Vert-à-Go

“The frying pan’s too wide…’ –Joni Mitchell, “My Old Man”

I have been posting sporadically lately. In April, my marriage came to an abrupt end and I have spent pretty much the entire time since then dealing with the exquisitely painful unpleasantness that a breakup entails while still trying to go through the necessary forward motions of everyday life with small children.

The final decision came at the end of the entire household’s two-week-long bout with the flu (the worst of my adult life). During the time I was sick, I could barely walk to the kitchen, let alone cook anything. We survived for a week on ginger ale and crackers, soup from the freezer and a cardboard box, poached eggs on toast, grilled cheese sandwiches, and later, takeout Vietnamese noodles. Anything in the fridge pre-dating the flu began to quietly turn on us while we all lay there inert–the neglected vegetables in the crisper, the chocolate milk, the leftovers from our final dinner party.

I didn’t really cook for quite some weeks after the morning of Thursday, April the 9th. There didn’t seem to be an awful lot of point, as I couldn’t bring myself to eat anything anyway. The kids were content enough for the time being with their rather monotonous rotation of 5-minute meals punctuated with fruit and cucumber and yoghurt and baby pita breads, while I ate a cracker here and there and rapidly lost the weight put on last autumn while I was sick with a succession of colds and heartaches. Reluctantly, having been anti-vitamin my entire life, I embarked on an annoying new regime of supplements to boost my decrepit immune system. I can’t tell you what a depressing moment it was to learn that my drastically depleted iron stores would simply never recover just with food alone. Even if I wanted food, it couldn’t help me now.

It wasn’t just that I didn’t have an appetite, however. Along with the music I couldn’t listen to anymore, the movies I couldn’t watch, and the photographs I couldn’t look at it, there were suddenly a huge number of meals and foods that were now off-limits because of the memories they stirred. Seventeen years together, just short of 14 years married–well over 3000 meals shared together. No more. I couldn’t yet contemplate a future of special meals cooked alone and eaten alone after the kids were in bed. I took curry off the menu indefinitely, threw the brown sauce into the garbage and shoved the tiger prawns to the back of the freezer.

Even when I managed to start cooking properly again, the reminders continued unabated. The everyday placemats that were a wedding present had to go. I grimly started separating the dishes: the bowl given by my mother-in-law, the tray made by his friend, the birthday wine glasses and carafe from my parents. Cookbooks were pulled from their cosy alphabetical home and piled into two teetering stacks. His, Nigella Lawson, Gary Rhodes. Hers, Nigel Slater, Mark Bittman. I had almost forgotten how cooking used to be a shared pleasure and how many kitchen items we had given to each other over the years–the pots and pans, the pestle and mortar, the new mixer, the beautiful big salad bowls. Who would take what? Who would start new? Could either of us manage to divorce the memory contained in these much-loved familiar objects and happily go on using them like nothing had ever happened?

I rearranged our table seating so that the empty chair wouldn’t be so obvious, but I still couldn’t seem to prise myself away from the square certainty of number four. I had made and eaten plenty of meals on my own with the kids over the years, but soon realised that there must be a deeper psychological reason for why after 20-odd years in the kitchen, I was suddenly incapable of figuring out how much food to cook for three people. The cold unwanted spaghetti pointed its long thin fingers at me accusingly as I tipped it into the compost hours later. Legions of leftovers lingered long past their welcome. I realised anew that the base amount for most recipes seems to be four people and despaired over the questions, “How do you split an egg in half?”* and “What if two is not enough and four is too many?”

Not quite six weeks later, I’m (mostly) eating and cooking again. I’ve even slowly cleaned out the fridge of the rotten two-month-old reminders of meals gone past. I expect that it will be some time yet before I’m fully up to speed with the new status quo in the kitchen and the table. In the meantime, I’m taking an enjoyably selfish pleasure in eating what I want when I want, and am mainly concentrating on making food to keep us well, make us happy, and create new memories (like my mom’s waffles, which we had this weekend). We’re also all eagerly awaiting the warmer weather that will let us finally get out in the garden and start growing something of our own to eat again. Spring is here, even if it doesn’t feel like it quite yet.

My mother’s waffles

• 2 cups flour (I like to use half whole wheat)
• 1Tb baking powder
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 Tb sugar
• 2 eggs (separated)
• 1-2/3 cups milk
• 6Tb vegetable oil

Mix egg yolks and milk–add dry ingredients–add vegetable oil–then stiffly beaten egg whites.

Serve with syrup, berries, jam, and vanilla ice cream. Personally, I like a bit of bacon on the side. You may think this is rather weird, but hopefully we can agree to disagree.

Serves 4–or a family of 3 with leftovers. Who doesn’t like leftovers?

* To split an egg in half, whisk it gently together and divide it that way. If the yolks and whites have to stay separate, just try using the smallest egg that you have. It really probably won’t make that much difference to the final recipe.

Today, in honour of my 1/8th Irish heritage (and the very pleasant months I spent in Dublin), I made a pot of soup with some green inspiration. Not so much the colour, (although there is some green in there), but moreso its low ecological footprint (thanks to vegetarian/home-grown/local ingredients).

I chucked the following into water with some canned tomatoes (after sauteeing the vegetables in olive oil with a bit of garlic):

• green lentils (grown on my parents’ farm)
• chopped Swiss chard (frozen, from our garden last summer)
• potatoes and carrots (farmers’ market)
• onion (Alberta-grown)
• celery (US organic)

Once the lentils are tender, season with salt, pepper and a splash of basalmic vinegar. Serve with hearty bread.

Appropriately enough, there was also–finally!–a hint of the coming spring on this greenest of days. On our way past Homestead Ice Cream earlier today, the kids spotted that the OPEN sign was lit. As it is closed for a few months in the middle of winter, they were starting to miss it. So we walked over after dinner for some made-in-the-same-block ice cream–since they were out of Guinness (one of my personal favourite flavours!), I made mine mint chip, of course.

Happy St Patrick’s Day–hope your day turned out as lucky as ours!

Christmas can come–the baking is done!

I don’t do a lot of baking in the run-up to Christmas, but there are a few special things that I (or my mom) make every year in the last few days before the 25th. Some of the recipes have been in the family for decades (shortbread), others I got from friends while I was growing up (chocolate toffee bars), and others have become a new tradition with my kids (gingerbread house and reindeer).

The weekend before Christmas, I make a batch of gingerbread house dough using the Joy of Cooking recipe. It makes twice as much as we need for the Lee Valley gingerbread house mold that we use, so I form two discs out of the remaining dough and stick them in the fridge or freezer until I’m ready to make cut-out gingerbread cookies. I like to make reindeer and dip their noses into red sprinkles.

If you’re well-organised, you could make everything on this plate in a morning and afternoon. Because I have two preschoolers who love to help cutting out cookies, I generally take two leisurely afternoons to get it done. All of the other little treats are extremely easy to make–shortbread that melts in your mouth, non-bake 10-minute brownies, and the most fabulous squares you’ll probably ever eat in your life.

None of this baking is Martha Stewart-fancy, but it all tastes delicious and uses good old-fashioned ingredients: butter, sugar, nuts, chocolate. I package up some of it for neighbours, friends, and family, and put out a plate of everything for dessert on Christmas Day, along with a bowl of oranges, a pot of good strong coffee and a bottle of Sauterne, muscat, or ice wine.

Great Aunt Ellen’s shortbread

My mom has made these cookies for years and I had no idea how easy they were. No rolling required–just drop them onto the baking sheet!

• 1 pound soft butter
• 3 cups flour
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 1/2 cup cornstarch
• 1 cup icing sugar

Beat until like whipped cream. Drop teaspoonfuls onto baking sheets. Bake 15 minutes at 350F (I would check them at the 12 minute mark–you don’t want them to have more than ever-so-slightly browned edges and tips).

I got 6 dozen cookies from this batch; it could easily be halved

French unbaked cake

You can make this in about 10 minutes flat, which makes it both extremely handy and rather dangerous.

• 1/2 cup butter
• 2 Tbsp cocoa
• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 1 egg (well beaten)
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 3/4 cup nuts (I use walnuts)
• 1-1/2 cups graham wafer crumbs (pack them down into the cup a bit)

Melt butter, add sugar & cocoa–cook to bubbling point. Remove from heat, add egg, vanilla, nuts, and crumbs. Be prepared to add more crumbs if the mixture doesn’t seem right, but use a light hand. Press into a square cake pan and let cool. You can ice or dust with icing sugar but it really doesn’t need anything. It’s addictive enough as it is.

Makes about 3 dozen squares

Melody’s chocolate toffee bars

A school-girlfriend of mine introduced me to these–all I can say is thank you, Mel! I don’t think Christmas would actually come if I didn’t make a pan of them.

• 1 cup flour
• 1/4 cup white sugar
• 1 cup butter
• 3/4 cup brown sugar (firmly packed)
• 1-1/4 cups coarsely chopped nuts (I use walnuts)
• 1 cup chocolate chips

Combine flour and white sugar. Cut in 1/2 cup of the butter until mixture resembles coarse crumbs. Press into the bottom of an ungreased 9×13 baking pan. Bake at 350F for 15 minutes; remove from oven (don’t turn the oven off).

Combine brown sugar and remaining 1/2 cup of butter in a suacepan. Bring to a boil, stirring constantly, and boil for 1 minute. Pour evenly over the baked layer. Sprinkle with nuts. Bake an additional 15 minutes. Remove from the oven and sprinkle with the chocolate chips. Swirl with a knife to spread the chocolate over the top (I find it’s easier to do if you put the pan back into the turned-off oven for a minute or two and let them melt a bit first).

Makes about 3 dozen bars

photo by naathas

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):

A most virtuous pumpkin chocolate chip muffin

Dry ingredients (combine in a large bowl)

• 1-1/4 cups whole wheat flour
• 1/2 cup wheat bran
• 3/4 cup ground flaxseed
• 2Tb wheat germ
• 1Tb cinnamon
• 1Tb baking powder
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1/4 cup chocolate chips (I used Cocoa Camino’s fair trade organic chocolate chips for the first time, which were delicious and completely worth the extra 80 cents)

Wet ingredients (combine in a medium bowl)

• 1 cup buttermilk
• 1 cup pumpkin purée
• 1 cup brown sugar
• 1 egg
• 1/2 cup All Bran Buds cereal

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!

This past weekend, the six members of the Number One Ladies Jam Collective got together to exchange the (preserved) fruit of their labours: strawberry, raspberry, pear ginger, apricot, and peach/raspberry jam. Delicious! We will definitely be doing this again next year.

We enjoyed a few wines during the evening, including an organic Chilean cabernet sauvignon (Cono Sur) and a French merlot packaged in the more environmentally-friendly tetrapack (French Rabbit). We sampled homemade/Saskatchewan-grown salsa, pickles, and hummus, and to top it off, I served chocolate beet cake, made from some of my beets from the community garden plot. My recipe came from the City Gardeners Cookbook, but this recipe is virtually identical (except that they sprinkled chocolate chips on the top and used canned beets and beet juice instead of 1.5 cups of fresh beet puree).

I made two 8-inch round cakes instead of one 9×13 sheet and spread peach-raspberry jam between the layers. Then I mixed up 1/2 cup of sour cream, 6oz melted semi-sweet chocolate, and 1/8tsp of salt for a quick icing. Topped with the very last surviving sprig of white and purple pansies from the garden and a few small bunches of Concord grapes from a vine at my mom and dad’s farm, it made an elegant-looking dessert that quite belied its humble roots. Unfortunately, I forgot to take a photo of it before we devoured it!

What I have in the fridge:

• corn on the cob, new potatoes, broccoli, green pepper, yellow zucchini, green onion, cucumber (Saskatoon Farmers’ Market)
• cauliflower (Dutch Growers’ Farmers’ Market)
• green beans, cherry tomatoes, potatoes, turnip, carrots, lettuce, herbs, jalapenos, raspberries, a handful of ‘free range’ crab apples (various gardens)
• most of a large (6.5lbs) Pine View Farms chicken that I cut up yesterday

What I`ve made/am planning to cook this week

• barbecued garlic marinated chicken with grilled potatoes and corn on the cob (used 1/2 a breast)
• a double batch of beany broccoli soup (a pureed white bean and broccoli soup from The City Gardener’s Cookbook)
• chicken cauliflower curry (used the other 1/2 breast, and adding cherry tomatoes and crab apples)
• potato salad, green salad, Moroccan tomato salad, green bean/corn/tomato salad
• pasta–something involving fresh herbs or tomatoes
• zucchini tomato frittata
• French country chicken soup (great for freezing for winter)

I need to come up with something to use up some broccoli stems as well as the remaining half-cauliflower…possibly a vegetable pot pie or casserole, or a quick stirfry. I could always make more soup too, but it will depend on the weather.

Every time I walk past the dill in the garden I start dreaming of Taunte Maria-style summa borscht….and I must make another batch of this amazing vegetable chowder and put some away in the freezer. It is a fair amount of work, but so worth it. This past April I found a container of last year’s chowder in the freezer and when I heated it up, it tasted just as great as it had months earlier–it was such a morale boost to get a glimpse of the heady days of summer that still lay ahead.

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
• 1Tb curry powder
• salt and pepper to taste
• 2lbs of carrots, chopped into 1-inch pieces
• 4 cups of vegetable or chicken stock (I used chicken on the advice of Jewish grandmothers everywhere)
• 2Tb fresh lemon juice
• 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.

Serves 4

Tonight’s salad–lettuce, spinach, mesclun mix, tomato, green beans, oregano, thyme, lemon basil, chives, dill–came entirely from our garden. In terms of food miles and taste, it doesn’t really get much better than eating vegetables that were growing within a few steps of your house a half an hour before suppertime.

I just started pulling out some of the oldest lettuce this afternoon, which was getting a little brown around the edges. I’ll re-seed the pots tomorrow with a fast-sprouting variety like mesclun, and have started using the fresh patches of greens in the front garden. With luck, I shouldn’t have to buy lettuce until freeze-up!

I made this quick stirfry the other night–with the exception of the root ginger, basmati rice, peanuts, and sauces, it was entirely locally-produced. You could just as easily make a protein-rich vegetarian version with some locally-made tofu from the Chung Wah Chinese Grocery (at 201 20th Street West).

• one sliced shoulder pork chop (Pine View Farms)
• broccoli, green onion, garlic, green pepper (Saskatoon Farmers’ Market)
• chopped swiss chard stems (the community garden plot)

sauce: 1Tb light soy sauce, 1Tb sherry, 1tsp sesame oil