Food Matters – Fruitcake: Love it or Hate it?

Posted on November 21, 2013 by Don Genova

If you are a lover of fruitcake, and maybe even make your own, you likely have some carefully wrapped and aging in a cool spot, waiting to be sliced when holiday festivities begin in earnest. Or, if you hate fruitcake, you’re thinking about using any gift of cake you receive this year as a doorstop. I presented both sides of the story on this week’s edition of Food Matters with Jo-Ann Roberts on CBC Radio Victoria.

I am firmly on the side of loving a good, dark, nicely aged fruitcake. My aunts made the fruitcakes in our family. I loved the dark ones, but would always pass on the light ones because I thought they were too dry or crumbly. But I’m willing to try any fruit cake at least once. Then there are others who don’t want anything to do with fruit cake…

I put this question of loving or hating fruitcake on my Facebook account, knowing it would stir up some debate, and I wasn’t disappointed. Here’s a sampling of what some of the haters said:

Yuck! I honestly don’t get it. Thick, overly sweet, full of weird fruit, nasty, brutish ugh. Seriously, is it some kind of food joke?

 I can tolerate it, barely, as long as it doesn’t have candied fruit. That stuff makes me hurl.

Hate it. Reminds me too much of Rob Ford.

 I have no idea why people like fruitcake!

 In my early 20’s, I attempted to replicate baking a great cake I had tasted, for a boyfriend. I spent about $80 bucks on very fancy ingredients…and I’m pretty sure he still gave it to his Aunt Bertha, or used it as a door-stop. After that, I divorced fruitcake, along with the boyfriend.

But then I also had some very nice stories and memories, like these:

Love it! My mom would make it in the traditional style – soaking it in rum for a couple months before Christmas. Haters have never had real fruitcake. It should not be made with green and red square bits of fake fruit.

The boozier the better – and it has to have REAL fruit, not the scary neon green stuff.

Love it. But it has to made right – butter, sugar, spices, good quality dried fruit soaked in rum, and not over-baked.

 Love them! Also love brandy soaked Christmas Cake with schillings embedded! Everyone in the family has to take a turn at stirring for good luck!

I heard from a few people who talked about that idea of the shilling being baked into the cake and whoever got that piece when the cake was cut was in for some good luck. And over and over again I heard from people who said, ‘it has to be well-made with quality ingredients and properly baked and aged.’ A lot of that so-called candied fruit and peel is actually made from turnip or rutabaga, and who knows what kind of chemicals they put in some fruits to make them that bright colour many people despise. If you see a cake in a store that is labelled ‘Holiday Cake’, it means it doesn’t actually have fruit in it, but dyed vegetables instead.

I brought in some fruitcakes for Jo-Ann to taste, which all have stories. I think the most amazing story goes with the cake dipped in brandy, wrapped in cheesecloth, then parchment paper, then foil.  This cake was from the Harbourside Rotary Club of Victoria, which bakes over a thousand fruitcakes every year as a fundraiser. Usually they sell out, but as of airtime today they still have about 160 left. Email Ann Moscow at amoskow at shaw dot ca to see if they have any left. They only have the 750-gram dark cakes left at $25 each. They expect to raise about $17 thousand dollars this year which will be used to fund their various charitable projects.

Ramona Froehle-Schact also offered up a sample of her cake. Ramona is the founder of the Out of Hand Craft Fair which takes place next week in Victoria. She never has time before the show to make a fruit cake, but she made one last year following the fair, and unearthed one out of her freezer for me today. I thought it was great.

For people who just cannot get their heads into fruitcake, I brought in some panforte, a dense, chewy, Italian treat from Saison Café and Bakery in North Cowichan. Or you could try some stollen from any number of local European bakeries. Still contains dried fruit and usually a marzipan core, and is more breadlike. And soon the locally-made panettones from bakeries in Victoria will start hitting the shelves.

I’ll post some favourite fruitcake recipes here tomorrow. You know, if you start this weekend you might still get a bit of nice aging for the cake before Christmas.

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Food Matters – Battling the Gluten-Free Trend

Posted on November 15, 2013 by Don Genova

You see the labels on so many more foods today. Gluten-free Rice Krispies, gluten-free breads, pastas and even dog food. Food manufacturers are jumping into the gluten-free market with great zeal. But today on Food Matters, I presented the story of a bakery that is battling the trend. 

Bruce StewartBruce Stewart

When I bumped into the owner of True Grain Bread in Cowichan Bay a week ago we started chatting about the whole gluten free thing. After we parted I thought back on how long the bakery has been in business and what the owners have had to face as a bakery over the past ten years. Current owner Bruce Stewart, who took over in 2007, told me he bought in just as the low carb Atkins Diet trend was starting to fade; then he faced a huge jump in the price of organic grains as he was trying to hold the line on prices; now he’s having to deal with this growing swing of people demanding more gluten-free foods in their diet. Bruce told me it certainly was cause for concern. As the company looked at soft numbers that they felt were being caused by the gluten-free trend, they had a decision to make: Should True Grain start making gluten-free breads? Which would mean either creating an entirely new facility, or completely scrubbing down the bakery between each shift of baking gluten, then gluten-free loaves. In the end they decided to stick with the original concept of the bakery, using organic, heritage and ancient grains. Noting that most gluten-free products are made without grains of any sort, Bruce felt that would be an ironic move considering the name of the bakery is True Grain.  

Wheat BellyWheat Belly

So the alternative is to help educate people about gluten, make them understand it is not ‘bad’. Only one percent of our population is actually celiac. These are people who get really bad physical reactions when they eat gluten. Bruce has done some research (including this recent article in Maclean’s magazine, and this one from CBC News) and figures there may be another 20 percent of our population in Canada that has some sort of problem with what he calls modern wheat, and this is what the popular book Wheat Belly deals with; that the genetic makeup of our modern strains of wheat have changed drastically from what our ancestors used to eat, and our digestive systems have a problem dealing with it. But many people have fewer problems with the so-called heritage or ancient grains, such as emmer. Bruce says emmer is one of the first grains ever cultivated by mankind, it was found in the remains of some humans that dated back to 7000 BC. Emmer is the wheat referred to as ‘the staff of life’ in the Bible, and the wheat that predominantly turned humans from hunter-gatherers into an agricultural society. Genetically speaking, it is a simpler grain than today’s wheat, Bruce says, it has only 28 chromosomes, whereas today’s modern wheat has 48 chromosomes.

But CFIA regulations mean that Bruce still has to include emmer as ‘wheat’ on his packaging, and it does contain gluten, although seemingly not the type that upsets the intestinal fortitude of so many modern wheat-eaters.

So this is where the communication problem comes in. Bruce and his staff, and for that matter, other artisan bakers in this region, need to tell people there is a difference, and it’s not that easy to do. Bruce says they are lucky at True Grain because they have a loyal base of customers who understand what they’re trying to do, but they have lost some people and need new clientele.  ”When someone new comes in and it’s busy and they ask if we have gluten-free bread and they want a yes or no answer, the answer is ‘no’ and then they’re out the door. But if we’ve got time we can talk to them and answer some questions, and I’ve made up a pamphlet (click here for a link to the pdf version) that explains what we’re trying to do here and how our ancient grains breads may be more tolerated by people who have a non-celiac gluten problem. In the past 6 months we’ve given out three thousand pamphlets!”

The biggest gratification Bruce gets is when someone will take a loaf of bread home to try, and then come back into the store to give him a hug and tell him how much their life has changed because they’ve discovered they can eat his products with no problems to their digestive systems.

Coffee CakeCoffee Cake

On my radio show yesterday I brought in what I think is a delicious coffee cake I made by milling some whole emmer in my Thermomix using some unset jars of marmalade I had kicking around for the sweetener. Here’s the original recipe. Bruce also gave me some of True Grain’s emmer sesame bread and kamut pumpkin seed bread, which the folks at the radio station were enthusiastically munching on.

Nobody seemed too excited about the loaf of Udi’s gluten-free bread I brought in. Made primarily with imported tapioca starch and brown rice flour, it was very light and white and just not appetizing in general. And as Bruce points out from a food security angle, why buy that kind of loaf unless you have to, when you can have a loaf made with BC-grown grain, milled right in the bakery for freshness?

Bruce thinks this gluten-free demand is just a trend, facing the same fate as oat bran, Dr. Atkins and so on, but at the same time he does believe there is a genuine problem for a lot of people out there with the kind of wheat and grains they’re eating today. So his bakery will always remain committed to the types of products they sell now.

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Food Matters – Cooking During Wartime

Posted on November 8, 2013 by Don Genova

On Monday, Canadians will observe Remembrance Day. This is not an occasion generally associated with food, as so many of our other holidays are. But if we go back to the Second World War, food was definitely a daily concern.

I’ve been doing some reading and listening lately about the abundance of food we have these days and how we actually waste so much of it, and what would I do if suddenly I couldn’t go to the supermarket or grocery store or even a farmers’ market to get pretty much anything I want. I also think about my dad this time of year…who was drafted into the Canadian army in World War Two, but was sent home when they found out he was a farmer. ‘Farmers don’t go to war’, he was told. So he went back to work on the family farm. Neither my mother nor my father ever told me any stories of food rationing or shortages, possibly because they had enough food from the farm. But a few years ago I discovered an old cookbook my mother had in her collection that would have helped her out during wartime.

Moms cookbookMom’s cookbook

It is the 1945 edition of ‘The American Woman’s Cook Book’.  It has an appendix dedicated to Wartime Cookery, with warnings about what ingredients you may expect to be short of, such as prime cuts of meat, sugar, lard, and other fats. It advises the cook of the family (assumed to be a woman) to save everything for the soup pot, take advantage of the availability of offal, eat more chicken (since it will have been raised nearby by a woman), and lots of fish, since freshwater fish will still be available. How times have changed!

Kate AitkenKate Aitken

I have also delved into another cookbook which looks a little more modern, but only because it’s a modern reprinting of ‘Kate Aitken’s Canadian Cook Book.’ This was a staple in my mother’s little spot in one of her kitchen drawers she reserved for small cookbooks and recipe clippings. Again, published in 1945. Kate Aitken was known to any Canadian woman who listened to the radio, as she was on three days a week during her CBC years. To listen, go to this page in the CBC archives. I made a batch of muffins from one of the recipes in the cookbook, molasses spice muffins, but I have to admit that they were quite dry to my palate and not very sweet, which is actually a perfect reflection of wartime cookery. Not too much fat, (only 3 tablespoons) and little sugar (4 tablespoons of molasses). If you want the recipe send me a note in the comments.

Back to my dad. During the war he was a farmer, who stayed in Canada to farm, but what about those who weren’t farmers, but wanted to grow their own food? As they were in World War One, people were encouraged to build Victory Gardens. The curious part about World War Two is that there was a reluctance at first, on the part of the Canadian government to endorse Victory Gardens or provide any means of support for them. The agriculture minister of the day, James Gardiner, actually discouraged people from establishing Victory Gardens. In a posting on cityfarmer.org, I found this excerpt from the Canadian Public Archives:

“Gardening on such a small scale invited inefficiency in its (i.e. the government’s) opinion, due to a wastage of seed, fertilizer, tools, etc. and lead to overproduction of some crops. They adhered to this opinion despite scores of letters received urging the Federal Department of Agriculture to support Victory Gardens, and despite the very active Victory Garden movement in the United States of America…. By 1943, however, problems of shortages of food supplies for the Allies (although not domestically in Canada itself) inclined the federal government towards Victory Gardens.”

And if I might issue a gentle reminder: Backyard gardening remains a very viable alternative to purchasing fresh produce, especially here on Vancouver Island, with our temperate climate.

One more thing: Another blog post on wartime cooking from my colleague Amy Jo Ehman in Saskatoon. I think you’ll enjoy it, and sounds like she had better luck with her recipe than mine.

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Food Matters – Rumble Nourishing Drink

Posted on October 31, 2013 by Don Genova

***UPDATE: Since Paul Underhill and his team appeared on Dragon’s Den, this post has been getting literally thousands of hits. For those of you looking for places to purchase Rumble, go to this page on the Rumble website and activate the Retail Location finder.

To order Rumble online, go to this page on amazon.ca.

We’re all familiar with the vast choice of beverages we’re faced with at the corner store or supermarket; sodas, juices, energy drinks, umpteen types of water and even meal replacement drinks. Even with all that choice, a Victoria researcher couldn’t find exactly what he needed, so he invented his own drink.

Paul UnderhillPaul Underhill

His need stemmed from his illness. Paul Underhill was born with Cystic Fibrosis. He had been able to cope well with his disease up to his mid-twenties, but when he got into his late twenties and early thirties, his condition began to deteriorate and he wasn’t able to consume the amount of calories his metabolism was craving. He had to turn to trying meal replacements like Ensure and Boost on one hand, and vegan shakes on the other but none of it was really helping, so he started experimenting on his own at home and came up with Rumble.

It’s a little easier to say what Rumble is not; it’s not an energy drink, it’s not a meal replacement, and not a protein shake. It’s called a ‘nourishing drink’. Paul defines it as an all-natural drink that is properly balanced when it comes to protein and carbohydrates.

RumbleRumble

Paul and his team have developed two flavours of Rumble, Dutch Cocoa and Vanilla Maple, packaged in 355 millilitre aluminum bottles that retail for between $3.89 and $4.49, which is what you might pay for a fancy coffee drink. I like the taste of both of them, leaning towards the Vanilla Maple, which also has a great undertone of walnut flavour coming from real walnut oil. The Dutch Cocoa tastes like chocolate milk, but without the heaviness and sometimes sliminess you get from regular chocolate milk.

The name Rumble has a double meaning. First, it stands for the Rumble you get in your belly when you’re hungry, and second, he and his team wanted to shake things up, make a rumble with a new beverage that didn’t already exist in Canada. And I have to say that Paul makes a rumble himself…he arrived at our meeting today in Victoria on his longboard, he’s also a runner, a cyclist and a kiteboarder. Not bad for a guy who had a double lung transplant in 2011! His health has improved immeasurably because of that operation, so that and the development of this nourishing drink have really kept him going.

However, he and his team are not really making any money yet. Despite being different, it is highly competitive to make a dent in the sales garnered by the big companies…Paul knows that many new beverages companies fail after the first two years, and they’ve managed to survive the first year. They are in 500 retailers across Canada, and they hope to make inroads into the U-S market in the next year. And they are already donating part of their proceeds to One Percent For Hunger, an organization that supports food banks here in Victoria and beyond.

To hear my entire interview with Paul, click here to listen to the 11-minute mp3 file. It will take a few seconds to buffer before it starts playing in a new window.

Gold Medal Plates Tickets Still Available

This is a big deal. On Thursday, November 7th, the British Columbia edition of Gold Medal Plates comes to Victoria. This is your chance to see some of BC’s best chefs (including a few from Vancouver Island) battle it out for a chance to represent the province in the final competition taking place in Kelowna next February. Not only is this a good chance to taste great food, but also a chance to hear great music from Blue Rodeo’s Jim Cuddy and rub shoulders with some of our Olympic athletes. I’ll be there, will you?

For more background visit my blog posting of a month back,  and if you want to purchase tickets, visit the Victoria Gold Medal Plates site. There should still be a few tickets left but they’re going fast!

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Food Matters – Art of the Cocktail

Posted on October 24, 2013 by Don Genova
Art of the CocktailArt of the Cocktail

Victoria will be awash with spirits and the people who mix them and the people who drink them this weekend. The Art of the Cocktail festival returns for three fun-filled and educational days aimed at exposing attendees to all the latest trends in cocktails and the foods that go with them.

Cocktail Culture BookCocktail Culture Book

The Art of the Cocktail has its roots in a single event that was held as a fundraiser for the Victoria Film Festival in 2008. Now it has grown into a three-day festival in various venues around the city, kicking off with an event called the Three Martini Lunch on Saturday afternoon at the Bengal Lounge in the Empress Hotel. The largest event is the Grand Tasting at Crystal Gardens on Saturday night where you can taste many fine cocktails along with many fine bites to eat prepared by area chefs. I’m really looking forward to that as well as a workshop on Sunday at the Little Jumbo restaurant with Roberto Bava, an Italian wine producer and chocolate expert. He’s going to talk about how wines and fortified wines and how they work with chocolate and nuts. Or course there will be tastings and pairings.*update: This workshop is now sold out. Little Jumbo is the site of several workshops, and this is the restaurant that well-known Victoria mixologist Shawn Soole opened earlier this year. Soole and Nate Caudle also published a book called Cocktail Culture this fall, and it captures the heart of the cocktail scene in Victoria with profiles and recipes from all the top mixologists in the city.

Still Master VodkaStill Master Vodka

The cocktail has been in resurgence for over a decade now, I think. Not just a trend, but more possibly a reflection of it becoming easier for liquor brands to market themselves through the expanding media. But I think here in Victoria especially the trend is another reflection of the interest in local artisans and local products. More than ever before, cocktail recipes I see from local bartenders include bitters they’ve made themselves or purchased from other local producers, and because we have a growing number of distilleries on the island, and bartenders like to showcase those local spirits. So when Merridale Cidery released their new apple brandy, they had local bartender Janice Mansfield create some cocktail recipes using that product.

With us in the studio this afternoon was James Marinus, one of the managers of Shelter Point Distillery just south of Campbell River. I’ll have a more detailed story about the distillery in the future, but it was built primarily to make whiskey, however it takes three years of aging to produce a Canadian whiskey, so while they’re waiting for that first batch to mature next year they have been busy making a vodka called Still Master Vodka.

nanaimo bar cocktailNanaimo Bar cocktail

James shook and served us the North Island Pear-fection, which uses fresh pressed pear juice and apple juice from Blue Moon Winery in the Comox Valley. You’ll be able to taste that cocktail along with another cocktail made with Still Master vodka called the Nanaimo Bar at the Grand Tasting. Shelter Point Distillery is also hosting a cocktail competition on Sunday the 28th at Catalano Restaurant as bartenders will concoct more cocktails using Shelter Point’s Still Master Vodka. 7:00pm. Tickets are just $10.

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Food Matters – Denis Connor, Irish Vegetarian Chef

Posted on October 17, 2013 by Don Genova

It’s a few days past Thanksgiving and you might just be tired of turkey leftovers. What about some meals that don’t involve any sort of meat, fish or poultry? I had the chance to learn about some top-notch vegetarian cooking recently and shared the details with Jo-Ann Roberts this week on CBC Victoria’s All Points West program.

I am not a person who has ever embraced vegetarianism. That’s not to say I don’t appreciate a good meatless meal. I have just chosen to include animal protein in my diet. Vegetables are one of my favourite parts of any meal, so when I was invited to meet a famous Irish vegetarian chef traveling here to cook a special meal at Hastings House on Salt Spring Island I jumped at the opportunity.

Denis CotterDenis Cotter

Irish and vegetarian aren’t two words I would normally put together, and that’s the way it was for chef Denis Cotter, of Cork, Ireland, where meat and potatoes are staples. I asked him if food played a big role in his life when he was growing up, and he emphatically replied, “No.” His family ate a lot of boiled meat and boiled vegetables. Meat was occasionally roasted instead of boiled. He remembers that when broccoli came to Ireland it was “pretty exotic”.

His vegetarianism came almost as a bit of admiration; he had a vegetarian girlfriend but wasn’t vegetarian at the time, but somehow it rubbed off on him, and he was also into music from The Smiths, and Morrissey, the lead singer, was vegetarian. He started his working career as a banker who had to travel around Ireland quite a bit, and his frustration with not being able to find good vegetarian fare in restaurants led him change from banking to cooking, since once he went vegetarian, he had learned how to cook already. He moved to London for a while to work in vegetarian restaurants there. When he moved to Cork to open his own restaurant, vegetarian establishments in Ireland had a poor enough reputation, so he had to really shine. “I just found that people were seeking food that didn’t have things. Didn’t have meat, didn’t have dairy, didn’t have this and that. So there was definitely a niche to be created in celebrating vegetables, attaching them to some bold flavours, a chance to celebrate real food.”

The restaurant he opened is called Café Paradiso, he still owns it, he has published a couple of successful vegetarian cookbooks, but he has been spending more and more time here in Canada as when he was teaching at a culinary school in Stratford he met his now-wife, and has been learning more over the past few years about Canadian culinary customs. He has learned that people there certainly tend to obsess over certain food trends. “They’re very serious about local food, things like the 100-mile diet, which I certainly support, but they almost get a little anal about it. I mean in a country this size, if it comes from 150 or 200 miles away, does it really matter? And there is certainly too much celebration of bacon and pork. The idea of taking a piece of pork, and wrapping it in bacon and then frying it in bacon fat, that’s really too much. I don’t know, apparently bacon tastes good. But you know what, so does celeriac!”

And celeriac was in one of the courses he served at dinner, braised in cider and it really took on the appley flavour of the cider, and that dish came along with fresh chanterelles and buttermilk cauliflower puree, so a great blend of fall flavours. Denis was very impressed with the foraged mushrooms available here so for Jo-Ann, I made her one of his recipes that should be another fall favourite, some chanterelles with pumpkin gnocchi in a brandy and cream sauce. *Please note there is a mistake in the recipe as published in the link. It mentions grated cheese in the ingredients but not in the method. From its position in the list, I assume the cheese is to be added to the pumpkin and flour when making the gnocchi.

Denis and his wife booked extra time to stay on Salt Spring after they arrived, and there was a little bit of talk around our table that he might even consider a move out here to open a restaurant that has been in the planning stages for years. I guess you would consider that high praise. I should mention that Chef Cotter was the star of the latest edition of Chefs Across The Water program at Hastings House, a fundraising effort that donates money to sustainability projects on Salt Spring like the abattoir that started operating last year and a cold storage project now underway.

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