Fruit is not just for dessert anymore
By Julia Belluz - Wednesday, December 8, 2010 - 1 Comment
A top British food writer turns the ‘stars in my pastries’ into the saviours of his savoury dishes
Photography Jonathan Lovekin
Fruit usually makes its debut in the third act of a meal. But in Tender Volume II: A cook’s guide to the fruit garden, British food writer Nigel Slater brings apples and pears into the main course, exploring a neglected pairing: fruit and meat.
There’s a good chance you know as much about cooking lamb with quinces as you do about Slater, though he is arguably Britain’s finest food writer. The BBC host and long-time Observer columnist has written a dozen books, including the acclaimed childhood memoir Toast. But while Jamie Oliver has been crusading internationally about eating well, and Nigella Lawson has built a lifestyle brand that rivals Oprah’s, Slater has shirked celebrity-chef culture, even refusing most press requests (including several from Maclean’s). “I put as much effort into keeping a low profile,” he has said, “as most cookery writers do in publicizing themselves.”
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Do you mind if we pick your pears?
By Julia McKinnell - Thursday, November 12, 2009 at 11:00 AM - 4 Comments
A volunteer project in B.C. gets fruit that would have rotted to people who need it
Dianne MacLean remembers the first time she pulled her car into a stranger’s driveway on Vancouver Island, went and knocked on the person’s door and said, “If you’re not going to eat those ripe cherries on that tree, may I pick them?” MacLean used to be a nurse but, back then, she was a single mom on welfare disability, and she knew other struggling moms, and here they all were, as she saw it, living in the fertile Comox Valley where pear and apple and cherry trees grow on every street, and all this fruit was rotting on the ground.The stranger with the cherries invited her in enthusiastically, says MacLean. “We’ve got tons of stuff here,” the woman said. “It was like the Garden of Eden,” MacLean recalled on the phone last week from her home in Courtenay, B.C. “She had kiwis, walnuts, apples and pears. She was totally overwhelmed. She couldn’t deal with it all. A friend of mine and I borrowed a ladder and we picked the cherries first.” Continue…
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Everyone's got pawpaw fever
By Sarah Elton - Monday, November 2, 2009 at 11:30 AM - 1 Comment
A mix of guava and banana, this coveted fruit is, oddly, native to Ontario’s Carolinian forest
From the outside, the pawpaw is a humble fruit. Its skin, a lacklustre chartreuse, bruises easily, and it resembles an unripe, banged-up mango more than anything else. But take a bite of its creamy, soft flesh and it is absolute heaven. The tropical flavours of banana and guava mixed with a touch of persimmon spread across your tongue. It’s hard to believe this exotic fruit is indigenous to Ontario’s Carolinian forest; it’s so rare few Canadians even know of its existence. But in the past few years, the pawpaw has gone from almost extinct to yearned-for local delicacy. With a revival under way, foodies are clamouring for a taste.Most people eat the pawpaw raw—like a papaya, which is sometimes called a pawpaw even though it’s a different fruit. They peel the skin, then cut the fruit in half, removing the shiny, brown, fava-bean-like seeds and slicing the flesh. When I tasted my first pawpaws last year, I never made it to the table to eat them because I’d devoured the entire fruit before I could sit down. Mark Picone, professor of the Niagara Culinary Institute, who has been eating pawpaws for years and thus has more patience, has concocted desserts like pawpaw pastry cream, pawpaw tart with a spelt crust, steamed pawpaw pudding with screech ice cream (yes, that screech—Newfoundland’s dark rum), and butter tart with pawpaw. “It’s an incredible emulsifier. It really brings flavours together,” he says. Continue…
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Fresh fruit, veg and paranoia
By Nicholas Köhler - Thursday, August 20, 2009 at 8:20 AM - 10 Comments
Personality conflicts at farmers’ markets aren’t that unusual, says one expert, but even he admits Calgary’s are ‘on a different scale’
In late July 2008, Antonio Souto, a B.C. fresh produce broker, drove out to Charnapal “Paul” Sandhu’s orchard in Osoyoos, B.C., just north of the U.S. border, “with a view,” as he puts it in an affidavit filed at the Court of Queen’s Bench in Calgary, “to purchasing an order of nectarines.” In terms that can sound almost Biblical, Souto continues: “I saw that the nectarines on the trees at Mr. Sandhu’s orchard were ripe and so purchased from Mr. Sandhu 119 18-lb. cases.” Affirms Sandhu in his own affidavit: “I did personally pick, sort, and pack these nectarines.” Upon buying the fruit, Souto goes on, “I went directly to Calgary. I then sold a number of these subject nectarines to Ms. Sharla Dube.”Nectarines, a species of fuzzless peach, aren’t the standard stuff of litigation. But such were the tensions at the Calgary Farmers’ Market last fall that Dube, owner of the Cherry Pit fruit stand, filed suit against Calgary Farmers’ Market NGC Inc., the market’s general manager, the six members of the market’s board of directors, and two of her competitors (fruit and veg stalls owned by two of those very directors). Continue…
