the last days of summer
canning season, and making messes
Hello, hello. Thank you for caring about my cooking adventures! Normally I intend to share a few kitchen highlights from my week with a bit about the process, as well as a few other bits of interest (like food-related media or a recipe), if I have them to share. This might be a little longer than what you’ll see from me in future newsletters, so hopefully you can get a fairly rounded idea of what kinds of things to expect. Just so you know before you start reading, in case you have a zoom call in 5 minutes or you want to go get a snack.
The last few days of August always feel like the end of summer, even though the autumn equinox isn’t until more than halfway through September (and thanks to global warming, we’re likely to see some more warm days even after that). I expect it’s a holdover from our school days, when you watch the sun start to set a little earlier, feeling the impending loss of your months-long freedom looming over your head as the calendar creeps ever closer to Labour Day weekend. While most of our day-to-day lives as adults don’t change too much during the summer, that feeling, for whatever reason, often stays with us. In May we start thinking about all the things we want to do in the summer, and by mid-August, we’re in a panic, thinking, I’ve got to bike to the beach at least once before the end of the season. Or, I can’t believe it’s almost September and I haven’t even made ONE heirloom tomato salad yet.
The month of August for me has been a frantic attempt to use seemingly unfathomable amounts of produce as they ripen in our garden. I actually ran out of canning jars and had to go on a wild goose chase to find a place that wasn’t sold out. First was apples: the tree in our yard is a prolific producer of deliciously sweet-tart red apples, and even after giving away several pounds to friends, we were left with more than we could ever eat. I made applesauce, apple pies, apple chutney, dried apple chips, apple butter, froze sliced apples for future pies, and there were still. more. apples.
Then, zucchini: one afternoon in the garden I saw that there were a few tiny ones that seemed like they’d be ready in a few days. Three days later I had 2 zucchinis the size of a child’s leg and more on the way. In a frenzied week I made vegan chocolate zucchini cake, five pints of zucchini relish, an enormous pot of zucchini lemon orzo, a zucchini pan pizza with olive tapenade, marinated grilled zucchini. There’s also been a steady amount of cucumbers, kale, and cherry tomatoes; I keep checking my larger tomato plants and tomatillos but nothing is quite ripe enough yet.
As I wait for the rest of our harvest, this week I’ve been basing my meals around what’s cheapest and most abundant at the produce store. Tomatillos were $1 a pound, so I got two pounds and made a litre of salsa verde. I made it without a plan, and didn’t want to sacrifice its fresh flavour by canning, but managed to improvise my way into some pretty delicious enchiladas verde, for which I intend to share the recipe in a future newsletter. I mixed some of the salsa with a little sour cream for a more robust sauce and made a large pan with a filling of chicken, white beans, mushrooms, and garden zucchini (and a small pan with no chicken), and topped everything with Monterey jack & cheddar.
Even though they create a huge mess, the one good thing is that in the time they take to cook, you can get all the dishes done. My mom considers enchiladas “birthday food”: when we were kids she would let us choose any meal we wanted on our birthdays, because some of the things we liked best were just too fussy or time-consuming for every day. I usually chose a saltine cracker-breaded fried chicken, and my brother always chose enchiladas. They aren’t exactly difficult to make, but they will dirty seemingly every dish in your house.
BC bell peppers were also $1.50 for 4, so I made a fresh loaf of no-knead bread to eat with the shakshuka from Yotam Ottolenghi’s book Plenty. This is a great book for the huge variety of vegetarian recipes, and how it’s organized based on what vegetable you want to cook— searching a cookbook index or food blog for the ingredient I want to use is how I choose recipes most often. The stew itself turned out excellent, but I’ve yet to fully master poaching the egg; I usually end up overdoing the yolk in trying to get the white cooked all the way through. This wasn’t perfect, but was better than my last attempt (completely solid yolks): the yolk was cooked through on the bottom but still soft on the top. I’m pretty sure I just need to be more patient and keep the temperature low, and stop taking the lid off to peek at it. I added a little feta to serve, to counter the sweetness of the peppers.
Wednesday was our anniversary— 2 years married, 12 years together! It felt pretty disheartening trying to celebrate midweek during a global pandemic, but we opened one of our nicer wines— a truly exceptional Brunello di Montalcino from the year we got together, purchased on a trip to Italy 6 years ago— and ordered some delicious vegan pizza from Virtuous Pie. My personal fav of their pizzas is Stranger Wings, but we went a bit more traditional with sweet pepper & sausage and a margherita to complement our Italian wine. Both of them were perfectly delicious, and I encourage you to order from them if you can (they now have locations in Victoria and Portland)! I’m so glad we’re now in a world where vegan cheeze can be more than just filler that is vaguely cheese-like and can actually be enjoyable to eat.
With a bit of homemade apple butter and the last few apples from our tree that didn’t get destroyed by bugs & worms, I decided to try making apple fritters. The recipe came from Tieghan Gerard’s Half-Baked Harvest: Super Simple (a similar recipe is on her website) but since I’m never super confident with deep-frying, I didn’t let my oil get hot enough and some of the bigger ones came out still a touch doughy in the middle. Instead of the maple glaze, I used leftover cardamom peach glaze from the peach poundcake I made earlier in the month, to give them a slightly brighter, more summery taste.
Because I didn’t want to have to be responsible for 12 donuts, and because having multiple types of pastries to choose from is the height of luxury, I halved the recipe and used the remaining dough to make a blueberry lemon pull-apart bread from the same book. This turned out quite nice despite filling oozing all over the counter while preparing them; I used yogurt instead of crème fraîche (who just has that lying around) which probably made the filling a bit thinner. But the dough was easy to work with and created a lovely sweet bread with a texture similar to cinnamon buns. I decided to use up the rest of the peach glaze instead of making the thyme honey suggested in the recipe, which I’m sure would be delicious.
Media:
If you don’t follow twitter drama or keep up-to-date tabs on food trends, you maybe don’t remember a few weeks back, when the owner of a successful LA restaurant known for its house-made jam was blown apart on social media just as she was gearing up to release her cookbook. Former employees spoke out to a journalist about the working conditions and particularly to confirm that the jam was stored open in buckets and up to 2” of mold would regularly form on top, which they then scraped off before serving the jam to customers or jarring it for retail, because the owner had told them it was all standard practice and abided by the health code. This, disturbingly, went on for almost a decade, because the area where the jam was kept was part of an illegal kitchen she kept hidden from health inspectors. I enjoyed this related NYT piece about Black jam makers, which discusses the white mindsets and systemic practices that prevent Black (and other people of colour) creators from breaking into the craft food movement.
On a more cheerful note, this past week we finally got around to watching the short Netflix series Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. The cookbook it’s based on is one of the few that I’ve actually sat and read cover to cover, so I was sure I would love it, and as predicted, we kept pausing it to talk about things we were enjoying. At one point I paused so I could say to Jeff, “You know what I love about this show? How many fucking women are in it!” Making food is among the domestic tasks considered to be “for women” when done for free at home, but in the professional world, primarily, we see male chefs dominate, and it is they who are most valued, most successful, most respected. So it was very rewarding to see Samin Nosrat, a knowledgeable, creative, and delightful chef, interacting with women chefs and other women who are not chefs, but whose domestic talent and labour have contributed untold to the world of food. In a post-pandemic world, I would love to watch a Parts Unknown-style series with Samin Nosrat as the host; she is truly a joy to watch and it’s clear she has a real respect for people’s ways of life, the diversity of food, and learning new things.
Thanks for reading— if you enjoyed this newsletter, please share it with a friend! In closing, here’s a cat who does not respect vegetables.