New toy

Here's a pic taken on my new iPhone. I can admit it.. this new toy makes me very happy. Mostly because I can use the GPS when I get lost.. and to find the phone when I lose it.

The first thing I did was download the free Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch App. Looking forward to seeing what other foodie apps come in handy.

I also look forward to using it to take food pics. Here's the first; at my favorite coffee shop, Beano. I try to like the coffee at other shi shi spots in town, but nothing compares, really. They are also firmly in first place because they have sandwiches full of Janice Beaton cheese, toasted Wayne's bagels with peanut butter and banana slices, and hot chocolate made with shaved Bernard Callebaut chocolate and ginger. AND scenes like this.

Eating my way through the season

I really shouldn't be blooging when I have a hundred other things to do. But I miss having a moment to write down my thoughts..

Some recent highlights.. we continue to revel in the season of not buying any veggies from the store; right now there are piles of tomatoes to be eaten. We have been eating mountains of Caprese salad, and last night I tried roasting cherry tomatoes, which was a hit. I didn't have proper goat cheese, but I did have some goat yogurt, which I had bought under the false impression that I could convince myself to enjoy it because it is better for me (less lactose). Bleah. I cannot get used to it. On savory things, no problem. With granola, ew. So I made it into yogurt cheese and it was terrific in the tomato dish.

The one concession I made to actually spending money on produce was to get my yearly three pounds of basil from the farmer's market. I also picked up a few pounds of Alberta garlic from the Hutterites. It is three times stronger than the stuff from China and makes me very, very happy. The basil became pesto, puree with olive oil, basil and garlic oil, and herb vinegar. I froze the first two. The second two recipes are from The Complete Book of Small Batch Preserving.

This Friday, I will be attending a fundraiser for Blue Mountain Farms, who lost most of this year's crop to a nasty hailstorm. I am so happy that this event is happening, I think it shows that the ties between some local farmers and the 'co-producers' in the city are getting stronger. More information is available at Sunnyside Market.

Seitan Worship

..the title of this post comes courtesy of my witty husband. It was all I could do not to eat this right out of the pan, but I plated it and took a picture for you, dear reader. That's what I'm willing to do for you. This was one of the hottest days we've had all summer, which is not saying much, it was 31 ℃. However the weather had me craving barbecue, and eventually I settled on making seitan.
For the uninitiated, seitan is a wheat based food that has been around for a few thousand years. Sometimes known as 'wheat meat', it is often found in the scary looking fake meat products you see in the grocery store. It used to be made through a laborious process of rinsing wheat flour in water until all that remained was pure gluten (the stuff that makes bread chewy..). These days you can buy pure wheat gluten in the store. And get this, gluten has more protein per gram than red meat.

I followed this recipe: Barbecued Seitan Ribz

It worked out quite well, although I baked mine in mini loaf pans and had to put them back in the oven for a bit longer because they didn't cook all the way through. I made the basic bbq sauce from Martha Stewart's website, and grilled them up on the stovetop in my cast iron grill pan.
This is one of the easier seitan recipes out there, many of them call for boiling, steaming, and frying to get a good texture. That's the key to seitan, if the texture is wrong it ends up too chewy. I go for the easiest recipes most of the time -- not willing to spend hours over the stove. The other handy recipe is Veggeroni (I do apologize for the names...). As Debra at Culiblog points out, why not enjoy seitan as seitan instead of expecting it to be meat. However it does work great as a meat replacement in all those recipes you grew up with. With all the worries over GMO soy, and therefore GMO tofu, seitan is a good local alternative.

Mead

I was at Millarville Market this weekend, and had a chance to chat with Cherie Andrews of Chinook Honey Company. Bees have been on my mind lately; just this week I read an article about colony collapse disorder.
I heard Cherie speak about the disorder and its worrisome effect on bee colonies at Local 101. Scientists have concluded that it is brought on by a combination of a pathogen that has become drug resistant, and.. wait for it... pesticides. What a shocker huh. Apparently the pesticides from pollen build up in the honeycombs, which result in weaker bees who are then susceptible to the pathogen.
It's encouraging to know that that scientists have been able to make these connections and track the consequences of heavy pesticide use. Hopefully these realities will result in action by governments and citizens very soon. In the meantime, I try to support local producers like Chinook Honey. Thankfully, they make it easy for me; they produce some really fantastic meads (honey wines) at Chinook Arch Meadery that you have to try to believe. Unlike midieval style European meads, which are a bit thick and funky for my taste, Chinook Arch's meads are light, like a sweet white desert wine.
On Saturday at Millarville, I also picked up a new product, Cinnamon Twist Honey, which is honey, cinnamon, and apple concentrate. It's good enough to eat off the spoon, and it was all E and I could to to stop ourselves from doing just that. Who says local eating is all about deprivation?

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.

100 Mile Challenge

I was happy to find that foodtv has the 100 Mile Challenge reality show available online (in Canada at least..). This is especially exciting as we don't pay for cable... Yes it is oversimplified etc. for television, but it still makes for good free tv :)

Episode 1

There are some good recipes and other resources on the show website:
http://100mile.foodtv.ca

The Blueboxing

Did you know that there is an entire phenomenon on the internets called unboxing, wherein people document reverentially removing a new gadget from the box? Wacky. Well I guess everyone has their thing, because I actually screamed out loud when we pulled up to the house this afternoon and saw someone unloading our big blue recycling bin. Curbside recycling has come to pass in this city of giant malls, trucknuts (yes, I actually saw 'a pair'... shudder... the other day) and no garbage bag limits. So here you have, ladies and gentlemen.. the first blueboxing.



It took us about four minutes to fill it. I think it'll be a few more weeks before the basement is free of a thousand yoghurt containers. For an interesting look at residential waste in Alberta, take a look at Evan Osenton's (disclosure: I am marrying this person in three weeks) feature on the subject in Albertaviews, Beyond Landfill.

Ode to local broccoli

I'm not finding a lot of time in my schedule for blogging these days. It would be rather silly to sit inside and write about gardening with a beautiful garden calling to me right outside the door.. especially since the Calgary growing season is about eight weeks long, and getting shorter with every passing year of global weirding. I have to say, despite my love/hate relationship with this city of my birth, summer in Calgary is a dream. It really feels like a different world. One day, it's minus two and snowing, and the next day, it's plus 25 and there are thousands of people on the river pathway, drinking Trad on the patio at the Ship, and walking up and down 17th Ave. in a quarter of the clothes they were wearing the day before. It's hilarious.

A few recent highlights:

Let me start with the most important. Yesterday at the market I came across some LOCAL BROCCOLI, courtesy of the heroes at Hotchkiss Herbs and Produce. This is totally unheard of round these parts. I don't know anyone who has managed to grow it themselves. I don't think I have ever in my life had broccoli from anywhere other than California. It is weird to wax poetic over a bunch of broccoli? Because it really did taste better. It had a quality I had never experienced.. it was more flower-like somehow.. and the stem had a buttery quality that was rather spectacular. Ok, I'll try to get a grip now. But seriously, local broccoli, get it while it's in season.

Also exciting.. Albertaviews, the local magazine where my very talented partner works, was nominated for and won 'Magazine of the Year' at the National Magazine Awards. Not too shabby.

Local 101

Still coming down from a great event on Saturday that gave me hope for a raised consciousness in Calgary.
Wade Sirois of Forage and Infuse Catering organized the gathering, which brought together interested eaters (..or co-producers, as they are known in locavore/slow food circles..) and producers to talk about the state of food production in Alberta.
It was a great event in so many ways. For one thing, people cried. Sounds crazy, but several of the speakers, tough AB farmers no less, got choked up talking about their experiences. It just goes to show how personal food is to our experience of the world. And for them it is about livelihood and a mission of sorts as well.
Some of the speakers were born to be advocates for this work -- Wade and Chris Vester from Blue Mountain Biodynamic Farm had the crowd hooting and applauding as they waded into some of the difficult issues no one wants to talk about (such as the government subsidization of cash crops that push out small producers, and the fact that most of Calgary's 'farmer's markets' make it very hard for actual farmers to sell food..).
Peter Haase of Buffalo Horn Ranch explained to the crowd of city folk how hard it is to be a farmer in Alberta, giving people a sense of the challenges farmers face. For me this was the most important part of the event. I think the farmers were in shock up at the front as a room of 200 people beamed appreciation and admiration toward them. For the last 50 years there has been an antagonistic relationship between the city and the rural areas in this province, and the hard work farmers do has been ignored.
Here is a short speech on the subject by Roger Epp, Dean of the University of Alberta's Augustana campus, entitled "The Need of a Beloved Country".

Another highlight.. at the end we got to eat, huzzah.. and sample local booze. I sampled (and then re-sampled..) mead from Chinook Arch Meadery. I HAD NO IDEA. It was gorgeous. I had tried European mead in the past and it is rather, er, medieval. Thick and strong. This mead was light and smooth, it tasted like a sweet white wine. Evan and I decided we'll be serving it at the wedding.

The photo above is Wade Sirois preachin' it to the masses.