We Sure Can! Toronto Book Launch on August 7

In case you haven't heard, my book about food preserving, We Sure Can! How Jams and Pickles are Reviving the Lure and Lore of Local Foods, has its official Toronto launch next Sunday, August 7 from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Leslieville Farmer's Market at Jonathan Ashbridge Park (Queen Street East between Greenwood and Coxwell).

I'll be signing books, answering canning questions to the best of my ability and also holding a jar swap. While you're at the market, you can pick up awesome warm baguettes, eat a fresh-cooked waffle, buy a few pounds of fresh fruit for canning, or a whole bunch of other delightful things.

There's a Facebook page for the event, if you feel like signing in. If you read the blog and I don't already know you in person, please say hi!

Pictured, above: great excitement in the family as my niece discovers Auntie Sarah's book on display at Book City on the Danforth! Photo by Alex Hood.

Trying Out The Unofficial Harry Potter Sweet Shoppe Kit

Now that we've read all the books and seen all the movies, we Harry Potter fans no longer share that sweet anticipatory pleasure of speculating what will happen next. However, there's still plenty of fun to be had with J.K. Rowling's characters and the world she created for them to inhabit. For those who aren't about to hop on the plane to visit Orlando's Wizarding World theme park, there are simpler pleasures, like The Unofficial Harry Potter Sweet Shoppe Kit. When I was offered a sample to test, I wasn't sure whether to say "You had me at Harry Potter" or "You had me at Sweet Shoppe Kit".

The cover of the box says the kit's appropriate for ages 8 and up, so last Saturday I got together with my nine-year-old niece Tara and my stepdaughter Niamh, who's in her early twenties, to try it out. The Harry Potter connection was more or less lost on Tara, who's still two years younger than Harry was at the beginning of the first book (she has a great treat in store for her later). However, the box wowed her; it's made of satisfyingly solid cardboard with an attractive brass-bound corner look.

There are two layers inside, and the top one displays the most important component: The Unofficial Harry Potter Sweet Shoppe Book by Dinah Bucholz. There's also a mold for making chocolate frogs, brooms, bugs and owls, a collection of nice-looking reusable plastic "broomsticks" for the chocolate broom pops, and about 15 cello bags and ribbon ties for packaging the treats. There's enough extra space in the box to store ingredients, like chocolate pellets or candy decorations.

Looking over the recipes, Tara was attracted to the one for sugar mice (as served at Honeydukes, the Hogsmeade confectioner's shop). I thought it seemed like a good choice for a nine-year-old, because it required no cooking and called for only four common ingredients: confectioner's sugar, butter, vanilla and corn syrup.

Niamh, who, like me, is enough of a Harry Potter fan to have bought books at midnight on the release dates and attended some of the movies on their opening days, was most keen on the chocolate frogs because - as she pointed out - discovering the chocolate frogs from the trolley on the Hogwarts Express was one of Harry's first happy magical experiences, and they were connected with his first meeting with Ron and Hermione. I pointed out that the ones we made probably wouldn't hop. She seemed resigned to this.

We concocted the sugar mice first, and it was immediately clear that the recipe instructions were not written for a nine-year-old. Tara's a good reader for her level, and she knew "confectioner's sugar", but had trouble with words like "indentations" and "consistency". I noted that there was no mention of the tools that would be needed for the job. Still, we assembled the ingredients mainly from her following of the directions, and she only needed a little help combining things. We fridged the mouse mix and set to work on the chocolate while the mixture was cooling to a workable "consistency".



Here, I'm sorry to have to point out that Bucholz and her editors have permitted at least one serious error to creep into the text, a bad enough one to spoil the half-dozen or so recipes that call for melted chocolate. The chocolate tempering instructions say to melt chocolate in a double boiler "until the temperature reaches 220°F for dark chocolate or 110°F for milk or white chocolate". Apart from the question as to whether you can heat anything above 212°F in a double boiler (because it ought not to be able to get hotter than boiling water), the correct temperature for dark chocolate is 120°F. I don't know what happens to chocolate at 220°F, but I can't imagine it's anything good.



Luckily, I've taken a couple of chocolate classes, so I caught the typo. However, I think Niamh, who's a very able cook, would have been led astray. Again, some mention of tools would have been useful, since it's extremely hard to skim excess chocolate off a mold without an offset spatula (as in the photo above). On the other hand, after I tempered the chocolate, Tara had a very good time spooning it into the molds provided, and when it hardened, the nine shapes popped out very neatly.

I was quite taken with the chocolate brooms on their plastic broomsticks, and the frogs looked really good. After Tara bagged and ribboned the chocolates, the family members she gave them to were really impressed with the results. "Did you really make these?" they asked. "We molded them," she replied proudly.



But back to the mice: when we started to work with the refrigerated mouse mixture, it was very, very tricky to follow the directions to make satisfying mice. Niamh bowed out early. Mine looked like polar bears, cats, hamsters, hippos, and in one case a gravely ill rat. At this point, Niamh's roommate, a trained pastrychef, poked his nose in. "Making fondant from scratch?" he asked. "Oh, man!" ...and promptly disappeared. You have to feel a little anxious about a kids' recipe that scares a grownup with pastry papers.

However, alone of all of us, Tara managed to make pretty convincing mice. She had fun doing it, she loved the taste of the mouse dough (which she kept dipping into), and she was really proud of the results. She also loved the squdgey feel of the fondant, and was with difficulty persuaded to stop squeezing the bag of leftover dough - and at that only after the first freezer bag had sprung so many leaks it had to be double bagged.



The five at right are Tara's mice. The two at the back seems to be a cat and a very sad rat. The lump with eyes at left is either Jabba the Hut or the unused mouse dough.

Of the 35 recipes in the book, 10 call for an ice cream maker, at least three call for special-order ingredients like citric acid and invertase, and many call for boiling sugar to precise temperatures. There are a few simpler things, like a list of ice cream sundae variations, hot chocolate and a very tasty looking frozen lemon pop. But in the final analysis, I think it's inaccurate to call this a child's cooking kit.

I see that The Unofficial Harry Potter Sweet Shoppe Kit retails around $25, with discounts through some of the online retailers. At that price (and apart from the chocolate gaffe), this is a pretty good beginner's guide to basic confectionery; it also covers boiled fudge, marshmallows, nougat and hard candies (no recipe for many-flavoured beans, though).

I think the kit would be great for 18- to 24-year old Potter fans who are also kitchen geeks, or for the parent with spare time who's comfortable engineering some fairly complex cooking manoeuvres with their child in such a way that the child feels empowered rather than overwhelmed. And I'm not exactly the target audience, but I do feel somewhat inspired by the initial experiment to try further recipes in the book myself.

Now if only someone with a working wand could just wave it and say "typo reparum!"

The second photo was taken by me; thanks to Niamh Malcolm for all the rest!

Let's Share Our Food Bounty with Hungry Children

As a child, I was horrified by the news images of Biafran babies who were starving to death, but I had no way to help. Now I can, and so I'm challenging my Twitter followers, Facebook friends and blog readers to help raise $50,000 towards the relief of the East African famine.

You don't have to attend an event or bake a cake or bid on anything. Just click the button in the right nav bar to make a donation via PayPal or credit card to The Humanitarian Coalition, which is made up of CARE Canada, Oxfam Canada, Oxfam-Québec, Plan Canada and Save the Children Canada. Or you can choose your own charity, like the Red Cross Horn of Africa Drought campaign. Until September 16, the Canadian government will match donations from individual Canadians.

Americans can donate too, but it won't be matched. Or you could set up something similar on your own site.

If you were able to spend $20 this week on a restaurant meal – or a batch of local fruit for preserving, or a pork belly to turn into charcuterie – please express your gratitude for our bounty by putting your next $20 into feeding kids who really, really need a break.

Let me know via email or in the comments, so I can post a list of donations with your name or anonymously and keep tabs on how much we've raised so far.

THANK YOU!

Photo from The Humanitarian Coalition's Flickr feed.

Alison Fryer's Summer Canning Cookbooks Roundup (including We Sure Can!)

Canning Books with Alison Fryer from GoodFoodRevolution on Vimeo.

Almost 15 years ago I took a trip to The Cookbook Store and asked owner Alison Fryer what book I should buy if I wanted to learn how to make jam. She sold me a copy of what is now known as The Complete Book of Small-batch Preserving by Ellie Topp and Margaret Howard (in those days it was called Put a Lid on It!), and I've never looked back.

Now, imagine my pleasure to see her naming my own book along with Small-batch Preserving, as well as books by some of my most admired food preservers and writers like Elizabeth Baird and Yvonne Tremblay, in this great roundup of summer food preserving books shot by Malcolm Jolley of Good Food Revolution!

Stinky Tofu at the T&T Night Market

It was Patrick McMurray (AKA @shuckerpaddy) of Starfish and Ceili Cottage who reminded me via Twitter that the T&T Waterfront Night Market was opening last night. In the comparative cool of a sweltering day, I thought it would be fun to bike down and check it out. Also, he mentioned stinky tofu, which I'd heard of but never tried. My curiosity was piqued.

Stinky (or "smelly") tofu is soy bean curd marinated in a fermentation based on milk and sometimes seafood. As far as I understand, it's a favourite at (especially) Taiwanese night markets (popcorn at movies, cotton candy at the fair, stinky tofu at the night market, I guess?) Wikipedia offers the note that "the nature of the stinky tofu production process makes it extremely difficult to pass government food regulation even in Asia" – and what could possibly be a more irresistible provocation to try something than that?

A night market, incidentally, is something like a carnival midway, except instead of games of chance, it's all about street food. I arrived around 10 p.m. to find that, what with last night's crushing heat and the occasional only slightly less stifling gust from the nearby lakefront, Cherry Street really felt like a different country. As I walked my bike into the crowd, I was assailed by a knock-down stench of supreme awfulness, sort of like an outhouse in a heatwave. My, I thought, could this possibly be that stinky tofu I've heard about?

I wasn't very hungry, but I was curious to try at least one thing I'd never eaten before, and I wandered around the jungle of food tents, very tempted by all manner of seafood: squid and prawns and many other delights quick-fried on sticks; the folks from Diana's laying out fresh Fanny Bay oysters, and a most delectable looking item called an oyster omelette, made with eggs, oysters, and something glutinous that a stranger I spoke to thought might be tapioca.

Innumerable pineapples gave their lives to the event, to spend their last hour garnished with umbrellas and straws. There were green coconuts, peeled and embellished with funny little cartoon faces. Hello Kitty merch was also on offer, and the folks from Ten Ren Tea were there with bubble tea and other cooling beverages. There was a midway; there was live music, there were some free food samples, and T&T was open for shopping too.

I asked a woman working the tea booth whether there was anything special I should try at the market. "Stinky tofu," she said. "It smells bad. It tastes good." By this time I figured the universe was making its point clearly, so I made my way to the tent marked "Smelly Tofu", which had a big lineup (always a good sign). It also smelled utterly foul (yes, this was the source of that gobsmacking odour I'd noticed when I arrived.)

There was a man (see the blurry photo above) swirling the stinky sizzling concoction in a large wok, and I took note as people in the line in front of me received their little cardboard clamshells, each with six biggish chunks of tofu (for $5). A brown sauce was squirted on top from a plastic condiment bottle; there was a dollop of bright red hot sauce and a topping of something that looked like cabbage.

Eventually I got mine, and armed myself with the thin, pointed wooden skewer provided as the weapon of choice with which to attack the dish. And you know what? The Ten Ren staffer was right: it doesn't taste like it smells. I think the appeal of stinky tofu is really the texture: the steaming hot inside was almost as soft as scrambled eggs, but the outside was crispy and crunchy. The brown sauce was not strong-tasting; it seemed to be a salty vinegary soy condiment. The hot pepper sauce was great, and not deadly. The cabbage topping was like cole slaw, but in huge chunks instead of grated. The combination of tastes was great.

I must say, there's also a lot of garlic in there somewhere, whether in the condiments or the wok; I could taste garlic all the way home. (Another plus, as far as I'm concerned.)

The T&T Waterfront Night Market continues until Sunday (6 p.m. to midnight tonight, 5 to midnight on Saturday and 5 to 10 p.m. on Sunday). I have a feeling it's going to get more crowded every night. Very useful to know: there's a free shuttlebus service running every 30 minutes from Union Station, Spadina at Darcy (north of Dundas) and Bay Street at the back (north end) of Toronto City Hall.

I can't stop thinking about the squid, the prawns and the oysters, so I might be back. I might even want a little more of that stinky tofu.

Making Emulsified Sausage (Bratwurst) for Charcutepalooza

Well, you might think that bratwurst would be the most badly behaved of sausages, but in this instance it has proved to be neither bratty nor the worst, by any means. After struggling, rather, with some of the other Charcutepalooza assignments, the brave Niamh and I had a lot more fun with the emulsified sausage exercise.

Perhaps I had a less fibrous cut of meat; perhaps I chilled it better. Perhaps I simply assembled the stuffer properly. For whatever reason, this time we had no great difficulty using the Waring Pro to stuff the casings. Here was our method: soak the casings for half an hour. Chop the meat into small cubes and pop it into the freezer with spices. Grind twice with the old-fashioned iron hand grinder. Emulsify in a KitchenAid stand mixer (rather against my normal predilections, but we were at Niamh's place, and her cohabitant CJ has attended culinary school).

I also found a different rhythm for feeding the meat into the stuffer (smaller bits at a time, and less plunging down the tube with the pushing tool), while Niamh said she was concentrating more on the meat that was entering the casing than on the casing that was leaving the funnel (if that makes sense). In any case it worked, and if the last Harry Potter movie weren't starting in 26 minutes, I would write more. As it is, I'll simply leave you with Niamh's lovely pictures.

Our hope is to BBQ some tomorrow at the first of the summer family birthdays...

PS: As you will see from the top photo, even Niamh's fridge is stuffed with my jams and pickles. Oh dear. - ed.

Photos by Niamh Malcolm (top) and CJ Cushieri (bottom).

Ontario Raspberry Jam vs the World

Okay, so these two little jars will soon be on their way to Scotland, nestled in a protective shell of bubble wrap and cardboard, to try their luck against all comers at the first annual World Jampionships in Blairgowrie, East Perthshire.

I thought for some time about what kind of raspberry jam might be judged best in the world. Some prefer seedless, but I generally make it with the seeds in, which helps it set (I didn't want to add extra pectin). Besides, I personally like crunching the tiny seeds with my front teeth.

I thought of adding other flavours, but I noticed the judging criteria don't include "originality", so I thought I'd go for a straight-up raspberry jam. The ratio is about four parts fruit to three of sugar, which is good and sweet, but not quite Christine Ferber intensity. I did my best to nail the set, using a thermometer to check it had reached 220°F (which I wouldn't normally do). But what else could possibly make it better than all other raspberry jams?

I finally decided the best jam would have to come from the very best-tasting berries, so it would come down to terroir in the end. I used about three-quarters red raspberries from Bizjak Farms in Niagara via the Leslieville Farmer's Market, and about one-quarter mixed red and black raspberries picked at my community garden. After some consideration, I included some overripe black raspberries that had aged and slightly dried on the bushes; they're dense and seedy, but they have a really intense flavour.

As soon as I have a chance to download the registration form and acquire the requisite £5, I'll be sending the little jars (well polished, mind you!) off on their mission.

You go, Ontario!

Why I Love my Local Farmer's Market

Beef farmer and vendor Jeffrey Arnold sent me this picture after I commented on the ironic juxtaposition of enterprises in the second week of the Leslieville Farmer's Market. Need I say more?

Ten Foods to Forage in the City

It seems everyone I know is out picking serviceberries (AKA Saskatoons) this week, and I'm just waiting for the mulberries to ripen at the community garden. So here are some ideas for would-be urban foragers: to the best of my knowledge, all of these can be harvested without destroying the plant.

I encourage anyone who wants to start harvesting city fruit, berries, fungi or greens to be conscious of the health and ethical questions that will arise.

• Use your own judgment about whether the plants you're harvesting may be too contaminated (a former petroleum refinery's probably a bad place to pick edibles).
• Read up: for instance, morels can make you sick if you eat them raw. Some edible flowers have poisonous lookalikes. And no one who doesn't know what they're doing should eat foraged mushrooms.
  
• Get permission from land owners when it's feasible to do so, and exercise discretion, courtesy and a sense of sharing when gathering food in public space.
• Avoid gathering plants like wild garlic, which won't grow back, and limit the amount of food you take in any genuinely natural setting to 5% to 10% of what's there, if any at all.
  

Dates given are for the Toronto area, and even here the season can be as much as two or three weeks early or late.

1. Crabapples (Malus – August-September): Yes, you can eat the little apples from those ubiquitous ornamental trees. Some taste better than others, but all can be used to make tangy pink jelly.
2. Dandelions (Taraxacum – April): Before they bloom in early May, you can gather young dandelion leaves for salad. Wash them before eating, of course.
3. Garlic Mustard (Alliaria petiolata – May): This is a slender, leafy green that produces small white flowers. It’s also massively invasive, so you’re doing local forests a favour if you help eradicate it. Related to broccoli and cabbages, it has a pleasant garlic scent. Remove the toughest stalks and cook it like kale or Swiss chard; it makes a hearty soup with potatoes.
4. Mint (Mentha – June on): Mint relatives have square stems and alternating perpendicular pairs of leaves; they grow prolifically all over the place. Spearmint (Mentha spicata) and peppermint (Mentha × piperita) smell just like your toothpaste; lemon balm (Melissa officinalis) has a distinctly lemony-sweet scent, while catnip (Nepata cataria) is pleasantly skunky. Any of these can be steeped as refreshing tea, either dried or fresh. Just don’t confuse them with nettles (taller and darker green), which sting.
5. Morels (Morchella – June, pictured): This is the foraging jackpot. Look for a pale grey-brown, pinecone-shaped mushroom with a texture like honeycomb, especially where there has been a fire. They’re only around for about three weeks in the spring, and they cost $35 to $50 per pound in shops. Store them in an open paper bag in the fridge; they’re delicious sautéd in butter.
6. Mulberries (Morus – July): You may have noticed the messy splatters below this underappreciated fruit tree, which can grow to 45 feet. Mulberries look like thumblike overachieving raspberries. They start out green and hard, but ripen through red to purple-black (or occasionally greenish white). They’re not as intoxicating as strawberries or raspberries, but they make fine pies and jams.
7. Quinces (Cydonia oblonga – September-October): As a shrub that puts forth brick-coloured or salmon-pink flowers in late April, the quince is a traditional park and garden plant. However, even the ornamental type can bear late-summer fruit, which looks like a hard yellow apple-pear. Quinces aren’t good eaters, but they make great jam and can be boiled to a paste and dried into “membrillo”: a highly coveted item on cheese and charcuterie platters!
8. Serviceberries (Amelanchier – June-July): These are the same thing as Saskatoon berries: a dark purple blueberry relative that grows on a shrub or small tree with white flowers in early spring. They’re plentiful in Toronto, where they seem to be popular with landscape architects. The berries freeze well, so you can save them for the winter, or make them into jam, jelly or pie right away.
9. Shiso (Perilla frutencens – June on): A knee-high herb with dark purple leaves that seeds itself abundantly and turns up uninvited in many front yards. It’s popular in Asian cooking; the leaves can be shredded and added to sandwiches and salads like basil. The flavour is unique, but reminiscent of licorice and cinnamon.
10. Sumac (Rhus glabra, Rhus typhina, etc. – August-September): These short trees spring up in abundance on vacant lots and along the edges of highways. Their fruit forms in conical clusters of fuzzy dark red berries. To make sumac lemonade like the early North American settlers, cover these “sumac bobs” in water and steep them like tea until the liquid is dark red. Strain and drink hot or cold, sweetened to taste. (Sumac is related to poison ivy and poison sumac, so if you think you could be allergic, proceed with caution.)
    

Photo by jdurham at Morguefile.

Ostriches are Our Future

And I for one welcome our long-necked avian overlords. Okay, I may be exaggerating, but I'm fascinated to discover that ostrich farming is a booming business in Ontario, to the point where the supply of ostrich chicks, eggs and meat simply can't match the demand.

This revelation comes from my excursion of last Wednesday to the rural territory around Guelph and Milton with Tastes of Tomorrow, the student-run chef's club at George Brown's culinary school. They run a great series throughout the school year, with an annual farm visit each summer. All the Tastes of Tomorrow events that I've attended have been great, and I highly recommend them.

In this case, for an amazing $10, I had a full day's worth of farm touring plus lunch and lots of time to ask questions of the farmers and representatives of Foodland Ontario and the Ontario Farm Animals Council.


Our first stop of the morning was White Rock Ostrich Farm near Rockwood, which is a little over an hour from Toronto via the 427. There, farmer Deb Simmonds recounted how she and her husband just drifted almost by accident into raising ostriches 25 years ago after reading an article about them.

Now, with 17 breeders, a small herd of "teenagers" (pictured above) and an incubator room full of chicks, the farm can't handle the market for ostrich meat. She describes visits from top chefs and their emissaries begging to be supplied regularly; she turns them down. (The farm does attend some farmers' markets, including Nathan Phillips Square, however.)

"We're training two other families to raise ostriches," says Simmonds."Quebec will buy any ostrich chick, and we're now selling fertilized eggs to BC." The farm experienced a 30% business increase after the "buy local" campaign started. Sidelines include selling the egg shells and moulted feathers, which people use for decorative crafts, and tanning the hides.



An ostrich farm will keep one male for every two or three females. Females can lay 30 to 60 eggs per season, each of which has 42-day gestation period. Ostriches can live for about 70 years, but the best meat comes from an 11-month-old bird. "They're lower fat than chicken or turkey, and there are no antibiotics because they're so disease-resistant," Simmonds comments. "It makes good carpaccio."

An ostrich egg is equivalent to two dozen chicken eggs. Simmonds mentions one family that created a monster devilled egg for a party after using a band saw to cut an ostrich egg in half. The demand is so high that Simmonds only sells eggs for eating in April and September, by reservation.



I must say that as we bumped around the ostrich enclosures on a tractor-pulled wagon, the theme from Jurassic Park started running on my inner iPod. Of all birds, ostriches have to be among the most dinosaurean. Look at those feet. Like something from Tatooine or what?



After our ostrich experience, we were treated (by Foodland Ontario) to a really lovely lunch featuring local ingredients cooked by Chef Hubert Bielmann of Heaven on 7 Bistro and Pub in Rockwood, before heading to Andrews' Scenic Acres, which is not far from Highway 401 and Trafalgar Road. Lauraine and Bert Andrews grow a wide range of fruit and berries, with 100 acres of pick-your-own crops and an additional 700 or so acres under cultivation.

Although most of their soil is the alkaline limestone of the nearby Niagara Escarpment, they also have one patch of very acidic soil that enables them to grow blueberries, which are rare in the neighbourood. Other crops include strawberries, raspberries, gooseberries (pictured), rhubarb, asparagus, apples, sour cherries and a few grapes.

The Andrewses also run Scotch Block Winery, where they sell wines made with their own fruit. As someone with a weakness for fruit wines, I tried several, and ended up taking home a bottle of their Raspberry Rouge, which I may or may not serve with my chunk of roast ostrich.