I know, I know. You read the word “salad” and you’re instantly wary, likely envisioning endless bowls of deep green leaves or raw vegetables smothered in bland balsamic vinaigrette, and you’re not particularly interested in reading any farther. Fortunately, this salad is anything but bland. In fact, it’s more like a complete meal that just happens to include some lettuce leaves – the overall flavour is rich and satisfying.

This salad gets a kick of deep, porky flavour from the crispy pieces of guanciale – cured, unsmoked pork jowl that’s well-known in Italy but still relatively unheard of here. Your local grocery store probably won’t sell it (in fact, they probably won’t have a clue what you’re asking for), but you might have better luck at an artisan butcher shop or a specialty Italian imports store. And if you still can’t find any, don’t panic. While the guanciale does give the salad its own unique flavour (richer than bacon and packed with explosive savoury flavours but without the overpowering smokey tones), you can swap in bacon or pancetta and still end up with a delicious final result. And the richness from the fish (which has a nice buttery texture) and the guanciale is balanced nicely by the bright flavours of the roasted beets and the bite of the raw radishes, while the dijon mustard also packs a punch of its own. Give this salad a try – I think you’re going to like it.

2. Suede high-heeled ankle boots are a poor choice for a twenty-minute walk in a torrential downpour, but I’ve never been one to choose practicality over style. By the time we arrive at L’Abattoir (earlier that day I read that its name means “slaughterhouse”, which gave it a sort of sinister allure) there are pools of water sloshing back and forth in the toe of each shoe. My umbrella has also developed a leak somewhere between downtown and Gastown, and I can feel a few cold droplets creeping their way down my scalp. But inside the restaurant – a high-ceilinged, dimly-lit space full of exposed brick and intricate tile floors – we’re soon enveloped in the warm buzz of the place, drinks in our hands and a parade of plates in front of us while we talk and talk and talk.

3.  The day begins with brunch at Medina Café: An egg, pita chips, tabbouleh salad, baba ghanoush, followed by a tiny waffle – edges crisp, centre almost custardy – slathered with orange fig marmalade and washed down with a lavender-spiked latte. It’s an unconventional combination, but it’s delicious, and it fuels us for the rest of the morning, which we spend wandering through Gastown’s shops. The rest of the day plays out in one continuous string of food-related moments: We buy exotic meats (elk sausage, venison prosciutto), cook up a lunch worthy of a restaurant, go out on a walk to work off the lunch, then return to the apartment to bake cookies. A few hours later we’re eating yet again: Plates of raw fish, Japanese-fusion style. By the end of the night, we never want to look at food again.

4. The attack is swift and unexpected, and neither of us see it coming: We’re at the Granville Island market, sitting on a bench overlooking the ocean and eating doughnuts out of brown paper bags. I take a bite of maple-glazed doughnut, and Diana pulls a chocolate doughnut out of the bag and begins to raise it to her mouth when suddenly there’s a whooshing sound and something firm and airborne smacks the back of my head. At the same time, Diana is yelling, jumping to her feet and shouting a string of obscenities at the sky: A seagull has just swooped in, stealing her doughnut directly out of her hand before soaring off over the water.

All photos taken on an iPhone 4S and processed with ShakeItPhoto.

A cold winter day calls for a specific type of dinner – something simple and hearty, full of rich flavours and deep colours; something that leaves you feeling warm and contented when you push your chair back from the table at the end of the meal. This dish – chicken wrapped in rich, salty pancetta and served with roasted butternut squash, tangy-sweet balsamic-glazed apples, and kale sautéed with onions and thyme – is the perfect winter comfort food. You can prepare the entire dinner in around an hour, or save time by roasting the butternut squash ahead of time (let it cool, wrap it, and keep in in the fridge), which will allow you to go from stove to plate in around half an hour.

Last week I met up for coffee with an old friend from university. We don’t see each other much any more – I’m living here, she’s living there, and our lives are on different paths going in different directions – but once a year I find myself sitting across from her in a crowded coffee shop, cappuccinos in our hands, with that inevitable question hanging there in the air between us: “So, what’s new?”

It’s been a year. I should be able to talk for hours, to fill novels with answers to that question. I should hardly know where to begin. And instead I feel like I’ve been treading water: So much effort, so little progress. What’s new? Not much. Of course, there are the little things. There was my trip to Europe in the fall – the highlight of the year, really, the only time I felt truly alive – and there were moments with friends, achievements at work, certainly enough smiles and contentment and good times to convince people that 2011 was a good year. And all things considered, it was a good year, but good in that vague, imprecise sense – It was good mainly because there was an absence of anything truly bad.

It probably sounds like I’m unhappy. Sometimes I even wonder if I feel unhappy, but I think I’m really just restless, impatient, waiting for that next big step, knowing – at least in part, on some level – what that next big step is, and knowing that now, right now, is not the right time to take it. I’m not one to make lists of detailed, specific resolutions for a new year, but I will paint with broad strokes and imprecise goals: This year will be about moving forward, moving towards this still-blurry idea that’s been hanging in front of me for a while now. This year is going to be an interesting one.

That’s where this recipe comes in. It’s healthy enough to eat by the spoonful (and believe me, I have), surprisingly quick to prepare, and the Middle Eastern flavours of spices and smokey roasted eggplant along with rich caramelized onion are exotic enough to make this recipe the one you grab when you’re surprised with a last minute invitation to a dinner party. Serve it with pita bread (I like to make my own – they’re always softer and more flavourful than the plastic-packaged pitas found in stores), crackers, or, really, any type of flatbread.

Note: If you’re looking for a good pita bread recipe, check out this one on Smitten Kitchen. I substitute whole wheat flour instead of the white flour, and add about a tablespoon of honey for a subtle sweetness and an extra-soft texture.

The first morning is, without a doubt, the best part of the vacation. The whole thing feels very fresh, and there’s a certain decadence in knowing that an entire week has been devoted to nothing but sunbathing, eating, and lounging around. I should stop here and clarify something: In my mind, I’ve always drawn a line between vacations and what I consider to be true travel. One is about relaxing and disengaging and isn’t very concerned with pins on a map, while the other feels somehow more weighty and full of opportunities for inspiration and exploration and the sort of cultural enlightenment a person would expect to experience when they jet off to the other side of the world. I’ve always favoured travel but can certainly appreciate a vacation, which is why I joined my parents on Maui for what might be fifth Christmas in a row. When an opportunity to spend a week escaping winter is dangled in front of me, I’m not one to turn it down.

It takes about a day to get into the routine of the vacation. At first, I’m vaguely anxious at the thought of spending day after day sprawled out on a lounge chair or staring out at the ocean. I’m restless by nature; the kind of person who likes to go places and do things, and I usually prefer my relaxation packaged up in neat little portions that slot in between various activities. And then there’s the strangeness of spending so much time with my parents after living on my own for several years. Soon, though, it all starts to flow smoothly. Mornings: Wake up early, shorts on, tank top on, stumble to the farmer’s market and the coffee shop under a sun that’s already starting to feel intense, back to the condo (more awake now), fruit and granola on the patio, then coat all exposed skin with sunscreen and get into position beside the pool. Afternoons are a rotation of sun and shade and back to the sun. Evenings: Dinner, sunset, then some kind of short stroll next to an inky ocean.

Part of the enjoyment in all this, I think, comes from the complete predictability of the situation. My parents love predictability, and nothing showcases this more than our family vacations. Year after year we’ll eat dinner at the same places on the same nights (“Have you dined with us before?” “Yes, this is our fifth year in a row”), order the same food (in the car on the way to the restaurant: “Now, last year I think we had the shrimp and scallop dumplings…”), retrace our footsteps to the same sights. Part of me wants to resist this. The other part recognizes that there’s something appealing about falling back into old routines, knowing what to expect and handing the decision-making off to someone else. I think it underscores the sense of disengagement that a true vacation brings about: The real world is annoyingly full of choices, schedules and obligations, and when these things can fade into the background for even a few days, it’s a vacation. The setting – the palm trees, the beaches – is really just an accessory.

And this is how to disengage and de-stress: Put down the phone, turn off the computer. Really think about things, or, alternately, think about nothing at all and relish how good it feels to be able to do that. Pick up a book; read it from cover to cover. Marvel over how strange it feels to have such long uninterrupted swaths of time, then pick up another book and repeat. Feel the sun on bare shoulders and the sand on bare feet, smile a lot, talk a lot, take a lot of pictures. Then pack up the suitcase and head back to the real world, where, weeks later, you’ll still have a hint of a tan and a few grains of sand stuck in the bottom of a shoe.

Unrelated tech note: I’ve figured out how to fix the RSS feed problem, for those of you who are seeing each post show up three times in your RSS reader. It appears as though an old feed (from a previous incarnation of this blog) is still kicking around and messing things up – if you’re seeing multiple posts, you need to unsubscribe from verbalized.net/rss and resubscribe to verbalized.net/feed, which is the correct feed URL.

They’re singing cheerfully about walking in a winter wonderland, but with Christmas looming just over a week away and crowds of excited shoppers surging from store to store, I can think of very few places less likely to be described as a wonderland. A mall under even the best circumstances is an unpleasant place, where the greasy smells of the food court collide with the heavy florals of the perfume counter while packs of pre-teen girls in low-slung jeans and too much eye makeup giggle at passing packs of pre-teen guys. Enter a mall anytime within six weeks of Christmas, and you’re voluntarily walking into the retail version of hell on earth.

In hindsight, I probably should have picked a better time to do my shopping. Monday morning would have been good – nobody goes to the mall on Monday morning, even in the depths of the holiday shopping season. I could have stopped in on my way to work, avoided the crowds, avoided the inevitable crowd-induced rage, and been back out on the street within ten minutes. But that would have required planning and organization, two personality traits that have been in short supply lately. So naturally I left it to Friday afternoon, where I would be forced to fight my way through packs of slow-moving shoppers while cursing the person who first decided to turn Christmas into a month-long materialistic frenzy.

I had come to the mall on to find and purchase a new pair of tights to wear with my dress for the office Christmas party (which happened to be taking place in a few hours), a benign and predictable mission that should have gone exactly as planned. I knew what I was looking for, and I knew precisely where I’d find it. But somewhere between the store’s doorway and the cash register, everything changed. The smallest hint of soft blue fabric poking out from between two heavy grey sweaters caught my eye, and the next thing I knew I was standing in front of a three-way mirror, draped in swaths of silk chiffon (strapless, save for a single gauzy strip of fabric making its way over one shoulder) and flanked by enthusiastic sales girls.

I left the store with zero pairs of tights and one very unnecessary dress.

I also left the store with a new mission, which involved acquiring a bra worthy of a suffocatingly tight, mostly-strapless dress as well as finding an altogether different pair of tights to coordinate with this sudden switch-up in office party attire. And this is how I found myself repeatedly circling the fluorescent-lit lingerie department of The Bay (Canada’s answer to Macy’s, but with fewer brands and more depressing wall-to-wall grey carpeting). I had just speed-walked through a gauntlet of overzealous perfume salesladies, dodged a pair of demonic-looking toddlers in Santa hats and tripped over a life-size cardboard reindeer cutout. The sound system was playing a particularly aggravating rendition of “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus”, which, out of all the Christmas songs, has always been the one that will instantly put me on edge, I was about to spend the better part of a hundred dollars on a bra that was a necessary purchase only because of a moment of inexplicable retail weakness half an hour earlier, and I still hadn’t found an acceptable pair of tights.

This wasn’t because I couldn’t decide what I wanted – no, it was because the entire section of the store that sold tights looked like a hurricane had swept through it, having been combed over and picked through by hundreds of frustrated women preparing to squeeze themselves into a dress and high heels for their office Christmas parties. Every time I thought I found what I was looking for, it would somehow turn out that someone had ripped a pair of queen-sized, control top, thigh-compressing fishnet tights out of their proper box and then stuffed them inside the box formerly belonging to the pair of small, slightly sheer, basic black tights that I was so desperately seeking.

Twenty minutes later, with one pair of tights clutched in a possessive death grip, I was waiting – no, seething – in a never-ending line for the cash register while the minutes ticked by and the women ahead of me all made complicated purchases involving exchanges and gift cards and calls to the manager. “Frosty The Snowman” was now playing in the background, which I found ironic given that the temperature in the store was approaching that of an oven. Thirty minutes later I burst out onto the street, shopping bags dangling limply from my hand. The sky was already dark. A group of children was singing “Silent Night” in front of the entrance, their voices emphasizing the words calm and bright – two emotions that I was certainly not feeling.

This story has a happy ending… sort of. The impulse-bought dress gathered compliments, the over-priced bra did its job, and the tights encased my legs in just the right amount of sheer black lycra. But a perfectly good afternoon was sacrificed in the process, one cardboard reindeer was fatally damaged, and I just might lose my cool next time I hear “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus”…

Unrelated tech note: A couple of people have mentioned that they’re seeing my posts show up three times each in their feed readers. Has this been happening to you too? Let me know. I’m trying to get this fixed!

Eating Panettone bread has become something of a Christmas tradition in my family. I’m not sure how this came to be – we don’t have even a shred of Italian heritage, my parents haven’t ever been to Italy, and yet the loaf of dense, fruity bread was a holiday staple in our household. Growing up, the bread always came from the store – sometimes in elaborately illustrated tins, sometimes in glossy boxes, and always wrapped in that trademark brown and gold paper. This year, though, I decided that I’d try something new while keeping the tradition alive: I’d bake my own Panettone.

I’m not normally the type of person who feels attached to holiday traditions. I don’t decorate my apartment. I don’t care for turkey or mashed potatoes or pumpkin pie. And I have absolutely no problem giving up the concept of a winter wonderland in exchange for some time spent lounging under a palm tree in Hawaii at Christmas. But for reasons unknown even to me, I do feel oddly attached to Panettone. And so I headed into the kitchen, armed with the world’s longest recipe and enough candied citrus peel to send me into a permanent sugar overdose.

There are two ways that a person can prepare their own Panettone. The first is the modern, time-saving method, an adaptation of the traditional techniques tailored to suit time-stapped housewives or those of us who just can’t commit to a two-day-long baking endeavour or a recipe that requires us to develop and cultivate our own wild yeast. The second way – the traditional method – requires patience, a lot of time, and a meticulously scheduled series of steps that guarantee a weekend devoid of both late nights out and lazy sleep-ins. It might be better suited to commercial bakeries than apartment kitchens, but I’ve never been one to shy away from complicated recipes, even ones that require driving across the city just to procure a couple of ingredients. Besides, with a wild yeast starter already developed for the normal bread I bake each week, I was already way ahead of the curve. Or so I thought.

Panettone, as it turns out, is a stressful dessert to prepare. The ingredients must be precisely weighed. The dough must be kneaded and kneaded and then kneaded some more, and the temperature during the rise has to be kept just right. Panettone is rather picky. I found myself sitting in front of the oven (warmed only by the oven light during the initial twelve-hour rising period) well past midnight, staring at the bowl of dough while willing it to rise faster, and the next morning I nearly had a nervous breakdown in front of my KitchenAid when the texture of the final dough was decidedly not what the recipe described. I added more flour – when in doubt, always add more flour – and kept mixing, kept feeding the dough ball more little cubes of softened butter until it was fat and glossy, ready to rise some more and then get placed into its traditional brown paper wrapper for baking. An hour later I swooped the finished Panettone out of the oven and immediately suspended it upside-down between the two chairs I had already arranged – so far, so good. As long as the bread didn’t slip out of the paper and plummet to the floor, my Christmas tradition would be a success.

Taste-testing after writing this post gives the homemade Panettone a solid two thumbs up for flavour, although the next iteration will definitely include a custard filling for additional calories wow-factor.

Since the recipe is so long, I’m not going to post it here. If you’re interested in making your own Panettone, you can find it here.

I’ve come to realize that some people aren’t very picky or sensitive about their climate. They can find a reasonable degree of comfort in the dead of winter as long as they’ve got a few sweaters nearby and a thick pair of socks on hand, and they’re every bit as content in the middle of an unexpected August heat wave. But me? This concept of multi-seasonal comfort just doesn’t exist for me. I have a narrow range of acceptable temperatures that spans a total of maybe five degrees Celsius – let’s say it’s from nineteen to twenty-four degrees, although if I’m being perfectly honest, nineteen is just a touch too cold and twenty-four is bordering on sweaty – and as soon as the temperature edges outside of this range I become distinctly, noticeably, uncomfortable.

Fortunately, it’s not too often that I have to deal with the upper half of that spectrum. Heat waves are rare and short-lived here in rain-prone Victoria, and my ground-floor apartment, conveniently devoid of the slightest trace of afternoon sunlight, doesn’t begin to approach balmy temperatures on even the most searing of summer days. I love summer. I love the freedom to drift between indoors and outdoors without needing coats or scarves or umbrellas. I’m a big fan of spring, primarily because it means that summer is just around the corner. I can even appreciate the first half of autumn – the picturesque half, where the weather is summery but the leaves are multicoloured – but as soon as the temperature starts dropping, my comfort levels begin to plummet right along with it. By the time the calendar hits November, which, in my mind, marks the official beginning of winter, I’m fully engulfed in my downward spiral of seasonal misery.

Winter wouldn’t be quite so bad if staying warm was just a matter of throwing on a heavy coat before heading outdoors, but it’s not that simple. Getting into the car in the morning is like crawling into the freezer and closing the door. Sitting in a coffee shop or restaurant becomes an exercise in tolerance each time the door swings open and blasts the place with a gust of cold, damp wind. The office, where I spend more waking hours than pretty much anywhere else, is subjected to year-round air conditioning thanks to our uncontrollable climate control system, which makes it chilly during the summer and downright glacial for the rest of the year. And my apartment, which should be my safe haven from all of these sub-optimal temperatures, the one place where I can feel truly comfortable, is instead transformed into an arctic environment as soon as my woefully underpowered baseboard heaters become unable to keep up with the heat-leaching single-pane windows. And so I shiver my way through the season, layering sweatshirts and leg warmers and wrapping myself in blankets while I’m at home and then resigning myself to losing all feeling in my fingertips and nose while I’m in the office, sinking my chin into a scarf and pushing my hands into my pockets whenever I’m walking down the street.

I’m aware that winter in Victoria is hardly comparable to, say, winter in New York City or winter in some snow-swept prairie province stuck in a state of perpetual deep-freeze for more than half of the year. I wouldn’t last for more than a week in those places. But Victoria has its own brand of winter that can’t be completely written off: It might only snow for one or two days each year, but nearly constant rain is a given, as are regular winter windstorms that combine with the rain to form little hurricanes of misery. And today, on the first day of November, I’m pulling the heavy coats out of the closet, dusting off my boots, and making sure that each of my purses is stocked with a pair of gloves. It’s time to prepare for winter.

Above: Capturing the last few days of autumn in Victoria. See the blue(ish) sky? That’ll be a thing of the past soon.