During our recent Episode 8 of the Eat | Drink | Cheap Podcast entitled “Meal Planning and Other Tips” my co-host and gastronaut Simon made reference to an Ethiopian spice mix he likes to whip up and add to stews such as Doro Wat.
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Radish Kimchee
Everyone I know has been hiding from the snow (we got a foot and a half! Wtf!?) and pre-Christmas congestion in their kitchens, baking cookies into festive shapes and filling the world with the often-neglected scent of nutmeg. I on the other hand, leave the sweet stuff to Crystal and have spent the last couple weeks pickling and preserving whatever herbs and veg the weather didn’t manage to wipe out.
Its slim pickings… If we were legit homesteaders we’d starve this winter *laughs* I’ve got a handful of radishes left from my mid-August sowing in the ‘ol Zen garden, some chard and a couple knobbly carrots. I’m thinking the chard will get eaten right away while the radishes ‘n carrots will live on, packed into mason jars and swimming in Korean chillies.
Pickled Red Cabbage
Walking 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
Spice-Rubbed Pork Loin with Pickled Rhubarb
This recipe features a spice rub that I’ve been tweaking over the last couple months. It’s a perfect seasoning for pork chops, a pork roast or any part of “The noble, magical animal” that is pig.
I really dig pig! And now it’s more important than ever for all of us to show our favourite four-legged food some love and respect. Read More
Gone To Seed
“Still alive I am.
At the end of a long dream.
On my journey,
fall of an Autumn day.”
– Matsuo Bashō, The records of a weather-exposed skeleton (1684)
I sit in my living room, coffee in hand with the fire from the wood stove sputtering and popping behind me, toasty and content, while outside my austere little zen garden shivers and rots in the autumn frost… It’s all gone to seed. Read More