Highbush Cranberries

Most of the highbush cranberries in the nearby park have lengthened into a distinct oval shape, which means they're ready for picking.

Often when harvesting or foraging in balmy summer, I find myself looking forward to the colder months ahead.

Much of the past year has been devoted to exploring seasonality beyond ingredients: looking at traditional dishes and meals that mark the season.  I pick highbush cranberries mostly for use in two meals: Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners.  (If there's a little extra that can be enjoyed in November with some game meats, all the better.)  So as I romp through the bush in late summer, I'm actually thinking about fall and winter.

Similarly, when candying cherries in August, I might envision a Christmas cake, or when picking pumpkins in September, a jack-o-lantern.  So it is with seasonal eating, that one eye looks back on the past, and one looks forward to the future.

To separate the cranberries from their stems and pits, I use a food mill with a fine die.  I cook out the sauce with a good pinch of salt, and honey.

After being processed in the canning pot, the jars will wait in the cellar until the turkey is killed.

Hard Cider

Earlier in the month we pressed our apples into cider.  The juice that ran from the press was sweet and tart, with a full, milky mouthfeel, and a subtle siltiness that I think was from the skins and seeds of the fruit.  It had a cloudy, oxidated colour and was a pleasing drink in all of its many facets.

Then the cider sat in my basement for a week.  Fermentation took hold, and for a brief few days, the cider got even better.  A yeasty aroma developed, and the resulting alcohol woke up the palate.  The drink was effervescent.

I should have bottled all my cider at this stage.  Hindsight is 20/20.

As it is, I left the cider to ferment for another two weeks before bottling.  By this time not a molecule of sugar remained.  In these later stages of fermentation some marked off-odours developed, notably sulphur (rotten egg) and acetone (nail polish remover).  Some of these odours persist in the bottled cider.

Do I still drink it?  Yes.  Only when very cold.  I also cook with it.  Cabbage sautéed in bacon or lard, then briefly braised in apple cider, for instance.

It also makes a passable mulled cider, sweetened with honey and simmered with spices like cinnamon and clove.

Can't wait for next year, when I encapsulate that cider in its sweet spot.

Notes on the Evans Cherry

This was the first year that I got to work with a good deal of Evans cherry, a sour cherry variety that grows well around Edmonton.  It's a very different beast than the sweet BC Bing cherries I've used in the past.

In some applications you can more or less substitute our sour cherries for Bings.  In others you can't.  Here are my findings.


Baked Goods

This is what God intended us to do with sour cherries: bake them in pastry.

I don't have a recipe for sour cherry pie.  In fact, I don't think you should use a recipe, because different cherries have different levels of moisture, sugar, and acidity, and additions of cornstarch and sugar should be varied accordingly.

Here's my process.  Macerate the pitted cherries in about half their weight of granulated sugar and a good pinch of salt.  I also like to add lemon or orange zest.  Leave the mixture at room temperature for at least an hour.  This draws a lot of liquid out of the fruit.

Transfer the cherry mixture to a pot and bring to a simmer.  Meanwhile, prepare a cornstarch slurry of one part starch and one part water.  Stir the slurry into the cherries.  This is the trickiest part of the preparation, as you want the filling to set after the pie has been baked and cooled to room temperature.  When a spoon is dragged through the cherries, it should take a few seconds for the mixture to level out and fill in the trench.  Taste and adjust sweetness.

Cool the mixture to room temperature to make sure that it sets properly.  Then transfer the filling to a bowl and refrigerate until chilled thoroughly.  It's important for the filling to be cold at the start of baking for two reasons.  First, if you are covering the filling with any pastry, especially a delicate pattern like the lattice, above, the pastry will be much easier to work with if it is resting on cold filling.  If you try to arrange a pastry lattice on warm filling, the fat in the dough will melt and the pastry will be more or less unworkable.  Second, if you put a warm pie into a hot oven, the filling will likely boil over the lattice and over-cook, forming a rubbery skin on top of the pie.

After making a properly thickened filling, the most important part of our pie, and of any pie for that matter, is a properly baked crust.

Undercooked Pastry: A Rant

At right is a strudel (the French style, made of braided puff-pastry, not the Austrian style...) that is sold at a reasonably popular coffee shop.

The staff that bakes these convenience products no doubt look for a certain pale golden brown colour to form on the outside of the pastries, then immediately pull them from the oven - even though there is still a thick mat of raw dough inside!

Make sure your dough is cooked all the way through, so that it's flaky and tender.  Don't just look at the dough: touch it to make sure it's firm throughout.


Glacé Cherries

Last Christmas I made a fruit cake filled with glacé Bing cherries, hazelnuts, and candied orange peel.  I decided to try making glacé sour cherries this year.  The process is described in the fruit cake post, linked about.

The sweet and sour taste of the cherries was fantastic.  The sour cherries are much more delicate than the Bings, and looked a little haggard after the boiling.  They didn't entirely break apart, but I expect them to turn to mash when folded into the dense pound cake batter that I use for the fruit cake.  We'll see soon enough.

The syrup that the glacé cherries are preserved in is fantastic in sparkling water.


Dried Cherries

Evans cherries do dry okay, but it takes forever.  In my dehydrater, running on the "Fruit/Vegetable" setting (135F), it took 30 hours to reach raisin consistency.

The dried cherries are extremely sour, even more so than when fresh (which I should have anticipated...)

I had originally planned to eat these dried cherries in yogurt and granola, but they are way too tart to be consumed with tangy yogurt.  Suggested alternative uses: game terrines, "Raincoast Crisp" style cracker, and other applications where there is meat or starch to temper their acidity.


Rumpot

Last year BC Bings were one of several fruits I threw into my rumpot.  I imagine that this preparation would benefit hugely from the acidity of the Evans cherry.

Last year I noticed that the more delicate fruit, notably raspberries, broke up into tiny pieces in the pot.  I suspect this will be true of the Evans cherries.

The many varieties of fruit in a rumpot blend together to form a generic "red fruit" taste, so this year I made "single fruit rumpots," ie. one pot entirely of sour cherries, one of plums, and so on.  Hopefully these pots develop unique flavours that will showcase the fruit better.  I'll get back to you on the results.


Conclusion

Sour cherry varieties like Evans and Nanking generally bring more taste and complexity to the table than sweet varieties like Bing.  The principle difficulty in working with them is their delicate, moist flesh, which damages easily.  They can be used in most sweet cherry applications, though they generally will not maintain their round shape.

Apple Cider

To most contemporary city-folk the word "cider" implies fermented apple juice.  My grandparents made the distinction between "cider" (juice pressed from apples) and "hard cider" (fermented apple juice).  For now I have simply made cider, and will leave the discussion of hard cider and its variants for another post.

This week we picked about 150 lbs of apples from three different trees:

• one beautiful, well-trained tree yielding large, blushing apples, which I will be referring to as "Ron's apples";
• one crabapple tree with bright red, tart fruit;
• one hideous, unkempt tree in our backyard that grows small green apples.  The tree is so large and spindly that we harvested its apples by climbing into it, shaking it vigorously, and then collecting the fallen fruit from the surrounding grass.

After harvesting, we borrowed a crusher and press from Kevin.  The crusher is a garburator, intended for a kitchen sink, outfitted with a hopper and a power switch.  You can read about Kevin's design here.  The press is a strong wooden frame with a carjack that drives a plunger onto the crushed fruit, described here.  Thank you, Kevin.

Some notes and photos from our cider day.

Here are the apples we used.  Below, left are the crab apples.  Below, right, Ron's gorgeous apples.

And here are the tiny, bruised apples from our backyard.  They don't look particularly appetizing, but apparently they make for good cider.

Some sources say to wash and stem the apples before crushing.  Others say this is unnecessary.

Here is Kevin's crusher, doing what it does best.  The apple mash comes out white, then rapidly oxidizes to the rusty colour we associate with apple juice.

With a traditional crusher the mash will sometimes be put through a second time for a finer grind.  This in unnecessary with the garburator.  It's very thorough.

The apple mash is scooped into a piece of cloth, which is twisted and squeezed to extract some of the juice.  We found that at least 90% of the juice could be pressed from the mash in this manner, without the use of the actual press.

Once the mash wrapped in cloth is shaped into a disc it is called a "cheese."  Some sources say to tie the cloth with a peice of string.  This is unnecessary.  The cheeses are stacked inside the press.  Some sources say to place wooden discs bewteen the cheeses.  This is also unnecessary.

Then the car-jack is opened to drive the plunger onto the cheeses.  The juice flows out of a spigot at the bottom of the bucket.

After being pressed, the cheese is dense, dry, and crumbly.  The left-over bits are called pomace.  In many parts of Europe grape pomace is mixed with water and sugar, fermented into a weak "wine," and then distilled.  The resulting liquor is called grappa in Italy (especially famous in the provinces of Friuli and Piedmonte), marc in France, and tsipouro in Greece, to name only a few of the regional variations.  I suspect a similar drink could be made from this apple pomace.

We crushed and pressed the three different apples separately so we could taste the juices on their own.  Tasting notes:

• Ron's Apple Cider - A good balance of tart and sweet, with a hint of almond extract, probably from the seeds and skins.  Slightly silty mouthfeel.  Reddish brown.
• Crabapple Cider - Very tart, but still surprisingly flavourful and pleasant to drink.  Brilliant pinkish red.

• Our Backyard Apple Cider - This was the real surprise for me.  They are by no means choice eating-apples, and most were battered and bruised by our harvesting method.  Their juice, however, was fantastic.  A great balance of tart and sweet, and a distinct grassy finish.

The three types of cider were then mixed together.  While "single variety" may be popular with coffee and wine, apple cider and any of its fermented and distilled derivatives are always made from a blend of several apple varieties.  Half the work of the cider producer is in finding the right mix of sweet, tart, and aromatic apples to create a balanced drink.

Once mixed, the cider was syphoned into carboys to clear over night.  The roughly 150 lbs of apples made 40 L of cider.

 
This really is one of those epic, rewarding, seasonal "chores," like tapping maple trees and slaughtering pigs.  There's lots to be done with the cider, yet.  Stay tuned.

Rose Hip Jelly (With a Brief Description of the Chemistry of Jellies)

When rose flowers wither and fall from the plant, they leave behind a little green ball called a rose hip.  In late summer those hips swell and turn red, and start to look like berries.

They are not berries, as you will discover if you open one up.  Rosehips are full of seeds and what looks like white hair.  If eaten raw those hairs will irritate your mouth and throat.  Don't eat those hairs raw.  The fleshy part around the seeds and hair can be eaten raw.  It has an interesting flavour; depending on the plant and the time of year it can taste like fresh cut grass, or a tomato, or possibly a plum.

Though rose hips can be eaten fresh, they are most commonly made into jelly. They contain little pectin, so the jelly usually contains another fruit, like apple.

Two hours have passed between when I wrote that last sentence and when I wrote this one.  It crossed my mind that I don't really know what pectin is, so I read a large section of On Food and Cooking to find out.  If you like, I can tell you what I found.


The Chemistry of Jellies

Unlike animals, plants get all their nutrients and energy from soil and air and sunshine.  They therefore stay in one place, and require a rigid framework on which to grow.  Like animal cells, plant cells are made of fluid enclosed in little sacks of a semi-permeable membrane.  Unlike animal cells, they also have a firm wall surrounding their cell membranes for additional structural support.

These cell walls are analogous to reinforced concrete.  Fibers of cellulose act as the iron rods, and hemicellulose and pectin act as the cement that cross-links the iron rods.  Hemicellulose is made of glucose and xylose sugars, while pectin is in fact "long chains of sugar-like subunits,"^[1] whatever the hell that means.

Here are some things that happen when we cut and cook fruit:

• the thermal and physical disturbance breaks the pectin chains in the cell walls apart,
• cell membranes rupture, spilling cell fuild everywhere, and
• the loosed pectin dissolves in that cell fluid (and any other liquid you have added to the mix).

The pectin does not re-form into its characteristic chains because it has been diluted, and the sub-units can't reach eachother.  To aggravate the matter, the pectin sub-units accumulate a negative electrical charge, and so are actually repelled by eachother!

As sympathic cooks we can help pectin chains re-form by doing the following:

• adding sugar - Sugar is hygroscopic and attracts water.  With water molecules flocking towards the sugar, the pectin molecules have an easier time finding eachother.
• boiling off excess water - This also reduces the distance between pectin molecules
• adding acid - Acidic solutions are full of hydrogen ions (H⁺) that neutralize the pectin molecules' negative charge.  After contact with a hydrogen ion, the pectin molecules no longer repel one another.

The three steps above that help reform pectin chains also happen to preserve the fruit!

With the pectin chains re-formed, there is now a network that traps water and gives the jelly its characteristic firm-but-wiggly texture.

Don't you feel empowered by all this information?  Put it to good use:


Rosehip and Apple Jelly
adapted from River Cottage Handbook No. 2 - Preserves

Ingredients

• 325 g rosehips
• 775 g apples, peeled and quartered (I used windfall apples from my questionable backyard apple tree, removing any severely damaged sections)
• roughly 550 g sugar

Procedure

Place the quartered apples in a straight-sided pan.  Cover with water.  Bring to a boil, then simmer until the apples soften and turn to pulp.

In the mean time, chop the rosehips in a food processor.

Add the rosehips to the pan and simmer for 10 minutes.

Remove the pan from the heat and let stand for 10 minutes.  Pour the mixture into a scalded jelly bag suspended over a bowl. Drain for several hours.  After 24 hours I ended up with about 800 mL liquid.

Measure the juice and put it into a pot. Bring to a boil, then add 400 g of sugar for each 600 mL of juice. (My 800 mL of liquid required 533 g sugar.) Stir until completely dissolved, then boil to setting point, 220F.

After boiling I had roughly 500 mL jelly. Pour into hot sterilized jars.

1.  McGee, Harold. On Food and Cooking. ©2004 Scribner, New York. Page 296.  This is the only direct citation I used, but really all of the scientific info is from this invaluable reference.

Perennials Bequeathed

In January, Lisa and I bought a house in McKernan.  The backyard was a gift that spring has recently unwrapped for us.  Over the last couple weeks we've discovered that the previous owners of this house were active gardeners who established a mass of edible perennials.

Following are the edible plants that are appearing in our yard.  If you think we've misidentified anything, please let me know.  (We're new at this...)


Strawberries

Apples

Horseradish

Juniper (with mature berries)

Raspberries (lots of raspberries...)

Rhubarb

Cherries?

Currants?

Sugar Plums

Here's another dried-fruit preparation with a baffling name.

Sugar plums are one of those items that are common in Christmas carols and stories and yet are basically unknown to modern revelers. (Other examples: wassail, yule, and figgy pudding. Furthermore, I've never seen mistletoe before, and I just saw real holly for the first time a few weeks ago, at the farmers' market. I got excited, grabbed the leaves, and stabbed myself.)

My dictionary defines a sugar plum as a small ball of candy, and nothing more. There are not necessarily any plums in sugar plums.

The word "plum" is associated with dried fruit, and good modern dictionaries still give one of the many meanings of "plum" as "a raisin." As such, the most common manifestation of sugar plums is dried fruit and nuts, chopped, sweetened, bound with honey, and rolled into little balls. A good winter treat for Edmonton. We're not awash with the fleshy fruits that lend themselves to drying, like apricots or figs, but there are lots of cherries and plums to be had. Even if you can't find any from within the city, in the late fall the farmers' markets are always full of dried fruit and nuts from BC.

Mincemeat

This is a dish that confused me for some time. "Minced" means broken up (it's actually related to the word "minute," as in exceedingly small). The British use the word "minced" in places we might use the word "ground," so when I started hearing about mincemeat pies, I assumed they were meat pies.

Then certain people (Lisa, Alton Brown) tried to explain to me that there was no meat in mincemeat pies at all, just dried fruit.

Just as I started grappling with the idea of a meatless mincemeat, I found one of my grandma's recipes which seemed to combine the aforementioned concepts. The ingredients:

• beef
• suet
• apples
• dried currants
• sultana raisins
• citron (I believe this refers to candied lemon peel, not actual citron fruit...)
• cider (knowing my grandma, non-alcoholic)
• spices

The ingredients were chopped, cooked, and canned.
I'm still trying to come up with a definition. "Dried fruit, usually with fat, sometimes with meat," might work, but, "Dried fruit and whatever else you have on hand" is probably the safest. This week I had suet, apple preserves, dried cranberries, dried currants, raisins, and brandy.  I worked off this recipe, from Alton Brown.

I was initially excited about the preserving potential of mincemeat, but most of the ingredients are already shelf-stable, and those that aren't (beef, apples) are probably best preserved in other ways. At any rate, the mix keeps very well, and actually benefits from storage, much like fruitcake. It makes a great pie. Most recipes call for a sweet crust, but I think a well-salted crust made with lard gives a good contrast to the sweetness of the filling. The partially reconstituted fruit has a very satisfying chew.

Fruitcake

The waiting is the hardest part.

-Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers


I used to revile fruitcake, but in recent years a description by Jeffrey Steingarten has made me more receptive to the dish.

...full of dark, saturated medieval tastes and colors... aged for a year and then set aflame at the very last minute, carefully spooned out like the treasure it is...

I became mildly interested in the idea of aging baked goods, but I still regarded fruitcake as a gaudy curiosity. Then I came across fruitcake in the memoirs of a woman who grew up during the depression in Northern Ontario, called On Turnips, Teas, and Threshing Bees. Her description of fruitcake, and the lengths her family went to prepare it, surprised me. They started collecting ingredients early in the fall, candying ripe fruit. Later in the year they had to seed all the Muscat raisins and crack the walnuts by hand.

Even the eggs were a luxury. Apparently chickens have only recently decided to lay eggs all year long (persuaded by better feed and warmer barns?). Her family preserved the last of the fall's eggs expressly for the Christmas fruitcake. They kept them in a jelly she called water glass, which is sodium silicate. Storing the eggs for months was a considerable sacrifice for her family, as during the depression eggs were one of the few bartering items they had to trade for necessities like flour.

Living in the Canadian shield, spruce was the main wood for ovens and furnaces. Hardwood was comparatively rare, but a few chosen logs were set aside for the fruitcake, which needed to bake at low temperatures. They cherished this cake.

I decided to reconsider my position on fruitcake this year with a simple trial: a single loaf with glacé cherries, candied orange and lemon peel, and hazelnuts.

Glacé cherries"Glacé" is a confusing term because it can refer to ice cream, cake frosting, fruit candied in "hard crack" syrup, or simply fruit preserved in syrup. It's that last definition that applies here. Most sources I consulted had a similar procedure for making glacé cherries:

Make a simple syrup of one part water and one part sugar.  Bring to a simmer, add pitted cherries, remove pot from heat, cover and let stand over night.  This is simply to infuse the syrup with cherry, and the cherries with syrup. The next day, remove the cherries and reduce the syrup until a candy thermometer reads 230F.  This gives a good thick-but-runny consistency.   Reintroduce the cherries, simmer briefly, then store in a sanitzed jar.


Candied Peel

Candied peel is dead simple to make. Remove the peel from lemons and oranges. Use proper, thick-skinned oranges like navel, not thin-skinned mandarins. Cut into strips.

The peel is usually blanched to remove some of the bitterness of the pith (the fleshy white part). Put the peels in cold water and bring to a boil. Strain and repeat. Strain and repeat.After blanching, boil the peels in simple syrup until translucent (see left). Remove and roll in sugar. Soak the peels in water or liquor before folding into the cake batter.

Batter
I made a simple, dense, pound cake of equal parts butter, sugar, eggs, and flour, by weight. If you cream the butter and sugar well enough, there's no need for baking powder. I added the zest of one lemon, then folded in my cherries, candied peel, and hazelnuts.
The doneness of the cake depends on how you intend to store the specimen until Christmas. If you're just throwing it into the fridge, it's important that you slightly under-bake the cake, so that it remains moist. If you're going to be steeping the cake in alcohol, bake the cake as you normally would, until a knife inserted in the middle comes out clean.

Aging

If you're taking the alcoholic route, keep your cake in a non-reactive container at room temperature. Every couple of days, sprinkle rum or brandy onto the top and sides of the cake. Alton Brown uses a spray-bottle to achieve a uniform mist of liquor. I partially block the bottle opening with my thumb and pour.

ResultsAfter a few weeks aging, the cake is dense, moist, and redolent of fruit peel and rum. It's remarkable how the flavours develop over the weeks. This is definitely going to be a tradition in my house.

The Rumpot Revisited

It's the height of folly to say this in the midst of our fleeting summer months, but I can't wait for Christmas.

-Allan, in August, filling his rumpot


It's been six months since I made the first layer of my rumpot using the early BC cherries and apricots.

Sitting in my coat closet, the mixture has gone through some profound transformations. It has lost the striking vibrancy it once had, and is now a uniform burgundy. The liquor has lost its clarity and is now murky with an exceptionally rich mouthfeel, verging on viscous.

It's delicious. The severity of the alcohol has been subdued, and the liquor is now surprisingly mellow.

The pot no longer exudes the delicate aromas that seduced me early in the summer. It now has a medicinal scent, strong of the boozy raspberries.

This morning was the first time I ate the fruit. On waffles with whipped cream, with an ounce of the liquor and black coffee. The fruits have combined to form one homogeneous flavour, so it matters little whether you spoon an apricot or a strawberry onto your plate. The fruit is extremely delicate, saturated with liquid.

A fantastic way to start the day, as long as you don't have to operate heavy machinery later in the morning.

Grouse

Step One: Acquire Grouse

A friend's father, Mr. McLarney, hunts game birds with his English pointer. I had never, not once, paused to consider the signficance of common canine descriptors like pointer, setter, and retriever, until Mr. McLarney's hunts were explained to me. The dog walks a ways in front of him, and when it comes upon a bird it stops and "points": it aims its snout at the prey. Mr. McLarney moves within range and readies his gun, then makes a call to the pointer. At the signal, the dog scares the bird into flight, so that Mr. McLarney can pull it from the sky with his shotgun.^[1]

Mr. McLarney trained his pointer in his backyard with a fishing rod and a feather. I have a hard time imagining what those sessions might have looked like.

This fall I received two grouse from the McLarneys. They had been shot the day previous. The condition of receiving the birds was that I provide the McLarneys with a recipe. Apparently Mr. McLarney is such a skilled hunter that Mrs. McLarney has run out of ways to prepare the birds.


Step Two: Clean Grouse

The most common way to clean game birds is to remove the skin, which takes all the feathers with it. I spread the feathers on the breast to expose the skin, which on this bird was paper thin and easily torn.

Pulling the skin and feathers away from the breast, I had my first glimpse of the crop, which is a pouch at the base of the throat that moistens the food before it is sent to the stomach and gizzard. As I removed the skin, I broke the wall of the crop, exposing a handful of bugs, berries, and leaves that released a pungent aroma into my kitchen. This discovery affected me. Not because it was grotesque, but because later, when eating the meat, I could taste that same sourness I smelled in the crop. The picture at left could be titled, "Why game meat tastes different than farmed meat."

The next step was gutting, which was easier than I anticipated. I cut around the anus, then slid my fingers through the incision and into the chest cavity. The organs separated easily from the walls, and came out in a fairly uniform piece.


Step Three: Cook

One of the main reasons I was excited to receive the grouse was because this would be one of the few times in my life that I would get to cook an old bird.

Let me explain.

Almost every chicken in the grocery store was killed about one month after it hatched. Young animals have tender flesh, and many of their bones and joints are still made of flexible cartilage. Next time you are breaking down a chicken, observe how the keel bone (sternum) is still pliable and lustrous, almost like plastic.

Older birds have much tougher flesh, their bones are solid, and their joints have little cartilage. These birds need long cooking and moist heat. Chances are you will never find an old bird in a grocery store, which is unfortunate, because we have inherited recipes, like coq au vin, that depend on them. If you were to try a traditional recipe for coq au vin with a young chicken, the lengthy braising would leave you with mushy meat.

I am very grateful to the McLarneys. This was my first experience plucking and gutting birds, and my first taste of wild poultry (and buckshot). As promised here is a recipe that I think will suite Mr. McLarney's palate. It is based on faisan à la normande, or "Norman pheasant," the word "Norman" simply indicating that there are apples in the dish.


Mrs. McLarney's Apple-Braised Grouse (or Pheasant)

Ingredients

• a few thick slices of bacon, cut into small pieces
• half an onion, diced
• a grouse (or pheasant): two breasts and two legs
• half a cup of white wine or cider
• three apples, peeled, cored and quartered
• two cups stock (ideally made from the bird you are cooking, but chicken stock would work fine)

Process

• Sweat bacon pieces until they are lightly browned and all their fat has rendered into the pot. Remove the pieces of bacon from the pot.
• Crank the heat and deeply brown the grouse. Remove the grouse from the pot.
• Lower the heat and sweat the onion in the same pot until translucent.
• Deglaze the pot with white wine or cider.
• Return the bacon and grouse to the pot. Add the apples.
• Add the stock and bring to a boil, then turn the heat down to a simmer.
• Cover the pot and simmer until the grouse is tender, maybe two hours. The apples should break down into a sauce that can be served with the bird.

1. After learning that pointers point and setters set, I spent the next hour looking up the etymology of every breed of dog I could think of, just to make sure there wasn't an easily understood meaning to their name that I was missing. "Poodle" is derived from the German word "pudeln," meaning "to splash in water," which makes sense, as poodles were originally bred as retrievers for hunting water fowl. Shitzu is mandarin for "Lion Dog," as apparently those pups were bred to resemble the lions in traditional Chinese art.


Addendum: Apples

Ask, and it shall be given you

-Matthew 7:7, also Kevin Kossowan

We received the grouse at the height of apple season, so the apple-braise was a no-brainer.

I just wanted to mention that Lisa and I don't have our own apple tree, but this year we asked some tree-owning acquaintances if we could partake in their bounty. Overwhelmed with deteriorating fruit, they happily obliged us, as you can see at left.

This fall Kevin drew a lot of attention to the amount of fruit that grows in Edmonton, and I just wanted to corroborate his statement that, regardless of how much or how little you speak with your neighbours, they are probably eager to share their crop with you.

Fall Foraging in Edmonton

A few of the many wild edibles that are in season:


Highbush Cranberries

Highbush cranberries are traditionally picked after the first frost, when they are said to be sweetest. I don't know if the freezing temperature itself does something to sweeten the fruit, or if it's simply that waiting until the first frost gives the fruit the longest possible time to ripen and sweeten.

Cool, cloudy summers like the one we've just had yield berries with more acid and less sugar. Even so, the berries will still be good, so go pick a handful to save for Thanksgiving dinner.



Chokecherries

Cornucopic clusters of chokecherries hang along the trails of the river valley this time of year. The ease of picking is counteracted by the relatively low yield of usable fruit: there is after all a large pit in each cherry (hence the name..) A food-mill with the right sized plate will separate the flesh from the pits. Chokecherries are extremely astringent, and make a superb fruit wine.



Rosehips

The fruit of roses.

A quick digression: I've often wondered why rosewater hasn't become an Albertan specialty, given the provincial association, the omnipresence of wild roses, and how easy it is to make.



Juniper

I've pondered for some time whether the low-lying juniper planted in front lawns (Juniperus horizontalis) is edible, like its cousin Juniperus communis. I recently decided to stop wondering and start eating. These berries rarely seem to get as dark blue and fleshy as those sold at the grocery store, but they still taste fantastic, especially with game and sauerkraut.



Fairybells

When Lisa and I started noticing these bright, matted red berries, we thought for sure they were poisonous. Turns out they're not. The berries and the root of this plant taste uncannily like watermelon.



Mountain Ash (Rowan)

I always assumed that mountain ash berries were inedible. They stay on the trees through the winter, and I figured that if the birds don't eat them, people probably shouldn't, either. Then I stumbled over the entry for rowanberry in Larousse: "An orange-red berry the size of a small cherry. It is the fruit of the mountain ash tree, a species of Sorbus. The berries are used when almost overripe to make jam or jelly (good with venison) and, on a small scale, brandy. They have a tart flavour."

As with the juniper, I worried that Edmonton had a different, inedible species of Sorbus. Then, after a certain botanist assured me they were safe, I started eating them. They're sour, and kind of taste like rhubarb.

Rumtopf

Rumtopf, literally "rum pot", is a traditional German fruit preserve. As each type of fruit comes into season, it is macerated with sugar, placed in the pot, then covered with rum. Traditional rumtopfs are earthenware pots with heavy lids, but any wide-mouthed, non-reactive vessel can be used.

Earlier in the summer I added the precocious BC fruits, mostly cherries and apricots. This week I can add u-pick raspberries and strawberries.

I use about one part sugar to two parts fruit, by weight, for each addition.

The finished mixture steeps for a few months, and is usually eaten around Christmas. The fruit can be spooned over, say, ice cream, cake, or waffles, and the liquor can be drank on its own.

Every time I take off the lid to add more fruit I'm clubbed in the face with the delicate perfume of spiced rum and apricots. It's the height of folly to say this in the midst of our fleeting summer months, but I can't wait for Christmas.

Raspberry Liqueur

Ever since Neil brought me a recipe for limoncello from Capris, I've been eager to try some sort of fruit infusion of alcohol. My surplus of raspberries from Roy's seemed like divine providence. Here is my recipe for raspberry liqueur.


Raspberry Liqueur (adapted from a souvenir-bar-towel recipe for limoncello...)

• 750g raspberries
  
• 750mL Everclear grain alcohol
• 750mL water
• 750g white sugar
• 500mL lemon juice, strained of pulp and seeds
  

Pour the grain alcohol and raspberries into a large glass container. Mash the berries, cover the mixture tightly, and leave for two weeks. This is the infusion.

Pour the infusion through a wire strainer to remove the berry pulp. Discard said pulp.

Make a simple syrup of 750g white sugar and 750mL of water on the stove. Cool to room temperature and combine with berry infusion.

None of the acidity of the berries survives the infusion stage. At this point, with the darker raspberry flavour, the strong taste of alcohol, and the sickly sweet syrup, the solution honestly tastes a lot like cough medicine. It needs the transforming power of lemon. Mix in the lemon juice, and allow some time (a few days?) for the flavours to combine. Strain through a coffee filter to remove the finer sediment.

I finished with about 2.5L of liqueur which was almost 30% alcohol by volume. At this strength, somewhere between a stiff schnapps and vodka, I was expecting to have to dilute my liqueur with pop. However, when poured over ice, it is surprisingly (and dangerously?) easy to drink straight. Summer in a glass.