Return of the Light

The first day of spring is less than a week away and for once the weather agrees with the calendar- it's been positively balmy lately! But even without the weather, or the calendar for that matter I'm already well aware of the upcoming equinox, because I can't sleep! Now that we've switched to daylight savings again we have extended daylight into the evening which is lovely but it's the light in the morning that wreaks havoc on my sleep patterns, even before the time shift. Going to bed early doesn't help either; I just wake that much sooner. So for about 2-3 weeks every year I walk around yawning and fighting to stay awake in the day but still pop out of bed when it's barely light the next morning.

Normally I take up afternoon napping until this passes, but between having a day job and not wanting to miss a minute of this glorious weather, I've been struggling through it this year. Which means nothing is safe around me right now; I forget things on the stove until I smell smoke, I've lost 4 bank cards in as many weeks, spilled and broken too many things to list and my already abysmal typing skills are beyond help- thank god for spell check!

It's not exactly productive to be this sleep deprived either so I have to keep moving or nod off at my desk. Things that require focus or complex reasoning are out too, or have to be done in small bursts. My ability to string words together , both verbally and written, is poor and even reading, normally my favourite pursuit , is a lost cause- I'm likely to doze off mid sentence! As a consequence of this I'm less inclined to take on extra projects and am having a hard time keeping up with the ones I have now. Some things, like seed planting, will get done because they must but for others, such as the Dark Days Challenge, I'm throwing in the proverbial towel. Not because we aren't still eating local, at least some of the time, but coming up with a meal the fits all the SOLE criteria is tough enough and posting about it is nigh on impossible right now. Besides it seems a little ridiculous focusing on the dark days when it feels like it's anything but!

Thankfully this phase never lasts long, my sleep patterns will self correct and I'll be back to cursing the alarm clock in no time. But in the meantime I can barely focus long enough to type this so please bear with me if I seem a bit erratic at the moment!

Dark Days Challenge-Comfort Food, Greenwashing and GMO's

My Dark days meal for this week is not exactly glamorous, but it was the end of February, and it's been a gray, bleak winter even without the cold and snow we normally have. I was in the mood for some comfort food and what's more comforting than Shepherd's pie?


I started by browning some lovely grass fed ground beef from the nearby Niagara region, added some chopped onion and garlic (both local), and frozen yellow peppers (from last fall). I had planned on adding some of the corn I also froze last fall but I completely forgot to include it, and didn't even notice until I started writing this post so I guess we didn't miss it! For the topping, I made some mashed potatoes (Ontario) with leftover whey - I still have over 3 litres of the stuff and am running out of things to use it in. This is a by product of home cheesemaking that hadn't occurred to me.



I layered the meat veggies and potatoes in a baking dish and topped it with some of the mozzarella cheese I made recently. As I was about to pop it in the oven to bake the Chef roommate asked if I wanted to add some crushed potato chips as a topping and I agreed without thinking. Only after I stuck it in the oven did it occur to me that the chips aren't really SOLE.

Or are they? This particular bag of chips was made by Lay's and like many large corporations, Frito- Lay is attempting to reach out to the local food market. Recently I've seen a number of tv ads for Lays promoting local potato farmers. So I went to their website and there I learned that I could use the product number on the bag to find out more about where this bag of chips came from. It seems our chips were made in the plant in Cambridge, about an hour from here. From that I was give a list of 3 potential potato farms which may have grown the chips: two were near Alliston,just north of Toronto and in the area of the proposed megaquarry), and one was Brant county (near Brantford, about an hour south west). Lays wouldn't tell me which variety of potato they use, only that it's specifically grown for them and it's a starch potato that does well in Ontario. So far so good on the local aspect!

But what about the other ingredients? According to the ingredient list of these chips (plain, wavy cut), they contain only potatoes, vegetable oil and salt. That didn't sound too bad but still rather vague so I called the customer info line to see what else I could find out. According to the website, the oil used for frying the potatoes into the lovely crispy chips is 100% sunflower oil but when speaking with the customer service rep, it seems they also use canola oil occasionally and she couldn't tell me which, nor where it was made, only that they purchase Canadian when possible but also use products from the US. Her answer was similar for salt which is abundantly mined both here in Ontario and elsewhere in Canada so I can live with that.

In the case of canola oil, it would seem likely that it's a Canadian source since we grow most of the canola in North America. However that's not exactly reassuring since most of the canola we grow is GMO. From the Canola Council of Canada Website:

Canola was developed using traditional plant breeding techniques, so it was not developed using biotechnology. However, about 80% of the canola grown in Canada has now been modified using biotechnology to make it tolerant to some herbicides. Using these specific herbicides has reduced the amount of chemical needed for weed control in the fields.

Remember - the canola plant has been modified, not the oil. So canola oil from the herbicide tolerant plant is exactly the same safe and healthy oil as canola oil from conventional plants. The modification has been made to only one canola gene and it is a protein. Processing removes all proteins from canola oil. That means canola oil made from GM seed is conventional canola oil.

I'm certain that is meant to be reassuring but frankly it raise more questions than it answers for me, especially since I recently went to see SEEDS, a wonderful documentary theatre piece currently running in Toronto until March 10. SEEDS takes on the case of Percy Schmeiser, the Canadian farmer who was sued by Monsanto over suspected patent theft when his fields were found to contain GMO modified canola. Monsanto's canola seed contains a gene that makes the plants immune to Round Up weed killer, another Monsanto product; Percy claimed it got into his fields unintentionally. If like me, you were already familiar with this story, you will be mesmerized by the use of actual court transcripts as well as verbatim conversation with the various experts involved. You may also be surprised by some of the information that didn't make the news and the play does an excellent job of offering a balanced look at both the science and the personalities involved, without offering an definitive opinion of who was in the right (don't worry, I still think Monsanto is the devil!) If you are in Toronto you should check it out for yourself at the Young Centre for Performing Arts (in the Distillary District)- for more info and to buy tickets go here To make it even better, Joel and Dana of Well Preserved have arranged for a 25% discount on tickets by using the code "Food" !

But back to the chips- the information on sunflower oil is less readily available. I was able to find out that the majority of sunflower crops in Canada are grown for 'confectionary" (eaten as a snack food I guess) or for birdseed. Which means the sunflower oil used at Lay's likely came from the US so not very local, but also not GMO, at least not yet!

So where does that leave my chip crumbs on the SOLE scale? Well they may or may not qualify as Local, I have my doubts about Sustainable at least in terms of manufacturing, Organic is not even a question and Ethically, who knows?

So I guess I still won't be buying Lays- but they sure tasted good...



Tomorrow in Toronto there's a Seedy Saturday, the first of 5!! Seedy Events in the GTA. I'll be manning the FoodShare table at Scadding Court Rec Centre, (707 Dundas St w at Bathurst) from 12 - 5 pm - come say hi!

Dark Days Challenge - Meat Eaters go Veggie!

The Dark Days Challenge-within-a-challenge for this round was to make a vegetarian meal. So far most of my Dark Days meals haven't been all that meat heavy anyhow (except there's been awful lot of bacon!) From these meals alone it appears we aren't heavy meat consumers but the truth is we eat a fair amount of meat and it is the one area that I still think we have have a lot to improve on. A few years ago I read The Omnivore's Dilemma and like anyone who's read it I was horrified and disgusted by the methods used to raise meat animals in North America. I drove my friends crazy that summer, quoting parts of the book to them. I made vows to never eat supermarket meat or eggs again. I've done pretty well with the eggs, having found a source of reasonably priced free range eggs. But the meat I confess is a lot more difficult. There are options for local humanely raised meat; grass fed beef, free roam pork, lots of poultry and even sustainably caught local fish. The problem is the costs are on average 4 -5 times higher than the supermarket options and it's really difficult for me to wrap my frugal mind around the concept of paying more for less even if I know it to be the better choice. As previously mentioned I grew up in a very large family and old habits die hard; a lifetime of shopping for sales and seconds is hard to put aside. I usually only shop at a main stream supermarket once or twice a month but that is where I purchase the majority of our meat- I watch for sales, look for last day of sale stickers and always check the discounted bin. Our grocery bills for 2 adults are normally around $100, and never more than $150/month. We eat well for that- lots of fresh veggies and whole food but we both eat meat almost everyday and I would guess that about 40% of our grocery budget spent on meat. And that's not likely to change any time soon. The Russian being a dancer has a very physical job, and being Russian thinks of any food without meat as a snack. He requires animal proteins daily. For myself, I attempted a vegan diet once for two weeks (not by choice, I was a guest) and I have never been so sick. Perhaps it's because I'm a O blood type, perhaps it's because I cannot digest legumes well (although I eat them anyhow because they are delicious!)I also require a regular source of animal protein. And to be fair, I love meat, particularly red meat. I even enjoy it raw - I had a lovely lamb tartare recently and I was in heaven!

So how do I keep us both fed and happy and still support the ethical treatment of animals? It's a debate I have with myself frequently and as of yet I don't have the answer. I've been looking at options like buying in bulk or through a meat CSA but the initial outlay is a bit daunting and we don't have the freezer space to take on even a quarter of a cow. And even if we could raise meat animals in the city (banned except for rabbits) I don't think either of us are at the stage where we could kill them ourselves. My current concession is to divert $10/week of our monthly food budget towards meat that is ethically raised, which equates to about 1-2 meals. It's not an answer but it's a start.

The other option of course is to increase the number of vegetarian meals we eat. I do try to make at least one totally vegetable based dinner a week, much to the horror of the Russian. Since I do most of the cooking he will eat pretty much anything I make but he's still convinced he's being deprived when I serve meatless meals . He was not at all impressed that I make borscht with butter beans rather than meat, even when I assured him it was done with beef stock.

So what do confirmed meat eaters make for a vegetarian challenge? Why pizza of course!

I'm impatient so I used a no rise dough recipe from here
I used a mix of Red Fife wheat flour and unbleached stone ground flour. The yeast was just regular from a packet- is there such a thing as local yeast (other than sour dough)? I substituted honey for the sugar - this honey is from the hives on top of the Royal York Hotel in the heart of downtown Toronto (where the Russian and I spent a night last week for our belated Valentine's date)!

For toppings I used some of my tomato sauce canned last fall, onions (both fresh and carmelized), and mushrooms. I added oven dried cherry tomatoes, dried basil and frozen roasted peppers all from last fall and to top it off, my home made mozzarella and feta cheeses.

The crust was more dense than a traditional pizza crust but the flavour was exceptional- there were no leftover crust from this pizza! And best of all, the Russian devoured it and didn't seem to notice the lack of meat!

Overly Challenged

If you been following along, you probably know I've been participating in the Dark Days Challenge since Dec, although I haven't exactly managed to post consistently every week. So of course when two new challenges, Independence Days and The Urban Farm Handbook Challenge came along I thought what the heck- might as well flail at 3 of them!

Independence Days is not actually a new challenge; Sharon Astyk over at The Chatelaine's Keys created it a few years ago as a method of acknowledging accomplishments, even the minor ones and tracking your progress towards a more sustainable lifestyle. She recently kicked off a new round with eight categories to report on weekly:
Grow something
Harvest something
Preserve something
Waste not
Want not
Eat the food
Build community food systems
and the newest category, Skill up!
More details and where to post your links are here. Post days for this challenge are Fridays and began last week so I'm already late to the party, go figure!

The Urban Farm Handbook Challenge, Twelve steps to Farmlette is the brain child of the folks at Sustainable Eats, Annette Cottrell and Joshua McNichols to coincide with their book of the same name. These are a series of monthly challenges, kicking off with February: Soil Building. Other topics include Home Dairy, Foraging and other things dear to my heart.I'm pretty sure I can handle posting monthly and I love the idea of having a 'farmlette' (Maybe I should change my blog name if I complete all twelve months?)

So in order to streamline all three I give you my combined Dark-Independence-Twelve-Step post.

Grow something: I dug out my sprouting jar last week and now I have a mess of alfalfa, red clover, mustard and green lentil sprouts ready to go. I like to add them to a slaw of grated beets and cabbage. So nice to have something freshly grown in the dead of winter.




Harvest Something: Would you believe I'm still picking fresh herbs from the back deck? Well if you are experiencing the same non-winter we are, I'm sure you do My sage has survived a couple of deep freezes and snowfalls and is still fresh and pungent!





Preserve something: It was actually a couple of weeks ago now but Colette and I made some Cold Soother Jelly using Meyer lemons, limes and local honey. I've already consumed one jar and I know this recipe is a keeper! I also have a new batch of chicken stock in the fridge waiting to be pressure canned.




Waste not: I had a large jar of whey leftover from my first round of cheesemaking and I've been using it in everything from soup to crepes. Yummy! I also reconfigured my worm composter to a larger bin with a removable screen to allow the worms to move upwards into fresh food and bedding. This makes it easier to remove the nutrient rich worm poop that I'm adding to my indoor plants and will be adding to my garden as soon the ground thaws. I'm making use of the giant vermiculture system at work as well and will be bringing home buckets of worm compost to add more nutrients to my soil. No need to truck home city leaf compost this year!

Want Not: Many of the small green grocers in our neighbourhood sell off less that perfect produce in $1 baskets. I picked up a bunch of mixed onions at one location and a basket of button and shitaake mushrooms at another. For the onions I peeled the worst of them, diced them and roasted them in the oven with a bit of butter for use in soups, stews etc. The remainder we'll eat fresh. The mushrooms I'll treat similarly and some will get used in a batch of mushroom soup using some of the chicken stock and whey.

Eat the food: My most recent Dark Days meal made use of frozen homemade pumpkin gnocchi I made last fall (from fresh pumpkin, and Red Fife wheat flour), with sauteed local mushrooms, garlic and onions, whole tomatoes canned last summer and fresh sage. I topped it with my homemade feta and although it wasn't the prettiest looking dish, it was a delicious memory of last summer's garden.


Build Community Food Systems: This is one area that I have an unfair advantage. My current job as a Community Food Animator at FoodShare is all about creating and building community food systems and I'm in the midst of working on a number of different projects, including 5 upcoming Seedy Saturdays in the GTA!

Skill up: I'm feeling pretty accomplished at my new skill sets; my bacon turned out great, and I'm working on my second batch of raw milk cheese as I type this (mozzarella this time)!




So it seems three challenges may be easier than one, at least when it comes to posting about them!

Dark Days Week 11- Makin' Bacon!

I'm still having trouble getting my Dark Days meals posted - I'm making them and even manage to photograph them for the most part but some how writing about them seems to fall by the wayside. Since the challenge is mostly about focusing on eating local I'm content to know that I'm succeeding on that front and if I do get a chance to write about it so much the better!

Living in the city it isn't always possible to be hands on with the way my food is produced. Growing vegetables and picking fruit to preserve at home is fairly easy but I'm never going to be able to raise pigs,goats or cows and thanks to narrow minded city officials, even chickens aren't going to be a possibility in Toronto any time soon. Not having a car limits how far I can travel to purchase locally produced food as well so buying directly from a farm is not an option. Farmers markets are fairly prolific here but they tend to be pricey and trying to both eat local and shop frugally can be challenging! Buying local food is always on my agenda but making my own is even better - the trick is figuring out whether or not it's cost effective.

Last week I made cheese at home using raw milk. I made two small feta cheese rounds and about 1 cup of ricotta from 2 litres of milk- not a bad return but certainly not cheap! It is possible to make cheese from store bought pasteurized milk (at a substantially lower cost) but is that any better than buying manufactured cheese? Is it worth $30 (in milk costs based on the quantities in my recipe book) to make a batch of mozzarella? I guess it will depend on how much cheese it actually makes and whether we would eat that amount of cheese before it spoilt(I suspect yes!).

This week I stumbled across some inexpensive fresh pork belly, already cut in small chunks. I have been thinking of attempting to cure bacon at home and this seemed like a good opportunity to test it out on a small quantity. After thumbing through recipes and speaking with a friend who makes bacon frequently I decided on a cure recipe to use.

Using equal parts kosher salt and brown sugar as a base, I added some maple syrup, spices and a tiny bit of chipotle for some smokey flavour. I rubbed the mixture over all the pieces until they were well coated, then sealed them in a plastic bag and left it in the fridge to marinate for 2 days.

Having the meat already cut in small chunks meant there was more readily available surface area, so I didn't want to leave it for the full 5 days as suggested in the recipes I read and have it end up too salty. After 2 days the bag was full of liquid and the meat had taken on a much denser texture. I discarded the liquid, placed all the pieces on plate and placed it back in the fridge exposed to air for an additional two days. The resulting pieces are still soft but darker in colour and of a much chewier texture. Slicing them into traditional bacon strips is tricky but worked best when I left the rind on and removed it later.

Because I didn't use any sodium nitrite (pink salt) the colour fades when it cooks and my bacon doesn't much resemble store bought but it still has a lovely salty pork taste that goes well with eggs! I'm sure it would be even better smoked but that's something that will have to wait til we build a proper smoker.

So instead of being behind, I'm going to post ahead of the Challenge for once. My Dark Days Breakfast Edition features local free range eggs, home made bacon, home made baked beans (not mine but I am ever so grateful to my friend who made these with local dried navy beans, salt pork, maple syrup and bourbon among other things) and I panfried a few of last summer's cherry tomatoes from the freezer.

And now I know how easy it is to make bacon at home, I'll be sourcing some ethically raised pork belly to do a larger batch!

Dark Days Updates

As usual the holidays were a blur and trying to eat SOLE and find time to blog about it proved to be an impossible dream. So I lost a few weeks and don't know what week I'm on any more. Since I did manage to cook a few things recently that encompassed the spirit if not the letter of the Dark Days Challenge I thought I'd do a quick update.

Post holiday eating is always a bit of a challenge. We've been oversaturated with rich food and haven't had time to shop for much in the way of fresh produce. And on top of that, the Sorauren market was on hiatus over the holidays so I've been missing my most ready available source of local ingredients. So I've been dependant on whatever we have in the freezer or pantry. Luckily both were fairly well stocked.

I made this dish based on something my mom used to make us when I was a child. I don't think it actually has a name but I jokingly refer to it as her fusion style because it has a base of her frugal Scots heritage mixed with elements of her French Canadian roots. In this case I used local smoked bacon and duck fat(I rendered myself) which we didn't have growing up but I'm sure Mom would approve.
1 leek, white and light green part, chopped
3 cups coursely chopped cabbage
1 med cooking onion chopped
1/2 cup of bacon cut in small pieces
1-2 tbsp duck or bacon fat
1/3 c maple syrup or to taste

Melt fat in a cast iron or similar frying pan. Add bacon pieces and saute for about one minute on med heat(longer if you like your bacon crispy- I don't). Add all veggies and saute until soft,about 5-7 minutes. Add maple syrup, stir to coat evenly. Turn off heat and allow to rest so flavours mingle but sugars don't burn. Serve as a side or a meal on it's own (feeds 2).


I mentioned in my first Dark Days post that I have issues with maple syrup made in Ontario and I promised to expand. My mom's family is from Quebec, near Montreal and maple syrup is a way of life- my grandfather was known to eat it on everything from eggs to coffee. Sugaring off time is a big community celebration and the most treasured syrup is the first run. I've grown up with this as the ideal syrup and although I am born and raised in Ontario, when it comes to syrup, Quebec will always be my gold standard. Ontario syrup has two things against it for my tastes; darker syrup (which I think tastes like molasses) is far more popular here, and it's common here to tap species of maples other than sugar maples. It's for the latter reason that my grandmother always referred to Ontario syrup as "fencepost syrup"; in her mind they'd tap anything in Ontario!

I've found I'm not the only one with very stong opinions when it comes to maple syrup. I've even been accused of liking 'flatlander' syrup by a native Vermonter, which I found funny since my ideal syrup is produced high in the Laurentian mountains. Apparently the light grades in Vermont are sold only to tourists.
There are different standards, as well as grading scales for maple syrup in Canada and the US (Vermont has it's own). "In Canada, syrups must be at least 66 percent sugar and be made exclusively from maple sap to qualify as maple syrup. In the United States, a syrup must be made almost entirely from maple sap to be labelled as "maple"." (from Wikipedia).

In Canada, maple syrup comes in 3 grades and each grade has colour classes. Canada #1 is broken down into Extra Light (sometimes known as AA), Light (A), and Medium (B); Grade #2 is Amber (C); and Grade #3 is always Dark (D). In Ontario, Canada #2 Amber may be labelled "Ontario Amber" when produced and sold in that province only.

The United States only uses two major grades: Grade A and Grade B. Grade A is further divided into three subgrades: Light Amber (sometimes known as Fancy), Medium Amber, and Dark Amber.

The lightest syrup to me is the best because it has the appropriate sugar content without the strong mineral content that many people believe is the 'maple' taste. The darker syrups are produced later in the run and because the sugar content is lower they must be boiled longer to concentrate the sugars to the correct density. The last syrup produced in a season is sometimes jokingly referred to as the 'frog run' since it may be far enough into spring that you can here frogs croaking. A good syrup producer will stop tapping long before that; the sugar concentrations in sap are extremely low by the time the first buds begin to open. Anything darker than Light in my books isn't true syrup so I wait until I can receive my annual share from Quebec and then hoard it like liquid gold. The syrup pictured above it is the last bit left from last year's run and has darkened over time in the fridge but it still retains it's delicate flavour.

So call me a maple syrup snob if you will- I can live with it. Just don't try to serve me 'fencepost syrup'.

Dark Days Week 2 and 3, Plus 'Local' Apple Juice

Since my first Dark Day's dinner seemed to come together with little effort I decided to try something a little more challenging last week. I had a spaghetti squash stored from the summer and a variety of local veggies as well as wild leek pesto that I had frozen and I thought they would go well together. I baked the squash, chopped some of the same bacon from last week, added some mushrooms, onions and garlic, all local as well as the frozen stuff and heated it all together in a cast iron frying pan. Truth be told, it didn't look very appetizing and didn't taste all that great either, even after I smothered it with lovely Tuscano cheese from Monteforte. The Russian thought it was okay but I think I've just discovered that I don't like spaghetti squash. At all. So much for that plan.



So I tried again this week with something I'm more familiar with - Beef Bourguignon! This is not a truly authentic version- no pearl onions for starters but it's tasty just the same. I used some stewing beef which was a gift from a farming friend in Stouffville, more of the bacon, local onions, mushrooms and garlic, frozen local carrots, and fresh thyme and oregano from the herb garden outside (which are still going in spite of a few hard frosts now). The bourguignon in this case was actually Baco Noir from Pelee Island, which is a tad outside the 150 mile radius but still in southern Ontario. To make it even more local I could have used a wine from the Niagara region but this one was already open and I think it suits this dish. The best part of this recipe is that I made it in the slow cooker so it took very little effort. I served it with mashed Ontario potatoes and the last of the tiny brussel sprouts from the garden. So good...


I'm still adjusting to having a regular work week again, even tho it's only part time. It's been 5 years since I last held a job with semi regular hours so I've gotten spoiled with the amount of time I've had to experiment with different recipes and pick up ingredients on a whim. Meals lately have been a lot more sporadic and thrown together without much thought so it's been nice to take the time to plan out at least one good meal a week and thankfully we have still lots of great local food stored in various forms to work with. The brussel sprouts and some kale are the last of the home grown fresh produce so there will be be more trips to the market from here out if we want fresh veggies. Can't complain about having anything from the garden in the middle of December tho!

A note for those of you in Ontario: On a recent trip to Zellers I discovered Allen's apple juice on sale for $.99  for a 1L can, which a great price. We drink a lot of juice in this house so we stocked up. Even more intriguing however is that these are Special Edition cans of juice, apparently because they contain 100% juice from "fresh Ontario apples". On one hand I am delighted to find local apples being used for commercially prepared juice, but it seem more than a little sad that what used to be the norm now rates as a cause for celebration. Just a quick check of stats for 2010 reveals that in Ontario we harvested about 280 million pound of apples, with the majority of those sold as fresh (about 211 million lbs)  but only 67 million lbs went into processing. That actually sounds like a good thing but when you consider how much apple by-products are used in the manufacturing of other stuff like mixed fruit juices and that imported apple juice concentrate from China cost about one fifth of the price, you can see why we rarely get local apples used in products manufactured in Canada, even if they are labelled as such. As long 51% of the manufacturing costs are incurred in Canada, the product can be labelled made in Canada, even if the only local ingredient in it is the water used to dilute the apple concentrate!  In 2006, Canada imported over 21 million litres of apple juice from China (I couldn't find a more recent statistic but I'm pretty certain that number didn't decrease in the last few years) .

I am prepared to vote with my dollar as the expression goes, and buy up as many tins of this as I can find room to store and I  also wrote the manufacturer (A. Lassonde Inc. ) an email to let them know I appreciate the effort to support local produce. If you have Zellers near you it might be worth picking up a few tins, if only to encourage both the use of local produce and the labelling of such!

Dark Days Challenge Week 1

I've been curious about the Dark Days Challenge for a number years but this is the first year I've signed up to participate. Started in 2007 by the folks at (Not So) Urban Hennery, the idea is simple: cook one meal each week featuring SOLE (sustainable, organic, local, ethical) ingredients, during the lean months of the year,and write about it on your blog. This year the challenge is being hosted by Not Dabbling In Normal and the post round ups are being split between the two blogs. It runs from the beginning of December until the end of March.

There are some basic guidelines to follow:

Local- Local is defined for this challenge as 150 mile radius. Now I'm not a stickler for rules in any case but this graphic that I stole from Joel and Dana at Well Preserved kinda demonstrates why that is a tad impractical and that's just a 100 mile radius! (If you are interested , they did a whole series of posts of how they define local for the Toronto area but be warned- there's geometry and other nerdy stuff going on here!)

For the purposes of this challenge I'm defining local as primarily Southwestern Ontario but in a pinch I'm okay with anywhere in Ontario (and for maple syrup only, I include Quebec- don't get me started on Ontario syrup).

Sustainable- this one's bit trickier to pin down. There's so much information (and misinformation) that it can be difficult to know what constitutes sustainable practises in food production. If I figure out why something is sustainable I'll post about about it in my recap.

Organic- I'm not a huge proponent of the organic labelling system so I tend to ignore it. The only time I pay attention is at the Sorauren market and only because I am speaking directly to the farmer/producers. I rarely buy organic unless it is reasonably priced or the only option.

Ethical- I'm going to assume this applies to meat, dairy and eggs and try to obtain these from sources I know to raise animals in an ethical manner.

Somethings I use frequently will not fall under any of the above: olive oil, sugar, sea salt and spices are the four most common but I will note any others as I use them.

I signed up for the challenge back in October and then promptly forgot about it, as I do frequently. So when I got my reminder email this week past week I was happy to see that I haven't missed any post deadlines. And I was even more delighted when I realized I inadvertently prepare a meal on Friday that fits the above criteria for the most part, so I didn't have to scramble to come up with anything before today (sometimes I am my own fairy godmother!) The only part I didn't manage to take care of was take any photos of the meal so a shot of the ingredients and some of previous meals will have to do for this round.


Back in Sept when local produce was cheap and plentiful we loaded up on potatoes and onions. I made a few batches of pierogies and froze them. The basic ingredients for them included local garlic, potatoes and onions, with goat cheddar from Monteforte in the filling, and Red Fife wheat flour, free range eggs and olive oil for the dough. On Friday I cooked a batch of them with local smoked bacon and more onions. The store where I purchased the bacon has an in-house butcher who cuts and prepares all of the meat they sell as well as sausages, bacon, and other charcuterie. I did not inquire where they source their meat however which I will try to ascertain on a future visit.


I also made beet roesti which I discovered during a different challenge last year. I grated local beets (the ones I still haven't gotten around to pickling) with the above flour, salt and chopped fresh rosemary from the plant that's overwintering inside for a fourth year. I fried these in store bought butter and served everything with homemade horseradish and sour cream produced by Western Creamery. Although I know little of where the milk is sourced, Western Creamy is family run creamery located in Brampton (about 30 minutes from Toronto) who use no additives, preservatives or stabilizers in their products. Once I connect with a recently discovered source for raw milk I hope to make my own butter and sour cream in place of the store bought.

All in all I think I did pretty well for my first attempt, especially since it was without any forethought or planning. It will be interesting to see if all the meals come together as easily!