Category Archives: Food

To The Woods

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Today our weather station recorded a high of +10C, which is unusually high for January. I spent the afternoon in the forest clearing trails that were first partly blocked by trees that fell during a storm called Dorian in 2019 followed by an even more severe loss of trees from storm Fiona in 2022. Looking after my mother took priority over the past few years and I just never had much time to get out with a chainsaw.

Mild weather and little snow on the ground means I have quickly pushed through some big tangles of trees the past few days and am now making good progress.

Black sleigh holding a green chainsaw and white bucket sitting on a snow-covered forest trail with cut logs on either side and standing trees in the background.
My little sleigh with chainsaw and supplies sitting in a newly-cleared section of trail.

The fresh air was wonderful, one of the many joys of a battery-operated chainsaw, though I did fire up my ancient Stihl for a bit to tackle some bigger trees. I haven’t used it much in the past couple of years and was surprised that it sparked up pretty quickly, even using some old gas. I should be nicer to it.

Black and white map of the land we occupy showing trails in white.
Map from a field day held here in 2009. Today I was working near #8 and then started the section halfway between 5A and 6.

Today I found evidence that snowshoe hares somehow get onto fallen logs to get close to the tender ends of cedar trees. After many years of seeing very few hares, there has been a spike in the past couple of years and the forest is filled with tracks. I’m guessing there are more places for them to hide in all the fallen trees and brush, but I also remember old timers talking about a cycle “rabbits”, an ebb and flow of them over a decade or more. We are certainly at a peak.

The end of a cedar branch that has been eaten off by a snowshoe hair being held in the hands of a fair-skinned person with snow in the background.
Snowshoe hare food.
A large tree leaning across a forest path, with cut logs on either side of a snow-covered forest trail and standing trees behind.
A couple of large trembling aspen that I can easily climb under and may have to wait for someone with more nerve and a bigger chainsaw to tackle.
Snow in the foreground, sky in the background, and both standing and fallen trees in the middle.
Heading home. Still lots to be done.

Ched and Pep Pep

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Love this packaging design. I imagine they were satisfying to stack together.

I admire the retro colours and the identical red bowl with different coloured pasta in them, the macaroni carefully arranged so it hit the top edge of the bowl the same in each photo, and some of the pasta on its side and some with o-ends facing out.

I don’t have many memories of the general store my parents ran until I was four, but I remember being fascinated by how the slices of cake on the different varieties of Betty Crocker mixes looked exactly alike, the size and icing swirls identical only in different colours and flavours. If I was transported back into that store as it used to be right now, I could take you straight to that shelf, at four-year-old eye level, and hand you your choice (and being the daughter of two great salespeople, ask you if you needed birthday candles as well. Always be selling!).

Boxes of Matheson Food Company macaroni and cheese mixes side by side with different coloured boxes for the four different flavours.

French Fried Granola

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Today’s rabbit hole was the link between Woodstock and the popularisation of granola in North America. I searched for granola and the top hit was a recipe with a surprising first ingredient.

The actual recipe does not include french fries (quel dommage!) and calls for light-brown sugar instead of golden brown, confirming once again that although I’ve spent lots of time on the internet over the past 30+ years, I understand very little about how it works.

Bye American

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Today is the first day of spring here in the Northern Hemisphere, but you could be forgiven for thinking it was the first day of autumn with all the red maple leaves everywhere.

In response to US tariffs on Canadian goods and increasingly ominous threats of annexation from the US president, many shoppers want to avoid buying things made in the US, so stores and sales flyers are dotted with little leaves to denote items are “Made in Canada” or “Product of Canada”, regulatory distinctions few of us knew about a couple of months ago.

US fresh produce is languishing on store shelves, and Canadian grocery chains are quickly trying to find new suppliers. This means that instead of the Florida and California citrus fruit we have seen in grocery stores for decades, those products are coming to the east coast of Canada from new-to-us places like Turkey, Israel and Egypt.

I have long despaired at seeing things like fresh Peruvian asparagus and Chinese snow peas in my local store, so I can’t say I’m thrilled with this development. I wonder how much of it ultimately gets thrown out, all that effort and fossil fuel spent on transporting garbage around the world.

I hope this new patriotic consumerism will make people consider not only where their products are from but if they need them at all. The climate crisis is still barrelling forward full tilt, and the nonsense coming out of the US is distracting from the real urgency to address this existential issue, which must certainly suit the “drill baby drill” ding dongs.

Stores will continue to sell us things if we continue to purchase them but, as we’ve seen from the rapid switch away from US produce, stores also notice when we don’t buy things.

Meadow mushrooms

In my 1970s rural PEI childhood, fresh mushrooms were a seasonal thing that we gathered ourselves; winter mushrooms came from cans.

Every autumn I would go with my parents to Ellerslie to pick meadow mushrooms in a pasture near the farm where my father was born and raised. Dodging cow pats, we would harvest the little white mushrooms, checking they had soft pinkish gills underneath. That was the only mushroom we knew to be edible, and I assumed or was told that the “toadstools” (ie. every other type of mushroom) would be poisonous. That turns out to not be true, but we didn’t need to be adventurous as the meadow mushrooms were plentiful and we could pick what we needed, never putting a dent into the crop that was in the huge field.

We had a summer cottage on the land where we now have a year-round house. We would stay at the cottage until after Thanksgiving, which was always a huge family gathering with lots to eat and a big roaring fire in the fireplace. I would walk our long lane each weekday morning in September and October to catch the school bus and, on my way back in the afternoon, would pick the meadow mushrooms that occasionally popped up in our yard for my mother to fry to have with our supper.

This morning I put sunflower seeds out for the blue jays and chickadees, our year round friends and neighbours. I picked four lovely meadow mushrooms (Agaricus campestris, iNaturalist tells me) that popped up overnight, and cooked them for my mother to have with her supper. I gently moved them around in a bit of butter, and they were soft and tasted of the past, when the labour that went into such a treat meant they were regarded as precious gifts.

Recall

I heard on the news this morning that some plant based beverages have been recalled across Canada due to possible listeria contamination. When I later walked by the empty cooler shelves at a local store, this yellow-and-red tag was next to all the price labels where the recalled products usually sit.

I know the tag must have something to do with the recall, but what is it supposed to be telling me? There was no information posted about the recall or what to do if I had already purchased product, which luckily I hadn’t. Is the tag telling me to call someone? Is it a re-call? Colour me perplexed.

Unsweetened chocolate for the fail

I’ve been making David Lebovitz’s brownies for years, and it’s a reliable and delicious recipe that just happens to be gluten free. I made them a few years ago for my pal, Emily, who is a chef, and she now sells them at her restaurant takeout counter, they are that good.

I always try to use Fair Trade chocolate and cocoa, but I needed a contribution to a meal for after a wake and didn’t have any chocolate on hand, so I raided my mother’s pantry. All my life she has had two boxes of Baker’s Chocolate on hand, a blue box of unsweetened and a red box of semi-sweet, but there was only the blue box, so I grabbed it and started baking.

Unsweetened chocolate is 100% cacao. It did not work. The chocolate Lebovitz suggested (bittersweet or semisweet) contain cocoa butter and sugar, which must have been what was missing.

Do make these brownies, and learn from my chocolate ignorance.

Food/Not Food

If you are unsure if something is a food, a good test is to put it outside and see what happens (most memorably done by Spy magazine in 1989 when they put a Twinkie cake on a NYC window ledge for four days and not even the pigeons went near it!).

I found three stale rice cakes in the back of a cupboard this morning and tossed them onto the lawn, confident some creature would eat them. The crows arrived quickly, took a few bites and passed, as did their bluejay cousins. A red squirrel triumphantly grabbed one, probably excited by how large and relatively light it was, scurried up a pine tree, took a nibble and dropped it to the ground.

I gathered up the rice cakes and presented them to the hens, who have pecked at them with little enthusiasm for four hours. They will probably finish them, but it will take a while. Their diet includes grit and small stones, so they are used to eating things without obvious (to us) nutritional value.

Not food.

“Why did you give us styrofoam? We’ll eat it, of course, but…styrofoam?”

Cookie Diplomacy

One of the joys of being my mother’s daughter is acting as the courier of her kindness, most often as the deliverer of baked goods to family and friends, and even sometimes to strangers. From a young age I was often sent to neighbours with fresh muffins or bread or whatever had emerged from her oven just because she thought they needed a treat, casseroles and dishes of soup to those unwell. She did the work, but I received the thanks and could bask in her goodness; I have slid far on her cookie diplomacy!

Last week I delivered some of my mother’s Christmas baking to a friend, who had a little card and gift waiting for me. It is a beautiful pine needle basket made by an artist from Maine called Morning Star Wolf. My friend said the basket might look empty, but it was filled with gratitude. What a gift.

Measuring Garlic

My third crop of garlic went in the ground this afternoon. I started with two bulbs of Phillips, a hardneck variety purchased from Hope Seeds, in 2020. That duo yielded 22 bulbs that I planted last fall, with the miraculous result that all 150 cloves planted grew! I credit the aged chicken manure produced by our little flock for the good outcome.

Phillips proud of Phillips.

I kept the 50 largest bulbs to plant this fall and the rest I have been using in the kitchen. Local garlic is wonderful but expensive, so it really is a worthwhile crop, even in my small garden. It doesn’t take a lot of work, and having something to plant in the fall when everything else is going dormant and there is less to do in the garden is very hopeful.

I plant garlic in rows 6″ apart. Luckily the dibber I use to poke the hole for each clove has a shaft that is exactly 6″ long, so it’s easy to space them out in the bed.

But equally as lucky, if I just want to poke a hole with my finger, is that I know that my hand is 6″ long, and my index finger is almost 3″ long, pretty much the perfect depth for a garlic clove. One of our set design teachers at the National Theatre School taught me that trick, to measure your hands and fingers so you would never be without a measure. It is one of the “handiest” hacks I know!

My hand is a half a foot, but a whole hand!
And 3″ wide.