Food Matters – Tastebud Guides – Victoria

Posted on June 13, 2012 by Don Genova

Guide Cover
E-books are here to stay, there’s no doubt about that. And whether you Kindle, Kobo, iPad it or even read them on your phone, the selection of reading material is growing. Today on Food Matters, I introduced some reading material that should make you quite hungry.

It’s the kind of idea that makes you think, ‘why didn’t somebody do this before?’ Victoria resident Jen Reiher has started a company called ‘Tastebud Guides’ that has just e-published its first offering called ‘Local Flavour, Victoria 2012’. It is an interactive electronic guide to a slice of Jen’s favourite restaurants in Victoria with a lot of room to expand with future editions.

Jen ReiherJen Reiher has been writing a blog about her restaurant visits in Victoria, and she eats out a lot in the city. So much so that this idea of sharing her knowledge base with anyone interested became something she just had to do. This reminds me I’ve something I’ve said in the past that goes along the line of, ‘If I had a nickel for every time someone asked me where to eat in Victoria..’

Of course she wants to make more than a nickel every time someone downloads this book…but it only costs you $3.99. Which is not bad considering that you might spend that much on parking outside your favourite restaurant in an evening. But this is an interactive guide which I think gives it added value the way Jen has cross-referenced restaurants and she loves the flexibility e-publishing has given her. When you are on the page for one restaurant you can easily click to jump the restaurant’s website if it has one, to other restaurants in the area, or other restaurants of that style. There’s even a neat infographic linking together via hop vines all the different breweries in Victoria which describes the flavour and style of beers they produce.

The title is ‘Local Flavour Victoria 2012’, which kind of sets us up for 2013…which is funny, because one of Jen’s New Year’s Resolutions for 2012 was to maybe not eat out so much…but if this becomes a success she will have to eat out even more so she can do a 2013 edition! Her plans are to augment and update each year, but beyond that, because she has put so much work into the format of this, she hopes other people will come to her to produce other niche guides. She says that the idea is that Tastebud Guides will serve as a template for other bloggers or food professionals to publish their own guides or reviews.

I think I will keep my own ideas secret for now! But here are some I’d like to see that I probably wouldn’t do myself…best places to have a cocktail in Victoria, complete with some recipes to try at home. Or what about a guide to Vancouver Island wineries? The opportunities are really unlimited, and it’s a format easy enough and affordable enough to put into reality that we could only have dreamed about a few years ago. In the future on the show I’ll tell you about some other neat ways food is coming to an electronic tablet near you!

To download Local Flavour Victoria 2012 to your reading device, just follow the instructions at this link.

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Food Matters – Tasting Tofino

Posted on June 6, 2012 by Don Genova

Serving SeaCiderServing SeaCider

The great thing about competitions between chefs as well as demonstrations by chefs is that ideas spread and trickle down to even us humble home chefs. That was just one of the lessons I learned Tofino last weekend at the Tenth Annual Tofino Food and Wine Festival over the weekend.

I’m ashamed to admit this is the first time I’ve been able to take advantage of an invitation to attend, and I’m really glad I finally made it. The sun was shining warm with not a cloud in the sky for the entire run time of the main event of the festival on Saturday afternoon called Grazing in the Garden. For three hours you can wander through the Tofino Botanical Gardens, grazing on snacks created by Tofino chefs and dozens of different BC wines, beers and ciders.

It was great to see so many Vancouver Island breweries and wineries well-represented there, including two wineries from Port Alberni (who knew?) Chase and Warren and Emerald Coast, serving a great Marechal Foch. Food-wise, I was very impressed with the offerings from Tacofino, the Wildside Grill and Long Beach Lodge. Tacofino presented a nacho chip topped with well-dressed smoked albacore tuna from Ian Bryce of Natural Gift Tuna, I featured him on my Island Artisans show. Liam Paul from Long Beach Lodge turned out these thin slices of duck breast prosciutto rolled up with rabbit rillettes and topped with fig preserves, and the ‘most want to try making at home’ award went to The Wildside Grill with its Vancouver Island Chicken Thighs, smoked then grilled, cut into small pieces and put on a piece of grilled cornbread topped with braised Nanoose Edibles greens. So I have recreated that for you here in a fashion, hope you enjoy it.

Nanoose Edibles is a certified organic farm near Nanoose Bay, not too far north of Nanaimo run by Lorne and Barbara Ebell. I sat down and had a nice chat with Barbara in the warm sun and I think I will go and visit the farm sometime in the near future so I can give you the full story, but I can tell you that this farm supplies many restaurants in the Nanaimo area as the name pops up on more than a few menus. Barbara has some very interesting ideas on how to successfully grow your veggies and on how to train young people in a fashion that will want them to carry on and become farmers on their own after a good apprenticeship at Nanoose Edibles, so listen for that story over the summer, I hope.

My major regret about visiting Tofino is that all of my visits are usually short, two to three days, so I don’t get a chance to eat at as many of the great restaurants I have tried there in the last few years. But that’s a great indication of how the area’s growth as a surfing and fishing and whale watching destination has brought in some really super food people as well. So in the past I have enjoyed great sit-down meals at Sobo, The Spotted Bear and Shelter…and food truck style snacks from Tacofino, which is in the old Sobo location just outside of town. This time my major sit-down meal was part of the Food and Wine Festival, a Quail’s Gate winemaker’s dinner at the Wickaninnish Inn under the very capable hands of Executive Chef Nick Nutting and Pastry Chef Matt Wilson. Quail’s Gate Winemaker Grant Stanley was on hand to describe the wines and the neat thing about this particular menu is that it really was determined at the last minute by the local ingredients. Some of the dishes are in the photo gallery below.

There are some  challenges with running restaurants when you are literally out there at the end of the road. There definitely can be a problem with supply of ingredients as your seafood delivery will quite often depend on the weather, and it can get rough out there. You are at the end of a long and winding road from many of your suppliers, so learning how to cope with what you’ve got is important…at the Wickaninnish they make a lot of their own preserves and all the bread and pastry baking is done in-house. The other problem is coaxing enough well-trained people to come out to work there, and to convince them to come to work when they would rather be surfing. But Charles McDiarmid of the Wick is working to solve that problem on a couple of fronts. One, because they pay so much attention to their wine list which is mostly made up of BC wines, many BC winemaking students have worked at the Wick to build their knowledge…one of the servers we met had just completed her Level 1 Sommelier Guild certification and that’s something that helps you build your career in the hotel and restaurant industry. Two, he is working with the provincial government to bring more immigrant workers to Tofino because he just can’t get enough locals to work there. So with growth comes growing pains, but from my point of view Tofino is a very tasty place to hang out these days…even if you don’t surf or fish. Have a look at this galley of photos from my weekend in Tofino:

 

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Joy of Feeding

Posted on June 6, 2012 by Don Genova
joyoffeeding banner1
 

If there is one thing I don’t like about leaving British Columbia in the summer time (or even in Juneuary) it is missing some great food events, like this weekend’s Island Chefs Food Fest in Victoria or the Joy of Feeding in Vancouver. Meeru Dhalwala of Vij’s and Rangoli Restaurants asked me to pass along the info for this event that she is organizing for this Sunday.

Tickets are $50, eat as much as you want and all food is local when possible (we buy all the meats, dairy and seafood from local BC vendors and it is organic). The prawn dish in the poster is BC Spot prawns. Wholefoods and ProOrganics donate the food that we can’t purchase from local small farmers. Last year was the first year and I featured 15 moms from around the world. This year, I’ve mixed it up and feature 16 men and women of different heritages who carry the title of “home cook”.
 

I hope you can attend either of these events on my behalf as I am away from BC this weekend!

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Food Matters – Salt Spring Tours Goes Locavore!

Posted on May 31, 2012 by Don Genova

The salt air of the Salish Sea always gives me a healthy appetite. This week on Food Matters I shared a voyage of culinary discovery, all from the deck of a Salt Spring Island-based cruiser.

Food somehow tastes better in the outdoors. Think about picnics, camping, dining al fresco, and certainly street food, as last week’s contest showed. But this week I wanted to  talk about food on board a boat. Out on the water, the sea spray in your hair, the aromas of curried spot prawns and smoked salmon bisque wafting through the air…
Spot Prawns on the Salty Cat
A couple of weeks ago I was on board the Salty Cat…her proper name is The Pride of Victoria , a 45-foot long catamaran cruiser operated by Salt Spring Tours. The other guests and me were on board for the party launching the first cruise of the year and also the first cruise for the new chef onboard, Richard Verhagen. Richard has cooked and run restaurants on Salt Spring for years, including a stint running the Raven Street Cafe on Salt Spring, where he cooked everything in and on a wood burning oven. Now he has a tiny but well-stocked galley to work out of, he calls it a closet, and a barbecue on the back deck of the Salty Cat he calls his corner office. And what a view! We started the evening with raw, freshly shucked oysters from up island, more about those in a minute, and then Richard served up the rest of the menu: Listen to Richard describe the menu.

The idea is to keep everything local. Listen to Richard’s philosophy.

Also on board for the launch with a cooler full of raw oysters was Rob Tyron of the Effingham Oyster Company. He raises oysters in the waters of Barclay Sound. Two different types that have distinctly different flavours, Pacific Rim Petites and Effingham Inlets. They really were different, and Rob says it’s a lot of fun to try as many different kinds of oysters as you can to discover new flavours: Listen to Rob’s Quote

Rob served the oysters he was shucking alongside a couple of sauces made by Richard Verhagen. You can find his recipe for the wickedly hot citrus sambal sauce here. I switched my version of the recipe a little by cooking 3 carrots in the orange juice and roasting the hot Fresno peppers I used.

I’ll post some more photos of our adventure later.

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Food Matters – Island Chefs Food Fest – You Can Win Tickets Here!

Posted on May 23, 2012 by Don Genova

Chef Bill JonesChef Bill Jones

With the growing emphasis being placed on where our food comes from, and how it is produced, restaurant chefs are also getting more involved in their own supply line. How chefs are helping farmers, and how you can help the chefs, were today’s topic on Food Matters.

It seems a given that chefs would care about the quality of ingredients and where they come from, but it’s not always that way. There is a huge range of involvement on the part of chefs and cooks and their ingredients. It goes all the way from chefs who have their own small farms or gardens to supply their kitchens, to chefs who have active relationships with local farmers and ranchers and fishes, to larger food service operations where all the ingredients come delivered by one truck and there isn’t as much care and attention paid to the source of the ingredients, which could be from down the road or could be from thousands of miles away. But take the case of American Chef Thomas Keller and Chef Andoni Luis Aduriz of Spain, who have created quite a case of indigestion for ‘farm to fork’ fans.  Keller is known for his famous French Laundry restaurant in California and Per Se in New York City. And here’s  how the New York Times recently described Aduriz: 

“He is a pioneer in culinary aesthetics, using taste and technology to create potatoes coated in edible clay that look like just-dug stones; salads like snowfalls; and desserts that evoke dustings of pollen or skeins of frogs’ eggs.” 

But what he and Keller said about the current trend of chefs knowing and supporting their farmers is making some people choke. In an interview with the Times, Aduriz said he likes to use local ingredients,

 “But to align yourself entirely with the idea of sustainability makes chefs complacent and limited.” Keller said, “With the relatively small number of people I feed, is it really my responsibility to worry about carbon footprint? The world’s governments should be worrying about carbon footprint.”

You should see some of the responses I’ve seen on Facebook from chefs I know. And there is also this response from from Twilight Greenaway on grist.org. When I think of restaurants like Locals, in Courtenay, where Chef Ronald St. Pierre has portraits of his farmers and their ingredients on the walls and a rack full of business cards at the front door so you can enjoy the same quality of ingredients he does…well, there’s just no question about how important chefs are in the local food chain. Which brings me to the Island Chefs Food Fest coming up on June Tenth at Fort Rodd Hill, which is not that far away. 

Island FoodIsland Food

This is the fifth anniversary of the food fest, it’s a big fundraiser for the Island Chefs Collaborative, and in the past the money has been used to help farmers purchase things like deer fencing and irrigation systems, the kind of capital investments that farmers can’t always afford, but when they do get something like that it really helps them increase their production and in turn their bottom line. Now the ICC is doing something different. This year they have a new zero-interest micro loan fund for farmers and processors – with over $100,000 to give away. The aim of the fund is to provide a pool of funds for growers, harvesters and processors to invest in equipment and materials that allows them to increase the supply of food in the region. Some of the projects being considered for loans right now include: funds for an oil processing facility on Salt Spring, a delivery vehicle for an urban farmer, and for a dairy transitioning to cheese production in the Cowichan Valley. So, get your tickets for the Food Fest and while you’re there think about the contribution the chefs and YOU are making to a better food life here on Vancouver Island.

The theme this year? Expect lots of street-style food using ingredients that we tend to discard or disregard because we don’t know what they taste like or how to cook them. So, I kind of rummaged about in my repertoire of odd bits and came up with a few dishes to help host Jo-Ann Roberts get in the mood, like chicken liver pate, grilled chipotle-lime flank steak and bacon fat cookies!.

The Contest Part: Think about the most delicious street food you’ve ever had. Scroll down to the comments section and tell me about your favourite street food from anywhere in the world. We’ll pick a winner who will get two tickets to the Island Chefs Food Fest on June the tenth. Your deadline to enter is 11am, Wednesday, May 30th.
 

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Food Matters – Babe’s Honey Returns!

Posted on May 20, 2012 by Don Genova

Distinctive LabelingIt was a household name for honey on Vancouver Island for more than 60 years. Babe’s Honey was known for being a high-quality local product as well as its bright fluorescent orange labels. The company went into receivership, though, and the honey supply dried up. But Babe’s Honey is back.

Charlie Warren and his wife Alison, also known as Babe, ran Babe’s Honey for decades, starting in 1945 with just a few hives and eventually thousands of beehives that were positioned around Vancouver Island to allow bees to produce honey from all the wonderful flowers we have we have around here. I actually got to meet Babe not long after I moved to Vancouver. This would have been back in the mid-to-late 90’s, I think, I was on a foodie-scavenger hunt of Vancouver Island and my meanderings found me at Babe’s. Charlie had already passed away, but Babe was going strong, showed me around their warehouse and told me how she stung herself with a bee every day to help out with her arthritis…which left a lasting impression on me, I can tell you.

Babe passed away in 2006, and the company was sold to a group of investors. The farm the honey processing plant was on in Saanich basically became a landfill site, creating much controversy, but the long and the short of it is that the company went into receivership in 2011, the courts ordered the land and the beekeeping and honey business to be sold separately, and that’s where Brandon Schwartz comes in. 

Brandon used to work at Babe’s. Not when Babe was there, but in the years after she passed away. He first got hooked on honey when he was studying accounting in school, but had a chance to go to California and work at a large-scale beekeeping operation. It was a life-changing experience: Listen to Brandon’s Quote (36 seconds)

HiveBy the box he means the beehives, beehives would become a huge part of his life, but he didn’t know that when he took the job at Babe’s. But by the time the company went into receivership he knew that he didn’t want to see all the bees, hives and other equipment go to waste, so he stepped in with some financial help from his father and bought the name and everything else he could afford at auction. But this is back in June of last year, too late to get the beehives and bees in shape for the season, which could mean no Babe’s Honey on the shelves for 2012.  So for this year only, Brendan’s bees did not produce the honey for sale now, but it was all produced here in BC:

Listen to Brandon’s Quote (23 seconds)

So, the bees are out in their hives, and I got a chance to get up close and personal with a group of hives, so close that Brandon got stung right next to his eye, and I had a couple of bees buzzing in my hair that I could just not get rid of for a while! Luckily I didn’t get stung but I feel bad that Brandon did…

Right now you can get Babe’s Honey in just one place.  Brandon is renting some space at Galey Farms on Blenkinsop Road right now, and for the foreseeable future as his main retail outlet. As Brandon grows the business he expects to get back into more retail outlets like Babe’s was before, and people are glad to see those bright labels coming back: Listen to Brandon’s Quote (48 seconds)

Try Honey

You can go and taste all the honeys there before you buy, and the shop smells great because of all the honey, and beeswax candles available there as well. If you want to learn more about honey, bees and mead, May 27th is Honeybee Awareness Day and you can learn all about the industry at Tugwell Creek Honey Farm and Meadery near Sooke. Click here for more information.

To listen to my entire conversation with Jo-Ann Roberts about Babe’s Honey on the All Points West show click here.

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