Soup Week 37 - Corn and zucchini soup

I love soup. I love making soup. I love making soup without a recipe, just composing it as I go along with ingredients I have on hand. So, if anyone should ask for the recipe to this delicious fall soup, well, there isn't one! But I can tell you how I made it:

1) Cut the kernals off three or four raw cobs of corn. Place the de-kerneled cobs in a soup pot along with a big carrot, a celery stalk and a spring of fresh thyme. Cover with 6-8 cups of water and boil. Turn down and simmer about an hour. Strain the stock (placing and vegetables in the compost -- gotta keep the worms fed, too). Clean out the soup pot.

2) Melt a nob of butter in the soup pot. Add a chopped onion and one chopped clove of garlic. Cook until soft. Add one red pepper, chopped in a small dice. Cook until soft. Sprinkle with salt, pepper and chopped fresh thyme leaves. Add corn kernels. Pour on the corn cob stock and bring to a bubble. Turn town and simmer until the corn is cooked.

3) Add two chopped zucchini -- one yellow and one green. I used young zucchini about 2 cm across. Since it was young, I didn't peel it. If you're using bigger older zucchini, you might want to peel it and scoop out the pithy centre before adding it to the soup. At the same time, add a tbsp (more or less) of fresh chopped basil.

Simmer until the zucchini is tender. It won't take long. Taste the soup and add salt and pepper if it needs more. Yumm.

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.

Newspaper - PASTA PRIMAVERA

This article appeared in the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix on 19 June 2006.

The other day, my husband pointed out that neither of us had a cold last winter. This is quite unusual. He usually gets a doozie of a cold once a year and I might lose a couple days of productive work. As well, I usually suffer a real about of depression come March when it seems that winter will never end. But this year I didn’t feel one iota of blue.

Why not? We didn’t get flu shots. We didn’t take happy pills with our morning oatmeal. So, what changed? In think it was our Saskatchewan diet. For more than a year, we have been making a concerted effort to eat almost exclusively the foods of Saskatchewan at our own dinner table. Could these local foods be better for our health?

Let’s consider vitamin C. Vitamin C reaches maximum levels in fruits and vegetables that ripen on the vine. Over the past winter, we primarily ate Saskatchewan-ripened fruits and vegetables including apples, cherries, saskatoon berries, strawberries, pears, tomatoes and red peppers, maximizing our vitamin C. As well, vitamin and mineral content is highest in foods that are freshly picked, since nutrients diminish with time and processing. We ate Saskatchewan fruits and vegetables when they were in season or quickly froze them for winter freshness.

Studies show that many fresh vegetables from the grocery store have fewer nutrients than they did in the 1960s. This is because commercial varieties have been bred for their uniformity and storability at the expense of nutrients and taste. Local fruit and vegetable growers are more likely to choose plant varieties for their goodness rather than for their ability to look pretty after travelling 2,000 km in the back of a truck.

Many vitamins and minerals boost the immune system so it can fight off germs. These include: vitamin E, abundant in whole grains and canola oil; zinc in meat, eggs and beans; carotenoids in carrots and spinach; and selenium in mushrooms (just to give a few examples).

Omega 3 fatty acids are terrific for fighting depression and disease. They are found in flax, nuts and leafy green plants. Fish that eat seaweed and algae are a good source of omega 3 fatty acids. So are wild game, bison and cattle raised on diets of grass, not grain. At our house, we eat almost exclusively pasture-raised or wild meat from Saskatchewan including chickens, beef, bison, moose and fish. We buy eggs from a farmer who lets his chickens peck in the grass. These eggs have way more omega 3 fatty acids and vitamin A than eggs laid by hens kept inside a barn. That vitamin A also helps to fight a cold.

The B vitamins are good for mental health and are found abundantly in the whole grains Saskatchewan is so famous for. Also good for depression are the magnesium in cabbage and folate in lentils. Perhaps all that coleslaw and barley soup we ate this winter were good for my body and my spirit. All this talk about colds has left little room to mention the long-term anti-cancer benefits of saskatoon berries and sour cherries, the healing properties of honey and yogurt, and the cholesterol-lowering advantages of oatmeal. All in all, our Saskatchewan diet didn’t just taste good, it was good for us, too.

Take advantage of the freshest disease-fighting vegetables with this terrific and easy pasta dish. The word ‘primavera’ means ‘first green’ and we can never eat enough of that!

PASTA PRIMAVERA
Melt 2 tbsp. and 1/2 cup of olive oil in a pot. Sauté a chopped onion and some chopped garlic. Then toss in a whole bunch of vegetables in bite-sized pieces. For example, green beans, asparagus, zucchini, spinach, snap peas, carrots, sweet peppers and fiddleheads. Season with salt and pepper. Meanwhile, cook the pasta (I prefer bowties or rotini with this dish). When the vegetables are cooked but still crunchy, toss in the drained pasta along with several chopped tomatoes and a couple tbsp. of chopped fresh herbs like parsley, basil and cilantro. Add more oil if necessary so the pasta is nicely moist, adjust the salt and cook until the tomatoes are warm.

Newspaper - September - FRENCH ZUCCHINI LOAF WITH TOMATO BASIL SAUCE

This column appeared in the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix on 26 September 2005

When my husband agreed to marry me, he insisted on a prenuptial agreement with just one demand – that I would never plant more than six zucchini at a time. That was a tough contract to sign. Zucchini is my favourite summer vegetable. It grows abundantly with little fuss, the flowers are beautiful and it’s very versatile in the kitchen.

I had just passed the first summer in my own house, and I must admit I went overboard with the zucchini. I had no fewer than a dozen zucchini plants in my little garden. Even if I ate zucchini three meals a day, I could not keep up with that level of production. I offered zucchini to all my friends. We would be at a party or a café and the conversation would go something like this:

"Would you like a zucchini?"
"Sure."
"Great, I’ll just go get a few from the trunk of my car."

My husband-to-be suggested I just leave the trunk open and with any luck, someone would steal them. One day, I found a newspaper headline stuck it to the fridge. It read: "That’s not a dead body, that’s a zucchini."

I signed on the dotted line. Since then, I have focused on quality not quantity by finding new and wonderful ways to make the most of my limited zucchini crop. A trip to France was a great eye-opener. In France, they eat the zucchini flowers. What better way to limit production than by lopping off the source of the fruit before it gets a head start? The French batter the flowers and fry them in hot oil. Sometimes, they stuff the flowers first with a mixture of breadcrumbs, herbs and cheese. I like to pick the young zucchini when they are as thin as a finger and the flower is still attached, and deep-fry them together. The flowers are so bright and sunny, I feel happier just to have swallowed them.

The end of summer is bittersweet for me. My garden is abundant with good things to eat, but there is so little time to enjoy it. Everything needs to be picked at once, before it over-ripens or freezes. Or, in the case of zucchini, grows to the size of Shaquille O’Neal’s shoes.

This year, I am preserving as much as possible by freezing or canning. I am doing this because I have pledged to eat nothing but Saskatchewan foods in my own home for one full year. I began in April, and it has been amazingly easy so far. There has been abundant fresh produce (from my garden and the Farmers’ Market) and local fruit (apples, cherries, saskatoons and other berries), but what about February? If I want to eat this winter, I better be prepared.

My freezer is now full, and I’ve billeted out some food to the freezer of a friend. Just last week, I canned a peck of pears from a tree on Temperance Street. Now, if only I could find a way to save zucchini flowers for a blustery winter day... If ever I discover a zucchini the size of a small boat, I know what to do with it. This recipe comes from a French tourist brochure. It’s good on its own or with a sauce like the one that follows. (For more zucchini recipes go to: homefordinner.blogspot.com.)

FRENCH ZUCCHINI LOAF
one big zucchini
4T flour
3 eggs slightly beaten
1 clove garlic chopped
1 handful parsley chopped
pinch of nutmeg
150g gruyere cheese

Peel the zucchini, scoop out the seed pith, and cut into chunks. Steam the zucchini until it begins to soften. Mix everything together and pat into a buttered bread loaf pan. Bake at 375 degrees for about 30 minutes. (I like to brown the crust under the broiler.) Serve in thick slices.

Tomato Basil Sauce: Warm a tablespoon of olive oil in a skillet. Add a chopped clove of garlic until fragrant. Add 2 or 3 well-chopped tomatoes. Cook slowly until the juices evaporate and the tomatoes break down into a sauce. Add 1 tablespoon of chopped fresh (or 1/2 tbsp. dried) basil. Season with salt and pepper.

Week 21 - RATATOUILLE

Menu of the Week -- 9 September 2005

Breakfast – Baguette with tomato.
Dinner – Corn-on-the-cob.
Dinner – Baked trout. Ratatouille.

RATATOUILLE
This dish is a taste of southern France. (Pronounced rat-a-TOO-yee.) It’s good hot or cold. It can be served as a side dish or as a salad with crusty bread. And best of all, it has zucchini! (Did I mention that zucchini is my favourite summer vegetable?) Try ratatouille next to a grilled pork chop or serve with Ricotta Pie (recipe at Week 9). In some versions of this recipe, the vegetables are each cooked separately and mixed together just before serving.

1/2 cup olive oil
a few cloves of garlic
2 pounds of vegetables including: onion, eggplant, red pepper, tomatoes and zucchini (about equal amounts of each).
1T fresh thyme and basil (or lesser amount of dried)
salt and pepper

Heat the oil in a skillet. Cook the sliced onion slowly until soft. Slice and/or chop the other vegetables and add to the skillet (except zucchini). Cook until the vegetables release their liquid. Turn up the heat and boil off most of the liquid. Add zucchini and herbs. Simmer until the zucchini is cooked. Season with salt and pepper to taste. To serve, drizzle with olive oil and garnish with basil leaves.