ReallyGoodWriter | Food • Writing • Poetry Iambic Cafe

food & poetry, but mostly the poetry of food

Food • Writing • Poetry

I have a quantity – indeed quantities – of yellow transparent apples to work with, so it has been apple everything of late.

These apples are tart and soft in the cooking, and so sometimes give the illusion there’s been lemon at work. I use them while they’re still green but even when fully ripe they are sharp and puckery. I stew some with blackberries and freeze that; I juice some, using carrots for sweetener and freeze that; and I make a bit of applesauce. I might try dehydrating some, but they are awfully tart. For the rest, I peel, chop and freeze in ziplock bags and leave a few in the veg bin in the fridge. They don’t last as well as some apples, they shrink and wrinkle, but will endure for some months – in fact I made a cake from some 2008 vintage ones I found malingering in the fridge back in April. And they can be chopped and added to everything from soup to curry to dog food (if you make your own!).

Some of the best things I’ve made include Apple Crème Brulée; Dan Lepard‘s Apple, Walnut & Custard pudding; Apple Raisin Cake; my enduring favourite, Delia Smith‘s Caramelised Apple Flan (cheat’s Tarte Tatin);

the recently remarked Blackberry-Apple Clafoutis; and a variation on German Apple Cake. Recipes yet to be attempted might include an Apple Soufflé, and one day when I am feeling ambitious enough to marshal the ingredients: Delia’s Prune, Apple & Armagnac Cake with Almond Streusel Topping.

Lots of fruit to pick these days. I’ve been blackberrying, of course

and then Judy connected me with the owner of a fig tree which was laden with green figs

and I joined my first pick with the Fruit Tree Project, where I obtained a quantity of yellow plums.

LifeCycles organizes this project in Victoria, which makes use of what would be otherwise wasted urban fruit. Owners register their trees with the project and then LifeCycles sends a team of volunteers equipped with picking aprons and orchard ladders who strip the tree, clean up and distribute the fruit – a share to the owner, a share to the pickers and the rest to LifeCycles which distributes or processes the fruit. Contemporary gleaning I suppose. The tree on Sunday looked like this when we began

and two hours later looked like this

because the tree was absolutely laden and we were short-handed, but more importantly short-fruit-boxed. We filled all these cartons

and departed, promising the owner a second pick one evening.

Come time to deal with all this bounty, I recommend The National Center for Home Preservation which covers most things extremely well– but a laptop in my kitchen is a dangerous thing… for weeks, my counter has been a massive sprawl of books, print-outs, jars, sugar, tongs, lemons, cutting boards. And the omnipresent fruit flies who are watching proceedings with interest.

I’ve done jams

and cans

and dehydrations

and even a little baking (happy revival of the Lightning Cake!)

And now I must can the rest of the plums. For the tomatoes are starting to ripen.

Thinking of jam making, which has been documented well and poetically by the likes of Maxine Kumin, I came across this snotty poem which claims to know whose history is more-important-with-a-capital-I. Preserving does seem to be one of the last barriers between the genders: although I know men who can vegetables and pickles and fish, I know precious few who make jam (though plenty who eat it). As a public experiment, may I suggest you attend a preserving workshop sometime and count the number of men in the class and interrogate them for their views on this. It is puzzling that more men appear to be willing and interested to learn how to grow things than to to preserve the fruits of their labour. Whence cometh this jam stigma?

They’ve really done it this time. A new GM corn variety has been approved for planting in Canada by CFIA without being subjected to any safety testing.

CBAN’s campaign asks us to let our government know this is not ok, and they have an email form you can send to Canada’s minister of health, Leona Aglukkaq, right this minute, while you’re thinking about it. Or you can send your message through Health Canada’s contact form.

This is what Health Canada’s own website promises, regarding the introduction of GE and other “novel” foods:

Health Canada assesses the safety of all genetically-modified and other novel foods proposed for sale in Canada. Companies are required to submit detailed scientific data for review and approval by Health Canada, before such foods can be sold.

The Globe & Mail did a good piece on the new variety that’s been approved without testing. This bit pretty much nails the problem:

The health agency said in response to questions from The Globe and Mail that it didn’t have to [assess the seeds for safety], because it is relying on the two companies making the seeds, agriculture giants Monsanto Co. and Dow AgroSciences LLC, to flag any safety concerns. But the companies haven’t tested the seeds either, because they say they aren’t required to.

Elsewhere this unbelievably careless approach to public safety is correctly but inadequately likened to putting the fox in charge of the hen house. Indeed.

I was by coincidence invited along to the last ever Grapevine event last Thursday.

The Grapevine was started five years ago by a group of entrepreneurial women who thought the best thing they could do for small businesses in Victoria was to bring them customers. They selected from among the best new small businesses in town and organized “grapings”, where a bunch of people from their 400-strong mailing list – usually numbering around 20-25 – would meet at a nearby location and walk to the graping point. They used all means licit and illicit to trick the owners into being their for their visit, so that they could have a chance to meet some consumers and tell them a bit about their business. The idea was that those who came to the graping would let their friends and colleagues know about it, and the organizers posted articles and photos on the website to spread the word. Simple, beautiful and now over, sadly, 5 years and 42 grapings later.

This last one was at a place I’d wanted to visit anyway: Village Family Marketplace is Victoria’s latest local food emporium. Seven young partners have pooled their resources and talents to start a grocery store downtown, where it might be difficult for locals to make it to farm shops or find good local produce. Two of the partners, Dustin and Justine, walk us through the history

and explain that everything they sell is either grown or produced locally. They’ve only been open for three weeks so the shelves are not yet as full as they will be. The professional kitchen in the back is geared to produce deli items, ready meals, condiments and treats to fill the display case. They have frozen goods including local organic meats, as well as dairy and produce,

a few items you won’t find everywhere, like purslane and lemon cucumbers and kelp

and a few dry goods. The group has dolled up a standard shipping container

and equipped it with coolers to add capacity; there are play stations for children; and they’ve build picnic tables so that one day there can be a place to relax out back. The interior makes use of reclaimed timber.. for example in the handsome front counter with its arbutus inlay.

So.. a happy morning spent poking round the shop and I’ll be making a return visit before too long. Not difficult since one of my other favourite food shops, the spectacularly well-stocked Mediterranean deli Blair Mart, is just about next door – and its courtly owner the Village’s landlord.

The blackberries have been calling me and I have been answering by the bucketful. These are, as I have said before, Himalayan blackberries, and they are the ones everyone thinks of when you say ‘blackberry’. They’re big, fat and in season from August through September.

The native blackberries, smaller and trailing, are now finished. They ripen in June and July and are very much worth the hunt. It might take three or four times the picking time to fill a pail, compared with Himalayans, but theirs is a different, more intense flavour.

Himalyans are not native to BC; they were brought to North America by Luther Burbank and have spread throughout the land with joy and vigour. The plant is highly invasive, and you need to practice extreme caution about putting any part of it into your compost. Moreover, as I saw happen during this spring’s ground-clearning at Haliburton, new plants can and will sprout from chopped stems. Perhaps if you decompose them for a while in black plastic bags, or make sure they are completely dried out they’d be safe, but they’re nasty and prickly any way you look at them so I think send them wherever you send other pernicious weeds. And don’t put berries into the compost either (birds and gravity put enough of them around).

Anton finds picking days Very Boring. He is like any 13 year old: if he could speak, his first words would be, Can we go now?

One excellent use you can put this booty to is a clafoutis (or clafouti), which I maintain is the righteous ancestor of the food known as impossible pie. Both these dishes are a kind of starched custard that creates its own base while enfolding the main ingredient in a soft eggy filling. They appear in both savoury and sweet versions; the savouries make good quick quiches, while the well-known coconut pie is an excellent dessert. Last night we had a blackberry and apple clafoutis which was exceptionally good. This recipe – which uses apricots and raspberries – is a good one to base it on. Serve it warm, but it’s not bad cold.