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food & poetry, but mostly the poetry of food

Food • Writing • Poetry

You can start the new year off in an activating sort of way by exercising some civic muscle on the new federal budget. We, my fellow Canadians, have been invited to offer some guidance to our country’s budgeteers, and share our views and priorities to help Federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty pull together the federal budget for 2009. So, if you want food and culture on the table, you’d best let him know.

The budget will be delivered January 27, and you have until January 9 to send him your ideas: www.fin.gc.ca/scripts/prebudget-prebudgetaire/1-eng.asp

For ideas on culture, check out the brief submitted by the Writers Union of Canada.

On Tuesday, January 13 at 7 pm, if you are anywhere near the Mary Winspear Centre (Charlie White Theatre) in Sidney you have another chance to catch Island on the Edge, a locally produced film about farmland & food security for Vancouver Island. It’s an event to meet others and hear the latest news on The Farmlands Trust’s bid to acquire historic Woodwynn Farm. They have a couple of other events coming up as well, in February and March, as they continue to try to raise funds to purchase the farm.

We’re glad the snow is mostly gone, but it’s still frosty on the Gorge in the morning, with odd wraiths rising from the deep.

There’s nothing like starting off the new year with a good meal somewhere new. I’d wanted to try Smoken Bones Cookshack since hearing the chef, Ken Hueston, talk at the Farmlands conference in November. The place is simple, the ingredients high quality and well prepared. My beef ribs (with local yam fries and collard greens) had the happy double purpose of bringing light to Anton’s new year as well. Should have stopped after the main course – which was substantial but not excessive – because a heavy hand on the cinnamon meant the organic peach cobbler was overwhelmed, and the cobbler itself wasn’t great. Would like to try the brulée du jour next time; although the desserts did look a bit too big to wrangle after a plate full of meat. Maybe they are designed to share.

Anyway I liked also the fact that Smoken Bones has local eating and drinking nights three times a year; the next one’s coming up in March. Gonna try to be there.

Much to my regret I won’t be making the Grub mingler and fundraiser for LifeCycles this week, but it sounds like a wonderful thing.

Started reading from the back of the latest Poetry magazine which featured a great interview with Seamus Heaney; I’m thinking it was probably an excerpt of a recently released book of interviews by Dennis O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones, which they say is a biography by any other name. He has interesting things to say about the sources, for him, of some of his well-known poems, and the value to him of form, which he says brings poems on more quickly and easily than free verse does.

It’s been a frosty old Christmas season here. It’s melting, but cold and grey right now. Last night’s epic journey over the Malahat was cut cruelly short by a blizzard near the summit; first time I’ve ever had to turn back trying to get up-island. Still, we get swans on the Gorge in compensation and the municipal workers are out there right now baring the path so old Anton won’t slip and slide so much on our walks.

Christmas day’s diversion was making banana jam: mighty good on yogurt, flavoured with cinnamon, lime zest and rum.

And here’s a new year invitation to look forward to: the launch of Barbara Pelman‘s new collection Borrowed Rooms. The event will be celebrated with music, refreshments, and of course poetry! It happens at Congregation Emanu-El (1461 Blanshard at Pandora, Victoria) Sunday, February 1, 2009 from 2 to 4 pm. Books will be on sale for $16.00 with profits to be donated to the synagogue’s Mikvah fund.

Just wanted to say a few words in defence of fruitcake. I too remember those sickly sweet crumbly marzipan-topped atrocities of yore. But I also remembered Michelle’s mother’s cakes as being the ones that won me over. I’d been dithering over about four pounds of mixed raisins, sultanas, currants and dried apricots that were growing plumper and plumper through repeated applications of calvados and apricot brandy; I craved fruitcake but couldn’t find a recipe that appealed, until Michelle sent me hers, which was a relative of this one; it features grape juice and 10 eggs and a quart of brandy, and at least 48 hours spent soaking the fruit. It is unspeakably good.

I didn’t include any citron in mine, but was thinking about a dinnertime conversation I had recently about this fruit. I used to see it in the markets in Italy, where it is called cedro. We were wondering if the liqueur my friends had had in Greece – Kitron – might have been made of that rather than lemon, and indeed this seems to be so.

Could wine be considered sour grapes? Vinegar could, anyway. I’ve been thinking about sour foods in recent months, after picking up on some local buzz about natural fermentation over the summer.

Back in 2003, Sandor Ellix Katz published a book – Wild Fermentation – which has become wildly popular; I believe I actually saw him floating around Terra Madre with his last copy so didn’t manage to secure one there, but the ideas intrigue me (and I have his latest, The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved, lined up on the bookshelf). So when I picked up a nice seasonal cabbage during a farm shop swoop the other day, I thought I should try my hand at sauerkraut. Starting a little late to have it ready for Christmas (one of those family tastes I’m wild for is our tradition of having sauerkraut alongside turkey – something about sauerkraut and turkey gravy…) but could start the new year off right.

It’s a simple thing to do: all you need is salt and cabbage, and somewhere to put it (I hear reports about its fermentation aromas which suggest you might want some distance between you and the crock while it’s doing its thing). A recipe from Mother Earth News makes it sound easy, and the benefits extolled include a possible cure for Avian flu and cancer prevention.