Foodshed: An Edible Alberta Alphabet

By dee Hobshawn-Smith

In this intimate guide to Alberta's sustainable food scene, writer, poet, professional chef, and food advocate Dee Hobsbawn-Smith profiles more than seventy-five of the province's growers and producers. Learn the A to Z's of each producer, from Asparagus growers to Zizania cultivators, and enjoy the twenty-six original recipes, one for each type of produce.

The book also examines the ground that farmers stand on: government involvement, sustainability and the environment, animal welfare, farm labour, and organizations from Slow Food to the grassroots Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) movement.

An (agri)cultural examination of modern farming that offers a clear look at current government policies and sustainable growers' best practices, Foodshed sets forth some of the issues that modern farmers face, as seen by the growers themselves.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Touchwood Editions
• Release date: Apr 3, 2012
• ISBN: 9781927129166

dee Hobshawn-Smith

Dee Hobsbawn-Smith is a poet, writer, chef, educator, and advocate. Between 1992 and 1994, she was chef and co-owner of Foodsmith, a Calgary restaurant that featured locally raised ingredients on a menu that changed daily. For eight years, Dee wrote a column for the Calgary Herald called “The Curious Cook.” She also hosted an annual farm tour for the City Palate for twelve years. These experiences provided her with ample opportunity to visit growers in their fields. Foodshed is her fifth book; she is currently working on a poetry manuscript and a short story collection. She lives west of Saskatoon with her partner and their pets.

Book preview

Foodshed

AN EDIBLE ALBERTA ALPHABET

dee Hobsbawn-Smith

For my sons, my farmers and Dave.

Peace Country

Bridgeview Gardens, Peace River

Harmony’s Way Farm, Crooked Creek

Kemp Honey, High Prairie

First Nature Farms, Goodfare

Red Willow Gardens, Beaverlodge

Nature’s Way Veggie Patch, Peace River

Dunvegan Gardens, Dunvegan, Edmonton and Fort McMurray

Lakeland Wildrice Ltd., Athabasca

Four Creeks Ranch, Silver Valley

Valta Bison Farms, Valhalla Centre

North Region

Swift Aquaculture, Ponoka

Bles-Wold Dairy and Bles-Wold Yogurt, Lacombe

Birds & Bees Organic Winery and Meadery (formerly En Santé Organic Winery & Meadery), Brosseau

Sunworks Farm, Armena

The Cheesiry, Kitscoty

Sunshine Organic Farm, Warburg

Inspired Market Gardens, Edmonton

Lola Canola Honey, Bon Accord

Sparrow’s Nest Organics, Opal

Smoky Valley Goat Cheese, Smoky Lake

Greens, Eggs & Ham, Leduc

Prairie Gardens Adventure Farm, Bon Accord

Tipi Creek Farm, Morinville

Linda’s Market Gardens Ltd., Smoky Lake

Sunrise Farm, Killam

Sprout Farms Apple Orchards, Bon Accord

Central Region

Edgar Farms, Innisfail

Kayben Farms, Okotoks

Field Stone Fruit Wines and Bumbleberry Orchards Inc., Strathmore

Country Lane Farms Ltd., Strathmore

Winter’s Turkeys, Dalemead

Elbow Falls Wapiti, Priddis

Canadian Rocky Mountain Ranch, DeWinton

Greenview Aqua-Farm, Delacour

Sun to Earth Farm, Castor

Hoven Farms, Eckville

TK Ranch, Hanna

Chinook Honey Co., Chinook Arch Meadery and Chinook Vinegar Works, Okotoks

The Jungle, Innisfail

Oxyoke Farms, Linden

Gull Valley Greenhouse, Gull Lake

Thompson Small Farm and Bergen Farm, Sundre

Cakadu Heritage Lamb, Innisfail

Sylvan Star Cheese Farm, Red Deer

Highwood Crossing Farm Ltd., Aldersyde

Eagle Creek Farms Inc., Bowden Sunmaze and Eagle Creek Seed Potatoes, Bowden

Poplar Bluff Farm, Strathmore

Lund’s Organic Farm, Innisfail

Hotchkiss Herbs & Produce, Rocky View (s.e. Calgary)

Heritage Harvest, Strathmore

Hillside Greenhouses, Bowden

The Blooming Fields, Didsbury

Blue Mountain Biodynamic Farms, Carstairs

Buffalo Horn Ranch, Olds

South Region

Cunningham’s Scotch Cold Smoking, Pincher Creek

Headwater Fisheries Inc., Medicine Hat

The Producers of the Diamond Willow Range and Diamond Willow Organics Ltd., Pincher Creek

Broxburn Vegetables & Café, Lethbridge

Driview Farms, Fort Macleod

Ewe-Nique Farms, Champion

Old West Ranch Ltd., Mountain View

Fairwinds Farm, Fort Macleod

Owen Cleland, Bow Island

Leffers Farm, Coaldale

Saunders Farms Ltd., Taber

Broek Pork Acres, Coalhurst

Noble Duck Farms, Nobleford

New Oxley Ranch, Claresholm

The Garden of Van Ee-den, Rosemary

Trail’s End Ranch, Nanton

Paradise Hill Farm, Nanton

Vital Green Farms, Picture Butte

Jensen Farms, Taber

Antelope Creek Road Berry Farm, Brooks

Ehnes Organic Seed Cleaning Ltd. and Back 40 Organics Ltd., Etzikom

Olson’s High Country Bison, Spread Eagle Ranch and High Country Ranch, Waterton and Bragg Creek

contents

PART ONE: FACES AND FENCES

Beginnings

a is for asparagus

b is for berries

c is for chicken (and turkey)

d is for dandelions and other greens

e is for elk

f is for fish

g is for grass-fed beef

h is for honey

i is for iceberg and other lettuces

j is for jalapeno and other chile peppers

k is for kale

l is for lamb

m is for milk’s immortal leap: cheese (with thanks to clifton fadiman)

n is for navy beans, (great) northern beans, and other edible dry beans, lentils and pulses

o is for oilseeds

p is for pork

q is for quackers (ducks)

r is for roots

s is for squash

t is for tomatoes

u is for u-pick

v is for vegetables

w is for wheat

x is for xeriscaping experts, nearly extinct (plains bison)

y is for yogourt

z is for zizania (wild rice)

On New Ground

PART TWO: FACTS AND FIGURES

Changing Landscapes, Terroir and Our Global Diet

Sustainablity, Environmental Issues, Animals and Grass

Government Involvement and Labour

Finding Local Food

Home Cooking

Appendices (including Maps, Growers and Farmers: Contact Information)

Index

Acknowledgments

About the Author

PART ONE

FACES AND FENCES

Author and chef dee Hobsbawn-Smith opened Foodsmith in Calgary’s Mission District in 1992, serving locally sourced Canadiana cuisine. PHOTO: CALGARY HERALD

beginnings

Eaters must understand that eating takes place inescapably in the world, that it is inescapably an agricultural act, and that how we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used.

—Wendell Berry

The blue flame of my Wolf stove flickered my restaurant, Foodsmith, into being in 1992, in Calgary’s historic Mission District, with a new menu every day. A week after I opened the doors, my mother arrived from the family farm west of Saskatoon. She was preceded by my two young sons, who between them lugged an old-fashioned dairy shipper’s milk can, one my grandfather had used. I painted this for you, Mom said. The can was emblazoned with my company logo, a stylized wheat sheaf surrounding the restaurant’s name. We positioned it in a place of pride and filled it with the real thing, a sheaf of wheat.

In the early months, a local greenhouse grower knocked on my kitchen door with samples of beautiful organic mesclun strewn with edible flower petals and herbs. Cheese made by Johan Broere arrived by Greyhound bus from Rocky Mountain House. Hutterite farmers brought ducks, the black-hatted men winking at the young women in my kitchen, holding out hand-stitched baby quilts as lures. Then Darrel Winter, a good-natured farmer from Dalemead, sat beside my desk and convinced me to buy the first Winter’s Turkey to end up in a restaurant oven.

Our hands were busy with the dozens of daily tasks—chopping herbs, cutting up chickens, making stock, rolling pastry, braising bison—that a professional kitchen must accomplish in order to serve meals to hungry customers. As we worked, one of my sous-chefs, Cape Bretoner John A. McDonald (who took no end of ribbing about his parents’ choice of his names!) told stories about his childhood on the East Coast. He said he traded lobster sandwiches for peanut butter—a step up, he claimed—but I, raised on peanut butter and an Air Force ethos of waste not, was doubtful. John A. also explained the mysteries of regional maritime specialties like hodgepodge, Solomon Gundy and blueberry grunt.

That first winter, the mesclun grower went bust when a heavy snowfall collapsed the air-supported greenhouse roof. Foodsmith closed in 1994, and I traded my chef’s hat for a freelancer’s pen, writing about growers, chefs and food.

My connection with my farmer friends deepened. In 1995, I joined the national executive of Cuisine Canada. I remember being dumbfounded when Anita Stewart, the organization’s iconoclastic co-founder, said, Canadian cooks should look beyond lemons and vanilla. Ruling out such simple imported ingredients opened my eyes to what local could mean. I began to examine acids in my cooking in a new way, cheering when Alberta’s first artisan-made vinegar was finally uncorked in 2010.

During twelve years under dee’s guidance, City Palate’s Foodie Tootle took Calgarians to fifty Albertan farms, including Kayben Farms in 2006.

My friend Gail Norton owns Calgary’s premiere food publication, City Palate, and The Cookbook Co. Cooks, an upscale kitchen shop, bookstore and cooking school where I taught for many years. Early in 1998, she tapped my shoulder. Wouldn’t you love to take a busload of city folks out to some of your favourite farms and ranches? That was the start of the annual Foodie Tootle bus tours. Over twelve years, I took a total of six hundred city folk on all-day trips that culminated in on-farm dinners—locally sourced, of course—to a total of fifty farms and ranches in south-central Alberta. That tour is now in the capable hands of Karen Anderson, who knows a thing or two about buses and hospitality—she owns Calgary Food Tours.

Around the same time, I learned of Slow Food, the international organization that seeks to restore honour and dignity to food and farmers in a fast-paced world. I served on Slow Food Calgary’s steering council for ten years. My biggest Slow thrill was chairing the committee that nominated local growers, cooks and culinary students to attend Terra Madre, the Slow Food movement’s biennial global get-together in Italy. Many of the farmers profiled in this book have become active in Slow Food and some have taken the mind-blowing trip to Italy. After nominating nearly two hundred Albertans to attend Terra Madre, I attended the conference myself in 2008, and my eldest son, now a Red Seal journeyman cook, went in 2010.

It didn’t take going to Italy to know that food is a family matter. Both my sons are confident professional cooks who live in Calgary. I’m the daughter and granddaughter of Saskatchewan dry-land farmers who lived through the Depression and the endless cycles of rising and falling food prices. I sense an internal communion with my late grandmother, Sarah Hofer, who canned, baked bread and cooked every day. A farm field feels like home ground to me. To those who decry a return to that nurturing lifestyle as a step backwards, I can only say that what we have replaced it with is empty.

In 2003, I began to consult about local food for the Alberta government’s Dine Alberta program. The goal was to put more Alberta-grown and Alberta-made food on Albertan plates, at home and in restaurants. An annual month-long local-dining festival introduced diners to many local foods, and a publicly accessible database told them whose hands had grown them and where to find them.

Teaching cooking classes and my journalism work, writing for the Calgary Herald and Calgary’s City Palate, led to my fourth book, Shop Talk. My previous three cookbooks were published in 1997, 1999 and 2004. Shop Talk was a guide to sourcing ingredients in the greater Calgary area, and at its heart was a detailed listing of south-central Albertan growers. When I realized those growers deserved a book of their own, I began travelling around the province to visit my farmers on their home ground, funded in part by a grant from the Alberta Foundation for the Arts.

Foodshed is the culmination of decades of local eating. It celebrates seventy-six Albertan growers. They are ranchers, fishers, farmers, market gardeners and orchardists, forward-looking and forward-thinking. There are many others, equally deserving, who are not included, mostly for reasons of space. Those I have included operate what some might call a throwback to my grandparents’ day—mixed farms, market gardens, specialized businesses. Sustainability is a common thread. All are devoted to the important job of feeding the people they know—their neighbours, Albertans.

When I first imagined this A to Z format, it seemed a pretty straightforward approach. It’s been more of a sidewinder than I thought, and has led to some imaginative uses of the alphabet. My usage of X, for example, was inspired by my sons’ old picture book Animalia. I hope you enjoy the slightly goofy thought processes that also landed ducks under Q (for Quackers) and ensured, like any frugal prairie cook, that every letter of the alphabet was used.

My Local

My vision of local food is more inclusive than the one-hundred-mile diet’s arbitrary focus. I don’t suggest we consume a diet strictly based on regionalism, only that we eat mostly based on our foodshed. We do live north of the 49th, and our geography imposes limits, so I practise selective, pragmatic self-indulgence instead of self-deprivation. Fair trade coffee, tea, chocolate, olives, vanilla and citrus remain part of my pantry.

It used to be that local was defined by how far a rider on horseback could ride in one day. Market villages were only a few miles apart; produce and meats were consumed within a stone’s throw of where they had been raised. In defining local, I imagine concentric rings, starting at my own garden and radiating outwards to include all of Alberta. Where those rings intersect with the ripples of other provinces is how and where waves of change begin. I drink wine, and eat peaches, from BC’s Okanagan and Similkameen valleys, a day’s drive west of Calgary. In twenty-first-century Canada, with the horsepower harnessed to a car, an Albertan driving from the heart of the prairie can reach, in a day’s trip, the Peace Country’s boreal forest, the high foothills of Turner Valley, the badlands of the Cypress Hills, the Rocky Mountains, or the northern lakeside arms of the Canadian Shield. That’s the Albertan foodshed.

It’s not a fad to eat locally, any more than it was in our grandparents’ day. It’s a simple fact for the majority of the world, as travellers learn. When we go to Toulouse, we eat cassoulet in the style of Toulouse. In Liguria, our pasta is dressed with pesto made from the hillsides’ fresh basil, and in Galicia, in northern Spain, we eat anchovies fished from the Bay of Biscay.

In Alberta, a natural foodshed, our pantry overflows with bounty. Albertans raise much of what we need for a pleasurable table: meats, grains, pulses, fruits and vegetables, cheeses, oil and vinegar, even wines made from hardy fruits and berries. Farmers are the wellspring. Better farm practices make for better ingredients. There is a decided correlation: good farming generates good food for good eating, good health and good living.

The new crop of thoughtful growers is tending fields, orchards and water to produce our food in a sustainable manner. Writing in France in 1825 in The Physiology of Taste, as translated in 1949 by MFK Fisher, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin said, Tell me what you eat, and I shall tell you what you are. It is just as true in twenty-first-century Canada. Thanks to travel, television, the Internet and books, we are growing more food-conscious; we are realizing that we are, literally, completely and exclusively, what we eat.

Here’s a quick guide to what is produced in this amazing province, Artichokes to Zizania:

A is for . . . artichokes, asparagus, ale, apples.

B is for . . . beans, beets, beef, bison, berries, buffalofish, blueberries, beer, berry wine, butter, broccoli, buffalo mozzarella (bocconcini di bufala).

C is for . . . carrots, cheeses, cherries, chard, celery, cantaloupe, casaba, canola, canola oil, chicken, chèvre, cheddar, cucumbers, crabapples, coho, chevon.

D is for . . . dill, dairy, ducks, dried beans.

E is for . . . eggplant, eggs, eels, elk.

F is for . . . fish, fennel, fava beans, feta, field peas, flour, fruit wine, flaxseed and flaxseed oil.

G is for . . . grass-fed beef, garlic, Gouda, goldeye, Gruyère, great northern beans.

H is for . . . horseradish, hemp, honey, honeydew, honeyberries (haskap), habanero chile.

I is for . . . icicle radishes, iceberg lettuce, IPA (India Pale Ale), Italian broccoli, Italian parsley.

J is for . . . juniper, jerky, jacob’s cattle beans, jalapeno chile.

K is for . . . kale, kohlrabi, kidney beans, kielbasa.

L is for . . . lettuces, lamb, leeks, lentils, lager.

M is for . . . mustard, milk, mushrooms, mead, muskmelons, mozzarella.

N is for . . . navy beans, nasturtiums, nuts, native grasses, nettles.

O is for . . . onions, oats, oilseeds.

P is for . . . pulses, peas, pumpkin, potatoes, peppers, parsley, parsnips, pickerel, pike, poultry, pears, plums, pierogi, pecorino.

Q is for . . . quail, quark, quackers.

R is for . . . rosemary, raspberries, rapini, rutabaga, rhubarb, radicchio, rabbit.

S is for . . . strawberries, sunflowers, squash, sturgeon, salt, santa claus melon, Santa Fe chile, sausages, savoy cabbage, scotch barley, scotch bonnet chile, serrano chile, smoked fish, snow peas, sorrel, sour cream, soybeans, spaghetti squash, spinach, spelt, spearmint, sugar beets, stinging nettles, stout, swedes, sweet peppers, Swiss chard, salmon, sage.

T is for . . . turnips, tomatoes, turkey, tilapia, trout, Treviso, thyme, tarragon.

U is for . . . u-pick, udon, unsalted butter.

V is for . . . vinegar, veal, vegetables, vegetable oils, verbena, vodka.

W is for . . . watercress, watermelon, whitefish, wine, whisky.

X is for . . . xeriscaping experts, nearly extinct (plains bison).

Y is for . . . yarrow, yard-long beans, yeast, yellow-eyed peas, yogourt.

Z is for . . . zizania, zucchini.

A–Z Recipe List

Food is a circular system. Without consumers to cook and eat their produce, growers are singing to an empty choir. To close the circle, I include twenty-six of my current favourite original recipes. This A to Z collection makes the most of what my farmers, orchardists, fishers and ranchers harvest.

A is for asparagus: Asparagus Roll

B is for berries: Berry Rhubarb Buckle with Yogourt Cream and Berry Ginger Compote

C is for chicken: Butter Chicken

D is for dandelions and other greens: Wilted Greens Agrodolce

E is for elk: Cherry-smoked Elk Loin on Eggplant Salad

F is for fish: Smoked Fish Chowder with Chives

G is for grass-fed beef: Honey-Herb-Cured Alberta Beef or Bison Steak with Spiced Honey Gastrique

H is for honey: Apple-Thyme Mousse and Caramelized Winter Fruit with Filo Sails

I is for iceberg and other lettuces: Iceberg, Arugula and Orange Saladio with Pink Pickled Onions and Pine Nuts

J is for jalapeno and other peppers: Desert Stuffed Peppers with Pepitas and Gouda

K is for kale and other sturdy greens: Chicken Ballotine stuffed with Kale, Mushrooms and Sage

L is for lamb: Rogan Josh

M is for milk’s immortal leap (cheese): Almost Alsatian Flambée

N is for (great) northern and navy beans and other pulses: Canadian Cassoulet

O is for oilseeds and oil: Herbed Honey Vinaigrette

P is for pork: Charcuterie @ Home: Pork Two Ways

Q is for quackers: Duck Two Ways

R is for roots: Grilled or Roasted Roots and Veggies with Minted Yogourt

S is for squash: Roasted Squash with Peppers, Corn, Feta and Smoked Paprika

T is for tomatoes: Tomato, Walnut and Cilantro Bruschetta

U is for u-pick: Berries in Yogourt Cream with Green Pepper Sauce

V is for vegetables: Vegetable Pakoras with Mint Chutney, Cucumber Raita and Lemon Ketchup

W is for wheat: Flaxseed and Oat Bread Roll with Basil, Gouda and Cold-pressed Canola Oil

X is for xeriscaping experts, nearly extinct (plains bison): Braised Bison Hump with Cherries and Juniper

Y is for yogourt: Yogourt Tiramisu alla Dennice with Fruit Wine or Mead Zabaglione

Z is for zizania: Zizania (Wild Rice) and Cranberry Risotto with Fennel and Sautéed Zucchini

Old-time prairie hay rake and newfangled round bales, the old and the new approach to farming.

My Growers

Much as the great short-story writer Raymond Carver lit up the lives of working-class Americans, my goal is to illuminate the faces and personal lives of my farmers. From the particular, we observe the universal. Times are changing in agriculture, as my friend Kathleen Charpentier, who lives on Sun to Earth Farm near Castor, observes, Back, but not backwards.

The principle behind Foodshed is simple: cook food grown by people you know. As Andreas and Mary Ellen Grueneberg say on their Greens, Eggs & Ham website, You know your doctor, you know your lawyer, you know your accountant. Who’s your farmer?

Here are my farmers. By monetary standards, a few are wealthy, but most live close to the thin edge of poor. What impels them to work long hours, live rurally and earn a pittance? In a world that professes to admire food and farmers but insists on carping about the high cost of eating, especially local fare, why do these farmers persist in farming? Read on to meet them, and to learn their individual answers.

a is for asparagus

Edgar Farms Innisfail

Doug and Elna Edgar, and Keri and Randy Graham

The tangle of ferns that engulfs my farmyard garden each summer bears no discernible relationship to the sweet green spears that I like to line up on my plate each spring. It is Mother Nature’s small joke that we are eating shoots, not leaves, of ferns. Asparagus is hope made tangible, spears spun from fragile ferns and sunshine after winter’s absolutist, mineral-fed root vegetables.

On this hot and dusty April day, the wind is whipping sand in taupe gusts across the slope of the hill. Sand blasting, Elna Edgar calls it, wincing as she pushes her fair hair off her face. One spear, barely three centimetres tall, is emerging from the small, sandy ridge that swells through the Edgars’ twenty-eight-acre asparagus field. That solitary spear tells her that it is time to cut last year’s old ferns from the field.

Harvest begins in mid-May, and lasts until the end of June when the asparagus stalks bloom into luxuriant ferns. In that brief window of time, Elna, her staff and family will live, breathe, eat and pick asparagus, about twenty thousand pounds worth, over one thousand pounds per acre. In one day in 2006, at the height of the season, they harvested a record amount—nearly two thousand pounds, ten times their initial harvest in 1989. The Edgars had to consider: how big is big enough, and what would they do with any excess crop?

Asparagus was an act of hope. Elna and her husband, Doug, planted their first acre in 1986, despite being told by agriculture experts that asparagus wasn’t viable in Alberta’s rugged climate, that their crops would be one-fifth of a warmer climate’s yield. But that cool weather translates into sweeter vegetables. It was doing well in the garden. So we put in an acre, Elna explains while driving us to the field. The family waited two years before harvesting to allow the plants to develop. In 1996, they began to add value by pickling the excess crop.

The dream was that the asparagus crop would feed their daughters’ future. It did. Cash earned from picking put the Edgars’ two girls, Keri and Angie, now in their early thirties, through post-secondary education. We never believed in just handing money to our kids. We always wanted them to make their own way, Elna recounts. That Keri and her husband, Randy Graham, have returned to the farm with their two young daughters is a triumph too, that their grown children see the value of farm life, and want to raise their girls here. Keri will decide how big [a farm] is big enough, Elna says.

During harvest, pickers ride through the field—sometimes twice daily—perched three abreast on Doug’s ingenious aspara-buggy, a squat, wheeled device that looks like a distant cousin to a da Vinci flying machine. They sit an eagle’s wingspan apart, each positioned over a row. I climb aboard, and am dismayed at how quickly those spears come towards me. I fumble and toss spears untidily into the waiting lug. Beside me, Elna is efficiently snapping and stacking, and steering too, with her feet. When Elna offers me a raw spear, I confess I don’t like it raw, but eat it when she insists. Yum. Freshly picked, asparagus tastes like young peas.

In the packing shed, the spears stand in cool water to stay crisp, beside produce drawn from the other family farms that form the successful co-operative known collectively as Innisfail Growers: Beck Farm, The Jungle, Upper Green Farm and Hillside Greenhouses. Shelves and freezers are filled with Elna’s pickles, certified Red Angus beef sausages, burgers, jerky, roasts and steaks.

By the time the other fruits and vegetables make their appearance, the Edgars’ asparagus season will be done for another year. Her field will return to fern, and rest.

In 2008, Doug and Elna attended Terra Madre, Slow Food’s biennial United Nations of growers and cooks held in Torino, Italy. The time spent in Italy solidified their sense of connection to the greater community of growers, Elna says.

Before I leave, Elna gives me asparagus crowns as a gift for my garden, welcoming me into that community in a way that merely cooking doesn’t impart. Putting the crowns in the ground is the easy part. Patience comes harder.

asparagus roll

This elegant spring dish plays up the sweet earthiness of new-crop asparagus. It takes its seasoning from the classic Italian flavours of porchetta—capers, garlic, citrus, parsley, rosemary—using grapefruit’s brashness in place of the customary lemon zest. Use pork tenderloin or boneless skin-on chicken thighs. Serves 2.

½ pork tenderloin or 2 chicken thighs, boneless, skin on

1 tsp (5 mL) olive oil or cold-pressed organic canola oil

2 Tbsp (30 mL) minced onion

2 tsp (10 mL) grated ginger root

kosher salt and freshly cracked black pepper to taste

1–2 Tbsp (15–30 mL) herb mustard

½ tsp (2.5 mL) minced fresh rosemary

2 tsp (10 mL) minced fresh parsley

1 Tbsp (15 mL) chopped capers

½ tsp (2.5 mL) grapefruit zest

6 spears asparagus, halved

1 Tbsp (15 mL) chopped oil-cured olives (optional)

1–2 Tbsp (15–30 mL) olive oil or cold-pressed organic canola oil, for the pan

Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C). Cut pork in half and slice each piece of meat into a flat piece about 6 x 6 inches (15 x 15 centimetres), viewing it as a jellyroll to be unwound.

Sauté onion and ginger in oil until tender, about 5 minutes. Season with salt and pepper, then cool. Spread mustard on one side of meat. Sprinkle with herbs, capers, zest