Tomatoes, spinach, peppers, processed meat, cheese, hamburger, peanuts…sounds like a fairly average shopping list, right? At various points over the past few years, however, each of these foods has been sold with a heaping secret helping of salmonella, listeriosis, or e. coli. Thousands of people have been made sick by these contaminated foods, dozens have died, and many innocent food growers, producers, and processors have been caught in the economic fallout caused by the outbreaks.
The latest exciting poisoned food saga involves peanuts contaminated with salmonella (677 made ill, 9 dead). A peanut processing plant in Georgia linked to the outbreak was found to have dead rats and cockroaches infesting the facility, not to mention big holes in the roof right above piles of peanuts waiting for processing (fyi: salmonella just loooves it damp). Another Peanut Corporation of America plant in Texas was later shut down after a crawlspace was found to contain dead rodents, rodent excrement and bird feathers and that particles from these delightful items were being sucked through the building’s ventilation system. The kicker? Well, there’s at least three kickers:
PCA’s in-house inspectorsknew that their peanut butter contained salmonella and yet knowingly went ahead and shipped tainted products on at least a dozen occasions since 2007–at the repeated urging of CEO Stewart Parnell.
The PCA was certified organic and its certification was completely up-to-date. I guess rats (and rat feces) are, technically, ‘organic’…
One of the PCA’s major customers, Kellogg, hired private food safety inspectors who had no experience inspecting peanut processing facilities and who were given insufficient access by plant managers to do their job. Oh, and they weren’t required to test for salmonella. So they didn’t.
One of the most horrible aspects of serious food-illness outbreaks is that so many people are made sick and die before the cause of the infection can even be found (overwhelmingly, children, the elderly, pregnant women, and those with compromised immune systems are those who fall victim first). This is due in large part to the incredible complexity of the modern industrial food production, processing, and distribution system, which means that contaminated food outbreaks are no longer limited to a single company or product, or even to the same area of the world (as the melamine-tainted Chinese milk scandal proved).
You’ll remember how meat products from that one Maple Leaf plant in Ontario quickly found their way into dozens of different stores and food outlets, killing unsuspecting people across the entire country last summer. As another example, the Peanut Corporation of America provided peanut products for about 85 different companies who used them in their own processed food products. So although most people would be wary of peanut butter, it might not occur to them to be concerned about energy bars, crackers, or ice cream cones. None of these products come with a huge Peanut Corporation of America logo (or skull and crossbones) on them, so we have to rely on the food recall updates provided by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency to find out what we should be avoiding.
Sad to say, it’s important to diligently keep abreast of these alerts in order to protect yourself and your family. An easy way to keep on top of the latest information is to sign up to receive email notification of food product recallsrelevant to Canadian consumers straight from the CFIA, and check out the food safety resources below. It’s also vital to ask questions about where your food is coming from and find out how it is produced. Too often, the consumer is expected to bear the majority of the burden of preventing food-borne illness (don’t mix up your cutting boards! never undercook your turkey!), while unscrupulous growers, producers, and processors are left free to play Russian roulette with our health by selling us their dirty and dangerous food.
Food safety resources
CFIA’s consumer centre Food illness fact sheets, up-to-the-minute information on food recalls and allergy alerts
Barf Blog Dr Doug Powell bluntly dishes the dirt on all things related to food safety
I initially described this acorn squash as a leftover, but really it wasn’t, because it had never actually gotten as far as being cooked. It had simply sat in a bowl in the counter for three weeks, staring at me accusingly while I tried to avoid looking at it. That’s what you get for buying something you don’t often buy without having a specific plan for how you’re going to use it!
The other issue with the squash is that I had only bought one of them, which really wasn’t going to go far enough to feed four people in any recipe I already knew, so there it sat. I finally realised that it wasn’t actually going to leap onto the stove itself (although I suppose it might have, if I’d left it another couple weeks). So I turned, as always, to Chef Google. This simple recipe for apple acorn squash soup from BC Tree Fruits* took care of that squash, a few apples that weren’t quite as crisp as they once had been, and part of a huge bunch of parsley that seems to have no end. It also finished off the chicken stock I had in the freezer, which prompted me to make another batch of stock that in turn used up some not-so-crisp celery and more of that never-ending parsley. The crisper drawer is now in much better shape. Only nice fresh vegetables remain and I don’t have to feel a twinge of guilt or apprehension when I open the drawer. A fridge really isn’t any different than the rest of the house–if any part of it gets ridiculously cluttered, then it can become very difficult to concentrate at the task at hand (in this case, cooking).
Food waste really has become a huge issue for me over the past few years, and I’ll soon be starting a series on how to drastically cut down on the amount of food that gets thrown in the (compost, hopefully) bin. In the past it was quite common for me to have to chuck stuff out, but now it’s a pretty rare exception. It’s not that hard to change your habits–some menu planning, inventory-keeping, thoughtful grocery shopping, and liberal use of your good friend Google will all help to get your groceries into your stomach where they belong, rather than the landfill. An estimated 5% of food is thrown out of Canadian fridges–at least–on a regular basis. In Britain, it’s about 1/3rd and in the US, estimates are as high as 40%. I can’t see why Canada’s level of waste would be much different. Cutting back on this unnecessary waste is the easiest way to reduce our consumption and ease the demand for food production, not to mention reduce the significant methane gas emissions caused by decomposing organic matter in landfills while saving you some significant money on your food bills too.
* Those are walnuts floating on the top. They weren’t about to go bad–I just thought they would taste good, and so they did. Next time I will candy them. Yum. It could easily be made into a vegetarian soup by substituting vegetable stock.
After a couple of unpleasant experiences with having store-bought hamburger recalled because of possible E. coli contamination, I switched to buying free-range or naturally-raised meat. I was unhappy with the idea of animals being raised on factory farms, and was very pleased to find that the quality of meat produced more humanely was much closer to what I had enjoyed on our small family farm while growing up.
One consequence of this switch is that I now buy a lot fewer pre-cut chicken pieces, and generally get whole chickens instead. Although you can buy frozen chicken breasts from free-range farms, and they are certainly handy for quick meal, I find that their very convenience tends to make me a less thoughtful meat consumer. It is just too easy for me to pull them out of the freezer rather than take the time to think of a vegetarian alternative. We have become so accustomed in the west to casually consuming the most premium parts of an animal on a regular basis–bacon, ham, chicken breasts, steak–that we seem to forget that animals aren’t comprised solely of these parts. If, as in the old days, you only butchered one pig for your large family per year, you certainly wouldn’t be sitting down for bacon for breakfast and ham sandwiches for lunch every day. These things were a treat, not an everyday indulgence.
In fact, I think the rise of factory farms over the past few decades is in large part due to the commoditisation of this premium meat. The vast majority of people can’t afford to eat top-quality cuts of humanely-produced meat every day, so a farming system emerged that could churn out huge quantities of meat at low prices. People became accustomed to to this cheap availability and grew to expect it. But unfortunately, this bargain at the grocery and fast-food till could only be achieved at an appalling cost to animal welfare and the environment. Buying a whole chicken really helps me to remember that 1 chicken=1 breast, and I prize the breast meat much more highly on the much fewer occasions that I do eat it.
Furthermore…I also must admit that I really balk at the price of pre-packaged chicken breasts. When you can buy a whole chicken for $15 or less, it seems extravagant to spend $10 on a few little pieces. I’m just too cheap! Taking the time to cut up a whole chicken into pieces will save you a LOT of money, especially if you’re buying free-range or organic meat.
If you don’t know how to cut up a whole chicken, you can find simple illustrated instructions here. The other night I cut one up and used the breast meat for a lovely chicken balti. I gave the thigh pieces to a friend to use, and was then left with the scraps of the carcass, two drumsticks, and a couple of wings. These would be hard to divide up between four people for another meal, and trying to rescue the meat off the raw wings and neck is would be time-consuming and somewhat unappetising. I tend to think that if you’re too squeamish to handle meat in its original format, you probably shouldn’t be eating it in the first place–but I don’t have much desire to chow down on a recognisable chicken neck! So I decided to make chicken soup out of the remains instead, which would create at least two meals. Soup makes every part of the chicken palatable and very easy to deal with, and allows me not to waste a single bite of meat–an extremely important consideration if you want to reduce its considerable carbon impact.
The first step was to make the stock. I find that right after supper is a good time to make stock. That way it can simmer all evening and be all ready to go the next day with the least amount of effort and hanging around. This recipe looks long, but it really takes very little fuss. I will point out that you will only get really good results with a free-range bird. A factory-farmed chicken just will not make very tasty stock.
Easy peasy chicken stock
1 chicken carcass, either raw soon after cutting it up, or frozen if you didn’t have time to deal with it straight away (reserve the drumsticks, wings, and neck for the soup and cook separately so they don’t get overcooked–see below). You could also use the remains of a leftover roast chicken. I will sometimes put two in the pot at a time to intensify the flavour.
2 carrots, broken into a few pieces
2 celery sticks, including the leaves (make the celery organic if at all possible–conventionally grown celery is treated with about 29 chemicals and has no protective skin), snapped into a few pieces
2 parsnips, broken into a few pieces (if you have them)
1 onion, cut into quarters
8 whole peppercorns
bay leaf
fresh herbs for a bouquet garni (a bundle of fresh herbs tied with string)–because it is autumn, I had none on hand, so threw in some dried parsley (from the garden) instead
Throw the chicken carcass into the pot (frozen is ok), along with the vegetables and herbs. Cover with water (I pretty much fill my big Dutch oven–over 10 cups). If you’ve cleverly been saving the cooking water from your vegetables (except potatoes) and freezing it, use that. It will intensify the flavour of the stock even more!
Bring to a boil and then reduce to a very low simmer for 3-4 hours, occasionally skimming off any foam and removing any pieces of skin that come to the surface. At the end, strain it with your colander and then once more through a fine wire sieve.
You’re now left with the stock. Leave it at room temperature until cool (don’t put it in the fridge warm–that will reduce the overall temperature of the fridge and bad organisms could start to grow in the stock before it gets a chance to cool off. If it’s winter, you could set it outside with a tea towel over top of it to speed things along). Place it in the fridge for 2 hours or overnight. The fat will rise to the top and congeal–just lift it off and dispose of it.
Voila! You now have about 10 cups of delectable chicken stock a million times superior to anything you could buy in the store, and which cost virtually nothing to make. You can use it all for a big batch of soup, or freeze into smaller portions (some people use ice cube trays, but I like having 2-cup and 4-cup containers on hand). And don’t panic if it has solidified into a jelly-like consistency. That’s what real chicken stock is supposed to do! Note: this recipe contains no salt, so you will need to add salt when you cook with it.
I used the whole batch of stock to make this soup, which is mostly drawn from this excellent Chatelaine recipe for a slow-cooker soup. The main difference is that instead of using a pack of chicken thighs or an entire chicken cut into pieces, I just used a few pieces (don’t forget the neck!). I thought that was plenty enough meat. I also only used one leek. They’re delicious, but very expensive, and there was no way I was buying three, as the recipe recommends! You could also economise and use an onion instead, but the leek does add a very nice flavour if you want to splurge.
A Frugal French Country Chicken Soup
10 cups homemade chicken stock (2L)
leftover chicken pieces (drumsticks, wings, and neck)–about 1-1/2 cups cooked
1 Tbsp Dijon mustard
2 tsp dried tarragon (my neighbour gave me some from her garden)
1/2 tsp ground nutmeg
1/2 tsp white pepper (must be white!)
6 baby potatoes or an equivalent of larger ones (our garden)
4 carrots (our garden)
2 celery stalks (organic)
1 leek (Saskatoon Farmers’ Market)
6 mushrooms (not necessary but I had them left in the fridge)
salt to taste
Gently simmer the chicken pieces in a few cups of water until the meat comes easily off the bones (about half an hour). Lift out the chicken and set aside to cool. Pour the 10 cups of stock into the soup pot and whisk in the Dijon mustard and herbs/seasonings. Separate the meat from the skin and bones, shred the meat and add to the pot. Cut the potatoes, carrots, and celery into thick chunky pieces and add to the pot. Chop off the tough dark-green tops of the leeks, then slice them in half (or quarters, depending its size). Rinse well. Slice thickly and add to the pot. If it looks like you need more liquid, add the chicken cooking water (leftover frozen vegetable cooking water would be great here too).
Bring to a boil and then reduce to a simmer until the vegetables are tender (about 15-20 minutes). Season to taste and serve with some wonderful bread and butter. Cover and refrigerate for 3 days, or freeze the leftovers for up to 3 months.
But what will happen to these people as real food grows increasingly expensive? Oliver says that in the past, people were able to use their cooking skills to make nutritious meals even when money was tight, but now there is a generation of young people who are nervous about using raw ingredients and simply don’t know the first thing about how to prepare them. He fears that these people will be forced by sheer economics to eat even more of the cheap (and usually nasty) food available, which could lead to an even bigger obesity problem in the UK, especially among children.
Of course, the UK isn’t the only place feeling the effect of higher food prices, the ubiquitousness of fast-food restaurants, and the rise of obesity. In the US, it’s even worse. And at least one fast-food chain is now explicitly using the shaky economy as part of their newest ad campaign. In this ad for KFC’s $10 Challenge, a family visits a grocery store and tries to buy all the ingredients for a chicken supper for under $10, only to throw their hands up in failure and, laughing, run out of the store to KFC to buy supper instead. It really has to be seen to be believed.
I don’t have the time or space to rant about how offensive this ad is on so many levels (mocking people’s money problems! insulting their budgeting/grocery shopping skills! having the gall to claim that fast food is equivalent to home cooking! assuming that no one already has a single food staple in their cupboard!), so I’ll leave it up to chef Kurt Michael Friese on Grist, who explains in detail about how he beat KFC’s $10 ‘family meal’ challenge. And he even gives you the recipes at the end. Beat that, KFC!
The Chinese melamine poisoning scandal caused a lot of people to take a closer look at their Halloween candy this year. I suspect that a lot of candy labelled ‘Made in China’ was simply thrown away by nervous parents after their kids brought it home. I know that I culled a fair amount of my kids’ treats–some because it was made in China and didn’t have any ingredients listed, some because it was overwhelmingly composed of corn syrup and modified palm oil. Other stuff got axed because it was just too ridiculously sugary for little kids (such as…tubes of powdered sugar). I didn’t really fancy dealing with a squishy-style bender, and preschoolers aren’t known for the thoroughness of their toothbrushing technique (besides, I just really fancied those Twizzlers).
But health considerations aside, there are other reasons that we need to look twice at that mound of brightly-wrapped chocolate. Most cocoa beans (from which chocolate is made) are grown by farmers and plantation workers who live in dire poverty and often suffer appalling working conditions. Over 100,000 of those workers are children–and most of them are working against their will.
The US Department of State has estimated that more than 109,000 children in Cote d’Ivoire’s cocoa industry work under “the worst forms of child labor,” and that some 10,000 or more are victims of human trafficking or enslavement. These child workers labor for long, punishing hours, using dangerous tools and facing frequent exposure to dangerous pesticides as they travel great distances in the grueling heat. Those who labor as slaves must also suffer frequent beatings and other cruel treatment.
Although the cocoa industry agreed to abolish child labour seven years ago, little or no improvement has been made. Cocoa companies promised to make their cocoa “child labour-free” by 2005, and when they completely missed that target, promised to
So what can we do to help the children who are the victims of the international cocoa trade, especially at this prime candy-buying time of year?
Buy fair tradechocolate. Certified fair trade chocolate production prohibits child labour, increases the amount of money paid to farmers, and encourages safer and more environmentally sustainable farming methods. I bought mini Cocoa Camino chocolates to give away to trick-or-treaters this year. Try 10,000 Villages, Steep Hill Co-op, Herbs and Health, or Just Delights (664-6071).
Go Reverse Trick-or-Treating. This Global Exchange campaign sets kids up with samples of free trade chocolate and postcards detailing the benefits of buying fairly traded chocolate, which they can hand out as they make their rounds. It’s a great chance to sweetly introduce people to the concept of fair trade!
Think homemade (if and where possible). Homemade treats have mostly gone the way of the dodo bird, due to fear of tampering by unknown nutters. But you could still give out your great popcorn balls or cookies to the kids and parents you know well. It’s a sad state of affairs when people are so afraid of their own neighbours that they won’t let their kid eat a home-made treat from someone they see every day, but will let them scarf all the trans-fat laden, non-identifiable mystery-ingredient junk they can stomach. Maybe you could make it a personal challenge to get to know as many of the families on your block as you can and break down that distrust–a summer block party can be a great way to get people to open up to their neighbours.
Try alternatives to chocolate. When I was a kid, we used to get apples. How delightfully retro! We weren’t always overjoyed, but we still ate them. This year I gave out little boxes of raisins along with the chocolate. You could also try something like Pure Fun candies–organic, kosher, vegan, fair trade candies made in Canada and the USA. They make lollipops, as well as individually wrapped sweets. Dad’s and Nutters carry their products–ask them to bring in the Halloween pack! There’s also peanuts in the shell (I wouldn’t hand these out unless there is a parent right there to say it was ok, in case of allergies), fruit leather, chips, pretzels, savoury snacks, juice boxes, applesauce/fruit cups…
Politely pester retailers to carry fair trade candy. Stores won’t bring it in unless enough people ask them for it. So ask for it! We need to create alternatives to the mainstream chocolate and candy trade so that they know what they should be doing when their customers abandon them for their unethical business decisions.
I went through the fridge today and finally dealt with a weird assortment of things that had been lying there neglected for some time, including:
a 1L container of partly-cooked pumpkin (about 1 week old)
about 2 cups of buttermilk (waaaaay past its best-by date–but buttermilk can stay good for weeks. Just make sure it hasn’t permanently separated)
1/2 cup of half and half (expiring today)
2 links of garlic farmer sausage (1.5 weeks old–I’d bought it fresh at the farmers’ market, so I wasn’t worried about it)
rather limp-at-the-end green onion (1.5 weeks old)
some beets, complete with starting-to-wilt greens (1.5 weeks old)
First I took the pumpkin (we had roasted it and used half for soup last week before running out of ambition–a whole pumpkin can be rather overfacing all at once!) and cooked it for about another 10 minutes in the microwave because it was still rather hard. Then I puréed it, getting about 3 cups worth. The purée, along with the buttermilk, was just what I needed for these fabulous and fibre-rich pumpkin chocolate chip muffins (I stuck the other two portions of pumpkin in the freezer for future use):
Add the wet ingredients to the dry, stirring until just mixed. Bake at 400F for 20-25 minutes. Keep a close eye on them–I have found 400F to be a little hot for them in my oven and had good results at 375F today for 20 minutes only. You don’t want them to get dried out. My original recipe says that it makes 12, but I today got 12 large ones as well as a full pan of mini-muffins (based on 12, they are 210 calories each, with 6 grams of fat and 8 grams of fibre). I took the mini-muffins out at the 15-minute mark.
Afternoon snack out of the way, I used up the rest of the (shall we say mature?) ingredients in a hearty soup for supper. I combined two different recipes (here and here) to approximate a favourite restaurant dish of mine:
At-home Summa Borscht (because you can’t go to Taunte Maria’s every day)
3 cups of 1/2-inch cubed potatoes
about 4 cups of water (if you had a ham stock or a bone to throw in, that would work well)
2 links farmer sausage, casings removed
1/2 cup green onion, chopped
dill to taste (1/4 cup of fresh dill is best, but I used the last of the dried stuff from the garden because that was what I had on hand)
1 cup buttermilk
1/2 cup half-and-half
1 cup chopped beet greens
salt to taste
Put the potatoes in a large saucepan with the water and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer until the potatoes are tender. While they are cooking, cook the farmer sausage in a frying pan (break it up with a spoon, but keep it fairly chunky). When the potatoes are ready, stir in the sausage, the green onions, dill, beet greens, and buttermilk. Bring it back to a simmer (until the beet greens are tender–you don’t want them to turn to sludge). Season to taste–depending on the saltiness of the sausage, you may not need to add any salt at all. Stir in the half and half before serving with some lovely bread & butter (and don’t forget the dill pickles!).
Cleaning out the fridge=good food. Go see what you can rescue before it’s too late!
How did we reach a point where so much food is wasted or unnecessarily doused with chemicals simply because someone decides it doesn’t look pretty enough to eat? I believe that a vicious circle has been created between consumers, who refuse to buy blemished produce, and supermarkets, which respond to and then further feed that choice by only stocking cosmetically uniform produce. Generations of people have become so removed from the food production chain that they no longer understand that vegetables come in all kinds of shapes and sizes, that they are grown in fields exposed to insects and the elements, and that the best-tasting fruits and vegetables are often the funniest-loooking ones. Because they’ve never grown their own food and usually have no idea who is growing the food they buy or how they’re doing it, their main instinct in the supermarket is fear*–fear that can only be assauged by seeing the same reassuringly familiar and homogeneous produce every time they walk in.
Thankfully, there is a growing backlash against this produce perfectionism. I also hope that as more people take up gardening, they will develop an emotional investment in their food that will keep them from cavalierly tossing a not-so-perfect specimen. Indeed, I hope that they will embrace them and celebrate them (and, if possible, eat them)!
This year, I’ve given my annual weird vegetable award to the potato above, which is shaped like some kind of…well, I’m not exactly sure, but it’s got an interesting snout, at any rate, and it looks quite jovial. For more amusing examples of Regular Food Gone Horribly Wrong, visit MoFA (Museum of Food Abnormalities). And please comment about or send pictures of your own strange home-grown examples!
* fear of eating food that ‘tastes gross’, fear of eating food that has gone bad, fear of germs and dirt on food, fear of getting sick from food, and the deep-seated fear of acknowledging that food is produced in the real world and isn’t just magicked out of thin air by white-clad fairies.
It’s still cool, I’m still feeling sick, and I still had a couple pounds of those old carrots to use up, so I summoned my remaining strength and threw a few things into the soup pot for lunch. Ginger has long been used by the Chinese to treat colds and flu (its strong yang properties are good for sore throats, congestion, and sinus pain, apparently). Indian Ayurvedic medicine also recommends curry dishes to alleviate the same symptoms. I can’t swear to their medicinal properties, but I know that a soup made with these aromatic spices always makes me feel better!
I used Premala’s madras curry powder, which is produced here in Saskatoon–it is a nicely balanced blend of spices and not too hot for little ones to enjoy too. You can find their spices, sauces (I highly recommend the cilantro hot sauce), chutneys, and spicy peanut spread at a number of grocery stores throughout the city, and they also have a stall at the Saskatoon Farmers’ Market.
Curry carrot ginger soup
1Tb butter and 1Tb olive oil
2 small onions (about 3/4s of a cup), chopped
1 clove garlic (I only had one remaining clove; you could always use more), chopped
a knob of fresh ginger (mine was a little wizened on one end but still had good moisture inside), peeled and grated
2Tb lemon basil (optional: I just happened to grow some this year and thought it would be a nice addition)
1 cup of milk (optional: if your soup is a bit thick or you like it a bit creamier, you could add some milk at the end)
garnish: fresh chives and dill
Melt the butter with the olive oil in the pot and add the onions, garlic, ginger, and curry powder. Cook on a gentle heat until the onions are softened (about 5 minutes–don’t let them brown). Add the carrots and stock, bring to a boil, and simmer until carrots are tender (about 15-20 minutes). Add the lemon juice and lemon basil, then whiz the soup with a handblender or in a regular blender. Add salt and pepper to taste, and milk if desired. Serve with chopped chives and dill.
On a cool-ish day like today, when three-quarters of our household has been felled by a rotten cold, it seemed like a good time to make something warm and comforting to eat for supper. Somehow a salad just doesn’t seem that appealing when you’re nursing sore throats! (Cold cucumber slices might be the exception.)
My crisper drawers are filled to bursting with vegetables at the moment, some of which have been there for quite some time. Normally I am much better about keeping track of what’s in there and not buying anything unnecessary, but a combination of events have left me with me with double quantities of rather aged vegetables: first, I was away for a couple days last week, and then my neighbour left for 2 weeks, generously gifting me with the perishable contents of her fridge. We’ve been harvesting daily from two garden plots, and yet I was still unable to resist buying not just one, but TWO bags of new baby carrots* the other day, despite already having a nearly full bag of old crop carrots languishing in the fridge. This plethora of carrots had further managed to hide a truly elderly bag of celery from sight, and I also had a bag of beet stems which I had somehow not yet found a use for, despite pulling them out to look at them every day for two weeks.
To make things short, I had a lot of veggies that wouldn`t even win second prize in a beauty contest, and they weren’t about to get any prettier. But as any restaurant chef (or your grandmother) knows, after you clean out the fridge, it’s time to put soup and stew on the menu–slow-cooking brings new life to sad sack vegetables. There’s no need to be scared of them and you don’t have to throw them out just because they’re not at their peak anymore. After all, you wouldn’t chuck away an entire apple just because it has a little bruise–you just cut around the bad spot and eat the rest, right?
I gave my last-ditch stew some extra summery zing with fresh green beans from the garden and lovely earthy new potatoes. And I have to say that it was absolutely delicious. Now, I just need to tackle that 20lb case of ripe peaches and that huge bag of rhubarb…**
11th Hour Stew (aka It`s Now or Never)
1.5 pound package of stewing beef (Benlock Farms, via the Saskatoon Farmers’ Market)
2 small-ish onions (old crop, so one was going a little dodgy on the outside–just peel off the offending layer/s), chopped
4 carrots (which needed a good shave to get rid of those white hairs, frankly), sliced into rounds
3 stalks of celery (what I could safely rescue from that limp old bag), chopped
a big fistful of beet stems (well-picked over to get rid of the dodgy ones), chopped
one clove of garlic lurking in the butter compartment, chopped
a half-bag of last year’s frozen fresh tomatoes (about 2 cups) which I had discovered in the freezer and which was starting to form ice crystals since I robbed half of it for something else last month
half a dozen mushrooms (the last of a bag), chopped
a nice big handful of green beans, broken into bite-sized pieces
6 small/medium new potatoes, quartered
a bottle of Paddock Wood Vienna Red beer (any beer will do, as light or dark according to your taste)–or use water or vegetable/beef stock
Brown the beef in a bit of oil in your big stewing pot, throwing in the onions and garlic partway through. Then add all the vegetables (apart from the beans and potatoes), the frozen tomatoes, and the beer. Bring to a boil, then turn down the heat and slowly simmer for an hour and a half, adding water if need be. Twenty minutes or so before you’re ready to eat, add the potatoes. When the potatoes are tender, throw in the green beans for five minutes or so while you’re setting the table. They should still have some bite; don’t cook them to within an inch of their life.
Serves 4 with bread, butter, and dill pickles–you’ll have leftovers for 2 that you could serve over egg noodles–go grab some at the farmers’ market!
* Sovereign Colony’s new crop of carrots are now available at the 8th St Sobeys! These are the most delicious carrots you can buy at a big chain grocery store, and they`re grown just down the road in Rosetown. Keep an eye out for their potatoes, which should be arriving at Sobeys soon too.
** Tomorrow! I`ll do it all tomorrow! August`s bounty has a habit of turning me into Scarlett O`Hara.
photo: spinach soup–it’s all the rage with the preschool set (today, at any rate)
As I mentioned last week, we’ve been doing some thinning out at the community garden plot. Some of the spinach had gotten quite large and was starting to bolt, so we stripped it, stuffed it into a couple of bags, and stuck it in the fridge. Then I got busy and it sat there for a week. Or was that nearly two? Oops!
I tentatively stuck my nose in the bags yesterday and it wasn’t nearly as bad as I had feared. Greens picked from the garden will last way longer than those you buy from the store because they haven’t taken a week or longer to get to you (incidentally, your risk of getting sick from home-grown greens is also way smaller than commercially-grown greens, although you still need to take sensible precautions while growing and preparing them). You wouldn’t want to make a salad out of the leaves in my fridge at this point–the leaves were rather mature to be eaten raw, some of it was wilting a bit (ok, a few of them were wilting a lot), and there were some yellow/damaged leaves which needed to be culled. It didn’t look real pretty, but overall it was still perfectly edible–a perfect candidate for soup.
I made a very quick and easy cream of spinach soup for lunch from Joy of Cooking: All About Vegetarian Cooking (2 minutes of chopping, 8 minutes of stirring, 5 minutes of casual supervision/pureeing resulted in 2 meals’ worth of soup). The recipe isn’t available online so I won’t infringe copyright, but I would highly recommend any spinach soup recipe that features nutmeg. My nearly-3-year-old got up from her nap and immediately requested a second cup of it for her snack (I suspect the fact that her daddy grew it made it a big draw!).
I’m expecting another couple bags of soup-grade spinach to be lugged home today or tomorrow, so there will be plenty of opportunity for further experimentation. Chilled pea and spinach soup? Spinach and chickpea soup? It’s so satisfying making a delicious meal out of something that you might unthinkingly throw out just because it doesn’t look ‘perfect’, and the possibilities are really endless.
Tomatoes, spinach, peppers, processed meat, cheese, hamburger, peanuts…sounds like a fairly average shopping list, right? At various points over the past few years, however, each of these foods has been sold with a heaping secret helping of salmonella, listeriosis, or e. coli. Thousands of people have been made sick by these contaminated foods, dozens have died, and many innocent food growers, producers, and processors have been caught in the economic fallout caused by the outbreaks.
After a couple of unpleasant experiences with having store-bought hamburger recalled because of possible E. coli contamination, I switched to buying free-range or naturally-raised meat. I was 
It’s still cool, I’m still feeling sick, and I still had a couple pounds of those old carrots to use up, so I summoned my remaining strength and threw a few things into the soup pot for lunch. 
photo: spinach soup–it’s all the rage with the preschool set (today, at any rate)
