Veggie Bender

Ontario is plentiful with delicious, fresh produce. And so, there is no excuse for a local restaurant to serve stale, wilted greens that smell and taste like a compost bin. Unfortunately, that's what I was served when I dined out recently and ordered a chicken Caesar salad. Just look at those sad, pathetic leaves.

So you can understand why I went on a veggie bender the next day. I had lots of produce left over from my pre-Thanksgiving grocery spree. They were threatening to turn bad on me within a couple of days so I decided to cook them all.

For a light lunch, layers of thinly sliced zucchini and eggplant were placed between two layers of puff pastry. I blind baked the lower crust first to ensure the vegetables would not turn the bottom to an unappetizing mush. You need to prick the pastry liberally with a fork to prevent it from shrinking and exploding out of shape; alternatively, you could use pie weights or heavy, dry beans (even cheaper) to weigh down the dough.

Some people prefer to seed their zucchinis and eggplants -- the seeds contribute most of the bitterness in those vegetables. Personally, I enjoy eating them whole. The same goes for cucumbers and tomatoes. However, personal preference must give way to science when making a dish that's not supposed to be soggy. The seeds, or rather the membrane surrounding them, are particularly wet. Tomatoes are water balloons so exercise special due care when using them. Zucchinis and eggplants are dry by comparison, so they did not affect the pastry even when cooked with the seeds.

For dinner, I mindlessly made a vegetable stew, i.e. I threw in everything I had into a pot and hoped for the best.

All right, so it wasn't entirely without some thought process. Always start a stew with the ingredients that have to be browned first (e.g. garlic, onion, meat), then the hardy ingredients (e.g. carrots, bell peppers, turnips). Once the chunky ingredients have lightly cooked through, add the liquid ingredients (e.g. water, stock, wine). Delicate ingredients (e.g. dairy, mushrooms, herbs) need to be added last so that the heat won't overpower them.

With this sequence in mind, pretty much anything works in a stew. Chef Anna Olsen has a mantra: "anything that grows together, goes together." That is, plants that are harvested at the same time tend to complement each other very well within the same dish. Before the conveniences of refrigeration and fast transportation, seasonal cooking was a logical choice. You would have to work with whatever was in season at the time and by default, Olsen's rule would apply. Food pairings are complicated today, with the universal availability of ingredients being harvested elsewhere. That's not to say that you can't combine, say, a winter root vegetable with a summer fruit. It just means that it's easy and cost-effective to improvise recipes like stews with whatever is in season now.