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!

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…

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!

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

• Turnip
• Radish
• Peas
• Beans
• Parsnip
• Various Carrots
• Various Potatoes
• Various Lettuces
• Various Radichios
• Cucumbers
• Various Onions
• Garlic
• Pumpkin
• Cantaloupe
• Broccoli
• Rhubarb
• And not necessarily in that order (I’m probably forgetting something too!)

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 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) .

I’ve never actually cooked veal before and it was has been one of those items on my cooking to-do list for awhile. I know, veal isn’t exactly uncommon, the reason I’ve never cooked it before is actually that I am much more of a vegetarian than a carnivore. Oh, I love my BBQ, never fear… but I generally follow a meat-centric meal with several days of veggie-centric foods.

So, first time cooking veal it was!

The Veal

I choose a scallopini cut , figuring it would be easy to manage (as long as I didn’t overcook it!) and breading was acheived through a simple 3 bowl method (dip in bowl of flour, followed by dip in a bowl of milk & egg, followed by a dip in breadcrumbs). Veal was then cooked for a very short period of time (5 ish minutes flipping once).

Sauce was a combination of freshly sauteed mushrooms in a rich-dark gravy. (writing this is making me hungry!)

The Beans

This was a simple recipe:

About a pound of beans were boiled just long enough to soften.

1 Fresh lemon was zested (grate the outside layer of peel into a bowl!) and juiced.

About 1/4 lb of button mushrooms were sauteed in olive oil(about 5 minutes with one stir in the middle!)

Once the mushrooms were ready, beans and lemon (both zest and juice) were added to the pan along with pepper, and a dash of dill and basil; and the whole thing was mixed over medium heat for a few minutes.

Thats it. The entire meal took about 20 minutes to prepare AND cook and was delicious!

Served with salad (which we always have pre-prepared) and fresh bread!

Next time I’ll try and remember the photos!

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

Last year we signed up for a local CSA (a what!? ), which was a great experience. It was a particularly hot and dry year, so the produce occasionally left something to be desired, but on a whole we were very happy to participate and the kids will miss not being able to visit the animals every week (my son is already talking about Flash, the farm horse!)

We’d be signing up again this year too, but the opportunity arose to plant our own garden on a plot of land about 27×35 feet (or just shy of 1000 square feet), and we couldn’t pass it up. My wife’s parents own about 4 acres off of Lake Simcoe and despite the fact that it is a 45 minute drive away, we tilled the land and are ready for a summer of Sundays at the inlaws.

If you can’t grow your own garden and have thought about CSA, or have never even heard of CSA before, you should stop by Heritage Hill Organics, just outside of Barrie, for their open house on May 10th . I think we’ll be making excuses to stop by over the summer a few times still.

The Summer Garden Series

So, long story short, this is the first installment of our ‘Summer Garden’ series. Actually, I have a lot to tell already as I spent a month clearing and double-turning the land last fall, began an epic battle against the ant hordes and started growing veggies in the basement almost a month ago now!

In fact, we put our first vegetables in the garden today: onions, cucumbers, cantaloupe, and garlic. It’s still a bit early, but I’m making some clotches (I think that’s the right spelling) and loaded on the mulch to keep the ground temp. up as much as possible… So we’ll see; this whole summer is going to be an experiment in organic gardening and I wanted to test how early I could get things in the ground (my fingers are x’d against any late frosts).

Wintered Vegetables

Not only did I plant today, I already began the harvest! There are a few things growing that were in the ground still from last summer (in a pre-existing garden) and we picked a pile of onions whose tops were already over 2 feet high! We’re going to use the tops as ‘green onions’ and replant the smallish bulbs!

My goal for the next week is to figure out which vegetables I still need to pick up, whether that will be in seed or plant form and the general layout of the entire garden (got to go in with a plan!). I have to finish the clotches, pick up more peat and mulch and find a hot tub to soak in (Hey! I have a desk job… I’m sore after a day in the garden.)

So much to do… so little time!

Practice.

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

Oh, I could tell you that your steak needs to bbq for about 12 minutes to produce a juicy medium-rare steak; but if your steak is only an inch thick, you just produced something closer to well done.

There are a few factors to consider when pacing your steak on the bbq… but in the end, practice makes perfect.

If you really want to bone up on cooking your T-Bone perfectly, and want to start a summers worth of practice off on the right foot, go and pickup a decent meat thermometer, because the correct question is not:

How long should I cook my steak for?

but:

What should the internal temprature of my steak be?

Like I said, there are a lot of factors to consider if you’re looking for the perfect grilling time, like bbq type (gas, or charcoal) and thickness of steak, etc. Eventually you’ll gain a 6th sense for knowing when your steaks have reached perfection, but until then, use the following information to get you started:

For steaks about 1 inch thick

Medium Rare Internal Temp: 145 degrees F.
Medium Rare (Estimated) Cooking Time: 8 minutes

Medium Internal Temp: 160 degrees F.
Medium (Estimated) Cooking Time: 9 minutes

Well Done Internal Temp: 170 degrees F.
Well Done (Estimated) Cooking Time: 10-11 minutes

For steaks about 1.5 inches thick

Medium Rare Internal Temp: 145 degrees F.
Medium Rare (Estimated) Cooking Time: 13 minutes

Medium Internal Temp: 160 degrees F.
Medium (Estimated) Cooking Time: 15 minutes

Well Done Internal Temp: 170 degrees F.
Well Done (Estimated) Cooking Time: 20 minutes

For steaks about 2 inches thick

Medium Rare Internal Temp: 145 degrees F.
Medium Rare (Estimated) Cooking Time: 17 minutes

Medium Internal Temp: 160 degrees F.
Medium (Estimated) Cooking Time: 20 minutes

Well Done Internal Temp: 170 degrees F.
Well Done (Estimated) Cooking Time: 23 minutes

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.

You see, we really didn’t have much of a plan when we started… we just wanted some good eats, and we wanted a way to share them… That original intent kind of expanded into starting to cover our local restaurant scene (which proved to much with 3 young children :) etc…

To our surprise we were really well received! We were sent lots of great feedback and we eventually decided that if we were going to continue this blog we were going to need to have a better plan as we moved forward…

So here we are. Plan in hand.

And I’m happy to say that not much is going to change… except our focus.

We’re not just interested in eating GOOD food, we’re passionate about eating good HEALTHY food! No factory produced, plastic packaged goods for our family! Some of our other concerns & passions include the environment, green living, healthy lifestyles, family values and organic eating…

Whew… get all that?

So this Blog is about to see a bit of a transformation as you take back seat in my families ride as we navigate our typically transfat, chemical and additive filled lives as we search for a better way to live longer, live stronger and live happier!

This year we had the opportunity to plant our own garden (about 30X30!) on a relatives property. So we’re going to be talking about organic gardening and our struggles there (and there have been struggles already).

We’re also going to try and start incorporating video soon… sorry, that’s all I’m going to say about that for now :)

Whew! (did I say that already?)

I’m spent for now…

Hope to see you soon as we cycle up this conversation that we hope you’ll join us in!

cheers!

The Valiants.

I’ve been out of town a lot recently (with the day job) as well as launching a new blog (MichaelValiant.com – warning, not food related at all!) so I apologize for not being around here much.

Thanks for the comments (that took me forever to moderate)!

I will re-kick things off with a thought for the day:

I try not to eat any veggies that have travelled more than I have!