A few months ago I almost cut my finger off.  Not the whole finger, just the tip, which is still an important part of my finger in my opinion!  Fortunately I didn’t cut it off but it was a decent wound, with blood getting on the carrots… sorry, too graphic.

Let’s see, what do I want to cut?

Anyhow, while trying to bring the knife down lengthwise through the side of a rather thick carrot the knife jumped off the carrot onto my finger.

I dropped the knife and jumped back from the counter yelling.  What caused the knife to jump off the carrot in the first place is also what prevented the cut from being too bad.  The knife was extremely dull, which is generally more dangerous than the knife being sharp.

Thus it was clear that the knife needed a proper sharpening.  I resolved then and there that the knife would get sharpened.  Well, it turns out I’m the kind of person who needs more than one push to get something done.

The prompt this time was not an accident but an online knife skills lesson that had a strong emphasis on knife sharpness and quality.  I had stumbled upon the video which is a free class from Craftsy, a website that offers courses about all sorts of home and hobby skills.

After viewing the lesson I did a bit of internet searching and found a few local sharpening options but it was the suggestion from various folks on a Waterloo Region food Facebook group that brought me to STOP Restaurant Supply.  My youngest son and I took a trip way down to the east end of Victoria street, handed over our knife and browsed the store while it was sharpened.

When the knife was returned to us about 15 minutes later we were asked a few questions by the woman who had sharpened it.

One, had we tried to sharpen it ourselves?  Yes, sort of, with a small tool sharpener intended for garden tools.  The reason for the question was that the non-sharp part close to the hilt showed signs of attempted sharpening.  Woops.

Two, did we allow water to sit on the knife?  Um yes, we tend to wash it and then leave it to air dry.  Why?  Well there are the beginnings of rust on the end of the knife above the hilt.  That surprised me since it’s a stainless steel blade!  Still, our fault again.

Three, did I have something to wrap the knife in since I was about to walk back to my car carrying a baby?  Uhhh, no, but it would be nice to have!  She wrapped the knife with butcher paper (very fitting) and sent us on our way with a slightly concerned look.

One other thing I learned through this experience was that honing and sharpening are not the same thing.  Many people—myself included—have knife steels in their kitchens.  The purpose of the knife steel is to correct the alignment of a knife blade, but not to actually make it sharper, a process known as “honing.”  Do you own something to hone your knife with?

Photo from Amazon.com

On a microscopic level the edge of the blade gets slightly bent, like the edge of a piece of paper being folded over.  By running your blade down the steel you hopefully realign the edge of the blade, helping the knife return to its original sharp state.  From what I’ve learned this should be done every time you use the knife!

Eventually after much use some of those folded edges of the blade can break and that is when it’s time to actually sharpen the knife, either with your own wet stone or professionally.  If you think your knife isn’t sharp enough right now try the tomato test:

If you live in the KW area like I do you can even get your knife sharpened for free!  Their normal sharpening fee is $1.25 per inch, thus $10 plus tax for my 8” chef’s knife.  With this coupon—you can probably just open it on your phone—the sharpening is free!  Don’t wait, just head down to STOP so you can sharpen your knife (or more accurately let them sharpen it).  There, I did it, I managed to quote Hozier in a way that was relevant to a food blog.

Here are directions to STOP in Kitchener or Sudbury and click below to download a printable PDF coupon, courtesy of STOP:

I’ve been debating getting my own wet stone or just having the knife professionally sharpened every so often.  If properly used a wet stone is a good investment since it pays for itself after about 3 or 4 sharpenings (based on these prices from amazon.com and amazon.ca).  For now my plan is to wait and see how long the knife stays sharp, and hopefully be responsible about honing the blade and always properly cleaning and storing it (for storage magnetic racks are recommended by many chefs, and we love ours).  If it dulls quickly I may invest in a stone, if it’s good for a couple years I’ll likely stick with the professional sharpeners.

With our newly sharpened knife we’ll be cooking up the following things to enjoy this week:

Monday.  Paraguayan Polenta with Winter Squash (from La Gran Cocina Latina), Salad.  Prep for Tuesday: soak 2 cups dry chickpeas.  Since only about half of the winter squash is needed chop up and refrigerate the other half for Friday’s meal. 

Tuesday.  Oh She Glows Indian Lentil Cauliflower Soup, fresh bread.

Wednesday.  Roasted Root Veggies with Drizzly Hummus (a random idea that floated into my head recently), Popovers, Caesar Salad.

Thursday.  Frozen Nasi Goreng, Salad.

Friday.  Thai Red Curry Squash Soup, Bread.

Sharing at Menu Plan Monday:

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:

This meal plan is a bit out of our ordinary pattern and it’s mainly because we’re not at home.  We’ve been at my parent’s house—aka my childhood home—for the last two weeks, and will be here the rest of this week before we hit the road for Oregon and California.  More on that later, but for now I’ll just say a few things about what it’s like planning meals when we’re not at home.

Amazingly it has been beautiful here!  Those are the Olympic Mountains, looking out over the South Puget Sound

What pattern?

And going back to my comment about our ordinary pattern, our whole pattern has been off for the past 6 or 7 months really.  From June to December I was spending my afternoons at Maurita’s Kitchen, part of The Working Centre in downtown Kitchener.  I also started a small home-based business which made things busier as well.  Okay, actually I was posting a lot less here starting last March due to a certain arrival….

I thought I could balance having a third child, working, and a blog but ultimately it was all a bit too much.  We continued meal planning, and have eaten very well in the last year.  There just wasn’t enough time or energy going around to document all of it.  So, days, weeks, months have passed and here the blog is, a little bit neglected.  But I think it’s okay in the end, because we’re happy with how things are.

Way more sun than we ever expected.  The big trees we were well aware of.

So I’ve essentially allowed the blog to fade into the background of my life while other aspects of my life—which ironically are much more local than a “local” food blog—took the centre.  It’s been great.  But soon, okay in like a bit less than three months, my wife will go back to work.  And I will again become full-time stay-at-home dad.  And maybe within that role I will once again feel the desire to blog on a more consistent basis.  Or not, we’ll see!

 Exploring McLane Creek, part of the Capital State Forest

In the meantime, we are enjoying a long holiday in Olympia.  Like until the end of this month kind of long.  And it has been wonderful to be here.  Having not been here in two years(!) I feel like I’m seeing the whole place with new eyes.  A big surprise for me has been noticing not just the moss that seems to grow everywhere, but the ferns!  There are actually ferns growing in trees here.  How did I never notice this in all my years living here?   Amazing.

 Yes, ferns growing on a tree.  

Back to food. 

It was a bit tricky planning a meal for the week when we didn’t know exactly what would be available at the Olympia Farmers Market, so we made a few assumptions and then went to see if we could find the ingredients we needed (mainly kale or hearty greens, beets, and apples.  My parents already had winter squash from their garden as well as some other things in their fridge and pantry).

Yeah so it was actually quite cold when we hit up the market.

Sadly there was no kale at the market.  We did find beets and ended up getting some beautiful carrots and a delicata squash.  We’ll have to decide if we hit the grocery store for some more veggies or modify the plan to fit what we found, but more or less this is what we’re shooting for this week.  We’ll probably start by going to Spud’s Produce Market, which is an awesome little store, exactly the kind of place we’d love to see in KW some day….

And Happy New Year, of course!  (And no, the sparklers aren’t local, I think that might be illegal, I’ll have to look into it…)

A Week of January Meals:

Summer is flowing all around me.

Days are full and we go to bed tired.  I wake up early and enjoy a few minutes by myself before the family wakes up.  Sitting alone it’s clear that I am not alone as the open windows bring in the joyful sounds of all the creatures beginning their day.

The joyful sound of the squirrels eating the last pear from our tree snaps me out of my meditation as I run outside to throw sticks and gravel in a futile attempt to scare the little critters away.

Life is not perfect.  As soon as I think a bit beyond my own small chunk of life this becomes more apparent.  So what do we do?

We work as a family to contribute good to the world.  Not all that we do achieves this, but we try.  Since food and eating are integral to our living this is a starting place for us.  We want our food to build positive connections between us and our community.  Our food should be part of the sustainability of the region we live in.

We talk to the farmers growing our food and make our meals from scratch using local ingredients.  We limit the animal products we eat since eating high on the food chain is not a sustainable model for how the world can eat.

And we try to make a plan for what we will eat, to limit our stress, save time, use the food we’ve purchased and grown better, and maintain a record of what we’ve eaten to reference later.

Okay, so meal planning doesn’t necessarily make the world a better place.  But if it helps us to feel less stressed then hopefully that can help us to go about our week in a more positive and helpful way.

This week’s plan features several more recipes from Chef Michael Smith’s Family Meals cookbook.  We received a review copy and have been happily devouring our way through the book.  It’s worth checking to see if your local library or bookstore has it.

One of our favorite tips from the book so far?  Turn leftover smoothies into popsicles!  We got these great molds (get them anywhere in Canada) from Relish Cooking Studio in Uptown Waterloo!

This Meal Plan is shared at Menu Plan Monday, check it out!

Welcome to The Local Kitchener!  If this is your first time here you should check out the book giveaway going on right now.  It’s a book about food, farms, and family, and how those things are all intertwined.

My family has been meal planning ever since we had our first child almost five years ago.  We realized that life would be much easier if we knew what we were going to make for dinner when we got home from work.

Meal planning has also helped us to eat almost entirely local and seasonal foods because we plan the meals around what is available locally.  Sometimes we have to alter our plans once we get to the farmers’ market, but for the most part the plan we make usually lines up with what we can expect to find at the market.

Here is a week’s worth of meal ideas that are perfect for the fresh produce available from local farmers and your own garden in the middle of the summer:

1. Veggie Burgers on English Muffins or Gluten-Free Potato Buns (shown).  Veggie burgers are best when you make fresh buns to go with them, and nothing beats the flavour and texture of homemade English muffins or the absurd simplicity of a potato as a bun.

2. Beet Black Beans.  Sometimes it’s hard to know how to incorporate beets into a dish but the Brazilians know how!  Make it even more tasty with some awesome fruit salsa!

3. Eggplant Parm-Awesome!  Our family is so in love with eggplant parmesan that we renamed it!  Goes great with a cucumber chickpea salad or a classic garden salad.

4. Polenta with Sofrito and Egg.  Some nights we want something that is a super easy, quick, delicious, filling meal, and this is it:

5. Local Pizza. Every Friday should be pizza night.  But every pizza night should be different.  Just take what you’ve got leftover from the week’s produce and put it on the pizza!
   1. Summer Pizzas with Tomatoes, Basil, and Zucchini
   2. Cardamom Apricot Pizza
   3. Kohlrabi Robertson – a Kohlrabi and Bok Choy Pizza

6. Greens, Egg, and Ham Potato. If you are a member of a CSA or have a garden (or both!) then you might need to have yourself a week of greens!  Start with this great dinner or breakfast dish.

7. Frittata, Salad, and Bread.  It’s nice to have Sunday’s meal be a good cleanup of the last things in the fridge, and if the pizzas didn’t finish off the produce then a nice frittata should. Serve it with some fresh homemade bread and some salad or slaw!

This post is being linked up at Menu Plan Monday!

However, I hadn’t anticipated that we’d be given a vegan cookbook.

The cookbook we were given is The Oh She Glows Cookbook.  A month or two ago when this came out I kept trying to win a copy from all the vegan blogs I follow.  (I didn’t win, but we magically received it as a gift!).

What Kind of Eater Am I?

And yes, although I am not a vegan I follow many vegan blogs.  As an ethical omnivore I very much understand the kinds of things that can motivate people to become vegans.  Although my own eating journey has not led me to the same place I often feel that if I had remained a vegetarian it would have made the most sense to become a vegan.

Vegetarians who refrain from meat because they don’t believe in factory farming of animals, and yet continue to eat factory farm products like milk and cheese are supporting the very thing they say they are trying to avoid.  If dairy-and-egg-eating vegetarians claim that they are wanting to eat without causing suffering then hopefully they are only eating milk from very happy cows, and eating eggs from chickens that live wonderful outdoor lives – and this kind of food is possible to find, it just takes getting to know some farmers!

Since this becomes very complicated as a vegetarian it makes more sense to me to become a vegan.  If, however, the vegetarian’s motivation is simply to “eat lower on the food chain” and make better use of resources then the decision to refrain from eating meat while still eating some animal products like dairy and eggs makes sense.

This is where ethical omnivores come in.  Having looked at the system that is producing food and realizing that there is such a thing as food that is produced ethically and food that is not produced ethically, this way of eating attempts to source all food from good sources.  The system recognizes the important role that animals have in agriculture and the benefits of raising livestock for dairy, eggs, and meat, but also limits the consumption of those animal products.

An ethical omnivore’s diet is more sustainable than the average North-American diet, but also more expensive, and requires more labor intensive farming methods than factory farming.  This means it costs more.  Thus, as an ethical omnivore I not only limit my consumption of meat because it’s good for the planet, but also because it’s good for my budget.  Eating meat once or twice a week becomes somewhat of a special occasion, like last nights hamburgers, rather than the presumed main dish on every plate.

The Important Role of Vegan Blogs for All Eaters

This is where vegan blogs like Oh She Glows come in.  Vegans are at the forefront of creative vegetable-based eating, and many of them are amazing cooks.  Regardless of my own willingness to eat meat, eating 100% plant-based meals is good for me, good for animals, and good for the planet.  Oh, and it’s also just good tasting, at least when done right!

If you’re wondering about my favorite vegan (and vegetarian) blogs, here are a couple more:

• The Sweet Life – Sara McMinn is a college friend of mine.  But I would follow her blog regardless, and I am pretty sure I’d have found it even without knowing her.  Her recipes are mostly focused on (yes, it’s obvious) sweets, but I most appreciate her dinner ideas, like these beet sliders.

• My New Roots – Okay, so it’s not technically a vegan blog, but almost.  Mostly it’s just full of incredible recipes that are very full of plants.  The photos showcase the vegetables in an outstanding way.  It also just won Saveur’s annual award for best special diet blog, a well-deserved win!

The Oh She Glows Cookbook

My first impression of The Oh She Glows Cookbook is that it is beautiful.  It is bursting with color and health, with different fruits and veggies everywhere you look.  What I appreciate most about it is that looking at the recipes in it there are no points where I, as a non-vegan, find myself getting annoyed.  In fact if it weren’t for the generous use of cashews as a substitute for cream and cheese I don’t think it would even be clear that it was a vegan cookbook.  It would simply be a cookbook about whole foods and veggie-heavy recipes.

We are going to be gone from Thursday through the weekend so the meal plan this week is a bit condensed.  We’ll also be eating a freezer meal given to us after our son was born (7 weeks ago!).  I also bought a ton of greens this week because I was so excited to see them at the market, thus there will be fresh salad every night!

No links, the book is worth owning, borrowing, or checking out from your library (WPL has it and so does KPL) .  And if your library doesn’t have it ask for it, they’ll probably order it just for you (I’ve gotten four books ordered on my behalf in the last year, and when it comes in the person who orders it gets it first!).

Disclaimer: How are we making these meals with local ingredients?  Thanks to our freezer and our pantry!  Last summer we froze and canned tons of local fruits and veggies, there’s really no other way to remain a locavore in the off-season….

Meal One: 

• Soul-Soothing African Peanut Stew (p.129)
• Fresh Whole Wheat Ciabatta Bread
• Salad

Meal Two: 

• Crowd-Pleasing Tex-Mex Casserole (p.149)
• Local Tortillas
• Extra greens for side

Meal Three:  

• Perfected Chickpea Salad Sandwich (p.105) using the leftover ciabatta
• Leftover Peanut Stew
• Salad

Here’s the week’s meal plan.  This time I just went back through old meal plans and looked for inspiration.  No cookbooks, and no theme, just a bunch of meals, most of which we’ve made before, or new combinations inspired by old ones.

Locavore Meal Plan for Southern Ontario (and similar climates) – February 24 – March 2.  Linking up at Menu Plan Monday and Linking up with Nomday Monday.

Once again I didn’t make the meal plan!  Madame has been so on top of meal planning lately and she did the shopping at the market as well so I’m feeling somewhat useless.  No, that’s the wrong way of describing how I feel, blessed is a better word.  It’s great to not go it alone when it comes to planning good meals for your family.  I’ve heard of families who sit down together once a week or once a month and everyone picks out the meals they’d like to eat.  That’s pretty cool.  I’m not sure if my young assistants would think of much more than pizza and PBJ’s so for now we might wait a bit.  But really, once you consider an idea like that it starts to take root in your head, and now I’m finding myself reconsidering.  Maybe this week we’ll take a break from doing this:

…And we’ll sit down with a few cookbooks and look for one or two meals that the assistants would like to make.  Huh, inadvertently in writing this intro to my meal plan I’ve given myself my own challenge.  I actually didn’t see that one coming.  That’s the problem with stream-of-consciousness blog writing, you don’t always think things through before you write them.  On the other hand, I guess it’s a good thing to have a new goal for the week!  Seeing as I no longer write in my journal this blog becomes the place that I hash out ideas and give myself goals and objectives.  Anywho, next week hopefully there will be a meal chosen by my assistants and then I’ll have to report back on how their preparation of it goes.

For lunches we’ll be incorporating freshly grown alfalfa sprouts, check out how to start those here.  They go great on a nice homemade whole wheat sandwich bread like this one, which is our go-to recipe.

Most of the recipes this week come from In My Mother’s Kitchen by Canadian writer and food consultant Trish Magwood.  It’s another one of the cookbooks we were blessed with by our awesome neighbor.  And good news if you like owning cookbooks, it’s actually very affordable on amazon.ca, only $9.49 for the hardcover!  It appears that it’s only published in Canada so sorry readers down south!

Meal Plan for February 10-16.  Sharing at Menu Plan Monday (get over there and check out tons of free meal plans!)

We’re really happy with our new cookbook, 30 Minute Vegetarian.  Sadly it’s not readily available on this side of the Atlantic.  Written by Rose Elliot, it is published in the UK.  How did we end up with this book?  Let’s just say we have a lovely neighbor who works for a publishing company and she shares some of the many books she edits.  Last week most of our meals came from the cookbook and all were easy to make (yes, roughly 30 minutes) and delicious!  So we have several more meals coming from the cookbook again this week.  We definitely recommend the book if you can find it!

Tonight’s meal consists mainly of the Perfect Protein Salad from the super-classic vegetarian Moosewood Cookbook.  I’m excited to try this dish and currently the wheat berries and soy beans are soaking themselves happily on the counter in the kitchen.

 The menu for the week (sharing at Menu Plan Monday, an awesome resource!):

Locavore menu for Southern Ontario for mid-winter.  Linking at Menu Plan Monday.