Strawberries

Part of me said to write about something a little less predictable than strawberries this week. But a bigger part thinks that at a time when those glorious, plump red berries are at their peak, you, like me, want new ideas for how to eat them.

I'm pretty certain there is no other produce item that Ontarians anticipate more than the strawberry. All of us have great memories around them, be they from strawberry socials, jam-making with grandma or shortcake on the back deck.

When I was in my early-20s, I helped run a summer daycamp for four to seven-year-olds and I'll always remember our berry picking outing. It was one of those perfect July days and each tyke was given a styrofoam cup to fill with their pickings. I am not sure any berries ever made it into the cups, though, so busy were these kids stuffing the warm, sun-soaked fruit into their mouths. 

Each one of them boarded the bus for home freckled from the sun, blissfully stuffed, covered in red stains (even on their bums, from having plunked down for a rest in the patch) and totally tuckered out. The bus smelled like a candy factory.

Every year I plan to slather on the sunscreen and go strawberry picking. Without fail, though, I instead end up dashing into my favourite berry farm on the fly to buy a pre-picked flat or two. I'm not sure this will be my year to hit the fields, either, because, at eight months pregnant, I can barely tie my shoes. But there's always next year. Having a ten-month-old in tow will no doubt add a whole new dimension to the experience. And present a prime new opportunity to create memories.

So now for that recipe. Well, pavlova's nothing new, but it's the perfect way to showcase fresh berries and a change from the ubiquitous shortcake. I hosted a baby shower for a friend last week and thought this would be the perfect way to end the meal. This cake is meant to feed 12 but six of us (half of whom were preggers) easily ate the whole thing. C'mon, it's pretty light.

This is a combination of one recipe I found in Bon Appetit magazine and another from The Complete Canadian Living Cookbook -- with a few tweaks of my own. 

The Bon Appetit recipe actually included a tablespoon of crushed pink peppercorns in their meringue, stirred in just before baking. This gives your meringue a lovely floral flavour. I planned to try this but discovered that the pink peppercorns in my cupboard were bordering on moldy (this at 9 p.m.) so I had to forgo them but I encourage you to give it a whirl. For a unique twist, you could also use basil in place of mint for the syrup. 

I recommend splurging on the vanilla bean because it gives unparalleled flavour. The rest of the ingredients here aren't going to set you back too much so it's easier to justify. 

Pavlova with Strawberries, Vanilla Cream and Mint Syrup

Meringue:

6 egg whites

1 cup sugar, divided

1-1/2 tbsp cornstarch

2 tsp white wine vinegar

Vanilla Cream:

1 cup chilled whipping cream

1 tbsp sugar

1/2 vanilla bean, split lengthwise

1 pint strawberries, hulled and quartered or sliced

Mint Syrup:

1/4 cup light corn syrup

1/4 cup packed, fresh mint leaves

2 tbsp water

Line baking sheet with parchment paper. Using a nine-inch round cake pan as a guide, mark circle on paper and turn over. 

Position rack in centre of oven and preheat to 275F. Using electric mixer, beat egg whites to soft peaks. Add 3/4 cup sugar, beating to medium firm peaks. Mix remaining 1/4 cup sugar with cornstarch and gradually beat in. Continue beating until very stiff. Stir in white wine vinegar. 

Spoon mixture onto prepared circle. Form into a nest shape with a hollow about 12 cm wide and sides about 3 cm higher than hollow. Bake for 1-1/4 to 1-1/2 hours. Turn off oven and let cool in oven until completely dry (about an hour). Slide onto serving plate.

Whip cream with sugar. Scrape in seeds from vanilla bean. Spoon into meringue nest, leaving the raised side bare. Arrange berries on top of cream. 

For the syrup, blanch mint leaves in boiling water for 30 seconds and squeeze dry. Puree with corn syrup and water, then cover and chill at least two hours to allow the flavours to develop. Bring to room temperature and strain through sieve. Drizzle the syrup over the whole pavlova or, better yet, on and around each piece after you plate it. Garnish with more mint leaves, if you like.

LOFT

Nothing beats homegrown food in summer. But it's not always easy to get at. 

Farmer's markets are close by, relatively convenient (at least if you like to shop on Saturday mornings), and much of the fare is sown right here in Waterloo region. But not all of it. The presence of pineapples and bananas should be your first clue. To boot, organic offerings are few and far between.

Lots of farmers sell at the gate, but that's not always a practical option for city dwellers -- getting out into the country doesn't fit easily into everyone's weekly agenda. And not all farmers grow all things.

Thankfully, there are people out there who badly want to help us gain easy accessibility to locally, sustainably grown produce -- organic produce at that. 

Local Organic Fair Trade (LOFT) is a cooperative of farmers and marketers working together to bring this beautiful stuff to the likes of you and me. They work like dogs to make sure that we can get our hands on it, not only because they want the population at large to eat better, but because they want to help small family farms become -- and remain -- viable.

Most community supported agriculture (CSA) programs ask customers like you and me to pony up a few hundred bucks at the beginning of the growing season. Essentially, this means buying a farm share. In exchange for your money, you get weekly fruits and vegetables roughly until the frost, often in the form of a weekly box. These programs aim to put us closer in touch with the source of our food. 

LOFT runs things a little differently. First, your food comes from several farms, not just one. And while these farmers have produce at the ready every week, customers aren't obligated to commit to a four or five month season. "You can buy one week or 20 weeks and that gives the customer a whole lot of flexibility," says LOFT founder Martha Scroggins, herself a grower. 

All a hungry person needs to do is log onto the website before 11:59 on Thursday night to order a bag or box of  organics for pick-up the following Tuesday or Friday at one of a number of drop-off spots in and around the region (Kitchener, Waterloo, Cambridge, Elmira and Wellesley). 

There's no picking and choosing. You get is what's seasonally available and the bags and boxes are packed for you. That might mean green garlic, maple syrup, kohlrabi, strawberries and lemon balm one week or soft wheat flour, tomatoes, leeks, zucchini and basil the next. 

Customers can choose from The Bag ($25), suitable for singletons or couples who want just a few items, The Family Box ($37), for hungrier pairs or small families, and The Heavy Box ($50), for bigger families. You can order a weekly supply for the whole season in one go, order once a week in a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants manner or find some sort of happy medium.

LOFT's is a remarkably easygoing program compared to its CSA bretheren. Forget the take-it-or-leave-it approach, these farmers are bending over backward for us non-commital city folk. Payment options are equally flexible, though Scroggins would love to see as many people as possible forking it over up front -- and for good reason.

"Early in the season is when a farmer needs money," Scroggins explains, "whether it's for seeds or for greenhouse and machinery repairs. It's a long, cold winter for a farmer and these are small family farms. So hopefully customers will understand with time why we encourage people to pay up front."

Last summer was LOFT's first, and it was, by all means, a successful one. Scroggins says there was no question it would return this year, sagging economy or not.

"There was a desperate need for this," Scoggins says. "I've got a fairly strong following and the market research shows it's growing. We've been at this for a long time and it's been arduous. We're talking carrots here, we're not talking microchips. Carrots don't have much value in society today but we're slowly seeing increasing value in local, sustainable food."

For further information on LOFT, check out their new website at http://loftmarket.ca/.

Minty Fresh

The best thing about warm weather, for me, is that I can grow herbs on my front porch. Every spring I stock up on basil, rosemary, thyme, oregano, mint, sage and parsley and plant away. It then thrills me to come across a recipe needing a handful of this herb or that, finely chopped, and knowing that it’s ten steps away, waiting to be harvested. No plastic-packaged, overpriced wisps of grocery store herbs for me.

If I had to pick a desert island herb to grow – just one – I think (right now, anyway) it would be spearmint. It’s so versatile and it has that fantastically fresh, cool taste that elevates everything, be it sweet or savoury.

Best, it requires no gardening prowess. Not only will it flourish despite you, it will take over your whole yard if you’re not careful. Planting it in a pot is therefore a better idea, whether you keep the pot on your porch or embed the pot in a garden bed (in which case you’ll have it forever, since it’s a perennial).

Cultures the world over have incorporated mint into their cooking – Greeks freshen up their salads with it (it goes beautifully with feta) and Asians add it to soups and stir-fries. It’s a good friend to lamb and to chocolate and it makes fantastic tea. My most-memorable-ever cup of after-dinner tea was at a lovely eatery in Chelsea, Quebec, and involved only a pot of boiled water and a heap of mint leaves from the restaurant’s garden.

Homemade mint jelly; mint pesto; mint tossed with freshly-shelled peas, butter, shaved parmesan and lemon zest; mint with grilled eggplant, red wine vinegar, garlic and a drizzle of olive oil; homemade mojitos. Have I tempted you yet?

If not, consider the following recipe for homemade mint ice cream. It has a freshness that the store-bought green stuff just doesn’t deliver. 

I’m going to include just the recipe for the ice cream here, but if you think like I do, you’re probably wondering how you can incorporate some chocolate. I don’t recommend stirring in chocolate chips because they always get waxy and flavourless in ice cream. Instead, whip up a fudgey homemade sauce to pour overtop or make it into ice-cream sandwiches with some rich chocolate cookies. (A cookie with a more cake-like consistency would be preferable since it stays softer when frozen).

Lastly, a word about ice cream machines. Most of you probably don’t own one; I bought one last summer and have never looked back. They can be had for well under $100 and you can make frosty drinks and frozen yogurt and all kinds of dreamy things in there. I’ve also seen a very cool and fairly inexpensive ice-cream making gadget out there called the Play and Freeze that would be great for kids – Google it up.

If you don’t have an ice cream maker, pour the custard into a bowl, pop it in the freezer, and pull it out every 30 minutes or so to whisk it up vigorously. You’ll get the same results as a machine, more or less, in two to three hours.

This recipe is from the queen of homemade herself, Martha Stewart. It makes about three cups.

Fresh Spearmint Ice Cream

1 cup packed fresh spearmint

1 cup whole milk

2 cups heavy cream

2 large eggs

3/4 cup sugar

1. Prepare an ice water bath. Cook mint in a small saucepan of boiling water until bright green (about one minute). Using a slotted spoon, transfer mint to ice-water bath. When cool, drain and squeeze out excess water. Reserve ice-water bath.

2. Puree mint and milk in a blender until mint is finely chopped. Transfer to a medium saucepan, add cream, and bring to a simmer over medium heat.

3. Meanwhile, whisk together eggs and sugar in a medium bowl.

4. Gradually whisk 1/3 of the cream mixture into the egg mixture, then pour egg-cream mixture into the saucepan with the remaining cream mixture. Set over medium heat and cook, stirring constantly with a wooden spoon until it’s thick enough to coat the back of the spoon (about eight minutes).

5. Strain through a fine sieve into a heatproof bowl, pressing on mint to extract liquid. Set bowl in ice-water bath and let cool completely, stirring occasionally. 

6. Freeze in an ice cream maker according to manufacturer’s instructions. Transfer to an airtight container and freeze until firm, about four hours.

Buying Local Made Easy

We live in a big box world in these suburban parts. When it comes to shopping for our food, we've gotten accustomed to pushing our extra-large carts through the extra-wide aisles of stores we can't really access by foot. We shop in a haze, rarely running into anyone we know, nose to the grindstone.

It's a shame, says Nina Bailey-Dick, because it lessens our sense of community. Bailey-Dick is working to change that through her own business, one that's hitting a nerve among local folk judging by the way its grown since its inception just over a year ago.

Bailey-Dick started Bailey's Local Foods out of her Waterloo carport in May 2008. Her passion for eating and sourcing out locally grown food got her thinking that, while many like her had an interest in eating closer to home, driving to farms, health food stores, and specialty shops for one or two items per stop wasn't exactly time or carbon efficient. 

"It doesn't make sense for all of us to drive around the countryside," she explains. "It makes far more sense for us to coordinate it and have farmers bring it into the cities."

So Bailey-Dick started a buying club with 10 or 15 families and a spiral notebook ledger. She made up a list of items she was willing to round up and had club members place their orders a few days in advance. Within a month, she was up to 50 families. A couple more months passed and 96 families were on board. "It was chaos," she laughs now, "but happy, beautiful chaos."

Things shut down temporarily for the fall and winter while Bailey-Dick and her business partner Rachael Ward regrouped. Now they've started back up just in time for the growing season, relocating from the carport to First United Church in Waterloo, where they rent a space that allows her club members -- now 257 families -- more room to pick up their weekly stash. 

Orders are done online between Saturday night (after Bailey-Dick sends out her weekly "what's available" email) and Tuesday evening; pick-up at the church takes place Fridays afternoons. Customers aren't obligated to order weekly, but the option is certainly there (at least until October, when pick-up will go monthly for the colder months). 

What's for the taking? A wide array of whatever's in season (berries, no-spray soft fruits from Niagara, herbs and vegetables), preserves, fresh bread, grains and flours, meat of various kinds, yogurt and cheese, oil, peanut butter, pasta, beans, popcorn and more.

Eggs and milk are no-gos (too highly regulated, says Bailey-Dick). And though she tries as best as she can to keep things as local as possible, she has no qualms about saying that it's not 100 per cent so. She also tries to keep things ethical, favouring foods that are organic or minimally sprayed.

"Sometimes the things we offer are not as cheap as Zehrs," she explains, adding that it takes some educating for people to understand why supermarkets sometimes seem so cheap. (Grocery stores offer certain items very inexpensively, taking a loss on them to get customers in the door; they then make their money on all the other items the customers stock up on while they're there). 

Buying club members pay a one-time $20 joining fee, and Bailey-Dick makes her income by marking prices up 25 per cent. "We're very transparent about how we mark things up," she says. "We're certainly not gouging. Some things will feel more expensive and others will seem like a great deal."

It's a great way to support a struggling economy, she adds. "It generates income for the church, it's a huge win for farmers, for urban families wanting to eat locally. It keeps money in the community and circulating among small business. There are so many positive ripple effects."

Including the way it brings people together. Bailey-Dick estimates that 85 per cent of her families walked or biked to pick up their orders last year, dragging their wagons behind them (a practice she heartily encourages). This year, with the move to the church and the increase in customers, she imagines more people will travel by car. Either way, she loves the atmosphere on pick-up day. 

"It's a gathering spot where you bump into people you haven't seen, there are kids selling pastries, there are strollers and bike trailers," she says. "It's a real community spot and that holds a good feeling for people."

Bailey-Dick is embracing continued growth, so do check out the company website, www.baileyslocalfoods.ca, if the buying club sounds like your kind of thing. Me, I can hardly wait to place my first order. Perhaps I'll see you at the church, wagon in tow.