Glenn Kubish

  We managed to get out downtown last week, and stayed in, too. Here are three things that left behind tracks of gratitude and happiness. Three Things, episode 107:                              1. Print   The big five Asian cuisines are Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai and Vietnamese, which means Filipino is not quite in the gang, yet. Our friend Ariel knows that’s not fair. Ariel runs Filistix, the wonderful Filipino restaurant on 100 Avenue downtown, which is where we were last week for a unique sit-down dining event called Rice and Mysticism. Six courses of pre-colonial and early contact Filipino food researched and prepared by Chef Earl Briones, who narrated the evening, telling stories from island history and culture as he introduced each dish of plated art. Shelagh was where she’s meant to be: at a table with food and words. That night was Edmonton’s version of the evening she spent at The Cloister...

Happy end of the week, friends. I don’t recommend ignoring the horrific news of the past week. I just think it is still somehow worth the effort of noticing what we notice that makes us happy or grateful, remembering it, recording it. Here’s my list from a tough week.                                            1. The oilers   The spit and sizzle of a couple of breakfast eggs frying in olive oil in a small pan in the kitchen last week was a good sound. I haven’t given enough thought to olive oil. We are oil-rich at our house. There’s stir-fry oil, canola oil and peanut oil. We have olive oil for cooking and olive oil for finishing. I know the difference because Auntie Shelagh has attached a piece of green tape to each bottle, and, in black Sharpie, printed the words “cooking” or “finishing” so I don’t mix them up and use the $30 bottle of Lorenzo to fry my greasy spoon eggs....

Happy end of the week, y’all! Each week, I try to notice three things I noticed that made me feel happy or grateful. Noticed that I noticed, because it’s good to try to be semi-conscious. Happy or grateful because anger and outrage, because how’s that working for everybody?  Here's this week's Three Things—episode 41 (5 minutes, 3 seconds):   1. Hauling dolly! There are days, we all have them, where you have to haul a 50-pound delivery dolly downtown and your driver’s licence is two years past its renewal date, so, putting the wheeled contraption in the trunk of the car isn’t going to work. And there are times, we’ve all felt those times, when your commitments to yourself, your very identity hang in the balance, even with mundane challenges like how to get the dolly downtown. And there are, to keep everything together, we all have them—bungee cords. I used eight bungees to secure the dolly and its handle to the back rack of my mountain bike last week. It was a spider web, a mu...

I am fortunate. I have a fatbike. I have a neighbourhood grocery store. I have a smartphone that dinged an incoming text request from Shelagh (who I am most fortunate to know) as she bused home from downtown while plotting the next steps in today’s Japanese chicken curry dinner. 1 1/2 pounds (680g) boneless, skinless chicken thighs, 2 onions, piece of ginger, 2 carrots, 1 celery stalk, 1 pound (455g) Yukon Gold, russet or other potatoes, 2 tetra paks (they are about 1L each) of chicken broth The dinner had started to take shape yesterday when Shelagh asked the spices to assemble. Answering the call in the aspect of an artist’s palette: pepper corns, turmeric, a bay leaf, cloves, cumin, fennel, cinnamon, brown mustard seeds, cayenne pepper, paprika, cardamom, coriander and salt. My job was to make efficient use of Shelagh’s time by going, while she travelled home, to get the rest of the ingredients. But how to go? I asked Siri for the temperature, and then consi...

Heaney In a poem whose name I do not remember, Seamus Heaney corrects those, including himself, who would rush to write. The bastion of sensation, he says. Do not waver into language. Do not waver in it.  For Heaney, the bastion of sensation, the room from which he built, was the scullery. Know it cold, he advised.  In our house, the kitchen is the bastion of sensation, and Shelagh is its poet. She knows it cold. I try to protect it by recording her kitchen words. This is the collection to date.  Nothing really smells like brown sugar. Is there anything better than a lime? Is there anything better than a lemon? Is there anything better than an orange? I love parmesan cheese. Look at an onion. Just look at it! I love the smell of cilantro. It's the smell of mushrooms. I have discovered the mushrooms are the key! I love mint. The smell of mint. That's it. Can you smell the squash? It smells great. Wow! Smell that! Fresh...

Somewhere in some poem by Seamus Heaney is a scene from the poet's memory where he is watching a woman in his family (his mother? aunt? grandmother? My power of recall is fading!) perform a mundane task in the kitchen. She is cooking or canning or jarring. The poem builds to its teaching, which is that that is what love looks like. Or something like that. I have retreated to that image many times, because I don't trust the images from advertising and celebrity culture that purport to show us what love looks like.  And I have used that half-remembered poem fragment to make sense of what I see every day in the kitchen in my house, where Shelagh, my wife, loves our little family into existence according to an ancient recipe.  I am no moviemaker, but I wanted to try to capture that reality as she made meatballs yesterday.