Why You Should Can Your Own Fruits and Vegetables?

Canning season is officially over for me. In the past two weeks I have managed to pack 40 jars of tomato sauce, 10 jars of peaches and 20 jars of salsa. I'm tired. I know for some of you the idea of canning your own fruits and vegetables is considered old-fashion and outdated. Many argue with me. If you can buy a can of tomatoes for 99cents why would you put so much time and effort into canning your own?
A couple of reasons, first if you are productive and efficient and your timing is just right you can do it for a little cheaper then store bought. But more importantly, I control what goes into my food, salt, sugar, preservatives. But the real reason I love it so much is because in the dead of winter, when you can saunder down to the your cantina and grap a jar of tomatoes that you have grown yourself or simply bought from your local farmer, cleaned, cooked, pressed etc.etc. there is nothing like it and nothing can compare to it.
If you really want to eat clean and healthy then you should seriously consider turning back the clock to the days of your grandmother and great-grandmother and consider taking up the lost art of preserving and canning.
I'm going to share with you today my recipe for canning tomato sauce. I consider this recipe to be my greatest treasure it belonged to my Italian mother-in-law. It was the quick thinking of my sister-in-law to it write down on one such occasion when she was canning with her.  We all took our turn learning the ropes and I continue the tradition today using the very same separator that belonged to her.

Nonna's Sauce
Your tomatoes should come fresh from your local farmer if not from your own garden. Roma tomatoes or if you can get your hands on San Marzano tomatoes are ideal.
Wash your tomatoes genereously, remove the stem and any dark or white spots.
Hand cut the tomatoes and put them into a blender.
Pour the blended tomatoes into the separating machine. This machine will separate the skin and seeds on one side and send the juice in a pot on the otherside.
Once you have filled a large pot with juice you can begin boiling it on the stove. You can add some salt at this time. This juice will boil for a couple of hours.
Meanwhile I wash my jars and lids in the dishwasher on sanitizing setting. If they finish before the sauce I will then hold them until the sauce is ready in oven. The lids I boil on the stove and hold in the hot water until ready to jar.
Before you jar place 3-4 fresh basil leaves (from your garden) and fill the jars with the hot sauce. Leave at least 1 inch head room. Attach lids and secure tightly, turn upside down to sit and seal. 


When you are ready to use your sauce.
saute up a little chopped garlic in olive oil, add a jar of sauce, let simmer for 20-30 minutes adding again some fresh or "frozen fresh" basil about 1/2 way through your cooking time along with kosher salt to taste.
This will make a lovely marinara sauce for your favourite pasta.

My Famous Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies

Today is the first day back to school. For my girls, long gone are the days of watching them with their lunch pail in hand walking to the bus in their new school outfits. Today, my 18 year old started her first class at college studying business. My youngest is 13 and started her first day of high school. Life is changing in our household. However, I thought today I would hold true to a tradition I have enjoyed for the last 30 years. I am making my famous oatmeal chocolate chip cookies.

The first batch is baking in the oven as I write this post. I wish you could smell them. When I was young, my mother would make these very cookies. My fondest memories were of coming home from school and smelling these freshly baked morsels. Still warm, moist and tender waiting for us to consume. I began the same tradition for my own girls. Throughout their school days they have often commented on how much they have enjoyed coming home to my freshly baked cookies. Their reactions when they came in from school was reward enough. So although only one daughter will be here at 3:30pm today to enjoy them I am holding true to the tradition. Some will just have to go into the freezer for my college student.

Why are they famous you ask? Mostly because whomever I have made them for over the last 30 years aways loves them and wants the recipe. Secondly, no matter how many other cookie recipes I have made over the years this one is always the tried and true favourite. I originally got this recipe from my Mom. She doesn't know where it came from. I have lost it many times over the years but I have made it so often I can recreate it from memory. I have made some adjustments each time I lost it and had to rewrite it. But now it is recorded and I hope you enjoy them as much as my family. I'm passing it along now to my nephew's wife. She has requested it. With a toddler and infant, I hope she looks forward to many years off baking these cookies for her boys.

Oatmeal Chocolate Chips Cookies
by Lynn Palermo
Ingredients
1 1/2 cups of soften butter
2 cups of brown sugar
1 tbsp. of vanilla
1 tsp of baking soda
1 cup of boiling water
4 cups quick-cooking rolled oats
3 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
2 cups of chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 350F
Cream together butter and brown sugar. Add vanilla. In a measuring cup add 1 tsp of baking soda, add one cup of boiling water. Add water mixture to butter mixture. Stir well. Add oats, mix well by hand. Then add flour, again mixing well by hand. Add chocolate chips. Drop by tablespoon onto parchment paper lined cookie sheet. Bake for 15-17 minutes or until edges of cookies begin to brown. Let cool for a few minutes and then move to cooling racks. They are delicious warm right out of the oven, or once cooled package in an airtight container and freeze.

My Lemon Tree

I have always loved lemons. However up until 2001, my knowledge of lemons was limited to the waxy polished kind you find in the produce department of your local grocery store. After a trip to Italy in the fall of 2001, I became much more acquainted with the path of a lemon to my kitchen table. In a lovely little casa in Caserta, Italy in the heart of Campania region, I was introduced to a beautiful lemon tree that stood proud in the courtyard. This home had belonged to my husband's family for generations and they informed me that this stately lemon tree was over 100 years old. As we traveled throughout Italy, I became quite taken by the lemon trees and I quickly became smitten with a lovely little liqueur known as limencello. We will discuss limencello in a later post.

Today, I want to introduce you to my lemon tree. Four years ago, I went to my local garden centre and picked up a small little lemon tree plant that stood nearly 6 inches in height. The tag in the plant assured me it would produce lemons. Fast forward to today, after a lot of tender loving care, I am here to tell you that I have produced my first lemon in my home located in Southern Ontario. A location not particularly known for any kind of tropical like climate.

I have nourished my plant from it earliest tender stage to the beautiful tree it is today. My routine includes bringing it outside every summer to take advantage of the maximum amount of sunshine. In the winter, it gets the best window in the house despite me having to rearrange furniture around it. I try to mist it daily through the winter months in an attempt to recreate a humid like atmosphere. I was fertilizing it and for 4 years I had a beautiful green plant, growing well but no blooms and no lemons. Then this spring, my local garden centre expert suggested I change the food and fertili
ze more often. I began feeding it a with Tomato plant food 4-6-8 every three weeks. Now 3 months later my lemon tree has begun producing blooms and its first lemon.

I wander out every morning to check on it's growth and look forward to the day I can pick that long awaited lemon. Now I need to decide what special dish I will honour it with, when that day arrives.

Julie, Julia and Me

Last night I went to see a new movie out called Julie and Julia. If you are a foodie then this is a must see. It is an inspirational movie to those of us who love to cook. I didn't grow up watching Julia Child but I was well aware of who she was in cooking world. Meryl Streep did a fabulous job playing the very unique and outgoing Julia. The characters were funny, the storyline unique and the food was fabulous. You want to go home and cook or at the very least run out and buy Julia's cookbook.


However, this movie also encouraged me to return to my food blog. Julie Powell played by Amy Adams, the other half of this entertaining movie, blogs her way through Julia's cookbook, testing 524 recipes from Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Her blogging reminded me why I started this blog in the first place. She loved food, the process of creating a new dish and her thrill in sharing it with the world. I have been away for awhile busy with my other blog at http://www.thearmchairgenealogist.com/.


I have been busy these past few months in the kitchen as well. So with the inspiration of Julie and Julia behind me I'm back to blogging about the world of food as it passes through my kitchen and community. If you get an opportunity to see this movie, let me know what you think. What's your favourite french dish? Mine: Coq au Vin

Fresh Pizza - Mangia!

I have decided to start this year off with my favourite thing to cook. Homemade Italian style pizza. I love making pizza and it is probably what I am most famous for amongst my family and friends. When we are out as a family and should we happen to indulge in some store bought or restaurant pizza inevitable it is always compared to mine.
In case your curious the photograph at the top of my blog was taken in Caserta, Italy. This little place ,I believe would equate to the local pizzeria's here in Canada. Somehow I wish pizzerias in Canada were all this inviting and charming. I have eaten pizza all over Italy, and I must say some of the best pizza I ever had is found there, including a little restaurant in Naples called Brandi's. It is the home of the Marguerita pizza. This is a lovely pizza consisting of a fresh homemade dough, fresh tomatoes, fresh mozzerella and fresh basil. Fresh ingredients are key to a great Italian pizza. Cooked perfectly in a woodburning oven. Marguerita pizza was named after Queen Marguerita who visited Naples in 1889. I know for many they may be disappointed with Italian pizza especially if you love our Canadian counterpart with its thick crust and numerous toppings. However, for me nothing compares to Italian pizza with it's fresh ingredients and its thin crust. I love to recreate these fabulous pies in my own kitchen.

The Norfolk County Fair

I love the fall and nothing says fall more then when the local county fair arrives. The Norfolk County Fair has many memories for me. I wait every year for the opportunity to wander across the fair grounds enjoying the sites and sounds. But of course the highlight is the food. I look forward each year to my annual corn dog and fries and this year it was followed by a warm gooey delicious cinnamon bun and a hot cappuccino from the Tim Hortons booth with proceeds going to charity.

However, this year the fall fair was that much more exciting and that was because of the addition of the celebrity chefs on the Norfolklicious Stage. I have to tip my hat to this local organization along with our local celebrity chefs the Two Fairly Fat guys for bringing in the exciting line-up of guests. My personal favourite was Chef Lynn Crawford, she was fun, exciting, down to earth and I learned a tip or two. David Adjey was quite enjoyable and Massimo Capra was fun and of course Italian so that always excites me. Michael Smith was tall and his talk on our food industry was exhilarating although I would've loved to had seen him cook more. I was unable to see Brad Long and Corbin Tomaszeksi due to my own turkey dinner commitments but they certainly rounded out a very exciting line-up for us Norfolk County foodies. All the chefs used local produce, meat and cheese to the best of their abilities.

The event came across as well planned and executed and I hope they build on this wonderful line-up for next year. I would love to see this in a venue that had a more controlled environment so that there was less background noise. My suggestion : Jaime Oliver is doing a tour and I would pay to see him.

The History of a Foodie

My world has always revolved around food. It is my passion. I love everything about it particularly eating it. I enjoy cooking; I read cookbooks in my spare time, I watch cooking shows. I particularly love discovering new or rather old well used recipes from family, friends and even strangers.

A perfect evening out for me is discovering a new restaurant with my husband. I love to try cuisine from all cultures but I must say I am particularly drawn to Italian food. But what I love the most is entertaining with family and friends around the diningroom table.

I believe my earliest passion for food was inherited. I was born of a French Canadian mother. She grew up in a rural Northern Ontario French community. She was exposed daily to the cultural influences of her heritage and the cooking skills of her mother and grandmother, many of those influences were carried over into her own kitchen. Even today I love rustic food, unpretentious, simple food of the earth.

Once I was old enough to make my way around a kitchen at the age of eleven or twelve I began to cook. It started with simple things like pizza, usually made for my Dad on Saturday nights while he watched Hockey Night in Canada. Pizza is still one of my favourite things to cook. I have fond memories of making desserts on Sunday afternoons for the traditional Sunday dinner. I believe pudding parfaits were my specialty in those early years. As I became older I learned more dishes of my heritage and when I married into an Italian family my mother-in-law strongly influenced my love for all things Italian. She was a phenomenal cook whose skills in Italian food could rival any chef.

At the age of 16 I began a small catering business and by 21 I was running the kitchen of 300 seat restaurant in Toronto which later propelled me into becoming a restaurant manager. I have worked in both the full service and quick service industry.

Today after 20 years in the hospitality industry, I am back in my own kitchen, back to where my love of cooking was ignited and I look forward to rekindling my passion again, lost after years in the industry. I am in search of marvelous meals to share with my family and friends. I am seeking out great restaurants offering fabulous food and superior service. I look forward to sharing those experiences past and present with you.

Please join me on a weekly basis as I reveal my kitchen experiences, restaurants reviews, great recipes and any and all things food related. Welcome to The Kitchen Sink Journals.