From Word To Word

I was visiting some friends yesterday morning.

There were peaches in boxes on the diningroom sideboard, waiting to be processed.  There were jars of freshly canned peaches on the kitchen counter.  There was bread rising in pans beside the stove.  There was basil drying in the oven.  There were trays of freshly flaked oats on the top of the fridge.  There was fresh coffee in the French press.

I suddenly discovered, in someone else’s kitchen, that I was at home.

I made dandelion coffee yesterday.  Actually, I started the process some weeks ago when I dug up a number of dandelion roots, washed them, chopped them roughly, and left them to dry in the makeshift drying rack that sits on my front porch, but  yesterday I brought them in, roasted them in the oven, ground them, and brewed them, just like my regular coffee.

I chose to make the experiment yesterday because we were having some friends over for dinner, so I was sure of having some test subjects.  As it turned out, my mother-in-law also came home in time to have some, and several other friends came by in the evening, though by that time there was only enough for them to have a taste.  All told, I eventually had ten opinions on the dandelion coffee, besides my own, and all were more or less favourable.  My wife, who does not even like coffee, was quite enthusiastic, and most people thought that it was actually some kind of lightly sweetened coffee at first taste, suggesting that it had a hint of maple or brown sugar, though the predominate taste is as bitter as regular coffee or even more so.

I am not sure that dandelion roots will ever replace coffee beans in my morning brew, except perhaps in the greatest extremity, but it is certainly an interesting taste in its own right, and I intend to brew it more often.

I have been reading about wild edibles lately, as my recent defence of Wild Carrots and my still more recent experiment with Plantain soup will attest, and I have been especially amused by a book called Feasting Free on Wild Edibles by Bradford Angier.  It was first published in 1966, so there are certainly more comprehensive guides now available, but there are few, I suspect, with an author as idiosyncratic as Angier, and his peculiar style has made the book one of my instant favourites.

I will not bother to list his literary mannerisms at length, but will merely let a single example be a figure for the whole: Angier’s peculiar tendency to begin sentences with the adverb ‘too’.  In his entry on Watercress, for example, he writes, “The flavour of nearly every salad can be enhanced by the addition of this edible.  Too, watercress is famous sandwich fodder.”  Another example of this stylistic quirk can be found in his entry on the Willow, where he writes, “Bitterish in many species, in others the inner bark is surprisingly sweet.  Too, this inner bark is sometimes dried and ground into flower.”  I am unashamedly amused by these things.

More to the point, however, the book has helped me to identify the quite surprising number of edibles that already grow wild in my yard.  With a great number of my garden weeds still waiting to be identified, I can already offer a whole range of food for the backyard naturalist, none of which I had to plant myself.

White Yarrow (Achillea millefolium) – The young leaves are edible raw or cooked. The leaves may be substituted for hops in beer. The leaves and flowers may be used fresh or dried as a tea.

Nodding Wild Onion (Allium cernuum) – The bulbs and the young leaves and stems are edible raw or cooked.

Chicory (Cichorium intybus) – The young leaves are edible raw or cooked. The roots may be roasted and ground as a coffee substitute.

Wild Carrot, Queen Anne’s Lace (Daucus carota) – The leaves are edible cooked and may be used fresh or dried as a seasoning. The roots are edible peeled and boiled. The flowers may be used fresh or dried as a tea.

Purple Shiso (Perilla frutescens nankinensis) – The young leaves and shoots are edible raw or cooked. They may also be used dried as a seasoning. The seeds may be used dried or preserved in salt as a seasoning. They may also be eaten cooked. They may also be crushed to produce an edible oil. The whole plant may be used to producee an edible purple dye.

Plantain (Plantago major) – The young leaves are edible raw or cooked. They may also be dried and used a tea.

Lady’s Thumb (Polygonum persicaria)- The young leaves and the seeds are edible raw or cooked.

Dandelions (Taraxicum officinale) -The flowers may be fermented to make wine. The young leaves are edible raw or cooked. The roots are edible peeled and boiled. They may also be roasted, ground, and brewed as a coffee substitute.

Purple Clover (Trifolium pratense) – The young leaves and blossoms are edible raw or cooked. The mature blossoms may be used dried as a tea.

Of course, this list does not even include the more standard edibles I have growing in my yard, like walnuts and red currants and wild strawberries and red raspberries.  I almost wonder why I bother to plant vegetables at all rather than just harvest what is there already.

I have some fairly large sections of Wild Carrots in the areas of my yard that are still pretending to be a lawn.  Wild Carrot is sometimes also called Queen Anne’s Lace or Bird’s Nest or Bee’s Nest or Devil’s Plague or a variety of other things, and these names are sometimes applied to other similar looking plants as well, but only the species Daucus carota is properly called Wild Carrots.   It is a very common plant in our area and is usually considered a weed because of how prolifically it seeds.

Wild Carrots are edible, though few people actually eat them, perhaps because they look similar to the poisonous Water Hemlock plant, though the roots of true Wild Carrots can easily be identified by their distinctively carrot-like smell.  Wild Carrot roots are tasty when they are young, though they get woody much sooner than their cultivated cousins.  Their leaves can be used exactly like those of cultivated carrots, as a way to add carrot flavour to a broth or a stew.  Their flowers and roots can both be used to make a tea, though there is some evidence that it interferes with the implantation of fertilized eggs in humans, so it should be avoided by women who are pregnant or who would like to become pregnant.  Their flowers also make attractive and edible garnishes for salads and other foods.

Beyond their culinary uses, wild carrots play an important function in the ecosystem, as highly nutritious food for browsing herbivores, as habitat and nourishment for butterfly larvae, and as nectar for bees.  They are also an attractive plant with large delicate white flowers that attract butterflies over a long blooming season, so they make and interesting addition to a garden, even if they are difficult to control.

Now, I have not spent all of this time describing Wild Carrots merely for the sake of information, but also for the sake of making an observation about how urban gardens have come to be cultivated.  Despite the fact that these edible, nutritious, attractive, ecologically significant plants grow easily around us, even without cultivation, we ruthlessly eliminate them whenever possible to make way for less useful and less attractive and less beneficial garden plants.  Though there is some justification for this on the basis that Wild Carrots are technically an exotic species, they are nevertheless a long naturalized species that poses no particular threat to the ecological system, to browsing livestock, or to humans.  The reason for our objection to them, the reason that we classify them as weeds, is far more based on the simple fact that they are common.

Gardening generally, and the urban garden in particular, is dominated by an obsession with the rare and a distaste for the common.  What distinguishes the expert gardener is the cultivation of plants that are rare and difficult to grow and that are uncommonly showy in their bloom or their foliage.  What reveals the poor gardener is the invasion of common local plants into the garden space.  Yet, I would suggest that rarity is not actually a very useful criterion for judging a garden or a gardener, particularly in a world that can less and less afford to spend its resources on the merely frivolous and ornamental, and in a world that must find ways to make the most of its land and its labour.

However, if we are not entirely to replace aesthetics with functionality, we will have to find ways to make the functional beautiful and ways to understand the functional as beautiful.  An essential part of this movement, in my opinion, will be to reassess the value of the common and the rare.  Rather than regarding the common as something to be eradicated in favour of the rare, we will need to regard it as beautiful precisely in its commonality.  I do not mean that we should merely let our gardens be overrun by what happens to sprout there, because this commonality would not be any more functional than rarity.  Neither do I mean that we should leave our gardens altogether without aesthetic form, because this would serve only to eliminate the essential role that the garden plays as a place between the human and the natural.  What I mean is that we need to identify and cultivate and form the very things that grow naturally around us, to recognize the beauty that is found precisely in their commonness.

Dave Humphrey and I were having a conversation a few months back, and he was talking about how the kinds of ingredients that people use in their cooking become a sort of index to the ways that they cook.  He suggested that the best way to know how people cook is not to look at the finished dishes that they make but to look at the ingredients that they use regularly, the ones that they cannot do without, the ones that are essential to their cooking.

I was intrigued by this idea, and I would have written on it immediately, only Dave said that he might post something on the topic himself.  He thought that it would be interesting to list the ingredients that he found essential in his own cooking and to ask his readers to create similar lists on their own blogs, to see the kinds of ingredients that others considered to be essential.  This post, however, has not yet materialized, though I have reminded Dave of it more than once.  So, now, because I am very interested to have Dave discuss his essential ingredients, I am pressing the question by other means, by writing the inaugural list myself and by inviting him to respond.

The criteria for the ingredients are simple.  First, they need to be basic ingredients rather than complete dishes, though this does not mean that they need to be entirely unprepared (yoghurt or cheese, for example, require preparation but are still basic ingredients in my opinion).  Second, they need to be ingredients for cooking rather than for baking (hopefully this will steer Dave away from his bread fetish).

Taking these criteria into consideration, here is my own list of essential ingredients, roughly in order of significance.

Garlic -  A day almost never goes by that I do not use garlic.  If I could only ever have one ingredient with which to flavour my food, I would choose garlic without hesitation.  It can be used in so many ways, and it is so beautiful when roasted on its own.  I can hardly overstate how dependent my cooking is on garlic.

Onion – I am cheating her a little, gathering all of the onions that I use regularly (yellow, red, green, shallot) under a single heading. Even so, onions in one form or another are also a key part of my cooking, both in my finished dishes and in my preparation of other ingredients like soup stock and tomato sauce.

Ginger – I have only begun using ginger regularly in the past few years, since I have been cooking Asian and South Asian cuisines more seriously, but it has now infiltrated my cooking entirely.  With garlic and onion it forms a kind of holy trinity for me.

Olive Oil – I use olive oil extensively, though I use canola oil also in certain situations, and I have been using grapeseed oil more often recently, especially when I need a higher smoke point or when I want a more subtle taste.  The reason that I prefer to use olive oil most often, quite simply, is a matter of taste.  Though a particular cooking need may force me to use something else at times, I prefer the taste of olive oil in most situations, and I not infrequently substitute with it when recipes call for other oils.

Butter – I love butter.  Some of my best childhood memories involve coating my grandmother’s homemade bread with her homemade butter and topping it with her hamemade jam.  These memories have given me a preference for saltless butter and for butter that is made by hand.  Despite its more brittle texture, I feel like I can actually taste the cream when butter is made like this.  Though I now have to make do with mass produced butter, I still love it, and I refuse to substitute anything else for it unless in the utmost extremity.

Cheese – I have written on occasion about how important cheese is to me and to my family, which makes it a kind of problem ingredient for me.  In some respects, it could head my list, though I do not use it as often as garlic or onions or ginger, at least not in a single form.  What I really need is another list for my essential cheeses, but that will have to wait for another day.  Suffice it to say that cheese, in one form or another, in a dish or eaten straight from the hand, has an almost spiritual significance for me.

Soup Stock – This is another item that could very well rank much higher, but that I am not sure exactly where to place.  Besides soups, of course, I use stock in countless dishes, gravies, and sauces.  I always have some homemade stock in my freezer, and having a pot of stock simmering on the stove is one of my purest comforts.

Black Pepper – This exercise gets difficult for me as soon as I start thinking about spices.  I cook with such a wide variety of spices that it is almost unfair to start picking one over another.  With freshly ground black pepper, however, I can at least offer my favourite spice with some confidence.  I actually use several varieties of ground pepper (green, red, white) depending on the occasion, but it is the spice I use most frequently, and this is not simply by default or by familiarity.  Fresh pepper is just beautiful.

Tomatoes – I use tomatoes, both fresh and in several prepared forms that I can myself (sauce, paste, stewed), in a wide variety of dishes.  I find that tomatoes, in any form, add complexity to the taste of a dish without dominating it, and they are essential for creating the proper texture in many kinds of reduction.

Sweet Red Peppers – My love of red peppers is matched very closely by my dislike of their green cousins.  Though I usually prefer bitter tastes to sweet ones, I have never been able to accustom myself to the particular bitterness of a green pepper.  Red peppers, however, taste good in almost anything, and when they are roasted with a little olive oil, they may be my single favourite flavour in the world.

Mushrooms – I can still recall the day when I discovered that mushrooms came in other varieties than the “white ones” and the “brown ones”.  I was in grade seven or eight, and it was my night to cook.  The recipe called for shitake mushrooms.  I had serious doubts that the grocery story would carry anything that sounded so exotic, but I was surprised to find a whole mushroom section.  The recipe was a success, and my love affair with mushrooms has only grown since then.

Lemons – I am discovering the imprtance of having citrus in a cook’s arsenal.  I do not like to use vinegar heavily, but there are occasions where this kind of acid taste is necessary, and I have found that lemon (or lime or orange) serves my purposes very well.  I also like the variety of textures that most citrus fruit provides (grated rind, whole slices, juice), which makes it useful in many different situations.

So, there you are: the twelve most essential ingredients in my kitchen.  I am now leaving it entirely up to Dave to put his food where his mouth is.  Of course, others are welcome to play as well.  Give me the link if you do.

Three Saturdays ago, there was a new vendor at the Farmer’s Market.  She was selling various dry goods, including a fair variety of South Asian spices, so I stopped to ask whether she had any curry leaves, a spice that I am not able to find elsewhere within walking distance.  She told me that she did not, but assured me that she would have some the following week.

I somehow missed the vendor’s stall the next week, but I found it again this past Saturday, and I remembered our conversation, so I stopped.  The vendor clearly remembered me.  Before I could even ask after the spice I wanted, she had pointed to a bag that contained, not dried curry leaves, which would have been more than satisfactory, but a whole branch, practically a small tree, of fresh curry leaves.  The price she asked was almost embarrassingly cheap, so I pretended not to have change and overpaid her an amount that I was still more than happy to pay.

I dried much of the plant, but while I still have some fresh leaves, I have been using it continually, and it has been a lovely luxury to have enough of it allow some culinary experimentation.  I have found an interesting recipe for a tomato suace that includes curry leaves, for example, and I will also be trying a potato dish that combines the fresh leaves with yoghurt and other spices.  Of course, depending on how all of this cooking turns out, I may now have to keep a curry tree or two growing on my window sill, just to feed my habit.

I find myself using a distinction lately that reflects the change in how I am coming to understand the idea of labour, the distinction between the homemade and the handmade.  Though these two terms are often used almost synonymously, I think that it is perhaps necessary to use them distinctly to describe those things that are made in the place of the home and those things that are made by means of the hands, because these things are not always the same, even if they are often related.

To me, the homemade is the more easily defined of the two terms, and it is also the one that is most practically defensible.  The food that I prepare and the things that I create at home are often of a higher quality or of a lower cost or of a more exact variety than their mass produced counterparts.  I can make a toy castle for my kids that is better than anything I could buy commercially.  I can make bread more cheaply than I can buy it.  I can make tomato sauce exactly how I like it.  There are many practical reasons why I would choose to make things in my home, to cultivate the practice of the homemade.

The handmade, however, at least in the sense that I mean it, is not so easily defined, because there is much that we now do in the home that is no longer done by hand.  We may make bread at home, but it will probably be with a breadmaking machine.  We may do carpentry at home, but it will probably be with a whole assortment of power tools.  We may garden at home, but it will probably be with powered mowers and trimmers and other mechanized tools.  None of this is essentially wrong, of course, and I am a proponent of anything that will get people participating more active in the home, but I would argue that there is a real if not always articulable difference between these things and the things that I actually make with my hands.

I cannot demonstrate this difference.  It is something that I only experience, something that I discover in the practise of using my hands.  It is something that I can only call spiritual, despite all charges of idealism and romanticism, about feeling the dough or the wood or the earth in my hands, between my fingers.  This tactility, this tangibility, this physicality, this intimacy, this is what I mean by handmade.  It is something that can apply, for me, only to the things that I have made myself, with my own hands.  It refers to the creation of something that literally has my sweat in it, something that has actually gotten beneath my fingernails, something that I have come to know by touch and even by taste.

Yet, this intimate contact with labour is something that many people find profoundly uncomfortable, at least once they pass a certain age.  My young children are still very willing to bury their hands in the cookie dough, but even the teenagers I teach are already mistrustful of getting anything on their hands.  Somewhere in the intervening years they have learned that it is unsanitary, undignified, and immature to abandon themselves to this kind of tactility, and most adults are far worse.  They have lost the capacity for connecting tangibly with the objects of their labour, at least in the context of the home.

I am not proposing that we abandon all mechanized tools, of course, but I am suggesting that there is something physically different about these tools that separates them from hand tools, and that there is something even about tools as such that physically separates them from the work that I do with my bare hands.  This difference is one of tactility, of tangibility, but it necessarily produces a difference in spirit also, something that I can neither satisfactorily define nor reasonably ignore.

There were two occurrences yesterday that reminded me again why I prefer to deal with small businesses rather than large ones.  Both stories will need a little introduction, so you may want to refill your coffee before you get started.

The first story begins with my difficulty in finding a vendor at my local market who could sell me hormone-free chickens at reasonable prices.  While I have a very good butcher there who supplies me with much of my meat, and while I have a quality farmer there who specializes in lamb, I have never been satisfied with the chicken that is available at the market.  Not only is it expensive, even for hormone-free meat, but the quality of the product is not always what I would like it to be.

Just before Christmas, however, a friend told me about Blue Haven Farm, a vendor who was selling various kinds of fowl, including heritage varieties, at a stand that I thought specialized in organic vegetables.  It took me until this past Saturday to find the time to talk with the vendor, but she was very helpful, comparing the qualities of the different fowl that she raises, showing pictures of the heritage pork that she also sells, even inviting me to come to her farm to see her operation.

Yesterday, because I had the car, which I rarely do, I took her up on her invitation, and drove my two sons to her farm, located a few miles north of Guelph.  It was cold but sunny, and our host was wonderfully hospitable.  She did not so much give us a tour as let us accompany her as she did her chores.  My sons have spent some time with cattle and with horses, but this was their first experience with swine, and my eldest was particularly impressed by the boar, which was taller than he was by several inches and came complete with a mouthful of tusks.  The swine are a heritage variety that has a gorgeous red coat, and the little ones looked particularly handsome as they ran through the snow.

We also saw different varieties of chickens and turkeys and ducks, helping a little as they were fed and watered.  The boys watched the goat being milked, though my eldest declined the offer to help in this operation.  As we walked, I talked with the owner, discovering that her family also has connections to Manitoulin Island and that she has met my father’s parents there on several occasions.  The cold prevented us from staying too long, but I hope to go back in warmer weather when there is a very young litter of piglets for the boys to see.

None of this, of course, would be possible on a larger farm.  The big factory pork operations would never allow visitors into the barns because of the risk of disease.  Many of the few remaining family operations have farm tours, which can be a revenue source for some, but these tours cannot usually provide the kind of personal attention that we received at Blue Haven.  There we were allowed to participate a little in the activities of the place, encouraged to milk goats, collect eggs, feed animals.  All of this is possible only because Blue Haven is a very small operation, even by the standards of a hobby farm.  It is essentially a house on a rural property just large enough to support a small collection of pens and outbuildings, but it offers something that is impossible for larger operations: an opportunity for others to partake in it, even if only in a very small way.  I have been on formal tours of some very impressive farm operations, including one horse stable that was truly opulent, but there was never an opportunity to be at home at these functions.  These facilities were never able to offer what the much smaller Blue Haven can only ever offer, an invitation into the life of the farm as it is lived precisely there and nowhere else.

The second story begins with the coffee roaster that my mother-in-law gave me for Christmas.  I am, if I have not already mentioned this before, deeply passionate about coffee.  I am also particular about coffee, so I am fortunate to have a local roaster just a few blocks away from me who provides me with a very good selection.  They do not, however, sell green beans, not any longer.  In fact, it seems that green beans cannot be purchased at all in Guelph, not from any of the regular coffee stores, though I have heard rumours about some underground sources.  So, I had my new roaster, but I had nothing to roast in it.

Just as I was resigning myself to the necessity of having to order something from elsewhere, I happened to see a new brand of coffee beans in the little grocery market down the street.  It was called Eco-Cafe, and it claimed to be locally roasted, though it did not specify its location.  A view of their website soon indicated that they were located in Kitchener, just a few miles from Guelph, and a phonecall then discovered that they did indeed sell green coffee beans.

So, while I had the car yesterday, I drove to Eco-Cafe.  I bought several pounds of different varieties, enough to test my roaster, but they had sold out of the variety that I really wanted.  A larger store would have been content to tell me to come back when the next shipment had arrived.  A really helpful store might even have offered to phone and let me know of its arrival.  Eco-Cafe, however, gave me the number to their warehouse so that I could let them know what I wanted, and then offered to have my beans delivered to my local grocery store so that I would not have to make another trip to Kitchener.  This kind of service is only possible from a store of that size.  It is exactly the kind of thing that makes smaller infinitely better than larger.

Advertisers and large retailers have done their best to convince consumers that we are best served by ever bigger and more comprehensive stores, that the economies of scale these stores create will result in a wider selection of better quality merchandise at lower prices.  Most of this, of course, is so untrue as to be ridiculous.  One farmer alone at my local market, one very small scale farmer, produces more varieties of fowl than are available in every major supermarket in the city combined.  One coffee roaster alone produces more varieties of coffee than all of the city’s supermarkets combined.  The quality of these products also far exceeds their supermarket equivalents.  The fowl are hormone-free and truly free-range raised.  The coffee is freshly roasted, organic, and fairly traded.  There is simply no comparison in the products.

It may be true that locally produced merchandise is often more expensive, but is it really worth the few dollars that we save at the supermarkets if it means that we have a reduced selection of lower quality merchandise delivered to us with poorer and less personal service, all so that the profits can leave our communities for large corporations elsewhere?  I would rather pay higher prices and consume less if it means that what I consume will be better, healthier, fresher, more environmentally responsible, more community supportive, more relationally committed.  I would rather pay more to the local roaster is who is willing to drive exactly what I want to the store down the street.  I would rather pay more to the local farmer who is willing to let me and my children spend the afternoon participating in the work of her farm.  These things, the smaller things, the better things, are worth any cost to me.

I am not certain that the world needs another recipe for beef stew, but I did something by accident today that has received such high praise that I might as well record it somewhere.

The first part of the accident was that I happened to have a fair amount of sausage drippings that were left from another meal, so I used them to saute the sliced onions, crushed garlic, minced ginger, and diced tomatos.  When they had softened, I fried the beef in the mixture, then stirred in cubed potatoes, carrots, turnip, and squash.

The second part of the accident requires some explanation.  I hate the texture of liver, but I also hate just trashing anything, so a few weeks ago I experimented with making some beef liver stock.  Since this stock was already in the house, and since the stew seemed a likely use for it, I added two cups of it to the pot rather than use plain beef stock.  When everything had come to a simmer, I added celery salt, parsley, bay leaves, and thyme.

Two hours later, the tomatoes and the squash had melted nicely, so the broth was very thick.  The beef was tender, and the root vegetables were still mostly whole but soft enough to mash with a spoon.  The sausage and liver flavours were beautiful.  Now, if only I would have had a draught stout to go with it.

I had an apple turnover this morning, handmade from local ingredients and still warm from the oven.

I can, of course, buy an apple turnover almost anytime and almost anywhere.  There is a cafe or a doughnut shop or a grocery store or a supermarket within a few minutes walk of any point in the city, many of them open early and late, some open almost every hour of the year.  If this does not suffice, I can even order groceries to be delivered right to my house.  I never have to be without an apple turnover if I do not want to be.

If I want to buy an apple turnover that is made from local apples, however, and if I want the pastry to be handmade, and if I want to eat it when it is still warm, I cannot choose the time and the place.  I need to be at my local bakery just as it opens on Monday and Thursday mornings.  No other time or place will do.

This phenomenon is true in almost every case: quality demands its time and its place.  If I want a quality butcher who will sell me hormone free cuts of meat to order, I will have to wait until the next time an animal is slaughtered, maybe even until the next season that an animal should be slaughtered.  If I want to buy quality local organic produce, I will have to wait for it to come in its season and make do without the things that simply will not grow in my climate.

The demand that things be here and now, that time be money, that success be about location, location, location: these things are the enemy of quality.  To find quality, I must always look for it in its own time and its own place.  No other time and place will do.