{"id":1178,"date":"2012-09-26T16:35:55","date_gmt":"2012-09-26T23:35:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.dongenova.com\/?p=1178"},"modified":"2012-10-18T09:46:18","modified_gmt":"2012-10-18T16:46:18","slug":"1178","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.dongenova.com\/site\/1178\/","title":{"rendered":"Food Matters – Honey and James Barber"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Babes<\/a>Babe’s Honey<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a harvest<\/strong><\/em> we don\u2019t often get to see, but as nectar sources dry up in the late summer and early fall, beekeepers are bringing their hives home from their summer locations and extracting the honey the bees have been making over the past few months. In springtime beekeepers move their hives from where they have been stored for the winter to areas around the province where they think the bees will have good access to various kinds of flowers and the nectar they contain. They may also \u2018contract out\u2019 their bees to orchards and other fruit and vegetable farmers who need the bees to help ensure pollination. The bees don\u2019t necessarily stay in one place over the summer; they may be moved as different kinds of flowers blossom or the weather changes. But in the fall, many of the bee colonies and their hives are brought in from the fields and the honey is extracted from the series of frames inside each hive. There is some filtering and blending and perhaps some pasteurization that takes place before the honey makes its way to consumers.<\/p>\n

According to the BC Ministry of Agriculture<\/strong><\/em><\/a> there are more than 23 hundred beekeepers in the province with 47 thousand colonies of bees, and that includes everyone who is doing it as a commercial venture right down to the growing number of hobbyists who are keeping one or two hives in their back yards. It\u2019s an industry with a history that goes back to 1858 when the first two hives of bees arrived via ship to the Victoria harbour. I was reminded last week at my talk at the Museum that there were no honey bees in North America before European settlement…now I know exactly when bees reached BC.<\/p>\n

Many of our food products<\/strong><\/em> are made with sweeteners other than honey, and basically it comes down to cost. One of the cheapest sweeteners out there is high-fructose corn syrup, but we also use a lot of cane sugar and beet sugar. But if you are looking for a natural sweetener that involves a very low-level of processing then honey is one of purest substances you can get, and also a way to support your local economy if you start buying your honey from local honey producers, and I\u2019ve found them at almost every Vancouver Island farmer\u2019s market I\u2019ve visited of late.<\/p>\n

Honey is taking on a special significance<\/strong><\/em> at an upcoming event at Providence Farm.<\/a> The Cowichan Chefs\u2019 Table is putting on another fundraiser in the name of the late, great James Barber and this year\u2019s theme is savoury, spicy and sweet dishes made with local honey. Providence Farm was one of his favourite charities and as you know a couple of thousand of his cookbooks were just sold off to raise money for the farm, and next Sunday, October 7th, the Sunday of the Thanksgiving weekend, the Cowichan Chefs will be working away in a grazing event<\/a> at the farm. Tickets are $100, with a $50 receipt issued for a charitable tax deduction.<\/p>\n

Chef Bill Jones of<\/strong><\/em> Deerholme Farm<\/strong><\/em> <\/a>is one of the chief organizers, and he made me some of the components approximating one of the dishes you might enjoy from the wood-fired oven at the farm that was dedicated to James Barber last year. They\u2019ll be using pizza dough at the event, but Bill made up some grilled flatbread made with honey and sage, topped with Porcini and caramelized honey humus and Spicy honey-pickled mushrooms.<\/p>\n

And listen to some of these other dishes<\/strong><\/em> you can taste while you\u2019re there:
\nMarissa Goodwin from Organic Fair<\/a> is preparing rosemary and fennel pollen honey caramel corn as well as roasted pumpkin honey ice cream with spiced pumpkin seed brittle
\nwith a honey-sweetened chocolate truffle with gold and bee pollen. Frederic Desbiens of Saison<\/a> is making a European honey nougatine, there will be honey cured sockeye salmon, a honey panna cotta topped with a chili-spice honeycomb. Pat Barber, James\u2019 son, will be working the pizza oven with a sausage-topped pizza with sausages from the Whole Beast Salumeria <\/a>and local apples with a honey drizzle, another chef is making coils of lamb and honey merguez sausage for the grill, and more and more. <\/p>\n

All Points West has two tickets to give away!<\/strong><\/em> <\/p>\n

James was a big fan of simple recipes. Just tweet them a simple recipe. That means a recipe of 140 characters or less. Deadline is next Tuesday. Here\u2019s an example:
\nBeer bread: Mix 3c flour, 3t powder, 1\u00bdt salt, 3T sugar. Stir in 1 bottle beer at room temp. Bake 375F 1hr in oiled pan<\/p>\n

In this recipe a small \u2018t\u2019 was used to denote teaspoon and a capital \u2018T\u2019 for tablespoon. Just make sure any abbreviations are easy to figure out! Tweet to @allpointswestbc.
\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Babe’s Honey It\u2019s a harvest we don\u2019t often get to see, but as nectar sources dry up in the late summer and early fall, beekeepers are bringing their hives home from their summer locations and extracting the honey the bees … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,30],"tags":[33,44,34,524,99,170,171,32],"class_list":["post-1178","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-contests","category-food-matters","tag-all-points-west","tag-artisan-foods","tag-cbc-radio","tag-food-matters","tag-honey","tag-james-barber","tag-providence-farm","tag-sustainable-eating"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.dongenova.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1178","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.dongenova.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.dongenova.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.dongenova.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.dongenova.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1178"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blog.dongenova.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1178\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1203,"href":"https:\/\/blog.dongenova.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1178\/revisions\/1203"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.dongenova.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.dongenova.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1178"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.dongenova.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}