Tag: pickle

Cherry Blossoms!

Shawn 2 Comments

Cherry Blossom 1

Cherry blossom petals
The wind carries them away
Taking me with them

– Sean Condon, Vancouver, British Columbia (2014 Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival, Honourable Mention)

One of the more profound moments of my short time living in Vancouver occurred by accident on a frigid spring morning at the Burrard skytrain station. It was crazy early and I had my headphones on to blot out the world as much as possible. I exited the train amidst the rest of the rabble and had begun the long climb up the central staircase to the street when a teenage Japanese girl beside me squealed.

It wasn’t a terror squeal, or a “look, its Johnny Depp!” noise, but it was enough to make me look up just in time to see a massive cloud of cherry blossoms descend down the staircase towards us. All the sakura trees up top had dropped their collective payloads simultaneously to form a dense, beautiful and unnervingly slow-moving tsunami of pink petals.

Whoooosh! The station filled with flowers and everyone gasped. Children whooped and spun. Couples drew closer. Even the proto-hipster guy (who hadn’t looked up from his book, even while disembarking the train) acknowledged the moment with a “huh”. The spell lasted about four magical, luxurious minutes before reality resumed… And I’d realized that by tallying amongst the cherry blossoms I missed my bus and was going to be late for work. Read More

Soy-Pickled Daikon Radish

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Soy Pickled Daikon 1I’m back from my trip to the not-so-frozen East coast and have one more afternoon of relaxation before work begins anew. To cleanse my overstimulated mind of the past week’s wildness I’ve decided to spend the day puttering around the kitchen performing my favourite Zen tasks: Simmering stock, baking bread and making pickles.

The oldschool Japanese art of making pickles (tsukemono) was first taught to me by chef Hiro, who would make one or two batches of variously-preserved vegetables each week for the restaurant. They were usually simple to prepare and quick to get into the game (never taking more than 2-3 days to fully pickle) and always showcased the natural flavour of the vegetable. All that was needed to make ‘em was a container, salt, and something to apply pressure on top. Read More

Pickled Red Cabbage

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Pickled Red Cabbage 5Walking around the local Megalomart produce section in the depths of a rainy West coast winter is a real lesson in our dependency on other places for our food. Yeah, I’d love to eat strawberries, tomatoes and mangos all year long, but the costs (financially and environmentally) of supporting the industrial mega-greenhouses of Mexico, Argentina and China outweigh my base cravings.

So I obsessively scan the “Product Of…” signs, hoping to hit something Canadian, or better yet, from our own backyard. Drives my wife freakin crazy!

These local eats are often hardier root veggies, or tough fibrous greens that look a bit scrubby next to piles of supermodel red peppers and dragonfruits. The kind of tubers, berries and brassica that need a little bit more processing to be as tender and sexy as the subtropical stuff. Read More

Pickled Green Tomatoes

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Green Tomatoes1Back in early November, before the frosts had withered every living thing in my garden I had enough foresight to pick all the remaining tomatoes off the vine and store ‘em indoors. Red, green or somewhere in between, it didn’t matter, I brought them in en masse. Over the next two weeks some ripened up, but a stubborn handful remained tough and green. Read More