Fast ‘Slow Food’

These samosas will soon become my fast slow food.

I know that some days, by the time dinnertime comes along I’m too bushed to bother. I decided yesterday that I need to have some ‘fast food’ on hand. For me, that means something that I can pretty much take out of the freezer, pop in the oven, and within a half hour or so be eating a satisfying meal. Now when I say satisfying, I don’t mean some tasteless slog that will ‘satisfy’ hunger, be incredibly nourishing and sit like a brick in my belly: the sort of food my grandmother would say ‘sticks to your ribs’.  That’s not appealing. In this regard, I am a bit like Goldilocks: I want things to be just right, and that means leaning towards nouveau haute cuisine type fare.

Since I have a nice potato harvest, yesterday I decided to make samosas for the freezer. Tomorrow, I may make perogies. Some time this week, I should make my cabbage rolls and freeze them, as I’ve got two more 5 gallon crocks of sauerkraut on the go and one of the crocks has a whole cabbage sunk into it. As I look at the above list, I realize some of you will be thinking, ‘That’s not stodgy fare?’ Well it’s not, and here’s why.

My sauerkraut crocks working their magic.

The food that I will prepare my ‘fast food’ from is actually ‘Slow Food’ fare: heritage vegetables, chickens and eggs, beyond organically grown veggies (by that I mean the original, unco-opted, non-industrial organic) that are all from open pollinated seed, and home fermented foods.

My friend digging the Ozette potatoes that became my samosas.

For example, the potatoes that I used for the samosas yesterday were Ozettes, an ancient variety of fingerling potato. The Ozette was brought to the new world by the Spanish exploreres in the 1700s and grown by the First Nations on the West Coast of North America. It is a really flavourful potato and won first prize in the personal potato party I had last week (possibly more on that in another post).

The elegant Ozette potato...

I’ll use the leaves of my embedded sauerkraut cabbage for the cabbage rolls (that’s the haute cuisine part of what could otherwise be quite stodgy fare). Using the fermented leaves makes a world of difference in the flavour of the cabbage rolls. Everyone who has ever tried my cabbage rolls claims they are the best they’ve ever had, and I’ve served them to some self proclaimed experts (we have a lot of Germans, Swiss, Austrians and Norwegians in this area of BC).

As for other fast ‘slow food’, I was hoping to have had tomatoes to make spaghetti sauce, but that’s just not going to happen–the lousy summer we had this year made sure of that.