We got the beet

I'm not sure how to feel about our week of plus thirty temperatures... it is nice in some ways, but seems to portend of future water shortages and wacky growing seasons. Learning to simply accept what happens is something I need to work on. Chris Vester is a great example of that. The fundraiser was fantastic, kudos to Sunnyside Market for putting it together. It was heartwarming to see so many people willing to lend a farmer a hand. And he is the epitome of grace, really... not angry or discouraged but simply accepting that his living is at the mercy of the earth and willing to accept that risk in order to live the way he does. Pretty admirable.

I had forgotten how much I like Matt Masters. He sang odes to the Bow River and a great riff on Johnny Cash's I've Been Everywhere called I Can't Go Nowhere, all about traveling post 9/11. I'm loving the roots country music these days, thanks in part to listening to a fair bit of CKUA. Corb Lund is another great Alberta artist. There's something special about listening to songs about the place you know.

This week we pulled up the beets. Which, we learned the next day, when we had record breaking temperatures, was a bit early. Ah well. The harvest this year was twenty five pounds.. not to shabby..

So far we have enjoyed roasted beets as sweet as candy and beet fritters when it's too hot to turn on the oven. (too simple to require a recipe. grated beets, breadcrumbs or a bit of flour, egg, ginger, salt, pepper. fry up in spoonfulls.)

We are experimenting with cold cellar techniques this year. The basic approach is to cut the tops off, leaving an inch of stem intact, brush off excess dirt, and leave them out to cure for a few days. We then buried them in a large bin of sand, which is bloody heavy but what can you do. The other options are sawdust, which sounds messy to me, or vermiculite, which costs a lot more. Perhaps we will move to vermiculite when we get tired of sand in the kitchen sink.

Here are some recipes I am interested in trying:

Cypriot Beet Preserves

Chocolate and Roasted Beet Pudding Cakes

I'll have to make another batch of kvass as well. That stuff is weird and addictive and I don't know why. And of course, borscht. The Moosewood Cookbook recipe is my favourite. I think the secret is caraway seeds and apple cider vinegar.

Garlic Scapes and Rhubarb Cordial

One of my favorite culinary discoveries while traveling was scapes. They were sold at the hippie grocery store on Galiano Island, and looked so delightfully out of control on the shelf. I had read about them online previously but had never had the pleasure myself.


We grilled the scapes on the barbecue. They were really nice, although I only ate half of what I had served myself as they are pretty potent. They have the texture of asparagus or beans, with the punch of spicy garlic flavor.

Right before I left, I harvested the rhubarb plant so that it would come back up while we were away. I found this recipe for Rhubarb Rosewater Cordial. The big breakthrough with this recipe is not having to strain the rhubarb -- which I did last year -- what a mess. Instead you put the fruit in jelly bags. I didn't have any rosewater on hand so just went for plain cordial. Compared to past attempts, this one was easy, not sticky, and done in 20 minutes.

My hands hurt

... from pitting cherries. Lesson #1 of this year's season: Never try to pit 20 lbs of cherries by hand. I have a pitter that looks like a pair of scissors; and after a few dozen cherries my right hand was hurtin'. I am nursing it with Forbidden Fruit Plumiscuous Wine, a new discovery that makes me very, very happy. I got hooked on plum wine (aka SeolJoongMae) when I lived in Korea. My friend Nessa and I drank the stuff by the bottle while comisserating about our love lives and other foreign worker drama.

It, like Plumiscuous, is 'fortified'. Good times.
When I came back to Canada the plum wine from local liquor stores was pretty bad. Syrupy and not the mildly tart kind I was used to, so I gave it up. Enter Forbidden Fruit. Their plum wine is gorgeous, and tastes like summer. Highly recommended. I have seen thier wines at Silver Springs Liquor Store in Calgary. Pearsuasion is also really good.

Bonus: no headache! I discovered, thanks to a good friend and booze afficionado, that organic wines don't have added sulphites (a preservative) and therefore result in little to no headache the next day. In the past I had headaches from even one or two glasses. Some sulphites exist naturally in wines, but the quantities are much lower than in the non-organics. This is a good reason to also buy organic vinegar, by the way... sulphites are added to almost all non-organic ones. We didn't make it to The Vinegar Works in Summerland on this trip, but will be sure to drop by there sometime. My husband's mom bought Gerverstraminer vinegar there last month. Yum.

Lesson #2 from this season: Plan fruit buying carefully. E and I were so happy to see cases of affordable organic fruit that we took home more cherries than we could eat, and I realized when we got back that they don't can well. Also we are not big into sweet stuff, we don't eat a lot of jam or desert, so it's hard to know what to do with so many. (Did you know that most pies are made with sour cherries not sweet ones? Um, neither did I.) Ah well, we soldiered on, it was so difficult, stuffing our faces with fruit all week.. Also I froze a bunch and made Amaretto Cherries (because sweet cherries do preserve well this way, aparently..).

The apricots were much easier to figure out. I froze some, dried some, and made nectar, which was a bit of a handful in my tiny kitchen (wash, pit, slice, puree, cook in giant pot, add sweetener, cook again, spill some on the floor, put through food mill to strain, heat up jars, hot water bath.. ta-da!) but the result was great. I got 10 1/2 cups of concentrate from 3 1/2 pounds of apricots. The nectar can be diluted for drinking or used in recipes. Also, I threw the leftover pulp in the dehydrator (which has been whirring for two days now..) and made fruit leather. I'll provide an update when I figure out what to do with the pits, I hear you can split them and eat the kernels like almonds.

Casaubon's musings on food storage and eating seasonally

I really love Causaubon's thoughts on 'foodie' food storage and the return of peasant food.

Lessons learned

Evan and I had the last of the chard we grew and froze this summer in a wonderful soup from Vegan Planet, Brown Lentil Soup with Chard and Orzo.
As winter has progressed I have begun to gather the lessons learned from a year of gardening, preserving and storing seasonal food.

They include:

1) Grow twice as much chard.


2) Don't try to can tomatoes, you will be driven insane trying to peel 30 lbs of romas.

3) Do make expensive sauces, chutneys and salsa, don't waste time on things you can buy canned at the grocery store for $1.00.

Ev and I concluded this is the same when it comes to gardening.. we won't be wasting as much garden space on potatoes and yellow onions, but will focus more on the things we like to eat that are rare or expensive to buy. Next year we will try brussels sprouts, leeks and sunchokes.

Sunchokes, incidentally, are an insanely good veg. One of the few vegetables indigenous to North America. They are very difficult to describe, but taste a lot like water chestnut or lotus root.

4) Make three times more salsa.

5) Don't pickle things that you are not used to eating pickled. Evidence - 5 jars of unopened pickled beans.. what was I thinking...

6) Do make pesto. Homemade pesto in December is out of this world. I paid $5.00 for a grocery bag full of basil this summer at the farmer's market and it was very much worth it. We have really enjoyed cilantro pesto as well, which I stir into pad thai and green curries.

So halfway through the winter season, we are running low on frozen veggies but are nonetheless eating very well, buying local seasonal produce for the most part (with the odd orange or lemon from California, sigh..) and using our store of roasted peppers, chutneys and frozen fruit to pull it all together. So far so good.

Solar Dehydrator

I'm starting to realize that growing my own food means learning how to build things. Especiallly if I want to find creative ways of preserving food without burning tons of energy. Homegrown Evolution has a post on building a solar dehydrator, and links to another plan that seems even easier.

Homegrown Evolution: Build a Solar Dehydrator

Simple Solar Fruit and Vegetable Dryer