Fall joy

Well the last month has been a whirlwind. The main food-related highlight was my visit to Whittamore's farm in Markham, near the Rouge River with Greg, Michelle, and Arthur. They usually have pick-your-own berries, and we went there looking for some late season strawberries and raspberries. Alas, we were too late and the first frost had just happened a few days before, killing off the last crop.

We did, however, race wheelbarrows with a mom and her kid, pick up some pumpkins and amazing honeycrisp apples, and stuff our faces with farmfresh cheese curds, biscuits, rye crackers, and onion jam. Even if you think onion jam sounds gross, you should give it a try. Think caramelized onions with sugar added till they're gooey, and spread across a cracker with some aged cheddar. A-ma-zing.

And now for photos of said adventure...

Pretty pumpkins from the pumpkin patch:

Me, showcasing my amazing picture-ruining talents:
Me and Arthur, mid-wheelbarrow race:
Tiny pioneery-lookin' church on the property:Greg looking sad because the berries are all dead. We actually ate a couple of full-sized-but-still-green strawberries that had been sheltered from the frost by leaves, and they were delicious! I can only imagine that they would have been amazing given the opportunity to ripen.
Leaving Whittamore's:Then we went to Michelle's parents beautiful home in Scarborough, where I rolled in the leaves:Mrs. Hilscher was nice enough to supply us with bundles of her homegrown chard:And then we finally arrived back downtown with all our booty:All in all, a lovely fall foodventure. Up next, butternut squash madness!

For some reason I've been baking like mad the last week. I baked two brownies, mint chocolate cupcakes and a cake of the same (these were a pretty big hit) and then for my friend's birthday today I made a double layer chocolate cake with creamy peanutbutter frosting. The cake and frosting recipe both came out of the Sinfully Vegan cookbook, which has so far not steered me wrong.
I made the two cake pieces last night. Then I cut off the rounded tops and frosted the first half and added chopped dark chocolate and peanuts:
Then I added the top layer and finished frosting. I used a plastic bag with a hole cut in it to frost around the top edge (which in the end was a little much, decoration wise). I covered the top with more chopped chocolate and peanuts and then pressed the remaining chopped peanuts to the sides of the cake. In the end it looked like this:
And damn was it tasty!

Emily

P.S. sorry for the crappy photos. I'll figure out how to take better indoor food photos one of these days. Also my camera lens is kind of dirty and I have nothing to clean it with.

I have been massively out-flogged lately... but I will now break my long silence for pizza and brownies.

I am back in room-mate land again, living with Katie in a lovely, homey uptown apartment whose windows offer a beautiful vantage of fights outside the Fox and Fiddle. I am once again nice and close to my friends and we've had some pretty good dinners and potlucks here in the last couple months.
Tonight Katie, Owen and I made pizza and peanutbutter brownies. Both turned out delicious!

The pizza, on homemade whole wheat crust, had tomatoes, sundried tomatoes, green pepper, artichoke hearts, black olives, hot peppers and caramelized onion. One side with smothered in the "teese" I bought in Portland. Vegan cheese generally sucks a lot but teese is pretty not bad and if you turn up the heat enough it actually melts. It tastes pretty passably like mozzarella. The other half had some goat cheese on it.


The peanut-butter brownie recipe came from the cookbook "Sinfully Vegan" and was dense, chewy chocolately deliciousness. The peanutbutter swirl part is peanutbutter, maple syrup and silken tofu whipped together in the food processor then swirled into the brownie batter with a knife.

Final harvest and this week's farm share

It's getting cold! Darn. Yesterday we decided that it was time to grab all of the remaining veggies out of the garden before it got frosty. Most of these are green tomatoes that haven't had time to mature due to the late start and sadly on-time end to the growing season. This year we tried growing a couple of heirloom varieties in the garden: Costolutu Genovese (the bumpy ones, good for sauce), and some Yellow Perfection (the rounder ones, good for eating fresh). We've also got a few beans and cucumbers left. We're hoping to ripen some of the tomatoes on the windowsill (my mom's idea) and probably just eat the rest green. Ed's aunt Katie says that they're good breaded and fried. Any other suggestions? Also, if anyone in the area wants some green tomatoes, we've got plenty, as you can see. Behold baskets one and two:
And basket three, post-washing:
Finally, it was farm share Friday today, and I took my new cargo bike trailer (pictures to come) to go pick up our share. This week, we've got celery, kale, eggplants, shelling beans, cooking onions, serrano peppers, cauliflower, butternut squash (yay!), raspberries (double yay!), German butterball potatoes, and cherry tomatoes.

Time to go eat!

Packhorses and Prep

Last Friday I was left by my lonesome to pick up the farm share by my variously busy housemates. I decided it was time to see if my new touring bike (a 2009 Jamis Aurora) is up to the task of carrying a big load for a reasonable distance. The results, as you can see, were largely successful.

Here's the steel horsey, freshly returned from her big trip:
These Ortlieb waterproof panniers are my absolute favourite bike touring equipment. They just stink of efficient German quality. The straps are in all the right places, there are just enough pockets for a good amount of organization with a huge inner compartment, and the mounting hardware leaves me speechless. If you're ever wondering if it's worth shelling out the extra coin for them, it absolutely is. Oh man. I'll leave it at that.

A hint at the bounty stored inside...
And a shot of the actual bounty. Behold this week's cornucopia! Watermelon, beets, celery, kale, chard, corn, russet potatoes, roma tomatoes, blue potatoes, and a dozen organic free range eggs.
And as a last word, my best kitchen experiences are always prefaced by prepping everything first. Things go so much smoother if you set out and pre-chop/grate/slice/measure/etc. stuff into bowls before you have to cook it all, and it also appeals to my insane love of organization and containers. Tonight, Ed and I kind of went overboard with prep to make Manjula's cabbage kofta.

By the by - if you haven't yet discovered the pleasure of Manjula's kitchen, go to her website NOW! Every time she opens a recipe video with "Namaste, my name is Manjula" our voices all ring out with "Hello Manjula!". Just try and stop yourself from doing it, I dare you!

Happy cooking, friends!

Taming of the Bar-be-shrew

It's corn season!
As the demise of BBQ-friendly weather looms closer, the 116 Oxfordites have decided to send it off in style.
We boiled some beets, sliced them up and tossed them with olive oil and salt and pepper, and then wrapped them up in foil and let them join some fresh corn on the grill. Serve beets with peppered Ontario goat cheese = pure win.And to usher in the beginning of autumn and the receipt of apples from our farmshare, we made applesauce! Peel n' slice em'...Add some water...Add some brown sugar...Nutmeg, cinnamon, and cayenne (this was an experiment)...Let reduce on high heat...

Turned out kinda thick, and we might have burned it a tiiiiiny bit (poor poor pot), but it is super-amazing when thinned out with some water.
Hope you're all enjoying the fruits of the season, and the beautiful fall weather. I personally can't wait to see more fall produce- squash especially.

The return of the p-flog (picture food web log)

I'm back in Toronto with a new camera, and that means the return of the traditional Mind Grapes entry format where I cook something with my housemates, take pictures of it, and hope that our 3 readers care.

Tonight, we turned this:

Into this:
And this:
Which lead to these happy faces:
I was there too!
For the cucumber soup:

1) Saute a cup of chopped onion in butter/olive oil/margarine/etc.
2) Add 2 cups of veggie broth, 2 cups of diced cucumbers, 1 cup of diced potato, 1 cup of chopped parsley or watercress, salt, pepper, and 1 tbsp of dijon mustard, and cook on medium heat until the potatoes are tender.
3) Remove from heat and use a blender (immersion or otherwise) to puree the mixture. Add water if there's not enough.
4) Put back on low heat and add about 1 cup of cream/milk/soymilk/etc. to taste.

For the seitan stroganoff:

Check out the post-punk kitchen website or Isa Moskowitz' amazing cookbook.

P-flog is back, bitchez!

P.S. You'll notice that the smiling face on the right is new to the p-flog. It's Jessica, one my greatest old friends from yesteryear, and she has just moved to Toronto. More precisely, she has just moved into my house. Let the p-flangels (picture food web log angels) rejoice!

P.P.S. I'm probably taking portmanteauing to a new and undesirable level, so I'll stop now.