Gratitude Sunday

This week we are grateful for so many things!  Here are a few that come to mind.  What are you grateful for?

- local certified organic non-GMO sweet corn (first of the season for us!) from Organic Oasis Farm Store (it's so hard to find organic corn that this was such a treat, and we brought home dozens and dozens to put in the freezer)

- freshly harvested organic edamame (yummm) dropped off as a gift from our favourite farmer Angie at Fertile Ground CSA  (thank you Angie!)

-  fresh berries in our yard, containers filled every day, especially with loganberries (here is a link to local Whiffletree Nursery where there are numerous kinds of hardy berries, fruit and nut trees available perfect for our growing zone)

- a hummingbird that has visited our yard three nights in a row now (loving Maya's pink zinnias - she is thrilled!) - to attract hummingbirds try planting zinnias, salvia, morning glory, snapdragon, cleome, nasturtium, petunias, trumpet vine...

- bees, bees, bees on goldenrod (I have such a new appreciation for goldenrod and it's many benefits to us, and for fall forage for the pollinators)

- apples, apples, apples - we hope to press our own apple cider this year at Rolling Acres farm and cider mill (the old fashioned way)

Making grape juice - the easy method

This year is proving to be THE best grape harvest yet in all our seasons living and gardening here.  Ironically, the falling of two large beautiful old trees in a high wind storm a few weeks ago has helped immensely in the grape success.   Now, where there used to be deep shade for much of the day, we get full sun shining down on our ripening grape vines all day long.  With all this bounty we needed to find quick ways to harvest and preserve. Having a young baby here to care for, means limited time for long canning projects - so we discovered this easy and quick method of making grape juice.  12 beautiful litres done in 30 minutes today!

Easy Grape Juice Method

1) Fill litre jars with 1 cup grapes (cleaned, destemmed and washed).  Concord, or other grapes.
2) Add 1/4 cup sugar to each jar (upto 1/2 cup if you want a sweeter juice).
3) Fill each jar with boiling water, leaving 1/2 inch head space.
4) Top jar with clean lid and canning ring.
5) Process according to canning procedures for 15 minutes.

When you are ready to serve the juice, simply strain it into your glasses and compost grapes.
Makes easy, delicious, beautiful juice.

Let's make pie!

Who doesn't love pie?  Sweet, savory, vegan, gluten-free, or just old fashioned with real butter...there is a way to make pie work for almost any palate.  We held our first pie making workshop here this morning.  What a delicious way to start the day!  We used a vegan recipe with organic coconut oil, organic spelt flour, sea salt and water - which makes for a healthful flaky pie crust that rolls out easily and tastes great for either a sweet or savoury pie.  The two hour workshop also covered tips about pie making tools (e.g. pastry rollers and pie weights), differences to watch for based on what type of pie pan you are using (e.g. glass, ceramic, tin or aluminum), ways to creatively top and edge a pie crust, and what each ingredient does in the recipe.  For example, the fat creates a flaky pastry but this only happens if it is chilled before rolling and baking.  The water activates the gluten, but too much water can create a tough dough that is not flaky...etc.  We tried to cover all the best tips for creating perfect pie, and in the end there was a table filled with beautiful pies made from scratch and satisfied participant who went home feeling confident to keep on making pies.

Harvest foods

Now that our Symposium is over and the calendar page has turned to September, it's time to work on finishing our garden harvest, canning & preserving, drying, fermenting & pickling for the winter months.  The greenhouse shelves are stacked with drying racks layered with herbs; our kitchen counters are lined with jars of beans and cucumbers that are being lacto-fermented; our counters are covered in bowls and containers brimming with tomatoes, basil, eggplant and beans to be preserved into sauce, pesto and ratatouille.

And our meals these days are simple, but fresh and glorious with the abundant garden harvest - kale, chard, beans, various pestos, tomatoes tomatoes tomatoes every day!  Using these veggies on different kinds of pizzas has been a fun way to experiment lately.  We were recently at a wedding in Muskoka where pizza was served by All Fired Up, a portable wood-fired pizza catering business.  We loved their pear-pesto-arugula-goat cheese pizza, and made our own version of it last night using all these ingredients sourced from our yard (we even have our own pears this year!).  Yumm!

Fresh Pear-Pesto-Arugula Goat Cheese Pizza
Ingredients:

Fresh pears, 2 sliced thinly
Freshly made Pesto (our version uses fresh basil, sunflower seeds, olive oil, garlic, nutritional yeast, lemon juice, sea salt)
Fresh arugula, about 20 leaves (we used Surrey Greens, a spicy arugula-type leafy green)
Fresh soft goat cheese

Roll out thin whole-grain pizza dough.  Let rest 15 minutes on your pizza pan, pizza stone, or peel.  Spread with thin layer of pesto to cover whole dough.   Cover in concentric circles with sliced pears.  Sprinkle with arugula leaves, and dot with clumps of fresh soft goat cheese.  Bake at 500F for about 6 minutes!  Serve hot with fresh arugula leaves tossed on top.

Summer picnics - loving zucchini, cucumber & Ontario peaches...

We are enjoying all the fresh local food available these days - in the garden, zucchini, cucumbers, fresh herbs, cherry tomatoes...and at the market, Ontario plums, apricots and peaches!   The fresh fruit is such a treat.  For a quick outdoor lunch picnic today:  a rustic zucchini pie, and a cucumber-peach salad. 

Rustic Zucchini Pie

Crust:
1 1/2 cups spelt flour
7 Tbsp margarine or butter
4 Tbsp water
pinch of sea salt

Topping:
sliced cherry or plum tomatoes, sliced zucchini (Italian Largo worked beautifully), a drizzle of olive oil, a handful of fresh herbs (we used green and purple basil, oregano and thyme), and your favourite cheese (we used goat feta and local mozzarella)

1) Prepare crust.  Roll out into a large oval on lightly floured surface.  Place on lightly greased baking sheet.
2) If you wish, brush crust with lightly beaten egg yolk.  Then layer topping veggies and herbs in concentric circles or other designs on the crust. 
3) Top with generous amounts of fresh herbs, and a drizzle of olive oil.  Sprinkle on cheese.  Roll up sides of crust to form a rustic crimped "pie" edge.
4) Bake at 350 for 35-40 minutes, until crust is golden.  Serve warm, on a rustic wooden platter or cutting board, sliced into squares.  Serves 4.

Cucumber-Peach Salad
2 large peaches, diced
1 large cucumber, diced
1 tsp sea salt
2 green onions, chopped finely
handful of fresh dill and oregano
1 tsp apple cider vinegar
1 Tbsp olive oil or hemp oil
1 tsp lemon juice
(1 tsp sugar or honey, if you wish)

Combine all ingredients well.   Serve chilled as a refreshing salad on a very hot day!

First tomatoes

We savoured the first luscious warm ripe tomatoes from the garden today (an heirloom variety called Stupice)!   So worth the wait...

Berries galore!

There are berries to be gathered, everywhere we turn!  All over the city the mulberries, currents, raspberries and service (saskatoon) berries have ripened.  We now carry collecting baskets with us at all times, just in case we come across a delicious patch.  In our own yard the black and red currants and blueberries are also ready for harvest.  The Neighbourhood Forager is a great resource book for those who are interested in pursuing urban wild food harvesting.  Wild grapes will be ready next...and then rosehips...and then...

Summer solstice!

In celebration of summer's beginning...

today we had the first CSA pick-up with Fertile Ground CSA, just around the corner from our place.  It's a fabulous CSA (community supported agriculture) and such a great opportunity for folks in this neighbourhood to meet each other and share a common interest in supporting a local farm through purchasing beautiful top quality organic produce!  Tuesday afternoons always become a major social gathering over at the CSA pick up.  We are there each week with a baked goods table - we will feature various breads (wood-fired and otherwise) made with wholegrains and local organic flour.  Today's offerings were focaccia, broa (Portuguese cornbread), rustic apple-rhubarb tarts, spelt chocolate chip cookies, rhubarb pies, and multigrain flax sourdough breads. All sold out by 6:15 pm - long day, but so exciting!  Maya (my trusty helper) fell asleep 5 minutes after we walked home - she loves CSA days because of all the neighbourhood kids she gets to see - but was exhausted!

Winter sprout garden

We've planted seeds in the greenhouse and cold frames already, in hopes of harvesting some late winter greens.  Today we started our indoor winter sprout garden.  All this really meant was pulling out the wide mouth mason jars, finding mesh lids for them, and soaking several batches of seeds.  We love the sprout seed mixes from Mumm's in Saskatchewan - like spicy lentil crunch, sandwich booster, spring salad mix, brassicas blend, ancient eastern blend, etc - but of course you can simply buy organic seeds and mix your own variations together.  It's best to blend seedsor beans that are of similar size, so they germinate at a similar rate.  You can also sprout individual kinds of seeds, like the common alfalfa sprouts, mung beans, pea sprouts, wheat grass, or sunflower shoots.

It was fun for our 2-year old to help with this "garden" project, and she happily mixed and watered seeds, stirred them in their jars, and helped set up the draining station (we drain the jars propped upside down on a slight angle, supported in a wire dish rack).  She can watch the progress of these growing seeds, which are satisfyingly quick to sprout and ready to eat in only a few days!  We are already looking forward to our next winter picnic with homemade bread, hummus and fresh homegrown sprouts!

If you live locally and want to learn more about sprouting, check out our workshop on Wheatgrass/Sprouting, coming up on February 12.

Neighbourhood peach tree

Word has gotten around that we like to rescue forgotten fruit around town, picking and harvesting wonderful fruit from the trees of willing neighbours, as well as trees, bushes (or the ground) on boulevards, in city parks, along hiking trails, etc...and there is a lot of fruit to be found in our city!  We've had luck finding pears, apples, cherries, grapes, saskatoon (service berries), raspberries, mulberries, and even plums - but so far did not come across anyone with a peach tree.  Today, a friend dropped by with a basket full of plump miniature peaches - perfectly sized for a child's hand.  They were tiny, oval-shaped, sweet, very fuzzy (much more than market full-sized peaches), and oh so tasty!  She sourced them from a tree growing right nearby, which a neighbour had shared with her and told her the tree was aproximately 100 years old!  Don't know if the age of the tree is correct, but it is certainly old and would then likely stand where one of the original farms in this area was.  I would love to know more about the story of this tree - who planted and cared for it, was it part of an orchard, how far does it date back?  What a great historical landmark for this neighbourhood.  Delicious - thanks for thinking of us Michelle!

Little City Farm B&B: 100-Mile food...wood-fired pizza, apricot custard tart, and yogurt-berry parfaits

We had a lovely couple from Ottawa staying at our B&B for their 4th wedding anniversary.  They were interested in our wood-fired pizza dinner for the evening, as well as our "100-mile breakfast" option for the morning meal.  I decided to do both meals using all locally sourced (within 100-mile radius) ingredients.  They also needed the food to be wheat-free, which was fine given that organic spelt flour is grown and milled not far from here - good sources are: Oak Manor Farms, Grassroots Organics EcoFarm, and Laepple Organic Farm!  Here's what we served (plus a few photos below):

Wood-fired pizza made with an organic spelt crust, homemade tomato-garlic sauce, loads of fresh garden zucchini, cherry tomatoes, green & purple basil and oregano, shiitake mushrooms from our logs, local organic mozzarella from Millbank Cheese

Tomato-cucumber salad with fresh chives, basil, sweet onions and green onions from Fertile Ground CSA, topped with edible nasturtium blossoms, Hempola hemp oil and Filsingers apple cider vinegar

For dessert, slices of sweet local organic watermelon from a friend's farm (the first this season!), and individual apricot-blueberry custard tarts (custard made with local organic milk, eggs from our backyard hens, and local maple syrup), baked on a spelt shortbread crust, topped with a dollop of local creme fraiche, a nasturtium and a mint sprig...the fruit was purchased through a local fruit co-op that sources no-spray and organic fruit from Niagara and delivers to this area each week

The 100-mile breakfast included our B&B "signature" yogurt-granola parfait (made with local organic yogurt - usually either Mapleton's or Pinehedge Farms), plus homemade oat-maple-hemp granola, and fresh blueberries and cherries...mmmmm

Sometimes we have faint dreams of opening a bakery or small cafe or tea house, but for now our bed & breakfast is the perfect opportunity to explore our culinary skills, delight in sourcing and showcasing local food, and find creative artful ways to use our burgeoning garden produce. I love the season of edible flowers, so I try to incorporate them where I can (salads, desserts, breakfasts...)

Last of the June berries...wild harvesting around town

We spent the morning wildharvesting fruit with a few other neighbourhood families - mostly mulberries from a huge tree that we've found around the corner growing near a parking lot.  In other years we've climbed the tree and shaken the berries onto a tarp below, but this year the season has gone so quickly with all the rain that the berries were mostly on the ground.  However, with only about half an hour of gathering we filled numerous quart baskets - and not to mention the ones eaten directly by our little helpers!  At the end of the picking there were beautiful purple mulberry stained hands, faces, mouths, pants, toes...  We also noticed a nearby cherry tree loaded with the last cherries of this season, just past their prime and falling off the tree.  We checked with the home owner and picked several baskets full too.  There are so many abandoned or wild edibles around the city so it feels good to take in some of the local harvest to enjoy over the winter months.

100-Mile Desserts: Mixed Berry Pie

I recently did some catering for a friend who was having all her grad students over for a start of term barbecue. The menu was local and seasonal, and featured locally made tamales, fresh corn on the cob, sangria with local fruit, and I added in dolmades made with wild grape leaves, a colourful heirloom tomato, basil & mozzarella salad, a roasted red pepper feta dip, and homemade aioli with seasonal vegetable platter.

For dessert the host had requested fruit tarts, which included rhubarb-raspberry, blueberry and cherry, and were served with whipped cream, edible flowers and mint sprigs. I made this fruit pie for our household with the leftover fruit mixture - this was our 100-mile dessert for the weekend!

100-Mile Desserts: Cherry Pie

mmmm, we just had fresh 100-mile cherry pie, made with a double lattice spelt crust and served with organic icecream from Mapleton's dairy.

Life is so busy - no time to post the recipe now, but it's a simple unsweetened cherry (or other berry) pie (thickened with a little flour), with a crust made of organic spelt flour, egg, butter and water.

100 Mile Diet for K-W group introduced in local paper

Are 100 People Ready to try the 100 Mile Diet? by Dinah Murdoch

If you committed to a diet of food that was grown within 100 miles of your house, what would you miss most? Coffee? Spices?

It's a valid question for Waterloo naturopaths Rachel VandenBerg and Michael Torreiter, who hope to round up 100 local residents to join them in eating "100-mile food" for 100 days.

Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon, a B.C. couple, were the first to try it. They devoted themselves (with some exceptions) to eating local for a year, then chronicled their experiences in the much-discussed 2007 book, The 100 Mile Diet.

Smith and MacKinnon then took the idea to everyday folks in Mission, B.C., having six families there try 100 days of eating food that was grown and produced within a 100-mile radius. A TV report describing the results recently aired in a Food Network Canada program called The 100 Mile Challenge.

Torreiter and VandenBerg run the Healing Path Centre for Natural Medicine on King Street in Waterloo. They thought about their 100-mile idea a couple of years ago and were going to try it then. Other things got in the way, but fast forward to now and the two are ready to take on the task.

On Tuesday, they'll hold a recruitment session of sorts from 7 to 9 p.m. at The Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery on Caroline Street in Waterloo. The event will be catered with locally produced food. All are welcome.

Region of Waterloo public health planner Marc Xuereb will give a presentation on local eating and growers will be on hand. There will be a Q-and-A session about how the project will work.

Though the 100 days won't officially start until Saturday, July 4 -- it's timed to coincide with the local growing season --VandenBerg says they're organizing now to help people to avoid the stress of being unprepared.

"This way we can paint a picture of what these 100 days will look like and people have time to figure out what prep work they'll need to do," she said in an interview.

Over the course of the project -- it wraps up at Thanksgiving -- there will be potluck events, organized farm expeditions and workshops.

VandenBerg says she and Torreiter are open to suggestions from participants as to how the experience can be enriched for everyone.

Local food growers and sellers are thrilled about the project and many are offering to help in any way they can. It will, after all, mean increased sales for those who run small food-based businesses and are constantly struggling to compete with commercial grocers and big box stores.

Asked what participants will find hardest to give up, Torreiter and VandenBerg offered a few thoughts.

"Coffee and chocolate," they both said, right off the bat.

"Sugar might be tough but we do have honey and maple syrup," added VandenBerg.

"Nuts and seeds might be a problem. And people pretty much can't have anything that comes in a package, so the loss of convenience will be tough. I think making everything from scratch will be the hardest thing."

Torreiter laughs at the thought of getting out a pasta maker late on a Friday night and telling the kids to wait a couple hours while he prepares and cranks out the dough.

The 100-mile diet is seen as a good way to reduce your carbon footprint while supporting the local economy. But Torreiter said he thinks the health benefits will also be well worth the effort as well. (One 100-mile eater in Mission, B.C. unexpectedly lost 42 pounds.)

"As naturopaths, we're interested in healthy eating and (in) anything that gets people back to a whole-foods-based diet," Torreiter said.

"The prevalence of processed foods is just huge. Giving that up will be hard for people."

If you think you're up to the Healing Path Centre's 100 Mile Challenge, visit the centre's website at www.healingpathcentre.com or phone 519-578-7000.

Or head down to the gallery on Tuesday night. Maybe one bite of those homegrown regional canapés will have you signing up on the spot.

Dinah Murdoch is a Kitchener writer. You can contact her by email at dinahmurdoch@yahoo.com.

First spring salad from the coldframe

Enjoyed our first harvest of fresh greens (spinach, arugula, dandelion, various salad varieties, chives, oregano, cilantro) from the coldframe tunnel. What a treat - celebrated with a bottle of 100-mile Niagara wine and homebaked wood-fired oatmeal bread! We also dropped off a bag of freshly harvested greens to friends around the corner who have been eating a strictly 100-mile diet for the past year, with one month left to go. We've been impressed by how they've managed to do this, including grains, flour, protein sources, etc. We will be joining the 100 mile challenge this summer (100 people for 100 days, eating 100 mile diet) and hope to glean some ideas from these friends on where to source out the best in local varieties.