400 Cookbooks and Counting

I read cookbooks with the passion and concentration of my husband, Jon nose-deep in the latest Robert Jordan mystery. I read them in bed at night. I take them on book tours. I buy them where ever I go. I have about four hundred of them. I cook a lot and read even more and have decided that since I like the two habits equally well, I will continue.

To me, cookbooks are fantasies of great meals in much the same way that travel books are fantasies of perfect vacations. They produce visions of perfect paellas and eye-rolling soufflés. As I pour through them, I can almost smell the house filling with the savoury smells of a cassoulet. I visualize my dinner guests dunking chunks of crusty bread in the dark wine and garlic-rich veal Marsala sauce. Of course, the dried out, even burnt reality of cooking, as we all know so well, is often far removed from the fantasy pages of my cookbooks.

Because I still have cookbooks stacked in the kitchen and almost every other room in the house, people have asked me which are my favorites. So, here are some that I'm working with now.

Pasta Classica by Julia della Croce (Chronicle Books). I bought this book on a trip to Florence, Italy so it is filled with many memories. It’s a basic recipe on how to make almost any kind of pasta you want from macaroni to spaghetti. There is a section of classic sauces and my favourite section, the one I use most often is the baked section. This book has taught me there’s more to baked pasta than lasagna. There’s a fantastic recipe for an eggplant and sausage timpano, the one that was served in The Big Night movie.

My latest love is Ottolenghi by Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi (Ebury Press). Two Middle Eastern chefs offer recipes from their London restaurant. The dishes are full of remarkably meaty salads made from quinoa, cous cous and lentils. Irresistible vegetable dishes like Caramelized Endive with Sarano Ham I’ve morphed into caramelized fennel with proscuitto and I can’t count how many times I’ve made the Chargrilled Broccoli with Chilli and Garlic.

On a recent trip to London, England I discovered the series of Michel Roux cookbooks (Quadrille Publishing). I have the book on Sauces, Pastry and now Only the Best. Each one stretches my culinary muscles with simple dishes prepared elaborately. Sure there are some ingredients that aren’t common in Canada, but they’re easy enough to substitute.

Here are three of the ones I’m working with right now. Of course, my own cookbooks are the best of what I’ve learned from my 400 teachers, what’s worked, what’s easy and what I love to share with everyone who cares to cook.

Check them out http://on.fb.me/HWN1Ja

The Ontario Table $10 Challenge: A Year of Eating Local

This is my new magazine – or better put ezine. An ezine for those who are wondering is an on-line magazine. So why a magazine when the book, The Ontario Table is still so popular?

Last year I traveled across Ontario on a book tour participating in over 55 events from June to December. I met thousands of wonderful people, all interested in local food. As I talked to each one of them I realized there was a common theme in peoples understanding of local food. Most people think of local food as the fresh vegetables that come out of the garden in the summer months.

As I tried to explain that local food is everything that is grown, raised and produced in Ontario, some got it and others dismissed it. It made for interesting conversations. I realized there was a need for a tool that was more specific than The Ontario Table book. What was needed was a tool that would both educate consumers on what local foods are available and when and also give them some quick and easy recipes to eat local all the time. It needs to be both fun and surprising.

So here it is. April is our 4th issue and I hope you like it. It has become bigger than I could have imagined. We now have over 32 agricultural commodity groups working with us. In this issue we’re featuring Ontario Greenhouse Vegetable Growers and Ontario Veal, Goat and Rabbit with others scattered throughout. In between are recipes, some identifying local ingredients with a comment or two on the ingredient. At the end you’ll find events that celebrate local food in different ways so you can get involved in a personal way. After all, local food is personal.

The official launch of The Ontario Table $10 Challenge: A Year of Eating Local will be at the Green Living Show, Direct Energy Building, Exhibition Place from April 13 to 15, www.greenlivingonline.com. I’ll be sharing a booth with the good folks at Rowe Farms (booth #1309). Please drop by and celebrate with me. We’ll have some delicious draws and who knows, you may be the lucky one.

Click here to download the on-magazine http://bit.ly/H5Of46
Click here for a preview in pictures http://on.fb.me/H6yQkD
Click here for launch invitation http://on.fb.me/H4kkEA

Eat Local in March!

April just around the corner and spring is already in the air. April is a busy month on the farm getting ready for the busy summer months. Trimming the trees and vines, plowing the soil, setting up irrigation, repairing equipment and planning for the upcoming season.

We live in a province rich with delicious local food and wonderful farmers who work hard in and out of season to provide this food, yet how many of us really take advantage of what we have all around us?

I have provided a page from the March issue of the new Ontario Table $10 Challenge Ezine. This online magazine was released at the beginning of the year and is filled with hints and tips to eat local year round. The Ontario Table presents the $10 Challenge encouraging consumers to switch $10 of their current food budget to local food. This is a great tool for those looking to take up this challenge and support these farmers. You can find the full January, February and March issues on the Ontario Table website at www.ontariotable.com

I would love to hear your thoughts and how you plan on taking up this challenge in the year ahead!

Like our Facebook page and share the local food Ezine with all your friends!

Lunch that is Brunchified

Step into the elegance of wine country cuisine with sunshine streaming into the simplicity of Early Canadiana décor of crisp, white woodwork, contrasted by muted Tuscan colours and romantic chandeliers hovering over crisp white tablecloths. This is Peller Estate Winery Restaurant and I’m having brunch, or as Executive Chef Jason Parsons tells it, “lunch that’s brunchified”.

“I make dishes at the restaurant that I’d make at home and then some,” explains Parsons of his irresistible menu that has room for both lobster and baked beans on the same page. The food reflects a rich Canadian culinary tradition and a typical chef’s playground all at the same time. Yet Chef Parsons is a real peoples chef; he makes food you’d want to eat instead of the artsy plates.

Brunch is one set price of $47.95 and it includes the most decadent start, a glass of Peller Estate sparkling Ice Cuvee. This is a delicious glass of uber elegant sparkling wine with a kiss of icewine used as the dosage – oh yummmm! To say the rest of the menu includes an appetizer, entre and dessert, is to understate the palate experience that follows the high expectations already set by sipping.

The Lobster salad fills the palate with fresh, sea breeze clean flavours of succulent lobster, bright greens, juicy beets and luscious chevre. It’s a dish that leaves you feeling as happy and exhilarated as a walk on a warm sunny spring day.

The Truffle Seared Diver Scallops offers up large, mouth-watering scallops that are seared and caramelized on the outside, seductively moist on the inside. The icewine hollandaise sauce lends a melt-in-your-mouth, heavenly texture while the potato rosti anchors the play of elegance with a crispy, weighty texture. With a sip of the Ice Cuvee, this is a dish you’ll swoon over.

The Slow Roasted Pork Shoulder with House Baked Beans, and Riesling Braised Winter Greens is a rich, savoury, heart-warming dish. The dance of hearty flavours wraps you in an embrace of passion and with every mouthful, you feel it right into your soul.

Heritage Beef Tartar with Celeriac Remoulade and House Made Toast offers up bright beef flavours on a floating texture that’s feather-light on the tongue and brought into focus with a morsel of celeriac slaw (or remoulade - chef’s speak).

The menu changes often and has more to do with Parson’s creative rhythm than any culinary schedule. In the spring you may find tiny tarts of bright, virgin asparagus and thick, sexy brie but the next week it may be gone in favour of what Parsons finds new and exciting. Parson’s is a rare chef that cooks with a heart and shares it with everyone who cares to eat his food. Don’t miss this amazing dining experience.

To feast with your eyes, check this out: http://on.fb.me/ykLc4V

Peller Estate Winery Restaurant
290 John St, Niagara-on-the-Lake
888-673-5537

It's Julia Child all over again!

The Grand Theatre is in the heart of downtown London and tonight Jon and I are here to see TO MASTER THE ART (of French Cuisine). It’s the live theatre version of the Julia Child story. Even from the grave, Julia Child has risen to raise the profile of cooking and eating – she is my hero!

Actress Sara Machin Gale played Child and did an amazing job walking us through Child’s obsession for food and passion for Parisian life. It’s a tasty fairytale that foodies can’t get enough of. If you’re an obsessed foodie you must see this play. On the surface, it’s a celebration of French culinary culture and cuisine but its messages run deep. I was especially drawn to the similarities I see among modern day foodies and Julia; the endless days of pure bliss spent in the kitchen whether the recipes work or not; the husband with the never-ending patience for eating the same dish over and over again while we go through the journey to perfection; and the way friends and family commune around the table in celebration of good food and better conversation.

Some days I feel like it’s a mirror image of my life. While Julia cooked, the aromas of the food flooded the theatre and everyone’s palate was whet with the anticipated flavours husband Paul Child was about to eat - pure culinary theatrics!

TO MASTER THE ART highlighted the culinary cultural differences between the French and the American. So if you’ve read this far, I’m going to guess that you’re like me – living in between the French and American culture. We’re a different breed you and I, we have a undying passion for food like the French yet we live in North America - specifically Ontario. It’s the passion for food that inspires us to be particular about the quality of food and about its origins, we want to meet the people who grow our food and learn everything about it from how to judge the best to preparing and sharing it. It’s not enough to eat to fill our bellies, we want it to mean something to our lives and our world and we want it to be the best it can be.

These are the qualities that inspired The Ontario Table. It’s a do-it-yourself eat local cookbook, but that’s North American talk. What I really wanted to call it was Mastering the Art of Ontario Cuisine. If it were called Mastering the Art of Ontario Cuisine would you think of it differently? Nah, this is North America after all.

Back to the play, perhaps some may see TO MASTER THE ART as a chic flick but to me it represents so much more. It’s a lifestyle to aspire to, a palate to cultivate and through these lessons we begin to indulge in the finer things in life. Julia – you still have it girl!

The Grand Theatre, TO MASTER THE ART is a must-see play for everyone!

A Bite of Heaven in St. Thomas

I was at the Horton Farmers’ Market in St. Thomas, Ontario and someone handed me what looked like a flat sugar donut. It was almost hot and the insides squished warm cream into my mouth while the soft apple inside caved so lusciously to my bite and it all finished with a sweet and crunchy ending of the coarse cinnamon sugar outside – oh, yummmmmm.

They call these little pillows of heaven apple fritters - somehow that just doesn’t do this amazing market pastry justice. The young girl selling them doesn’t understand my over excitement as she stands over dozens and dozens of them, ready to sell them to market shoppers. It’s a local delicacy and they’re well known to those who live in St. Thomas.

Baker Jacques Vanrign takes pride in being the inventor and his process is rather labour intensive. As the girl describes it I’m reminded of making ravioli.

Large sheets of sweet dough are rolled out, slices of fresh apple are placed inches apart across the entire dough surface. Next a spoonful of Bavarian cream and a dab of almond paste is placed on top of each apple slice and a top layer of dough is placed overtop. Next the dough is gently pressed down to separate the apples and they’re cut out with a large, round cookie cutter. The apple fritters are then deep fried and covered with coarse sugar with just a kiss of cinnamon.

They sell for $1.25 each, wrapped in a napkin and customers walk around the market shopping, visiting and eating the fresh, seasonal, heavenly apple treat. Other than market day, you can buy them at The Dutch Bakery in town.

It’s the season for Vanrign’s exquisite bites of heaven so get to St. Thomas and buy them by the dozen.

Why Eat Local?

I think the biggest issue with local food is people’s understanding and attitude.

We live in an international food world where super large quantities of food are produced cheaply and many people will tell you, efficiently, then it’s shipped around the world. This so called efficient system presumes food is a commodity where numbers and business plans make more sense than the quality of food. Here is where the system begins to break down.

Food is not a commodity. Yes, we need to eat to live but high quality food that is living and vibrant gives our bodies vibrancy, health and energy – dead food does not and therefore compromises the quality of our lives on many levels.

Think about it, food produced and consumed locally can stay on the plant, vine or tree for a longer period of time because it doesn’t have to be shipped or warehoused. When it stays longer, it ripens further developing nutrients and flavour along with colour and texture. It’s the difference between a dry, tasteless cantaloupe and one that is ultra sweet, juicy, soft and exciting in clean, clear flavour. Therefore, local food not only nourishes better but it pleases and excites as well.

Food is far from a commodity, it’s a personal experience. With food produced locally we can meet the people who produce it. These are people who live in our community and chances are you have something in common. Either a passion for food, perhaps you discover your children go to the same school, many times you have common acquaintances, but always you live in the same community and have opinions on community issues that can be discussed and shared. You discover you both pay taxes and thanks to the both of you, your town or city has services that enhance your lives. You’re linked to a farmer more than you know.

Local food is not only personal, it’s seasonal. We live in Ontario where the winters prevent us from growing fresh produce year round. Our ancestors would preserve and fill their root cellars to keep themselves fed throughout the long winter months. The root cellar was stocked with winter vegetables, sausages, flour, wine, preserves and more. The root cellar held foods that were both seasonal and year round.

Today we no longer fill our root cellars because grocery stores fill their shelves with all foods at all times of the year. This modern, convenient, access to food successfully strips the seasonality out of our food cycle and we forget what seasonality is all about. But seasonality comes natural to all of us. Take for example the way we crave lighter salads in the hot summer weather. This is when the growing season is prime for tender, delicious salad greens. Then in the frosty winter days we crave a slow roast in the oven with savoury root vegetables to fill not only our stomachs but our soul as well. Isn’t it amazing how Mother Nature is right there to feed our cravings at just the right time? The reality is that as humans, we’re much more connected to our environment than we remember.

Grocery stores are definitely convenient places to buy food but remember that they’re called grocery ‘stores’ because they were meant to ‘store’ food. To store fresh produce, special varieties have been bred to withstand rigorous transportation and to extend shelf life. This benefit of designing food for international markets compromises it’s integrity, quality and most certainly flavour. That’s why a tomato purchased in a grocery store in January can’t hold a candle to a tomato picked from your own back yard in September. The flavours are as different as black is to white.

People who love local food, love it because of the mouthfuls of bursting flavour and the joy and excitement it offers; artisan sausage with savoury herbs; rich and beefy butcher steaks; free roaming chickens with robust flavour; candy sweet and finger staining strawberries; tender just picked sweet corn, crunchy, snow white apples and soft, juice dripping peaches. People who love local food shop at their farmers’ market for fresh garlic that oozes with juices or crunchy peppers that spit back when you slice into them. The world of local food offers all this and more.

So how do you begin buying and eating local? First, remember it’s about doing the best you can. Eating local is not about only eating local food at the expense of any other foods. Eating local is about supporting your community, about finding a safe source of food, about discovering healthy, flavourful food and it’s about preparing and sharing the local harvests.

Start out on your eating local journey by doing the best you can and deal with the challenges as they arise. Start by taking an inventory of the local foods you have in your kitchen right now. Eggs, cheese, milk, chicken, butter and more; these are most likely locally produced. Pat yourself on the back for a great start. Now plan to shop at the farmers’ market or an on-farm market regularly, buy what you can there and discover new things. Remember, local food is personal so ask the farmer about foods and how to cook them. You have now grown your local food purchases.

Check the grocery store for local foods such as meats, dairy products, tinned tomatoes and bags of beans. Once you can identify locally produced foods, you’ll find a grocery store to offer more selection than you thought. The Ontario Table can help identify more grocery store foods in the chapter called, The Ontario Pantry.

As you grow your inventory of local foods, remember the seasons change and so will the amount of local foods you buy each season. But as you become more and more confident about buying local, the dance will be one of anticipation and hedonistic pleasures.

My $92 Breakfast

It started out as any other casual summer weekend away. Jon and I were in cottage country, we love Muskoka. I love to shop in the upscale shops in Port Carling, stroll the quaint and beautiful little village of Bala, Huntsville is home of the Deerhurst Resort (my favourite) and Bracebridge is a great food town.

On the main street of Bracebridge is a small, very unique eatery called Marty's. The 'cottage-style' eclectic decor immediately welcomes and pampers. I say pampers because one look at the pastry counter and you know you're somewhere decadently special. Giant pies made of light butter rich pastry, super deep and loaded with glistening, luscious fruit. The lattice strips are, like the pie, super thick. I've never seen pies so seductive and exciting they make you want to do an immediate face plant.

Below the pies is a shelf loaded with over sized butter tarts. Inside the buttery soft pastry is a light brown filling that doesn't at all look sicky-sweet, but curiously sexy. I looked at the few tables with customers seated sipping on mugs of coffee and most had small plates of pastry with an oozing light brown filling puddling around the pastry like gravy dripping around mashed potatoes - they were all indulging on butter tarts.

It's easy to read this place - the owner is obviously obsessed with making great food, over-the-top better. So, who is Marty?

Marty Curtis (www.martysworldfamous.com) is described by chef Micheal Smith as the "Michelangelo of butter tarts". He Won the Toronto Star best butter tart competition and people began flocking to his cafe - butter tart fanatics from around the world keep coming to Marty’s.

So there we were, hungry for breakfast and the breakfast place two doors away had a line up out the door. So our choice was to drive to the outskirts of Bracebridge or indulge at Marty's - we choose the latter.

Towering over his small workspace was Marty. I’m guessing - 6 foot 8 inches tall; a big, intimidating man in love with his pastry. Marty says, “if you’re making pastry for butter tarts, go big! If you’re making pastry for pies, go big ass!” It made sense with what we were seeing and the intimidating part – well, it was fleeting.

Marty’s doesn't serve breakfast but the chicken wraps were calling to us. We sat down and Marty brought over our wraps with a side salad. It was wonderful! Ordinary, sensible food made extraordinary with superb quality ingredients. Succulent chicken, fresh, ripe juicy tomatoes fresh from the field, cool crisp cucumbers and a savory flavor created with a feather light sauce.

We sipped on our cafe au latte and leafed through Marty's World Famous Cookbook (Whitecap Books, ISBN 978-1-55285-9-292, $29.95). Then our desserts arrived. One beautiful butter tart and one slice of giant cherry pie. The butter tart was super light and buttery with a lusciousness that luxuriated across the palate in an angelic sort of way, yet it was sinfully delicious!

A short while later we went to the counter to pay and I lingered to read the notes written to Marty by celebrities on photographs hanging on the walls. There were Marty’s special ultra deep pie plates for sale along with stacks and stacks of Marty’s cookbooks.

That's when I heard trouble. "I'll give you a receipt so you can write this off", said Marty to Jon. Who says that when you're paying for breakfast I thought? How much of a write-off did I just eat?

Jon and I left the restaurant without saying a word, but half way across the street I couldn't stand it any longer and I asked the question I really didn't want to hear the answer to - $92!!!

Ok, so I bought Marty's cookbook; deduct that. Now I know what you're asking - was it worth it? Well, the place is certainly excitingly unique and authentic, the food, while sensible, is extraordinarily delicious and unbelievably sexy, hmmmm.

The best breakfast I’ve ever had in my life was in Miami. Jon and I were staying at the amazing Viceroy Hotel and the restaurant was run by none other than Michael Psilakis – one of the worlds top chefs. Our breakfast was amazingly delicious and exciting. It was a bargain price of $55 for the 2 of us. It’s one of those meals we all have to have before we die and the fact it was breakfast just blows me away.

Yes, Marty's will be one of those delicious memories filed away with the handful of other over-the-top food experiences. I’ll recommend it to everyone, but with a warning that you don't do what we did and order with complete abandon. The best plan is a coffee and butter tart and it will be less than $10.

Road Trip with Cheryl

Went for a ride with Cheryl Barnes of Inn The Pines Market, in St Catharines. Cheryl runs one of the more popular farm markets in the region. She grows lots of vegetables on her 14-acre farm and for the rest, she gets fresh produce directly from large farms - right from the sorting tables, now you can't get much fresher than that!

On her farm, Cheryl grows garden veggies like celery, 30 types of tomatoes, 10 types of peppers, cauliflower, zucchini, and more. In addition to her vegetables, Cheryl raises chickens for eggs, cattle for beef and pigs for pork. Her friend, Dale Cable fishes and Cheryl sells fresh frozen perch from her stand.

Cheryl’s a great foodie. All summer long she’s putting food away like corn for winter corn bread or corn chowder. She has her pork bones smoked for winter dishes like soups and stews.

Today I’m shopping for the market with Cheryl and our first stop is at Pleasant Berry Blueberry Farm in Brantford. Tony and Grace Gdyczynski run the 2.5 blueberry patch. He's been growing blueberries for too long, he thinks 16 to 17 years. I have refrigerator of blueberries at home and I can't resist buying more, They're ultra sweet and bursting with blueberry flavor. It's both a U-Pick as well as ready picked. It's a very neat and pretty little patch. We load up Cheryl’s truck with blueberries before heading to the next farm.

Next stop was Welsh Brothers. Peter and brother Wayne are 3rd generation to farm this land with their children. We go from the office barn and drive out to the corn patch that is being harvested. We pass asparagus fields and pumpkin patches and more corn fields. They grow 500 acres of premium sweet corn and pick 5 acres a day. Planting different varieties of corn at different times insures a continual corn harvest until - weather permitting, Thanksgiving.

Out at the field, the picking machine is hard at work. We climb on board. Five to six workers pick furiously in the field and throw the corn into a suspended hopper that leads through the field. From the hopper a conveyor belt moves the corn to the sorting and packing line where another eight workers sort the corn and bag it. The bags are then piled high in a trailer that is pulled behind the sorting line.

The full trailers now go to the barn that houses 6 cooling rooms. Three to four trailers fill one room and the corn is rained on with ice water until the internal temperature reaches a very low temperature. This stops the conversion of sugar to starch and keeps the corn tasting fresher longer.

We pass another cornfield that's being irrigated with well water. Peter loves sweet corn but admits to being a traditionalist. He likes to boil it, but if he's hungry in the field, he’ll eat it raw. Of course the only corn you can eat raw is fresh local corn. For Peter, sweetcorn can be an entire meal and he loves eating it cold the next day.

Both Peter and Cheryl lament consumers tendency to pull back the corn husks and leave the corn because the rows of kernels aren't perfectly straight. In fact corn kernels are seldom perfectly straight and when striped corn is tossed aside, no one else wants it either and the farmer looses. Food, like people is far from perfect, but it's still good! Both encourage their customers to know their food and their farmer.

Next stop was Steve and Paula Fett, Fett Farms and they grow lots of potatoes; red, white and yellow. Now they’re growing gourmet fingerling potatoes from Russian, Pink and French to All Blue and White Creamers. Fett is a large enough farmer to sell to grocery chains so look for them in the grocery stores.

It may be a simple thing but Steve puts his red potatoes in red bags, yellow flesh in yellow bags and white potatoes in white bags. It’s a great way to spot Fett potatoes.

On the Fett farm they have a sorting table, washing station and cold storage for their potatoes are available year round – or until they last. Steve explains one of the biggest potato myths is if you wash potatoes, they won’t keep. They do, the secret to storing potatoes is a constant cool storage temperature. They’ll keep very well in a cold cellar but rarely will they keep under a sink (apparently this is where most people store potatoes).

With a quick lunch at Harmony Bakery we were off to Berkel’s Greenhouse for beefsteak tomatoes. The 8-acres of greenhouse Ted Berkel grows some cocktail and yellow tomatoes as well as his mainstay – beefsteak. Cheryl buys the large tomatoes that don’t fit into shipping flats. I guess you could call them the rejects, but they’re the perfect size for a thick slice of crusty Italian-style bread. Rub the bread with garlic and lay one thick slice of tomato on top with a bit of salt. Options are a bit of mayo and shredded basil leaves – it’s the quintessential summer meal!

We were done our day of shopping at farms, Cheryl had enough food to stock her shelves and I had enough to share with my neighbours. There’s lots of fresh produce out there right now, get out there and find your fill.

Muskoka Delicious!

When I think of Muskoka my mouth automatically begins to salivate for some of Ontario's most succulent beef, luscious maple syrup and of course a martini made with one of chef Rory Golden's pickled wild leek stir sticks. Golden is the executive chef of the Deerhurst Resort in Huntsville (www.deerhurstresort.com) and one of Muskoka's most vocal local food advocates.

Chef Rory is the talent behind the Field to Fork event held August 14th (www.savourmuskoka.com). The format is quintessential farm and country with gourmet food tastings on a farm for the country low price of $65 a head.

There is an amazing farmers market in Gravenhurst at the Muskoka Warf. A double row of market vendors form a giant circle and shoppers meander around smelling the freshness and scooping up the seasons bountiful harvests. I was there promoting local food with my new book, The Ontario Table. Every book purchased earns a signature on the Ontario Table-cloth. As I travel across Ontario collecting signatures, it will surely be the longest tablecloth in support of local food. Chefs sign in red, farmers in green and locavores in black. At the end of the season I will roll it out and plan a huge feast where we'll all sit around and read what everyone has written about local food. Keep posted on my blog for more info.

There is T & R Family Farm from Niagara-on-the-Lake with the seasons first cherries. Muskoka doesn't grow cherries so the giant table of red and white juicy berries go quickly. It’s garlic scape season and you can overhear many conversations about delicious garlic scape dishes.

Today is a special day and Savour Muskoka is offering tastings of what is growing in Muskoka. Reed of Muskoka Meats is serving up delicious venison sausages, Black River Food Co is offering a beer, bacon and sausage soup. Strawberries play centre stage with mini strawberry shortcakes - fresh from the fields.

Huntsville seems to be the regions hot spot for resorts. In addition to the all season Deerhurst Resort, Taboo (www.tabooresort.com) is a luxury resort, golf course and spa. The new chef there is Andy Dymond, former chef of the Prince of Wales Hotel in Niagara and another chef in love with food that grows near and around him. Can't wait to visit and try his version of Muskoka cuisine.

While there is no competition among the great chefs of Muskoka , there is great fun for foodies to graze around Gravenhurst, Bracebridge, Huntsville, Bala and Port Carling tasting and experiencing it all.

I love the little town of Bala, so pretty, so quaint. It’s the cranberry capital of Ontario and it’s worth taking in the festival every October (www.balacranberryfestival.on.ca). If you can’t make the festival, drive to Johnston’s Cranberry Marsh for everything cranberry you can imagine from fresh (frozen) to dried, juice – yes even wine from Muskoka Lakes Winery.

In Bracebridge, Marty's is the hip place to be. Find a table among the locals and feast on his take out counter. I've never seen pies so big and abundant with juicy fruit that it inspires a direct face plant. The ice cream is just as exciting.

Gravenhurst is home to Muskoka Meats, also known as the 100 Mile Store. Owner Dave Purdon stocks a great selection of small artisan food products from within 100 miles – or 160 km. Their specialty is local meat and a look in their meat counter has you drooling over ultra thick cuts of well-aged beef. Best to ask for what you want because most of the meat is out back reserved for the local carnivors who know exactly what they want.

On the way home I discovered Fairdale Farm, went and met Kim Leatherdale who professes to be a new farmer in love with her new business and success. They sell beef, lamb and chicken. Freezers in the farm retail store carry a great selection of cuts and the honor box speaks to the trust in farm and country conviviality. You can find other farms across Ontario to visit at www.ontariofarmfresh.com.

Eating up Stratford!

If you’re looking for something delicious to do this glorious summer weekend, take off for a few days and explore Stratford. Sunday is the day for the Stratford Slow Food Farmers’ Market. What a fantastic market and what a fantastic marriage of a farmers’ market and the international Slow Food organization. Stratford has one of Ontario’s strongest Slow Food chapters and this is their market run by food blogger Steve Stacey local-come-lately.blogspot.com.

Antony John of Soiled Reputation is there selling his amazing greens and radishes so fantastic Jon couldn’t resist taking pictures.

Farmer, Brendon Lyoness of Caveman Crops is at the Slow Food booth along with Fred de Martines of Perth Pork Products. Fred raises the Tamworth, Berkshire and Wild Boar that all the restaurants go crazy over. There is Bizjak Farms from Beamsville with load of fresh strawberries and apples and of course Lindsay the baker who surprised me with a real croissant. Says it’s easy to make them for the market because people love a treat on Sunday mornings.

The market is right in the heart of downtown Stratford and if you know the beautiful town with the Stratford Chefs School and Stratford Festival Theatre at its heart, you know that it’s a great foodie town filled with farmers and folk that appreciate the finer things in life.

I met Shawn Hartwell of the Simple Fish Co. He also owns a restaurant called Simple Fish & Chips, with a twist and while his place may be casual and welcoming, it’s anything but simple. Shawn started out like many restauranteurs planning according to numbers on a business plan but soon decided to take a different turn with his restaurant, upping the quality by buying only seasonal river fish from trusted sources.

Hartwell tells me that perch and pickerel from Lake Huron are in season. He’s also buying any fish that runs up river right now meaning salmon from the Frasier or Stikine Rivers in British Columbia. Soon he says he’ll get fish from the Columbia River. Hartwell knows the seasons for fresh fish, like I know my vegetables.

Shawn is at the Slow Food Farmers’ Market offering a wide variety of fresh fish – pity I had no way to keep it cool until I got home, but lesson learned. I’m traveling with a cooler and ice pack in my car from now on!

Had lunch at the York Street Kitchen. It’s where I always go when I’m in the mood for something that packs a simple explosion of flavour. This little sandwich place should never be underestimated. Here a simple smoked turkey sandwich creates as much excitement, surprise, contentment and satisfaction as one would expect from high-end gourmet restaurant run by celebrity chefs. Plan on a long wait during lunch and dinner so do what I do, go mid-afternoon!

Downtown Stratford has more to do than one can pack into a weekend including perhaps a rare Bieber sighting, so go directly to the tourism office on Downie Street and they’ll help you narrow down your options.