I have irish ancestry and my beloved, while catholic, hails from the country of the House of Orange — William of Orange was a dutch protestant and took over the british/irish crown from the catholics, with familiar fallout.

So yesterday we had a green-and-orange dinner party with all green-and-orange food and orangy rosé wine. (No green beer. We had beer and we had food colouring at the ready but it was respectfully declined.) I made zucchini halva for the first time and it was really lovely. Also: garlic rapini; spiced yams; carrot-and-bean salad with sesame-tofu dressing; cabbage and coconut with black mustard seeds (meh, and not very green either); orange squash with green rind left on, cut in chunks and cooked in broth; and for dessert, fruit salad with oranges, dried apricots and green grapes, and the aforementioned zucchini halva.

Mark wore an orange t-shirt from volunteering at the Festival du nouveau cinéma; I wore a green silk salwar kameez from Bangladesh. (We didn’t ask our guests to dress thematically because they aren’t the kind of people who take well to being told what to do.) I had always thought of green and orange as being gang colours, where young men spoiling for a fight would wear the appropriate colours and go somewhere to find someone wearing the opposite colours and set to. But I looked it up and it’s a bit more complicated than that.

St Patrick’s day is a legitimate irish holiday and has been observed in Ireland for over a thousand years. It’s been observed in the US by irish immigrants since the 18th century. But apparently it took over as a general public festivity around the time of the irish potato famine, when starving irish started landing in the US and Canada. Non-irish started celebrating St Patrick’s day as a show of solidarity with the oppressed. “Everybody’s irish on St Paddy’s day” was a variation on a theme we still see today, recently in the form of “We are all Trayvon Martin.”

I almost always serve rapini when I’m cooking for guests because it’s colourful, nutritious (greens are actually an excellent source of protein) and somewhat bitter, which is a good counterpoint to starch and fat. Most importantly it’s hard to mess up and perfect for a multi-dish meal because the rapini are blanched in advance and set aside so I can focus on other things. It gets heated up quickly with garlic at the last minute before serving so I don’t have to worry about it getting either overdone or cold. Since it’s so perfect I’ve already supplied the recipe.

Now for the zucchini halva. You look skeptical. I understand. I was too, but I needed a green dessert and it did look intriguing. Turns out it’s really, really good and I’ll be making it again.

Zucchini Halva

4 baby zucchini (about 1 lb or 500 g)
2 cups of milk
1 pod of cardamom or 1/2 t ground cardamom
2 T oil
6 T sugar
2 T coarsly chopped pistachios

Finely grate the zucchini. Put it in a wide pot with the milk and cardamom. Cook over low heat until the water has almost evaporated. (This takes a long time but you don’t need to hover. Just give it a stir when you pass by as you’re cooking other things.) Stir in the oil and sugar and cook more until it becomes thick and pasty. Turn out into a serving dish and sprinkle with pistachios.

That’s it. (From Madhur Jaffrey’s Eastern Vegetarian Cooking.)

Marijn came to visit for a month, and while he was here I put him to work making pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving dinner. This recipe comes to me from my great grandmother, Deborah Ferrier.

Don’t bother trying to prepare a regular pumpkin for pie this way as your mash will be too watery and kind of stringy. Pumpkins may have been more edible and less decorative in Deborah Ferrier’s day.

For the shell, I like to make a nut crust out of finely chopped walnuts or pecans but whatever your favorite crust is will be perfect.

Pumpkin Pie (imperial)

3 cups of either:

1½ cups sugar or Splenda
3 eggs, separated
¾ cups melted butter
¾ cups cream
1½ t cinnamon
¾ t nutmeg
¾ t ginger
1 T vanilla

Combine all ingredients except the egg whites. Beat the egg whites until stiff and fold into the mixture. Pour into two 9-inch or one deep 10-inch unbaked pie shell. Bake 45 minutes at 375°F.

*Halve a butternut squash. Bake it cut-side down on a baking sheet for an hour or so at 325°F.

Pumpkin Pie (metric)

750 mL of either:

375 mL sugar or Splenda
3 eggs, separated
200 mL melted butter
200 mL cream
8 mL cinnamon
4 mL nutmeg
4 mL ginger
15 mL vanilla

Combine all ingredients except the egg whites. Beat the egg whites until stiff and fold into the mixture. Pour into two 22-cm or one deep 25-cm unbaked pie shell. (I like to make a nut crust out of finely chopped walnuts or pecans.) Bake 45 minutes at 195°C.
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We got off-season rates at Cox’s Bazar on the Bay of Bengal. It was a wonderful time to be there. Every day we had stretches of sun parenthesized by downpours and impressive winds.

Food ranged from the sublime to the grotesque. The grotesque included the high-carb ‘free’ breakfast at our hotel—flatbreads, Chinese noodles, curried vegetables, dals with beef or mutton, chicken curries, oatmeal, sweet rice puddings, omelettes, boiled eggs, croissants—where families and honeymooners fueled up for the day’s activities.

The sublime included the best grilled fish I’ve ever tasted at a hole-in-the-jungle eco-restaurant that we got to by hiring an electric baby-taxi to drive us up the coast past army teams repairing washed-out roads. The most exotic, and by far the least expensive, was a dining hall where families, labourers, businessmen, and ladies with their friends filled benches at tables on either side of a corridor that allowed waiters to whiz up and down delivering delicious fish curries, bhotas, vegetables, rice, pickles, and much else and where the three of us could eat splendidly and take home doggie bags for an equally splendid evening meal for just over $5.00.

On a hotel-arranged tour of beauty spots, little boys with prehensile feet carried Isha up a gully to see a waterfall and across a channel over a decorative bridge.

Next week after a Vancouver visit, I’ll be heading back to drought-ravaged Ottawa, where Danjuma tells me he has plenty of peppers ready to garnish Italian sausage.

I left work in the middle of the day yesterday to escort my beloved home from the hospital after a minor surgical intervention. Once home I paused to gently scratch the neck of my little dog Poupoune — my first ever dog — the one who used to be packed full of personality, eager to please and do and be useful; who helped save my beloved’s life when he was depressed; the one who at the venerable age of sixteen has begun withdrawing from life — and she tensed up and curled her tail between her legs.

She was suffering.

I called the vet and we’ll be putting her down tomorrow afternoon. My beloved has been busy preparing.

Poupoune trying her grave on for size.

She has been dearly loved and will be sorely missed.

Patrick is in Bangladesh, taking the philosophical view.

*** *** ***

Picture from the Internet, not taken by Patrick.

 
Yesterday I was waiting in a long, slow-moving queue for a government service. The queue was an everyday affair, so small tea stands and coconut carts had set up parallel to the shuffling crowd. After I had been there an hour or so an elephant came along with a mahout and passenger astride. The elephant stopped at a stand, ate some of the discarded coconuts shells, rose on his hind legs, waved his trunk around, and shouted. It was clear there was mayhem on his mind. Every merchant understood the drill. Very quickly and with obvious trepidation, each approached proprietor held out a ten taka note (about ten cents), which the elephant took with his trunk and passed up to the mahout. The apparent alternative was to have the stand’s product consumed, dispersed, or destroyed.

The whole operation was enormously entertaining for the people in the queue, was carried out efficiently, and took very little time. A model for the rest of us.
 
Kuda habis (take care),
P

My father is back in Dhaka, the cricket pitches are wet, the goats amuse and the food is good.

*** *** ***

Dear Family and Friends,
 
It rained this morning in Lalmatia. The sky was dark and it was going to rain when the marketers (Beli and Lippy) set out for the bazaar in a rickshaw. Everyone was laughing. We are now at the beginning of Asharh, the first month of the two month “monsoon season.” Isha and I were watching cricket from the rooftop when the first large droplets began to fall and the boys scattered. Rain was shooting in through open windows when we got back to our flat.
 
Within an hour, the big boys were carrying pallets of sand onto the field to fill the puddles. The smaller boys were swimming in larger puddles beyond the cricket-playing areas; or they were building canals, dams, and drainage systems to the ditches around the park. The windows in our flat were open again. Isha and I were following a goat around on the cricket pitch, watching it eat the seed-tops off the grass. The marketers were buying vegetables and fish that hadn’t looked so fresh for months. There is nothing subtle or gradual about this change of seasons, and it feels good to everyone.
 

The pictures speak for themselves. Some shrimp was curried for lunch and two of the fish were fried. Most of the fish will be prepared and frozen for use over the next week or two. The second tiniest fish will be individually cleaned with the heads reserved for a bhota (a paste for kneading into your rice), one of the three or four or five dishes served up at every meal.
 

The water lily is at the top of a rolled up two or three metre stalk, which is the part we eat. There are at least three types of, including sweet potato leaves, greens in the big white bag; several varieties of cucumbers for cooking or eating fresh; tendrils that hang down from lattices supporting gourds, cooked as a vegetable; and an impressive pile of what is sold in Canada as ‘bitter melon.’ There is a bag of achi (roasted and coarsely ground red rice) and a bag of attah (the wheat flour used for making roti, fresh flat bread, for breakfast). And there are guavas, three varieties of mangoes, and a large clutch of lychees. There was going to be a jack fruit, but the load was too heavy for an additional fruit about half the size of Isha. That will have to come tomorrow.
 
Seasonal best wishes!
P