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The Ploughman’s Lunch

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Hi Detroit! We’re adding a new sandwich to our menu!

The Ploughman’s Lunch is an English dish consisting mainly of cheese, bread and sweet pickles or chutney.  Ham and hard-boiled eggs are also often involved.  While cheese, bread and chutney were commonly eaten together in England throughout the ages, the name “Ploughman’s Lunch” was first introduced in England in the 1950′s by The Cheese Board as a marketing vehicle for cheese which had recently been de-rationed.  There’s some random trivia for you!  Our sandwich version of this lunch is J and M Farm’s smoked ham, Oliver Farm’s organic provolone cheese and house-made sweet mustard pickles on an Avalon bun, as always served with fries or salad.

The sweet mustard pickles really make the sandwich. They were made back in August using Grown in Detroit cucumbers, and is my most very favorite of all my mother’s pickle recipes.  Granted, this is the wrong time of year to be giving you a pickle recipe, but dedicated picklers can thank me later!

  • 4 large ripe cucumbers (regular garden cucumbers, not pickling), peel seed, cut into chunks and sprinkle with salt.  Let sit for 3 hrs and drain.

mix in a saucepan:

  • 1 1/2 cups mild vinegar
  • 1 1/2 cups sugar
  • 1 1/2 tsp mustard seed
  • 1 1/2 tsp celery seed
  • 1/2 tsp tumeric

Add the cucumbers and simmer until easily pierced with a fork.  Pack in jars and cover with the syrup, seal while still hot.

Enjoy!

Two, dos, deux, du, zwei, 2, mbili, dois…

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… you get the point, with the help of google translate I could keep going with that for-seemingly-ever.  The point is we now have two daily soups!  That’s right, double your soup fun Tuesday through Friday.  Please see our beautiful soup montage below.

In other menu news, over the next couple weeks we will be introducing some new items, including a sandwich involving… pickles!

Sweet potato & peanut butter

Sweet potato & peanut butter

Roasted heirloom tomato, onions and hot peppers

Roasted heirloom tomato, onion and hot pepper

curried hubbard squash and coconut milk topped with toasted seeds

Curried Hubbard squash with coconut milk and toasted seeds

 

Lentil & Vegetable topped with fresh red onion salsa

Lentil & Vegetable topped with fresh red onion salsa

Corn & Basil, a summer soup topped with a fresh red onion salsa

Corn & Basil, a summer soup topped with a fresh red onion salsa

Chilled Cucumber, a summer soup topped with chives and fresh tomatoes

Chilled Cucumber, a summer soup topped with chives and fresh tomatoes

Beet, Millet & Black Bean topped with house-made croutons

Beet, Millet & Black Bean topped with house-made croutons

Baked Potato soup topped with bacon, cheddar cheese and green onion

Baked Potato soup topped with bacon, cheddar cheese and green onion

Canadian Thanksgiving, happening this weekend!

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Up in Canada (or technically “down” in Canada if you’re coming from Detroit) Canadians celebrate Thanksgiving the 2nd Monday of October to give thanks at the end of a bountiful season.  This is done by sacrificing a moose or other small animal to our non-denominational God of Harvest, Tim Horton.  While we will not be performing the entire ceremony this weekend as it can only be done on Canadian soil, we WILL be serving our version of a Thanksgiving feast!.

In many aspects Canadian Thanksgiving is quite similar to American Thanksgiving, except we do not celebrate Black Friday the day after Thanksgiving, we celebrate it the day after Christmas and call it Boxing Day.  True story …the more you know…

Help us celebrate our first Canadian Thanksgiving in America, this weekend with a Thanksgiving Brunch!  We will be serving a Turkey Benny, Pumpkin Pie Tarts, Cranberry Scones and of course the traditional Thanksgiving Poutine.

We’ll be celebrating Saturday Oct 6 and Sunday Oct 7 9am to 3pm

Addicted to kale

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You have probably heard about the wonderful benefits of kale.  Sylvia Rector recently wrote in the Freepress about the spread of kale salad across Detroit.  Kale is constantly making top lists for healthiest food, and for good reason.  It is packed full of seemingly every vitamin and nutrient around.  It is also available at farmer’s markets and backyard gardens in abundance right now!  So it’s here, it’s good for you, but what do you do with all this kale??  I love kale salad but I can’t eat it everyday!  Enter the kale chip.  These are so easy to make and I believe they are literally, not figuratively, addictive.  I was very skeptical when told that kale chips could be eaten as a substitute for potato chips.  I thought there was no way I was going to be able to trick my body into eating kale – the healthiest of the healthy food – instead of a deliciously greasy junk food like potato chips.  But after testing it out, I am a convert!

Kale chips can be made just by tossing the leafy greens in some olive oil and sea salt, but the recipe below is my fave.  It also doubles as an amazing salad dressing.

I made this in a large quantity for the restaurant, so it will fill 2 large sheet pans. For personal consumption you may want to adjust for a smaller batch, but if you do make the full recipe I’m confident that none will go to waste!

Set oven to 250 F

3 large bunches of kale – tear the leaves off the stems and into large bite-size pieces, wash by soaking in cold water and spinning dry.

Dressing
1/2 cup tahini
1/4 apple cider vinegar
3 Tbsp olive oil
2 Tbsp tamari
1 Tbsp lemon juice
1 Tbsp maple syrup

Whisk all together until completely combined.  Adjust to taste, add more maple syrup for a sweeter taste or to cut the acidity of apple cider vinegar, add more tamari for a saltier flavor.  If you’re a fan of salt and vinegar chips you may want to add more apple cider vinegar or lemon juice.

Pour half the dressing over the kale, toss the kale to coat, and add more dressing as needed to fully coat the kale but without being soggy.  Save any extra dressing for another batch of kale chips or a salad!

Line a baking tray with parchment paper, arrange kale in a single layer on pan.  Bake at 250 F for 40 min turning kale every 15min or so.  Watch them closely at the end as they will go from perfectly crisp to burnt in a very short amount of time!!

Happy eating!

Summertime and the Cooking’s Easy

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I love July and August when local produce is bountiful and we can practically live on fresh salads.  This is the time of year to let all of your salad boundaries down and combine any number of ingredients!  One of my favorites that is delicious with everything, is roasted cherry tomatoes.  I went to the Tuesday Eastern Market this week to pick up some salad mix from Food Field and impulse purchased beautifully coloured cherry tomatoes.  Unfortunately they only had 1 pint left, now I know for next time to get there early!

When cherry tomatoes are fresh from the vine I can eat them like candy, roast them and I lose all control!  I actually can’t believe that any of the roasted tomatoes made it into our quiche today.

Below is the recipe for roasted cherry tomatoes that I used for the quiche.  It is super easy, delicious and versatile.  I play pretty fast and loose with recipes so feel free to adjust at will.

1 pint cherry tomatoes

1/3 cup lovage, finely chopped.  Lovage is a leafy herb that looks like parsley, but tastes like celery, it is a flavourfull addition to almost anything and can be found at your local farmer’s market.  I love lovage (I also love saying that) but many different herbs would work well here, I’d recommend basil or parsley but it’s summer time so let your imagination run wild!

1 – 2 cloves garlic minced

2 Tbsp olive oil

1/2 tsp salt

10 – 15 turns of the pepper mill

Set oven to broil.  Or if your oven doesn’t broil, 500 F will work.  Combine all ingredients in a bowl, toss until tomatoes are fully coated.  Move all ingredients to a baking pan/dish, place in the oven and roast for 10 – 15 min. I check them at around 10 min, give them a stir.  The tomatoes should be starting to crack, but still be intact.  I like to catch them just before they crack so they pop in my mouth with a little flavour explosion!

These tomatoes can be added to a salad, pasta with a little extra olive oil and parmesan, quiche, burst and spread on sandwiches, eaten with fresh mozzarella and basil as a twist on a caprese salad, or just popped whole into your mouth.  Enjoy!

 

Give me spots on my apples…

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Real food, is that too much to ask? Robyn O’Brien at TEDx Austin talks about our food system and its consequences

Who are you calling healthy?! So-called health food companies that are actually owned by unhealthy big businesses

As I read the above article I was eating a Kashi granola bar.  I purchased this brand because I recognized it and associate it with health conscious living.  An examination of the ingredients doesn’t reveal anything too nefarious looking, but GMO’s are not identified on labels.  GMO stands for genetically modified organism, the linked TEDx talk provides a very comprehensive and relate-able description of what GMO’s are and what they mean to our food and health.

Another reason I purchased this brand of granola bar is because of the word “natural”.  I know this word has become meaningless, I have heard over and over and over again from people in the organic and legitimately natural food industry, the word “natural” on a package or label literally means nothing.  Even though I know this I still lean towards products that claim they are “natural”.  To be fair there are companies making legitimately natural foods that use this term, but there are no standards required for use of this word, McDonalds can use it just as easily as Kashi. Although I still feel better about eating my granola bar than I would about eating a Big Mac!

The term organic does have meaning, there are certification standards that have to be met before a company can claim their product is organic, and the certification symbol will be on the packaging.  I understand the need for these standards and certification process because it prevents the word from losing its meaning like natural has.  Anyone can throw a “Green!” or a “Now All Natural!” on a label without any real meaning, this is known as “greenwashing” and I still fall for it and it drives me crazy!  That being said I am not a stickler for the organic certification, as long as I know that the food was produced with practices I am comfortable with. Practices such as, no pesticides use, ethically treated animals, no GMO seeds, in that case I am not too concerned with whether or not the producer is actually certified organic.

But if it is not certified then how do you know if it is actually “natural” or just greenwashed?  This is why I love local.  If I am getting produce from the farmer up the road, I can talk to them personally and even visit the farm if I want to and feel confident that Farmer Greg isn’t a subsidiary of Coca-cola!  We all have to make our own food choices and I would never tell anyone how or what to eat, but I do believe in sharing information and when I came across the above article and TEDx talk today I felt they are so comprehensive and poignant that I had to pass them on.

Happy Eating, D