Late summer and early fall are usually the season of Projects in our house. They’re usually of the preserving kind, although as always renovation projects elbow their way in as well. First up (June or July) is the strawberry-jam project, which is later followed by other berry jams and various peach projects (August), then grape juice and grape jelly projects and various pesto projects (September), and lastly tomato-, mint-, apple- and crabapple-related projects.

It’s my Estonian heritage I’m sure. It’s summer! Preserve, preserve, because soon it will be cold and we might die! I have to enter winter with a nice big shelf of preserves and a freezer full of pesto or I feel deeply uneasy. I own an insane number of mason jars and I find it hard to part with them. If I share one with you, you know I really really like you and would very much want you too to live through winter.

But gah, who wants to deal with great vats of boiling water, pots of bubbling jellies or slow-roasted tomatoes when it’s 30 frickin’ degrees out? I made peach butter when it was still over 30 out, and I ended up with spatter burns up and down my arms because I simply couldn’t handle the thought of long sleeves in that heat.

Finally now it’s cold enough to enjoy jelly projects. Good, because my parents left a huge bowl full of crabapples on the kitchen table today before they left…

We were pleased to be not the only ones returning a large number of wine bottles to the Beer Store.  Everyone seemed to have large boxes or garbage cans full of the things… maybe everyone else saved them up for the whole summer too.  Probably  I shouldn’t respond to this by ordering more wine, but hey! now we have room!

These pictures are going to be too big for the blog template, but oh well. You can’t see the detail if they’re any smaller.

I’d never thought much about what lentils look like when they’re growing. Turns out they look something like this when they’re just about ready to harvest — they’re inside the small flat pods:

Yellow peas, the kind that end up dried and in split pea soup, look like this:

And canola looks like this:

From a distance, a whole field of canola looks sort of feathery and delicate. It’s tough stuff, though, not much bothered by an energetic five-year-old running through it:

Animal, vegetable, miracle: a year of food life

by Barbara Kingsolver, with Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver.

It’s a simple premise for an experiment: what does it look like to spend a year eating food you’ve either produced yourself or sourced locally? The Kingsolver/Hopp family certainly aren’t the only ones who have attempted this in the past few years; the personal eco-food-adventure is becoming a bit of a genre.

Still, if it is a genre, as long as we’re spending more calories shipping food than the food itself contains (and don’t get me started about bottled water), it’s a worthwhile topic and this book is one of its better examples. Kingsolver (and her husband and oldest child, who also contribute) can write well, and she has managed to write about their experiment without the over-earnest tone common to eco-adventurers, recognizing that fifty or sixty years ago her point would have been moot. She has a sense of humour and — critical to the books success, IMO — while she is thoughtful and articulate, she doesn’t take herself too seriously.

They’re realists: they buy coffee and spices from overseas sources and the odd box of KD for one child’s school friends. They eat out sometimes. They plant too much zucchini (well, any zucchini is too much zucchini in my books). They are not vegetarian; they produce some of their own poultry and buy meat from local farmers. They don’t gloss over the amount of pure work involved in weeding and maintaining a garden large enough to feed four people for a year. However, it is, as she writes late in the book, an experiment that turns out to be about eating well instead of being about deprivation: about enjoying the crunch of spring greens and the sweetness of fresh strawberries and eggs straight from the chicken; of appreciating what is in season and of working within those natural limits.

It is also, inevitably, a book about compromise. She recognizes that it’s easy to contemplate growing your own food when you have forty acres in South Virginia, but that we all make choices in our own contexts. The extensive sidebars, references, and links give people ways to find out more should the urge strike.

Nicely done. Not so much a book to read at breakfast while munching raspberries from California and blueberries from New Jersey, though. At least my yogurt was organic and my honey was local!

Quotation of the Day for June 4, 2007

“It is not really an exaggeration to say that peace and happiness begin, geographically, where garlic is used in cooking.”

- X. Marcel Boulestin, cook and writer (1878-1943)

Proto-strawberries

Originally uploaded by morecoffeeplease.

In a few weeks we’ll be fighting the squirrels and raccoons for these…

Quotation of the Day for April 25, 2007:

“I now know why my own childhood packed lunches were such joyless, dispirited affairs. It was vengeance. And despair. Somehow it is very hard to feel inspired to make sandwiches at 8.15 in the morning. I just stare into the fridge.

“As Nietzsche said, peer long enough into the fridge (the most common translations use the word “abyss”, but his true meaning is clear) and after a while the fridge stares back at you. Such fugitive joy as there is at that time of day vanishes utterly. What now? Tuna and sweetcorn again? I do not have writer’s block. I have sandwich block.”

- Nicholas Lezard, “Slack Dad”, Guardian 22.10.2003.

I’ve been trying to take my lunch to work lately instead of buying it. It’s healthier, more sociable, less expensive, and good for my French (it’s mostly my Francophone colleagues who seem to eat lunch in our office kitchen). But yeah, that quote nails it.

If only this woman would come by and make my lunch for me. Using her collection of fabulous bento stuff, of course. Unfortunately she lives in San Fran and she probably wouldn’t enjoy the commute even if she did know me, which she doesn’t.

I just know I’ll be at a Japanese supply store one day and I’ll buy an expensive pile of cool bento equipment thinking grand thoughts of perfect, colourful, nutritionally-balanced lunches like the ones she makes. Then the next morning I’ll be staring into the abyss of the fridge, thinking “sandwich” yet again.

The Estonian Easter dessert.

(Ingredients, courtesy of my grandmother. Method developed by my mom’s trial-and-error experiments, and mine.)

Ingredients:

2 lbs dry cottage cheese (This is sold in vacuum packs near the regular cottage cheese. Salted? Unsalted? Some of each? Up to you. I used 1/2 salted, 1/2 unsalted, but that’s just because that’s all Loblaw’s had.)

1/3lb currants
2 tbsp candied fruit
1/2 c sliced almonds

6 egg yolks
1/3 lb melted butter
3/4c whipping cream, or 1/2 c sour cream
1/2 lb (1 1/4c) white sugar
1 tbsp vanilla
grated peel of one lemon

What to do:

1. Assemble the following:
• 2 large bowls
• Food processor or hand mixer (or both)
• Cheesecloth
• Empty dishwasher or an accomplice willing to clean up after you
• Something heavy (like boxes of nails, or a brick)

2. Process cottage cheese until it’s somewhat smooth and put in a large bowl. My grandmother apparently uses a food mill for this.

3. Process currents, candied fruit, and almonds until they’re in reasonably small chunks but not completely macerated. Add to cottage cheese, but don’t bother mixing it in yet .

4. Process egg yolks, melted butter, lemon peel, sugar, vanilla and whipping cream or sour cream.

5. Combine with the cottage cheese mixture and mix well (this is where the hand mixer comes in). It should be kind of a soupy texture.

(It looks rather more appetizing after it’s mixed!)

6. Line the other large bowl with cheesecloth. Transfer the mixture to the cheesecloth and tie closed. Place in a colander, put the colander in a large bowl, put a clean pot lid over it, and put it in the fridge (remember about those egg yolks). Then put your heavy item on top of the pot lid and leave it for a few hours until the texture is somewhat firm, rather like ice cream. About 1 cup of liquid will drain off.

7. Clean up the enormous mess all of this has created (or hand it off to your accomplice).

8. Remove the cheesecloth and transfer the pasha to a container with a tight lid (to keep it from drying out). Refrigerate.

9. Makes about 8 cups. Don’t eat too much at once — it’s really rich!

…with the Toronto Star, no less: Estonian cuisine via grandma.

Mine on the other hand, is deeply reluctant to share.

I have her recipe for apple cake: “It’s a sweet dough, with yeast and cardamom. Then apples and some sugar and flour on top.” Okay then! I did attempt this “recipe” once. What I made was yummy, but resembled her applecake not at all. I’ve clipped the recipe from the Star article, but it doesn’t sound right either. Ah well, at least experimenting is a tasty process.

Or I could try her buttermilk pancake recipe, which is something like: “Some buttermilk, flour, and sugar. Then cook it.” Right.

It took my mother — who is not Estonian — something like fifteen years and two tries to extract a usable version of the Christmas cookie recipe (which makes 200 dozen tiny cookies, all brushed carefully with egg white, all with a tiny piece of citrus peel on top, if you do it whole hog. Estonians don’t mess around with the desserts.). Even then Grandma didn’t mention that she usually doubles a bunch of the seasonings; this pearl of information took another ten years.

I’m not sure whether she thinks we’re just asking to be polite, or whether she’d really rather we not even attempt to make them since in her mind we’re probably incompetent in the kitchen, or what. I have a suspicion she amuses herself to tears thinking about us struggling with the vague little clues she drops. Which in turn amuses me. The whole thing is just funny — frustrating, but inherently farcical, and I can’t help but laugh as I play my part.

Recently Grandma gave my mom the recipe for pasha, an Easter dessert. Well, sort of. Grandma wrote it down in Estonian. She actually wrote it down! A first! But there were no instructions, just a list of ingredients. Mom’s trying to make it, now, and (as was revealed in a series of progress-note emails) apparently it needs to be wrapped in cheesecloth, pressed and drained at a certain point, which Grandma didn’t mention.

The whole thing makes me giggle helplessly. I’m sure I’ll be hooting loudly and wiping my eyes when I turn my first pasha attempt out of the cheesecloth. The stuff can’t help but be good, given the ingredients in it. But I’m sure it won’t resemble Grandma’s — not a bit.

This is a soup similar to one I had once in a teashop in Wales, or possibly Ireland — my sister may remember. It was a cold day in February (well, not Canadian cold, but zero-ish). I was starving for no particularly good reason and half-frozen so I gave the soup a try even though I don’t have much time for parsnips, and it was excellent. It seemed like a good soup for a blizzardy evening like tonight.

Parsnip/Apple/Sage Soup

Takes about 40 minutes start to finish, what with all the stock-defrosting and peeling

4 c chicken or vegetable stock
4 parsnips, peeled and chopped finely (i.e., chuck them through the food processor, if you have one)
3 smallish apples, peeled, cored and chopped finely. (Maybe use only 2 if you really dislike sweetness)
about 2 tsp powdered sage
about 2/3 c grated sharp white Cheddar
about 1/3 c milk or (preferably) cream, if you have it

Bring the stock to a boil. Add parsnips and sage and cook for a few minutes until the parsnips are soft. Add the apples and cook for a few more minutes. When everything is soft, turn off the heat and puree (an immersion blender is just the thing). Add the cheese and stir until it’s melted and mixed in. Add the milk or cream. Taste and add a little salt if necessary. I might put a little more grated cheese on top as a garnish, if I had any, or a little swirl of cream. Serves 4.

by Vikram Vij & Meeru Dhalwala

This is our current favourite cookbook. My Mom bought it for us right when it came out, because Vij is our favourite restaurant in Vancouver and she knew we’d love it.

The great thing about these recipes is that they are, for the most part, cheap to make. We had to stock up on a bunch of spices we didn’t previously keep around, but they were all the kind that come in big plastic pouches for about 79 cents. Then we were set.

Two things to watch out for. The recipes are HUGE — the ones we’ve made would easily serve eight, and needed some mighty big pots. And a few have instructions that end with “…and then simmer for four hours,” so they’re no good for making on a whim.

A couple to start with: the Vij Family Chicken Curry is quickly becoming a house favourite. It doesn’t take all that much longer than a Patak’s curry does, assuming you’ve already made or bought some garam masala. The Tomato-Ginger Soup is likewise excellent and pretty quick to make (I cheat and use a tin of pureed tomatoes instead of fresh ones).

OK, now I’m hungry.