Half Pints’ Burly Wine Day

Yesterday morning, even though it was a Saturday, we set our alarms for early and managed to get out of the house before 9am. (Trust me, that’s a miracle for us for Saturdays after the time change. Winter = sleepy.) What rousted us from our warm bed so early? Why, beer!

We visited the Half Pints Brewing Company’s Burly Wine day and open house. The Burly Wine, which has gotten some rave reviews, was available in the 2009 variety, along with a small selection of 2008s and 2008s aged over bourbon chips.

Burly Wine is a barley wine, or a very strong ale. They have rather high alcohol content, and actually improve with age (rather than going “skunky.”)

We managed to get to the brewery on Roseberry a bit after 9:30am and got in line. We snagged four bottles of the 2009, two of the 2008, and six of the 2008 bourbon. We also grabbed a six of Half Pints’ seasonal beer, Sweet Nikki Brown.

After we secured our goods, we made for the tasting room to sample the beer we’d just purchased. Whew, that stuff is strong! I admit to liking my beers a bit less – uh, robust. For comparison, St. James Pale Ale is right up my alley. But I can see the Burly Wine being more of a sipping beer rather than a drinking beer. This is a beer that you enjoy slowly over the course of an evening… Almost out of necessity. (I admit to being a cheap drunk.) My husband, however, LOVES the Burly Wine, and is already figuring out how to portion out the bottles in order to age them in the most efficient manner.

Then we went on a tour with the Brewmaster for Half Pints, Dave. He called the company a home brew operation that got out of hand, and you can tell in the way he shows people around. He takes pride in every step along the way, and happily answered all of our questions about the brewing process. As my husband put it, “I enjoyed the tour because it was presented in the enthusiastic manner of somebody who obviously loves his craft, showing off his favourite toys.”

I asked if they were planning on doing a lambic anytime soon, since I love lambic beers so much. He said that he would like to do a lambic, but that they were really labour intensive. If they do come up with one, I’d really like to try it!

Anyway, we had fun, and we’ll try to make it back for next year’s Burly Wine day.

Fresh Option Organic Delivery

With the seasonal closing of the St. Norbert Farmers’ Market last weekend, and having put the garden to sleep earlier in October, we decided to take the plunge and sign up for something we’ve been interested in for a while: the Fresh Option Organic Delivery service.

Fresh Option delivers boxes of fruits and vegetables to your door weekly (or bi-weekly if you prefer). I’ve been interested in this service for quite a while, but we just didn’t think we could eat the veggies from the garden and the stuff from the farmers’ market and whatever was delivered! But now that we’re into winter (sort of), we decided to try it out.

It’s sort of like a pot luck for vegetables. Fresh Option posts the contents of your upcoming box on their website a few days in advance, allowing you time to plan your meals and research foods you haven’t tried before (for example, our first box will contain chard). We opted to get the small box once a week, and I’m surprised at how much stuff we’re going to get. If we go a few weeks and it looks like we’re getting too much food, we’ll scale it back to once every other week.

It’s also requiring us to shift when we do our meal planning, since we ordinarily go grocery shopping on Sundays. This first week, though, I’m using the few days leeway as a chance to get “caught up” and use up the veggies that we already have on hand: namely, almost a whole bag of onions. (French onion soup it is!)

When spring rolls around, the farmers’ market opens and the garden starts producing more zucchini than I know what to do with again, we will most likely cancel the service until the fall again. But until then, we’re looking at this as a challenge – can we use up all the fruits and veggies in once week? If anything, it’ll encourage us to get more veggies in our diet!

I’ll post again in a few weeks with an update as to how it’s going.

Last Farmers’ Market of the Year

Saturday was the last market of the year in St. Norbert. The promised that they’d be open until Halloween this year, and they delivered – even if the choice of vendors was a bit slim due to the late date and cold weather.

When we go to the market, our bags usually look like this when we leave: about 75% veggies and fruit, 15% prepared foods (pierogies, breads, cider, etc), and 10% meat. On this last trip to the market, we bought a stack of vinartarta from Kyle, one eggplant, and the rest of our money went towards meat.

Meat! It freezes well, so this seemed like a great way to enjoy the fruits of the market further into the winter. We bought two pounds of bacon, which I divided into six-slice packages for freezing. We got two veal flank steaks, and we picked up a bison roast that will be experiencing the crock pot thing today.

This was a great year for the market, at least from the customer’s point of view. Our garden did so poorly this summer (more on that later) that the market felt like a godsend for providing local tomatoes when mine failed badly.

We’ll miss you, St. Norbert’s Farmers’ Market! See you next year!

Russian Blue Smashed Potatoes

So, remember those Russian Blue potatoes that we found at the farmers’ market? (And the vendor still has lots! I can’t remember their name, though; they are usually along the southernmost row of stands at the St. Norbert Farmers’ Market.)

Anyway, I’ve made a lot of things with these blue potatoes, just to see how they look in different formats. The steak fries were really interesting, although the browning they got sort of muted the blue colour. Making potato and leek soup was – well, it tasted great, but the soup turned out an odd greenish-brown colour.

But! When I made smashed potatoes, I think I have found my most favourite thing to do with these potatoes. I just love the lavender colour.

I never make mashed potatoes anymore, by the way. Peeling a potato just feels like I’m sending the best part to the compost pile. And who has time to whip potatoes into smooth submission anymore, anyhow?

I also don’t use a recipe, typically, and prefer to eyeball things. So here’s how it usually goes, with amounts estimated. Adjust everything here to your taste!

* About 1lb Russian Blue potatoes
* 1 to 2TB butter
* 1/4 to 1/2 cup sour cream
* less than 1/4 cup milk – maybe a few tablespoons
* salt and pepper

Wash the potatoes and cut out any eyes or soft spots. Cut the potatoes into 1/2″ chunks. In a large pot, cover the potatoes with water and bring to a boil. Cook until the potatoes are soft. Drain.

Put the pot back over high heat for about a minute. Flip the potatoes around in the pot to dry them off just a bit. Remove from heat. Add butter, sour cream and milk, all to taste, while mashing with a potato masher. Mash them good! You’re looking to break up all of the big chunks of potato, and to make sure the butter, milk and sour cream get thoroughly mixed through. You are not looking for silky creaminess. If you wanted that, you should have peeled the potatoes! :)

Add salt and pepper to taste. If you want, add some freshly chopped chives as well.

Chanterelles on Toast

Remember those chanterelles? I’m here to tell you their fate!

I did massive searches for recipes that used chanterelles. Boy, there sure are a lot out there! But I already had an idea of what I wanted. I wanted the mushrooms to stand on their own, and not have to compete with a cream sauce, for instance, or a strong-tasting cheese. I also wanted simple, because our schedule has been a bit hectic lately.

In the end, I found exactly what I wanted: a fresh-tasting dish that highlighted the taste of the chanterelles, but without a lot of fuss.

This was so simple and easy, but my husband summed the taste up when he said, “Wow. This tastes like something you’d get at a really expensive restaurant.” If we can find more chanterelles at the market this weekend, I’d like to pick more up so I can try this again. So good!

You will need:
* a loaf of crusty french bread
* 1/2 lb yellow chanterelle mushrooms
* 1/2 an onion, diced
* olive oil
* 1 TB cream (I just used half-n-half)
* about 1/8 cup chopped fresh parsley (or four sprigs or so)
* salt and pepper

Slice four nice, thick pieces of bread from the loaf. Don’t use the heel! In a large frying pan, heat about 2 TB olive oil over medium heat. Toast the bread in the frying pan. When one side is golden, add more olive oil to the pan and flip the toast pieces. (Watch them carefully – some of mine got a bit *too* toasty, if you know what I mean.)

Meanwhile, clean the chanterelles with a damp cloth. Quarter them lengthwise, and then chop into pieces about 1″ wide or long.

Heat a medium frying pan over high heat. When the pan is hot, toss in the chopped chanterelles and stir, stir, stir! You can add a bit of salt at this point if you’d like.

Doing this dry saute will drive a lot of moisture out of the mushrooms. You can spoon off the water if you’d like (apparently it makes awesome mushroom stock) but I didn’t get enough to bother saving. I just left my water in the pan – it was probably about two tablespoons or so.’

Once no more water is cooking out of the mushrooms, add the onions and stir. Cook the mushrooms and onions until the onions start to get soft. Add a sprinkle of salt and a few twists of fresh-ground pepper. Add the parsley and stir to combine. Add the cream and remove from heat. Continue stirring until the cream is completely incorporated.

Spoon the mushroom mixture over your toasted bread. Serve hot.

Food, Inc. showing at Cinematheque

Colour me thrilled! The documentary Food, Inc. will be showing in Winnipeg! I first heard about this movie before it opened in the States, but when I scanned their list of dates there were no Canadian dates listed. I wasn’t too surprised, since it is an American movie about the American food industry, but still…

Check out the trailer:

The Canadian food system is very similar to the American system, but they aren’t identical. The Canadian system does some things better, and some things worse. I would also warn against taking everything in this documentary as gospel; it’s quite easy to take a truth and twist it to your own view.

Anyway, I am very excited that this movie is finally coming to Winnipeg. It will be showing at Cinematheque on the following days:

* Fri Sep 18, 2009 at 7:00 PM
* Sat Sep 19, 2009 at 7:00 PM
* Sun Sep 20, 2009 at 2:00 PM
* Wed Sep 23, 2009 at 9:30 PM
* Thu Sep 24, 2009 at 9:00 PM

If you’re at all interested in where the food in your supermarket comes from, how it was made and who was involved in its creation, I encourage you to take in this movie.

Farmers’ Market Finds: Fungi and Potatoes

One of the things that I simply love about going to the farmers’ market is the sheer variety of stuff you can find. A walk through the market on a crisp fall morning will reveal a wealth of squashes, heirloom tomatoes, oddball cauliflowers (I like the orange ones), and meats you simply can’t find at the grocery store.

Now, mainstream supermarkets are getting better, to a point, in the variety they carry. You can now find lemongrass and starfruit and bok choi at a well-stocked supermarket, things that you had to get from speciality stores a few years ago.

But there are still things that I’ve only found at the farmer’s market. We picked two of them up this week.

The first are these Russian Blue potatoes. They’re really quite neat. The colour remains after you cook them, so you can get some interesting shades in your dishes. They’re also a fairly firm, starchy potato, and can be used in place of russets for most recipes. (Even better, they aren’t like beets – the colour won’t transfer to the cutting board and the table and your shirt and the cat…)

The second neat thing we got were these chanterelles. We’d seen evidence of chanterelles before: a sign and an empty box, with an apologetic seller standing next to it. But this week we got up early. This week we made it to the market not too long after it opened. This week… We got to the chanterelles before they all disappeared.

This week I’ll tell you about what we did with our loot!

Farmers’ Feast at St. Norbert Farmers’ Market

On Sept. 23, 2009, the St. Norbert Farmers’ Market will be holding a Farmers’ Feast at 6:30pm.

The Farmers’ Feast will feature top chefs and local food, along with several local food and beverage companies, such as Tall Grass Prairie Bakery, Green Bean Coffee Imports and Half Pints Brewing Company. The price is $35 per person, and if you bring your own wine glass you get a voucher for a free glass of wine or beer. There is a list of places where you can buy tickets on the website.

Now, the website doesn’t say what you get for your $35. I would love to see a menu, or at least some indication of how it will be set up. (Will it be a sit-down affair, or will you move between the participating companies trying their food?) The concept sounds great right now, but I’d love to see more detail.

Grilled and Butterflied Chicken

Like I said earlier, I’m not the grillmaster in our house. That title belongs to my husband. However, I do enjoy coming up with interesting things for him to grill.

We really like doing roast chicken during the winter. One chicken will get us about two meals, plus 6-8 cups of rich, homemade chicken broth. But it’s way too hot during the summer (well, usually) to think about turning on the oven for the length of time it takes to cook a chicken.

So when I wandered across an episode of Good Eats in which Alton butterflies a chicken, I was intrigued. The concept is simple: instead of leaving the chicken all “bunched up” (you know, looking like a regular chicken), you could speed up the cooking process by “spreading out” the chicken so that the heat was more evenly distributed.

A little Googling found me a video that explained very clearly how to make a chicken lay flat (even better than Alton’s explanation. Whoa!). A word of warning about the video: it’s not for the vegetarian. You are doing a bit of custom butchering on your bird, and that involves crunching kitchen scissors through bones.

(Man, he makes it look easy. I always forget that part about cutting through the gristle at the top of the keel bone.)

Anyway, once you have the chicken flattened, it becomes a dream to grill. Now, our experience with the chickens had a fair amount of trial and error in it. Our biggest lesson is evident in this photo.

This bird? Tasted awesome, but it was a bit charred. The grease from the bird caused some flare-ups. After a trying a few different things, my husband eventually hit on using a lower temperature (increasing the cooking time a bit), and using a syringe filled with water to knock down any flare-ups. We’ve ended up with one perfect bird so far: perfectly crisped skin that isn’t burn, and moist, juicy meat. Unfortunately we were hungry that night, so I didn’t get a photo.

What you put under the skin is really up to you, but we have found a favourite.

What you’ll need:
* olive oil
* salt
* coarse ground pepper
* 2 tsp dried rosemary
* 1 or 2 cloves minced garlic
* one chicken (3-4 pounds is good for two meals for two people.)

In a small bowl, mix together 1/2 tsp salt, 1/2 tsp pepper, the rosemary and garlic. Add enough olive oil to form a nice paste. Set aside.

Prepare the chicken. Remove the back and keel bone, and lay flat. Salt the inside of the bird and rub with olive oil.

Loosen the skin over the breasts and thighs. Spoon the rosemary mixture under the skin. Sprinkle the skin with salt and rub with olive oil. Massage the rosemary mixture around under the skin with your finger tips.

Heat grill to 325-350°F. Carefully lay the chicken on the grill, skin-side down. Cook for 20 minutes. Use a syringe (or a baster) filled with water to knock down any flare-ups from dripping oil or fat.

Using two wads of paper towels, grab the legs and flip the bird skin-side up. Be prepared for flare-ups! Cook for another 20 minutes.

Using a tip-sensitive thermometer, check that the chicken has reached 160°F in the breast and 170°F in the thigh. Remove the chicken from the grill, cover with foil, and let rest for 10 minutes. (The internal temperature should rise to 165°F in that time.)

The Strawberries are Here!

On our trip to the farmers’ market this weekend, we made a wonderful discovery…

Strawberries are in season!!

There were several vendors there with strawberries, so we picked up a box (which is about four liters). Strawberries don’t last for very long after they’re picked, so we’ve been using them quickly. This batch became strawberry shakes, strawberries on sponge cake, fruit salad, and just plain old raw strawberries. Yum!

This also means that the U-Pick places are up and running. They’re a bit behind this year because of the rain, but the berries at the market looked awesome. I detailed one of our trips to Boonstra Farms for Foodtv.ca, but there are tons of other U-Pick places around Winnipeg and southern Manitoba.

The Manitoba government publishes a brochure for U-Pick places (pdf), and you can also check PickYourOwn.org, a great place for all things U-Pick. That site also has great tips for picking and storing your fruits and veggies. *edit: Ruth in the comments also suggested the Prairie Fruit Growers Association website, which looks like a great resource as well. Thanks, Ruth!

We’d like to get out and do picking for something other than strawberries this year – I’m thinking raspberries would be a neat change of pace.

Have you gone picking yet this year? What did you get?