Got berries? Make clafoutis!

It's a French brunch-y thing conveniently suited to the berries of a prairie summer. It's tradition in France to leave the pits in the cherries, so you decide...

2 tbsp butter
3 eggs
3 tbsp sugar
1 cup milk
1/2 tsp vanilla
1/4 tsp salt
1 cup flour
1 tbsp flour
2 cup mixed berries such as cherries, raspberries, strawberries, blueberries, low bush cranberries, saskatoons. You can also add some thinly sliced rhubarb.

Heat the oven to 350F. Put butter in a 10-inch cast iron skillet or a pie plate. Place in oven until butter is melted but not brown.

Meanwhile, in a blender mix eggs, sugar, milk, vanilla and salt. With the blades running, add 1 cup flour and blend well.

Toss fruit with remaining 1 tbsp flour.

Remove the skillet or pie plate from the oven. Pour in the batter and scatter the fruit on top. Return to the oven. Bake about 20-25 minutes, until the centre of the custard is set.

Serve warm with a dusting of icing sugar or cool with a drizzle of syrup.

Berry Smooth

Want to eat more Saskatchewan berries? Try a smoothie.

This luscious smoothie for two contains:
1 banana (this is optional, but I like it)
2 big spoonfuls of yogurt (Dairyland yogurt is made locally)
1/2 cup frozen wild blueberries (available occasionally at the Saskatoon Farmers' Market)
1 spoonful frozen lingonberries (also purchased at the Saskatoon Farmers' Market)
12 or so frozen raspberries (picked myself last summer)
Squirt of honey (Saskatchewan honey, of course)
2 teaspoons ground flax (ditto)
Milk as required to blend to a drinkable consistency.

Perhaps it's the little girl in me, but I think a smoothie tastes better with a straw!

Sweet start 2011

With my commitment to fill the year with Saskatchewan fruit, I've ditched the maple syrup in favour of locally-grown fruit syrups, such as this wild blueberry syrup from Over the Hill Orchards, which we ate this morning on french toast.

Over the Hill Orchards has a store in Lumsden. In Saskatoon, their products are available at the Saskatchewan Made Marketplace and online store. Yummmmm...

Newspaper column - Breakfast

Published in the Saskatoon Star Phoenix on 20 July 2009

You’ve all heard the advice: a healthy diet starts with a good breakfast. However, I contend that a healthy diet begins with a good Saskatchewan breakfast. So often when we talk about eating locally, we focus on the big meals—dinner with meat, veggies, salad and dessert. But it’s just as easy and just as fun to start each day with a taste of Saskatchewan.

A few years ago, my husband John and I decided to eat locally for a whole year. Breakfast, lunch and dinner. That year is up, but good habits are hard to break. We still stock our larder with locally-produced foods and breakfast is my favourite meal of the day.

This time of year, you may find me out early in the strawberry patch picking berries for a bowl of yogurt and homemade muesli. When the berries are this fresh and so delicious, breakfast is worth celebrating, so I often serve it in a martini glass. It looks as good as it tastes!

In the winter, I eat my muesli in a bowl with dried apples and cherries (that I dried myself) or with berries such as saskatoons and raspberries that I canned with a light honey syrup. Sometimes in winter, we get a warm start to the day with oatmeal porridge sweetened with honey or maple syrup.

.

Whether for porridge or muesli, I always try to buy a bag of oats that specifically states it is a product of Saskatchewan. My homemade muesli includes nuts and seeds (which aren’t necessarily from here), plus locally-grown flax and hemp seeds, mixed with canola oil and honey, then toasted in the oven. (I buy the flax at the Saskatoon Farmer’s Market; the hemp seeds come from The Good Seed farm at Birch Hills.)
.

Berry smoothies are also a great breakfast idea. We start with local Dairyland yogurt, add a banana, which isn’t local of course, and top it up with frozen blueberries, cranberries, saskatoons and/or strawberries, all locally picked, plus a dash of ground flax.

.

When we have a little extra time, or when company is coming, John heats up the griddle and makes wild blueberry pancakes. If I’m cooking, we might have clafoutis, a terrifically easy breakfast custard from France, where it’s traditionally made with cherries. I use a mix of Saskatchewan berries, including the local sour cherry.

Speaking of traditional, bacon and eggs in our house are always local. We get them at the farmers market, or, if we’re at a local meat shop, we pick up good Saskatchewan-made bacon and breakfast sausages. (Currently, our freezer is stocked with breakfast sausage from the Smokehaus in Martensville.)

.

As for toast and jam, it’s easy to be local. I make my own bread or buy it at a bakery such as Christie’s. My mom supplies the jam. While it might be hard to turn every breakfast into a local meal, here are some tips to get started:

1) Buy locally-made bacon and breakfast sausage. We have such good butchers in Saskatchewan, it’s easy to find quality products.
2) Pick extra strawberries, saskatoons and sour cherries this summer (available at u-picks) and freeze enough for a smoothie or clafoutis now and then. Wild blueberries may be found at the farmers market when they’re in season.
3) Reach labels and try to buy basic ingredients, such as eggs, oats, honey and flax, that are products of Saskatchewan.

.

Here's the recipe for my homemade muesli. And here's the clafoutis (pronounced cla-foo-tee), which will impress everyone at breakfast time, especially the cook!

Prairie Berry Clafoutis
2 tbsp butter
3 eggs
3 tbsp sugar
1 cup milk
1/2 tsp vanilla
1/4 tsp salt
1 cup all-purpose flour
2 cups mixed Saskatchewan berries
(fresh or frozen)
1 tbsp flour

Heat the oven to 350F. In the oven, melt the butter in a cast iron skillet or large pie plate, making sure the butter doesn’t brown.

>

Put the eggs, sugar, milk, vanilla and salt into a blender and blend until smooth. With the blades running, gradually add 1 cup of flour and mix well. Remove the buttered pan from the oven and pour in the batter.
>

Toss the berries with the remaining tbsp of flour. Scatter the fruit over the top of the batter. Bake for 20-25 minutes, until the centre of the custard is set. Serve warm, perhaps with a sprinkling of icing sugar.

Saskatchewan Food Festivals 2009

Hog Fest, June 26, Englefeld.
The 38th annual event. What else would you expect of a town with a giant pig?Saskatoon Berry Festival, July 4, Mortlach.
The second annual, and it looks like it will be a fantastic event.

Cherry Festival, July 25-26, Bruno.Plus a cherry cheesecake literary event on the 24th.
Rhubarb Festival, August 2 & 3, Marr Residence, Saskatoon
This historic pioneer house celebrates this hardy prairie "fruit".

Wheat Festival, August 7, 8 & 9, Weyburn.
The website still shows last year's event, but you get the picture.

The Great Canadian Mustard Festival, July 25-26, The Willow on Wascana, Regina.Chefs face off in the mustard challenge, and you're the judge! Several restaurants also feature mustard on the menu. The event doesn't seem to have a website, but there's some info on the SaskTourism site.Wild Blueberry Festival, August 21-22, St. Walburg.
The whole town gets involved so there's lots to see and do besides blueberries.
Pumkin Festival, end Sept., Pilger.
Giant pumpkin contest (see photo) and pumpkin lunch.

Chokecherry Festival, Thanksgiving weekend, Lancer
Going on 39 years now. Here're some photos from a past event.

Do you know of other festivals that celebrate Saskatchewan-produced food? Click comment and tell us all about it.

Breakfast nectar - FRUIT SMOOTHIES

Here it is, somewhere between oatmeal porridge (winter) and tea on the patio (summer). It's the perfect season for a smoothie breakfast. My sister got us hooked on smoothies a few weeks ago. Lucky for us, there are three biiiig bags of Saskatchewan wild blueberries and one of lingonberries in the freezer just waiting to be smoothie-fied. I say there's no better way to get your daily dose of fruit. Here's our recipe:

1 cup frozen blueberries

1 chopped banana

1 tbsp ground flax

4 big spoonfulls plain yogurt

enough juice to blend it all

(currently using store-bought cranberry juice, but also used Saskatchewan cherry juice and my raspberry preserve syrup.)

Instructions: Blend!

Isn't this a marvellous glass? It's a souvenir from my childhood (yes, imagine, not broken after all these years...) Here's a closeup of the "Eskimo." Isn't he cute in pink?

Blueberries gone even wilder

People must be crazy for Saskatchewan wild blueberries. Take, for instance, the St. Walburg Wild Blueberry Festival. This spunkly little town of 400 attracts a crowd of more than 5,000 people for the Wild Blueberry Festival in late August. By 9 am, there's a long lineup at the blueberry sale table. When the Centennial Clock stikes 9 o'clock, the commerce begins.

In some years, when the berries are less prolific, they sell out in ten minutes. This was a good year for berries and some vendors didn't sell out until 11 am! Of course, I was near the front of the line -- I didn't drive three hours from Saskatoon to go home empty handed. My friend Laureen came with me. We sampled the blueberry pie, blueberry cheesecake and, because there was no blueberry beverage, a Labatt's Blue.

Blueberries gone wild

I went to La Ronge to pick mushrooms. To be exact, chanterelle mushrooms. I went to the same spot in the forest where I picked chanterelles last year and wouldn't you know it -- nothing. Not a single one. Picked clean. (There were lots of mushrooms but none I could be sure woundn't kill me, despite the excellent mushroom picture book I had with me.)

However, all was not lost because I found a forest full of blueberries. I sat down on the green moss and picked to my heart's content. When I got home to Saskatoon (after a four hour drive and a flat tire), JB did not share my mushroom disappointment because he loves blueberries way more.

I have no recipe for fresh wild blueberries because they are just terrific on their own. As my neighbour Andrea said: "They're so good I didn't want to spoil them with ice cream!"

Berries galore - BUMBLEBERRY PIE

Last week, I spent a couple days at a Benedictine Monastery at Muenster, Saskatchewan, where the monks fill their days by keeping marvellous gardens. Brother Basil, the chief farmer, showed me around the grounds on his golf cart. Later, I walked out past the cemetery to the raspberry patch and picked a pail of amber raspberries.

I had never tasted amber raspberries before. They are sweeter and more delicate than the common red raspberry, and so delicious. Now I’m eating them every day (or twice a day!) before they go soft. This Bumbleberry Pie is a good way to use a variety of berries and fruit when you don’t have enough for one pie on its own. In addition to the amber raspberries, I used raspberries (picked at Don's house), lush strawberries from the Strawberry Ranch, my own rhubarb, my mom’s saskatoon berries and crabapples we picked over our neighbours' fence.

BUMBLEBERRY PIE
5 cups of fruit, of which 1 cup is tart apple
1 cup sugar
1/4 cup flour
dash of salt
a bit of butter
prepared pastry crust

Peel, core and chop the apple. Chop the other large fruit like rhubarb and big strawberries. Combine all the fruit in a bowl and toss with the flour to coat. Mix in the sugar and the salt.

Roll the pastry so it will have an overhand of at least one inch when placed in the pie plate. Place it into the plate and scoop in the fruit. Dot here and there with bit of butter. Fold the loose edges of pastry over the top of the filling so that it forms a rough circle around the edge of the pie; the centre remains uncovered. (This method uses less pastry crust and allows everyone to see how pretty the fruit looks after it’s cooked.) You can sprinkle the crust with sugar, if you like. Bake at 375 for about 30-40 minutes, until the crust is cooked.