Deirdre Buryk - Peak Season: 12 Months of Recipes Celebrating Ontarios Freshest Ingredients

Peak Season IS A STORY ABOUT what Ive 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 bookin fact, a love letterabout 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 seasonsa place that I believe should be a culinary destination. Sure, we are young when it comes to documenting our food historymaybe even a toddler stumbling in a world of grown-up regions like Oaxaca, Hong Kong, or Bolognabut Ontario is particularly special. From my experience visiting farms, we have twelve distinct growing seasonseach with its own identity. Categorizing our climate into spring, summer, fall, and winter doesnt seem to fit the bill when each month bears new ingredients at their freshest in, well, peak season. Its like having your very own culinary muse in your backyard (or balcony garden in my case). Take a tomato, for exampleso simpleplucked 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 Augustnot November, not Aprilunder the hot summer sun. By the time an ingredient goes out of season, something else, like a rich, nutty sunchokeready to relax into a velvety autumn soupis 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 didnt 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 developing 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 every farmer I visited. A rooted carrot would be plucked out of the soil and urged to try. They would show me how a radish isnt