A Fruity New Year

Every year, I make a food-related New Year's resolution. I find these resolutions are much easier to keep! So, my 2011 resolution is to eat more Saskatchewan-grown fruit: to beg, buy, u-pick, forage and by any other possible means try every fruit that grows in Saskatchewan and discover great ways to serve it. And to post it on this blog, of course...

Here's a list of fruits that are grown in Saskatchewan, as far as I know (additions welcome): Apple, Apricot, Black Current, Blueberry, Buffalo Berry, Cherry, Chokecherry, Cloudberry, Cranberry, Crowberry, Elderberry, Goji, Gooseberry, Grape, Haskap, Lemon, Lingonberry, Pear, Plum, Raspberry, Saskatoons, Seabuckthorn and Strawberry.

Soup Week 1 - PEAR & SQUASH SOUP

In keeping with my New Year's resolution ~ to make a pot of soup every week, preferably a different soup each time ~ I made this pear and curry flavoured soup for guests ~ Tom and Eva, with their daughter Magda and her husbad Lars. I used local pears I picked and canned last August. Mmmm a bite of summer...

Curried Pear and Acorn Squash Soup
1 acorn squash
2 tbsp butter
1 large onion in thin slices
1-2 tbsp curry powder
Salt & white pepper
4 cups water
1 cup chopped canned pears and their juice (about 1/2 cup juice)
1/2 cup cream
cooked wild rice

Peel, seed and chop the squash into small chunks. You should have 4-5 cups of squash.

Melt the butter in a soup pot and sauté the onions. When the onions have softened, stir in 1 tbsp curry powder, salt and pepper. Cook until the onions are soft. Add the water and the squash. Bring to a boil, then turn down the heat and simmer, covered, until the squash can be pierced with a fork (about 30 min). Add the chopped pears and juice. Cook another 15 min.

Remove from the heat and cool. Purée the soup in a blender. Return the soup to the pot. Taste for seasoning and add more curry powder if you like it hotter. Stir in the cream and heat, but don't boil. To serve, ladle the soup into a bowl and place a spoonful of rice in the centre.

Fruity enough for ya?

My friend Marlene is not shy. So when she saw a tree laden with plums, she knocked on the homeowner's door and asked if she could pick them. He was amenable and Marlene invited me along. Don't we all need friends like that! Come to think of it, wouldn't it be nice to have a registry in Saskatoon so that people with unused fruit could hook up with a willing picker?

This weekend, we picked pears at Dick and Verna's house on Temperance Street. They have a big old pear tree that produces oodles of fruit. We canned them on Sunday and Tuesday evenings (12 jars in all). John helped peel and chop the pears while I sterilized the jars and made a light sugar syrup.


The recipe for the sugar syrup comes from the canning Bible "Stocking Up" --- 1 cup sugar, 1 cup honey and 4 cups water. Heat the syrup so the sugar and honey disolve. Simmer the chopped pears in the syrup until they are just soft. Scoop the pears into the jars and top up with the syrup, tapping to release air bubbles. Boil the sealed jars in water for 20 minutes.

Fruit + fruit = more fruit flies - PEAR TART

My kitchen is full of apples, pears, plums, cherries, blueberries and... fruit flies. Tonight, JB and I were peeling apples for apple butter and it seemed as if the fruit flies were multiplying right before our eyes. Fornicating and birthing right there in the compost bucket. When we were done, I swabbed the counter with ammonia and put every scrap of fruit in the fridge. For the curious, here is where I obtained this luscious Saskatchewan fruit:

Apples, cherries and plums from the Yoanna U-Pick orchard at Radisson. The last of the fruit will be picked this long weekend, so if you want some get there fast. By the way, this orchard does not advertise and has no road sign - word of mouth sells out its product every year.

Blueberries from three sources: 1) the Saskatoon Farmers' Market, 2) the Wild Blueberry Festival held last weekend in St. Walburg and 3) picked myself in the forest outside La Ronge.

Pears came from a big old tree in a back yard on Temperance Street (Dick and Verna's house). It is a very good year for pears - they are as large and as ripe (er, riper) than any you get in a grocery store. The moral of this story is: Saskatchewan has prolific fruit trees and prolific fruit flies.

PEAR TART
4-8 ripe pears, depending on the size
juice of one lemon
2 tbsp. brandy
1/4 cup butter
1/4 cup brown sugar
purchased puff pastry, thawed

Peel and core the pears and cut into quarters or fat slices. Heat the oven to 350.

In a medium cast iron skillet (9 or 10 inches), melt the butter and stir in the brown sugar. It should be bubbling. Toss in the brandy; let it sizzle and evaporate. Remove from heat. Place the pear pieces, core side up, into the caramel. You can toss them in at random or arrange them in nice circles.

Place the skillet back on the heat until the caramel bubbles. Using a small spoon, scoop up the sauce and pour a little over each piece of pear. At this stage, you want the pears to be warm in the sauce but you don't want it to brown and burn.

Remove from heat. Roll a piece of puff pastry into a circle roughly the same size as the skillet and place it neatly over the pears. Tuck the edges into the caramel sauce. Don't worry if the pastry isn't exactly round, just fold over the edges to make it fit in the pan. Cut vents in the pastry. Bake for about 20 minutes.

Remove the skillet from the oven. Put it on a low-heat burner to loosen the pears from the bottom of the pan. Place a plate tightly over the crust and, using oven mits, flip the skillet so that the tart is on the plate. The pears are now on top. Serve with ice cream or creme fraiche.

Newspaper - PEAR AND BUTTERNUT SOUP

(Thic column was first published in the Saskatoon Star Phoenix on 19 December 2005.)

I have a confession to make. I bought a box of Christmas oranges. This may seem innocent enough to you, but it is a brazen violation of my Saskatchewan-only diet. For one full year, I am attempting to eat only Saskatchewan foods in my own home. No orange, banana, mango or tasteless strawberry has graced my door since April.

Until now. What came over me? There I was in the Co-op grocery store picking up Saskatchewan cheese and sausage, drifting right past the produce section, when my cart bumped into a stack of orange boxes direct from China. I had a flash of childhood Christmases, discovering an orange in the bottom of my stocking and studiously removing the peel in one whole piece. I remembered the pioneer stories about jubilant children who got their only orange of the entire year at Christmas time. If it was a luxury of the pioneer diet, then surely I could justify a few zipper oranges in my own shopping cart at Christmas.

Not that my diet really resembles that of the pioneers. Eating locally is much different today. We grow so many more foods in Saskatchewan than the pioneers ever thought possible and we have freezers to keep them in.

As I write, I am awaiting delivery of half a pig – cut, wrapped and cured – from a local organic farm. Yesterday, I made ricotta cheese with local milk. And Canada Post has just delivered a box of Saskatchewan sprouting seeds for my cheese sandwiches this winter.

Why am I doing this? It seemed an appropriate challenge for Saskatchewan’s centennial year. But that is not my prime motivation. I want to support local farmers and processors, eat healthier tastier food, and cut the fossil fuels expended getting dinner to my plate. When you consider that most of our fruits and vegetables travel upwards of 1,500 kilometres, it’s a major contribution to pollution and greenhouse gas. I like to travel, but I like my vegetables to stay close to home.

To be truthful, I do purchase "foreign" food items if I need them for a mostly Saskatchewan recipe when there is no local equivalent. The other day I made a Russian salad with beets, carrots, potatoes, egg and pickled herring. That was followed by a pork and apricot stew and for dessert, cookies sprinkled with icing sugar. Astute readers will know that herring, apricots and icing sugar are not from here. But they do wonderful things for the foods that are.

This Christmas dinner, I will be serving a ham with a honey-mustard glaze, the herring salad and a coleslaw. My sister is bringing homemade perogies. Perhaps we’ll start with a curried soup of pear and butternut squash and finish with a saskatoon pie. Happy Holidays! (For the other recipes, go to homefordinner.blogspot.com.)

CURRIED PEAR AND BUTTERNUT SOUP
I use Calcutta Curry produced in Saskatoon by Chatty’s Indian Foods. You can use a generic curry powder but it won’t be as good! You can buy it (and the vegetables) at the Saturday Farmers’ Market. As for the pears, I canned them last fall from a tree on Temperance Street.

1 large butternut squash
2T butter
1 large onion in thin slices
3T curry powder
Salt & white pepper
4C water
1 cup chopped canned pears and their juice
1/2 cup cream

Peel, seed and chop the butternut squash into small chunks. You should have 4-5 cups of squash. Melt the butter in a soup pot and sauté the onions. When the onions are softened, stir in the curry powder, salt and pepper to taste. Continue cooking until the onions are quite soft.
Add the water and the squash. Bring to a boil, then turn down the heat and simmer, covered, until the squash can be pierced with a fork (about 30 minutes). Add the pears and juice. Cook another 15 minutes.
Remove from the heat and cool. Purée the soup in a blender. Return to a clean pot and add the cream. If it looks too thick, add more water to reach your desired consistency. Reheat and serve.