Wild About Mushrooms

To forage for mushrooms on the forest floor is to connect with your inner wild pig because to find these elusive treats you must get down on the ground, your eyes and nose pointed earthward, and get dirty. Very dirty.

The prey you are stalking may be silent and still but hunting them requires as much skill and patience – maybe even more – as it takes to bring down big game.

In your porcine state, you will happily spend hours mutely scrambling down misty hillsides and through damp woods, carefully rooting under fallen leaves and nosing into dark crevices – all in your quest to coax these masters of camouflage out of their subterranean lairs.

You will brave insects, incur stings and scratches and stare down all manner of woodland creatures and creepy crawlies. You will willingly embrace rot and decay because mushrooms are nature’s necrophiles – and wherever there is death on the forest floor, you will find them thriving.

Deep in the woods, your primitive animal imagination will thrive in a fairy world of toadstool rings, a magical place where fungi’s modern scientific labels are discarded in favour of more whimsical identifiers such as hawk’s wing, cow’s nose, witch’s butter, chicken of the woods, slippery caps and flames of the forest.

You will find mushroom hunting a largely silent endeavour, broken only by the occasional grunt and groan that is, until you find what you’re looking for and then you will hear your primal yell echo off the surrounding rocks and trees.

There are few activities that bring out the primitive hunter-gatherer in us more than foraging for edible fungi and you will want to devour the earthy fruits of your labour soon as possible. For this reason, wild mushrooms are best enjoyed at the edge of the woods, if you can manage it, prepared as simply as possible on a Coleman stove and served picnic-style.

If you absolutely must wait until you get home, spread your haul out on a tea-towel, on the kitchen counter, and leave it for an hour or so to give all the tiny creatures residing in fungal gills and folds a chance to crawl away into the corners of your kitchen. My friend Kerry taught this very effective 'shroom cleaning method! After that, simply brush off any large chunks of remaining soil or forest matter and start cooking. Whatever you do, don’t go all hygienic and try to wash the mushrooms thoroughly. This will ruin them and, considering the primal effort you put into obtaining them, any concerns about swallowing a bit of dirt would be a bit silly at this point.

Whether you’re eating mushrooms out in the woods or at home, there is one critical rule of safety you should always adhere to: never eat a wild mushroom you can’t confidently identify. Only a few hundred of the world’s thousands of varieties of fungi are actually edible. Some of them are seriously harmful and eating them can lead to a swift, painful death which ranks wild mushroom dining up alongside sampling fugu is an extreme gastro-sport. This definitely helps explain why so many mycological societies darkly call their end-of-season member soirees "survivors" banquets.

In my more adventurous foraging days, I lost my nerve a couple of times while staring at a seemingly innocent shroom and second-guessing my identification. Of course, this doesn’t stop folks like me from going a little hog-wild and heading out into the hills every season.

When I get a good batch, usually of chanterelles, eating them fried up in olive oil and butter and served on toast or tucked into a fluffy omelet is usually enough to satisfy me until I can cook up the rest of my haul in more involved dishes such as soup, risotto or a rich sauce for roast beef, poultry or game. My measurements for the following dish aren’t very exact because I eyeball the ingredients in my rush to get my wild mushroom fix.

Mushrooms on Toast

1-2 Tbsp extra virgin olive oil
10 -12 ounces mixed wild mushrooms (chanterelles, porcini, matsutake, oyster, etc.) roughly chopped
1 tsp garlic, minced + 1 whole clove garlic, sliced in half
1 tsp fresh thyme, roughly chopped
Salt
Freshly ground black pepper
1 – 2 Tbsp butter
1 Tbsp medium-dry sherry
Slices of sourdough or other crusty bread.

In a large frying pan, heat the oil. Add the mushrooms to the pan, making sure not to crowd or layer them. Toss the mushrooms to coat with oil. Add garlic and fresh thyme and toss again. Add a pinch of salt and ground pepper. Sauté gently for 3-5 minutes. If mushrooms begin to dry out, add a bit more oil. Add the butter. When it is melted, stir to incorporate. To finish, add the sherry. If you would like the mixture to be creamier, you can toss in a couple of tablespoons of water, or chicken broth if you have it handy, and let mixture simmer for 1 or 2 minutes longer. Adjust salt and pepper as necessary, to taste.

Note: mushrooms are very accommodating and you can make variations on this dish by adding shallots instead of garlic, substitute dry white wine or the juice of half a lemon for the sherry, throw in a handful of chopped Italian parsley and/or a few red chili flakes like Jamie Oliver does in his book Jamie at Home.

While the mushrooms are cooking, slice the bread into thick pieces. Rub one side of each piece with the slice of garlic. Toast the bread lightly under the grill (or over the stove if you are preparing this outside). If you don’t want toast, you can leave the toasting step out. Put each slice on a plate, spoon the mushrooms over them, let out a big snort and start scarfing them down!

Apples

Apples, Byward Market, Ottawa, Fall 2008

Macaron Madness in Paris

I’ve decided that if Paris were a pastry it would be a macaron. This revelation hit me recently while looking through photos of my trip to France in May where I worked my way through at least a dozen of these dainty confections.

Some would argue that the architecturally complex millefeuille or the decadent éclair are more sweetly symbolic of the city of light. Others might consider Proust’s sentimental madeleine a more apt gastronomic parallel. I disagree. Paris and macarons are a natural match.

For one thing, macarons, like the French capital, are gaily coloured and full of rich flavours. If there is a confection with joie de vivre, it is the light and airy macaron. And this little cookie is also packed with sex appeal. Don’t believe me? Just try walking past a display of these treats without being seduced into eating one.

Macarons are believed to have been invented in Italy in the 8th century and should not be confused with the American coconut-based cookies known as macaroons. Macarons are a delicate mixture of egg whites, icing sugar, granulated sugar, almond powder and colouring sandwiched together with jam or cream.

In this sense, macarons resemble the inhabitants of Paris in that they are thin-skinned and crusty on the outside – and ever so slightly intimidating -- but once you break through their brittle outer shell, these tasty pastries, much like Parisians, are all intense, gooey sweetness and love.

Despite the plethora of online content devoted to the subject of making your own macarons, the other thing they have in common with Paris is that it is impossible to recreate the real thing at home. There is just no substitute for the experience of eating a fragile arôme de Rose-flavoured macaron on the sidewalk outside Ladurée on the Champs-Élysées – just as nothing matches a visit to the city of Paris itself.

Another attribute that Paris and the macaron share is that both lend themselves easily to innovation. Each season, the city’s patisseries compete with each other to introduce new macaron fillings and ever more unusual and exotic flavour combinations. These often reflect new global gastronomic influences proving that the even the most classic of French confections, like Paris, continues to evolve and grow while retaining all the charm and taste that keep those who love it coming back for more.

Macarons now come in a seemingly limitless array of colours and flavours. Nowhere is this more apparent than at Ladurée, the venerable Parisian pastry shop and café where Pierre Desfontaines, in the early 1900s, first thought to take two almond meringues and fill them with silky smooth ganache to create what today, in essence, is a really classy Oreo cookie. Ladurée is Mecca for macaron-crazed fans in Paris. It offers dozens of flavours including the basics (and best sellers) chocolate, vanilla, caramel and pistachio plus seasonal flavours like anise, basil lime, lily-of-the-valley and white chocolate. Ladurée’s original flavours this year included cotton candy, apricot ginger, orange saffron and strawberry poppy flower.

Filmmaker Sofia Coppola is said to have been so inspired by the jewel-toned hues of Ladurée's macarons that she used them as the colour palette for her film Marie Antoinette. Macarons hadn’t yet been invented when Marie was queen of France, but if they had, my guess is she would have reconsidered her edict to "Let them eat cake” in favour of this addictive little creation.

My new favourite destination for macarons is the Patisserie Sadaharu Aoki on the Left Bank. The Japanese-born chef is a fusion master who has been shaking up the Parisian pastry scene in recent years. His sweets may look like classic French confections but they taste decidedly different. Aoki’s unique treats are infused with Asian flavours that include matcha (green tea), yuzu (citrus), sesame and sweet red bean paste. He also produces hazelnut, raspberry, chocolate, orange and other more conventional-tasting macarons favored by traditional palates.

But the award for most inventive macarons must go to legendary patissier Pierre Hermé. I arrived in Paris just as his wasabi and grapefruit macarons were making their debut. They join his other intriguing flavours of olive oil and vanilla, rose, and chestnut, and his best-selling chocolate and passion fruit. At Christmas last year, his seasonal macaron collection of black truffle, balsamic vinegar and chocolate foie gras sold out quickly.

There is no telling what intriguing taste combinations Aoki, Hermé and the other pastry chefs of Paris will come up with next. It seems macarons, like the city that made them famous, are limited only by the imagination.

Sucre à la crème

I went back to Ottawa for a few days last week and found that the brilliant canopy of scarlet and canary leaves I’d walked under near my mom’s house in late September had collapsed to the ground into deep, brown heaps. With the best of fall over in eastern Ontario, I had to content myself with afternoon walks in tepid sunlight and listening to the strangely satisfying sound of fallen leaves crunching under my feet.

I found more comfort in a big slab of sucre à la crème that my mom brought home from the office one day. Sucre à la crème, or sugar cream in English, is a traditional fudge from Quebec. The little squares of pure cream sugar, sometimes flavoured with a hint of maple, are a rich, sweet but simple treat that really seems to suit the cool fall season. Luckily for me, the wife of one of my mom’s colleagues, Louise Perron, excels at the art of making sucre à la crème. She regularly sends batches of it to the office to satisfy the many sweet-tooths on staff – including my mom who manages to bring home some to share…most of the time. Louise’s recipe is prepared in the microwave, making this the ultimate quick sugar fix.

Sucre à la crème Louise

1 cup soft brown sugar
1 cup white sugar
2 Tbsp butter
1 cup 35% cream
1 tsp pure maple extract (or vanilla)

In a large microwave-safe bowl, stir together the brown sugar, white sugar and cream. Microwave at full power for three minutes. Stir the ingredients and microwave at full power for another three minutes. Stir the ingredients again and microwave for another three minutes. Add the maple extract (or vanilla) and the butter. Using an electric mixer, beat the mixture for around two minutes. Check the texture and beat more if needed.

Pour the mixture into a square glass baking dish and allow to set. This recipe does not call for the mixture to be refrigerated but many others do, for around 1 hour or so. When set, you can cut this into squares to serve but Louise suggests leaving the sucre à la crème in a block until just before you are ready to serve, or eat, it because it will keep fresh longer.

Give peas a chance!

As a child, I loved the fairy tale of the princess and the pea.

I think it was idea of sleeping high atop 20 mattresses that intrigued me more than the tiny vegetable that caused the princess such a bad night’s sleep but I guess I’ve admired peas ever since.

I’ve been sadly neglecting my blog of late for no other reason than I’ve been doing too much cooking and eating and not enough writing during the fall harvest season.

One of the late summer recipes I’ve been wanting to share comes from Canada’s über chef Michael Stadtländer who is renowned for his ability to elevate less celebrated vegetables like the pea to high art.

I’ve been whipping up his version of cauliflower & pea soup with brown nutmeg butter for a couple of years now and it has become one of my favourite dishes to make in the early fall when the days are cooler but not quite cold enough for those dead-of-winter root-veggie-heavy soups.

I like the simple combination of creamy cauliflower and fragrant nutmeg butter studded with playful green peas that pop in my mouth. This soup is perfect dish for those who, like me, are not quite ready to dig out sweaters and scarves and leave summer behind.

Cauliflower Soup with Fresh Peas, Chervil and Nutmeg Butter

½ head medium-sized cauliflower
750 ml chicken stock
1 medium yellow onion, finely chopped
2 Tbsp butter
1 generous handful fresh blanched green peas (or frozen)
1 Tbsp chopped chervil (if you can’t find this herb, use parsley)
2 Tbsp 35% cream
1 bay leaf
Brown nutmeg butter (recipe follows)

Sauté onion in butter. Add the cauliflower, roughly chopped (reserve some florets for garnish). Over low heat, add chicken stock and bay leaf. Simmer for 45 minutes.

Remove the bay leaf and add the cream. Purée and strain the soup.

Meanwhile, blanch the peas in salted water, for a maximum of two minutes. (They should soften, but retain their sweetness.) Lightly steam the remaining cauliflower.Season the florets with nutmeg butter and chervil. Pour soup into bowls and garnish with peas and cauliflower.

Nutmeg Butter

In a hot pan, melt 1 Tbsp butter. Remove it from the heat, add freshly grated nutmeg to taste and reserve. Note, you can freeze any leftover butter for later use.

Autumn Squash

Autumn gourds & squash, Byward Market, Ottawa, Early October 2008

Pesto, presto!

After another summer of cooking with fresh basil, I’ve decided it is the prima donna of herbs. Out in the garden, if it gets too much sun, it scorches, but plant it in a place with too little light and it becomes sullen and refuses to flourish.

When basil gets into the kitchen, it can become truly demanding and unreasonable when it doesn’t receive the attention it commands. Add it to hot dishes too early and it loses its flavour. Try to dry it for later use and it shrinks into a tasteless heap. Use too much of it and basil’s strong taste can easily overwhelm other ingredients and become more irritating than enjoyable. And don’t even think about letting this leafy diva languish in the fridge for more than a couple days or its emerald-coloured plume of leaves will quickly shrivel up and turn to a brown-green mush. “You should have used me first,” basil seems to protest, “before cooking with all that parsley and thyme.”

I’ve learned the hard way that basil will settle for nothing less than centre stage when it appears in recipes but, like all talented performers, if you can tame its temperamental nature, the results are usually memorable.

The challenge is keeping the green princess happy so that she sings, rather than sulks, when she hits the plate. And that usually involves a strong chorus of ingredients to back her up. The Italians figured this out long ago when they invented pesto. The classic easy-to-make oil and herb sauce hails from the Ligurian coast of Italy. Its pungent cast of olive oil, garlic, pine nuts and parmesan cheese complement basil brilliantly.

I like making pesto (and its French cousin pistou) in late summer to use up the last big bunches of fresh basil from the garden and farmer’s markets. When frozen in small batches, pesto is great way to preserve basil’s allegro summer tang and keep this leading lady of the herb garden performing well into the early winter. I toss it with pasta, stir it into mashed potatoes, add big dollops of it to tomato-based soups and spoon it over vegetables that need a bit of kick. Last week, my latest batch of pesto starred in an easy mid-week dinner atop a heap of steamed fresh green beans served alongside grilled pork chops.

Pesto

4 cups packed fresh basil leaves, washed if needed, and roughly chopped
1/2 cup pine nuts, toasted until golden and cooled

1/2 cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese
2-4 garlic cloves, minced1/2 cup extra-virgin olive oil
Salt and pepper to taste

In a food processor, purée basil with garlic. Slowly add in the oil while the processor is running. (You may need to adjust the amount of oil depending on what consistency you like. Less oil will give you a chunkier sauce, more will give you a creamier version.) Add in pine nuts and Parmesan cheese. Process until smooth. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Note: Pesto can be made 2 days ahead and chilled covered, or frozen up to 2 to 3 months.

My Cheatin' Heart

I admit that I cheat every now and then. Oh, not romantically or on tests or taxes but in the kitchen. Most people who know me think I make everything from scratch, especially considering how enthusiastically I can criticize processed foods. But those who know me really well know I sometimes take shortcuts.

Apparently I’m in good company. The oh-so-proper British cook Delia Smith has just released a book offering product-by-product recipes and tips on how to cheat in the kitchen. But good luck finding some of the brands she uses if you don’t live in England. When I cheat, I usually do it with a good old American classic, Campbell’s soup.

Despite all the hand-wringing in the press these days over processed foods and their effect on our health, I’ve had a long relationship with the red and white can that trumps nutritional facts. Like any illicit affair, I know it's bad for me, but I just can’t break it off.

It’s all my grandmother’s fault. Campbell’s soup figures prominently in her culinary repertoire and I can’t blame her. She was a young woman raising a family at the dawn of the processed food era when canned goods and their ilk heralded the liberation of women from the kitchen. My grandmother was raised on a farm and knew well the labour involved in growing, harvesting and preparing food from scratch. I’ve never asked her, but I imagine that, as a young mom filling her shopping basket with canned goods in those early days, the thought of speeding up dinner with processed food must have been as unbelievable but thrilling as the idea of man walking on the moon – which wouldn’t happen for a few years yet.

Unlike my generation of cooks, my grandma feels no shame in cracking open a can of Campbell’s. She uses it in almost all her signature recipes. Corn chowder (Cream of Corn soup), chicken stew (Cream of Mushroom soup) and her piece de resistance, creamy chicken vol-au-vents (Chicken a la King soup and a tin of Green Giant-brand sweet peas)

When I cheat, like I did this week, my Campbell’s soup of choice is invariably Tomato Rice. It reminds me of childhood Thanksgivings and the soup my mother made with leftover turkey. (Mom cheats, too!) We’d dine large on turkey-tomato-rice soup for almost a week – and never tired of it.

Some folks are probably shocked to know my secret. But I like to think it takes a strong cook to ‘fess up to taking shortcuts in the kitchen. I’ll go one step further and brag that I’ve even updated my mom’s signature cheat recipe for tomato-rice soup by using local seasonal produce to jazz it up. The result is the culinary equivalent of a quick nooner in a motel off the Interstate – or the perfect lunch for a cool late-summer day.

Cheater’s Tomato Rice Soup with Roast Chicken and Fresh Basil
1 10-oz can Campbell’s Tomato Rice soup
1 cup roast chicken meat (cooked) cut into bite-sized pieces
1 medium-size tomato, diced
2 Tbsp (or to taste) fresh basil leaves, cut in a chiffonade
1 Tbsp heavy cream

In a small pot, prepare soup according to directions on the can. While soup is warming, add chicken, tomato. Heat soup to desired temperature. Remove from heat. Add in basil and cream and serve with a crusty bun or crackers.

Salad Days 2008

Summer 2008 - some of the yummy things Michelle made and ate: grilled salmon salad; chilled psychedelic pink borscht; watercress vichyssoise; parsley potatoes Provençal; tomato-basil fried rice; blackberry-peach-ginger cobbler; eggplant pasta; Tokyo-style avocado-arugula salad; rubbarb crisp with Devon cream.

Flour Power

Despite being a city girl at heart, I’ve long harboured romantic notions about living in an old stone mill out in the country – complete with quaint waterwheel – but I’ve never given much thought to how flour actually got made back in the old days when farmers had to haul their grain in for processing.

So, during a recent trip to Ottawa, I was keen to visit one of the few remaining mills in Canada still producing flour in much the same way it did back in the mid-1800s. Watson's Mill was built alongside the Rideau River in 1860 in the picturesque town of Manotick and has been milling flour from locally grown wheat for almost 150 years.

While most other mills in North America have fallen into ruin or been converted into modern restaurants, museums or private residences, Watson’s Mill still has a lot of its original equipment, thanks in large part to Harry Watson, who owned and operated it as a working grist mill from 1946 until the mid-1960s.

Long before the local food movement had people clamouring for regional products or food scientists re-discovered the nutritional benefits of stone-ground wheat (author Michael Pollen paints an especially compelling portrait of what we lost when we stopped milling with stone in his book In Defense of Food), the Rideau Valley Conservation Authority purchased the mill and restored the millstones and other machinery to their original operating condition, including the water turbines which drive the millstone up to 120 revolutions a minute.

That’s enough power to produce the whole-wheat flour used to make the giant loaves of bread sold at the mill on weekends. Also available for purchase on a daily basis are two-, five-, 10 and 50-pound sacks of flour. The day I visited, the volunteers who mill the wheat couldn’t get these bagged fast enough for enthusiastic customers.

When it preserved the mill for its original use, the conservation authority could never have predicted how intense the demand for local, environmentally friendly products would become. According to staff, Watson’s Mill had about 24,000 visitors last year, an increase of 60 percent over 2006. In response, it expects to produce five tons of the powdery stuff this year. The wheat, incidentally, comes from a farm just outside Ottawa owned by the Ruiter family, some of whom I went to elementary school with.

Much of the newfound zeal for local flour has, no doubt, been fuelled by the recent 100-mile diet craze. After all, sourcing home-grown onions and carrots is a piece of cake in most parts of Canada – at least during the summer -- but when was the last time you baked bread using 100-percent stone-milled whole-wheat flour ground in your community from wheat harvested nearby?

While I only partially subscribe to the 100-mile philosophy myself, after watching grain flow through the mill’s loud orchestra of millstones, drums and chutes, I felt the baker’s flutter of delight at the thought of experimenting with such a pure, pre-industrial-revolution product. At the same time, after witnessing the amount of effort it takes to make flour the traditional way, I also felt an overwhelming sense of responsibility about not wasting it. The result? I put a lot of thought into what recipes would be truly mill flour-worthy. I didn’t want to adulterate the flour with too many processed, modern or exotic ingredients. My goal was to capture and celebrate the historical spirit of this novel foodstuff.

Not being a bread baker, I decided it would be too ambitious to try and make a loaf, especially since I had been warned that whole-wheat loaves can turn out very rustic and dense – think spelt bread. I had a few false starts – a batch of mixed berry muffins and a lemon blueberry coffee cake that didn’t quite meet expectations.

In the end, I channeled my inner pioneer and settled on a simple recipe for apple oatmeal pancakes. This produced a small, dense, but surprisingly moist, stack that I served with pats of butter and a big splash of maple syrup. Add to this a couple of fried eggs, a few slices of thick country bacon and a hot pot of coffee, and your inner pioneer will be ready for a hard day of farm work or stone milling.

Chunky Apple Oatmeal Pancakes

¾ cup whole-wheat flour
1/8 cup oats
2 Tbsp oat bran
½ tsp cinnamon
2 tsp baking powder
¼ tsp salt
¼ cup raisins (optional)
½ cup finely chopped apple
1 cup pure apple juice

Combine dry ingredients. Add raisins and chopped apple. Stir in apple juice until dry ingredients are moistened. Heat a non-stick skillet over medium heat. Pour batter into the skillet. (Using a ¼ cup measure for each pancake, you should get approximately 6-8 pancakes.) Cook until bottoms are brown. Flip pancakes and brown the other side. Serve with a pat of butter and maple syrup.

Dining on modern Huron cuisine in Quebec City

If the journals of French explorer Samuel de Champlain are anything to go by, aboriginal cuisine has come a long way since 1608. Back then, when Champlain first arrived in North America and founded the settlement that today is Quebec City, he wrote of local First Nations people dining on a new-world fondue of elk, bear and beaver meat cooked in big vats of boiling water. On really special occasions, the feast would be accompanied by dancers with the heads of their enemies slung over their shoulders.

What a difference a few centuries can make in fine First Nations dining.

This year, as Quebec City celebrates its 400th birthday, a neighbouring Huron community of Wendake is celebrating the debut of a unique new restaurant that blends First Nations culinary traditions with a contemporary dining experience. La Traite's original take on aboriginal cuisine is fast making it one of the hottest tables in the region.

The restaurant is part of the Hôtel-Musée Premières Nations, a 4-star resort and museum complex on the bank of the St. Charles River (or Akiawenrahk River in the Huron language) that opened in March 2008.

Wendake was first settled by the Huron-Wendat people in the mid-1600s after the Iroquois drove them from their original homelands near the Great Lakes. The Huron-Wendat arrived in the Quebec City area around the same time as the first French settlers. The two groups of newcomers formed an alliance that helped the French successfully adapt to their new home. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Today, Wendake is a tidy, thriving town of about 1,500 people. Its new restaurant, hotel and museum complex was conceived and created by the Huron-Wendat Nation Council and other Quebec First Nations groups with government support. Huron-Wendat Grand Chief Max Gros-Louis says the goal of the resort is to reflect Huron culture past and present and provide visitors with an authentic experience. But anyone looking for aboriginal kitsch will not find it on the menu here.

In design, the Hôtel-Musée Premières Nations is part ancient Huron longhouse, part urban boutique hotel. The sleek lobby offers a decidedly modern take on Huron Wendat mythology and traditions with its cool stone floor, tree-trunk pillars and an ultra-chic fire pit around which guests can relax on leather chairs draped with coyote skins. Floor-to-ceiling window overlooks a stand of maple and birch trees. On the walls hangs a stunning collection of contemporary artwork, much of it created by First Nations artisans, including a rare pair of paintings by the renowned Canadian Ojibwa painter Norval Morrisseau which Grand Chief Gros-Louis acquired directly from the artist.

Off the lobby is a small but thoughtful museum housed in a cone-shaped building mimicking a traditional Algonquin smoke house. It contains rare Huron artifacts, carvings, delicate beadwork samples and dioramas depicting the Nation’s history, culture, society and beliefs.

The lobby’s modern aboriginal design theme is carried down a wood and glass stairway and into La Traite. The restaurant features a small bar with a canopy of interlocked antlers and a comfortable dining room leading to a walk-out stone patio where, in warmer months, diners can eat al fresco overlooking the forest and fast-flowing river.

Like most Eastern woodland tribes, the Huron were farmers during the summer and hunters during the winter. Staple crops were corn, squash, pumpkin, beans and tobacco. Game was mainly bison, deer, bear and other small animals. Fishing was also a major source of food.

La Traite’s gourmet menu incorporates many of these traditional foodstuffs as well as other regional ingredients fresh from the farm, forest or river. The hotel's executive chef, Martin Gagné also sources herbs, edible flowers and roots, in season, such as lavender, fennel and wasabi, that grow wild in northern Quebec.

La Traite’s summer 2008 lunch menu includes a rich squash soup, delicate seasonal vegetables in wapiti broth, a rabbit casserole with mushrooms, black pudding with maple mustard and a marinated deer flank steak with rosemary sauce. Many of the mains are accompanied by crisp, seasonal vegetables and an intense puree of pumpkin.

The more extensive dinner menu includes goat cheese with wildflower honey, apple salad with wild mint, smoked sturgeon and trout, venison, pheasant and pike. You may even find some Indian bannock or the ubiquitous Quebec maple sugar pie on offer some nights. Prices for dishes range from $7-$30 and there are several prix-fixe tasting menus available.

The dishes here are flavourful, attractively plated and presented by a team of friendly, young servers knowledgeable about the menu. Grand Chief Gros-Louis explains that the resort’s 70 employees are a 50/50 mix of Aboriginals and Canadians, creating a dynamic professional team.

A perfect end to your First Nations dining experience might include a cup of Inuit herbal tea, or a walk along the forest path just outside the restaurant. On colder nights though, you might prefer to go back to one of the hotel's 55 luxurious riverfront guest rooms upstairs, complete with plasma TVs, wireless Internet, spa bathrooms and bear-skin rugs, and snuggle up to the handmade beaver-fur pillows on the beds. That beats a big vat of boiled elk meat any day!

Visiting Wendake and the Hotel-Musée Premières Nations

Wendake is 20 minutes drive north of downtown Quebec City, a 2 and 1/2 hour drive from Montreal and a 5-6 hour drive from Ottawa.

This summer the Huron-Wendat Nation is holding special events to mark Quebec City’s 400th birthday including a new evening musical show, called Kiugwe, being presented in an outdoor amphitheatre. The show tells the story of how the world was created according to Aboriginal legends. It runs until September 7.

Where's the beef? Part II: Riding Calgary's Tasty Trails

The annual Calgary Stampede & Exhibition kicks off next week. While the raucous celebration of all things wild and western lives up to its claim as the greatest outdoor show on earth, it’s a sad but true fact that those interested in tasting really good cowboy cuisine will not find it at the Stampede.

Not to buck off the world’s largest rodeo – or all those corn dogs, mini donuts and free pancake breakfasts served up during Stampede week – but, for an authentic taste of Alberta, or more to the point, Alberta beef, you’ll need to leave the fairground.

A lot of folks in search of an authentic cookhouse atmosphere get no further than Buzzards. The rustic restaurant and bar a few blocks from the Stampede grounds is famous for its annual prairie oyster festival. Prairie oysters are a quaint euphemism for calf testicles, a novelty that – as far as I’m concerned – is best sampled with copious amounts of beer. Luckily, the adjoining pub boasts 80 different brews from around the world. Buzzards also serves up slabs of certified Angus beef and locally sourced buffalo meat burgers– all in big cowboy-sized portions. The food quality can be a bit dodgy but the live country music during Stampede makes up for it.

A little further away from the crowds of urban cowboys in their white Stetsons and clean jeans is Buchanan’s, a chophouse and whisky bar in the Eau Claire area with a neighbourhood feel, linen napkins and some of the city’s tastiest burgers and steaks. The restaurant’s thick cuts of meat – including an 18-oz prime rib chop – make this spot popular with locals and visitors alike. And while it may be difficult to pass on the great steaks, Buchanan’s eight-ounce cheeseburgers are made of premium sirloin and charbroiled to perfection. The 200+ kinds of malt whisky on offer are also another good reason to belly up to this friendly restaurant and bar

For high-end frontier food, there’s a trio of restaurants in Calgary offering fine feeding. The River Café is set in a picturesque spot on Prince’s Island in the Bow River. It’s a stone’s throw from downtown but the relaxed, rustic ambience will leave you feeling like you’ve stumbled into a fishing lodge. The River Café is consistently voted one of Calgary’s best dining establishments and for good reason. Chef Scott Pohorelic’s menu is a showcase of local and seasonal ingredients transformed into wholesome, innovative dishes. Lunchtime standouts include a buffalo burger with Saskatoon berries, Oka cheese and tomatoes. In the evening, a starter of wild morel mushroom perogies followed by the organic beef tenderloin paired with stinging nettle chimichurri is a truly modern Western treat.

Open Range is another eatery featuring contemporary dishes made with regional produce served in a modern western ambience. While the menu is heavy on game – elk, bison, buffalo and venison – the beef dishes on offer include a blackened New York strip with a Rocky Mountain chimichurri sauce and Demerrara crusted bone-in-beef rib chop with ancho chili rosemary butter.

A little more than a horseshoe throw from the Stampede grounds, Rouge serves up local Spring Creek beef and other local farm-sourced delights in more traditional fashion in a historic setting. The restaurant is housed in the original home of A.E. Cross, one of the Big Four businessmen who founded the Stampede.

If, after sampling the city’s cowboy cuisine – not to mention watching the Stampede’s world-famous rodeo and chuckwagon races, tribal pow-wows and nightly concert and fireworks show -- you’re still feeling bullish for more beef, consider heading out of town to where real wranglers and deer, and maybe even an antelope or two, roam the foothills.

The Cowboy Trail runs south of Calgary along Highway 22. It will take you past some of southern Alberta’s most spectacular scenery. Majestic mountains, lone pump jacks, and vast herds of cattle dot the landscape around these parts. In Black Diamond, a dusty little town complete with a “old west” main street, sisters Amy and Jessie Smulders serve up innovative cuisine with a local flare at the Wild Horse Bistro. The food features produce from Alberta growers and producers and it’s all made to order, including the Highwood Valley Beef Burger. It comes with cheddar, sautéed mushrooms, onions, lettuce, tomato and a side of big roasted potato wedges served with a sweet basil mayo dipping sauce. The bistro is also known for its Big Rock Elk Burger and, despite being smack in the heart of cattle country, there are a number of tasty vegetarian options.

Farther south, the highway runs through the community of Longview and past the Longview Steakhouse. It’s a homey-looking establishment but don’t be fooled by appearances. This steakhouse is run by a Moroccan family that boasts a couple of classically trained chefs. Stop here for the lunch special – a house-ground sirloin burger topped with crispy bacon, onions and Jarlsberg cheese – and you might just find yourself rubbing shoulders with ranchers and farmers from the area who come in for a taste of their own produce. At dinnertime, the menu features a short but exquisite list of juicy steak cuts – along with more exotic fare such as duck breast in pear sauce, chicken pastille in phyllo pastry and Moroccan fig cake.

While In Longview, you can get a feel for what ranching was like in the olden days at the Bar U Ranch National Historic Site, a preserved Canadian ranch.

Tasty trails to you pardner….until we eat again…

Riding the Cowboy Cuisine Trail
Buzzards Restaurant and Bar: 140 10 Avenue SW, 403-264-6959.
Buchanan’s Chophouse and Whisky Bar, 738 3rd Avenue SW, 403-261-4646
River café phone, Prince's Island Park, 403-261-7670
Open Range, 1114 Edmonton Trail NE, 403-277-3408
Rouge, 1240 8th Avenue SE, 403-531-2767
Wild Horse Bistro, 126 Centre Ave, Black Diamond, 403-933-5800
Longview Steakhouse. 102 Morrison road (Highway 22), 403-558-2000

Biting Back!

With the arrival of summer, almost everyone I know will be heading into the great outdoors. They’ll go armed with Deep Woods Off, citronella candles and every other invention created by man to fight off insects. But maybe their plan of attack should include a frying pan and some salt and pepper instead because there’s a buzz about eating bugs - and it’s getting louder.

I first noticed it earlier this year when the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation held a conference on the benefits of eating bugs – a practice known as entomophagy. Then, during a recent cruise through the Fortnum & Mason’s food hall in London, I spotted an entire display of edible insect sweets and worm treats. Now comes news that Vij's restaurant in Vancouver, one the world’s high temples of modern Indian fushion cuisine, is experimenting with crickets.

The message emerging from the UN conference was that eating insects is good for you and good for the environment. Not only are many bugs rich in protein and some minerals, they are low in cholesterol, hormone-free and can be sustainably harvested. And, given all the hand-wringing over current food production practices, some scientists would like to see more people in the western world adding them to their diets.

The edible insect products I saw in London are the multi-legged creations of a company called Edible. Its website echoes the UN conference’s sentiments about health benefits and eco-friendliness while showcasing a sticky sweet product list that includes chocolate covered scorpions and peppermint-flavoured Antlix lollipops.

And then there’s Vikram Vij. One of the West Coast’s most well-respected and influential restaurateurs, in a recent column in the Globe and Mail, he wrote that if we can eat and enjoy the texture of foie gras, eating bugs should be a walk in the park.

“My personal philosophy has been that if you can eat beef or chicken then you should eat everything, as long as it is sustainable," said Vij.

He even has a solution for the squirm factor. He just grinds the insects up into flour to reduce the visual impact. That’s all well and nice, but what about enjoyable?

The first time I watched someone eat a worm I was in Grade 3. It was recess and the schoolyard was wet after a rainstorm. A bad boy named Jamie had peeled a thick purple-brown worm off the pavement and was chasing me and some other girls around with it. Once he had our attention, he stopped, tilted his head back and swallowed the thing whole.

I don’t remember exactly what happened after that, except there was a lot of screaming – mostly by me – before the teacher herded us back inside. How could anyone willingly eat a worm or an insect?, I asked myself then. And I continue to ask that today.

I have never, to my knowledge, voluntarily eaten bugs, although I did try a few unidentifiable dishes when I traveled through China back in the early 90s. I’m also certain I’ve swallowed a few unfortunate creatures while riding my bike. And god only knows what may have crawled into my mouth during nights spent sleeping in campgrounds.

This, of course, classifies me as one of those squeamish westerners that bug-eating proponents are targeting for a bit of re-education.

I don’t know where or when westerners went off the insect diet but lots of people around the planet have been happily eating bugs since ancient times. A study conducted by the National Autonomous University of Mexico found 1,700 species being eaten in at least 113 countries worldwide today, usually as a substitute for meat.

Mexicans enjoy fried grasshoppers sold by the pound in markets. Colombians eat ground ants spread on bread. In Papua New Guinea, moths and nutty-flavored sago grubs are popular boiled or roasted over an open fire. Australian Aborigines consider Witjutie grubs a delicacy, while Filipinos are partial to crickets. In Thailand’s night markets, locusts and beetles are served up as snacks. Indonesians simmer dragonflies in coconut milk and ginger while in Southern Africa, mopani worms are traditionally stewed with tomatoes and onions. Africans have a big appetite for termites, too. The Japanese eat fly and bee larvae sautéed in sugar and soya sauce and Japan’s late Emperor Hirohito was said to enjoy wasps with rice.

There are a few American eaters of six-legged creatures and Seattle-based naturalist David George Gordon is one of them. Gordon is, among other things, the author of the Eat a Bug Cookbook. He makes an enthusiastic case for the high nutritional value of his book’s star ingredient. A serving of cooked grasshoppers, for example, packs a whopping 60 per cent protein and only 6 per cent fat. Compare that to a similar serving of hamburger which contains only 18 per cent protein but 18 per cent fat. And insects are arthropods, like lobster and shrimp, which means that insect fat, like fish fat, is unsaturated.

Not only do they pack a nutritional punch, insects gathered through foraging or raised on farms for human consumption have significantly less environmental impact that large livestock farming. In fact, cultivating some insects requires tracts of forest be preserved instead of logged.

Another American insect gourmand of note is David Gracer, a college instructor by day and Bugs for Dinner blogger by night. Gracer maintains that if cows and pigs are the food world’s SUVs, then bugs are bicycles.

I have to admit the case for munching bugs is compelling but it is difficult to imagine North American farmers raising ants as livestock or eating Edible's array of creepy crawly confections as anything more than a novelty item. And, despite Vikram Vij’s newfound enthusiasm for insects, it remains to be seen whether his spicy parantha with ground crickets will become a popular menu item.

And then there’s the price. At around $25 CAD for a small bag of Edible's sun-dried mopani worms, not many people can afford to make these a regular part of their diet. Although it occurs to me that if local insects become a staple, Canadians will never starve – at least if blackflies are on the menu

All this talk of edible insects leaves me pondering some interesting questions. If this trend takes off in North America, will all those bloodthirsty swarms of bugs that plague us every summer start to make a beeline in the other direction when they see humans coming? Will Deep Woods Off stock plummet?

It’s going to take some persuading before I’ll be chowing down on a big bowl of bugs any time soon, but if the mosquitoes get really bad this year, I may just change my mind and decide to bite back!

Springtime in Paris and simple white fish

On a recent trip to Paris, I was invited to have Sunday lunch with an ambassador and his charming wife in their splendidly gilded residence on the rue de Faubourg Saint-Honoré. We spent a warm spring afternoon dining on the wide back terrace of the house. The terrace overlooked a small but elegant city garden shaded by a trio of old chestnut trees in full bloom. Beyond the back garden wall, we could hear someone lazily playing a guitar.

For lunch, we started with half a sweet, juicy cantaloupe, followed by a delicious but simple grilled filet of white fish topped with a pungent Provençal-style pesto sauce and accompanied by a silky green heap of fresh steamed spinach. We finished with more slices of cantaloupe and plate of tiny assorted pastries. While we talked, the ambassador’s wife discretely sketched our table scene in a small notebook beside her plate.

The whole dining experience struck me as what non-Parisians imagine dining in Paris to be – relaxed but elegant. Simple but classic. The menu – planned around fresh, readily available ingredients – also reminded me that food can be both sophisticated and delicious without a lot of preparation and fuss.

Back in Canada, I wondered why I didn’t make simple white fish more often for lunch – especially when fresh, thick filets of halibut were beginning to appear in local markets.

I decided to re-create a bit of Paris for myself by combining a recipe from one of my most trusted cookbooks, Anne Lindsay’s New Light Cooking, and a recipe for classic basil coulis I learned to make from Vancouver-based chef Eric Arrouzé.


Halibut with Basil Coulis
1 6-oz halibut filet (or any white fish that has been responsibly caught)
1 tsp fresh lemon juice
1 tsp olive oil
1 Roma tomato roughly chopped (optional)
1 green onion sliced on the diagonal (optional)
1-2 tbsp basil coulis

Basil Coulis
1 large bunch of fresh basil

1 cup extra virgin olive oil

4 garlic cloves, peeled and germ removed

Salt and pepper to taste

To make the fish:
Preheat oven to 400˚F. Place filet on piece of aluminum foil. Pour lemon juice and oil over the filet (along with the tomato and onion if you are including them) and add salt and pepper to taste. Fold foil up loosely and seal tightly. Place packet on a baking sheet and bake for about 10-15 minutes – depending on the thickness of the filet. Fish should flake easily when done.

To make the basil coulis:

Remove stems from basil leaves and place in a blender along with the garlic, salt, pepper and olive oil. Blend until the basil is completely liquefied and the oil turns bright green.

Note: any coulis you don’t use can be kept in the fridge for up to one week.

To serve, remove filet from foil packet and spoon basil coulis, to your taste, over the top.

Where's the beef? Part I: Don't cry for me Argentina

Before I left for Argentina, everyone kept telling me I had to try the beef.

“I heard it’s delicious,” said one friend. “The steaks are the best anywhere,” claimed a colleague. And this was in Calgary, a city that produces some pretty tasty cattle itself.

Being an enthusiastic carnivore, I was well aware of Argentina’s reputation for rearing the world’s finest beef. The opportunity to taste it was a serious factor in my last-minute decision to travel to Buenos Aires for a quick five-day trip. The plan was to meet up with my mother, who would be there on business, and have a few good steaks.

On the long trip from Alberta to South America, people kept mentioning the beef. During my layover in Dallas, even the woman staffing the airport’s tourism information booth enthusiastically endorsed it as the best meat she’d ever eaten. “Better than Texas beef?” I asked. “Oh yes siree!” she exclaimed.

I boarded my flight with visions of contented cattle grazing on Argentina’s lush central pampas - or plains.

By the time I got to Buenos Aires, I’d been in transit almost 24 hours and eating was the last thing on my mind. That night, my mom and I were too tired to have a big dinner. In our room, we nibbled on a complimentary cheese plate provided by the hotel.

The next day, we decided to shake off our jet lag with a walk around the city. We sampled empanadas and dulce de leche-filled pastries but no beef. Back at the hotel, we stopped in at the lobby bar where everyone I met – from the doorman to a group of diplomats – kept telling me I had to try the beef. “You’ve never had anything like it,” they all insisted.

My mother had to be up early the next morning, so we opted to dine early. Unfortunately for us, Argentineans eat very late and the only restaurant we could find open at that hour served pasta.

On day three of my trip, I joined a group of VIPs on an organized tour of Buenos Aires. First stop, the Casa Rosada in the Plaza de Mayo where Eva Perón gave her famous “don’t cry for me” balcony speech. Then, the rainbow-coloured Boca quarter where tango dancers entertain tourists in the streets. After that, the dusty antiques arcade in the San Telmo market. And, finally, the city’s re-claimed waterfront district, now transformed into a fashionable stretch of eateries and boutiques, where we stopped for lunch.

“We’re going to a restaurant that’s famous for beef,” said one of our hosts. So, at last, I was going to have a taste! When we were seated, the chef appeared and announced proudly that he was preparing a very special meal for us.

When it came, it was magnificent – a platter of five different cuts of juicy beef accompanied by chimichurri, several other interesting sauces and salad greens so fresh they must have been picked that morning. The meat was butter-knife tender, flavourful and charred to perfection. We washed it all down with some fine Malbec. I ate everything on my plate but barely had time to fully savour it before we were ushered back onto the bus to continue our tour.

Several hours later, as we pulled up to the hotel, my tummy did a little tango. I didn’t think anything of it. After all, I’d been sightseeing non-stop all day and still had a bit of jet lag. Exhausted, and feeling a bit strange, I skipped dinner and went to bed.

Shortly after midnight, I awoke just in time to see my lunch – all that famed Argentine beef – re-appear, spectacularly, all over the bedspread, all over me and, before I could make it to the bathroom, all over the hotel room’s lovely Oriental rug.

I spent the rest of the night on the bathroom floor where the beef kept coming back, re-inventing itself each time in ever more colourful and exotic ways - like Madonna! I called my mom who leapt into action with wet facecloths, carbonated water and lots of towels.

The next day, I stayed in the hotel room. The only thing I could keep down was weak tea and a plate of banana slices that a room service waiter delivered, with a theatrical flourish, on an enormous domed silver tray. My mom checked in by phone to report that nobody else from the tour group had been ill. Just me. Feeling sorry for myself, I went to bed.

On my last full day in Buenos Aires, I felt well enough to wander around the gorgeously macabre Recoleta Cemetery, then attend a dinner and tango show. But when I got to the restaurant, my stomach flip-flopped. In an open kitchen, cooks were tending to dozens of sizzling, spitting pieces of beef on a massive parilla, or traditional charcoal grill. What should have been mouth-watering, was agonizing. I hurried past the kitchen to my table and ate bread and steamed vegetables that night.

The next day, it was time to fly home. Still feeling queasy but over the worst of it, I boarded my 12-hour flight to Dallas on an empty stomach. The plane reached cruising altitude just as we passed over the border of Argentina heading north. From my seat in the last row of economy class, I watched as the flight attendants started making their way down the aisle with the dinner cart. When they reached me, one announced cheerfully, “We’re all out of chicken. But you can have beef.”

Book Review: Table for One?

"Cooking for yourself allows you to be strange or decadent or both," writes Jenni Ferrari-Adler in her introduction to Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant, a tasty little collection of confessions about cooking for one and dining solo.

Released last year, the title of this intriguing anthology comes from an essay of the same name by the late writer Laurie Colwin, who got very resourceful with two gas burners and a bathtub when she was young, single and living in Greenwich Village.

“When I was alone, I lived on eggplant, the stove top cook’s strongest ally,” Colwin recalled. “I fried it and stewed it, and ate it crisp and sludgy, hot and cold. It was cheap and filling and delicious in all manner of strange combination.”

Colwin’s essay was the inspiration for Ferrari-Adler’s collection but the native New Yorker is no stranger to solo performances in the kitchen herself. She introduces the essays by sharing memories of her days living alone as a graduate student in Michigan where dinner would often be a lone potato boiled and sautéed in olive oil and balsamic vinegar.

Ferrari-Adler claims cooking alone fosters experimentation, impulsiveness and invention but many of the book’s 26 contributors – among them celebrated fiction writers, foodies and cookbook authors – seem to lean in the opposite direction – at least when feeding themselves. Many admit to favouring make-do, functional dinners over self-indulgent meals for one. They prefer to reserve their culinary creativity and passion for preparing food for others.

The collection confirmed my suspicions that even most creative souls can be the least imaginative when making a solo meal. Memories of canned goods, store bought pasta sauces, and junk food pepper the pages of this book. Ann Patchett, the acclaimed author of Bel Canto, remembers eating Saltines for dinner most nights while on a solitary writing fellowship in her 20s. Jeremy Jackson pens a long love letter to canned beans. Famed Japanese author Haruki Murakami recalls a surreal year of eating nothing but spaghetti.

But along with these confessions are more than a dozen useful recipes, tips and suggestions to try when by yourself. Ben Karlin shares his “legendary” recipe for Salsa Rosa. Marcella Hazan, who brought sophisticated Italian cuisine to America, offers a simple grilled ham-and-cheese sandwich for one. New York Times foodie columnist Amanda Hesser dishes up a serving of Single Girl Salmon.

Some of these shared culinary confidences are comic, some sexy, some sad. Phoebe Noble’s ode to spring asparagus is pure whimsy; Dan Charon’s chili quasi-hallucinogenic. Reading these essays is a bit like peeking through a kitchen door to watch people perform that most personal of acts – feeding oneself. Together, they leave the reader feeling just a bit voyeuristic, not to mention hungry.

Even if you don’t have a passion for food or solitude, this book is an insightful, worthwhile read, especially if you have nobody to talk to at dinner.

Lust on a spoon

Legend has it that Cardinal Wolsey was the first person to serve strawberries together with cream at Hampton Court. That would have been back in the 1500s before his fall from grace. The berries in question would have been native English wild strawberries as crimson as the cardinal’s robes and as intense as his ambition. And the cream unpasteurized and impossibly fresh.

Whether this story is true or not, there’s something about strawberries and cream that screams England – and sex. Whenever I think about this pairing, visions of Wimbledon, well-mannered men and women in big hats on brilliantly manicured green lawns spring to mind – images of civility and restraint that belie more primitive emotions lying just below the surface.

Would the British be insulted by this characterization? I doubt it. You don’t build an empire or sever your ties from the Roman Catholic church based on polite, flaccid feelings.

You can try and hide the true nature of strawberries and cream by serving it in dainty bowls at garden parties and quaint afternoon teas, but this dish is pure lust on a spoon.

Now, when I talk of lusty berries and sexy cream, I’m talking about produce that comes from small, local farms and dairies, not big commercial operations that turn out that thin, clinically pristine cream or those poor, freakish long-haul strawberries that arrive at grocery stores looking botoxed and tasting like sawdust. Those products are created with shelf-life, not sensuality, in mind. Eating them is about as sexy as making a baby in a test tube.

Real juicy, sweet strawberries and luscious, rich cream are sexy precisely because of their short shelf-life. (And cream, we all know, also earns the label “excessive” purely by virtue of its milk-fat content.) In most of the northern hemisphere, the true berry harvesting season is only a few weeks long, and the "best before" date on organic cream is even shorter. Once you bring organic berries home, they barely last a night before they start sprouting the telltale fuzz of decay.

This simple fact demands that you, the eater, seize the moment. Call it culinary carpe diem. There is an urgency to enjoying strawberries and cream in their original form that, as far as I’m concerned, gives you licence to indulge in your most primitive urges. I like to think Cardinal Wolsey would have understood and appreciated that.

I remember picking up two cartons of succulent local strawberries at the Trout Lake Farmers Market in East Vancouver one Saturday in early summer. On my way home, the berries’ heady perfume seduced me as I waited at the bus stop. I sat down on a bench and ate half my haul right there, juice dripping down my wrist and off my fingers. Just as I felt like I might pass out from the sheer pleasure of it, I glanced up to see an elderly Sikh man waiting nearby watching me. He just grinned and nodded.

If you are fortunate to get your hands on some fresh, local berries this season, don’t waste any time messing with them. Don’t sprinkle them with sugar or douse them in balsamic vinegar or syrup. And, heaven forbid, don’t bake or cook them into anything! Just plop them in a bowl, add a dollop of the thickest, sweetest, freshest organic cream you can find and sit down, wherever you are, and eat them.

This little piggy went to Borough Market

The Wife of Bath Remarries

The Wife of Bath was a lusty woman with strong appetites so I was intrigued recently to come a across an English cheese named after the bawdy Chaucer character. Truth be told, the Wife – or Wyfe as Chaucer spelled it – was my very favourite character in the Canterbury Tales. Five times widowed, intelligent and independently wealthy thanks to her dead husbands, she was a medieval clothes horse who was really on the pilgrimage to Canterbury Cathedral to socialize and taste all of life’s earthly pleasures. She was putting herself out there, so to speak, and you have to admire a gal for that!

In her lactic form, the Wyfe of Bath is handmade with organic milk by the Bath Soft Cheese Co. using its own herd on a farm in Kelston near Bath, England. Owner Graham Padfield had been producing it in relative obscurity until 2005 when the product won a nationwide cheese taste test in Britain. It is now available at Tesco and Sainsbury’s supermarkets so the modern Wyfe of Bath, like its namesake, is out there making its way across Britain feeding the appetites of lusty cheese lovers everywhere.

The semi-hard cheese has a chewy texture and a fresh, smooth taste with a just a hint of sweetness and creamy finish. The cheesemakers describe it as “redolent of buttercups and water meadows.”

Given her proclivity for marriage, I decided the Wyfe would be best enjoyed paired up but with a slightly more conservative partner. I considered a tangy marmalade or a fruit jelly but, in the end, I opted for a gooseberry puree because, in my mind, gooseberries are as quintessentially British as Pimms and clotted cream.

There is something old-fashioned about gooseberries but, for some reason, the British have a soft spot in their hearts for this tart little fruit. Maybe it’s because of where it grows – in the hedgerows and copses of the pastoral English landscape – that evoke patriotic images of God, queen and country. Maybe it reminds people of running wild in the countryside on childhood summer holidays or of visiting their jam-making grannies. Whatever the reason, my marriage of the prim gooseberry and the bouncy Wyfe was a tasty success.

I purchased the Wyfe of Bath at Jacobson’s Gourmet Concepts in Ottawa. My gooseberry puree of choice is available for purchase online from The Fine Cheese Co. in Bath, England or you can make up a batch of your own during gooseberry season by mixing 2 handfuls of fresh gooseberries (trimmed) and 1 or 2 tablespoons of sugar in a saucepan and heating the mixture until the sugar has dissolved and the gooseberries have softened. You may have to add a bit of water to adjust the consistency. For a nice contrast with the cheese, use the darker gooseberries, rather than the light green ones, if available. Allow to cool before serving.

Foraging in the Forest Pantry

Around this time each year, my inner bear awakens to the thought that there is food to be found in the forests. Sprouting up from the damp floor of the sun-speckled woods of North America are edible stinging nettles, fir shoots and that holy trinity of wild springtime eats: fiddleheads, ramps and morels.

Fiddleheads, or ostrich ferns, are typically the first to appear, poking their graceful green heads up in April or early May. They spring from the moist, fertile earth along stream banks and at the edges of swamps and marshes where foragers harvest their tightly coiled fronds quickly before they begin to uncurl and lose their culinary appeal. In flavour, they have a nuttiness similar to asparagus or artichoke.

Following not far behind fiddleheads are ramps, or wild leeks, an intensely flavoured member of the onion family with long elegant leaves and a garlic-shaped bulb. Ramps can be found in pungent clumps, usually near maples and other hardwoods, their flat, unfurled leaves covering the forest floor like a carpet of emerald quills.

In the Appalachian communities of the eastern United States, there are several festivals held to celebrate this rare treat. Including one, held annually in Bradford, Pennsylvania on the first Saturday in May, that is simply and aptly named Stinkfest. Their smelly scent aside, ramps are a delicious delicacy. Their garlicky, sharp taste and short harvest season of around five weeks have earned them an almost cult-like status among food lovers.

The bulbs can be cooked slowly in butter over low heat to caramelize them and bring out their sweetness but are equally tasty eaten raw in vinaigrettes, salads and with pasta.

Morels are considered by many to be the most elusive of Mother Nature’s spring treats. These mysterious fungi reveal themselves six weeks after spring thaw when the sap has finished running. Their reluctant appearance signals the start of the mushroom hunting year for mycophiles. I know from experience that stalking these wrinkled thimble-shaped ‘shrooms can be, by turns, an exasperating and exhilarating search.

What I can say with certainty is that a large part of the morel’s enigma lies in the fact that they are most often found thriving under dead fallen trees, in abandoned orchards and in areas scarred by forest fire. They feed on decay in the forest’s darkest, most secluded spots until some lucky forager plucks them from their hiding place. Once unearthed, their meaty texture, complex subterranean smell and earthy taste more than make up for their necrophilious nature, not to mention the challenge of finding them.

While I didn’t have time to do my own foraging this year, on a recent trip to Ottawa, I picked up a bag of fresh fiddleheads and a dozen bunches of ramps at the city’s historic Byward Market. Before I could get them home to Calgary, I got stopped at the airport security checkpoint where a puzzled officer sifted through the bag of fiddleheads and sniffed suspiciously at the ramps. (It is illegal to pick ramps in Quebec where they are a threatened species.) Luckily, he allowed them through but, unfortunately, after a four-hour flight, the ramp leaves were a bit worse for wear.

Back at home in Alberta, I knew I had to act fast to make the most of these seasonal ingredients from the forest pantry. It didn’t take me long to settle on a Chicken Fricassee with Fiddleheads and Morels paired with Spaghetti with Ramps. Both quick and easy dishes to make.

For the chicken recipe, fresh morels proved too elusive for me this year and I had to substitute them for regular brown mushrooms. I adapted the recipe from one I found on the Olson Foods Bakery website, the cyber home of celebrity chef Anna Olson of Food Network Canada fame. The spaghetti side dish comes from Epicurious and was originally printed in the April 2000 issue of Gourmet magazine. The only adjustment I made was adding some chopped parsley to the dish.

Wine Note: In the spirit of serving a truly Canadian spring dinner, I paired these dishes with a 2006 Pinot Gris from Tinhorn Creek Vineyards in the Okanagan Valley.

Chicken Fricassee with Fiddleheads & Morels
Serves 4

1 lb 450 grams diced boneless skinless chicken breast
2 Tbsp 30 mL butter
1 Tbsp 15 mL oil
1/2 cup 125 mL diced onion
1/2 cup 125 mL diced celery
2 Tbsp 30 mL all-purpose flour
1 cup 250 mL morels, well cleaned and thickly sliced

(or brown or cremini mushrooms)
1 cup 250 mL low-sodium chicken stock
1/2 cup 125 mL 2 % milk
1 cup 250 ml fiddlehead greens, blanched 4 minutes
1 Tbsp 15 mL chopped fresh parsley
salt and pepper

Heat a skillet over medium high heat and melt butter and oil. Season the chicken with salt and pepper and add to the foaming butter, sautéing lightly for 4-5 minutes. Remove to a dish. Add onion and celery and cook approximately 3 minutes until the soft but not browned. Add the mushrooms and stir, cooking, for 2 minutes. Add the flour and stir for 1 minute. Whisk in the chicken stock and milk and bring to a simmer. Return the chicken and add the fiddleheads to the pan. Simmer 5 minutes until the chicken is cooked through and the fiddleheads are tender and hot. Check the seasoning and add parsley.

Spaghetti with Ramps
Serves 4

1/2 lb ramps*

1 teaspoon finely grated fresh lemon zest

1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil
1 lb spaghetti

2 tablespoons freshly grated parmesan
1 Tbsp chopped fresh parsley

Trim roots from ramps and slip off outer skin on bulbs if loose. Blanch ramps in a 6-quart pot of boiling salted water, 2 to 3 seconds, and transfer to a cutting board with tongs. Coarsely chop ramps and put in a blender with zest and oil.
Add spaghetti to boiling water and cook a few minutes, then ladle out 1/2 cup pasta water and add to blender. Purée ramps until smooth and season with salt. Continue to cook spaghetti until al dente, then ladle out about 1 cup additional pasta water before draining spaghetti in a colander. Return pasta to pot with ramp purée and toss with parmesan over moderate heat 1 to 2 minutes, thinning sauce with a little pasta water as needed to coat pasta.

*Both the ramp bulb and leaves are edible. If the leaves are too damaged or old to use (as mine were this year), trim off the unusable ones and use only the bulb and any tender, green, unbruised leaves remaining.

Mellow Yellow

When I was growing up, the most exotic dish my mother served was chicken curry. This was in the ‘70s long before Thai restaurants popped up on neighbourhood corners or magazines offered step-by-step instructions for grinding your own curry spice blends at home.

Mom made her chicken curry with big spoonfuls of Sharwood’s mild curry powder and lots of cream and served it with up with Uncle Ben’s white rice and a half dozen or so condiments that included bottled Major Grey chutney, chopped almonds, cashews, shredded coconut, juicy mandarin orange segments and plump slices of banana. My job was to help set these out in little bowls in the middle of the kitchen table in an uncommon configuration that I thought gave our dinner a festive air.

On curry nights, what I looked forward to most, maybe even more than the meal itself, was the story my parents dished up alongside it for us kids. I don’t remember the first time they told it but it became a ritual to ask them, between big saffron-hued spoonfuls of chicken and rice, “Tell us the story about this curry?”

On cue, they’d recount the narrative of their courtship. The place was the Bahamas. The time: the tense few weeks in October 1962 that would become known as the Cuban Missile Crisis.

In those days, my mom was an Air Canada stewardess (this being the more carefree pre-“flight attendant”, pre-terrorist era of air travel). My dad was an equally carefree British engineer working in Nassau. The drama playing out in Cuba a few hundred kilometres away grounded my mom and her fellow crew members. While the world waited with baited breath on the brink of nuclear war, my mom and dad did what any respectable young jetsetters in the 60s would do. They partied. Of course, my parents didn’t use those exact words when recounting events for us kids. Their version was far more romantic.

Mom met dad one night in a crush of guests at the home of British racecar driver Sterling Moss. Dad took mom out to dinner at the posh restaurant the next night where the meal turned out to be unpalatable. The waiter gave them a tip on a more authentic local eatery. They left and ended up in a place called the Rum Keg Room with a delicious plate of chicken curry in front of them. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Mom always maintained that her “Cuban Crisis” curry, as we came to call it, was a re-creation of the dish she and my dad shared that night and, over the years, the narrative seldom wavered. Whether the details were true or not, in the constant re-telling, the story became fact -- a permanent part of our family history.

It was only years later that I realized my childhood curry reflected culinary influences that had more to do with England than the Caribbean.

The word “curry” is thought to be a loose English translation of the Tamil word kari, meaning spiced sauce or gravy. When the British colonized southern India in the 17th century, they were seduced by the exotic cuisine but didn’t immediately grasp the subtle differences in the spice blends that Indian cooks used to create different dishes. Curry quickly became the default term for all the fiery sauce-based dishes the British tasted regardless of the variations in spices, seeds and herbs they contained.

As Britain’s interest in India grew, so did the British fondness for Indian food. By the late 1700s, the English had begun to produce the pre-mixed, pre-ground curry spice powders for commercial sale that remain popular today despite the recent interest among some home cooks in grinding spice blends from scratch.

The British love of curry is now more than 400 years old but much of what is now served up all over the UK bears little resemblance to the intense, complex dishes the Brits first tried on the Indian sub-continent centuries ago. Like love, it was inevitable that over time curry would evolve into something milder and more familiar to the British palate.

I don't doubt my parents' account of their curry dinner in Nassau but I realize now that the beloved family recipe it inspired was more likely born in the southwestern London suburbs where my mom and dad lived as newlyweds.

Despite the intensity of its name, Cuban Crisis Curry is an offspring of that long-ago marriage between Indian cuisine and British tastes – a mellow yellow reminder of an exciting first encounter.

Cuban Crisis Curry

2 Tbsp vegetable oil
2 lbs skinned, de-boned chicken breast cut into 1-inch cubes
2-3 Tbsp flour
1 medium onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 tbsp minced fresh ginger (or 1/8 tsp. ground)
2 stalks celery, diced
2 carrots, diced (optional)
1 red or green pepper, diced (optional)
1 to 1 ½ cups chicken stock
2-3 Tbsp mild or medium curry powder
½ to ¾ cup whipping cream

Coat chicken cubes with flour, and shake off excess. Heat oil in a large pot or skillet over medium heat. Add chicken and sauté until golden. Add onion, garlic, ginger and celery (and carrots and peppers if using) and cook until vegetables are tender. Add curry powder, stir in and cook one minute longer. Add chicken stock. Bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer 10-15 minutes until chicken is tender and cooked through. Stir in cream and heat through. Serve hot over white basmati rice (Uncle Ben’s Converted White Rice if you really want to go old school) with condiments on the side.

Condiments

Shredded coconut
Cashews
Slivered almonds
Tinned mandarin orange segments
Sliced banana
Chopped green onions
Chopped parsley or cilantro
Mango chutney or major grey chutney
Crystallized ginger
Sultanas/raisins
Chopped tomato

Condimontage

Here’s a kitchen tool for you, Mrs. Robinson

In one of the more memorable scenes from the movie The Graduate, Benjamin Braddock, the Dustin Hoffman character, gets some unwanted career advice from a friend of his parents. "I just want to say one word to you,” says Mr. Maguire, his arm firmly around Benjamin, “Plastics.”

That now famous film line, uttered for the first time back in 1967, reverberated with audiences who understood that “plastics” symbolized everything that was wrong with America’s suburban middle-class values and aspirations – the materialism, the phoniness, the conformity, the budding obsession with consuming for consumption’s sake. I was only two when The Graduate was released but I can appreciate the irony of that line given how little the middle-class quest to conform and consume seems to have changed over the years – especially in the kitchen.

Plastics came to mind as I sat through my first “pampered chef” party the other night. The Pampered Chef is the somewhat evangelical offspring of that iconic revolutionary, Tupperware. Founded by suburban American homemaker and entrepreneur Doris Christopher, the Pampered Chef empire uses an army of homemakers to sell hundreds of kitchen tools made of, you guessed it, plastic -- not to mention many other groovy materials Mr. Maguire couldn’t have even imagined back in the swingin’ 60s.

These products, claims Cunningham, make cooking easier and faster. Her mantra is: time wasted fixing meals is time that could be better spent with your husband and kids and, apparently, this can’t be achieved without the help of a dizzying array of cookware, cutlery and other culinary devices like the Mix ‘N Masher, Apple Wedger, Pie Gate and Hold & Slice – the last one bearing a disturbing resemblance to an afro pick.

My sister and I were the only single women at the party held deep in northwestern suburbs of city. Almost all the other guests were stay-at-home moms – some well-educated, some older, all nice, friendly women. It was a Friday night and not a cocktail in sight. The Pampered Chef is all about good, clean cooking. Mrs. Robinson, the original desperate housewife, would have hated this, I thought, like she would have loathed the Tupperware parties of her time. She would have opted for a cigarette over a spoon any day. And I imagine she was partial to more risqué gadgets -- the kind usually found in bedside drawers, not kitchens.

The soft sales pitch began when the hostess asked each guest to choose a piece of kitchen equipment to try out. The plan was for the guests to prepare an aloha chicken pizza and cherry chocolate skillet cake together at the kitchen table. My job was to chop a red pepper. Right away, I saw that my gadget, a maraca-shaped food chopper that I quickly dubbed the Bang & Chop, was a complete waste of good plastic.

As the party hostess demo'd it for me, she said, “You just need to push down on it harder. Just bang it down a few times to get everything chopped up nicely.” She’d already employed a mini-scoop to de-seed the pepper, a knife to cut it into pieces small enough for the Bang & Chop to accommodate, and some weird flattened scoops to transfer the pepper pieces to a nearby bowl.

“Don’t you see?” I wanted to yell at the other guests. “With one good sharp knife, we could have had this diced in half the time it’s taken us to produce this sloppy mess of red shards.”

“And the best thing about this,” added the hostess, while breaking the B&C down into its fussy individual metal and plastic parts. “Is that it can be dismantled and put in the dishwasher.” So, in addition to the trauma of maiming a perfectly innocent red pepper, my environmental antenna sprung to life!

As the evening progressed through displays of collapsible mixing bowls, metal egg separators and garlic presses – all dishwasher-safe! -- the presenter enthusiastically pointed out that many of the tools are designed so you never have to touch the food you’re preparing. Since I’ve never understood people’s aversion to touching food they are perfectly happy to put in their mouths, the whole thing struck me as slightly repressed.

Of course, the target consumer for these devices are moms with tots. Being single and childless, I don’t know what it’s like to fix dinner with a snotty, crying child hanging off my leg. But I don’t buy the sales pitch that the solution to getting food on the table quickly is to arm yourself with lots of kitchen gadgets. Wouldn’t be easier and better for the environment – not to mention the soul – to stay focused on the food, not the tools?

My grandmother, now 94 and the original comfort food queen, will tell you the simplest, most satisfying dishes are prepared with a few good ingredients and even less equipment. Her signature dish of macaroni and cheese requires only seven ingredients (and that includes the salt and pepper) and five kitchen tools. She still makes it for her family and it beats aloha chicken pizza any day.

Back at the Pampered Chef party, the pizza and cake were ready to eat and everyone had moved to the living room to fill out their order forms. As I eavesdropped on discussions about high-tech spatulas and whisks, I thought not much has changed since ’67. There will always be stay-at-home moms in suburban kitchens spending their husbands’ pay cheques on the latest in needless cookware. These people will always be more interested in “stuff” than in the actual food they are preparing.

But, luckily, there will always be people like me, too. We are disillusioned, alienated gastronomic Benjamin Braddocks. We aren’t interested in being pampered. And while we may never triumph over the $700M Pampered Chef empire and its ilk, we will always want our food to be real, the preparation authentic. We’ll always want more flavour, basic, good-quality tools, fewer gadgets, less plastic.