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.