Giving thanks for the humble pumpkin

It's Thanksgiving Day, and of course I'm thankful for the usual things. To shake things up at bit, we all had to say one frivolous thing that we were thankful for. Today, after an amazing discovery, I've got to say pumpkin! The happy orange of a field of pumpkins always makes me smile, and what other food can be carved into a Halloween decoration? Best of all, you can eat it!

Today we took the kids to Cooper's CSA (CSA being Community Supported Agriculture where you buy shares in the farmers crop and get a weekly box of seasonal veggies, thus offering the farmer stability and the non-farmer seasonal, healthy food). It was a great day, and much less tacky and jam-packed than some of the "agri-tainment" closer to the city. Besides, it's Local Food Plus certified, and that gives me confidence in it's sustainability. Long story short, we ended up carting home a van-load of pumpkins because I discovered earlier in the weekend the amazing versatility of the pumpkin!

Why didn't anyone tell me before that it can taste so good? I know, pumpkin pie's okay...but that didn't seem very connected to an actual pumpkin. In my mind it was like the connection between dill pickles and dill pickle potato chips -a loose association at best. I now realize, thanks to a wine soaked Friday night tutorial from a pie-master friend, that you can make pumpkin pie from an actual pumpkin. Will wonders never cease? It got me thinking that if you can make pie from a real pumpkin, maybe you can make other things...which led me to this recipe for pumpkin bread. It is, to quote my mother-in-law, "to DIE for". It's similar to banana bread, only based on a local crop. You can substitute any type of squash, I tried a batch with butternut squash too- delish! Next step, pumpkin soup!

If interested, I played around with the recipe a bit, but this is more or less what I used:

1 1/2 cups flour (I used half white and half whole wheat)
1/2 teaspoon of salt
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 cup agave nectar (or just use 3/4 c of sugar and ignore the agave nectar)
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 cup mashed up cooked pumpkin (apparently the little "pie pumpkins" are tastier...just cut it in half, bake it for about an hour at 350, discard seeds and mash up pulp)
1/3 cup olive oil
1/3 cup plain yogurt
2 eggs
1/4 cup water
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon allspice
1/2 cup chopped walnuts

Mix wet ingredients, mix dry ingredients, mix it all together. Bake in a buttered loaf pan at 350 for 50-60 mins. Enjoy fresh or freeze for later!

Garlic's in the ground!

Garlic is planted! I got my 20 pretty heads of Russian, Salt Spring, Tibetan and Persian garlic in the mail two weeks ago from The Cutting Veg. I spent a day last weekend adding bags of sand to the clay soil at my "allotment garden" at my dad's. Then coating it all with sheep shit.
This weekend it was ready to plant and then cover with leaves and wait a long 10 months til it's ready.
My experiment with patience is about to begin.

Pioneer Retro

Our Tomato Stock 2010 canning party was hard work, but left us all with a sense of accomplishment and community. I rarely spend time doing "work" with friends, and now I see that it can be an effective way to socialize and accomplish things. If only my friends would want to come over for a cleaning party... Anyway, 5 of us women (and my husband) managed to can 81L of tomatoes. That was 5 bushels, or 265 lbs! We learned some lessons about how we could be more efficient next year (ie. get an outdoor burner, invest in a tomato mill rather than blanch, seed and peel), it did take us a collective 43 hours. My husband (nerd), did a humiliating analysis of the cost of this exercise and let's just say it didn't save us much money, but we're already booking a weekend for next year!

Sauce Rage

A few weeks ago, I made salsa and tomato sauce. I did it late at night after my kids were in bed. Some evenings I started this ridiculous endeavour at 9:30 pm only to collape exhausted into bed at 1 am. Let me explain that I am on summer holidays and my husband is not. His alarm goes off at 6am and I have learned to sleep right through it. So when I got it in my head to start a canning binge on a Sunday night, my husband, while supportive in theory, was not particularly enthusiastic. So I did it myself.

The first day was fine. I made a test batch of tomato sauce. No problem. But that didn't even make a tiny dent in the massive pile of tomatoes in my kitchen. So I got to work on salsa, diced tomatoes, roasted tomatoes. Over the course of the week (one that also included taking the kids swimming, to the zoo, the beach, the library, and making 3 meals a day), the nighttime canning experiment began to get ugly. I began to vent in my head, I started to bang pots and pans around, I took to angrily elbowing my snoring husband when I crawled into bed late at night. I recall at one point being reduced to screeching something to the effect of "I'll remember that this is NOT YOUR FOOD and won't serve you ANY! Jackass!" when he made a comment about the mess in the kitchen not being his idea. Or something like that.

Turns out, I was suffering from Sauce Rage. Seems it stems from anger at the futility of spending countless hours to make something that you don't really need to make. And, for me, from some deeply instilled feminist voices in the back of my head.

After my first week of canning was done, and my mountain of tomatoes reduced to a mere molehill, I was able to think again. I was able to use real words to express what had been eating at me. And that was, "6 years of university and two degrees and here I am toiling for hours over a hot stove to make food for us that I could just buy at the store with the money I can earn in less than an hour of work?" Indeed, in all this waxing poetic about the joys of the "old ways", there is certainly a tense undercurrent of "there is a reason women wanted out of the kitchen". I still can't quite wrap my head around the gender politics of this endeavour, but I certainly found some food for thought (sorry) in an article by Peggy Orenstein, The Femivore's Dilemma. Despite the unfortunate title (femivore=one who eats women?), I found the article both inspiring and cautionary. It made me glad that I said " Next time, let's do this together so I don't feel like a harried hausfrau" and we agreed to use weekends instead of evenings. My next batch involved spousal assistance in peeling, seeding and chopping. It was kind of fun, and overall left me blissfully free of the dreaded Sauce Rage. Moral of the story, don't sauce alone. You'll want to kill someone.

Bye Bye to Chinese Garlic

This summer I got my first delivery of fresh Ontario garlic from Mama Earth. I didn't recognize it...it tasted and smelled, well, fresh. It seemed barely related to the dry supermarket imposters (Product of China) I've been buying for years.
I started going out of my way to look for local garlic. It was nowhere to be found in supermarkets - the closest I found was Mexico, and that took some time. At my local farmers market there were plenty of choices, however, I had to be ready to pay up to $3.50 a head. Shocking to be sure...especially since I could fill my car with Chinese garlic for approximately the same price. But I bought it whenever I could find it. And now, I can't go back. Especially after stumbling across an article about how difficult it is for Ontario garlic growers to compete. How Ontario had 4000 acres devoted to commercial garlic production in 2001. Now there are less than 500. How Ontario garlic growers have been devastated by Chinese imports which flooded our market in 2001. But Canadians like me are beginning to get a taste of the fresh stuff, and we're excited to bring Ontario garlic back to the mainstream.
I just placed my order for 20 heads of organic "seed garlic". I belatedly discovered that you plant garlic in the fall (which explains why my spring planted garlic gave me cloves the size of TicTacs), let it "overwinter" and then harvest it the following summer. Fingers crossed, I'll have evil garlic breath this time next year. I ordered 4 different varieties from The Cutting Veg and can't wait till it arrives. It's going to get it's own bed! It's obvious now that I did not take the photo in this post, but I'm hoping it counts that it is my imagined harvest for next year...no? Photo credit here)
I also ramped up my weekly garlic order from 3 head to 15 heads of fresh organic Ontario garlic for next weekend's (hopefully) annual Tomato Stock. My backyard and kitchen will play host to a group of likeminded friends getting together to make tomato sauce and "put up" (haha..just testing out my new lingo) about 5 or 6 bushels of tomatoes. Since I've been experimenting this summer, I guess I'm the expert. Uh oh, I hope no one gets botulism.

Priorities

My university "sister", travel companion, bridesmaid, and confidante of many years was killed in a car accident last week. She was driving to the Yukon on a spur of the moment roadtrip, that's the kind of girl she was. She was 35 years old.

It is only in retrospect that I realize how many opportunities I missed to spend time with her, to send her a long email, or to find an hour for a real phone conversation. These are regrets I will carry with me. Rosie lived up to her name, she was always generous with her time and her affection. She was open, honest, and totally without guile. There are many lessons that I can draw from her examples, and I will try my best to live up to the honour of being her friend by working on these qualities.

Rosie's tragedy has made me ask myself (among other more common questions you ask in these times) why I have found time to peel and seed 53 pounds of tomatoes when I haven't had time to pick up the phone. It makes me question some of my priorities. Does good food trump good friends? Would I be a better mother if I was playing Snakes and Ladders with my kids instead of making them natural ice cream?

I guess the best compromise is to combine the two. Involve the kids in making ice cream, and invite friends to eat tomato sauce together.

The Elusive Organic Peach

All the markets and grocery stores are brimming with fresh, local peaches, so why not take a trip to an orchard and make a day of it? I got online to look for an organic peach orchard in the Toronto area. No such luck. I could find organic berry farms, organic spinach, broccoli and the like. But few tree fruits. My organics delivery box was even bringing me peaches from British Columbia. My grocery store's organic peaches came from the USA. Why?
I learned the answer at the East York Farmers' Market. For the first time, I saw a few baskets of relatively small organic peaches. Curiosity piqued, I asked the farmer. He said he's been experimenting with growing 5 acres of organic peaches because the demand is high. However, he explained that Southern Ontario's humidity makes the peaches very susceptible to disease. That's why almost nobody grows organic peaches. He said in the end, he's not sure if growing organic peaches is sustainable. Organic peaches are still sprayed, just with different stuff. And they require significantly more applications of the "different stuff" because of the climate. It was some food for thought. When asked which ones he'd choose to eat, he said he's perfectly happy with his conventional peaches. So, which to buy? I couldn't decide, so I bought some baskets of both and cut them up to freeze for those dreary winter days when summer fruit is a big treat. I'll let myself ponder the question of local conventional food vs. distant organic some other day.

How to freeze peaches: Peel, slice and lay out on a tray lined with parchment paper. Put them in the freeze until they are solid. Transfer to a freezer bag. If you just throw them in a bag without the tray step, you'll end up with one giant mass of peaches that you can't break apart!