Step Away From The Kitchen!

March 30, 2015 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

There’s more to life than the kitchen!

“I don’t know what is more terrifying…that your blog makes you seem like this insane woman who spends all day in the kitchen, or that you really are an insane woman who spends all day in the kitchen.”

I just want to make it perfectly clear that I do not spend all day in the kitchen. I may be insane (indeed, I’m pretty sure I am), but not in that way.

For example, I spent all afternoon Saturday in the garden, and Sunday morning I cleaned the house and payed a social call to the dentist. I just finished editing a resource management plan for a client, and soon I will move on to the main task of each week day, writing and selling (well, trying to sell) my books (which have nothing to do with food, though sometimes characters do eat).

Have I spent an inordinate amount of time in the kitchen lately? Yes, at least on weekends. But it is harvest time, and extra work now means I can spend winter evenings sewing, or curled up with a book. I intend to enjoy every one of the frozen and canned meals I’ve been working so hard on lately, and I will take full advantage of the extra hours I gain later, spending them out of the kitchen.

Oh boy! Oh boy!

March 29, 2015 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

Every crack in my hands is stained purple. My fingernails have turned a dark grey. The floor, walls and cupboards in the kitchen are splattered magenta. There is a sticky splotch on my big toe that looks remarkably like a terrible wound.

These are the inevitable result of working my way through the better part of 40 kg of black boy peaches.

The dentist called mid-week to say he had a box of peaches for me; I should call in at the office and pick them up (this is the gardening dentist I mentioned in a previous blog). Along with the 10 kg box of peaches was an invitation to coffee (and more peaches) this morning. We came home with a veritable carload of peaches (more than 30 kg, though I haven’t weighed them all). The first 10 kg became 10 pints of spiced peach butter. Then I filled up my remaining quart jars (14) with canned peaches, and made enough peach crisp for a generous dessert tonight and breakfast tomorrow morning.

There are still about 12 kg left. I’m out of jars, out of freezer boxes. Hmm…I suppose that means we’ll have to eat peach pie, peach cobbler, peach shortbread, peach muffins, peaches on granola, and just plain old peaches all week. Darn. 🙂

In praise of the freezer

March 27, 2015 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

Hurrah for the freezer that allows us to enjoy hot homemade pizza in 15 minutes!

This evening, the kids have a piano recital. But first, we will stay late at school for band practice, and Ian will come home late from work because of a meeting. There will be precious little time between the day’s events and the evening’s event to cook and eat a meal.

Thank God for the domestic freezer (or perhaps I should thank the dozens of inventors who worked on developing and refining refrigeration technology since 1755). Despite the tight schedule, we will eat well this evening. A homemade pizza awaits us in the freezer. Fifteen minutes in the oven is all it will take to turn that icy block into a delicious meal.

This is our first year with a chest freezer, and we are singing the praises of modern refrigeration technology (at least until the power goes out for four days, which has been known to happen in this shaky land). In the past, we’ve not been able to freeze vegetables, because the little freezer space we had was needed for the 24 loaves of bread Ian makes every two or three weeks. We resisted getting a chest freezer for a variety of reasons—space constraints, cost, the frequency with which the power goes out (5 times so far in the month of March)—but after the cheese fridge died, we decided to give the chest freezer a try (it could sit where the cheese fridge had been, after all, and the cheese…well, we’d figure out where that was going later).

In the heat and bustle of summer, it was lovely to be able to quickly prepare fruit for freezing, rather than laboriously canning it and steaming up the kitchen. It was delightful to be able to plant as many peas as I had space for, knowing I could freeze the excess. I was thrilled to be able to freeze the extra corn, rather than watch it dry out on the plants. And when the pumpkins start to rot in late winter, I’ll be able to bake dozens of them at a time in the bread oven and freeze the flesh so we don’t lose them.

So, thank you William Cullen, Oliver Evans, Jacob Perkins, Alexander Twining, James Harrison, Ferdinand Carré, Nathaniel Wales and many, many others who have refined this technology over hundreds of years and brought us the modern freezer.

Life as a Squirrel

March 26, 2015 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

Having recently crossed over into the dark side of the year, I am naturally looking ahead to the winter to come. The days are growing short, the nights cool.

As I sneak a late-night snack of almonds and raisins (though I’m not particularly hungry), I begin to wonder…Am I like a bear, eating extra food, building up fat in order to hibernate all winter?

Then I harvest the beans, corn and pumpkins and store them away in cupboard, freezer and shed, and I believe I am like a chipmunk, filling its larder with autumn’s bounty so I can huddle inside munching on the fruits of my labour all winter.

Our last snow–in 2011. We rarely get snow to frolic in, but it’s nice to frolic when I can.

But that’s not quite right, either, because I’m truly more like a squirrel. I hunker down in my winter nest during the worst weather, but on fine winter days I like to frolic outdoors, to scamper around searching out the little tidbits I’ve stashed here and there. The chard I left growing on the compost pile, the lettuces in the greenhouse, the last of the potatoes and carrots still in the garden, the cabbage and broccoli that hang on through the cold months. Sometimes, squirrel-like, I forget where I’ve hidden something—the last jar of artichokes, in the back of the cupboard, perhaps, or the leeks, quietly growing without my noticing until one day they are ready to eat.

I’m sure that, for a squirrel, fine winter days are a frantic race to stave off winter starvation, but for me, winter frolicking is just that—a little light weeding, gathering in the meagre winter crops, and enjoying the release from the hard labour of summer.

I still have a month or more to go before I can rest from summer labours, but on this tired end of the year, I look forward to my squirrely winter days, curling up in my nest and eating from my food caches.

The Well-sharpened Knife

March 25, 2015 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

Tomatoes are always good for our knives. There’s nothing like a tomato to show you how dull a knife is, and the knives get sharpened more during tomato season than they do all the rest of the year. Last weekend, I sharpened my favourite tomato knife twice as I chopped 18 kilos (40 pounds) of tomatoes for pasta sauce. Then I sharpened it again the next day before slicing a tomato for lunch.

Years ago I saw a knife salesman demonstrating his wares. He cut a tomato to show how good his knives were. The knife sliced cleanly through the fruit, without squishing it, or tearing at the skin. It would have been an impressive demonstration, except that I know all about tomatoes and knives. The best knife in the world will destroy a tomato if it’s not well sharpened. The knife salesmen count on that. Their knives might be the cheapest, lousiest knives out there, but because they sharpen them before a demonstration, they’re guaranteed to cut better than any knife in the average domestic kitchen.

A well-sharpened knife is a pleasing tool (and much safer than a dull one). It’s too bad it takes a bushel of tomatoes to remind me to sharpen them.

Brought to you by the letter P and the colour Purple

March 24, 2015 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

Potatoes are one of my favourite foods. They go with just about everything. They can be baked, fried, boiled, steamed, and grilled. They can become a cool potato salad for a hot summer day, or a thick steaming soup for a cold winter night.

When we visited Bolivia and Peru years ago, I got to see and taste a wide range of potatoes I’d never experienced before. One of my most vivid memories is sitting in a boat travelling across lake Titicaca watching a group of local men pull out their lunches—handfuls of small, colourful potatoes that they ate like apples. Most of those potato varieties never make it out of South America, and our cuisine is poorer for it.

Purple potatoes (and purple beans, too) add a lovely colour contrast to other vegetables.

Supermarket potatoes are a rather uniform lot, but a greater variety can be had in seed potatoes. My all time favourite potato is Purple Heart. Even if it weren’t delicious (which it is), its purple colour would win me over. The colour remains during cooking, and adds a splash of whimsy to a plate. Purple mashed potatoes, anyone?

Chai

March 23, 2015 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

It was a cool, drizzly day today, and the ceiling was dripping from some newly sprung leak in the roof. It was a day for tea.

My current favourite tea is a homemade chai my husband gave to me at Christmas. I had been making up individual cups of chai for us, plonking various spices into the cup individually, but some days it was too much work to search through the cupboard for all the right spices. Ian’s chai mix makes a cup of chai as easy as a tea bag. A scant spoonful of his mix makes a wonderfully spicy cup to warm up even the wettest of days. The mix includes candied ginger, hot pepper flakes, stick cinnamon, cardamom pods, whole cloves, and star anise. And the best part of it is the spicy Christmas-baking smell it leaves in the house long after the last sip has been drunk.

The Brewer’s Wife

March 22, 2015 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

Ian and I each have our own ‘domains’ within the kitchen. Ian’s domain involves everything involving yeast (as befitting a guy who studies fungi), so brewing is his job.

Of course, being the brewer’s wife has its own responsibilities. I am the assistant who lifts, holds, and hauls as needed. I’m also the capper and labeller when it comes time for bottling. These tasks are not unpleasant ones, but there are others less agreeable.

Every now and again, something goes awry with a batch of beer. Somehow it always seems to happen when Ian is away, and I am home. Usually it involves a mess.

Once, several years ago, Ian started a batch of beer, then left the next morning for a week of field work. About midday the first day, I happened to glance at the brewing bucket, and was concerned to see the lid bulging. I bent down to peer at the airlock, which looked clogged with foam and debris. At that very moment, the lid blew off the bucket with a boom. Beer sprayed everywhere—floor, ceiling, walls, and kitchen cabinets were all anointed. Not an inch of the room was spared, and I was left soaked and dripping with beer. It wasn’t the only time I’ve had to clean up wayward beer, but it was surely the most spectacular.

On the whole, though, being the brewer’s wife has more advantages than disadvantages (she says as she sips a lovely pale ale…)

Some Like it Hot

March 21, 2015 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

What do you do with 3 kg of hot peppers? I don’t know, but you’ll need lots of water on hand!

I planted Thai Super-Chilli, my reliable, high-producing hot pepper this year, and I also tried a new variety—Jalapeño Early. Ordinary jalapeños take so long to produce that they’ve barely flowered before the frost kills them off. I didn’t expect much from Jalapeño Early, but I hoped we’d at least get a few. They’ve been tremendous! We’ve been eating them for weeks, and I finally had a chance to go out and properly pick—close to 3 kilos, and more still on the plants (I quit picking when my colander was full). That’s a kilogram of fruit from each plant–way more than I ever expected!

Unfortunately, they’re milder than an ordinary jalapeño, but I’ve pickled them with a few Thai Super-Chillies in each jar, to spice them up a notch. They should be great with the black beans I harvested a few weeks ago—warm us right up on a cold winter evening!

Favourite kitchen tools: Granny Fork and Pastry Knife

March 20, 2015 / Robinne Weiss / 1 Comment

I thought it was time to share another favourite kitchen tool, and really had to share both of these together, because I so often use them together for pie dough.

The granny fork. I don’t know what this sort of fork is actually called, but everyone’s granny has one, so we call it a granny fork. Long, thin tines make it perfect for mixing water into pie crust, and the real bone handle, worn and stained, tells stories of kitchens past. The granny fork mixes history into every pie.

The pastry knife. I suppose most people don’t use this tool anymore. It’s been replaced by the food processor, which is far quicker and easier to use, for sure. But I enjoy the feel of a pastry knife. There is a pleasing rhythm to cutting butter with one of these, and it’s much quieter than the food processor when I’m making scones early on a Sunday morning while the family sleeps. I particularly like the old ones, purchased at second hand shops or garage sales—they fit the hand better, and are sturdier than new ones—but as I wear out a pastry knife in about a year (don’t think about that…it’s a lot of pastry!), I use whatever I can find.

So there we are—the Luddite’s favourite kitchen tools. While the food processor gathers dust, I quietly make my pie dough just like granny did.

Robinne Weiss

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