Moving past the food elephant in the room

Eat and enjoy local food

Photo: Contributed

There are ways around the elephant in the room when it comes to food issues.

I know news in general is not a pleasant thing—many people I know say they listen to it much less than they used to. I think that is why reality shows are so popular. Ironically, they have little to do with reality in most cases. But I believe we need to be aware of what is happening in our world.

Don’t worry, I’m not talking about politics. This is a food column, remember. I know food isn’t often a top news story, although the rising cost of it has been featured. Here are a few headlines for you:

• Food insecurity (the number of people who cannot afford to eat good food consistently) has gone up again. Did you know it has been on the rise since 2007?

• Despite rising prices, our tendency in Canada to shop local has risen,and we are willing to spend more to do it (53% said $5 more, another 33% said $10 more)

• On average, 25% of Canadians eat out at least once a week in a restaurant, but 31% order takeout or delivery once a week, with 25% of those being from a fast-food place> Last year 38% dined out and in 2022 only 25% ordered in. For comparison, in the U.S. the average person eats out three times per month. Prices are lower, so they spend less per visit but they also choose fast-food places 51% of the time.

I don’t want to focus on tariffs for foods that are coming from America, instead, let’s focus on the positive. We have decided to support our communities by supporting local businesses. In the same vein, we can decide to support local charities and efforts that direct help towards those less fortunate.

Soon, school will be out and everyone will be on vacation or heading out for picnics or boat rides. At the very least they’ll be eating outside. Here are my favourite tips for making great memories of summer meals:

1. Ask friends, relatives and neighbours for their favourite hidden gems, and give those places a try.

2. Check out new markets, restaurants and food trucks when you see them and pass the word around if they strike your fancy.

3. Be a tourist in your own town. Check out a recommendation from a local ad, website or social media page.

To get you started as things warm up, here are some that are on my list, in no particular order.

• Homestead Food Market—This recent addition in Rutland is becoming a not-so-hidden gem. They have their first Friday night market coming up on June 6th. I haven’t been yet, but I have a great recommendation from a fellow food blogger.

• El Salvador Bar & Grill— If you’re a fan of Latino food, this one’s for you. A cute little place in the Pandosy district with a lovely patio.

• Mission Creamery is a great place in Kelowna for a special treat with house-made ice cream flavours

• Paynter’s Fruit Market on the Westside is a fun family outing with local foods, coffee and ice cream. You can enjoy a walk through the orchards on a nice day, or sit under cover enjoying the view if it’s raining.

I hope this inspires you to share some good news amongst the other headlines that might take up the news channels.

Instead of bumping into the elephant in the room, let’s move past him and get on with making the most of our moments.

This article is written by or on behalf of an outsourced columnist and does not necessarily reflect the views of Castanet.

What does Canadian summer taste like?

The tastes of Canada

Photo: Contributed

Canada has many uniquely Canadian foods.

The calendar and the rotation of the sun and moon might deem the Summer Solstice as the official beginning of summer, but if you ask most Canadians, I think they’d tell you that summer begins on the May (Victoria Day) long weekend… at least the idea of it does.

This week, I want to talk about what the season tastes like. In a time when we are banding together as loyal Canadians and supporting each other, maybe we’ll share some more favourite regional foods? Local specialties might be hard or expensive to duplicate, but let’s see what we discover.

Our traditional cuisines across the country have been influenced by the original Indigenous population, as well as the largest groups of immigrants, namely the English, Scottish and French. In certain parts of the country, other influences were added as people travelled further west, and our country grew.

Over time, new influences have been added of course, and innovations have combined flavours from unique cultures to create exciting fusion dishes. I like to highlight the traditions to give us some connection with our past and to recognize the efforts of the pioneering forces that created our wonderfully diverse country.

I hope you’ll indulge me for a slightly longer missive this week so I can include something from each region.

The North is a place many of us don’t know much about. It is rich with game and seafood that differs slightly from further south. Arctic char and cod, even caribou and moose we might have tasted but have you had foraged flavours, like morel mushrooms, spruce tips or birch syrup?

If you haven’t been to the Atlantic coast, you might not have tried dulse, a type of seaweed. It is a popular snack and flavour enhancer in that region, as in Ireland and Iceland. It is highly nutritious with protein, vitamins and trace elements. You can have dulce crisps (similar to kale chips) or use it powdered or flaked in all kinds of dishes.

Fiddleheads are another summer specialty from the east coast – the young shoots of a type of fern plant. They must be boiled first to be enjoyed, but I think they are a delicious fresh early taste of summer.

Quebec of course gives us maple syrup and other maple products (the Indigenous communities first froze the sap to extract the syrup). There is not just poutine (which by the way translates to “mess”) but many other dishes with a French twist. Tourtière (a ground pork meat pie with cloves) is one of my favourites.

Oh, and Montreal bagels are a unique item too – not the same as New York bagels (Montreal bagels are denser and a bit sweeter with a chewier crust, being boiled in honey water and then baked in a wood-fired oven.)

Ontario is an agricultural powerhouse so there are many local foods. The traditional ones most known are quintessential items for many tourists—peameal bacon (called “Canadian bacon” outside Canada. This is pork loin rolled in cornmeal and cooked in slices) and butter tarts. The recipe for butter tarts was first published in Ontario but they are said to have been invented in Quebec and are popular with bakers across the country (with and without raisins and/or nuts).

Across the Prairies, the influence of immigrants from Eastern and Northern Europe shaped the cuisine. Manitoba has the greatest population of Icelanders outside Iceland (of which my family is part). Many Icelandic pastries and vinarterta (a layered fruit-filled torte) are common in bakeries. Ukrainian and Polish families shared pierogies alongside English and Scottish families with their Yorkshire puddings and roast meats.

German, Belgian, Czech, Dutch, Mennonite, Jewish and even American families settled in our Midwest as the railway expanded and farmland was cultivated. Local ingredients like Saskatoon berries and Winnipeg smoked goldeye added to the innovations.

In Alberta, of course we know meat is the specialty with beef and pork. I think we could include pancake breakfasts as something common too, not just from wagon trains but still today as a Calgary Stampede tradition.

Many Chinese families opened restaurants in towns across the country, giving generations of Canadians a sort of re-invented Chinese food as they cooked for a new audience. Canadian Chinese cuisine has its own regional specialties. Did you know the “Chinese buffet” first started in Vancouver’s Gastown when restauranteurs started feeding the Scandinavian lumberjacks working at the mills there?

Here in B.C., salmon is a signature food, prepared in many ways. Spot prawns are also a regional feature this time of year. Certainly, the influence of Asian immigrants has created opportunities for new dishes and flavours to become popular, like a B.C. roll at a sushi restaurant (made with cucumber and BBQ salmon with the skin on). Our Okanagan fruit is world-renowned. Lesser known, but also part of our immigrant culture, is Doukhobor borscht. The Doukhobor communities provided an early vegetarian influence in many interior communities.

Phew, what a bunch of creative, community-minded folks we seem to be, sharing recipes of all kinds as we built a nation. No wonder we are called a cultural mosaic.

I’ll finish with one last signature item, an anomaly as it’s not like most of the homegrown foods featured but it speaks to a time when church suppers and coffee klatches were a common way of building bonds.

The Nanaimo Bar was the result of various women’s recipes during the 1940s and 1950s, many submitted to community cookbooks and local newspaper recipe contests.

It was known as a “dainty”, a rich, sweet treat one could easily transport and once cut in squares, hold in one’s hand and nibble. It features five different brand name products that would simplify the process of baking the recipe.

It seems even when we first fell into the commercial side of convenience foods, our traditional tendency was to create something polite and at least a little elegant in its understated presentation.

That sounds quintessentially Canadian to me.

This article is written by or on behalf of an outsourced columnist and does not necessarily reflect the views of Castanet.

How does one get 'qualified' in the kitchen?

Learning life skills

Photo: Pixabay

Learning in the kitchen can be fun for the whole family.

I read an article recently about the woman who designed the prototype for the basic modern kitchen, created for efficiency.

It was fitted with built-in cabinets and drawers that optimized storage and, for the first time, showed a continuous counter with a tiled backsplash. Minimum movement was required to complete all the duties of prep, cooking and washing up. It was a whole new concept.

The catch was, the woman was not a housewife or a mother—she didn’t even cook for herself. Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky designed her “Frankfurt kitchen” in 1926 as part of a social housing project. Her goal was to make life easier for working women. It made me think of how we consider people qualified for projects, and then it occurred to me, how do we decide we are qualified for life?

I suppose all this existential thinking came from memories of my mom as Mother’s Day approaches. She isn’t here anymore but I never cease to wonder at how she managed, a young mom at 19 years of age with me in tow. My grandma (her mom) was a great cook apparently but lost her appetite for cooking when she started to drink, so my mom didn’t get much formal guidance in the kitchen.

In the 1960s and 1970s, when I was growing up, there was lots of cooking information out there in magazines and, of course, moms shared their successes. I remember my aunt and my mom trading recipe cards and clippings of things they found that worked. My mom had what were called “beef and pea pod recipes,” ones that called for beef and pea pods but if chicken was on sale and broccoli looked better at the grocery store, then we had the converted recipe for dinner.

I didn’t feel like my life was lacking in any way as a kid. My mom stayed home until my younger brother and I both were well into elementary school, so she made oatmeal on winter mornings and made cookies for our snacks, as well as making dinner.

It wasn’t until I was an adult that I learned she was embarrassed to serve “finn and haddie” for dinner. I loved it and never thought canned haddock served with toast points and stewed tomatoes on the side was considered a dish for poor people. It must have been all the love and laughter in our house that outshone the lack of money.

I remember my mom telling us too, she was horrified to show us caterpillars and daddy long-legs spiders in the grass but felt that it was the kind of thing to do if she was to instil a sense of curiosity and wonder in her children, which she did very well. She hadn’t a clue how to be a “good” mother, she simply had faith that lots of love along with the basics of food, shelter and education would make for good children.

She and my dad had a special bond too. I’m sure that made a big difference. He didn’t know how to be a dad either—only 22 and just out of university but full of dreams with promise and full of adoration for my mom. He was not an adventurous eater in the beginning (how could he have been, there wasn’t much adventurous food in Winnipeg in the late 1960s). But that would change.

After a business trip to California in the mid 1970s, he and my mom started to make salsa and create homemade fried tacos (we had Pilsbury biscuits rolled in cornmeal as shells and ground beef with cumin and a dash of cayenne cooked in the electric frying pan.

When a purchase of frozen breaded pork cutlets on sale turned out to be a bad idea, they decided to make peach chutney to go with them as an upgrade. The bought a case of fresh peaches and mason jars. The chutney was fantastic, but I think we threw out the last few cutlets. They were like pressed sawdust.

Daddy encouraged us to cook for Mom, too. One year for Mother’s Day he cooked dinner and my brother and I made chocolate mousse. It had a few teaspoons of coffee in it, which the recipe said would add depth of taste. Mom didn’t bat an eye but just asked enthusiastically what the intriguing crunchy element was. I told her about the spoonsful of coffee grounds and she just smiled.

I guess it was my mom who taught me we qualify ourselves in the kitchen and in life when we jump in with both feet. If we are optimistic about the results and have the clear intention of having a good time, then things usually turn out pretty well.

At the very least, it makes for great stories around the dinner table.

This article is written by or on behalf of an outsourced columnist and does not necessarily reflect the views of Castanet.

Cook often, be happy and live long

Joy of cooking

Photo: Pixabay

Cooking and dining are fun ways to bring people together.

Every day, we are constantly being pushed and pulled by influences in our lives and all those influences change how our lives go and how long they last. The quality of life you have is not only about where in the world you live, but how you live.

For example, if you “super-size” your meals too often, it will shorten your life. If you eat lots of fresh veggies and whole grains, you will live longer. They tell us we need more exercise; don’t go to the drive-through, get out of your car and walk in!

Of course, the worst thing of all for shortening your life is stress. Studies show the only way you can undo the damage stress causes is to unwind. (Can’t you just imagine those two groups of lab rats in the studies – one group running through mazes non-stop, and the other group with their feet up, eating mini tubs of Hagen Daas!)

I have a confession to make - I often work late. My stress comes from work. The worst part is, working late means there is almost no time left to cook dinner and so my Hubbie cooks (or I eat leftovers or salad if he is not home). This week I am proud to say that although we ate a bit later, I have managed to cook not once but twice this week! I have not done some of the work I took home to do, but I accomplished something much bigger…. And I am rejuvenated and ready to take on the pile on my desk in the morning.

This past week has made me feel as though I have bumped into an old friend; it felt relaxing and comfortable to be chopping and stirring things. I missed the “therapy” of de-stressing with my kitchen gadgets and recipe books, and I plan to take up my old hobby again with renewed vigour. (Do I sound too much like a born-again Foodie? Well don’t worry, I’m not giving up on going out for donuts or lattes.)

I have a whole bookcase full of cookbooks I’ve collected over the years that will be my starting point for this new project. I am even planning to have people over, so that I can expand my field of guinea pigs. (It’s a win-win situation really – if the meals go well, I get praise from a bigger circle of friends; if I fail miserably, I can just move along to the next names on the list for the subsequent attempt.)

There is nothing like time around the dining room table to bring people down to earth and make them smile. Good food and good vibes are the best tonics for a long and happy life for everyone in the room.

That age-old concept of balancing the priorities in one’s life is one that never stops being important. I know not all my readers are as happy to cook as I am, but I hope you’ll find some way to enjoy more leisurely meals of food that was made with love.

If you want to see how your habits around food might affect you and where you’re at in your life span, check out a cool site that has some extensive research behind it, along with a fun quiz.

The Vitality Test may look like just a publicity stunt but it is based in statistics and algorithms. It offers some interesting options for you if you want to head towards a lifestyle that focuses on habits that could help you live a more fulfilling and therefore longer life. I always figure those things are worth trying out, just like a new recipe in the kitchen.

This article is written by or on behalf of an outsourced columnist and does not necessarily reflect the views of Castanet.