for a taste of something fresh after a long winter of starch, processed food and wizened root vegetables, when I saw them. Baby zucchini. Tucked up in a row in their plastic tray like newborns. Tender little mites no longer than your fingers. So I carried them home and made them into soup.

I wanted to capture the essence of spring, when new buds unfurl on bare branches and the sun shines a little bit brighter. Something clean and fresh and lemony to celebrate the time of year. The end result is a light creamy broth from the addition of ricotta cheese, with a cheering hit of bright green.
---
Spring soup

Any young, fresh spring greens will do: apart from the ones used here you could also try asparagus, sorrel, pea shoots and nettles. Even shredded lettuce is nice in the buttery mix.

Melt butter in a soup pot while cleaning and slicing some leeks into thin rounds.

Sweat leeks in the pot over medium heat with the lid on. You want them to soften but not brown.

Slice baby zucchini into small half-moons. Add to pot. Stir around and leave to soften for a couple of minutes, with lid on.

Zest a lemon into the pot. Squeeze one half into the soup, reserve the other half for later. Add chicken stock and replace the lid.

Wash and trim sugar snap peas, add to pot. With lid on, cook on medium heat for three minutes. Then add a handful of peas, either fresh or frozen. Cook for another two minutes. The point is to treat the vegetables gently – you want to have a bit of crunch left in the snow peas, and you want to retain as much of the green colour as you can.

Squeeze the second half of the lemon into the soup, crack some pepper into the mix, and taste for seasoning. Add some fresh tarragon if you like. I prefer not to add any fresh or dried herbs, as I want the soup to taste of the young green vegetables and the freshness of lemon.

After ladling into bowls, add a handful of baby spinach leaves and a generous spoonful of fresh curd cheese: either ricotta or good fluffy cream cheese (in the US I recommend the zesty Zingerman's cream cheese).

Serve with farm bread and European-style butter.

Easter peep show

It's Easter, and America has been invaded by Peeps. They're squat little marshmallow chicks, full of evil corn syrup and loaded with sugar. They're coated in even more. So, something sugary and mass-produced... can you get any more American?

If they weren’t so unnaturally pastel-coloured, their soft-serve extruded forms would look like something dogs deposit on front lawns. Maybe that’s why I find the quivering, artificially-flavoured things so disturbing. Or maybe it's the imagination of their taste - an aggressive, chemical sweetness - that renders me oblivious to their charms.

But they’re wildly popular, appearing each spring and given to children at Easter (give me chocolate bunnies any day) and swallowed by nostalgic adults as well. They’re a cultural phenomenon which I had no idea about until this week. Cyberspace is littered with tributes (peep shows?) to the marshmallow peep.

The first one I saw was the wacky librarian humour from Millikin University; while others perform scientific experiments on peeps, testing their responses to a microwave oven or liquid nitrogen. Other sites offer recipes for Peep Waldorf Salad or Peep Pizza. Peepophiles use them in seasonal displays and even craft the squishy things into dioramas for local newspaper competitions (the coolest, on urban overdevelopeepment, is pictured above and below). Talk about playing with your food.

Local flavour

An Americana weekend, foodwise, featuring Provel cheese and Maine lobster. But not at the same time.

On Friday night we were treated to handmade pizza at the home of journalism fellow Jamie, his wife Amy and their three, criminally cute, little girls: Ruth, Zoe and Bebe. Jamie makes his trademark pizza using provel cheese – a processed cheese developed from cheddar, swiss and provolone. It’s an invention of St. Louis, a city in the midwest with an Italian-American population, where it is used to make St. Louis-style pizza because of its low melting-point. Provel (pro-VELL) is pale in colour and doesn't have a strong taste - kind of like Velveeta - so it wouldn't overpower other flavours, and it retains its texture when it melts.

Provel isn't widely available outside its hometown so Jamie’s current source is St. Louis gal Julia, another Fellow spouse (and a terrific writer to boot). She once told me St Louis is also the home of "toasted ravioli". Now that is something I have to see.

Incidentally Jamie is something of a culinary mastermind – he also whips up regular batches of a mean Irish cream liqueur.

On Saturday afternoon we had a lobster clambake, organised by the New Englander in the Fellowship. Lobsters are the pride of Maine. Ours were shipped overnight live, alongside New England clam chowder and “steamers”, i.e.: clams. When I peeked inside the tall can it was like looking into a deep-sea treasure chest. I saw of glimpse of dark green shell and large claw and a net bag of clams, all entwined with clumps of seaweed.

I’m sure New Englanders don’t open the lid – surely it’s much better to avoid acknowledging the creatures are still alive when we cook them. Talk about fresh food. Any irksome pricks of conscience are easily brushed aside as the actual cooking process (or moment of death) is so simple with a canbake. Just leave the lid on and put the can directly onto a heat source. There’s no wrestling of critters required – the lobsters cooked directly in the pot: steamed in seawater released from the seaweed, and the two bottles of Heineken Graham added.

We had hoped to eat outdoors on the deck for a true lobster cookout but, Michigan being Michigan, spring was late to arrive. We started bravely with bowls of clam chowder, generous with chunks of meat, but had to retreat indoors for the remainder of the feast. By now the steam was shooting from the hole in the lid of the lobster can, along with the heady aroma of the ocean: of seaweed strewn rocks, saltwater and sand. We were bringing the beach indoors and ushering in spring.

The cooked lobsters were bright red, and their tails had curled beneath their bodies (best not to think why). Graham performed initial surgery on them over the sink, while we sat down with a large bowl of steamers.

Using our fingers, we plucked the clam out of the open shells and pulled off the dark ‘turtlenecks’. Then we dunked them in water to remove any shell or grit, dipped into butter and slurped.

Next, the lobster. Rainey demonstrated how to dismember the beasts for eating, the spots to crack the shells, and where to find the sweetest chunks of meat. We struggled gamely to follow, although Gail found that years of eating crab in Baltimore gave her an advantage with getting the shells to release their bounty. Once we had our prize we pulled the rich flesh apart and sat them in bowls of drawn butter while we worked on the next part of the crustacean. Eventually the lobster absorbed so much butter we had to eat the slippery chunks with a fork.

It all tasted luscious, and the texture of the meat and its mouthfeel made it a very sensual feast. Albeit a messy one – our wine glasses were smeared with buttery pawprints. We drank Australian riesling and Veuve Clicquot, and the champagne was perfect with the lobster. It was acid enough to cut through the rich butter, while its crisp bubbles were a light counterpart to the heavy meat. A match made in heaven. All in all, a meal to savour and linger over. Which is why we hurried out the door to go to... a bowling alley! That’s America.

The politics of food

I’ve just been reading in Salon about a fascinating new book called The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan. Americans have not only lost the connection between the land and what they eat; this is a country which doesn't really cook at home anymore. I was shocked when an NPR story on how to make your own salad dressing became one of the most-emailed stories of the week! Is it frightening that Americans don’t know how to make salad dressing from scratch, or gratifying that they want to learn?

Pollan had a New York Times Magazine cover story recently about hunting boar, with a little unease, in order to connect to his place in the food chain, and because he “wanted, for once in [his] life, to pay the full karmic price of a meal.” I don’t enjoy reading about the slaughter of animals, but as a meat-eater I can’t very well turn my eyes from the killing that precedes my meals. A good reminder of the the true cost of food.

The Omnivore's Dilemma is also about how corporate America drives the nation’s obesity epidemic with high-fructose corn syrup, why Americans should spend more on fresh food instead of junk, and what’s really at stake when we decide what to put into our mouths.

Which brings me to something Ari Weinzweig told the Fellows at lunch at Zingerman’s Roadhouse yesterday. He says if you eat great food you’ll find it tastes better than “industrial food”, and because you get more pleasure from it your tastes are satisfied sooner. You need less to provide the sensations and you don’t need to overeat to remove the bad aftertaste of factory-made food. Which probably explains why Ari is so slim.

Just don't mention the riots

Here's what New York magazine deems worthy in Sydney, in its New Yorker's guide to the second-greatest cities in the world (humph). As well as - surprise! -Tetsuya's and Icebergs, they recommend shopping at the Fish Market, drinking at “Dirty old man pubs” like the Nelson in Bondi Junction (where our wedding night party ended up), an antique crawl in Woollahra and buying a pair of R.M. Williams boots. Tamarama, "big on attitude and style", is the spot for fresh mango smoothies and barely-there bikinis. "Don’t miss the regular surf lifesavers’ drill, when good-looking, athletic bodies scramble into the surf and power through the waves. If you feel like you might need to be rescued, this is the place to do it". They also include a handy guide to Sydney fashion (Jayson Brunsdon = a young Yves Saint Laurent while Lover = Marc Jacobs), equate Palm Beach to the Hamptons, and helpfully describe the taste of Moreton Bay bugs as "like lobster, but sweeter". They take the piss in the Sydneysider slang glossary though - ever heard "Fancy a cheeky shampoo?" when asking somebody if they want a drink? Where the bloody hell did they find that?

I'll now return to reading Dog Days by Wonkette Ana Marie Cox.