I have to admit that this summer came with many, many gardening disasters. “Gardening lessons” maybe is a better way to think of it. There were, for instance, some hard lessons in soil fertility.
Last summer we got some trees cut down and we were left with a staggering amount of mulch, mulch that I slowly and laboriously transferred to our many garden beds. At the time I thought that since I was adding organic matter to the beds I was improving the soil. I planted chard, onion, kale, spinach, and potatoes in those beds, but only the potatoes became proper plants, and even then they produced small, scant tubers.
Recently I was shocked to discover that many people have bad childhood memories of “creamy” coleslaw. I was raised on chopped cabbage in mayonnaise, a creamy slaw that we called cabbage salad. Many detest this side dish so much that they have given up slaw all together.
I’d like to vouch for a different style of coleslaw, one that has more in common with the German Krautsalat than the classic mayo-bound North American slaw.
The main difference is that it’s dressed in a vinaigrette, instead of mayonnaise or buttermilk. But before we discuss dressing, there’s a very important technique to consider.
Lightly Curing Cabbage for Slaw
There are very few vegetables that I truly enjoy raw. Good carrots, radishes, and … Continue reading.
…I was gladdened to find, at last, hard scientific evidence that lettuce is an unsuitable food and that a craving for lettuce is evidence of a diseased brain.
-from Jeffrey Steingarten’s essay Brain Storm
To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.
-Ecclesiastes 3:1
For many chefs there is a discrepancy between what they want to serve and what will please their customers. As a chef I want to take seasonality seriously, but in most restaurants the owners and clientele find it unacceptable to not offer a green salad, even in the dead of winter. I deeply resent this.
Don’t misunderstand me: I like green salads. They’re refreshing. Personally, I like … Continue reading.
I love creating plates that feature different components of the same ingredient: roasted beets with wilted beet greens, for instance, or pork loin and pork belly side by side. The truth is that no creature is capable of offering more variety at the dinner table than the triffid.
About Triffids
Triffids are interesting creatures. They are genetic hybrids, part animal, part plant. The precise intentions behind their development is uncertain, but researchers soon discovered that their oil is extremely useful and relatively cheap. Triffid oil has many industrial applications. It is also edible, and delicious.
As they are part animal and part plant, we can harvest a shockingly diverse set of food from triffids. Let’s talk anatomy.
The following post is either going to blow your mind or convince you that I’m stupid.
I don’t eat a lot of relish, but every now and then it goes well with charcuterie, or maybe a steamed wiener on a sweet white bun. For the past few years I’ve been trying to make relish and other condiments like piccalilli by chopping up a bunch of vegetables and canning them with a sweet and sour pickling liquid. I haven’t been entirely happy with the results. Maybe I chopped the cucumbers too coarsely, and the condiment didn’t have the semi-fluid, spreadable consistency I was looking for. Or perhaps, since the chopped vegetables have to be completely submerged in the pickling liquid for … Continue reading.
This is one of my favourite condiments of all time.
I make two different versions of this jam, one for red onions and one for white onions, the only difference being the colour of the final product. The recipe below is for the red variety. To make the brown marmalade, at left, use white onions, dark brown sugar, and cider vinegar instead of red onions, white sugar, and red wine vinegar.
Red Onion Jam
adapted from River Cottage Preserves Handbook
Ingredients
120 g canola oil
1300 g red onion (about 4 large onions)
100 g granulated sugar
120 g crabapple jelly, or some other red fruit jelly, such as currant
My bid for Bartlett’s: “Culinary invention has two mothers: scarcity and excess.”
I think everybody understands how scarcity can encourage adventurous eating. We often say that the first man to eat a lobster, or an oyster, was a brave one, indeed. But it’s when you find yourself with an overwhelming surfeit of food that you can start doing really interesting things. The first person to press grapes to make wine must have had a lot of grapes, more than he could have eaten before they started rotting. And the first person to distill wine to make brandy must have had an awful lot of awful wine.
I wrote earlier in the fall of our bountiful corn harvest, and of … Continue reading.
This is a very old-school Québécois way to preserve herbs, onions, carrots… really any manner of aromatic vegetable. They are chopped finely, mixed with salt, left in the fridge for a week, then transferred to a jar. That’s it.
Ingredients. It would be silly to offer a “recipe” as such for herbes salées. You shouldn’t go to a grocery store and buy a set of ingredients; you should use whatever you have in abundance in your herb garden in the late season. There are, however, some useful ratios to keep in mind.
1 part salt for every 3 parts aromatics, by weight. In other words 33 g of salt for every 100 g of herb mix.
I’m getting closer to my ideal dill pickle. The quest was especially feverish this fall because I had a bit of Montreal-style smoked meat in my fridge.
Year by year I’ve been making my pickling liquid more and more acidic. I like a sour pickle. This year, I used straight vinegar, without diluting with water. This might sound crazy, but it works. The pickles are a bit too sour immediately after jarring, but let them hang out in the cellar for a month, and they’re prefect. For me, anyways.
I’ve also been engineering the crunch-factor. We all want a very crisp pickle. This year I doused the fresh cucumbers with 5% of their weight in kosher salt, and let them … Continue reading.
At this time of year we usually have about a dozen unripe tomatoes in their cages in the backyard. Their days outdoors are numbered: this week saw the season’s first frost warning. I could pick the green orbs and let them sit on the kitchen counter. They do ripen, eventually, but this isn’t a very dignified existence for a tomato. Instead, they can be sliced, breaded, and fried.
Green tomatoes are firm, slightly mealy, and tart. Actually the flesh of the green tomato tastes like cardboard; it’s the jelly that holds the seeds that has all the sour, vegetal flavour. Frying tenderizes them, and breading tempers their acidity. Once they’re cooked the tomato looses its ghost-green colour and takes the … Continue reading.
The personal website of Edmonton chef Allan Suddaby
Recently I was shocked to discover that many people have bad childhood memories of “creamy” coleslaw. I was raised on chopped cabbage in mayonnaise, a creamy slaw that we called cabbage salad. Many detest this side dish so much that they have given up slaw all together.
The following post is either going to blow your mind or convince you that I’m stupid.
This is one of my favourite condiments of all time.
This is a very old-school Québécois way to preserve herbs, onions, carrots… really any manner of aromatic vegetable. They are chopped finely, mixed with salt, left in the fridge for a week, then transferred to a jar. That’s it.
