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  • Red & Green Cabbage Slaw with Tahini Lemon Dressing

    Having made this salad twice now, I wanted to make sure to keep track of the recipe.

    The salad is just shredded red & green cabbage. The dressing is tahini lemon garlic, the recipe for which I found over on ohsheglows.com »

    You can skip the nutritional yeast, and whipping everything with a fork is just fine, it doesn’t need to go through the blender.

    Using the tahini made me think of Na’ama, who gave it to me. She swears that Israeli tahini is the best, and it’s hard to find here in Vancouver.

    → 9:35 PM, Aug 4   •  cabbage, coleslaw, Foodists, Food, recipe, dressing, lemon, salad, slaw, tahini, Blog
  • 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
  • Cooking Octopus on @Foodists

    Media_httpfarm5static_peimi
    via foodists.ca

    Here's my write up on Foodists of how I cooked the octopus.

    → 11:05 PM, Apr 19   •  Personal, Foodists, octopus, Blog
  • Making Cheese

    Making Cheese is as easy as…pie…?

        <span class="date">September 2nd, 2009</span>
         <span class="edit"></span>  
    
    <p />
    
    <div class="entry">
        <p>A few months ago I read the wonderful book <a href="http://www.amazon.ca/Animal-Vegetable-Miracle-Barbara-Kingsolver/dp/155468188X">Animal Vegetable Miracle</a> written by Barbara Kingsolver. It’s an entertaining and inspiring recounting of the year she and her family spent growing their own food. The book includes meal plans and recipes at the end of each chapter that are based on what is available by season. Some of these, like the asparagus and morel bread pudding, sound mouth-wateringly good.<br />
    

    Cheese making-4

    About three quarters of the way through the book there is a chapter where Barbara describes making her own cheese. And not only does she make her own mozzarella but she does it in just thirty minutes! Boris and I were really excited about this (Cheese in half an hour!! WE CAN MAKE OUR OWN CHEESE!!!!!) and I started to track down the ingredients. This ended up being the most complicated part because though the cheese is made with only three ingredients – milk, citric acid and rennet – I had no idea where to look for two of those three. In the end it was Anne who found everything for us and we owe her a cheese of her own in thanks.

    For future cheese makers based in Vancouver here’s where to get ‘em: citric acid can be found at most pharmacies and rennet is sold at Bosa Foods. After that it was easy-peasy and we ended up with delicious cheese, fresh and hot. The mozzarella was tasty and went beautifully with the heirloom tomatoes we’ve been picking up at the Farmers Market throughout the summer.

    Cheese making-2

    The 30-minute mozzarella recipe is available as a PDF download from the Animal Vegetable Miracle companion site. Boris and I have made the mozzarella twice now, the first time with friends and the second as a tag team effort. Two key things we discovered: resist the impulse to keep stirring the milk because it’ll separate into curds and whey faster when still, and add a bit more citric acid when the milk reaches the highest temperature mentioned in the recipe.

    Cheese making

    We’re still both AMAZED that cheese making can be this easy and this fast. And thanks to the recipes included within the box of rennet tablets there are more cheese experiments we’re hoping to try in the near future.

    Cheese making-3

    via rachaelashe.com

    Ready for editing and reposting on Foodists.

    → 12:22 AM, Jan 12   •  Personal, Foodists, cheese, Blog
  • Me sawing off a pig's head /via @ecstaticist

    http://s.ytimg.com/yt/swf/watch-vfl139942.swf
    via youtube.com

    Also features James in the background.

    → 12:45 PM, Jan 7   •  Personal, cooking, Foodists, me, video, Blog
  • Evan prepping Napoleons of utter joy

    12292009950
    → 10:06 PM, Dec 31   •  Foodists, decadent dinner, Food, ecstaticist, Evan Leeson, Blog
  • Foodists: Much Ado About Recipes

    Posted on Foodists: Much Ado About Recipes - http://foodists.ca/2009/12/29/much-ado-about-recipes.html

    Chicken Marsala Recipe on Rouxbe Screenshot

    Chicken Marsala Recipe from Rouxbe.com

    I’m facing a dilemma I’ve faced several times before. What to do about recipes?

    I'm facing a dilemma I've faced several times before. What to do about recipes? We don't focus on churning out lots of start-to-finish recipes here on Foodists, mainly because it's more about sharing food experiences rather than "just" recipes. But we do share our recipes, and try and tag the blog entries with ingredient hints to help find them. Still, it's not ideal for sharing lots of recipes.

    Most of my cooking using recipes falls into the "inspired by", "adapted from", or "I'm sure it'll be fine if I substitute half the ingredients" categories. But I'd like to keep track of those sources, whether it be from just the right Google search or from a physical cookbook.

    And yes, I've got lots of cookbooks. At the one end I've got basics like Joy of Cooking and Fannie Farmer, and at the other end I've got various cookbooks from second hand or thrift stores, plus a smattering of regional cuisines purchased while traveling. While I like nothing better to sit down with piles of cookbooks all around me, engrossed in reading and dreaming of food, it's not very practical to a) easily find a recipe amongst dozens of cookbooks or b) to share that recipe. Where's my digital index for my physical cookbooks?!

    I tried to solve my dilemma a while back by building my own recipe website. It does a passable of sharing links to recipes I've found elsewhere, and a pretty terrible job at inputting recipes with full ingredients and instructions. And, I really don't need to be maintaining yet-another-website.

    So over the holidays, I again began looking for a great place to make my "digital recipe home".

    My first stop was at Foodista. It's a startup out of Seattle that's just barely a year old, run by a friend of a friend. Foodista is unique in being a kind of Wikipedia of cooking. You can set recipes to be public, which means that anyone can edit and evolve them, whether that means fixing mistakes, clarifying the directions, or adding a note that Brand X flour needs to be used differently. I love this feature, and I love the concept of seeing the history or changes of recipes over time.

    They also have a widget that links blogs to recipes and vice versa (similar to Urbanspoon). Here's an example of a Foodista widget for my favourite Czechoslovakian Cabbage Soup recipe: Czechoslovakian Cabbage Soup (Nutbread & Nostalgia) on Foodista

    Foodista is still relatively new and will be evolving more features (check out my taste profile). I've already left a comment about making it easy to link in my own photos from Flickr.

    Next stop was our own local recipe / learning website, Rouxbe. I've got an account from ages ago, and couldn't recall if they actually let you enter in your own recipes. They do, so I started work on entering in Shredded Short Ribs with BBQ sauce that I made over the holidays. At first, I was excited by the interface, which lets you upload a photo for each step. Ultimately, I gave up before completing and publishing the recipe, because there were too many fields and too much to fill out.

    I think Rouxbe has a great interface for longer recipes, especially those with unfamiliar or complicated techniques (many of which they have video tutorials for that you can link in), and I would definitely use it for that kind of recipe. They even have a "Save as Draft" feature to make it easier to finish inputting those long recipes. Here's the embed for the Chicken Marsala that I used a screenshot of at the beginning of this post - the embed is gorgeous, but at the same time doesn't show the ingredients (which is what *I* would want out of a widget) and busts out of this blog layout: http://rouxbe.com/embedded_player.swf

    Rouxbe Online Cooking School & Video Recipes

     

    So, Foodists, help me with my recipe dilemma: What recipe sites do you frequent? How do you share / keep track of recipes that you find online? What features do you want out of an ultimate recipe website? And yes, I'm still contemplating building my own -- recipes.foodists.ca anyone? :P

    → 9:10 PM, Dec 31   •  cooking, recipes, Foodista, Foodists, Food, Rouxbe, Blog
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