Yakity Yak, send this back

Enter the Lamb Lady

We met a nice lady at Acorn Creek Farm’s Melon Fest and Pepper Pow Wow who ran a farm where she raised a different kind of livestock — yaks. We were more interested in the lamb she had for sale, but she was all out when we met her.

She did encourage us to come visit her at the Ottawa Farmers Market (www.ottawafarmersmarket.ca), where she promised to have some lamb. We dubbed her The Lamb Lady.

Genuine farmers markets

So we went to the Ottawa Farmers Market, at Lansdowne Park, the following Sunday (Sept. 13) and were almost overwhelmed by the number of booths, and the wide array of meat, vegetables, fruit and assorted other things. (See list of purchases below.)

Somehow in all this, we missed her booth and ended up getting our rather very fresh lamb from the Natural Lamb booth, run by a couple of local farms. The lamb may have been pricey, but in keeping with the concept of you get what you pay for, a lot of things are a little more expensive at this market. Ottawans, however, seem quite willing to pay the price for good quality.

A newspaper article a while back pointed out how, for example, some farmers charged $3 for a few tomatoes at the Parkdale Market in Ottawa’s near west end and $5 for the exact same amount and quality of tomatoes at the Ottawa Farmers Market, at Lansdowne Park.

It was explained that there were two main reasons for this price difference. At the other markets in the city, the Parkdale Market in the near west end and the legendary Byward Market downtown, farmers were competing with resellers, those who buy produce elsewhere — like bargain tomatoes from Montréal, for example — and truck them into town to sell at these markets. Local farmers say they can’t compete unless they match the bargain prices.

However, only producers — genuinely local farmers with truly local meat and produce and such — are allowed to sell at the Ottawa Farmers Market. So the farmers take it as an opportunity to sell at what they consider a fair price. And the customers, like ourselves, obviously agree in terms of getting fresh, local product of high quality and, at the same time, supporting local farmers.

The other stated factor is that the overhead — rental fees and such associated with leasing a stall — is much higher at the Ottawa Farmers Market. Again, customers are willing to pay for the convenience of having a truly local market right in the city.

Bye bye Byward

Many of these farmers don’t even bother trying to sell at the much bigger, more established Byward Market because it has become known as a home to resellers. Which creates other issues. Like out-of-town resellers setting up on the sidewalks right in front of establish fruit and vegetable stores who operate year round and obviously have a much bigger overhead.

As revealed in a recent newspaper article, at least one such fruit store owner says he has to actually lay off staff during the summer because business is so slow trying to compete with the temporary stand of the resellers parked right on his doorstep.

While the Byward Market was rich and vibrant with local farmers during my childhood, I do believe it has become more of a tourist attraction these days. It has even become almost better known for its robust night life, with all the bars, clubs and restaurants in that condensed, central area.

I know from experience that the addition of so many tourists can make the Byward Market far too crowded for comfortable shopping. Which is why I switched to the much smaller Parkdale Market years ago — before we got into true farmers markets featuring real local farmers and locally grown, raised or fabricated products.

Naturally delicious lamb

Now, back to the prices we paid for the lamb we got from Natural Lamb (www.NaturalLamb.ca), which also provides fresh lamb to local restaurants. (This idea of local restaurants obtaining ingredients from local farms is a growing, and quit pleasing trend. A number of chefs even visit and enter into contracts with specific farms, which assures the restaurant of fresh ingredients and gives the farmer a stable revenue source to aid in his business of running a farm.)

Note: 1 kilogram = 2.2 pounds    $1 Cdn. = $1.07 US

Rack of lamb: $44.00 per kilogram ($20 per pound)   Bought: .366 k (small rack) for $16.10 Cdn.

Lamb chops: $36.60 per kilogram ($16.63 per pound)   Bought: .298 k (4 chops) for $11.80 Cdn.

Ground lamb: $18.15 per kilogram ($8.25 per pound)    Bought: .414 k for $7.51 Cdn.

Now this lamb is considered organic because it is declared pasture-reared, hormone-free, antibiotic-free and pesticide-free. It also contains Omega-3. It is described as being from Katahdin lambs which are said to produce “a high-quality, well-muscled (meat) that is naturally quite lean and consistently of a very delicate flavour.”

Now I confess I really don’t know lamb prices. I do sometimes order lamb in restaurants and enjoyed a very delicious rack of lamb at Fitzgerald’s Restaurant (www.fitzgeraldsrestaurant.ca) in Almonte, late this summer. But until now, for home consumption we’ve bought legs of lamb, usually frozen and from New Zealand, at the grocery store.

As Mariette does the shopping and even if I did later check a label, I have no idea how much they cost. I do know the lamb was usually very good and quite plentiful at mealtime — which is why we preferred a whole leg of lamb.

But however the prices above check out, all we know is that the lamb we enjoyed was worth every darn penny. I’ve never had lamb this good outside of a restaurant. It was everything it was said to be and more.

I was able to do the rack of lamb more rare than medium, just as we like it, and it was exquisite. As were the chops on the BBQ.

Even the ground lamb was superb. I mixed it with a lesser amount of butcher-shop quality lean ground beef for use with basmati rice as the filling in my stuffed peppers. Even mixed with the beef, the lamb was so distinctive and so very darn tasty. I made far too much filling — and probably didn’t need the beef — but we reheated the excess filling (meat and rice) the next day and it was still superb.

T-bone steaks to yak about

But of course the title of this article doesn’t even refer to lamb. So back to the woman we’d dubbed The Lamb Lady.

In one last look around the market that Sunday morning we finally noticed The Lamb Lady. (Her friends at Natural Lamb had said they hadn’t seen her but confessed they’d been confined to their booth since before the market opened.)

We felt we had spent enough for lamb but decided we’d try her yak meat. I knew yak to be a bit dry, so I opted for T-bone steaks. We bought two for $30. (The package was hand-labelled so I don’t recall any weight or price-per-weight information.)

Early yesterday afternoon, running short of items to BBQ, I took these steaks out of the freezer and left them in the fridge to thaw overnight. Tonight, with the potatoes and cauliflower already in the steamers, and the BBQ warming up, I took them out of the fridge, unwrapped the brown paper and discovered two things — the steaks were THICK (2″ thick with only a slight taper at the end furthest from the bone) and they were still PARTIALLY FROZEN!

So on they went right away and I mentally cancelled the planned salad as I had to keep close watch on these monsters, leaving no time for chopping and dicing or anything.

They actually came out not too bad. Not burnt but fairly well cooked on the outsides and what we call medium-rare (slightly more rare than medium) at the centre. And the centre, fortunately, was as hot as the outside.

I confess that each of these monsters darn near overwhelmed our plates.

The verdict

So, how was it?

Better than I feared but not good enough that we’d buy more.

It’s not as gamy as say, venison, but it certainly is different.

As I said to Mariette: “At least if we ever went to Mongolia and they served us yak, we’d know we could eat it without a problem.” However, at home, the problem was we didn’t like it anywhere near as much as we like all our traditional meats, the ones our palates are familiar with and enjoy.

Now I confess I had a late breakfast — two eggs, fried potatoes, two slices of excellent pea meal bacon (from the Pork Guy at the OFM) and toast — at around 3:30 p.m. or so. (I’d gotten up late and then distracted on the computer and wouldn’t have bothered, but I’d been looking forward to this breakfast so long, I couldn’t resist.) So I didn’t have a lot of room. I made sure that I tasted enough of the monster T-bone to form my opinions, then concentrated on the potatoes and cauliflower. I didn’t even finish a normal serving of those.

Mariette also didn’t eat much of her steak. She’d forgotten the steaks were yak meat and was wondering why they tasted strange. Until she thought to ask me. In the end, we agreed it was an interesting experiment but we’ll pass on yak from now on.

Purchased at the Ottawa Farmers Market (Sept. 13)

Chamomile, catnip, calendula and orange peel tea
(Very good, very relaxing. Came with two tiny quartz crystals “charged with the healing intention of each tea blend.”)

Almond-coconut “hand-crafted” granola
(Delicious. I tended to sprinkle it over my regular healthy cereals so it would last longer.)

Elk smoked sausage
(Another “experiment” due to be eaten in the not-too-distant future.)

Homemade salsa, with sun-dried tomatoes.
(Very good. I even used some instead of ketchup on my BBQ hamburgers.)

Sun-dried garlic and feta dip.
(That’s according to my scribbled notes. This was for Mariette and she said it too was very good.)

Pea meal bacon.
(Had it today for the first time. Some of the absolute best I’ve ever tasted.)

One duck leg.
(Made the mistake of throwing it on the BBQ with the hamburgers at dusk. The burgers were finished much sooner and the duck leg half forgotten in the dark. It ended up rather burnt on the outside and dry in the inside. One quick taste and I ditched it. Will try again another time.)

Apple and date oatmeal cookies.
(Tried to stay away from baked goods but these looked every bit as mouthwatering as they turned out to be.)

Raspberries.
(I prefer my faves, blueberries, on my cereal but these fresh raspberries — so delicate they have to be eaten quickly — were pretty darn good.)

Blue and green grapes.
(The small basket was half-full with blue grapes, half-full with green. The blue grapes were delicious. The green ones were far too sour, even for Mariette, so we ended up tossing them. For me, the blue grapes alone were worth the price of the whole basket.)

One candy apple.
(A dee-licious bit of nostalgia. See the article Candy-coated memories further down in this blog.)

Assorted plums.
(From small yellow ones to large-egg-sized blue ones. The yellow ones were too squishy, and a little sour for my tastes. But the larger yellow, and red, and especially the blue were quite tasty, if eaten almost right away — like over two days or so.)

Broccoli.
(By far the very best we’ve had all year.)

Califlower.
(About the size of a bowling ball. I kid you not. So fresh and white and perfect it was almost too bright to look at. Took three meals to finish it off and it was beautiful each and every time.)

Brussel sprouts.
(I have always loved Brussel sprouts, but these were disappointing. Too much dirt. Also, bruises that needed cutting out, giving them a flat side, which tends to burn when sautéeing as they tend to roll on to the same side every time. I agree with Mariette that they were still quite tasty. But I’d have liked them to cook a little more evenly. BTW, Mariette only learned to like Brussel sprouts when I learned to sautée them, instead of boiling or steaming them. I kind of like them better in a hot frying pan as well.)

New small potatoes.
(Varied in size, from marble-size to slightly smaller than a ping pong ball. I intended to roast them with the rack of lamb. Unfortunately my potato cupboard was full and the cupboard I did store them in, well it was higher — above the kitchen counter — and the door was opened a few times every day. Meaning the potatoes were too warm and ended up too soft and had to be trashed  when I went to use them.)

Spinach.
(This summer we learned all over again to really love a good, fresh, spinach salad, especially with our favourite mango-poppyseed vinaigrette — which we no longer buy one bottle at a time. I do do a mean spinach salad and a good fresh bunch of spinach usually provides for three nights of salad. It ain’t soup but it sure is Mmm-mm good!)

Support your local farmer

So hopefully this will give area residents an idea of what’s available and where. For others, perhaps it will encourage them to check out what’s available in their area.

Despite the mention of crystals and granola above — the crystals were like a surprise in a box of Cracker Jacks — we’re not hippies (though I am still proud of my ’60s heritage as at least a semi-hippy). Nor are we health fanatics. And we still shop at grocery stores between visits to farmers markets. But it’s just something we found fun, probably good for us, and worthy in terms of supporting local farmers.

We’ll still hit some of the markets for fall stuff. And now that we’re hooked on fresh, local produce, fruit and meat, we’ll probably be making a lot more visits next year to some of our favourites sources — the Carp Farmers Market, in Carp; the Acorn Creek Vegetable Farm, near Carp; the Ottawa Farmers Market, at Lansdowne Park in Ottawa. And probably a few new ones, like the Chelsea Farmers Market at Chelsea on the Quebec side of the river and who knows what others we might discover here in the Ottawa Valley.

Not only has shopping for fresh ingredients become a lot more fun, but the meals are also far more dee-licious! 😀