Recipe 2 - Lavender Scones

As an early wedding gift for a special young lady, I'm early releasing another of my dessert recipes. I guess we are keeping it sweet in here!

Lavender Scones

The centrepiece of a spring tea party

Recommended tools

Food processor, knife, large bowl, small measuring cup, spatula, baking dish, parchment paper, baking sheet, fork, pastry brush

Ingredients

• 2 C flour
• 3 + 1 TBS (OP) sugar
• 1 TBS baking powder
• ½ tsp salt
• ¼ tsp baking soda
• ¼ lb butter, chilled and cubed
• ½ C buttermilk
• ½ C sour cream
• 3 TBS dried lavender
• 1 egg (OP) (SUB)
• 2 TBS water (OP) (SUB)

Method

1. Preheat oven to 425°F
2. In processor, pulse the five dry ingredients
3. Add butter and pulse into pea-sized chunks
4. Transfer to bowl. Add both dairy and lavender. Hand mix quickly but don’t work it too long. Loose crumbs are fine.
5. Press crumbly mixture into square dish. Refrigerate for 10 minutes.
6. Roll out and fold into thirds, then half. Repeat several times then roll out to about 9 X 9 inches.
7. Cut into 9 squares. Line sheet with paper. Space out scones.
8. For optional glaze, beat egg with water. Brush tops lightly with mixture and sprinkle with remaining sugar.
9. Bake 15 minutes or until sides are slightly gold and dry

Substitution suggestion: Melted butter can also be used as glaze

What Eating Local Means for Us - Part 2

The Local Farmers' Market

I see my community there

The one closest to my home has a number of vendors I support.

• One sells hydroponically-produced tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and eggplant year-round. I admit to buying them from time to time to broaden my diet, but I prefer soil-grown for the reasons I mentioned here.
• One sells a large variety of organic products from near and far. I go to them for fruits and berries grown in neighbouring BC, as well as lemons from Mexico. I wish I could buy locally grown Meyer lemons, but sadly that is a niche no one has yet seen their way to fill.
• The veggie stall I like the best offers a good selection storage vegetables; potatoes, carrots, beets, parsnips, parsley root, turnips, rutabagas, garlic, leeks, onions, cabbage and kohlrabi. These are the garden staples our ancestors grew for themselves in large quantities and ate while the ground was frozen.

I can fill out most of the smaller quantities of shopping list there too.

• butcher
• baker
• cheese maker (eggs too)
• honey
• hazelnuts

Obviously there are gaps in the shopping list that force me to visit a high volume seller, but if I buy these non-perishables in bulk, I don't have to go as often. I hope I have made my point; we can eat pretty well on local produce if we commit to eating seasonally. That is what I intend to demonstrate with my cookbook.

What Eating Local Means for Us - Part 1

.........to everything ...there is a season, turn, turn, turn and a time to every purpose.........

I heard someone on the radio say something about the new Canada food Guide that really bugged me. Canadians were going to have to rely more on imported food in order to follow it. The idea was probably conceived by a meat or dairy lobbyist. Sadly, most Canadians will take that statement on face value as a reality that cannot be avoided.

What a capitulation! It completely disregards how our ancestors ate, and ignores the data; they didn't suffer from half the diseases we do today!

I live in Calgary, probably the toughest place to grow food in Canada. Due to climate change, our plant hardiness zone was re-designated in 2016 from 3b to 4a, based on an increase in average temperature. What those numbers don't reveal is the extremes we continue to face here:

• Quick thaw-and-freeze-again cycles due to warm, dry and intermittent winds called Chinooks
• Hot dry days followed by cool summer nights that slow down growth
• Crop-destroying hail that can happen with little warning at the height of our growing season.

It makes Calgarians bitter and envious at times, but it also steels our resolve to beat nature into submission. It's not enough to really, really want that juicy tomato! Determined gardeners finally learn by trial and error to invest in shelters to get the damn thing to ripen on the vine.

This is all well and good for people with the time and space to grow what they will eat half the year at best. In the summer and fall, we all have a much broader choice in where to get our produce. The biggest problem I face in August is what to do with all the zucchinis my friends give me. The real issue that needs addressing is where can urban populations access produce the rest of the time?

The good news is consumer demand has created niche markets that small growers and enterprising re-sellers are beginning to fill. There are several successful distribution hub models already around and I want to explore all of them at some point, but I will begin part 2 with the one I am most familiar with.

Here's the Dirt on Food - Part 2

I failed Veggies 101

So when that food scientist gave me a look of incredulity, I have to admit something. It was the first time since grade 8 that I felt stupid. Why did I not know that not all carrots were created equal? I grew up in a family where we ate well. Not much fruit, but lots of hearty Canadian vegetables cooked in traditionally Irish-Canadian ways - they had the shit boiled out of them. OK, so maybe they could have been prepared better, but one raw carrot is the same as another? Please?

The AHA moment

As I said, I was on a journey. Now that journey had become a quest that quickened when I was invited to an open-yard event near my Calgary home and met my future permaculture teacher, Rob Avis. He had transformed a small city lot into a perennial food forest, with random annual veggies scattered about for good measure. The entire effect was breathtaking - mini Garden of Eden. When he explained to our group that each plant provided a particular design function for the benefit of nearby plants and thus the whole garden, I was hooked.

Since that day, I have learned a great deal from him and many others. I have listened and observed for myself the diversity of life that lives in a self-sustaining environment. I have seen the work (yes, there is a considerable amount of work) that goes into creating such places. I have been made aware of how much soil fertility is restored by food forests as they literally (through their litter) build inch upon precious inch of humus, teeming with the diversity of life that makes a healthy soil food web possible.

Why biology is more important than chemistry to that carrot

Remember what modern farmers are doing? Tilling and adding chemicals like NPK fertilizers, both which slowly destroy the soil food web. Have you even taken a bunch of vitamin C only to pee it out later? That is exactly what happens to most of that NPK. Sure, it's water soluable, but it is not in a form that our bodies can readily use. Do doctors recommend we grind up some seashells and eat them? That's basically what you do when you take a calcium pill.

Just like me, my carrot needs its nutrients given to it in a form it can more easily incorporate. That is exactly the role the microbiology play! They break it down through their own bodies into much more digestible forms than industrial methods can.

Forgive me one final tangent; we are only just beginning to understand the role critters in our guts play, but that is another big story for another time. The missing piece of the puzzle is a little-known fact that it's time to reveal.

How sweet it is!

Most folks understand why a shipped carrot is more tasteless and less sweet than one straight out of the garden. The moment the connection to the soil food web is severed, complex sugar compounds begin the process of breaking down into simple starches. We already know the fresher the more nutritious, right?

It turns out the sweeter something tastes, the more nutritious it is also. No, this doesn't mean candy is good for you, but it does mean that not all carrots are equal!

Would it surprise you to learn there is a way anyone could test nutritional quality right at the produce market? It's called a Brix meter. It measures sugar content and all produce has an optimal range. So here's an idea; let's all get them and shake up the food industry! Big Food, we are coming for you!

Here's the Dirt on Food - Part 1

Originally, I was going to focus mainly on permaculture, the design principles as put into practice by my husband and I. We were going to move to a new community and embark on a completely different lifestyle. We re-invested our lives' savings into virgin land. We had the funds to begin, but we were counting on a few more years of good income to fulfill the vision, but the local economy had other plans. So here we are, older and wiser - and still carrying on.

This is The Soil Food Web

This community of gazillions of micro-organisms live under our feet, as unaware of us as we are of them. They can survive without humans, but we can not survive without the Soil Food Web

The real Garden of Eden story

Our ancestors survived by hunting other creatures and gathering fruits, nuts, leaves and roots. We foraged exactly like the other animals in a self-sustaining ecosystem we were told was created for us - as long as we followed the advice of the Creator. When our numbers grew too large to keep doing this, we learned how to drop a seed into a dimple in the earth and sprinkle water on it. We learned how to save seed for the next year and how to turn other seeds into flours to eat with game when the ground was frozen. That worked ok for the next ten thousand years.

Where we began to go wrong

As our brains got bigger and our tools more efficient, something bad happened. We left the garden in the hands of a few and went off to do greater things, like building empires. The soil became depleted of certain nutrients by planting the same thing in the same place. Land was prepared for seeding by tilling, which further hastened infertility by killing a lot of beings living there. Topsoil was treated with chemical weed killers and fertilizers which destroyed even more biological life.

What we forgot to remember

We could have created multiple Gardens of Eden, using the same model, outside of the one we left. Why we did not is in our history books under the heading of Growth.

Now that we are where we are, everyone is saying somebody should do something. Perhaps everyone needs to do something. I believe there is no better way than if we all build Gardens of Eden; self-sustaining ecosystems where each one of us gets to be a care-taker again. The good news is our brains are bigger, so we can do this, as long as we work with other species, instead of killing them.

What a garden needs to be self-sustaining

We learned in science class that plants need sunshine and water to kick off the carbon/oxygen cycle we call photosynthesis. That's the chemistry of it. What I don't remember learning is the biology of it; how the micro-organisms interact with the plants to kick off the carbon/nitrogen cycle - The Soil Food Web.

Basically what happens is each needs something the other has; little critters (ie. bacteria, fungi and nematodes) need to eat carbon/nitrogen compounds off the roots of the plant. The plant needs minerals deep in sub-soils it roots cannot reach. So they trade. As bigger critters come along to eat the littler critters their manure (I love talking shit) and dead bodies create organic matter (humus, not hummus) containing a variety of other compounds that the plant takes up through its roots.

Ya-ya, but how does all this affect my carrot?

I hope I haven't lost you, Dear Reader with the set-up to where I am going with this. All should become clear in the next post.

How my journey began

In a nutshell, nothing made sense for me after 911

The before

It was a comfortable life on the hamster wheel. Family, job, mortgage. Rinse and repeat.

The continuing story

Once that cathartic event happened, I started using my computer for something more important than Free Cell, looking for reasons why the world worked (or didn't) the way it could have. I found the Zeitgeist series of films among other things and they radically shifted my consciousness, how I perceive events that are shaping a radically different future than the one I had imagined. I became less religious and more spiritual, less judgmental and more curious, less materialistic and more connected to the earth.

I was diagnosed with Graves, an autoimmune disease that attacked my thyroid and eyes. It was another wake-up call for me, and I eventually had to leave my job. With even more time to research new areas of interest, I studied permaculture and that is when my whole life plan changed.

A series of unfortunate events in the economic sector my husband and I had worked in derailed our plans, so we are in the middle of coming up with a new one. Watch this space for updates.

In the meantime, I am writing. I am not particularly good at it but apparently there is hope I can improve.

This cookbook is a project my daughter put me up to as she has become interested in the way I cook. It just made sense to put it all in one place for her, and anyone else who enjoys my recipes.

This blog will be getting into some other areas of interest for me; growing food in healthy soil and how to redesign man's footprint in the world. Not sure the latter has time to be pursued given how far along towards extinction we have traveled, but I was born a designer, so I am meant to keep doing it - until I can't.

Recipe 1 - Gingerbread

I rushed this onto my newly-designed blog for the benefit of one of my food heroes, Jack Monroe (and their fellow fans). This is an old family recipe passed down to at least 3 generations of sturdy Irish-Canadian women. The only alteration I made was replacing the cheap and trans-fatty vegetable shortening with more healthful (and tasty) butter. As my equally-sturdy French ancestors would say, bon appetit!

Gingerbread

This also makes the base for Pumpkin Cheesecake Trifle, page _.

Recommended tools

Medium bowl, sifter, large bowl, electric mixer, small bowl, whisk, Bundt cake pan

Ingredients

• 2 ½ C flour
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 1 ½ tsp baking soda
• 1 tsp ginger
• 1 tsp cloves
• ½ tsp salt
• ½ C butter
• 1½ C sugar
• 1 egg
• 1 C boiling water
• 1 C molasses
• 1 TBS aroma-free coconut oil

Method

1. Preheat oven to 350°F
2. In bowl, sift together the first six dry ingredients
3. In bowl, cream butter and sugar until fluffy and smooth
4. In bowl, beat egg, then add molasses and whisk
5. Alternately add dry ingredients, molasses mixture and water to large bowl, mixing in between to form batter.
6. Coat pan with oil, pour in batter
7. Bake 45 minutes
8. Test centre with toothpick and if not clean, bake for 5 more minutes, repeat until toothpick comes out dry.
9. Save some for trifle base (if you can) and slice and serve the rest with a nice cup of tea!