Edible Tulip

Recipes for Eating Locally

*Recipes for the following salads are in the continued reading section.

While it's all fine and good to eat a peach, other items of interest in my Eat Local Challenge are much better cooked and seasoned. The maple syrup-curry potato salad dish is hugely popular. I try to serve it right after the dressing has been poured on and is beginning to soak into the warm potato flesh. People have a difficult time pinpointing the exact ingredients because they simply blend together.

For some reason (perhaps the tartness of an apple early in the season combined with the bitterness of chopped radicchio and the subtle sweetness of red wine vinegar), this absolutely simple salad is always a big hit at lunchtime. Once the apples are peeled, season them with a touch of lemon juice to prolong the discolouration of their flesh. Early Crispin and Early Golden Delicious apples from Ontario are starting to appear in our green grocers. The earthiness of apples is a poignant turn toward autumn away from the succulent sweetness of the berries of August.

Bell peppers are everywhere. They usually are I guess since they're so popular in so many different dishes - kebabs, stir fries, pasta sauces, marinated and used on sandwiches, raw with dip. I like the vividity of their colours, like heirloom tomatoes, they radiate that purity of primary colours, put them all in a bowl and it's like a kindergartener's finger painting - reds, oranges, yellows, purples. I don't have the purple bell pepper in my photo but I've become a big fan of the ones sold at the Creemore Farmer's Market. This salad takes the crunchy fresh watery flavour of the bell peppers and combines it with mint and tarragon and coarse salt with the tang of rice vinegar.

Eat Local Challenge Update III

The eating locally situation has been a fairly straight-forward venture for me since I subsist on very little from the big-box stores in the first place - I don't have any dependents, roommates, husbands - and I'm naturally a low-on-the-food-chain type of eater in the first place. I eat fruit for breakfast with coffee, maybe have a carb of some sort mid-morning, I bring a tupperware of some sort of composed salad each day for lunch (a combination of any of the following: cabbage, radicchio, lettuces, red onion, cheese, tuna, beans, nuts, grated carrots and beets, diced tomatoes) and my dinners while home are typically seasonal - I'll cook new potatoes, cobs of corn, fresh beans and side it with local pork sausages, or I'll make a stir fry with carrots, tofu, broccoli, rapini, bok choy (the latter being a new introduction to an Ontario grown produce). In the fall, I'll switch over to stews and soups that include sweet potatoes, squashes, pumpkins, the last of the tomato season, curries, harvest meals.

Mushrooms are at their peak right now. I was fortunate when I cooked at the Art Retreat Centre years ago to have a very local mushroom producer who dropped off boxes of the most gorgeous oyster mushrooms.

And while I don't typically like mushrooms, I've found various recipes that I adore them in - fried in butter with garlic and tossed with fresh pasta and homemade pesto made with both cilantro and basil; and, cooked in a broth into a delightfully earthy risotto dish with sage from the garden. My sister, who receives a bi-weekly drop off of food from Spring Arbour Farms got a delicious looking bundle of mushrooms in her last delivery.

Another vegetable that is on the way to over taking gardens all over Ontario is the squash. Luckily my mother learned years ago that planting vegetable marrow, which she thought was squash, was a simple way of having something basically bully everything else out of the garden beds. We were stuck with these enormous 11 pound monstrosities of tasteless mush. The only way to use them was to cook the crap out of them in ginger and garlic or to put them as a puree into some sort of baked good like a zucchini bread and use them not for their flavour but simply for their moistening effect.

My parents grow pattypans. We love the colour of them added to roasted vegetables and we covet the sweet daintiness of their size and shape. They are a cheerful addition to any garden and produce like mad.

Eat Local Challenge - Update II

So here I am, picking what's left of the lettuce in my folk's garden after the dog got under the chicken wire and ravaged the new crop.

I am grateful I chose August as the test of my local eating capabilities since we've had great harvests of potatoes, little yellow plum tomatoes, oodles of long green beans, pattypan squash that under the cloak of the gardens vast coverage grow quietly and quickly into yellow footballs, green peppers, cucumbers and plenty of herbs like oregano, mint, marjoram, basil, dill, thyme and tarragon. There's delicious corn at every farmer's market and peaches, pears, plums, blueberries and musk melons are at their peak in Ontario. We roasted a local chicken on the barbecue last night and had sides of corn on the cob, a roasted potato and zucchini dish, a garden salad of herbs, fresh lettuce and our own cucumbers. I'm finding it quite easy eating meat, dairy, vegetables and fruits from local suppliers and producers but my salads have always had that simple yet necessary additional ingredient of canned chickpeas or tuna or roasted nuts. Of course my dressings i.e. vinegar and oil don't fall into the local category but my mustards and homemade mayos do. Eggs are also easy to source from local farmers. Our breads we buy at the local bakery, made on site, but with wheat from where? With yeast from where? With flax seeds from where? I find myself usually caught between wanting to buy exclusively local ingredients with wanting to support my local merchants.

Luckily in many of the green grocers around Toronto they post little handmade signs that state where the produce originated from and the following pears, peaches and tomatoes are Ontario grown.

Eat Local Challenge - First Update

One comes across the darnedest things while trolling the internet. Just to keep my site appropriate for a PG-13 rating, I'll stick to the fun, family, political, agricultural, food related topics. I read about the Eat Local Challenge first here, and then more detailed information was found here, and I guess it's like lottary ticket addicts who enter a variety store for a pack of gum and leave with $200 worth of worthless paper with typewritten numbers all over them, I find challenges online and I must do them. I print them up and get very excited about plotting the challenge and then, being a Gemini and all, I start to restructure the entire event with what I conceive to be more efficient, more sensible rules. So I am participating in the Eat Local Challenge but I'm doing it my way.

Everything I have to say on this challenge (and believe me I think about it deeply many, many times a day) would scroll down hundreds of feet like a mismanaged tapeworm if I wrote it all down this moment so I'm going to continue to post snippets here and there about the politics of it, the lifestyle it requires, the awareness it perpetuates to become constantly curious about where goods come from (all manufactured goods included), how I am participating in this challenge (the rules, the guidelines and my personal exemptions - luckily, I'm not a big cigar smoker), websites and companies and farms and individuals who I want to celebrate with relation to their involvement in food, Industry links I find useful and informative, personal stories and anecdotes about eating locally, and finally, a bunch of no doubt contradictory (how can this not be?!) reflections on what I'm learning.

All participants of the Eat Local Challenge are asked to spell out the following:

1. What is your definition of local for this challenge?

I have two homes - one is my own apartment in the urban core of Toronto and the other is my permanent i.e. family home up in the Georgian Triangle area - so, because I spend ample time up near Creemore I am using the 120 km radius that extends from both places. The Niagara region is included in this as is the farmland around London and of course the farms, etc up around the Bay. This is my first criteria, what I cannot find in this radius I will extend to a provincial wide inclusion, and then ultimately a national one. I am not on the coast you see and since I eat very little meat I need to eat fish. A balanced diet must also be considered in this challenge.

2. What exemptions will you claim?

This challenge is surprisingly not a big personal challenge for me. I eat from a very local foodshed for the majority of the year. What I deem important about this challenge is to support local farmers and independent producers (dairy, poultry, meat, preserves) so I am eating all fruits, vegetables, dairy and meat from my local foodshed. I am however not applying the local parametres to things like rice (the enormity of the quantities of rice that come in by ship from Thailand and India and the little fuel it actually consumes in comparison to say importing by jumbo jet Russian caviar), coffee (I'm using a very local roaster - the Creemore Coffee company who has bird and shade friendly as well as free trade coffees), olives, capers, condiments like oil and vinegar, and spices. Also, when I eat out, I will always try to eat what is considered the local item on the menu, but I will never be able to guarantee its authenticity as 100%. What will be difficult for me? I hate to say it but drinking Ontario wines. I like supporting the small families in France (hey, I worked on a small vineyard in Beaune and they are lovely people deserving of success and international support) and their wine is superior to any we have here but I will use this challenge to court my palate with new flavours.

3. What is your personal goal for the month?

This is difficult. I want to support local producers but if a grocery store doesn't have organic milk and I end up with a litre of half and half cream from Beatrice then is it really so bad since Beatrice although a large company uses milk produced by Canadian dairy farmers. Local is important. Is in important not only in individual consumer choices but the larger, more impactful and influential ones - our major grocery store chains (they need to carry in season local produce i.e. Dominion on Front Street in Toronto still has ONLY American peaches), since a megastore like WalMart is now moving into the grocery world of perishable foods we should demand they carry a certain % of products made froom local producers, our wholesalers to the restaurants, etc, etc. We need more advocacy and support for our farmers on a large scale. So while during this challenge I am eating locally and sourcing local products, I want to find a way to make these choices have more weight. I already eat, for the most part, local and seasonal foods so I will continue to do so but I will also take this initiative to the next level and start making phone calls and writing letters to grocery chains who refuse to carry inseason local produce.

What I personally find difficult about sticking by the rules here is that I live in a community in an urban centre. I want to support my very local economy. Do I go across town to find a product that is from a local producer or do I support my local green grocer since they respond to their consumer requests and bring in products and items that there is a demand for. Because this challenge is to EAT locally, I will go out of my way to find those products and do so, but normally, my instinct would be to support a family run local small business and that sometimes means choosing organic over local.

Pingue Prosciutto

According to James Chatto, Mario Pingue is 'Niagara Penninsula's Prosciutto Maestro'. I'd heard ramblings about this fellow before, most notably when I was drunk on scotch at my friend Jon's farmhouse and playing late night poker out on the back deck about 3 years ago. The other participant was an old friend from high school, Joe, who happens to be Mario's cousin, and who also happened to just find out right then that I write about food. I can't remember now if that was the summer I was slowly becoming a carnivore after 17 years of eating beans and rice because I can't figure out why I didn't JUMP on that story. It doesn't matter. I have now secured the invitation to go to Niagara with Joe (it better be on the back of your motorcycle, Mr. Pingue) to witness the curing process deep in a cave below the escarpment. Apart from the Niagara prosciutto business, Joe's family has a longstanding tradition of cheese and meat production in Italy (since 1889). He sent me the link to his family's business in Italy but it's in italian so I could only look at the visuals and try to eke out their story.

On other serendipitous notes related to Pingue's Prosciutto, I got to the Gladstone Hotel's Harvest Wednesday celebration about 2 minutes too late. It was at capacity. I could hear people stomping around upstairs obviously enjoying the food and wine for a meagre donation of $7.50 and I was downstairs all dressed up with nowhere to go except the Gladstone bar alone. I contemplated waiting but who leaves a festivity like that right after it's began? Not likely. I began riding my bike up Dovercourt and ran into my friend Joe who promptly invited me to join him for dinner at the Drake on the rooftop patio. Now luckily the Drake uses a lot of local ingredients because I am doing the Eat Local Challenge for the month of August (and yes, I will post about it very soon) so there were ample things to choose from the menu without having to feel guilty or paranoid that an eat local challenge cop hiding behind a pillar was taking polaroids of me eating, say, Urugayan flank steak. Although the older man (or did he just look old because of his deep dark Tropicana tan?) with the bleached blonde hair and the white shoes and the white pants who drank many mojitos despite the unappealing fact that his teeth were not processing the raw mint very well would have been the perfect disguise. I know that's not very nice and admittedly I enjoyed watching his antics at the bar, soaking up his Caribbean joie de vivre and his screw Toronto's Presbyterian elistist attitude. I adore these random characters that appear like out of a novel, even if it's Robinson Crusoe, into my world.

Now here's Joe eyeing the menu knowing he offered his cousin Mario to me years prior:

Now this is why he's giggling inside (note menu item number 5):

Unfortunately it was entirely sold out so we never even got to sample it.

Announcement: The Gladstone Hotel's Harvest Wednesdays

I love the verb "to taste". It suggests the beginning of something marvelous - the celebration of flavour materializing in your mouth. I love to taste food and I equally love to taste wine. I'm just relieved that now I have the option to do both of those things with a roomful of strangers at the Gladstone Hotel every Wednesday night should I choose to.

The Gladstone is hosting, in collaboration with Food Share, an event called Harvest Wednesdays. The first two events are tastings (one was last week, the following is tonight), the next a buffet, and the one after that a Harvest Dinner. The tastings will feature a casual mingling atmosphere with menus varying depending on the produce the chefs are able to ultilize from the harvest provided by a local farmer. The farmers and producers will be at the event and there will be ample opportunity to learn about community shared agriculture, various Food Share programs, as well as to eat local bounty and wash it all down with local wine and beer.

I hope to see you there!