CanadianFoodies.com

I don’t really gauge the passage of time by the year anymore. Once you have kids, and maybe it’s only while you have young children, you start measuring time by the age – usually of either the oldest or the youngest.

In 2012 my eldest will be turning 7. He was born shortly before the original incarnation of this blog was – back when Mrs. Foodie and I thought it would be fun to blog about all the great food we found in our favourite restaurants and our efforts to recreate those dishes at home.

Time flies and boy do things change! With 4 kids under our roof, we don’t make it out to many restaurants now-a-days, and with 6 people stuffed into a little urban kitchen – there isn’t a lot of room for wowing the diners (besides, we don’t have many diner parties anymore either!)

Not that I’m complaining about any of it (okay, maybe I complain about the tiny kitchen a bit… er, a lot) but life seems to increase in pace each year, and with each kid, and we never seem to have time to do the things we had planned on doing.

…hence the decidedly sparse number of posts over the past couple of years.

But, 2012 is going to be a year of change – big change. Trust me, I know about these things.

For us, we’re about to put an offer on a big (really big) century home in a quiet little town, across the road from a nice little river. And this big home comes with a big kitchen (really big!) Once all the initial excitement died down around here, Mrs. Foodie and I began to talk about all the great things we could do with that kitchen (procrastinating from the packing and cleaning that needs to be done around our current house of course) – and one of the things that we both kept coming back to, was the relaunch of our sadly neglected, but not quite forgotten food blog!!

So this is a new beginning. Our focus will change around here a little. We are trying to feed a family of 6 every night, while still keeping food fun, adventurous and healthy. We do things a little different, and I’ll be posting again shortly to talk more about that – and updating our About page.

We’re about to launch on an exciting new chapter in our lives and we are looking forward to sharing some of those stories with you – and we hope you’ll share some of your food adventures back with us here!

Also, I wanted to say thank you to everyone who has visited over the past year – visiting an almost dry well. Our traffic is surprisingly good despite our neglect, and we’re looking forward to providing better content again soon!

The Canadian Foodie

Tags: 2012

This recipe is simple, quick, delicious and as long as I call them ‘Veggie Pockets’ our kids love them!

No really – first I told the kids that they were getting a fancy spinach pastry for dinner, the reaction?

See for yourself:

But I quickly recovered! “Just kidding! It’s Veggie Pockets!” it worked:

Don’t ask… let’s just call them Pockets. Okay? Good…

We buy most of our vegetables at the Farmers Market when possible and therefore, in any season other than winter, we eat a lot of whatever is available. Lately that’s been Fiddleheads (now over unfortunately), asparagus, small eggplant, spring radicchio, swiss chard and baby spinach.

This is a new recipe for us, and we love it (in fact, we’re going to repeat it tonight!) It is really easy and quick to prepare (which is important with 3.9 kids underfoot) and for a ‘fancy’ meal the kids loved it.

Spinach, Eggplant and Ricotta Pastry Pockets

• Prep Time: < 15 minutes
• Cooking Time: 25 minutes
• Difficulty: Easy
• Serves: 4-6

Ingredients

1                   small onion, diced
1 tbsp          butter
1 tbsp          olive oil
1                   medium eggplant, peeled & cubed
4 cups         spinach
2 tbsp          of your favourite dried herb
1 cup            ricotta cheese
1 package   puff pastry
1                    egg; beaten with a little water

Set your oven to 400.

Drop the butter in your favourite deep pan and heat until bubbly.  Add the diced onion and cook until soft (5 minutes – don’t brown). Add the olive oil and then the cubed eggplant and mix. Once the eggplant is soft (it will change colour too), add your herb – tonight we used a mixture of oregano and dill, but you could add basil or lemon thyme; I’ve even made it once with cumin and coriander to give it a bit of a curry flavour.

As soon as you’ve stirred in your herb mixture, drop in all of your spinach and heat, stirring occasionally until the spinach is wilted. Remove from heat.

Remove your puff pastry from the package and cut into 4 equal squares. Ration out equal parts of the eggplant/spinach mixture into the middle of each square and add a healthy dollop of Ricotta cheese to the top. Use the beaten egg to dampen around all the edges of your pastry square and start folding the corners up to the middle, one at a time, pushing them together to seal any ‘cracks’.

Place the ‘Veggie Pockets’ on a lightly greased baking pan – we use a pizza stone, which I highly recommend! – and cook for 15 – 25 minutes, or until the tops of your pastry pockets are golden.

Eat and enjoy!

* Update – June 17, 2010 – I made too much filling the first time around (I’m crazy like that sometimes), so we made this again last night.  This time we mixed it up a little and shredded a carrot into the vegetable filling; adding a nice balance to the colour when cutting into it with a fork!

Tags: eggplant, pastry, ricotta, spinach

Wow! 2009 already!?

Let’s start the new year with a confession… I pretty much neglected the CanadianFoodies blog in 2008 (I’m sorry CF blog! I still love you!)

I didn’t stop eating, or loving food, I didn’t lose my passion to create food, write or share our experiences with you… or anything else like that

What I did do was try and cope with being busier than I ever have been before.

Floods and children, increasing demands at the office, our first major garden and all the while trying to not just survive, but improve life for our kids… you know, that whole life thing…

But it’s a new year, we’re back and this year our focus is once more going to change, or at least shift a bit.

This year, anyone who has stopped by in the past will notice an increased emphasis not just on food, but on healthier, greener, local and organic foods and the ‘greener’ lifestyle that we’ve been attempting to adopt over the past few years.

Mrs. Foodie and I have always eaten well (in a ‘healthy choices’ sense), but like almost everyone else, even we were guilty of the odd quick and easy processed foodstuff for times when time was in short supply (a couple frozen lasagna’s were a definite staple within our deep freezer) But, when we started having kids we began taking a hard look at everything that came into the house.

Foods with transfat were the the first things to go (and Mrs. Foodie felt the pain when our last microwave popcorn was finished).

Then, over the course of a year, we made choices to minimize foods heavy in sodium and saturated fats, we stopped using the microwave, stopped buying grocery store inst-meals and our occasional trips to the local farmers markets became a weekly event. In fact, in the summer months 80 – 90% of our produce comes from a farmers market.

We made a lot of headway that first year (2005) but the next year brought child #2, followed a year later by child #3 (yup, 3 kids in less than 34 months!) and we struggled to maintain our momentum forward.

But heare we are in 2009, the first decade of new millenium is coming to a close and through experience or wisdom the changes that we started 3 year ago have truly become second nature and we’re ready to take our ‘green’ life to the next level.

What exaclty does that mean?

Honestly I’m not 100% sure where the final destination is going to land us, but I do know the direction we’re heading.

The focus of this blog will continue to be food, (we’ll be posting a new recipe/meal of the week column shortly)

and we’ll continue to investigate the back stories and histories of the foods we eat.  But now, in 2009, we’ll start to focus on food as part of our environmental impact, our carbon footprint. We’ll look at the choices we want to make and followup with the ones we’re actually able to follow through with.

And that’s just the first step of the journey…

We’ve missed out on Farmer’s markets two weekends in a row now for various reasons and I’m starting to go through withdrawl.

I’ve pretty much run out of produce (except for lettuces and radish which we pulled from our own garden this week) and am dreading having to put in a visit to the grocery store to buy their ‘fresh’ product.

I’m not sure why Saturday mornings are becoming difficult (3 kids under 3.5 years old) but we’re having a hard time getting out of the house in time to make the markets.

I think this week we will visit the Eco-market at Hempola farms. We’ve been talking about it for a year, but Friday nights come and go and we always forget!

Ack – a note from the tech side of my personality… Apparently Hempola Farms haven’t updated their site since 2004! The good news is their Eco-Market will be up and running again in the spring of 2005! Doh! I missed it! Come on Hempola, I know farms aren’t always thought of as being part of the most tech-savvy industry, but try to make at least ANNUAL updates to your site if you are going to go to the trouble of having one!

Garden specs :

The 2008 garden is a little below 25 X 30 feet, or ~850 square feet.

Biggest pests so far:

• Mosquitos – Installed bat boxes and spray on repellent
• Ants – Don’t know what to do about this menace!

Grown:

We’ve planted the following:

• Corn
• Eggplant
• Various Heritage Tomatoes
• Ground Cherries
• Various Peppers (green, red, orange etc)
• Jalapeño
• Horseradish

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I am about to upgrade CanadianFoodies.com to WordPress 2.5.

So please ignore any short term randomness as I disable plugins, upgrade and (hopefully not) troubleshoot. We’ll be back to our regularly scheduled program shortly!

Thanks for your patience.

* Update (15 minutes later) – Upgrade complete. If you notice any further randomness, it is completely my fault!

I forgot to take a picture! -ack- I must be out of practice…

I took a few days off work to celebrate an extra long holiday weekend (and my birthday – yay me!-) and that generally means a little more time to plan a nice meal.

And in typical fashion, I went with a few new dishes…

Thursday night meant Breaded veal in a rich mushroom gravy (a hunters-style gravy) and lemon beans (with lemon zest and more mushrooms) .

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We spent a day in the fields today. For future refernce (because I know you MUST be visiting and reading my site fanatically!) Sunday is garden day.

Unfortunately, and if you followed along last summer you probably know, we live in the city. Not that living in the city is unfortunate, there are plenty of good things about living in the city and at this point in our lives it just makes sense to be close to everything. But, I was raised in the country and would like to find my way back sometime before I retire :)

The unfortunate thing, and likely my least favourite part of city living, is our postage-stamp sized back yard. It’s big enough for a shed, a small deck and a large childrens play center (slide and swings), with just enough grass left over for the dog to do her serious business.

…definitely NOT large enough for a garden.

Community Supported Agriculture

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How do you know when your steak is finished on the bbq?

Practice.

But in the meantime, stop asking HOW LONG… because it’s not the right question.

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Hello everyone!

Thanks for visiting. To any of my old regulars, thanks for checking back.

We’ve been a little quiet around here over the past 6 months or so… what can I say :)

I’ve been hibernating through the long Canadian Winter!

Actually we’ve been really busy with other ventures… a new baby in January (our second daughter!), a flood in February that destroyed our basement, and being generally busy trying to plan out the future of CanadianFoodies.

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