The Nip Trip 2011

Okay, not quite food, but foraging, certainly. For over a decade, Jonathan has been gathering catnip when it's in flower. He hangs it in a cool, dry spot for about six weeks until it's crispy, and then strips the flowers and leaves from the stalks. Here is Daisy, guarding about a quarter of this year's harvest.

Later, I'll sew hundreds of little pillows, which Jonathan will fill with catnip to make them aromatic, and with stuffing material to make them bouncy. My best guess is that we've probably made about 3,000 of these over time. They'll end up all over Toronto and beyond; Jonathan's view is that when he turns up at the pearly gates asking for admittance into heaven, and St. Peter asks why he should open up, a thousand cats will appear, meowing "Let him in!!!"

Single-serving Grape Jelly Recipe for Just One PB&J

My niece Tara was with me on Tuesday morning, and we walked over to the community garden to feed the tomatoes and pick some beans. "I'm sorry, but I'm just obsessed with string beans," said Tara, munching them on the way home. "If there was bean jelly, I'd be right into that."

She was also intrigued by the stray grapes that hang on the fence next to my plot, which are getting ripe and taste a little like sour Concords.

"Could you make some jelly from these?" she asked. (Tara is also a grape jelly connoisseur.) When I said I didn't think there were enough for a batch, she suggested I make a small batch. And then it hit me: why not make enough jelly for just one single solitary sandwich?

So I picked a handful of the ripest grapes, we walked home, and I made the smallest batch of jelly I've ever made in my life. It only took about 20 minutes, which was oddly freeing. Here's what I did.

Grape Jelly for Just One Sandwich

• About 20 grapes
• 1 cup water
• ½ cup sugar

1. Combine grapes and water in a non-reactive pot with a thick bottom. Bring to a boil and crush the grapes with a potato masher or the equivalent, until the liquid has reduced by half and has taken on a strong grape colour.
2. Strain the grapes and liquid through a jelly bag. It should yield about ½ cup.
3. Return the liquid to the pot. Add the sugar and stir to mix.
4. Put the jelly bag with the seeds and skins back in the pot and bring it to a full rolling boil.
5. Boil until jelly reaches the setting point (about 5 to 10 minutes).
6. Remove the jelly bag and pour the jelly into a small, clean jar that has been gently warmed up under a hot tap so it doesn't break when the hot jelly hits it.
7. Add a lid, but don't process. Eat at once.
   

How to Carve a Watermelon into a Lotus Blossom Serving Bowl

I agreed some weeks back to take on a challenge from the National Watermelon Promotion Board to design and carve out a watermelon to serve fruit. Now, if you Google "watermelon carving", you'll come up with an array of images so daunting in their complexity as to terrify the amateur melon carver entirely. So I decided to focus on ease of preparation... and to keep myself tranquil and calm while working, I thought it would be nice to meditate on the perfect, lovely lotus blossom for inspiration.

The finished version (above) features watermelon and a few honeydew melon balls, but you could mix it up with any kind of fruit pieces. To make a fancier presentation, you could stand the lotus in a shallow bowl of water surrounded by floating candles.


Here's how I did it. First, I marked and cut guidelines to divide the melon into six wedges. I also cut guidelines for the 12 petals. I should have made them shallower; it would be best if they don't cut right through the hard part of the rind.

Then I cut a slice off one end large enough to act as the base of the lotus (see top), and a second, thinner slice off the other end. This made it easy to slide a knife around the inside, top and bottom, so as to be able to pull out the core (pictured above).


To form the petals, I cut out a W shape across the top of each of the six sections. I looked at some pictures of lotuses online to get an idea of how their petals curve.


Then I shaved the green part of the rind off every second petal. I carved the sides of each pink petal back at an angle so they would slant in a bit. This also made them white below and pink on top, which is how many lotus blossoms look.

If you wanted to be very fancy indeed, you could make all the petals pink and white. However, the bowl would be less sturdy.


Remember that very thin slice I cut off one end? If you check the third photo, you'll see that I squared the edges, and in the photo above I'm fitting it onto the bottom of my lotus bowl so it will show off the fruit piece better and keep them from leaking juice out the bottom. (If you were really worried about leaking juice, you could line the inside with plastic wrap or a small bowl too.)


Now the melon baller comes into play. I used it to turn the core into tasty little balls, but you might prefer to cut it into quarters lengthwise and then into wedge-shaped slices.


Finally, you assemble the lotus by standing the flower on the base (inserting toothpicks as needed to guarantee stability) and fill it with cut fruit. Your lotus blossom serving bowl is complete!

Grateful thanks for the lovely photos to Niamh Malcolm.

Cornfest Time in Athens, Ontario

There are culinary delights to be found everywhere you go. For about 45 years, my family has been spending parts of the summer at a cottage on Charleston Lake, about 35 kilometres northwest of Brockville, Ontario. The nearest spot to buy groceries, hardware and so on is Athens, Ontario, and we've grown to know the town pretty well over the past five decades. (In fact, both my mother and my brother painted murals on town walls back in the early '90s.)


You might not think a town of just over 3,000 souls would have any notable culinary offerings, but you'd be wrong. Even a small place like Athens (which was renamed from the original "Farmersville" in 1888 for the excellence of its three schools) boasts a heritage of cultural treasures, as you can see from this lovely 1936 Ford V8 Bickle Seagrove pumper truck that the local fire station brings out for special events, and the elegant Victorian commercial buildings along main street (top photo).


And have a look at this gorgeous wood-fired steam tractor, being used – as it is every summer – to heat the big pots to cook fresh ears of corn, likely grown a short walk away and picked in the past 24 hours for the annual Athens Cornfest, which I attended this past weekend.


No shortage of takers at $1 an ear. We had some of that sweet corn for dinner, and it was delicious. Of course, Athens also has lots of other beautiful local produce: tomatoes and potatoes, maple syrup, beef and pork, as well as cheese from the single remaining nearby cheese factory at Forfar (within my memory there also used to be one at Plum Hollow, but it closed decades ago).


So here I am, pulling back the top of the corn husks to choose half a dozen for us to take home (for $2). But there wasn't a bad one in the lot.


Athens is also the home of Willard's Bakery, which ships its specialties all over the county. The star attraction is the locally famous Willard's Fried Cakes. These were already a venerable tradition back in the '60s when we started to spend time around Athens; they're simple doughnuts made with a very, very old recipe, which gives them a moist mouth feel and just a few crackly bits around the edges when they're fresh. I suspect the basic formula hasn't changed in 200 years or more.


I'm sorry, but next to a Willard's Fried Cake, any iced, glazed or filled product from your Tim Horton's, your Krispy Kremes or any other doughnut emporium you care to name must retire in shame. Cakey, oily and delicious, Willard's Fried Cakes take their perfectly satisfying savour from the soupçon of nutmeg that is the final item in the list of ingredients.


They contain milk and eggs and butter and lard, so each one contains a hefty 230 calories with 14 grams of fat. (In case you're curious, that's about the same as a comparable doughnut from Krispy Kreme or Tim Horton's.) They're not really meant to be eaten by people with a sedentary lifestyle; they're supposed to power you through a day of winter camping.


Finally, should you ever find yourself in Athens, especially on a grey fall day with a nip in the air, hope that the noble local chip wagon is open. It has, says my brother John, the right kind of fat to fry the potatoes in (he thinks it might be beef tallow), as well as "the right cut, the right kind of salt shaker, the right wooden sticks, the right boxes, the right bags, and a good turnover." The recipe for the perfect fries? Try some and decide for yourself.

Thanks to John Hood for photos!

Shrimp and Salmon Terrine for Charcutepalooza

There's a show business truism that dictates that if you say "ta-da!" enthusiastically enough at the end of the show, people will think your act was a success, no matter what came before. Since cooking is a form of show business, allow me without further ado to say:

"TA-DAAAA!!!"

I launched a book and embarked on a house painting project this month, and Charcutepalooza kind of got away from me. Also, I really was all primed to do a pig's head, especially since one of my heroes, Ruth Goodman, tackles one with ease at some point in Victorian Farm. However, since there are only two of us in the house, and as I don't eat much meat, and as Jonathan doesn't really like leftovers, when the reports began to come in about the large quantity of head cheese you get from one pig, I decided I needed to rework my strategy.

Thus, on the last possible day, I tackled the Shrimp and Salmon Terrine with Spinach and Mushrooms, encouragingly described as "probably the simplest terrine to make at home". It calls for a food processor to reduce the shrimp to paste, the modern equivalent of forcing the shrimp meat through a sieve. Now I don't own a food processor; what to do? I tried chopping with a knife. I tried a food mill. I even tried a sieve.

Allow me to inform you at this point what a pitiful grey teaspoon of sludge you get after forcing a perfectly good, $10-a-pound tiger shrimp through what I think of as a sieve.

Reader, we will draw a curtain across the lamentable kitchen scene that constituted the middle section of the exercise. We will rejoin our heroine as she drizzles one cup of light cream (not 1¼ cups of heavy cream, as per the recipe) into a mush of shrimps and egg white, when things were starting to look up again.


We may even follow her to the kitchen garden where she chooses some beans and very pretty chard, a head of dill and a few cloves of garlic for the rest of the meal. It's starting to feel more like a French country kitchen again, thank goodness. (There will be a baguette too, from yesterday's market. Better and better.)

It was pretty much all good news from there on in. Despite the shrimp-chopping difficulties, the texture was pleasant. Despite the use of light cream, it set just fine. Despite a hurry-up chill-and-press involving cold-water baths, it held its shape. And despite the omission of plastic wrap inside the mold (because I like to avoid contact between plastic and food when possible), it unmolded beautifully – with a little help from a spatula (thank you, Le Creuset!)

Now, if only my poor old camera would take photos in indoor light, I could show you a picture of a lovely meal! The best I can do, by morning light, is show you the leftovers:

Canning Workshop at Red Rocket Coffee

To celebrate my book launch, I'm offering a beginners' canning class this coming Sunday, August 14 at Red Rocket Coffee (1402 Queen East, just east of Greenwood). It starts at 3 p.m. and will last two to three hours. I'll be demonstrating a simple berry jam. Everyone will have some hands-on time, and also go home with a jar of jam. It will be a small group, so everyone will have a chance to ask really in-depth questions about canning techniques, safety, recipe developing and how to tell whether your jam has set.

Participants should wear closed-toe shoes (leather or equivalent rather than canvas), and might like to bring an apron, although we will have some on hand. A pen and notebook would be handy too. Everything else will be provided.

The cost is $25, which goes to support the Leslieville Farmer's Market. If you'd like to participate, please email me directly.

First Tomatoes from the Garden

Jealous? I could have let this baby stay on the vine a little longer, but last year I lost so many tomatoes to human and/or animal thieves that I chickened out and picked it (and its vine mate) last night to ripen on the counter.

It's a Jeff Davis, a late Victorian tomato named for Jefferson Davis (1808 to 1889), leader of the Confederacy in the US. It has odd leaves that make it look more like a potato vine than a tomato. However, this is clearly a tomato, and I look forward to cutting into it.