Food Matters – Local Food ‘Champs’

Posted on May 1, 2013 by Don Genova
Local Food ChampsLocal Food Champs

As with all cultures, part of who we are is determined by the food we eat and how we eat it. Our food culture is changing on Vancouver Island as more people choose a local, sustainable food lifestyle. But who are the people who are helping to change the way we eat? I met a whole bunch of them on Monday night and talked about them on this week’s edition of Food Matters on CBC Radio’s All Points West.

I met them at the Belfry Theatre in Victoria as part of an event called Food Talks, Changing the Way We Eat. This was an evening put on by CR-Fair, a coalition of organizations working to strengthen food security in this region along with helping to develop a more local food system. For the past number of year CR-Fair has been taking nominations and choosing a Local Food Champion. This year six of the eight nominees were able to attend this event and speak in a TED-Talks style forum about what it is they do and why they do it.

Their activities are quite wide-ranging. It really goes from a one on one food level, such the cooking program run for just 6 people at a time at the Cool Aid Community Kitchen, or the Food Swap Program which was started with the help of Derek Powell of Barefoot Organics, where you take the fruits of your labour, be it preserves or baking, and swap them with what other people have to offer. On a larger community scale, we heard from people in programs that reach a wider swath of the public, like the Victoria Downtown Public Market Society and its soon-to-be-realized efforts to create a permanent public market in the Hudson Building, or the Camosun FarmBox Program, which helps students join a type of Community Supported Agriculture Program that they can access right on campus. And then there is the Lifecycles Growing Schools Program, which is helping schools in the region create organic food gardens on their properties.

 I don’t want to play favourites, but some of these people have such wonderful stories I think you will hear about some of them more in depth in the weeks to come on this column. But Kim Cummins of the Camosun FarmBox program gave a great explanation about the range of benefits provided to both farmers and students. Students benefit by not having to even travel off campus to get affordable, local food, and when they pick up their boxes there are volunteers there to tell them what the food is and how to prepare or cook it…something a lot of students need at that time in their lives if they haven’t learned at home. For the farmers, they get to stay at home doing farmwork, instead of having to go and deliver or sort their products. Again, volunteers go out to the farm to pick up the goods, and those volunteers again are involved in a learning process with the farmer.

So Kim was a runner-up Food Champ, and another runner-up food champ that couldn’t be there were the folks who put together the Salt Spring Abattoir project. When meat inspection regulations changed in 2007 it meant an end to farmgate slaughtering and sales, all animals had to be trucked off of the Island to be processed, then shipped back. That added expense saw Salt Spring lose about 50 percent of its meat production. The abattoir project means small scale meat producers will have a place to have their animals processed, and that in turn means more locally available food for Salt Spring residents.

A project that is unique enough in this area that it has been garnering some notice from the public, who sent in the nominations for Food Champs this year. It’s called Meadowbrook Farmily. Elizabeth Upton represented the four families who came together to not only buy a farm but have most of them live on it together as well, including 8 small children. These are all families who wanted to farm, but in no way could they afford to buy a farm property on their own. So, they share ownership and the chores, and have found themselves in the middle of a mixed use farm that grows blueberries as the main products, but also pork, beef and chicken…and they also board horses. They’ve only been at it for less than two years, and the best news so far is that the kids have yet to get sick of eating blueberries every day.

The other project that I am just beginning to hear about is called the Food Hub, driven in part by Dwane MacIsaac, president of the Island Chefs Collaborative, who is in the middle of developing some much needed infrastructure for this region that will include things like a commercial kitchen that can be leased 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, a huge walk-in cooler that will allow farmers to grow more produce because they will have somewhere to store it, a teaching café, where people can take cooking classes but also where students can be trained in how to work in professional kitchens, and there are even plan for a grain mill to only be used to mill gluten-free grains. You are definitely going to hear more about the Food Hub in a future program.

And the winner is Miranda Lane of the Cool Aid Society and the Community Kitchens Network for her work in that network to educate people about food, get them some skills as well as any much-needed connections in the community for people facing barriers in their everyday lives. In her speech to the crowd at the event she talked about how community kitchens are a great recipe for bringing people together to cook and share food in a convivial atmosphere, and that there has been so much emphasis on de-skilling society we have lost a lot of our ability when it comes to cooking and that community kitchens are one way of trying to reverse that trend. Miranda will give half of her $500 cash award to the community kitchen network, and the other half to her Cool Aid community kitchen where it will allow her to run one complete session and feed the people doing it.
 

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Food Matters – The Farm Table

Posted on April 24, 2013 by Don Genova

Farm Table
The ‘farm to fork’ movement is no longer a novelty on Vancouver Island. More and more restaurants are getting their ingredients directly from nearby farms. Now there is another link in that equation, involving the education of young chefs.

I think we are quite fortunate here on Vancouver Island to have a choice in Culinary Programs for students interested in a career in a kitchen. The choice just got even more interesting for students in the Culinary Institute of Vancouver Island at Vancouver Island University. April 25th, 2013 marks the first evening members of the public will be able to sample student offerings at the new Farm Table Dining Room at Providence Farm near Duncan. It’s not a brand new restaurant, but it does mark a formal arrangement made between Providence Farm and the University to use the existing kitchen and dining rooms facilities at the farm.

DSC 1662Culinary Institute students

Thursday, Friday and Saturday evenings, people will be able to go to Providence Farm and enjoy meals made by Culinary Institute students. But it’s not a simple rental agreement, there was a fair amount of negotiation to get it going. I went to a reception marking the beginning of the collaboration last week, and talked to Chef Allen Aikman, the chair of the culinary program and an instructor as well. He says the dining room and kitchen at Providence Farm is meant mostly to feed lunches to the staff and volunteers at the farm. The idea of running a restaurant at the same time was never discussed when the kitchen was renovated a few years ago. But here they are, and they will come in at 3pm on the days they operate and transform the kitchen that had just served a buffet lunch, into a restaurant kitchen and serve plated meals to folks in the dining room, taking advantage of the produce grown on the farm, grown in some cases with their help: “Just the other day some of the students were out in the garden transplanting some seedlings, and we’re going to be here through the best months of the year when there is so much great produce. It’s a great opportunity for students to learn about how ingredients are produced. People talk about the ‘hundred mile menu’, we’re right here at ground zero.”

I also spoke with VIU president Ralph Nilson. He told me that when they were doing a review of all the programs at the university, the culinary program really stood out as a success, but the review also recommended that it be expanded. With the Cowichan Campus as part of the Culinary Institute, in what Nilson calls ‘a foodie valley’ the opportunity to run a restaurant nearby a few days a week seems like a great way to invest in the program and the community.

DSC 1665Goodies from the kitchen at Providence Farm

Peter Bontkes, the chair of the Providence Farm Board of Directors, admitted that they had a few reservations when the idea was put forward. For people who don’t know, the primary function of Providence Farm is to help people in the community who are facing some sort of challenge. The farm runs some very good therapeutic programs, and they just wanted to make sure the restaurant could fit into the mix. He told me that they get proposals to develop many programs or opportunities at Providence Farm but they have to scrutinize each proposal to make sure they don’t crowd out the key functions. In this case they were satisfied with the way the Culinary Institute was going to operate the restaurant.

You will probably want to make reservations. I looked at this sample menu online and both the selections and the prices look great.

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Food Matters – Stinging Nettles

Posted on April 17, 2013 by Don Genova

nettles2

You don’t have to go very far anywhere on Vancouver Island to find a patch of stinging nettles. But why would you want to find them? Stinging nettles hitting bare flesh does mean a nasty stinging or burning sensation that can last for hours or even days. And yet the stinging nettle is highly regarded as a food source with nutritious and medicinal properties. I brought a batch of nettle goodies without the sting to my Food Matters column on All Points West today.

I have just brushed up against one ever so lightly, and that was enough. I immediately felt the sting and burn, but luckily for me it went away quickly. Funny thing is that until I moved to Vancouver Island I had never come across them before, even though they grow almost everywhere in the world. Now I see them everywhere I go on the Island, and I even have a few on my own property and the ones I harvested for today were just down the street from me off the side of the road. I was very careful to harvest them wearing a long-sleeved jacket, jeans and heavy duty dish gloves.

nettles1nettle patch

Stinging nettles have become almost trendy lately, for a number of reasons…for one, they are free. Although if you live in a built-up urban area where there are no nettles I have seen them for sale at farmer’s markets. Another reason is that they are a local, wild food, and more people are getting into foraging for wild foods, we talked about morel mushrooms last week, for example. And the last reason is that there are also regarded as a natural ingredient with positive medicinal properties.

Let’s just start with what is contained in the plant from a vitamin and mineral standpoint. Nettles are rich in vitamins A and C, iron, potassium, manganese, and calcium. They are also thought to increase levels of serotonin in the body, act as an anti-inflammatory for people suffering from arthritis, and they have even been recommended as a cure for bedwetting.

The secret in using them safely is all in deactivating the hairs that line the stems of the plant. They are the culprits that release the chemicals that cause the sting. You can eat raw stinging nettle if you fold the leaves UP over the stems and hairs, the trick is to never rub the hairs against the direction they go. OR, you can simply soak the nettles in cold water, or blanch them, and chop them all up in the food processor. All of these methods deactivate the sting, and then you can use them in delicious recipes.

On the Flavour TrailOn the Flavour Trail

I got of lot of ideas from Katy Ehrlic at Alderlea Farm in Glenora. Katy and her husband John are holding their third annual Stinging Nettle Festival at the farm this Sunday. So, along with cooking demonstrations and a nettle identification walking tour, you can purchase lots of foods made using stinging nettle. True Grain Bakery is providing nettle bread, and Katy is making a nettle mulligatawny soup, a nettle stew using their farm-raised beef and potatoes, there it going to be a nettle quiche, nettlekopita (like spanakopita) and Farmer John will be tending the wood-fired oven and producing pizzas with stinging nettle pesto. Today I brought Jo-Ann some buttery buns I made cinnamon roll-style with a nice layer of nettle pesto and a topping of Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, some stinging nettle and mint tea from the TeaFarm in North Cowichan and then a soup I made from a Chef Brock Windsor recipe in the new ‘On the Flavour Trail’ cookbook from the Island Chefs’ Collaborative. 

John Ehrlich told me about how stinging nettles are also an important part of biodynamic farming. They make an excellent compost activator. So he buries the nettles for a year, then adds the resulting black hummus into his compost and it helps the soil transmit the proper nutrients to his vegetables. He says you can also make a nettle tea you steep for three days you can then use as an insecticide, especially against aphids…ferment it for ten days and it becomes a great tonic for your plants. But John also warns that you can overharvest nettle, so be sure to leave a large patch untouched if you want it to come back next year. Only harvest the top two sets of leaves to get the most tender nettles. Below that that stems get kind of stringy…and in some countries they even use them to make rope and textiles!

bunsnettle pesto buns

If you are interested in making the buns I made today, prepare your favourite recipe for bread dough. Here is one recipe for nettle pesto. After the first rise of the bread, I rolled out the dough into a flat rectangle. Then brushed the surface with olive oil, and spread a generous layer of pesto (you’ll need close to a cup) evenly over the surface of the oiled dough. Roll it up as evenly as possible and cut into 8 or 9 even rolls. Put them together in a baking pan, brush the tops with olive oil and sprinkle with freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese and let them rise a second time. Put into a 400 degree F preheated oven and bake for about 20 minutes or until the tops are golden brown. Cool on a rack…if you can stop yourself from eating too many of them as soon as they come out of the oven!

cheesecheddar and blues

One more event this weekend, this one on Friday night at the Oceanfront Grand Hotel in Cowichan Bay. I’ll be emceeing a neat event called ‘Cheddar and Blues’. Patty Abbott from Hilary’s Cheese has brought in several cloth-bound cheeses from the renowned Neal’s Yard Dairy in England. We’re talking fine cheddars and Stiltons here, which are blue…cheddar and blues, get it? And lovely jazz from the Wayne Kozak Trio. Tickets $35 available at either of the Hilary’s Cheese locations in Cowichan Bay or on Fort Street in Victoria. Hope to see you there!

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Food Matters – The Deerholme Mushroom Book

Posted on April 11, 2013 by Don Genova
bill jonesBill Jones

Spring is an exciting time of year for local food fanciers on Vancouver Island. At farmers’ markets you can already find the first spears of asparagus, salad greens and hearty overwintered kales. It’s also a great time to forage for wild foods like stinging nettles and morel mushrooms. This week for Food Matters on CBC Radio’s All Points West I talked about my ‘hunting’ trip with Chef Bill Jones of Deerholme Farm near Glenora in the Cowichan Valley.

bookThe Deerholme Mushroom Book

I have been lucky enough to be out with Bill several times since I moved to the Valley myself and each trip is always a little bit of an adventure. This particular trip was inspired by Bill’s latest cookbook, The Deerholme Mushroom Book, which really has captured Bill’s love of fungi along with his experience of 20 years of foraging for them and cooking them. How do you come to love things from the earth like mushrooms and truffles? For Bill, it was when he was living in France and working in a restaurant kitchen. Growing up in Canada meant his knowledge of mushrooms was generally limited to white button mushrooms, but in France the foragers kept showing up at the kitchen door with all kinds of wonderful mushrooms. He really fell in love with cepes, (sometimes known as boletes or porcinis) saying they are ‘a really sexy-looking mushroom, with a meaty, caramelized taste and texture.’

MorelsMorels

We weren’t looking for porcinis or cepes during this trip though, those are fall mushrooms. We were keeping our eyes peeled for morel mushrooms, which are out there right now. They frequently are found for a year or two in areas that have been hit by forest fires, or perhaps land that has been disturbed by plowing or tree clearing. They like to be around Douglas Fir trees, sandy river banks, and one other somewhat surprising place, abandoned fruit tree orchards.

TapasTapas

Bill really loves morels for a couple of reasons. One, they turn up in the spring which just means the mushroom hunting season is longer, and two, the ridges and valleys of a morel really pick up the flavour of whatever you cook them in. One of his favourite recipes from the book is a Spanish tapas-style dish. He takes large morels and stuffs them with a mixture of caramelized leek, chorizo sausage, and garlic. Then he poaches them in white wine or chicken stock and serves them with a vinaigrette of olive oil, sherry vinegar, paprika and chopped parsley. I made that recipe for Jo-Ann Roberts to taste on the show and she loved it.

The best eating mushrooms in this area are easy to identify, so we’re talking the boletes, morels, chanterelles, oyster mushrooms and pine mushrooms. But you don’t have to forage for yourself, you can get wild mushrooms at farmers markets and some grocery stores, and there are a greater number of mushrooms being cultivated now, shitakes, enoki, for example and Bill says if you are a little industrious you can even try growing your own with some kits you can buy. They are mostly bags of compost that have been inoculated with oyster mushroom spores, or you can buy plugs inoculated with shitake spore, and place the plugs into holes you’ve drilled into old alder logs. I have a bunch of alder logs on my property so that could be a good way to go for me…but it’s a bit of delayed gratification, it takes about a year for the mushrooms to sprout and mature. Then you’ve got to watch out for the inevitable worms and slugs that like to eat them.

SpringdishBill’s Morel-stuffed Ravioli

With all of Bill’s knowledge of mushrooms this is a great resource book. It blends together everything you need to know about mushroom identification, habitat, their huge potential as medicinal ingredients, with great photos and close to 150 recipes for all kinds of mushrooms, including fresh, dried and powdered, and how to pickle or freeze them as well for future use. The name of the book again is The Deerholme Mushroom Book, From Foraging to Feasting, from Touchwood Editions. Click on the above link to order directly from amazon.ca and save 37%.

To listen to my conversation about the book with Jo-Ann Roberts, look for the link on this All Points West page. But if you’d like to go on the hike that Bill and I enjoyed earlier this week, click on this link to listen to an mp3 of the audio adventure.

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Food Matters – Comox Valley Artisan Co-op

Posted on March 27, 2013 by Don Genova

Starting and running a small artisan food business on Vancouver Island isn’t easy. Most of these companies start up in a home kitchen, but soon larger, food-safe facilities are needed and that costs money. Today on Food Matters on All Points West I talked about a burgeoning food production hub in the Comox Valley.

Sarah Walsh
Sarah Walsh

Three businesses are sharing some small but important commercial kitchen and retailing space in a complex called Tin Town in Courtenay. It’s an area I would like to have a little more time to explore…all the buildings are metal-clad, with metal roofs, so it’s quite striking as you drive into it. All the buildings have living spaces on the top floor, and production facilities, services and retail shops on the bottom, including the home of Prontissima Pasta. This is where I met Sarah and Derek Walsh as they were making up a batch of beautiful, fresh squid ink pasta, just one of the many fresh pastas they make and sell there. There is a long story behind how Sarah, from Quadra Island, and Derek, from Dublin, Ireland, ended up in Courtenay with a small pasta company, but it did involve spending a year in Venice and Tuscany and a decision to return to a less-populous region where people love food, and to start their business.

They wanted people to be able to buy fresh pasta made with local eggs, as well as their line of pestos with a few surprises such as Walnut, Artichoke & Roasted Garlic, Roasted Butternut Squash and Roasted Red Pepper, the latter two types being only available strictly in season, summer for the bell pepper and winter for the squash. Today I brought you some of Prontissima’s spinach tripolini pasta with their sundried tomato pesto and a pasta shell stuffed with cheese and my own tomato sauce.

Clever Crow SaltClever Crow Salt

There are couple of other producers involved in the hub who are quite complementary to each other. Clever Crow is a handmade sea salt company of Lia and Brian McCormick, a duo who have started a number of business endeavours over the years in the Comox Valley, and once again it came down to trying to fill a void, no one else in the area was making sea salt, and they have worked at it steadily for six months to get the process and the texture of the salt just right. Today Khalil tasted their regular Clever Crow sea salt, the hot chilli version, as well as their new smoked salt. Sarah is starting to use some Clever Crow salt in her pasta products, and Sarah does the packaging of her salts there and also uses the kitchen to make up the herbed and spiced salts. The third company in this little triumvirate is Tria Fine Catering and Gourmet Eats. Chef Kathy Jerritt uses Prontissima Pasta AND Clever Crow Sea Salt in some of her gourmet take-home products, which are sold there in the shop, such as Kathy’s Bacon Jam.

Stuffed Pasta ShellStuffed Pasta Shell

Sarah says this combination of artists is great since they can take turns running the retail sales part of the shop and share on rent and utilities. I am sworn to secrecy for the time being but it’s safe to say that expansion of facilities may be in their future.

*I was part of a culinary tour of the Comox Valley provided by Feast Media and Concierge. More about this company and the tours it offers in two weeks!

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Food Matters – Tis the Time of Year for Lamb

Posted on March 20, 2013 by Don Genova
DSC 0096Salt Spring Island Sheep
 

Spring has arrived, and with the season comes a number of celebrations. This year, Easter, Passover and the Persian New Year celebration of Nowruz all take place within a couple of weeks of each other, and lamb is a traditional food served with all of these observances. Today on Food Matters on All Points West, I presented a couple of lamb recipes, but also a look at the sustainability of the lamb agricultural sector on Vancouver Island. 

Lamb never used to be a favourite meat of mine. Never ate it once as a kid growing up, even though my uncle had a sheep farm in Southern Ontario not far from where we lived. My mom simply never cooked it. In university residence I had my first lamb chops. Very strong-tasting, with about an inch of fat around the chop. I figured I wasn’t missing anything. Then a few years later my sister did a leg of lamb on her barbecue with lots of garlic, lemon, oregano and rosemary, cooked to medium rare, and I loved it. When I moved to Vancouver and started my food journalism career, it seemed like every high-end restaurant had rack of lamb on the menu and I had it many different ways and definitely developed a taste for it.

Here on Vancouver Island, I’ve experimented with sharing half of an entire lamb with a neighbour from a farmer in Metchosin, which was great, but I started running out of room in my freezer because I also had a side of beef and half a pig in there. So now I tend to buy local lamb as I have a desire to make a particular recipe every now and again. I do have to tell you that price is a concern, it can be quite a bit more expensive than beef, chicken and pork.

To find out why the price is higher, I had a chat with John Buchanan, who has been running Parry Bay Sheep Farm in Metchosin for the last 30 years. It’s one of the largest sheep farms on the Island and John certainly has a wealth of experience in the sector, he told me much more about raising lambs and sheep than I can pass along here, but there are some very interesting nuggets of information regarding the price of lamb. The first is the cost of feeding the lambs. Despite our mild climate, most farmers can’t rely on the sheep and lambs eating grass all-year round, so they have to bring in feed, and the cost of the feed has been steadily rising, especially with some of the drought conditions experienced in the Prairie provinces recently. Another contributing factor that goes along with the feed is the efficiency of raising sheep. John told me it takes ten pounds of feed to get back one pound of lamb. For a chicken the ratio is only 1.8 to 1 and pigs are also much more efficient at converting feed to carcass weight. A mother sheep can only get you 1.7 lambs to market every year whereas if you have your own hatching program a hen could get you 300 more chickens to market every year. Then there are the predators. This year John lost 12 lambs to a cougar. And the cost of processing the lambs at the abattoir has also gone up by tenfold since he started his farm.

So why does he still do it? He told me he loves the challenge! He says it’s more fun than raising chickens. John says the abattoir situation has stabilized after some shutdowns and turnovers, and that’s very important for farmers to have somewhere to process their animals locally. Salt Spring Island finally has a new licensed-for-lamb abattoir this year. And, John says he is finally starting to see some actual profit in the operation, which he attributes to the rise of local food. People want local lamb, the flavour of Vancouver Island and Gulf Island lamb has a great reputation, and they are willing to pay more for it. John says local farmers can never compete on price with cheaper imports from Australia and New Zealand but now, people are willing to pay more for local lamb.

To find local lamb, it helps to know a farmer and ask where they sell their lamb, or find a reliable butcher. Sometimes you can buy at the farmgate or farmers’ markets, especially if you are willing to buy a whole cut-up frozen lamb. But there are more and more local grocery stores, especially in Victoria, carrying local lamb like that from Parry Bay Farm, and the Village Butcher, I talked about them a few weeks ago as they are the main processor for south Vancouver Island. Make sure you ask where the lamb comes from…you should know whether you are buying local lamb, imported lamb from Australia or New Zealand, or lamb that has been brought in from other Canadian provinces like Alberta.

Photo1Reshteh Polo
 
I’ve learned how to use some of the cheaper cuts of lamb to my advantage. For Easter I’ll be slow roasting a lamb shoulder with fresh herbs, onions and star anise, but today I brought in an Persian dish called reshteh polo which is a savoury mix of simmered lamb stew and saffron rice, and even a brochette of lamb heart done Moroccan style.
wordsthaw web

I will be out of the kitchen this weekend but still behind a microphone. I am moderating a panel on Food Writing at the University of Victoria, part of a day of talk about writing and readings called WordsThaw, organized by The Malahat Review. My part of the day is called A Sustainable Feast: The New Food Writing. It starts at 1:30 at the Human and Social Development Building, but check my blog for the link for more information. Panel members include my fellow Masters of Food Culture colleague Rhona McAdam, who has written Digging the City, an urban agriculture manifesto, and Kimberly Veness, a UVic student and Editor in Chief of Concrete Garden, the first environmental magazine to emerge from students in the writing department at UVic. Hope to see you there!
  

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