ReallyGoodWriter | Food • Writing • Poetry Iambic Cafe

food & poetry, but mostly the poetry of food

Food • Writing • Poetry

Last week’s work party at Haliburton Farm was a bit of planting – some fingerling seed potatoes going surplus. The smartweed had taken over a lot of the prepared beds so we weeded as we went, and came upon a few hungry bystanders: cutworms,

slugs,

and a few (but only a few, fingers crossed) of those potato-loving wireworms, the bane of organic gardening.

Wandered around a bit afterwards, noting the onion flowers

and the proximity of strawberry time!

The farmhouse, with the rebuilt farmstand on the right.

Tried an experiment with dock (yellow dock, I think?)

whose roots were the size of carrots.

Kind of looked like carrots too, once cleaned up.

Rather pretty and very aromatic – a kind of perfumed soapy smell.

You can eat the leaves, and make a tea from the root which is said to be good for the liver and digestion. I’d had some burdock & dandelion root tea in Duncan at Seedy Saturday, but mine was fit, I’d say, for the plants, a kind of deluxe compost tea maybe. Very bitter roots; like a lot of plants, some parts are bitter and others edible at different times of the year.

A couple of events involving warm beverages coming up in Victoria – ideally timed for these chilly spring days.

On the coffee front, The Black Stilt and Oughtred Coffee are fundraising for the families and children of coffee farmers that they purchase from. Come to either Black Stilt location to support sport and education programs for these families by purchasing the Seed to Cup book, written by Dave from the Black Stilt, about Rio Negro coffee, produced by the Rainforest Alliance certified coffee farm featured in the book. The event takes place all day Thursday, June 3 during regular business hours: an opportunity to learn more about your cup of coffee and local businesses’ efforts to help their farmers’ families. (Follow it on Facebook –if you aren’t part of the quit facebook movement…)

The Room To Grow Foundation, a Canadian charity located on the Thai-Burma border in Mae Sot, Thailand, is holding a Burma Tea on Sunday, June 6th, from 2:00pm to 4:30pm at St. Matthias Church Hall on (Richmond at Richardson in Fairfield). $15 per person; tickets available at Ten Thousand Villages, Oak Bay Avenue and Full Circle Studio Arts.

The event will feature tea and homemade goodies, but also a Bingo on Burma, which offers entertainment and information about the situation on the Thai-Burma border, and a Silent Auction (items including: weekend getaway at Hidden Haven, Lasqueti Island, handmade fair trade items made by Burmese refugee women, healing therapy sessions (Reiki, Reconnective Healing, Cranio-Sacral), a composting consultation and some delectable desserts). Tax receipts are available. More information from Diana Pennock / phone 250-382-9466.

I enjoy my membership in COG-Vancouver Island, which has information sessions over the winter followed by local farm tours. Last week’s farm tour gave us a chance to see Blackberry Spring Farm in Saanich, which has two greenhouses. Barb grows greens for farmstand sale in this one

and Diane has just started planting in this.

Diane has a flock of chickens as well. She pointed out the difference between young hens in their prime

and older ones who at about 18 months stop being productive layers (these are laying hens rather than meat birds so they end up in the soup pot). The differences are in the colouring and the legs.

We actually began the tour with a visit to the goats, which are Nubians and very curious.

They have very long necks

and ears.

Diane chose them because they are great milkers, easy to handle, and are both dairy and meat animals, which is a consideration when half the offspring will be male. In the milking parlour we saw the milking ramp and the milking bucket

and then on to the kitchen to see a bit about her yogurt and cheesemaking. Here Diane is setting the curds to drain.

She says that Nubian milk is the Jersey of goat milk: very rich and high in butterfat, so excellent for cheesemaking, which we got a chance to affirm for ourselves when she concluded our visit by bringing out her spectacularly good bread with some chevre.

I have not talked about poetry for a while. Food has seemingly taken over; but food poetry and writing are holding their own too. Here’s a little update of my food writing news:

Food poems are being published in a couple of specialist food & literature publications: I’m currently in CuiZine, out of Montreal, and will soon be slathered on the pages of Alimentum, which is from New York.

JackPine Press in Saskatoon, which does wild and innovative limited edition chapbooks, is publishing Sunday Dinners next month, which features 8 of my food poems presented like the treasures found in the pages of old cookbooks, thanks to the artistic genius of my clever collaborator, Colleen Philippi. We’ll be launching it here in Victoria at Open Space Gallery on June 19.

Not sure when, but sometime in the next 12 months I’ll also be launching a 20-page chapbook of food poems, The Earth’s Kitchen, from Lantzville’s delightful Leaf Press. More on that as it unfolds.

And my most recent and most exciting news is that I’ll have a piece included in Lonely Planet‘s anthology of food & travel writing, A Moveable Feast: Life-Changing Food Encounters Around the World, which will be published in the fall.

It’s a breezy day in Victoria and damp enough to keep me away from the lawnmower again this morning. Soon, all will be jungle.

I spent last weekend baking cakes instead of mowing my lawn. Here’s what I learned:

Angel food cake is just 4 things: egg whites, sugar, flour and acid (cream of tartar), plus flavourings (salt, vanilla). The acid stabilizes the egg whites once they are beaten. We also added lemon zest and a little lemon juice (which adds both flavour and more stability). We were told never to use non-stick pans, and to mist (with water) rather than oil the pans so that the fragile batter had something to cling to as it rose. It also needs walls to hang onto, hence the use of tube pans. And when we cooled it (for a minimum of 3 hours) we did so upside-down to allow gravity to help the cake stay tall. The steam trapped inside the pan during cooling helps to loosen the cake when it’s time to take it out.

After that it kept brilliantly and was lovely and light 3 days later when I served it with some awful organic California strawberries and cream (the things I do for food knowledge).

(Actually: I will not be buying California strawberries again as I’ve just watched Forever Plastic and seen how non-recyclable is plastic clamshell packaging)

Then we made two more cakes (chocolate and butter)

and learned a bit about butter cakes: the importance of making your butter/sugar mix fluffy before you start throwing eggs into it; the abrasive effect of sugar on butter which helps to cream it; and the importance of smoothing the batter before you put it in the oven. We learned three tests to determine whether a cake was done: feel (does it spring back when touched); stability (if it looks wobbly it’s not done); edges (are they pulling away from the pan’s sides?). And we inverted the cake pans (propped up so the tops weren’t touching anything) to keep the filling light while cooling.

We then chilled our cakes and on day 2 we cut them (not to be attempted when they’re fresh from the oven). First we put the cake on a rotating cake stand and marked two evenly spaced lines with our knives; then we lightly circled round cutting about an inch in, to make sure the first cut was even; then we circled round again and severed the first round. Then we repeated and separated the three layers. We kept the bottom layer as the bottom and, depending on how bulgy the top was, might flip it over to make for a flat top in the finished product.

We had made some simple syrup and some orange curd for use in our frosting exercises.

We brushed all three layers of the cakes with simple syrup, to keep them moist. Then we spread the curd on two of the layers. If it was too soft (we’d made it with gelatine but some batches were softer than others) we piped some butter cream icing to make a dam

to keep it from drooling over the edges like this

and then refrigerated it so everything could firm up. Then we took it out and applied a thin layer, the “crumb coat,” and put it back to chill some more before the final decorating. Cakes can be frozen at this stage.

We passed the time learning to pipe flowers

and comb icing round the sides.

I did not master the combing but was quite pleased with my flowers. So was my bench-mate, apparently, as he made off with most of mine before I got to the decorating stage. Still, it looked ok even with no combing and only one flower. The almonds round the bottom helped (but they’re also there to hide the inevitable imperfections that iced cakes will have at the base).

Chocolate one looked ok too, and the ganache filling was divine.