Telling tales out of school

and a recipe for roast beef tortilla roll ups to eat at your desk

To everyone new here, welcome. I’m Elizabeth, the writer of The Delicious Bits Dispatch, a weekly missive for the curious, blending discovery, reflection, and musings, always wrapped up with a seasonal recipe worth lingering over.

Hilroy notebooks, a different colour for every subject.

Laurentian coloured pencils, neatly encased like soldiers in a pristine plastic case. Erasers with that squiggly, squishy smell, little pink bits scattering everywhere.

New shoes, new clothes, perhaps some hand-me-downs in the mix. First day photos, favourite dresses and cowlicks tamed, bangs ruler-straight. The dreaded gym class, and teams and being chosen or left behind. The annual emergence of the mean girls, cool girls, good girls.

God, I loved going back to school.

Canadian Laurentien pencil crayons, bilingual and designed to be used for colour by number books (photo credit Tina Koyama*)

All the months are crude experiments, out of which the perfect September is made

—Virginia Woolf, A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals, 1897–1909

There is something about September that has always held the art of the possible for me—a sense of a real beginning, a fresh start.

It mattered little that summer was ending. We were not a family where the kids went to summer camp for weeks at a time, or had a cottage, or even a swimming pool.

Family vacations meant me stuffed in the middle seat between my two sisters, motels and the 1000 Islands, Niagara Falls, and roadside picnics with ham sandwiches made thick with a generous slick of butter. Modest pastimes for a hardworking family.

But come September, I could write a whole new chapter. The magical turning of the leaves crunching underfoot, the brilliant blue autumn sky and the promise of another chance to become a model student became the perfect backdrop for new beginnings.

School activated my imaginative wanderings. I lost myself in the Scholastic Book Club order form, debating and deliberating between each choice with the serious consideration of diamond dealer choosing gems.

So many book bargains! (photo credit Letterology)

Invariably, the bloom would fade from the rose. My hummingbird mind, flitting from subject to subject, the mediocre teachers far outweighing the ones that pushed and taught with provocation, not pedagogy.

And so September after September, my chest filled with those ticklish feathers of hope, only to be squashed by bleak December.

A sense of curiosity is nature’s original school of education.

—Dr. Smiley Blanton, American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst

It is often true that our hard-won knowledge comes at great expense, trial and error, hours of practice or sheer determination. In my case it came from the slow and steady realization that the confines of schedules and required reading and assignments wrestled mightily with my rebellious need to fight conformity.

And so those early years of schooling, particularly in university, were full of the dichotomy of the freedom to choose what to do with my time and the cold hard reality of what was required of me to succeed. Majoring in English felt like an easy win—my love of books, of writing and history, of diving deep into Victorian literature, international relations between the two World Wars, modern 20th century novels. But still, the patterns of inattention held fast.

It wasn’t until I broke away from that curriculum, and away from home, that I finally found my footing. The circuitous path I stepped upon turned out to have more twists and turns than the yellow brick road, but just as Dorothy found wonder upon wonder along the way, so too did I.

What I learned was that detours were really pathways to discovery, that the destination I had in mind could materialize into something entirely different.

Most of all, I learned that my innate curiosity was the best teacher of all…that just saying yes to unknowns might not always work out quite the way I thought they might, but that too, had value beyond measure.

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*I read a fun history of Laurentien pencils on Tina Koyama’s wonderful blog, Fueled by Clouds and Coffee. Tina’s an urban sketcher who came to drawing later in life. As she says, “It wasn’t my inability to draw that was holding me back. It was my belief in my inability to draw. I decided to change that belief. This blog is about what happens when a belief changes.” It’s worth a visit.

Roast beef pinwheels

Menus and Music – Picnics, Sharon O’Connor

makes about a dozen pieces or one sandwich

I love that this photo has a retro vibe, almost like it could have been lifted straight from one of those old cookbooks floating around when I was in primary school. The big difference, of course, is that these bites are far more flavourful than anything that ever found its way into a school lunchbox back then.

They’re simple, satisfying appetizers that come together in minutes — and disappear just as fast. As for me, I’ll happily skip the party platter and call one of these roast beef roll-ups lunch.

Note: Not everyone is a fan of raw red onions. Slicing them very thinly makes them the right complement for these roll ups, but if you want to skip the onions entirely, a sprinkle of minced parleys and basil gives them a fresh Mediterranean vibe.

Ingredients:

½ cup cream cheese (regular or light)

1 tablespoon extra hot horseradish

Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste

2 10-inch flour tortillas

½ pound rare roast beef, sliced thin

1 tomato, thinly sliced

½ red onion, sliced into very thin rings

Minced basil and parsley, optional (see Note)

1. In a small bowl, beat together the cream cheese, horseradish, salt, and pepper until fluffy.

2. Divide the cream cheese mixture and spread on the tortillas, making sure to spread it right to the edges. Cover with a single layer of roast beef slices. Add 4 or 5 tomato slices, then place a few onion rings on top of the tomato.

3. Starting at one edge, roll up the tortilla very tightly. Wrap individually in plastic wrap and chill in the refrigerator until serving time.

4. To serve, slice the tortillas on a diagonal into thin slices.

Yield: Makes one small platter or one sandwich