Edible Tulip

Oh Me Oh My, Holy HARVEST!

           

Down the road from us on Highway 124 between Duntroon and Collingwood (north of Nottawa) is a squash and pumpkin farm! Isn't that delightful? I mean, of all the things to live close by to than 20 varieties of winter squash, 15 sizes of pumpkins from baby boos to oversized mottled monsters, some white skinned cutie pies and some with warts that are not so cute, a wagon full of gourds, stalks of dried corn, squares of decorative straw, and Indian dried decorative corn. 'Tis the season for the death of gaudy colours - so long magenta - to make room for the subtle splash of autumn, which is so pretty and so full of childhood memories (crunchy leaves, cold cheeks, spicy hot cider, the play of light through the window, the serious romance of the sky at dusk, the rush of ripeness before the desolation of winter. It's a fleeting and torried affair I have with fall.

For almost everyone I know the change of season is a sort of bookmark for change, an excuse to rid a particular bad chapter of life out the window with the humidity, a desire to embark on new things or strengthen some thing that has already begun. I don't know. Maybe it's because we're Canadian. We live for the seasons. Each month brings some new hallmark of the earth altering around us and we bear witness. From milkpods to silky thistles, and the pungent odor of an early thaw and the sweetness that burns with the sun on a bed of pine needles, the colour explosion in the hills, the rush of spring water down the mountain and the particularly serene beauty of a colourless winter. So colourless it becomes colourful, a palette of lilacs and blues until the sun sets or rises and the sky turns to fire. I went to California once and lived in a tent for a week on my friend's front porch in the mountains. I never saw rain. I never saw clouds. I didn't feel a degree drop or rise in temperature. The sun shone. And it shone. And the sky was blue. And blue, again. The same blue. The same sky. It became so eternal and unbearable in just five days that I starting dreaming, in August, of the moors of England. Dampness and must. Ripe fields and lush meadows. Mist. The magic of ambiguity. California weather made me feel transparent.  

I have a few recipes to share with you from this bounty: a pumpkin sweet bread, a spicy squash and sweet potato soup, and the results of our squash bake off! There were so many squashes with such different skins - ribbed and striped and flat and bumpy concealing what I know to be different fleshes - colourful and opaque, dense and bland, firm and strand-like. So we've pulled together the White Swan variety with a few Delicatas and Celebrations and Turbans and Hubbards and we'll bake them and taste them and let you know the results.  

PUMPKIN SPICE BREAD, makes 1 loaf

-----I bought a small pie pumpkin to use for the puree. You can use canned if you prefer. I baked the pumpkin, whole, on a cookie sheet at 350 for about 45 minutes. I let it cool; skinned and topped it; and scooped out the flesh.-----

1 1/2 cups flour (I used 1 cup of all purpose and 1/2 cup of whole wheat but feel free to experiment with the flours you prefer)
1/2 teaspoon of salt
1/2 cup packed brown sugar
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 1/2 cup pumpkin purée
1/2 cup sunflower oil
2 eggs, beaten
1/3 cup maple syrup                                                                                                                       1/4 cup plain yogurt
1/2 teaspoon chinese five spice (or nutmeg or cardamom or whatever hint of spice you like!)
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon allspice
1/2 cup (1 dL) chopped walnuts

1 Preheat oven to 350°F. Sift together the flour, salt, sugar, and baking soda.

2 Mix the pumpkin, oil, eggs, maple syrup, yogurt, and spices together in a separate bowl until blended. Combine, in batches, with the dry ingredients. Stir in the nuts.

3 Pour into an oiled loaf pan. Bake 50-60 minutes or until it is a deep golden colour on top and a skewer comes out clean from the loaf's centre. Let cool on a rack.

Dagwood Would Be So Proud

 

I'm not really one for sandwiches. But I sure love making them - scouting the refrigerator for ingredients, pulling out condiments and dressings, mixing and matching for taste and colourful effect. I'm not sure whether it's the latent outcome of my suburban upbringing where my father left with his briefcase at dawn and returned at 6 p.m. for a cocktail and a sit down family supper that has instilled itself in me but I dream of waking up and getting up and making someone a take-a-way lunch. Yesterday's impulse was actualized in the form of a sandwich. Toasted artisanal white bread slices were the bookends around a bit of mayo, some Russian sweet/hot mustard, a few thin slices of an heirloom tomato, pieces of just ripe avocado, some French Rouy soft stinky cheese with a piece or two of old cheddar slotted in for fun, shavings of roasted turkey breast, and a few crunchy leaves of lettuce.

The Arrival of Fall

When you walk as much as I do, the outside world becomes like your living room. I’m constantly walking around my house correcting slightly misaligned picture frames, moving the candlestick and the mini pumpkins and gourds on the dining room table a few millimetres, and then moving them back, bringing the outside world inside in the form of tree bark and beach stones, misshapen sticks and wildflowers. In August, which was the first month spent up here, the world where I walked – meadows, trails, woods, marshes – was all yellow and purple, allergy flowers and blooming clover, tacky thorns and mile high wheat, the dizzying lemon yellow canola fields the perfect backdrop to the effervescent hum of insects. There’s a feverish pitch to the dying days of summer. The air all August hung sweetly in a damp embrace each morning before being singed and set aside by the afternoon sun. There’s so little humidity here compared with the city that the temperatures fluctuate depending on sunlight and nightly cloud cover. The seasons have it right. Just as we passed into the Fall equinox, everything has been changing around me – I’ve noticed at least 4 or 5 different kinds of berries, the arrival of crimson like a slow bleeding, the eruption of fungi in the forest, and the acrid smell of fallen, rotting apples in my path.

Some simple ideas to try in order to enjoy a harvest close to home:

• Eat "in season"
• Shop at local farmers’ markets
• Buy direct from the farm (pick-your-own orchards, community shared agriculture (CSA’s), farm stands…)
• Source and support restaurants who use food from local growers
• Become an activist and encourage local green grocers and larger supermarkets in your area to carry produce from as close to home as possible
• Try recipes that focus on in season ingredients
• Freeze bags of cut up in season produce, or make jams/preserves/sauces

I fully acknowledge that there’s no perfect remedy for fighting the scarcity of food on a global level or supporting local farmers while making delicious food. I do know that starting with the seasons and being keyed in to what is grown in your area is a great start. And also that somtimes using one very locally sourced product in a dish or a preserve might mean that everything else is imported, simply because it has to be. The following recipe uses up all the bags of late summer tomatoes I see for sale at my local roadside stands – beefsteak and roma, specifically. A recipe for Chilli Coriander Jam is listed below.

The Winner

And the winner is... Sally S. from the Georgian Triangle! Congratulations Sally and I hope you will enjoy some burgers enhanced with the bbque sauce from your gift box, just like you like 'em.

One More Day 'Til the Give-A-Way

 

Thank you to those who participated in the Loblaws Eat Well Save More give-a-way contest. I am thrilled to actually have more than one person’s name to pull out of the hat! I will announce the winner tomorrow.

And thank you for the thoughtful comments submitted. I was interested in some of your grocery shopping experiences. It’s the urban forager in us all that seeks out the best places to source our food, even if it means visiting a handful of spots to have a stocked kitchen. Kim mentioned a "really nice No Frills" in her area and I know from personal experience that there can be a huge discrepancy from one No Frills to the next. Some, I will simply not shop at, and others are like the Whole Foods of the discount grocery scene (minus the agony of shopping where a take out container from the salad bar sets you back $16, and the women tend to look like they’re either misplaced from South Beach – overly tanned and overly taut – or evading the paparazzi – oversized sunglasses a la 1990) with amazing fish and meat. And Shreela brings up visiting the local Asian markets which I had forgotten to mention in my own post. When I lived in Toronto I used to take the dog to Cherry Beach each Saturday morning and I’d drive by the enormous T & T Supermarket on Cherry Street wanting to venture inside but also sort of agonizing at the whole process – it’s so busy, we have to park so far away, it’s going to reek of raw fish, it’s so hot out and we can’t leave the dog in the car, I have a headache and some feisty 80 year old Asian lady is going to ram me with her car… anyway, one day I got over myself and went in and a

durian fruit

had fallen from the display and split open and if you have ever smelled the inside of a durian fruit well I am sure I now have your empathy. The T & T supermarket is impressive. It’s like the Loblaws of the Asian markets – high quality products in a clean, neatly organized, and airy superstore with a huge parking lot. It’s the antithesis of the small, cramped stores in Chinatown where things are piled up on the floor. T & T has an incredible take-out section of pre-made foods, an extensive bakery, an impressive fresh fish selection, cheap and fresh looking exotic produce, and a huge selection (over 15,000) of packaged products (noodles, sauces, flavourings) from Korea/China/Japan/Philippines. I also used to visit the P.A.T. Korean Market on Bloor Street West at Clinton for lemon grass, sesame oil, a bag of bean sprouts, and fried tofu. They have tons of kimchi and seaweed pre-made. 

Loblaw Give-Away - Contest to win a basket of Eat Well Save More products

 

If you're interested in the give-away and want to put your name in the hat then skip to the end to find out the contest details and you can avoid my long-winded testimony to grocery shopping.

I would surmise that over the past 10 years, I have only grocery shopped at a big box grocery store (A&P, No Frills, Loblaw, Sobeys, Dominion, Price Chopper, etc.) a few times a year. There was the stint living in Russia (no big box grocery stores in sight), and France (small markets in Burgundy), Yonge/Roxborough in Toronto (went broke at the local strip of gourmet small shops fondly known as The Five Thieves), Queen Street East/Pape Avenue (lived above a coffee shop and worked at the CBC and existed on caffeine and nicotine, plus the mice in the apt ate anything edible), High Park (a zillion green grocers, bakeries, butchers line the strip of Roncesvalles Avenue), and where I spent most of my time in around Bloor Street West and Dovercourt Ave, I shopped at the Dufferin Grove Farmers Market, the Italian butcher just west of Ossington Ave, Strictly Bulk, an array of Iranian/Persian/Eritrean small grocery stores, and my daily visit to the green grocer around the corner which was run by a spanish speaking Peruvian/Korean family and they carried everything - organic, local, freeze dried vegetables from the Andes, a hundred kinds of Mexican chiles, mole sauces, Asian foods, Montreal bagels. When a Shoppers DrugMart opened in my neighbourhood, my needs for the big box groceries disappeared - no name feminine products, toilet paper, house cleaning products. When I did do a larger grocery shop, I would go to Fiesta Farms, the independent grocery store in my neighbourhood around Christie Pit. A lot of this, and the above has to do with a few things: I didn't have a car for most of the time mentioned above; I don't have children; I eat very little processed/packaged/frozen food; and living in a large urban environment with an array of options you have the option to make CHOICES about what to eat, where to eat, and where to buy your grocery products. I chose Fiesta Farms because they were independent, had great prices, carried lots of local/organic, and were being hemmed in by the big box grocery labels and I would like to see a smaller one-off shop still exist on the commercial landscape. The No Frills at the Dufferin Mall was my second big box choice but it usually required fending off multitudes of little people crying and screaming and banging into my knees, and pushy women with too full carts vying for an angle in one of the 6 cart long check out lines, and the parking lot was always overfull and if I walked it meant adding on several inches to each arm from the weight. The cents and dollars saved most often just weren't worth the inconvenience.

So now I find myself living in a place close to Georgian Bay and dotted with roadside farmstands but also with zero small groceries or ethnic specialty shops or Portuguese bakeries or Italian butchers so if I want to do a "shop" then I drive to a local grocery store. Welcome to small town Ontario.

Exploration

   

"I am puffed clay, blown up and set down. That I fall like Adam is not surprising: I plunge, waft, arc, pour, and dive. The surprise is how good the wind feels on my face as I fall. And the other surprise is that I ever rise at all. I rise when I receive, like grass". - Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, pg. 221

It was a typical early Autumnal weekend - the early morning rapture of the earth cooling down and waking up, a confused skyscape of storm clouds, puffy white streaks, forboding amounts of gray all punctured with tiny glimmering openings of bright light. On Saturday by 2 pm, Simon, the dog, and I were riverside under a cloister of pines and I was unwrapping a wool sweater and pulling on a t-shirt. One excellent rarely acclaimed virtue of living in the country is that those quick changes that I love to do - the shorts and tank top exchanged for a cotton sundress behind a car door - go entirely unnoticed because there is simply nobody around to give a hootenany.

Simon and I have discovered a perfect eden of a meadow. It's at the side of a road behind 2 boulders and a sprinkling of gravel. If you follow the slight depression in the grass you will come to a sort of V where it looks like 2 logging roads diverge. Pick the one to your right. It will amble along in an overgrown grassy road type of way and dead end at a grove of trees. If you enter into the woods you will see that some teenagers have also found this hidden nook and built a skateboard ramp 6 feet off the ground. Keep walking and cross the river. Rainboots as footwear is appropriate enough. There will be a metal fence that you will walk alongside turning right. As you come out of the woods you will emerge into a field dotted with a few trees but mostly overrun with grasses, weeds and wildflowers. It is municipal land that I gather will be slated for development soon. It's the fate of all the glorious in-town wild spaces.

If You Enjoy the Funghi, Then This Contest Is For You

 

I got wind of this contest via email and that's when I recognized what the heck has been trodding underfoot the past two weeks. They are trumpet shaped mushrooms, called chanterelles, that can be a golden champagne colour (see above) or a real turn off of a piss yellow colour that yelled "poisonous" to me in the woods but I guess I was wrong. These are delicacies and if you live somewhere urban where fresh mushrooms aside from the white button ones are hide to find then I suggest you give this contest a whirl.

The detes:

To enter - submit your best, original chanterelle mushroom (I'm betting risotto is a given) to Marx Foods. (Marx Foods is a Seattle based food distributor who initially only supplied high end restaurants with fresh, hard to find food from farmers, foragers, fishermen and artisans but now have an online guide to also supply home chefs)

Prize - 2 pounds of fresh chanterelle mushrooms

Contest deadline - Friday, September 19th

'Shroom away, my friends.

I Can Eat for Miles & Miles & Miles...

100 of them. In either direction - due south or north-west, and beyond.

Two new 100 Mile Stores dedicated to selling food and food stuff from a 100-mile foodshed have opened in my area, one in Meaford, Ontario and the other in Creemore, Ontario. I will suss out them both. Until then, I have other tales along similar themes. Last night, to celebrate the back end of summer, and, well, what else I don't know, because my month of officially taking time off is now over, I ate dinner on the deck amidst the Jack Pines and a cacophany of red squirrels and cicadas and the dinner came from no further than 10 miles. The fun of it, eating locally I mean, is that it's the most community I have ever been a part of. After a personal tragedy in the fall of 2004, I realized I had nobody who would really rally around me in times of need outside of a few close friends who were scattered around the globe and tied up in their own dramas. After my experience, I felt that while family is who we all should be able to depend upon in times of need because of what family represents I'm not sure there can ever be total unconditional non-judgmental arms-around-waists-to-form-a-trampoline-to-throw-you-back-onto-the-safe-side-of-reality support. The patterns are too deep and entrenched and the perspective is thus skewed. In families, one person's problem because every other family members vendetta or cross to bear or salvation. I may not belong to a church but I do know my farmers and that counts for something.

Our dinner consisted of corn that I bought from a farmer on 1-24. He sets up in the bowling alley parking lot north of Nottawa and south of Collingwood. I bought some corn, half a dozen Paula Red apples, and a large vidalia onion. Gone are the little yellow Ontario plums replaced by the purple skinned kind: Verity, Veeblue and Victory varieties. In another few weeks, he'll have about 30 different kinds  of apples. The sausages came from an elk farm in the area, the beans and tomatoes from my parents' vegetable garden, the cucumber from a lady on county road 9, the spring onions from a couple in Dunedin, the lettuce from the back garden, and ginger ice cream for desert from the 100 mile store in Creemore. Whew. Unlike seeing an animal's face as you eat your meat, I saw the face of the woman/man who grew the food and it made me happy. People put some effort into growing something and harvesting it and I was reaping the honest rewards. The only thing not produced within a few miles was the horseradish mustard we ate with the sausages. The chili sauce we also seasoned the meat with came from the the same woman who's onions we were eating. I went home with a jar of homemade peach jam. The peaches are not within the 100 mile radius but they do come from Niagara, Ontario.

I certainly don't feel righteous or preachy about eating this way nor do I think it's possible or affordable for everyone. I like it primarily because I am able to support people who work to produce food that is rarely carried by our local supermarkets. So when you begin to look outside of the food offered in your local foodland or loblaw or A & P, you whip yourself wide open to the reality that you've been eating dairy or eggs or grains for many years only from a handful of producers, and those producers probably come from another province. Suddenly it's like oh, Bob, from around the bend, and over the bridge, uses locally sourced grains and flours and makes an incredible loaf of bread.

I'll be attending a 100-Mile dinner at a local farm in a few weeks. My father is sourcing the booze and has found an incredible winery on the hillsides that stretch along Hwy 26 up around the Bay. If he's impressed by the quality then I can't wait to give it a swirl and suck it back myself!

Eating Al Fresco, Anywhere, Anytime

The weather this weekend has been extraordinary. Our new house must be insulated (crossing fingers) because on hot humid sultry sun-beating-down on the back of the house, it remains cool like a cellar. On days when the air is a bit fresh it's downright chilly inside. I have I am embarrassed to admit taken several baths this August. Sometimes more than one a day. The air flow is so good upstairs that with all the windows wide open and the sun porch off the master bedroom a conduit for the outside being brought inside I often wake up to my fan blowing the musky scent of a field in August over my face. It smells ripe, and sweet, and a bit like clover honey.

I celebrated the last weekend of summer with a picnic in Toronto. Of all places. We just moved out of the city but due to circumstances and sometimes you have to make the best of what you've been given that's where we had our token meal of the weekend al fresco. We ate in the green park setting that runs along both sides of the Humber River. It's a nasty bit of water running downstream from a hospital evidenced by the number of latex rubber gloves I have seen tangled in the weeds. But a bunch of grass with patches of trees is all one really needs. We battled the bees, the earwigs clamouring up my dress, the biting red ants, the smell of garbage, the pot bellied fisherman in the speedo, and enjoyed a great picnic lunch.

For picnics I always think there should be choice because who really knows what sort of hunger you'll face. For this particular day I kept it fairly simple and fresh. The menu for 2 was homemade banana bread with walnuts (poppyseeds and sesame seeds and sweetened with homemade maple syrup), a baguette, some soft French cheese, a basket of peaches, multi-grain tortilla chips, a tupperware with tuna and marinated spicy eggplant and artichokes and baby cherry tomatoes with fresh basil and pepperoncino, another tupperware with a curried chickpea salad and a potato salad in a curry vinaigrette, and a final tupperware with a mix of finely sliced carrots and cabbage tossed with arugula in a light fresh lemony dressing.

Since we only had 4 stolen hours together we took in the best of being in the city on a hot long weekend afternoon and moved from the verdant riverside down to the cool breezy beach overlooking Tommy Thompson Spit and letting Simon swim and see his old canine buddies. We are surrounded by a hundred picnic spots where we now live but we've learned that with good food and the right company almost any old outdoor nook will do.

Curry Vinaigrette 

Make the dressing and then pour over the still hot potatoes so they absorb the flavours. This can be made a day ahead.

1 large fresh Ontario garlic clove

2 Tbsp full fat yogurt or mayo (I mix a Tbsp of each)

2 tsp curry powder

1 1/2 Tbsp lemon juice

5 Tbsp olive/sunflower oil

2 Tbsp finely chopped cilantro

Finely mince or use a press with the garlic and place in a glass jar (or small bowl). Add the yogurt or mayo, the curry powder, the lemon juice and the oil and shake vigorously to blend the ingredients together. Toss with the hot potatoes, add the cilantro, and toss again until the potatoes are well coated.