Rainbow Stew

In very stressful times, folks turn to cooking out of necessity.  During the 1900's we had homecanning as a means of surviving the Canadian winters.  It made a resurgence during the Great Depression which also introduced a style of cooking known as Depression Era Cooking.  When women went to help the war efforts then remained in the work force, convenience foods like tv dinners and packaged foods made their appearance.  There was a resurgence in home canning with homesteading and survivalism.  That grew during the period leading up to y2K.  Cooking shows coined the term foodie, so anyone who  could cook was inspired by their favourite tv chef.  Now into the 2000's, we have the popularity of food kits and pandemic cooking.  

 

Once again we are seeing a resurgence in home cooking, canning and food preservation in general.  Many are cooking for the first time because they have to.  Restaurants are closed, take-out is limited and then there's stay-at-home restrictions.  People do not want to spend a lot of time at the grocery stores.  Two trends have emerged as a result: inexpensive food kit availability and most smaller food producers are offering online shopping with reasonable shipping.  This opened the door to people discovering a wide range of ingredients they normally wouldn't find locally and at the same time, they discovered a multitude of ingredients they could get from local food producers.

Earlier this year, I began buying organic produce from a local grower who delivers weekly.  I've dealt with this farmer for ages so when he offered the delivery service, I supported it.  Each week, I place an order based on availability so have been experimenting with a few neat ingredients.  

I made this delightful stew for dinner, quickly named Rainbow Stew because of the bright colours. Unlike most stews, potatoes are not included. It is chock full of nutritious ingredients including purple top turnips, celeriac, corn and rainbow swiss chard. The bay leaf (middle left) was fresh picked from my bay laurel plant! The new to me ingredient in this dish was celeriac.  It's definitely an ingredient I will use again.  Very tasty stew!

Working the Lame

The art of sourdough making is truly that, an art form.  This delightful bread truly is the bread of 2020 when so many couldn't find yeast so decided to try this older method using wild yeast.  The yeast actually comes for the flour used, not the air.  In general, rye flour has the highest yeast content but rye flour is hard to find in smaller communities so most resort to using whole wheat flour.  Unbleached white flour will work but bleached flour will not.  You must use filtered water or non-chlorinated water as well as chlorinated water will kill the yeast.

 

Traditional sour dough uses a starter, flour, water and salt.  That's it.  That was one of the appeals of this bread for the first part of the pandemic.  However, a good sourdough bread will take 18 to 24 hours or longer before baking.  Once ready for baking, the bread must be slashed.  This allows for a higher rise and expansion of the dough while baking.  A good simple tool to make small cuts are kitchen sheers but if a lamb is better.

The lamb is a handle that holds a straight edge blade.  The straight edge may or may not be replaceable.  I highly recommend one with a replaceable blade.  They aren't expensive, about $12 and replacement blade will likely cost about $3 for a multipack.  The lamb should be sheathed when not in use and kept well out of reach of children.  

This tool is essential for fancier slashes like the spiral or heart as shown.  It takes a lot of practice which hubby doesn't mind given he gets the resulting bread.  Some slashes are rather fancy while others are plain but all add to that lovely artisan look of sourdough breads.  If you need inspiration for creative sourdough slashes, YouTube definitely won't disappoint!

Homemade Squeaky Cheese Curds

Poutine is and Canadian delicacy, very prevalent in Old Montreal.  While there are many, many variations any Canadian will tell you that using squeaky cheese curds is a must.  Only fresh cheese curds are squeaky.  They lose that squeakiness about 8 to 10 hours after being made.  So, I wanted to learn how to make squeaky cheese curds.  The best way I found was to buy a kit from Make Cheese, a Canadian company that is quite good to deal with.   

The poutine cheese kit came with enough rennet, calcium chloride, cheese salt and mesophillic culture to make eight batches of poutine.  A thermometer and cheese cloth was included.  A long bladed knife, large perforated spoon and colander is required.  A French fry cutter is optional but honestly, I tried it but wouldn't use again.  The cheese curds were too small!  Each batch of poutine uses 8L of whole milk with a final yield of about 1.34 kg (about 3 lbs).

The entire process is not difficult but it will take up a good part of a day.  But parts of that is waiting for certain stages while other stages you have to be actively involved (ei. every 6 minutes).  After a couple of batches the process will be a bit smoother.

Pictured is the milk heating, coagulation/cutting stage, curd/cooking stage.  Once the curds are formed, they are drained, they are drained from the whey.  The nutrient rich whey can be used in baking.  The drained curd then undergoes a texturing process by cutting the drained curd into two slabs then stacking and rotating.  This is important for achieving the right texture for making squeaky cheese curds.  

We made a traditional poutine (homecut fries, brown gravy and cheese curds) and a chili poutine (homecut fries, homemade venison chili, and cheese curds).  The layering really makes the poutine too.  Fries, then curds followed by hot toppings and in Montreal the variations are endless.  Honestly, we had if I recall correctly nine different variations while we were there.  Basically if the topping in some way, remotely goes well with cheese, it's fair game.

The bottom two pictures show the traditional and the chili poutine.  The traditional has the gravy over the curds, the chili has it reversed.  Either way is delicious but the sauce over the curds is better!

Many restaurants here offer their version of poutine using shredded cheese.  Technically, that is not poutine even though it is quite delicious.  The best version we found used a shredded three blend cheese and called the dish ugly fries.  The reason for this variation is despite poutine being so popular, finding cheese curds in smaller communities is rather difficult.

Homemade Mozzarella Cheese

Learning new skills is always a good idea especially when you are a prepper or even just concerned over current events or even just because.  I've been making easy soft cheeses like yogurt, farmers and ricotta for quite some time.  I even tried my hand at making cream cheese that came out very close to store bought.  So I decided that branching out from making simple cheeses might be rather interesting.

The first rule of thumb with cheesemaking is to use the best milk possible.  Unfortunately, all of our milk is pasteurized but after a bit of experimentation, I found a brand that gave rather good results.  If you try cheesemaking, keep that in mind.  One brand may work better for you than another.

Fresh mozzarella cheese is not difficult to make but there are two steps where the process can fail:  at the curd stage and at the stretch stage.   Other necessary ingredients are rennet, citric acid and non-iodized salt.  A thermometer is essential as different stages require different temperatures.  It's important to take that stage to that temperature and no further.  I also found a good pair of heavy vinyl gloves quite useful because forming a ball for stretching involves putting your hands into rather hot whey.

For fresh eating, the mozzarella cheese can be stored in whey and refrigerated for an hour.  For longer storage, rinse in a cold water bath the store for upto 3 days in the refrigerator.  The mozzarella cheese will shred easier after a day and it does freeze nicely for later use.