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  • Local Food Challenge Profile

    The team at Growing Chefs asked me to answer a few questions about why I'm participating. I thought I'd kill two birds with one stone and turn it into a full blog post.

    Why did you decide to take the local challenge?

    I decided to take the local food challenge because food is one of my main life passions. The local challenge is really just an excuse to spend slightly more time documenting what I'm eating and drinking this week.

    Foodtree is a company that I advise which is trying to help people know more about their food (they have an iPhone app -- go download it). Getting involved with Foodtree and its founder Anthony Nicalo really opened my eyes another level. Once you start thinking about where food is from, who grew it, whether it's filled with pesticides or hormones … you can't unthink all of that.

    You've turned the corner, and you start asking more and more questions about food. This can lead into all sorts of depressing realizations, but I prefer to think of it as heading into delicious realizations. It becomes a challenge in the sense that a long mountain hike is a challenge - it's the journey along the way that's most interesting, and reaching the summit is just sort of the bonus.

    Now, my bigger challenge is to think about how we can encourage masses of people to think about their food, to try and make lasting changes to our food systems. And we can't do it by making people feel bad - we need to make them feel powerful, inspired, and hopeful!

    What will be the hardest part for you to do this challenge?

    Well, probably a toss up between finding the time and finding the ingredients. The week is busy with a conference and various activities, so we have to fit in more time for cooking or selecting what we're going to eat.

    For instance, I actually forgot that we were starting today (we just got back from a short vacation), so I had to figure out what to get for lunch. Luckily, the Fresh Local Wild food truck is not far from my office, so I had some delicious cod & chips. Now, I happen to know that his potatoes aren't local, because the wet weather has been terrible. But they did the next best thing and sourced some potatoes from Washington state. 

    But finding local ingredients is always hard. Heck, finding BC ingredients is hard. And it shouldn't be. But just this evening shopping at Donald's Market, the majority of the conventional fruits & vegetables were unlabeled (but many of them likely local), and virtually all of the organic ones were from far away (because organic labeling & pricing demands a level of "proof").

    Finding the time is probably a common excuse. I do the majority of cooking at home, and I tend to cook everything from scratch - that is, limited use of processed foods or prepared ingredients. It doesn't take significantly more time to do this than for prepared foods. But, like a diet, it's easy to "slip" when you get crunched for time. Because of where we shop, even the prepared food is often local and/or tends to be made of good for you ingredients.

    One last answer here pertains to how you define "local". Since I know how hard something like the 100 mile diet is, I don't get sticky about things like "if you buy bread, the wheat should also be local" (although I do have some Flour Peddler flour in my cupboards). Similarily, dried pasta that is local is going to be next to impossible - splurge on fresh pasta this week, Duso's on Granville Island is a good start.

    Food memories

    Salmon berries in Maple Ridge

    I think my memories from my childhood are all about food! I grew up on Bowen Island, which has lots of things for a kid growing up to forage. Salmon berries and huckle berries are something that you don't tend to see in stores at all - you need to stop and pick them when you see them.

    My heritage is German, so most of my other childhood memories are various German meat dishes and cakes. And jam. My mom still makes massive amounts of jam every year - she just posted her recipe for currant jelly.

    Shopping locally

    It's been 2 years since I put up a post on Foodists about shopping in Vancouver, which has a huge list of some of the more interesting/ethnic/novel places to shop around Vancouver.

    Today, we get a weekly order from SPUD.ca, visit the farmers market a couple of times a week (Wednesdays on Main, weekends at Trout Lake), buy most of our meat from Big Lous Butcher Shop, and round out the list with various stores along Commercial Drive (East End Coop, Daily Catch), and around Nanaimo at Hastings (Donald's Market, Ugo and Joe's). Famous Foods is a long time family favourite that should definitely be mentioned.

    I decided to call this section "shopping locally" rather than where to shop for local food, because that's how you should think about it. Find a butcher shop, a sausage maker, and a bakery. Find a farmer's market. All of these places have local food by default, for the most part.

    I confess that I find "traditional" grocery stores strange these days. I never go to them, and when I do happen to find myself in one, I just find all the packaged items disturbing. Whole Foods is a slightly better experience, but you just can't afford to shop there regularly, and even they aren't great in the fruits & veggies department (that is, lots of things from California, Mexico, etc.).

    Favourite recipes

    Recipes are tough for me. I tend to improvise a lot of the time, so a lot of my recipes tend to be documenting something that I've made once. And a lot of the very best tasting foods are very simple - asparagus broiled with olive oil, steak with salt and pepper, in season tomatoes popped straight in your mouth, and so on.

    I'll leave you with a basic ingredient list for spaghetti alla carbonara that I made the other day and Kim Werker ended up using for a post on Vancouver is Awesome: guanciale from Oyama Sausage on Granville Island, Rabbit River eggs, and parmesan from Ugo & Joe's. 


    Read the original post and updated gallery about #eatlocal, and you can follow along on my Twitter account where I'm using an #eatlocal hashtag.

    Donate to my Eating Local pledge »

    → 10:46 PM, Aug 15   •  Personal, Foodists, Famous Foods, Bowen Island, Big Lou's Butcher Shop, #eatlocal, Daily Catch, Donald's Market, East End Food Coop, Flour Peddler, Fresh Local Wild, Growing Chefs, SPUD.ca, Ugo and Joe's, Blog
  • Sunday Cooking: From corn bread to yogurt cake, with some beef in between

     

    So, I did a whole bunch of "experimental" baking today. Experimental mainly because a) I don't bake a lot and b) I tried tweaking a bunch of baking recipes. And by "tweaking" and "bunch", I mean not quite having all the ingredients for one recipe, so vaguely scavenging a few other recipes trying to see if I could come up with a Franken-recipe.

    First up was corn bread for breakfast. Corn bread is, as far as baking goes, NOT HARD. However, I was faced with no flour, and the need for no dairy. The soy milk worked just fine. But spelt flour...

    ...OK, so spelt flour and me are done. I didn't really like it before, and yeah, stuff made with it is usually denser / coarser, which you have to watch for. But the main thing is, spelt flour makes stuff taste bad! Yes, it's true: I was relatively happy with how the slightly coarser, slightly crumblier corn bread turned out. Except it was infected with yucky spelt taste. *sigh*

    At dinner (or rather, in the midst of cooking 2 things at the same time), I found out that all those yogurt containers in my fridge needed to have the yogurt used up so that I could use the empty containers (that, and so that fur wouldn't grow on the yogurt). The thought "yogurt cake" popped into my head, and so I looked at Lemon Yogurt Cake, Wonderful Yogurt Cake, and Simple Yogurt Cake. I also looked into my pantry after seeing that last entry about cake mixes and found chocolate pudding mix / pie filling. So that got combined with the yogurt...but a double-plus amount of yogurt...and off I went, creating a Franken-recipe for Chocolate Yogurt Cake.

    I may post it for posterity as a full recipe later, as I did note it down. But, after baking, it's clear that I made a medium-rare cake. Medium rare is great for steak. It is not good for cake. Flavour is pretty good, but gooey...

    Ah well, it was still fun. And I made two meat dishes to stock my freezer with, as well. Prime rib bones roasted on a mirepoix, and then simmered to make a nice and rich beef stock. 3 large empty yogurt containers for the freezer, plus a small bowl of soup for "first dinner".

    Aside: how do you cool things before they go in the freezer? My apartment is small, and usually quite warm after I've been cooking and baking and such. I have a window in the kitchen, so I usually stick things to cool on the window sill. I haven't had a pigeon steal anything yet...

    The other meaty item was beef stew, simmered for hours in the slow cooker. Another 5 or 6 meals worth, and all good hearty winter time stuff.

    Source of all this good stuff? Famous Foods on Kingsway. An excellent, excellent store, heartily recommended for meats, bulk staples, and everything in between.

     

     

    → 8:15 AM, Dec 9   •  cooking, Food, Famous Foods, foodlikethat, spelt flour, Blog
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