Don Genova's Blog

I don’t think I’ve stopped to take more than two breaths after the Thanksgiving weekend. Teaching my class in freelance travel writing at UBC is keeping me quite busy, and this is what we call the ‘silly season’ in broadcasting. Everyone is coming through Vancouver to promote their latest cookbook or TV cooking show, there are more and more dinner invitations…and I know you don’t feel sorry for me, but it can get a little tiring trying to keep up the pace.

Last week I was one of the few journalists in Vancouver to be granted a one-on-one interview with Jamie Oliver, the Naked Chef, visiting the city to promote his new show, Jamie’s Kitchen. He’s taken a bunch of jobless 16 to 24-year-olds in London and trained them to run his new not-for-profit restaurant. Their selection and progress unfolds over the next few weeks on the Food Network. I’ve seen the first episode and while I’m generally not a fan of reality TV, this one really works. Jamie set himself a tough task, and he thought he would find a good group from the hundreds who applied, it was hard to find even 30 kids that knew which end of a knife to use. One hilarious scene shows Jamie talking with one of his potential employees who cut the tips off the asparagus he was about to cook instead of the stalks. Jamie’s Kitchen debuts on the Food Network on Sunday, November 2nd.

I was the last person to interview Jamie before he headed back to London. He had been away for two weeks, and was exhausted, as well as missing his wife and two young children. Still, he perked up when I started asking him about the show and the restaurant. He took a lot of risk to do this, most of the project has been financed from his own resources. At one point he had to put up his house as a loan guarantee, ‘and I didn’t really tell Jools (his wife) what that really meant right away.’

Jamie was also my last interview before returning to the Cowichan Valley for a little R+R. On Friday we went for what was supposed to be a brisk hike around the shores of Spectacle Lake near the summit of the Malahat. It turned into a mushroom hunt, as my fiancé Dana goes crazy for edible wild mushrooms this time of year. The only problem is, we’re still learning how to identify the ones that ARE safe to eat. We know chanterelles quite well, and a couple of others, but the chanterelles seem to be scarce this year, and some of the other edible mushrooms have been eaten by creatures large and small before we got to them! (many of them were wormy) The most important thing to remember when it comes to mushrooms you find is, don’t eat them unless you are ABSOLUTELY sure they are edible. We always consult our friend Bill Jones, who is a mycologist (mushroom expert) along with being a great chef. Check out the photos from our walk/hunt. Even if you don’t want to go mushroom hunting, they are neat to look at, and it’s a great time of year to get into the outdoors, now that we’ve had a bit of a break from the torrential rains. I’d love to hear about your own mushroom hunts. Just scroll to the bottom of this page and enter a comment.

To see the photos for this entry please visit the gallery here >>

I’m writing this on board a BC Ferry bound for Horseshoe Bay and eventually a bus to Vancouver. It’s Thanksgiving Monday, and EVERYONE has chosen to return home at the same time as I did. Major line-ups, especially for foot passengers! But everyone on board is pretty cool and patient…they must have had major doses of sleep-inducing turkey like I did on Sunday. The weekend was a real home-cooked pig-out at our place, as we welcomed all of my soon-to-be-relatives and some friends to our Cobble Hill hideout. Saturday night we boiled up 17, yes SEVENTEEN Dungeness crabs we purchased from Katy and Scott Mahon at Mad Dog Crabs, where we find them weekly at the Downtown Duncan Farmers Market.

I had managed to slice the ring finger of my right hand on a piece of broken glass the day before, so my fiancée Dana handled the cleaning chores. She cleaned all the crabs before they went into two pots of boiling, salted water…for about 10 minutes each. We set up plastic-covered tables, doled out the crabs, garlic butter and nutcrackers and went crazy. Can you say finger-licking good?

Sunday it was a traditional Thanksgiving Dinner for 12. We roasted a free-range turkey raised by Dana’s friend Bob…obviously with loving care, as this turkey was very tasty and tender. There was a brief moment of panic as the power flicked off with more than an hour to go on the turkey timer! We kept the stove shut tight, and waited it out. An hour later the power was back on, and the turkey was none the worse for wear. We rounded out the feast with roast parsnips, carrots and yams, mashed potatoes, the last green beans of the season, a big green salad, stuffing and home-made cranberry sauce. Then…we still had room for dessert of whipped cream and pumpkin pie. The rain and wind had let up, so a roaring fire was built in our outdoor pit and we had a great little sing-a-long courtesy of Dana’s brother Dave, a whiz at the guitar, who brought not only his head full of sing-able tunes but a suitcase full of shakers and other percussion instruments so everyone could have fun making some sounds.

The weekend hosting duties were a lot of work, but everyone pitched in to help and nobody went home hungry.

To see the photos for this entry please visit the gallery here >>

Here I am in Toronto again, on union business again, but with slightly better food this time. Fellow food writer Chris Johns and I visited La Fenice on King Street West. This tastefully-appointed Italian resto is right in the middle of all the restaurants that serve the city’s Theatre District. Sadly, there are more bad restaurants than good ones in this area. Happily, La Fenice doesn’t fit the tourist trap mold. Highlights of our dinner included a creamy risotto topped with grilled quail, and very tender veal scallopine sauced with wild mushrooms. A definite recommendation!

Earlier in September I devoured a couple of other dinners of note. One at Raincity Grill where chef Sean Cousins was doing wonders with vine-ripened tomatoes from Kelowna that survived the wicked fires of August. One dish included a tomato stuffed with duck confit and eggplant, another well-executed dish was wild salmon finished with a glaze of smoked peach. Cousins will smoke almost any ingredient, and earlier in the day showed me how to smoke tomatoes to use in a curry-crusted venison dish that will be featured in a profile I’m writing about Sean for the January-February 2004 issue of Northwest Palate magazine.

I was also invited to a Mission Hill Winemakers Dinner at the Delta Ocean Pointe Resort in Victoria. Ingo Grady of Mission Hill was a cheerful and informative master of ceremonies, and the kitchen crew at the hotel really pulled off a great meal for a full house in the restaurant. One of my favourite dishes was the cedar-smoked ostrich tenderloin, and the meal was capped off with a pear cobbler and lemon-buttermilk ice cream dessert. The evening view of the Inner Harbour from the Ocean Point Resort is beautiful, and Willie’s Bakery at 537 Johnson Street is rapidly becoming my top choice for breakfast in Victoria, with flaky baked goods and savoury omelets at reasonable prices.

To see the photos for this entry please visit the gallery here >>

Just on a short trip to Toronto to visit some family and take care of some union business. (That’s another hat I wear, president of the freelance branch of the Canadian Media Guild) I always try to get to a few different restaurants while I’m here, but this weekend yielded mediocre results. Mediocre Thai food, mediocre Italian food, and less-than-mediocre sushi. So I won’t even write about those places. But I did arrive 20 minutes ahead of a trend by going for drinks at The Communist’s Daughter, a tiny bar in the shell of an old Portuguese snack bar on Dundas St. West at Ossington. It’s the ‘new’ place to go on the next part of Toronto to be ‘gentrified’. It’s cramped and smoky inside, but a great atmosphere of people just enjoying themselves, even playing crokinole or Scrabble.

The next day I saw an article in the Toronto section of the Globe and Mail lauding the bar and announcing that strip of Dundas West as ‘The next Queen Street’. You’ll have to judge for yourself, it’s still a pretty gritty area. I also made my Saturday morning pilgrimage to the St. Lawrence Market. My favorite treat is peameal bacon and a fried egg with cheese on a bun from the Carousel Bakery. For $4.25 it’s a messy, flavoursome treat. I picked up a big log of peameal to bring home from the market from Brown Brothers Meats. I will slather some of it with Anton Kozlik’s Mustard, another great shop in the market with over fifty different kinds of home-made mustard. Yum!

I’m writing this in the air above Prince Rupert, on BC’s wild North Coast. I’m on my way to meet the Hawkshaws, Fred and Linda, who are going to take me out on their commercial fishing boat looking for pink salmon. They use a unique ‘catch and hold’ system that ensures the fish they sell directly to restaurants are as fresh as possible. This is a bit of a homecoming for me, as I began my radio career in Terrrace, to the west of Prince Rupert, and started my first job for the CBC in Prince Rupert. Of course, landing at the Digby Island airport reminded me what a chore it is to get in and out of this place by air. The airport is on an island….after you land you have to get on a bus, which drives on a ferry ($11), which takes you to the outskirts of the city, then the bus delivers you to downtown Prince Rupert…about an hour after you land. I guess the good news is that once you’re downtown you’re not far from anywhere in the city! The optimistic folk in town call the ferry ride a ‘scenic, relaxing, 20-minute glide across the harbour’. The pessimistic folk call it ‘a pain in the ass’.