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.