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Jasper returns to Fairburn Farm, 5 years after he disappeared!

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Stinging Nettle Tarts photo S.Philip

 At this time of year I am usually finishing up the last of the winter vegetables and am ready for something fresh and green. One of the very first things to appear in the spring is stinging nettles. Nettles are a strong spring tonic, good for people, plants and animals.

The first time I really became aware of nettles was living on the farm in Austira. We had a big patch growing beside an old barn, where they are often found. At that point I wasn’t eating them and of course had an unforgettable experience learning about their sting by running into them. I think it may have been Giordano Venturi www.venturischulze.com who got me curious about trying them when we were their neighbours. Italians love wild greens of all kinds and picking them is an Easter ritual from north to south. I harvest and wash nettles using tongs and scissors but you can also wear gloves to avoid their persistent sting. Once nettles are cooked for 3 to 5 minutes they loose their sting, and can be used as a substitute for spinach in almost any recipe. I started by making nettle and potato soup, then quiches with both pureed and whole cooked nettles. When we moved to Fairburn Farm I had to get used to much later frosts and was not able to grow salad greens 11 months of the year as I had at Engeler Farm. So nettles became even more important as I was trying to cook for my guests, sometimes from sunny California, using only local products in March and April! Each year I try to think of something new to do with nettles. We make ravioli stuffed with nettles and ricotta, gnocchi, sauces for fish and timbales.

In 2006 I expanded my pre-occupation with nettles and held a Festival for the Stinging Nettle and Other Spontaneous Greens of Spring, a bi-annual tradition I will continue this weekend for my last year at Fairburn Farm. 

We’ll have a Stinging Nettle Cafe with tarts, soup, and pizza from our wood burning brick oven with a nettle pesto. Biodynamic farmers John and Katy Erlich of Alderlea Farm www.alderleafarm.com will give a talk on the benefits of nettle and their use in biodynamic farming, and I’ll be doing a cooking demo and giving away recipes for an easy to make nettle spanikopita. The festival is Sunday April 18th from 11 to 3 at Fairburn Farm. Admission is $5. for Slow Food members and $10. for non members.

Stinging Nettle Tart 

Here is a recipe for the nettle tarts pictures above. If you like you can puree the cooked nettles into the cream and egg mixture to make a custard that is brilliant green.

1 pie crust, blind baked

1 cup of cooked nettles

2 finely chopped shallots

2 Tbsp. of butter

1 cup of milk

1 cup of whipping cream

6 whole eggs

1 egg yolk

Salt and Pepper to taste

Add the pre cooked nettles and a pinch of salt and cook for another minute

In a bowl, whisk the eggs until well beaten and then add the cream and milk, season with a little salt and pepper

Remove the shallots and nettles from the heat, allow to cool for a few minutes.

Line the par baked tart molds with the nettle and shallot and fill with the custard mixture.

Bake approximately 35 minutes on the middle rack of the oven or until the tarts souffle and a knife inserted in the center comes out clean.

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Satish Kumar and Vandana Shiva

 This winter, I traveled to Northern India with my 18 year old son to participate in a course called “Gandhi and Globalisation”  at Bija Vidyapeeth, the biodiversity conservation farm managed by Navdanya, www.navdanya.org/ the organization founded by Indian scientist and activist Dr. Vandana Shiva.  I have been an admirer of Dr. Shiva’s work to support traditional farming, women and biodiversity for many years, and this seemed like a perfect opportunity to study and see a little bit of India for the first time, learning in a structured environment while staying on a beautiful farm. I had not thought very much about studying Gandhian philosophy, or the other instructors at Navdanya, which included Satish Kumar, editor of Resurgence magazine www.resurgence.org/  and founder of Schumacher College in the UK,  the Venerable Samdhong Rinpoche, elected President of Tibet in exile, and Sunderlal Bahuguna, noted non-violent environmental activist who has dedicated his life to preventing deforestation in the Himalayas. I arrived without expectations, and little preparation except for the recommended vaccinations, and a friend’s advice; “Don’t think about India as a vacation, think of it as a camping trip!”

While the facilities at the Navdanya farm challenged western views of comfort, they were reminiscent of a summer camp and we soon became used to them. Here we had a simple routine that consisted of early morning yoga, an hour of voluntary service in the kitchen, garden or at the seed bank, three delicious vegetarian Indian meals a day, six hours of daily instruction held outdoors or sitting on the floor of a communal hall, a daily walk and the luxury of time to think, read and just to be. It was an unforgetable trip to take with my teenage son, and a great experience to watch his high strung youthful energy fade over the course of ten days into a more thoughtful and observant state.

While it was Vandana Shiva that drew me there, it was Satish Kumar who won my heart at mind. A former Jain monk and peace pilgrim, Satish Kumar has spent much of his life walking for nuclear disarmament and to encourage a spiritual connection with nature, lived with us and taught us for 5 days. Satish, simply dressed in hand woven Indian made clothing,  spoke to fourty of us from around the world about the pillars of Gandhian philosophy, which emphasised equality for all, a sense of creating one’s place and usefulness in the world, self rule and non violent civil disobedience, all within the context of a holistic relationship with ourselves and the earth.

From Gandhi’s massive march to the sea with hundreds of thousands of Indians to the simple act of using the spinning wheel to create independant livelihood for millions of Indians, to the voluntary simplicity that Gandhi lived, Satish Kumar explained how so many of Gandhi’s examples provide lessons to be learned, even, and perhaps especially in times of global dominance and economic uncertainty.  I was a little afraid about going to India, afraid of witnessing the poverty, the traffic and pollution  in Delhi, afraid of my own feelings and reactions, really. So I decided to go to Navdanya because I knew I would feel comfortable and stimulated on a farm, that the food would be pure and organic and that I would be taught by brilliant, respected thinkers. The combination of the daily treachings and the environment of the farm made this the most remarkable trip I have ever taken and almost daily I am haunted by the memories of the exotic smells, the light, the animals and the Indian people.

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Curing our 2009 garlic crop

This summer, we had the biggest and best harvest of garlic I have ever had in over 10 years of growing garlic! After planting 2 boxes of seed garlic purchased for $200. , we now have around a thousand heads of beautiful, organic garlic. Like most chefs, I consider garlic a kitchen staple. But I hate to have to buy it. Nowadays, most restaurants use big plastic jars of pre-peeled, sulfited garlic, or worse yet, pureed garlic.  Like so many tasks in the restaurant industry, it is not worth the labour to pay someone to peel garlic. Even most of the garlic in the grocery store is imported from as far away as China and it is often chemically treated so that it will not sprout. So I try to grow enough garlic to last the whole year. Garlic is a wonderful crop to grow. Planted as the last task of the season, in mid October and mulched with straw to supress weeds, it lays dormant under a blanket of earth and snow until the soil warms up in spring. It will poke through the straw around March. In June it will sprout serpentine scapes,which should be cut off and then sauteed or pickled like beans. We cut back on watering by the beginning of July and let the garlic harden off, and from then on I check the size of the garlic by pulling out a plump head every couple of days. When the tops dry out and turn yellow and cloves have formed a skin the garlic is ready to harvest. This year the garlic harvest and subsequent cleaning, trimming and bundling took place over the course of one hot week in July and involved the help of WOOFERS (Willing Workers on Organic Farms), staff and even some of our guests! Our wonderful, creative gardener Valdilia figured out a way to weave them into decorative bunches. After about a month in a shady, drafty spot, we now have them dried and put away, enough for the whole year!

With so much beautiful garlic, I was inspired to make a  silky-smooth roasted garlic veloute. We served it to our guests several times this summer, with a zuchinni blossom stuffed with goat’s cheese and lemon thyme, a single, seared, Qualicum Bay scallop, some chopped arugula or a fresh salsa verde.

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This is a speech I delivered at the 2009 Canadian National Slow Food Meeting in Toronto at a Gala Dinner at Hart HouseReal Canadian Food-What is it?  Is it in danger of disappearing?

Many of us here for this National gathering traveled though a Canadian airport.  Airport food is often a foreign traveler’s first experience with food in Canada. I want to tell you about a guilty pleasure I have. Actually, my biggest guilty pleasure is that I fly at all, but that is another subject. When I travel through Europe I often go through the Frankfurt Airport. If I have the time, no matter what time of day it is, I sit down in the airport restaurant and have a Weizen Beer and a Weisse wurst, or a Frankfurter with good strong German mustard and a pretzel. For me, it is part of really knowing I am in Germany. These are foods I never eat in Canada, in fact, I never even think about them.

Mara and Slow Food presdient and founder Carlo Petrini raise a toast

Recently, I traveled through the Vancouver Airport, past the beautiful new Bill Reid sculptures and river rock water fall surrounded by totems carved by some of Canada’s finest First Nations carvers to the domestic terminal to return to Vancouver Island. I passed Tim Horton’s, Flying Wedge, Swiss Chalet, A &W, Starbucks, a Greek Souvlaki stand, one of those food court Chinese places with greasy fried noodles and a sit-down sushi restaurant. I had a little time to wait so I went into the White Spot Legends Sports bar to have a glass of wine. They had a tent card on the table advertising a new special, a Tuscan Shrimp Salad with tender shrimp, mixed greens, dried cranberries, sunflower and pumpkin seeds, and a house made Sherry dressing. It came with red grapes and gorgonzola cheese bread. Welcome to Canada. None of the ingredients are even remotely Tuscan. How can that not matter at all?

Canada is a modern model for multiculturalism. There is no doubt about it, our open attitudes have led to vibrant, diverse communities that have much to contribute to the cultural fabric of Canadian society. We can boast about some truly great restaurants of ethnic origin in Canada. Diverse cultures have also played a vital role in developing farming in this country. Since the beginning, immigrants to this country have brought agrarian know how, seeds, plants and animals which have naturalized here and become our own. Even several of our ark products, Red Fife wheat, Nova Scotia Gravenstien apples, and the Canadian Cow arrived with immigrants. Prior to that, our First Nations populations lived in a truly sustainable way for over 10,000 years, physiologically adapted to the foods of their immediate environment. Recent studies have shown it has actually become dangerous, because of high levels of contamination, for First Nations people to eat many of their traditional foods, such as fish and shellfish, on a regular basis. In less than two centuries, we have looked elsewhere for our food while we have paved over and contaminated our waters and the land beneath our feet.

But, as young as we are as a nation, Canada has changed very quickly. As a post capitalist society, settled for trade and expansion, we did not have the same motivation or amount of time to develop a regional cuisine.

Today in Canada, it would be hard to find a 5 year old that has not tasted sushi, much less one that does not at least know what it is. This is a food that most people of my generation, including myself with an early culinary education, had not tried until I was 30. Our modern society has an incredible knowledge of franchises, brand names and food products, strongly reinforced by over 40 years of aggressive marketing. But when we think of a Canadian food, sadly, many think of the Tim Horton’s doughnut, found not only in the airport but in Canadian hospitals, University campuses and Canadian Military bases. How we managed to come to think of this perfect industrial food, genetically modified, high in trans fat, starch and sugar and devoid of any regionality as a symbol of our country is a testament to the power of media and brands.

Slow Food in Canada is about giving a voice to the regional Canadian foods we are in danger of losing and celebrating the pleasure, flavour, good health and sense of

connectedness they can give us. We are especially blessed in Canada to still have a wealth of wild foods from coast to coast. From cloud berries in Newfoundland and Labrador to great plains bison raised on native grasses and fescues, wild ramps in Ontario to the wild sockeye salmon, our nation possesses a wealth of wild foods that are quickly becoming forgotten as our society spends more and more time indoors and on the computer and as valuable wilderness is paved over with big box stores or used to dump the toxic sludge of the tar sands. We really have not developed a regional cuisine with these wild foods, because unlike older countries, we’ve never been hungry enough to develop ways to prepare them. Canadian cuisine really is in a nascent state.

 Every year I look forward to the arrival of stinging nettles, sweet chick weed for salads, miners lettuce and dandelions. These foods provide a powerful spring tonic for people, plants and animals. I love to feed these foods to my guests that have never had them, try to invent one of two dishes each year with these ingredients. As a Slow Food friend from New Orleans, Poppy Tooker says, “you have to eat it to save it.” In other words, we have to eat and enjoy something to become engaged enough to care about it, to want it again. In the case of wild foods, this could be taken one step further. We need to spend time in the wilderness to recognize and care about the foods we can gather there.  We have many chefs working with local ingredients in Canada, but every time we add coconut milk to those mussels, or vanilla to a sauce for locally raised pork, we have missed an opportunity to create a truly regional dish.

Tonight’s menu, prepared by Toronto’s finest chefs is locally sourced and is an outstanding example of an emerging, authentic Canadian cuisine. I hope it will give you a real taste of Canadian culture and a sense of place.

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Last year, our Provincial government introduced a new carbon tax. Whether a carbon tax is an effective way to curb climate change is a discussion I will leave to the likes of climate change expert and my favorite critical thinker, British author George Monbiot www.monbiot.com . Instead, I want to focus on what I did with my $100. carbon tax credit cheque. Every man, woman and child in British Columbia was issued this cheque last summer with the encouragement to spend it on something with a positive environmental impact. No doubt a political jesture to quiet some of the negative press the tax had been receiving. Working at home and cooking from a garden takes a good chunk off of my bad carbon score for flying, but when my personal wine budget is tight I often turn to imports. So this was where I decided to try to make a difference. Here at Fairburn Farm we have about a dozen old fruit trees. They are very tall, crooked and well beyound pruning. Every year we loose at least one or two due to storms and the juvenille water buffalo that like to rub up against them. Yet they still produce enough fruit for 3 families, the sheep and chickens grazing in the orchard and the occassional bear or racoon that comes through in the fall. I never manage to pick as many as I would like and several varieties are not good keepers. So one warm day this fall my friend Valdilia and I headed out to the Orchard with a ladder and some plastic tubs. After about an hour of harvesting, we had around 200 pounds of heritage apples, including Gravensteins, Alexanders, Jonathans and Northern Spys, 2 kinds of pears and quince. We loaded them up in the car and drove them 5 minutes away to “Duncan McBarleys”, a local You-Brew facility. They washed and crushed the fruit and made a dry, hard cider according to my specifications, for a cost of $200. for 50 litres, including the cost of the bottles. A month later I showed up to bottle the cider, an easy task that took about an hour.The results were great! A dry, crisp cider which has developed more integrated fruit flavour in the last two months has been my local apperitiv through the winter months and has also been a great braising liquid for lamb, roast pork and sablefish. It’s just too bad it won’t last until summer!

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Sometimes the dark days of winter spook me. Unpredicatable weather and power outages. Cash flow challenges.  A lack of sunlight and fresh local produce means I depend more on the grocery store, and personally, I just feel more vulnerable. I lost both of my parents in the winter and my ram, hungry and cranky on a cold snowy day,  broke my leg in the winter. With the long daylight hours of summer I feel strong and alive, practically invincible. But in the winter I am not so bold and I retreat to the indoors, sleeping more and going out only for the bare necessities. Those around me have heard me refer to this as the time to stay home and eat lentils. Not only is it a comforting and affordable food to eat in winter, it just seems a lot less dangerous.

Lentils have long been known as a staple protein for vegetarians, and beacuase of that, perhaps they suffer a hippy stigma. But from India to Italy, the humble lentil offers a versitile source of daily protien which adapts well to a multitude of spices and cooking methods. Unlike other pulses, it’s small size means it can be cooked quickly.

Canada is actually the largest producer of lentils, with 28% of the world’s production grown on the Canadian praries in the provinces of Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Alberta. But some of the finest lentils come from regions such as Puy in France, or the Sicilian island of Ustica.

In Italy, traditionally, lentils are the first thing you eat for the New Year, as their small size and shape symbolize money and prosperity. On New Year’s eve they are often served with slices of smimmered fatty pork sausage such as Cotechino or Zampone, a stuffed pork trotter.

On a recent trip to Sicliy I tried the lentils from the Island of Ustica, which are one of 32 of Sicily’s Slow Food Presidia items. The Ustica lentils are the smallest I’ve seen, and cook quickly without pre-soaking.The classic preperation is a soup of pasta e lenticchie, with broken spagetti cooked on the side and added to the soup before serving. Here is a recipe inspired by a humble bowl of soup made with Ustica lentils which I was offered during the staff meal at La Lucerna restaurant in Porto Palo, near Menfi, in Sicily. Served with a generous swirl of freshly pressed, spicy Sicilian olive oil on top, it was the best lentil soup I have ever eaten.

Pasta e Lenticchie

 Rinse 2 cups of dried lentils several times. If you are using large lentils, let them soak for an hour or so. Chop a “sofritto”, a fine dice consiting of 1 Cup of onion, 1/2 a Cup of celery and 1/2 a Cup of carrot. Finely mince a large clove of garlic. In a soup pot, saute the sofritto and garlic in 2 Tbsp of olive oil, adding a pinch of salt, a little freshly milled black pepper and a bayleaf. Cook until the onions are soft and translucent. Add the lentils and 6 cups of water. Cook for between 45 minutes and 1 1/2 hours, depending on the size of the lentils, tasting them for doneness from time to time. Bring a seperate pot full of water to a boil.

Fill a one cup measure with spagetti broken into 3/4 inch pieces. (This is a good job for a kid) Salt the water and cook as per the package instructions. Taste the soup and add salt and pepper as needed, stir in the cooked spagetti and serve drizzled with the best quality olive oil you have in the house.

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I love the story of the farm mouse and the city mouse. Anyone who lives on a farm knows the feeling of guilty neglect when you miss harvesting something at it’s prime, or suffer a setback because you have been off having fun or had your mind on other things. The flip side of that is the smug satisfaction you get when the cold weather comes and you know you have all kinds of treasures squirreled away, jars of preserves, a freezer full of meat and fruit, enough home grown garlic to last the year. This fall was particularily mild, and when I returned in mid November from my annual trip to Italy my garden was still green and lush. I am proud to say I have not yet bought any produce other than onions and celery this winter. All that changed this week with the onslaught of a foot of snow and temperatures cold enough to turn the cellulose structure of even my hardiest kale to mush. But three days beforehand, after listening to the weather forecast I headed out to the garden and filled two buspans with beautiful winter greens, escarole, radicchio, mustard greens and arugula. I picked the last tops of sprouting broccoli, harvested fresh chives and parsley and filled the produce drawers of my refrigerator with  green and purple cabbages.

Let it snow.

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Navajo Churro lamb born Dec. 12, 08

December 12 was a full moon and the first really cold day we’ve had this year, and that was the day one of my Navajo Churro ewes decided to have her lamb. I admit, my farming style is somewhat hands off, which is exactly why I chose the Navajo Churro breed when I started raising a small flock of sheep 8 years ago.  A multi purpose rare breed, they can be raised for meat, milk or wool, but are not really champions in any category. Perhaps their greatest attribute is that they are low maintenance, seldom require veterinary care or help with birthing, and have good mothering skills. In fact, I often only notice a new lamb when I look out the window to see a small wobbly figure following it’s mother in our 2 acre orchard. Despite the fact that the sheep have a shelter with fresh straw to sleep on, they prefer to sleep under the stars, regardless of the weather. So this weekend, when the little black ram-lamb was born into cold wet conditions with a forecast for snow and sub zero temperatures, I agonized with the decision to intervene or not.

In the 12 years that I have spent on a farm, raising a few animals for meat has become  more and more difficult. New slaughter regulations and increasing centralization have meant  the disappearance of critical rural infrastructure, from finding someone to haul animals to the closure of many smaller abattoirs. Veterinarians can make more money giving dogs hip replacements in a big city then working in a rural area. A recent cover story in the Vancouver Sun stated that over 3 million farm animals die in Canada each year during transport to slaughter houses, a trip that can be up to 56 hours long without food or water. Calling up a food service supplier and ordering a box of industrially produced lamb racks from far away is just not an option for me. Local lamb, either from my flock or one of the few remaining local producers is a very special product and I need to use every piece of the animal.

All this ran through my head as the sun was setting and I could see the newborn lamb huddled with it’s mother in the freezing rain on the far end of the field. So my son and I caught the lamb and brought it under shelter to warm it up and dry it off but the mother, practically feral, refused to follow. In the end, we tried to bottle-feed the lamb some powdered sheep milk  and we placed it in a dog kennel in some straw. But seperating it from it’s mother just didn’t seem right and was giving stress to us all. So we left the door of the kennel open a little. The next morning, after a night of tossing and turning, I was relieved to find the lamb nursing from it’s mother at the end of the snowy field. I made them a big nest under a tree with some hay, and I am happy to report mother and baby are doing just fine.

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