My Cheatin' Heart

I admit that I cheat every now and then. Oh, not romantically or on tests or taxes but in the kitchen. Most people who know me think I make everything from scratch, especially considering how enthusiastically I can criticize processed foods. But those who know me really well know I sometimes take shortcuts.

Apparently I’m in good company. The oh-so-proper British cook Delia Smith has just released a book offering product-by-product recipes and tips on how to cheat in the kitchen. But good luck finding some of the brands she uses if you don’t live in England. When I cheat, I usually do it with a good old American classic, Campbell’s soup.

Despite all the hand-wringing in the press these days over processed foods and their effect on our health, I’ve had a long relationship with the red and white can that trumps nutritional facts. Like any illicit affair, I know it's bad for me, but I just can’t break it off.

It’s all my grandmother’s fault. Campbell’s soup figures prominently in her culinary repertoire and I can’t blame her. She was a young woman raising a family at the dawn of the processed food era when canned goods and their ilk heralded the liberation of women from the kitchen. My grandmother was raised on a farm and knew well the labour involved in growing, harvesting and preparing food from scratch. I’ve never asked her, but I imagine that, as a young mom filling her shopping basket with canned goods in those early days, the thought of speeding up dinner with processed food must have been as unbelievable but thrilling as the idea of man walking on the moon – which wouldn’t happen for a few years yet.

Unlike my generation of cooks, my grandma feels no shame in cracking open a can of Campbell’s. She uses it in almost all her signature recipes. Corn chowder (Cream of Corn soup), chicken stew (Cream of Mushroom soup) and her piece de resistance, creamy chicken vol-au-vents (Chicken a la King soup and a tin of Green Giant-brand sweet peas)

When I cheat, like I did this week, my Campbell’s soup of choice is invariably Tomato Rice. It reminds me of childhood Thanksgivings and the soup my mother made with leftover turkey. (Mom cheats, too!) We’d dine large on turkey-tomato-rice soup for almost a week – and never tired of it.

Some folks are probably shocked to know my secret. But I like to think it takes a strong cook to ‘fess up to taking shortcuts in the kitchen. I’ll go one step further and brag that I’ve even updated my mom’s signature cheat recipe for tomato-rice soup by using local seasonal produce to jazz it up. The result is the culinary equivalent of a quick nooner in a motel off the Interstate – or the perfect lunch for a cool late-summer day.

Cheater’s Tomato Rice Soup with Roast Chicken and Fresh Basil
1 10-oz can Campbell’s Tomato Rice soup
1 cup roast chicken meat (cooked) cut into bite-sized pieces
1 medium-size tomato, diced
2 Tbsp (or to taste) fresh basil leaves, cut in a chiffonade
1 Tbsp heavy cream

In a small pot, prepare soup according to directions on the can. While soup is warming, add chicken, tomato. Heat soup to desired temperature. Remove from heat. Add in basil and cream and serve with a crusty bun or crackers.

Salad Days 2008

Summer 2008 - some of the yummy things Michelle made and ate: grilled salmon salad; chilled psychedelic pink borscht; watercress vichyssoise; parsley potatoes Provençal; tomato-basil fried rice; blackberry-peach-ginger cobbler; eggplant pasta; Tokyo-style avocado-arugula salad; rubbarb crisp with Devon cream.

Flour Power

Despite being a city girl at heart, I’ve long harboured romantic notions about living in an old stone mill out in the country – complete with quaint waterwheel – but I’ve never given much thought to how flour actually got made back in the old days when farmers had to haul their grain in for processing.

So, during a recent trip to Ottawa, I was keen to visit one of the few remaining mills in Canada still producing flour in much the same way it did back in the mid-1800s. Watson's Mill was built alongside the Rideau River in 1860 in the picturesque town of Manotick and has been milling flour from locally grown wheat for almost 150 years.

While most other mills in North America have fallen into ruin or been converted into modern restaurants, museums or private residences, Watson’s Mill still has a lot of its original equipment, thanks in large part to Harry Watson, who owned and operated it as a working grist mill from 1946 until the mid-1960s.

Long before the local food movement had people clamouring for regional products or food scientists re-discovered the nutritional benefits of stone-ground wheat (author Michael Pollen paints an especially compelling portrait of what we lost when we stopped milling with stone in his book In Defense of Food), the Rideau Valley Conservation Authority purchased the mill and restored the millstones and other machinery to their original operating condition, including the water turbines which drive the millstone up to 120 revolutions a minute.

That’s enough power to produce the whole-wheat flour used to make the giant loaves of bread sold at the mill on weekends. Also available for purchase on a daily basis are two-, five-, 10 and 50-pound sacks of flour. The day I visited, the volunteers who mill the wheat couldn’t get these bagged fast enough for enthusiastic customers.

When it preserved the mill for its original use, the conservation authority could never have predicted how intense the demand for local, environmentally friendly products would become. According to staff, Watson’s Mill had about 24,000 visitors last year, an increase of 60 percent over 2006. In response, it expects to produce five tons of the powdery stuff this year. The wheat, incidentally, comes from a farm just outside Ottawa owned by the Ruiter family, some of whom I went to elementary school with.

Much of the newfound zeal for local flour has, no doubt, been fuelled by the recent 100-mile diet craze. After all, sourcing home-grown onions and carrots is a piece of cake in most parts of Canada – at least during the summer -- but when was the last time you baked bread using 100-percent stone-milled whole-wheat flour ground in your community from wheat harvested nearby?

While I only partially subscribe to the 100-mile philosophy myself, after watching grain flow through the mill’s loud orchestra of millstones, drums and chutes, I felt the baker’s flutter of delight at the thought of experimenting with such a pure, pre-industrial-revolution product. At the same time, after witnessing the amount of effort it takes to make flour the traditional way, I also felt an overwhelming sense of responsibility about not wasting it. The result? I put a lot of thought into what recipes would be truly mill flour-worthy. I didn’t want to adulterate the flour with too many processed, modern or exotic ingredients. My goal was to capture and celebrate the historical spirit of this novel foodstuff.

Not being a bread baker, I decided it would be too ambitious to try and make a loaf, especially since I had been warned that whole-wheat loaves can turn out very rustic and dense – think spelt bread. I had a few false starts – a batch of mixed berry muffins and a lemon blueberry coffee cake that didn’t quite meet expectations.

In the end, I channeled my inner pioneer and settled on a simple recipe for apple oatmeal pancakes. This produced a small, dense, but surprisingly moist, stack that I served with pats of butter and a big splash of maple syrup. Add to this a couple of fried eggs, a few slices of thick country bacon and a hot pot of coffee, and your inner pioneer will be ready for a hard day of farm work or stone milling.

Chunky Apple Oatmeal Pancakes

¾ cup whole-wheat flour
1/8 cup oats
2 Tbsp oat bran
½ tsp cinnamon
2 tsp baking powder
¼ tsp salt
¼ cup raisins (optional)
½ cup finely chopped apple
1 cup pure apple juice

Combine dry ingredients. Add raisins and chopped apple. Stir in apple juice until dry ingredients are moistened. Heat a non-stick skillet over medium heat. Pour batter into the skillet. (Using a ¼ cup measure for each pancake, you should get approximately 6-8 pancakes.) Cook until bottoms are brown. Flip pancakes and brown the other side. Serve with a pat of butter and maple syrup.