I went on another apple pick for the Fruit Tree Project the other day, or tried to. When we got there the owner explained that a fellow who’d picked his apples last year to make wine had turned up again this year and been told the fruit was going to LifeCycles; a couple of days later the tree was completely stripped,

leaving only this one little windfall to show what a gorgeous apple it was:

And this is what the skin looked like:

The owner didn’t know what it was; the pick leader thought maybe Gravenstein. So we picked what few apples there were on two other trees

and headed for a grapevine that was growing all over a house and into the hedge

and picked about 140 lbs of grapes from the one vine.

Then I made a cake from some of the grapes.

I admit I was suspicious of the recipe’s description of the “rustic crunch” of the grape pips, but in fact it was just so, and an excellent cake. We had some assorted appetizers – artichoke dip, Greek Salad, and some of Delia’s courgette & potato cakes with mint & feta (aka kolokythokeftedes) which I have made before and always have trouble turning as they get mushy, but they dry out eventually and are delicious. Had some beautiful yellow zucchini which I picked myself at Haliburton on Wednesday and made that into a respectable zucchini alla scapece.

So a good old feed.

Ready to feed the soul with the opening night of Planet Earth poetry later this evening!

There’s been some flap about how Facebook makes rather too free with the photos and personal information posted by its subscribers – using people’s personal photos for advertising without asking and so on.

No sooner do we sort out that – to some extent (by adjusting privacy settings) – than we’re presented with Google’s new terms of service which you must agree to in order to post photos on Blogger, or Picasa albums (emphasis mine):

Google claims no ownership or control over any Content submitted, posted or displayed by you on or through Picasa Web Albums. You or a third party licensor, as appropriate, retain all patent, trademark and copyright to any Content you submit, post or display on or through Picasa Web Albums and you are responsible for protecting those rights, as appropriate. By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through Picasa Web Albums, you grant Google a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to reproduce, adapt, distribute and publish such Content through Picasa Web Albums, including RSS or other content feeds offered through Picasa Web Albums, and other Google services. In addition, by submitting, posting or displaying Content which is intended to be available to the general public, you grant Google a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to reproduce, adapt, distribute and publish such Content for the purpose of displaying, distributing and promoting Google services. Google will discontinue this licensed use within a commercially reasonable period after such Content is removed from Picasa Web Albums.

I fear my love affair with Blogger – and all things pertaining to the Google empire – may be drawing to a close…

As the canning season progresses, it might be useful to refer to the Table of Condiments for guidance. I’m not sure how accurate it is, but it’s entertaining!

The Slow Food Vancouver Island & Gulf Islands convivium has been eventless for some months, so it was with joy and sunshine we celebrated the love-apple yesterday at Haliburton farm, hosted by the delightful Dayle of Terralicious gardening & cooking school.

We brought tomatoes for tasting

enjoyed a seed-saving demo

and then chowed down

on some extraordinary grub. I must say that Slow Food events have the best tasting food, and the most enthusiastic diners.

Dayle even dropped a perfect loaf of hot bread

on the table which we fell upon with as much enthusiasm as we could muster, given the wonders that had preceded it. She had made this pretty Andy Warhol Cake

which turns out to be a reincarnation of ye olde tomato soup cake, but she made it with heirloom tomatoes, of course. And Joan’s green tomato and apple crisp was an inspiration!

Then we had a tour of the farm which was, like us, baking gently in some late season sunshine.

And then gave out the raffle prize – seasonal condiments plus a bit of Slow Food swag –

but are holding off awarding the grand prizes (a place on a Terralicious course, a night for two at Sooke Harbour House) to award with signed copies of Michael Pollan‘s books, at a Slow Food sponsored screening of Food, Inc. at Cinecenta on September 22.

There has been a lot of buzz around the UK’s Food Standards Agency-sponsored study – actually not a field study but a literature review – released in July, which claimed that organic food was no better, nutritionally, than conventionally-grown. As this article points out, the flaw in the FSA‘s treatment of the topic was to sidestep the main fact so many people buy organic: to avoid pesticides and agricultural chemicals in our food. COG has a few things to say about the study as well.

People choosing organic are choosing it for a variety of reasons, including faith in organic farming methods, which attend more closely to the longterm health of the soil, water and animals involved. Choose “nutritionally equal” conventionally grown foods and you choose to support farming methods that have been shown to exhaust soil fertility, contaminate water and deplete nonrenewable natural resources that prop up chemical fertilization and pesticide productions.

For the yay-sayers, a new French study contradicts those pesky Englishmen and upholds organics as all-round better, because

organic plant products contain more dry matter and minerals – such as iron and magnesium – and more antioxidant polyphenols like phenols and salicylic acid.

and

Organic animal products were seen to have more polyunsaturated fats.

Carbohydrate, protein and vitamin levels were not studied because the authors feel they are insufficiently documented. They did look at pesticides though, and found

between 94 and 100 per cent of organic food does not contain any pesticide residues, and organic vegetables have about 50 per cent less nitrates.

It’s totally tomato season. I managed to can my first jars of diced tomatoes, which will liberate me from the tyranny of grocery store cans for a while. I have a bowl of ready-to-sauce beauties on my counter, some suffering a bit of seasonal splitting due to the amount of rain we’ve had over the past few days

and lots more on the vine, so I’m keeping fingers crossed against blight. And considering what to bring to the tomato brunch Slow Food is holding with Terralicious, at Haliburton Farm, this weekend.

Though I’ve been out there on work parties most every week, I haven’t posted much from Haliburton lately, but for starters here’s a selection of tomatoes they’ve had on the farmstand lately:

A frantic round of this and that last week. The event I was very much looking forward to, the Compost Education Centre‘s autumn worm party, was delightful. Half a dozen or so of us stood in some bonus sunshine for a couple of hours, getting our hands dirty sorting through the bins that had housed the centre’s summer campers – worms that are part of the school worm bin project.

These worms had been spending the summer lying around and eating and breeding and generally enjoying themselves, but now it was time they were rounded up and sent back to school. Local teachers will soon be stopping in to collect their charges, who will work all year demonstrating their skills at composting to a new year of Victoria’s schoolchildren.

We picked through the worm castings

to find and capture these light-shy worms and their eggs

and drop them in a big bucket which would be turned over in a few days to allow a finer sorting.
These are red wigglers, which is a fairly wide term for a number of different subspecies that include some natty tiger stripe fellows

and they love, as we discovered, corn – were found hanging onto cobs for dear life.

We heard that they were fed the contributions of discarded produce from a local grocery store – the only one in town that would supply the centre; the others have all gone funny and cite ‘health and safety’ as their reasons for tipping tons of produce into the dumpster every day. Such is our world.

So that was Friday’s excitement. On Saturday I hoisted the sign of the snail

to sit at the North Saanich Farmers’ Market and explain the world of Slow Food to passers-by (a good moment to do so with a few tasty events coming up in the Vancouver Island & Gulf Islands convivium). The market is small and neighbourly and featured the wares of Kildara Organic Farm,

some green eggs from Ameraucana hens (I’d seen some last October at Terra Madre, as Araucana Chickens are one of Chile’s Presidia products)

some local watermelons

some really local fruit and veg

but hands-down the busiest stall at any farmers’ market seems to be that of the bakers,

which featured some spectacular cupcakes

and gorgeous tarts

The weather was very up and down and at times it sheeted down, which did not stop our excellent local performer Paul Stephens.

Rain and chill being something of the story of the weekend, I was grateful for a taste of Peg’s fabulous Rebar-inspired spicy squash soup on Saturday night, made from – and served in – her amazing golden hubbard squash.