Sometimes, when I cook rice, I heat the pot first before adding any water. I like that small moment when the first drops hit the metal and vanish into steam it feels like the kitchen breathing. I used to ruin tofu steaks every time. They’d stick, tear apart, and refuse to behave. Eventually I learned to just wait. Once the water inside them evaporates, they release themselves, flip cleanly, as if forgiving you for your impatience.
Most of the non-dairy milk substitutes are full of additives, so I started making my own. Oats, water, blender, sieve done. About 40 cents a litre, and no mystery ingredients. Too bad in grade ten chemistry they didn’t teach us to cook; it would have made the lessons infinitely more understandable, not to mention edible.
A few piano teachers tried to teach me when I was a kid. I never knew what they wanted from me. I could play whatever I heard on the radio, but I wanted to understand how to build on that. They wanted me to worship the page all those dots and stems in their vertical hierarchies. Everything else was wrong.
Later, when I started teaching, I realized that good teachers don’t force students into a single shape. They start from where the student already lives what they love, what they’re curious about and build a bridge from there. Engagement isn’t optional; it’s the ground the whole thing stands on. The best teachers honour the student’s experience, not because it’s perfect, but because it’s real, and because without that connection, nothing truly sticks in cooking, music, or life.
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There is no deficit of bad piano teachers. Most have an axe to grind and are always looking for dreams to chop down…I remember one in my twenties who always smelt like vodka, who had “no way to hold his head that didin’t hurt…” I was supposed to play a Chopin prelude for a recital. I did the prelude and then decided to tag on an improv after. Didin’t think a piano teacher could yell that loud. I also have fond memories of asking my childhood teacher why I was never allowed to play Kiwanis, to be earnestly told “you don’t have what it takes to play live.” Years later, after having achieved a certain level of success and notoriety, a friend of mine who was a fellow student of this teacher, ran into her in a supermarket. She commented to my friend that “she always knew I’d be successful.”