Thoughts, Reflections and a Global Food Crisis

Apologies for the long wait between posts. We have been busy with work, weddings, birthdays and traveling. This is not to say that there hasn't been a host of local eating involved. One great treat was the trip to Windsor for the wedding of our dear friends Luke and Alyssa, where we scored some exceptional canned Tomatoes from the Tomato capital of Canada. We highly recommend Thomas Utopia organic canned tomatoes if you can get them. Bold flavour, great texture and dripping of summer freshness.
On another note, though, this post is meant to speak to an issue we have been been talking and thinking about over the past month and a half of eating and thinking local. Inspired largely by two couples who are very close friends of ours who are traveling to Malawi, we have been learning to stop, look around us and be grateful for where we live. Southern Ontario has been blessed as the greenbelt of the country. Come summer, the farms and orchards are bursting with fresh fruits and vegetables, the vineyards are hanging low with grapes and the fields of corn, soy and wheat (yes, wheat) blow along the highways in Wellington, Grey-Bruce and Prince Edward counties. Even when the dark and blowing winter winds wind their way through the province, the fields still bring forth potatoes, carrots, cabbage and chard, bringing a welcome freshness into the depths of the cold. Yet throughout all this bounty, it is still easy for people looking for alternatives. A trip to any of the many Korean produce markets in the city of Toronto attests to this. The big attraction for many to these markets is the big, cheap boxes of berries flown in from California. Granted these berries look attractive. They are picture perfect, uniform in size and bright in colour, why wouldn't you want to eat them, right? If you were to shift your glance a little though, you would find a smaller selection of Ontario produced berries nearby. This berries appear in waves over the summer beginning with strawberries in June, shifting to raspberries and blackberries in July and then sweeping to blueberries in August. Now these berries do look different then their California cousins. They are smaller, often misshapen and perish very quickly. The difference, however, is in the bright, sweet, juicy taste hidden behind their deep colour. There is nothing, nothing that compares to the flavour of a local strawberry in season. It bursts in your mouth and fills you with a flavour that is so distinctly strawberry, you will be longing for them for the rest of the year. But that's just the point, they aren't around for the whole year, you are only able to savour them for 3 short weeks. But people are not satisfied within that 3 week limit. Instead, they buy forced, tasteless California berries all winter just to meet a craving and then continue to buy them in the summer because they are 'picture perfect' and can survive a few weeks in the fridge. The silly things we do for convenience.
But it's this culture of convenience, in all parts of our lives, that truly is the heart of the problems with our eating habits. Frequently, as we introduce our local diet to people, we receive accolades for our efforts, but are met with comments that the individuals could never do the diet themselves. Whether it's a comment of not knowing how to cook, a perceived lack of vegetarian options or not want to live without imported product 'x', people remain reluctant to step away from what they are used to in order make a change in the way they eat, how they live or what they want. Now, regardless of the efforts we have made in own own eating adventures, we absolutely identify this reluctance to change. We've struggled with our own haunts (coffee, chocolate, pepper etc.) as you've heard and have had to learn a whole new way of cooking and we are still working on resisting our temptations. But lately, what has been helping us through is an appreciation for the food we have available to us. The fact that we are even so 'lucky' to have a choice between local berries and imported ones is astounding. In comparison, we recall a story our friend Luke told after his first trip to Malawi. After working on a small local farm for a day, plowing a field, he was offered a handful of groundnuts and a cup of tea as his meal for the day. Hungry as he was, he was still grateful for whatever he was blessed to eat. This is what it means to truly not 'have options' when it comes to food. We, in Ontario, in Canada, in North America have been given a great gift of nutritious, fruitful land that produces beautiful food and we have the tools to work the land with greater ease. So many places in the world do not have this luxury. Many people perform back-breaking work by hand in dry, rotten, swamped or scorched conditions and marvel when they are able to grow the smallest piece of food. For them, local eating is not a choice, it is survival. In thinking globally, eating strawberries for only 3 weeks a year isn't restrictive, it is a treat and needs to be valued as such. We don't need imported fruit to eat well, we just need to switch our thinking, look around and maybe begin to feed our needs a little more than we feed our wants. And that is applicable to all parts of life!

P.S. Looking for a drink to substitute for the lack of 100% local beer! Try cider! Why didn't we think of this before? Two great Ontario options from Prince Edward County are Peeler and Wappoos. You might not even miss the beer...

Temptation Thwarted

Tonight was the first night since starting the diet that neither of us felt like cooking dinner. At all. We both got home from work somewhat later than normal, and the 33 degree temperatures outside made doing as little possible a much more appealing option than standing over a hot stove or oven. Throw in the relative lack of food in our house at the moment and not only were our options even further reduced, but motivation fell to an all time diet low.

So naturally we thought about going out. There are a fairly large number of restaurants in Toronto that strive to use as many local ingredients as possible (check out http://www.savourontario.ca/) and many do a pretty good job. The problem is they are almost all on the pricier side (at least for us) and only one is near our house (well, actually two but the second is both pricy and Italian so we'll avoid that for now). Now, we're not exactly shy on spending more than we should on a good dinner, especially for a good occasion, like celebrating a birthday or finishing a final school assignment. Or coming back from a vacation, preparing to leave on a vacation, celebrating the end of spring, celebrating the start of summer, celebrating friends going on vacation, or payday, or pretty much any friday or saturday night...

Despite our historic lax with spending money in restaurants, dropping what would likely be close to $80 or more on dinner simply because we were lazy we just couldn't justify, even though Holland's win in the world cup today is reason to celebrate! So we decided on a chicken dish pan fried in an egg and parmesan coating with beet greens, beets, and carrots. Sounded good and fairly simple, but we didn't have any eggs so off to the store. Now the store right at the base of our street carries eggs from within our radius, so that's not really a big deal. But we decided to first walk down to the Shoppers (drug store) to get a few items we needed for the house and then just stop by the Globe - local restaurant - in case maybe the menu didn't look as expensive as we remembered. It was so it was short visit, but by the time we got back to the store for eggs it was 9:06. The store closes at 9. Damn.

Plan B. Sushi? It was tempting. So were the smells from the Greek places we walked by on the way to the store and the Brass Taps' (a favorite pub) weekly $10 pasta special. But we held out deciding we could forgo the eggs and instead make a corn meal breading using yogurt to bind the corn meal to the chicken.

By the time we ate it was 10 and we were both ridiculously hungry, but it was worth the wait! We found a new use for red fife flour, it made a great coating on the raw chicken and the yogurt stuck to it perfectly. We mixed some parmesan with the corn meal and coated that over the yogurt covered chicken. It all held together wonderfully even throughout the pan-frying. The parmesan melted a little as it cooked binding with the corn meal and making a delicious cheesy corn crust and the chicken stayed nice and juicy. We topped it with a garlicy ranch sauce and served over a bed of cooked beat greens with a side of carrots and beets in a maple syrup and thyme glaze. Not too bad for being tired and not inspired. We just need to remember this when we're not doing this diet and stop spending so much money at restaurants just because we don't feel like cooking. Certainly glad we decided to cook tonight.

The Fate of the Fife

The red fife, our hardy Ontario heritage wheat, certainly has its endearing qualities. It does have a great taste, a little nutty, a bit sweet. It's very heavy, but that's not necessarily a bad thing depending on the dish. And then of course there is its history and it's low inputs needed to grow (ideal for organic agriculture). But... it has also certainly been a challenge to work with, especially because we're lacking a few other baking essentials, like baking soda, that might otherwise compensate for its dense texture. So while we're not totally giving up on the fife, we have found a few alternative flours that are taking a more prominent role in our cooking.

Two farms, Grassroots Organics near Desboro On. and Merryland farms near Peterborough both provide some good alternatives. So far we've tried kamut and Spelt flour, both of which have been much easier to work with than the fife (although we both must admit that they don't quite have the same flavour) and an all-purpose flour which blends the two with the red fife. Grassroots Organics also has a pastry flour, which is from a local wheat, but lighter than the red fife. We've only used that one once so far in making pasta, blended with the all-purpose. It was certainly a lot easier than our pasta making experience with the red fife. And because it still tasted great, we think we'll be avoiding red fife pasta again.

But the fife still does have a place in our local kitchen. It's still good to mix with another flour for some added flavour without becoming too heavy or tough to work with, and we found out it makes for a great coating for breading (see 'Temptation Thwarted' post). Maybe after this experiment is over we'll still buy some on occasion. But for the bulk of our baking needs, it looks like Kamut, Spelt, mixd all-purpose, and newly found pastry flour will take over.