Local Food and Winter Blahs

There are other colours for winter foods besides brown. If you are trying to go local or organic, this winter preparation will help to make your cooking more interesting. All it takes is about 2 hours on a weekend afternoon, 3 veggies and one box of snack sized zip lock baggies, one cookie sheet, a broiler or a bbq. If you want to go extreme, add in one fruit and one very large zip lock baggy.

Here's how:
Clean out your freezer of junk and knock off the ice build up.
Buy 1 box of snack sized baggies. Find one or two large sized baggy or 3 of the plastic bags that veggies go into at the grocery store.

Buy (from the Farmer's Market at Seaport on Saturdays, or the Farmer's Market at the VG Hospital on Fridays):

one bunch of celery
10 red peppers or a selection of different coloured peppers, not green (because green makes you burp).
10 small eggplants
4 pints of blueberries

Wash all of the above and do the following:
Celery - make sure there isn't any dirt in the lower regions or the leaves. Cut the root off. Cut the entire plant up into 3-4 inch bits. Yes, the leaves also. Toss it around a bit so there is an even distribution of leaves and stems. Stuff into baggies, squeeze out air, place on a cookie sheet or a shallow cardboard box. Wait.

Red peppers - core out the seeds. Cutting into strips is optional. Toss with olive oil or any other cooking oil, but sesame oil might be weird. Roast on a BBQ or under a broiler until pepper has lost its shape. This usually means the skin will burn. Allow to cool. Using a rounded spoon, scrape off the burnt skin. Stuff into baggies, remove excess air and place onto cookie sheet and Wait.

Eggplants - cut into quarters. Toss with olive oil or another oil. Sesame oil might be interesting for these. Roast on the BBQ or under a broiler with the red peppers. They are done when they are completely soft. They may take a bit longer than the peppers. Using a sharp knife, peel off the burnt skin, if you don't like it, otherwise, leave it on. Once cool, stuff into baggies, remove excess air and move onto step 2.

Blueberries - wash all the blueberries, remove any stems or bugs, place onto a large tea towel and sort of gather up the tea towel into a bowl shape. Shake the bowl shaped towel so the berries dry. Place all the berries into the large baggy or the several thinner bags. Place at the front of your freezer so you see it every time you open the door.

Step 2 for veggies:
All the baggies except the blueberries have been place on the same cookie sheet, No? If not, then do so. Place the cookie sheet in a level position in the freezer. Let freeze for 10 hours.

Step 3 for veggies:
If you are an organized person, remove the frozen baggies from the cookie sheet, return cookie sheet to its home. Place the 3 frozen veggies into the door of the freezer. Make a sign to remind you they are in the freezer. If not, just make the sign and tell someone where the cookie sheet is this winter.

How to use your fruit and veggies when the winter is looking pretty bleak for local food stuffs.

Celery - use in making homemade soups, chop into chili or spaghetti or bean soups, add to casseroles, and you have a few spots of green in another wise dull looking dish.

Red Peppers - add to anything that is looking forlorn. Add to pizzas, foccaio, hummus, bean soup or salad, eggs, chicken sauces, fish sauces. Whatever, it adds a nice red to everything.

Eggplants - really, these are brown, but they are a good protein source and can be added as is, or pureed to pizzas, eggs, pasta sauces, into meatloaf. They just extend the flavours of winter a little bit. Some people think they are tasteless, but I think they add a dark, roasted flavour to food.

Blueberries - chip off a 1/4 to 1/2 cup at a time and add them to muffins, plain cakes, coffee cakes, oatmeal cookies, oatmeal, pancakes, french toast, yogurt, applesauce, smoothies, drinks, martinis, and you have a nice blue juice. No long distance fruit for you!

Canned peaches - what not to do and still get 'em

Again with the local peaches, and Bernardin recipes. We bought some yummy local peaches from the Annapolis Valley at Bob and the Boys along Highway 103, exit 14. Bob and the Boys is a great fresh produce store, open long hours and a long season. We spied these local peaches and knew it was now or never. We bought 20, 10 for the fruit cocktail and 10 for canned peaches. We knew we would run short but there were only 20 peaches left. The Ontario peaches were in and we could have bought the remaining 10 peaches right then, but, like fools, we decided we would try and get local peaches in Halifax instead of taking advantage of the Ontario peaches right in front of us.

Steve boiled the peaches and skinned them and cut them up into lovely slices. I ground up the two Vitamin C tablets and added them to water and poured them over the peaches so they wouldn't turn brown. They didn't.

We paused and put all the garden furniture and potted plants BACK into the shed and garage because Hurricane Dan was following Hurricane Bill and since we have survived Hurricane Juan in 2003 (?) (it was a blur), we knew measures needed to be taken to prevent property damage.

Steve measured the cut peaches and we were 4 cups short of the amount needed. Pause to help daughter move stuff into her first apartment. Attempt to get to grocery store to buy more peaches. Hurricane Dan arrives in the form a tropical storm. Still, tons of water pouring out of the sky. Not enough peaches so we do other things. Return to helping daughter, this time with a drill and tool kit. Watch Steve responds to the looks of misery from the other kids as they can't build dressers or hang shelves. This time get to the grocery store. Stand in front of peaches and curse. One group of peaches from Mexico, another group of peaches from United States. No offense, but these aren't local. Not by a measure of a continent. No Ontario peaches. Why not, one wonders? They are just over one as a neighbour and are as close to local as Nova Scotia gets for some products. Still, this is not the time to ponder the ongoing negative brain power of this local supermarket. I choose..... United States peaches, because if I don't the whole canned peaches plan will go into the compost. The fruit is now half local, half foreign. The flavour of quioxite.

Back to the kitchen, Steve does his boiling peaches magic and voila, naked, sliced peaches. Stop. Time to go sailing. Yes sailing. The winds and waves have died down, the weather buoy at the mouth of the harbour has the waves at only 3 metres and we call the people we promised a sail to and off we go. Sailing is a whole other topic to which I will return one day. Sailing, sailing, over the deep blue seas... Stop. Phone call from distraught son. Distraught girlfriend in the background. The apartment they are moving into, after huge amounts of physical work already invested in getting out of their two old apartments, is not in suitable condition. Can they move in with us? Well really, they are calling from in front of our television, they just want us to know their day is hell, and they are in our home. For a while.

We arrive home, rather beaten by the winds and waves and lack of toilet paper to use the potty with and lo.... amongst the suitcases and shoes are 8 rolls of toilet paper. Too much, too late, wrong place. Listen to kids, offer soothing sounds and crawl into bed. Peaches languish in their vitamin C.

Sleep but not too much. Students are moving house all over the city and did you every watch “The Aristocats” by Walt Disney and the gang? Do you recall the scene where all the alley cats are on the fence and some noisy cat is playing the piano in an attic. That is Halifax in the first week or two of September. Quality of sound not comparable.

Up the next morning, work clothes on and we are underway. Sort of. Because I am utterly distractable. What should have taken an hour has concluded, finally, after three. The peaches are cleaned and ready to go. I wash the jars, and sterilize the lids and slip the jars into the oven to sterilize. I read the recipe. I notice that I need to make a syrup. Make the syrup and take the sterilized lids off the burner. Get the water bath going, take the nice clean jars out of the oven, probably too early but I am not following sequence well. The syrup has boiled and I'm about to roll along when ALL OF A SUDDEN, I notice I have sterilized the wrong sized jars. I don't need the 500 ml. jars, I need the 250 ml. jars. I backtrack and do the jar thing again. Turn the hot water bath down, because I am nowhere near ready.

Now I have to wait 15 minutes for the jars to be sterilized, so I start to write. This is what I was thinking about:
Things to have on hand when canning : 1) A wide mouth jar filler upper thing. This is not to be underestimated. It prevents tons of spillage, it prevents scalded fingers and it can be used all season long. 2) a collection of yucky tea towels. The ones that look awful but are clean to assist with cleaning up messes, not wrecking good tea towels and drying your hands on, over and over. 3) a second large pot. A biggy! You need one for the hot water bath process but you also need one for processing the fruit. Some fruit goes in uncooked, but most doesn't.

Beep, beep, beep, the timer is going and the jars are done. I carefully put the fruit into the jars and am about to ladle the syrup into the jars, all the while thinking about the issues around a second big pot. How to write about this in an interesting way? I stop and stare at my jars, looking lovely I might add, when I realize I have overlooked the processing the fruit step. Pour the whole mess back into the Second Large Pot and boil her up. Then ladle it all into the jars, top up with liquid, get rid of air bubbles and immerse into water bath. I did bring it back up to a boil and it boiled away merrily for the required 15 minutes. 15 minutes because these are 250 ml jars, remember?

Somewhere I thought I had read that the fruit can be packed into the jars raw (as in unboiled) and then the processing takes place during the hot water bath. But since I didn't have that in front of me in print but only in my unreliable brain, I decided to stick with the fool proof instruction. They haven't failed me yet.

To summarize, Things Gone Wrong: 1) not buying Ontario peaches when I had the chance, 2) Tropical Storm Dan, 3) repairing one kid's desk and shelves during process, 4) repairing strange kid's possessions during process, 5) sailing in the middle of the process, 6) two other kids moving into the house unexpectedly, 7) sterilizing the wrong sized jars, 8) forgetting to process the fruit, 9) Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that I had jar's worth of fruit left over and was thinking “wow, that's a lot left over!” when I spied the heading at the top of the recipe that said Yield: SEVEN x 250 ml. jars, as in not 6, 10) grabbing a 7th jar and flinging it into the process willy nilly and not marking it to use as the first jar to open.

Conclusion: Even though there is now one unsterilized jar in the mix, the piece of peach left over was some yummy.

Fruit cocktail, peaches and sustainability

Fruit Cocktails, Peaches and Sustainability

Lovely peaches and pears are available in Nova Scotia right now. Get those local peaches while you can, they go fast. The peaches come from the Annapolis Valley and are small and fuzzy and cling to the pit, but they are worth the work to eat or preserve. We get great pears as well and now is the time to make fruit cocktail.

The second most important ingredient for making fruit cocktail or canning peaches is the Bernardin Guide to Home Preserving. I spent the winter going through cookbooks and books specializing in canning and jamming etc. and generally the recipes in the Bernardin book are the core recipes in other resources. The amount of cinnamon or pickling spice might change here and there but overall, these recipes are fool proof. And I am a fool. I haven't messed any up yet. Visit their site at www.homecanning.com/can to see what's cooking.

OK, here we go.
Canning fruit cocktail:
Buy 5 pears, 8-10 peaches, realize that local grapes won't be ready for a few weeks yet and decide to substitute in blueberries. This has interesting consequences. 1 cup of maraschino cherries are needed but these will never be local. Having read the recipe a few weeks earlier, I bought some local cherries and tried to keep them fresh in the crisper. I pulled out any bruised or moldy ones every few days and as good luck would have it, I had a little more than a cup when the other fruit was ripe. If you can't get cherries, strawberries will do. Some late bearing berries are now available.

Next, go out side and put all your garden furniture and potted plants into the shed because Hurricane Bill is coming in a day. Back in the kitchen, clean all the fruit and realize something called Fruit-Fresh is required. This is ascorbic acid. What is that? Turns out it is vitamin C and once I clued into that, I remembered that one cookbook suggested crushing vitamin C tablets and mixing them with water and pouring the mix over the cooked fruit. It works. Nothing turned brown and now my fruit cocktail and canned peaches have extra vitamin C in them.

Follow all Bernardin instructions regarding cooking times, canning times, levels of fruit in the jar and so on. Truly, if you read the instructions (which I hardly ever do until it is too late) you can not go wrong. I recommend wearing your glasses when reading recipes. I often forget which recipe is on which side of the page and find I am on the path to making sour krout instead.

What the recipes don't give you is a sense of time. How long does it all take. Well, a good chunk as it turns out. Peaches are a bugger to clean if they aren't ripe and if they are too ripe, they have the opposite problems. Under ripe and the skin won't peel, even if you boil the whole peach and then rinse in cold water. Stubborn is the word. If they are too ripe, then the flesh peels off with the skin. So you want a moderate peach. One with a bit of give to its flesh, but not firm. If you can't find anything soft enough, then let them sit on the counter for a day or too to reach a nice squish.

Fruit flies – are inevitable. They are already in your home, you may not have noticed but they are. As soon as the fruit is prepared, a general all out invitation to cousins and great uncles goes out and they all arrive, spoons in hand. I keep the vacuum nearby when canning. This is illogical in the carbon foot print sense, but in a “kill that bug in my kitchen” sense, a vacuum can't be over rated.

Boil up your syrup and hope that the electricity doesn't go out. Hurricane Bill is in full throttle and the winds and rains are lashing. We are doing a team work effort to get the fruit cooked and processed through the water bath.

Water Bath: not an optional event. Also not a romantic moment. Do not climb in with your partner, it will hurt. A Water bath involves a huge pot of boiling water, a wire trivet on the bottom of the pot so the jars won't crack against each other and enough water to cover the jars. It takes an age to get the water up to a boil so this can be done while the syrup is being processed and the jars and lids are being sterilized. Because we have committed to making more preserves from local produce, we purchased a medium canning pot from Canadian Tire. Lots of dry goods type of stores carry them and they do simplify things. If this is your first go at it, use the pot you have for boiling corn or pasta and make sure your jars are covered at least a half inch with the water during the entire process. If the edge of the pot is too low, you may lose a lot of water in the roiling boil and have to top up. This might add to your cooking time. One solution is to use smaller jars and do the water bath twice. You do the math. Best bet is to borrow one for a day.

The recipes make it sound as if all the fruit cleaning, syrup boiling, sterilizing and water bathing will take about an hour. Nope, it takes a lot more. If you add up all the minutes, minus the Hurricane preparation and add in the help from darling hubby, it will take closer to two hours. Maybe three if the peaches are stubborn. (see above) This is not a bad amount of time. It is the time it would take to listen to a good CD or two and in fact, this is a good thing to be doing while undertaking the preservation of local foods. I also download an audio book from the library and listen to it during the water bath time.

This recipe yields 5 x 500 ml jars of fruit cocktail and that means about 10 deserts or 20 servings. Let's say the fruit, ingredients, jars, lids, electricity and time added up to about $30.00, divide it by 5 = $6.00 a jar. Seems pricey. Subtract the carbon foot print of buying tinned fruit or worse, the foot print of imported fresh fruit and I expect, it comes out looking much better. I haven't figured out how to do this kind of calculation but someone has and I've concluded that my time investment is worth the end product.

The addition of blueberries to the fruit cocktail turned the concoction a tremendous purple! Not mauve or light blue, but PURPLE. Just think how cool this will be when we open a jar in the dead of winter, pour it over ice cream or pound cake and have a chow down on fruit from our own province we will know that the carbon foot print was relatively small and plus, when I get to lick the bowl, I will have a huge purple tongue.