We got up today with the express intent of finding oil. I had done some research and discovered that there was a place in Mitchell, FlorAlp Farms Inc that was growing and cold pressing Sunflowers for sunflower oil. After checking out their website, http://floralpfarms.ca/, it appeared that they do not sell directly to the public. This was a shame as I am going camping next weekend at the pinery and could stop there on the way; I might anyway just to check it out. They do sell their oil through 3 retail store in our area, Full Circle Foods (Kitchener), The Gentle Rain (Stratford) and The Stone store (Guelph). Seeing that I live in Kitchener the Full Circle made a lot of sense.
We headed over to Full Circle, http://fullcirclefoods.ca/, and were quite impressed with the store. Again the store is catering to the Organic and not local. The staff was extremely helpful showing us around and letting us know what was local and what was not. They seemed to carry the oak manor products but they also had bulk flour they said was local (not much information there but I am getting ahead of myself). We did get a 1 litre bottle of the FlorAlp Sunflower oil. I have not yet opened it as there is still olive oil to finish (and plastic salad dressing). My intent here is to use this oil for eating directly, like salads…. This should go really well with the cider vinegar, maybe some fresh herbs and quite possible some of the asiago cheese, grated, that I picked up in Millbank. Speaking of sour I am wondering if I can somehow substitute rhubarb for lemon juice, I guess I have some research ahead of me to find out. I guess there's a second question there, does rhubarb contain vitamin C and can I use it to prevent food from changing colour. If that is the case I will have to juice some of the rhubarb and set it aside specifically for lemon replacement. I will comment more on this once I find out.
We left Full Circle heading to our second stop of the day, a new cache had come out in Waterloo and we just had to go get it. This is now going to take a bit of an aside here. I have numerous hobbies one of which is Geocaching. We have a GPS and people place caches (small treasures) and post on line where they are (GPS coordinates. Then a bunch of crazy people like ourselves go looking for these. It is a combination treasure and scavenger hunt combined with high tech toys. What better fun could there be!!!!
Anyway as we were driving downtown Waterloo, we happened upon Eating Well Organically. I've checked and could not find a Website. We had to stop in for a look around. I was surprised to find the place very busy. It was bustling with people. The staff were quite busy so I did not really get a chance to speak with anyone. I looked over the shelves and again found that emphasis of the store is on organic and had problems discovering what products were local.
After getting the cache (and several others in the area) we headed off to Picard Peanuts, http://www.picardspeanuts.ca/home. We picked up a couple of snacks for immediate use and some peanut butter, fresh ground from Valencia peanuts, grown in Windham Centre. We also discovered that they sold peanut oil. We asked as that told it they were from local Valencia peanuts. I have been unable to confirm this as I cannot find an email address to contact Picard's head office. I think that maybe I will give them a call to reaffirm. In the mean time this will be an excellent cooking oil. No one here is allergic to peanuts and I don't usually produce food for others. I think for the time being I have solved the oil issue.
We also discovered that Picards also carries "Uncle Bob's" popcorn, http://www.ontariopoppingcorn.com/. I said it was from Walsingham, Ontario. I had never heard of Walsingham so I pulled out my GPS and entered their address. It came back as 97.5 Km from St Jacobs, so I figure we had to be within the 100 mile limit so we have a great snack now, well at least I have I love popcorn, L not so much she's still looking for local chocolate.
Our last stop of the day was to Zehrs. We were actually there for a completely different purpose and decided that since we were there… L had a coupon for Chapman's ice cream and a great idea for desert, obviously not 100 mile desert. I decided to check out the salt while I was there. I was quite disappointed as most of the salt was Windsor Salt with the exception of some specialty salts and Noname. I checked out the noname a my heart lifted, it was sifto salt and then I read the fine print stating that it was "imported" by Sifto. I am sure I will find the Sifto salt somewhere. Interestingly I mentioned I was looking for sifto to a friend, not surprisingly the same one who told me about Tavistock Cheese factory and he told me that Sifto was sold to a US firm but he thought the name had been maintained.
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