Tummy Grumbles

Friday, March 7, 2014

March 7 - A(nother) Great Canadian Regional Food

The Canadian Food Experience Project began June 7 2013. As we (participants) share our collective stories across the vastness of our Canadian landscape through our regional food experiences, we hope to bring global clarity to our Canadian culinary identity through the cadence of our concerted Canadian voice. Please join us.

It’s March! It’s almost springtime! Time for the sun to start shining its warmth upon the frozen ground and start to warm up the trees for the maple sap to flow. Hooray! It’s a great time of year to be Canadian!

That’s what I would normally be saying at this time of year. The sap usually starts to run just in time for March Break, when you’re looking for something to do with the kids to get them outside finally.

Except this year.

This year, the ground in southern Ontario is still frozen solid. Metres of snow piles sit on people’s lawns and line the highways. The afternoon temperatures are still in the minus teens, before wind chill. We are lamenting that this is the winter that will never end. Well I hope that’s not true. I would rather have a late maple syrup run than be wearing winter coats in July.

So about three years ago, when Spring came at a normal time of year, around March Break, our family went to the maple syrup festival at Bruce’s Mill Conservation Area in Whitchurch-Stouffville. While my then four-year-old son had a blast, especially on the hay wagon ride, what was important to this story is that he got hungry and wanted one of the giant cookies that he had seen at a table for sale. The thing was, it wasn’t a maple-based cookie but just a very ordinary chocolate chip flax seed cookie. So because having pancakes and syrup and syrup tasting and fudge wasn’t enough sugar for the day, we got him a cookie but only if he promised to split them with us. And since his dad can’t eat chocolate, he had to split the cookie with me.

In spite of the long trip the cookie made and being wrapped in cellophane for the whole trip, it was one of the best chocolate chip cookies I had ever eaten. The gentleman assured me it was because of the type of flour. He represented a small mill called Tyrone Mills, very local to Durham Region, and closer to my house than Bruce’s Mill.

Tyrone Mills is a working mill that continues to grind grain into batches of flour. You can get almost every flour imaginable at the mill. And when I noted that the address wasn’t too far from my house, I figured one day we would see what it was all about.

There are no wheat farms close to the mill but they do grind large batches and small batches of grain. We found the ultimate Canadian flour, red fife flour, at the mill, along with the world’s finest durum semolina flour – grown right here in Canada.

So we took a batch home and I had no idea what to do with it. I heard about the nutty flavour, the earthy aroma, but I couldn’t believe how incredible this flour actually smelled when I opened the bag. I had never really thought about the scent of flour until I found one that had such a robust scent. I had to do something with it right away before the scent faded.

I stared in my cupboard and the first thing I saw were chocolate chips. So I thought, why not? I searched for Red Fife Chocolate Chip cookies. Most recipes had people half and halfing the flour with unbleached all-purpose. But I wanted that scent to waft through my kitchen to the top floor and the bottom floor.

So I made one up. To preserve the nutty flavour, I cut back on the amount of regular granulated sugar you’d use and sweetened the batch using some tangerines that were sitting on the counter. I suppose I should have used maple syrup, but the cookies wouldn’t turn out nearly as crispy chewy.

Red Fife Chocolate Chip Cookies

1 ¼ cups red fife flour
½ cup rolled oats

¾ tsp sea salt

¾ tsp baking powder
½ tsp baking soda
½ cup unsalted butter (4 oz or 1 stick), room temperature
½ cup brown sugar, packed
½ cup granulated white sugar
1 egg
1 – 2 Tbsp juice from ½ a fresh squeezed orange/tangerine
4 oz chocolate chips
1 tsp orange/tangerine zest

Preheat oven to 350F.

Mix all dry ingredients together. Do not sift them.

Cream butter and sugars together until just mixed. Add egg and mix in. then add juice.

Add the dry ingredients until barely combined. If using a stand mixer, mix on the lowest setting for less than 30 seconds. Scrape the sides and combine the ingredients.

Fold in chocolate chips and the lemon zest. The batter should be clumpy and look barely mixed.

Drop batter by rounded tablespoonful onto parchment-covered cookie sheets, about 2 inches apart. Pat cookies with fingertips or butter knife to flatten slightly.

Bake for about 15 minutes, rotating pans at around the 7 minute mark. Remove cookies as soon as they are golden brown, and allow them to cool on racks for at least 5 minutes or for as long as 10 minutes, before removing to cooling racks.

Make sure you make this recipe when nobody is home so you don’t have to share the cookies with anyone. But if you do find people won’t leave the house, tell them they are healthy cookies so that you can have more for yourself!

Friday, February 7, 2014

February 7, 2014 - My Canadian (Food) Love Affair

My late husband, Paul Mesbur, was a very talented young chef. He stagiared under Jamie Kennedy at Palmerston, and under Michael Stadtlander in the early days of Eiginsinn Farm. Among the other culinary skills he learned from Michael, he helped Michael plant the trees that line the drive up to the house.

Paul and I ended up together because of food. We were both attending a martial arts school, where they had decided to hold an end-of-year potluck to celebrate the achievement of the students. I signed up to bring tabbouli because, at the time, I was a vegetarian. He signed up to bring a chocolate cheesecake. I asked him where he was going to buy it. He said he was going to make it. I had my doubts. Sure enough, he brought a chocolate cheesecake in a baker’s box. I asked him again where he bought it. He told me he had his own baking business, and emphasized that he made it. He made me try a piece – a key part of this story is that I have always hated cheesecake – and when I tasted it, I asked him if he used French chocolate. He was impressed that I could taste the type of chocolate that he had used, and asked me how I knew. I said, “Because if you had used Belgian chocolate I might have had an orgasm here at the table. But it was only French, so it was okay.”

It was love from that moment on.

Paul was heading off to the Stratford Chefs School soon after that potluck. For two years I travelled the VIA line from Toronto to Stratford in the winter to visit him, discover what he was learning, be his guinea pig, all the while, slowly, Paul brought me back to the dark side of the omnivore world. Thanks to Paul, I went from a near-vegan to a woman who likes her steaks black and blue.

While at Stratford, the students were given a project to design their own restaurants from layout to menu. Paul came up with the name Cinnabar, after a colour of a specific kind of clay he wanted to use for the centrepiece bar - clay being the raw material that is crafted to create something exquisite, much like food itself. The name stuck, and his side business, which became our full-time catering business, was called Cinnabar Culinary Delights.

After Stratford, Paul worked in the kitchens of Bistro 990, All the Best Fine Foods, and at Jamie Kennedy’s kitchens once again, before operating Cinnabar full-time. I was the wine consultant at Cinnabar, having studied at Stratford and the LCBO, and together, we were doing in-home cooking classes and customized catered events in the GTA during the early days of Toronto’s emerging gastronomical revolution.

Paul was the one who showed me that I had a palate, which led me to the study of wines, and food and wine pairings. He showed me how to find the balance in flavours of a meal. He had a delicate touch with food – nothing was ever over- or under-seasoned, and his plates looked like little jeweled treasures.

When he passed away, suddenly, after a short-term illness, at the young age of 34, I tried to put together all of his original recipes scrawled down on scraps of paper. I tried to remember which of the 3 shortbread cookie recipes he said was easiest, which one was the best, and which one to never use. In spite of all I found written down, some of his recipes remained in his head, and left the earth with him. One was his divine chicken liver pate, which he would make for me often and frequently. Another was a succulent corned beef he would cure from a raw brisket every year for his best friend Michael in time for St. Patrick’s Day.

I collected all I could find put the recipes into a binder. Some of the recipes I tried were quite successful – the pumpkin pie recipe is now a Thanksgiving tradition in my home – and others I have been unable to replicate – the Chocolate Commitment Cake, for one. It’s a flourless chocolate torte. Simple for some, but there was something he would do with this cake that made it transcend any other flourless chocolate cake you may have had in your life. It was the most requested dessert at Cinnabar, and young men often proposed to their girlfriends after it had been served, hence the name. So here is the recipe for you. I make no guarantees about how it will turn out or whether you’ll receive a proposal because of this cake. I just know that I don’t have the delicate touch that Paul had to make this a work of food art. But when it does turn out, it transcends food heaven.

Cinnabar's Chocolate Commitment Cake (Flourless Chocolate Cake)

1 lb bittersweet chocolate
1 cup unsalted butter
6 large eggs
(for raspberry, add 2/3 cup raspberry puree)

Melt together chocolate and butter. Stir in raspberry if using. Heat eggs until just warm over water, then beat off heat until soft peaks form. Fold into chocolate in two batches. Pour into an 8” springform pan, greased and lined with parchment, bottom wrapped in foil, and place in water bath. Cover with foil and bake at 425 for 5 minutes, remove foil and bake 10 minutes more. Cool on rack, then cover and refrigerate at least 3 hours before unmoulding.

Paul started my love affair with Canadian food. It was something I took for granted, growing up near Bradford, but he showed me the unique things we were able to find in southern Ontario. At Eiginsinn Farm, Michael Stadtlander taught him (and the other young chefs) what “local product” really meant. Paul took that to heart, and, wherever and whenever possible, he always utilized the best local produce he could find in everything he prepared for our clients. He showed me many of the wonderful things that were available to us locally – from morels to local meats to Cookstown Greens.

Paul passed away on February 20, 2005, so it seems fitting that this topic came up for me for this month. Every time I set foot in the kitchen, whether it's to make something simple like scrambled eggs or something complex like a turducken, I hear his voice in my ear, guiding me when I have my doubts or lose my way, and encouraging me when I believe all of my dish's flavours have been married in harmony. I miss him every single day that I turn on a stove. And I thank him for leaving me with this great love and reverence I have for our Canadian food landscape. I just wish he was still here to see how far his dreams have come since he left us nine years ago.

Tuesday, January 7, 2014

January 7, 2014 - A Canadian Food Year's Resolution

Last year I lost forty pounds.

I can tell you it wasn’t the easiest thing I’ve done in my life but it was far from the most difficult. All I did was get up and start moving. I drank more water than I ever did before. I made sure I went for at least one 1-hour walk a day, or two if I could. On cold and crappy days, I walked up and down the stairs at work and in my house until I was profusely sweating.

The reasons why I lost weight were multitudinous, but one of the key reasons why was that because I love food. I love REAL food. I love wheat when it’s ground into flour, mixed with salt, water, and yeast, left to rise, thumped down, left to rise again, and put into an oven. There is no greater food aroma on this earth than the scent of baking bread. Real bread. With gluten. And a pinch of sugar to help the yeast rise. I love real sugar! And I love honey and maple syrup and sugar beets. I love flaky puff pastry made with real, cold, creamy butter. In fact, just give me a croissant right now, hot from the oven, with just a touch of peanut butter and honey, or maybe baked with some frangipane and chocolate in the middle.

The problem is that there is Type 2 Diabetes on both sides of my family. And in January 2013, I was overweight bordering on obese with hypertension through the roof. So I had to make a choice – go on pills for the rest of my life and give up the foods I love, or do something about it. Rage against the machine-made foods, like aspartame, gluten-free, margarine…I just threw up a little writing those words down.

So I started to walk. And drink water. And walk some more. No, I didn’t diet. If you followed my food blog from last year, I was making some pretty tasty things. All I did was follow that wonderful word that more of us in the First World need to heed: moderation . Yes, I made a New Orleans-style King Cake for Mardi Gras, but I didn’t eat the whole thing. I shared the wealth. Yes, I made shmoo cake, and ice cream, and all sorts of tasty treats, but I ate just enough. I no longer ate to be stuffed. I ate to enjoy. And I walked. OK I did a few abdominal stretches. But I wasn’t doing a 2 hour workout every day. I didn’t become one of those people.

So at the beginning of this year, 2014, which was last week, I made myself a couple of, well, more promises than resolutions. The first was to never go back to the size I was, or the poor health that I was in 12 months ago. The second was to try new things.

So it seems only fitting, that with this, the first Canadian Food Experience blog of 2014, that I should carry these resolutions over to here. Am I going to extol the virtues of a fat-free food life? Oh goodness no! You’ve got the wrong blog for that. But what I will say is that I am going to look for other Canadian Food experiences that vastly differ from maple-drenched beaver tails. As I’ve discovered reading many of the other Canadian Food Experience blog entries, there is a whole world of fresh, exciting, flavourful and yes, healthy, Canadian food out there. So I am going to try to make some new recipes that are uniquely Canadian, or, at the very least, are from our bounty of fresh fruits and vegetables.

Now this is kind of difficult to do in winter, but we do have greenhouses. We still have apples in storage from the fall harvest. And we have our bounty of winter vegetables, like rutabagas, squashes, beets, kale, cabbages…there’s so much we can do! And of course, we have the lovely flash-frozen vegetables and fruits and meats and fish available to us.

I don’t really have a recipe this month, because it’s only the seventh day in, and I’m still finishing the leftovers from Christmas and New Year’s, along with just having made a Galette des Rois for Twelfth Night/Epiphany.

If you want to try something new, you could make up a winter salad using local winter greens, such as kale, mixed with roasted local root vegetables, some local soft-ripened cheeses – most goat cheese in Canadian grocery stores is made with Canadian goats’ milk – some dried cranberries, sunflower seeds, tossed together with a vinaigrette made with Framboise, the wine that made Southbrook farms famous, and some pumpkinseed oil.

There – I just tried something new. I tried to think of a recipe off the top of my head that would be completely local that I had never made before in my kitchen. Now, I’m off to try it!

Saturday, December 7, 2013

December 7, 2013: My Canadian Christmas Tradition

I was born in Scarborough, Ontario, and was raised Catholic – at least until my father discovered that he could talk to God on the golf course on Sundays – so Christmas always meant snow, no school, and lots of cooking. In Trinidad – where my parents are from as you may recall – food is paramount to every celebration, especially to Christmas and Easter.

My mother was raised Muslim – she converted later, but that’s another story – so our family Christmas traditions came from my father. When I was a kid, I always thought that the cooking took place over several days. It wasn’t until I left home that I realised that it was the torture of sleep-deprivation that kept me believing the cooking was a seven-day non-stop extravaganza. All of the cooking actually took place within 36 hours.

We would start on Christmas Eve afternoon with the ham. This is not your honey-glazed baked ham. This was a nice bone of ham, which you can now buy at any self-respecting West Indian grocery store starting after December 15^th each year, but when I was a kid, we got a smoked picnic shoulder ham from Dominion. To this day, even though I know in the depths of my heritage, I should be going to the West Indian shops and buying a nice, hung ham, I still go to the grocery and get a water-chilled, vacuum-packed smoked picnic shoulder ham.

We put the ham to boil in plain water for about 2 hours. It’s supposed to get most of the salt out, and it’s also supposed to cook the ham. While the ham is boiling, we make the dough.

Dough? Dough, you say? What do you mean dough?

Well, here is the secret of the world-famous Trinidadian-style Christmas ham. Every Christian family in Trinidad has their way of preparing the ham and preparing the dough. Then you wrap the ham in the dough, and bake it until the dough is golden brown. And when I say “wrap”, I mean like the ham is a Christmas gift and the dough is the wrapping paper.

There is nothing that tastes better on Christmas Eve, and leftover on Christmas Day breakfast, than ham in dough. To me, ham in dough is Christmas. Even when I was a vegetarian for six years, I would sneak pieces of dough that weren’t too close to the meat.

After the ham and dough were done, and we were busy having pieces as snacks, we would then roast chestnuts for our stuffing. This is not a Trinidad tradition. This is an Italian tradition that my father picked up from his Italian co-workers (and mistress, but again, that’s another story). My father believed the only way to prepare chestnuts was to roast them in the oven in foil and then, when they split, peel them and use the nut meat for the stuffing. I cannot tell you how many Christmas Eves I spent as a teenager (probably all seven of them) slumped over the kitchen table at midnight, with A Christmas Carol starring Alistair Sim on the TV, holding a paring knife, cutting into each chestnut by the split seam, peeling the wooden skins, getting splinters under my fingernails, just for a few tiny pieces of precious, golden chestnut. Just thinking about it right now makes my fingertips hurt as I type!

The next morning, my mother would use the chestnuts in her famous chestnut stuffing, which would be roasted inside the duck we would have for Christmas dinner. My mother is allergic to turkey, so we never had turkey at any celebration. We would usually have duck instead, since I grew up in Newmarket which was close to the King Cole duck farm.

My mother would also make Christmas sweet bread, which is not black cake or West Indian fruitcake. Sweet bread, not to be mistaken for sweetbreads, is a coconut bread, which may contain raisins, though mine never does, which has a crust of sugar on top. But overall, we didn’t do a lot of cookie baking for Christmas. Dessert was either sweet bread or something my mother would whip up. Dessert was always secondary to the food.

In my own house now, I make the ham in dough. I buy vacuum-packed chestnuts – sorry, dad – and chop them in the food processor to make my mother’s chestnut stuffing. And I bake all sorts of cookies and cakes for dessert, along with the raisin-free coconut sweet bread.

Much like the Christmas I grew up with, my Christmas is even more multicultural, including things from cultures that aren’t even part of our family. Last year, I went insane and made duckenhen - duck, chicken, and Cornish hen – with chestnut stuffing instead of Andouille sausage stuffing.

I made a batch of pepparkakor from scratch.

I much prefer the Swedish ginger cookies from any other gingerbread cookie recipe out there. And, from my late husband’s family’s tradition, I made mund cookies from scratch. I also made Gordon Ramsay’s cranberry sauce which is simply to. Die. For. And yes, I made Gordon Ramsay’s shortbread. If anyone knows shortbread, it’s going to be a Scottish chef with anger issues.

Christmas is about the old and the new. As long as I’m alive, there will be a ham in dough on the table on Christmas Eve. And there will be chestnuts in some form. But we will keep adding items to that table, creating new traditions along the way.

If you’re still curious about this whole ham in dough thing, here you go. But don’t say I didn’t warn you – once you try some, you will want to keep the entire package to yourself!

Trinidad-style Christmas Ham

1 – bone-in ham, min. 7 lbs, max. to whatever can fit in your largest pot and oven.

Dough for a 7 lb ham:

3 cups plain AP flour
1 Tbsp baking powder
½ - 2/3 cup butter, room temperature soft
½ - 1 tsp salt
1 ½ - 2 cups lukewarm water

If your ham comes wrapped in plastic wrap, remove it, but leave any mesh netting the ham may come in on the ham to keep it intact while boiling.

Place the ham in a pot deep enough to hold the ham submerged in water. Fill the pot with water to cover the ham as much as possible. Place the pot with the ham on the stove and bring to a boil. Keep the ham going at a lively boil without spilling too much water out of the pot. If the water is bubbling over, then turn down the stove until the water is bubbling but not boiling over. Cook the ham, uncovered if at all possible, for 2 hours minimum.

To make the dough: in a large bowl, measure and sift/whisk together flour, baking powder, and salt. Then take half of the softened butter and rub it into the flour mixture with your hands until the whole thing has the consistency of cornmeal. Add the water, ¼ cup at a time, to the cornmeal-like flour mixture until the dough is gathered into a smooth ball. Knead well, and leave in the bowl in a warm area of the kitchen with a damp dry towel over the top for about 35 – 45 min. It can stay for up to an hour if your ham needs more time to cook.

Ham will be ready when it starts to look flaky and feel springy to the touch. Remove from heat; drain. You can leave the ham in a colander or whatever you used to drain the ham (if in the pot, leave the ham in the pot but do not put back on the stove dry).

While the ham is draining and cooling off, preheat your oven to 350F. Turn your dough out of the bowl and onto a well-floured surface. Roll out until the dough is about 1/3” thick. Take the ham out of the mesh netting, if it had one, put it in the centre of the dough, and wrap the dough around the ham making sure to cover all surfaces of the ham. Put the ham, seam-side down, onto a baking tray lined with parchment or silicone. Take the rest of the softened butter and rub it on the outside of the dough until the dough is well-greased.

Put the ham in the oven and bake until the dough is deep golden brown. Depending on the size of your ham and how hot it was when it went into the dough, this could take from 35 – 60 minutes. If the dough appears to be drying out, you can re-baste it with any remaining butter you might have on the counter.

Once the dough is golden, remove the ham from the oven. Try to resist the urge to tear into it right away, but if you do, be careful of the steam that will come out of the dough when you first cut into it. Dough may be torn off the ham by hand as well.

If you do have any ham left over, be sure to pierce it with cloves all over before storing it away overnight. But don’t bake it with the cloves in it. The dough will not be as tasty.

Thursday, November 7, 2013

November 7, 2013: The Great Canadian Pumpkin Harvest

We are so lucky to live in a country that experiences all four seasons. We see the stillness and feel the cold of the ground in winter, watching the bare trees bear the burden of snow to prepare for the burden of new growth. We smell the replenishing earth and watch the buds and flowers sprout off of trees and bushes in the spring. We enjoy late-night noshing and long, evening strolls in the warmth of summer nights. But it’s fall where we truly appreciate the fine bounty that this country brings.

As I’ve mentioned before, I live in the Ontario Green Belt. That means we have pumpkin patches and apple orchards. Our farms provide us with plenty of fall and winter crop vegetables and fruits to tide us over until the return of the spring.

Everyone I know has their own recipe for apple pie, whether or not they make it themselves. There’s a debate as to which apples are best to use for pie – Macs, Granny Smith, Honeycrisp, Red Prince, Gala, Fuji – the only thing we all agree on is not to use Delicious apples. To be honest, I am not a huge fan of apple pie, probably for that very reason – I haven’t found the perfect apple to make the perfect pie yet. Plus, as I discussed in the jam blog, I am not a huge fan of cooked fruit.

But there is one pie I have a terrible weakness for, and that is pumpkin pie. If I was left on a desert island, that island better have more pumpkins than a Canadian farm at Halloween.

A pumpkin is a perfect fruit, and the amount we waste in this country for Halloween decorations is frightening. As you probably know, the smaller the pumpkin, the sweeter the flesh; hence the reason why we carve large pumpkins and use baby ones for pies. By the way, my heart dies a little every time I see a baby pumpkin carved on a stoop at Halloween.

Pumpkin makes excellent soup (and the pumpkin itself makes a perfect tureen for serving the soup). We have recipes for curried pumpkin in Trinidad, even though the type of squash itself is slightly different from the orange kind (though it can be done with a bit of spicing up and a little extra salt with a pie pumpkin).

My mother knew I loved pumpkin pie, and she liked it as well. God bless her for being born during the end of a war, when canned food was praised to be better for you than real food. So she would buy those frozen Mrs. Smiths pies and bake them for me, claiming they were as good as a fresh pumpkin pie.

They weren’t.

I had many a fresh pumpkin pie over the years, but it wasn’t until my late husband, who was a chef and a graduate of the Stratford Chefs School, made me his version of pumpkin pie that I truly appreciated what it takes to make an honest-to-goodness mouth-watering pie.

So I’ll share his recipe here so you can create your own harvest pumpkin memories. This will make one 10” deep dish pie. Also, it’s best to use a blind-baked shortcrust, though a blind-baked flaky pie crust can also do in a pinch. You just have to account for the extra leaking butter or fat.

Pumpkin Pie Filling

2 cups fresh pumpkin puree (from 1 pie-sized pumpkin, roasted)

1 cup brown sugar

1 vanilla bean, scraped, seeds only

1 tsp. ground ginger

½ tsp. each cinnamon, nutmeg, ground cloves

Pinch salt

Pinch white pepper

4 eggs

1 ½ cups 35% cream

¼ cup bourbon, dark rum, or good-quality rye (if you want to be ultra-Canadian)

First things first – cut your pie pumpkin in half, scoop out and save the seeds for roasting for snacks (!!) and roast the pumpkin in a 350F oven for about an hour. Test it with a wooden skewer; if it goes in easily and the pumpkin flesh looks caramelized (see photo), take it out and let the pumpkin cool until you can easily handle it. Scoop the flesh from the skin, throw it in the food processor and puree it until it is smooth like baby food. Raise your oven to 375F.

Put 2 cups of the pumpkin flesh in a large metallic or glass bowl, add all of the ingredients listed above into the bowl, and whisk together until smooth.

Pour the filling into the blind-baked shell and bake for at least 30 min before opening the oven to check. When the sides of the filling are firm, the pie is done. The centre may be a little jiggly. You may have to put a ring of foil around the top of the crust to keep it from getting too dark, depending on how thick your shell was made.

Monday, October 7, 2013

October 7, 2013: Preserving: Our Canadian Food Tradition or How I Learned to Stop Fretting and Love the Jam

Let me start this off by saying I am one of those rare people who hates preserved food. I don’t like jams, jellies (except mint jelly on lamb), dried fruit, pickled things…I like food to be as fresh as it can be. I’m not sure why.

To be honest, I’ve never really heard about Americans or other nations home canning or making jams as much as we do in Canada. In Canada, we talk about someone’s mom or grandma making jam at home with the same ease as we talk about them making pancakes for Sunday breakfast.

As I’ve mentioned previously, my parents came to Canada from Trinidad. The methods of preserving in hot climates vastly differ from cold climates. In Trinidad, fruits and nuts are preserved by leaving them to dry outside in the sun, or in a shack in the backyard. The only things that people “can” are chutneys (which are very different from Canadian chutneys) and “pepper sauce”, which is basically a savoury chutney-style sauce made out of various types of hot peppers and other ingredients. Every family has their own recipe. Pepper sauce is not heat sealed or canned since it never lasts longer than a week or two on most people’s tables, and is usually stored in some type of recycled container, like an old mustard bottle.

My mother was born during WW2, when canned food first became a necessity in the Northern hemisphere, and brought by soldiers to the bases on the Caribbean islands. Foods such as corned beef, tinned soups, and canned milks were then integrated into local cooking on the Islands, becoming staples of everyday meals.

But when my mother came to Canada, for the first time, she saw people make their own preserves. The woman she boarded with made her own pickles. When my father started working as an accountant in an office in Weston, Ontario, the Italian workers would bring in jars of tomato sauce that they had made at home to share with others. And when we moved to the small town of Newmarket, Ontario, our neighbours made fruit chutneys and canned their own fruit (though using this term confused me for years when I was young. I expected people to put things inside of tins, not glass jars!).

Watching all of our neighbours making their own preserves inspired my mother to buy a bunch of fruit from Niagara and start canning things herself. She made about 100,000 jars of canned peaches one year. Another year, she canned her own tomatoes after we had a bounty in the back yard. I remember she also made dill pickles (after we grew dill one year in the garden), as well as trying her hand at jams and jellies. The problem was, she was making them all thinking that I would like this because, well, we were in Canada now and this was Canadian food for her Canadian daughter.

Being surrounded by endless jars of the fruit of my mother’s labours most likely contributed to my disdain for preserved goods. But I’ve never really liked the taste of them.

I never had an interest in continuing my mother’s misplaced traditions until I had a son of my own, and we moved out to the Green Belt. The spring and fall we get out here are the sweetest berries on earth, and there’s only so much room you can make in your freezer for them. Besides, frozen berries are really only good for making sauces, ice creams, or throwing into punches as alternatives to ice cubes. And so I pulled out the books that my mother gave me to attempt to make jams.

The one thing I have decided, though, is that additional pectin is just sinful in jam. I understand the need for it in jelly, because you are straining out all of the pulpy goodness and natural pectin in the fruit to give yourself a crystal-clear substance. But why add something to jam that is already there? So all of the jams I have ever made were crafted without additional pectin. I let the natural pectin in the strawberries, raspberries, and blueberries shine through.

(I did make mint jelly using the mint from my backyard, and there I was forced to use ready-made pectin, since mint does not have any natural pectin.)

My recipes are simple – fruit, sugar, lemon juice. Cook until done. (I use the spoon in the freezer trick.) Pour into a jar, and seal. I try to leave the berries as large as I can – I mash them, but I like to see big pieces of fruit in my jam, even though I still won’t eat them.

Since I don’t eat jam, and my son will only eat it if he sees other people eating it, I make jam for gifts. In June, I take the first strawberries of the season and make jam as thank-you gifts for my son’s teachers. In fall, I take the last of the strawberries and make jam for Christmas gifts. The above pic is a jar of my spring jam which I gave to my son's teachers in June.

I think that’s what we all do these days – most people who preserve end up trying to make a business of selling their things or they give them away as gifts – it’s very rare in the urban areas of the country to see people who stock their pantries with their own home canned goods to use them through the winter anymore, even though they’re happy to purchase home canned goods made by country and city chefs alike.

If you’ve never tried to make your own preserves, it’s quite easy. Don’t be intimidated by the sterilization process – it’s easy to do these days if you have a dishwasher and an oven! So let’s keep up the Canadian tradition of home preserving and canning. We have the perfect bounty for it, we should count (and can) our blessings!

Strawberry Jam Recipe

For every 2 1/4 cups of berries, add 1 cup of white sugar and 1 tsp of lemon juice. Wash and hull berries (with a knife - no need to use a fancy huller!) and throw them into a large pot. I use a stock pot. Add the sugar and lemon juice, then place on the stove over medium heat to heat up. Mash berries using a hand potato masher. You can crush them to a pulp or you can leave them depending on how whole you like your strawberries in jam. Once the jam starts to bubble and boil, start skimming any bubbles that come to the top off. You may end up with about a cup of bubble liquid for every 12 cups of berries you use. When you see the jam start to give off fewer bubbles and thicken up, put a metal spoon on a plate and put these in your freezer for about 5 - 7 min. Using dry hands take the spoon out and dip it into the thickened jam. Drop some on the plate, and if it comes to just about the thickness you like your jam to be, turn off the pot, and get ready to start pouring it into jars. If the jam isn't as thick as you'd like it, leave it on the stove, wash the spoon and plate, dry them thoroughly, and put them back in the freezer for another 10 min. Keep repeating the check until desired consistency is reached.

Saturday, September 7, 2013

September 7, 2013 My Cherished Canadian Recipe: The Humble Butter Tart

It’s almost commonplace these days to be an only child. People now start families later in life, and as a result, keep them small. But when I was a child, being an only child was still unusual. Most families still aimed to have at least three children, and most moms, including mine, stayed home while most dads, like mine, worked all week and hung out with the boys all weekend.

We moved to the small town of Newmarket, Ontario, when I was about three years old. That’s not meant to be cynical at all – Newmarket only had 12,000 people when we moved there. I think I spoke in an earlier blog of my food memories at the markets in Bradford with my mother to get fresh produce each week during the summer.

In the winter, though, there wasn’t much to do, except play in the snow outside, or go on errands with your parents. My mother took me everywhere with her, and she loved to go to craft fairs at the local senior citizens’ homes or church basements. And because I was such a quiet and shy child, I just stood looking at the pink crocheted toilet paper roll dolls while she chatted with the ladies about crafting techniques.

No matter where you find a craft fair in Canada, there is always a bake sale towards the end. My favourite part would be getting a treat at the bake sale. There were always at least three long folding tables, covered with red and white checked tablecloths, ladened with trays of party sandwiches (which are my weakness to this day), brownies, Nanaimo bars, thick and chewy chocolate chip cookies, shortbreads, and simple, thick crusted butter tarts, with raisins.

I have to tell you – I despise raisins. I think it’s because the old ladies at the seniors homes used to always give me boxes of raisins for snacks, because they were “nature’s candy”. I would always eat them to be polite, but they would stick in my cavity-free teeth, leaving an overly sweet yet bitterly burnt taste in my mouth. And sometimes, they would even have seeds. But no matter the colour – golden, dark, medium – raisins and I have never been friends. Grapes, fine. Wine, divine. But raisins come from a special part of culinary hell (along with all dried fruit in my opinion).

The old ladies would try to get my mother to buy the tarts. You may recall that my mother came to Canada from Trinidad. Back then, they didn’t have tarts like they did in Canada, and they still don’t have butter tarts at all. My mother called these tarts the ladies would offer her “raisin tarts”, and would always ask if I wanted one. I would always say no thank you, and, since my mother was more of a mille feuille type of person, she would never eat them.

But one day, we went to one of these craft fairs, and lo and behold, we found what looked like the same raisin tarts without the spurge of raisins within. I asked my mom if I could try one, and she bought one for me. The pastry was crumbly and hard, like a cookie. The filling was runny and sweet with a hint of tanginess that left me lapping up the inside of the shell. When I asked what they were called, the lady told me they were butter tarts. So for years, I thought the ones with raisins were “raisin tarts” and the delicious ones without raisins were “butter tarts”. I grew up believing that butter tarts were one of those things that only old ladies could make, like egg salad sandwiches and macaroons.

Over the years, I tried store-bought butter tarts, cafeteria-made butter tarts, bakery butter tarts, but they would all disappoint me at some level. They would either contain raisins, and thus to me would be inedible, or they would taste too artificial, as if the filling were made from melted plastic and the crust made from sawdust and cardboard glued together with margarine. I started to dislike the butter tart, not because of their flavour, but because they would always be nothing more than a disappointment to me.

At my last day job, one of my colleagues was a butter tart fiend. Like me, she believed the butter tart should remain pure and unspoiled, i.e. made without raisins. With my rediscovered love for baking, I set out on a quest to satisfy both of our appetites for the humble yet illustrious butter tart.

While searching for a recipe, I discovered that the butter tart is a Canadian dessert. Ask any American what a butter tart is, and they will have no clue. They may know sugar tarts if they live near the Quebec border, but only we Canadians know butter tarts. Asking what they are should be one of those instant citizenship questions at the border, rather than knowing hockey trivia or the recipe for poutine.

Earlier this year, I found it – and I posted my success (and failures) at this very blog right here. To make them more Canadian, I used maple syrup instead of corn syrup. It makes the filling runnier but less sweet and more balanced. I did discover the old lady trick of making them in muffin tins. When I left that job after fourteen years, my last gift to my colleague was a box of homemade butter tarts, pictured below. The crust was like a shortbread cookie, and the filling had just the right amount of sweetness and tanginess. My next big culinary quest: to perfect the egg salad sandwich!

(here's a picture of a Wild Blueberry Butter Tart I made today. Yes, it does indeed work!)