Presents for Food Preservers

Not many people are marketing merchandise for jammers and picklers, but that hasn't stopped me from acquiring some treats for myself and Jonathan over the years. Here are some things I really like, starting with my latest gift to self, a very nice, cheerful green Mason jar t-shirt by "beryllynn" of Florida, on Etsy. (It also comes in pink.) The XL size is a good fit for me, which is lucky, as I'm about a size 16.

I got this one for Jonathan when we got our community garden space. It's by "Happy Family", also on Etsy. I really like the typography a lot.

I got this one from a table at Union Square Market in New York last spring, but it's also available online. It's by Brooklyn artist Jen P. Harris. and proceeds go to Just Food, a group that works on food-related social justice projects. As you'll see, the "we can" theme has inspired quite a few designers. I don't have these other two... yet.

You may recognize the work of Punk Domestics here; PD also has a range of saucy men's undergarments with food preserving themes. Note that the apron seems to come pre-splotched.

I'm very tempted by this organic shirt. It's from a company called Northern Sun that sells t-shirts and other items with funny, pithy left-leaning messages. I think this particular one is clever, simple and attractive. And maybe just a bit sanctimonious, but that's okay too. Next time I feel like giving myself a present, I may well put in an order.

Finally, it would perhaps be remiss of me to fail to mention that the Charcutepalooza meat curing challenge has spawned a whole raft of merch for the discriminating carnivore with the delightful sectioned piggie logo: shirts, hoodies, caps, aprons, bags and baby clothes, all available at Cafepress.

Heirloom Tomatoes and Citron Melon Seedlings

With happy anticipation we look forward to another year in the organic community garden. Heirloom variety tomato seedlings are popping up: Red Pear, Green Zebra, Blondkopfchen, Heirloom Beefsteak, Paul Robeson, Ropreco Paste, Amish Paste and Jeff Davis.

Some of these are new to me, but I already know that Red Pear is a pretty little red, pear-shaped cherry tomato that bears well. Green Zebra is a medium-sized, sweet-tasting, decoratively green-and-yellow striped tomato. Blondkopfchen yields its tasty little yellow cherry tomatoes magnificently, while Amish Paste can be large, full-fleshed bright red sauce-makers (though not for me last year!)

There are also Genovese Basil and Jalapeño Pepper seedlings, and five exciting Citron Melon sprouts grown from bright red seeds I was given at the Culinary Historians' marmalade event last February. An African ancestor of our watermelon, citron melons have lots of pectin and, though they make poor eating raw, they are a prolific and hardy crop for pickles and (especially) sweet preserves.

If there's anyone around Toronto with space to grow a melon vine, let me know. I can use at most two of these five plants!

Quiche Lorraine Recipe for Easter Brunch

If Anthony Bourdain ever comes over, I'm making quiche. It's my go-to recipe for when I have to produce something basic but fairly impressive. If you think people will be turned off by the idea of quiche (admittedly not such a risk since it's become less trendy than it was 20 or so years ago), you can always call it ham-and-cheese pie.

I've made it on the fly in many places: at a spontaneous whatever's-in-the-fridge dinner at a friend's house on the Toronto Islands (where you can't run out for extra groceries); at a post-bike-race courier get-together (and it's no joke to feed a posse of famished bike messengers), at a guest house in the Jura region of France, where I used Comté cheese (which was fabulous).

This year I made it for an Easter brunch. In fact, I made two, and they turned out very well indeed. Here's my recipe for a pair of quiches. I love eating it cold the next day, by the way, but they do reheat fairly well.

Pie Crust for Two Quiche Pans

This is my mother's pie crust recipe, which she came up with after intensive experimentation in about 1957. It will be best if you have time to make it in the evening and refrigerate it in two separate balls, wrapped in plastic or waxed paper, overnight.

• 3 cups flour
• 1 cup lard
• ½ cup very cold water
• pinch of salt

1. With a knife or pastry blender, cut up lard into small cubes.
2. Add flour and salt and continue to cut up until well blended. It should have a consistency like meal. (You can use cool fingers at the end, in a gentle pinching, flicking motion).
3. Add water a bit at a time. A whisk is useful at this stage for blending. Don't overwork it; it should remain flaky instead of coming together into a smooth mass like clay.
4. Divide into two equal parts and gently press together two balls. Wrap each one in plastic or waxed paper and allow to rest, chilled, for at least half an hour.
5. When you're ready to roll the dough, press each ball into a slightly flattened round, repairing any major cracks in the edges as you do so. Using a rolling pin or wine bottle, roll out on a floured surface, reflouring both the counter and the roller as needed.
6. When the dough is evenly rolled and about ¼" thick, roll it onto the rolling pin to lift it in one piece into the quiche pan or pie plate. Unroll it and gently tuck it into the pan. Trim the edges with scissors or a knife, leaving about 1½" to 2" of overhang.
7. Fold the dough under and tuck the edges inside the lip of the pan, then pinch the edges all the way around to make a raised, fluted crust.
8. Using a fork, pierce the bottom of the crust in about half a dozen places.

Quiche Filling

• 200-250 g (about ½ pound) very thinly sliced Black Forest ham or equivalent, cut into fine strips or squares
• 200-250 g (about ½ pound) Swiss cheese, very finely grated
• 8 eggs (at room temperature)
• 5 cups of milk (at room temperature)
• ¼ tsp grated nutmeg
• ¼ tsp pepper (grey or white or black)
• pinch of salt

1. Preheat oven to 425°F
2. Layer the ham and cheese evenly over the bottom of the two pans.
3. In a medium-sized bowl, use a fork or whisk to beat the eggs until they're slightly frothy.
4. Add the milk, nutmeg, pepper and salt, and continue to beat until the mixture is well combined and slightly frothy.
5. Divide the egg mixture between the two quiche pans or pie plates. Don't fill over the top of the pan, because the raised crust is probably not strong enough to hold the filling in while it's baking, and it's annoying to have eggs all over the inside of your oven.
6. Bake at 425°F for 15 minutes, then turn the oven down to 350°F. Continue to bake for about 45 more minutes, until the top is slightly browned in a few places. The filling should still be just a little jiggly but not at all liquid.
7. Allow to rest for about 20 minutes before serving. The centre of the quiches will sink a bit.
8. Serve as a main course with a green salad or as part of a larger meal.

Variations:

• For the milk: You can make it richer, with half-and-half, or even switching out a cup or so of milk with whipping cream. Or you can go leaner; I've made it with 2% milk, or with equal parts milk and yogurt.
• For the cheese: You can use any hardish, gratable cheese (but I wouldn't use a blue cheese). As mentioned above, Comté is divine; I also like to use fairly old cheddar. You can use up bits and pieces of dried-out cheese from the back of the fridge.
• For the ham: You can substitute bacon, but fry it fairly crispy first, and drain it well. I expect other salty preserved meats would be nice, but the quiche should have a light, sweet flavour, so I wouldn't advise using things cured with garlic or other strong heavy tastes. A maple-cured meat would be fine, I think.
• Veggie (but not vegan) variation: Various types of mushrooms, sweet peppers and onions are delicious instead of the meat. I'd still avoid garlic, but I think broccoli, asparagus or cauliflower could be nice. They must be chopped fairly small and sweated first, perhaps in olive oil, until they lose a good deal of moisture. (I learned this by trial and error as a teenager. I used to actually slit holes in the bottom of an aluminum pie pan to let the extra moisture drain out of my cooked quiches until I learned about sweating the vegetables first.)

If you only want to make one quiche, you can halve this recipe, but the results will be better with two.

This extra photo from our Easter brunch is only here because I'm so pleased with myself for making hot cross buns and my best-yet loaf of plain white bread (already half eaten in this picture). The excellent fruit loaf is from my mother's charming neighbour Polly.

Put 'em Up by Sherri Brooks Vinton

As someone who's just spent a year writing a book about food preserving, I have to take my hat off to Sherri Brooks Vinton, author of Put 'em Up, A Comprehensive Home Preserving Guide for the Creative Cook (Storey Publishing, 2010). It's a book I'd love to have written myself: a lot of fun to read and very informative.

Brooks Vinton is also the author of The Real Food Revival: Aisle by Aisle, Morsel by Morsel, and is active with Slow Food USA. With Put 'em Up, she's produced a cheerful, readable and comprehensive reference and recipe book not only for jams and pickles, but also for food drying, fermenting, freezing, root cellaring and several related methods.

If it has a flaw, perhaps Put 'em Up offers so many illustrated step-by-step guides in its first 99 pages (for blanching vegetables, cooking jams and jellies, preparing hot- and cold-pack pickles and so on) that the timid reader might feel shy about diving in; however, the lighthearted and encouraging writing style should negate that possibility.

And some of the projects really are simple ones: for instance, she provides full instructions for hanging a bunch of herbs for drying and for roasting vegetables.

The second half of the book (or, rather, the next 200 pages) are devoted to her 150 recipes. These are organized alphabetically according to the main ingredient, so if you come home from a countryside afternoon with 25 pounds of cherries, you have but to turn to page 155 ("Cherries") to find out how to freeze them, dry them or make Black Forest Sauce, Drunken Cherries, Cherry Leather, Cherry-Walnut Relish or Classic Cherry Preserves. Brooks Vinton's instructions, incidentally, are meticulously safe and adhere firmly to the USDA guidelines for safe food preserving.

Besides the preserving recipes, there are also recipes for using up the preserves; in this case, Duck with Cherry and Black Pepper Preserves. Also, for every fruit or vegetable in the book, Brooks Vinton gives the always-useful and often overlooked instructions for storing them fresh until needed.

Again, some of the recipes are extremely simple, like garlic purée, ristras (strings of dried chilies) and frozen strawberries. But very experienced preservers will also find new ideas and inspiration: I'm very tempted to try her Figs Preserved in Honey Syrup (which she suggests serving with blue cheese) and her Sparkling Rhubarb Jelly.

There are two things that really distinguish Put 'em Up from most other preserving guides. First, Brooks Vinton uses very low sugar in her recipes, and whenever fruit being made into jam or jelly is low in pectin, she uses Pomona's Universal Pectin to keep the sugar content as low as possible. Second, she provides a lot of recipes for syrups and alcoholic infusions with rum, vodka or brandy that would be useful to anyone who's experimenting with the most fashionable trends in mixology these days, which are increasingly calling for imaginative drinks made from artisanal infusions.

Brooks Vinton is based in the US (just north of NYC, I think), so although Put 'em Up includes a list of farmers' market associations and food preserving resources, none of them are in Canada. However, listed at $24.95, Put 'em Up is a practical guide that's also an enjoyable read for those of us in any country who may not have time to get to all the food preserving projects we'd like to explore.

Fiddlehead Season and NorCliff Farms' Culinary Challenge

In about a week or two, if warm weather prevails, fresh Ontario fiddleheads will begin to be available for their short (two-week!) spring growing season. Fiddleheads are one of those polarizing foods: on one side of the room we have those people who've either never heard of them or simply hate them. On the other is the passionate contingent for whom they hold an almost mythic status.

The unobtrusive little unfurled frond of the ostrich fern is one of the very first edible plants to rear its head above the last snowdrifts in northeastern woodlands. Thus, like ramps, it has a specially precious quality, and must have seemed like a miraculous blessing to anyone who lived through a northern winter in pre-industrial times.

As an ingredient, a fiddlehead is a tricky thing: somewhat bitter, occasionally tough, and apt to be gritty if not properly washed. Last night, Ontario fiddlehead producer NorCliff Farms tested the fiddlehead skills of three professional chefs in the final round of their annual culinary competition So You Think You Can Cook? I had the fun of attending as one of the 14 judges, and learned some interesting details.

• Fiddleheads are antioxidant and a good source of iron, as well as various other minerals.
• To keep them, one should snip off the ends and stand them in cold water with a little lemon juice in the fridge.
• Fiddleheads grow so fast that you can hear them.
• There is some confusion around the question as to whether fiddleheads are toxic in some circumstances and to some people. The commercially marketed ostrich fern fiddlehead has been known to cause illness in people with a particular sensitivity. However, cooking for about ten minutes is thought to eliminate any toxic qualities, which means that fresh rather than frozen fiddleheads give the best results. They should not be eaten raw.
• Some foragers confuse ostrich ferns with bracken ferns; however, bracken fern fiddleheads contain both toxins and carcinogens. So if you intend to pick your own fiddleheads, you should be certain about your identification.

This is the first of the dishes we were served, and my personal favourite. Titled "Fiddlehead Riding Hood", it was created by sous chef Eric Henry Anderson of Inn On the Twenty in Jordan, which is the sister property to Cave Springs Cellars; its On the Twenty restaurant was one of the first Niagara establishments to begin championing the idea of matching local foods with Niagara wine.

The dish consisted of a raviolo stuffed with one fiddlehead and Upper Canada Ricotta over mixed greens, garnished with a delicious fiddlehead-Riesling purée, and topped with a candied fiddlehead "coin". Pale green on medium green on dark green, it offered a crunchy-creamy contrast to the fiddlehead texture, and that puree was mouthwateringly good. It paired well with the very citrusy Peller Estates Reserve Riesling 2009. I liked it because it faced the challenge head-on and put the fiddleheads at the forefront of the dish.

Our second plate was "Fiddlehead Frenzy", presented by executive chef Kyle Christofferson of Luxe Bistro, which is located in Ottawa's Byward Market. This was a far more complex construction; on the right of the plate was a morsel of butter-poached lobster with fiddlehead beurre blanc sauce on a pearl barley risotto of butternut squash, fiddleheads and walnuts. Next came a palate-cleansing sip of a "fiddlehead smoothie" made with pineapple, lime, mint and honey.

Finally, there was an ahi tuna tartare with fresh herbs, fiddleheads and wasabi tobiko (flying fish roe), which had a delicious cucumber-wasabi flavour. It was served with Peller Estates Sauvignon Blanc 2009, which recently won a gold medal in California. The wine started out with almost no scent but quickly developed a strong natural gas aroma; its vivid apple taste went well both with the buttery lobster and with the strong wasabi-tuna. This dish was certainly accomplished, but the tastes of lobster, fruit and wasabi overwhelmed the pleasant green taste of the fiddleheads.

Batting third was executive chef Brian Scott Pingle of Gossip Restaurant in Toronto, which is a little off the beaten track, next to the rose garden inside Exhibition Place. He presented an ambitious and imaginative "Gossip Fiddlehead Maki", which consisted of bison carpaccio and fiddlehead sushi rolls topped with fiddlehead tempura and a side of wild garlic ramp mayonnaise, all accompanied by Peller Estates Gamay Noir. The wine's sweet raspberry scent and a lightly tannic peppery fruit taste was very pleasant, but perhaps a weaker pairing than the other two.

Chef Brook Kavanagh of La Palette (which moved some time ago from Kensington Market to Queen West near Bathurst) also showed off his fiddlehead prowess – though not as a contestant – with a generous amuse bouche consisting of morel mushroom stuffed with duck leg mousse, served over a warmed leek and fiddlehead salad with duck bacon, floating in a rich duck brodo – er, that's broth to most of us – and topped with a single lightly cooked quail egg.)

When the judges' scores were tallied, the winner was Kyle Christofferson of Ottawa's Luxe Bistro, for his elegant and impressive Fiddlehead Frenzy. (I did hear that the competition was tough; apparently the margin between first and second place was a mere six points over a possible total of 1,400.) I believe all the recipes will be posted on the NorCliff site. If not, and if you're interested, I have them all, and I intend to keep them.

Fresh fiddleheads are stocked by Food Basics, Longo's, Lococo's, Price Chopper, Fortino's, No Frills, Whole Foods and The Big Carrot. Both fresh and frozen fiddleheads are carried by Loblaws, Metro, Sobeys, Zehrs, The Great Canadian Superstore and IGA. I expect other places, like Fiesta Farms, will have them too.

Fiddlehead image from NorCliff Farms. Fiddlehead raviolo photo by executive chef Jason Parsons of Peller Estates winery, used with permission and thanks.

Maple Syrup Musings

Strange revelation: I'm a sugar geek. Or maybe I've come late in life to an appreciation of physics and chemistry. Either way, it seems I'm fascinated by the natural laws that govern the behaviour of sugars in a change of state. These are demonstrated in the setting of jam, but it didn't occur to me until I attended a maple tour of the Stratford area that maple syrup follows similar rules.

Ontario writer, artist and pioneer Susannah Moodie, in her memoir Roughing it in the Bush, writes about an episode that might have come from any modern food-blogger's Fail Files: she describes trying to make maple syrup, and boiling away the sap on her wood stove for days and days, only to have it suddenly burn and turn to inedible muck on the bottom of the pot. As it turns out, she apparently didn't know a simple but profound physical law about change of state: when water is in the process of moving from solid to liquid (e.g. boiling) or liquid to solid (e.g. freezing), the whole mass will maintain a constant temperature.

Thus all boiling water at sea level will hold a temperature of exactly 212°F (100°C). So will a mixture of boiling water with fruit or vegetables. But as soon as the water is all gone, the temperature of the remaining mixture will suddenly start to rise to equalize the difference between it and, say, the wood fire or the electric burner.

Maple sap is 2% to 6% sugar, while maple syrup is 66% sugar. Depending on the sugar content, it takes about 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup. It may take days to boil off the water, and throughout that time the liquid will remain at 212° (in fact, the dials on syrup evaporators are calibrated so that "0" equals 212°.

But after all those hours of boiling, suddenly at some point there will be too little water in the mix to maintain the temperature of 212°, and the thermometer will start to climb rapidly. As soon as it hits 219°, you have syrup (and beyond that, disappointment!)

Incidentally, the difference between the grades of syrup (known in most of Canada as extra light, light, medium and amber) has nothing to do with cooking time. The light maple syrup comes from the sap that runs earliest, and it darkens over the course of the sugaring-off season.

For a sugar geek like me, the book Maple Sugar, From Sap to Syrup, The History, Lore and How-to Behind this Sweet Treat by Tim Herd (Storey Publishing, 2010) is a lot of fun. It discusses the earliest methods of maple syrup production, passed from Native North Americans to Europeans, with a sprinkling of Iroquois, Eastern Woodland and Ottowa legends about maple sap – mainly explaining that the Trickster (in whatever guise) arranged that maple syrup would be hard to produce, lest lazy humans be tempted to lie around all day sucking back the syrup right from the tree.

It also shows how hollow sumac twigs were used to make the "spiles", or sap spigots, that are pounded into the tree, and how the sap was boiled away in hollowed-out trees. In short, it covers a pretty detailed history of maple syrup, with great illustrations of old tools and vintage syrup labels and ads, not to mention some pretty tempting recipes.

While in the Stratford area, I got to taste several samples of maple syrup. It was the first time I'd ever tried drinking syrup straight, and it was way too good. We tried some from McCully's Hill Farm in St. Mary's (pictured above), where we had an idyllic tour of the trees via horse-drawn wagon, and also from Hoover's Maple Syrup just outside Listowel, which is certified organic. Hoover's handles 1,850 taps; you can have one, two or three taps in the same tree, depending on its width. (I found out a lot more geeky stuff about maple syrup production while chatting with Diane and Terry Hoover, but I'll spare you. For now.)

There's still some time to visit one of the maple farms mentioned above, or, nearer to Toronto, the Kortright Sugarbush Maple Syrup Festival, running until April 10. Hoover's organic syrup is also available in outlets around Stratford, including the Slow Food Market that runs 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Sundays at Anything Grows (235 St. Patrick Street).

Now, are you craving pancakes as badly as I am?

For more maple musings from Stratford, visit:

• Food With Legs
• Bon Eats
• What's On My Plate
• My Daily Bread

Canadian Sparkling Wines at #tinybubbles

So I kicked off my birthday in style today with #tinybubbles, a tasting of sparkling wines from across Canada, including lots of Ontario choices, rare east-coast wines like Benjamin Bridge, and a selection of Okanagan bottles from Sumac Ridge and See Ya Later. One glance at the cork litter tells you that this was a great event (organized by Suresh Doss of Spotlight Toronto and wine writer Rick Van Sickle as part of an occasional ongoing series of events designed to raise awareness and appreciation of Canadian wines).

It was especially pleasant for me to have another go at the Sumac Ridge wines, which I tried last summer when I was out there. Their Stellar's Jay Brut is very popular in B.C. It got its name around 1989 when Stellar's Jay was designated as the provincial bird. It's a blend of pinot noir, chardonnay and pinot blanc, and has a gorgeous pale peachy pink-gold colour and a bready nose. Its bubbles are gently frothy, and the taste is apple. You can get it for $24.95 at LCBO in Ontario, which is a bargain sparkle, as far as I'm concerned.

Sadly not available here is their delicious Sparkling Rosé, which is a bright ruby peach with a sharp fizz of bubbles and a brilliant strawberry taste.

If you look carefully at this picture you can get a sense of the ambiance: we were at Canoe on the 54th floor of the TD Centre, with the southern portion of the downtown core and Lake Ontario arrayed below us on a sparkling spring day. Look very, very closely and you can even see the CN Tower!

I managed to miss the $100-a-bottle Benjamin Bridge, which many people declared as their favourite of the morning. However, there were lots of other standouts for me, including (in no particular order):

• Chateau des Charmes Sparkling Wine (traditional method), a very pale pinot noir-chardonnay blend with a faintly pink-bubblegum apple scent and a nice light fruity taste ($22.95 at LCBO)
• Hillebrand Showcase Sparkling Riesling 2006, a pale green-yellow with an olive-oil scent, a pleasant petroleum taste and small sharp bubbles
• Secco from Pelée Island, a very pale yellow wine that reminds me of birthday cake, with a gentle pineapple-syrup scent and a taste like strawberries coated in icing sugar ($15.95 at LCBO)

Or maybe I'm just anticipating my birthday dinner tonight, to which I must run!

...postscript after a lovely family dinner at Il Fornello: There were lots more wonderful wines to talk about. It just shows that you don't need to go to France to find a delightful sparkling wine. There are plenty in Canada.

Monsanto Changes Policies on GM Seeds

The US-based agricultural biotech giant Monsanto announced today that it is making a big shift in its corporate policies relating to Genetically Modified (GM) seeds and related plant products. The company has recently been on the receiving end of a lawsuit from a group of 60 organic farmers through the Public Patent Foundation who claim Monsanto's patented GM seed stock has "contaminated" their organic produce.

"We realize now that some of our policies, particularly those that make it difficult for farmers to opt out of using GM seed stock, may have been wrong," said company spokewoman Daisy Proofall. "From now on, we think it should be up to the farmer to choose our seed, saved seed, or seed from any other supplier."

Image by luisrock62 at Morguefile.