It has been a long time since I posted, basically a year!  In that year I have been working as a high school science teacher at a local private school here in Kitchener.  It’s been great to be back in a school teaching biology, chemistry, and even math.  In my free time I’ve been eating lots of homegrown kale (mostly in salad form) and brewing with local hops.

One of the projects that I had wanted to work on for a long time but kept dragging my feet about was an idea called “Homestead City.”  My brother-in-law, Graham, and I came up with a few pilot episodes featuring my family and a couple of our good friends from our neighborhood.

The premise of this project was an idea I’ve talked about before on this blog, that you can’t do or make everything from scratch when you live in the city, have a job, a family, a small yard (or no yard), and so on, but you can do something!  And when you connect with your neighbors, friends, and other community members, together you can create a homestead out of your city.

In the past year Graham has taken the project to Toronto where he has worked with a crew to develop a series of episodes for television.  Stay tuned for more news about when you can see the full series, and in the meantime here’s the pilot episode featuring The Local Kitchener and his family:

The next two weeks we will be cooking almost entirely from one cookbook.  We received the cookbook from our  good friend who works in publishing (and yes, it is very nice to have friends like that!).  The cookbook comes from the brilliant cooks behind Cooks Illustrated, a magazine that is known for its recipes being thoroughly tested.

The book is called The Complete Vegetarian Cookbook (available locally as well as from Amazon.com and Amazon.ca), and it’s put out by America’s Test Kitchen.  Basically it’s a compilation of all the vegetarian recipes from Cooks Illustrated.  What I’ve always loved about that magazine is the length they go to in explaining why their recipe works, and that’s included with every single recipe in this book.

You might see a few reoccurring ingredients in the 2 week meal plan that follows.  One is barley, specifically pearl barley.  It turns out I ordered us a 12 kg sack of that wonderful stuff from Bailey’s and now we’ll be working our way through it all winter.  The other common ingredients are kale and squash, because they’re healthy and delicious, but more importantly they’re local and abundant right now.

Keep in mind that you can keep harvesting your kale until it’s completely covered in snow (and it will just taste better and better!).  And winter squash has “winter” in its name because it can be stored through much of the winter.  Yes, it can and should be enjoyed now but it’s good to stock up and fill your pantry with it too so you can eat it until March or sometimes April if you store enough.

Butternut is one of the best keepers in our experience, whereas acorn squash doesn’t hold up quite as long.  The only real way of knowing what keeps best in your climate is by buying a wide variety of squash and keeping an eye on them.  Whenever one gets a soft spot it needs to be eaten quickly.

The links provided are mostly to recipes that are similar to ones in the cookbook, but in many cases they are not nearly as thorough as those in the book.  If your local library carries the book you should definitely check it out, but if not I feel like this is a worthwhile book to own (of course we got our copy for free so it’s easy for me to say!).

Nov. 1-14

• Monday – Red Pepper Polenta Triangles (our own invention, but similar to this), Kale Caesar Salad (we briefly fry the kale to soften it a bit)
• Tuesday – Barley Risotto (we made it vegetarian, but otherwise it’s like Michael Smith’s recipe), Sweet and Sour Cabbage Apple Salad (we omitted the fennel and it was still great), Glazed Beets (along these lines, but with jam for the sweetener)
• Wednesday – Roasted Red Pepper and Winter Squash Soup (recipe coming soon), Fresh Bread

• Thursday – Braised Kale and Butternut, Celeriac Sweet Potato Roesti
• Friday – Smoky Pumpkin Empanadas
• Saturday – Spaghetti Night, Salad
• Sunday – Pulled Pork Tacos
• Monday – Pumpkin and Kale Bread Pudding, Roasted Beet Salad
• Tuesday – Carrot Ginger Soup, Fresh Sourdough Bread
• Wednesday – Barley Kale Tabbouleh, Sweet Potato Fries, Broccoli and Cheese Sauce

• Thursday – Frozen Quiche, Salad
• Friday – Pizza Night

This post is shared at Menu Plan Monday which is a great resource for meal ideas!

Ever since I began thinking more about the food I eat—and this includes reading books, watching films, following blogs, and lots of cooking and eating—I’ve been rather hung up on the idea of tradition.  I find myself lamenting the fact that North America does not seem to have its own traditional cuisine (unless I count fast food).

The more I explore different food cultures and traditions the more I realize that in this modern world most food cultures and traditions are being influenced and changed by one another.  This is helping me see that the food culture of North America has the potential to be the most unique and exciting since this is a land filled from all cultures of the world.

Here in Ontario, TVO has been exploring the role of food in our lives through a new project called The Food Chain.   In TVO’s words, “it is a multiplatform series of documentaries and current affairs as well as discussions and articles looking at what we eat, where it comes from and how it lands on our plates.”

The series has already begun online with a series of articles at tvo.org/thefoodchain, and kicks off on television tonight with a 10-part travelogue, Girl Eat World, hosted by Food Blogger and Master Chef South Africa winner, Kamini Pather.  I’ve watched about half of the episodes so far and the show has definitely made me nostalgic for traveling and eating my way through different cultures.

In my former life I lived in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, and my favorite activity was exploring the city and finding new places to eat.   After work I’d go home, change clothes, hop on my mountain bike and ride down to the old historic center of town.

The ride took me through a dirty urban sprawl but once I’d cross the river to the old town things would change.  Street were narrow and turned in unexpected directions as they followed their way around the hill that loomed above.  Every week I would find a new part of town I had missed until that point and with it new restaurants, cafés, and shops.

My favorite restaurant specialized in licuados, or smoothies.  Often I’d just order a licuado and spend the afternoon grading tests, planning, or reading and writing letters.  If I was hungry I’d get some street food, like a baleada, a simple mix of a handmade flour tortilla filled with refried beans and Honduran queso.  Other times I’d try a torta which is basically a mixture of wonderful Central American foods stuffed in a hamburger bun.  But my real love was pupusas.

Pupusas are balls of masa flour stuffed with cheese, or a mixture of cheese, meats, and veggies, then hand flattened and fried with a bit of oil.  They are then topped with curtido, a spicy sauerkraut of sorts.

What I’ve been realizing lately is that it’s not the dishes themselves that define a food tradition but the way those foods are made.  Connection to the land—the source of all food—and the processes through which the food is cooked create the tradition, not the recipes.

As my children grow up I’d like them to be a part of our family’s food culture as we build upon the traditions we inherited while making them our own.  We have the freedom to borrow from all cuisines as we cook but also the chance to root ourselves in our local community.  Trips to the farmers market, to our CSA, or simply exploring local farms outside of town give us a chance to see what foods are available to us as we consider what we’ll be eating for the week to come.

Letting “local” define what we eat can seem limiting, but without limits we could never hope to build our own tradition.  Moving through the seasons with the foods that are available and working with local farmers gives our eating purpose and roots it in our community.

For my family our food chain is one that connects us to the land and local farmers.  It connects us to our neighbors, friends, and family with whom we share our meals.  It is not just about eating, it has become a way of living.

What about you, what experiences have shaped how you look at food and what you eat?  Is travel important to you with regard to food, and if so why?  Do you value new experiences and going outside of your comfort zone?  What about traditions, is it important to maintain them?  I’d love to hear your thoughts, and let me know if you check out any episodes of Girl Eat World.

Disclosure: This post was sponsored by TVO.  However, (and this should be obvious) all opinions are my own.

My wife and I have been meeting for daytime dates at DVLB for the last two years.  They are not the only coffee shop that we go to but we do find that they pay the most attention to quality (something I’ve talked about previously with regard to coffee).

I contacted Smile Tiger to see if we could meet up and wound up sitting down for a coffee last week with Joel, who owns and runs DVLB with his wife and who is also one of the owners and founders of Smile Tiger Coffee.  Quality was something he kept returning to when I asked him to describe the perfect cup of coffee.

The perfect cup of coffee doesn’t begin at a coffee or in your home.  It goes back to the source—the farm—and how the coffee was grown and processed.  In the case of most small coffee roasters, like Smile Tiger, the roasters are dependent on importers to help them source the highest quality green coffee beans from the best growers.

While there is a romantic idea that the best small batch coffee roasters are spending their time traveling the world in search of those perfect green coffee beans to roast, that’s almost never the way it really works.

Joel explained that in terms of both time and money a roaster who’s concerned with quality could never afford to travel to farms all over the world hoping to find the best beans.  Instead roasters work closely with importers to find the best quality beans that have the characteristics that they want in a coffee and then roast those for cafes and customers.  Many of these roasts end up being single origin as well as direct or fair trade.

From that point the best way to brew the coffee is with attention to every step of the process.  Any corner cut can “ruin the coffee,” says Joel.  At DVLB this means they use very deliberately chosen pieces of equipment for each process, from the grinder to the portafilter and its tamper (shown below), to the espresso machine, and finally the serving mugs.

For a coffee lover who brews primarily at home it is a bit out of my reach to spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars on my coffee brewing equipment.  Nonetheless, I find that little improvements made over time (and birthdays, hint hint) can help me enjoy my coffee more and more.  My sites are now set on a better grinder, either a hand operated burr grinder or a countertop one.  In the meantime I do my best to purchase delicious roasted beans from local roasters that care about the quality of their products.

Over the past two years my preferred local coffee has been Planet Bean from Guelph.  Their coffee is great and I love their cooperative business model.  Being based within 30 minutes of KW means they are definitely “local” so I feel some connection to them and can visit their headquarters if I like.  However seeing as I can easily ride my bike to DVLB and chat with the people who roast the coffee (one of the baristas, Jess, is also the roaster and green buyer for Smile Tiger) means I can learn more about the coffee and how to brew it best at home.

Because so much goes into making coffee—both in terms of environmental resources and on the processing and brewing end—I find it’s important to drink coffee slowly and without a sense of the dependency that our culture tends to practice.  Like my other favorite beverage, beer, coffee should never just be something you drink because you feel you need it.  You should drink it because you enjoy it.  And to enjoy it you ought to make sure it is good!

I’ve spent the past week thoroughly enjoying the cold brew coffee that Smile Tiger gave me to try.  The beans are called “Heaven Hammer” and are roasted with cold brew coffee as the target.  I diligently followed the instructions on the bag:

1. Coarsely grind the beans (which is tricky with a crummy blade grinder like mine)
2. Mix them with cold water in a ratio of 1 ounce of beans per 1 cup of water
3. Steep them in the fridge for 16 hours
4. Filter and enjoy with ice or bourbon

I used a mason jar filled with 3 cups of water and roughly 1 cup of ground coffee (1 ounce of beans is about ⅓ cup) and filtered through an old gold coffee filter lined with very fine cheese cloth.  I haven’t tried the bourbon option yet, mainly because I don’t have any bourbon on hand (hmm, a good excuse to go get some?) but I have definitely enjoyed the cold brew over ice.

Tasting Notes (because with good beverages you should take some time to ponder what you’re experiencing!):

1. Aroma: My first impression of Heaven Hammer is of tobacco, followed by dark cherry and maybe a bit of toasted oak.
2. Mouthfeel: This coffee is very smooth and lively, and lighter feeling than espresso.
3. Flavour: It’s sweet with a bright fruity acidity. There is a slight nuttiness.
4. Finish: The fruit flavors fade leaving a soft lingering bitterness that urges you on to the next sip, which is why it’s easy to keep drinking this coffee all day!

I’m excited to try Smile Tiger’s other roasts and plan to stop by DVLB again soon to taste them under the care of expert barista hands.

Smile Tiger Coffee is currently roasting in a temporary space until they have their permanent location set up.  That location will feature a café where customers will be able to see the roasting equipment, and possibly observe the art in process.  In the meantime the easiest way to get the coffee is by ordering online or going to DVLB in Uptown Waterloo.

You can also enter below to win a bag of coffee from STC.  Keep in mind that you’ll have to pick it up from DVLB so this is mostly limited to locals:

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Disclosure: I was provided with a free bag of coffee, but the opinions are my own.  

I spent almost three years of my life living in Tegucigalpa, Honduras.  While living there my absolute favorite food was pupusas.  They’re not hard to love, considering they are pretty much like the corn tortilla version of pizza (which I am rather obsessed with).

It’s a simple idea, you take a ball of masa dough, make a hole in the center and stick in a lump of cheese, or meat, or veggies, or a mixture of those, pat it flat, fry it up with a decent amount of grease, and serve it with a variety of spicy cabbage slaws and krauts.

I didn’t appreciate it at the time, but the main type of kraut used on top of pupusas is called curtido, which is pretty much just a broad term for pickle.

I have played around with various non-fermented versions of curtido over the years but it wasn’t until I won a copy of Fermented Vegetables by Kirsten and Christopher Shockey (available also in Canada) that it finally hit me what was missing from my version—mine wasn’t fermented!

The recipe is very simple, just cabbage, carrots, onion, garlic, and chile pepper flakes, and oregano and cumin.  You can take the curtido in different directions by tweaking the ratios, making it hotter or milder, more herbs or less, more of one vegetable or less, and so on.  I was running out of carrots the day I made mine so I think I’ll use more next time, partly because it will add more color to the final product.

The recipe is adapted from Fermented Vegetables, and if your library doesn’t have this book I highly recommend getting yourself a copy (or asking them to get it!).  I’m so happy to have won a copy because I love the book and have read through pretty much the whole thing!  Now I see before me a summer full of fermenting….

It will be a week or two before it’s fully fermented, but making it now will help connect you to the spirit of Cinco de Mayo, which is ¡perfecto!  Once it is ready make your favorite tacos, burritos, or even try making pupusas, and then be sure to put tons of curtido on top.

Occasionally we worry about how we are perceived.  More specifically, we worry about how our son is perceived at school, and indirectly how that makes us look.  I should really phrase this in the first person singular: I sometimes worry about this.  Which is absurd.  Nonetheless, it is a fear of mine.

The fear of perception also gives way to a secondary fear that our children will want what other kids have.  Of course, that is really an issue of my own, in that I often want what others have.

Let me go back to the original point about school and food.  For most of the year our son’s school lunches consist of a hodgepodge collection of containers filled with all sorts of homemade things and fruits and vegetables.  (The main exception to this pattern is the weeks following Halloween when bags of chips and small candy bars take up some of the space.)

We are not purists when it comes to the locavore lifestyle, but we do strive to eat locally all year long.  We’d like our children to grow up eating this way so that they understand the rhythm of the food seasons and the benefits and joys of eating within these limitations.

Fortunately we are blessed to live in a region with a strong and vibrant local food culture, which makes it much easier for us than if we lived somewhere else.  Finding locally-grown vegetables and fruits—at least apples—is possible all year long.

However, as delicious as the local carrots and apples are, our children are not wonder kids who only eat these things.  They would happily eat more processed foods.  Luckily we have learned that we can make healthy-ish processed foods at home.

I say “healthy-ish” because clearly cookies are not healthy, but at least homemade cookies can be made with 100% whole grains, and a reduction in sugar, often replacing the sugar with honey and maple syrup.  Crackers can be made with sourdough starters, whole grains, and overnight soaks to render them more digestible.

This graham cracker recipe has been a lifesaver for us.  Our youngest loves them, and they seem to provide him some relief from teething.  Without a doubt making crackers from scratch is much more work than buying them, but they are also much tastier than store-bought, and the ingredients are local and natural.  So long as I don’t charge for my baking time they’re much cheaper too!  Pretty awesome.

The recipe is adapted from Peter Reinhart’s Whole Grain Breads, the main changes are the addition of multiple grains, butter to make them softer, and a slight reduction in the honey.  These can be made with just whole wheat flour, but you can really use any combination of wheat and other flours (barley, spelt, emmer, einkhorn, Kamut®, rye, etc.) adding up to 1 ¾ cups.

Useful tools for making crackers:

• Silicon Baking Mat (Amazon.ca)
• Dough Docker (Amazon.ca) for making uniform holes—but you could also use a fork!
• Pastry wheel cutter (Amazon.ca) perfect for making cute zig-zag edges.

While it’s dragging on there is no hope yet of new produce.  There is no asparagus or rhubarb.  The trees are still lacking buds and the garden is a dead wasteland.

So what do we eat during this strange in-between time?  The question is less about what and more about from where.

We eat from the pantry.  Now is the time of year when we look most to our shelves of preserved tomatoes and fruits.  We look at the last remaining winter squashes that have managed to last incredibly long.  We open up the chest freezer and pull out bags of strawberries and peaches to make smoothies.

Yes, we still shop at the market for the cellar vegetables that the farmers have preserved nicely, like beets, carrots, potatoes, onions, cabbage, etc.  And we are also quite happy to buy the greenhouse greens that make nice salads and remind us of the warmer days ahead.

But it’s the pantry that brings us joy.  All the hard work done in the fall makes for easy dinners now as we cook with the canned tomatoes and handfuls of frozen peppers.

Recently we tried a new recipe for Winter Squash and Apple soup and shared the recipe on Bailey’s blog.  It’s a great recipe, both sweet and savory.  It also makes great use of less-than-perfect apples, and would likely work with applesauce to.

There will be more winter squash this week as the plan is to use an acorn squash or butternut for two meals, which you can see below:

• Red Bean and Barley Soup
• Asparagus Quiche (using up the frozen asparagus), Salad
• OSG Quinoa Broccoli Wraps (from The Oh She Glows Cookbook)
• Winter Squash Soup, Fresh Sourdough, Salad
• White Bean Chili with Winter Squash (from Easy Everyday Slow Cooker Recipes), Sourdough or tortilla chips
• Mezze Night – something along the lines of fresh pitas, hummus, tzatziki, falafel, and possibly some shawarma…. We like getting carried away with some meals.

Linking up at Menu Plan Monday.  Check out more of our Locavore Menu Plans:

Fresh salsa is always the preferred option, assuming it’s made with delicious local ingredients.  Based on that restriction fresh salsa is generally limited to a span of about 3-4 months, with true pico de gallo salsa only happening for a couple of months.

So I’m okay with eating my canned salsa.  My whole family enjoys it and when we open a jar it typically gets eaten in one sitting.

Recently we found a game changer.

Apples.

Ontario’s apple growers are very adept at preserving their apples into the winter months allowing us consumers the opportunity to eat a delicious local fruit throughout these lean months.

Ontario farmers are always quite good at coaxing plants to grow in greenhouses and hothouses throughout these cold and sun-starved months.  The most recent discovery of ours was cilantro.

One day for lunch a couple weeks ago I decided to make a salsa with the apples and cilantro we had got at the Kitchener Market a few days before.  I through in a couple frozen jalapeños that we grew, some local red onion, a dash of lime juice (not local…) and dash of apple cider vinegar.  I think I could have left out the lime juice to stay pure to my local ideals but I wanted to have at least one classic flavor on board.

The result is an amazing, crunchy, flavorful salsa that really makes it easy to imagine the summer that is still a long ways off.  And thanks to the lime juice and vinegar the apples stay nice a fresh so this salsa can be saved in the fridge for several days without losing quality.

Now, I have to admit this is not the first time I put apples in a salsa – see The Pleaple have Spoken.  But it is the first time I’ve realized we could eat a fresh Pico de Gallo style salsa in the cruel cold heart of winter.  So, our lives have been changed, and for the better.

This post was originally written for Bailey’s Local Foods, which is where you can find the recipe.  However, a recipe is not super necessary for this salsa as you can simply experiment and find a ratio of ingredients that works for you!

The last sweet corn of the season will soon be harvested, but it can be enjoyed for the next year until a new harvest begins by simply buying and cooking a bit extra right now.  Find a local farmer, and buy 3-4 times as much as you’d like to eat for one or two meals.

The easiest way to preserve all that extra corn is by freezing it.  Simply cook the corn the way you would normally cook it, but shorten the cooking time to roughly half.  For us that means cooking it about five minutes.  And make sure to leave a few cobs of corn in the water for the full cooking time to eat while you’re working on this project.

Then trim the kernels off the cob with a knife.  Aimee from Simple bites recommends using a bundt cake pan to support the cob and catch the kernels that fall down.  Once you have collected enough corn spread them out on baking sheets and freeze them (or skip this step and go straight to bags, we do this extra step so they don’t all freeze together).   Once frozen transfer the corn to large freezer bags labeled with the year.  Stick them in the freezer and that’s it!  Now you can enjoy local sweet corn all year!

Oh and don’t make our mistake and toss the cobs until you’ve used them to make corn stock!  There are tons of recipes on the internet for this, including Aimee’s, but here are the basics:

• 1 onion, chopped a bit
• 5-10 (or more) corn cobs
• 2 (or more) quarts of water
• Spices and herbs if you want

Simmer for 45 minutes, then strain and save the broth for soup!  Freeze it if you want, or you could can it so it doesn’t take up freezer space.  Yes, as I’ve said before you totally can can soup!

Now, if you still have energy then you can be a good prepper and freeze some peppers!  Or can some salsa.  What about peach salsa.  There’s lots to do….

(This post has been updated a few times since 2014, including the past two summers with info about prices found at St. Jacob’s Market in Ontario).

Our final batch of salsa that we canned for the year, Chunky Peach Salsa, was definitely our best.  And maybe that is because after canning 3 other batches we learned a couple things.

One thing we learned was not to cook the peaches very long or they got lost amongst the tomatoes.  Basically we now just add the peaches to the salsa right before we’re ready to start canning.

Second was that if you don’t want to add tomato paste to thicken the salsa then you’ll have to cook it for a long time.  This could mean simmering the salsa for 1-2 hours….

So our final canning session for salsa leaves us with a total of 56 pints of 4 different kinds of salsa (including the homegrown salsa I wrote about earlier this week).  And while 56 pints may seem like a lot it’s essentially 1 pint a week for the next year with 4 extra for sharing or larger eating events.  Yes, we eat a lot of salsa.  Well, my family eats a good amount of it, but without me around they’d likely only need about 20 pints for the year.

Here is the recipe and it is loosely based on our friend’s (non-peach) salsa which we refer to around here as “Mr. Dan’s.”  When we made this the other day we did a double batch which produced 18 pints.  A single batch will likely produce 9-11 pints, but results will vary based on the variety of tomatoes used and how long they are cooked down.

Update, 2017

Here’s what I got at St. Jacob’s Market here north of Waterloo in late August, to make a quadruple batch:

• 1/2 bushel Roma tomatoes($11)
• 1/2 bushel San Marzano Tomatoes ($12 or $15 depending on vendor)
• 1/2 bushel sweet banana peppers ($12)
• 1/2 bushel Red Haven peaches ($15 for the smaller uglier ones)

And 2018:

• 1 bushel Roma tomatoes for $15
• 1/2 bushel long red sweet peppers $15
• 1/2 bushel Red Haven peaches $20

And what I generally have from our garden, CSA or elsewhere:

• 1 large bunch cilantro
• 5 lbs onions
• 3-4 heads garlic
• 1 litre/quart cider vinegar (we actually make our own… which it seems surprising I don’t have a post about!)