The Yum Yum Factor

The minute I saw this recipe for Rock 'N' Rye Peach Jam , I knew I would make either this recipe or a variation of it as soon as we hit peach season. Once we brought back our delicious Niagara peaches, I kept thinking that the cardamom was screaming ARAK to me and not rye. Only a Canadian will remember using the purple, velvet Crown Royal bag as a pencil case in grade school, but suffice it to say, Rye is as Canadian as it gets. Cardamom, on the other hand, reminds me of the flavours of the Middle East while rye bellows East Coast Canada at 2am on a Saturday after gorging on smores made with a stale Aero bar and the marshmallows that I found in the back of a cupboard in my aunt's trailer. Then I thought that cardamom required an alcohol that comes from the same part of the world and I just happen to have a bottle of Arak that I brought back from Jordan. This Levantine booze is an anise flavoured, colourless alcohol similar to Greece's Ouzo, France'...

It's tomato time!    2011   was the last time we spent the day with Nonna and the gang, washing, blanching, grinding, skinning, boiling and jarring bushels of juicy plum tomatoes. Looking at those pictures, I can't believe how much The Kid and his friend, Patricia have grown and wonder how it is possible that as everyone else gets older, Nonna keeps looking younger all the time! Guardians of the future If you have never done this before, you might wonder why anyone would work from the crack of dawn until suppertime just to come away with 20 litre bottles of tomato puree? At $20 a bushel for the tomatoes, approx $1 a jar for jars and lids, surely you can just buy cans of decent San Marzanos for a couple bucks and save your lower back and shoulders? three teens, three adult women plus Nonna and one strong man to tighten the lids and it still takes over 7 hours to process a dozen bushels As I have said many times, I didn't grow up with any...

Nona and her tomatoes It's time again for the Great Canadian Food Experience . Every month we approach a different aspect of Canadian food and it's traditions and what it means to each of us. This month we are talking about preserving, which is clearly a huge part of our Canadian culinary heritage. Any country that enjoys a short growing season and long, harsh winters is going to depend heavily on food preservation and Canada is no different. From salting fish on both coasts to our modern freezers, we have always looked for ways to make our summer bounty carry us through until spring.

I have not had one minute to cook anything for the last couple of weeks between working at the Toronto Film Festival, school starting up and life in general. Today, I was gifted with a glorious day off mid festival and so I after yoga, i set off to the grocery store to gets supplies for dinner and found some lovely, Ontario peaches and knew I had to make a little batch of jam with them. I had been planning to do a plum jam with cinnamon and crystallized ginger but didn't get around to it so I made some peach jam with the ginger instead. I knew I didn't want to bother with pectin and because it was such a small batch, I wouldn't bother with a water bath either. I would keep a jar and give the other jar to The Neighbours. After searching around, I found this recipe for Peach Vanilla Jam on Seasons and Suppers and decided to use it with a couple of tweaks. This recipe only makes a couple medium sized jars or one larger one but I like the idea of making a jar to eat inste...

I can remember helping out our Italian neighbours put up their tomatoes when I was really young in exchange for a couple of jars of sauce. I am pretty sure I didn't do much but I remember wishing my own mangia cake family had these sorts of traditions where all the women would gather together and spend the day working and laughing and doing something together that would benefit everyone at the end of the day. Now, at least 40 years later, I found myself in a garage with Nona, Signora (the next door neighbour), my friend Lydia and her daughter Patricia (she has been my son's classmate since he was 5). My son helped Lydia's kids wash the neighbour's tomatoes and he helped with some of the heavy lifting but it was clear that this was woman's work and they were sent off to play. I couldn't wait to dive in and felt kind of guilty that my job started out as the person who scrapes the tomato pulp off of the extraction tube thing on the food mill. That was until I...

Sarah at the stove, working her voodoo Okay, I think I have admitted that I have always had a bit of a hang up about the whole canning/jam making thing. I have harboured an irrational fear of killing my loved ones with my botulism filled jars of sugary confections so, until this past year, I have refused to even try to can. I have made freezer jams but the whole canning process was too terrifying for me to consider. When I was first getting to know Jen, at Piccante Dolce , she was planning her wedding and was in a jam making frenzy. She made tiny jars of jams to give as her gift to her wedding guests and I was lucky enough to get to try a bunch of the contenders while she experimented. She told me that canning was really easy and once I got the hang of it, I would be jamming like a champ. Because I felt kind of foolish for being so canphobic, I decided to bite the bullet and I researched and read all that I could, settled on a couple of delish sounding recipes, went to Canadi...

I am still trying to get this canning thing down. The Neighbours brought me a flat of beautiful strawberries from the farm and so I decided to make a straight forward jam. I have only made a few jams and they have been fancy pants jams with savoury flavours more suited to eating with cheeses or for roasting meats and I wanted something sweet for The Kid to eat on toast. This recipe from Food In Jars  was prefect for the amount of berries I had to use up and I liked the addition of vanilla. Unfortunately, I realized after it was too late to turn back that I didn't have any more vanilla bean but I did have some nice Mexican vanilla extract and just used a tablespoon of that. I might have used a bit too much in the end and would probably go get some vanilla beans for the next attempt. I have also never used pectin and wanted to try that out as well. All in all, it tastes pretty good, it's not too solid (I like my jams a bit runny) and it was really easy to make. I am going t...