INTRODUCTION

Peak Season is a story about what I’ve learned as my relationship to this land has deepened. Through my years of cooking, I have learned a lot about the food that grows in Ontario. Paying closer attention, I now realize how vibrant these fruits and vegetables are. This is a book—in fact, a love letter—about these gifts and the home that has provided it to me. Ontario is a province with wildly diverse flavours and people, with an ever-changing balance of seasons—a place that I believe should be a culinary destination. Sure, we are young when it comes to documenting our food history—maybe even a toddler stumbling in a world of grown-up regions like Oaxaca, Hong Kong, or Bologna—but Ontario is par- ticularly special. From my experience visiting farms, we have twelve distinct growing sea- sons—each with its own identity. Categorizing our climate into spring, summer, fall, and winter doesn’t seem to fit the bill when each month bears new ingredients at their freshest in, well, peak season. It’s like having your very own culinary muse in your backyard (or bal- cony garden in my case). Take a tomato, for example—so simple—plucked off the vine and eaten with just a sprinkle of sea salt. Or perhaps, drizzled with an herb oil and placed on a hunk of warm baguette in August—not November, not April—under the hot summer sun. By the time an ingredient goes out of season, something else, like a rich, nutty sun- choke—ready to relax into a velvety autumn soup—is in season, and the spirit of that August tomato will be a pleasant memory for next year.

Instead of tethering myself to a particular recipe and hunting down each specific ingredient, I prefer to cook by the season. It is a magic trick, really. Whatever may be in peak season is also going to be full of flavour and that vegetable fortitude is hard to mess up. Though, there is creativity needed for this. This type of cooking requires adapting to what is available and will always buoy a playful side to my cooking. I didn’t always cook with such intimacy. I spent much of my career teaching, counselling, and learning how to eat “optimally,” using the precision of numbers as a nutritionist. When I started devel- oping recipes in my test kitchen, years ago, at Fresh City Farms and in my more recent years coordinating the Leslieville Farmers’ Market, I began to broaden my relationships with food grown in Ontario and with those who grow it. The farmers I know have always been my greatest culinary teachers. I began to understand food a little more with everyfarmer I visited. A rooted carrot would be plucked out of the soil and urged to try. They would show me how a radish isn’t just a radish, but comes in many forms and spectrums of spice. How a new spring turnip is delicate and sweet, flavours best preserved by steam- ing instead of roasting. You may think you know what spinach tastes like, but nothing can be as healing as this verdant green picked straight from the field. If I could give you that perfect bunch of spinach that looks and feels alive, you would experience the mean- ing and wholesomeness of peak flavour—not even the most exotic superfood can com- pete with that. This is the foundation of cooking simply, connecting to home, eating with intent, and developing a deeper appreciation of how food gets to your plate. When I stopped trying to control the ingredients I wanted to use and let the repeating cycles of monthly vegetables and fruits inspire me, the more intuitive I became in the kitchen, and I hope the same happens for you.

In these pages you will find a collection of my favourite recipes made mostly from plants and inspired by this province’s flourishing seasons. Every season—and every month—presents a diverse ensemble of fruits and vegetables, each with their own charm- ing personalities. I like to keep my cooking simple and casual. When I cook at home, I cook in a relaxed, sensorial way that would probably raise eyebrows in my test kitchen. These recipes are more influenced by my home cooking than they are by my recipe development career. They are not definitive, and I invite you to use each one as a starting point to a new way of eating.

Whether you are looking for a quick, delicious meal or a sensational affair on a plate, there is something for everyone here and for all types of occasions. Most are easy recipes for those whose time is short, though I did sprinkle in some more involved recipes—such as mushroom-garlic pot-stickers for family night, a slow-cooked brisket during the high holidays, or a multi-layered carrot cake filled with Ontario walnuts and ground cherries to celebrate a special someone’s birthday. These recipes take a little extra time because the ritual of making them deserves as much attention as the ingre- dients themselves. These types of traditions create magical moments that I, like many, carry forever.

Some recipes I hold near and dear to my heart are from my grandma, my aunts, my mother, and my father, while many are inspired by friends, teachers, and loved ones who have welcomed me into their kitchens and showed me the heart of their cuisine—and lucky for me, in Toronto, there are many cuisines to taste. As you flip through each month’s recipes, it will become more and more evident that I grew up on the flavours of my home- town, Toronto, one of the most multicultural cities in the world. Dishes here are influ- enced by Chinese, Italian, French, Jamaican, Japanese, and Mexican cuisines, to name a few. All of these have played a major part in developing my taste buds. Just like the soil thatfosters an astonishing range of fruits and vegetables, Ontario food is also inherently about celebrating an exchange of cultural diversity.

I hope this book offers you many new cooking experiences and inspires you to eat all the wonderful plants that Ontario has to offer. And more than anything, my dream is to give you an opportunity to develop a new relationship to this land, these plants, these animals, and most importantly, to one another. It doesn’t matter where we are from; we all find ourselves making food as a way to live a life deliberately full of love and kindness.