Dispatches from Dufferin Street

This one is for the lovely Tracy O., who always inspires me by making my everyday tasks feel impressive and worthwhile – thanks, gorgeous!

I have almost filled my freezer for fall… one of my favourite things to do as the fall harvests come in and our fridge starts to explode with tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchinis. I usually hoard these beautiful fruits and vegetables, incapable of refusing people’s glorious bounty when offered. There are so many months of the year here where there is nothing available that even resembles these beautiful things. And then after a few days, I curse it all for a day, wishing I didn’t have to come up with new and interesting things to do with vegetables my children profess to dislike. Then I shake it off and methodically go about filling my freezer with ready-to-eat meals for rushed fall and winter evenings. And then I sleep easy at night, ready for the next baskets of goodies I know are coming my way.

It started this year with tomatoes. On returning from the cottage, I was dying for a fresh, red, tasteful tomato. I found baskets of Ontario tomatoes at No Frills, and feeling overly ecstatic at the fairly half-assed effort on their part to promote semi-local, seasonal food, I snatched a bunch up. Then we received about three more baskets full within 24 hours from friends and family with prolific gardens and farms. I should know to be careful what I wish for.

Inspired by the desire to cook a post-partum meal for a dear friend, I decided to make the tomatoes into lasagna. An afternoon of washing, chopping, simmering and stirring produced a whopping amount of tomato sauce featuring a fraction of the tomatoes, zucchinis, mushrooms, onions, garlic, carrots, celery, peppers and red wine - one batch with tofu, one batch with beef. Step one – done. I mixed up some spinach and ricotta, and grated a ton of mozzarella and laid out six – count ‘em, six! – baking pans. I layered while enjoing the tail end of the red wine, and ended up with three meat and three vegetarian lasagnas. One for the new parents, five for the freezer, plus a big batch of ready-to-eat spaghetti sauce. Ahhhhh, I felt better already.

The tomatoes continue to dwindle – lots of sandwiches, but there is still more work to be done on that front.

Next came a desire to have quick and easy snacks for the kids, and a plethora of rolled oats. This morning, Leo and I busted out the mixer and made eight dozen oatmeal-raisin cookies – replacing the white flour with whole wheat even lets me feel somewhat virtuous about the number consumed today. Most are in the freezer, and some stashed away for everyday snacks.

I still had a few casserole dishes unused, so tonight’s enchilada supper also yielded a meal for the freezer… just as easy to make two trays as it is to make one! Spinach tortillas stuffed with garlicky brown rice, black beans, Monterrey Jack and enchilada sauce, served with sour cream and pureed chipotle peppers – a family favourite. We had a giant basket of beans crowding out the beer, and given that it was still four hours until bedtime, the beans had to go before the beer. We don’t have any passionate bean lovers here, so I waded through a few books to find something out of the ordinary to do. We ended up with a cold bean salad: beans just barely cooked, then tossed in a dijon oil and vinegar dressing, topped with bread crumbs toasted in butter, olive oil and garlic mixed with ever-so-tiny bits of diced hard-boiled egg. Divine.

I added the enchilada tray to the almost-full chest freezer, balanced precariously on top of the organic chickens, lasagnas, sauce, coffee beans, etc., etc.,  etc. Once the vegetables are long-gone, the anxiety will hit about what is at the bottom of the freezer, and we’ll eat our way through forgotten treasures for a while, until the whole beautiful cycle starts all over again…

The weekend will hopefully bear muffins and a large stash of trail mix, and I’ll have to wade through the rest of the vegetables we have – we have cucumber, fennel, tomatoes,  and edamame at the very least, and there is certainly stuff I’ve forgotten about at the back of the crisper drawers.

But first… the triathlon. The next time I write, we will have accomplished this minor yet intimidating feat. Please think of us at 10:05 Saturday morning, as we launch ourselves into the Ottawa River and embark on our first mini-triathlon – here goes nothing!