Don Genova's Blog

Making the decision that the all the ingredients at your restaurant should be local and organic is easy. Sourcing all those ingredients is hard, and that’s where the artisanal nature of the head gardener at Sooke Harbour House comes in.  For the past twenty years Byron Cooke has fed a steady stream of over 300 edible plants to the chefs in the restaurant and I introduced him to listeners of All Points West today on Island Artisans.

The restaurant operates year-round and it has a huge appetite for everything Byron Cooke can supply it with.  Of course the meats and seafood and some other ingredients come from other farms down the road or elsewhere in BC, but the majority of salad greens, herbs and edible flowers come from the gardens surrounding Sooke Harbour House and a new plot at a farm the Inn operates close by.  My wife and I took a winter gardening course from Byron a couple of weeks ago and he took us through the process he goes through at this time every year when it comes to planting for the cooler months ahead.  He has to figure out what will grow in the Sooke micro-climate, what he has the space to grow, and which plants the deer that abound on the property will eat!

I have two acres of land at my place but only a small portion of that is fenced so that it’s protected from the deer.  And Byron also mentioned thinking about what chefs will cook with.  That’s like me.  I could plant all kinds of squash to that will keep over the winter, but I don’t really like squash so it would be silly to devote all that space to it. 

Walking around the gardens of Sooke Harbour House is like being in an ongoing whirlwind of growth and harvesting.  Byron described just a few of the plants that will still serve as ingredients for the winter, and one that will go straight through to the spring, such as the walking stick cabbage, which produces small leaves great for salads, larger leaves perfect for wrapping other foods, and will flower in the springtime with some of the sweetest and tastiest cruciferous vegetable blossoms that are perfect for salads and garnishes.  Some of the cabbage leaves were sacrificed to the deer because the wily devils stuck their noses through the fence and nibbled whatever they could reach! 

South Vancouver Island has a pretty moderate climate year-round, so what about winter gardening for places elsewhere in the province where you can expect lower temperatures? Byron says don’t be discouraged.  Plant appropriately in the mid-summer so you can actually leave vegetables such as leeks and carrots in the ground, they store well there, as long as you can make your way through the snow to pull them up, and some things, like kale, actually taste better after a freeze-up.  He says 150 years ago settlers couldn't go to a grocery story in the winter, so they made sure they preserved what they grew in better weather and planted crops that they could continue to harvest in the winter.  He thinks that's just a better way to live and we should all be doing more of it.

Byron gave us lots of seeds to plant at the gardening course. And now is the time to get some hearty herbs and bitter greens in the ground that you can harvest into the winter, and I’ve already planted some kale and chard to keep me going as well.

Here are a couple of photos of the lunch we enjoyed after the gardening workshop. You can see how colourful the dishes are made with the help of Byron's flowers and greens.

In the weeks ahead on Island Artisans, I’ll take you past Sooke to the Tugwell Creek Meadery, where beekeeper Bob Liptrot will talk honey and mead, and also about the new regulations about the transportation of bees to Vancouver Island that has many beekeepers here concerned.  And Bob will be speaking at a rally concerning the fate of the honeybee at the Legislature next Wednesday.  It's called Swarm The Legislature!

For thousands of years humans didn’t have such things as refrigerators and freezers, so they had to become pretty inventive when it came to preserving foods for pantries barren of fresh foods over the winter.  Part of that invention included smoking and curing meats from their farm animals, and while we can freeze meat for later use quite easily, smoking and curing is something we still do because we love the flavour.  At least many of us do, including of course, me!

I have always loved cured and smoked meats, hams, sausages, salamis, bacon, any part of an animal that has been salted or brined and cured and possibly smoked.  When I spent a year studying food culture in Italy, salumi, or cured meats, was a required course of study and any field trip we went on to any European country usually involved a visit to some artisan who specialized in cured meat.

We don’t have as much of a long-standing tradition here in Canada. Well, it is out there, but definitely not as pronounced here on the west coast as it is in provinces where there are stronger pockets of European immigrants…so in Quebec and Ontario and some of the Eastern European pockets across the Prairies there is still some authentic local production, but we seem to rely on a lot of imported product on Vancouver Island, whether it’s imported from overseas or from the rest of Canada.  So imagine my delight when I first tasted the products of the Nanaimo Sausage House at a local food festival there.  I had to go directly to the source and caught up with Catherine Clarke, one of the current owners of the Sausage House.
 

They specialize in a lot of Eastern European style products that are usually smoked, so a little bit different from the Italian and Spanish products I’m used to, which are primarily cured, with no smoking once they’ve been cured. They also make fresh sausages (about 30 different kinds) perfect for your barbecue. As Catherine took me through their showcase I couldn't help but start slathering at all the aromatic and yummy-looking sausages, ranging from Hungarian to Polish kielbasa types, to hams and bacons, all made from hormone-free pork raised in the Fraser Valley.  No fillers, preservatives or binders are used.  They also make some products using Vancouver Island bison!

If you think Catherine Clarke doesn’t sound like a very European name, her business partner, Pawel Biegun, has the European pedigree and they were looking for opportunities.  He had known the couple who started the Sausage House since he arrived from Poland 20 years ago, so they bought into a company that already had been operating for 20 years and have now run it successfully for 10 more years. The couple passed on all of their recipes and methodology, which has remained unchanged, although Catherine and Pawel have put into place some processes that have made the operation a little more efficient.

Here are some of their grilling sausages I tried, their North African made with sun-dried tomato, cilantro and pine nuts, as well as their turkey sausage made with sun-dried red peppers. The dense meaty flavour is complemented by a very moist texture…I think I need to try some of the other 28 varieties!

I always worry about businesses like this surviving in the future, because it not really a turn-key operation, someone really needs to learn the craft like Catherine and Pawel have, and we live in a world where we often forget what a hand-crafted product is supposed to taste like.  But Catherine is optimistic our attitudes are changing, more people are appreciating good quality in artisanal products, and that will keep them going. 

Nanaimo Sausage House does not do mail order, but if you don't live in Nanaimo maybe someone who is passing through can take along a cooler and pick up some of the frozen product.  The smoked hams and sausages keep quite well for weeks in your fridge.

If you are in Nanaimo, the Sausage House is at 3018 Ross Road, behind the Country Club Mall.  Call them at 250-751-0555.

And just a heads-up if you are looking to purchase some sausages for the long weekend, they get VERY busy before long weekends! 

Blueberry season in British Columbia is a little late this year because of our cool spring, but it is now in full swing.  BC blueberry farmers produce around 90 million pounds a year.  While many of those go into typical processed blueberry products such as juices and jams, I found a different blueberry product to talk about today on Island Artisans. 

Some folks in the know told me that just outside of Courtenay I would find Nature’s Way Farm, a certified organic farm that specializes in blueberries, strawberries and salad greens.  Of course this time of year the blueberry bushes are loaded with fruit, and I strolled through the rows with owners George Ehrler and Marla Limousin. Marla told me we were standing in what used to be a swamp.  But 20 years ago the swamp was drained and blueberries were planted, all kinds of different varieties, but they all love the acidic, well-drained soil. 

I have to admit I became just a little jealous, since I have just 6 tiny bushes at home in my garden right now, and at Nature’s Way all these bushes were just loaded down with ripe blueberries, and it was so fun to go from different varieties, taste sampling all the way along.

While the bushes are twenty years old, George and Marla are relative newcomers to this business of blueberries.  George is an engineer by trade, Marla a landscape architect.  They used to live on Salt Spring Island and work quite often in the high Arctic, but with their kids growing up they found themselves coming to Vancouver Island a lot, so George was originally looking to buy a condo at Mount Washington.  Those plans went somewhat sideways.

George was trying to get real estate agents to call back.  When none did he started looking on his own, and came across the ad for the blueberry farm.  He told Marla about it, and she basically said, 'Are you crazy?'  A week and a half later she said, 'Let's go and have a look at that farm.'  And he said, 'Are you crazy?'  But off they went, and about a week and a half later they bought the farm.  Coincidentally, that was right about the time the first studies about the health benefits of blueberries started to make the news, so that the timing was perfect.

Instead of doing something obvious like making jams or jellies, George decided to get a little bit more serious with the winemaking hobby he had pursued for years.  So, the second part of the operation is called the Blue Moon Estate Winery.  George turns blueberries, blackberries, apples and strawberries from the farm into fruit wines, and also purchases fruits like pears and cherries from nearby orchards to make into wines.  The one I tasted with Jo-Ann Roberts today is called Eclipse, it’s a port-style wine made from their own blueberries and Island blackberries.  Wines made with fruits other than grapes in general have had a bad reputation, and that’s why George likes to keep the production small so he can meet potential customers coming in the door.  "Our biggest hurdle is getting over the memories people have of the fruit wines their elders used to make down in the basement, and how they didn't really enjoy it.  But we have people coming in here now and tasting, and saying how it's different than what they remember, and they like it."

The third component to this ‘venture in the swamp is called the Tria Culinary Studio.  So along with your blueberries and fresh produce and wine that you can get at the farm, you step just to the side of the front counter and you find yourself in a beautiful kitchen that doubles as a dining room and a classroom.  That’s where chef Kathy Jerritt hangs out.  She returned from an inspirational trip to Italy where she realized she wanted to somehow take advantage of the wonderful foods available in the Comox Valley.  She teaches cooking classes where you often go into the Nature's Way garden to harvest ingredients, and once a month during the growing season, Kathy hosts a full moon feast which includes a Blue Moon Winery cocktail, appetizers you eat as you tour the farm, a tasting of Blue Moon’s wines, and a 4-course plated meal paired with wine. The bad news is that the August and September feasts are sold out, the good news is that they’ve added another feast in September and you can always look ahead to the December winter solstice feast. 

I spent a beautiful weekend on Mayne Island two weekends ago, where the scenery and friendly people were only topped by my visits to the Saturday morning farmers’ market and Deacon Vale Farm.  The farmers market was very well-attended, I managed to get my hands on the last box of snap peas from one farm and merrily munched on them as I wandered the stalls, which were stocked with fresh produce, delicious baked goods, and jars and jars of  organic sweet and savoury offerings from Deacon Vale Farm.

Don and Shanti McDougall produce so many fruits and vegetables on their farm that they also built a commercial kitchen to preserve what they don’t sell at the farmers market. The McDougall’s invited me out to tour the farm.  Of course I wanted to see the commercial kitchen as well, where all the jamming and chutneying and pickling takes place, and Shanti explained how her specialized equipment, like her giant sized steam kettle, makes the canning more efficient. She's been known to can well over 300 large jars of tomato sauce in one day.  If you knew how long it takes me to make 12 small jars of jam, you would appreciate what kind of volume that is!

Along with the steam kettle, another helpful too is a steamer that she puts the sealed jars into for final processing.  It maintains the heat necessary for proper canning right from the start, and means no dunking and retrieving of jars from boiling water.

They make a wide variety of products which differs from year to year, depending on what they harvest, and can get up into the 10 thousand jars a year range.  One of their most popular products is the tomato sauce, which people travel from the Mainland just to get it.

Don is a professional chef as well as a farmer, but when it comes to the canned products, that is totally Shanti’s realm, although she does admit that his knife skills come in very handy when she needs thirty pounds of onions chopped in a hurry!  So Don takes care of the farm operations, which also include some chickens and beef, I’ve had a couple of their steaks, which are some of the best beef I’ve ever tasted.  He was also responsible for getting the Mayne Island Farmers’ Market going when he realized the need for it.  Don says the next dream is to actually open a store in an unused auto shop there on Mayne, but the idea has met with some opposition.

Here's the sign they had made up for the store, which would sell their own produce, meats and canned goods, as well as those from other farms and producers on Mayne Island, the other Gulf Islands and beyond. There’s a lot more to the story, but in a nutshell the Islands Trust has denied the McDougalls the permission to open the store, they’re fighting that decision, with the support of much of the community…to be continued!  In the meantime, you can find their products at some Mayne Island retail outlets. Thanks to Don and Shanti for adding a very personal touch to my enjoyment of my first weekend visit to Mayne Island, I'm sure it won't be the last!