Pure Lard Part Two: Soap

So what's a gal supposed to do with 15 lbs of lard, anyway? How much pie crust can you eat? A few weeks after rendering all my pig fat I was still trying to figure this out when I thought of making homemade soap. I remembered watching my Oma make soap when I was a little girl. It was really harsh, nasty stuff that was great for cleaning laundry - all that lye burned the stains right out of the clothes! I found the idea of using my nice organic, porky lard to wash my tender body quite delightful, so I started doing a little bit of research online. How hard could it be?

The internet is a wonderful thing. I found so much info - recipes, lye calculators, tips on what to do if your batch fails, and pictures of what each step is supposed to look like. I even found a local source of lye at http://www.dierbe.com/ . (Di Erbe actually just opened up shop at 1853 Main Street next to Don's Photo this last weekend! Funny that I had to find them by googling 'Winnipeg Lye' and they ended up being neighbours...) Anyway, I was glad to find them because lye is a little hard to find in retail stores these days - apparently it's also an ingredient in Crystal Meth.

There was also a ton of info on which oils and fats made the nicest soaps. Most recipes use a combination of tropical oils and almost every recipe included coconut oil, which is desirable due to its abundant lathering capabilities. It was pretty difficult to find information on lard as the main ingredient but I eventually discovered that soap made of pure lard is known to be slightly soft, quite moisturizing, but with meagre suds action. It was pretty universally recommended that you add beef tallow (or even better, coconut oil for hardness and bigger bubbles!) to lard soap to make sure you get nice soap.

I wasn't terribly interested in besmirching my 100-mile lard with mangrove-destroying, plantation-grown palm or coconut oils, so I started to look for tallow. However, it turned out that NO ONE in Winnipeg even knows what tallow is, let alone sells it. Only a handful of the dozen butchers I called even knew what suet was, let alone tallow. I finally found suet (from veal - yikes!) at DeLuca's. They gave me four pounds of it for free! Time for more rendering!

The online soap calculators are really neat - you input exactly how much and what kind of oil or fat you have, and it will calculate exactly the amount of lye and water is required to saponify the amount of fat you have. I think this is why the old fashioned stuff was so harsh - people used to use a lot more lye than necessary.

My first batch of soap did turn out slightly harsh, due to my inexact and bouncy kitchen scale. Maybe I'll get a better one for Christmas, hey Santa? I made a bigger batch the second time around so I would be able to measure larger amounts at a time and therefore get slightly more accurate measurements.

Anyway, this is how you make soap.
1. Weigh your fat, and melt it.
2. Weigh your lye and your water, and then add the lye to the water in a WELL VENTILATED AREA. Lye fumes are pretty nasty - My Aunt Mary told me scary stories of damaging her respiratory system when making soap in her basement many years ago. It can also burn your skin, so you have to be careful with that, too. Wear your gloves and your gas mask!
3. Make sure your lye mixture (which gets really hot when you mix it together) and your fat are both around 100 degrees Fahrenheit, then mix them together.

4. And then mix together and mix together and mix together until the whole mess starts getting thicker, kinda like thin pudding. This is called 'trace'. It probably took about 15 or 20 minutes for my soap to trace. When your soap starts to trace, add your scented oil and colours (I used a vanilla pomegranate scent and a bit of paprika to add a bit of colour) and mix it up.

5. Pour the thickening soap into your primary mold and let it sit.

There was a lot of info online about how to primary molds, but I used the good old fashioned milk carton like Oma used to, which worked out well. The soap continues to heat up as it hardens - you want to keep it warm so it can finish going through the magical chemical process of saponification.

After a day or two, you can take it out of the mold and cut it into blocks and lay it out to cure a little longer. Apparently soap made from animal fat solidifies a little quicker than soap made from pure vegetable oil, which can take a little longer to harden properly. I let my soap dry out for a couple of weeks before I tried using it.

In the next few weeks while I was waiting for the soap to harden I read up on milling processes. Milled soap is basically regular soap that's shaved and then melted down and poured into molds. It's the FANCY stuff! I ended up melting down most of the first batch and about a third of the second batch to make some new exciting molded soaps. I made some lemon scrub soap with turmeric, lemon zest and cornmeal and a couple batches of cinnamon oatmeal soap.

EVERYBODY will get soap for Christmas this year. Make sure you look surprised when you open it up!

Pig's Head Soup (warning - graphic photos)

Like I mentioned in the previous post, when I purchased a butchered pig last month, I asked for the extra fat, the liver, the heart and the head to be delivered with my meat. When you buy meat directly from a farmer, you pay for the whole animal, even though you only get the nice bits of meat that the butcher wants you to have. I figured since I already paid for the weird parts, I should get them home and figure out what to do with them. I had a few plans - I had long wanted to try making liverwurst, and as for the head - I was interested in getting the jowls so I could smoke them or make Guanciale. When smoked, it's similar to bacon and guanciale is apparently kind of similar to pancetta.

Well, the idea of using up all the spare parts was a noble one. I didn't take any pictures of the liverwurst making process for some reason - I guess it was so intense and engrossing that I didn't pick up the camera. I ended up making two large liverwursts and about 10 small loaves of liver pate with bourbon. Pretty yummy stuff. I ended up giving the heart to my brother Carl, who always called dibs on the chicken hearts and gizzards any time Mom would roast a chicken when we were kids.

But the head.... Oh my God, the head nearly did me in. I don't think I was quite prepared to handle the huge hog's head that came wrapped in butcher paper. First of all, it was skinned. Do you know how gross a skinned pig's head is?

I'll show you how gross it is:



Not only was it gross, but the way that it was cut left very little meat in the jowl area, so I couldn't even make my hog jowls. Now what was I supposed to do? Make head cheese? Even I have my limits.
I found my way over to El Izalco that particular weekend, and the lovely Salvadorean woman who runs the place (and who I constantly forget the name of) suggested that I roast the head, make stock, and cook up some pozole. Pozole is a Mexican/Central American soup made with pork and hominy corn. Apparently it is served on special occasions because of the time it takes to prepare and it is a pretty big treat. I picked up a few pounds of dried hominy and lots of dried guajillo and chipotle chiles and went home with renewed excitement for my pig's head.

I have some pretty large stockpots, but nothing really worked with this damn head. I had hoped to skip the roasting part of the stock making, but the skull just wouldn't fit in the pot in one piece. After it had roasted for an hour or so, it was easier to break up into parts.

Long story short -

I was victorious in my goal of not wasting the pig's head. It made a delicious, rich soup that tasted extra yummy with all the hominy corn and chiles. And triple yummy with a garnish of chopped up avocados, cilantro and lime juice.

Pure Lard

Let me preface this post by saying that I don't particularly care for pork. It's not really my favourite meat in and of itself - if I'd have my pick on a buffet table I would probably go for chicken or fish sooner than a big piece of pork. However, I seem to be drawn to the transformative nature of pork. You can do so many interesting things with pork - you can cure it, salt it, smoke it, age it, stuff it into sausage casings, and render it. I love what I can do with pork.

This year we purchased a whole pig from some organic farmers in La Broquerie, Manitoba. (Butchered, of course). I like buying meat directly from the farmer for a few reasons -

1. I like buying straight from the producer. The farmer gets all the profit - no money needs to go to a middle-man or shiny grocery store. They get to pocket all the money from the sale and thus actually afford to have a small-scale organic farm and be able to make a living doing so.
2. I like that organic meat is cheaper than in the grocery store. Not cheaper than the regular meat, but cheaper than the organic stuff. I really like the idea of eating organic, humanely raised meat, but I also cringe at the inflated prices on the freezer-burnt organic roasts I see in the supermarket freezer. I paid $1.95 per pound of live weight - around $300 for this batch of meat.
3. I like that I can decide how I get my meat cut up. Now this point is actually hypothetical, because I haven't ever received meat cut the way I requested it from the butcher. It seems that butchers are an obstinate bunch that like to do things the way they want to do them instead of how they were asked to do them. This time, I asked for large roasts, to have half the belly fresh so I could make pancetta, and half of it smoked into bacon, for lots of ground pork so I could make my own sausages and very few pork chops. I also wanted the head, the liver, and as much of the fat as possible. What I actually received was 3 measly pounds of ground pork, no fresh belly,12 rings of farmer sausage, 56 pork chops, a couple of large roasts.... and the head, the liver and 3 giant bags of fat. (At least they got that part right.) Apparently my ham and bacon is on its way this weekend - when it comes, I'm going to see if I can trade some of those pork chops for ground pork.

Anyway, the first weekend of the pig I was BUSY. The meat went straight into the freezer, and I started working on the weird stuff. The first job was rendering the lard.

Why do I need to render lard? I really have no idea.

I think the main problem with me is that I read Chowhound.com way too much and I pay too much attention to the crazy Mexican food aficionados that say that you gotta render your own lard to get the real, authentic good flavour you need for good Mexican food. I've been on a bit of a tortillas, beans and pork kick for the past year or so and so it made sense that I should ask for the fat from my pig so I could render my lard and have lots of exceptional flavour in my tortillas.

Rendering lard takes a long time. You have to chop up the hard fat into small pieces like the picture above, and then cook it for hours and hours until all the fat turns to liquid.

There will still be some solid pieces in all the liquid fat at this point. Strain the fat through a small-grain sieve to get all the chunks out of there and set the lard in a pan to cool and harden. I figure that I rendered about15 pounds of lard, when it was all said and done. When it solidified, I cut it into chunks, wrapped it in parchment paper and stuck them in the freezer.

The chunks that are left are crackles, or Jreewe, in Low German - the preferred way to die from cholesterol poisoning for every Mennonite girl worth her weight in grease.

You can still buy Crackles in Steinbach in big plastic tubs, smothered in lard. I was really grossed out by crackles when I was a kid - Mom would scoop up a big spoonful of what looked like dirty lard into the frying pan, and then it would melt to reveal these brown glossy lumps of... whatever the hell they are. I'm thinking it must be leftover collagen from within the fat structure of the fatback. Like... Grody to the Max.

But who am I to deny my heritage? They're still not my favourite, but once the extra fat is strained out of them, they tasted pretty fine with some fried potatoes.

Home Canning Season 2008

The frenzy of food preservation hit us just as hard this summer as last year. In 2007 we had attempted to put away as much food for the winter as we could, partly due to our desire to avoid India-grown pickles and California-grown tomatoes throughout the winter as much as we could, and partly just to learn how to do it.

Some things disappeared really quickly - I think we had eaten most of our 20 jars of tomatoes by January. The chow, relish and pickles were gone by mid-winter too. When spring finally arrived, all we had left was some pickled cauliflower, ikra and salsa.
This year I tried to focus a little more on the stuff that went early last year, and a couple of new things like the sauerkraut mentioned in an early post.

I decided not to can tomatoes or tomato sauce this year. Because tomatoes aren't that acidic, you have to process them forever in a boiling water canner to safely can them. All that extra cooking didn't do too much for the flavour, either. This summer, whenever I had a few ripe tomatoes from our garden, I tossed them into the freezer whole. I also froze a big batch of tomato sauce in plastic yogurt containers and I also processed about 25 pounds of farmer's market tomatoes by roasting them in the oven until their skins blackened. I saved the run-off tomato juice to drink, and froze the roasted tomatoes in big blocks.
I also froze most of the swiss chard, kale and spinach that we got from the CSA so I could use them in soups and stews all winter long.


I went a little crazy with the pickles this year. I pickled everything - carrots, garlic scapes, green beans, zucchini and the odd cucumber. Between my garden, our CSA deliveries, and the farmer's market, there were a lot of vegetables to process as soon as they came in the house.

One day stands out in my memory in particular. I woke up early to cut up cucumbers and zucchini so they could sit in salt during the day when I was at work (the salt draws out the moisture from the cut vegetables and keeps them crunchier once they're pickled). My plan was to spend the evening canning the pickles and then making venison meatloaf for a friend at work and then doing laundry for my trip to Quebec.
At work that day, I received some free Bomber tickets for a game that very evening. I'm not the biggest football fan, but Jeff loves going to the games, (especially when they're free) so I accepted them, thinking that Jeff could find a buddy to take to the game and I could continue my evening pickling plans. So when I got home, I started boiling the water in the canner, and Jeff started calling his friends. By the time I was into mixing up the venison meatloaf however, he conceded defeat at finding anybody to go with him to the game. The onus was on me to accompany him to the damn football game. At this point, kickoff was about an hour and 15 minutes away. No problem, right?

At about this time I checked my e-mail. There was a new message from the Landless Farmers (our CSA) saying that there were FREE EXTRA CUCUMBERS available for pick-up a couple of blocks away on a first come, first serve basis. My mind raced... If I could get Jeff to run over and pick up a couple more pounds of cukes, I could get the meatloaf in the oven in the meantime, and then when I got the cucumbers from Jeff, I'd cut them into slices and get them soaking in salt by the time the meatloaf was ready to come out of the oven in time to go to the football game, and then I could can them when we came home from the game! I could make it all work! We might miss the beginning of the game, but it would all work out!


For some reason Jeff agreed to this plan and he ran off to fetch the free cukes. He must really love me. Or maybe he just loves pickles. I don't know.


To make everything more stupid, I decided that I didn't want to make sweet bread and butter pickles from this new batch of cucumbers - I wanted sour dill pickle rounds even though I had no dill. Wasn't it convenient that there was a Safeway directly on our way to the football stadium? It was a strange feeling to walk into the game with huge fronds of dill erupting from my purse - I got my share of heckling for my dill from the drunken football fans, but I felt quite vindicated when the Bombers actually won the game, the first win of the season.


I totally chalk that up to the dill. Anyway, the Bombers won, the second batch of pickles were successfully processed and EVERYTHING WORKED OUT.

I didn't do a proper count of everything we canned this year, but this picture shows what my pantry looks like right now. Lots of relish, chow, sauerkraut and salsa and LOTS of pickles.

Sauerkraut

- Sorry for the lack of Planet Borscht posts this fall - since I got a new modem I've been having problems uploading images to Blogger - hopefully it'll all get solved soon!

Remember when you were a little kid - your mom always let you pick your favourite food to eat on your birthday? I always picked sauerkraut. Sauerkraut with farmer sausage and potatoes. Mmmmm. Still one of my all-time favourites. It was one of the first meals I cooked for Jeff when we were first dating - I don't know how the relationship would have worked out if he hadn't liked it too... Thank goodness I never had to find out.

Since sauerkraut has always been one of my favourite foods, it's surprising that I never thought of making it before this summer, when it was one of the most plentiful veggies in our weekly CSA box. During the first few weeks of cabbage deliveries we tried to eat a lot of cabbage borscht and coleslaw, but every week we'd get another one and they'd start piling up. I went searching for cabbage recipes... what would use up a maximum amount of cabbage with a minimal amount of effort?

I found my obvious answer quite quickly - my two favourite Menno cookbooks, More with Less and Simply in Season - both had a really simple Sauerkraut recipe designed for small batches like mine. I kind of combined the two recipes - the MWL version has a bit more detail but I think it assumes that you're going to start out with really fresh cabbage that will make its own brine, and the SIS version tells you to add water.

So here's how I made my sauerkraut:

1. Chop cabbage. It would be sensible to have a food processor for this purpose, but yet again I did all the chopping by hand. My shoulder got quite sore and so my darling husband got to chop his share of cabbage as well. Darling husband.

2. Add a bit of salt to the shredded cabbage and pack it really tightly into clean jars. (I ended up taking the cabbage from these five jars and cramming it into three). Liquid should cover the cabbage once it's in the jar - if you're using super fresh cabbage, I think the salt would pull enough water out of the cabbage to not require any more water. However, my cabbages had been sitting in my fridge for a week or two already so I topped up the levels with boiling water.

3. Put really loose lids on the jars and let it sit at room temperature for a couple of weeks. During the first week the liquid will ooze out of the jar as it's fermenting. Once the water levels drop down again, your kraut is done. Then you can move it into sterilized jars and can it for longer storage.

That's it, that's all. Easy Peasy.

It worked so well and so easily that I decided to make a second batch. Although this time I was in a hurry or something and I neglected to top up the water levels when I first put the cabbage in the jars. I remembered to do it about a week later but it didn't work out so well.

These jars of kraut didn't do their oozing thing and when I took off the lids after two weeks, this is what it looked like.

Some of the really old crock-cured recipes I found when I was first doing my research said that mold was possible and could simply be removed along with the top inch or two of cabbage. (Assuming you were using a gallon size stone crock filled with massive amounts of cabbage). This was NOT the case for my small jars of kraut - the whole thing smelled yucky and therefore it was discarded.

Ah, you live, you learn. The first batch still gave me some damn fine kraut and I'll definitely be doing this again.

Community Gardening

This year I became a gardener!

Apart from the bits of lawn that I dug up this year to plant a few tomato plants, our yard doesn't have a lot of productive dirt. I had been thinking about digging up our whole back yard to plant veggies, but it's so shady back there that the only thing worth planting back there are hostas.

Thank goodness for community gardens! My dear friend Kreesta had planted almost the whole space in this community garden on Maryland Street last year and this year wanted to share the burden/joy with some others. I got a 5 by 20 foot plot to use for my own growing pleasure.

It was a lot of fun to watch everything explode into delicious green yumminess throughout the summer. Certain things produced very well - I had a good month and a half of sugar snap peas and green beans. I probably didn't take very good care of the tomato plants though... They kind of got huge and unruly mid-summer and then a little diseasy by the time they were supposed to be pumping out the fruit. We also got a few small green peppers but strangely enough the plants at home did a lot better.

The cucumbers also started off really strong but eventually got some kind of musty nastiness half way through August that kept them from producing more cukes. I did manage to get enough from these plants for a couple of jars of baby dills, so I can't complain.

I also planted some cantaloupe plants near the back that didn't do too well, apart from the one lovely little melon I picked mid-August.

Tiny but tasty!

This picture kind of shows the risks of community gardening in a poor neighbourhood. I was so proud of my potatoes (you can kind of see them at the back). I had planted fingerlings because I thought it might be nice to have baby size potatoes throughout the growing season.

Unfortunately a few days after I took the picture on the right, I came to the garden to see that all the potato plants in the entire garden had been uprooted. Kreesta had warned me about planting potatoes - along with carrots and corn they're the most popular veggies in the neighbourhood, and you shouldn't expect to harvest everything you grew. I was pretty upset when I first saw them gone - I REALLY love potatoes and I had gotten quite attached to my plants - but them's the breaks. It's easy for me to go and buy baby potatoes at the Farmer's Market if I really want to - but it's probably not much of an option for whoever pulled up my plants.

My Brussels Sprouts on the other hand, have been left entirely for me! I've already picked a few of the biggest ones near the bottom of the stalks, but if this mild autumn continues the way it's been going, I'll be swimming in sprouts for the next few weeks! Yum.

Crampton's Market Part 2 - Smoked Garlic!

This is a short story about a good thing I found at a nice store called Crampton's Market. This good thing is Local Smoked Garlic.

Local Smoked Garlic are big heads of juicy garlic roasted over smoke until they're almost soft, but not quite.
Local Smoked Garlic tastes really good in things like three bean salad.

Go and buy some Local Smoked Garlic.

A tale of two pizzas

The pizza pictured above was consumed on a warm sunny patio in Quebec City. It consisted of brie, artichokes, prosciutto, and sundried tomatoes. It was very tasty. It was very French.

When I came home I had a lot of vegetables to eat. But I wanted to make it exciting like the food I had on holidays so I made a pizza like the one in Quebec City but not like the one in Quebec city. Mine had roasted green and yellow zucchini, fresh tomatoes, black olives, feta and Parmesan, drizzled in balsamic vinegar. It made the zucchini taste special and not like a burden. This was my goal.

Lovely Treats from La Belle Province

I can't quite make the transition to talking about autumn food until I have the summer food posts out of the way. This summer, the funnest food I had was definitely in Montreal and Quebec City.
Jeff and I usually manage to get away for a roadtrip every summer, but this summer he couldn't get time off work so I had to make other plans. My lovely friend Deb obliged me with a 5 day girls' getaway to Montreal and Quebec City for a shopping - eating - drinking extravaganza. It was fantastic on all points, but we're here to talk about food. Each meal could probably be its own post, but here are the highlights:

1. Breakfasts.

Every morning started with a cafe breakfast with a huge mug of cafe au lait. This particular breakfast also had a toasted bagel with cretons. Pork pate for breakfast. I love it.

2. Jean-Talon Market.
We were blessed with a hotel room with a full kitchen so I wanted to make sure I got to cook at least one tasty meal in it. We spent a lovely morning at the market perusing the veggies (spherical eggplant!) and the wonderful cheese shops and bakeries and meatshops.
Duck fat in a jar! Horse meat! Duck sausages! Purple peppers! Yup - this market has it all.

Alas, cooking options were limited in the hotel kitchen (no oil, no spices) so the spherical eggplants and purple peppers and horse meat were left behind at the market. We still managed to bring home a feast of sausages, wine, cheeses, garden fresh berries and some lovely bread.

3. Schwartz's Deli.

Restaurants with ritualized ordering procedures have a fond place in my heart. This place has exactly the same spirit as the best BBQ places I've been in the southern States. The ritual is equal to the pleasure of actually eating the food.

There are two lineups here - one for take-out and one for eating in. We were in the take-out line and still waited 25 minutes for a smoked meat sandwich. Would I stand in line here if I lived here? I don't know for sure, but all that waiting, staring at the meat through the window did make me yearn to learn how to smoke beef.

I had read somewhere that you should order your sandwiches medium-fat because then they're more juicy. And so I did because I always do what I'm told.

Mmmm, medium fat. They perhaps were a trifle too juicy for Deb's delicate hands.

4. Au Pied de Cochon.

This restaurant has gotten a lot of press for two things - for really pushing the whole 'snout to tail' philosophy of enjoying and preparing meat (a philosophy to which I try to subscribe) and also for putting foie gras on practially everything on their menu. This was my first time with foie gras, and I've got to say that it's damn tasty. I'm not exactly sure how I feel about the ethical aspects of eating the fattened livers of force-fed ducks but it seemed like something I should try at least once. Next time I come here, I'll go for the 'pied de cochon', which is what the guy beside me was eating. A roasted pig's foot, stuffed with sausage and triumphantly topped with a thick slice of foie gras.

This time we decided to eat light and shared an order of fried clams and a foie gras pizza with prosciutto, arugula, figs and goat cheese. Thumbs up, indeed.


Finally it was off to Quebec city for...

5. Classic French dining

Quebec City was a little more fancy pants than Montreal and it was definitely harder to get a seat in a restaurant due to the massive tourism that the 400th Anniversary Celebrations brought to the town. On our first night, our concierge suggested that we make a reservation if we wanted to eat out. At his suggestion we ended up at this little bistro at the end of a very long day. It was a little pricey, but duck confit with frisee salad and cretons on toast seemed like a perfect French meal, with the added Quebecois touch of having everything served on a slab of slate.

There was plenty of other great food on this trip, but there's simply too much to post here. You'll just have to go and eat for yourself.

Crampton's Market

Crampton's has been around for a couple of years but only recently have I discovered the amazing goodness of this place.

I had seen this place at the corner of Waverley and Kenaston before - I always thought it was something affiliated with the driving range that's right behind it. I had seen the signs on the road advertising fresh fruit and the like but I assumed it was another one of those road-side price-gouging markets. One day this summer on the way to St. Norbert Farmer's Market I decided to take a closer look. As soon as you make it to the driveway, the character of the place starts to come through. There's lots of cute hand painted signs, lots of nice potted plants and a gelati window on the deck. And the most amazing fresh bread smell!

I don't have any shots inside the shop, but it's packed full of local produce, dairy, meat, fruit and baked goods. It's the closest thing I've seen in an actual store that can compare to the Farmer's Market in quality and variety of produce. They're serious about sourcing local grub but doesn't shy away from offering other non-local stuff that still tastes yummy. Thus you can still buy avocados and limes and peaches at the same time you buy your New Bothwell and Oak Island cheese, Halbstadt corn, Ste. Anne chips, green tomatoes, and Manitoba Berkshire pork. The prices are a little on the high side for certain things - similar to the farmer's markets but it's worth it when you know there are farmers in our own backyard that get to make a living by growing our food.

Erin is SERIOUS about her produce. She sends out a weekly newsletter to those who subscribe and it makes for really good reading. Her last newsletter was a 2000 word explanation of the corn industry - the variety of species, the marketing, the merits of hand-picked vs. machine picked corn, and lots of cooking ideas.

So yeah, the produce is good, the ambiance is nice, but what really keeps me stopping here on the way to St. Norbert every weekend are these cinnamon buns!

Every time I've visited the shop on a Saturday morning they're still warm and glistening with melted butter and sugar. They're not gooey or syrupy - they're more like a super buttery soft cinnamon bread with lots of sugar. And at 75 cents each I usually get two.

And so should you.

Cedar Plank Salmon

But Man and Woman cannot live by greens alone. Sometimes tasty fish is good too.

Tasty fish cooked on a cedar plank basted with maple syrup and dill over charcoal is even better.
And tasty fish with the smoky maple dill glaze carmelized on top is the best.

Early Summer Greens

Oh Dear.

Yes, it's late summer now and I haven't posted for two months. If I have any excuse it's because I've been too busy enjoying my food and planning meals around the fresh produce to blog about it. But pictures have been taken all along, and the pictures and experiences must be shared.

So this post is about my life in early July of this summer.

This is the list of our veggie delivery on July 15. Notice the abundance of greens and herbs?

This was the story pretty much all of July. It didn't get boring though... Check out the gorgeous salads below...

My favourite way to eat our greens ended up being pictured below - stirfried scallions and chinese cabbage and chard and chard stems and kohlrabi and baby carrots mixed up with red thai curry paste and served with coconut rice. So decadent!