Moveable feasts — and nature is not for me

This sum­mer, I finally made the move back to Toronto after giv­ing Strat­ford, Ont., — the well-known rural home of Shake­speare, swine and swans — the five-year col­lege try.

To say that small-town life didn’t agree with me is prob­a­bly putting it mildly. To say that liv­ing in this seem­ingly bucolic but actu­ally often bleak and occa­sion­ally sin­is­ter spot led to a slip­pery slope from which I am grad­u­ally climb­ing back to health and hap­pi­ness is only par­tially true. What I do now know is that too much change at once, liv­ing alone for the first time in my life and mis­guid­edly choos­ing an iso­lated, alien­at­ing envi­ron­ment located in Ontario’s snow belt as my new locale was a geo­graph­i­cal cure that, as is usu­ally the case, didn’t work.

Coin­ci­den­tally, I have met sev­eral peo­ple who have made midlife deci­sions to leave their urban home for what seem like greener pas­tures in the coun­try­side, only to return. No one is wrong or right here but, to quote my brother Eric, who recently moved to West Harlem and claims these words are from Andy Warhol: “The best thing about a small town is that, when you leave, there is noth­ing to miss.”

With­out going into detail, the last two years have included a vicious addic­tion to sleep­ing pills (in par­tic­u­lar ben­zo­di­azepines, ie. the class of seda­tives end­ing in ‘azepam’) that brought me to my knees, a six-week stint in rehab  and a whole new world that has opened up to me along what has been an often rocky but also beau­ti­fully spir­i­tual path to recovery/discovery.

In a nut­shell, the Big Smoke has beck­oned me back and I have answered its call.

Now that I have bought a house in Kens­ing­ton Mar­ket, hang­ing on for now to the 1950s mini-mansion in Strat­ford that came com­plete with vin­tage pool, boudoir and mag­nif­i­cent view of the river (views are greatly over­rated I’ve now found, espe­cially when you’re so iso­lated on your pres­ti­gious street that being out of milk means a car trip to the near­est cor­ner store), I have begun mov­ing into the nar­row 10-year-old town­house in my for­mer neigh­bour­hood of 28 years.

It now turns out that friends kept mum five years ago in the face of my fierce deter­mi­na­tion to trade Kens­ing­ton — a colour­ful, crowded, eth­ni­cally diverse and uniquely feisty enclave in the heart of Toronto that had been the first real home of this wan­der­ing Jew — for a mostly anglo  town of a mere 30,000 peo­ple. I still don’t know entirely what moti­vated me to make that move but there were neigh­bours from hell who ter­ror­ized me for four years and then, unbe­knownst to me at the time, bought my adjoin­ing house.

A search for peace, quiet and safety were not good rea­sons to re-locate. In spite of my best efforts to build a home — and I have made some won­der­ful friends in Strat­ford who will remain so — peace, quiet and safety soon became dev­as­tat­ing lone­li­ness and a form of exile. The sound of ducks quack­ing in early morn­ing after sleep­less nights caused me to panic. I real­ized that nature is not my thing. I need peo­ple, build­ings and things hap­pen­ing around me to feel safe. I felt cut off from my pas­sion: the world of  food, this in spite of a chef’s school in Strat­ford and lively, clever peo­ple  like chef/teacher Paul Finkel­stein and organic farmer Antony John who are both out­stand­ing in their fields.

On a much hap­pier note, thins brings me to a cou­ple of culi­nary tips for those set­tling into new digs.

My first pur­chase dur­ing a whirl­wind few weeks of hang­ing chan­de­liers (I have six in my dining/living room area) and cre­at­ing, accord­ing to a friend, an over-the-top space that resem­bles New Orleans, was a bright red whistling ket­tle and a pound of my favourite cof­fee. Sadly, the lat­ter is only avail­able in Strat­ford: the house brand at Revel cof­fee shop that comes from bril­liant cof­fee peo­ple — Las Chi­cas del Cafe, two young women from Nicaragua located in Lon­don, Ont., who import fair trade beans from their fam­ily and other grow­ers, then blend and roast them. The best. They’re also sold, I hear, at chef Mark McEwan’s Toronto gourmet food shop in Don Mills.

Next came my numero uno ingre­di­ent: dijon­naise. I use this combo of may­on­naise and mus­tard to coat chicken and fish  before roast­ing, on sand­wiches, in tuna salad etc. etc. It is indis­pens­able. I also can­not be with­out Renee’s Well­ness cucum­ber dill dress­ing — the most deli­cious store­bought salad dress­ing I have found.

I also keep the 4-year-old Que­bec ched­dar from Cheese Magic on hand at all times and the won­drous double-smoked bacon from Sanagan’s: the best butcher spe­cial­iz­ing in naturally-raised meat in town. Both shops are Kens­ing­ton stal­warts. Peter Sana­gan, who recently bought Max Meat’s on Bald­win St. from Solly Stern whose father opened this Mar­ket land­mark more than 60 years ago, is one of a new gen­er­a­tion of mer­chants in my ‘nabe who are proof that the key to pos­i­tive change is giv­ing shop­pers what they want.

This blog entry comes with a warn­ing. Beware of seek­ing grass that is greener on the other side. And if you do, remem­ber that great places to visit are not always a good place to live.