Labour of Love - Love Catering Co. – week 3
The adventure continues… here is week 3 of local harvest following a start-up, locally focused catering company based out of Toronto, ON, called Love Catering Co. If you need to catch up, check out week 1 and week 2 of this company’s “labour of love”:
After a crazy-busy week I’m happy to report that we now have three stores and cafes (with three more in the earlier deliberating stages) signed-on to carry Love Catering Co.'s product! We'll be supplying these businesses with terrines, charcuterie, pickled vegetables, gazpacho... and the list goes on. You might remember that this started off as a catering company that was striving to go heavy on the private functions- but turns out there’s an even bigger market for lunches. We're having a great time letting Love Catering grow organically and it’s so much fun seeing where that takes us. The next stage is a cool package design and many, many more terrine experiments. This week we are also going to try making our own sausages from scratch.
Just so you know, the Ploughman’s Board (aka a selection of charcuterie, cheese, pickles, spread and bread) that won over the heart of our first-ever client was a pork and triple crunch mustard terrine, which we paired with 2 year old smoked white cheddar; sweet pickle and simple baguette. Made with love of course.
We sourced the pork from Cumbrae Farms; the smoked white cheddar from The Village Cheesemonger; the baguette from Le Comptoir de Celestin. The pickles were made in our own kitchen using cucumbers from Fiesta Farms organic market on Christie.
Spencer and I were up until the wee hours on Wednesday night making pickles of all sorts. We got a little carried away but the result was pretty delicious, if I may say so myself. First, we cold-pickled carrots- this is actually cheating (don’t tell) because the vegetables (from Square Fruit Market and Groceries) and brine are never actually cooked- this also means that they go straight into the fridge rather than being canned and stored in a pantry to age. We tried this with shallots and red cabbage as well, sweetening the brine by using fig balsamic vinegar. We pickled golden and green cauliflower, and red cabbage with apple the old-fashioned way. For the most part it turned out well, except for a few rookie mistakes: storing cauliflower in a jar that used to house peppermint tea (no matter how long you boil the jar for, your pickles will still taste of mint) and also using a Patron tequila bottle to store cabbage. "How are we going to get this out?" and "Won’t the cabbage taste like tequila?" were two questions Spencer and I ignored until about halfway through. Lucky for us, that particular pickle experiment turned out the best.
Tonight Elias and I are so excited to be trying our hand at making these rad little dark chocolate and bacon rillettes for after dinner- if we can wait that long without having a taste! Don't tell but we totally stole the idea from Cowbell in Parkdale, an amazing restaurant that works almost exclusively with naturally-raised, organic meat and produce, sourced from local farmers. If you get a chance, check them out.
1564 Queen Street West
Toronto, ON
(416) 849-1095
http://www.cowbellrestaurant.ca/
Next week: the outcome of making our own sausages from scratch!
