March 20th, 2011

Greetings from Montreal!

This photo makes it look sort of slimy. Pictures lie.

I am taking a working holiday here, following another fun trip with The Fugitives. I’ve been making borscht, baking bread, and catching up on e-mails. Why borscht, you ask? Well, it’s delicious, good for you, and cheap. Seriously cheap! Beets pretty much volunteer to come home with you. And if you buy a head of red cabbage to add to it, you will get massive, ridiculous quantities of borscht, and also you will also be a witness to the Miracle\Curse of Cabbage. It. Never. Disappears. Barring cabbage rolls, I cannot think of one good way to get rid of an entire head of cabbage in one go. Yeah, yeah, sauerkraut. But, do you really need that much sauerkraut? Are we holing up for winter in the potato fields of pre-WWII Poland?

My thoughts are toward food, frugality and Europe because I am less than two weeks away from the next story collecting trip for The B.C. Memory Game. I’ll be visiting Grand Forks, which, like many towns in the Kootenay, has a rich Doukhobor history. If you are from Grand Forks, or have lived there, you should come visit with me! I’m looking for all kinds of stories, Doukhobor and otherwise, and as you can see from the preceding paragraph, I am easily impressed. For example, I would be so excited if you told me a sure-fire way of decimating a head of cabbage in one meal, or at least making its stretch through the week somewhat less of a grind.

Meet me with your stories, histories, recipes and chats at:

The Grand Forks Library
7342-5th Street
10-10:30

Saturday, April 2

I have to boot it very quickly to Vancouver on Saturday, so why don’t you, e-mail me to make an appointment for Thursday or Friday: badler [at] badler [.][ca]

Or, come say hello on Saturday, and we’ll pick a time for me to phone you! Ah! Luxury!

Also! I will be playing a show at the Grand Forks Library earlier in the week:

Stories, poems, the accordion and an Open Mic!

March 31st
7-9 pm
Grand Forks Library
7342-5th Street
Grand Forks, BC
Canada V0H 1H0

And, without any further ado…

My Borscht Recipe:

You need to buy, borrow, or pilfer:

- lots of beets, peeled, cubed and inspected for nasty black bits
- as much red cabbage as you can fit into the pot
- two small onions
- some stewing pork (not necessary, but come’on. Live a little. You’re making BORSCHT, not triple-butter-deep-fried-endangered sword fish. Stop feeling so guilty)
- lots of dill
- potatoes, cubed.
- some olive oil

1. Heat the olive oil in the bottom of the pot, until it sings to your soul. Oh, sweet olive oil. Ripple away!

2. Saute those little onions until they’re translucent, and then a little longer, so that their oils are doing their amazing onion oil thing. Add some caraway seed. This is supposed to help break down the cabbage and keep you from being full of gas and disgusting. Old European trick. Respect it.

3. Brown the pork. Throw in things that smell good. Some dried sage, thyme, salt.

4. Start cramming the cabbage in. Wilt it, saute it, cram some more. Do you REALLY want to eat cabbage with breakfast again tomorrow? If you don’t get rid of it here, you never will. And even when you think it’s gone, there it is, leering at you from the fridge. Stupid cabbage. But—it’s cheap, and good for you.

5. Give the cabbage, pork and onions lots of time to befriend each other. Baby them. This is a first date. Be sensitive on the heat. No one likes a bully.

6. In a separate pot, boil some potatoes until they are soft, but not too mushy. You could do this in the main pot, but not if you follow my instructions, because if you’re doing things right, there will be way too much cabbage in there to even think about putting in a potato.

7. Throw in the beets. Walk your pot over to the sink and fill it with water so that everything is covered.

8. Bring it all to a boil. You’ll have to put the pot back on the stove to do this. Unless you are magic.

9. Reduce the heat to the barest whisper, put a lid on it, and go do something else. Go to an art gallery! Look at some modern art that makes you feel uncomfortable! An American flag made of human hair? A Styrofoam horse with brown goo coming out of it? Awesome!

10. Come home. Your house smells amazing. Hopefully it didn’t burn down. Stir the potatoes into the borscht. Turn the heat off, and stir the dill in. Let it all sit together for awhile, so the dill can do its thing. You don’t want it in there too early, or the dill will wimpily peace out because of the heat. Dill: not a herb you’d want fighting alongside you in a war– but delicious.

11. Eat borscht. You should have made some bread by now. Someone other than you is going to do the dishes. Also, you may be able to request back-rubs, because this is good food, and you are a saint, and the cabbage is almost done, amen!

Stay tuned for more recipes. Seriously. I am on tour more or less full time until August. My domestic heart will be indulging itself in every kitchen I can find.

See you in some town soon!

Barbara

Happy News!

Jordan Bent and I have completed our first two stories for the project, and there are a bunch of ways to enjoy them. Scroll down and click on images to get stories, artwork, text and photos. The videos are little slide shows I put together with photos from my trips. They are small format, but awesome anyway, especially if you like deer. Enjoy, enjoy, and if you’d like to enjoy some updates
sign up for our newsletter.

It’s free, pretty, and not too frequent. Now go get ‘em!

Click on the thumbnails below to hear and download the stories.

Invermere, May 2010

Hudson’s Hope, August 2010

Click on the art for larger views. Click on the PDF thumbnails for text.

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

Hey hello!

A big, gooey thank you to everyone who came out on Friday, December 10 to The B.C. Memory Game Recording Party with The Brilliant Ally & Fang. It was about as warm and nice as I’d ever need. Thanks for being such a great audience, and for supporting the concept of artistic hodge-podge. It’s fantastic that we can gather in living rooms and enjoy yelling\accordion\stories about B.C.\instrumental jazz and projected visuals by Jordan Bent, all in one night.

I took some photos of the post-party space, so we could roll around in smugness a bit: it does NOT look like we had a storytelling and jazz party. It looks like we ate some popcorn and then had an orgy. Those photos are here

Probably the most magical part of the night for me was The Brilliant Ally seducing us hard with clarinet. You can view video of that from a live stream made by Ryan Zammit: http://rjztv.com/. Watch through, or skip to the end, so that you definitely see them play Louise Armstrong’s “Lonesome Blues.” Yeah!

We are currently mixing The B.C. Memory Game tracks, and finishing off the art. Stay tuned for a big post about that in the New Years.

Many many many thanks again!

Barbara

Hello Good People,

I’m back home from an amazing trip to Hudson’s Hope, and have had my nose dug deep into readings on the proposed Site C Hydro development on the Peace River. From talking to folks in the valley, and reading, reading, reading, I’ve become very uncomfortable with the Site C idea.

I am going to be joining folks from the West Moberly First Nation, Paddle for the Peace, The Wilderness Committee, The Sierra Club and the Peace Valley Environmental Organization in Victoria on Sunday, September 19th. The groups are traveling in a convoy from Fort St. John to raise awareness about the cultural, environmental and social issues surrounding the proposed Site C project. On Sunday, they will converge on the parliament buildings in Victoria for an event called “Paddle for the Premier.” Their key speaker is David Suzuki.

This is an issue that’s worth reading about. Previous to my dipping into this story, I’d always assumed that hydroelectric power was a “green” energy option. The Site C project is even called the “Site C Clean Energy Project.” Easy, right? Unfortunately, the reality is far more complicated. I will be writing about what I have learned in my piece on Hudson’s Hope.

To be honest, I’m more than a little bit overwhelmed by the many sides to this problem. I think though, that opening myself to bewilderment, and the task of learning more, is a personal responsibility that I share with anyone who uses Hydro. One of the main frustrations I heard from people I spoke with in the Peace River Valley, was that the Lower Mainland doesn’t have a clue about the impacts of energy development in the North. Luckily, there are barrels of easy-to-find resources available on online. Please consider joining me in bewilderment.

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