A weekend stop in Duncan is not complete without coffee at Saison Vineyard, and neither can coffee be drunk without something to nibble on from the bakery.
Choices were very tough indeed on my recent visit, but the black cherry upside down cake prevailed. Some nice looking produce on the veg stand as well, but we were heading to the farmers market on a pretty warm day, so we had to leave it all behind.
Spent the afternoon lolling about in good company at Maple Bay, where the breeze subsided to leave an utterly perfect afternoon view of Mount Maxwell, with sailboats and kayakers passing by and an osprey busying itself above.
Meanwhile, back in Victoria, things are well at Haliburton Farm, where the farmstand continues to groan with plenty, and the weekly veg boxes are plumped out with seasonal treats. This week the takings included sui choy and cherries, the plumpest, sweetest sugar snap peas, and bundles of carrots and herbs (Lemon Bergamot, chocolate mint, and tender young cilantro).
Marketing has come to poesie! If you want to make your views known about what you read, where you buy it and what moves you to do so, help yourself to the Literary Press Group’s survey of the poetry market.
A few short days remain for those wishing to RSVP on a mouthwatering invitation from LifeCycles: RSVP by July 30th! It’s holding a summer soiree – the Local Food Fun-raiser – featuring “local food, drinks, music, a silent auction and great fun.” All happens Thursday August 11th, 2011 from 6-9pm @ Sleeping Dog Farm, 1506 Burnside Road West, Victoria BC, with catering by Nourish and Real Food Made Easy. The price is $60 with local alcoholic beverages for sale (charitable tax receipt given for a portion of the ticket). All proceeds will go to support LifeCycles core programs. For tickets (available via Paypal) head to LifeCycles website, or visit The Good Planet Co. located at 764 Fort St. in Victoria.
And if you’re out Sooke way, or would like to be, you can support Sooke Region Food CHI Society by attending its second annual Farm and Food Garden Tour on Sunday, August 14, from 10am-5 pm. This self guided tour will feature 11 unique local farms and gardens in and around the Otter Point area.
If you want to get more involved, you can contact Keeley Nixon if you’d like to volunteer at one of the venues to work with a grower, meet and greet people, and help with any set up/take down. This is a great chance to connect with more people in the community and show you support for our farmers.
Tickets are $10 (free for ages 15 and under) and are on sale now in Sooke at Shoppers Drug Mart, Peoples Drug Mart, Double D Gardens, Westburn Garden Centre, and Sooke Country Market (Saturdays). In Victoria, tickets are available at all Dig This locations and Moss St Market (Saturdays). Free for ages 15 and under. Tickets are also available in Sooke on the tour day at Shoppers Drug Mart and Peoples Drug Mart. Contact the Sooke Food CHI for more information.
Spent some time at Haliburton Farm this week, collecting my latest CSA basket and seeing what was up with the farmstand and the farmers. “What a beautiful farmstand!” said one woman, visiting for the first time. And she was right: it’s in its glory just now.
And the veg box bounty reflects that too:
While elsewhere on the farm, the bees are buzzing, the weeds are growing, and the potatoes need hilling with a nice bit of straw.
Last night’s COG-VI farm tour was in Metchosin, at Sweet Earth Farms, where farmer Ian King explained how his mobile greenhouses can be pulled on their metal runners to help extend his seasons. We all admired his radicchio which was fortunately too bitter to interest the deer that had just broken into the field, obliging the purchase and installation of new deer fencing.
Then we got a look at the raspberries (thriving) and the strawberries (likewise) and were inspected by a couple of bold and curious ducks
unlike the rest of the flock which were young and skittish. Their duck barn boasts a custom designed water trough which sits on a mesh-covered drainage box so that their wild drinking doesn’t end up soaking the nice thick straw floor. The geese were interested and vocal; they are Pilgrim geese, an endangered species, so Ian is planning to raise goslings to try to safeguard some numbers locally.
And the final farewell goes to old Anton, who passed away today after an extremely long and joyful life, aged 15 and 3/4.
A day late will perhaps be better than none, by the time you read this. Thanks to Meatless Monday for passing along this Meat Eaters Guide which includes a quiz that lets you test your knowledge about protein sources and find out where yours sits along the sustainability scale.
Actually although I applaud the idea, I think the quiz as written is terrible, and not a lot of fun – unless you happen to have memorized a lot of figures on American meat production, greenhouse gas emissions and cropland usage. I also think it’s far too long at 18 questions; very few people will make it to the end of the quiz and check the answers.
I have encountered a lot of this sort of thing in recent years, as well-intentioned organizations search for new ways of catching the notice of consumers who’ve heard it all before and really don’t want to change their lifestyles.
The fact is that if you design a quiz for a public website, you have to give your public – which has a wide, wide range of knowledge about your subject, and the slimmest of attention spans – a fighting chance to answer the questions. Asking a lot of multiple choice questions about trade figures and crop statistics is not fair play, and most sane participants will give up after the first or second such question.
And with that I will go back to reflecting on the delicious meatless meal we enjoyed tonight: after a starter of kale chips (tossed in tahini dressing and then dehydrated for a couple of hours) and freshly picked snow peas with garlic tahini dip, we had Spaghetti al Vino Rosso (much like this recipe, but also including parsley and some chopped toasted walnuts). Followed by a handful of freshly picked trailing blackberries in (sorry) cream and sugar, and a few organic cherries.
The rest of which are bound for the freezer and/or dehydrator and/or canner tomorrow. What fun we will have with my new cherry pitter!
Last weekend’s Vancouver Island Music Fest was blessed with warm weather, peaceful crowds, some good food and great music.
It kicked off this year with Alison Krauss & Union Station playing a separate Thursday night concert. I’ve seen her a couple of times, so although I consider her to be both the bee’s knees and the cat’s meow, I took the more affordable option of skipping that, and waiting until the festival weekend pass kicked in on Friday.
Which gave us a chance to enjoy a leisurely Thursday night dinner of pasta dressed in garlic scape pesto, that was kindly included – courtesy of Farmer Derek – in the first Haliburton food basket. Which also included organic greens for the salad.
Red Horse, VIMF 2011
Friday night highlights were Red Horse (Eliza Gilkyson, John Gorka and my longtime favourite Lucy Kaplansky) followed by real Vegas magician Jeff McBride who provided some harmless fun. We left the next generation to enjoy Arrested Development so as to be fresh for the Saturday morning visit to the Comox Valley Farmers Market, which happily for us takes place right next door to the festival site.
Watermelon radish
Though the snackable carrots were long gone by the time we rolled up, the Willowvic Farm cinnamon buns were not, and nor were some particularly delectable spinach & feta croissants from Alderlane Farmhouse Bakery. And there was the watermelon radish which Big Buzz AcresFarm from Campbell River was selling to my great delight because I’ve just planted some myself.
Nathan Rogers, CVFM 2011
There were a lot of stands with some good looking foods and regular customers who bring their own shopping barrows, apparently. One surprise was to arrive and hear what sounded like a Stan Rogers cd playing, only to discover that it was in fact his son Nathan singing live, whose cross to bear is a voice very much like his dad’s, and perfectly suited to singing his father’s repertoire.
Celso Machado, VIMF 2011Celso Machado, VIMF 2011
On with the day. As usual, far too much to choose from, but I lucked into a workshop called The Magic of Music which introduced me to the wonderful Celso Machado, whose percussion antics so entranced his fellow performers they started filming him.
The Broken Hearted Song Circle followed, with a stellar lineup (Jon Anderson, Rodney Crowell, BettySoo, Leela Gilday and Gurf Morlix) and then it was on into the barn and Songs for Reason to discover some good ol’ boys – Atomic Duo – from Austin: highly entertaining all round.
Daniel Lapp, VIMF 2011
A Melancholic Frolic followed, featuring Lucy Kaplansky, JD Edwards, Eugene Smith, Morlove, Devon Sproule — and a rare treat for me to see Daniel Lapp again; I’d only seen him once and he was incredible, but at subsequent appearances I’ve caught, he’s given the stage over to his students – he’s a
JD Edwards
much-admired teacher and mentor to young musicians.
“Don’t worry,” he told us, “it’s not broken” – as he detached and then slung the strings of his bow over the fiddle and proceeded to make some great sounds that left the others on stage gaping in delight. Edwards was good, if having a bit of trouble with his coiffure at times; always a pleasure to see Smith; but I was mostly there to see
Lucy Kaplansky
Kaplansky who jammed with the others just like she oughta.I stayed for a few numbers by Steve Riley and the MamouPlayboys but the beer tent beckoned, and I also caught the unmistakeable sound of an oyster burger murmuring my name from Bob’s Burgers.
John Jorgenson+Albert Lee, mainstage VIMF 2011Jon Anderson
So then it was Saturday evening mainstage performances, starting with Jon Anderson, followed by John Jorgenson & Albert Lee – surely the stars of the evening. After which Randy Newman, more entertaining than I’d expected. We left before the Travellin’ McCourys & The Lee Boys mixed it up in ways that just sounded like more than I could handle before bedtime.
Sunday had a slowish start for me but quickly peaked at a workshop called Guitars! where Albert Lee and John Jorgenson, with Celso Machado, quickly stole the show, although Bill Coon and Darren Radtke rose to the occasion as best they could, particularly with the closing number (Crossroads). But the standing ovation encore rendition of Orange Blossom Special was quite a moment. And not a fiddle to be seen..
A sense of anticlimax prevailed during the final workshop (Hope ya Like Jammin’) what with abysmal failure of sound systems to cope with some 13 musicians (Steve Riley & The Mamou Playboys, The Travelin’ McCourys and The Breakmen) not all of whom, ahem, played nicely with the others.
It’s easily said from my side of the stage that the best workshops are the ones where everyone jams – such rare opportunities and odd combinations – and yet other sessions end up as fairly pointless one-after-anothers.
Rodney Crowell + Jedd Hughes
So in that sense Rodney Crowell’s workshop appearances were disappointing – no jamming on his stages – and he sang songs (and not always his best numbers, imho) that he then repeated in his mainstage performance Sunday night. I’m a longtime fan of his so can’t believe he wouldn’t want to make more of his considerable repertoire. I guess one gets tired of one’s own words after a while. Anyway, I like most of Sex & Gasoline which was one of the few cds I bought this year (economy, economy) despite the fact I didn’t like most of the songs from it that he sang in workshops. Go figure.
The other Sunday nighters – Holly Cole, Night Train Music Club and David Crosby – were, shall we say, just not what I was looking for. And so it ended for another year. Kind of expensive, food-wise: most plates were $10-12, and there really wasn’t much of interest in the vegetarian offerings. And the vegetarian meals were pretty much always the same price as the meat ones, which means the veggies were subsidizing the carnivores: a wrongness if ever there were.
Sadly, very sadly, I had to leave all these fellers on the beach too, as it’s red tide. Odd to see the coolers standing empty at the Fanny Bay Oysters Seafood Shop.
I often share tables and menus with people who have not spent the past half dozen years or so obsessing about food to the same degree as I, and who therefore do not have as much trouble finding something edible in restaurants and other food outlets. Most of them do not register my shudder at the sight of prawns on the menu; nor do I act on first instincts to seize the menu and tear it into tiny pieces and then arms flailing eyes wild to scream at them “don’t touch them they’re poison!!!!” It’s become one of those things I simply won’t comment on unless invited.
One of the reasons I eat very little fish anymore, and particularly avoid prawns, as well as farmed catfish, basa, tilapia etc from China, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam and elsewhere – and of course farmed salmon from Canada – is because of the use of antibiotics, which are used to combat potential infection in overcrowded tanks and cages. This is prophylactic use, not treatment of illness, and is as worrying as the use of low dosages of antibiotics as a growth enhancer in land-based meat farming. The most troubling of these antibiotics is a series called fluoroquinolones.
So I’m inviting myself to comment here, because I have just read an article about these very chemicals (showing up in fish illegally imported to the US from China, Thailand, Canada, Indonesia, Vietnam and Ecuador) and simultaneously noticed that the Canadian Food Inspection Agency has relaxed by .04 ng/g the fluoroquinolone residues in aquaculture products action level from 0.6 ng/g (ppb) to >1.0 ng/g. This is because
The revised action level continues to provide adequate human health safety to consumers and is considered stringent enough to detect deliberate use of fluoroquinolone therapeutants in aquaculture.
Well all right then. It’s tiny, and the CFIA continues to assure us that there is no change in Health Canada’s policy of
zero tolerance for deliberate use of fluoroquinolone therapeutants (ciprofloxacin, danofloxacin, enrofloxacin and sarafloxacin) during fish production life cycle.
Resistance to quinolones has been reported in a variety of important bacterial pathogens, including Escherichia coli, Klebsiella pneumoniae, and other enteric organisms; Pseudomonas aeruginosa; Chlamydia trachomatis and Mycoplasma pneumoniae; Campylobacter jejuni; Burkholderia cepacia; Stenotrophomonas maltophilia; Neisseria gonorrhoeae; Staphylococcus aureus (especially oxacillin-resistant strains); Enterococcus faecium; and Streptococcus pneumoniae.
I have no doubt that things have improved since 2003 when Felicity Lawrence documented problems with the industry; but I am still suspicious of foods like prawns whose cost has so cheapened on the menu. And I know that most restauranteurs are watching their price points too carefully to ask too many questions about the full story on everything they buy. And will mislead you whether by accident or not, as I learned in Newfoundland a few years ago where a waitress informed me that the tiger prawns on the menu were local, which I doubted enough to double check; and yes, they were local – to Thailand I think it was.
