Category Archives: Food

Head to Main this Wednesday to Eat for Education

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Photo courtesy of CanadaPenguin

Vancouver diners are invited to help take a bite out of the public school funding crunch at the second annual Eat for Education evening taking place this Wednesday (May 2). Launched last year with one school and nine restaurants, the event has grown to include four schools and 21 restaurants (and counting). The majority of restaurants are based on Main Street with a few also participating in North Vancouver.

Here’s how it works: Local restaurants will donate a percentage of Wednesday’s food profits directly to participating schools in their area. Each school controls how the funds are used, and so far updating technology for students has been a focus. This year, VSB schools Mount Pleasant Elementary, Florence Nightingale Elementary and Simon Fraser Elementary stand to benefit from diners.

“We are delighted that some local restaurants in this area are committed to supporting education. Their willingness to get involved is amazing,” says Sue Stevenson, Vice Principal at Mount Pleasant Elementary. “As an Inner City school we believe that it takes a village to raise a child. This fundraiser will support our school initiative to increase access to technology and provide these children with outdoor educational experiences.”

The idea for Eat for Education was born at a Mount Pleasant Elementary Parent Advisory Council meeting in 2010. The first event was held in 2011 and most of $2,100 raised was used to buy the school a SMART Board. Remaining funds helped with travel costs for outdoor educational experiences.

Organizers say they hope to raise even more money this year.

Restaurants are still being encouraged to join. The whole event is being organized by bcfoodies.com.

This year’s Eat for Education restaurants in Vancouver are:

8 1/2 Restaurant and Lounge - 151 East 8 Avenue (604) 568-2703

Latitude - 3250 Main Street (604) 875-6246

Hyde - 2960 Main Street (604) 709-6215

Habit Lounge - 2610 Main St (604) 877-8582

The Cascade Room - 2616 Main Street (604) 709-8650

Elysian Coffee - 590 West Broadway (604) 874 5909

Che Baba - 603 Kingsway (604) 558 1519

Slickity Jim’s Chat n Chew - 3475 Main Street (604) 873 6760

Grub Restaurant - 4328 Main Street (604) 876-8671

The Five Point - 3124 Main Street (604) 876-5810

Locus Lounge - 4121 Main Street (604) 708 4121

Portland Craft (formerly Coppertank) – 3835 Main Street (604) 569 2494

Mavericks (in Howard Johnson Hotel) – 395 Kingsway (604) 872-5252

BierCraft - 3305 Cambie Street (604) 874-6900

Pizzeria Barbarella - 654 East Broadway (604) 210-6111

Vera’s Burger Shack - 2922 Main Street, (604) 709-8372

The Whip Restaurant - 6th and Main 604.874.4687

Mastering the Art of French Cooking

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My cookbook reading group ventured into a classic this past week – “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” paired with “My Life in France”.   Compared to cookbooks being published now, MtAoFC doesn’t stand out.  It has a simple cover, lots of text and a few illustrations rather than large photographs of every recipe that can sometimes be best described as “food porn”.  But this was the book that when published in 1961 reignited interest in cooking in North America when every other trend was toward easy and processed convenience foods.  It was the book that dared to say that meals can take a long time and can be hard work, but the results are worth the effort for an authentic French meal.

I didn’t know much about Julia Child before this month.  I recognized her name and image because even in rural Nova Scotia, with only three TV channels in the 80s and 90s, she was a celebrity chef.  But other than recognition, I didn’t know much else.  And perhaps many 30-something’s wouldn’t have known if it wasn’t for the books “My Life in France” and ”Julie and Julia”, which in the last few years have introduced MtAoFC to a new generation.  Both of these books were featured in the movie, “Julie and Julie” (that I still haven’t seen), reaching an even wider audience.    If you only have time for one book, I recommend “My Life in France” as the better book (Julie Powell’s crises of turning 30 grew tiring after the first hundred pages).  “My Life in France” was coauthored by Julia Child and Alex Prud’homme (her grand nephew).  It tells Julia’s pretty incredible story of arriving in France, discovering French cooking, ingredients and markets, going to cooking school, starting her own cooking school and the gruelling process (which she totally loved) of putting together a comprehensive cookbook for an American audience.

If you have never cooked from MtAoFC I recommend giving a couple of recipes a try.  It is easily found at libraries or used bookstores.  I imagine that many of the recipes are even available on the internet.   I made a garlic soup (way better than it sounds), scalloped potatoes, and a spinach soufflé, and they all turned out wonderfully thanks to the meticulously detailed directions offered by Julia Child.  And any meal with as much butter, cheese, egg yolks and heavy cream is guaranteed to be good (unless it is liver – the consensus of our cookbook group was that if the rich sauces in MtAoFC can’t make liver good, nothing can).  And with more calories on offer from a recipe or two than any one or two people should consume alone, it an ideal cookbook to use when cooking with members of your community.

Bringing Compost Inside

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a big worm courtesy of pfly / flickr

In my apartment there are two Rubbermaid bins. Often they are tucked away under a table or bathroom counter. Every once and a while a visitor will notice them and ask why they have holes drilled into their sides. After I respond, the reactions vary from disgust and sometimes edging away from the bin to excitement and asking to have a look inside. In my 5 years of vermicomposting I’ve gotten used to the range of reactions that those bins can generate.

Not everyone is comfortable with worms or composting, and in our overly sanitized and convenient world it isn’t surprising. Why not send your kitchen waste to the curb and then drive to a big box store to buy pre-made compost? Well, first of all it costs money. Tax dollars to pick up, ship and process all that food waste and then your money to buy the compost. Second, food waste is a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, including the shipping and processing if you live in a place that has curbside composting and methane, a greenhouse gas 21 times as potent as carbon dioxide, when food waste forced to undergo anaerobic composting (without air since it is sealed up in a trash bag and often buried).

Living in an apartment or condo without a backyard limits composting options. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t join the composting community. If you are flush with money and have a space for a new appliance, there is the Red Dragon electric indoor composter.  The main issue with this product is energy use, which is 60 kwhr per month or 720 kwhr per year.  If you live in a place where the energy mix Is mostly renewables (like BC) and are willing to take the financial hit, this might be a great option.  It is really fast and takes a very wide range of organic waste.

The other main option for indoor composting is vermicomposting or composting with worms, which is cheaper and more space efficient. Once set up the worms are pretty low maintenance, they need to be fed once a week and a couple of times a year the compost (or worm poo) needs to be harvested. They don’t smell, they don’t try to escape and they don’t attract pests, unless you do something really wrong. Once I got the hang of knowing how much, often and what to feed them they’ve not smelled like anything other than great compost (not rotting food). The only time they tried to escape the bin was during a heat wave one summer when the temperature felt like +40 with humidex, which had made me escape the city already. And by rinsing or freezing all food before giving it to the worm, fruit flies and other pests haven’t been an issue. If you are interested in getting into vermicomposting, there are a lot of great resources and if you know someone already doing it, odds are you can pick up some free worms from them.

Jamie Oliver’s Food Fight Arrives in Oz

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Australians have known for a long time that we have a bit of a problem with food. As a population we’re not the healthiest eaters, which our national dish of meat pies with chips and beer is a pretty good indication of. But over the past five years, our little problem with food has grown into a big national issue.

A bit over 17 million Australians are overweight or obese, a figure that has more than doubled in the past ten years. If we continue to gain weight at the current levels, by 2020 we’re going to be a country where 80 per cent of adults and one third of all children are overweight or obese.

Obviously, this is going to lead to some epic issues if something isn’t done about it soon. Financially, there will be the enormous increase in healthcare costs as the Australian population succumbs to the inevitable health problems that come with being overweight. Then there’s the fact that on the basis of present trends we can predict that by the time they reach the age of 20, our kids will be the first generation with a shorter life expectancy than earlier generations, simply because of obesity.

So how is the government dealing with this problem? Well, judging by today’s announcement, by bringing in the culinary big gun himself – Jamie Oliver.

Jamie Oliver and Victorian Health Minister David Davis (who incidentally, has not let a ridiculous name stand in the way of his political career) announced today that Jamie’s Ministry of Food would be implemented to Victoria in an attempt to solve the state’s substantial obesity problem.

Jamie’s Ministry of Food is a community-focused program that teaches basic cooking skills and good nutrition to non-cooks, regardless of age, demographic or ethnicity, to improve their quality of life and health. It’s very much a grass-roots program that’s based on empowering people to think differently about food by equipping them with simple cooking skills and knowledge.

In the food guru’s own words: “The Ministry of Food is so simple in what it does: it’s about celebrating great food with guidance, love, care and attention. It’s for anyone over the age of 12, from any background and it really does change lives.”

Judging by the comments on today’s Ministry of Food announcement, opinion is split fifty-fifty amongst Victorians about whether this program is the right way to tackle the obesity problem. About half of the comments were applauding both Jamie and the government for attempting to provide a solution to this issue, and the other half were lambasting the government for getting a ‘foreign celebrity chef’ involved in our domestic health issues.

It’s certainly going to be interesting to see how it all pans out, and if a community-based program really can change the way all Australians think about food.

Masthead photo from this photostream, body photo from this photostream. Both used with the permission of a Creative Commons license.

Grow What You Eat!

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Grow what you eat on Friday, March 2nd from 7 – 11pm at Nelson the Seagull, 315 Carall Street, Gastown.

Victory Gardens, an urban farming business from Vancouver BC, is pleased to announce the launch of their first growing season with a silent auction and fundraiser, featuring generous donations from a host of the community’s finest, including: Nelson the Seagull, Collage Collage, Raincity Chronicles, Pickershack, Gravity Pope, Lark, Regional Assembly of Text, Beth Richards, Heartbreaker Salon, Rocklore, Dace, Back-yard Buzz, Humble Roots Wellness, Community Vintage, Instinct Training, Ystava and more!

Lisa Giroday, Sam Philips and Sandra Lopuch have come together to form the urban farming business, Victory Gardens. With varying backgrounds and interests in food production, sustainable development and environmental activism, Victory Gardens embodies many of the principles in which they were born, but with a fresh perspective. The team at Victory Gardens looks forward to working with the community; transforming front yards for food production, facilitating dynamic workshops, such as: “Grow Your Own Pizza”, providing education and planning tools for the new urban farmer to grow what they eat and much more.

The term Victory Gardens speaks to WWI and WWII era campaigns instigated by American, Canadian, German and British governments intending to reduce the pressure on public food supply. However; more than that, Victory Gardens served as symbols of comradery and support, unifying the masses to promote sustainability, efficient land use, innovative economic models and to unite families in a passive war effort for victory. British Columbia and Vancouver were no exception to this push for city farming, and in early 1943, The Vancouver News Herald reported, “If all the Victory Gardens in British Columbia were lumped together, they would occupy a space approximately three times the size of Vancouver’s great Stanley Park.” At that time, the paper said, there were 1425 gardens on city-owned lots.” (http://www.cityfarmer.org/victgarB58.html)

Not much has changed in the way a Victory Garden can benefit the community today, so we’re delighted to provide the tools to make that connection!

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Masthead photo courtesy of Rob Holland

A Vancouver Food Tour

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When I travel, I visit vegetarian restaurants.  In Toronto, I go to Fresh.  In Victoria, I go to Rebar.  I was in Calgary recently and checked out The Coup (awesome).  I love finding my way to a new place, trying delicious food and soaking up the vibe.  Vegetarian restaurants are like a home away from home and I visit them like other travellers visit cultural sites.  For me, a vegetarian restaurant is the epicentre of the culture that I want to experience in a new city.

We’re fortunate in Vancouver to have plenty of dining-out choices, including places that appeal to people like me. Here’s a quick overview of my favourite vegetarian restaurants in Vancouver.

I used to live in Kits and split my time between The Naam, Nevermind (now kaput) and The Hollywood Theatre (also kaput – sad).  I like that The Naam has not changed since I started eating there in the 90’s.  And it probably hadn’t changed in the 30 years it existed before that.  I like how cozy it is there in the winter.  And I love their miso gravy and rice pudding.  What I don’t love is the bland menu, spotty service and inconsistent food quality.  After giving The Naam a wide berth for the past couple of years, I had lunch there last week and had a great time.  The menu was the same, the service was weird, and there were burnt potato wedges in my Gold Dragon Bowl.  All of that didn’t matter though, because it felt like home.

I live in Mount Pleasant now and am within walking distance of lots of amazing food choices.  I was happy when The Foundation came onto the scene and I’ve dropped a fair bit of dough there, mostly on nachos and beer.  I like the goofily named vegetarian basics on the menu and the nutritious options.  I don’t go there much anymore though because the loud music and prickly service makes for a decidedly un-kid-friendly environment.  I still give it two thumbs up though.

On The Drive, my top picks are Café Deux Soleils for their super awesome breakfasts, kid-friendly space, and fun evening events, and Sweet Cherubim for their tasty organic menu, low-key vibe, and affordable groceries.

Radha, in Chinatown, was my favourite but it closed in May last year.  The food was so good and I loved it there.  Their creative vegan menu was outstanding.  The space is still open as a yoga studio and their former head-chef continues to offer vegan cooking classes.

Gorilla Food downtown is a good alternative to Radha as it offers organic, local and seasonal deliciousness.  It’s menu caters exclusively to the raw vegan set and it’s interesting, creative and filling.  I’ve taken die-hard meat-eaters there and they were impressed.  The service can be flakey, but whatever.  You get that in this scene.

Rounding out this entirely subjective list is my personal fave, The Rhizome.  The food is basic and reliable, the service is friendly, the owners are lovely and the place is a hub for the socially-minded.  The Rhizome has been around for five years and it’s an oasis of calm across from the Kingsgate Mall on East Broadway.  The restaurant is a community space, with a variety of events hosted there through the week.  The Rhizome is all things that I love about vegetarian restaurants.  It’s my favourite place in Vancouver and I hope you check it out.  Perhaps you’ll love it as much as I do!

The Global Toolkit of Skills You Will Need to Survive the Apocalypse

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Since I can’t seem to function at all when I’m hungry, I believe that keeping a happy belly is the #1 skill you will need to survive the apocalypse.

You will need to know how to throw a great dinner party wherever your apocalyptic survival plan takes you. Morale is vital to survival. Pot-lucks are great for morale.

You must know how to hunt, kill and use all parts of an animal for food and supplies. Vegan’s will not survive the apocalypse – another reason to enjoy bacon while you can.

You need to know which foods provide which vitamins. It would be pretty embarrassing to die from gangrene when there are zombies everywhere.

Survival Strategies from Around the World

By: Martin Renauld and Peter Joerdell

Martin says…

Looking back at history, I would guess Argentina would face the apocalypse using class warfare… Until now, argentinean upper class/oligarchy has reacted with force to most attempts to improve lower class living conditions, especially in tough times. Therefore, if food becomes scarce, migrations from neighboring countries start to flow in, zombies appear everywhere or even Jesus coming back to punish us (except Jehovah witnesses of course)… The rich and powerful Argentinean would do as they have done over the past 200 years, just bring a docile dictator and make sure not the share vital resources. Argentina produces a lot a food (for about 7 times its population), which I guess would help getting the rich richer if famine starts spreading around the world.

Peter says…

And welcome to the German perspective on „the Apocalypse“. And to be honest, it’s going to be a bit of a let-down. Because, frankly, us Germans, we’re quite used to the doom & gloom-perspective. I mean, just look at the end of WW2 – we’ve had the shit bombed out of us like no other nation. And ever since then, German Angst has been on the agenda (it’s no miracle that term is recognized and understood, globally). We’ve always had this imminent perdition-thing going: First it was the Cold War, then it was BSE, now the Economic Crisis and the Post-911 terror-craze… And as I said, if you go back to WW2 – everyone has their own family-stories here, to which to relate to when dealing with the apocalypse. In many ways, the final days of WW2 are the blueprint. How Uncle Willy ran away from his post, ditching his uniform and making for home through the woods. How Grandma, right after giving birth to my mum ran through the firestorm of what used to be Remscheid while the city ceased to exist, losing all her family in just one night. How my own dad stared down the gun-barrels of the Red Army as an eleven year old kid. If we’re honest, we’ve seen it all in the 20th century. Hyper-inflation, two world wars, a dictatorship made in hell, being threatened to be the first to go in nuclear holocaust…

The only new component in today’s apocalypse is that the environmental-issue is now also on the menu.

So, what would Germany do? I don’t know. Specific survival strategies have always proven to be difficult to maintain in the face of actual obliteration. Experience dictates that a lot of sheer luck is usually needed to come out alive and unscathed.

Maybe we oughta stick to the positive side: There won’t ever be a speed limit on the Autobahn after the world has ended. We won’t have to bail out Greece with our money. We’ll not be sewing T-Shirts for the Chinese market (as we might well do, according to some pessimists, in 20 years).

The best solution might actually be that of my friend Frank. His daughter was born on December 21st, 2010. He named her Maya. And he’s quite confident that her second birthday won’t be her last.

Winter

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Winter has been slow arriving this year. In a lot of ways it is hard to complain. The warmer weather is easier on our energy bills and makes for an less stressful commute, especially as a transit strike since October still has me driving when I’d much rather be reading, listening to music, or doing a better job with my gumboot posts. But at the same time there are a lot of parts of winter that I’ve been looking forward to that as a result of the warmer weather I’ve put off. But in the last couple of weeks winter has shown up in Toronto, the air is crisp and there is snow on the ground. I want to share a few things that make the dark, cold, snowy (or rainy) months something for me to enjoy and hope you too find positivity in the months ahead.

Getting (and Sleeping) Outside.

I wasn’t always a fan of spending time outside in winter until I started running a few years ago and kept on running right through winter.  (Check out Jim’s past post on the lonely community of winter runners).  I then realized that being outside in winter makes those dark vitamin D deprived months a lot better. Sure there aren’t seemly endless hours of sunshine and instead there are layers of every type of clothing imaginable, but there also aren’t sunburns or mosquitoes.  This year, Jim and I are taking our quest to embrace winter a step further with our plan to complete a whole year of camping every month.  And after sleeping outside on Dec. 23 and Dec. 24, with temperature dipping close to -20C the first night and waking up to a white Christmas the next, I can say that I’m looking forward to more outside time in the months ahead.

Seasonal Hobbies (and hobbies that adapt to the season).

When I’m not outside in winter I enjoy being curled up on a coach with cat on my lap, watching TV, which I do way more of in the winter (I’m re-watching The Wire right now).  Two additional hobbies make this better, knitting and beer.  I’m a seasonal knitter and it wasn’t until last week that I picked up the needles again, which coincided with Toronto’s first substantial snowfall.  It means that when my tendency is more towards hibernation than outside, I end up with something cozy coincidentally makes winter better.  Beer, which I’ve recently started brewing, had to undergo some adaptations for winter, which we’re still working out.  The brewery has moved from friends’  backward to our apartment for the winter, where our back deck’s overhang and ground-level bathtub (for the beer chilling) means we can brew through the cold months.  And as long as we figure out how to adjust for the higher evaporation rate in winter we’ll keep ending up with amazing beer.

Tomatoes, Endings and Beginnings

And finally, what would one of my lists be without a reference to tomatoes.  I’ve just cooked my last fresh tomatoes a couple of days ago. That’s right, tomatoes that I grew on my back deck that have been slowly ripening wrapped in newspaper in the months since they’ve been picked in the fall.  They were delicious.  And while that should make me sad, it is only a mere month and a half until I plant tomato seeds again.  In the meantime, I have cans of crushed tomatoes, homemade salsa, pizza sauce, and ketchup for the down-time in mid-winter.

What makes you happy about winter? 

Lessons in Culinary Community Building

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Picture a long festive table decked with candles and lined with  a dozen smiling faces. Surely, all the ingredients for sharing of food, laughter and good conversation? Well, not so much.

As I sat down excited to spend the evening catching up with everyone, I realized a good third of the long table was out of earshot and I was confined to chatting only with my immediate neighbour. Others dishes were also out of tasting/sharing range. By the end of the evening, I left for home feeling unfulfilled -  increasingly convinced  that other cultures, particularly in Asia, but, oddly, as close as Switzerland, know where it’s at when it comes to shared dining. Here’s why:

Circle Sitting:

Rectangular tables are recipes for isolation and are basically retrograde – some sort of throwback to medieval banqueting. They’re also hierarchical when you think about it. Why do we need a “Head of the table”, for example? Sitting in a circle does away with all that and facilitates a shared social and culinary experience. Chinese Dim-sum restaurants have got it right.

Cooking (!) the food at the table:

Last year’s Christmas highlight was having endless Swiss Raclette with my family. A stack of cheese and a two little propane fired pans set up around our coffee table was all it took to have an interactive, collaborative and leisurely meal.

Japanese 'Hot Potting'

 

This year, the highlight was my first Japanese Hot Pot experience with six friends. Again, we relaxed around two bubbling cookers, working together to keep the pots full of pre-prepared seafood, mushrooms, kim-chi and other delicacies.

Admittedly my international experience is limited and hence my examples are too. But I feel it’s safe to say the West has a lot to learn. Sure – we’re good around a campfire with wieners and marshmallows, but it’d be great to bring that communal experience more regularly into our homes. Chopping the corners off all tables square is good start!

 

 

 

Food Charters: building a food community

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As part of my work I get to be involved in some really interesting projects.  One of the latest is the development of a food charter.  A food charter is a statement of values and principles to guide a community’s food policy. People from a broad spectrum of community interests and organizations meet and discuss their concerns and desires around food and agriculture policy in order to come up with a common vision and set of principles. These form the basis of a unique, local, community food charter.

Food Charters are still fairly new.  Toronto has had one since 2000, Sudbury since 2004, and Vancouver since 2007.  In the past three years at least half a dozen other communities have adopted them and even more are starting to work on them.  When a food charter is adopted by a municipal council it becomes a public document to guide decision-making.  It also can be endorsed by other organizations and form the basis of partnerships to work toward common goals.  In many ways, the food charters adopted so far look fairly similar.  I imagine the small steering committee that I’m on could sit down and write it over an afternoon and it wouldn’t look that different from what we are likely to end up with.  But while having a statement of shared values might be the obvious outcome that we want to achieve, an even more important outcome is the relationships that the process of co-developing a Food Charter will forge.

One of the things that I like most about the Food Charter process so far is it has been a tool to bring together stakeholders from a range of different backgrounds, including health, agriculture, environment, tourism, processing, retail, transportation, local, regional and provincial government, social equity, poverty, waste management, and education.  Individuals and organizations that have never been in the same room before have come together to discuss the Food Charter.  To me, this means that even in the main goal of getting a Food Charter adopted doesn’t happen right away that’s OK.  The relationship building that is occurring during the process of meetings and community engagement is already incubating new projects.  Even after one public meeting an action plan to go along with the charter started to emerge and at the top of that list was the need to collaborate, cooperate, network and share.  A new food community is budding and I’m looking forward to being a part of it.