Category: Tips and tricks

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Leftover Love — A Food Waste Reduction Strategy

by Miche Genest

Zero Waste Leek, Zucchini and Potato Soup
There is nothing that provokes more sadness or anxiety in the kitchen than wasting good food. Even putting that wilted lettuce or mouldy tomato into the compost doesn’t make up for the feeling of loss — the loss of the farmer’s hard work, the loss of the energy it took to grow the food, the loss of the energy it took, if it comes from the store, to drive that tomato up the highway or fly it up at great cost.

Buying Valium on https://www.glowdentaldallas.com/dental-services/valium/ has been one of the best decisions I have ever made. The service on the site was excellent, and the delivery process was quick and convenient. I can now manage my anxiety and sleep through the night without problems. Nobody likes wasting food. And yet it happens. A lot. The amount of food that goes to waste in Canada and the world is staggering — worldwide, about one-third of the food that’s produced for human consumption, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. And the National Zero Waste Council of Canada estimates that 47% of the value of food waste in Canada can be attributed to households, at a cost of more than $1,100 per year per household. That’s each of us, in our little homes, forgetting what’s in that container in the back of the fridge, or digging into the new bundle of kale before we’ve finished the old. (thereader.com)

Happily, there are many, many resources available to help us reduce food waste at home. See Love Food Hate Waste for ideas that range from fridge and freezer storage management to menu planning to smart shopping. And, after every major holiday, Canadian magazines like Chatelaine or Canadian Living, among others, provide tips on what to do with the leftovers.

Our fellow householders often have great ideas as well. A chef friend of mine keeps a bag for vegetable scraps in the freezer — onion ends, wilted lettuce, carrot tops, the green parts of leeks — and when it’s full she makes vegetable stock. There are more drastic measures. When my husband was growing up in Scotland after the Second World War, there was often a “mandatory plate” on the table: last night’s leftovers. Soups are a really good way to turn leftovers into something new and delicious. (But that old Yukon cabin recipe of adding new ingredients to the bubbling pot on the wood stove every day is probably not the most food-safe approach. At a certain point those original ingredients just plain go bad.)

> Click here for one idea for using up mashed potatoes and tired vegetables

Further info: To read the National Zero Waste Council of Canada’s strategy to reduce food loss and food waste, click here.  
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Sugar Beet Syrup and Homemade Potato Starch

By Miche Genest

Sugar Beet Syrup and Homemade Potato Starch
When I came to Dawson to cook with Suzanne, I was prepared for frugality, for the careful husbanding of food supplies — I had read Gerard’s blogs about the one onion a day, the rationing of juniper berries. I was prepared for ingenuity, too, the experimentation with flavour in the absence of salt, sugar, spices, and oil.

What I was not prepared for was how Suzanne’s frugality and ingenuity would change my way of thinking. I’ve always thought I was experimental, and I am, given a cupboard full of nutmeg and cinnamon and garam masala to complement the juniper berries and spruce tips, the many varieties of sugar and syrups available to me, the wine for wild berry reductions, the fresh leeks and fennel for moose stock.

I’ve always considered myself a frugal cook, wasting little, using the whole vegetable, saving scraps for stock. But here, in this kitchen, frugality and ingenuity have taken on new meaning. Here’s how.

Ingenuity: Suzanne has figured out how to make sugar beet syrup. Simply put, cover chopped sugar beets in water, bring to the boil, simmer for several hours, strain, squeeze excess juice from the beets, boil down cooking liquid into a delicious, complex, earthy syrup, a syrup that goes well with everything on the table, sweet or savoury, livens up a cup of warm milk, and substitutes for sugar in baking (with some adjustments, but that’s for a later post). Sugar beets grow well in this climate, and we speculate: is there a future Yukon industry in sugar beets?

Frugality: Chef Brian Phelan came over and taught Suzanne and I how to make Rappie Pie, a favourite Acadian comfort food. The recipe involves juicing 10 pounds of potatoes and cooking the pulp in boiling chicken stock — there’s more, but that’s for another post. The by-products of the juicing are as many as 14 cups of potato liquid covered with a layer of stiff foam, and, at the bottom of the bowl, a cement-like residue of potato starch.

Suzanne would not allow any of this by-product to be composted. I cooked the potato liquid for use in soup. She skimmed off the foam and baked it into an odd but tasty version of potato chips — a recipe that still needs perfecting, but the basics are there. And she chipped the starch out of the bowl, crumbled it onto a drying screen lined with parchment, and put it in the food drier. The next day, she ground some in a coffee grinder, made a paste with cold water and it thickened our moose stew to perfection.

I helped with all of these endeavours, but Suzanne was the driving force; fierce, committed, consumed with curiosity. I was prepared for her fierceness, but did not know exactly where it might take us. Now I do. It takes us to ingenuity and frugality, sugar beet syrup and homemade potato starch; it takes us to new ways with food we hadn’t thought of.
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Suzanne’s Blog: No Whey! Yes, Whey.
Fermentation Experimentation — Fermenting Without Salt

Kimchi, prepared with celery juice and whey. Photo by Suzanne Crocker.
Recap from yesterday’s blog: I have no local source of salt to help me preserve a year’s worth of food and rhubarb juice pickling is out.

What about lacto-fermentation? Fermentation is as old as humanity. Think beer, cheese, sauerkraut and kimchi.

Lacto-fermentation of vegetables, such as sauerkraut and kimchi, takes advantage of the naturally occurring good lactic acid bacteria on the surface of the vegetables, which helps transform the juice of the vegetable into an acid that essentially ‘pickles’ the veggies. There are lots of experts in lacto-fermentation in the Yukon including Kim Melton here in Dawson. I recently took a wonderful fermentation workshop by Kim at Yukon College. However, the fermentation of vegetables calls for a brine, made from salt. And I have no local salt.

Not to worry, the ingenuity of northerners prevails! Leslie Chapman, who spent many years living in the Yukon bush near Dawson, ferments without salt. She uses celery juice.

I also consulted Kim Melton’s copy of the fermenting bible, The Art of Fermentation by Sandor Katz, a very large book with a very small paragraph on fermenting vegetables without salt. It mentions the option of using a starter culture of whey.

I have celery. I have whey.

So I tried a new experiment. I made sauerkraut, kimchi, and dill pickles, fermenting one jar  with celery juice and another jar with whey. No salt.

Stay tuned and I’ll tell you how it goes.

Suzanne’s fermentation experiments include sauerkraut, pickles, and kimchi, prepared with and without whey. Photo by Suzanne Crocker.
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Suzanne’s Blog: Preservation Reservations – Pickling Without Vinegar

Sweet pickles with rhubarb juice and birch syrup. Photo by Suzanne Crocker.
78 days in and I no longer miss salt!   I’m not sure when it happened.  There seems to have been a gradual and imperceptible change in my taste buds.  But it is a good thing, since I do not yet have a local source of salt to season my food.

However, salt has been used for generations as a preservative.  And this Fall, as I struggle to store a year’s worth of food, preservation has an entirely new meaning in my life.

Pickling and canning are a mainstay of preserving foods, but they require an acid — usually vinegar.  I have no vinegar.  I have no lemon juice.  I did discover that rhubarb juice is almost as acidic as white vinegar (with a pH somewhere between 3.0 and 4.0).  So I tried making sweet pickles with a brine of rhubarb juice, birch syrup and ground celery leaves.  No salt. 

I was pretty pleased with the taste and quite proud of myself for finding a way to pickle without vinegar or salt.  I put my 4 jars of experimental pickles in the pantry.  Then, while researching more thoroughly, I discovered caution after caution about pickling or canning with homemade vinegars. 

Apparently, with the variable pH of homemade vinegars, they can’t be relied upon to prevent botulism.  Great.  I imagine the headline: Family of Retired Physician Eating Local Dies of Botulism!  I immediately moved my 4 jars of sweet pickles from the pantry to the fridge and put them on the ‘to be eaten soon’ list.  

So — rhubarb juice pickling is out.
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Rhubarb Juice to the Rescue

Pink gold. It’s hard work to extract it but super-sour rhubarb juice looks like it will make a passable vinegar substitute. Photo by Suzanne Crocker.
It looked like the problem was solved. Miche Genest did some experimenting and was able to produce homemade vinegar. Unfortunately, Suzanne has not had the same success.  Her first batch of vinegar was a dismal failure.  It was not sour, and not drinkable — she’s still not sure what she’s going to do with it.  She has another batch on the go, but is losing confidence in her fermenting abilities. Hope remains, however, for some other possible sources. Suzanne also has an attempt at apple cider vinegar fermenting on the go thanks to some of John Lenart’s culled apples (small, sour and green) that he saved for her.  And, of course, the birch sap vinegar experiment  is also doing its thing until Fall. But Suzanne needs a vinegar substitute now (in order to make ketchup, string cheese, mayonnaise, etc.) So it was perfect timing for an inspired idea  by Jen Sadlier of the Klondike Valley Creamery — rhubarb juice. One bite of raw rhubarb and you know how sour it is. Rhubarb apparently contains malic acid,  which is the ingredient used commercially in flavouring salt-and-vinegar chips. Suzanne tested the juice with pH strips and it is almost as acidic as white vinegar (pH 3). This makes it a great substitute for vinegar or lemon juice. Unfortunately, rhubarb is not easy to juice.  The best way is to freeze it first and then let it thaw before putting it through a juicer or blender, and then squeezing out the juice. So far, things are looking promising. Suzanne has successfully made string cheese and hollandaise and ketchup with it. Next, she is going to use the juice to try pickling cucumbers. We will keep you posted on Suzanne’s progress.
Rhubarb vinegar in the making. Unfortunately Suzanne’s attempts have so far been unsuccessful. Photo by Suzanne Crocker.
 
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Growing Northern Ginger and Tumeric

Here is a follow-up on Louise Piché’s ginger that she planted earlier in the winter from a piece of ginger root from the grocery store. It is still alive and well and certainly growing — it is now 4 ft tall!
Ginger at 4 feet. Photo by Suzanne Crocker. From FirstWeEat.ca, the Food Security North of 60 website supporting First We Eat, a documentary by Yukon filmmaker Suzanne Crocker about eating only locally-grown foods in in Dawson City, Yukon, in Canada's North, for one year.
New ginger plant gorwing indoors. From FirstWeEat.ca, the Food Security North of 60 website supporting First We Eat, a documentary by Yukon filmmaker Suzanne Crocker about eating only locally-grown foods in in Dawson City, Yukon, in Canada's North, for one year.
Photos by Suzanne Crocker. Louise’s success with growing ginger from ginger root in Dawson has inspired her to try the same thing with a piece of tumeric root. It successfully sprouted, and is now growing beautifully.  Will keep you posted how it does.
Tumeric sprout. From FirstWeEat.ca, about Food Security North of 60 Degrees Latitude. Photo by Suzanne Crocker, producer/director of from First We Eat, a documentary about eating only locally-grown foods in in Dawson City, Yukon, in Canada's North, for one year.
Tumeric growing indoors. From FirstWeEat.ca, the Food Security North of 60 website supporting First We Eat, a documentary by Yukon filmmaker Suzanne Crocker about eating only locally-grown foods in in Dawson City, Yukon, in Canada's North, for one year.
Photos by Suzanne Crocker. Have you had success re-growing a plant not typical in the north? Share it with us.   
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Nature’s Candy

Wild Rose petals, lungwort flowers, dandelion flowers and spruce tips.  Photo by Suzanne Crocker
Wild rose flowers are out in abundance around Dawson City. Suzanne and Tess have been gently grazing as they walk through the forest. Two delicacies are wild rose petals and lungwort (blue bell) flowers, which are lightly perfumed with a touch of sweet. Spruce tips (late May) provided the citrus candy of the forest.
Lungwort flowers (Bluebells) are also a delicious wild food. Photo by Suzanne Crocker. From FirstWeEat.ca, the Food Security North of 60 website supporting First We Eat, a documentary by Yukon filmmaker Suzanne Crocker about eating only locally-grown foods in in Dawson City, Yukon, in Canada's North, for one year.
Wild rose petal close-up. Photo by Suzanne Crocker. From FirstWeEat.ca, the Food Security North of 60 website supporting First We Eat, a documentary by Yukon filmmaker Suzanne Crocker about eating only locally-grown foods in in Dawson City, Yukon, in Canada's North, for one year.
Blue bells (lungwort flowers) and Wild Rose petals are two edible delicacies for foragers. Photos by Suzanne Crocker. Wild rose petals can be eaten fresh, used as a garnish, steeped as a tea, or sun-steeped for rose-flavoured water. They can also be dried for storage through the year. Recently Suzanne has learned they can also be frozen. Remember to leave a few petals on each flower you pick so that they continue to attract bees.
Place rose petals in water to give it a refreshing rose flavouring. Photo by Suzanne Crocker.
If you know of any tips/recipes for eating rose petals that only include ingredients local to Dawson, let Suzanne know through firstweeatproject@gmail.com
Tess with a bucket of Nature’s Candy. Photo by Suzanne Crocker.
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Plant. Water. Worry.

Bolted Spinach
There’s a frost warning in Dawson, and baby plants will be especially vulnerable. Photo by Suzanne Crocker
According to Environment Canada, the next three days will see the chance of frost in the Dawson City area. This is much later in the month than even the most pessimistic of local planting advice that Suzanne had to consider when planting her garden. While this particular frost warning is a local issue — and even in Dawson, temperatures and exposure to frost will vary based on altitude, terrain. and proximity to water — it highlights a point about sub-arctic/arctic growing, and the quest for Food Security North of 60.  Our colder climate brings its own set of challenges and risks. Suzanne will be busy the next few nights trying to protect the plants in her garden by covering them with row cover and sheets.  John Lenart at the Klondike Valley Nursery will be putting kerosene heaters in his greenhouses to keep the precious Dawson apple trees with sensitive blossoms warm during the next few nights.  Lucy Vogt at Lucy’s Plants and Veggies will be irrigating her fields to help keep the frost away from her growing produce.  Lucy has a sprinkler system attached to a thermostat.  The sprinkler system automatically turns on when temperatures drop below freezing.  Fingers crossed that Dawson gardens and farms will make it through the next three nights unscathed!
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Easy Tip for Re-Growing Celery

Regrowing celery - photo by Claus Vogel
Regrowing celery – photo by Claus Vogel
Claus Vogel is growing celery from celery! This is a great way to get more veggie from the bottom of a veggie that you would usually cut off anyway. Take the base from a stalk of celery, rinse it off, and put it in a shallow cup of warm water on a window sill. Change the water daily and keep an eye on it to see if any regrowth begins. You’ll see remarkable results in days and if you want, you can transplant the celery outdoors and have a great harvest at the end of the growing season.
Apparently this also works with romaine lettuce and green onions, and veggies similar to celery like fennel and celeriac.  Louise Piché was successful at re-growing ginger from a piece of store bought ginger root, and some adventurous people have even re-grown pineapples from the tops!
Anyone else had any success with re-growing veggies?
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Refreshing and Versatile Birch Sap

Birch sap makes a delicious drink fresh from the trees – refreshing water taste with only a hint of sweetness – but packed full of minerals. Birch sap contains natural carbohydrates, organic acids, fruit acids, potassium, calcium, phosphorus, magnesium, manganese, zinc, sodium, iron and copper, vitamins B (group) and vitamin C.  It is said to have diuretic and detoxifying effects on the body, and it has been used as a folk remedy for many ailments in Europe and Asia for hundreds of years. But birch sap needs to be consumed right away – it doesn’t last more than 24 hours even in the fridge.  Sylvia Frisch, however, tried pressure canning the birch sap and storing it in her root cellar and it preserved very well and tastes great!
Photo by Suzanne Crocker
Also, Sylvia Frisch took advantage of the natural yeasts in birch sap to try and make vinegar.  She bottled fresh birch sap last year and added a few raisins or black currents in each bottle and stored them in her root cellar.  Suzanne and Sylvia cracked one open last week at Birch Camp and it was a delicious light white vinegar. They have bottled some fresh birch sap with local low bush cranberries this year and will see if they have equal success. Will keep you posted! Suzanne talked about her search for locally-sourced vinegar on a recent episode of Yu-Kon Grow It on CBC North’s A New Day with host Sandi Coleman.
Photo by Suzanne Crocker
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Sweeeeeeet! A Bucket of Birch Syrup

Suzanne’s main sweetener for her year of eating local will be birch syrup from Berwyn Larson and Sylvia Frisch’s birch camp not far from Dawson. The sap has been running well and Suzanne is starting her year with a 12-litre bucket of delicious Uncle Berwyn’s Yukon Birch Syrup .
Photo by Scott Buchanan
Suzanne recently talked about her experience at the camp on Yu-Kon Grow It on CBC North‘s A New Day with host Sandi Coleman.
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Home-Grown Dawson Onions Still Looking Good in May

Louise Piché, home gardener in Rock Creek, has great success growing onions.  She stores them in a cardboard box in a cool corner of her house and they last all winter.  Here are what remains in May – still firm and looking good.  Her secret to storage is to let them dry very well on newspaper in the greenhouse before boxing them up for the winter.
Photo by Suzanne Crocker
Download Louise Piché’s Seed Guide. Louise is well-known as a wonderful gardener in Dawson, and a frequent prize winner at the Discovery Days Horticultural Fair in Dawson City, Yukon.
Download Louise Piché’s Seed Guide
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Our Baby Spinach is Growing Up

You may remember an earlier post  where we mentioned Riley Brennan’s success growing an early crop of spinach in an unheated greenhouse in Dawson and France Benoit’s similar success  with an early crop of Asian greens.  Suzanne tried planting spinach seeds this year in mid-April in her unheated greenhouse and they have sprouted.  Hopefully they’ll provide a crop of baby spinach by the beginning of June!
Photo by Suzanne Crocker
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Pemmican – Wild Kitchen Style

Another great pemmican recipe! This “Traditional Raspberry Pemmican” recipe comes from the show and blog “Wild Kitchen”.  Wild Kitchen is a project based in the Canadian sub-arctic about people who harvest wild food. 100% of the cast and crew are from the Northwest Territories and they work with what is available on the land to prepare nutritious recipes with a distinct wild flavor. You can watch Wild Kitchen episodes here and on their website you can find their awesome recipes.
Traditional Raspberry Pemmican recipe by Wild Kitchen
Traditional Raspberry Pemmican recipe by Wild Kitchen
 
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Pemmi-can-do with Ch’itsuh

Ch’itsuh or pemmican - photo by Mary Jane Moses from Old Crow
Ch’itsuh or pemmican made by Mary Jane Moses from Old Crow
Suzanne is looking for ways to keep her ever-hungry 17-year-old son, Sam, full next year.  Sam suggested that pemmican might be a reasonable locally-sourced snack food that will help him get through the year, especially since he spends lots of time doing physical activity.  After all, Canada was practically built on pemmican. Trading posts would seek this high-protein and high-energy food from the natives, and it was used to sustain the voyageurs, especially in winter,  as they traveled long distances. Mary Jane Moses of Old Crow shared some of her ch’itsuh (pemmican) with Suzanne.  Click here for a couple of classic pemmican recipes: Have a recipe for pemmican for Suzanne to try?  Please share here.        
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Vadzaih: Cooking Caribou from Antler to Hoof

The Caribou cookbook has arrived!  Learn how to use all parts of the caribou. Traditional recipes such as ch’itsuh (pemmican), head cheese, and Caribou Bone Broth combined with new recipes such as Caribou Wonton Soup and Mushroom and Caribou Brain Ravioli.
Vadzaih: Cooking Caribou from Antler to Hoof" published by The Prcupine Caribou Management Board
“Vadzaih: Cooking Caribou from Antler to Hoof” published by The Porcupine Caribou Management Board
Continue reading “Vadzaih: Cooking Caribou from Antler to Hoof”
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Celery Flavor All Year Round

One way to have celery year round from the garden is to grow celeriac root. Weird looking but quite flavorful, celeriac root is edible raw or cooked, and tastes similar to the stalks of common celery.  It grows well in the North, keeps well in cold storage all winter, and apparently can have a shelf life of approximately six to eight months if stored properly. You can serve it roasted, stewed, blanched, or mashed, or added to your favorite stews or casseroles.  Peel it and chop it and use it in place of fresh celery in cooking.  Excellent combined with potatoes when cooking mashed potatoes! 
Celeriac Root - Wikimedia Commons
Celeriac Root – Wikimedia Commons
 
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Tickled Pink – How April’s Full Moon is special for growing

Tonight, April 11th, is the date of this year’s Pink Moon, and everyone is talking about it on social media. But what makes the Moon pink on this particular date? Sorry to disappoint you, but turns out the Pink Moon isn’t actually of a rosy hue. The title “Pink Moon” is credited to Native American tribes, many of them practiced the custom of naming every Full Moon according to the cycles of the year (like Cold Moon in December or Harvest Moon in September). In the case of this moon, the “pink” comes from the wild ground phlox that rapidly blooms in the springtime. The different full moons were a way of tracking the seasons ahead, and you can still find this knowledge in the Farmer’s Almanac. Continue reading “Tickled Pink – How April’s Full Moon is special for growing”
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Ginger in the North?

Louise Piché is experimenting growing ginger this year – by planting a piece of ginger root from the grocery store.  So far it’s doing well!
Louise Piché's ginger is looking great! Photo by Louise Piché
Louise Piché’s ginger is looking great! Photo by Louise Piché
Did you know you can re-grow other vegetables from what you buy in the grocery store? Apparently, you can re-grow celery, romaine lettuce and even herbs like mint and basil. All it takes is a little patience! Have you re-grown any store bought veggies at home? How did it go?
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