Fiddleheads!

Things I love about fiddleheads:

1. They mean that it's spring. 

2. They provide an awesome excuse to spend time crawling around your local riverside, marsh, or wherever else you find ferns. 

3. They are delicious. 

Fiddleheads are baby ferns, still curled up into what looks like ... the head of a fiddle. They come out in early spring and are absolutely amazing gently steamed with lemon and butter. While you can sometimes get them in stores, you are way more badass if you find them yourself. 

                       This fern is almost too far along for fiddleheads - only the smallest shoot at 

                       the base of the plant is still good to eat. 

There are a couple of important things to remember when harvesting fiddleheads. First off, they are only good to eat when they are still quite small. In the photo above, only that smallest shoot at the bottom is still small enough to eat - once the shoots start to unfurl and become leafy, you're too late. Secondly, only take one or two shoots from any given plant, to leave the plant healthy for future years. 

                       This fern is younger - perfect size for harvesting. 

Toronto has a number of extensive park systems where you can find fiddleheads in the spring. While I would never give away my secrets, I would suggest that you check out the ravines (the Humber ravine in the west and the Don Valley in the east), which provide great opportunities for careful foraging, especially as you move north out of the downtown core. 

                        Harvested fiddleheads

When you get your harvest home, rinse the fiddleheads and store them in a bowl of ice water until you are ready to use them. This keeps them crisp, and gives a chance for any dirt/bugs to separate from the shoots. 

There are many ways to cook fiddleheads, but my favorite is very simple. Steam them for a few minutes, until they are tender-crisp. Steaming fiddleheads is a bit like steaming asparagus - it doesn't take long, and they get mushy very quickly. Serve them with butter (or butter substitute), lemon and a little bit of salt. Serve next to pretty much anything - I served them with garlic/leek/goat cheese scrambled eggs and rye bread, but they would go just as well as a side with dinner. 

If anyone else out there has a favorite way to cook fiddleheads, or another favorite spring forage-able, I would love to hear about it. 

Apple Cider

So recently, it came to light that a co-garden member had made his own apple cider press, and (having pressed all the apples he could) was willing to lend it out. Apple cider is awesome - especially with cinnamon and spiced rum - and so we quickly put our name on the list, and a plan was born.


Now, someone back in Peterborough's history clearly loved apples, and to this day there are apple trees growing all over the place, if you know where to look. No one I know here buys apples in the fall. Its wonderful.

We picked up lots of apples from the ground (which traditionally, are the apples you would use for cider), but couldn't resist doing some tree climbing. The apples were smaller then the ones you would buy from the store, but they were sweet, and awesome, and free. I think we filled every bucket and pot in the house with apples - and barely made a dent in the tree. We did a quick wash of all the apples in the bathtub, and then moved into serious apple cider production.

I cannot underscore how badass this cider press is. It had two main parts, a garborator, which is used to munch up the apples into a fine pulp, and a bin, where the actual pressing happens in a few stages: a) wrap the pulp in muslin bags, maybe 5 of them. b) sandwich those bags between plexiglass sheets (cutting boards, it turns out, works too). c) put your pulp/plexiglass many layered sandwich in your large bin, and d) stand on top of the sandwich and watch the apple cider pour out. There was originally a tire jack for this purpose, but no one could figure out how to use it, so we substituted human body weight instead.

Aaand it was that easy! Apple cider = apples, mushed up and squeezed. Presto.

Ok, so it wasn't pretty. It was actually a total disaster (the awesome kind). I could barely take this photo because my hands were so sticky (and the floors, and the walls..) and there was pulp flying everywhere. Unfortunately, non of the photos I took of the pressing process even remotely turned out. It might have been the pulp, the laughing, or the copious amounts of beer we were drinking at the time. It was a pretty glorious mess. But isn't that what the best projects are all about?

In the end, we made about ten gallons of apple cider. I'm not sure why, but our cider turned out strangely velvety - much more so then the apple cider you buy in stores. It could be because we were drinking it unpasturized, or maybe it was because of our somewhat unconventional pressing techniques. Either way, I like it!

About half of the cider headed home with friends of ours to become hard apple cider, and we made some of ours into apple cider molasses (post to come!), the rest we canned in a hot water bath for about ten minutes, with two tablespoons of lemon juice - so that even in the darkest days of winter, there will be hot apple cider and rum.

Elderberry Syrup / Foraging is Awesome

Recently, friends of ours tipped us off to a local spot to harvest elderberries just outside town. Today, Agata and her mom (cute!) went out together to see if they could find them- and, the huge bowls of berries on the kitchen table are any evidence, they managed just fine.

Not pictured above is the 5 gallons of elderberries that went home with Agata's mom, destined to become elderberry wine. We kept a big bowl for ourselves through, and decided (mostly because we're running low on jars) to boil it down into syrup.

Taking the elderberries off their stems was a pretty fiddly business, but once they were off the process was simple. We boiled the elderberries with just enough water to keep them from burning, and then ran them through a food mill to get out the bulk of the seeds. Then we returned the juice to the pot and boiled it down until we decided it was 'syrupy' enough, and added just enough sugar to balance out the tartness of the berries.

As a side note, elderberries were being sold at our local farmers market for $7 a quart last week. At that rate, we were probably boiling down the equivalent $50 worth of elderberries or something. Foraging = awesome.