Posted in Food Fighters on February 18, 2010| Leave a Comment »
We are fired up this week.
Jamie Oliver (British celebrity chef who is gaining ground in the US) spoke at TED this week. He passionately describes his mission to change how we eat and how our children do.
Set aside the 20 minutes to watch this video, it`s worth every moment. If you do, we`d love to get a discussion going in the comments section below. 🙂
Posted in Articles, Recipes on February 17, 2010| 5 Comments »
The dehydrator was out and we had a counter full of onions and carrots. I almost passed them by justifying that they were one of few foods I can buy local and fresh (though not nearly as good as the moment they come from the ground) throughout the year. I also associate them with the hard chunks I have received in homemade instant soup recipes – the kind that you add water, an oxo cube and transform a jar of pebbles into nourishment.
Then again, the carrots and onions were there. I have eaten dehydrated versions of them my entire life (not in great quantity, mind you) and I like the idea of learning more about what you eat by cooking it at least once (something I`ve wanted to extend to the world of cheese for some time).
The process couldn`t be easier – pull out the mandolin, hack up the veggies and get them on a try at 125. Fruit is dehydrated 10 degrees hotter and I believe the difference comes from the larger percentage of water in the sweeter things.
Once your product is in the dehydrator, wait. Vegetables (depending on thickness) take 6-8 hours to complete. The manual work is over in 15 minutes which is a start contrast to canning (which takes at least an hour for me from start-to-finish).
The results are notable and, like other efforts in preserving, so much better than what I previously accepted as dehydrated. I am learning more about the reasons behind that (it appears that many commercial products are, in part, chemically dehydrated) but will post more when I learn enough to talk about it in full sentences.
The carrots and barely pliable and wonderfully sweet. Two entire trays (about 4.5 square feet of carrot slices) became 2 cups of dehydrated carrots. They are dry and leathery and somewhat pliable. They are not miniature rocks. These are heading for salads and stir-frys through the winter. I am very happy with them.
The onions were surprisingly awesome. A sweetness now comes from their essence and they are stunning to look at as well. These will make great additions to salads, tops of soups and to our no knead bread as well.
I should also mention how delightful the house smelled during this process. The fragrance was enough to drive one to eat (a positive and a negative I suppose). It really was a fantastic smell through the house and has me thinking. If I dehydrated onions and carrots while making a roast for a dinner party I could enhance the culinary smells of the entire house and get people`s senses further engaged.
I can now see uses for both ingredients – even when fresh are available in the house. I would eventually like to experiment with transforming the onion to power form – perhaps this will be a mystery ingredient in a coming onion soup recipe.
Cost: $0.50 carrots, $0.25 Onions
Posted in Cheap Tuesday Gourmet, Preserving (General Articles About it), tagged cheap tuesday gourmet on February 16, 2010| 4 Comments »
We started this series of posts in response to many things – an undeniable motivator (as previously shared) was the focus on poverty and eating well and a particular scene in Food, Inc which spoke to the cost of good food vs. `filler`.
Michael Pollan shares that the cost of food on the outside of a store is dramatically more expensive than the inner aisles (see his 2007 article here). The article is a must-read and it`s fascinating food for thought to consider that a dollar yields 250 calories of carrots compared to 1,200 calories of potato chips. I find Pollans` writing fascinating and thought provoking. I also find it deeply troubling.
As our $6 dinner for 4 people roasts in the oven, I find myself deep in reflection.
According to Discover Magazine (here), 15-35% of North American food spoils in the field while 10-15% is lost in transport.
The Farmer`s I speak with (regularly), feel that the argument for cheaper food is dangerous – it threatens their livelihoods, could create shortcuts and threaten the future of farming. Cheaper can come with ethical issues as well – both of what goes into the product and how it is created.
There are enough voices fighting the virtues of all sides of the arguments. I`m not nearly enough of an expert in any of the above – though I`ll cheer for anyone trying to make a difference. There`s enough battling in the world of food – much of it is important – but we also need to findprovide solutions. A significant amount of food is rotting while people are starving or not being able to afford fresh, real food.
Cheap Tuesday Gourmet has been both easier than I thought and way more difficult than I could have imagined.
Making the cost work has been easy. Most meals have been less than $2 and focused on good food with solid technique. They have been healthy, satisfying and simple to make – even when balancing a 60 hour work week, writing 7 days a week, a young puppy and life at large.
What`s been tough? The meals could have been better, healthier and cheaper.
Recall our recipe for roasted red peppers in the fall. We bought a bushel (25-30 pounds) of red peppers for $14. Our freezer is full of $0.30-$0.40 bags of fire roasted peppers that take any soup to another universe.
Our canned peas taste like summer and cost about $0.70 each.
Our Romano beans were about $0.60 a can.
Fresh from the field beans were pressure canned for well under a dollar.
Our preserved turkey stock was practically free with the leftover carcass from Christmas.
We preserved 24 liters of peaches for around $19. 126 liters of tomato sauce cost us about $1 each.
Garlic scapes and wild leek chutes fill our freezer all waiting for sauces and soups. More than 60 units of these flavours fill our freezer – the total cost was $4.
There is certainly start-up costs and a learning curve. It`s not easy (though not difficult) and takes some time. It`s also the way that many families functioned for a long time from all around the world.
The results are stunning. When we opened our first can of peas last night we both started to laugh. We have 10 cans of summer peas left that taste like they just came from the field. They contain peas, water and a bit of salt and nothing else.
I haven`t been using our preserves in these posts because I thought that was cheating. It`s time to change that. Starting next week we`ll be using the pantry to raise the bar a little.
From now on we will also price all of our preserving posts (based on ingredients). Not all of our preserves will be considered cheap (wild blueberries with maple syrup is an adorable jam but not for the most cost conscious), but I want to help get the message out that preserving can help make a significant difference – in the amount of food that rots, the cost of what you eat and the quality and taste of what appears on your plate.
I`m also asking for those of you who preserve to share the word with your own communities (online and organic). Together we can make a difference. There are so many problems in our food system – we have part of the solution and we need to continue to inspire those around us with it.
Posted in Recipes on February 15, 2010| 5 Comments »
Our initial batch of dehydrating was feverish – there were lemons, oranges, pears, apples, lemon and lime zest and then we paused. We had to eat some of our bounty after all.
I wasn’t wholly convinced of the merit of our oranges and lemons. They looked awesome and smelled wonderful – I just couldn’t imagine eating a whole lot of them. When I finally got brave enough (laugh) to try them on Friday night, I discovered that we will go through them fast.
It was time to fire up the dehydrator again – this time we chose to replenish our dwindling dried apples (choosing Spartans) and dehydrating pineapple slices.
The pineapples slices are not candied – they are merely slices of pineapple thrown into the unit at 135 degrees and their moisture content is slowly removed.
3-pounds of dried apple slices fit into a single mason jar – as do 2 pineapples. It’s easy to overeat when consuming dried fruit but the flavour is so intense that you don’t need quantity.
We also changed our approach this time – using a mandolin (food slicer) to cut our slices of both. I had used a knife previously (something I am very comfortable with) but have learned my lesson – the mandolin will save hours of drying time and checking time. Each slice is uniform in thickness and the entire batch of a single fruit finishes at the same time and is most efficient. Our slices were about 1/8 of an inch (3-4 mm).
Both taste phenomenal – I can’t wait to use the pineapple in muffins or (*GASP*) on pizza.
Posted in Our Cuisine on February 14, 2010| Leave a Comment »
Last night`s dinner plan was simple, yet special. Two small moose steaks, pickled wild leeks and crab were the focus – our family had harvested all 3 ingredients. We were going to match that with peas and pickled beets that we preserved. It would also be the first test of our own canned peas.
Once the small package of steak defrosted, I opened the package. The butcher butchered the cut of meat. It was a single cut, folded in two and the width varied from less than half an inch to more than 2 inches. There was no question – the plan for dinner had to change fast.
It`s times like this that having more than 100 flavours of preserves of different types is an absolute joy (we`ve made about 60 of the current flavours). We didn`t have a lot of other ingredients in the fridge so a bit of creativity and a lot of options help out.
I resigned myself to a stir fry of sorts – the only fresh veggie we had was an onion. I recalled that we had a comment (from Ferdzy of Seasonal Ontario Food) on our blog suggesting that we could use our dehydrated oranges for a chinese recipe called orange beef. Most of the recipes I found called for deep frying the meat; I varied a fair distance from the suggested technique but decided that orange moose was the way to go.
The beets and leeks went back into the pantry and out came the dehydrated mandarin slices from Christmas.
Our stiry fry was served on fried rice which featured Ontario pressure canned peas. For those new to pressure canning, it is simply a way to presserve low acid foods (pickles and fruits are high acid) such as most vegetables. I hadn`t tried our peas before and almost melted when I did – though they are soft (they were cooked for 15 minutes at high heat in the jar), they taste like a summer pea.
The meal was fabulous – a combination of so many flavours that came together from the great wall of preserves.
Winter is a great time to learn how to preserved and to discover that it`s not complicated and that it`s easier than you may think. It`s a great time to practice and hone your technique and experiment with ingredients from further away (marmalade is great to make in winter).
Soon we will have an abundant crop of options (more than 30 fresh and local ingredients can be preserved in the Spring of Ontario). The work that we did last year feels so little in comparison to our options and flavours now.
Posted in Television Shows on February 12, 2010| 1 Comment »
Every once in a while you witness something that your brain can`t process.
Bitchin` Kitchen is a web-based cooking show and channel. You can find them here – including a tonne of their videos. I`ve watched several – they are not conservative, perhaps not for the entire family but mostly tongue-in-cheek humour and some cooking undertones (that was also tongue-in-cheek – there is actually some serious cooking advice here as well).
Although there is an affiliation with the Food Network I haven`t seen any sign of this show on it – perhaps it`s still on it`s way to our Northern Clime. Then again, the bios do seem to point me to the fact that these dudes are actually Canadian (they are based out of Montreal) and the more I read, the more I wonder if I`m actually the last person on the Internet to discover them.
I really like that they are doing something different – I also love the branding of the entire thing. A skull pierced with a fork and knife, pink kitchen and sketch humour that they bring into each episode is a lot of fun and something different.
You can follow them on Twitter here.
Posted in Urban Gardening on February 10, 2010| 2 Comments »
Imagine an independent army of citizens who hide in plain sight with a single mission: to add beauty to their towns and cities.
Guerrilla Gardening has been around for many years (it’s roots go back to the 1970’s) though it’s picked up steam with the progress of the Internet and the ability for people to mobilize with like-minded others.
The soldiers of this war arm themselves with typical gardening tools in addition to modern weapons of a city planter. In order to avoid resistance of planting in places that one does not have permission, gardeners find innovative ways to secretly plant in public. Seed bombs, seed balloons and seed pills are all used for random plots of flowers (see more about them here).
New gadgets appear to be on their way as well (I say “appear” as I can’t tell how much of these are real vs tongue in cheek): a device that automatically drops seeds from you shoes, a briefcase with a hole for planting through and the like.
The recent wave of this movement started in 2004 in the UK. Richard Reynolds wrote a book and launched a website to inspire and gather the masses. If nothing else, check out their Troop Digs – it’s a page of before and after shots from around the world of the results of this secret army.
I’ve been dreaming about Guerrilla Farming for some time – hiding food crops around the city and seeing what happens. All things in good time…
I really do adore this project and the spirit behind it – the spirit carried out by people around the world trying to make it just a little better.
Posted in Cheap Tuesday Gourmet, Soups, Stews, Stocks and Sauces, tagged cheap tuesday gourmet on February 9, 2010| 4 Comments »
I wholly believe that part of the difficulty of eating affordably is, in some cases, completely solvable by learning simple cooking techniques. This won`t solve all the world`s problems but I know that some easy tricks could make a difference.
Last night was a good test of our committment – it`s a busy week and the evening was chock full. I had a 30 minute chunk of time between arriving from work and needing to head out the door to meet Dana for a walk. 30 minutes to get dinner on, change, clean a little, return some calls – you know the drill.
I decided on a chicken barley soup. The goal was something warm and hearty for last night as well as something that could be used for lunches through the week. I spent $7.50 on ingredients – barley, tinned tomatoes, a 2-pound bag of onions and a full (`double`) chicken breast with skin and bones in tact.
Before we discuss the recipe, a few tricks.
Onions from Canada were $2 a pound when purchased individually. $0.50 a pound would buy you onions from Peru. I was frustrated by this choice until I dug a little deeper – a 2-pound bag of onions from Keswick, Ontario were $0.99.
Canned tomatoes can be bought affordably and often with little to no additives. I would have prefered crushed tomatoes to extend the flavour of my broth but a quick crush was my only option.
I bought the smallest chicken breast possible – the skin and bone are a bonus in this case – they are all flavour. Instead of spending $3-4 on a 1-litre box of commercial stock, $4 of chicken and $0.50 of Onions will make 2 litres of stock – and also provide actual chicken for the soup. Vegetarians could replace the $4 chicken with $4 of root vegetables.
Place some olive oil in a pan and heat. Through in about 1 pound of onions and season to your taste (we used salt, pepper and chilli flakes).
When te onions are on, bring 1.5 litres (6 cups) of water to a boil. Rinse the dried barley and add it to the boiling water; stir occasionally. Simmer for 20 minutes. While you could cook the barley in your stock, it would absorb so much broth that you would have to add more water and lose flavour from your soup. 2 cups of dried barley make 4 cooked; you could easily use less. Cooking it separately is a key to extending your broth without losing flavour.
As the onions soften, clear a spot in the middle of the pan and place the chicken to seer it quickly. You are looking to add some brown on both sides. If you don`t get a great sear, don`t fret – this is a bonus stage.
Cover the onions and chicken with water. We used about 10 cups of water. When in doubt, use less water as you can always add more at the end. We can get away with more water than you think as we`re going to add flavour with the tomatoes.
Boil the chicken on a low simmer. It`s tough to overcook like this so accuracy is not of great concern, as long as it is cooked.
Remove the chicken from the broth after 20 minutes or so. You should be able to shred it with a fork – if not, chop finely with a knife. Discard the skin and bone and add the meat back to your pot. Add your can of tomatoes at this point.
Strain about half of the barley and add it to the soup. You can add the remaining unstrained barley at this time as well. Straining some of it simply reduces the overall starch content in your soup. Some starch is good (it adds thickness and flavour), too much just makes it feel like glue.
Allow the flavours to lightly simmer together – we did this after our walk.
The total work was about 15 minutes and the soup took about 45 minutes to make. The taste is phenomenal, warming and hearty.
Click on the Cheap Tuesday Gourmet tag below for other articles in this series.
Well Preserved 