My Second Kick at the can - Ham Edition

As mentioned in the Bacon Edition earlier, things were a little easier this year.
The ham was brined for 3-4 weeks in our cold, cold basement, and then the ham was smoked for about 10 hours without catching fire! Everything went nicely and according to plan.

I found myself wondering how I should store the ham until Easter - about three weeks later. Iwas trying to figure out how I could vacuum wrap or somehow seal it before freezing it until I realized that I had CURED A HAM. No refrigeration necessary. So up in the basement it went again until it was time to eat it.

I boiled it in several changes of boiling water to reduce the saltiness. Then I removed the rind, stuck some cloves in the fat, smothered it in honey and baked it up.


Ham to be proud of. Easter dinner will never be the same again.

My Second Kick at the Can - Curing Bacon

They say that the third time's the charm - but my second try at bacon was so vastly improved over the first batch that I feel plenty charmed already. (For those of you interested in the miserable results of my first attempt at bacon, click here.)

The first and most important thing I learned from last year was not to brine the belly for so damn long! Last year I kept the bacon and pancetta in the salt mixture for about 5 days, which is what you'll need if you want to truly cure the meat to avoid refrigeration. However, these being modern times, I have a freezer and need not fear spoilage. So the bacon soaked up the salt for just under 24 hours this year.

The second thing I learned from last year was that I needed a better smoker with an off-set firebox so my meat can't start on fire! My little charcoal BBQ unit still provides a pretty amateur smoking situation, but it's easier to use than my old kettle smoker.

And the third thingI learned from last year - don't use yucky wood! Apparently Manitoba Maple is not a premium smoking wood. (Who knew?) A less acrid choice was a bag of little Hickory and Applewood chips that I bought in a bag at S.I.R. It wasn't 100-Mile smoke, but it actually resulted in enhancement of flavour rather than the detriment of flavour.

The bacon sat in the smoke (away from the heat this time!) for about two hours.

My result - lovely pink bacon. hampered only by the nasty hack-job that I performed on the skin removal.

Just enough sugar to have a slightly carmelized effect when cooked, without the overwhelming saltiness from last time.

Yay for modern packaging. Say no to oversalting.

PS - I made pancetta too. It was also good!

Mmmm, Mmmm! Sausage Cake!

I'm not quite sure why this recipe grabbed my attention the way it did. I'm even more unsure as to why I felt the need to make it.

I was curious, sure. Wouldn't you be curious? What would the texture of meat baking within a cake be like, exactly? Would it be chunky? Would it be savoury? Would it be soggy?

I found it quite fun that the first step was to cream the sugars with the raw sausage meat. A pretty standard recipe step, creaming the sugars with the fat source, but it seemed so icky this time. But cream I did.
I used Maple flavoured breakfast sausages from the grocery store - (I didn't really feel like breaking out the Berkshire chorizo for this one, know what I mean?)

With the addition of the flour, coffee, nuts and raisins, the cake batter was looking a lot more palatable. Still, it was a little disconcerting to not be able to thoughtlessly scoop up a spoon of the batter to taste - something about raw pork consumption made me shy away from the taste test.


The end result was astonishingly tasty.

Served with a burnt sugar caramel sauce, this actually became a nice, moist, dense spice cake. No discernable meat texture, although a co-worker of mine swore that it had an after-taste reminiscent of Hot-Rods.

Rice Pudding

I'm a lazy person on the weekends at the best of times - and the end of January in Winnipeg is generally not well known to be the best of times. In my ideal world, winter weekends are for reading and watching movies and cooking and being slovenly and not leaving the house.

Today I managed to fulfil my goal quite nicely - I didn't get out of my pajamas all day and I still managed to have a nap. And I made the perfect food to eat on a day that you're not going to get out of your pajamas - rice pudding.

Just to make it fun, I used arborio rice for extra creaminess and threw a few cardamom pods into the mix. If I had raisins, I probably would have thrown them in as well, but I didn't so I added some dried cranberries and toasted almonds to the finished dish. And delightful it was, eating in my pajamas in my sunny dining room, gazing at the cold snow outside.

Merry Christmas Part One - The Christmas Tomato

I'd love to make this a yearly tradition, but the timing might be tricky to duplicate next year. Tomatoe plants just go so nicely with Christmas ornaments!

Our potted tomatoes actually did quite poorly this summer - I think we might have gotten 2 or 3 tomatoes from them all year. We brought in the plants when it got cold this fall - there were still a few tiny little tomatoes on the plants that we thought might eventually grow and ripen if we brought the plants inside.

They started turning red the week before Christmas and are now perfectly ready to eat in our leftover turkey sandwiches. Brilliant!

Merry Christmas Part Two - Tourtière

Apparently, it is a French Canadian tradition to serve Tourtière on Christmas eve. I am not French Canadian, but I love tourtière, and I happened to have a lot of ground pork in my freezer. And anyway...what goes better with a turkey dinner than MEAT pie?

So...this is the method. You get your ground pork (Berkshire pork from Clearwater, MB in my case), you cook it up with some water, onions, garlic and lots of ground cloves, sage and savoury. Mix it up with mashed potatoes and stick it in some lardy pastry. Bake until lovely and enjoy with friends and family.

Fried Potatoes

Today is Gray Cup Sunday, the pinnacle of the Canadian Football League season, and I'm not at a party celebrating. This is by choice. I am not interested in football. I find football dull and difficult to pay attention to. There's something about the day that deserves a party, though.

Several years ago, after fostering an anti-Gray Cup party tradition, some friends sadly informed us they would no longer be available to celebrate the day with us in our particular fashion because the desire to actually watch the game had stolen upon them. This was not particularly sad, just somewhat puzzling. These days we celebrate the day by grocery shopping in an empty store.

I don't know what it is about Gray Cup Sunday, but I had this wicked craving today for hot wings and potato chips today. Sitting around the living room watching-the-game-food. Even though I held strong through all the grocery aisles, my passion for salty crispiness did not abate when we got home.

So I made me some potato chips. And ate them as I watched The Simpsons, avoiding the big game one channel over.

Planet Pumpkin

I've been living in pumpkin land for the past couple of weeks.

We got several pumpkins this year from our CSA, like every year. This year however, we actually wanted to eat them before they rotted away. A noble goal, yes?
We got through the first little pumpkin quickly with Creamy Pumpkin pasta and Liberian Pumpkin Stew from the Simply in Season book. Pretty tasty.

Even our giant Jack-O-Lantern pumpkin was saved for food this Hallowe'en - we used an LED light inside the lantern instead of candles so it wouldn't get charred and nasty on the inside. After its life as a Jack-O-Lantern was complete, we roasted it whole until it was nice and soft. It ultimately gave us four litres of cooked pumpkin to deal with.

So this weekend - I dealt with it.

Pumpkin and kidney bean enchiladas...

Pumpkin Crumble....

And pumpkin bread.

And there is more pumpkin pie filling and pumpkin enchilada sauce in the freezer for later squash adventures.

So as a celebration, and as reward for our hard work using up our pumpkin in such ingenious ways, we celebrated with some fantastic Sargent Sundae soft serve pumpkin pie ice cream.

BEST SOFT SERVE IN TOWN!

Home Canning Season, 2007

As I posted earlier in July, we made the commitment this year to eat locally all summer while the produce was fresh and in season. At some point we also made the decision to stock up on all the beautiful, fresh, local stuff and try to save some of it for the winter. (This decision came shortly after we noticed that the pickles we were buying were grown in India, and the tomatoes we depended on all winter were from California...) Our Wiens Farm CSA share gave us our veggies for the week, but we also made it out to the St. Norbert Farmer's Market almost every Saturday morning this summer to supplement the frenzy to 'put food by'.

And yes, it became a frenzy. Lots of food made its way into the freezer, which is currently full of kale, swiss chard, beet greens, corn, strawberries, freezer jam, gooseberries, raspberries, apples, and sorrel, but the most time intensive effort was devoted to canning preserves.

The diced zucchini, peppers and onions pictured above were diced by hand. As was everything else processed in my house. I don't know why I keep resisting a food processor - I'm paranoid that everything is going to be sliced down to mush, I think. If you're going to make everything from scratch, let it have some character! Yay for chunks!

My kitchen was continuously filthy. Simmering pots on the stove for hours and hours at a time... boiling pots of water going for hours and hours at a time...
All I can say is, thank God August wasn't as hot as July was this year. This project would definitely not have come to fruition if it that 30+ heatwave would have continued.

Slowly but surely, the little batches of tasty things collected up...

In the end, this was the approximate final tally:

• 2 pints zucchini and pepper relish
• 4 pints curry pickles
• 3 pints bread and butter pickles
• 4 pints pickled baby carrots with oregano
• 4 pints pickled cauliflower
• 8 pints baby dills
• 3 quarts big dills
• 12 pints tomato salsa
• 10 quarts diced tomatoes
• 10 quarts tomato sauce
• 9 pints carrot ikra
• 10.5 pints green tomato chow (all from Stiles Street tomatoes!)
• 1 quart apple cider
  

I'll keep ya'll posted to see how long all this stuff lasts us!

Pembina Valley Manitou Honey Garlic & Maple Syrup Festival

Please welcome our second ever guest writer to Planet Borscht - Ms. K - an individual who truly knows the Manitoba food scene in and out.

I am delighted to be a guest blogger here at Planet Borscht....
home of down home Manitoba food culture!

September 7th found us flocking to Manitou for the Pembina Valley Manitou Honey Garlic & Maple Syrup Festival.

The festival featured a Pancake Breakfast, Craft Show and Sale, Farmer’s Market, Display Booths, Honey, Garlic & Maple Syrup Vendors, Free Stage Entertainment, Cooking Demos, Historic Town Tours, Soap Box Derby, Gourmet Alley, Beverage Gardens, all topped off with a delicious Buffet Supper. The highlight of the day was the soapbox derby. Below is a video to give you a taste of the action!

There was even transportation to tour one throughout the town! An enterprising Manitouarian was holding a garage sale and we missed out on purchasing a nearly new 1950's accordian for $50!

The evening was lovely with a Deadwood Saloon in the arena and an excellent dinner.

In the realm of fall suppers the dinner was something of a gourmet meal and well worth the $17. Here is the visuals on the dinner..our eyes were much much bigger than our stomachs and I regret to inform you we wasted some of this lovely food

Veggie option

Meat Option

The buffet featured

• Plain or garlic roast beef


• Honey lemon crusted chicken


• Dry roasted garlic pork ribs with wild cranberry jelly


• Honey mustard glazed farmer sausage


• Garlic mashed potatoes


• Herb sauteed mushrooms


• Orange honey glazed carrots with fresh dill


• Manitoba maple syrup baked beans


• Tomato salad with basil garlic dressing


• Honey coleslaw


• Cucumber onion salad


• Dinner rolls


• Roasted garlic in olive oil and herbs (my favorite)
  


• Pembina valley apple crisp with manitoba maple syrup

In closing here is a clip from the Deadwood Saloon compete with saloon piano player

We give the Pembina Valley Honey Garlic and Maple Syrup Festival 4.85 stars out of 5!

MCC Relief Sale, Morris MB

The MCC Relief Sale in Morris, MB is the ultimate kick-off to Autumn each year.
MCC puts on this combination of farmer's market, craft sale, bake sale, flea market, auction and fall supper every September as a fundraiser for food, water, and other missions projects for the Mennonite Central Committee.

You can find hand-knit winter mittens, cottage cheese vareneki, damson plum jam, giant homegrown watermelons and Manitoba apple cider and quilts and antiques... and so many other exciting things.

Then you can eat yourself into a stupor! What more can you ask for?

The jam table and the mittens table. The jam went pretty fast this year, but the mittens were plentiful. The fresh produce and food tent.
It's a little different from a farmer's market in that you don't actually get to talk to the people that grow or produce the food - it's completely run by volunteers. Some of the food is produced by large companies - farmer sausage is donated from Winkler Sausage and the noodles are donated by a local pasta company. But most of the produce comes from regular folks' gardens.

Noodles and apples.

The food is cheap as borscht....

And so tasty at 10:30 in the morning!

This is the booty from this year's trip. 4 liters apple cider, 4 dozen frozen cottage cheese vereneki, a link of Winkler's liver sausage, a bag of windmill ground rye flour, four jars of jam, two pairs of mittens, 9 pounds of tomatoes, 5 pounds of apples, a head of romaine lettuce, a giant watermelon, 3 green peppers, 2 big onions and two dozen eggs.

Everything is cheap, locally produced, and all proceeds went to the MCC.

For more info on MCC Relief Sales, check out this link: http://mcc.org/manitoba/morrisreliefsale/

The Camping Gourmet

Yes, that's right. Canned lobster. The Camping Gourmet's best new friend.

Jeff brought a frozen can of lobster home from his last trip to Nova Scotia (mostly to keep the fresh scallops cold). Normally I'd kind of question frozen lobster, but when you're camping with no refrigeration, frozen canned lobster is brilliant! We packed it in the cooler Friday morning, and was thawed out but still cold for Saturday night supper.

There were about three tails and four big claws in the can - altogether about two and a half small lobsters worth of meat. It's pre-cooked and soaked in brine. Surprising not rubbery.

We fried it up with some butter and pesto, added some tomatoes, and finished it off with white wine and cream.
Yum. Couscous with zucchini and green peppers rounded out the meal. This meal topped the time we had grilled octopus in Pacific Rim on the camp stove. Best anniversary meal yet!



This was the site of our elegant repast. We were camped next to some yahoos in the campground, so we thought this abandoned park trailhead called Forester's Footsteps would at least be quiet.

Those Foresters sure were rough on their playground equipment.

Romantic Dinner, here we come!

Beet Salad