Consumable Earth – Kamloops

I have recently started to substitute honey for white and brown sugar in my recipes. Half of the required sugar is the measurement of honey that I have been using. 1 cup white sugar = 1/2 cup honey

Honey is amazing!! If you want soft chewy cookies that stay like they were just taken out of the oven use honey! Shh…. I bet the cookie companies don’t want you to know this!

I have a cellar! The house that I recently moved into is VERY old. How old I don’t know but pre second world war easily.  And of course as such it has a root cellar as all houses should. I am thrilled. I grew up with a cold room and for those of you who don’t know a cold room is a room that essentially sits ‘outside’ of a houses normal structure and foundation, much like a cellar of old but more integrated into the actual home. I digress we had a cold room and stored lots of good stuff in it.

It has been something that I have missed in all the houses I have been in since. If I wasn’t sold on the charm and character of this home before I went into the cellar the deal was sealed when I went down those stairs.

Now I am enjoying the fact that I have somewhere appropriate to store my preserves. So far in the cellar is a box of apples, a bag of rice and a flat of canned peaches. I will be sure to post a picture at the end of the harvest when it has been filled for winter!

Some future additions I am considering are salsa and dehydrated tomatoes, a huge sack of potatoes and some vegetables I haven’t really thought of what though. I did pickles years ago and failed miserably it seems that all the pickling cukes this year are quite large and just don’t appeal to me. I scored a pressure canner at a garage sale this year so I would like to try some vegetables now that I have the ability to properly preserve them and my soup can be canned now instead of frozen! Hooray!

I love food. It is such a wonderful thing. I love knowing the path of my food and being able to see it. My pantry is filled with glass jars. I hunt them down at garage sales and thrift stores. Apparently here in Kamloops those fabulous huge glass jars I keep finding with the white lids are what the cafeteria food for the hospital used to come in. They would sell them at the RIH Thrift Seller for a quarter. Of course the food no longer comes in these useful containers and instead comes in plastic packaging that is thrown directly into the garbage. I loathe plastic and how ‘useful’ it is but that is another story.

My pantry is actually a series of cupboards in my kitchen and is divided up into the different meals or uses for the things contained within the jars:

Breakfast

• Homemade Granola
• 7 grain Organic Oatmeal
• Honey
• Dried Cherries
• Dried Cranberries

Cooking

• Organic California Brown Rice
• Organic Rainbow Pasta
• Quinoa (I hear you can grow this here…)
• Couscous
• Misc dried beans (from a lovely lady at the market)
• Pearl Barley (from a local grainery)
• Buckwheat (from the same grainery)
• Wheat Germ
• Misc jars of sea weed (some day harvested by me in our ocean but for now from the health food store)
• Potatoes (from local growers)
• Onions (from local growers)

Flours (I dig grains and bread so I have an excess of these things)

• Millet
• Organic Spelt (from a Kootenay grainery)
• Organic Whole Wheat (from same Kootenay grainery)
• Corn (from a very nice Mexican lady in Kelowna who brings it from back home)
• Durum
• Chick Pea
• Flax seed (ground from whole into flour)

(I think that is all for flours but I could have more)

Baking

• Organic Fair Trade Chocolate and Carob chips
• Organic Coconut
• Organic 6 grain flakes (wheat, rye, soy, kamut, barley and…. darn I forget)
• White sugar (I haven’t managed this one just yet but I do try to sub for honey or stevia when ever I can)
• Typical baking staples like powder, soda, cornstarch etc
• Homemade vanilla extract – a bean in a jar of vodka
  (it is that simple and will last for years! Just keep topping it up)
• 100% Canadian Maple Syrup
• Sea Salt from the Antarctic

Specialty and Convienience Items (largely from Costco)
(Ok so I haven’t perfected the whole process and we don’t have 100% whole food on our grocery list, yet. )

• Corn Tortilla Chips
• Cliff Bars
• Sesame seed granola bars (these things are amazing they are seeds and honey. That’s it)
• Suzanne’s flat bread crackers (sometimes I make crackers it all depends on life at that point in time)
• Flat of organic tomato sauce
• Misc ‘Delectable Edibles’ (real, whole food, fast!)
• Sushi makings (a fabulous treat)

Of course that doesn’t cover spices and tea which are food items in and of themselves but that is the jist of our pantry.  We keep additional potatoes in the cellar over winter.  I am constantly rethinking food and our food choices. We struggle a lot with it because of my desire to eat whole food that comes from, if not my own home, close to home.

I love summer. Who doesn’t. But what I love about it is the growing season and how the produce changes as it ripens and becomes ready for harvesting.

The kitchen staples of apples, oranges and bananas are a perfect example of how out of touch we are with where the food we eat comes from. Bananas are terribly cheap, horribly cheap as a matter of fact and everytime I eat a fresh banana I think a little part of me dies inside knowing where it came from. Oranges don’t grow here either so the only thing that we can actually get from around here are apples. I am staring at an apple tree as I write this. For those who come from the Okanagan they know that before there were vineyards everywhere, and the coddling moth, the apple orchards were what sustained generations of farmers and orchardists. They are a fabulous fruit in that they keep so incredibly well. I can buy a 25 lb box of apples, put them in my cellar and be done with it. No additional labour required. Fantastic.

Not all fruits are so simple. Peaches are another thing that grow plentifully where I am from and man who doesn’t love a fresh peach? They are simply delicious but they don’t keep well at all. Which is why I spent 3 hours a few days ago slicing, boiling, peeling and packing peaches into jars for us to enjoy in the coming colder seasons.

Canning is one of those seemingly lost arts. There was a time when not a root cellar in the city would be found without dozens of jars filled with wonderful fruits and vegetables lining it’s shelves. These days cans of food line grocery store shelves and are packed in factories instead of kitchens. It is sad really but I hear that canning is coming back into fashion what with the recession and all.

When I was growing up we also had a food dehydrator. My mom mostly used it to make fruit leather and banana chips, it didn’t really work all that well and I never really thought much of dehydrating food. Until this spring I met a friend who was/is an avid backpacker and recently purchased a food dehydrator. We would talk about all the things he was going to dry and as the fruit started to come into season a big giant light bulb smashed above my head. Dehydrating food is such a perfect way to keep it intact. I dehydrated a flat of strawberries early this summer and they came out magnificently I wish I had done more. We now have the ability to make our own raisins, crasins and chaisns (dried cherries I just made that up think it’ll catch on?). Brilliant.

To sum it up my primary modes of preservation are drying, canning and freezing. Pretty standard stuff.

I actually have two freezers, the one above my fridge and a second upright. Whenever people come over one of the most common questions I get is, “How come you have two fridges?”

As I learn to do things differently I think I will eventually perhaps get rid of the second upright but for now I freeze a lot of things that I make and then store for later. I’m a busy single mom what can I say!

• Giant ziplock bag of blueberries
• Giant ziplock bag of cherries
• Huge bag of mixed vegetables for stirfries (beans, carrots, brocoli, peas)
• Various jars of nuts & seeds currently:
  pine nuts, hemp seeds, chopped almonds, chopped walnuts, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds

In the big freezer:

• Homemade vegetarian wontons
• Homemade vegetarian chili
• Bags of chopped spinach & kale
• Large bags of apricots I have to make into jam
• Flat bread
• Perogies from Salmon Arm (if anyone knows how to reliably make these PLEASE come to my house!)
• Various teas
• Another huge bag of mixed beans

Points of pain: Glass doesn’t freeze so well if the contents are liquid or anything but dry.

In the winter or rather end of autumn I made a lot of soup and will freeze it into yogurt containers. I also have been known to stock up on bread and store it in the freezer as well.

For my son breakfast means one thing. Granola, yogurt and berries. That is ‘breakfast’ and when he says, “Mom I want ‘breakfast’” he means “Mom I want granola with yogurt and berries”. He is my youngest and I suppose by the time he was born my eating habits had somewhat evolved to the point that this was simply what we ate for breakfast.

And for all general purposes that is what we eat for breakfast every day. I have started to make my own granola I buy a 25lb bag of organic mixed grain flakes from Nutters (one of my fav stores in Kamloops), we buy bakers honey from a local honey farm and I always have a good supply of various nuts and seeds which get thrown in randomly for each batch.

We buy berries when they are in season down at the farmers market and preserve them for when there are no fresh berries. Blueberries and cranberries (from the lower mainland) get frozen, strawberries and raspberries are dehydrated. Recently my son has discovered that blackberry jam in his yogurt and granola is even more delicious than fresh or preserved berries!

I haven’t gotten to the yogurt part yet. I have a friend who makes his own yogurt (Johnathan you are AWESOME!) and from what I hear it is relatively simple and this is what we will eventually do. What I really want is to own a dairy cow with a small group of people so that we can make yogurt and cheeses from fresh whole milk. That is a side project idea that hasn’t come to fruition yet but will soon enough!

Of course we sometimes have pancakes or crepes as they are called made from organic spelt, honey, butter and milk with fresh fruit compote or some jam. Sometimes it’s omlettes made from free range eggs stuffed with fresh produce and cheese are another fun thing for days when we have a bit more time or are feeling adventurous!

I will be sure to post recipes later on, I honestly just wing it most of the time so I don’t nessecarily have exact proportions.

Ok it’s later and I found this recipe that is pretty close to what I do. Except of course I don’t bother with fruit at all after it comes out of the oven because we add it later.

Melinda’s Homemade Granola Recipe

2 cups rolled oats (not instant)
1 cup peanuts or toasted almonds
1/4 cup sesame seeds
1/2 cup toasted sunflower seeds
1/2 cup coconut (I always use unsweetened, but you can go for the sweetened kind if you’d like)
1/4 cup toasted wheat germ (I often omit this ingredient, as I tend to forget to buy it)
1/2 cup raisins
1/2 cup dried fruit (dried apricots, craisins and dried apple are all delicious choices)
scant 1/4 cup cooking oil (not olive)
1/2 cup honey

1. Mix the oat, nuts and grains in a large bowl.
2. Measure oil into the measuring cup and swirl it around before pouring into bowl.
3. Then measure out the honey in the same, unwashed cup. The oil will help the honey exit the cup.
4. Toss everything together until evenly coated and then pour out into a baking pan. I use a large roasting pan, as it keeps everything contained. A cookie sheet with a lip also works, but you have to stir it slightly more carefully if you use that.
5. Bake at 300 degrees for 30 minutes, turning it with a spatula every ten minutes or so. You want everything to be an even golden brown.
6. When it is finished cooking, returned the baked granola to the mixing bowl, add the raisins and fruit and stir to combine. Stir gently several times as it cooks, so that it doesn’t clump together too much.
7. Enjoy!