1. Baby butternut squash. So cute.
2. I don't eat any sugars or grains except for on Saturday (Cheat Day) so I really appreciate an orange on a special plate for breakfast.
3. Pictures of coffee art are kind of overdone. But it makes me so happy.
4. I eat a lot of eggs. I take a lot of pictures of eggshells.
All the food in the above photo I acquired today... for free. Little did my friend Kameyo and I know that the free bread we received from the church near her house was just the begninning of our free food day. As we were walking from her house to the library we were stopped by a short, smiling Asian man in his fifties or sixties. He waved us over to his minvan full of bread and the first thing that crossed my mind were the stories I was told when I was a child about bad men that will tell you they have a kitten in their van that they want to show you. But now, grown up, and armed with my grown up friend, I was not afraid, only curious. He told us to please take some bread, as it had been donated to the church. We tried to tell him that we appreciated the offer, but that we would rather he give it to people more in need than us. He insisted, telling us that there was more than enough to go around, and that he had already been to the church to give them all they could handle for the time being. So, I gratefully accepted 2 loafs of bread, and Kameyo stuck a small bun in her purse.
Our day led us to Granville Island, where we did actually pay for some food (a potato knish, 2 tangerines, 2 pieces of chocolate, and a can of coconut). And in the meantime, at South China Seas Trading Co, I tasted the best garlic I have ever had - black garlic! This stuff is beautiful, incredibly delicious, and has twice the antioxidants as regular, raw garlic. Unfortunately, it is $7 per bulb. It has been fermented and has a sweet, slightly smokey flavour. I highly recommend getting your hands on some of this stuff.
On our way out, Kameyo mentioned an article she had heard about, which had described Granville Island dumpsters as the place for Freegans to find food.
"Freeganism is a total boycott of an economic system where the profit motive has eclipsed ethical considerations and where massively complex systems of productions ensure that all the products we buy will have detrimental impacts most of which we may never even consider. Thus, instead of avoiding the purchase of products from one bad company only to support another, we avoid buying anything to the greatest degree we are able. The word freegan is compounded from “free” and “vegan”." - freegan.info
More practically, freegans don't buy food, they search for good food that has been thrown away.
Kameyo and I were both curious about Freegans, and about what one of these dumpsters might look like so we wandered over to one and right in front of our very eyes we saw a merchant throwing away crates full of tomatoes. I took one of the tomatoes from him and asked why he was throwing them out, as they looked perfectly edible. Granted, most of them looked kind of moldy, but there were definitely many that looked perfectly fine. He said they were no good, but then when Kameyo and I started loading up on the ones that looked completely edible, he turned his little cart around and took them back inside.
We had caught the interest of another couple people that were standing there and together we decided to check inside the bin, just out of curiousity, to see what it looked like inside. Not completely dedicated to the cause, we pulled out 4 large red onions, shared them with the other two, and were on our way, Kameyo earning extra points for having the balls to be the one to actually get inside the dumpster.
It was an interesting addition to our day, to live like a Freegan for a few mins, and a social experiment that left me contemplating my consumtion. More than anything, it made me laugh and step outside the box for a moment.
This summer I visited Westham Island on a little adventure to pick berries. It was quite a while ago, but I haven't been able to get around to posting the pictures until now. I got a little bit lost on my way there but evetually I found my way and crossed the one lane bridge to the island.
The first thing I saw when I crossed the bridge was this weird and rather unwelcoming sign.
I visited two farms but for some reason I only took pictures at one of them (the one where they had veggies to buy, but no picking).
...
Remember I was trying wrapping up my green tomatoes in newspaper to ripen them and turn them red? Well, it totally worked. And a pumpkin I grew!
A couple weeks ago I made my second batch of spicy beans. If you would like to try making these have a look at the tutorial I did for Granville Magazine.
If the way to a man's heart really is through his stomach, one day I will make a man (or at least his stomach) very happy. Yesterday I canned 9 jars of banana peppers, made butternut squash and ginger soup, and baked gem squash for stuffing tortellini. Today I baked a loaf of bread, made spaghetti sauce from scratch, made stuffed peppers and made pasta dough. Food food food.
The stuffed peppers were made from mostly all local ingredients bought at the farmer's market. I made the pasta sauce from tomatoes that I grew from seed! They started out on my windowsill at home and then were transplanted to the small plot my landlord gave me.
I have a bunch of green tomatoes on my kitchen table all wrapped in newspaper to make them ripen. I was thinking of making fried green tomatoes, green salsa, and/or pickled green tomatoes instead of waiting for them to turn red. Does anyone have any recipes for those things?
There are four things that I really want to can this fall. Tomatoes, pasta sauce, and tomato paste, apple sauce, antipasto, and red cabbage.
I pulled 3 more zucchini (pictured above) from my community garden today. More zucchini bread on the way.
This is the relish I made a few weeks ago. Isn't it the most beautiful relish you have ever seen? I used yellow zucchini from my garden. Yep.
This head of lettuce came from the little patch of ground that my landlord gave me for growing things. It looked like this a few weeks ago:
and looks like this now:
The lettuce isn't even visible because the tomatoes are so large.
My plot at the community garden looks like this right now:
I planted the majority of these plants from seed.
Some of the veggies that I have in there that you can't see are pumpkins (between the tomatoes and the brussel sprouts), leeks (beside the red cabbage), onions (beside the beets, beside the lettuce, behind the leeks), lavender and poppies (in the far right corner out of the picture), beans, peas, chives, anise, parsley (all in the back, out of the picture).
The lettuce portion of my community garden (which you can just see the tip of in the left of the above picture) looks like this up close:
If you live in the neighbourhood and need some lettuce please help yourself.
I went strawberry picking the other day with my mom.
We picked 16 pounds of berries.
I made strawberry jam for the first time. It turned out pretty good. I used honey and pectin. It is a bit too sweet but tastes really yummy on a toasted english muffin with some peanut butter.
The universe has been providing lately. With payday still a week or so away and the cupboards looking kind of bare (what can I make with frozen peas, limp celery, dry lentils, and cocoa powder?) I was amazed by the food that appeared. My landlord went fishing and gave me one of the two trout that he caught.
I stuffed it with lemon and onion and some thyme on the inside and outside and put it in the oven. Then I went outside and picked some lettuce, trimmed the tops of the onions that I am growing, and plucked some basil and cilantro for a salad. Made some dressing. Wild rice. Dinner.
The next day my friend invited me over for a pot luck BBQ. I had baking ingredients and some frozen raspberries so I whipped up a cake with raspberry lemon icing. It looked like it was made in an Easy Bake oven, but it was good.
That night we feasted on three kinds of bread, cucumber garlic dip, roasted veggies, greek salad, camembert, and (they had) ribs.
Cooking and eating is one of my favourite things to do with friends.
Yesterday I picked a collander full of mint from the garden.
I washed it, dried it between some napkins, and then put it in a warm oven to dry. I warmed up the oven at the lowest temperature for 20 mins then turned it off and put the mint inside. It dried in there over night. Leaving the light on creates a bit of warmth too, which helps. This is my first time drying this much mint, so I have no idea what I am doing, really. I will just have to experiment and see how it goes.
Also yesterday I tried making fettucini for the second time and it turned out way better this time. I made it much thinner and coated it with flour before rolling it through the machine. Then hung it to dry on my clothes rack over night.
I am completely addicted to spelt flour. I don't understand how anyone could go back to regular flour after using spelt! I ate the noodles tonight in a tomato sauce with shrimp and they were so great! I made a deal with myself that when I got a pasta maker I would stop buying pasta from the store. It has been 5 months and I have kept to it!
Remember the chive vinegar that I started a few weeks ago? Well, this is how it looks now! Amazing, eh?
And speaking of vinegar, I have a great salad dressing recipe that I would like to share with you. It is super simple (you probably have all the ingredients at home already) but is super tasty.
Oil and Vinegar Salad Dressing
1/3 cup Extra Virgin Olive Oil
1/3 cup Balsamic Vinegar
6 tbsp Dijon Mustard
1 tbs Honey
1 tsp Sugar
1/4 tsp Black Pepper
Put all the ingredients into a jar and shake until well mixed. You can use all honey or all sugar instead of a bit of both. You can also add any herbs that you like. I sometimes add dill or thyme, depending on the salad. If you don't have dijon you can use regular mustard. And of course, you can add more or less of any of the ingredients to suit your taste.
Two tbsp equals 100 calories.
Competely unrelated, but so cute - my landlord's cat, Charlie:
The Trout Lake Farmer's Market was beautiful (as usual) last Saturday. I was really lucky to be placed next to a couple who mill wheat into flour. They are called the Flour Peddler and they sell really wonderful LOCALLY GROWN flour. Their products are really affordable (way cheaper than the grocery store) and some of it is even milled by bicycle!
My farmer' market sign still in progress:
I have been on a pasta kick. I bought some spelt and made roasted squash, romano, and ricotta tortellini. It was to die for! I would have never thought that I could make pasta so good. I love the colour of the pasta when spelt flour is used. Lovely. Today I will be making more, this time with a spinach filling.
I have planted a little herb garden in a little bucket at my house:
Lemon Verbena, Thyme, Basil (from seed), dill, two kinds of mint (chocolate and orange), and dill. The whole thing is growing nicely, but I am a bit unsure about the mint. It has gotten some black spots on the leaves and I can't really tell from the smell or taste which one is which.
Does anyone have any tips on growing/harvesting mint? When is the best time to pick it etc?
My landlord has given me this little patch of soil and I put in some tomato plants and pepper plants that I had grown from seed. But the pepper plants are dying. The tomoatoes are doing ok. All this rain is bogging them down, I think. I have also put in some lettuce, one red cabbage plant, and the basil and onions. The basil is a mix of some plants I grew from seed and some that I bought. The onions I grew from seed and they are doing really well. I recently transplanted them into those pots and trimmed them and since then they have thrived.
I harvested a HUGE batch (a packed grocery store sized bag) of greens from my community garden plot yesterday. Lots of peppercress, mizuna, pak choi, and red and green leaf lettuce.
End on a cute note:
