Don Genova's Blog

   As we head into the last long weekend of summer 2011 people are winding down their travel plans, but for destinations within a day’s drive or short flight, well, let’s just say the harvest season is just getting underway and the tasty rewards for exploring intriguing farms is just getting underway.  I’m just back from my own farm exploration, which took me to Oregon State. 

Why Oregon? Why not?  It’s a short hop by plane, doesn’t cost that many frequent flyer points if you have them, or a day’s drive away that isn’t too onerous once you get through Seattle. And Oregon has a very vibrant food scene, based in Portland, but expanding to towns like Salem and Eugene, and especially into the largest wine producing area, where you can find about 400 wineries, all within about an hour’s drive of Portland. And I even discovered a couple of islands to explore.  I was doing some research, looking for restaurants in cities that use nearby farms to supply their ingredients.  I came across the name Minto Island Growers, which is right in Salem, the state capital.  Elizabeth Miller, one of the owners of the farm, explained to me how she and her partner Chris Jenkins named the farm and how they ended up there: “It’s a historical name, from when the Willamette River, which runs through Salem, surrounded this area.  Now the river channel has changed and it’s no longer an island, but lots of people still ask us about it. We named the farm Minto Island Growers because it is right next to a city park, Minto-Brown Island City Park, so that people would know that we are very close to downtown and they can get great organic produce without driving too far.”

Elizabeth Miller’s parents bought a large farm area on the island back in the 1980’s, but a few years ago she and Chris carved off part of that farm and turned it into an organic operation.  This year they decided to open up the farm to the public on a regular basis. So when you get to the main entrance, you will find a farm stand with their fruits and veggies available to purchase, but also a food cart, self-contained in a little trailer, and if you’ve ever been to Portland, you know that there are clusters of very innovative food carts downtown and in some of the other neighbourhoods. 

So, in addition to buying produce to take home, you can stay for lunch, with quite an impressive menu cooked by Elizabeth’s mother and some helpers with most of the ingredients of course coming from the farm. Chris told me that the decision to open up the farm to the public has been very rewarding so far: “We made a conscious decision to add to people’s farm experience and although it has helped our bottom line with the farmstand and foodcart sales, just to see tours come in, or mothers and their young children wandering through the fields and saying, ‘hey, there’s a Brussels sprout!’ has been a very rewarding and positive experience.”

My rewarding and positive experience there was a pulled pork sandwich with very fresh tomato-cucumber gazpacho and a lavender infused soda water. Just imagine the setting, out on the farm, surrounded by fresh produce and growing things, and having a very nice meal at the same time!

The other island I found is closer to Portland…and this one is really still an island, you have to cross the river on a bridge to get to it, and it’s called Sauvie Island, around 26 thousand acres in size, home to farms and a large wildlife refuge, the largest river island in the United States.  Somehow there is a different, quieter feel to life once you cross over the bridge, it’s hard to explain.  Not too far from the bridge I found Bella Organics, another family-run certified organic farm that is trying to turn a visit to a farm into a fun and education experience. 

The day I was there they were catering a birthday party under a large tent and farm manager Samara Hashem says that’s just a tiny part of a rapidly expanding operation: “We are going to be expanding our U-pick operation, we’ve just about finished a new farm stand building, we are getting chefs and caterers to come up and do dinners in the field to show people what they can do with all the neat fruits and veggies we produce.”  They will also do a corn maze for the first time this year, there will be a pumpkin field for Halloween as well.

We do hear a lot about how farms here in BC are struggling to make it given rising fuel costs, and competition from cheaper imports, but here are two organic Oregon farms that are really taking a more aggressive stance in providing value-added experiences at the farmgate and beyond, so if you are at all into agriculture, farming and of course eating, take a drive down to Oregon and poke around a bit, you’ll be amazed at what you see.

A professional chef could often be labelled as a wanderer or a traveler, or just someone with a resume as long as their arm.  They tend to work in a lot of different places, sometimes for a few months, maybe for a few years. But once a chef, always a chef, right?  Today on Island Artisans, I talked about a chef who has decided to change his focus to perhaps a less-frenzied lifestyle.

I first met Cory Pelan when he was the chef at La Piola restaurant in Victoria, a place where you could get a very good Italian meal with housemade pasta and a dedication to local ingredients. When his contract to run that restaurant was about to end, he was thinking about moving to or starting another restaurant, just like most chefs would. Then he had second thoughts: “I kind of had an epiphany with a pig one afternoon.  I was in the kitchen, working with a whole carcass, breaking it down and eventually making maybe 15 or 20 different products with it and thinking that this was the happiest I’d been in my working life, so that’s when I thought I could do something like this full-time.”

So, from being a full-time chef, he has turned himself into a full-time salumi-maker or salumist. Salumi is the Italian word for cured meat, and many of Cory’s products in his new career are rooted in Italian tradition.  These products are now for sale at The Whole Beast Artisan Salumeria on Oak Bay Avenue, sharing a new space with the Village Butcher, so you have a great place for both cured and fresh meats under the same roof. I went in for the first time a couple of weeks ago and a place like this is heaven on earth for a cured meat enthusiast like me, starting with the aromas of smoked and cured meat, and the gleaming counters full of a multitude of different products, most of which originate from that magical animal, the pig.

Curing meat is not a skill you just pick up overnight, but that’s where his chef background came through, always searching for the best ingredients to serve your customers: “So instead of just ordering my sausages and cured meats from distributors and getting a product that I wasn’t really satisfied with, something that either didn’t have enough fat or wasn’t the right texture or flavour, I started trying to make it myself. First I started with fresh sausages, and then I got more into cured and fermented products, and those products became part of the menu wherever I was cooking.”

When I visited Cory he had just taken some wonderful brisket out of the smoker, and I was really like a kid in a candy store there, there are different kinds of bacon, spicy cappicollo, guanciale, lardo, pork belly confit, coppa, pancetta and more,and a whole line of fresh sausages.

An unexpected find for me at the shop were all these different preserves that you serve with these products. Honey candy cane beets, pickled broccoli, mixed Italian style pickles, pickled peppers, even his own pickled ginger, which is so superior to anything else you can buy in a jar. 
It’s all been wonderful, but a decidedly different pace than what he has been used to in his chef career.  Mind you, the pace is still pretty busy as the demand for his products has kept Cory and his staff working away to keep the shelves stocked. But I did ask him if he misses his former restaurant life: “Uh, sometimes.  And I know at some point I’ll probably go back into it, and there’s even an opportunity to get into a small food service establishment right here with this business.  But I don’t miss the long hours or the tiny profit margins in the restaurant business, and thinking of that keeps me in check.”

So, you can’t really take the chef out of a chef once they have the bug.  Cory and I talked for quite a bit longer about the kind of products he’s making there, how he sources local meats in his products and how his business partner Jeff Pinch brings a northern European specialty to The Whole Beast to complement Cory’s mainly Italian preferences…y’know I even saw some Chinese-style pork belly hanging there the other day. Next week I’ll put our entire conversation on the blog for you to listen to, but to keep you busy in the meantime you can always log onto Facebook and ‘like’ The Whole Beast Artisan Salumeria page!

You can have the biggest marketing or advertising budget in the world, or you can have successful word of mouth. In the case of Bruce Wood, it was word of mouth that brought me knocking on the door of Bruce’s Kitchen one sunny afternoon on Salt Spring Island.

Word spreads pretty quickly in a small community like Ganges when there’s a new restaurant to be tried.  But to take advantage of the tourist season on Salt Spring it’s nice to know that people are talking about you.  I started hearing about Bruce’s Kitchen a couple of years ago, just after Bruce Wood opened his little cafe that is part of the strip mall right where the Saturday farmers’ market takes place in Ganges.  More than a couple of people told me I had to go there. I tried at least twice to go there on visits to Salt Spring, but my timing was always off.  I even met Bruce at food events on Vancouver Island.  Finally, I caught up with him at home a few weeks ago, on one of his rare days off. I found out he came to Salt Spring from Ontario for family reasons. No place to live, though, and no job. But under his belt, a lot of experience in the restaurant industry: “As a chef I can always find work, so it wasn’t long before I started working at the Rock Salt Cafe on the south part of the island. But as I was working there I started to realize I didn’t want the rush of a restaurant anymore, working on the line.”  Serendipity stepped in when Bruce met a businessman who wanted to start a food venture and Bruce’s Kitchen was born…a cafe that concentrates on take out, catering, a few seats inside and outside and lots of local, seasonal food. His partner wanted out after a year, so he sold his portion to Bruce.

Bruce’s kitchen is just a larger version of what you may have at home.  Lots of pots and pans hanging from the ceiling, open shelves holding plates and bowls and Bruce’s preserves, a self-serve coffee and tea station and a huge chalkboard with the daily menu…as Bruce really cooks with the seasons and what he can source on Salt Spring.  His main goal is to give his patrons a real sense of community. “So on the menu we use local fruits and vegetables, cheeses and meats. We keep things very seasonal and are teaching people that you shouldn’t eat strawberries in February and asparagus in March. And I think it’s working, because we get the same people coming in all the time. Earlier this year I had a bit of a scare and I was in the hospital for a few days and it was so wonderful to have some of my customers coming in to visit and bringing plants, really happy to be supported at that point.

In turn, Bruce supports the community by working closely with the cooking apprenticeship program at the local high school and serving on its advisory committee and he’s very proud of the people from that program who come and work and learn from him at the cafe.

On my visit to Bruce’s Kitchen, I ate two of my favourite things…pizza and salad, together.  A very generous portion of flatbread covered in housemade sausage, roasted tomato and feta cheese, with a lightly dressed green salad served right on top of the pizza which was actually great eating it together like that.  The other main special that day was a quiche made with ‘Sally’s Braising Greens’, local leeks, cheddar and ham…the staff were also making sandwiches, and serving up vegetarian chilli with homemade cornbread and free-range chicken pot pie. If you visit, make sure you leave with some of Bruce’s preserves or his great house-made ketchup and mustard.

Bruce’s dedication to quality and local ingredients is really paying off. In June the restaurant was included in the Frommer’s Guide to Vancouver Island, The Gulf Islands and the San Juan Islands as one of the region’s 15 Best Restuarants.  The guide marks it as a ‘Special Find-those places only insiders know about’. Now you know about Bruce’s Kitchen, too. Tell him I sent you…