As I previously mentioned in last week’s Fiddlehead Frolic part one, I’ve been doing some research into pickling fiddleheads. There aren’t too many recipe books that include recipes for fiddleheads, so I’ve had to experiment a bit. I really enjoy … Continue reading
As you may remember, we built a root cellar here at the Ecology Action Centre and five lovely women shared the space to store their vegetables over the winter. Additionally, I fixed up my home root cellar and stored my … Continue reading
Remember those community root cellar grants were we talking about several months ago? Curious about what’s going on? Well, the Deanery Project in Ship Harbour, our first grant recipient, is hosting a root cellar work party on May 18-19 and you’re invited to attend.
Kick it Root Down: Work Party @ The Deanery Project
When: May 18th-19th (Friday-Saturday). 10 am-5 pm.
Where: The Deanery Project
37 Deanery Road, Lower West Ship Harbour
What to bring: lunch/food for potluck supper(s), good work clothes and songs, as we’ll be rolling down each night with a jam session/potluck supper. If you’d like to stay over night, please bring sleeping bag/pillow/mat etc.
Why: After receiving a Community Root Cellar Grant through the Ecology Action Centre, the Deanery Project building team has unearthed many natural designs for our basement Root Cellar space.
The Plan is to construct wattle and daub walls, insulated with locally sourced wool. Most of the materials (i.e. sand, clay, small dimensional round wood) will be harvested in the immediate area in and about the Deanery grounds.
Directions
From Dartmouth take Main Street/Highway 107 out of Dartmouth (direction Eastern Shore).
Follow the #107 for about 25 minutes.
At the “T” intersection – turn right into Musquodoboit Harbour – follow the old #7 highway east for about another 20 minutes, passing through Lake Charlotte – the next community is Ship Harbour
Just past Family Fries restaurant on the right, turn right down the Lower Ship Harbour Rd. Follow for 5 km. (past the Church) is Deanery Rd. on your left.
For more information or to RSVP: Email Gregory at thenumskull@hotmail.com
I’m determined to eat up the very last of my winter stores, and so the great freezer clean-out continues. One way to use up small amounts of fruit is to throw them into a batch of muffins. I like the following oatmeal muffin recipe, because I can make it almost exclusively from local ingredients, I generally have all of the ingredients on hand, and it’s very flexible. Blueberry-apple, strawberry-rhubarb, blackberry-peach or the most recent combo – zucchini-cranberry.
I had a cup of frozen cranberries in the freezer and a 2-cup bag of grated zucchini. I defrosted the zucchini, and after I had strained off a lot of the liquid, I had a little less than a cup. So I threw both the cranberries and zucchini into the following batch of muffins.
Oatmeal Muffins (adapted from Quick Vegetarian Pleasures by Jeanne Lemlin)
1 1/4 cup rolled oats
1 1/4 cup plain yogurt
1 cup flour
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp salt
1 large egg
1/2 cup packed brown sugar
5 tbsp unsalted butter, melted
1-2 cups of your favourite fruit
(you can also throw in a small amount of nuts or seeds)
1. Preheat oven to 400 F. Mix together oats and yogurt and let sit for 15 minutes.
2. Butter the insides of a muffin pan.
3. In a small bowl combine flour, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon and salt.
4. Beat egg, brown sugar and butter into the oat-yogurt mixture. Stir in dry ingredients until just mixed. Gently stir in fruit and nuts. Spoon batter into muffin tin.
5. Bake 15-17 minutes or until knife inserted into the center of muffins comes out clean.
Makes 12 muffins.
Yours in Food,
Marla
I must now confess that I ordered too many beets for my root cellar this year. However, I’m stubborn and the beets are still firm and I am just as determined as ever to eat ALL of them. And thus beets are the subject of today’s clean out the root cellar and deep freeze challenge post.
In a thorough examination of all the cookbooks I own (current count: 30), I have discovered three beet recipe themes. They are 1) pickled beets, 2) borscht, and 3) beet salads.
I passed on the pickled beets, still having 2 unopened jars in the basement. Then, I made a borscht. Pretty good, probably my fifth batch of the season, but not something I can eat any more of this year.
So, that left the beet salad. I have blogged on more than one occasion about my grated winter salad. However, a girl’s gotta branch out. More recently I’ve been roasting the beets and tossing them with spinach and goat cheese, and a little olive oil & balsamic vinegar. (The first bags of spinach have hit the farmers market in Halifax.) Yum.
But there are still more beets. So, while I was in Cape Breton, I left my partner in charge of eating beets. As I was running out the door with my bags, I shouted to him, “I love you. Eat the beets and take a few photos of whatever you make. Bye”. And so he did.
This salad will actually use several ingredients from your root cellar. Adam said it was great. All I know is that there was none left upon my return home.
Beet, Potato, Carrot, Pickle and Apple Salad
from Quiches, Kugels and Couscous: My Search for Jewish Cooking in France by Joan Nathan
2 medium beets
5 tablespoons olive oil
salt to taste
2 small potatoes
1 large carrot
2 tablespoons red or white wine vinegar
1 clove garlic, minced
1 teaspoon Dijon mustard
dash of sugar
freshly ground pepper to taste
1 large kosher sour pickle, diced
1 tart apple
2 hard-boiled eggs, peeled and roughly chopped
1 tablespoon chopped fresh dill
Preheat oven to 350.
Cut tops off of the beets, scrub them, and place on baking sheet. Coat them with 1 tablespoon olive oil and roast for 1 hour. Remove from oven. When they are cool enough to handle, peel and cut them into 1/2 inch cubes.
Bring a small pot of salted water to a boil, and cook the potatoes until they are tender, about 15 minutes. Remove from water, allow to cool before cutting into 1/2 inch cubes. Cook the carrot about about 5 minutes in that same boiling water. Remove with slotted spoon, cool and cut into 1/2 inch rounds.
Whisk together vinegar, garlic, mustard, sugar, salt and pepper to taste in a salad bowl. Stream in the remaining 4 tablespoons olive oil. Toss in the beets, potatoes, carrot, pickle, apple and eggs. Stir until everything is just coated with vinaigrette. Serve at room temperature, or refrigerate and serve the next day, either way garnished with fresh dill.
Yours in food,
Marla
Have you noticed a lack of recipes on Adventures in Local Food lately? I will admit to a case of late winter blahs in the kitchen. I’ve been feeling rather uncreative. I mean, really, how many times can you post about the exact same soup?
However, this week there was a burst of warm weather and the urge to spring clean has hit! And with this new (if premature) spring energy, I have issued myself a challenge.
I want to unplug my chest freezer by mid-May.
It’ll just be unplugged for 2 months or so, until the summer bounty starts to roll in. I figure that this will both save energy and ensure that mysterious frozen foods don’t live in the bottom of the freezer for years upon years. And I will still have the freezer on top of the fridge for a small number of frozen foods in the summer months.
I also want to eat what’s left in my root cellar before it goes bad.
This means eating the majority of the contents of both over the next two months. And I want to do it using mostly new recipes. And I will tell you all how it goes.
The first vegetables to participate in this challenge were a butternut squash and some frozen green beans. I have made this squash soup about 5 times this winter and, tasty as it is, I just can’t bring myself to eat another batch of it. I needed a new squash recipe. I also seem to have a lot of miso paste at my house, so I thought that this too, could be incorporated into the recipe. I started googling and found this recipe for Roasted Miso Squash at the 101 Cookbooks blog.
One of the things I like about this recipe is that while there’s a total of 70 minutes of cooking time, there’s only about 10 minutes of actual preparation time.
My cooking method is rather haphazard. I like to find interesting sounding recipes and then alter them within an inch of their former selves. So here’s what went in my roasted miso squash (green bean, chick pea, cabbage) dish. (I changed the recipe because I had neither maple syrup nor orange juice at the time, so I used honey and extra lemon juice. I substituted the tofu for chick peas, and added green beans and cabbage, just for kicks.)
Roasted Miso Squash
1 butternut squash, peeled and thinly sliced
2 tablespoons sesame oil
2 tablespoons molasses
1 teaspoon tamari
2 tablespoons honey
1 heaping tablespoon miso
2 tablespoons lemon juice
5 tablespoons water
1 cup of chick peas (amount flexible*)
1 cup of green beans (amount flexible)
1/2 cup thinly sliced cabbage (amount flexible*)
* Amount flexible really just means that I didn’t measure. 
Preheat the oven to 425. Peel and slice the squash. Toss with 1 tbsp of sesame oil and roast for 40 minutes (check on them at the 20 minute mark and flip).
While the squash is cooking, mix together the remaining sesame oil, molasses, tamari, honey, miso, lemon juice and water in a large bowl. Add the chick peas, green beans and cabbage (or other vegetables of your choosing) to marinate. Set aside until the squash is done.
Mix the roasted squash with the vegetable marinade mixture and bake in a casserole dish for 30 minutes, until much of the liquid has boiled off. Serve as a side dish or over rice. I imagine it would also be good topped with greens or nuts.
So, what are you cooking in your kitchen these days? Anyone have inspiring ideas for the last of the season’s root vegetables?
Yours in food,
Marla
Back in the summer, I wrote a post called “A week of CSA meals” which outlined what I did with my CSA veggies for a week. I have gotten some nice feedback on that and have been wanting to write a winter version – a week of root cellar/freezer/preserved meals, which illustrates what I’ve been making with everything I squirreled away last fall. So, just over a week ago, I sat down, made a nice meal plan, filled with lots of wintery meal ideas. And then I got a few days in, work got busy, meals got less creative and then I got the stomach flu. Ah, the best laid plans…
So, here’s a week (and a bit) of suppers made from ingredients in my root cellar, freezer, and pantry, in the real world, where plans get made and subsequently thrown out the window.
Sunday: We had friends in town and cooked up a feast. We made quiche with a vegetable crust, a grated beet & carrot salad with some not-so-local, but still delicious greens, roasted potatoes, and fruit crisp for dessert. (We had strawberries and rhubarb in the freezer and apples in the root cellar, and baked them with a crispy oatmeal top.) The vegetable crust for the quiche was made of zucchini (which I had grated and frozen in the summer), grated parsnip, and grated carrot. See recipe at the bottom of this post. The quiche itself was a mushroom, goat cheese quiche.
Monday: Parsnip apple soup with fried potatoes on the side. The parsnip soup is loosely made as follows: I chopped and sauteed an onion and a couple cloves of garlic. I added a teaspoon or so of each of the following spices: curry powder, ginger, garam masala. Then I took about 4-5 large parsnips, peeled and chopped, and added them to the onion mixture and covered them with water. I peeled and chopped 2 apples and threw them in there too. Bring to a boil, then simmer until vegetables are soft. Add salt and pepper to taste, as well as any additional spices. Meanwhile I boiled the potatoes in a separate pot until soft, and then fried them in a bit of oil. If I’m in the mood for comfort food, I’ll add cheddar cheese to the top.
Tuesday: Homemade macaroni and cheese. I like to add vegetables to the cheese-noodle mixture. In the winter months, mushrooms are really good, as are the green beans I froze last summer. Once the cheese-noodle-vegetable mixture has been mixed up and spread into the baking pan, I add a jar of (drained) tomatoes to the top and then bake it.
Wednesday: Quick week night meal. Back in the summer when I was tomato canning with a friend, we canned up the tomato liquid that was left over. (I don’t like my canned tomatoes to be too watery.) This tomato juice/pulp makes AMAZING soup. Chop up and saute an onion and a clove or two of garlic, add some salt and basil, and pour in a litre of tomato liquid. Bring to a boil. Soup! Pair with some cheese on toast.
Thursday: Another quick week night meal. Egg sandwich for dinner. Fried egg on nice bread. I can’t actually remember what all I put on this sandwich, but I often add a little pesto or sprouts.
Friday – Monday: Okay, this is where things all fell apart. I wasn’t feeling great at this point. And Friday night through to early Tuesday I basically just ate plain rice, oatmeal, applesauce, and anything else that was sufficiently bland as to not upset my stomach further. Ugh. Let’s move on.
Tuesday: I worked up enough motivation and appetite to cook again! Yay! I started simple, with an old stand-by: squash soup. This batch also had some carrots, parsnips, and an apple.
Wednesday: Still dragging a bit from the flu. Vitamins! I need vitamins! I went through the root cellar for inspiration. Beets? Yes! Carrots? Yes! Apples? Yes. Into the food processor they went (using the grating attachment). Then I found cranberries in the freezer. Yes, they’ll make a nice addition. More grated salad for me, with a simple olive oil, lime, basil dressing. I also felt like I needed comfort food. Hmm… potatoes? Yes, potatoes. So, we made potato salad. The kind my mom makes, with boiled potatoes, boiled eggs, and mayo. I like to add a little pesto for flavour.
Thursday: Back into the swing of things! Since I started this tale with a dinner party, I’ll end with one too. We cooked up a meal for some friends (as our wedding present to them). First course, Quebec cheeses with dilly beans, blueberry apple chutney, and pickled beets. Second course: Prime rib roast (we modified this braising recipe), roasted root vegetables, and mashed potatoes. Third course: pumpkin pudding and ginger snap cookies. The beef was from a freezer order in the fall, veggies from the root cellar, and pumpkin from the freezer.
And there you have it. A week of meals using primarily ingredients from our root cellar, freezer, and supply of preserves.
What are your favourite winter meals?
Yours in Food,
Marla
(Note: To give you a sense of what I’m eating at other times of the day, my lunches are generally leftovers from the night before. Breakfasts are usually one of the following: oatmeal with frozen fruit; cornmeal with cheese, eggs, and salsa; smoothies with toast; and sometimes rice with veggies and eggs. Snacks are often nut-based or include hummus. My partner regularly whips up a batch of homemade hummus and there’s usually some in the fridge.)
Golden Vegetable Crust
From Mollie Katzen’s The Enchanted Broccoli Forest.
2 cups coarsely-grated summer squash
1/2 cup coarsely grated parsnip
1/2 cup coarsely grated carrot
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons melted butter
1/3 cup whole wheat flour (I used buckwheat and it worked beautifully)
(extra butter to melt on top)
Place the grated squash in a colander. Salt it lightly, and let it stand for 10 minutes over a bowl or sink. Squeeze out all excess moisture. (Marla’s note: if using frozen squash, simply defrost and drain off excess water.)
Combine all ingredients and mix well. Transfer mixture to a buttered 9-ich pie pan and form a crust with fork or fingers.
Bake for 40 minutes at 375° F. Midway through baking, brush the top surface with extra melted butter.
Fill crust with quiche batter, or any other savory pie filling you can find or concoct.
Coastal Coordinator, Jen Graham, shares her free-range, grass-fed beef adventures with us.
I have an uneasy relationship with meat. I eat meat, I enjoy meat, but I never actually learned to cook meat. I always had a variety of excuses for not cooking meat: I had been a vegetarian for too long; I couldn’t afford free-range, organic, local meats; I didn’t have the right pots and pans; I was worried about undercooking meat and making myself deathly ill. But mostly, I didn’t have the faintest idea how to start.
The thing is - I actually like meat – so since I couldn’t cook it myself, to satisfy my cravings, I’d frequently order juicy hamburgers whenever I went out to eat, Then, I’d feel kind of guilty because I make an effort to eat local and organic, and I didn’t have the faintest idea of the origins of my restaurant beef-outs. I wanted to shift this pattern, but needed a really big push to expand my cooking horizons.
Instead, I ended up with a really big cow. Or more specifically one third of one eight of a steer. The concept is simple: a local farmer raises free-range, grass-fed beef and uses his networks to find potential buyers. The customers can order 1/2 or 1/4 or 1/8 of the animal. Once the entire cow is sold, the farmer sends it to a local slaughterhouse and butcher and the customers receive their “cow share”. The beef comes in a variety of cuts snugly wrapped in brown paper and ready to freeze. The minimum purchase from the farmer is 1/8 of the steer, but I split my share with two friends with equally small freezers and a mild trepidation about cooking meat. I didn’t keep an exact count, but I received about 9 packages of ground beef, 2 pot roasts, some chuck beef (whatever that is), and a few steaks. All in all, a lot of beef in the freezer for someone who had never cooked any meat up to that point.
For about a month, the beef packages languished in the freezer beside the frozen trap caught shrimp (that’s a tale for another day). I checked in on the beef packages every once in awhile, but was too timid too make the first move. Things would have likely gone on this way indefinitely, if i hadn’t received another new culinary experiment for Christmas: a slow cooker.
The slow cooker was equally unfamiliar, but it was more reassuring than the beef. There are are only two settings on a slow cooker: hi and low. The cooking time starts at 4 hours and goes as high as 12 hours. With that kind of cooking time, I reasoned, I could dump in the beef, go away for a few hours, and come back and find that sucker completely cooked with nary a hint of undercooked pink to trouble my dreams.
And in fact that’s pretty much how it went down. I looked online for chili recipes for slow cookers. I already make a mean chili, so all I really needed to know was how to prepare the beef ahead of time, and how much liquid to use. Slow cookers are closed during the cooking time, so liquids do not evaporate as much as in a saucepan. Most slow cooker versions of favourite recipes reduce the liquid by about half. The chili recipe suggested browning the beef by cooking it for a few minutes before I popped it in the slow cooker. This was nerve wracking, but I figured even if I somehow missed a spot, the beef would be in the slow cooker for 8 hours or so, so it (and be extension anyone eating the meal) would be fine.
And as it turns out, browning is actually a pretty accurate name for the process – cooked meat changes from pink to brown, so you know when it’s done.
After clearing the browning hurtle, I placed the beef along with the other ingredients in the slow cooker, put it on “low” for 10 hours and went to bed. The next morning, I was greeted with hearty, savoury, delicious beef chili (and very few dishes to wash).
After a few more rounds of chili to get my confidence up, I moved on to other recipes, like spaghetti sauce, beef stew, pot roast, and eventually even hamburgers. It is official – I am a meat cooker! And I owe it all to my trusty companion – the clumsy chaperone that helped ease me into cooking meat – the slow cooker.
Slow Cooker Chili
2 pounds of ground beef
1 can of kidney beans (drained)
1 can or jar of canned tomatoes
2 medium onions (sliced)
3 cloves of garlic (chopped)
3 tablespoons of chili powder
1 tablespoon of cumin
1 teaspoon of brown sugar
1 teaspoon of pepper
salt to taste
(This makes a very meaty recipe. I usually add some chopped, carrots squash or sweet potatoes too).
Directions
In a skillet, cook the beef until no longer pink. Add to slow cooker and add the remaining ingredients. Cook for 10 hours on low.
We’re nearly 2 months into our root cellar experiment, so I wanted to give a quick update on how things were going.
As a quick reminder, in case you’re new to the blog, we have a root cellar in the basement of the Ecology Action Centre, which we built last spring and filled up this fall.
And I have a root cellar in my basement at home.
What I’ve learned so far:
1) Produce has to be perfect when it goes into storage. We had a few things spoil in the first 2 weeks of root cellaring. Little bruises or cuts lead to mold right away. While I knew this from the books I’d read, it wasn’t until a whole bunch of my sweet potatoes went fuzzy that I really learned this lesson. Next year I’d connect with the farmer earlier in the season before they had washed the produce and buy unwashed produce, thus eliminating extra handling. And on the upside, we only lost some sweet potatoes and a couple of cabbages. The rest of the produce has been great.
2) I prefer the dirt floor to a cement floor. The EAC root cellar has a dirt floor and the humidity doesn’t vary as much as it does in my cement floored root cellar at home. We regularly water the floor of the EAC root cellar and it rarely drops below 70%. At home, the humidity fluctuates with the outside humidity. Despite keeping open buckets of water and a wet towel in the root cellar, the humidity is still quite variable. I will be giving some thought to how to increase and stabilize the humidity for next year. The upside: vegetables are really quite resilient. Other than a couple of slight soft beets, and one moldy cabbage, the vegetables and apples have mostly been fine.
3) The root cellar is subject to the outside temperature. I know, another obvious one. But, it was really warm this December and when it’s regularly above 10 degrees outside, it’s hard to cool down your root cellar. I don’t think the temperature in either root cellar dipped below 5 degrees more than once or twice all December. Fortunately (for the root cellars) January has been colder.
4) Things have sprouted and I’m not sure why. We’ve had some carrots sprout and a few potatoes. This could be due to the ethylene gas given off by the apples or (and this is my theory) it was too warm in December. The sprouting seems to have slowed or stopped, so we may not know the exact reason. This is something to watch for the future.
5) You have to eat with your root cellar in mind. I actually did a pretty good job at guessing how much my partner and I eat of certain vegetables. We seem to be going through the carrots, parsnips, beets, potatoes and apples at a good rate. I still have a lot of squash and cabbage, but I’m nearly out of onions. This week I’m going to cook up some cabbage and make some sauerkraut.
Stay tuned for more root cellar updates as the season continues.
Yours in Food,
Marla
This video is from Cabbage Girls (and Acadia University nutrition students) Elise Sanderson, Breanna Hiltz, Pauline Wolak, Samara Ohm, and Merissa McBride. Ever wondered about the scandals of the cabbage patch? Check it out…
**This Just In**
Cabbage Girl here,
Reporting from the fertile soils of the upper east side of the Annapolis Valley.
Being situated in Nova Scotia, I have the perfect growing conditions, where the weather is generally rainy and overcast so I can be planted away from the summer sun. Where I come from, the cabbages are grown from roots, however it has been rumoured by the carrots that the farm next to us grows their cabbages from seeds. We’ll see who grows better for upcoming market! After the cooling weather of fall, I will have developed my main head.
Spotted! Four red cabbages, one row over, dating four green cabbages two rows over. Only one couple made it to the end. The first couple had to end their relationship when one of them was not picked in time and developed a cracked head. He was discarded, leaving his girlfriend to be shipped to the market alone. Couple two had a slightly rougher time as the boyfriend witnessed his girlfriend getting a fungal infection causing her to develop Fusarium wilt. He noticed something was wrong when her growth was stunted and the disease just made her weaker and weaker, causing her leaves to brown and eventually … she died. The third unfortunate relationship was torn apart by the worst disease known to the cabbage world: the black leg. It’s an infectious fungal disease and both cabbages were found with black cankers on their stems. As the disease is highly infectious, they were both discarded.
Word in the garden is that the cabbage, Bob, spread it; we always thought his leaves were a little dirty. The fourth couple just so happened to avoid all potential mishaps that cabbages can endure during their lifetime; they were made into a tasty coleslaw and were together forever.
In a few hours, the farmers will come around to harvest the freshest and finest cabbages for a road trip to the market. The farmers must cut the cabbages at the base of the stem and then throw them into a container to be hauled away. It is always a busy time as all of the cabbages are eager to see who returns after the day and who doesn’t.
We cabbages are versatile in the ways that we can be stored and used. If eaten raw, we need to be consumed within the first few days of harvesting. However, if being cooked, we can wait for up to two weeks before we rot. Best of all, we can be pickled to be enjoyed year round.
Although we may not be the most beautiful vegetable in the garden, we have many hidden nutritional benefits that often consumers are not aware of. We are a high source of dietary fiber, vitamin C, folate, calcium and iron. Measured out to a cup, we only have 22 calories and no fat. Our mild flavour makes us compatible with many other food commodities to aid in making a delectable dish. Our texture can vary depending on how we are served; we are tougher if raw than if cooked. If you dare take a knife to our head, make sure to use stainless steel to avoid discolouration. If you attempt to suffocate me in a pot, I will ruin your dinner party by releasing volatile sulfuric compounds caused by the breakdown of isothylcynates, so be sure to keep the lid off! Don’t mess with the cabbages. However, to help you out, you can enhance our external beauty by cooking us in a bit of acid, which will bring out our natural pigment.
Here comes the farmer to inspect my beautiful leaves… see you at the market!!
XOXO, Cabbage Girl
