Ketchup Recipe

Knowing that there are certain thing that are going to be difficult to live without, I made a batch of ketchup. I am horrible with following recipes, This is the approximate recipe, measurements my not seem very exact. First I had frozen tomatoes from our garden that we froze last year. I pulled out 2 large freezer bags of these. This was enough tomatoes to fill our dutch oven.

4 quarts of tomatoes

2 medium onions sliced

2 cloves of garlic finely chopped

2 Tbls of sunflower oil (did not want to use peanut oil here as you never know who might use this)

½ cup of cider vinegar

2 Tbls of honey

2 tsp of salt

1 teaspoon of pepper flakes (I have some roasted/smoked hot peppers from the garden last year)

Put oil into the pot and heat. Once it is hot add the onions and stir. Cook the onions for about 8 minutes until soft, tender and translucent. Add garlic and cook for another 2 minutes. Add all other ingredients and bring to a boil. Simmer until it very thick, this was about 3 hours for me. Put sauce into a blender and puree. Bottle (I had an empty ketchup bottle so I put half in that and froze the rest)

June 21, 2009

Not much to report today as I did very little. I did however receive an email follow up on a bean opportunity that I had. It turns out that they are more than willing to sell me bean and currently have black turtle beans available and will have red kidney beans very shortly. The down side on this is that at this time they are selling them in 25lb bags for $45. There is no way that I could use 25 pound of beans, at least all 1 kind unless they were chick peas. They are considering selling 2 lb bags for $6 now I could see using a few pounds that way. I email back stating this. Unless I could find some other people interesting in sharing 25 pounds I will have to abandon this line until the start selling in smaller quantizes. I am sure there are people out there who would be willing but I am unsure how to find and contact them. Again maybe I need to contact the blog about this.

June 20, 2009

Go up this morning after a rather restless night. I could not stop my mind from racing. I sent off the following email to the waterloo Region's 100 mile blog site.

"I attended the 100 mile diet seminar and have committed to 60%.  This is not because I do not want to try 100% but because I will be away and unable (and possibly unwilling) to maintain 100% while away.  I have 1 suggestion and a couple of comments.  Let me start with the comments.

 

Baking Soda is not a grown product but rather a chemical composition that is produced rather than grown.  As such if you feel the need to find this locally I would think any good laboratory could produce a batch.  I think it should not be consider a food but rather a food additive, sort of like adding red dye to make your cake look nice except this make the food rise.  Baking power follows right behind it as it is a mixture of baking soda and a powdered acid, and has the added benefit of not requiring an acid in the food you are baking to be active.  Again I personally think (although I am not the referee) that this also is a food additive and not a food.

 

  Let's look at yeast now. This is a fungus and can be grown.  I have done a little bit of research on it and think I have a viable solution to the problem.  I will note that I have not seen this done and to this point have not tried it myself.  I did some reading and many people making beer reuse yeast.  My original thought (you can read it on my blog) was to reuse the yeast over and over keeping it in the freezer between uses.  After reading I discovered that there would be a problem with this approach as apparently yeast will mutate over generations.  Most everything I have read states that you can use from 4-20 generations without any problems.

 

  So my solution is get some yeast from where ever you want to get yeast, spend some money and get good quality yeast.  Next fill a measuring cup with enough warm (30 degree C) water to fill and ice cube tray, that was approx 640ml for me for a 16 cube tray, you will likely only need 10 cubes but better safe than sorry.  To this add some honey (I am guessing 5-6 teaspoons would be more than enough) add your yeast put in a bit more than you need again I suspect you will want 5-6 individual packages of yeast and stir.  Proof the yeast for 5 minutes (let it sit); if the water smells yeasty and bubbles are forming on the top it should be good.

 

Mix the yeast water well and pour it into an ice cube tray. Pop it into the freezer for 24 hours. Take the frozen yeast cubes out of the tray and put them into a freezer bag.  Take one of the ice cubes and add it to enough water to fill an ice cube tray add honey as above and allow to proof.  This is strictly a guess on my part but I think that 5 minutes might be good.  Again this should smell yeasty when it is good.  Freeze this mixture back into the ice cube tray.  Again this could be removed from the ice cube tray after it is frozen.  If you do that make sure you do not confuse these cubes with the original cubes.

 

  Now each day you want to make a bread remove 1 cube and melt it in a quarter cup of warm water with a teaspoon on honey.  Let this proof and then add it to your bread dough and proceed as normal.  I think that you will need to reduce the amount of sweeter (honey/sugar/maple syrup) and water (by that 125ml in the yeast water) that the recipe calls for. Once you run out of cubes from the second tray, pull out a cube from the original batch and repeat.

 

Technically this should yield 256 loaves of bread (assuming a 16 cube tray, which mine is) which should be more than enough to last the 100 days.  The only set back I can see to this is that maybe the frozen yeast will die.  I read that it should be good for 3-4 months but that is based on reusing beer yeast not bread yeast.

 

A final note if you are trying this and using a bread maker does not use the delay function, the bread must be made immediately once the yeast is done proofing.

 

M"

I will wait and hopefully get a response.

Got up and headed down o the Kitchener Market. I do not do this every week but most. I really did not buy much as we have already spent quite a lot this week and have the loft box coming on Wednesday for vegetables. I did pick up some sweet potatoes (from Simcoe) and spoke with the poultry dealer that I like to deal with there. He is out of St George and he assured me that all the chicken, turkey and duck that he carries is definitely local. That is a good this as I use a fair amount of whole chickens and turkey breasts along with many other cuts. I thought I scored as I found a seller selling beans. I had seen then all winter and knew they sold beans but it had slipped my mind.

I bought the last of his beans and ask him where they were from. He told me he grow them himself, he was out of Burford. He also told me that the beans cook in about 2 hours, they look like pinto beans. Ten he told me that this was the last of the beans he would have for the year and would have more in the fall. Sure typical situation I find myself in a day late and a dollar short.

I headed from there to the STOP store. I really like my Soft shell taco shells and wanted to find out how much a taco press would cost me. They only have one size and that it 4" and the price was $28.99. I really wanted a 6 or 8" press and thought the price was just too high so I passed.

Thought I would take a quick look at the Guelph Market but by the time I got over there the market was closing. I thought they had longer hours than this but… I will be back to check it out later. There was a vendor there who sold sprouts that I am interested it.

It brings me back to the question I keep posing, when does something become local. If he buys mung bean seeds from where ever and sprouts them, are they a local crop. I guess I will ask these burning questions to the 100 mile blog before too long.

June 19, 2009

Well I set myself a news task for today but so far have failed. With that said it was still a very interesting and informative day. I started by searching the net. I would not go so far as to suggest that it was exhaustive but I seem to have the ability to quickly find almost anything on the net. I struck out so next I tried contacting foodlink. I received a response from them very quickly, love it when that happens. Unfortunately the answer was not what I wanted to hear, "Thanks so much for this. I don't believe any of our participating farms grow legumes to sell dried." They had a couple of suggestions but… What can I say; I like to do things my own way as should be obvious from this blog.

L had a shocking input, at least to me. From out of the blue she says "There are legumes in Aylmer" I asked her where she got that information to which she responds "I read it somewhere." Glad one of us is detail oriented and reads the entire thing instead of just skimming looking for the "important" details, like moi. Well a couple of quick minutes on the keyboard and I have discovered a possible source for dried beans. Unfortunately this means travelling to London or St. Thomas not something I want to do but I do know someone who regularly goes to the London Market. I picked up the phone and made a quick call to see if it would even be possible. After 10 rings I hung up think okay I'll try again later, which I have not yet done. I have not completely abandoned this line but it is on hold for the time being.

We headed out to follow up on something else I wanted to try. Since we are doing a 100 mile diet and the Waterloo Region buy local, buy fresh has been such a help a quick web search reveals that Guelph-Wellington have a similar map and program. I spoke with someone who said that Brant county should be releasing one shortly and there is one (sort of) online for Oxford County. We picked up one of the Guelph maps and sifted through it. It is similar but seems to stress more on restaurants. It looked very good and we thought we would head over to one of the places. It was a farm that looked very interesting. When we arrived I was sort of surprised as it is actually a Jesuit Centre. It looks like a very peaceful and serene. There are hiking trails, gardens, mediation labyrinth etc.

They are running a farm Community Share Agriculture Program and although it said there hours were open Friday afternoon we found a closed sign up. As we were looking a very nice and helpful gentleman came to the door and helped us. He explained that they were a CSA and were currently full at least for the summer, they also run a winter program (2 pickups, one in January and one in February) mostly of root crops that will keep and still had some space in it. He also gave me a very good lead to pursue for dried beans. I regret not getting his name, stupid, stupid, stupid. I would really like to thank him!

We left there and I decided to go to one of the places on the Waterloo Region buy local… map which I thought sounded interesting, Jeese and Verna Gingrich. The store was quite large and featured a lot of home baking and fresh produce. Unfortunately the produce is fairly limited at this time of the year, almost nothing is out yet. They still had some onions and shallots from last year I imaging that they would be great fresh, I'm sure we will not have to wait much longer. We did pick up some radishes and honey. We already have Maple syrup at home so I think we should now be good for sugar substitutes for now. I really do need to check and find the correct amounts of honey needed to replace sugar. Will post it once I find it should be easy.

We still had a little time to kill so again stupidly we drove to Ayr. We went to Oakridge Acres. This place was recommended to me by someone who shops there regularly. Nice big store with lots of space. The variety of meat and poultry was surprisingly large. We spent a lot more than we were intending but I got a few Bison burgers, extremely lean meat, a few other assorted cuts and the makings for some broth. This is something I am likely to miss; I use a lot of broth but guess that I will have to make my own for the duration of this challenge. This might be a challenge as it is not something I have done well within the past and I have tried.

Since the Faul Farms was right around the corner we could not resist going there. The store in embedded in a lovely older farm house. The owner met us in the store and was extremely helpful and very pleasant. I chatted with her, well as chatty as I get, despite what you might think from this Blog I really am shy and don't mix well with people I don't know. L browsed and picked up a few more things.

I started making broth. I had the BBQ on and what better spot to brown the bone etc. After supper I threw the bones into some water to boil and we headed over to Chapters/Starbucks, our Friday night ritual. I am not sure what to do about this. Both of us love browsing though the books and then we meet some people for pleasant conversation over, well a coffee for me and whatever for L who does not drink coffee. I cannot think of a thing that Starbucks offers that could even be construed as local (not even for my vivid imagination).

After that we headed home and … well I can't imagine how I have come this far without mentioning Tali. Tali (Taliasin) is our soft-coated wheaten terrier. He has travelled with us to all of the locations so far and was greatly disappointed today as he did not get a walk. He is a fairly typical terrier and has more than a bit of energy to spare (read in he needs to burn it off). I took him for a walk and during the walk had one of my eureka moments. Let me digress, yet again. A while back I was surfing the web and decided that could make my own yogurt. Not only could I but I discovered that it was easy and with a few modifications from the original recipe was quite quick. Anyway in the process of making yogurt it is important to separate some of the yogurt and put it aside for the next batch. Yogurt is made using a live bacterium. This is where I tie it back in.

Yeast is also a living organism (a fungus) which we grow. I have not tried to tackle the idea of where to get yeast yet although I have been keeping my eye on the Waterloo Regions 100 mile blog who I know are also trying to tackle this problem. Well if you start with a yeast and add water and sugar (honey) to it you should be able to keep it alive and growing for some time. So like my yogurt each time you use the yeast you put some aside to be used next time you need it. Now I keep my yogurt culture in the fridge and that works for yogurt I think that the yeast would need to be frozen to make it go dormant in between uses. I think that this actually is the way that monster dough used to work in the past. I will have to do a bit of research but my hunch is that this has to work. There is only one question left for those trying to maintain 100% and that would be when does something become local.

My yogurt is many generations from the original store bought yogurt that I started with. At some point the yeast in the freezer also local. It brings to mind the question of whether we need to judge if something is local based on not just that it was grown locally but also where this seeds came from!

Speaking of which some research done,

To use honey in place of sugar, use 7/8 cup for every cup of sugar, and reduce the liquid in the recipe by 3 tablespoons.

To use maple syrup in place of sugar in cooking, use 3/4 cup for every 1 cup of sugar.

To use maple syrup in place of a cup of sugar in baking, use 3/4 cup, but decrease the total amount of liquid in the recipe by about 3 tablespoons for each cup of syrup you use.

Interesting tidbit I discovered and thought I would pass along granulated sugar has 46 calories per tablespoon, brown sugar has 50, maple syrup has 53, and honey tops them all with 64.

Thanks to http://www.ochef.com/91.htm where I found this information.

June 18, 2009

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.

June 17

We need to start stocking the larder with some health local foods. Despite the fact that I know we should not be doing this we decided to take a drive in the country and see if we could scope out a few places that we wanted to deal with. Our first stop was to Oak Manor Farms, http://www.oakmanorfarms.ca/. We had some difficulty finding this place and it took us about 3 tries and much cursing and heated tempers. Fortunately the tempers cool right off once we finally arrive. For anyone else out there hoping to find the place the and you have a GPS the coordinates are N43 19.391 W080 44.149.

This place was small but great. It is part of a barn. They had many different grains and oats available. They also have ground grains (flour). The person who dealt with us was very helpful but could have been a bit more knowledgeable. We did not want to have to come back here for a while so we stocked up. We bought flour and oats and spelt.

That brings me to an interesting and becoming a repeated problem. All of what they and most places carry is organic but the ideal of local is so new that it is not common. They did have labels to indicate that foods are from Ontario but not where they are from in Ontario making it difficult to know for sure that you are within the 100 miles.

My next thought was that we should go to Tavistock to the cheese factory. I could not find it and we decided that it must have close. Much later I spoke to someone who said it has been bought out but was still operating. We will have to go back.

Our next point of call was to the Bright cheese and butter Factory. The map for the Waterloo Region (Buy Local, Buy Fresh) http://foodlink.ca/ shows the outlet in Shakespeare but as always I know and headed to Bright. Surprise, surprise the Cheese factory is in Bright and they do have an outlet N43 16.853 W080 39.703. We bought a couple of bricks of cheese and asked about the butter, they told us it was just Gay Lee I have been to the Millbank cheese factory in the past. It is very nice but a bit pricey compared with what you can get in the supermarket. Maybe I am expecting too much! I am still hoping that Tavistock will be cheaper.

We wound up backtracking once again as we took a foray into Oxford county. This was likely the highlight of the day. The place we went to was Thames River Melon Farm, http://www.thamesrivermelons.ca/. It would have been a bit tricky to get to but I used the "Call a friend" option and arrived with no complications. There is a map on their website or just go to N43 11.575 W080 41.079. We met the owner Robert who was extremely helpful. He told us that he started the farm with one acre of musk melon and a backpack sprayer. The farm is now 400 acres and has an amazing variety of produce, I believe he just recently purchased 250 acres and is intending to grow blueberries on it. We left here with 2 bunches of asparagus and the advice "it does not freeze well as it get mushy" great for soup but none of us are fond of asparagus soup. We also had 2 flats of strawberries (over stuffed) and as they were not "Fresh" but a couple of days old we got an excellent price. We hulled and froze those for use later on, of course keeping a bowl aside for the next couple of days meals. We also picked up a couple of quarts of baby new potatoes, man I really love those. I think we will likely return, Robert was telling us that baby zucchini are right around the corner and the raspberries will be out shortly. He has many other crops including sweet potatoes in the fall and he sells vine ripe tomatoes from his neighbor who has a green house.

The final location we went to for the day was Wellesley Apple Brand Products, http://www.wellappleproducts.com/ N43 28.844 W080 45.858. Great apple products and very good I think if you are in the area. I think that this sort of products I can likely pick up at the market without much difference in price or availability. We did pick up 4 litres of cider, cider vinegar (it is local but not theirs), and large jar of apple butter and a basket of apples.

Well I think we've done very well for the day tomorrows problem I think need to be oil. We need a source of oil or this just won't work

Forward/Description

The point of this blog is to track out attempt at the 100 mile challenge.

This really should be quite a challenge as we have at least one member of the family who is opposed it and just wants "regular food from the supermarket"

We only signed up for 60% rather than 100% as we are going on vacation to Washington DC in August and knew that there was no way that we could stick to the rules during that time. You are not suppose to take food across the border, there was no way to find local foods in Washington area and finally we are on vacation and want to enjoy it not spend the time trying to sort local and make the food.

I realize that I am a couple of days behind posting as it took me a bit to get everything set up and running. This was not my first choice to do this I wanted to use my own website but this was much easier. The actual 100 days starts on July 5^th and continues on until October 11^th.