Rare is the celebration of poetry, song, and offal combined. Allan Suddaby and Nomad Mobile [local food truck and caterer] hosted a Burns supper at the Yellowhead Brewery this week to celebrate haggis and Scottish culture. Lamb hearts, lungs, and liver from Tangle Ridge Ranch [Ep 15] that normally would be destined for the bin [Ep 28], are instead the feature. This was my first taste of a Burns supper, and it makes me wish more cultures had this kind of celebration more often. It was charming to see some of the older folks being touched by it all.
If you haven’t had haggis, I would recommend giving it a go. It furthered my interest in grinding off-cuts into other ground meat preparations – was chatting with some folks on Twitter this week about the prospects of a heart, tongue, and marrow burger, for example. How is it that that sounds decadent, when all of those pieces would often get thrown out? I’d bet money I could serve you a chili with tongue in it and you’d never know different. I’m already sold on spaghetti and beef-heart-meatballs. If my mother in law ever reads this, she’ll really, totally never ever want to come over and eat in my kitchen.
Dear whoever will read this, [this letter has been sent to the mayor and a number of city councillors]
I would like to add my voice to all the others asking the city for a non-essential or cosmetic pesticide ban.
I’m a local food writer heavily involved in the urban agriculture and foraging communities. I lead groups of Edmontonians to harvest backyard urban fruit with Operation Fruit Rescue Edmonton. I go on forays with the Alberta Mycological Society to harvest mushrooms that are abundant in our city. I guide a fruit foraging event for Slow Food Edmonton. I write about wild foods for the Alberta Conservation Association, many of these foods being abundant in our city limits. NAIT’s Culinary Arts program has me take students out foraging in the city to inspire them to use the foods around them. In all of these cases, broad use of pesticides is a concern. In fact, one of the most common objections to folks using the foods around our city is that they don’t want to touch them because they don’t know what kind of chemicals they’ve been sprayed with. That’s just sad, and a deterrent to our citizens connecting with the food around them – which seems to counter the spirit of the ‘Food and Urban Agriculture Project’.
I often hear the City of Edmonton talk about the desire to be a world-class city. Perhaps then we should share the same level of protection other municipalities have when it comes to ingesting pesticides. Perhaps we need to be progressive on this front rather than last on the uptake. Sports fields are nice, but so are food and health. If you think pesticides are safe to eat, by all means feel free to eat all you like, but please don’t force the rest of us to in the name of protecting jobs. - Sincerely, Kevin Kossowan
Applejack is a hard liquor of 20-30% abv that can only be made when it’s extremely cold out. For that, it is special to me. Its flavours and smells cannot be created in warmer climates – perhaps why the Normands don’t do applejack despite their apple-booze culture…they simply can’t. It’s extra special due to the fact that distilling booze to make spirits is illegal here – big time. But this isn’t. I spoke to 4 people at the AGLC [all strangely helpful and nice] before finding out if posting this would incriminate me. The guy at the top didn’t even know what applejack was, and had to look it up and get back to me. Apparently I am into the obscure. Clearly couldn’t be something they were enforcing if they didn’t even know what it was, no? Had to be sure though, and in the end, the authorities gave me the okay – but do check with the authorities in your jurisdiction prior to trying it, finding yourself in the slammer, and blaming it on me. Don’t do that.
You could try this with a full bodied white on the sweeter side if you want to give it a go and are short on cider [not a problem I have]. My one suggestion having done it is that you’d want to use as high quality an input as you can – use your good stuff, not your ‘this-sucks-but-maybe-if-I-Applejack-it-stuff’ – as it will concentrate the good, but also the bad. More, in the video.
This is a follow up to Episode 27, the reaction to which I must pause to thank you all for. I was more than slightly apprehensive in the days just prior to shooting it, fearful that if it didn’t go well, it could reflect badly on the subjects of the story. Turns out the result has been an outpouring of praise, appreciation, and value for the transparency, respect, and approach. I’m very grateful for you all and for having a brilliant individual to interview.
This is far…lighter, although still a serious topic near and dear to me: food waste. I left that day with 60-70 lbs of off-cuts from only 1 of the 5 cows killed, and it wasn’t even all the off-cuts. 100 lbs of edible ‘waste’ from one cow might be a good rough estimate. I’ll repeat myself to death that it’s the consumer demand that drives this waste. I’ll lump myself in there. I didn’t grow up eating heart, tripe, kidneys, caul fat, oxtail, etc – so I’m still learning about all this stuff too. But I now render all my lard from our annual pig, and easily use it all up. And I thoroughly enjoy roasted pig head which I would never have considered a few years ago. Pig skin crackling makes a regular appearance in my kitchen. There’s still a lot of an animal that I could learn to use better. So in this one, you get to see me make a dish with a bin cut that quite frankly should not be.
How did it taste? The flavour was intense and outstanding, and the mouthfeel unparalleled. For stews, I’m not sure there’s a better cut of beef. If the local restaurants don’t scoop this reject cut, I might, it’s that good. And for those that ‘don’t have the time’, please note how long it took to prepare.
When I buy sides of pork and beef from local farmers, it is quite plainly illegal for them to be killed in an un-inspected environment. Consequently, farmers bring their meat animals to one of the local meat processors/abattoirs and for a very reasonable fee, the processor does what’s called a ‘kill & chill’. Under supervision of a provincial meat inspector, they do the kill, gutting, skinning [or scraping for pigs], and chilling of the carcass. It’s important work, and I’m guessing it’s work that most retail customers are oblivious to, for a variety of reasons. You don’t want to know. Industry doesn’t want you do know. I think we should know.
In the poultry industry, kill plants have been shut down by increasing regulation over the years such that producers must now drive their poultry to the plant in St. Paul to have their birds processed – even if it takes hours and hours to drive there. The result is highly-stressed birds and significant loss of life in transit. Ask your local poultry producer about it. For whatever reason our local red meat processors have [thankfully] not met that same fate. We need to keep it that way. We need to better understand their role in our local food supply chain. We need to support these people that do our dirty work for us – and make no mistake, it’s the consumer that demands the dirty work be done.
Another theme I wanted to address is the amount of food that goes in the bin at the processor – by request of the consumer. Stock bones, oxtail, heart, liver, tongue, kidney, caul fat, tripe, pig heads, and loads more go in the bin because we don’t want it. It’s wasteful, disrespectful, and I think we’re due for a culture change in this regard.
This episode is graphic and not for everyone, so don’t watch it unless you want to see how a cow gets killed and processed. It’s a far too uncommon look at a critical part of the process of delivering meat to the table. I will be moderating the comments liberally.
Here’s something I wasn’t expecting. Back when building and planting cold frames I had written numerous times how I’d like to see a harvest from them in December. I thought that might be bold. I wondered if I’d have to eat my words. Then in early December, as my garden fork bounced off the frozen soil nearby, it slipped easily into the soil protected by the cold frame, and I dug up some carrots. Mission accomplished. But it didn’t end there.
In this strange spell of warm January weather, when I’d long accounted the arugula and spinach in the cold frames for dead, I noticed that amongst the mature leaves that had clearly been beaten by the cold, younger leaves had emerged, or better survived, or something – whatever the case, what you see in the photo was harvested January 6. This is a deal changer for me. My ‘dream date’ of December harvest has now been moved into January. And with new plants about to be seeded to be transplanted into the cold frames [I'm hoping in February], the gap of non-gardening season is awfully narrower than I had suspected – all without having to use fossil fuels to heat a greenhouse. I suppose that’s the kicker. If it’s a non-energy consumptive solution to growing more of our own fresh, extremely inexpensive, organic food, the cold frame seems like a rudimentary technology that needs some major revisiting, and a serious pat on the back.
I grew up hunting and gardening, abandoned them both as a young adult, then fell in love with both again later in life. Apparently, same goes for ice fishing. I have semi-fond memories of exhausty ski-doo-trailer rides on to the lake, sitting on a pail getting blasted by the elements, eye lashes freezing together, not catching much of anything, getting cold, and hearing stories about how at one time you caught way more and way bigger fish. When you’re a kid, those kind of stories are far from any form of consolation.
A friend of mine [who I met when shooting another video, coincidentally] invited me out ice fishing with him and a co-worker of his, and I just couldn’t say no. It’s January. In my usually busy food world, action had slowed. Gardening season was over. Hunting season was over. But ice fishing is just getting started. And I had a blast, despite it being a particularly slow day. Ice fishing is immeasurably more enjoyable when you’re protected from the elements in a shack, and more importantly, can see down the hole to watch the fish swim about. Add to that some camaraderie and wild-food action – I now get why folks enjoy it. I’m hooked. I want to go again.
Music courtesy of The AwesomeHots
I couldn’t help myself. A large piece of pork shoulder came out of the freezer, and all I could think was ‘rotisserie‘, shortly followed by ‘I want to shoot that‘. I figure one thing better than watching the fireplace channel is watching a fire AND a chunk of pork shoulder turning away on a spit. It will also serve as a reminder that I do not rotisserie nearly enough, not even close. I fell in love with rotisserie’d pork and chicken long ago in Belgium, and partook in both when I was there again in September. They know rotisserie. Combine that with good beer, and it’s one of the many reasons I keeping going back to Belgium. Every time I pull the spit out I kick myself for it having been so long. Perhaps that should be my new year’s resolution for 2012: more rotisserie, lots more.
The shoulder was started in a lidded earthenware crock, in the oven with some carrot, onion, sage, and apple wine – 180C for 2-3 hours. The idea here was to let it break down in the oven, and to finish it on the fire. Worked a charm. I will most certainly be doing the same again. And the days I’m not setting up the rotisserie, I can now sit back and watch.
I recommend watching the vid below with a beer in hand.
When we butchered pigs back in mid-October, one pig face was allocated to dry curing [details here], and today it came down from its hook in the cellar – 2 months later. I’ve successfully cured a number of jowls, and was keen to see how this one turned out as it lacked the slashes we’ve had from processor-butchered jowls, and I had also left cheek muscle, and other muscles in the preparation – you can see the dark cheek meat on the left. The simple conclusion is that it’s darned lovely, period.
I’ve admitted before that I’ll take a well made bacon over guanciale, generally speaking, but I’m certainly starting to see the appeal to this piece of charcuterie. The dry curing gives it some complexity and intellect that bacon can lack – bacon’s strength is pure hedonism, it’s not so much about the brains. The dry curing brings some mystery to the table – some light funk and earthiness. Some drama.
What to do with it? Lunch was fried lardons of dry cured pig face, onion, and tomato sauce – classic pasta all’Amatriciana, really. So tasty. I get why this dish is a classic – the dry cured pork has a chance to show its character. Of all dry curing, this one seems like a good bet if you’re thinking of trying your hand at it. Seems consistently successful and presents few challenges if any. Except maybe, for finding yourself a pig head in the first place.
My highlight reel of ‘From Local Farms‘ videos was just chosen by Daniel and Mirra of The Perennial Plate as a top-four contender in their recent video competition. I’m honored to be on the list, to say the least. The very reason I started a video series at all was directly because of Daniel and Mirra’s earliest episodes – inspiring me to pick up a cheap Flip camera, introduce myself to some farmers, and press some record button. My life, quite literally, has not been the same since.
So a big thank you goes out today to Daniel, Mirra, all the passionate farmers, and especially to you for taking the time to watch what other folks have to say about our food world. You plugging into and supporting projects like The Perennial Plate matters – it creates cracks in a food culture needing to evolve.
Please click over here to like the video on facebook, and vote for it too while you’re at it. If the vid wins the day, it will replace the regular programming of The Perennial Plate next Monday, exposing it to a very large viewership of like minded folks across many borders. That would be very cool. Even if it doesn’t, big thanks to Daniel and Mirra for your support of what I’m up to and sharing your audience.