A happy culinary discovery on a recent trip to London, Ontario. (I had the gnocchi and autumn veggie salad, mmm)
Some people like a view of the kitchen when dining.
I prefer this.
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restaurant with a view
food
a runcible fruit
The quince crop this year is just enough to fill the house with bowls of fragrance (gorgeous fresh scent for weeks as they ripen); not enough to make jam. Which makes me very happy.
I’m not in a jam-making mood.
They dined on mince, and slices of quince,
Which they ate with a runcible spoon;
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
They danced by the light of the moon,
The moon,
The moon,
They danced by the light of the moon.
—from The Owl and the Pussycat, by Edward Lear
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peter’s peppers
Peter’s freshly picked but as yet unpickled peppers: Italian Roaster, Belgian Carrot, Banana and Jalapeno (every one of them grown and babied from seed then planted outside the day before the heat and humidity struck in June; who knew there was an early heat wave scheduled? (The Farmers’ Almanac that’s who, probably.) Anyway, plenty of innocent and tender seedlings perished—fast and painless for the most part—but these guys made it, making them, hopefully, bearers of super hardy seed for next year)
So… with the addition of vinegar and a few magic ingredients, presto—
red and yellow and tomatoey all over
Very ‘connected’ to our tomatoes this year as Peter grew every one of them from seed—coddling the seedlings through the last weeks of winter, convincing them that, yes, they must go outdoors, easing them into the sunlight, into small pots, larger pots, and finally into the big bad world of real soil with its inherent bugs—and worse. And all of them heritage plants, which made them very different from what we’re used to. Not as plentiful on the vine as the hybridized versions, nor as perfect or uniform in shape, but delicious (and beautiful). Along with the usual red variety, we had orange and green striped, plain orange, and yellow. Made some very nice salads.
And even though things are slowing down a bit—picked the last big bowl of cherry tomatoes yesterday (it’ll be small batches from here on out)—for the moment it’s still fresh bread, butter, salt, and occasionally some onions and a drizzle of oil—as the tomato festival continues (thankfully) just a little longer…
“One of the joys of summer is to go roaming through the garden, pulling ripe tomatoes off the vine and biting in. Juice and seeds drip all over your nice white shirt, but who cares? In summer the idea is to eat as many tomatoes as you can and enjoy the luxury of getting sick of them…
“My own idea of pure bliss is the tomato sandwich, which is good on any kind of bread… This sandwich can only be made with ripe tomatoes, luscious and full of seeds. The bread is slathered with mayonnaise, then dusted with celery salt and layered with thinly sliced tomatoes. I prefer this sandwich open, but it is fine with a lid.
“My favourite salad is the ubiquitous salad of the Middle East: diced cucumber, onion, and tomato dressed with salt, pepper, olive oil, and lemon juice. If you fry up some squares of pita bread in olive oil and add some flat-leafed parsley and a little fresh mint, you have a salad called fattosh, which is ridiculously delicious and extremely simple to make.”
—from More Home Cooking, by Laurie Colwin (who, in the same book, offers up a recipe for Tomato Pie that is next on my To Be Made list)
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take this
Take 2 cups of it, in fact (from your local farmers’ market if you can, or better still, pick it yourself on a sunny day). Tightly packed. Put in food processor. Add a few pinenuts. A tablespoon, two. Or none. Or walnuts. Half a cup of olive oil. A whoosh of salt and by a whoosh I mean about an eighth teaspoon, no more than a quarter (you can always add later). Garlic cloves. Three, four, five, depends how big they are, how much you like garlic. But more than five large ones would just be silly.
Puree.
Place in small tupperwares and freeze. I use single serving yoghurt containers, covered with saran wrap (and an elastic band to hold it in place). This recipe will fill two such containers.
Don’t worry about imprecise measures. You can’t go far wrong here. What you’ll have, no matter how you do it, is a little preserved ‘summer’ to enjoy in December.
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vegans beware!
A good reason to check each freshly picked garden leaf before chopping.
Audible sigh of relief as guest is returned to place of origin. (Note: no caterpillars were harmed in the making of either this post or pot of sorrel soup.)
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a good sign
Seen next to a busy street.
Had to stop of course.
None of the gardeners were there.
So I wandered about being amazed and delighted at the variety of contraptions and ‘constructions’
—humbled at the idea that people would come all the way out here to the middle of nowhere to work in the heat, tending rows of cucumber
and string beans
cauliflower
tomatoes (112 plants in this patch alone)
as well as lettuce (not to mention zucchini, eggplant, brussel sprouts, beets, carrots, herbs, peppers, kohlrabi…)
for the benefit—at least in part—of others.
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food share program
deciphering messages
Funny the domino effect of things.
Or whatever it is.
Yesterday I read Rona Maynard’s musings and reflections on ice cream. Today the stuff is everywhere I go. On CBC this morning with Matt Galloway. On the side of the semi that pulls out in front of me and makes me say bad words as enormous tubs of vanilla, cherry, chocolate, pecan-swirl momentarily tower over me—I can’t remember the brand.
And, oh look, there it is again on a sign
that I’ve probably passed ten or twenty thousand times on my way to the place where I buy happy meat and eggs and the best butter tarts I’ve ever tasted—but I’ve never noticed the great honking strawberry cone before.
Most bizarrely of all, it’s in my mum’s fridge.
Three individual servings of vanilla and butterscotch, untouched and melting. So instead of making the usual oatmeal or toast for her breakfast, which has been getting little or no reaction recently, I pour the ice cream into her coffee, then pour some more over canned peaches.
She laps it up, asks for seconds.
She’s almost ninety. What can it hurt?
A recent stroke has left her unable to do much for herself and this gets her down—everyone ‘doing’ for her, helping her dress and wash, preparing meals. She recently stopped enjoying food entirely, so when I see her licking her fingers, everything makes sense, the semi, Matt Galloway, Rona Maynard—it occurs to me there’s a message in all these ice cream sightings—ie. life is too bleeping short for oatmeal every morning—at least give the poor woman a dollop of coffee toffee mocha crunch with it…
And of course it makes complete and perfect sense.
Funny indeed how these things work.
~
here’s to fresh food and farmers
The picture doesn’t do this bounty justice. All of which was less than seventeen bucks. And yes, that’s the last of the asparagus (sad to say goodbye—it’s been sooo good). The first (for me) of the strawberries—which, by the way, I learned recently, are best picked and eaten in the morning when the dew’s still on them—just in case any of you are heading out to a strawberry patch in the coming dewy days.
To the left, a pile of mini hothouse cukes, most of which got left out of the snap. (Tomatoes are also hothouse; I normally wait for vine-ripened, but it was my first day at the local farmers’ market, the sun was shining, and, well, I had a mad moment…)
From the garden, there’s this—
I’m slightly insane about salads. They would be my preferred last meal were I to face a firing squad and be offered a choice.
This one includes nettles, dandelion leaves, mesclun, arugula, lambs’ quarters and purslane. Oh, and nasturtium leaves and flowers for oomph and a peppery je ne sais quoi-ish quality that never hurts and is not hard on the eyes.
Also garlic. I couldn’t resist pulling one from the still ripening crop. Normally the ‘First Garlic Bulb of the Season’ is almost a ceremonial event around here. Not this year. I just yanked one out and diced a few perfect, crisp, translucent, completely-unlike-the-stuff-from-China cloves, then topped the whole schmozzle with my favourite dressing: olive oil and fresh lemon juice.
Anyway, definitely oodles to choose from at this time of year, right from our own ‘backyard’. (It’ll be months before I step inside a grocery store again, except to buy detergent and sardines.)
Matilda Magtree 
