Interview: Laura Reinsborough and non-profit leadership

15 February 2011 by pat.

As I wrote last week, I attended the ceremony for the Yves Rocher Foundation’s Women of the Earth awards last Thursday. I recorded Laura Reinsborough’s speech, and interviewed her afterward at Allen Gardens. My edited interview is now up on YouTube.

Shot with my iPod Touch, edited in iMovie.

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Being inspired by Women of the Earth

11 February 2011 by pat.

Yesterday I was fortunate to receive an invitation to attend the 2011 Women of the Earth Awards, a project of the Yves Rocher Foundation, and sponsored by Coup de Pouce, Elle Magazine, greenliving, and The Nature Conservancy of Canada.

 

Sometimes we feel “what can I do? I’m just a single person.”  Then we get paralyzed, and don’t take any action.

 

Yesterday I learned what three remarkable women have done in Canada.

 

 

The first prize winner is Marie Rose Bain. She’s the founder and director of the Hortico-Agricultural Centre in Cayes, Haiti. The organization she has founded is helping the women of Cayes to plant and cultivate food: food to feed themselves, their families, and food to grow to feed others, to allow them to earn money to support their families. Marie Rose will be heading back down to Haiti at the end of next week.

 

The second prize winner is Laura Reinsborough, the founder and director of Not Far From The Tree. From an opportunity with a few friends to pick the fruit at Spadina House in 2007, Laura has built an organization of 750 volunteers who picked over 20,000 lbs of fruit last year. Each year, they’re expanding into new neighbourhoods, documenting more city-owned trees that can be picked (thanks, Mayor Miller, for granting them permission to pick the fruit!), and expanding into new projects. This year, their pilot project of tapping Norway Maples is going live as a full project: maple syrup for the masses! Not Far From The Tree donates a third of all the fruit picked to food banks, shelters, and community kitchens in the neighbourhood. The harvest potential of the city is huge, as is the growing potential. I interviewed Laura yesterday, and will be posting the edited video on YouTube. Stay tuned.

 

Third prize went to Nicole Meunier, the founder and director of Puits Eau Mali (Wells in Mali). From seeing how children looked longingly at her bottle of water when she was a tourist in Mali, she and her husband have spearheaded an organization that has now dug 10 wells, providing water to 5,000 people. But that’s not all: once you have water, you can plant trees, and have shade. You can start growing food. As one person in Mali told her, “water is life.”

 

Three women, three different stories about three different projects in three different places.

 

Women making a difference, affecting lives.

 

We all can: if not by launching our own project, then by supporting one of the existing projects that is out there, like these ones.

 

It was a truly inspirational afternoon.

 

Many thanks to Kim Galvez for inviting me.

 

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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!

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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 »

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.

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Wednesday night dinner, Anghiari

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 »

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.

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Tuesday a.m., Anghiari market

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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Using very ripe peaches

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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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?

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Yes, I finished the soup!

25 April 2010 by pat.

But forgot to blog about it!

It ended up taking the whole evening to make the stock, so I made the soup the following evening.

I had two bunches of wild leeks, and I cut them apart at the bottom of the leaf.

Sautéed the bulbs and stems along with a couple of onions, and then added the stock from the previous night together with some potatoes, cut into 6 to 8 pieces each, depending on the size of the potato. There were probably about 3 pounds of potatoes. Also added some black pepper. Would have added some nutmeg, but I seemed to have used it all up. Must remember to buy some more.

Simmered until the potatoes were cooked, and then roughly chopped and added the leek leaves to the mix, and cooked for about 5 more minutes.

Removed from heat, waited for it to cool a bit, and then used my stick blender to turn it into a homogenous soup.

It’s good hot, it’s good cold. I like it cold with a little drizzle of white truffle olive oil!

I’ve frozen it in two sizes: hefty meal and soup appetizer.

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Know your meat source

16 April 2010 by pat.

More and more people are becoming vegetarians and vegans. When I read the linked article, I understand more of them.

I’m still doing what I can to purchase my meat from small organic establishments: Witteveen at the St. Lawrence Market on weekdays, the farmers who sell pig, goat, and lamb at the north market on Saturdays.

Please don’t buy meat from CAFOs. If you haven’t seen Food, Inc., watch it. Read some of the books that have been written in the last few years (including Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food).

Oh — that link: Tom Philpott’s Grist.org.  Michael Ruhlmann pointed to this article in a tweet today.

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

Brunch at the Black Hoof Café

11 April 2010 by pat.

Yesterday morning I had the pleasure of having brunch with Cheryl from Autodesk at the Black Hoof’s newest spot, the café directly across the street from the original.

We arrived at 11am, which seems like a good time to go: only had about a 5 minute wait until we were seated (line up was out the door by the time we left). Yummy menu. We had difficulties deciding what to get!

Eventually we settled on tongue grilled cheese sandwich (Cheryl, who accepted the waiter’s recommendation to get that over the blood sausage & crepes, since she had not eaten here before) and pig tails & grits (Pat). Plus French press coffee (two pots thereof).

We shared :-)The tongue grilled cheese sandwich was wonderfully rich and flavourful: swiss cheese, and the tongue had been turned into a preserved meat somehow (didn’t ask for info, unfortunately) and sliced very thin — was a very rich corned beef kind of taste.

The pig tails were shredded meat that was shaped into kind of a rectangular sausage that had been crisped on the outside: yummy, rich, and didn’t have to deal with all those little bones. The grits were creamy, tasty, a little sweet, and topped by two perfectly poached eggs.  A little crispy chip (tasted like Munchos — remember them?) was on the top and gave some crunch to the dish.

We still had room for a little more, so Cheryl ordered the donut holes, stuffed with marrow and rhubarb jam. Little gems, about the size of a marble, dusted with sugar. Added that little bit of sweetness to say that the meal was done (that’s when we had the second pot of coffee).

I’ll be back. There was so much on the menu that looked good! Definitely have to try the suckling pig benny: three people at the next table all ordered it, and it looked scrumptious.

I’m also curious about fried artichokes & broth.

Unlike at the parent restaurant, there seem to be a number of items that a vegetarian could enjoy here: granola, salad, rapini pesto & pasta, and toast with jam and goat butter. Food for all!

Posted in Food, dining out, Food, SOLE food | 6 Comments »

Roasting a bird with Anchovies on it - part deux

31 January 2010 by pat.

I roasted a fowl using anchovies instead of salt.

Given it was an experiment, and just me at home, I didn’t want to do something large like a turkey. So I bought an organic cornish hen over at Whitehouse Meats at the St. Lawrence Market. It was only 1-1/4 lbs, so I wouldn’t be wasting a lot of food if it turned out horrible.

Rinsed the bird, did the wing fold over so they don’t flop, and placed it on its back, so it would be breast side up. Peeled and halved an onion, and stuffed it in the cavity. Opened a can of Spanish anchovies that I had at home that were wrapped around capers. They were harder in texture than most anchovies I’ve bought in the past. Still, I spread a few of them across the bird’s breast and nestled some of the capers in places like the leg joints.  Not a whole lot of fat on the bird, so I used a bit of olive oil.

Basted a few times while it was cooking (I gave it 1 hour and 15 at just below 350F), and gradually the anchovies softened, and I smashed them around a little.

While it was resting, I microwaved some kale I had washed and torn into bite-sized pieces. Gave it a light sprinkling of sesame oil, tossed, and put them both on the dinner plate.

Verdict? I really enjoyed the taste. It wasn’t overly fishy, but the anchovies provided some of that “umami” feel that makes food really mouth satisfying. I’ll definitely do it again, and next time, I might smear some truffle paste on it, too!

Addendum: last week I did a 1.5kg organic chicken the same way. I needed to start basting earlier than I did, because the anchovy fillets didn’t break down as much. But it was still very tasty.

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