Tag Archives: Kawartha Ecological Growers

Harvest!

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Harvest is in full swing. To kick it off Jim and I attended our CSA’s (Community Shared Agriculture) annual harvest party. We’ve been CSA members of Kawartha Ecological Growers for three years now and this is the second time we’ve made it out to the farm(s) for their annual party. The KEG Harvest Party brought together many of the people from my food community, including a number of the vendors from my local farmers’ market, the Apple Tree Market. We were treated to a potluck, tomato tasting, free camping, a wild light show from nature (that didn’t turn into rain until after we went to bed), and a samba band around a giant campfire – Samba Elegua. We woke up to hot chocolate from ChocoSol and handmade tortillas for breakfast topped with tomatoes and jalapeños.

But this only marked the start of the harvest season for us. We brought home a bushel of heirloom tomatoes from the farm to preserve and after a few hours had jars of yellow, green, orange and red tomatoes. Their seeds have also been saved for next year. We have since canned another bushel of roma tomatoes, including our annual batch of ketchup. Still on deck are plans for salsa, pickled roasted red peppers, a batch of pumpkin beer, and saving a few more tomato seeds, enough to keep us busy to the more official harvest party: Thanksgiving. With all this on the go the past couple of weeks I’ve slacked on my Gumboot writing duties and decided instead to share a few pictures.

Foodie February

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This week I’ve spent a fair amount of time enjoying the foodie communities of Toronto through three events: my cookbook reading group, Seedy Sunday and A Lovely Feast.  It was hard to pick only one to write about so here is my recap of my fantastic week of delicious food and dreams of food to come, including my top 3 favourite things about each event.

Cookbook Reading Group
The cookbook reading group is a monthly gathering of a group of friends where a cookbook is the centre of conversation and a potluck.  Jim has already profiled the first meeting of the group a year ago on the Daily Gumboot.  This month’s book was “Vij’s at Home: Relax, Honey”.  Vancouverites may know Meeru’s and Vikram’s restaurants, Vij’s and Rangoli, but I’ve never been to the restaurants.  It was quite well received by the entire group, with only a few minor complaints (including recipes calling for too much water or roasting and grinding large amounts of spices just to use a fraction of them in the recipe).  But overall everything was delicious.  My favourite things about the cookbook were:

  1. Spices – I’ve learned a lot about cooking with Indian spices with some hands on cooking lessons from a friend.  Jim and I have more or less been able to replicate curries in our own kitchen, but Vij’s has added another layer to our knowledge and has a great reference section describing less familiar ingredients to help out when shopping in little India.
  2. Local Ingredients – While the spices are Indian and veggies are almost all things that grow in Canada and it was easy to find lots of curries that could be made entirely of available Ontario produce, even in the winter.  And it even gave us lots of great options for all the celery root we’ve been collecting from our CSA over the last few weeks.
  3. Pressure Cooker – This cookbook embraces the pressure cooker, one of my new favourite kitchen tools.  It means that even complicated curries or brown basmati rice can be done in a fraction of the time, making the cookbook a winner for even weeknight cooking.

Seedy Sunday
Seedy Sunday (previously Seedy Saturday) is a long-time favourite of mine and focuses on looking forward to the upcoming spring.  Coming just in time to get tomato seeds started, Seedy Saturday/Sunday has become a regular part of my mid-Februaries in Toronto.  The idea of Seedy events is to bring together the grassroots groups in your community that are interested in organic, heirloom seeds to sell, swap and giveaway seeds.  Since I’ve been in Toronto, Seedy Saturday/Sunday has grown exponentially, starting in a community centre, moving to the The Stop’s Green Barns and this year being held in the University of Toronto’s Hart House.  And there are two more events planned this year in March for Scarborough and North Toronto.  Seedy Saturdays and Sundays happen all over Canada in late winter and early spring and the full listing can be found on the Seeds of Diversity website (including in Vancouver on February 26th).  My three favourite things about Seedy Sunday were:

  1. I always learn something new – this time it was the new work being done by the Vineland Research and Innovation Centre on growing a wider range of foods in Ontario that appeal to the GTA’s increasingly diverse communities, like bitter melon and okra.  There were even lots of seeds that they were giving away.
  2. Great timing – every year it comes just in time for me to start planting my seedlings.  As an apartment dweller space is limited so I focused on tomatoes and basil, but this year I’m adding peppers and garlic to the mix.  Most of these I’ll give away, but some will end up on my balcony as my container garden.
  3. It feeds my tomato addiction – it is no secret on the Gumboot that I love tomatoes.  And Seedy Sunday has hundreds of different kinds of tomato seeds available in all shapes, sizes and colours.

A Lovely Feast
A Lovely Feast was a community Valentines dinner organized by my CSA farmers at Kawartha Ecological Growers and my coffee/chocolate traders ChocoSol that celebrated eating locally and sustainably in winter.  They teamed up with Hot Yam! from the University of Toronto, who are a volunteer-run vegan food collective to deliver a delicious 5 course vegetarian meal for the reasonable (at least by Valentines/foodie standards) price of $50 per couple at the Chocosol loft downtown.  Dinner was served family style at two large tables, giving a great chance to get to know your neighbours a bit.  My three favourite things about A Lovely Feast were:

  1. Mexico meets Ontario – as one might expect when eating locally grown food in February there were a lot of root vegetables and squash, but Chocosol brought a mix of Mexican flavours and spices to the meal that are ethically traded, including handmade corn tortillas, epazote (a Mexican herb), and of course chocolate.
  2. Random conversations – ranging from how to best pour out of pitchers that had a very high chance of spilling (we concluded that they should be under half full for best results), to how lentils grow (we guessed in a pod like peas and beans), and looking up nostrils (there was a 4 year old at our table).
  3. Thanksgiving II – on a number of occasions over the course of the night Jim and I referred to the day as Thanksgiving rather than Valentines.  And as someone that has never really celebrated Valentines with anything more than cinnamon hearts that is how I preferred it.  The whole event had a vibe that celebrated community and food, which is what I love most about Thanksgiving.

So that was my week.  Have you been to any great community based foodie events lately?

The Wilbur Collective

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The day started poorly. I figured the ham had been out of the freezer for a good 36 hours, but it remained pretty frozen that morning at 10 am. After some emergency internet searching I got a large tub of water and started thawing.

Nine and a half hours later, after a lengthy boil and slow roast in the oven, I carved into the ham. This would have been a special night simply because we had a large crowd of friends over and some great food to eat.

However, this food had a story, which made it even more enjoyable. This was the first Wilbur Collective Ham Roast and most of the friends around are table contributed to the purchase of a local and sustainably raised pig. To get to this point it took a lot of community and a little bit of organization. We bought the pig from the Kawartha Ecological Growers Coop. [KEG], a collection of small farmers who manage a C.S.A. [Community Supported Agriculture] and sell at a number of farmers markets here in Toronto. Their community of farmers and a very supportive local chief made it possible to buy and process a pig and my group of friends made it possible to find the money to pay for it.
I have wanted to figure out a source of ethically raised and organic local meat for a few years now. The problem is that Katie, my lovely wife, is a vegetarian and she shows little interest in pork, ethical or not. So I have been restricted to buying small amounts of meat from farmers markets or organic butchers, which is not cheap. Months ago, we had a group of friends enjoying the spring weather on our back deck, eating some “Naked” sausages [meaning they were flavoured only with a bit of onion, salt and pepper] I’d bought

from KEG at the farmers market. I soon found that a lot of my friends shared my interest in sourcing their meat locally.

My connection with the farming community starts with Shannon. During the last weeks of winter Katie and I managed to wake up early enough on a Saturday morning to visit the year round farmers market at the new community barns (the potential topic of another post). Shannon was managing one of the best tables of local winter vegetables. After picking out a few bags worth of food we noticed they were advertising a CSA (community supported agriculture). More importantly they were delivering their CSA at a new farmers market in our local park, meaning we could walk to get our share. We quickly decided to sign up for a share and have loved it ever since. It is a really amazing thing to be on a first name basis with the people who not only sells us our food, but also grow much of it themselves.

The folks at KEG developed an interesting network of farmers, butchers and chefs to raise, kill and process pigs. An older, mostly retired farmer, who has been organic longer than label, keeps a couple of sows and one boar from a collection of heritage breeds Berkshire, Tamworth, Hampshire, Yorkshire, and Landrace. He does the farrowing, or pig birthing, for KEG. The young pigs are then passed on to one of two farms who finish the pigs, feeding them locally grown grains and legumes and allowing them to forage around outside. Once the pigs are ready for slaughter, they are sent to a multigenerational butcher in Lindsey for custom small scale killing. The final leg the journey and the one that is really interesting in my mind, is the kitchen of a high-end restaurant in Toronto. The chef and KEG came to an arrangement to process pigs. He then converts the lesser meat into excellent sausages and sells them back to KEG. These are the very same sausages that my friends and I were eating when we decided to found the Wilbur Collective back in May. On Thanksgiving Sunday the chef allowed me to join him in his kitchen and we spent the day making sausages, pork chops, smoked hawks, head cheese, bacon, pancetta and a huge ‘city ham’. After a few dozen emails we found a night that we could all come together and despite my poor defrosting plans, the ham tasted amazing.

Developing real relationships with the people involved with producing our food is important in creating sustainable communities. Doing this while deepening your connections with your existing communities of friends and family makes the experience even better.