Sushi Bar 5517

For me, the whole point of eating out is to find a meal that not only delights me but is also something I wouldn’t readily toss together for myself. It also helps when an order for lunch is priced in the under $15.00 range. Small wonder that Sushi Bar 5517 is one of my regular fave raves whenever I can tear myself away from my desk.

They do have the standard menu offerings, and thank goodness for that. My husband rarely deviates from his Bento Box B – beef, please, and my daughter, from her regular order of Bento Box B chicken, please. The servings are generous enough that at least one of them takes some part of it home, which reminds me – we have to get better at bringing our own containers when we eat there. We all hate adding to the ever-growing pile of Styrofoam waste on the planet.

The special sushi for the day was mango & cream cheese. The fish in the sashimi is fresh and is also melt-in your-mouth tender. Apologies to the chef that I didn't rearrange the elements for artistic effect. They arrived looking perfect, the beef was perfectly centered, but it slid sideways before I took the shot.

Now, I have nothing against Bento Box A, B, C, or D, nothing at all, but the rest of the fifteen page menu is so darned exciting, that I usually can’t resist trying something new. I have yet to be disappointed, even if I can’t pronounce the names of half of what I order.

 I can heartily recommend the Lollipop Scallops prepared by chef Mike Daito. They are made of deep fried scallops wrapped in zucchini & eggplant with spicy mayo. It is a perfect marriage of crisp and soft, savoury and spice. In season, the fresh oyster that he also does, with the light citric hit of ponzu sauce, Japanese chilli and green onion is another perfect balancing act. The baked topping is creamy, not unlike béchamel sauce.

Yesterday, I went there again with my daughter for lunch, and since I felt like comfort food, I ordered a combo that for me is like sliding into comfortable slippers: Spicey Agedashi Tofu and Garlic-Nasu aka eggplant in a sauce that god in her wisdom intended me to have even more often than I do.

Spicey Agedashi tofu - if my photography were better, you would know that the dark bit in the middle was a mushroom, and the lovely red dot is a little dab of pepper..

Agedashi tofu is not a new approach to tarting up the venerable vegetarian standby. The recipe actually dates back to at least 1782, when it first appeared in a cookbook entitled Tofu Hyakuchin – literally: One hundred Tofu. Often when I order this dish, I also order a side of Ohitashi Spinach instead of the Garlic-Nasu since it is a lighter combo, but yesterday my appetite felt more exuberant, as if I were channelling my inner Sancho Panzo. It is probably gauche, but I can never resist pouring the last of the agedashi sauce over my side of rice. Heaven is not intended to be left in the bowl.

The dashi sauce is delicately scented, and does not overwhelm the lightly cooked spinach.
It is topped with shaved bonito flakes.

NOTE: The restaurant is sometimes closed –Sundays and Mondays, I think, so it is worth phoning them at 604-741-0558. They are located at 5517 Wharf Ave., Sechelt, between the Bank of Montreal and Off the Edge Cycles. I would give even more specific directions, but I am notorious for not knowing my left from my right. No worries. It is easy to find.

Humped Pelican Crossing

NOTE: For reasons mysterious to me, this post shows up under August 2011 - when I actually posted it in November 2010. I did finally add the picture to the text in August 2011, which may be the explanation.

I took this picture in Banbridge the other day, just across from the bus station at the War Memorial stop. Naturally, I had to quiz my Irish hosts about the meaning and etymology of - Humped Pelican Crossing. No such traffic animal exists in Canada. We all took the quest quite seriously, and the consequent search naturally took us deep into Google territory which finally revealed that in the UK - which includes Northern Ireland - there are at least three kinds of related crossings: Zebra, Pelican and Puffin. Who knew?


During the after-supper analysis with my Gilford Castle hosts, we ruminated on what these different designations might mean and more importantly - how did such names get chosen for this kind of traffic sign. Well, the zebra is striped ... yes ... and the pelican has a bill ...

I don't think I can blame the Irish whiskey - it is a challenging topic on which to make much progress, and so it is with great regret that I must leave you with much of the mystery still intact. If you really need to know more from the official oracles of signage, there is always the Ten Commandments of Traffic as revealed by the Department for Transport, at Great Minister House, London.

It does make me wonder though if Canada should follow the lead of our mother country and introduce signs such as: Humped Bison Crossing and Humped Grizzly Crossing. After all, each of these animals actually come equipped with humps. No mystery there. Also, if we had such signs, then tourists to Canada would take wads of photos, and they too would end up in inane blog posts such as this.

Carolan’s Farewell

I am one of those Luddites who doesn’t even own a smart phone, a Kindle, a Nook, or a whatever, but I do wonder what would it be like if novels on digital devices had a sound track. Maybe such things already exist. If they do, then Charles Foran’s novel, Carolan’s Farewell , should be paired with the harp music in The Carolan Album by Máire Ní Chathasaigh & Chris Newman. It would be like the perfect pairing of wine and cheese, in much the same way that Beaujolais goes with Camembert.

Some of Charles Foran's books in our personal library.

A couple of weeks ago, I started rereading Carolan’s Farewell, and was still enjoying rereading it when I attended the Mission Folk Music Festival. On Sunday morning, there I was butt-in-place, book set temporarily aside, and utterly captivated by the music of Máire Ni Chathasaigh, Patrick Ball and Ailie Robertson. Immediately afterward, I hustled said butt off to the CD tent and bought The Carolan Album.

The liner notes are extensive, and after I had downloaded the CD onto my iPod – at least I have one of those – I listened to it while reading the rest of the novel on the ferry. The sound track was almost a necessity if I was to continue reading, since several young men sitting two seats over were talking, each one louder than the previous one, about their drinking and womanizing prowess at some event two days ago.

Life is usually too short for me to have the luxury of rereading novels, but I do find that rereading them often tells me as much about myself as it does about the book. For example, I can no longer abide Anais Nin.

I first read Carolan’s Farewell in September 2005, immediately after reading a review in the Globe and Mail: Lyrical, ambitious.... A richly imagined landscape.... The melodies of this novel resonate long past its final pages. How could I not buy it?

At the time, I knew little of Irish history from the early 1700s, apart from the iconic touchstones: 1641, Cromwell, Derry, The Boyne. Significantly, all touchstones were battles, a limited perspective of any people at the best of times. Foran’s novel is not about battles, although it references many of them. It is a fictional treatment of one of the last of the pre-modern harp composers, Turlogh O’Carolan and his trusty sidekick, Owen Connor aka Owen Ballach in 1737.

It is a bit of a Don Quixote tale, except that in this case the knight in rusting armour has the body and habits of a Sancho Panzo, while his companion is the one who is rational and a virgin. Although Carolan’s harp music is what he is known for, a short verse that he once wrote is quite revealing:

A while drunk

A while mad

A while tearing harp-strings to shreds

Smoking tobacco, going insane

This new fashion we practiced and never will we part from it.

As in the writing of Cervantes, Foran’s contrasting characters work to good effect. Each man has a foot in a separate era: Carolan in the oral and Connor in what Marshall McLuhan calls the manuscript culture. Not that it is that simple. Although Carolan continues to mourn all the losses experienced by Catholics in the past century, he also makes a curious choice when he includes the Protestant Ango-Irish James Butler, Duke of Ormonde, as one of those who he both toasts and respects. 

Connor also makes a similarly curious choice when one of the two books he chooses to steal from the Maguires’ decaying aristocratic household is one written by Francis Hutcheson (1694-1746), a Protestant, who was born at Drumalig, Co. Down - his Presbyterian family having fled Scotland as a result of the Covenanters conflict. Connor quotes him often, and shares the passage: every man, whether captive or servant, has the right to resist tyranny. By identifying with much of what Hutcheson says and stands for, and at the same time identifying with much of Carolan says and stands for, Connor straddles the divide between the old and the new. He prefigures what will emerge in the next generation when Presbyterians and Catholics make common cause during the uprising of 1798.

Unlike Anais Nin, Foran stands up to a rereading, especially when the music of Carolan goes hand in glove with the text. For me though, my second read was a very different read from the first since my own reading about Irish history in the intervening years has introduced me to many of the real life events surrounding these characters. A further plus was that the immediacy of the descriptions was exactly as I recalled them. They triggered recollections of the prose of Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent, Sir Walter Scott’s Old Mortality, and Caroline Blackwood’s Great Granny Webster. 

As in his earlier book, The Last House of Ulster, Foran situates his characters and tells his tale primarily from the Catholic perspective. At the same time, whenever one of his characters uses a broad brush to paint either side of the faith divide, the authorial voice seems more interested in looking at the injustices that result from abuses of power than to put white hats on one lot of people and black hats on the other. Just as in the choices of heroes made by the characters of Carolan and Connor, truth is more nuanced than party lines permit.

It is the same perspective that Foran brings to his writing on China, Hong Kong and Vietnam in his two non-fiction books: Sketches in Winter: A Beijing Postcard and Join the Revolution Comrade: Journeys and Essays. Lest you think the latter too academic to dip into, it isn’t. My favourite essay in the latter collection was Pray to the Lord of the Lotus. It closes with:

Scramble down to the river and find an abandoned barge. In the vessel lay the bodies of those you hold so precious, and so wished to protect, and then cast off the shore. Float out into the water. Float out to the sea. Here is now and here is how now must be. Pray to the Lord of the Lotus. Pray to be awakened.

Lacuna

Definition of Lacuna: A gap.

First let it be said that I am absolute rubbish when it comes to being able to make tortillas. The night that our book club was due to discuss Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver, I gave it my best shot. I borrowed a friend’s tortilla press, listened to how she said she made them, bought the masa harina, and downloaded a recipe. Good to go, I would have thought. Not. 

In my first attempt, I ended up with a crumbling mess. Another version resulted in sticky slabs that fell apart when I tried to get them to a pan. After three tries,  I gave up, took the mess of corn meal gorp, added a whack of beaten eggs to it, fried it up, and called them tortilla-pancake dippers. They worked. After a fashion.

Now, you might wonder why on earth I would even bother to try to make tortillas. It was because of my book club. There is a bakers’ dozen of us who meet once a month, and we not only report on our chosen book, but we also feast. I mean – we REALLY feast and the food is chosen to go with either the locale or the theme of the book.

Here we are - too wide for the box of this blog format - but that's us.
Photo Credit: Kerith Perreur-Lloyd

Obviously, some books present a real challenge. For example, consider the culinary dilemma of cooking food to go with Trainspotting by the Scottish author Irving Welsh. That wasn’t the only book that threw curve balls at us. I still cringe when I think of the dark humour surrounding the shish kebabs that were served the night we talked about The Bridge on the Drina by Ivo Andrić. Usually, the food-book convergence is not that challenging, let alone disgusting, and the good thing about it is that we stray into culinary territory that we would not have entered without the nudge.

Fortunately, the night we gathered to discuss and appreciate Barbara Kingsolver’s Lacuna, my chilli-lime chicken wings turned out just fine, better than my tortillas. Not that they were memorable. The most memorable piece de resistance, in spite of Chris's Jamie Oliver Mexican Street Salad being in contention - along with Sarah & Kerith's stunning salad and Colleen's amazingly arranged appies,was the chocolate cinnamon cream pie done by Rosemary. 

We all bow down in front of Rosemary. She is the only one of us in this book club to win Canada-wide notice in Ian Brown’s series in the Globe and Mail on where to eat in Canada. 

Here is what I think of most often when I imagine a Canadian meal: lunch with Bill and Rosemary Terry on the patio of their seaside home in Sechelt, a seaplane's hop up the coast from Vancouver.

Poor Ian, he only had the one experience of Rosemary’s cuisine.

Not that I want you to think that we didn’t actually talk about the book – even after copious amounts of Patron Gold Tequila. We did, but I would be lying if I said that I could remember the specific insights better than I remember the pie, many of which were no doubt worthy. Maybe I should blame the tequila. Maybe I should blame the pie.

Fortifications for intellectual discourse.