Newspaper Column - TOMATO MINT SALAD

Published in the Saskatoon Star Phoenix, 20 May 2008.

Curiosity got the best of me. I have often seen the mayor and his wife strolling the aisles of the Saskatoon Farmers’ Market and wondered, What do they buy? What does the mayor think as he wanders the market that he envisioned for the untapped potential of south downtown? How does it fit with his vision for Riversdale revitalization? And why is he always wearing a suit? Isn’t Saturday morning a bit early for a suit? Apparently not when you’re the mayor.

When I recently made arrangements to meet Mayor Don Atchison and his wife Mardele at the farmers’ market, he came dressed in a colourful pinstripe shirt and casual pants. He only wears a suit, he says, when he’s dashing to official functions and Mardele insists they stop at the market on the way. As it turns out, they are big fans of the farmers’ market.

“We always try to buy local,” says the mayor. “Mardele is a wonderful cook, as you can tell by looking at me.” It could also be his favourite sugar cookies, to which he makes a beeline the minute we walk in the market door. Mardele’s first purchase is a bunch of fresh-cut pussy willows. She is on the hunt for mint, and for that we head outside.

Since early May, many of the market vendors have moved their stalls outside onto the new paving stone patio. The big overhead doors of the market (it used to be a garage) are open to the fresh air and sunshine. People drink coffee on park benches and the lineup at Grandora Gardens is a block long. A typical summery day at the market.

“I have Middle Eastern blood in me, so I cook with lentils a lot,” says Mardele. “Lentils and brown rice and plain yogurt and a ton of mint. Mint goes in everything.” She tells a wonderful story about her grandmother’ dolmades, a Middle Eastern finger food wrapped in grape leaves. She remembers picking grape leaves with her grandmother at the Forestry Farm in Saskatoon.
“They had incredible grape vines and we would take bags and pick leaves. I was such a little girl but that memory comes racing back.”

The mayor grew up on a traditional prairie diet of meat and potatoes, fresh vegetables and oatmeal cookies. He remembers family outings to the Simpkins farm to buy vegetables in season. All these years later, he still shops from the Simpkins at the farmers’ market.

As we stroll the market, the mayor is stopped by friendly faces to shake his hand and say hello. He takes a lot of pride in the farmers’ market which, in 2007, was the first project to establish itself in the new River Landing development (followed recently by Persephone Theatre). They mayor was supportive of the new farmers’ market, not just because he’s crazy for local vegetables, but because it serves as a magnet to draw people from all over the city to River Landing, a bridge that connects the more affluent parts of Saskatoon with its poorer neighbourhoods on the west side.

He points out that the price of homes near the market has tripled. Patronage at the farmers’ market has also boomed since it moved to Riversdale. “It shows that people believe this is a healthy community again. It’s vibrant and it’s going to be even better,” he says. “The important thing is that Riversdale and downtown are joined together just as it was 102 year ago.”

The market is still surrounded by construction and traffic is congested by roadwork, but sitting on the park bench in the sunshine with the mayor and his wife, it’s easy to believe that vegetables (and cookies and mint) are vital to the future of downtown Saskatoon.

In keeping with Mardele's heritage, here's a salad with Middle Eastern overtones. For more Middle Eastern recipes with Saskatchewan ingredients, click on the label "Middle Eastern" below.

Tomato Mint Salad
2 tomatoes, quartered
1 pita bread
1/4 white or red onion
2 tbsp fresh mint
2 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp lemon juice
Salt and pepper

Slice tomatoes and pita into bite-sized wedges. Slice onion into paper-thin wedges. Toss onions with tomatoes and bread. Chop mint and stir into tomato mixture. Whisk together olive oil and lemon juice. Add a pinch of salt and pepper. Toss dressing with salad. Marinate 5 minutes and serve.

Stop and smell - er- eat the flowers STUFFED ZUCCHINI FLOWERS

This article first appeared in the Saskatoon Star Phoenix on 27 August 2007.

Summer is not over yet, so there’s still time to stop and eat the flowers. That’s right – some flowers are just as lovely on the palate as on the nose. Just imagine, if they look pretty in the garden, how charming flowers can be in a salad, sprinkled on strawberry shortcake or stirred into a sauce.

Take, for instance, those little carnations called pinks. Recently, I made devilled eggs for a backyard party and topped each one with a pretty pink. It turned an ordinary appetizer into a conversation piece. I also throw pinks into green salads, along with tiny tangerine marigolds, peppery nasturtiums and beautiful blue borage flowers. Perhaps the radishes and arugula in your garden are past their prime? You can get a second harvest from them – a harvest of flowers. In fact, the flowers of many herbs and vegetables are edible, such as the flowers of basil, scarlet runner beans and summer squash.

A couple of summers ago, I ventured into the Nesbit Forest south of Prince Albert to pick wild rose petals with Marie Symes-Grehan, who turns them into lovely pink jellies and syrups. We picked the rose petals in the morning, after the dew had lifted, dropping them into soft cotton bags and later, we sorted out the leaves and broken petals on Marie’s big kitchen table. That evening, she made a batch of jelly full of suspended pink petals. Marie sells her syrups and conserves under the label Lily Plain Summer, which are particularly popular at the Granville Island Market in Vancouver. (http://www.lilyplain.com/).

Rose petals have a long tradition in Middle Eastern cuisine for flavouring syrups and pastries. Edible flowers were also popular in Victorian times but fell out of favour until now, when they’re making a comeback on swank dinner tables from London to L.A. The list of edible flowers includes some popular garden varieties such as pansies, day lilies, roses and tulips, this latter described on one website as tasting of “sweet lettuce, fresh baby peas.” A word of caution: Not all flowers taste good and some are not good for you. Please do your own research before experimenting with edible flowers, and never eat a flower from a flower shop or one that may have been sprayed with a chemical.

My favourite culinary flower is the zucchini. In Mediterranean cuisine, they may be stuffed and deep-fried, laid decoratively on top of a quiche or stirred into risotto. Pick them in the morning when they’re open so it’s easier to remove the stamen or pistil inside the flower. Sometimes, I pick baby zucchini when the flower is still attached and cook them together. This also cuts down on the number of giant zucchini to contend with later. As always, I try as much as possible, to set my table with the foods of Saskatchewan and that includes flowers – both in a vase and on my plate.

DEEP FRIED ZUCCHINI FLOWERS
1 slice good dry bread
1 cup milk
2 tbsp chopped fresh basil
2 tbsp grated Parmesan cheese
Fat 1/2 cup water
Scant 1/2 cup flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
6 zucchini flowers
Canola oil

Cut the crusts off the bread and tear it into small pieces. Cover the bread with milk and soak 30 minutes. Drain and discard the milk, squeeze out the bread and mix it with the basil and cheese.
Meanwhile, stir together the water, flour, baking powder and salt. Add more water if needed to reach the consistency of a thin pancake batter. Let sit 30 minutes.
Carefully spoon a bit of the bread mixture into each flower. Twist the tips of the flower to close.
Heat the oil on medium high. Use enough oil so the flowers will float and not stick to the bottom of the pan. When the oil is shimmering, roll the flowers in the batter, drain excess and drop into the oil. Do this in batches so the flowers don’t stick together. Brown on both sides and remove to a paper towel. Sprinkle with salt and enjoy.

Hanley Bread Series #5 - LAND-LOCKED CAESAR SALAD

My garden romaine is ready for eating so what else but a Caesar salad. A true Caesar salad has anchovies in it, which I don’t normally have in my fridge, so you might call this version a Land-Locked Caesar. It’s part of the “Hanley Bread Series” – what to do with the free loaf of bread you get for filling up at the gas station in Hanley, Saskatchewan, especially if that loaf of bread sits in your car for a day or two before you get home to use it. For more recipes in the Hanley Bread Series, click the label at the bottom of this post.

LAND-LOCKED CAESAR SALAD
1 egg yolk, room temp.
1½ tbsp lemon juice
1 large clove of garlic, chopped
½ tsp Worcestershire sauce
½ tbsp Dijon mustard
¼ tsp salt
A few grinds of black pepper
½ cup canola oil
½ cup grated Parmesan cheese
Romaine lettuce

CROUTONS
Three or four slices of day-old bread
1 big sprig of fresh oregano or parsley
1 big clove of garlic
A few tbsp olive or canola oil

In a blender, mix together the egg yolk, lemon juice, garlic clove, Worcestershire, mustard, salt and pepper until smooth. With the blades running on low, drizzle in the olive oil. When it is thoroughly mixed, pour the dressing into a bowl and stir in half the cheese. Do this ahead of time so the flavours can mingle.

Cut the crusts off the bread and cut the bread into small cubes. In a mortar and pestle (or with a fork) crush together the garlic and oregano until mashed. Stir in enough vegetable oil that it will coat the bread but not make it soggy. Toast the bread cubes in a skillet until browned.

Tear up the romaine and toss with the dressing. If the dressing has become thick, you can thin it with a few drops of milk. A few minutes before serving, toss in the bread cubes and sprinkle on the remaining parmesan cheese.

Hanley Bread Series #4 - RHUBARB & LINGONBERRY BREAD PUDDING

Those in the know always stop for gas when they drive by Hanley, Saskatchewan, because you get a free loaf of homemade bread just for filling up. This is the fourth in a series of recipes to make with day-old Hanley bread.

1½ cups rhubarb cut in small pieces
½ cup lingonberries (low bush cranberries)
½ cup sugar
3 eggs
1 cup half-and-half cream
1 tbsp orange juice or orange liquor
½ tsp cinnamon
4 cups bread cut in ½–1 in. pieces

Toss together the rhubarb, lingonberries (fresh or frozen) and sugar. In another bowl, whip together the eggs, half-and-half cream, orange juice and cinnamon. Stir the fruit into the egg mixture, then stir in the bread to coat well. Pour the bread mixture into a baking dish. Bake at 375F for 40 minutes.

Newspaper Column - HANLEY BREAD SALAD

Published in the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix, 23 May 2007.

Shopping reward programs are a complete nuisance, as far as I am concerned, unless the reward is instant and edible. Take, for example, a loaf of bread. In Hanley, 60 km south of Saskatoon, the reward for filling up at the Prairie View Gas Station is a free loaf of bread, white or whole wheat. I take this opportunity every time I visit my family just down the highway at Craik.

The bread is not always fresh, since it may have been baked the day before, but it’s big and solid like grandma used to make, and is therefore just as useful a few days later for French toast, grilled cheese sandwiches and bread pudding. But lately I have been using it to make bread salads. Bread salads are a tasty and convenient way to use up day-old bread, which was important in times past before most bread was made in a factory and treated with preservatives to keep it fresh. In Italy, bread salad is called panzanella. In Greece it’s dakos. In Lebanon and Syria, it’s called fattoush. The most common bread salad in Saskatoon is undoubtedly the Caesar Salad, but those hard little croutons that come out of a box hardly qualify as bread in my books.

A few years ago, I produced a documentary on homemade bread for the CBC radio program Ideas, for which the research involved making and eating a lot of bread. I spent time with several home bakers of different cultures discovering the traditions, folklore and spirituality of bread, and learned that in many parts of the world, for many many centuries, bread has nourished not only the body but the soul. Nowadays, we take bread for granted. It is no longer the primary food that fills our tummies, yet we still speak of the bread-winner rather than the fish-winner or the salad-winner or the apple-a-day-winner. Bread still commands that respect.

When I haven’t the time to make my own bread, I often buy it from the Good Spirit Bakery at the Saskatoon Farmers’ Market. Peyton Leavitt and Jonathon Lee bake the bread in a wood-burning brick oven on their farm near Naicam, a process that takes all night. Then they bring it to the market first thing Saturday morning. It’s very rustic and made with local ingredients such as fresh-ground flour, flax and honey. It’s worth a trip to the new farmers’ market venue at River Landing, but go early because the Good Spirit bread often sells out well before noon.

While you’re there, pick up the other ingredients for a good bread salad. Don’t even think of buying these vegetables in a grocery store when you have access to the freshest, most beautiful local produce at the farmers’ market.

This time of year, I make salads with the tiny little greens popping up in my garden. This includes tender dandelion leaves, the cilantro that reseeded itself, mint that grows like a weed and the baby radishes and lettuce that I pulled to thin the rows. If you don’t have access to these fresh micro-greens, you can substitute lettuce (also available at the farmers’ market) or you can omit that ingredient altogether.

Hanley Bread Salad
1 slice of bread per person
2 small tomatoes per person
(a mix of red and yellow tomatoes)
8 slices of English cucumber per person
1 green onion per person
1 tbsp chopped fresh mint
1 tbsp chopped fresh parsley
¼ cup baby greens per person

Dressing for two:
2 tbsp fresh lemon juice
2 tbsp olive oil
¼ tsp Dijon mustard
Salt and pepper to taste

Trim the bread of crusts and toast until nice and brown. Cool. Cut into chunky cubes. Chop the tomatoes. Put them into a bowl, crushing them with your hands to release their juices. Chop the cucumber, green onion, mint and parsley; toss into the bowl. Whip together the dressing ingredients and mix into the vegetables. (You can do this ahead, giving it time to mingle flavours.) Five minutes before serving, toss in the baby greens and the bread cubes.