These spring dishes, prepared by Chef Jonathan Gushue of Langdon Hall, in Cambridge, Ontario, were garnished and infused with foraged ingredients that can be found across Canada in woodlands, swamps, fields and even backyards.
Charred rhubarb with Chardonnay honey, Jack-by-the-hedge, goat yogurt and hazelnut Continue reading
Edible wild plants bring fresh and earthy flavours to the plate–and at this time of year there’s an abundance in our own backyards.
Newfoundlander Jonathan Gushue is an avid forager. His backyard is the 75-acre estate of Langdon Hall, in Cambridge, Ontario, where he is grand chef. Jonathan uses ingredients such as spruce tips, morels and wild ginger to create dishes with an authentic taste of place. Here’s his guide to some of nature’s best spring offerings:
This week I’m doing the Live Below the Line Challenge: living on $1.75 per day for food and drink–the average amount 1.4 billion people around the world living in extreme poverty have to spend on everything in one day.
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Poor Andrea: She’s our chef on Day 5, and it’s now two days since we ran out of money. The best of the ingredients have been picked over and she’s left with a random assortment: roiboos tea, onions, a couple cloves of garlic, canola oil, one white potato, three sweet potatoes, chickpeas, rice (groan) and our beloved hybrid dip–peanut-butter hummus.
Lucky us: Andrea is French! She chops every last onion in the bag, tosses in the last of the garlic and oil, and slow heats the lot for almost two hours, creating the richest, most intensely satisfying heap of caramelized onions I’ve ever tasted. The rice, she boils in roiboos, making it fragrant and sweet. She dices both kinds of potatoes and roasts them together; they come out the oven golden around the edges and sticky. I don’t know what she does to the last of our chickpeas, but they also taste amazing: cooked through, but still firm and nutty.
My son and I are cooking tonight. I’m nervous. We’re working with onions, a massive bag of potatoes and 24 eggs (our group caved and bought a tray of factory-farmed eggs for $3–hunger trumped ethics).
We peel the potatoes at home and grate most of them in a food processor, then we carry them in a heavy pot of water for the 25-minute walk to Kensington Market, where we’ll all eat. I worry with an intensity disproportionate to the chances of it happening about dropping the pot. And we’re trying a new recipe–adapting it too. What if the dish doesn’t taste good? What if we burn it and everyone starves?
We make crispy, salty, hash browns, glistening with fat and loaded with caramelized onions for dinner.
Those get divvied up and topped with tiny fried eggs, over easy, and a sprinkling of chives from Amy’s garden. After eating rice nine times in three days, I’m glad to take a break from the grain.
We’d gathered dandelion leaves in the garden, but they taste bitter and we’ve no money left for vinegar or citrus to make a dressing. They don’t make it to the table. We could have done with something green on our plates.
For tomorrow’s packed lunch, we do Spanish omelettes with onions, sliced potatoes and chives. I’ve saved our potato peelings to serve on the side, sauteed with salt, pepper and fresh oregano (God bless Amy’s garden).
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The night after the hash browns and eggs, I fall asleep at around 11 (early for me, but as the weeks go on, we’re all getting tired and spending more hours in bed). But then I wake up at 3 with a terrible dull headache and insatiable thirst. I drink several glasses of water and toss and turn for the next few hours before drifting off again.
In the morning, my son and I are both down to plain white rice for breakfast. The last of our snacks have gone too, save a smear of peanut butter hummus, with nothing for dipping.
Once he’s gone to school, I dress for a morning jog, but end up just taking the dogs for a longer walk to avoid feeling any weaker. My vision is getting blurry and I feel a little faint as it is. Later, another group member tells us she over-exerted herself at the gym and yelled at a texting pedestrian on the way home. (She admits it felt good.) We’re all tired and testy.
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Our saving grace is the communal dinners at 7 pm each night. It is wonderful to sit down together, talk about our days and share our experiences and reflections on the challenge.
Extreme budget or not, the more heads there are at a table, the less what’s on your plate reflects your personal preferences. But as I’m drinking cheap tea and chatting on the deck at dusk after our group meals, I realize I’d sacrifice customized dinners in a heartbeat to experience the warmth of dining like this on a regular basis.
One more night to go. I’m going to miss these people.
This week I’m doing the Live Below the Line Challenge: living on $1.75 per day for food and drink–the average amount 1.4 billion people around the world living in extreme poverty have to spend on everything in one day. Click these links to read about Day 1 and Day 2.
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Day 3. It’s the first dawn-to-dusk sunny day of spring, so we haul the dinner table outdoors and eat al fresco, to the sounds of salsa tunes on the laptop, occasionally drowned out by hippies singing along to acoustic guitar in the nearby park. It’s Taco Night!
On the second day of living on $1.75 for food and drink, my teen realizes he’s 100-percent on board. Dinner is salty, sauteed potato wedges and rice frittata, with onions and beans and a garlicky hummus sauce slathered on top.
Also, the group has kindly picked up a few packets of ramen noodles, as exclusive growing-boy snacks, which he lays into the second we get home after our evening meal. No being nagged to eat his greens this week, just a blow-out starch-and-MSG fest, served up with maternal blessings.
I’m not going to lie, I love that double-carb dinner too, but I’m starting to fantasize about green beans.
As I walk into Amy’s art-filled, lamp-lit home and set eyes on the neatly laid table, with cloth napkins bunched prettily in wooden holders, I’m hit with the irony that I’m here to share an experience of extreme poverty. Along with my son, a new friend, Mary, whom I met (once) in January and five strangers she rounded up, I’m participating in the five-day challenge set by Live Below the Line Canada: to spend just $1.75 per day on food and drink.
Every year, Dairy Farmers of Canada awards prizes to the best 100%-Canadian cow milk cheeses in 19 categories at the Canadian Cheese Grand Prix. They had a record-breaking 225 entries this year. With our own artisans offering that kind of selection, it’s worth going beyond classic French or Italian options next time you’re assembling a cheese platter.
The Ginger Gimlet tastes citrus-fresh and mind-bendingly fiery all at once. It was developed by Christopher Cho for his new cocktail list at CHARCUT Roast House. Cho likes to keep his mixed drinks clean and simple, as you’ll see by the recipe below.
I fell in love with turned vegetables last year while eating a whisky-laced soup in Scotland. Our chef, Paul Rogalski of Calgary, transformed pounds and pounds of carrots into hundreds of tiny barrel shapes to bob around in our broth at a dinner honouring the craftsmen who produced the whisky on our table.
Paul Rogalski, Bistro Rouge, Calgary
He must have been up all night, whittling , but the end result looked amazing.
When you turn a vegetable, you essentially carve it into a gem shape. Why bother? Well, mainly because it looks stunning on the plate.
