Category — Veggies

I took the best parts from Marisa’s (Food in Jars) and Bon appétit’s recipes for tomato jam and made the most deeeeeeelicious spread imaginable. Thank you both for the recipes.

I had seen recipes for tomato jam before, but it wasn’t until we had tomato jam with our appetizers at DiVino the other week that I realized exactly what we were missing.  And with several pounds of garden tomatoes ripening in our basement, I suddenly knew just what to do with them.

Out came the canning supplies: mini jars, stock pot, funnel and tongs.  Ready to go.

The greatest thing about the Food in Jars method is that it’s SO easy.  All you have to do is chop the tomatoes and toss the ingredients in a pot to cook away.  No blanching the tomatoes or removing seeds, everything goes in the pot.

I served my jam with bread and goat’s cheese and I’m not sure there is any better possible pairing.

Aren’t these little 1/2 cup size jars cute?  And my favourite part of the process?  Making the stickers for the lids.

The greens in my garden had grown to Popeye-esque proportions and it was time to use them up.  So, on Saturday afternoon, I pulled up beets and hacked off the leaves to make beet green chips.  So easy.  So kid friendly.

Then on Sunday, it was showtime for the swiss chard.  Now, the little guy loves stuffed grape leaves from Raw Sugar, so I gambled that stuffed swiss chard would also be familiar enough to casually slide onto the dinner table without an upturned nose or a scowl.

And it almost worked.   Once he realized that they contained meat – MEAT! – he warmed up to the idea.  Although, I say that in the most lukewarm of ways.

Look at those little bundles... so cute.

Now, the rolls weren’t overly tedious to put together, but it’s a dish that’s best saved for the weekend when you have a bit of extra time.

Handy tip #1:  You’ll want to find some nice large swiss chard leaves with as few holes as possible.  Luckily, it’s the perfect time of year for finding swiss chard in the market if you’re not growing them yourself.

Handy tip #2: Don’t pick swiss chard wearing pajama pants on a Sunday morning when you live next to a church.  The raised eyebrows from passers-by had me believing that God frowns upon flannel snowflake prints.  Oh well.  Such is the life of the urban gardener.

(For the fashion record: I was wearing a normal fall raincoat over the jammies.  Nonetheless, the addition of slippers to the snowflake ensemble was likely the downfall.)

I followed this recipe for Bulghur and Beef-stuffed swiss chard from the Washington Post almost to a tee.  I made a slight modification to the herbs – tossing in extra parsley, oregano and lemon balm that I had gathered in my PJ outing.

As we tucked into our dinner, it struck me that without any thought or planning, most of our dinner was home/locally grown.

Home: chard, tomatoes, onions, herbs, homemade chicken stock
Ottawa: ground beef (Bearbrook Farm)
Canada: bulgur
Unknown: rice

We’ve come a long way from just being very mindful about shopping for local ingredients and reading the labels.  Now it’s part of how we cook.  Having a garden has trained us into the “use it or lose it” mentality.  If you have a CSA box, you’ll know the feeling.  If there’s anything that irks me more, it’s letting good food go to waste.  I believe some people refer to that as being Scottish.  Stereotypes aside, I don’t like wasting food.

And these swiss chard rolls?  They will be gobbled up before you know it.  No waste.

After the “great tomato canning weekend of ’11” I caught the canning bug.  Since mustard is off the menu in our house due to allergies, I wanted to have something zingy that we could add to our burgers in its place.  Enter relish!

Looks at those red onions.  They are almost too pretty to eat.  Almost.  We picked them up at the farmers market – likely the Roots and Shoots stand, but my memory is a bit fuzzy.

After thinly slicing the fennel, red pepper and onion, they needed to rest for a bit before being cooked.  I followed the handy recipe from Small Batch Preserving (but you can also find a variation online at the Three Clever Sisters.)

I’ve totally mastered the art of small batch canning.  Our large stockpot does double duty sanitizing the jars and then acting as the boiling water canner.  The small pot on the rear of the stove heats up the lids.  And finally, the smaller stock pot is used for cooking.  Easy.

I’m really fond of the small 125mL size jars – they’re the perfect size for condiments like relishes that you don’t use very often.  It’s also a great size for gifting.

Wouldn’t you like to get a little sampler of relishes and jams as a gift?  Affirmative.

This recipe is a keeper -it tastes great and it just looks like summer.  Mmm!

A fellow mom and I decided to set aside our holiday Monday to do some tomato canning. The husbands were briefed as to the plan and coordinated the management of children outside the house.

I booked the Vrtucar and did a run to the grocery store and farmers market early on Sunday morning to pick up our supplies: jars, tomatoes, tomatoes and more tomatoes – about 40 pounds in total. I bought beefsteaks from the grocery store and Romas from the farmers market. The grocery store tomatoes, sold in 3L baskets, weren’t a great deal, but at least they were from Ontario.

Next year, I’ll do a little more legwork to find someone who sells by the bushel – I would hope that buying in bulk would make the process slightly more economical. Because, despite what my hairdresser thought when I told about my tomato canning plan at my last appointment, it’s really not a money saving activity. At least not the first year when you need to buy your jars. Or factor in your time. And your spouse’s patience.

On Sunday night I mentally prepared: counting stockpots, collecting ingredients, dusting off my canning tools and rereading the instructions in my Bernardin canning book to determine the most efficient way to can the tomatoes in our limited amount of child-free time. I watched and re-watched the tutorial by the guys behind the Bitten Word. (Next year, I will heed their advice and bring beer.)
On Monday morning, with the children out of the house and off to the dinosaur museum, we quickly got the first batch of tomatoes washed, blanched and peeled. It took a bit of pot jockeying to figure out how to manage it all. The canner, the blanching pot, the lids, the ice bath… it was a squeeze.

Initially, we thought we could use the BBQ to avoid turning the kitchen into a steam bath, but the pots just didn’t fit. We would have to work with only the four burners on the stovetop.

Once the first jars (8 x 500mL ) were in the canner, we realized that the final water bath processing step was the Achilles heel of the production line. With only one canner, we had a bit of down time between each batch.  Not good.

With a bit more pot jockeying, we set up two more burners to sterilize jars while the canner was occupied and we got started on the next round. To be more efficient in this round, we opted for the bigger 1L size jars.

Lesson learned: If you only have one canner, use the biggest jars that you can fit in it. (Duh, right?)

The children arrived back at the house while round #2 was in the canner. We decided to pause for lunch and finish the job once everyone was tucked in for naps. Use your own judgment, but a third round of canning may be the straw that breaks the marital camel’s back.  Nevertheless.

When the third batch was in the canner, we made a quick sauce with the remainder of tomatoes. (Note: If you do this step, provide camel/spouse with back pain medication and/or beer to soften the news that after four hours, you just aren’t *quite* done.)

The final tally from our tomato canning day was:

• 12 x 1L
• 8 x 500mL
• 2.5 x 500mL sauce

Split between two families, we’d certainly have to can much more to have enough to last the winter. Spouses – this is your official warning for next year.

Okra. You know, those weird green pod things. What do you do with them?

Maybe you’ve heard about using okra in gumbo recipes that hail from the South y’all, but what if you don’t want to make gumbo?

The Waratah Downs farm booth at the Ottawa Farmers Market was selling some on Sunday, so I decided I would bring a bag home and see what could be done with it. I’ve never cooked okra and I’ve only ever eaten it once. The okra sat in my fridge for most of the week until I figured out what to do with it.

Having never cooked okra before, all I really knew was that it had a reputation for being a slimey. Gak. With this in mind, I entered my experiment with really low expectations. I’d already had a foccacia recipe failure the night before, so I was not on a winning streak in the kitchen.

This recipe changed all of that.

I found a Bobby Flay recipe for grilled okra. Now, I don’t have cable so I haven’t seen any Bobby Flay shows, but if this recipe is indicative of what he does, then I may have to turn into a big Bobby Flay fan.

Of course, I tweaked the recipe. It seemed a little spicy for me and I didn’t have any celery seed, so I revised to suit my tastes and pantry supplies.

Both the husband and I were shocked at how tasty this simple dish was. It was spicy, sweet, and a bit salty all at the same time. The lightly grilled okra retained a bit of crunch and was not slimey at all. And the cherry on the cake? It was fast. It took less than 10 minutes at the BBQ to have these ready for the plate.

It was such a hit that I’ve mentally reserved time this weekend to make a quadruple-duple batch of the spice seasoning and I’ve started researching different kinds of okra to plant in next year’s garden.

Okrafest!

Before...

After!

Last week flew by.  Every evening was filled with some activity: a cooking class on Monday, grocery shopping on Tuesday, birthday party on Wednesday, playdate on Thursday (complete with bee stings – only to me, but ugh!).  That’s a lot of out-and-abouting for someone who’d rather just be home picking tomatoes, reading cookbooks and playing legos with the boys.

I insisted on Thursday evening, that I wanted to cook Friday night’s dinner.  The husband had worn the apron all week by cooking and BBQ’ing and all I had accomplished cooking-wise was slicing tomatoes and tossing them into the dehydrator.

After my cooking class on Monday, I discovered that I might not hate polenta after all… the issue may in fact be my own cooking techniques.   So, I decided to give it another try.  Broccoli on polenta.  It’s a date, cornmeal.  The broccoli in the garden was at the perfect picking stage.  Look at that broccoli!  It’s straight out of Peter Rabbit!

I mostly-ish followed the instructions from this Food and Wine recipe except:

• I used regular broccoli, not rabe
• I added bacon, not sausage
• I omitted the wine and used chicken stock instead.  (No wine in the house!)
• In the polenta, I used chicken stock and water.. instead of just water.  I also added a bit of milk and parmesan.

I guess I followed more of the process than the finer details.

And voila. The finished dish. Even the boy poked his fingers in the polenta, but he feigned cooked broccoli. The young one, he is a purest. For him, it’s the raw way or the highway.

So, my final thoughts on polenta. With a bit of TLC and some add-ins: parmesan, milk, salt, pepper – it can be pretty tasty. But best of all, it’s fast. And it’s cheap. Ding ding.

Are you thinking of taking the City of Ottawa’s $10 Local Food Challenge?  Yes?  Why not spend your $10 this week on some beets.  For $10, you can buy a bunch of beets and some potatoes and make two easy (and filling) dishes.  I bought two big bunches of beets at the Lansdowne farmers market this weekend: one red, one golden.  Price?  $5 per bunch.  Maybe that seems expensive for a bunch of beets.  But it’s a deal if you use the greens that come along with them.  And these beets?  They came with a lot of greens.

One of the nice things about buying beets from the market is that the greens are still in good shape for cooking.  To me, it feels nicer to cook with crisp greens, but even grocery store beets with wilty tops are perfectly fine for using in the soup recipe.  You just won’t get that satisfying “crunch choppy chop” sound from your knife slicing through the greens.

I bought beets to make the two-colour beet salad from Simple Cooking and the soup was a bit of an afterthought once I saw how many greens I came home with.  This beet greens soup seemed easy to throw together.

Simple Cooking seems to be out of print, but the Dean & Deluca website features a similar beet salad recipe.  Although, I can’t recommend hunting down a copy this book enough.  The eggplant coloured book has so many really simple, really fresh recipes with effortlessly rustic photography.  It’s staged, but not annoying rustique.  It is one of my most prized cookbooks. (I found mine at the Chapters on Slater/Bank last week).

To get started, chop the greens off the beets and give everything a good wash.  The beets get cooked in a pot of boiling water until soft.  Don’t worry about the skins, they come off later.   While the beets are boiling, you can get started on the soup.

Wash and chop your greens, dice your onions and garlic, cube your potatoes.  And whatever you do, if you use fresh hot peppers intead of dried chili flakes, use gloves.

I bought these peppers thinking they were just like a red version of a jalapeno.  WRONG.  So wrong.  I took a very tiny bit to test the hotness of the peppers and my mouth went on fire, my lips burned, I cried.  I diced no more than a heaping teaspoon to add to the soup.  And once the burning stopped, I wondered how I would use the remaining five peppers.  Twelve hours later, after having showered, washed dishes and washed my hands serveral times during the day, I stupidly rubbed my eye in the middle of the night.  3am is a really unfortunate hour to be awake with a burning eye.  Lesson learned.  This pepper is potent.

Toss the salad dressing together: olive oil, vinegar, salt pepper and mint.  Easy.   Drain your beets, cool them under cold water, peel and slice.  (Reserve a few slices for your soup.)  Pour dressing over beets, add a bit of extra mint on top.

Now, finish off your soup.  I like to blend my soup a bit with a stick blender and leave a few larger potato chunks.  I will admit, it doesn’t look creamy or velvety or even very pretty.  But it’s tasty and warming and good for you.  If you’ve used the greens and the beets for these recipes, you should also have very little waste.

Serve with some bread and you have an easy $10 local lunch.

$10 Local Food Challenge Contest details:
You can enter the contest to win one of 10 coupons valued at $50 to spend on the restaurants and retailers who are part of Savour Ottawa. Contest ends at the end of October.

I’ve got tomatoes piling up chez nous.  I’ve even borrowed the boy’s colander to temporarily store them.  (He didn’t seem to mind.)  I completed a third batch of tomato sauce, throwing recipes and measuring out the window.  What a nice way to cook.

I followed the same process as my previous roasted tomato sauce, but omitted the carrots.  I simply filled the baking tray with tomatoes until it was full – tucking in some onion and garlic into the nooks.  And then I sat down and relaxed while they roasted away.  Once the tomatoes were removed from the oven, I blended them and a big bunch of basil in the blender.  Voila.  Another pasta sauce ready for the week.

It was delicious served on our homemade gnocchi.  See the tomatoes in the background of this photo?  They got turned into sundried tomatoes later in the day.  And I got to tick one more item off my 2011 resolution list: make sundried tomatoes from homegrown tomatoes.

I wasn’t wowed by my last “Tuscan” pasta sauce.  It was too tart, too bold, too… just not right.  I guess I was looking for a lighter and more summery tasting sauce.

For second batch of tomato sauce, I decided on a roasted tomato version.  I chose this one because roasting makes things taste great and there’s no fussing with removing the tomato skins.  Less fuss is a good thing. (Wink Martha!)

I picked about 3.5 pounds of my plum tomatoes, cut them in half and scooped the seeds into a bowl.  I set them on a foil-lined baking sheet along with some garlic and coated liberally in olive oil.  Perfect.  Into the oven it went.

I reserved the tomato pulp that I scooped out and strained out the seeds.  I got quite a bit of nice tomato juice and planned on adding it to a future veggie stock.

And then I started reading some more recipes.  Some people were  adding onions and carrots!  Good idea.  I ran to the garden and grabbed the extra ingredients and tossed them onto the baking sheet too.

Back to the computer.  Other recipes called for herbs.  Herbs!  Of course, the darn sauce should have herbs.  Back to the garden.  I got a little overzealous with the thyme picking.  (Looks like I’ll be drying some thyme.)  In went the rosemary and thyme.

After an hour, everything was nice and roasted.  Once the roasted veggies had cooled, they all went into the blender with some salt, pepper, olive oil and sugar.

It was a good thing that I reserved the tomato juice because I ended up needing all of it to blend the tomatoes. (If you’re using tomatoes with a thicker “wall”, you may not need to add any tomato juice.)

Thick and rich. I think roasting is definitely the way to go.

Pros:

• No peeling tomatoes!
• Great flavour
• No stirring!
• No boiling and adding humidity to your house

Cons:

• Need to keep a hot oven running for an hour
• Need to clean a baking sheet (Maybe it’s just me and my tiny sink -  I hate cleaning baking sheets.)
• Need a blender or hand blender to pulverize into sauce.

Next batch: roasted tomato and basil.  Stay tuned!

Growing and picking tomatoes is the easy part.  The hard part is deciding how best to use your precious homegrown produce.  I’ve been thinking a lot about making pasta sauce to can for the winter, but before commiting to one recipe and going to the trouble of canning, I wanted to make sure I had the best recipe possible.  For the first batch, I turned to my Small Batch Preserving cookbook and selected their Tuscan tomato sauce – I went off recipe since I would be eating this fresh and not processing it to store.

If you’re canning sauce, you need to stick with a tested recipe… otherwise you could get sick.  Really sick.  Botulism sick.  Or you can toss your sauce in the freezer and avoid canning altogether.

Going off-recipe meant adding a few extra veggies into the sauce.  I grated a couple of homegrown carrots and beets.  The beets added lots of colour to both the sauce… and my hands.

Beet juice drama scene. Like most old school recipes, most of the work is up front: chopping, peeling, dicing.  I started out with a couple of onions and garlic and sweated them out in some olive oil.  Then added my tomatoes.

I roughly chopped the tomatoes and discarded a bit of the seeds and innards that fell onto to the cutting board, but didn’t concern myself with totally deseeding them or getting the skin off.  I think this may have been a critical mistake as the seeds can impart too much bitterness into your sauce.  It’s my first batch, there are bound to be mistakes.

It seems (according to my Google research after-the-fact) folks usually blanch their tomatoes first, peel the skin off and then scoop out the seeds.  Oops.

I added some dry red wine to the mix – in this case a pretty cheapo Jackson-Triggs merlot.  Merlot.  It begs to be italicized.

Here’s a look at the sauce with the beets, wine and balsamic added.  It’s pretty dark.  I sort of regret using our better balsamic for the recipe.  I think it overwhelmed the recipe and that the Small-Batch writers were probably using your grocery store “balsamic”.

Once it had all cooked, I really regretted not skinning the tomatoes.  The texture was terrible.  I decided to pull out my food mill to remove the skins.  It tasted better, less bitter.

At the same time I was tippy tapping this post, an email came into my inbox from the people at Winefox (a site that takes wine from “snobby to hobby” and features a monocle wearing fox mascot) wanting to know if I wanted to get some wine tips to write about on the old blog.  Good timing.  I definitely didn’t want a repeat of Merlot-gate for my next sauce.  So I sent along some questions about choosing a better bottle for the next batch.  Here we go…

1) Do you have some recommendation for a not-too-expensive red wine for my next batch of sauce?  (Preferably something Canadian)
Winefox wine expert (and Real Food for Real Kids “founding Dad”), David Farnell recommends a Gamay. “Just pick a producer!”

• Henry of Pelham Gamay, $14.95
• Malivoire Gamay, $16.95

2) Do you think people should cook with as good of wines as they drink?
“When recipes call for just a splash of wine, feel free to use the good stuff from your glass – it really will produce a better result.  If you need to use more than a cup, choose a less-expensive option from your pantry, but one that you’d still drink yourself.   Keep in mind, you’re using the wine to add flavour, so you want to make sure you enjoy it for what it is, but it’s not necessary to splurge on a top-notch bottle either. Here’s a good rule: If you can pour yourself a glass and enjoy it while you’re cooking with it, you’re all set. And, maybe, have an even better one on-hand to enjoy with your guests once dinner’s served!”

My last question was answered by Winefox’s brand manager, Lindsay Gavey…

3) How do you know if a Canadian wine has been mixed with other countries’ grapes?
In most cases, origins will be provided on the back of the bottle. With VQA wines, authenticity is clear and guaranteed, as there are very specific rules in the VQA that govern foreign content – and labeling. Some will even specify a more specific region (or appellation), such as Prince Edward County. This means that the grapes used were exclusively grown in Ontario, with at least 85% grown in the stated appellation. If a bottle has the VQA logo, then you know that the wine was made from 100% Ontario grown grapes.

Thanks for the tips Winefox! I’ll be sure to check for a Gamay next time I’m shopping.

Need to know more about Winefox?

“The goal of Winefox.ca is to be Canada’s go-to destination for anyone interested in wine, whether they want to share, learn and discuss wine, build their personal wine profiles and online cellars, or simply find a wine to take to their next dinner party,” says Dean Ostilly, General Manager of Winefox.