Don Genova's Blog

Today on Food Matters I revealed my suggestions for cookbooks as gifts for the 2011 holiday season. But it’s very important to match the cookbook to the cook. You don’t give a book that has complicated recipes in it to a beginner, and you don’t give someone who already has 300 cookbooks the Dummy’s Guide to Boiling Water.

Michael Smith
 

I started with someone who is known for producing cookbooks that are for the relatively inexperienced home cook. The latest from Chef at Home, Chef at Large, and Food Network star Michael Smith is called Chef Michael Smith’s Kitchen, in which he has put together one hundred of his all-time favourite recipes that he makes at home on a regular basis. No fancy ingredients, not too many fancy methods and a photo for every recipe.

Mark McEwan

If you are looking for a book with just a little more technique, but still fairly easy recipes to make in the Italian fashion, check out Mark McEwan’s Fabbrica. McEwan is the chef behind quite the culinary empire in Toronto, with Fabbrica being his latest restaurant, what he describes as a casual but elegant, authentic Italian eatery. As he built the restaurant he built his collection of Italian recipes, so decided to put all those together in a cookbook. He takes pride in both the restaurant and the cookbook for being authentic Italian, and says you can learn how to do it, too.

Natalie MacLean

The perfect wine read for this year is Ottawa-based wine writer Natalie McLean’s second book, Unquenchable, A Tipsy Quest for the World’s Best Bargain Wines. For this book Natalie traveled the world to find bargains, we’re talking well under 20 dollars a bottle for the most part here...because there is a lot of wine out there we can experience at lower prices that is just as good or even better than the higher-priced stuff.

Other books you can consider as great gifts for this year:

Jacques Pepin: The Essential Pepin

Nigel Slater: Tender, Volume II

Jamie Oliver: Jamie Oliver's Food Escapes

Coleman Andrews: The Country Cooking of Italy

Edward Behr:  The Art of Eating

Becky Selengut: Good Fish

Ottolenghi: Plenty

My Last Supper - The Next Course

While researching this item it was a real pleasure to be able to interview Jennifer McLagan, Natalie MacLean, Michael Smith and Mark McEwan. The entire interviews cover much more detail about their books and other facets of their lives than I had time to mention on the show today, so if you'd like to hear more from them, just click on the files below to listen.

Don Genova Interviews Natalie MacLean

Don Genova Interviews Michael Smith

Don Genova Interviews and Mark McEwan

Don Genova Interviews Jennifer McLagan

Eggs!

You can find a carton of them in almost every fridge in Canada. Canadians love eating eggs...about six BILLION eggs every year. There didn’t used to be much of a choice in eggs other than the size, small, medium, large, extra-large. Wandering into a grocery store today, though, presents us with a now-dizzying array of different kinds of eggs.
 

There are the ones we’re used to, plain white eggs. Small, medium, large, extra-large. Then there are brown eggs. Then there are free-run, free-range, or organic eggs. Eggs that somehow have extra omega-three fatty acids content. Then there are the eggs that you might buy at your local farmers market...how do you know what goes into them?

I spoke with Leanne McConnachie, who is the Animal Science Director of Farm Animal Programs with the Vancouver Humane Society. She told me that people are now more than ever concerned about how their eggs are produced, and she was a wealth of information when it came to the labelling distinctions.

Free range Hen

- 95 percent of the eggs produced in Canada come from so-called ‘battery hens’. In BC we are at about 85 percent. Main issues are from the animal health standpoint. A hen should have a nest, and there are no nests in the cages they are raised in. They can’t flap their wings, forage, or move anywhere. 5 to 7 birds are crammed into each cage, and there are thousands of birds in a barn. There are health implications as well, sores on feet, the birds get de-beaked so they can't peck at each other, they often have their legs collapsing, loss of feathers. Eventually they just mostly go into dog food once they have outlived their laying life. The eggs themselves are safe to eat as certified by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, but Leanne says how can the quality of the egg be that good when the chicken it comes from isn’t that healthy? Salmonella can be a problem since there are weaker shells because of the poor health. Avian flu of course becomes a big problem when you have that kind of density. But the jury is still out from a scientific viewpoint on this, there are some conflicting study results.

The environment is also at risk because of the amount of manure and ammonia gas produced by these chickens living in such a concentrated space.  Birds are allowed to be raised like this because it's easy. It’s very easy for farmers to produce this kind of egg, it’s more automated, you can put many many more birds in one barn because you can stack them on top of each other, it’s a commodity from a factory farm. 

Alternatives: Free-run: The chicken is not in a cage. But there are no standards in force right now. Nobody checks it. Whatever the farmer says it is. Some free-run barns are not that great, they need nests and perches.

Free-range: Means they have access to outdoors.

Certified organic: Certified organic feed and pasture, one third of their lives must be spent outside. Usually an independent auditor goes around every year or 15 months to inspect the farm.

Bio-dynamic, goes beyond organic, also inspected.

Omega-3 eggs: That doesn’t mean free range. Unless it says free range or cage free, it’s an egg from a caged hen that has been given a special feed. A free range hen naturally has more omega-3 because of its higher diet of grasses and bugs. Colour in the yolks comes from the variety of diet, but it does vary. Chefs say whites are thicker and they like them better for cooking.

When you’re buying eggs at a farmers market, ask questions of the farmer. Go and visit a farm and see how the chickens are being raised.

We are seeing some encouraging changes in the egg industry right now. McDonald’s in Europe is very progressive and sourcing eggs from non-battery hens. Nothing happening in Canada with McDonald’s, though. Part of the problem is political.  Supply management of eggs is run by the large cage operators.
But big companies: Compass Foods, a large food distributor, supplies cage-free eggs on demand. UVic is included, and have switched 100 percent to cage free shelled and liquid eggs.
Terra Breads, audited free run eggs. Lots of restaurants. City councils, Victoria and Duncan included. Hellman’s Mayonnaise on their ‘half the fat’ mayonnaise. And Overwaitea Foods is working with the Humane Society on labelling descriptions so you actually know what you’re getting. Green-red-yellow system as well at point of sale.

Price differences? There can be a 2-3 dollar difference per dozen eggs, but think of it more per meal, or per egg. Maybe 1 dollar more for free-run, but it comes down to pennies or up to a 25 or 50 cents more per meal. But people are still voting with their wallets to a certain extent. That’s why the Humane Society would like to see the point of purchase labelling to remind people of the benefits to the environment and to the chickens. 

And what about all the municipalities that are allowing people to have backyard chickens for eggs? The Humane Society can't in good conscience support it, would really like to see it done right with gold standards for care. It is a certain amount of work to take care of a few chickens, and even people with the best intentions sometimes find it’s too much. And there has been some ‘chicken-dumping’, particularly in Seattle where the zoo started finding chickens that had been popped over the fence into their property.  For more on this go to Chicken OUT!

Update: When I was talking with Leanne McConnachie I mentioned the McDonald's television commercial airing in Canada right now. The major selling point of the ad is that McDonald's uses the same eggs you can buy in the grocery store. It makes no claims or mentions about where those eggs actually come from.  Today Leanne sent me a link to a news story about McDonald's in the United States ending a contract with an egg producer when the company learned of a video produced by an animal rights group showing horrendous conditions at the factory farms.  You can read the story and see the video here. Warning: There are some very unpleasant images in this short video. Viewer discretion advised.

Perhaps McDonald's should be a little more proactive in discovering just how chickens are treated by the companies that supply it with eggs. 

Persimmon on my backyard tree

When I started our Food Matters column a few weeks ago on All Points West, I asked listeners to take part by sending us questions and story suggestions about living a sustainable food life, and you responded. I was particularly struck by one of the first questions that came in from Ninon St. Denis of Royston: "Firstly, who says something is actually sustainable... many company presidents, it seems, claim that their food, meat, or fish are sustainable. Who defines it as such?"

It's an excellent question...but I can’t say that I have a crystal clear answer to who defines what is sustainable. It can depend on what kind of food you are talking about or even the industry to which the word has been attached. One company I contacted that distributes organic and fair trade food products told me sustainability is measured more by your heart than your head, and when I asked if they thought organic foods are sustainable the answer was, ‘they are more sustainable’ than non-organic foods.

I had more luck with The David Suzuki Foundation. I got in touch with Jodi Garwood at the Foundation, who is one of the people behind a new webpage at the Foundation called ‘Eat For Healthy Oceans’. Jody told me the definition of sustainability the Suzuki Foundation has used before comes from the United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development back in 1987: Sustainability is “meeting the needs of the present generations without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs.”

She went on to quote the Sustainability within a Generation document on their website:
“Sustainability means living within the Earth’s limits. In a sustainable future, no Canadian would think twice about going outside for a walk or drinking a glass of tap water. Food would be free from pesticide residues, antibiotics, and growth hormones. Air, water, and soil would be uncontaminated by toxic substances. In a sustainable future, it would be safe to swim in every Canadian river and lake; safe to eat fish wherever they were caught. Clean, renewable energy would be generated by harnessing the sun, the wind, water, and heat of the Earth.”

Those are nice mission statements, but they don’t really sound like a way to measure anything...so I’m searching for something that is a little more measurable. Funny how when you start paying attention to something it pops up all over. This week I received press releases from a company in Costa Rica called Cayuga Sustainable Hospitality, and a South African wine brochure in which all the wines are accredited as Integrated Production Wine, a ‘voluntary’ sustainability program that assures buyers that grape and wine production is undertaken with due consideration of the environment. In the case of Cayuga Sustainable Hospitality, it runs a series of resorts and eco-lodges that operate under certificates of Sustainable Tourism granted by the Costa Rican Tourism Board and there are five different levels of sustainability a company can achieve, so in this case there are strict standards they have to meet. The concept extends to the restaurants at the resorts that serve locally produced foods. They also have operating standards, for example, that see food scraps and peelings from both guest and staff kitchens being fed to pigs; their manure creates methane gas to fuel the staff kitchen stove.

Closer to home, there is The Global Aquaculture Performance Index (GAPI), which was developed by Dr. John Volpe and the Seafood Ecology Research Group right here at the University of Victoria. This index measures many different factors involved in producing farmed fin fish in different countries around the world and makes comparisons as to which country is doing it in the most sustainable fashion. So the index looks at what’s necessary to produce the fish in the form of how they are fed, the amount and type of energy used in the infrastructure, any pollutants or discharges to the environment and levels of escapement. I’m simplifying it a lot, but Canada scores better than the world average on the index when it comes to fin fish aquaculture of all types, a little worse than average if you are only looking at Canada’s Atlantic salmon production.

The GAPI is a little complicated, so the question is, how can the average consumer be assured of real sustainability when they are shopping for food products?

From an environmental sustainability side you can start by shopping organic because harmful pesticides or chemicals are not used in production...from an ethical and profitable point of view, think about buying fair trade...part of being sustainable also means making a profit, and certified fair trade products try to make sure the farmer is getting enough return on their investment to be profitable. On the seafood side there are now several different agencies you can visit online, or via a wallet-sized card to help you make sustainable seafood choices. There’s Oceanwise, and Seachoice, for example, as well as the Marine Stewardship Council. Do they all differ in their approach to determining what is sustainable? Probably. Do some homework, read about how they measure sustainability and send them questions.

pumpkin don

Although I look pretty happy in this photo, it was only because my parents were allowing me to sell our pumpkin harvest to passing motorists at the end of our driveway. The more pumpkins I could sell (25 cents for small, 50 for large), the more change would jangle around in my pocket so I could buy really good tasting stuff like candy bars and jujubes.  I hated pumpkin and squash when I was growing up, with the exception of my Aunt Polly's sweet pumpkin pies topped with whipped cream.

Tortelli di Zucca

It wasn't really until I moved to Northern Italy for a year and started eating the traditional 'tortelli di zucca' that I was converted to enjoying a savoury pumpkin dish.  And why not? The secret ingredient in the pumpkin filling for the tortelli is a handful of crushed-up amaretti cookies. Along with a rich sage-butter sauce and a snowfall of parmigiano-reggiano cheese, who could not like them?

Now I make these often and it has become kind of a signature dish for me, especially for students taking my Pasta 101 courses at Cook Culture in Victoria.  The recipe, including the method for making basic pasta dough, is pasted below.

Pumpkin Creme Brulee

The other recipe I made for the special edition of Food Matters recorded for All Points West last week was a pumpkin creme brulee.  Creme brulees are actually very easy to make, and you can get a fancy creme brulee torch at a cookware store or just use a plumber's propane torch like I do...but be careful when you play with fire, okay?

The recipe for the creme brulee was found on Epicurious at this link.  I didn't have time to make the pie crust as recommended in the recipe, so I just put it in a nice pie dish and baked it, with fantastic results.  You can also pour the mix into individual serving-sized ramekins on a baking sheet and throw that into the oven for about the same amount of time recommended for the larger pie shape. It will make about 8 small ramekins.

And now here are the Tortelli di Zucca and pasta dough recipes, buon appetito!

Tortelli di Zucca – you will find almost as many different versions of this recipe as there are towns in Emilia-Romagna. None is ‘the’ recipe. This is my own variation. Feel free to make changes!

Ingredients:
1 recipe pasta dough (recipe follows)

For the Filling:
1 pound pumpkin, or squash, seeded and cleaned of fibres but not peeled
Olive oil
1 small package amaretti cookies, finely crushed
½ tsp nutmeg or cinnamon
1 egg, beaten (optional)

For the sauce:
1 bunch sage, stemmed, washed and dried
¼ to ½ pound butter
To Finish: Freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese

Method: Make the pasta dough and set aside for at least half an hour.

Pre-heat the oven to 350F. Place the pumpkin or squash skin side down on a baking sheet and drizzle with olive oil. Place on middle rack of the oven and bake until fork tender, about an hour. Remove from oven and let cool until you can peel the skin from the squash. Then cut it into chunks and mash together with the amaretti, nutmeg or cinnamon and the beaten egg if the mixture is too crumbly. Set aside.

Roll out the pasta dough with your machine, eventually to the thinnest setting. Lay one sheet on your work table and at regular intervals, place tablespoonfuls of the filling in a line down the centre of the sheet of dough. Cover with another sheet of the same length. Carefully press the dough together around the filling, removing any air bubbles. Then cut away the excess dough, leaving a thin border around the filling, using a sharp knife or fluted pastry wheel.

Boil a large pot of salted water. Gently place the tortelli in the water, in batches if necessary, to prevent crowding. Cook for about 3-5 minutes, and remove from the water with a slotted spoon to serving bowls. Top with the sauce. To make the sauce, simply melt the butter over medium heat in a frypan and add the sage leaves, cooking until the leaves just start to crisp. Spoon some sauce over each dish of tortelli and top with the grated cheese.

Basic Egg Pasta Dough
I always make my pasta dough in a food processor now because it is easier, neater and produces an even mix of the ingredients in just a few seconds.

Ingredients:
1 ½ cups all-purpose flour
2 large eggs
¼ tsp salt
2 tsp vegetable or olive oil
1-5 tsp water, if needed
Additional flour, if needed

Combine flour, eggs, salt and oil in a food processor fitted with the metal blade. Process until well-blended and the dough starts to hold together in small, sticky crumbs that can easily be pressed together. This should only take about 5 to 10 seconds. If the dough is too dry and not sticking when you press some between your finger and thumb, sprinkle in the water, one teaspoon at a time, process after each addition of water until you get the right consistency.

Dump dough onto a work surface and work together, kneading for a few seconds until you get a smooth ball. Wrap dough in plastic wrap or set on a plate and cover with an inverted bowl and let rest for minimum 30 minute before working with it. You can keep it in the fridge for up to four hours but return it to room temperature before you start working with it.

Cider Apples

Hi everyone...I am SO busy today I haven't got the time to do a full blog post.  But if you listened to Food Matters today and want more information about Merridale Estate Cidery just click here.  I'll post more about my visit to the cidery tomorrow!