Edible Tulip

Food News

This newsletter comes into my inbox every Thursday and it's a complete delight to read. It features food and drink columns from the a number of American newspapers and the layout is consisted of 3 food feature articles (long essay type stories with recipes), a food column (a personal food column), a quick recipe section and then two drink articles (one is usually a profile on something like scotch or beer and the other is a personal column on something like what to do if you drink red wine and your partner drinks only white). The writing is excellent, informative, quirky, well-written. The recipes are interesting and often manageable. An example of one newsletter I recieved: an article on a woman connecting to her grandchildren through the Japanese cooking taught to her by her mother; an exporation of a new cookbook that demystifies Middle Eastern cuisine; and an article about the evolution of corn and how and why the flavour has been modified. If you want to subscribe go here and register for free. It's worth it!

Morsels of Morels

I'm dying to go mushroom hunting! I've been online looking at where to find morels in Ontario and very soon I'm going to head a bit north out of the city at dawn or at dusk with a spade and a cloth bag and an old worn indispensible book on mycology.

I find something about morels totally charming. Maybe it's their unabashed feral look or the smoky earthiness of their flavour but really I think it's the spongy, conical-capped shape of their honeycombed exterior. Within each small compartments insects thrive in a haven of life.

Morels tend to cluster around Aspens and abandoned orchards (due to soil alkaline). Here's more information from the University of Guelph.

I grew up detesting mushroom. Nowadays I give them a little more credit because of their ability to saturate a larger dish with a grounding sustenance. They make a brilliant risotto because they hide their texture within the rice but coat it with their flavour. Another 5 minute simple meal is sauted morels in butter (3 or 4 minutes) with a few lightly beaten eggs and mixed slowly over low heat with a wooden spoon. A rather decadenct elaboration on the scrambled egg.

REMINDER: Morels must be cooked. They contain a toxin that will make you very sick if you eat them raw.

To get a glimpse of the giant puffball mushroom I came across last August and subsequently dug up for my parents to take as a cottage gift ("Here, we brought you something gourmet as a thank you for having us: a 2 foot diameter fungus!") check this out and check here to see the oyster mushrooms I received as a gift at the retreat centre last year.

Mariages Freres Tea

This beautiful tin full of chestnut coloured smoky flavoured dried tea was a gift from one of the girlfriends I was visiting in New York. She had been traveling in France with her husband, spending 10 days in Paris, while en route to her brother's wedding. Since I'm a bit fickle with my devotions and we had not spent quality time together in ages she had thoughtfully booked my birthday dinner celebration at a very elegant vegetarian restaurant on the upper east side of NY (I'm of course now a full on carnivore) and she had brought back this delightful gift of tea remembering that I had gone off coffee (I'm back working in an office and that tends to induce strong java cravings). Regardless, the vegetarian food was some of the best and most inventive cuisine I'd experienced in a long time and the tea is truly a decadent way to spend an afternoon. It has a chocolately cocoa flavour with a bit of Indian spice present in the aroma. The French are just so damn good at everything is seems. Merci beaucoup!

A traditional picnic lunch

Day 3 at the Retreat Centre.

The first week is always hard. It takes time to build the adrenalin needed to sustain the daily emergencies that people or machines have. Our oven broke down today (it doesn't help that it was bought at a used appliance store specialising in antique/retro gas stoves - pretty to look at, but to cook in? A nightmare). I also seem to have forgotten how much prep time is needed when cooking for 13. I begin each day with a bit of a kick, yanking ingredients and bowls and grabbing knifes, but then I calm down and I start to feel like I'm WAY ahead of the game until, amidst bowls and platters of half-finished dishes, I look at the clock and realize I have 15 minutes to get EVERYTHING on the table.

The week before a workshop I menu-plan and organize every day into snacks, and meals down to the finest ingredients in each dish. By the end of the first day, I'm crossing out ideas and scribbling in new ones. By the end of the week, my menu-plan, once so organized and pragmatic, is a haywired mess of "no, not cream cheese, goat cheese" notes or entire menus scratched out altogether.

The Aid of Lemon and Ginger

Sometimes when the spring weather suddenly turns garish you need the help of something other than sun or drink. Baking helps. And the combined flavours that are both medicinal and soothing of lemon and ginger can also be turned into a delicious tea bread. Both ingredients also make a good steeping brew for tea: just peel a knot of ginger or an arm of its pretzeled body, chop up into pieces, halve a lemon and squeeze into a tea pot, add honey for sweetness and pour boiling water over. Eating and sipping tea while reading the weekend papers is an utterly acceptable way of spending a Saturday afternoon in my world.

I'm a plantin' pimentos

Hot chile peppers date back to the food of the Stone Age Peruvian Indians. It's a pod full of tiny seeds and veiny membranes. The general rule of thumb is the larger the hot pepper the milder the flavour (the smaller the hot pepper, the more seeds it contains and ALL the heat is in the seeds which is why recipes often ask you to carve out the seeds). A chile pepper contains a compound called capsaicin and it is responsible for the heat produced when a seed or membrane touches your taste buds. I like all kinds of hot peppers so I decided to buy the medley packet of seeds. As I write, they are embedded in soil in a little peat container. There's over 200 kinds of hot peppers but the most common are: jalapeno, poblano, ancho, anaheim, bird, cayenne, cherry pepper, chipotle and pasilla. I tend to find I use the jalapeno pepper the most. It's versatile and not too hot (in fact not hot enough sometimes). I like it added to homemade salsas and mango chutneys. It spices up ginger/garlic dressings for grated carrot salad with cilantro and it's great in corn bread. The bird chiles and the habanero chiles are the definite have a beer handy and don't rub your eyes after dicing. They are HOT HOT HOT!

Swiss Chard goes Indian

I'm completely unpacked at the cabin and I've hung a large watercolour painting by my mother, my grandmother's old wooden birdcage, 3 African masks and I arranged a dozen peach coloured tulips (with ebony centres) in an old jug. The place is coming along. If only the weather would shape up. I'm nearly through the pile of ancient hardwood left by the owners under a tarp. I know chopping wood is meditative and a brilliant way to focus the whole energy of your body and direct it at something inanimate, I have a strange freezing up moment just as the axe is about the hit the log.

Asia goes to the country

While packing up my pantry for the big move, I came across packages of mostly dried Asian goods: wakame, shredded mushrooms, bags and bags of poblano and chipotle and tiny Guatemalan chiles (which of course are used in Thai and Singaporean cuisine(, and tamarind paste. The one thing all of these items have in common is that they came from my neighbourhood green grocer. While living in Toronto, my cooking has slowly shifted sideways into Indian pickles, thai fish dishes, a love of seaweed, the beauty of hot with cold and sour with sweet. I can walk to Koreatown in 5 minutes and Chinatown in 20. Chinatown borders a large community market in Toronto (Kensington Market has a mixture of green grocers, Mexican bulk shops with grains and legumes, several excellent health food marts, cheese shops, bakeries, the best empanadas with a citrus tomatilla salsa and then a line of vintage clothing stores). This means when I go to buy my favourite Bulgarian feta I also invariably end up with bags of chinese greens and some flashy package I've been drawn to regardless of the contents. Chinatown in Toronto is all neon lights and puffy dried out baby shrimp and people spitting and lots of bicycles and a sort of organized chaos to the food shopping experience. Some of the markets are below sidewalk level so you navigate through mounds of pomelos, boxes piled high of cilantro and baby bok choys (the white ends are apparently far superior to the fragile pale green bunches) and containers of live crabs.

When I'm in Chinatown I have a hard time rembering that I'll soon be living in a southern ontario prime agricultural zone far from the neon lights. This means instead of the smell of cigarette smoke and garbage and rotten fruit that permeates a visit to Chinatown I'll be driving the open country smelling only the changes in the land.

Wakame is dried seaweed. I go for the dark green colour. It needs to be soaked in lukewarm for twenty minutes until it is soft and pliable. Drain and rinse (do rinse if you want the subtle fishy smell of seaweed to not take over your salad) the wakame well. Chop up a cucumber by slicing it lengthwise and then scooping out the flesh to create an arc. When you slice the cucumber up it should look like little moons. Toss with sea salt, the rinsed wakame and a dressing of soy sauce, rice vinegar, a pinch of sugar, and a tablespoon of sake.