Chicken Soup for the Vegetarian Soul

As most of you know, I'll be travelling for a year starting in March. I definitely want to keep in touch with everyone at home, but Facebook is too evil, and a new blog is too much work. After some thinking, I've decided that I will try to put up a quarterly local food-related post on this site. No promises though. :)

I should warn you, though, that my allegiance to the Vegetarian Faith will be put on hold during my travels. When I first committed myself a few years back, I had already decided that travelling outside Canada/US would be an exception. Part of me feels really guilty about this, because it makes me one of those “convenient vegetarian” types. But I can’t imagine turning away the chance to try all sorts of new meaty foods in their country of origin. I guess I’ll just have to live with the guilt.

Debate aside, I’ll need to prepare for this sudden assault on my gastrointestinal system prior to departure. This will be achieved by integrating meat into my diet slowly and methodically (read: very INconveniently) for 6 weeks. Departure date = March 2. Therefore, meat-eating date = January 19.

My first step as a reborn omnivore is chicken broth. I chose this because it’s easily digestible, achieving the ‘slow' part of the re-integration. Plus I really enjoy making broth from scratch; I feel like it's Slow Food at its most basic. And... it also just so happens I saved the leftover meat/bones from a holiday roast chicken left at my place, which was earmarked for the trash. Perfect. Armed with a recipe from the French Laundry Cookbook, I was on my way.

After one tedious hour of "skimming off impurities", I was left with a semi-clear, caramel coloured broth. After straining, adding back the carrots and meat bits, and reducing for another hour, I would say this handsome looking liquid could become a great chicken noodle soup. Or maybe a base for a squash soup using the frozen butternut I saved up from August. Thank you, dear chicken, for giving your life to nourish mine.

How To Petrify an Egg

When the weather turns wintery, chickens naturally stop laying eggs. To combat this, many egg producers will mimick warm weather conditions by using artificial lighting, which keeps the hens popping out eggs even when it's cold out.

Even so, I believe that we should still consider eggiwegs to be a seasonal commodity. I loaded up on eggs at the market in September, with the intent on some hard-core pickling. I tried spiced pickled eggs, and spicy ginger pickled eggs, but the best of the lot was good ol' garlic dill pickled eggs.

But there's only so much pickled eggs that one can eat... not to mention the foul smelling gas that one produces after eating all those pickled eggs. So I also made a few tea eggs for fun.

Tea eggs are serious yummers. Dark caramel brown in colour, with a smokey, complex flavour. And so easy to make... just boil some eggs in tea and soy sauce, and enjoy! Or is it? Hm...

I sooo wanted to have my eggs turn out gorgeous like the ones in the above recipe. I followed the instructions exactly, or so I thought. When I took the eggs out after 3 hours of boiling, I realized something was horribly wrong.

Reading the recipe the second time and applying some logic, the problem because so obvious. I was supposed to KEEP the egg-boiling water, and add the ingredients to it. Instead, I had basically boiled eggs in a solution of soy sauce PLUS salt and NO WATER for 3 hours. But I just can't bear food being wasted. So I ate those rubbery, shriveled and incredibly salty eggs over the course of a week. Shiver.

One more quick note before I sign-off. Peeling the shell from an ultra-fresh chicken egg can be a maddening experience. My good friend shared a tip with me on how to keep your blood pressure low in this stressful situation: make a slight crack on the bottom (large) end of the egg before boiling. Something about the pressure inside the egg equalizing with the outside, she says. Ta-da! One sexy looking egg.

City Chickens

The existing law that bans chicken-keeping in Toronto is in the news again. The Toronto Sun recently ran an article suggesting that it could be an issue for voters in this upcoming municipal election.

I would love to see this ban overturned, for all the reasons you can imagine. Plus it gives me another reason NOT to vote for Rob Ford (who is against city chickens, claiming "we're not living on the farm". What a sad day it would be for food policy and security if this bozo got elected to office).

Step 1: backyard chickens. Step 2: building rooftop chickens?