Adding Colour to the Pastry Stand

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The Tea Room market now has a well attended pastry stand where we sell our pies, cakes, scones and various sweets that typically make up our High Teas. This week we've decided to start showcasing the talent of one of our team and we made from scratch some scrumptious and beautiful cupcakes. We've decided that there will always be something to interest our guests, so our cupcakes will now be decorated with seasonal themes.

The pastry stand is now not only scrumptious but also colourful,

In fact, we can now take special orders for cupcakes (they make a  great gift idea) or for larger cakes destined for special events and functions.

In the Tea Room market, we've also added a new chutney to our line: Blueberry. This Blueberry chutney is unlike most chutneys in that it consists primarily of Blueberries, a touch of ornage zest and spices (no onions or other fruits are involved). This makes for a spicy Blueberry flavour, great with ham, salmon or chicken.

The latest addition to the chutney line: Blueberry.

Elsewhere on the farm, it was now time for us to start planting. It is early for this since last frost in these parts tends to occur in mid-May. However, we wanted to get an early start on the edible flowers that typically accompany our Tea Room dishes (primarily Scarlet Runner and Borage) and on our herbs which are essential to our kitchen. As a result, the Growing Dome "nursery" is now in full production as we wait for our seeds to sprout.

The Growing Dome nursery is now in full production.

Fresh herbs are an important part of our cooking. To date, most of these have come from local greenhouses. We anxiously anticipate picking our own from our raised beds. So far, some of these have wintered well and are already showing signs of production. Standard herbs such as Sage, Thyme, Savoury and Chives can already be picked as we need them.

There are however two special perennial herbs we have really taken a liking to: Chervil and Lovage. We planted the Chervil from seed last Spring. With a bit of protection from some straw, the Chervil survived this hard Winter and is showing signs of thriving as the Spring progresses.

Our Chervil  is already looking great.

Lovage is another perennial we were lucky to obtain from a kind lady who is a member of the local horticultural society. We left the Lovage in a pot and it Wintered in the Dome. There it pretty much remained green all year long.

The Lovage will soon be ready to transplant outside the Dome.

We mention these two herbs because they are not readily available and have become quite important to our vegetable stock. We make our soups from scratch using a vegetable stock. Often it is very difficult to give a vegetable stock the kind of "body" or depth of flavours you would normally get from a meat stock. Our trick consists of three rules:  1. always include leeks, 2. oven roast all your vegetables before combining them in the stock pot, and 3. use an abundance of fresh herbs (Lovage and Chervil adding that distinctive taste).

To close this week, we're also quite excited with what will be our first crop....a foraged one.

The Ramps are almost ready to pick. We really lucked out with our few acres of swampy Carolinian forest. This time of year, the grounds are covered with Ramps (also called Wild Garlic or Bear Leek). Almost picked to extinction in Quebec, these plants have to be harvested sustainably. So we minimize the amount picked to 3% of the total field (the plants flower every seven years).

A field of beautiful Ramps...just about ready to pick.

For those not familiar with ramps, it is truly a culinary delicacy. We will be pickling some and making them available in the market. But better yet, we'll be serving these with our Ploughman's platter as long as quantities last. We hope to have these on our menu within the next two weeks ...and we can hardly wait (the whole family loves these).