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Comfort Food for the Holidays

Food topics frequently come up at our staff meetings. We often talk about food from our garden or from the farmers market. As we were pondering the holiday season the topic of favourite comfort foods came up. We each have our own unique family and cultural traditions — and particularly to mark holidays and special occasions.

We asked Foodlands members for stories about their go-to seasonal comfort food — dishes they remember from grandmother’s kitchen or something they like to make when they’re home alone on a cold winter’s night. Here are a few contributions to share for the Winter Holidays

Trish Chung — Horse Lake Community Farm Cooperative

Christmas is about getting together and enjoying life’s pleasures. Nourishing food to feed a crowd is prepared with love. Our family liked to stay up late on Christmas eve. There are always sweet treats of every kind and rich meat and gravy the next day so soup served late is a hit.

I simmer a couple ckickens to make broth early in the day and because it is cold outside I can set it out there to cool and skim off the fat. I add ginger, garlic and onion along with astralagus root when I have it. You scoop that all out with the fat. I make wontons ahead of time and freeze them or make them fresh and everyone helps. We chop bok choy, green onion, julienne carrot and celery. At around 10pm I get the broth up to a boil add the vegetables, wontons and prawns and chicken pulled from the carcass. It is so nourishing. The younger ones can go to bed with a full belly and the older ones can stay up and play games and visit before they do the secret Santa duties.

Ariella Falkowski — Rootdown Organic Farm

When the days get shorter and colder, I turn towards comfort food in a big way. Maybe it’s because I’m a mixed vegetable farmer, and the fall and winter is when I tend to have more time to cook, or maybe it’s simply because fall and winter vegetables have always been some of my favourites – especially when I’ve worked hard all spring and summer to grow them. Whatever the reason, I love simple, hearty, locally grown comfort foods in the darker months.

These are often very basic and rarely do I follow an actual recipe – for example, a whole meal consisting solely of roast winter squash wedges (wedges is best so that they caramelize on the edges) and roast miscellaneous root veggies. Or roast potatoes, squash, and a radicchio or kale salad with a creamy dressing, nuts, fruit, and cheese. Or creamy leek and potato soup with fresh baked biscuits. Or pasta with caramelized onions, cubes of roast squash, and parmesan cheese. While not fancy, these types of meals, made mostly with farm grown veggies feed both my body and my soul, therefore qualifying as the best type of comfort foods in my mind – healthy, hearty, and downright delicious.

Jen Cody — Growing Opportunities Cooperative

The food I made for Craig and I during the holidays, and comfort food for us both, was Brussel sprouts. We loved all ways but boiled was a go-to for us with salt and pepper. And in the last year, stir fried with garlic and little lemon. Nothing better than the sprout for dinner.

Paul Manly — Nanaimo City Councillor

My mother is Danish and makes some lovely traditional dishes including a red cabbage dish and a couple of desserts that I can barely pronounce let alone spell. These are dishes my grandmother made and my mother still makes. They remind me of my childhood and the Christmas holiday season. All the best.

Sara Dent — Executive Director & Co-Founder Young Agrarians

Our family tradition annually is a mix of Chanukah and Christmas… Chanukah was always a longer process, and then Christmas was really just fun when I was a kid. My mom makes the best latkes. (Even though my parents are divorced, my Dad still asks her to send over latkes every year. However, these days, we’re actually all together at all of the family dinners, birthdays, holidays, etc.) This recipe would have been from my mom’s mom who was really a wonderful cook of Jewish cultural foods. My grandmother Leah was off the boat from Poland and came to Canada as a girl, before WWII.

Latkes:

4 large organic russet potatoes about 1 lb each
juice of 1/2 a lemon
1 large onion
2 large eggs
1/4 cup rice flour (sub matzah meal if you can eat gluten)
2 teaspoons salt
1/8 tsp white pepper
veg oil for frying

Peel potatoes and grate them by hand.
Roll grated potatoes in tea towel and wring it out to get rid of excess starchy water, or use another method for draining out water.
Place potatoes in bowl and mix in lemon juice.
Peel and grate onion and beat eggs lightly.
Add grated onion, beaten eggs, rice flour, salt & pepper and mix well.
Heat 1/4 cup oil in frying pan.
Drop potato mixture in pan a tablespoon at a time and fry until brown on both sides.
Drain on paper towels and keep warm in a 250°F oven.

Serve with applesauce and sour cream on the side, or vinegar.

Sarah Wenman — Farmers on 57th

As for comfort food, baked beans comes to mind for me. I have been growing a certain cultivar of bush beans for dried beans – a bean passed down through my Swedish side of the family, brought by my great grandparents when they settled in Saskatchewan to farm in the late 1800s. It is a rather plain and hearty brown bean. This dish takes 4 hours. It’s a good one when you are at home all day or evening – it warms the house and smells wonderful. There are many recipes for baked beans, this is amended from my grandparents’ woodstove version:

Baked Beans – Bruna Bönor; to make 5 cups of baked beans

Cook: 2 cup dried beans (brown or navy are best imo but any will do), cooked until just tender (don’t overcook! the final dish will be mushbeans if you do!!)
Put beans in an oven proof baking dish with lid.
Then, on the stovetop: Saute in butter or oil: 1/4 of large onion (red onion is best) + 1 minced small garlic clove.
Add to onion mix and heat: 1/2 cup tomato sauce, 1 T worcestershire, 1/4 cup molasses, 1/3 cup brown sugar, 1 T prepared mustard (dijon or yellow), salt + pepper.
Pour sauce over cooked beans.
Add water if needed to cover beans (and add water as needed throughout cooking process).
Put lid on and bake in oven at 300-325 for 4 hours.
Stir every 1/2 hour.

Kathleen Gibson — Founding Member, BC Food Systems Network

A seasonal comfort food in our house is my grandmother’s Christmas cake. It’s a light-coloured, though rich, fruit cake with a generous amount of rum in it. We don’t ice it with marzipan or Royal icing (too sweet). My cousin helped me adapt the English weight measures to cups. The recipe continues to evolve in various ways: square or rectangular rather than circular baking pans make better sections for serving or gifting. And a Jamaican acquaintance told me to aim for rum fumes that almost knock you over when you take the lid off the cake tin! Accordingly the cakes are now “fed” (holes poked in the top, basted with rum) several times before serving. For best results this means they should be baked in early November and fed every two weeks. What actually happens is that early November is overcome with processing fall harvest, so the cakes get cooked later and basted more often. They are delicious served with rum butter; some family members consider the rum butter the feature and the cake merely the platform!

Christmas Cake (Kathleen Jane Gale’s recipe: credited to Mrs Beasley)

6 oz butter
6 oz sugar
1 tsp coffee essence
3 eggs
6 oz currants
6 oz sultanas
3 oz raisins
3 oz glace cherries
2 oz candied peel
2 oz almonds
1 wineglass sherry, brandy or rum
8 oz flour
1 pinch salt
1 tsp cocoa
2 tsp mixed spices
1 tsp baking powder

Shred peel and cut up raisins and cherries.
Blanch and shred almonds.
Mix all the fruit and warm slightly.
Sieve the flour, cocoa and spices.
Beat the eggs.
Line a 7-inch cake pan with two thicknesses of paper.
Cook at 250-300°F for two hours.

Amir Nourmand — Abundance Community Farm

As for holiday seasonal food, we do not celebrate Christmas in Iran, so it’s not a special occasion. However, one thing I could share around this time of the year in Iran is the winter solstice, where we eat pomegranates and read poetry! We have the pomegranate with a spice called Angelica, which gives it a nice smell and flavour 🙂 Amir Nourmand — Abundance Community Farm