Goat Sausage

I love breakfast. You might have noticed. I also love these lovely people from Au Fond des Bois who make some really lovely homemade goat cheeses. Recently, their son went to train to butcher goats and is now selling the meat every Saturday at the Dieppe Farmers Market. This week he had sausage!

The taste of goat is unique since it's slightly dry, does resemble lamb somewhat but is milder. Regardless of taste though, it's unique and made by some really nice people. People who will travel over 100 kms through a snowstorm to make sure that market regulars will have their weekly cheese fix. My hats off to them and to all of the dedicated merchants who let me fill my fridge with delicious and natural food every week.

Organic garlic and gardening escapades

I think it would be fair to say that for most of us, garlic is just garlic. Unfortunately, our culinary knowledge is mostly formed by what's available in supermarkets so here in North America we are ignorant at the best of times. So you can imagine my surprise when I volunteered at Amarosia Organic garden and was put to the tast of sorting through a dozen varieties of garlic.

That wet and cold day was the first time I've ever been able to chat with my friendly neighbourhood organic gardeners. They're winding down their season now so can finally take a breath only to find themselves blathering on with me about topics as varied as farm economics to long-distance familial relationships. Besides the cold, it was a great day. And Rowena was kind enough to send me home with a knob of horseradish, a few garlic cloves and some Russian cooking tomatoes who's exact name I forget.

Now the catch was that I had to sample the garlic raw in order to really appreciate the different characteristics of each garlic variety. So to the utter displeasure of my girlfriend, I munched on some raw garlic whilst preparing a super garlicky tomato sauce. Here are my impressions of the different varieties I sampled raw: 1) the hot and spicy variety was rather mild with only a slight spice; 2) on the other hand, the roja variety had a good spicy kick and it's taste was reminiscent of green onions; 3) finally, the music variety of large garlic cloves was also spicy with an almost fruity aftertaste which was quite pleasant. As for the other varieties, they went unlabelled so I couldn't really tell you what their individual characteristics are. Best talk to Rowena.

Seeing as I was graced with so much garlic, horseradish and cooking tomatoes, my obvious reaction was to make a tomato sauce for our farmer's market bought ravioli. I first sweated an onion along with some celery, then added the dozen chopped cooking tomatoes, some fresh horseradish, oregano, thyme, a bit of anchovy paste, a splash of white wine, salt and pepper. Now seeing as Rowena had advised me that the garlic varieties lose their individuality once cooked, I chose to "infuse" the garlic into the sauce rather than cook it. What I mean by that is that I cooked the sauce till the tomatoes had broken up and everything was reduced, took the pot off the fire, and stirred the half dozen sliced garlic cloves into the sauce. So they didn't really cook. The sauce was more like the hot water and the garlic was the tea...if that makes any sense.

Along with handmade fresh ravioli, a good handful of grated grated parmesan, capers, and a glug of quality cold pressed olive oil, this was a smashing albight stinky success. I love garlic.

Thanks Rowena.

Ferme du Diamant Strikes Again

I love my farmer's markets. I love the food, the people and I love the fact that I'm now a regular. I walk up to some stalls and the merchants know right away what I'm going buy. At the Moncton market I buy bubbly apple cider every week. He sees me coming and has it already pulled out for me. You wont see that at the supermarket.

One such merchant who I love is the French gentleman of Ferme du Diamant. His ham is the best. His sausages are the best. And considering that he's the only one at the markets who makes terrines and patés, his terrines and patés are the best. But really, they are. I mean I'd even go so far as to say that his creton is almost better than my grandmother's. And that's saying something.

This week, I bought chicken liver paté with prunes and madeira wine. Just the name sounds amazing...and don't knock it just because it contains offal. The paté had the delicious smooth taste particular to chicken livers which was balanced with the sweetness of the wine and the prunes. On toast, this is absolutely the best way to start the morning. That and a good big cup of coffee.

What you see alongside the paté on toast is the Norwegian whey cheese on toast I'd mentionned last week. Nice, sweet, and soft. Yum.

The Full Conversion to Fresh Food

This week, I've set myself the challenge of purchasing 100% of my grocery at the farmer's market and supplemented by my neighbourhood natural food store. I'd say that 100% is hard since there is still alot of stuff in my pantry and in my fride that have their origins at the supermarket but still...

The above photo shows a very good example of what shopping entirely at the market could be. Fresh sausages and locally made bread (and supermarket bought sauerkraut and mustard which I'm sure I could find elsewhere). Market corn with GMO free margarine. Sun gold tomatoes with organic olive oil (and supermarket bought balsamic vinegar). Fresh local apple cider. With only a few exceptions like salt, everything on this table is market bought. It's really easy when you just set your mind to it.

I find alot of people who go to the market only go for the treats. Don't get me wrong, I love hot cinnamon buns as much as the next guy, but I also recognise that there's everything at the market for me to eat very well for a whole week. There's bread, cheese, meat, vegetables, fruit, eggs, pastries, wine, beverages, nuts, pasta and even milk. Plus there's the advantage that mostly everything is either organic or locally grown or both. There are only a few stands where there are inported items. But even these include things like walnut oil or dates which can't really be made in our region anyways (except for the oil...but I digress).

The point is that getting your grocery at the farmer's market is good. Supermarkets and their monoculturally grown, 2500 kms travelling products, genetically modified processed foods are bad. The best way to stop the world from crumbling under too much agricultural "progress" (which includes biodiversity killing genetically modified foods and pesticide uses) is to support your local farmer. Call it Slow Food or 100 mile challenge or whatever you like. If it's chemical and coming from halfway across the world, it's bad. For your health and for the environment and for the future.

It's as simple as that. Or nearly.

Dumpling Squash with T-Bone Steak

As time passes, we've been shopping more and more for our nutritional needs at the farmer's market. We now buy 99% of all our food from either the farmer's market or our local natural food store Corn Crib. This means that almost everything we eat is either 1) locally grown or produced; 2) organic or natural; or 3) both of these. By shopping in the manner and encouraging others to do so, I'm doing my part to stop GMOs, mass-produced food and all other nasty stuff associated with a globalized and industrialized food industry.

In the news I read that certain powdered milk products in China are seriously poisoning young infants. The reason? It's cheaper to produce the powdered milk with the toxin than it is to produce it without it. HOW FUCKING SICK IS THAT?! And don't get me going about battery farming, listeria, avian flu, etc. We're in a real mess if you ask me. So rebel. Eat organically and locally.

Following with my culinary acts of defiance, I've purchased an organic dumpling squash from my friends at Amarosia Organic Farm. They said that it was really sweet and delicious. So what I did was slice the squash in half, smear it with olive oil and apple butter which was already spiced with cinnamon and cloves. Had it not been, I would have gone with cardammom.

As I baked the the squash I fried up some locally raised t-bones in my cast iron skillet. I finished them off in the oven along with the squash. The problem was that my t-bones were well done before my squash was fully cooked. The meat was still very tender - which is one of the reasons I really love buying my meat from this local farmer - but the squash was pasty. If I'd mashed the squash it would have been better but seeing as my timing was already off and the t-bones were cooling down quickly I had to just eat the squash this way. 350 degrees for 45 minutes wasn't enough. Oh well, there's always another time. Hell, there surely are enough pumpkins and squashes at the market in this season to permit trial and error.

Pickled Kobalsa

My girlfriend has fond memories of this concoction. Back home, pickled weiners and pickled eggs are quite popular. They probably are elsewhere as well but I don't know about elsewhere. All I know is that pickled kolbasa would be something you would find in the fridges of the people back home. And with good reason.

Making this is simple. We bought our kolbasa from a German deli counter at the farmer's market and then simply chopped the pungent cured meat sausage in chunks. You top it with a generous amount of onions (as you can see in the above photo) and pour white vinegar over it. You may want to dilute the vinegar with water but that's completely up to you.

All you do now is let the kolbasa and onions steep in the fridge for about 3 days and enjoy. I imagine you could can this if the vinegar were hot but why wait.

Mostly Market and Organic Dégustation

The return to New Brunswick spells two thing: the return to the farmer's market and my own kitchen. It's always a bitch to be in someone else's ill equiped kitchen, where you don't even know in what drawer the spatulas are. On est bien chez sois.

This dégustation featured fresh salami, Champignon brie with green peppercorns (absolutely delicious and creamy and mild), Oka (a Canadian cheese with a quite bitter taste), a stilton blue, and a garlic and chive English cheese whose name I forget...something about monks or mountains?

The olive loaf you see on the side there is from a wonderful German woman's bakery. It's soft, fun to tear as opposed to slice, and absolutely exquisite when dipped in olive oil (my girlfriend said that the olives in the bread put the olive back into the olive oil and that the olive oil put the oil back into the olives...if that makes any sense to you). I got the idea from my day at Amarosia Organic Garden where I was fed this wonderful bread. Exposure to great food through sharing. But more on that later.

The other part of our little finger food meal was comprised of vegetables and fruit from the previously mentioned farm. The whitish-yellowish thing you see right in front that looks like the quarter of an apple is actually a cucumber! Lemon cucumbers to be precise. They were fresh, crunchy and something I could see in a ploughman's lunch. Really cool vegetable. How many times have you seen the word cool used to describe vegetables, eh?

The little orange tomatoes were soft, burst in your mouth and had a really sweet taste almost reminiscent of cantaloupe. All organic so you don't get that unshakeable pesticide taste. At the far back we also had organic Galia melon. It looks like a cantaloupe but a tad smaller, with green flesh and not as sweet. Really nice.

The un-organic part was comprised of dull avocado and some ripe pears. Nothing exciting there.

I'd like to take a moment to advocate this sort of meal. Since it's all finger food placed in the middle of the table, it accomplishes three things: 1) It encourages us to take our time to eat. A bit of this. A bit of that. And here on the Western part of our blue planet we tend to have a problem with eating too quickly. So this makes it easy. And fun; 2) Having a bit of everything satisfies the picky people sharing your table since if they don't like such and such an item, they don't have to eat it. More for you; 3) Like a fondu, I find this is a very social way of eating. We're all sharing from the same plate, just ripping away at some bread, taking time to talk about the wonderful things we're eating and generally having a good time centralized on food. It's something a TV can't accomplish. Whoever heard of quality family time spent in front of a TV? Plus you don't have to take the time to cook it or make individual plates so it's really not labour intensive. Just slice and throw it on a plate.

Screw fondus! Have a dégustation with your family tonight!

Goose Eggs

When I go to the market, I have a hard time resisting unique or odd items. Like today I bought kimchi from these two Korean ladies. I’d made my own once but here it was, authentic and ready made. So when I saw the little sign that said “goose eggs $1.50” I really couldn’t resist.

The egg has a very thick shell. I really had to give it a good whack to be able to crack it. I then discovered that a goose egg equals about 3 or 4 large chicken eggs. Eating it was like eating a steak. The thing was massive. I had a girlfriend in high school who had an emu farm. Those eggs are at least the size of 4 or 5 goose eggs so it would make for a pretty hardy meal. A bit too hearty maybe.

What I really like about the goose egg was the colour of the yoke. It was a nice rich, almost creamy yellow colour. I find that chicken eggs, even supposedly free run eggs are getting to be of a highlighter yellow colour. It’s fishy. Especially when you get this nice goose egg from a local farmer whose yoke is the colour a yoke should be, it’s suspicious when you get a chicken egg that has no richness to it. I’m sure that there’s something going on with storebought eggs, either the hormones or the environment or something. But market bought eggs are definitely better. Market and therefore locally bought anything is better.

Sausage and Cheese Breakfast

As always, we picked up a few things at the Farmer's Market. This time the menu was all-French. And I mean European French, French.

There's this French vendor, Ferme du diamant, who sells all sorts of specialty meat products. He's got veal, veal cutlets, smoked duck, foie gras, a whole selection of terrines, and the most delicious sausages I've ever had. Now I'm not usually a huge fan of sausages. It's all the stuff they put inside it which is mostly preservatives, fat and salt. But mention any hot dog or mainstream sausage and you've just started this vendor off on a rant about how gross food can be made. His animals are properly raised and his products are full of nothing but real, untampered food. In the above photo you can see the veal sausage with cheese and parsley that I bought from him for this particular breakfast alongside a healthy little dollop of grainy mustard. A few weeks ago I also bought a wild boar terrine and another Landais county pate with cognac which were both magnificent. Though both of these contain liver, I don't find it gross because I know the liver was put in there on purpose and is not just some remains that were floating around the blood covered floor of a slaughterhouse. If ever you're in Dieppe, New Brunswick, you must visite the Ferme du diamant's booth. If you already live in the Dieppe and Moncton area then I suggest you pull yourself away from your computer and sample the delicious local product that is NOT featured at your local supermarket. Farmer's market. Not super-market.

Right beside the abovementioned booth, there is a small Belgian lady who sells these beautiful goat's cheeses. We sampled a few which were all very delicious but finally opted for what I think is the Madawaska cheese. It's a very creamy, almost liquid cheese, wrapped in a beautiful crust and perfect for this little breakfast dégustation on a bit of Montreal style bagel. We went back today and bought an even bigger wheel. Good food is hard to find so when you find it you make sure to support it. And everyone at a Farmer's market is worth supporting. They're locals with a passion for their products. There is pride there that can't be matched by the highly advertised and unethically produced food you find at the grocery stores. The present is the best time to emerge from your suburban bubble.

A Short, Amateur's Guide To Selling Hot Sauces

I love hot sauces. I love spicy food. I love the burn and the cooling sensation of endorphins flowing through my body, easing the pain. I also love to think up of business ideas.

Hot food is become more and more popular. Mexican. Indian. Thai. And so on. All of these ethnic foods are growing in popularity and their love for spice is following them into the upper realms of culinary acceptance.

Sadly, most people and most supermarkets are limited to jalapeno peppers or pickled hot banana peppers. Sure you've got some "spicy" ethnic sauces coming onto the market but hot sauce is like good music. The real good stuff is in the underground. It's the yet-to-be-discovered. It lives in small venues across the world. Thankfully, delicious and spicy hot sauces are at home on the net.

For review on thousands of hot sauces on the market, take a tour at the http://www.hotsauceblog.com/. These mad chilly heads test hot sauces, review them, give recipes and generally have a blast (both coming in and certainly going out ;). They provide information on how to get your hands on their reviewed hot sauces and much much more. The good thing about hot sauces is that they can be shipped and most hot sauce makers are set up for mail orders. Most hot shops are also set up to make deliveries (for my fellow Canadians, please see http://www.chillychiles.com/).

But if you're not one for flavourless internet shopping, your local hot shop is the best place to go. "But Pat," you say, "there aren't any hot shops in my area!" My answer to that would be that you've already got all the ingredients for an entrepreneurial venture. You like it hot and you want more of it.

So let's say we start small. You have two options: 1) visit every single hot sauce makers website and gather their wholesale information --- wholesale is the price retailers pay which they then mark up to sell to consumers; 2) process your orders through hot sauce wholesalers such as http://www.hotsaucewholesale.com/. The advantage with the second option is that these wholesalers can split cases. This means that you don't have to buy, say, 50 bottles of one hot sauce. Instead, you can order one of this, two of that, four of these, etc. At first you'll want to sample the market so split cases is the best place to go unless you want to make a trip to a hot sauce store and have the owners there guide you through your options. Regardless of how you choose to proceed, the important thing is that you want product knowledge without having to re-mortgage your house.

Once you know which hot sauces you'd like to sell (I suggest you start small and then build your way up), you need to decide where and how you're going to sell these. One great inexpensive option is to set up a booth at your local farmer's market. The fee shouldn't be very high and the advantage is that you get to speak to alot of people face to face, let them try out some sauces, and get your name out there. A farmer's market is where people go to see what's in season. They love food. They love making food. They love talking to people. At least that's the vibe at my market.

Once you've become comfortable with the basics of product knowledge, ordering, finances, and sales, you can either open a permanent hot shop, sell your hot sauces on a special rack at grocery stores (you'll need to make arrangements with the administration for this), open a mail order business, market your product at events and festivals, etc. etc. etc. The possibilities are endless. Heck, you could even create your own hot sauces and start bottling and selling them to the world. Visiting hot pepper festivals and making a name for yourself.

Whatever you want to do, hot sauces and the chileheads who love them are part of a very fun, unpretentious culinary world.

Here's a list of award winning and larger hot sauce maker websites:

http://www.allspicecafe.com/
http://www.arizonagunslinger.com/
http://www.asskickin.com/
http://www.austinspice.com/
http://www.brandingironfoods.com/
http://www.brobrubru.com/
http://www.bufalo.com.mx/
http://www.cajohns.com/
http://www.chiptletexas.com/
http://www.cholula.com/
http://www.davesgourmet.com/
http://www.doctimfoods.com/
http://www.droolindevil.com/
http://www.extremefood.com/
http://www.hotmamasfoods.biz/
http://www.huyfong.com/
http://www.mariesharps.us/
http://www.montysgourmet.com/
http://www.originaljuan.com/
http://www.pepperpalace.com/
http://www.pickapeppa.com/
http://www.sweetsunshine.com/
http://www.tapatiohotsauce.com/
http://www.thecheech.com/
http://www.unclebrutha.com/
http://www.wingtime.com/

OH! And if this blog entry has led to you starting your own store or making your own sauce, or anything, I wouldn't mind a free sample....really.....a small fee to pay for inspiration and business consulting....right.....be a pal...............

Very, Very Basic Salad

Something else I picked up at the farmer's market over the weekend was frisé lettuce. I don't know the English term for it but it's the kind of lettuce that curly and a bit bitter. Once again considering the freshness of ingredients at the present time, I didn't want to mess around with the crisp, beautiful lettuce. The result was the making of the simplest salad I know. A recipe from our grandmothers in Kap.

All you need is a fresh head of curly lettuce, 6 or so green onions, cream or sour cream, salt and pepper. I added colour with some locally grown yellow zuchinni but this is usually left out which results in a very minimalistic salad that highlights the unsung beauty of lettuce.

If it's fresh, don't mess with it. Leave that job to crappy restaurants.

Market Fresh Pesto

When it comes to figuring out what's in season, the grocery store is almost useless. The only place to go, in my opinion, is the local farmer's market. Everything is fresh, local and in season. Seeing as we're coming around to tomato and fruit season, it came as a beautiful surprise to find a generous bunch of fresh basil.

The only obvious thing for me to do with basil is good old fashioned Italian pesto. Though I have an excellent Italian cookbook in my library, I figured I'd just grab the ingredients and wing it. After all, how hard can it be to make pesto.

As is not always the case with my impromptu cooking, my pesto turned out great. In contrast to the overly salty versions you find at the grocery store, my pesto was smooth and creamy. I filled my food processor with about 8 cups of loose basil leaves, topped with 3/4 of a bulb of garlic, a bag of pine nuts equal to about 3/4 cups, 1/2 cup of parmesan cheese and started the machine. All I did then was pour olive oil into the spinning mixture till it formed a nice sauce...not too oily and not too light.

Though I'm sure there are other ways to serve pesto (if you know any please comment on this post) I like my pesto with pasta and nothing more. My girlfriend added some shrimp one night and that gave it a nice added touch. Either way you serve it, pesto is just great. The perfect recipe to highlight the fruits of the market and the hard work of local farmers.