Vancouver and the Granville Island Public Market. July 2013

Sorting through my photos from my travels to Canada, I have found a few food related photos that I took with the intention of writing blog posts about but never got a chance to do while on the road. WiFi in campgrounds I discovered is not always the most reliable so that is my excuse.

We only spent a couple of separate days in Vancouver but on our first day there, after walking over a very very long bridge in a downpour, we discovered the Granville Island Public Market......foodie heaven.

There it is, down there on the left....... This photo was taken on our second trip to the market in much better weather,on our return to Vancouver a week later.

All sorts of food was on offer from fresh seafoods, to handmade ravioli, from olive oil to cheeses from all over the world, from artisan breads to fresh fruits of all descriptions piled carefully into arty displays and the most exquisite looking hand made and decorated chocolates which unfortunately at about $4 per tiny piece were beyond my budget of my last remaining Canadian dollars.

Naturally it was the place to have a late lunch/ early dinner (twice) as it closed up at 7 pm. There was of course the long hike back over the bridge to our hostel to work off all those extra calories.....not for us those cute little boats that ferried people back and forth across False Creek, so named because itwasn't  really a creek at all but an inlet. We didn't really care if we didn't see any of the other sights of Vancouver after that!!!

Wensleydale with a twist 26th July 2013

Last weekend I made the first hard cheeses I have made for months. I make feta regularly but to make a hard cheese involves quite a process which needs a whole day free. Even though the process itself is not that difficult, there are lots of little steps which leaves little time to do much else in between.

Since I was going to make one cheese I though, why not make two?  I should have answered that by saying, because you don't have the equipment to do two at once. Once I realised that I would need 2 cheese moulds and a press that pressed twice the weight I have needed before, it was too late, the milk was heating up in the 2 pots!

So in between all the little steps, I was busy making a new mould out of pipe and getting Max to invent a way of adding additional weight to the press which involved safety ropes and bars suspended from the laundry ceiling.

Meanwhile back in the kitchen the cheeses were progressing to curd stage.

One curd had mustard seed mixed into it before pressing and the other dried cranberries.

 I had tasted some Wensleydale with cranberry in Carstairs near Calgary when I was recently in Canada, sitting around the dinner table with my daughter Jennie's Workaway host who kindly hosted me as well on my first night in the country. It was so delicious, I had to have a go a producing it myself.

By the next morning, both rounds were pressed nicely and just needed a couple of days drying before being waxed. The cranberry version needs to be eaten in a month or so as I read on someone else's blog that they might ferment if left longer. The mustard one I will age for much longer. We have recently been eating one I made in March 2012 and it has a fantastic bite to it, like a vintage Cheddar.

Add some nice new red wax and voila, there you have it.

Wild Salmon in the wilds of Canada

At the moment I am on a road trip with my vegetarian daughter through British Columbia. Mostly I have been eating vegetarian dishes with her, cooked on the camping stove but yesterday when we went to a farmers market in Vernon in the Okanagan valley, I couldn't resist the opportunity to buy some wild salmon to have for dinner. We also bought some fresh asparagus and spinach so with a sweet potato mash, it made for a delicious meal. We stayed in a motel last night due to an unseasonal deluge so made the most of the opportunity of having a kitchen. This area is also the fruit bowl of British Columbia so dessert was made up of fresh cherries and strawberries!

Red Cabbage in Winter and Jams galore 18/5/13

At this time of year there is nothing better for dinner than some braised Red Cabbage and Apple. I made a big batch of this last night. With a little bacon and fennel seeds to start things off, add some sliced onion and apple and chunks of red cabbage. Pour in some balsamic vinegar, put the lid on and slowly cook for an hour.  How good it tastes. This is a great side dish or good enough for a meal in itself.

The jam cupboard is looking a bit bare at the moment and the freezer is full so what better way to spend the day than making an assortment of jams from the summer's harvest.

First a mixture of raspberry, loganberry, blueberry, strawberry and black currant to make a Summer berry jam.

Next on the list was a Blueberry and Passionfruit Jam. Not a combination I would have thought of but I found it in one of my recipe books.

Last on the list was to do something with the feijoa crop. There have been a few sitting in a bowl in the kitchen for the past week or so but then today I found some more under the tree today. Enough to make into a couple of pots of jam. As the feijoa tastes a bit like pineapple, I thought it would team nicely with passionfruit as well.

So at the end of the day, there were 10 new pots to put in the cupboard. That should last us for a while.

Deliciously Dried Apples April 23rd 2013

I have so many apples this year that I have been looking for new things to do with them. Rather than let the possums gradually nibble their way through the entire crop hanging on the tree, I have harvested them all over the past couple of weeks. Now they are sitting in boxes in a previously empty fridge in another building on the farm. Hopefully this will act like a cool room and they will last us for several months in good condition.

Roaming around the second hand shops in town, I found one of these apple peeler/slicer/corer gadgets for a good price.

The hardest part is to get the apple centred.

Wind the handle and magically the apple gets peeled sliced and cored.

 Perfect I thought  for doing all the peeling and chopping required to make dried apple rings. A hiking friend told me about being given some delicious dried apple rings sprinkled with cinnamon when she was walking in the South west of Tasmania so I thought that would be a recipe worth trying.

After a few practices, I worked out how the peeler worked and got down to business. Rather than individual slices, they turned out  like an apple slinky but a quick slice through turned the slinky into numerous slices. Apples oxidise really quickly when cut so I once I put them through the gadget I immediately put them in some acidulated water (water with a bit of lemon juice) while I did the next apple. Then it was onto the dryer trays, sprinkle with cinnamon and leave to dry for several hours. They took about 6-8 hours to get to a pliable leathery texture and  I kept removing ones as they got to that point, not wanting to overdry them to the point where they were crisp. The result is very tasty and I look forward to eating them on hikes in the future if they don’t get eaten before that!

 We had a French couchsurfer staying with us over the weekend and when she saw all the silverbeet in the garden offered to cook us lunch. This is a recipe from the south of France for a silverbeet pancake. I didn’t write down the name so have forgotten what she called it. It was a vivid green so looked great accompanied by a multi coloured salad.

For any readers of this blog who are return visitors, I now have a subscribe gadget on the right hand side of the page. No idea if it works so if anyone tries it, can you leave a comment for me.

A Fruity Glut, or is that a Fruit Glutton? April 9th 2013

I have been a bit neglectful of this blog of late. That is not because I haven't been doing anything but more that I am just repeating things I have already posted about.

We have so much fruit ripening at the moment it is hard to keep up with it.  All the peaches are picked and while a couple of kilo are still sitting in a bowl in the fridge, I have bottled, jammed, stewed, dried and eaten lots already. The Golden Queen variety that I grow is a clingstone which makes it more fiddly to stone them to do things with but the flavour is magnificent, much better than the early freestone peaches that I bought in early summer just to taste. When bottled or stewed, the taste takes me back to childhood when a special treat was a tin of cling peaches for dessert.  One casualty of the wet spring of 2012 was the nectarine tree which, despite several sprays of  fungicide at bud burst, was really badly affected by curly leaf. This meant the entire crop consisted of about 8 nectarines. Perhaps that was a good thing as what would I have done with more?

I seem to find ripe passionfruit on the ground every time I walk past the Nelly Kelly vine.  We are now onto our 3rd and 4th apple trees almost ripe while there is still a big box of the Cox’s Orange Pippen in the cheese fridge/mini coolroom.  And finally the raspberries are now onto their second crop for the year and I am picking every couple of days. What more is there to do but make a fruit salad of a mixture of everything that is ripe.

With the windfall apples I have been making juice and cider with the second hand juicer I bought recently . This replaces the one I have had for 30 years which although still working, is not the best design for large amounts of fruit. I am hoping that kiwi fruit juice is tasty as I see that as an easy fruit to juice when the huge crop starts to ripen in the couple of months.

Sensational Sour Cherry Strudel and a Peach Glut, March 19th 2013

Last week, after watching a first episode in the new series of Gourmet Farmer on SBS,  I was inspired to start using some of the frozen Morello cherries that I picked in January. Matthew Evans met up with a friend ,originally from Croatia, who showed him how to make a sour cherry strudel. Seemed a simple recipe other than having to deal with fiddly filo pastry so I gave it a go on the weekend. The filo was fiddly as predicted but who cares when the result tastes so good. Sour cherry would have to be one of my most favourite flavours! Yummmmm!  I can see this recipe becoming an all time favourite.

I was busy bottling tomato paste and drying tomatoes on the weekend but one new thing that I tried was making peach leather. The peaches are rapidly ripening on the tree so I am going to have to come up with some uses for them. This peach and passionfruit leather looks and tastes nice.

 I also made a peach and walnut cake for my book club last night.....looks nice and tastes that way as well.  There seem to be millions of peach cake recipes on the net so just picking one was difficult. This one came from a site called Foodnetwork.