Edible Tulip

How To Eat More Fruit

 

I'm back working downtown in an office which means I am back struggling to find ways to eat fresh and healthy homemade food throughout the long days. A couple tips that might help you if you face the same challenges.

1. Find a supermarket near where you work. I'm at Yonge and College and there is a Metro grocery store under the office tower. Not only can I pick up things for dinner on my break, I can also buy things to keep at the office: half melons that are ready to eat for breakfast, baby carrots, hummous, fruit that bruises during travel, i.e. nectarines, plums, peaches and bananas to keep on the desk. 

2. Take 15 minutes on a Sunday and cut up whatever fruit concoction you like and put it in a large container in the fridge. Above I have canteloup melon, an atulfo mango, and organic blueberries. I took one serving of the fruit and put it in a smaller tupperware. I have my breakfast ready to take with me to work each morning with no preparation required. 

3. Forget the attitude that the day is so packed with meetings that you won't have time for lunch and therefore nibble on crackers and the end of a baguette. Because the nibbling will turn into broken off pieces until you've eaten an entire loaf of bread. You won't feel satisfied because you won't have ingested any nutrients of value! Prepare lunches that are mostly devoid of carbs (an afternoon buzz killer, you'll be dozing off by 3 pm) and instead stick to vegetables, protein, and little fat. In the summer, large salads full of romaine lettuce, nuts, legumes and cubes of cheese provide tons of energy. A tin of tuna, mixed with cut up radishes, chopped cucumber and seasoned with sea salt, lemon and olive oil is easy to prepare and more nutritious than almost anything you could find at a salad bar. To make preparing lunches easier, I wash my lettuce and put it into large sealed freezer bags. When the huge plastic tubs of spring lettuces are on sale at the supermarket I buy those and use that lettuce throughout my work week. I make my lunches the night before as I'm preparing dinner then it doesn't become a separate chore to find motivation to tackle. 

  

Spring Backyard Harvest: Asparagus, Rhubarb, Mint and What To Do With Each of Them

One of the awesome things about sifting through all the mulch in a garden that you don't know is the treasures that lie in wait for you. We moved to this big old century former-baptist-manse house last August. The lawn couldn't really be called a lawn. It was dried up dying patches of flailing grass sort of fighting for survival amidst a desert of dirt. The gardens had been so unkempt for so many years and the grass was knee high in the back yard and it was the thick of August when the crickets never shut up and the weeds twist and shout in a last rhapsody and everything is tall and wild and overgrown and tangled. The air was sweet with pollen and overgrowth. I let everything go and be just as it was thinking next spring I'll tackle this insanity. August is the only month in Ontario that I ever feel like I'm living in the jungle.

So I was out with my bare hands the past few days digging away straws of old growth from last season, trying to decipher the weeds from the goods before madness takes over and they become one. There were your usual suspects out front: tulips (but PINK? why pink?), a few varieties of daffodils (baby ones, yellow ones, mixed yellow and white ones...), hyacinthes (well, I love these cut and in a glass jar fresh from the flower market, but in a garden I think they just look phony), and tall irises are blooming alongside the driveway. So as I bent and I dug and I pulled away the sheathe of winter armour, I found a few surprises: mint (it really has to be the most hardy herb ever - growing out of the asphalt in the driveway?), rhubarb, and asparagus.

So, well I love rhubarb, and I ate it raw as a kid, I don't know what to do with it. It seems so fussy. Although, that said, I do know that to prepare a simple stew of rhubarb takes only the following tasks: wash the stalks and chop them into short lengths, add to a heavy based pan with sugar (linked recipe has details), and cook, over low heat, stirring constantly. Let me know how it goes. My mother came by today to walk the dogs together so we pulled out stalks and she'll stew it with apples and serve it over vanilla icecream. The tanginess of rhubarb, I admit, is absolutely impossible to match. Here is a recipe for stewed rhubarb from the very early days of my blog, my golly, back in 2004. Funnily enough, or not, back then, I was ALSO living in a cabin in the country and I was also marveling at the wonders of an unknown garden coming into being before my own eyes. If only I knew then what I know now about how that fateful summer would play out. I am however pleased beyond reason that for all the dips and turns and after four long years of office work in Toronto I somehow found my way back up north, right back in the same transcendental valley, alongside a waterway that connects me back to that very place 365 days times 4.75. So this plot may be a new rhubarb altogether but it's brought me full circle.

I was a bit shocked to see TWO (yes, only two, but I see more coming through the earth) thick and ready stalks of asparagus pulling through the earth and reaching high. They, like anything really, taste best when eaten the day they are snapped off their root. If you happen to have a bunch of thick fresh asparagus spears then by all means cook them quickly, in a large frying pan of water brought to the boil. They will change colour, to a deep green, fairly quickly. Test repeatedly until you like their doneness. Serve with a brown butter, a scattering of roasted chopped hazelnuts or a strong mustardy hollandaise. If you are serving grilled fish, then cook your asparagus last and simply toss with a very garlicky vinaigrette. Side with some buttered/chived baby potatoes. Here I wrote about the history of asparagus and included a recipe for Salsa Verde which is I had forgotten delicious served over top steaming asparagus spears.

Clearly mint really romps. It's climbed the side of the house and it's growing in the driveway in any crevice the pavement cracks open to allow air and sunlight. I have loved being able to pluck a few sprigs for lunch but it's also delicious added to yogurt, garlic and a seeded chopped cucumber to side with grilled chicken. If you're not that into cooking then mint goes with a trillion spring cocktails. If you're crafty, I'm not particularly, but this is easy enough, then freeze mint leaves in ice cube trays with water and add to cool summer drinks. And in this recipe from many years back I wrote about tossing mint with fresh strawberries and a bit of lemon juice and sugar. Strawberries are, of course, not yet in season in Ontario. Heck, we're not even in the heart of spring yet, but mint would also be excellent with a just ripe mango and some feta cheese and a drizzle of lime juice.

Fruits and Vegetables - How to Eat 5 Servings A Day and Save Money

• Drink a glass of grapefruit juice instead of a 5th cup of coffee.
• Cut up celery, cucumbers, radishes, carrots, daikon, peppers, when you first buy them and put in sealed snack bags to take to work or toss into your purse.
• If hit with a hunger pang when out and about, buy a large ripe banana and a bag of baby carrots. Both cheap, healthy, don't need washing, and can be found at local green grocers/larger convenience store type places.
• Do as I did for a day trip (see photo) to the city: I packed my breakfast - a tupperware of canteloup and blackberries, and my lunch - salad with white beans, yellow pepper, escarole lettuce, sunflower seeds, lightly dressed in lemon juice and olive oil with sea salt, and a snack for the afternoon - a bag of green seedless grapes. I have a green and white bag that is lined with plastic and insulated. It fits a few tupperwares into it, or I take it with me when I grocery shop and put my freezer/cold stuff in it with an ice pack.
• At the movies, instead of popcorn, take a refrigerated can of V8 juice and sesame snaps. Or if you insist on eating popcorn save yourself the $7 coconut oil sodium injection and pop your own corn at home in sunflower oil, and season with salt and ground pepper. A jar of organic white popcorn kernals will set you back about 37 cents.
• Buy frozen packs of strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, mango, etc and keep in your freezer for making morning shakes with vanilla soy milk and bananas. Buy bananas that are starting to brown and on sale. Peel them and put them in freezer bags.
• On Monday's during a break or at lunch time, go out and buy fruit for the week that you can keep at the office. That way you will have it on hand when you are hungry and you won't have to lug it in each day, plus the more fragile kinds like pears, mangos, peaches, nectarines, bananas, etc., won't get bruised or beaten up.
• Anyone else have suggestions?

Pomelo: A Disappointing Discovery

Grapefruits have been a bit of a ubiquitous fruit in my family since I was a kid. If they were the yellow fist-sized orbs with a yellowish-white segmented flesh, they tended to be sour (and not nearly as pleasant as the rosy pink flesh filled fruit, but on par with the unreliable ruby red coloured grapefruit) so as youngsters we were allowed to drizzle a teaspoon of grenadine syrup in one big concentric drip over our half of grapefruit. We then used our serrated pointed spoons specially invented for digging out the flesh of the grapefruit which tended to root itself firmly against the soft white interior side of the rind. If you didn't use a serrated curve-edged knife (specially invented for segmenting the grapefruit) first to loosen the flesh then using the spoon would only result in a lot of sticky splattering. As a kid, when I woke up and went downstairs for breakfast in wintertime, there would more often than not be a half of a grapefruit sitting in a bowl at my place at the table with each juicy bit perfectly scalloped by either my mum or my dad, and I could just dig in with my spoon.

My grandparents were snowbirds who fled a winter existence in a highrise in Kitchener, Ontario for six months spent in a trailer home in a retirement village outside the town of Port St. Lucie, Florida, just an hour south of West Palm Beach. It's grapefruit and orange country down in those parts, and after a few years of tacky XXL t-shirts from various state fairs or tourist boardwalk, my parents prudently suggested a single gift: one crate of pink grapefruits at Christmastime for the whole family.

So, now knowing my love of grapefruits, imagine my absolute delight at seeing a football-sized one the other day at my grocery store. I'd heard of pomelos but I'd never really had the urge to buy one. This time I did. So I picked one up, all wrapped in shining cellophane, and encased in an orange mesh netting. I couldn't wait to get it home and cut into it. I ripped off the packaging and carefully spun the fruit like a top just to marvel at the enormity of it. I sat it like an egg, with the wider part of the teardrop shape on the underside, and I cut it in half. The rind was almost an inch thick and very stringy and sort of chewy-looking. The flesh looked dismal - pockmarked, dried out, sort of like styrofoam. But after spending a few dollars on a single piece of fruit, I was hardly going to toss it without trying it. Sadly, it tasted worse than it looked. It was much sweeter than a grapefruit, more saccharine, and tasting a bit like candy-floss, basically, it tasted fake. But it wasn't just the flavour of the thing, it was the consistency. I don't know if your gag reflex is as bad as mine, but give me a mealy peach, whose flesh tastes like a mouthfull of earthworms, and I'm done. I'll spit that out so fast, depositing it wherever it's convenient - back on the plate, into a napkin, into a closed fist, out the window, into my lap. I don't care. It is better than taking it all the way down and then having a full blown outright hurl 5 minutes later with much greater consequence. The pomelo did not endear my gag reflex to its sudden existence in my mouth, in the cavity in the centre of my tongue. I chewed to get the full effect. I pondered it in my mouth like I would a nice wine for a few seconds. But then that piece of pomelo flesh was out of my mouth so fast and into the pit of my palm, that I had only a few moments of grimacing and head shaking to get the bitterness and general pithiness out of my system. 

I don't know. Maybe it was my pomelo that didn't work out so well. Maybe like most fruit you get a few bad ones in with a few glorifying ones. If any of you have had a wonderful experience with a pomelo, please do let me know. I would hate to ruin its reputation single-handedly.

Facts: The pomelo is indeed a giant citrus fruit and it is native to Malaysia. It is thought to be an ancestory to the grapefruit (duh, it looks exactly like it!) so says numerous food reference books. The typical size, like the one I tried, is of a canteloup-size, but they can grow to be as large as 25 pounds and be shaped more like a watermelon.

What Gets Me Up in the Morning - Strawberry Kefir Shake

I'm sleeping in WAY later than I'm used to. This morning I woke up early, 8:10 a.m. But that was simply just an extraordinary circumstance. Normally we wake up between 9/9:30 a.m. I have no idea why my schedule has completely retuned itself to a fast forward of 3 hours. I admit I like sleep. I don't do a lot of it but I do like the quiet, the lying in bed, the mental images, the awakening of the subconscious, the altered reality, the desolation of night. I have struggled with insomnia my whole life so now it doesn't help that I have a farting, snoring dog a few feet from my face, 2 cats that sleep on the bed - 1 of which sleeps in the crook of my leg so I'm rendered paralysed all night in case I squish his little head - both of whom are known to run up and down the cedar posts of my bed when they aren't sharpening their claws on it, and a heavy breathing boyfriend who flings the full force of his entire body when he rolls over onto his side then his back and then his other side so the gravitational pull of the mattress sinks a few inches. I stick to the outer foot of the bed wearing an eye mask and ear plugs and with the direct flow of a large stand fan in my face. Hey, we all have our ideosyncracies.

When I finally do make the slightest stir, my dog is up and off his bed and over licking my face so fast you know he's been lying there all morning staring at my face intently WILLING me to just wake up already and take him out for a walk. Given that I really don't know a single soul in this town, dressing for the outside world is really not an issue. I wear my glasses. Some sort of longish zippered cardigan over long sleeves and a scarf and a hat. When it's too cold to put on jeans, I opt for the 70s coloured checkered flood pants I bought in the kids section of Le Chateau about 15 years ago. They're synthetic and much warmer on the bare legs. I stuff this entire outfit into a pair of yellow rubber boots. A very tall cup of coffee to go and we're out the door for the morning walk. Our morning walk is no walk around the block. It typically consists of Simon attempting to herd seagulls round and round an enormous field. Then there's ball throwing and fetching. We cross over a foot bridge and make our way through an arboretum (lots of squirrels). We find a gravel path that wends its way through tall reed grasses under an archway of rippling poplars. Down alongside a river, out onto a marsh for a swim, back onto the trail and up along a boardwalk then down a dirt butterfly trail to a little beach then through the forest and back through a large swathe of greenery with picnic tables and around a naturalized section of trees and wild flowers and into the water to chase ducks and geese and a ball throw to the car.

When I get home, I'm starved. But by that point, it's almost lunchtime!, so not wanting to fill up too much, I make a variation of this shake, and drink about 3 tall ceramic mugs (in my case, they are vases) of it.

Morning Shake

1/2 cup orange juice

1/2 cup Kefir* yogurt or soy milk

handful of frozen strawberries or blueberries or mixed berries (you can buy these in bags at the supermarket)

1 cup diced canteloup melon

1/2 peeled, frozen banana

Toss all at once into a blender, pulse until the frozen bits start to break down, then fire it up on liquify. 

*Kefir is fermented milk, sort of like liquid yogurt but with a carbonated, sour taste. Kefir, pronounced like heifer, originated in the Caucasus and was originally made using camel's milk.  

Cucumis Melo

The mighty melon is indeed a member of the gourd family which includes cucumbers, pumpkins and squashes/zucchinis. Even though hard-skinned, strong-stemmed gourds are mostly New World plants, the origin of the melon is Africa.

A bewildering number of cultivars have evolved from the wild melon plants, among the more popular: cantaloups/summer muskmelons (bright orange flesh with a netted, scaly exterior), honeydew (celery-green flesh, hard smooth skin), Ambrosia (looks like a canteloup but flesh is softer, more fragrant), watermelon (bright pinkish-red, grainy, slightly sweet flesh with a green and white hard smooth skin).

I bought my melon (pictured) at Fiesta Farms (mentioned in NOW magazine as a good, cheaper alternative to big box store produce) on Christie Street north of Bloor where their extensive Ontario produce (huge heads of Ontario broccoli with their 'hoods' still on!) looks fresh and bountiful. I assumed it was a crenshaw melon but as I researched melons I realized it was probably a muskmelon. It has scallopped edges if you put it on its stem end and cut through its middle. The skin is carved into perfect melon slices if you cut it lengthwise. I picked a melon that wasn't too ripe so the flesh is still firm, slightly crisp and watery and less pungent and perfumey than one that has become soft to the touch.

Melon is wonderful served in an antipasto fashion with slices of cured meat; the sweet crisp flesh undercuts the saltiness of the meats. It is also delicious served after dinner with a digestif. But I like it simply cut up and doused in fresh lime juice as the start to my day.

The Taste of Honey

When I was in Creemore over Thankgsiving weekend I visited my favourite apple factory in Glen Huron. Grandma Giffin is world famous or at least locally famous for her incredible pies, butter tarts, and muffins. I used to buy her pies to serve at the art retreat centre I cooked at and when the vegetarians of the group oohed and aahed over her pies I thought keeping the lard factor a secret wouldn't really hurt anyone (especially those vegetarians who were lactose/gluten/sugar intolerant and allergic to garlic AND onions which obviously made my life absolute hell). There were huge wooden boxes of apples and each bushel was $5 with the second bushel FREE.

I bought 1/2 bushels of Mutsu/Crispin, Honeycrisp, and Spy apples. The honeycrisps are smallish in size (perfect for a child) and a total balance between sweet and tart with a reddish skin and a firm crisp flesh. Mom and I first came across this new hybrid apple a few years ago (it's the offspring of the Macoun and the Honeygold Apple and was first cross-pollinated at the University of Minnesota in the 60s) and it's quickly become a favourite. In fact it's so popular that fruit growers in Nova Scotia are ripping out the traditional McIntosh orchards and replacing them with the more lucrative Honeycrisp trees according to CBC news.

Smoked Trout and Mango Salad

The other weekend I was on babysitting duty for my two nieces (2 1/2 and 11 months) with my mom. We strapped them into strollers and headed out for the morning, not without incident however. While mom and I stopped for extra large coffees at the Cherry Bomb cafe on Roncesvalles Avenue (mom had been up since 5:30 with the little ones) Kyra ran to the Film Buff for Crunchy Frog icecream - mint icecream with chocolate chunks. It wasn't even 9 a.m. She got hyper and didn't want to be strapped into her stroller because she's such a 'big girl' which inevitably led to us hitting a large curb as I raced across a pedestrian walk and the stroller flipped and she scraped her knees and fell flat on her face. Then of course all she wanted was 'grandma' who was on the other side of the street and long out of sight as she bustled to try to get the baby to sleep. The magic solution was taking my traumatised neice into Scooter Girl, an excellent children's gift store, where she became instantly distracted by toys.

The four of us then moved on to High Park in search of their Saturday morning Organic Farmers Market. It's a small but elaborate set up under a tent on the hill near the restaurant. There are tons of organic fruits and vegetables and, since it's early September, lots of end of summer into early fall produce. I passed on the squashes but we did see some delectable perfectly unripe green mangoes.

Green mangoes make a delicious accompaniment to smoked fish and it is the perfect foil to the late arrival of fall. It makes a great side dish to curried shrimp and rice. This recipe comes from "Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet", the beautifully written and photographed Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid cookbook.

Smoked Fish and Green Mango

2 green mangoes
1 small smoked trout
1/2 cup chopped coriander leaves (a bit of mint is encouraged)

Dressing
2 Tbsp rice vinegar
1 Tbsp Thai fish sauce
1 Tbsp sugar
1 tsp minced garlic
1 Tbsp minced shallots
1 Tbsp minced galangal OR 1 tsp minced ginger with a pinch of grated lemon zest

Peel the mangoes and coarsely grate. Or finely julienne the flesh. Put in a bowl.
Remove and discard the skin and the bones from the fish. Chop into small pieces and add to the mango. Stir in the coriander and set aside.
In another small bowl, combine the ingredients for the dressing.

Canteloup & Lime

I love fruit first thing in the morning. It's been my ritual for 10 years. It's always the first thing I put in my mouth. I'm unable of putting anything dry or flaky or toast-like or cereal-ish into my mouth until I've eaten fruit and drunk some tea or coffee.

My fruit habits are pretty seasonal. All winter I consume citrus fruits because they are at their prime juiciness and because I got spoiled growing up with grandparents who were snow-birds and sent us boxes of Indian River pink grapefruits for Christmas each year. About this time of year when the skin on oranges and grapefruits starts to thicken and pull away from the flesh and the interior becomes mealy and light coloured I tend to veer towards melons. I'm in the nascent of melon eating right now and it's a beautiful thing. This morning I split open a large firm sweet smelling canteloup, cut out its seeds, and then pared it into wedges that then became square bite size pieces that I put into a tupperware and seasoned with fresh lime juice. Kiwis sometimes make the cut too. Then I'll start into honeydews before they get too ripe and saturated in their own juice. Then suddenly it's berry season - strawberries and blueberries and slices of just ripened still tart mango. And then before you know it I'm eating grapefruit again as the sky darkens and winter arrives. But hey, I'm getting ahead of myself. Melon. Spring. We're nearly there.

The Pips of Pomegranates

Pomegranates are surely the sexiest of fruits. Not only do they historically symbolize fertility and rebirth but their actual physical being represents all things EROTIC: a leathery rind capped with a crown, a lucious interior of edible pink pulp, a personality that masochistically vacillates between sweet and sour, and a sassy slowly-untie-me outfit that requires a lot of work in order to get to the fruit inside. The best way to wrangle your way in is to cut off the crown and then cut the pomegranate into sections. Place the sections in a bowl of water, then roll out the arils with your fingers. Discard everything else. Strain out the water. Then open a bottle of slightly sparkling low sugar riesling (the Ontario Cave Spring label is very good) and feed the succulent arils whole, seeds and all, to a lover.

Pomegranates have such a lovely hue and rustic shape that they make perfect holiday decorations (edible decorations are my favourite kind!). Add them to vases of green berries, pine cones, holly and any other greenery. You can stand candles in this arrangement or gather it all around a bulb of an amaryllis.

Also, check out this wonderfully informative website with great recipe ideas and tantalizing photos!

Photo and recipe credit to POM wonderful pomegranates.