Edible Tulip

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.

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.

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.

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.