22 January 2012 by pat.

I was invited to a dinner party at Tony’s, and volunteered to prepare a dish. The theme for the evening was “heavy garlic,” and we talked about what movie to watch… I volunteered to bring my DVD of Ratatouille, and then decided that a garlicky ratatouille would be a good fit for me to bring.

Next, I researched a ratatouille recipe that looks like the one in the movie. The original, as can be seen on some of the DVD extras, is by Thomas Keller. It’s a little involved. I found a simplified version over at Smitten Kitchen’s blog that looked tasty, so my next step was to hit the St. Lawrence Market to buy ingredients. Yes, I know that this is absolutely the wrong time of year to be making ratatouille, that the vegetables all are being flown in from South America. Most of the time I do cook local. Every once in a while, I go exotic.

I wasn’t quite sure of the quantities to get (hadn’t decided what I was going to bake it in!), so I did end up with one yellow squash and one zucchini unused, and I have a bunch of slices of everything in a ziplock bag in my fridge that are going to become more ratatouille today.

Wash, chop the ends, and then run all the veggie tubes through the mandoline. Put each vegetable in a separate bowl, and then make short stacks and arrange them on top of the tomato purée.

Put it in the oven — this was in for about an hour, mostly at 350F.

Delicious dinner with friends. Tony made a Thai peanut chicken and salad (and guacamole, which we had earlier) and Bill and Claire brought a fruit salad and fruit pie.

Posted in Food - farmers' market, Food, recipes, Food | 2 Comments »

22 October 2011 by pat.

Compare and contrast.

No, I won’t do that, because that’s comparing apples and …hmm. bread? Two vastly different categories, although both are in similar spaces.

Fifth town, if you read back in my blog, is an organic cheese maker based in Prince Edward County. And they’re here, at the Delicious Food Show. I picked up some of their Quark cheese. I had never tasted quark until this summer, when they drizzled some maple syrup over some and offered tastes. Yes, I’ll take that over dessert any day, thanks. It’s delicious.

The other was a maker, Daiya, that I had heard about, and I saw their products when the Foodist Mart was briefly open in Leslieville. They create a vegan product that tastes like cheese.

They had some slices of pizza out with their mozzarella-like cheese-like product, and I took one and ate it. It did have a cheesy flavour, it melted like mozzarella, and looked like it, too. So for vegans who miss the taste of cheese, there’s a product out for you! They also had some grilled cheese sandwiches with a cheddar-like product, but after wandering all the stalls, I confess, I was sated, and didn’t try it.

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22 October 2011 by pat.

I had to highlight them. They’re another place I usually go to at the Saint Lawrence Market — I’ve got green peppercorns I bought fresh from them on the stem. Hmm, I should check on those: they’ve been in brandy for about a year now.

Selsi combines spices with the lovely containers I’m used to seeing at Lee Valley Tools, and put them together as spice kits that are visually appealing, and I’m sure would help get a novice using spices. They have two sizes:

And a smaller sampler:

Support your local purveyors!

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22 October 2011 by pat.

They’re at the Delicious Food Show. I hope more people try Kozlik’s mustards and horseradish. They are my absolute favorite purveyor of those items.

I usually buy their products at the Saint Lawrence Market. I’m a huge fan of their horseradish: it’s got heat and flavour. Totally clears out the sinuses. Has taste and works well in a Bloody Caesar as well as being served alongside a hunk of prime rib, or mixed in with some applesauce to go with pork (think I got that trick from the Joy of Cooking).

One of my favorite mustards is the triple crunch: it’s the caviar of mustards. Three different types of seed — makes a beautiful visual. Has an awesome flavour. Your teeth bear down on a seed that’s been softened and expanded with vinegar, and it explodes in your mouth with pure flavour, the way a fish egg does. It’s awesome. Put some on a slice of aged cheddar and eat it. Your toes will curl with pleasure.

One of the big reasons I love Kozlik’s is their customer service. My father can’t eat sulphites, and for years, this has meant the only mustard he could eat was the Keen’s powdered mustard, which my mother would add water to and make a paste.

I called to find out if any of their mustards or horseradishes were sulphite-free, and got a phone call back (I think it was Jeremy who called), and had a superb conversation. I couldn’t get my Dad a pure horseradish (it requires sulphites to keep it) but I could get him a horseradish mustard (wow, was it tasty). I was also given the names of two other mustards I could get him that were sulphite-free.

You treat a customer well, it’s remembered forever.

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20 January 2011 by pat.

Lunch time came around. I opened the fridge (lo and behold! wondrous variety of veggies from KEG). Figured it was time to eat up some things, like about 2oz of bacon that were there.

I have containers of pasta and beans pre-cooked in the fridge: it makes it easier to throw something together for lunch.

Here’s what I pulled out today:

From top left, clockwise around the little bowl with pepper flakes:

• fusilli pasta (coloured with vegetables),
• bacon,
• garlic (it was a huge clove),
• black kale,
• leek,
• 2 chopped anchovy fillets,
• and pine nuts.

And here’s what it looked like after cooked in the cast iron skillet in a little olive oil.

I like the drama the kale added!

Posted in Photography - documentary, Food - farmers' market, Food, recipes, Food | 2 Comments »

14 January 2011 by pat.

I purchased shares in the Kawartha Ecological Growers‘ CSA (community shared agriculture) this winter.

Our first pick-ups were yesterday. So at about 4:45, I wandered over to Ceili Cottage, and went over to the far side of the bar to see what I had in store.

A number of standard items were part of the list:

• carrots,
• potatoes,
• onions,
• celeriac,
• a Hubbard squash,
• kale,
• popcorn on the cob, and
• baby bok choi.

In addition, I could spend up to $25 of money (extra would be carried over to the next pick-up) on a number of optional items. I chose some

• leeks,
• garlic,
• a package of stewing goat, and
• eggs.

They had a variety of meat items, and some beautiful preserves and jams available, as well as parsnips and other veggies.

I was tempted to start eating things last night, but I wanted to take some pictures of the food first.

Because it’s beautiful food.

Posted in Photography - documentary, Food - farmers' market, Food, grown, Food, SOLE food | 1 Comment »

3 December 2010 by pat.

Soil. Dirt. Humus.

It’s the quality of it that affects what and how much can be grown. It’s becoming more obvious every day that our wastrel ways with the soil must come to an end, and that our current ways of farming have to change in order to be able to grow food another day.

Why is all of this coming to my mind now? It’s a combination of things: I’m reading Lorraine Johnson’s The Gardener’s Manifesto, and this morning, read Why Farmers Are Flocking to Manure in the Atlantic. Michael Pollan’s  The Omnivore’s Dilemma introduced many of us to Joel Salatin, who carefully husbands his soil, pasture, crops and animals and rotates them to ensure the health of each.

About a year ago, I was arguing online after an article appeared in The Star about an architect who was designing the urban farms of the future — highrise buildings in which our foods would be grown hydroponically. I confess, I have unease about hydroponics.

I feel it is analogous to the futurists of the ’60’s who told us that our meals in the future would consist of eating a few little pills that would satisfy our every nutritional need: more than a little reductionist, yes? In the same way that we continue to discover what humans need nutritionally, we continue to learn what plants require, and what benefits a good, healthy soil provides the plants: nutrients, micronutrients, mycorrhizae, and who knows what we will discover next year.  How can we put all of what is needed into water for plants when we probably don’t know what everything is?

In the same way that a pile of chemicals contained in a human is not a human, is a pile of chemicals that we think are important in the soil the same as a healthy soil?

The age of artificial fertilizers seems to be coming to an end. The article in the Atlantic points to the rising costs of fertilizer in North America. Some farmers are now considering using CAFO manure to fertilize their fields, making for a smallish closed-loop environment — corn is used to feed the cows, put the cow manure in the field to feed the corn.

I would be happier if the manure was

• feeding crops other than the crazy amounts of corn grown in the US,
• coming from healthy animals that weren’t fed corn and
• properly composted.

My concerns from reading the article are that we’re going to create a situation where E. coli 0157:H7 becomes as endemic to our food system as salmonella is to factory-raised chickens. Cows (and other ungulates) really aren’t built to digest corn. They get sick. They shed the E. coli virus. If we’re then taking the unhealthy manure from CAFO cows and chickens and spreading it on fields, I think we’re risking more food recalls in the future. We’ve had recalls of carrots, lettuce, tomatoes, and other field crops in the last two years. Can we start to mend our ways, please?

I know some farmers are.

I used to work with Martti Lemieux. He’s now a farmer up near Sault Ste. Marie, and this year was president of the Algoma Farmers Market.  In his words, he farms “working on rapid topsoil development, high brix forages and nutrient dense, flavour rich grass-fed/finished beef, lamb, pork, poultry and produce.”

Please support your local farms through your local farmers’ markets. These are the farmers who are working to build their soil and will guarantee our future food supply.

Posted in Food - farmers' market, Food, grown, Food | 1 Comment »

22 November 2010 by pat.

A coming event is TEDxHartHouse.

The theme is The Future of Food, and it’s going to be held here in in Toronto on Dec. 6th.

I’ve applied to be invited: we’ll see if my application is accepted.

Posted in Food - farmers' market, Food, processed, Food, grown, Food, SOLE food | 4 Comments »

31 October 2010 by pat.

After coming back from the Ravagni tour and food, and a before-dinner drink at the café atop the old city wall, it was time to prepare dinner. One last look at the valley before walking around the corner to our apartment.

We scored a beautiful pork loin roast at one of the local butcher’s in the morning, we had ingredients for a risotto, and some tiny fishies… it was time to begin.

The first thing into the oven was some apples that Francesco had picked from one of the apple trees in his orchard for us. Betty decided they would make a great apple sauce to go with the roast pork loin, and popped them into the oven to roast. Fortunately, she improvised a lid to the roasting pan, because when she took them out of the oven, they had pretty much exploded and split their skins! Wow, not much mashing required!

I cleaned the fishies.

The larger ones to the right of the paper are the anchovies. Just regular sized anchovies, like the little fillets we get in tins or in jars with oil. That gives you an idea of their size. So you can see how little the other fish are! I cleaned the anchovies, and chopped the heads off the little ones (the gut came out with the head most of the time). Into a frying pan with some olive oil and chili flakes, then out onto a plate for group munching with a glass of wine. We mostly ate around the spine of the anchovies, and I think we ate the little ones whole.

Next, Sandy got the pork roast ready for the oven, and Betty prepared the risotto.

Pork roast was laid on top of chopped long onions, and simply seasoned with some rosemary from the windowbox:

Apple sauce done, roast ready to go into the oven.

Also part of this meal was a pan full of cipolline onions, slowly carmelized in the oven, drizzled with Balsamic vinegar. We got the idea from one of the stores in Arezzo that we had visited to get some antipasto.

Sandy served the pork roast sliced on top of a bed of apple sauce.

And we had Betty’s risotto with porcini mushrooms.

I think Betty made the salad, too!

Posted in Photography - documentary, Food - farmers' market, Food, SOLE food | 1 Comment »

14 October 2010 by pat.

After breakfast, espresso (for Betty and I) and tea (for Sandy), we headed down the hill to the Piazza Baldaccio Bruni for the local market. The Anghiari market wasn’t as large as the one in Sansepulcro, but I think it might have had almost as many food vendors!

There was a wonderful mix of fresh vegetables, fruit, meats, cheeses, fish! Sorry, I confess I didn’t pay much attention to the other vendors of cloth, kitchen gadgets, clothing, shoes, etc.

These ingredients made me want to play with food. Spicy cherry peppers, zucchini, eggplant and fennel: I bet I could make something with those!

The fennel looked great, and smelled fresh.

The next seller had lots of different types of fruit: several apple varieties, pears, oranges, even kiwi fruit.

These pears intrigued me: their look is longer than the ones I’m used to seeing.

As in Sansepulcro, you could buy plants for your own backyard vegetable garden. Cool weather crops — must be expecting some significant time before frost hits! This was the last full week of September.

They had some of what I consider the most attractive looking tomatoes: “Borgo,” they called them. I think I saw some of these at one of the local farmers’ markets this summer.

The melons have a level of sweetness and juiciness that doesn’t compare with melons grown to be transported 3000km!

I saw some fresh anchovies for sale! Had to get those for an appetizer for dinner for us. (I had run across the word “alici” a few days earlier, so I knew what they were).

a

I also saw these ones. They’re really small, about 2cm and a bit in length. The price was about 4 times the price for the anchovies — not sure what they were, but had to try them!

If only there was enough time to try all the different types of pecorino cheeses!

And sausages!

I took even more pictures at the market. To see them all, go to my Flickr page.

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12 October 2010 by pat.

As you may have read, we bought food at the Sansepulcro market on Tuesday morning, while we were staying in Anghiari. I seem to have been a bit timid in photographing vendors and their produce, so I don’t have as many photos of this market as I do of the others.

Nonetheless, here they are.It was late in the morning, so the light is very contrasty. All of the market stalls were on one long narrow street. The farmers and vendors must have the setup down to a science for who gets there when, and who sets up first, and how they’re organizing their stalls. Most of the food stalls were all at one end of the market, although the occasional one was dotted here and there in the rest of it.

The next vendor was fruit, fruit, fruit, of all kinds, very fresh.

I found the wares of the fellow selling meat and cheese very tantalizing.

Next to the anchovies, which are to the right of the cheeses, you’ll see a huge pile of sliced dried porcini mushrooms. This was a great time to be in Italy for mushrooms: we had some early season white truffles at a couple of restaurant, and fresh porcini were everywhere.

The next vendor had some of the most rainbow-colored tomatoes I’ve seen. Oops. On second look, they’re cherry peppers.

The markets in Italian villages aren’t just food markets: they’re markets with all kind of things that one might want, and not have a local store that provides. Clothing stalls with men’s, women’s, or children’s clothing; electronics (Sandy got an iPod car-plug-in recharger); kitchen gadgets, dinnerware, linens; seedlings; shoes!

I thought I took a picture of the young plants that were being sold at the market, but I don’t see it here in my downloads. The season is long enough in Tuscany that seedlings of cruciferous vegetables, lettuce, and onion sets were being sold for people to plant in their back vegetable gardens, so there must be time for another harvest of cool weather crops.The market started to peter out at one point where two roads intersected. There were a few vendors on the side arms of the second road, and it was spacious enough that I could stand back and take a picture of the vendors.

After getting our purchases, it was time to drive again across the plain where the Battle of Anghiari was fought in the 1400s.

Posted in Home gardens, Food - farmers' market, Food | 1 Comment »

7 October 2010 by pat.

Tuesday morning we hit the market down the road in Sansepulcro. It’s the long, straight road, Corso Giacomo Matteotti then Via della Battaglia, that goes from the business district near the Baldaccio Piazza down the hillside and across to Sansepulcro. We didn’t know where in town the market would be held, but figured we’d find it.

Sure enough, a couple of signs, a turn-around, a glimpse here and there down a street, and Sandy’s parking karma held, as she found a lot that was nearby with empty spaces. The market in Sansepulcro is linear. One long street, from one end to… wherever the vendors petered out.

So we shopped there, and decided that we should use up some of the tomato-based sauce left over from Monday night in Tuesday’s dish. So the tomatoes needed a bit of augmentation, and some other sauce ingredients were purchased. They had some lovely looking clams and mussels at one stall, so those were purchased, too. I’m afraid I’ve forgotten if the pasta noodles were purchased there or at one of the little supermarkets in town.

Dinner was a three-person preparation affair: Sandy prepped and laid out the antipasto; Betty made the sauce and pasta, and I dealt with the seafood.

The antipasto was delicious, comprised of some meats purchased the previous day in Arezzo, some olives, sun-dried tomatoes, and some exquisite cipoline onions that had been carmelized with slow cooking and then given some sharpness and bite with vinegar.

Simultaneously, Betty developed the pasta sauce for the night:

and I cleaned the shellfish, knocking on them with a spoon and listening for if they sounded alive. Most of the clams were fine; a fair number of the mussels had to get tossed.

Once the seafood was cleaned and the sauce had reached an appropriate thickness (needed to compensate for the fact that it would thin out a bit once the shellfish opened  and released some liquid into it), first the mussels and then the clams went into the sauce.

One quick stir, and the lid went on the pot until the shells opened.

The pasta water was boiling; we figured the fresh pasta and molluscs would require about the same amount of time to cook, so Betty added the noodles to the water. The egg yolks here are a very rich color (I made an omelette one day for the three of us for breakfast), and make for a very yellow pasta.

With pasta ready and bivalves opened (well, most of them), it was time to serve up bowls of pasta and allow each of us to add the amount of sauce and shellfish to our dishes as we wanted! Again, the meal was accompanied by Tuscan bread and wine from Ravagni.

In photo: Betty (l) and Sandy (r).

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12 September 2010 by pat.

Last weekend I bought peaches to make the peach tart described earlier in the blog. I had two peaches left over, which I left in the paper bag. They continued to ripen, and were flavourfully fragrant and quite soft when I remembered to check on them today!

Trying to figure out what to do with them, I decided I wanted them to be part of a main dish, not a dessert (mostly because I seldom eat desserts). Alas, I couldn’t do a proper Beyond-the-Fringe Frog a la peche, so I had to come up with something else.

I decided to make a curry: curries work well with fruit (think: dried apricot, or raisins, or currants) so I thought that fresh peach would work well.

I went over to Meating on Queen (local organic butcher), and bought three magnificent bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs.

I brought them home, and browned them in a little bit of olive oil in my cast iron skillet. Then removed them to a bowl while I sautéed some chopped onions, and then added two chopped (freestone, peeled) peaches to them. Sautéed for a while longer, then added a few tablespoons of curry powder, mixed well, and added some white wine to make a sauce. Cooked it for a bit, then put the chicken back in the skillet, put a lid on it all, and transferred to the oven at 350F.

After a half hour, I added some roasted cashews to the mix, and put some brown basmati rice on to cook.

45 minutes later, dinner’s ready to eat. Here’s the skillet as it came out of the oven.

Had a piece of chicken with curried peaches and cashews  on some basmati rice. The sauce thickened up very nicely. For additional heat, I had a bottle of Himalaya Gourmet Hot Carrot Pickle in the fridge that I bought at the Cabbagetown festival.

That, and a green salad, made for a very enjoyable dinner.

And I have leftover chicken for other meals.

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10 September 2010 by pat.

Working at home means, frequently, making lunch at home (unless escaping for a spot to meet with others due to cabin fever!).

Today, while rummaging through the fridge, I found a few ingredients that should be eaten up before going bad. They included:

• Oven-roasted side bacon from Witteveen’s at the St. Lawrence Market
• Polenta
• One white mushroom
• Frozen spinach

First into the pan went the bacon, followed shortly by the polenta, and then the chopped mushroom. I microwaved the spinach on the plate.

What was missing? I could have used a clove of garlic and a cipolinni onion in the frying pan, added just after the bacon and before the polenta. Maybe a few (rinsed) salt-cured capers, some chopped sun-dried tomato that had been preserved in oil, to bump up the color quotient, and add a little bit of bite.

I should have noted the name of the mushrooms when I purchased them at Phil’s Place at the St. Lawrence Market. They’re delicious: I’ve bought them there before. Big meaty mushrooms that do well in a frying pan, absorb the flavours of things they’re cooked with, but don’t have a very strong flavour of their own. Here’s a picture of two of them. The plate they’re sitting on is 6″x6″, so you can see that they’re a good size. If I recall, they were $9.99/lb.

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6 September 2010 by pat.

 I documented the process

There was prep work that had to be done before flinging the ingredients together.

First, I toasted the sliced almonds in a frying pan. It didn’t take long to toast them over a medium heat.

I tossed them constantly.

Next, I had to prepare the fresh peaches. First, a pot of boiling water, and I blanched them by boiling them for almost a minute.

Next step was to peel them. They peeled really easily, thanks to the blanching. Peel came off in big strips.

Then came the challenge! These were supposed to be freestone peaches, so they should release easily from their pits. Would they?

I cut around a peach, grasped the two halves, and rotated. Yes! They easily separated, and the pit came out without any fuss. Then I chopped the peaches all up

.

Now it was time to make the pastry dough. I did some prep work by chopping the butter and putting it back in the fridge to cool, and by cooling some water in the freezer so it wouldn’t melt the butter when I added it.

Following the instructions on the pate brisée page, I pulsed the dry ingredients together, then added the butter.

A few more pulses, and then a few tablespoons of water, followed by a few more pulses, gives the following result.Next, pat it together into a ball on a floured surface. Handle as little as possible.Mix all the filling ingredients together.Roll out the dough, put the ingredients in the middle, and pull the edges of the dough up over the ingredients.Bake in the oven at 350F for 45 minutes to an hour. I regret to say that mine hadn’t browned after an hour, so I quickly put it under the broiler, but didn’t remove it fast enough: hence, it’s a little… umm… dark on top.

Posted in Food - farmers' market, Food, recipes, Food | 2 Comments »