A Workshop, A Hike, And A Big Jam

Saturday I attended a wonderful (and free!) canning workshop that was part of the the City of Oshawa Food for Though series and sponsored by BerNardin. Although I had already experimented with my first canning project (had to use those tomatoes while they were ripe!), I have a lot to learn (and did I mention it was free?).

We watched the entire process from ingredients selection to making and canning the finished product. Encouraged that I hadn't made too many mistakes with the salsa, I immediately went out to buy pears from a fruit stand and a stock pot large enough to not boil over and scald me this time. The result was 1.5 l of delicious pear vanilla jam and the decision to preserve Christmas this year so I'm sorry if you were looking forward to a really fancy gift, you are getting jars filled with mushy goodness.

Lovely ladies volunteering their time to teach us

But before I could get to the cooking there were woods to hike, mushrooms to marvel at and kids to shake my head at. Sunday was a rare and wonderful day, indeed, as my guy had a day off, it is late September and the day was sunny and warm. To the woods! This time, to a ravine not far from our house that I have shamefully never explored before. On our hike I found the most vibrant and wonderful looking mushroom growing all by it's self.

It's red, so it must be delicious, right?

Despite my assertions that the tastiest foods on the planet are red and so this must be edible and delicious, my guy coaxed me away from the little fungus with nothing but a photo to remember it by.

We encountered the usual trappings in a wooded area surrounded by suburbia, mountain bike jumps and trails, trenches for pant ball games, red cups - lots of red cups and fire pits. Then just evidence of fires having been set, directly under trees...and then fires set in trees!!!!!

Burnt out tree - What were they thinking?

Children, please allow me to explain, it is evident that you like to drink and generally party in the woods. That's fine, I'm not very eager to come tripping through here at night anyway, but please realize that if you burn it down, you won't have it to play in anymore. This lovely protected greenspace will be replaced by a subdivision in a heartbeat and there will be even more of you sitting around on a Saturday night complaining that there is nothing to do. I hope they don't burn it down, I'm really looking forward to snowshoeing here in the winter.

(You can find the recipe for Pear Vanilla Jam here: http://foodinjars.com/2011/02/pear-vanilla-jam/)

It's Getting All Steamy Up In Here

We consume a lot of salsa in my home, and I've never had a salsa I liked better than the kind I make. I think it's my heavy handed cilantro use. Many a wintry Sunday I've made my kitchen look like a pre-Industrialization battlefield with bits of red tomato carcass everywhere, the juice dripping down my arms, counter, cupboard door...all the while lamenting that I cannot wait until tomatoes have flavour again. Well, that time is now and I am loathe to let it slip past me, so I am embarking on a brand new adventure - canning.

Quaint, a little archaic, really, really messy and, as my Guy reminds me hourly, probably more expensive than just buying jars at the store (after all, my recent foray in making apple butter resulted in a destroyed blender. How a top name brand - it starts with a K like in kitchen *ahem* blender can crumble under the load of mushy apples that have been cooked for 4 hours, cooled in the refrigerator and  suitable for a baby sans teeth  is beyond me, but I digress).

This rekindled desire to cook, bake, preserve and generally work with all things edible has been brought on by the drastic turn in temperature from 40 C with humidex to 7 C in about a week. This summer was just too hot to contemplate anything requiring the use of more heat and I lived on smoothies for most of August. Also rekindled is my Guy's snickering about how he's "tamed" me and that he has "turned" me into a "house wife". The fact that I am neither a wife, nor a house being a fact that seems to have escaped him. (The use of house wife as a derisive term is a rant that I just don't have the space to go into, suffice to say, a woman's choice to stay home or work is her own, though I am sure most of the population just doesn't have the choice in this two income economy.) Lucky for him my desire to remain a vegetarian and stay upright, mobile and healthy prevents me from ceasing all kitchen activities immediately because nothing kills my desire to make dishes that will also feed him like being called "tamed". 

I have no idea where this smugness even comes from because the only version of me he knows is the good cook/bread baker. That former self, the one who still makes me marvel when anything turns our right, had already pretty much disappeared by the time he met me. He only knows about it from the stories, so I am not sure how it is he thinks he gets the credit for my healthier lifestyle or why eating properly, with fresh whole foods, somehow makes me tame.

Tame isn't being adventurous in the kitchen, taking on new and increasingly difficult recipes and even making up a few. Tame is eating a lot of processed barely food because it's easy, and that's what everyone else does.

I have to go burn myself over steaming pots now, and I plan to make the salsa inferno, that'll teach him.

Karma Police in Riot Gear

I do not, as my blog may suggest, get into trouble so I have something to write about. I write because, after years of the odd and the awkward happening to me, I have finally taken my friends advise to "write this $#!+ down!".

Easter weekend, a time to share and celebrate with family. Even better if you can celebrate with the friends you choose to replace your family with. After months of trying to coordinate schedules, I was very excited to have a firm invitation to the home of a dear friend, who happens to be half of one of my favourite married couples. I was especially looking forward to it as it was to be their first meeting with my guy.

In preparation for the day and to alleviate the trouble of cooking for pain-in-the-a$$ vegetarians, I spent all Saturday cooking and prepping. Vegetarian Moroccan stew, always a pleaser, and pre-ferment for fresh French loafs. Up early Sunday morning, take the dough out to lose its chill, coffee on and fire up the laptop to watch Paris-Roubaix, my favourite bike race (Chapeau Tommeka, great to see you back on form!). A fabulous way to spend Sunday morning. Post race, I whipped up some banana and hazelnut crepes, finished the dough and left it to rise and got started on dessert - my first attempt at strawberry and kiwi Pavlova. It was all going fine.

The Pavlova took longer than expected and so the baguettes went in late. I HATE being late, it really, really stresses me out. I composed a very apologetic message and started on the whip cream to top the Pavlova while the bread was baking. That I chose to use the old stand mixer would turn out to be my second error in judgment that day. The problem with kitchen multitasking is in the details. The big detail being that my old stand mixer, though small and so easier to use for tasks like whipping small quantities of cream, sucks and really needs to be babysat. As I turned to wash fruit I heard a shout from my guy. My shaky sunbeam was shooting unwhipped cream all over the kitchen. I thought this, combined with being late was the major disaster of the day, but later would look back on it as the golden period.

Kitchen cleaned, cream whipped, Pavlova topped, bread fresh from the oven and into a bag - we were ready to roll. The now spitting rain posed a bit of an issue with the delicate Pavlova but nothing aluminum foil couldn't save. We hit the highway and cottage country traffic but at least we were on our way. Then the car started to shimmy. This is not standard Subaru behaviour, at least not for this Subaru. My guy quickly navigated us off the highway and to the nearest plaza where the car died almost immediately. Horrible, right? It gets better.

I had to, of course, phone my dear friends and tell them the bad news. There was no possible way for us to get to their home (nearly 60 km from ours). We then had the problem of getting ourselves back home and what to do with the car. My guy called his dad who happened to be around the corner at his brother's house for a big family Easter dinner.

So, instead of barbeque with friends, we sat on the outskirts of a big family dinner with all the trimmings and relatives who I was meeting for the first time. Our hosts were incredibly gracious about welcoming us, particularly me, a complete stranger, into their homes. It was awkward though as we did crash the party uninvited and the family were not very impressed with my guy's new vegetarian lifestyle. Oh, and the fact that a few months ago, one of the members of the family had said some very disparaging things about me, not because of anything particular I had done, but because "I'm warning you, all women are like that." I don't know what I did in some past life that I must endure such retribution. I only hope that I can atone for it and move on soon.

Domestic Goddess Fire Starter

Once upon a time I was a barely healthy vegetarian, very active but a little lazy in the domestic department. I ate the healthiest pre-packed foods I could find, but alas, they were packaged, processed and all had one flavour - salt. My cooking skills were disastrous. DISASTROUS! Has anyone ever managed to set nachos on fire? I have. Twice.

Don't ask me how I manged either fire, I have no idea. I have prepared nachos thousands of times in my life with little fanfare. Sure, there was an occasional burnt outer layer, but even that was rare. Then one day, flames, smoke and a white stove turned black. Thankfully, what I lacked in kitchen know-how I made up for in emergency response. I calmly wet a few tea towels, opened the oven door just enough and smothered the flames quite easily. I then carried the pan out the back door to smolder and smoke in the back yard and ordered a pizza. I stayed away from nachos for a few months but soon I was back at it and all was fine for a time. The second fire was much like the first and all I can say is that in my incompetent hands, nacho chips are combustible.

Then I met a man who was a little on the traditional side and who criticized my lack of cooking. He criticized a lot of what I did, I tried to improve and impress him, he found more to criticize about. As I said, I'm a slow relationship learner, so I kept trying. Eventually I hit upon cookies. He loved cookies and I was mildly successful in making them so I kept at it even though I don't care for the things. The other irony is I did all this cooking to impress a man who was incapable of eating in public and I, apparently, am a one woman public. Like an idiot I would pack him food to go like I was running a bakery. Eventually I got rid of the bad man (yeah THAT bad man), but I kept up the baking, turning my interest to bread, because boy do I love bread! Eventually I moved to homemade pizza, then homemade everything. 

Now the upside to all this is that my very happy, very wonderful and deserving partner is the benefactor of all my attempts to impress the loser with my kitchen prowess. He thinks I am an amazing cook, that I rarely fail when I touch food. One of his favourite refrains early on in the relationship was, "you sure do know what you're doing in the kitchen". I wonder at how far I've come from the woman who couldn't manage even the simplest of heat up meals without having an emergency plan has managed to impress self-proclaimed "bread people" with a couple of my loafs at a party. A former kitchen hazard has become toast of the town! (ok, I apologize for that appalling pun but I am completely giddy about overcoming my complete lack of belief in myself and actually impressing people with an activity I once feared and dreaded).

So I guess two good things actually came out of that bad relationship - I can cook now! and I met and have maintained an amazing friendship with someone I met through him. Three things, I haven't set fire to my kitchen in ages ;) Oh and now I am a healthy vegetarian.