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The Gift of Zucchini

Come back here! You need more courgette!

Having a neighbour who has a zucchini plant is so commonplace that even referring to it as a cliché seems strange, as everyone knows someone who has a zucchini plant. Or, I suppose, everyone knows someone who planted zucchini and ended up with too many to count and had to give them away. 

They’re incredibly productive. Personally, I have never actually grown a zucchini plant, but I do have cucumbers out there and I did grow a pumpkin one year, accidentally – that’s poorly-rotted compost for you.

I’m sure there is some sort of a joke about a neighbour with a zucchini plant. I did Google a few, but most were strange puns and had to do with ‘squash’. 

Regardless, the near-perfect specimen above was given to us by a friend. she also gave us a yellow one. 

I bet it’ll be amazing. Seriously. I’m going to shred it and mix it with ground turkey and some herbs and spices and make turkey burgers. The recipe is from Jerusalem and it is a true family favourite. 

There is more to this blog post, though. More than a snicker about yet another zucchini.

I remember back to when I used to assist a food photographer. On shoot days we would have a kitchen full of food. When the food stylists shopped they made sure we had enough of every ingredient for any and all eventualities. Often we would be shooting a product – packaging or menu items – and we would have more than enough of that, too.  

At the end of every shoot day we would put together a bunch of bags of groceries – for the clients as well as for the assistant (me). The photographer would take his share of the spoils, too.

I remember John, the photographer, commenting on how the perceived value of the gift of food was far beyond its actual value. I am always amazed at the response from people when a gift of food is offered.

Even if it is a much-maligned zucchini.

Grilled zucchini, zucchini bread… Those turkey burgers… And it’ll taste even better because of the gift, no question.

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Pickles

I’m on the left

This is one of those great photos (not a great photo, but bear with me, here) where the subject is straightforward but the setting is a little odd.

My mom took this photo. I’m on the left. Middle of three kids.

My mother didn’t do anything in half-measures, although the other Catholic families in the neighbourhood certainly had more children than she did. She was one of 5, and she had three kids. The Cruickshanks had 9 kids, I think, and the Mahonys had 9 as well. My mom used to comment that Laura Cruickshank was three times the mother she was, mathematically speaking.

But no half measures. Look at the shelf behind us lovely children.

What the heck? Enough pickles to feed a baseball stadium on a busy Sunday afternoon.

One year, my mom decided to make dill pickles, so she made about a dozen 2-gallon jars. We had a lot of pickles.

Thankfully, they were rather good, but I would be lying if I relished (ha! that’s a pun, that is) the prospect of eating even my own share of dozens of Kosher Dills.

In the ensuing years I have learned to love pickles again. But we only buy them one small jar at a time.

As for not doing things in half-measures, that mindset has, unfortunately, rubbed off on me. I have 150lbs of roma tomatoes ordered for sauce at the end of the month.

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Breakfast with baggage

Happiness on a plate

Facts about avocado toast:

  1. It’s tasty.
  2. Apparently only Millennials eat it. (and I’m no Millennial. Gen-X, baby. Just like Douglas Coupland.)
  3. It has an appalling amount of discussion and furor surrounding it, given that it’s avocado smeared on a piece of toast. From Nigella Lawson being pilloried for offering the recipe in her TV show to a hapless Australian millionaire suggesting that Millennials could afford a house if only they could stop buying so much avocado toast. (see item #2) There have been more headlines about avocado toast than probably any single other breakfast item in the last decade. Even a condominium complex was giving away free avocado toast for a year with the successful purchase of a condo. That made headlines. How, I’m not sure, but feel free to Google away.
  4. There is a secret to good avocado toast. Well, I’m sure there are several secrets, but the one that stands out for me comes from Trader Joes in the form of a jar of ‘Everything but the Bagel’ seasoning.

I live in the Trader Joe’s wasteland known as ‘Canada’ and you can buy the seasoning online from Amazon. I guess that some guy goes and clears the shelves at Trader Joes and then puts the jars up on Amazon. Price for a single jar, shipped to me in Canada? $30.

Yeah, all of a sudden it looks like you could buy a house in lieu of daily avocado toast.

But if you have a pal in St. Louis who regularly visits Trader Joes, and who knows you can cram 5 jars of ‘Everything but the Bagel’ seasoning in a fixed-price USPS box, well, then, all of a sudden you can have avocado toast AND make your downpayment.

Super simple to make. The only caveat is making sure you have a decent, ripe, avocado. The joke about ripe avocados:

Cook: Are you ripe?

Avocado: Not yet.

Avocado: Wait.

Avocado: Wait.

Avocado: Wait.

Avocado: Wait.

Avocado: Ok, now I’m ripe.

Cook: Great!! *reaches for a knife*

Avocado: Oh, too late!

Hey, I think it’s funny, mainly because for me it’s totally true.

Regardless, this morning I had perfect avocados.

See? Perfect!

I had some really nice bread, and it was a perfect warm summer morning.

My coffee was made (saved $5 there, just in case anyone is counting, and not considering the capital cost of the espresso machine and grinder)

Toast. Bit of butter. Avocado and a generous sprinkling of the seasoning. Step back and enjoy the fact that you made, for about $2, what would cost you several times that in a restaurant or cafe.

Amazing toast (my goodness it was good) Good coffee. On a shoestring budget. Best part of making food at home – how cheap it is and how, with a bit of practice, you can make stuff that is as good or better than what you might get eating out.

Just bring the Everything sprinkles.

Didn’t last long. Even from a household where everyone eats like the proverbial condemned man, it disappeared in a hurry.

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French Toast, Betty-style.

Raspberry delivery vehicle.

My mother-in-law’s (Betty’s) specialty.

Hang on. I should clarify. It’s her specialty in the same way that making most things in the kitchen is her specialty. Like her huckleberry pie, or any of a zillion other meals she has made over the years.

She makes the best French Toast. No idea how she does it, but it is definitely better than mine. Admittedly, not much of a bar to clear, but I have to make some sort of comparison. Great with raspberries, too. Especially if they are out of her garden. Lots of raspberries.

Betty is one of those cooks who pulls a bit of this, some of that…

…and makes something spectacular.

Like all of her meals, the french toast benefits from this talent. She announced she was going to make breakfast – something we try to discourage her from doing, given that she did more than her fair share of cooking while raising 4 daughters, let alone feeding yours truly every time I came to visit for the last 25 years.

However, she insisted, and I wasn’t going to stop her. Nothing like a half-hearted “Oh, there is no need” to really cement the deal. Funny how we have these conventions.

But to the french toast. Perfectly cooked – perfect consistency, super hot and exactly the right surface upon which to pile a bunch of said raspberries and a bit of maple syrup.

The only drawback was that my hungry kids move faster than I do, and by the time I looked up all the ‘extra’ pieces were long since spoken for.

Next time we’re up I’ll see what I can do about getting her into the kitchen. I’m working on my speech now… “Oh, really, no, we couldn’t ask you… Are you sure? I’ll get the eggs…”

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Charcoal

Getting hot in here.

It’s a ton of work. I get to cook with it about two weeks out of every year and as a consequence I have very little experience in figuring out how it works. Practice makes perfect, as they say, and I’m really out of practice. What is more, every time I come back to the charcoal grill, I have forgotten *most* of what I learned the last time I cooked with it. And I like to keep things interesting by doing things like buying lump charcoal and seeing how THAT works. My wife and kids tolerate this insanity because I don’t mess things up too terribly (that often) but it is a testament to the triumph of hope over experience.

Hey, I love a challenge. A few days ago I did a brisket on the grill, and that worked out much better than expected. I’ll suggest that it was beginners’ luck and a fortuitous Google search for ‘barbecue beef brisket’ rather than any type of hard experience informing the outcome, but the family was happy and so am I. What is more is that I read all kinds of brisket horror stories and I managed to avoid all of them. It was delightful. Watch this space for the next time I toss one of them on the grill. Maybe it’ll be even better. Maybe not.

Charcoal tonight is for ribs. Here’s hoping they’ll be Ok. I expect they will, as I have had a fair amount of experience with ribs.

Regardless of the challenges, the entire process is tremendously enjoyable. Not that I have much else going on here at the lake. My daily highlights are, in no particular order: coffee. Dog walk. Book reading. Swim. Taking a few photos. Making dinner on the grill. Vacations should be like that.

That said, I’m not sure I would love it as much if it were November. 

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They were all supposed to fit.

This was designed with future expansion in mind. The expansion was spoken for in about 4 minutes.

I took this photo to illustrate to a friend the place of honour that his gift of “Everything but the Bagel Sesame Seasoning Blend” has in our household. If you’re wondering where it is – top shelf. Wait, top of the cabinet, in the middle.

We don’t have Trader Joes in Canada. For a while we had a store called “Pirate Joes” where the owner would go to the USA, purchase product at full retail from Trader Joes, mule it back across the border, and then sell it at a markup in a store in Vancouver. He stayed in business for years before Trader Joes finally shut him down. I don’t think they really cared that he was selling their products; they just cared that they had no opportunity to have any control over said sales.

Canada is Trader Joes-Free. We lament this on a regular basis.

But I’m here to write about spice racks. But like any good food conversation, it’s hard to really comprehend how many themes there are here. I know, it’s a spice rack and only a spice rack. But I built it after much consultation with my wife. We agreed on the size and how many jars we needed.

We agreed on 35 different spices, all in similar jars. 7 shelves, 5 jars per shelf, no problem. We filled it completely in about 10 minutes once it was installed. I’m not sure who was in charge of counting, but obviously we left a few essentials out. I had no idea that Ras-el-Hanout even existed, let alone THREE types of paprika (Sweet, spicy, smoked)

What is more, we don’t have anything older than me in the shelf. See below for an explanation.

Exhibit ‘A’. From my late grandmother-in-law’s spice rack:

Older than one might think. Or not.

My grandmother-in-law was lovely, and the turmeric was… Terrible. It was like 50 years old. The packaging was epic, but the spices not so much. There is something to be said for keeping things fresh.

Back to the spice rack – it’s a work in progress. We have swapped the ground nutmeg for fresh nutmeg (nuts about the size of olives that you grate on a microplane), and we only have one type of dried oregano right now. The fresh stuff is taking over the herb garden as I write this.

Still, we have harissa, and now rose harissa. And we have Zatar, and something called ‘Dukkah’ which showed up recently. No idea what it is, but I expect it’s tasty.

My next plan is to find smaller jars.

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Plant life.

Sage – straight from the garden.

I would love to meet the person who figured out you could eat plants. Hm. Maybe that’s a strange thing to say. How about this – I would love to meet the person who figured out that this certain plant was tasty, and that one was toxic. I should like to shake their hand for doing the heavy lifting for me. No foxglove in this household, as far as I know, although one of my kids was talking about Socrates and how he had a difficult time with hemlock. I’m no Greek philosopher, but I’ll pass, thanks.

When I go into the forest there are a few things I know I can eat – huckleberries, salmonberries, thimbleberries, saskatoon berries… Asparagus, morels… Fruit trees from long-overgrown orchards… Fiddleheads? That’s about it.

And I’m also pretty sure I can identify a pine mushroom. But in a million years I would never trust myself to eat one. My father-in-law knows his mushrooms and he did find and cut up one for me off the forest floor many years ago. It was great.

But I’m still leery. I have heard of enough horror stories about eating the wrong thing out in nature. It’s wild out there and nature doesn’t care how carefully edited your ‘eat from the wild’ book was.

And thus to the sage. This grows in our garden and I’m pretty sure even the morning glory that tries to choke it out at every turn is also edible but just not nearly as tasty, lest a spring of it end up in the soup. thankfully, the balance of plants in this area are also edible – namely the thyme on one side and the oregano on the other side… Rosemary and tarragon just down the way. I feared the sage plant was near death not too long ago. The morning glory was strangling as best it could, the cold winter obviously didn’t help, either. The leaves were nearly all gone. I did my best to not pick too many and it was quickly becoming obvious that there soon would be no more to pick. However, some regular water, warm weather, and a bit of fresh soil and we have an abundance of one of my favourite herbs.

Perfect with some wide-noodled pasta. Farfalle or the like. Butter and olive oil in a pan; cook the sage leaves until they sizzle and get crispy, hoist in a quarter-cup of roasted pine nuts, salt and pepper, toss and serve with a bit of the pasta water.

Yummy. It’s a bit of a starch overload so we don’t do it that often, but man, it’s good.

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You’ll live! Sheesh…

They’ll never wilt.

“You Won’t be Poisoned”


This was a standard comment from my mother when we asked what was happening for dinner. “offer it up” was another regular response when any questions were posed about meals, but I’ll leave that for another time. The conversation went like this:

  • Kid: What’s for dinner?
  • Mom: Food, some of which you have had before and I know you can tolerate it because I have seen you eat it with my own eyes.. Yes, I have. Don’t look at me like that.
  • Kid: Uh, really? I was hoping for a different meal, all of which I have decided ten minutes before dinnertime.
  • Mom: Well, that wasn’t on the menu. (gesturing to the menu we had with daily dinners listed. Anyone was welcome to go ahead and cross off what was listed and make whatever dinner they wanted for the family. Yeah, that didn’t happen very often)
  • Kid: Well, I’m not sure…
  • Mom: You won’t be poisoned.
  • Kid: *shrug* OK.

“You won’t be poisoned”. I sometimes wonder what she meant by this, aside from the obvious assurance that the grim reaper was not going to visit us at the dinner table no matter how dark our teenage minds were.

Part of me thinks she was saying, “Good grief, what do you kids expect? Eat it! You’ll be fine! It might not be exactly what you were looking for, but for goodness’ sake, I can’t hit it out of the park every evening. And besides, I’m not going to kill you with this.”

Exasperation? Resignation? Exhaustion? Little of each? Not really sure. She always said it in a kind way – rarely angry, usually just outraged or, more likely, impatient and by 6PM on a rainy Thursday, rather done with the kids.

Or it’s possible she was saying, “Trust me. I know what I’m doing here. I wouldn’t put you kids in danger. You’re the most precious thing in my life.”

Nah. Option “A’ for sure.

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Tomato sauce – Pizza sauce

Draining the sauce.

When I make pizza, or, for that matter, make anything that requires tomatoes, I reach for a jar of our passata – which is an Italian word for sauce, except that it isn’t really sauce.

Let me explain, if I can. Passata is a product you make by passing cooked roma tomatoes through a mill. The only ingredient is tomato. It isn’t sauce, per se. It’s crushed tomatoes. With a basil leaf or two and a touch of citric acid to make absolutely sure I don’t kill any of my family members, even though the acidity of tomatoes makes it pretty hard to grow anything in there. I wouldn’t dream of canning garlic or mushrooms but tomatoes are pretty safe – a low bar to clear.

In tandem with a bunch of other crazy neighbours, every year I get about 120 pounds of organic Roma tomatoes from a farm not too far from Vancouver. The tomatoes show up in boxes, all ripe and perfect, and we (myself and any other family members I can dragoon into helping) spend an afternoon boiling them up and running them through a food mill, making several dozen jars of passata. Or sauce. Or whatever the English word is for sieved tomatoes.

To take the sauce from passata to pizza sauce, I make it the way Joe Beddia tells me to do it in Pizza Camp. Fresh tomatoes, no cooking. Bit of garlic, oil and salt. Let stand for a few hours, or overnight.

I used to just use it straight from the jar, but there is a lot of moisture in with the tomato pulp and things were getting a bit gooey, so now I have taken to concentrating the pulp by running yet again through a sieve. I used to use a coffee filter as well but that was just too much trouble – messy and super time-consuming. The fine sieve works, uh, fine.

It tastes great. Takes a couple of hours to do, but only about 30 seconds of work – the rest is waiting for things to drain.

Simple, tasty. I do love having the jars of tomato in the basement. We use them for all kinds of things. Now if only I could convince a certain wife of mine to let me build a wood-fired pizza oven in the backyard. So far my attempts to articulate my rock-solid case for a new piece of backyard furniture have fallen on deaf ears.

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Junk food. But a higher level of junk food.

Super tasty

I’m eating a really awful sour-cream glazed doughnut while I write this. Hm. Better have another to see if it’s any better…

Many years ago I was at the PNE (the local summer fair, here in Vancouver) and I was wandering around with my Hasselblad, taking photos of interesting things. It was a lot of fun. I went thinking I would maybe get a few good photos but I ended up with a bunch of images I was really proud of. Here is the roller coaster:

It’s way scarier than it looks – especially if you’re sitting next to your youngest child. And she isn’t particularly well strapped in.

And the swings. A ride that I last rode when I was in Grade 6. Didn’t end well for me. I’m not usually prone to motion sickness, but… Yeah.

Dangerous ride. That’s all I’ll say.

But back to the junk food and the Funnel Cakes.

I was wandering around a back area of the fair. It was right beside the chaos, but about 20 paces away – enough to be in a rather forlorn and somewhat less traveled area. I thought it looked fantastic and so I took a photo.

…and then I figured I had best pay for the privilege. I bought a funnel cake.

The booth was run by what I’m guessing is a husband-and-wife team. I expect they would go from fair to fair, peddling their funnel cakes. I vaguely remember being told it was an old family recipe. The fellow had a funnel full of batter and he picked it up and made a crisscross pattern in a deep fryer. In about a minute he flipped the lattice over and cooked the opposite side.

Then out on to a paper towel of some sort, a liberal dusting of powdered sugar and it was handed over.

It was heavenly. Better than any other doughnut I think I have ever had. Who knows why? It could be the family recipe, it could be the fact that I was really hungry. The cake was freshly made – still piping hot when it landed in my hands.

But I think, possibly, it was because it was made with a bit of love from someone who took his work very seriously; who had done it a zillion times before and who knew exactly how to produce the perfect piece of deep-fried battered goodness.

If you’re going to eat junk food, it better be good junk food.

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