Last stop of the day in Prince Edward County: Mushrooms!

15 August 2011 by pat.

In the ongoing downpour, we decided to stop for lunch in Wellington. Alas, I was elected the one to leave the car to find out if the restaurant Sandy and Susan had picked out was open (only fair: Susan was driving and Sandy was in the back seat). No dice. The  restaurant was closed, and wasn’t going to be opening that day. I don’t even remember what it was called, unfortunately, and Google Earth has a really shitty low-resolution map of Wellington and no Street View, so I can’t tell you what it is from walking down the street and stopping just before the traffic light. But it was a place Sandy and Susan were hoping we could get to for lunch, since it was too rainy to eat outdoors at any of the wineries with restaurants.

So we went halfway down the block to the Devonshire Inn for lunch, and had some lovely local fare of salads, pork, and fish. While we were finishing up and talking to the waitress, the topic somehow got onto mushrooms and the local mushroom farm/factory. Heck, what else are you going to do on a rainy Wednesday afternoon? We went off to Highline Mushrooms, just past the corner of Gilead and Conley. Go to their website if you want to learn about the place. I’d love to do a tour some time. What they offered was a price list and a fridge full of mushrooms at really great prices.

Price list:

“Cafe” are what they call cremini mushrooms at the grocery store. Ports are portabellas. Susan bought a box of mushrooms, but I’m not sure which variety. Here’s how big a box is.

That’s lots of mushrooms to dry, confit, turn into a spread to go on toast with some paté… oh yes, I could imagine doing things with lots of mushrooms.

Posted in Food of a place, Food, grown, Food, SOLE food | 1 Comment »

The county’s bounty

7 August 2011 by pat.

Sandy and I went to Prince Edward County and surrounding areas for a speedy 48 hours this week. We took the train to and from Belleville, and were able to relax in the air conditioning and work, using wifi, both ways. It was a great trip, and I came back with some good pictures and wonderful things.

Susan, who moved to the area recently, met us at the train station in her jaunty convertible, and we began our adventures.

Our first stop was at Maple Dale Cheese in Plainfield. Unfortunately, I didn’t take my camera with me into the store! What a wealth of cheese, local preserves, and other goods that go with cheese. I came away with some roasted garlic oil, cheddar shortbreads, garlic cheese curds, Mediterranean Trimmings cheese (contains green olives, sundried tomatoes, roasted garlic and sweet basil) and a hunk of X-Hot Smoked Cheddar. Other interesting cheeses they have include a beer-rinsed cheddar, a horseradish cheddar, and a number of flavoured curd cheeses. I confess, a lot of it is now in the freezer as soon as I photographed it, because there is only so much cheese I can eat. Sandy and Susan also picked up some cheeses for our afternoon snack (more later).

After Maple Dale, we continued deep into farming country and ended up at the farm and red barn of Chef Drew Ferguson, who grows garlic and is a professor at the Culinary School of Loyalist College. What a beautiful place: the barn was filled with hanging garlic. Alas, Drew wasn’t there for us to winkle some recipes from him, but Betty was, fortunately, so we were able to purchase some.

Of course, we couldn’t walk away empty-handed: both Sandy and I got hanging bunches, and Susan got a big bundle of small heads of garlic. She’s planning on doing some garlic pickling!

From there, it was over to Susan’s place near Roslin, and a tour of her century home and the renovations she’s been making since she moved in in June. The next order of the day was to sit in the shade of the oak tree and eat cheese and pickles and drink wine. Sandy and Susan were in charge of the food: I hauled garden furniture.

We were joined for dinner by Carole and Margot, two of Susan’s friends who have homes in the area.

Susan slow-roasted ribs, made a wonderful salad, and we continued with cheese and olives and pickled garlic. Dessert was amazing polvorons - shortbreads with cinnamon and pork fat that Susan brought back with her on a trip to Spain.  Absolutely delicious.

After dinner, it was time to pull out the Bocce set, and play the game, until the mosquitoes got to us.

Getting dark, time to go in.

The next day, Wednesday, it rained until about 7 in the evening (when we got home!). Susan bravely soldiered on, driving us hither and yon, and we went to a number of places:

• County Cider,
• a house that had an honour system set up for buying maple syrup,
• Fifth Town Cheese
• Black River Cheese
• The Carriage House Cooperage
• and
• Highline Mushroom Farm.

More about them in future blog posts!

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Photograph: this week’s CSA box

27 February 2011 by pat.

I did miss photographing the box one week, but I’m back to it again. This time, I took advantage of some of the things Herb Chong showed me on the weekend, and I shot 5 images, at one stop separations (and f/16) — exposures from 30seconds through to 3 seconds at the high end. I then selected the five images in Bridge, brought them into Photoshop as an HDR, and did some processing. This is the result. The light for this image is all through the window, about 4 feet away.

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Dinner challenge & recipe test

8 February 2011 by pat.

It’s pretty much a rule that if you’re going to test out a recipe for the first time, you make it at least once before you serve it to guests.

I broke that rule on Sunday.

I had Sandy, Damir, and Betty over for dinner. I was testing recipes for Natalie MacLean’s new book that will be coming out this fall.

Wherever possible, I bought local organic. When local organic wasn’t available, I bought local. When it wasn’t available, I bought organic (this great hierarchy of food choice courtesy of David Suzuki).

We started with martinis and some white kidney bean purée I made by cooking up the beans and using the stick blender on them and a little bit of the water they cooked in, and added a little drizzle of white truffle oil and a pinch of salt, and served it with triangles of whole wheat pita.

I made the martinis a little different by including a wee drip of VSOP brandy that had been drowning green peppercorns since December 9th, and popped a few peppercorns into the bottom of each glass.

From then, it was food & wine.First stop: oyster chowder. This was a really tasty recipe. Served it up with Altana Di Vico pinot grigio 2009.

Next recipe had me out in the kitchen cooking for a while; fortunately, I had prepared the green pea & thyme puree (shelled the peas myself!) and the semolina gnocchi in advance. So I roasted up some young pigeon (squab) breasts and a partridge, too, because Whitehouse meats only had 3 pigeons left! It’s quite expensive there: I’m going to take a look this week when I’m at T&T with Betty to see if they have pigeon, and see where it’s from and what the cost is. It’s a lovely meat: dark, juicy, flavourful, but not strong and gamey or liver-tasting, which had worried some.

We drank Betty’s Peppoli Chianti Classico from 2008 with this dish. I almost forgot to take a picture, which is why there are fork marks in my pea purée!

On to the fourth course! Lamb croquettes. Definitely the most labour-intensive dish (had to prepare it over 3 days… I could have done it in one day, but it would have had me worrying about coordination with other dishes).

Awesome. Totally AWESOME. Crunchy on the outside, rich lamb flavour and melt-in-your-mouth inside. Very rich. The recipe suggests serving it with an endive salad, so I made a very simple salad of endive leaves, ruby-red grapefruit slices, some very old balsamic vinegar that almost wouldn’t pour any more because it was so thick, and a little olive oil. Just something simple and a little acidic to balance the richness.

And with that, we had an awesome wine from Sandy and Damir: K1 by Geoff Hardy, a 2002 Cabernet Sauvignon from the Adelaide Hills. It was a numbered bottle, #3910 of only 5000. It did a slow, smouldering tango with the lamb: they were a perfect pair.

After that, a little break (we needed a break, really) and then some panna cotta for dessert (blackberries from the St. Lawrence farmers’ market that I bought and froze, raspberry syrup from the Royal Agricultural Winter Fair made by Lennox Farms in Shelburne) with another half-bottle of Betty’s Chianti.

All in all, dinner was a success. Definitely didn’t throw any food out: everyone cleaned their plates. Only complaint was that I spent too much time in the kitchen and not enough with my guests!

Next time, they’ll be served a big plate of pasta and a salad, and I’ll spend all my time with them. Or I’ll barbecue something (it had better be warmer out).

This coming Sunday I’m cooking for Steve & Rob & Joanne — more new recipes!

Posted in Photography - documentary, Food, recipes, Food, grown, Food, SOLE food | 1 Comment »

My first winter CSA delivery

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 »

Feeding the soil that feeds us

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 »

And speaking of TED…

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 »

TED talk: food, food honesty, foie gras

16 November 2010 by pat.

Dan Barber talks about foie. This goes places you may not expect: the history of foie gras, the way one Spaniard (Eduardo Sousa) has been able to create an award-winning natural foie gras, and how it all relates to so much we do with food. Please, if you have the twenty minutes it takes, watch this video.

Posted in Food, grown, Food, SOLE food | No Comments »

Wednesday afternoon with olives and grapes

28 October 2010 by pat.

While we were based in Anghiari, our go-to vintner was the Ravagni store just opposite the main piazza.

From our landlord (all around great guy, W. Weston Bielby) we learned that Ravagni provides tours, olive oil tastings, and scrumptious meals.

We managed to get into an afternoon olive oil and wine tasting and lunch on Wednesday. We were going to latch on to a larger tour group. We got there a little early, so had a chance to walk around before the rest of the group got there.

We could definitely smell things fermenting!

Olives weren’t quite ripe yet, but they were beautiful.

It was yet another beautiful day to walk around: not too hot, not cool, not much of a breeze. We walked around the olive grove, and stopped to look at the size of the old grinding wheel that was at the edge of the road.

Meticulous — can one call olive trees an orchard? Row after straight row of trees.

We walked around the buildings, and I liked the view from above the grouping.

We went back to the parking area as we saw the bus arrive, and followed the bus up to another area, another set of buildings, and followed the people into one of the buildings.

The tour was on! This was the first piece of machinery we encountered.

You can get a sense of how large these wheels are by comparing the size of people beside the machine. Whole olives are fed into this from the trap, above. They’re crushed by the weight of the stones. We were told that it’s important to be on the look-out when the wheels are moving, because pits from the olives do squish out and fly across the room. Oil that is freed from the olives at this stage of the process is called Mosto.

Next, the crushed olives are placed on woven mats. Here’s Francesco describing the process. There’s a mat in front of him. Blurry I know; he’s an animated man, and I had to use a slow shutter inside.

Layer of olives, another mat, another layer of olives… stacked 5 deep. The stack is made between two metal disks. Here are some of the cleaned disks.

Wasn’t quite olive season, so everything was waiting for harvest.

A thick stack would be made of disks, mats, and crushed olives, and these would be placed on the press.

Wondering how much pressure gets applied?

I love machinery. Here’s the wheel to tighten the disk array on the press.

In pressing season, Francesco plans to have a live Internet camera on the procedings! That’s the camera, top left corner of the spiral staircase.

From there, we went up to the house and store. Lovely landscape to look out on.

Through the grape arbour toward the courtyard. That’s Sandy.

Green grapes.

Horse chestnuts abounded. I placed a few up on the stone wall separating the courtyard from the grape arbour and took a shot.

Next, a table was added to the end of the long table for Sandy, Betty and I to join the tour. This tour group is a group of people who are staying at a villa in Tuscany, taking cooking classes for the week. They’re from all over: a number of Americans, some from Texas, the Carolinas, and elsewhere; an Australian; I couldn’t quite catch where everyone else was from. They made some great food in their classes; Maria Yates told us about an exquisite Balsamic gelato they made!

We first tasted olive oils by drizzling some on hunks of hearty bread (put the oil on the bread, not on the plate!). Francesco, one of the directors of Ravagni and a member of the Bartolomei family, described the process, growing, and subtleties of the different oils we were sampling.

Francesco’s family has a dog. He came by for petting (maybe for scraps from lunch?). Very friendly, well-behaved.

Betty volunteered to take pictures for the cooking class. So they all grouped up, and Betty used each of their cameras to take a shot at them.

Of course, it’s unfair to take a photo of the photographer without also providing one of the group!

While the cooking class was making their purchases in the store, I wandered around again. This is my favourite bunch of grapes of all time. I will be offering a duo of prints of this and the green grapes.

Little tiny figs were growing. They’ve got a while until they ripen.

The shop is in the basement of this building.

Here is a commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the birth of two of the ancestors. The first person we met at the Ravagni store was Virgilio, so I suspect he was named after his great(?)grandfather:

After the crowd cleared, we made our purchases in the store, enjoyed a little grappa, and were shown the cantina. Sort of like a cold-cellar, it’s a deep conical section in the house that holds wine, including what look like some very old bottles! A steep ladder goes to the bottom.

It was a wonderful afternoon. I have some tiny bottles of mosto that I squirrelled away in my suitcase. I have great memories, too, and will be looking to watch some olive oil pressing on the video camera!

Late in the afternoon, we returned to Anghiari, parked the car, and looked out over the river valley.

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

Sustainable native back-yard gardening: edibles

27 August 2010 by pat.

How’s that for a subject line to push all the buttons?I attended a seminar by Lorraine Johnson at the Brick Works, back in July, on just that subject. Lots of food for thought, and lots of books to consider getting, including:

• Identifying and harvesting edible and medicinal plants  - Steve Brill
• City Farmer - Lorraine Johnson
• Peterson Field guide to edible wild plants

It was a fact-filled morning, discussed fruit, veggies, and mushrooms, and included some things I hadn’t even considered. We’re at the northern edge of the Paw-paw’s range (Carolingian forest), and it seems they were never commercially grown because there wasn’t much of a way to save them — they don’t transport well, they don’t stay fresh long — so they never caught on big with the population. I’d only heard of them in a southern play that got used a lot in scene study classes (can’t even remember what it was called! about 3 sisters).

She described it as very tropical looking… like a small mango, and with an interesting taste, like banana and pineapple and custard all together. To me, it sounds like it should be ice cream at the very least, and probably would make a good cream pie flavour.

These days, we can refrigerate or freeze fruit, which wasn’t available back when.

So it was interesting to hear Lorraine talk about them, and what’s needed to actually get harvestable fruit in the fall.

The tree, which under the most optimal conditions, can grow up to 30 feet tall, is more likely to max out at about 10-15 in our climate, so a medium-height shrub. And they grow slowly. It needs filtered light in its early years, and then full sun when it is established. It doesn’t like wind; it does like high humidity (sounds like Toronto summers!)

The one problem? Lorraine said 3 trees are needed for cross-pollination.

Hey, who says they all have to be in one yard? Given the size of downtown backyards — about 17 feet across, maybe 20-30 feet deep, if three neighbours got together and each planted one, there’d be plenty of paw-paws to go around. Sounds like fertilization is mostly through insects (but not bees). So they can’t be too far apart. Most insects aren’t known for long-term memory.

It’s hard to find them in garden centers now, because there isn’t demand. And there isn’t demand, because people don’t know about them. So it’s kind of a vicious circle. But just as the whole 100-mile diet thing really got started with two writers reporting for the Tyee, maybe Lorraine can start things up here… she told a bunch of us, and if we each tell a bunch of people, and can collectively get people to plant them, then we’d bring back a tree that’s almost been completely extirpated from our ecosystem. And who knows what else that might help?  Definitely the zebra-swallowtail butterfly!

More info about Paw-paws here.

I think it sounds like an interesting project… some garden centres may carry them: Lorraine mentioned Grimo, in Niagara.

What do you think?

Posted in Urban nature, Home gardens, Food, grown, Food, SOLE food | No Comments »

Interesting workshops at the Brick Works

14 July 2010 by pat.

From a link on Facebook, I discovered that the Brick Works, through Green City Workshops, is running a number of gardening workshops this year, for only $15 each (sign up by emailing ebw@evergreen.ca! limited space available!)

 The workshops are:

• Edible Native Landscapes (July 17)
• Harvesting & Preserving Toronto’s Urban Orchard (Aug 15)
• The Natural Beauty of Native Plants: Great Plant Pairings (Sept 11)
• A Drought-Tolerant Toronto Garden (Sept 18)
• Gardening for Songbird Conservation (Oct 2)
• Food Cycles Urban Farm Project (Nov 6)

I’m planning to attend three of them (first and last two). Maybe I’ll see you there?

Posted in Home gardens, Gardening, Food, grown, Food | 1 Comment »

8 lbs of green San Marzano tomatoes

12 October 2008 by pat.

It hasn’t been a good year for tomatoes: long, slow cool spring, lots of rain. Actually, wasn’t a good year for jalapenos, either. They just disappeared.

There just isn’t enough time for my heirloom San Marzano tomatoes to ripen before we get frost. I haven’t seen any turn red: I think they’ve been taken when they turn orange. It’s not the rodents, because they just eat things in situ, and the stem end of the tomato remains on the plant.So this weekend I decided it was time to harvest what is out there, and decide which ones I’m going to try to ripen indoors, and which ones I’ll turn into some green tomato recipe. I’ve got 8 lbs of them, so I have lots of room to experiment.My front garden didn’t develop many weeds this summer: the 4 tomato plants pretty much overran the garden. Pulling the plants out today has left my garden much emptier! I still have a few rosebuds that may bloom.Anybody have a favorite recipe for green paste tomatoes?

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Now I’ve done it

12 May 2008 by pat.

I took a little walk to East End Garden centre yesterday to buy plants for the two planters (front living room window, front of porch) that are sitting completely empty. Bought some lovely plants (potato vines, double impatiens, petunias). Also saw some other plants that I couldn’t quite resist, because I had such luck last summer.

I bought 4 San Marzano tomato plants.If you know my house and its situation, you know that my back yard has become almost completely shaded over the last eleven years. So it’s definitely not a place to grow tomatoes.So I will be planting them in the front garden. Among the roses. Heck, flower and vegetable gardens were never separate things in the middle ages to Renaissance. The French called them potagers.Why not? Maybe the thorns will help protect them from raccoons and other thieves. If not, I bought another set of four plants to serve as centurions guarding the tomatoes.Jalapeno peppers.I chortle with glee. We’ll see if I’m successful. My front yard, although it gets more sun than my back yard, doesn’t get anywhere near as much sun as the allotment gardens at the base of Leslie Street get.Cross your fingers for me!

Posted in Home gardens, Gardening, Food, grown, Food | 3 Comments »

Enjoying last summer’s bounty

9 March 2008 by pat.

Just felt like taking a picture of some of my tomatoes thawing. I liked the frosted look.

It’s a mix of Romas and San Marzanos. Thaw them, slip the skins off and cut them in bits, then turn them into to pasta sauce. Memories of summer!

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2.5 kilos (just over 5 lbs)

12 September 2007 by pat.

More tomatoes.I think, however, that this is the last of the Caspian pinks for the season.There are still many more Black Cherries, San Marzanos, and Romas to come.Several of the birdhouse gourds have serious munches on them, and are not likely to be useful. I’ve left them on the vine, hoping (maybe against hope) that this will persuade the beasties not to munch the other ones, because they’re obviously not tasty.We’ll see if there are any harvestable ones by the middle of October.

Posted in Gardening, Food, grown, Food, Allotment garden, SOLE food | No Comments »