I guess I have always been a teacher at heart. Right from my first jobs at radio stations I worked at across Canada, I was always showing people how to do things, be they technical or writing/editing, as I worked my way up from supervisor to associate news director to producer. When I chose food and travel to be my specialty as a freelancer, soon enough came along the opportunity to teach Food and Travel Writing and Blogging courses at UBC, at first in person, but now in a 100% online format.
As I progressed to being a ‘food celebrity’ of sorts, one who enjoyed bringing food I had cooked into radio studios for hosts to taste, there came invitations to do cooking ‘demos’ to showcase a certain product or just to be on stage to add into the merriment of a festival or some sort of special event. I even raced then-CBC Radio host Rick Cluff to see who could whisk up a silky sabayon the fastest at the Pan Pacific Hotel’s Opera Buffet.
Somewhere along the way I was asked to teach cooking classes, and I did so for quite a few years, at Cook Culture in Victoria, Kilrenny Farm in the Cowichan Valley, and various one-offs here and there, especially during promoting my book, Food Artisans of Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands.
But then life changed for a while. My food and travel journalism and cooking classes took back seat to my role as a union organizer and defender of freelancers’ rights at the Canadian Media Guild Freelance Branch.
I’ve really missed the food journalism and food educator part of my life. So…I’m leaping back in, just on a part-time basis at first. I’m very happy to have landed at The London Chef, a catering company and cooking school based in downtown Victoria. Starting this month, I’ll be teaching 1-2 classes a month in my favourite cuisines. Starting with some classic Sicilian dishes, a summery Italian menu, and moving on to teaching people about sustainable seafood. You can find the descriptions of all the menus on The London Chef website. These are really fun classes as they are all hands-on. You get your hands and aprons dirty as you learn how to make pasta from scratch and wrap pork chops in sage and prosciutto before cooking them with a Marsala/butter/sage sauce. I know, right?
So I hope you will join me for one of more of my courses. You will eat very well!
Amanda Swinimer’s passion is kelp. Yes, that green stuff from the sea. Around 30 different kinds of kelp are found in the waters around Vancouver Island. It’s easy to get caught up in her passion if you listen to her talk about the medicinal and nutritional qualities of this seaweed she’s been harvesting on a commercial basis since the early 2000’s. Her sustainably-harvested products include dried winged kelp and bull kelp, rich in minerals and vitamins. Her dried product is available online and in many of the specialty shops described in this book.
Chefs also order seaweed from her to use on their menus. On an outing with Amanda to learn about seaweed off of Whiffin Spit near Sooke with chef Oliver Kienast of Wild Mountain Food & Drink, I was treated to seaweed tea, bread, spread, and even popcorn sprinkled with Dakini’s Kelp Flakes. Seaweed is loaded with umami, that mysterious fifth basic taste after sweet, salty, sour, and bitter that may be hard to describe other than saying, ‘tastes good’.
Amanda is a marine biologist and also a folk herbalist, which means she also makes medicinal salves out of seaweed. She told me she got turned onto seaweed while learning about wild crafting with herbs. “You should have seen my tiny one-bedroom apartment,” she laughs. “It was always laced wall-to-wall with long strings of seaweed hanging to dry.”
