Canadiana, Part I: Habeeb Salloum and Lentils From the Ashes of War

Grainews

May 2022.

In 1923, Jirys Ya’qūb Sallūm kissed his wife and young sons goodbye in the town of Qar’awn, located in the Biqa’ Valley, in the French protectorate of Lebanon and Syria. Speaking only Arabic, he traveled to Canada to work for a relative who had a farm in southwestern Saskatchewan. He wanted a safer home for his family than the Middle East, turbulent in the wake of the First World War. His region had been occupied by the Turks of the Ottoman Empire, then by the French, and it seemed to him that Canada was a long way from this strife.

One of only 3000 Syrian immigrants to Canada, his name anglicized to George Jacob Salloum, he found that working for his cousin was not ideal, and he briefly became a peddler. When his family arrived three years later, George’s wife, Shams, arrived with Syrian dietary staples – lentils and chickpeas – in her luggage.

The couple acquired a homestead near Val Marie, close to the US border. Drawing on their family’s agrarian traditions, they built an adobe house and planted a large garden. George and Shams had a large family over the years, and the children worked hard on the farm, picking rocks, gardening, seeding, harvesting. But the Dirty Thirties arrived instead of bumper crops.

Shams planted mint, chickpeas and lentils in her garden, and made yoghurt and fresh cheese. Some days, their second son, Habeeb, hungry from working in the fields, would feel furious at another meal of chickpeas or lentils – lentil stew, lentil soup, lentil salad, lentils with yoghurt, lentils with burghul (parcooked, dried and chopped wheat). At school, he and his siblings were ridiculed for their “foreign” food, and often retreated to eat in private.

In efforts to assimilate, and because she thought her immigrant fare not good enough for non-Syrian palates, Shams did not cook Arab food for the threshing crews when they came to the farm to harvest. Instead she offered fried chicken with simply prepared garden vegetables, and lunches of bologna sandwiches, which young Habeeb loved. But one year, a man on the crew brought her three jack rabbits, and she marinated, stuffed, and roasted them with Syrian ingredients. The threshers were thrilled.

Those healthful “foreign” foods that helped the family survive the drought years became important in the province’s food culture, as much-loved food, and agriculturally and economically. Lentils and chickpeas – lentils in particular – became commercial crops in Saskatchewan several decades later. In 2020, Canadian-grown lentils (95 percent of which are grown in Saskatchewan) generated over $2 billion in export sales. Crop specialists at Sask Agriculture see the Salloum family’s plantings in the ‘30s and ‘40s as forerunners, but there are no official government records providing a link.

The best existing record is the late Habeeb Salloum’s award-winning and brilliant book, Arab Cooking on a Prairie Homestead: Recipes and Recollections From a Syrian Pioneer, which he wrote at the age of 81. In 2017, Habeeb was 93 when the University of Regina Press issued an updated edition.

His book combines a scholar’s diligent research with the memoir of an immigrant family. The result is a marriage of personal, cultural, culinary, geopolitical and economic history served up with traditional Arab recipes. The book was recognized by the Saskatchewan Library Association as their 2022 selection for the annual “One Book One Province” – the book chosen for provincial residents to read for literary and cultural bonding. In this chaotic year of war, refugees, pandemic, and escalating food prices, a little bonding is a timely idea. First we eat some lentils, then we talk about an end to all the rest.

Lentil Salad (Salatat ‘Adas)

Adapted from Habeeb Salloum’s Arab Cooking on a Prairie Homestead, my version substitutes roasted winter vegetables for high-summer tomatoes. I am sure Habeeb’s gardening mother Shams would have done exactly the same thing. Serves 8

1 cup Du Puy or green lentils

4 cups water

½ tsp. salt

1 lb. small carrots, trimmed

2 cups cauliflower florets or quartered Brussels sprouts

½ cup olive oil, divided

salt and pepper to taste

½ cup lemon juice

1 Tbsp. roasted and ground coriander

1 tsp. roasted cumin (ground or seeds)

zest of 1 lemon

1 cup cooked chickpeas

I bunch green onions, minced

a handful of minced fresh mint or parsley

Combine the lentils, water and salt in a pot. Bring to a boil, cover and simmer until tender, about 30 minutes. Drain.

Set the oven at 375 F. Line a baking sheet with parchment. While the lentils cook and cool, toss the vegetables in a little oil with salt and pepper. Spread on the baking sheet and roast until browned and tender. Let cool.

Combine all the ingredients in a large bowl and season to taste, adding extra salt and lemon juice as needed.

Nuts About Spuds

May 2020. As a dedicated spudnut, I save potatoes for next year’s seed. This year I planted Pink Fir Apples, Amarosas, Kennebecs, German Butterballs, Linzer Delikatess, Yukon Golds, Norlands and Purple Vikings. When I dig the first crop, it’s a sign that we’ll be eating spud dishes of all sorts: boxty, champ, shepherd’s pie, colcannon, kugel, latkes, Parmentier, rosti, scalloped, pavé, spudnuts, frites, Anna, bubble and squeak, gnocchi, croquettes, duchesse, chips.

First grown by the Peruvian Incas, potatoes were transported to the Old World in1570 by the Spanish Conquistadores as part of the cultural appropriation that accompanied invasion. But the new vegetables were reviled by Europeans fearful of their nightshade family tree, with cousins including eggplant and tomatoes, but also deadly mandrake and belladonna, and so were grown initially as animal fodder.

It took advocates like Antoine-August Parmentier to make spuds acceptable. Parmentier was a socially conscious chef and medical officer who also enforced smallpox vaccination among Napoleon’s troops. He became a staunch advocate for potatoes after he survived on them in a Prussian prison camp during the Seven Years War (1756-63). He later planted potatoes on his estates near Paris: to create potato cachet, he posted guards during the day, but removed the guards nightly so Parisians could “steal” the plants to grow in their own gardens. His influence endures in French dishes bearing his name as indicators that they contain potatoes. In an ironic moment of food history, in the aftermath of the French Revolution, the royal gardens, the Tuileries, were converted to potato fields.

Potatoes migrated to North America in the 1770s. American inventor Ben Franklin attended a “potato feast” cooked by Parmentier for the French king, Louis XIV, who wore a potato flower boutonnière. Franklin subsequently carried seed potatoes home. His colleague, Thomas Jefferson, served as American Minister to France, and one of his slaves, James Hemings, studied to be a chef while they were in Paris. Later, at the White House, Hemings served finely cut potato pieces cooked in hot oil. Et voila: French fries.

It’s amazing that the potato is even eaten in Ireland after the Potato Famine of 1845-51. At that point, Irish Catholics could not own or lease land, so were reduced to tenant farmers and poverty, eating one variety of potato, the Lumper; the Corn Laws made wheat unaffordable, and dairy, fish and cattle were exported en masse to England. But an ecological disaster made a bad situation worse. A plant pathogen, Phytophthora infestans, wiped out the Lumper crop, turning tasty taties into rotting slime. A million Irish died of starvation and a million more fled, mostly for The New World. Thus my potato-loving paternal ancestors became settlers in what would be known as Treaty 3 Territory, the Between the Lakes Territory, Upper Canada, or southern Ontario.

In what became known as Alberta, Daniel Harman, agent for the Northwest Trading Company, mentioned in his journals the harvest of the first potatoes seeded in 1810 near Dunvegan. Forty-three years later, the potato chip was invented in Saratoga Springs, New York. A chef, George Crum, irked when railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt sent back his potatoes for more cooking, thinly sliced the offending potatoes, fried them in oil, and sprinkled the resulting chips with salt. Vanderbilt loved them, triggering our continuing affair with potato chips.

But potatoes have better uses than chips. As my feisty Irish granny was fond of saying, spuds are best served plain, with a few added ingredients – hence latkes, boxty, pommes Anna, or champ. So first we eat, then we’ll swap recipes.

Hedgehog Potatoes

This is one of those deceptive dishes that elevate its few ingredients. It’s also good for practicing your knife skills. Choose uniform oval potatoes – yellow-fleshed are best – of similar size. Make extra! These reheat well, uncovered, in a medium-hot oven. Serves 6

6 potatoes

2 heads of garlic, peeled and thinly sliced

olive oil

salt and pepper to taste

chopped chives for garnish

sour cream for garnish

Set the oven at 350 F. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Cut off a thin slice of each potato to make a flat surface. Set the potato on its flat side and use a large sharp knife to make parallel cuts across the potato at regular intervals. Do not cut all the way through. Insert a garlic slice into each cut. Repeat with the rest of the potatoes. Transfer the potatoes to the baking sheet. Drizzle with oil, then season with salt and pepper. Bake for an hour, more if needed, basting at intervals. Serve with garnishes.

Hand-made

Grainews

May 2020. Before the pandemic, I spent an afternoon at my neighbour Sharon’s house, teaching her how to make pasta. Her house is about 100 years newer than mine, and has fewer eccentricities, like the small ceramic tiles covering the only work surface big enough for rolling out pastry, tiles painstakingly installed by my late dad in one of his periodic re-dos. Those tiles catch flour in the grouting crevices, but they are perfect for hot pans straight from the oven. Sharon and I drank wine and told stories as we cooked, although Sharon stopped talking, her lips set in concentration during her first effort at feeding a strap of dough into the pasta maker. When she caught the first handful of noodles as they emerged from the cutter, she sighed in relief and resumed telling me about her donkeys.

I first made pasta at a tiny nouvelle cuisine restaurant where I worked during the 1980s in Calgary. I experimented with adding all kinds of vegetable purees and herbs to the dough, although Calgary diners back then were just not ready for garishly pink beet-stained pasta, although they liked the saffron version, yellow stains that bled across the dough like paint on a canvas. In my own restaurant in the 1990s, we bought fresh pasta after learning we just couldn’t keep up with making our own. Since then, fresh pasta is a made-at-home event.

A food processor is best for combining the dough. For rolling and cutting, use a machine attachment for your countertop mixer, a hand-crank pasta machine like my Italian beauty (if you are willing to jury-rig it a bit to keep it from wiggling about as you crank the handle) or a knife and rolling pin (but only if you use doppio, or “double zero” Italian-style flour, which is super-finely ground flour, but make sure you choose a grade milled specifically for pasta, not bread or cake). I use all purpose flour when I make pasta and roll it in my stainless steel Imperia. Good Italian-made pasta makers are easily ordered online.

Judging by the state of the nation’s grocery shelves, we all have flour in our houses, so between bouts of feeding your sourdough starter and shaping loaves, cranking out some noodles is a good use of time. Like bread-making, the end result is something that offers succour as well as sustenance. And truly, there’s nothing like a fresh bowl of pasta dressed in butter and Parmesan cheese, or in a Bolognese that spent hours in the oven.

But if you quail at the time outlay, consider: if you amortize the time spent making (an hour, but half that spent letting the dough rest) with the time spent cooking (2 minutes, maybe less, depending on thickness), fresh pasta begins to look like an ideal supper for folks confined to home with an appetite and time to put in. So let’s get to it. First we eat, then tell me what’s new with you in your socially distant home.

Hand-made Pasta

Pasta is made of only a few ingredients. Weighing those ingredients is the best choice for the most consistent texture: flour can be compressed or aerated, and eggs vary in size. The more often you make pasta, the sooner you can make it intuitively, by feel, like an Italian nonna. Until then, weigh your ingredients, including the liquid. Makes about 500g, enough for 2 – 4 servings

300g all purpose flour

salt to taste

3 large eggs

2 large egg yolks

water as needed to bring the egg volume to 185g

Aerate the flour and salt in the food processor for a couple spins, then add the liquid. Mix until blended. The texture should form a rough ball. If it is pebbly or sandy, add water, a spoonful at a time. If it sticks to the bowl, add a little more flour. Turn out on the counter and knead, but not like you knead bread. Use smaller motions and only pinch over a bit of the dough at a time, almost like pleating, then turn the dough a few degrees and repeat. Knead for 8 – 10 minutes, until smooth and supple. Wrap well and let rest at room temperature for half an hour.

Dust the pasta with flour, ground semolina or rice flour to minimize sticking. Divide into 4 or 6 pieces, keeping the extra pieces wrapped up so they don’t get too dry. Flatten one piece with the heel of your hand, dust again, then feed it into the pasta maker’s aperture, set at its widest opening. Lay the dough on the counter and fold the two ends to meet in the middle. Turn it 90 degrees. Flatten the leading end with the heel of your hand before feeding it into the aperture. Send it, flattened narrow end first, through the aperture a second time, still set at the widest setting. Repeat the fold and roll 4 times, dusting with flour as needed.

Advance the aperture by one click. Pass the dough through twice, flouring as needed, but do not fold it in between. Advance the aperture again, and roll through twice. Cut each piece in half when it gets too long to handle. Continue rolling until the dough is thin, perhaps stopping at the second-last setting.

Let stand uncovered on a floured countertop or floured tea towel for 15 – 30 minutes, until the top surface is almost leathery, then turn over and dry the other side. Put a pot of water on to boil and salt it very generously.

Attach the cutter. Move the crank to the cutter mechanism and position the dough so it lays flat and feeds though smoothly. Crank, catching the noodles as they emerge from beneath the cutter. Lay them on a tea towel dusted with flour. Repeat with the other pieces. Cook for 1 – 2 minutes in boiling salted water. Taste to determine when the noodles are just cooked through, or al dente. Remove from the pot using tongs, not by dumping the noodles and water through a strainer. Toss in sauce and serve immediately.

Comfort

Grainews

April 2020

April 2020. Dave and I live rurally. Just us, our dog Jake, housecat, and the barn cats. But there are the birds who visit our feeders. And the deer that graze at dawn and dusk just south of our house. The coyotes lurking. And the porcupines that stop by some nights, usually about midnight. But we keep the glass between us, so there’s no danger of breaking our social distancing compact. It’s good to see them clambering into our deck chairs, or picking up spilled birdseed, singing some incomprehensible versions of 1960s ballads to each other.  They will doubtless stop coming by once we start spending our evenings outdoors, but I like that they feel at home enough to occupy our chairs in our absence.

All those animals notwithstanding, it sometimes it feels like we are far from the madding crowd – a good thing – and other times, the crowds seem to jostle right up our long driveway and make themselves comfy too.  That jostle is life right now. Even though we are under pandemic lockdown, even though we are used to spending most days with just the two of us, the ghosts of thousands of Covid-19 victims from around the globe feel too close for comfort.  I don’t fear them. But I am not ready to join them, and I want them to rest more peacefully.

It’s been awhile, this isolation. We are praying, as everyone is, for wellness on the planet, a flattening of the curve, a drop in infections, for no more deaths, for a resumption of life as it was. But life will never be the same. This virus has made sure of that.

So what do we do?

We comfort one another. We go about our lives as best we can. We practice kindness and calm. Comfort includes cooking. Many of us have bursting pantries, stockpiles of groceries to stave off the threat of illness. Feed yourself. Feed your family. Cook food you love. Pour the wine. Steep the tea, make the coffee. Bake your favourite chocolate and ginger coffeecake, your best braises, all the beloved recipes that are marked up with spatters of love in your cookbook or indelibly imprinted on your memory. Make extra. If you can do so safely, drop some off – but honouring social distancing, and no contact! – to the porches of friends and neighbours, to elders who are shut-ins, to friends who don’t cook as much as you or who don’t have a bursting pantry.  Feed people. And as you bake or braise or broil, remember that stirring the pot with love is another way to flatten that curve. It’s love that is going to get us through. Not panic. Not hoarding. Not bullying or pointing fingers.

So spread around some love. My favourite breakfast right now as spring tiptoes toward us is a muffin that is endlessly adaptable.

This recipe began as a cake, my beloved auntie’s favourite carrot cake that she made for her family’s and friends’ birthdays in and around the Bay area of California. It is one scrumptious cake, loaded with butter, nuts and coconut, topped with cream cheese icing. The kind of cake that makes a baker’s name as a baker. Then I took a few liberties with it to make it less cake-y. Less butter, less sugar, swapping some of the all- purpose flour for whole wheat.

These days I use barley flour mixed with spelt flour, but it’s just fine made with wheat flour.  Paper liners for your muffin cups are advisable when using barley flour, because the muffins are crumbly. I sometime add an extra egg to help with the cohesion, but you don’t have to.

These muffins freeze well, and can be dressed up with cream cheese icing if you want them to masquerade as dessert one late evening as you watch another solo round of Netflix. Be well. Be calm. Be kind. Be good to each other. First we eat. Then we heal the planet.

dee’s Morning Muffins

Take on changing this recipe to suit your own preference. Like blueberries best? Use them instead of cranberries and chopped dates.

Makes 14

2 large eggs

½ cup melted butter or vegetable oil

½ cup brown sugar

3 cups coarsely grated carrot, apple or pear

1 ½ cups milk, orange juice, buttermilk or alternate milk

3 cups flour (a mix of barley, spelt, wheat, or any one)

1 Tbsp. baking powder

1 tsp. baking soda

2 tsp. ground cinnamon

1 tsp. ground ginger

½ tsp. ground allspice

¼ tsp. ground cloves

½ cup dried cranberries

1 cup chopped dried dates

Set the oven at 375 F. Line muffin cups with parchment liners.

Mix together the wet ingredients in a large bowl. Stir in all the dry ingredients and mix gently with a large spatula. Spoon into muffin cups. Bake for 22 minutes. Best served warm with butter and company.

Food fit for humans and canine friends

Grainews

Our golden retriever, Jake, is lying at my feet, waiting for me while I write. He won’t let the clock slip past eight AM in midwinter without getting up and nudging me. Sure enough, on the stroke of eight he’s beside me, his beautiful head in my lap, insisting we get moving. Time to get outside, throw a ball and run around.

The sun is almost up, a cascade of violet and rose in the eastern sky, enough light for me to feel Jake and I will be safe despite the coyotes that live nearby. As I toss Jake’s tennis ball down the lane a few minutes later, I start thinking about his breakfast. I’ve been thinking about dog diets a lot for the past six months, ever since he went on a diet. Jake is what’s called “an easy keeper”. When Dave asked me to explain the term, I ended up telling him the story of my first pony, a fat Appaloosa gelding who got fatter just by looking at the grass growing on the far side of the fence.  So an “easy keeper” requires fewer calories than the norm. Tough luck, Jake! Jake too has been neutered, and that slows his metabolism somewhat, our vet explained six months ago when we first discussed his foursquare solid shape. What we needed to do was reduce his calories.

Since then, Jakie has dropped twenty-five pounds, and I am learning about caloric density in foods. His fave snacks are now carrot bits and blueberries, bell peppers and snap peas.  Same as mine – except that I get chocolate on demand as well. Fortunately, he loves them all – or else his appetite makes them all equally appealing – and we always have plenty of fruits and vegetables on hand, including, especially in winter, the crucifers – broccoli, cauliflower, brussels sprouts and all the cabbage-y cousins. For some reason I had always thought that the crucifers were on the verboten list for dogs (that list also includes grapes, onions and chocolate). But no, says my vet/animal nutritionist, although large amounts of cabbage and dogs can be an uneasy alliance beset by gassy vapours. So when I roast some winter vegies, including cauliflower and peppers – Jake gets some too, although his will not be dressed in olive oil. Extra calories, right?

The long and short of it is that I plan to cook Jake’s meals eventually and eliminate our reliance on processed dog food. I cook anyhow, right? A dog’s diet can be pretty simple, and I’d rather not feed our retriever the pulses included in some brands that studies have linked to heart disease in some breeds, including retrievers. So it will be grains – millet, brown rice, quinoa, oatmeal, and wholegrain breads and pasta – lean roasted chicken or fish, yoghurt, bits of cheese, and fruits and veg. That’s a tidy overlap with how Dave and I mostly eat. And before you ask, he will get a vitamin and mineral supplement.

The production of commercial dog food (“kibble”) in North America began about 100 years ago. Before that, dogs ate much as their human companions did. It didn’t take long before pet-food companies began to make noises about the unwholesomeness of table scraps as dog food. It was a marketing ploy. My vet/animal nutritionist assures me that Jake will thrive on home-cooked meals, just like we do. In fact, the biggest challenge will be to not overfeed him, as home-cooked food is more calorie-dense than most kibble and canned dog foods. So Jake will have to get used to eating less. Except, of course, for the vegetables and fruit I feed him for added vitamins, variety, fiber, bulk and – yes, admit it, good taste.  All the same reasons we humans love our vegetables! So first we eat – but before we eat, we feed our animals. Then we can talk more about what to feed Jake and his canine cousins.

Roasted Winter Vegetables

If you are feeding your dog and counting calories on Fido’s behalf, you may wish to roast a separate pan of vegetables without oil or onions/garlic for your mutt. Regardless of who will eat this, cut everything into similar sizes to ensure even cooking.

3 carrots, peeled and sliced

½ onion, sliced

1 head garlic, peeled, cloves left whole

¼ head cauliflower, cut into florets

12 brussels sprouts, halved

1 bell pepper, diced

yellow or white turnip, peeled and diced (optional)

olive oil to taste

salt and pepper to taste

Toss all the ingredients in a large bowl, then spread evenly on a parchment-lined baking sheet. Roast uncovered at 375F until tender, stirring several times.

Grainews: First We Eat: The Lake

Grainews

Dave is mourning the passing of the lake that almost surrounded our house for seven years. It covered fifteen acres at its peak, in fact a large slough, but ‘lake’ dignified what was a difficult situation. And now he mourns its loss.

Our lake arrived suddenly and unannounced in April 2011 with the flood that inundated much of the province of Saskatchewan. We’d been in residence at what we’d named Dogpatch for less than a year, and we didn’t yet have a sense of the strategies that any resident of an old house in a rural setting can tell you are de rigueur.

We went from dryland to nearly drowned within a week, as the winter’s large snowmelt met an unexpectedly high water table, gift of a very wet summer and fall. Water over a meter deep in places covered the low-lying driveway, swamped the fields south, west and east of the yard, drowned the contents of the pole barn, and knocked at the house, lapping twenty feet from the front door.

Fortuitously, our cars were parked at the outside edge of our long driveway – that half-kilometer now an impassable stretch of water – so we did have wheels once we reached the road. But getting in and out was interesting. Our good neighbours, Ken and Sharon, did us the biggest in a long list of helping hands over the years, and gave us the use of an ATV.

For almost a year, as we awaited the rebuilding of our flooded road, we splashed through the adjacent field on board the ATV, hauling in groceries, computer parts and paper, dog food, kitty litter, wine, beer. On a dark, cold or rainy night, surrounded by mosquitoes, there was nothing pleasurable about that trip except for its end – and the carolling of the coyotes a few hundred meters away.

Eventually, in an amazing feat of winter engineering, the driveway was built up into a causeway, with front-end loaders breaking through meter-thick ice to build the foundation. A berm went up around the house as well, burying the well-tended garden beneath its protective shoulders.

But outweighing all these challenges was the sheer beauty of the new ecology that engulfed our land. Shore birds, water birds, boreal tree frogs, cattails, bullrushes, black snails, muskrats, dragonflies – we were suddenly in a birder’s paradise. On my daily walks, I learned to identify a dozen species of water fowl, among them grebes, coots, canvasbacks, teals, pintails, buffleheads, ruddy ducks, and mergansers; and shore birds that included avocets and killdeer by the dozen. Occasionally a blue heron or pelican showed up, and Canada geese by the multitude.

We were forewarned. Within weeks of the lake’s arrival, I’d called Trevor Herriot, a Saskatchewan naturalist. “Lakes come and go on the prairie,” he said. “In eight or ten years, it’ll be gone again.”

Sure enough, it’s gone. But the raised beds we built after the garden drowned have borne a wondrous crop. And for that, and for the memory of all those birds, we are grateful. So before embarking on our annual autumn yard cleanup, first we eat – new-crop vegetables made into pickles as addictive as any dessert.

Shon’s Jardineria

The best pickles ever, from my Eastend friend Shon Profit’s prodigious kitchen. Hot-packing and stuffing the full jars into the fridge without processing makes a crisp pickle with a dense bite. Processing softens the end result somewhat. Yield: 2 x 2 L + 8 pints

Brine:

5 c. white vinegar

5 c. rice wine vinegar

10 c. water

¾ c. salt

1 c. white sugar

¾ t. ground turmeric

Dry spice:

for 2 L jar:                                                       for 1 pint jar:

1 T coriander                                                   ½ t. coriander

1 T mustard seed                                             ½ t. mustard seed

1 T cumin seed                                                ½ t. cumin seed

1 t. fennel seed                                                1/8 t. fennel seed

1 T. peppercorns                                              ½ t. peppercorns

½ t. hot chilli flakes                                        a pinch hot chilli flakes

Seasonings [in each 2 L jar; reduce amount to taste for pints]:

1 lime, rind in strips, flesh in 1/8s

1-2 whole hot peppers

6 peeled garlic cloves

6 batons ginger root cut in narrow strips 3” long

Your choice of raw vegetables [cut in batons to length]:

carrots in several colours

zucchini in 2 colours

beans in several colours

cauliflower florets

white/yellow & purple onion wedges

Bring brine to boil & keep hot. Measure spices into hot sterile jars. Drop in seasonings. Pack in vegetables, softest textures first, packing with a pair of chopsticks for a tidy vertical look. Add carrots last to line outside and fill gaps. Either refrigerate for 4-6 weeks before eating or process in canner.

Grainews: First We Eat – Gifts for Aging Parents

http://grainews.ca

I recently spent a considerable amount of time perusing old photographs as I edited a vanity-press family history book written by my mother. When I showed Dave the wedding photo of my parents – taken sixty-three years ago – he confessed he would not have recognized the young and handsome couple in the image. He’s only known my folks for ten years; this year, my parents will both turn eighty-two.