her real world

Corn on the cob

Apologies for not having a more recent photo of corn, but the ones I took today at the farmers market (yes, I went again) haven’t been uploaded yet and I’m actually writing this as my corn cooks in its hot tub of goodness.

Corn on the cob is one of my favourite things on earth. Soon you will find out that I have many favourite things and most of them are food.

Corn on the cob evokes a number of memories for me, I can close my eyes and be husking corn in the shade of the trees in front of our trailer and looking out over the huge garden that we kept. If I explore the memory deeper, I’m probably sitting there complaining to myself about how much my Mom makes me work and how come we need all this stupid corn husked anyways. Oh god I was probably quite sick of corn, and the husking of it, and the cutting of it off the cob. But in the winter I’d be eating the frozen corn with the margarine already added and enjoying myself.

As I dig further into my self, I realize how grateful I am that I grew up with a farm family who struggled to make ends meet. I never had the newest clothes or the fanciest toys or anything. But I was raised on really excellent food. Food I took for granted. Food that was a hell of a lot of work. Food that fed a whole family for not a whole lot of money.

In the city I’m struggling to feed myself. Today I visited a farmers market, a local butcher shop, and a specialty food store that sells organic produce and dairy. I bought enough food for the week and I spent my usually horrendous lunch budget times two. Which I guess doesn’t seem like a lot in the grand scheme of things, but I could have bought a lot more food if I wasn’t being picky about what I put in my body.

The food I will eat for the next week will flood me with memories and longing. And then it will make me a bit angry, knowing that it’s the fact that I make enough money that allows me to eat like a queen.  For the first phase of my life I ate like a princess and I’m grateful every day that I was able to experience what not so many kids get to experience anymore. Which is part of why I’m writing this down.

One of my favourite memories associated with corn on the cob is my grandfather. My mother’s father. The town I went to school in has a yearly Corn and Apple Festival. There is a parade, and a midway, and a whole bunch of shopping stands. And free apple cider. And free corn on the cob. The line to get free corn on the cob is always very long, and my grandfather would spend all day waiting in line, getting his corn, and then eating the corn while he waited in line for another piece.

So tonight when I eat my corn on the cob, I’m thinking of you grandpa.

On being flexitarian: The Farmers Market

Or alternatively titled: How shopping at farmers markets brings back fond childhood memories.

I’m sorry that this photo is so blurry. I promise that I’ll upload some photos taken with a camera other than my iPhone soon. But really, I had to take a picture of these berries before I snarfed them down.

One of the things I like most about being flexitarian is the fact that I’ve cut back on my meat consumption (I’ve been trying to eat only local or sustainable or organic meats) and that I’m eating a lot more fresh produce. Also, I’m eating less of everything, which means I can afford to splurge and buy the most delicious raspberries on earth.

And oh they were delicious.

In figuring out who I am, I’ve been spending a lot of time figuring out what my favourite things are. Fresh raspberries are one of them. Eating them on their own reminds me of the excruciating hours spent picking raspberries with my family. The only thing that makes them better is cold cream and a bit of sugar.

Farmers markets are lovely and dangerous things, I have to go in with a strict budget. Today I visited the farmers market just down the street from where I work. I went in with $15 and came out with a huge bouquet of sunflowers, a half-pint of raspberries and two pints of baby summer squash. The flowers adorn my desk, as mentioned, the raspberries are happy in my belly, and the baby summer squash will be a lovely homemade pasta dinner tonight and lunch tomorrow.

Farmers markets are an excellent place to find seasonal, delicious food. Yes, the food can sometimes be more expensive. Sometimes it can be a lot cheaper. But if you’re careful and you find good quality local produce, you’ll wonder how you ever ate hard white hothouse tomatoes from the supermarket again.

Being a bit of a farmgirl snob, I sometimes wonder how anyone could ever think that what comes out of the supermarket is a REAL tomato, as growing up I can remember laying hundreds of tomatoes out on newspaper to ripen so that we could can them for the winter. In summer, lunch and supper often consisted of toasted tomato sandwiches, sometimes with bacon or cheese, mostly just with salt and pepper and margarine and maybe a bit of mayonnaise. In winter, we had the most delicious canned tomatoes ever.

One of the things I like most about being a flexitarian is that I’m going back to how I ate while growing up. I place standards on what is good enough to eat, which often times means I eat less. This comes to me at a much higher cost as when I was on the farm, the tomato plants were bought but the tomatoes we ate only cost the hard work it took to nurture and harvest them. Homemade pasta will be a lot of work tonight and not everyone can afford to buy $8 of baby summer squash.

But the end product is going to be a small portion of deliciousness that makes my heart and my waistline sing.

On being dumped: When I say forever, I mean it

The precursor to this story begins in my first year of university during reading week. Those who were close enough to family had gone home to visit them, those of us who weren’t stayed and did more of nothing than usual. It was just after Valentine’s Day and I had been lamenting to myself over the fact that for the 18th time in a row, I was single.

My roommate had her boyfriend come to visit her and he had gotten her two dozen roses and I was a tad jealous but quite happy that I was able to help him get a really good deal on them in the Byward Market. I helped her modify of my big water bottles as a vase and I was able to enjoy them as we shared a room.

There was a guy on our floor that was always very sweet and often girls would say “Oh I wish I could marry you!” to him. Very friendly, open hearted, kind. I will admit that I had developed crushes on many of the guys on the floor (you were all so awesome!), but one evening (and for the first time ever) that crush became something more.

I’d been waiting for this forever. This being a relationship. I had no idea what I was getting into; I just knew that I wanted it. And all of a sudden it was almost seven years later and I was sobbing into my telephone to anyone who would listen about how he left me that night and shoved his keys under the door. I have never spoken to him since.

It’s strange how things work out. The end of that story was a typed note signed with a red marker duct taped to my wall that told me how fucking much he loved me and that he’d call me in a few days about bills. The beginning of this story was a note that I found stuffed into my hardcopy of the Values and Ethics Code for the Public Service while cleaning my office for our move across the river. The note was attached to a dozen roses (one of which is pictured above) that was sent to my workplace and said “love me forever, the ex”. I looked at it, shook my head, and threw it in the recycling bin.

This story won’t be about my relationship with my ex. That ended rather crudely on December 5, 2006. This story will be about how being dumped made me into the woman I am today. And though there will be bits and pieces of the story of that relationship mixed up in this story and even though I (and a number of medical professionals and therapists) think what he did to me was inhumane, I’m going to do my best to respect the ex’s privacy.

I hope you learn as much from this as I did, I am certainly going to learn a lot from writing this.