Jennifer Renaud’s submission to our Apron Strings contest is a testament to the importance of reading labels. Poor Grandma.  The contest continues until Father’s Day (June 19th). Submit your story of the worst meal someone in your family ever served for your chance to win a Fiesta Farms gift certificate.

My grandma’s apple pie is legend in our family. It is the only perennially-requested item at all family gatherings and it is a closely-guarded recipe.

Last Thanksgiving Grandma joined us up north to celebrate the end of the first summer at our new cottage. That Saturday, while the family headed to town to pick up a few last minute items for the feast, Grandma stayed behind to make a couple pies — and we came home to the mouth-watering aroma of baking apples!

The next night after a lavish spread of turkey, stuffing and cranberries we all eagerly awaited our little slice of heaven

. I remember looking across at my brother as he took his first bite and his face froze with a strange look. I glanced around the table where, in rapid succession, that same look flashed across the faces of everyone at the table. Oblivious to what was unfolding around her, dear old Grandma was tucking in contentedly to a lone piece of pumpkin pie: store-bought the day before.

As it turns out, my 80-year-old grandmother had mistaken the salt container for the sugar container. How many cups of sugar normally go into an apple pie? That’s how many cups of SALT went into this apple pie. My family is a living testament to the fact that copious amounts of salt burns taste buds. Granny will never live it down.

Months later we now try and keep the teasing to a minimum: she still has one ace up her sleeve… she’s still the only one with the recipe!

Noelle entered this spine-tingling story to our Apron Strings contest. You can enter yours too. Share your pain, we’ll publish it here and give you a chance to buy good food and make properly cooked food to serve your family. Thanks Noelle!

From a young age I discovered a profound love for fried chicken. In fact, I was pretty sure someone abducted me from the deep southern United States at birth, and unknowingly transplanted me to an all-Italian family in Toronto. Instead of savouring classic dishes like my beloved fried chicken, jalapeno-laced cornbread and braised okra, I found myself seated at dinner tables laden with pasta and veal Milanese.
So you can imagine my delight, when on a steamy August long weekend spent at a family friend’s Muskoka cottage, my mother proudly announced we would be having fried chicken for dinner.

What delight! What wonder! What crispy-skinned, salty-spicy, tender-juicy tidbits awaited! I was only 12 years old at the time, and this meal was going to be epic.

My mother followed a 5-Star Food Network recipe to a tee. She carefully soaked the chicken pieces overnight in flavoured buttermilk. She patted them bone dry. She double breaded them in a homemade seasoned flour mixture. She then took them outside to a bubbling deep fryer resting precariously on a Coleman camp burner.

The chicken, and my mother, emerged from the frying area unscathed. After taking their sweet, golden bath, the pieces of meat emerged sizzling in a perfect shade — a heavenly shade unmatched by any Italian food item. It just can’t be done.

I squealed with excitement as the chicken platter hit the table. The potato salad and coleslaw, also homemade, were merely the meager opening acts for the main show.

My dad and I eagerly reached — no clamoured — for our pieces and bit in hard.

English novelist and playwright Dorothy Gladys “Dodie” Smith once wrote: “When things mean a very great deal to you, exciting anticipation just isn’t safe.”

Stuck between my teeth and tongue was sopping mess of raw, slimy bird. And then, mercilessly, the coating slid off the skin and landed with a wet slap on my dish.

Each piece was the same. Disappointment on a bone.

If we never ate fried chicken in my house before, we would certainly never eat it again. To this day, reminding my mother of the great cottage-fried-chicken-debacle is not a good idea. It was the only thing she has ever made that turned out inedible, and the thought sparks a type of culinary rage in her like nothing else.

Now that I’m all grown up, and living on my own, my fried chicken cravings can be quenched anytime at The Stockyards Smokehouse and Larder on St. Clair West. A month ago, I invited my parents to join me there for dinner.

And funny enough, my mother did end up ordering the fried chicken.

Mary Luz Mijia, a Toronto writer, researchers and TV Director/Producer submitted this great pie eating tale to the competition to win a Fiesta Farms gift certificate. You can enter yours too. Share your pain, we’ll publish it here and give you a chance to buy good food to make far better pie than the one Mary Luz describes below.…

I thought I had a legitimate right to complain about my dad’s shoe leather meat offerings– always beyond well done, always tough and dry. But I had absolutely nothing on the culinary woes of my university roommate who swore his mom was the world’s worst cook.

I didn’t believe him. He’d never had my mom’s “everything but the fridge” soup or my dad’s shoe leather steaks or chops. But then, he brought home a care package to share with all of us roommates.

There was the requisite box of pasta, some homemade sauces, jams and lo! Even a pie! A Pie! I love pie– always have. I offered to make the six of us dinner and then we’d tuck into the pie. “You sure?” he asked with more than a little trepidation. I didn’t get it. I mean it looked like a perfectly golden crusted, burnished pumpkin pie. What could possibly be so gross about it?

Gross. Well, that wasn’t exactly how I’d describe the sensation I felt when I pulled out a juicy piece of flesh-toned plastic from my mouth, followed by the secondary “missing” piece from my roommate’s slice. Yes folks, there was a used band-aid fully baked into the deceptive dessert. I think one of my roommates went to throw up, another one dropped his plate and everyone else just threw their pie pieces into the garbage can. We all looked a little gray.

“THIS is why I didn’t want you guys to eat this s%!t!” said the angry roomie. “My mom’s got eczema and this happens ALL the time!”

I went from being disgusted to feeling sorry for my frustrated friend and for his mom who tried her best to show her son a little culinary TLC only to have it fall flat into the waste bin.

We all tried to reassure him that it was alright, but he was crestfallen. There was no way he was ever going to share his homemade treats with us again. And for reasons beyond the bandaid, I can’t say I blamed him. I just hoped that he realized that even if the final product doesn’t live up to delicious expectations, the intent and thought behind something as simple as pie can be even more important as how well it’s made.

This guest post was writ­ten by Laura Reinsborough. Laura is Founder and Director at Not Far From the Tree an organization dedicated to putting Toronto’s fruit to good use by picking and sharing the bounty. Laurea’s post is part of the part of the Apron Strings series, help­ing shine a light on our foremother’s food tra­di­tions. Visit the Apron Strings page to see other posts and the videos.

A decade ago, I spent a year as a high school exchange student in Norway. I learned the language. I learned how to knit. And, though I had been a picky eater at home, my politeness took over and I learned to love Norwegian food.

In one of the families I lived with, my Norwegian host mother Kirsti had a garden that cascaded from her house towards the fjord-like river below. Before I had ever heard of the word “permaculture,” I learned this gardening philosophy simply by witnessing her garden. It produced plenty of food – asparagus, strawberries, cucumbers, and so much more – though its greatest impact was that it was inviting. I wanted to be in that garden. There was even a peach tree growing delicately along the house wall, clinging to any extra warmth it could to survive the cool Norwegian climate.

Kirsti introduced me to a culture of food that extended well beyond the garden. Each day began with a feast of jams and jellies for breakfast, eaten on handmade bread that Kirsti baked fresh. There were picnics almost every time we left the house. My first time fishing was out on their boat in the fjord and we even took a trip to the Arctic Circle where we plucked cod from the fjord under the midnight sun. And every cross-country ski trip included a feast of coffee, oranges, and Norwegian chocolate in the outdoor living room that my host father Haakon would carve from the snow, complete with a fire pit to cook the hot dogs.

Treks in the mountains meant foraging for berries, which in turn meant a new batch of saft. Foraging is tradition in Norway, codified through the freedom to roam law called Allemennsrett, or “every man’s right,” whereby everybody has access to uncultivated land that is 100m from a dwelling. With the freedom to roam comes the freedom to forage and saft is the culinary result of this national pastime.

Saft is a juice concentrate, made by cooking berries and straining them, almost like syrup for a cordial. You can preserve the syrup and later dilute with water to serve. Most commonly made with lingonberries in Norway, saft can be made with just about any berry and even some fruits.

My first attempt to make saft was when Not Far From The Tree once picked an elderberry tree clean. Elderberries need to be cooked in order to be safe to eat, and so it was difficult to donate the berries fresh. I remembered the lingonberry saft I used to drink in Norway and found this tutorial to take me through the process.

Once your saft is ready, be sure to make a few Gleaners, Not Far From The Tree’s signature cocktail, developed specifically for our elderberry saft.

The Gleaner

Created for Not Far From The Tree by Sharon Bergey of Jamie Kennedy Kitchens

• 1 oz. Not Far From The Tree’s phenomenal elderberry syrup
• 1 oz. vodka
• 2 oz. Bottle Green Sparkling Elderflower

This guest post was written by  Vicki Bell. Vicki is Founder and Editor of The Little Paper; a monthly newspaper with a weekly newsletter and a website that provides parents with the most comprehensive, creative and useful listings for programs, classes, activities, events and resources in the city. Vicki’s post is part of the part of the Apron Strings series, helping shine a light on our foremother’s food traditions. Visit the Apron Strings page to see other posts and the videos.

I’ve always suspected that my mom doesn’t like cooking very much – this despite the fact that she’s actually a really good cook – but I thought I should check in with her before I went ahead and made it public. “Oh God, Vicki” she said, “I hate cooking.”

This shouldn’t really surprise me. My first kitchen memories aren’t, as I believed for many years, of baking cookies with my great grandmother Gammy but with Mary Mills, her silver-haired Scottish housekeeper. My grandmother had a cook as well and would only occasionally waft into the kitchen on a cloud of Arpége to look for a vase or a cocktail or a child. It wasn’t much of a hothouse for orchids of the Cordon Bleu persuasion. But then the story turned sharply to the left and my mom made what her mother would have called “an unfortunate marriage.” Imagine the poor thing, 18 years old, madly in love and utterly adrift in a tiny, (unstaffed) kitchen with only the Joy of Cooking to keep her impending family afloat.

I remember that book as a flour-dusted, penciled-in, broken-spined kitchen bible. From it emerged chicken baked with Lawry’s seasoning salt and butter, French salad dressing made with Crisco and Ketchup and Harvard-styled tinned beets, smothered in vinegar and sugar. What’s more important than mom’s cooking though, is the kitchen itself. It was the centre of the world. Everything of any importance happened there. Everyday after school I found my mom in the kitchen and while she cooked, I ate and talked.

Over time, my mom became more confident and more ambitious. While I laid out the entire plot of a movie (Silver Streak comes immediately to mind), she attached a grinder to the kitchen counter and minced steak and onions for shepherd’s pie. As I agonized over the more popular girls in grade seven, she made lamb curry with little dishes of raisins and coconut. While I got dumped, fell in love, opened my university letters and planned my first apartment, she made scratch crusts for blueberry pie – and apple, pumpkin and most importantly, rhubarb pie.

The phrase ”Come into the kitchen for a minute” still strikes me as a spine-tingling prelude to big news or big secrets.

Not surprising then that I love to cook and that I love sharing the kitchen with my own girls. We make wonderful food and great memories together but alas, kind of a lousy pie.

Maybe you can do better…

Vicki

Pastry (enough for 1 1/2 — 9 inch pies)

This recipe works for me but I have given the recipe to others who say that I have missed out an ingredient.  Good luck !

• 1 cup shortening (Tenderflake) cut up into small pieces and softened
• Add:
• 1/2 cup boiling water and blend
• 2 cups of flour(pastry or sifted)
• 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp salt
• Blend all together with pastry tool or knife cutting through the mixture not stirring. If too greasy add a little more flour.
• Form into a ball and place on a floured piece of tin foil and wrap up and chill before rolling. Best done the day before.

Rhubarb Pie (1 –9 inch pie)

• 2 cups fresh rhubarb cut into 1/2 inch pieces
• Sprinkle 2 to 3 tblsp flour over rhubarb and toss pieces in flour.
• Mix together in separate bowl:
• 2 tblsp butter softened
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 egg beaten
• 1/8 tsp salt
• 1 tsp lemon juice
• Add rhubarb to the above mixture and coat well. Place in an unbaked pie shell and cover with a pastry top.
• Prick the pastry top with a fork and bake in a 350 degree oven for 30 to 45 minutes. Enjoy !