Farms to Tables 2025: The Citizen's 100K Meal is back for another year
Each year, The Citizen endeavours to provide its readers with some fun ideas and delicious options for meals featuring ingredients that can all be sourced rather locally - specifically within 100 kilometres of your home.
In past years, we’ve had former reporter Denny Scott participate, as well as Publisher Deb Sholdice and photographer John Stephenson and his wife Maria. This year, joining myself - Editor Shawn Loughlin - and reporter Scott Stephenson is Mel Luymes, the new editor of The Rural Voice.
She lives a bit farther north of Huron County, so her radius is a bit different than mine or Scott’s, but the principles remain the same.
Anyway, here goes - a salad, a soup and some tacos, in what might be among the lightest Citizen 100K meals ever produced.
- SL
Green Salad by Mel Luymes
Whenever we have a family get-together, I’m always asked to bring a green salad. Fine by me. It is one of the easiest things to throw together at the last minute and one of the hardest things to truly mess up. This is perhaps why my family entrusts me with it.
Over the years, I feel I’ve just about perfected it.
The trick to a good salad is to use as few vegetables as possible.
You’ll need the greens, of course, and I prefer spinach over lettuce personally. Then you pick a nut, a cheese and a fruit. For a heartier salad, add chicken to the mix. If I feel I should add more vegetables, I go for cherry tomatoes, because they are technically fruit anyways.
So, for this local salad, I’ll start with some fresh spinach from Harwill Farms. Luke and Crystal Hartung started growing vegetables and meats on their farm outside of Palmerston in 2011, and they have been a driving force behind the Minto Farmers’ Market in Palmerston every Saturday morning. All-around lovely people, I love buying from Luke and Crystal.
The next most important thing is the salad dressing, and I’m a sucker for a poppyseed dressing and my favourite is Feige’s Gourmet Dressings, which are made in Listowel. Chef Mark Snowden, and his wife Monica Filman, ran Feige’s Fine Dining restaurant in Listowel until 2012, when they began to focus on the beloved salad dressings. Due to popular demand, they have ramped up production and the dressings are now available in many grocery stores in the area.
On to the cheese! We are so lucky to have a few talented and entrepreneurial farmers in the area. For me, I have Katie Normet and Will Makxam just down the road, outside of Arthur. They are goat farmers who also make over 20 types of goat cheeses, and they have an on-farm, self-serve store. All their cheeses are great, but for this salad, I’ll use their feta, in brine.
Cherry tomatoes I can get from my own garden, if you can believe it! They loved this heat and the Plowman’s Choice compost I put all over the garden. Seeds from the lovely Kim Delaney at Hawthorn Farm Organic Seeds outside of Mount Forest and, yes, even the compost was local, made on a farm outside of Drayton, adding value to their beef cattle manure and composting it with other local organics into a wonderful product used near and far.
For the fruit, I usually go with an apple or pear in the fall, but my year-round go-to is a dried fruit. In this case, I’m going for some dried cherries from Vineland. Cherry Lane has a great line of juices and dried cherry products, and I love the sweet and sour notes they add to the salad.
Last is the crunch, and for this part, I’m cheating and using some almonds, from California I imagine – though I have read that there are some people starting to grow almonds in Niagara! I like to toast some sliced almonds just quickly in a pan before throwing them onto the salad. But I’ve been known to make some candied walnuts or pecans if there isn’t an already sweet fruit in the salad.
Even better is to buy them already candied! Elisabeth Burrow lives near Fergus and started roasting nuts with maple syrup for incredible flavours. She started Jewels Under the Kilt and has started growing and sourcing nuts locally. For a fall salad, her Pumpkin Pie Pecans make the salad extra perfect.
So here is the recipe:
• Five handfuls of spinach
• Two tablespoons of Feige’s Creamy Honey Mustard Poppy Seed salad dressing
• A quarter-cup of dried cherries
• A half-cup of cherry tomatoes, cut in half
• A quarter-cup of sliced, toasted almonds
• A quarter-cup of feta, crumbled.
Toss the spinach in salad dressing, at the last minute just before the meal is about to start, then load on rest and so a quick “lifting” with some salad tongs to get the goodies somewhat distributed in the greens. Pop the salad on the table. You’re done!
Broccoli and cheddar soup by Shawn Loughlin
Who doesn’t love a good bowl of soup, especially one full of fresh ingredients?
Superstar Canadian chef Matty Matheson knows this, which is why, late last year, he penned Soups, Salads, Sandwiches as an ode to the holy trinity of - mostly - easy to make, high-quality dishes. In that book are many fantastic recipes, but one that, for me, stands above them all is the broiled broccoli and cheddar soup. I’ve made it a few times, slightly altered to suit my tastes, and it always delivers. Not only is it great the night you make it, but if you multiply up the recipe and make a few batches, it’s perfect for portioning and freezing; ideal for an easy thaw-out in a saucepan and a ready-to-eat dinner, complete with a few pieces of crusty bread.
Matheson’s recipe focuses on charring about four heads of broccoli with your oven’s broiler. This, I think, is something that can be adjusted to taste. Put the broccoli on a baking sheet and sprinkle with olive oil and salt and pepper to taste and then broil it on high for between 10 and 20 minutes, depending on the strength of your oven (Matheson calls for 10 minutes, but I found I got my best results after closer to 20 minutes).
Here, I think you could just cook the broccoli more traditionally in the oven with olive oil and salt and pepper (I like to add a sprinkle of dried chili flakes as well for a bit of heat, but that’s just me) and still make a great soup. The charring adds flavour, but if you’re not wanting that aggressive flavour, cooking them traditionally in the oven may be for you.
There’s another fork in the road at this stage too. Matheson advises to reserve some of the charred broccoli florets for garnish when the soup is ready, covered in lemon zest (which will be pretty tough to get within 100 kilometres of Blyth) and salt and pepper. I’ve never done this, as I prefer my soup to be smooth and soupy, but I wanted to tell you about it, as I would never dream of arguing with The Big Dog.
While the broccoli is broiling or baking - your choice - prepare your mise en place for the rest of the soup. Dice a large onion, three celery ribs and three leeks and mince four garlic cloves. You should be able to find all of this vegetal goodness locally, be it from organic farms, farmers’ markets, stores like Maitland Market and Supply or Eat Local Huron and more.
When you have everything ready to go, get a dutch oven on the stove over medium heat and throw in some olive oil and a half cup of butter, allowing it to melt, before adding the onion, celery, leeks and garlic. Cook that until everything is translucent - about 10 minutes - before adding the broccoli, eight cups of water and a quarter cup of a local stout. (The recipe calls for my beloved Guinness, but there are many local options. Cowbell makes a stout, as does Wellington Brewery - only seven kilometres outside of the 100-kilometre zone - so there are local alternatives.) Let that simmer for about a half-hour.
You now have 30 minutes to grate a pound of sharp cheddar cheese for the next step of making the soup.
Once everything has simmered away for a half hour, add a cup of heavy cream - easily found locally - and use your immersion blender to bring everything together and dice up the solids in the bottom of the pot. At this point, taste the soup and see if it needs any additional cream, butter, beer or salt or pepper before adding the cheese - make sure to reserve some for garnish - stirring consistently while it all melts away and incorporates into the soup.
You’re done! Serve the soup with a generous heap of that reserved grated cheddar and some pepper for garnish and you’re all set.
Thanks to Matty Matheson for much of this recipe and for just being generally awesome.
Huron County Style Crock-Pot Potluck Tacos de Cabra by Scott Stephenson
When it comes to potluck dishes, Crock-Pot tacos may be one of the more-complicated options available. But they’re also always worth it, because tacos are one of the best foods for satisfying a crowd. So, for this year’s edition of The Citizen’s 100-Kilometre Meal, my wife, Chelsea and I decided to make Huron County Style Crock-Pot Potluck Tacos de Cabra, the (sort-of) uncomplicated way! Every ingredient in this dish came from within 100 kilometres of The Citizen offices.
Tacos de cabra, or goat tacos, are a popular street food in northern Mexico. Corn tortillas are topped with slow-cooked goat meat, and topped with chopped onions, tomatoes and cilantro. We’ve made a couple changes for the Huron County version of this traditional dish, but the basic idea is the same: goat tacos topped with fresh local produce!
Goat is, absolutely, an underused meat in this area - it’s lean, full of flavour and well-suited to long, slow cook times. It needs a little bit of time to break down, becoming tender and rich as it does. Rather than work with a large roast, we picked up a few packages of stewing goat from Capella Meadows, a biodynamic goat farm just outside of Brussels.
For anyone unsure about trying goat for the first time, this dish is a good introduction. The slow cooking makes the meat tender and, when wrapped in a fresh tortilla, it’s hard not to enjoy.
While at the Capella Meadows farm stand, we picked up some of its herb-seasoned salt, as well as goat cheddar cheese to top off our tacos. While shredded cheese is in no way a traditional taco ingredient, many Canadians who grew up with cheese-laden Tex-Mex cuisine enjoy having it as a taco topping option, and Huron County Crock-Pot Potluck Tacos de Cabra are all about giving the people what they want.
To cook our cabra, we rubbed the stewing goat with herb-seasoned salt and added it to the Crock-Pot, along with a sliced sweet onion, two minced bell peppers, one large diced tomato, one diced banana pepper, homemade vegetable stock, some butter, coriander, black pepper, and half a can of Landmark Dry Cider from East Street Cider Co in Goderich. Every Crock-Pot is different - after five and a half hours on its “high” setting, our goat was nice and tender - the meat was falling apart, the onions had begun melting into the juices, and the flavours of the braising liquid had developed into something crowd-pleasingly mellow.
After removing the meat from the Crock-Pot, we allowed the meat to cool enough to shred, at which point we shredded it and returned it to the Crock-Pot. Before serving, it is important to drain off all the excess liquid, in order to prevent sloppy tacos from making a mess. For the same reason, tongs or forks make better serving implements than spoons.
The complicated part of potluck tacos really has less to do with the Crock-Pot side of things than arranging and transporting the various accoutrements that come along with it: the tortillas and various toppings. Keeping it simple is paramount when it comes to pulling off these potluck tacos. In addition to the shredded cheese, we also filled our three-in-one serving dish with onions, fresh herbs and diced tomatoes, keeping things straightforward and traditional, although we have elected to use pickled onions over raw onions for our tacos de cabra. It also doesn’t hurt to have a little jar of homemade pickled jalapenos off to the side, for spice fans.
We decided to use homemade flour tortillas for a number of reasons. The first being potluck logistics - flour tortillas can take a little longer to dry out than corn tortillas and become brittle. The second is that making flour tortillas is a great excuse to use Farm Little Flour from Bayfield, and St. Brigid’s Creamery butter from Brussels. And the third reason is that my wife is much more confident in her flour tortilla-making skills than her corn tortilla-making skills, and it was her job to make the tortillas.
For tortillas, you’ll need:
Two cups all-purpose flour
One teaspoon salt
Two-thirds of a cup of almost hot water
Five tablespoons of butter, melted
Dissolve the salt into the water. In a big bowl, mix flour and butter until crumbly consistency is achieved. Pour in salt water gradually and stir until dough comes together.
Transfer to a floured surface and knead for about three minutes. Cover and let sit for two hours. Divide dough into 30 even portions and shape each one into a rough disk. Roll into rough rounds, and cook, one by one, in a cast iron skillet, being sure to cook both sides. Store in an airtight container until heading to the potluck, at which point the tortillas should be stacked up and wrapped in a large, clean dishcloth for transport.
At the potluck, the tortillas and toppings should be arranged strategically around the Crock-Pot to indicate to people that they’re dealing with a DIY taco station. A label or small sign that explains that these are goat tacos is also helpful. Then you just have to sit back and watch people enjoy!
Cooking locally can take more effort than just going to the nearest grocery store. But it’s a lot easier in Huron County than it is in most other parts of the world. This dish didn’t come from a recipe card, or a grocery flyer - it was created from a combination of what’s in season, right here, right now, in Huron County, and what felt right to make with those ingredients based on the food we know we like, and hope other people will like too.
One of the most exciting things about doing a 100-kilometre meal is the way it gets people talking - not just about food and where it comes from, but how lucky we are that we live in a part of the world that produces such a vast variety of great food - enough to make a whole office potluck!