The Bounty of the Harvest

Food from the St. Norbert Farmer's Market

I've just finished reading Barbara Kingsolver's book, "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year in Food Life" and found it very inspiring. In her book, Kingsolver and her family have committed to eating locally for a year. This involves raising their own turkeys and chickens for meat and eggs, growing huge vegetable gardens, and even making her own cheese. It helps that she's living in a rural, agricultural area in a moderately temperate climate that makes this type of living feasible, but there are a lot of ideas in it that are pretty viable, even for an urban dweller living in a part of the world where winter lasts for 6 months.

The idea of primarily eating food grown in our own community is an goal that we've been moving closer towards for a few years. We've been members of the Wiens Shared Farm, a CSA based out of St. Adolphe for about four years or so and have really enjoyed eating food in season. We've also been buying a majority of our meat in the last year direct from local sources - organic pork from La Broquerie, chickens from New Bothwell, and the odd package of grass fed beef from those who bought a quarter and didn't have the storage space to keep it all.

This year, the Hundred-Mile-Diet is getting a lot of buzz in the media. There are groups being formed here in Manitoba that are promising to stick to a rigid 'locavore' diet for 100 days this autumn. I like the idea of food challenges, and this one sounds interesting, but the idea of forgoing coffee or the odd citrus fruit for 3 1/2 months will make me say no thanks to the 100 day promise. Instead, I'm doing what I can now to buy my food from farmers markets to supplement our CSA share (very wet fields this year - lots of kale, green onions and lettuce so far) and I've decided to plant peas, beans, tomatoes and herbs in my front yard this year instead of begonias and petunias.

My front steps garden - tomatoes, green beans and peas.

My herb garden - thyme, oregano, basil, sage, chives, sorrel, and some more green beans.

Check out http://100milemanitoba.org/ for links to lots of local Manitoba food producers.

Warning! Lewd Content!

We've been making our own sausages for about four years now. I'd always liked Italian grocer's fresh lean sausage and it seemed like it would be easy to make. Simple as that.

This is how you make sausage:
Take meat, grind it if it needs to be ground, add spices and then stuff into casings. Then you're done. This time around we started with pre-ground organic pork from La Broquerie. We made two flavours - a spicy Italian with lots of red pepper flakes, fennel and sambuca, and a chipotle pepper fresh chorizo style sausage. Once the meat and spices have been mixed and taste-testing is successful, it's ready to stuff into casings.

Making sausage enriches our marriage. (Tee Hee!)

Stuffed and ready to make into links.

Linked, vacuum packed, and ready for the freezer.

Sour food from my garden

I like sour food. When I was little, all I can remember wanting to eat is sauerkraut and dill pickles. (And process cheese and potatoes...) As an adult, sour is still one of my favourite tastes.

Although my garden is quite pitiful, I have ensured I have a supply of my sour favourites.


Gooseberries.

Nasty little sour berries that eventually ripen on some other alternate universe, but never in any garden I've ever seen. Add a little sugar to these babies, though and they're magical. I'm not sure what I'll make with these - maybe some gooseberry pereshki or milch moos if my mom will teach me how.

(What is a gooseberry pereshki, you ask? My mother's rendition is a handheld pastry filled with the tart berries and a bit of sugar. Here is one of my mom's goosberry pereshki, baked fresh:)

Rhubarb. This is the saddest little rhubarb plant in the world, but its presence is comforting. Thank goodness I have friends that have more rhubarb than they can handle.

Sorrel.

The secret ingredient for somma borscht and a tart addition to salads. Every year I buy another sorrel plant, and every year it kind of disappears for different reasons. This year the plant is looking pretty robust.

Non-BBQ Southern Treats

I'm still catching up with the food pictures from our trip, even though we got home over a month ago. I've already posted a bit about the BBQ we experienced down south and my poor attempts to duplicate it.

This trip was not all about BBQ, however... Not by a long shot.

Favourite food surprise of the trip: Hot Boiled Peanuts just outside of Mobile, Alabama

I wouldn't have necessarily thought that hot peanuts would be tasty, but this bag of spicy goobers that we picked up at a gas station in Alabama were FANTASTIC. You still had to sort of crack the shell open, and the soggy, salty, spicy peanuts inside were really tasty. We devoured this bag by the side of the road at 10 in the morning.

Favourite greasy breakfast: Fried Country Ham in Hoxie, Arkansas

This definitely was not a slice from some plastic-wrapped Toupie ham product - this was the real deal. This ham reminded me of my Oma Froese's fried ham- it was swimming in its own grease and it seemed appropriate. Why shouldn't it be swimming in grease? It's HAM!

Favouite Cajun food: Chicken on the Bayou, Henderson, Louisiana

We ate a lot of great Cajun food on this trip, and most of it was fancier than this place, but nothing could match Chicken on the Bayou for freshness or local flavour. It was basically a convenience store with a fry kitchen on the side with about 5 tables where you grab your own beer from the fridge. We started off with these spicy boiled crawfish and some yummy boudin (the spicy pork liver and rice sausage in the foreground) and ended up also ordering a fried seafood plate that included oysters, alligator, catfish, crawfish, shrimp and frog legs.

(And before you get alarmed at our unending gluttony here, remember that you only eat the tail from crawfish! Most of them were smaller than the average size cocktail shrimp.)

Favourite Seafood of the trip: Oysters!

It's hard to decide how I liked them best...it's a toss-up between simple raw oysters on the half shell and the fried oyster po-boy we had in Larose, Louisiana. Those po-boys were absolutely delicious, though...

Most interesting edible seafood: Fried soft-shell crab

I don't know about you, but I found it interesting to eat a crab - shell and all. Yummy. And not too crunchy, either. Jeff also had a softshell crab po-boy in New Orleans. Imagine half of one of these guys in a baguette with lettuce, mayo and pickles. Super yummy!

Favourite 'It's Getting Late and We're Hungry and We Need To Find a Hotel' supper: Spring Hill Seafood, Mobile AL.
We saw this place as we were on our way through Mobile, looking for a cheap hotel on the edge of the city. After we finally found a Super-8, we backtracked into the city to check this place out. It was a run-down fish market that also boiled crawfish and shrimp to order. We got a couple pounds of crawfish and a pound of huge Gulf Coast shrimp boiled fresh for about $12. We then rounded out the meal with some fried dill pickles and some fried catfish from a fast-food fish place across the street. So good! Why don't people sell fried dill pickles in Manitoba? We love dill pickles!

I've left out a lot of great food from this trip. We fine-dined at NOLA and munched on beignets at Cafe Du Monde in New Orleans, listened to Cajun music at Prejean's in Lafayette, and ate crawfish pie in Breaux Bridge, not to mention the very fine tin-foil dinners we enjoyed while camping. There just simply isn't the space to list it all. This list was mostly about the delectable surprises that were unexpected high points of the trip.

For those of you who'd like to see the non-food highlights of the trip, check out our album:

http://www.froddard.photosite.com/

Barbecue Ribs

We recently returned from a trip to the US. We had many, many culinary adventures on this trip through the American South- but this post will focus one particular discovery of the trip - BBQ ribs.

I've never been a huge fan of ribs; they always seemed like more bone, fat, and gristle than meat. I've had great oven cooked ribs, but the ones off the grill never enticed me. On this trip we decided to investigate the world of BBQ ribs. We had our first rack at L.C.s in Kansas City and they were so good, I knew we were on to something.

Some other notable racks from our journey:

On the left - Memphis dry ribs at The Rendezvous. (The picture at the top of this post is an example of Memphis wet ribs, at B.B. King's.) The folks in Memphis are pretty proud of their ribs - these two places were suggested by the security guard at Graceland.
On the right - beef and pork rib combo at Leatha's, in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. I am still astounded at the huge hunk of meat attached to this rack. Where can you even buy ribs like this? These were absolutely delicious, but the sauce was really sweet. These rib leftovers made really good tin-foil dinner supper 6 hours later.

When we returned home, I thought I'd try making these for myself on our new smoker with an off-set wood box. I tried out the ribs two ways - one rack was kind of steamed in tinfoil in the oven at 250 degrees, and the other rack went into the smoker, maintained between 225 and 250 degrees. We used dry Manitoba Maple for the smoke.


This is what my smoked ribs looked like after about 4 hours. I took these ribs off the grill at about 4 1/2 hours. The ribs in the oven were falling off the bone after 3 1/2 hours.
The verdict?

The ribs from the smoker were too smoky and too tough, and the ribs from the oven were so soft they were almost mushy! The smoked ribs just needed more time and less smoke and the ribs in the oven definitely didn't need the tin-foil.

Food for thought for next time around. (And besides, Kansas City is only a 12 hour drive away if I want the real deal!)

Happy Marshmellowy Mother's Day!

My Mother Can Do Anything.
My Mother Can Make Marshmellows and make 5 dozen zwiebach at the same time.

To make marshmellows - boil sugar and water and gelatin together until it gets to soft-ball stage. (Add maraschino cherry juice to make it pink, just for fun.) Let it cool down, then beat until it triples in volume.
Once tripled in volume, spread it in a small pan coated in icing sugar and let set for a few hours.
Roll in coconut, and you got yourself the treats pictured at the top of the post. After finishing these, Mom said it was too much work.

To me, It seemed a lot easier than the zwiebach going on at the same time. My mother has a gift for the most amazing breads and buns. I love to cook, but I leave the baking to my mom!

Happy Mother's Day, Mom!

Eggs and Salmon

I was somewhat remiss in my duties last week.
I forgot to take pictures of the potluck brunch after a weekend morning at the spa with the girls. There were beautiful foods at this brunch, and they must only be brought to mind with memory and no photos. Like the old days. (Sigh). My contribution was warm gingerbread (which really deserves its own post someday) and some devilled eggs filled with smoked salmon. The devilled eggs were quite delightful - I hadn't really thought too much of eggs and salmon before, but they were a tasty delight.

And subsequently, the inspiration for the following quiche a few days later:


I like making quiche. I pride myself on my pastry. Rarely attractive, but usually quite flaky.

This particular pie wasn't too flaky - the pastry ball was approaching freezer burn after living in the freezer for several months - but I thought this photo demonstrated the unattractive quality of my pastry, at the very least. This quiche was loaded up with Swiss cheese, red peppers, dill and chopped up smoked salmon.
Add some green salad, and you got yourself a nice early-spring supper.

Sushi

Enough about pork! Time for Sushi!

Lest you all believe that all I eat is salt pork, I would like to affirm that my pleasure of the palate are wide and varied.

That being said, these sushi rolls may not have been authentic, but they sure were tasty! And remarkably easy to make, too.

The Agony and the Ecstasy - Curing Pork (Part Three)

Part Three: Smoking.

The pancetta in the basement was joined by even more hanging meat. Smoke permeates the meat better if the surface is totally dry.

Jeff got to work preparing the wood. While it is true that you can buy wood chips all over the place, it seemed more fun to do that from scratch too. (Although not as much fun after an hour of sawing..)

This huge branch of Manitoba Maple fell down during one of last summer's windstorms.

Next morning, bright and early.

A few pieces of lit charcoal and a couple of chunks of maple got the smoke puffing nicely. Nice and cool.

Look at the happy smoker on the deck!

Look at the happy ham and happy hock and happy sausages!

Now look at the burnt, sad and unhappy ham!

This catastrophe occurred around hour 3 of smoking.

Everything had been going really well until that point. The wood was smoking consistently and was nice and cool for the first hour and a half, but then it started fizzling out. It took a while to get the next batch of charcoal and wood smoking nicely, so I figured I'd have to time it a little tighter on the next batch. Which led me, an hour later, to add half a dozen burning briquettes to the wood when the last half dozen were still going.

About fifteen minutes later, Jeff saw flames spitting out of the smoker. No more smooth, cool smoke. We had fire.

Now, the whole thing about smoking is that you want to flavour and somewhat dry out the meat without cooking it. This is why the low temperature is so important - you don't want to render any fat or cook the meat. Which is what happened.

I wept bitterly.

But all was not lost. The burnt parts of the ham were cut off, and then we roasted it. The smoke had permeated about 3/4 of an inch into the ham, leaving a nice pink ring on the outer layer. It tasted...kind of hammy.

Some of the bacon had started cooking in the fire and had gotten pretty leathery. I cut those pieces off to use later as salt pork, some of which flavoured a huge pot of spicy baked beans beautifully the next day.

There was about a 6-inch square of usable bacon from each slab that I had prepared. Hey, for my first try, that's not so bad, is it?

Mmmmm. Homemade maple bacon.

The Agony and the Ecstasy - Curing Pork (Part Two)

Part two: Bacon and Pancetta.


The dry cure sucked out a lot of the moisture from the meat as it sat in the fridge, creating its own brine, as seen below. After about 5 days, it was time to get the meat out of the salty brine. The remaining salt was scrubbed off the meat and thoroughly washed.


The two slabs designated to be bacon were dried off, and placed into new bags into the fridge. I added some maple syrup to one of them, and garlic and pepper to the other so the flavour could permeate a bit before smoking. (The scallops pictured on the Valentine's Day post were wrapped with the maple bacon from this stage.)


The slab designated to be pancetta was also scrubbed and dried off, then covered with a thick layer of cracked black pepper.

Then came the fun part - rolling up and trussing the tightly rolled meat.

Rolling - easy, trussing - tricky.

And then the easiest part - Hang it up, and let it cure.

Thank god the cats can't jump higher than two feet - the basement is usually their domain, but the cool, dry environment down there was very nice for the pancetta.

The finished product, after curing for almost four weeks:

For more info on making pancetta, check out http://www.chowhound.com/recipes/10699.

The Agony and the Ecstasy: Curing Pork (part one)

2007 - The Year of the Pig.

Pork intrigues me more than beef, somehow. Beef is too simple. You don't have to work with it to get results. It justs sits there, tasting good, being beef. But pork! Working with pork is like a culinary costume party. Different preps of pork leaves you with totally different tasting meat. Pork for the sake of pork - I could take it or leave it. But seasoned, smoked or cured pork becomes a seasoning of its own.

Yes, I could find simpler hobbies. Hobbies with less sleepless nights, with less heartache and tears, with less crushing disappointments. But then I'd never have homemade bacon!

O.k. So this all started about two and a half weeks ago, when I purchased half a pig. Half an organic, raised under the oak trees in La Broquerie pig. After trying out the flavour of the fresh pork by roasting the bone-in loin roast (juicy and succulent - organic pork for the sake of pork is pretty damn good!), the work of curing began.

Three projects were started: ham, bacon and pancetta. I received several small ham roasts cut from the leg, and I chose the largest roast (about 6 pounds) as well as the hocks to brine and eventually smoke. The belly came in a 8-pound slab that I cut into three equal pieces. One piece would become pancetta, and the other two were destined for becoming bacon.

Darling husband made the brining possible by procuring some lovely plastic buckets from the cafeteria at U of W.The brine for the ham and the hocks was salt, brown sugar, some juniper berries, and water. Next came the pancetta. This was a dry cure, pictured above: salt, brown sugar, bay leaves, juniper berries, fresh thyme, chopped garlic and cracked black pepper.

This spice mixture was rubbed liberally all over the slab of pork belly. This was repeated with the other two slabs of belly, but with a simpler cure of salt and sugar.

The slabs of bacon were placed into air-tight plastic bags, and then weighted down in the fridge. I used a sophisticated method of placing canned goods on top of them. Clever, yes?

The brine with the ham and the hocks were placed in a cold corner of the pantry. There happened to be a cold snap during this time and this room was probably around 5 degrees. Although it probably slowed down the process of salt absorption, I didn't have to panic that it was going to go bad on me!

Then, I waited.