Category: Food Security

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Cooking with CropBox Greens

By Miche Genest

Greens, greens and more greens. Local. In winter.
I picked up my first Solvest Inc. CropBox subscription order of fresh, local, hydroponically grown greens on January 23 at Baked Café in Whitehorse, located a 10-minute walk from my house (convenient!). For the uninitiated, the CropBox System is a portable, hydroponic greenhouse system, entirely contained in a sea can, developed by Vertical Crop Consultants, an American company based in North Carolina. Solvest Inc., a Whitehorse- and Yellowknife-based company that sells custom solar energy systems, is the Canadian provider and distributor of the CropBox system.

Solvest Inc. has a particular interest in the viability of the system for growing fresh greens in remote northern locations. The company installed its first CropBox unit in Whitehorse in the spring of 2018, and is tweaking the system for optimal production in cold climates. And they are selling the crops — fresh lettuces, kales, chards, herbs — produced in the unit to Whitehorse residents and some restaurants on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. I am a brand new subscriber.

A couple of other subscribers arrived at the cafe at the same time as I. They clearly knew the ropes — one had a clutch of breathable string bags with her and the other a small cooler. (Customers are asked to bring their own bags or containers and transfer their order from the company’s refillable boxes at the pick-up point, part of Solvest Inc.’s effort to be a zero-waste operation. ) Next time I too will bring a cooler, easier than bags because you can lift the whole clump of greens out of the box and put them into the cooler, which insulates the greens if you’re transporting them in cold temperatures, and then sort them at home.

The smell of the fresh greens when I opened the box  was intoxicating — pungent, sweet, peppery — a complex blend of fragrances emanating from  basil, dill and arugula that was utterly uplifting at five o’clock on a winter afternoon. This first box contained butter lettuce, rainbow chard, and the arugula, Thai basil, Genovese basil (the classic pesto basil), and dill that were causing my nose to twitch. The total weight was 400 grams; though the mix of fresh greens varies from week to week the weight remains the same, and so does the price — $15 for 400 grams. That amount is calculated to  be enough to feed one or two people. Tarek Bos-Jabbar, who coordinates the CropBox program and operates the unit in Whitehorse, harvests greens such as chard, lettuce and arugula by cutting leaves from the plant.

With herbs, he generally harvests the entire plant, with the root plug attached. Once you get the CropBox order home, there are a few things to sort out. If the herbs come complete with plug, theoretically you can place them in a jar of water and they’ll continue growing. I haven’t yet tried this, but a Whitehorse friend who has subscribed to Cropbox since December reports anecdotally she hasn’t been successful at keeping the herbs going; they tend to wilt fairly soon.

My herbs came without a plug. I cut a couple of millimetres off the ends of the Genovese basil and dill stems and stood them in cold water, but they wilted in a few hours. I think the old trick of refreshing herbs and greens in ice-cold water, and then wrapping them in a tea towel and putting them in a re-sealable bag in the fridge is the way to go. The lettuce I treated this way is still crisp and crunchy, six days after pick-up.

There were a few wilted leaves among each crop but those went straight into a bag in the freezer and, once the bag fills up with other vegetable ends and trimmings, will contribute to vegetable, fish or meat stock. Nothing wasted! (Well, except a bit of dill. See below.) The flavour of the greens fulfilled all the promise of the first smell: from-the-garden fresh, and to my palate, more intensely alive than the basils and arugulas and lettuces I bring home from the supermarket. This is the crux of the matter: the flavour. In winter, the flavour of greens grown elsewhere and brought up the highway just doesn’t compare.

Here’s a quick rundown of what we did at my house with our first CropBox order, with a rough calculation of number of servings.  

Butter leaf lettuce and arugula: Half the  lettuce and all the arugula went into a mixed salad that fed three people at supper, with seconds all around  (just for interest, the protein was elk smokies and the starch, sourdough buns).

Thai and Genovese basil: On the second day after pick-up my husband turned both basils into pesto, in order to catch the herbs at their best. The pesto was more than enough for 250 grams of linguine, which again, served three people (with no accompaniment except extra grated Parmesan and black pepper).

Rainbow chard and dill: I used all of the chard and a third of the dill in a Colcannon, along with eight large baking potatoes, one large onion and three cups of cheddar and Parmesan, mixed, for a Robbie Burns supper. The dill is not traditional in Colcannon and neither is the chard but it worked; my visiting sister, who is a fine cook, said it was superb. Our Robbie Burns supper was cancelled due to illness, so I froze two-thirds of the Colcannon for later consumption; there are at least 12 servings in the freezer. The remaining third fed three people at two meals and there is still some left over.

The remaining dill: I bought a cucumber in order to make tzatziki with the rest of the dill, but I didn’t get to it on time and the dill wilted and then rotted in its jar on the windowsill.  Entirely my fault. And a lesson for next time. (See section on storage, above.)

Genovese basil stems: The stems were packed with flavour, so I made a basil simple syrup for use in cocktails and anything else I can come up with.

The remaining lettuce: Salad, to come in the next couple of days; there’s enough left to feed two of us one serving each.

In conclusion, I’m in. I have a small household, so the amounts seem to work for me. Still, it remains to be seen whether we will subsist on greens from CropBox alone for the winter (there are options for ordering more frequently), or whether we will need to augment. But I’m excited about what might be coming in tomorrow’s box, and the culinary possibilities that will open up.  And I like that this one $15 investment in 400 grams of greens contributed to dishes that fed many mouths — well, the same three mouths — many times over many days. That is, 26 separate servings of very different dishes. And that’s not counting the cocktails that will emerge from the basil syrup. Ultimate conclusion: Two green thumbs up. (Sorry.)

For information on how to subscribe to the greens program in Whitehorse visit cropboxcanada.ca
Oh, Colcannon! A hearty Scottish or Irish dish combining our winter stalwarts, potatoes and cabbage. Or, in this case, fresh, local rainbow chard and dill.
> Click here to view the recipe for Colcannon
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Leftover Love — A Food Waste Reduction Strategy

by Miche Genest

Zero Waste Leek, Zucchini and Potato Soup
There is nothing that provokes more sadness or anxiety in the kitchen than wasting good food. Even putting that wilted lettuce or mouldy tomato into the compost doesn’t make up for the feeling of loss — the loss of the farmer’s hard work, the loss of the energy it took to grow the food, the loss of the energy it took, if it comes from the store, to drive that tomato up the highway or fly it up at great cost.

Nobody likes wasting food. And yet it happens. A lot. The amount of food that goes to waste in Canada and the world is staggering — worldwide, about one-third of the food that’s produced for human consumption, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. And the National Zero Waste Council of Canada estimates that 47% of the value of food waste in Canada can be attributed to households, at a cost of more than $1,100 per year per household. That’s each of us, in our little homes, forgetting what’s in that container in the back of the fridge, or digging into the new bundle of kale before we’ve finished the old. (thereader.com)

Happily, there are many, many resources available to help us reduce food waste at home. See Love Food Hate Waste for ideas that range from fridge and freezer storage management to menu planning to smart shopping. And, after every major holiday, Canadian magazines like Chatelaine or Canadian Living, among others, provide tips on what to do with the leftovers.

Our fellow householders often have great ideas as well. A chef friend of mine keeps a bag for vegetable scraps in the freezer — onion ends, wilted lettuce, carrot tops, the green parts of leeks — and when it’s full she makes vegetable stock. There are more drastic measures. When my husband was growing up in Scotland after the Second World War, there was often a “mandatory plate” on the table: last night’s leftovers. Soups are a really good way to turn leftovers into something new and delicious. (But that old Yukon cabin recipe of adding new ingredients to the bubbling pot on the wood stove every day is probably not the most food-safe approach. At a certain point those original ingredients just plain go bad.)

> Click here for one idea for using up mashed potatoes and tired vegetables

Further info: To read the National Zero Waste Council of Canada’s strategy to reduce food loss and food waste, click here.  
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Agroecology: A Local, Ethical Approach to Farming

Agroecology is about nurturing the land where food is grown, striving for a healthy and balanced ecosystem.
With global populations and the effects of climate change on the rise, many people are sounding the alarm about potential threats to the world’s food supply. At the same time, the production of food has become a multinational corporate endeavour, often criticized for its negative impacts on people’s health, the environment, and the well-being of family farmers. One solution being proposed is agroecology, a movement whose key aspect is nurturing the land where food is grown, striving for a healthy and balanced ecosystem.  And it is a movement that is gaining momentum globally.

Agroecology is being touted as both a mitigation and adaptation strategy for climate change, and meets the concerns of consumers who are increasingly demanding healthier food and a closer connection to food producers. Agroecology  also dovetails with social movements around the globe – many with significant leadership by women’s and indigenous organizations – that are demanding  a healthy food system built on both environmental and human rights.

The agroecology approach centers around small farmers with an ethical approach to  their growing, rooted in an understanding that this strategy protects their livelihood. While this has echoes of a throwback to historical growing practices, it is in fact a future-looking strategy that includes applied research and policies centered around small farmers. According to the Agroecology Fund, a non-profit dedicated to fostering the movement, across the planet scientists, grassroots organizations, NGOs, consumers, universities, and public agencies are working with farmers to construct sustainable and nutritious food systems based in agroecology.

Agroecology seems well-suited to the North. Although the short growing season and harsh climate can be challenges for farmers, there are also the perils of a food system where 97 per cent of consumables are trucked in over long distances along a handful of vulnerable highways. Northerners are also, of necessity, resourceful, cooperative, and independent-thinking, and as a result very willing to support local enterprises. Suzanne would not have been able to successfully complete her year of eating locally without the help and guidance of local growers.

While these individuals avoid labels, it is safe to say their philosophical approach is an agroecological one — and perhaps serve as a model for the rest of the world.
The agroecology approach centers around small farmers with an ethical approach to  their growing.
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Barley Bliss

 

One of Suzanne’s greatest challenges early in her year of eating locally was the problem of grain and flour. Farmers Otto Muelbach and Connie Handwerk of Kokopellie Farm had earmarked rye and barley for Suzanne’s use. But the moose got to the barley first, and weather, busted machinery and road closures almost did in the rye.  Happily, the rye was saved and Otto surprised Suzanne with a secret planting of Red Fife wheat. Baked goods were once again a possibility and so were healthy, whole grains for breakfast and dinner.

But the barley was just a fond memory. This year Suzanne planted several rows of hull-less barley from seeds ordered from Salt Spring Seeds, and farmer Grant Dowdell planted some too. Suzanne’s personal stock is about three bushels of seed heads, according to Gerrard; they don’t yet know how much grain that will translate into until they get around to threshing. But once the threshing is done, a delicious world of barley-based recipes awaits, like this blissful wild mushroom risotto. Mmm, barley!  

> See the recipe for Wild Mushroom and Barley Risotto

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Haute Cuisine Finds Foraging

Suzanne forages for high bush cranberries. Photo by Tess Crocker.

Across the planet — from Australia to the Faroe Islands — the culinary world is rediscovering a very old idea, foraging for food. In a heavily mechanized global food system with a very large carbon footprint, where households regularly consume food from continents away, the idea of eating locally and in a wholesome, sustainable fashion, is starting to catch on, especially at the highest levels of haute cuisine. And wild foods are front and centre in this trend.

Foraged foods are not altogether a new idea for restaurants. Truffles, for example, can only be found in the wild, usually with the help of specially-trained animals who sniff them out. High-end chefs have long been in love with the truffle’s unique flavour, and have been known to pay $1,200 a pound for the specialty item. Fiddlehead ferns and wild mushrooms also make the culinary most-wanted list.

Wild truffles are a favourite of chefs, and can sell for as much as $1,200 a pound.

Not surprisingly, indigenous peoples are at the heart of the modern foraged food movement.  A new generation of chefs from indigenous backgrounds are bringing their age-old culture to modern restaurants. Chef Rayleen Brown of Kungkas Can Cook in Australia is of aboriginal descent, and many of her flavors come from her nomadic upbringing. For her business, she sources 100 percent of her bush foods from local women foragers. Brown’s menus vary based on the foraged products that come in, “riding rhythms of the land and seasons.” Similar stories emerge from places as diverse as Brazil, the American Southwest, and throughout Canada (read our piece on Canada’s indigenous cuisine).

As foraging emerges from the fringes, the mainstream is taking note. We wrote previously about renowned chef Dan Barber, author of The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food. In addition to growing his own ingredients at the Blue Hill at Stone Barns farm, Barber and his chefs also forage the nearby woods for nuts and herbs. In Japan, chef Hisoto Nakahigashi of the Michelin-starred Miyamasou restaurant combs the nearby forest and river for fresh ingredients, which he uses to create the evening “kaiseki” meal, comprising many small courses. At Attica Restaurant in Ripponlea, Australia, a suburb of Melbourne, every member of the staff forages for food each day, sometimes bringing back finds just 15 minutes before service begins, and thereby assuring maximum freshness.

Wild mushrooms are among the most common, and commonly misunderstood, foraged foods.
Foraging can be a bit of an art, so it’s not surprising that many busy chefs employ experienced foragers to bring them their ingredients. For example. Chef Eddy Leroux of New York’s Restaurant Daniel, collaborates with expert forager Tama Matsuoka Wong, and the two have even co-authored a  book, Foraged Flavor.  

Slovenian chef  Ana Roš of Hiša Franko (who was named World’s Best Female Chef in 2017 by The World’s 50 Best Restaurants awards), believes in a “zero kilometre” approach. She has a team of 10 foragers who harvest nearby mushrooms, berries, wild herbs and plants, many not traditionally used in cooking. Chef Virgilio Martínez Véliz of Central restaurant in Peru sends a team of seven people out four times per month,  foraging from the sea to the Amazon and the Andes for indigenous ingredients. Véliz also runs a research centre called Mater Iniciativa, where researchers record the flavor profiles and properties of wild ingredients before they enter the kitchen. In the Faroe Islands, a popular scuba diving destination, chef Poul Andrias Ziska of Koks restaurant encourages divers to collect mahogany clams, sea urchins, and horse mussels and submerge them in a fjord near the restaurant until it is time to cook.

Nature’s gifts are seasonal, so not surprisingly the use of foraged and wild ingredients often vary depending on the time of year.  Rene Redzepi of the Noma 2.0 Restaurant in Denmark varies their menu seasonally, focusing on seafood in winter, fresh vegetables in summer, and wild game and forest finds in fall. Poland’s Atelier Amaro restaurant goes one better. Chef Wojciech Modest Amaro divides his menu into 52 calendar weeks so that he can incorporate the freshest foraged ingredients from the countryside and his garden.

As Suzanne learned during her year of eating only food local to Dawson City, Yukon, edible wild plants abound, even in urban areas, where they are often considered to be weeds, especially if they are prolific growers. Dandelions, wild sage (a.k.a. stinkweed), stinging nettle, and chickweed are just some of the plants that frustrate Canadian lawn owners, but are in fact delicious ingredients, especially when picked while they are young. Some urban restaurants, such as in Iceland, Camissa Brasserie, in Capetown, South Africa, and Masque, in Mumbai, India, may pick up ingredients from among their city’s sidewalks and empty lots.  
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Iqaluit Grocery Store Fire Highlights Northern Food Security Issue

The recent grocery store fire in Iqaluit highlights the precarious nature of Northern food supplies.
A major fire this week that completely destroyed one of Iqaluit ‘s two grocery stores has reignited concerns about food insecurity in the North. Our thoughts go out to the entire population of Iqaluit at this difficult time. The blaze at the Northmart store not only destroyed the food on the shelves, but also an adjoining warehouse where a large cache of dry goods was being stored.

Most of these goods, including stocks for Christmas and Easter, were brought in by barge while sea lanes were open during the summer, and now concerns have been raised about possible food shortages and escalating prices. Food costs are already an issue throughout Nunavut, where 55 per cent of the population is living with food insecurity, according to Statistics Canada, and the issue has been getting worse since monitoring began in 2005. (StatsCan defines food insecurity as occurring when one or more household members do not have access to an acceptable amount of quality healthy food, usually because of financial constraints).

The entire issue of food security also falls across racial lines. A recent report found the average cost of groceries for a family of four in Nunavut is $19,760 per year while almost half of Inuit adults earn less than $20,000 annually. This is in contrast to annual salaries for the non-indigenous population averaging over $72,000 in Iqaluit. It’s worth thinking of the food security in your own community.  

No matter where you live, grocery stores only carry 3-4 days worth of perishable food. This is not such a big deal if one store shuts down in, say, Toronto, but in our current system your access to food is more fragile than you might imagine. If there is a disruption of the distribution chain (due to an internet black-out, for example, or natural disaster) food shortages could occur in a matter of days. Supporting and enhancing local food systems in our own communities remains a critical piece in food security.
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Suzanne Speaks at National Food Conference

Suzanne will be speaking at the Food Secure Canada National Assembly, which runs from Nov. 1 to 4 in Montreal. Called, Resetting the Table, the gathering is billed as Canada’s largest and most vibrant food gathering. At the event, hundreds of Canada’s brightest food thinkers and most innovative organizations will discuss how to get to better food policies.

Practical solutions to pressing food system failures — such as skyrocketing levels of diet-related disease, climate breakdown, and food poverty — will be shared and developed. The Assembly brings together farmers and foodies, chefs and Indigenous leaders, activists and businesses, seeding a wealth of new ideas and connections. More than 100 expert and activist speakers will be engaging with attendees.

Resetting the Table includes both a Northern and an Indigenous stream.  The Northern stream is based on the theme of Rebuilding Northern Food Systems with speakers from across Northern Canada, including Suzanne. She will be speaking about her experience spending a year of eating 100% local to Dawson City and profiling where her food came from — both the people and the land.

Special thanks to the Yukon Agriculture Association, the Yukon Agriculture Branch, and the  Canadian Agricultural Partnership (CAP)  for supporting Suzanne’s attendance to speak at the conference.

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Suzanne’s Blog: My First Moose Hunt

I have just returned from my first ever moose hunt. Never before have I been even remotely inclined to take part in the annual moose hunt that has provided meat for our family year after year.   But something has changed in me.  I have transformed from the woman who didn’t like handling meat and couldn’t even manage to successfully roast a chicken.

Spending the past year connecting with my food has been revolutionary for me.  I have spent time with the chickens and pigs during their life on the farm. And I have been there during their quick and stress-free harvest.  I have been there as salmon are pulled from the river, as rabbits are snared, and caribou are harvested. I have witnessed the care and respect the farmers show their livestock both during their life and at the time of their dispatch.  I have participated in the transformation from animal to the cuts of meat that are neatly packaged for us, disconnecting us from their original form. And after a year of wasting no morsel of precious food, I have learned that there are many more parts of the animal that are edible beyond the steaks and roasts. 

Animal-based protein is essential to food security in the North.  The alternatives just don’t grow here. This year, as moose hunting season approached, I had a great desire to make a similar connection with the moose that year after year provides the staple meat for our family.  So I volunteered to accompany Gerard on his week-long, river based moose hunt. I now have a new respect for the moose hunt. 

It’s not as simple as I thought it was —  Gerard going for a week long camping trip with the guys and coming home with a year’s worth of meat.  In fact it’s amazing to me that anyone ever gets a moose at all! First of all you have to actually see a moose.  There are more moose than people in the Yukon, but with a territory larger than California and only 35,000 people, there is a lot of wilderness for those 65,000 moose to wander through.  It’s not like 65,000 moose are standing on the river bank just waiting to feed your family.

The moose along the river were not coming to the call, so luring them out of the wilderness was not an option. If you are lucky enough to see a moose, then you have to be close enough to determine whether it is a cow moose or a bull moose.  Only bull moose can be hunted in the Yukon. And it is amazing how a 1000-pound animal can simply vanish into the willows completely silently.  Whereas I, a 130 pound woman, can’t seem to step into the forest without snapping branches under my feet.

If you are lucky enough to see a bull moose that waits by the river bank long enough for you to be in range to take a shot, you’ve got just a couple of seconds to shoot before he bolts.  Add one more challenge:  you are shooting from a moving boat in a river with a 6-knot current.

Seven days we searched and called – the majority of which we saw zero moose and zero fresh tracks. In the end I find it best to consider our week on the river a moose conservation trip. All points for the moose.  Zero points for us.  Plus one forest fire staunched (more on this in the next post).

We stayed on the river until the boat’s steering cable froze up from the cold weather and then reluctantly came home.  For the first time ever, there will be no moose in our freezer.  But we do have lots of local pork, chicken, turkey, and chum salmon, so we will be okay.  And Gerard now has his sights on February’s buffalo season. All I can say is, thank goodness it’s not last year!  And well done moose!        
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Farming, Fishing, and Foraging Keys to Iceland’s Food Security

Farms in Iceland tend to be small, family-run operations.
Geographically, historically, and culturally, Iceland is unique. Nevertheless, this island country located just below the Arctic Circle has many lessons to offer in Northern food security, striving for balance between self-sufficiency and sustainability. Not surprisingly, in the government’s own words, “the fishing industry is one of the main pillars of the Icelandic economy.” A responsible, sustainable fishery is official policy, and includes a structured fisheries management system, including catch limits and ongoing stock assessments.
Iceland’s government strives to maintain a responsible and sustainable fishing industry.
Arable land is limited in Iceland (less than 1 per cent). The island’s volcanic soils are thin and much of the interior is covered by lava fields, mountains, and glaciers.  But while only a tiny fraction of the land is therefore under cultivation, a preference for and tradition of locally-obtained food means the produce from farms (which are generally small and family-run) finds a ready market. Not only are there hearty vegetables like potatoes, turnips, carrots, kale, cabbage, and rhubarb, but thanks to an abundance of geothermal energy, a cornucopia of greenhouse crops, including tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers – and even bananas. 

Although less than 10 percent of Icelandic farms are certified organic, most conventional farms do not use pesticides either, since there are few crop-devouring insects to contend with on the island. Iceland’s main agricultural activity is sheep ranching, with island sheep far outnumbering human inhabitants.  Government regulations mandate that the sheep spend their summers outdoors, requiring them to be freely grazing for a minimum of two months.

Dairy farming also flourishes, thanks in part to strict breeding regulations that serve to keep the 1,000-year-old Icelandic cow breed free of disease. More importantly, a farmer-owned co-operative – MS Dairies – collects 98 per cent  of the milk produced in the country, and helps to ensure sustainable prices for the dairy farmers. The co-op is also fostering an export industry for Skyr, Iceland’s unique yogurt-like dairy product.
A farmer-owned dairy co-op buys 98 per cent of the milk produced in Iceland.
A relative newcomer to the food scene is foraging, brought about in part by Iceland’s recent financial crisis, but also spurred by a growing interest in natural foods. There are two types of foraging activities in Iceland – land and seaside. Surrounded by pristine waters, the island’s beaches are a bounty of edible offerings, including mussels, clams, seagull eggs (which many consider superior to chicken eggs), and also kelp and seaweed. 

Moving inland, the best time for foraging plants in Iceland is during the short summer, basically late May to late July, when berries (blueberries and crowberries are common) and wild herbs abound. But the most popular foraged food is mushrooms. It is estimated Iceland has over 100 varieties of edible fungi.
Foraging in Iceland takes place on the beach as well as in the countryside – and even the cities –  and is gaining in popularity.
In fact, foraging in Iceland has not only become  common, but trendy too, popularized in part by a new generation of local chefs who feature wild, local ingredients. Iceland’s foremost restaurant, Dill, (its first and only Michelin-starred eatery), highlights foraged offerings, several of them actually obtained within the city limits of the capital Reykjavik itself. Looking to the future, the government is moving to set aside wilderness areas specifically for foraging.

Admittedly, Iceland’s current focus on sustainability was borne from hard lessons. At the time of the Viking settlement (1150 years ago), around a third of the island  was covered with trees. Human expansion resulted in rampant deforestation, and sheep grazing inhibited regeneration. Over 95 per cent of the original forest cover is gone, so, not surprisingly, today Icelanders are careful to maintain an ecological balance, with tight government regulations and policies on land use and agricultural practices, as well as sustainable fishing.
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Eating Local at Legendary Bullocks Bistro in Yellowknife

No visit to Yellowknife, the capital of the Northwest Territories, would be complete without a side trip to the renowned Bullocks Bistro restaurant. Located in a historic building, site of the original Weaver and Devore Trading Post built in 1936, Bullocks is famous — some would say legendary — for its fish and chips. But if you’re expecting seafood imported from some distant ocean, you’re in for a pleasant surprise.

Given that Yellowknife sits on the shore of Great Slave Lake, all the fish served at Bullocks are local fare. And since Great Slave is the deepest lake in North America at 614 metres, and the tenth-largest lake in the world, that means variety as well as quality.

“They’re all coldwater fish, and some of the best fish in the world,” explains Jo-Ann Martin, the bistro’s co-owner. “It’s real cool to serve a local product. We do trout, whitefish, inconnu, pickerel, and burbot … which the local fishers call ‘mariah’. And there’s a Catch of the Day, so the menu is always changing.” Those who don’t like fish can always enjoy a bison rib eye steak. All ingredients are prepared from scratch, and the bread is also baked fresh daily on the premises.

While a traditional fish-and-chip recipe means battering and deep frying, Bullocks delivers its own stamp there as well. “Our fish is pan fried, grilled, and broiled too.”

Jo-Ann and her husband Mark Elson bought the eatery 2½ years ago from the original founders, Sam and Renata Bullock, who started the operation back in the 1980s. The new owners were fortunate to have a transition period. Not only did they acquire Renata’s home recipes for staples like the teriyaki sauce, tartar sauce, feta dressing, and herb and garlic dressing, but they were taught Sam’s unique bone-out filleting technique  — developed to process fish that would be suitable to be served in a restaurant   —  which is important, given the 150 to 250 lbs of fish the restaurant can go through daily.

One of the biggest challenges of running Bullocks is ensuring a continuing supply of fish for the patrons during the spring and fall, when commercial fishers are not able to get onto the Lake.  This resulted in the technique of freezing fresh fish whole — between 4,000 and 6,000 pounds — to get Bullocks through the shoulder seasons. And how is Jo-Ann enjoying the experience now that they have a few years under their belts? “I like it even more now. It’s part of living off the land and water.”

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Suzanne’s Blog: Store-Bought Blues

I am struggling with grocery store food. My tentative and gradual re-introduction to store-bought food switched to full-on immersion two weeks ago when we left the Yukon and headed to a cottage in southern Canada. The transition was not easy. First, there is the psychological component.  For one year I quite successfully convinced my brain that food from afar is off limits.   This remains my knee-jerk reaction and it has been difficult to give myself permission to try it.

I expected the re-introduction to a wide variety of new foods would be a taste explosion.  But it hasn’t been. Things taste exactly how I remember them, and it’s not all that satisfying.  Maybe it’s a sign that my local food is pretty darn flavourful in its own right!  Smells are tantalizing, but the tastes often don’t live up to the smell. Sugar has been the craziest phenomenon. Things I used to love, now taste sickly sweet.  I get the same ‘I don’t feel so good’ feeling after one bite of a chocolate chip peanut butter cookie that I used to get overindulging on six of them.  It astounds me that, once upon a time, my body felt that six cookies worth of sugar consumption was totally reasonable.

Salt creeps up on me in surprising places.  Store bought bread is too salty, as is butter and cheese.  But a nacho chip tastes like it should. Despite the saltiness, bread products taste incredibly bland. It hasn’t all been disappointing.  I reclaimed a love for the avocado.  I was  able to indulge in sushi again, which is as delicious as it used to be. Fresh local southern fruit such as peaches and concord grapes were definitely a treat and fresh-from-the-field Ontario corn is as sweet as candy.

However, on the ‘grocery store food diet,’ I was often hungry and never quite satisfied.  I found myself longing for some of my old staples.  I started poaching myself eggs for breakfast so I didn’t have to suffer through a bowl of cereal or another baked good.  One sip of wine literally went straight to my head.  Water and milk were really the only drinks I could tolerate. The once-loved Sanpellegrino tasted way too sweet.  Dilution became my friend.  A couple of tablespoons of the Sanpellegrino added to a tall glass of sparkling water felt like a reasonable treat.

Gradually my tolerance for sugar and carbs started to increase. Popsicles didn’t seem to bother me and two pieces of chocolate no longer made me feel sickly.   I couldn’t handle a butter tart but a Tim Horton’s old fashioned plain donut was going down quite easily and left me craving another.

Before my body adjusts back to old habits, I want to put on the brakes.   I’ve just returned home and am looking forward to eating local foods again. I believe my body is telling me something when half a cookie makes me feel sick.  Surely it can’t be good to consume as much sugar and carbs as I once did. Today I stood on the scale.  No change in my weight, but there is a new roll around my middle that I’m not so happy with.   So don’t get too used to sugar, oh pancreas of mine – we’re going back to local Dawson food!

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Seal Meat an Integral Part of Traditional Inuit Lifestyle

For many Inuit communities in the far North, especially fly-in communities not connected to the outside world by roads, food security is an ongoing concern. While a number of new initiatives have been undertaken in recent years, including Nuluaq, The Inuit Community-Based Food Initiatives Mapping Project, one of the solutions is as old as the Inuit themselves — a return to country foods such as seal, walrus, whale, and fish harvested from the local environment.

Game meats are high in protein, fatty acids, vitamins and minerals. Seal meat is especially lean with less than two per cent fat (compared to 12 to 27 per cent fat in other store-bought meats). It’s also rich in iron, zinc, vitamins A, D, B and C, and Omega 3 fatty acids. Through initiatives like community kitchens and cooking classes, hunter coops, and communal freezers, efforts are being made to help far Northern communities expand local access to country foods.

Southerners are discovering seal meat too, and some chefs, indigenous and non-indigenous alike, are bravely adding the dish to their menus, including Chef Eric Pateman’s Edible Canada in Vancouver, and chef Joseph Shawana’s Toronto restaurant, Kū-Kŭm Kitchen. The move can be a controversial one, because the harvesting of seals continues to be a touchy topic for some animal rights activists.

For several decades opposition to seal products by global animal rights groups has impacted the ability of Inuit communities to sell their seal products. Seal skin products used for waterproof, biodegradable clothing such as boots, mittens and hats, have long been a vital source of cash to purchase items such as the boats/snowmobiles, gasoline, and ammunition used by hunters.

The Inuit are fighting to change public opinion. Most notably, Iqaluit film maker Alethea Arnaquq-Baril, director of the documentary Angry Inuk, has started to alter outisder perceptions. The Canadian government is also trying to get the message across that the harvest is humane and sustainable.  But for many northern Canadians it’s much more basic. They simply consider seal comfort food.
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FEAST an Edible Roadtrip Interview

Lindsay and Dana on the road - Photo by FEAST
Lindsay and Dana on the road – Photo by FEAST
FEAST an Edible Roadtrip is a project by Canadian food enthusiasts and writers Dana VanVeller and Lindsay Anderson. These two friends set out to find out what is cooking in kitchens, farms,  markets and all kinds of places all over Canada.  They even stopped by Dawson City on their travels, and sampled some of what the Yukon has to offer.

Their exploits have produced a cookbook that features recipes and stories collected on the road, from home cooks to seasoned professionals alike, including our own Miche Genest.  They not only celebrate Canada’s culinary diversity, but also note how important it is to look at where our food comes from and what we can do to get involved. We had a chance to ask them some questions about their project.

How did the idea originate for your project?  What sparked the whole thing for you? When we were camping this one time we had a long conversation about food and culture, Canadian food culture, and how we had both travelled across the country (we both grew up in different parts of the country) and it turned into a talk about what we point to as Canadian food and we didn’t quite know the answer. We thought, wouldn’t it be interesting if there was a project where we went around for a certain amount of months to specifically talk to people in different regions and see what people were making and what they were eating. And we thought the most efficient way to do it would be on a road trip.

What makes Canadian food Canadian? Canadians tend to think that we don’t have a distinctive culinary culture, it is interesting because there is this mentality that we are an immigrant nation and that the foods we consume are imported from other cultures, but it is in the mixing of those influences that you can find it. There are all these dishes that maybe come from somewhere else, but they are transformed by Canadian-specific ingredients and they become a whole new thing. And there is this feeling of “oh, this is just what we eat. This isn’t Canadian food”, as if we are reluctant to claim a food culture, and the wider sentiment is that we don’t have one. It is almost like the cliché of Canadians, that we are always apologizing for everything, and we are also apologetic for our own culinary culture.

What kind of dishes or cooking techniques that you had never heard of before did you discover on your roadtrip? Did any of them make their way into your everyday cooking? There were almost daily discoveries. One of the coolest discoveries of a cooking technique was when we were on Spring Island on the northwest coast of Vancouver island and we were on a kayak expedition, and cooks from the Kyuquot first nation showed us this traditional cooking method for fish in which they butterfly the salmon and weave it through cedar slats and they roast it vertically over the fire.  And it was the best roasted salmon I‘ve ever had, but it also felt like a whole experience, not just a meal. The trip and the process of writing the cookbook completely opened us up to new cooking techniques and ingredients, like for example I had never cooked wild boar before, and we got this recipe from a Saskatchewan chef for wild boar meatballs and then we started seeing that you could actually get these ingredients around our area. Learning to cook different types of wild game and realizing how different all the flavors are, and that there really is so much variety out there. We definitely expanded our kitchens In P.E.I. a chef gave us a recipe for scallops that combined them with a pear and currant salsa, a combination that you normally wouldn’t think of but they are all super Canadian ingredients that were locally sourced from the area. All the recipes in our cookbook feel Canadian for different reasons, either ingredient based or culturally based. Perhaps a recipe just happens to be really popular in a specific region, or the reason is because of the ingredients that are found there.

What are your thoughts on the issue of food security? It is interesting for people who want to change the way they eat and be more aware of what they consume, I think this is such a much easier time to do so. Food is a topic that has been exploding for the last 10 years or so, the local food movement has expanded so much. In my experience, the best way to get involved is to reach out and talk to different people, ask more questions, ask what everyone is eating and where it comes from. Also we have to think on practical terms, not everyone has the economic means to start spending more money on organic food at farmer’s market or the time to grow their own food all of the sudden, but the fact that things are shifting is very important. Making an effort to be part of the conversation is important. A good way to do this is sharing meals together.      
John Lenafrt canoes Dana VanVeller across the Klondike River.
John Lenafrt shows Dana VanVeller his vegetables.
Miche Genest serving dinner.Dana and Lindsay's Yukon visit included a tour of Klondike Valley Nursery and a special dinner at Miche Genest's house - Photos by FEAST
Salmon roasting with cedar slats, Kyuquot stye - Photo by FEAST
Salmon roasting with cedar slats, Kyuquot stye - Photo by FEAST
Salmon roasting with cedar slats, Kyuquot stye - Photo by FEASTSalmon roasting with cedar slats, Kyuquot stye - Photo by FEAST
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Gerard’s Blog: Contemplating Culinary Control

It only took 30 hours. An overnight trip to Whitehorse, medicinally supplemented with a few coffees and Monster drinks to maintain energy and alertness, and then back on “The Program.” And the price has been two days of caffeine withdrawal headaches. It seems that our bodies adapt more readily to the intake of nutrients and chemicals than it does to their removal. How unfortunate.

Simplistically, it helps one understand addiction and the inherent struggles with recovery. It took my body only 30 hours to adapt to, and depend on, the regular consumption of coffee. Meanwhile, it took months for this same body to accept even a diminished intake of sugar and grains. So much for mind over matter.

I’ve mentioned before that one of my ambivalences about coming off “The Program” is the potential for loss of thought about food choices. On the one hand, I look forward to the ease of eating indiscriminately. On the other, I worry about the loss of taste discrimination and the loss of altruistic thoughts about food security.

It was nice to be able to eat at a restaurant in Whitehorse. But, the barbequed ribs were not barbequed at all. They were simply bathed in barbeque sauce, which on first bite, tasted bold and delicious to my virgin taste buds. Scrapping away the sauce revealed overcooked and tasteless pork, much worse than the “happy meat,” to which I have become accustomed. The fries tasted like a crusty conduit for bad grease, hidden beneath a generous dousing of salt, the ubiquitous masquerader. The small piece of corn-on-the-cob was tough and tasteless, suggesting that the chef decided it was best to pawn off the remnants of last year’s stock, before the fresh, delicious, new stuff arrives…

Makes one think that taking control of one’s dietary intake does have its merits. Another distinction of eating conveniently from stores, and one that is also worthy of reiteration, is the production of garbage that this entails. With virtually every individual item coming in its own designated package of single-use plastic or Styrofoam or tin or paper or cardboard, this rapidly adds up. Again, I had generated an embarrassingly notable bag of garbage by the end of my short trip, about the same as our whole family now produces in a week.

And while eating conveniently on the run feels decadent on the one hand, there is the undeniable lingering question about the wisdom of our course. Sure, we all want to do less dishes: washing out zip lock bags, jars, and plastic containers for repurposing, is neither convenient or fun. Just ask my kids. But, aside from the individual desire to minimize effort, it is time to re-evaluate the sustainability of the current retail business.

Hey, my headache is gone! Perhaps, just perhaps, there was more to it than caffeine withdrawal, after all…

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Suzanne’s Blog: “Knee High by the 4th of July”

Home-grown barley already waist high by July 7th. Photo by Tess Crocker.

“Knee high by the fourth of July” is a farmer’s refrain south of the 49th Parallel – predicting a healthy crop of grain. So waist high by the 7th of July is looking pretty good up here at 64 degrees north!

Inspired by Miche Genest’s post “Back Yard Grain Growing in the Yukon – the Logical Next Step”and Kokopellie Farm’s success in growing grain in Dawson,  I decided to give back yard grain growing a try. My experience last Fall taught me that hulling grain is no easy feat.  In fact sometimes, as is the case for oats and buckwheat, it is virtually impossible for a home gardener.  Therefore I was thrilled that Salt Spring Seeds carries hulless varieties of grain.   After consulting owner Dan Jason, I decided to try Faust Barley (hulless) and Streaker Hulless Oats. And look how well they are doing!

Hulless Faust Barley. Photo by Suzanne Crocker.

Gardening has never come easily to me.   I struggle to grow brassicas while the local farmers produce them in abundance. This year I decided to try my luck growing edibles that are not so easily found at our local Farmers Market.  My raised beds are hosting oats, barley, amaranth, Tom Thumb popping corn and onions.   The onions are not looking so good but, so far, the rest seem to be growing well.

Streaker Hulless Oats. Photo by Suzanne Crocker.
With the idiosyncrasies of our short growing season, grains have often been difficult to grow in the North.  Perhaps as a result of climate change, perhaps due to hardier cultivars, it seems that in the past few years growing grain is becoming more feasible. So it is a good time test out the possibilities of back yard grain growing in the Yukon! Fingers crossed that local barley and local breakfast oats will be on the menu in our house next year.
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Suzanne’s Blog: What’s Missing?

Only two months left in my year of eating 100% local to Dawson. And it is not joy nor eager anticipation that I feel as the end approaches, but a sense of melancholy. I don’t want to stop. I loathe the day that packaged and processed foods re-enter the fridge and the cupboards and I know that I will be powerless to stop it.

My family has put up with this experiment for almost a year, and they are very much looking forward to the shopping spree on August 1st. Tess misses salt and the ability to pour herself a bowl of Cheerios in the morning. Kate misses baking – the fluffy sort that comes with white flour, baking powder and white sugar. Sam misses grab and go filler food – bagels, crackers, a limitless supply of apples all year round. Gerard misses big tubs of unrationed ice-cream.

And what do I miss? Surprisingly almost nothing. Except a hot mug of strong black tea – which I am loathe to return to after ten months of being caffeine free. I expected I would miss chocolate, avocados, oranges, sushi, nutritional yeast on butter slathered popcorn… But it is not these things that I miss. I miss salad dressing! Vegetable oil and balsamic vinegar salad dressing! Fresh greens are back on the menu and I now realize just how much I miss salad dressing. Lettuce, on its own, just doesn’t cut it for me. Ghee (clarified butter) and melted animal fat do not make good vegetable oil alternatives for salad.

Rhubarb juice (my vinegar) doesn’t have enough punch on its own. I have tried making a ranch style dressing with yogurt, herbs, garlic and honey but it is still missing something. So, with 2 months left to go, and fresh greens popping out of the ground, I am determined to crack this case. There must be a 100% local salad dressing option that can rival vegetable oil & balsamic vinegar. Help? If you have any suggestions, please let me know!!

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Gerard’s Blog: A Question of Compromise


I’ve been away for a bit.  Living the life of the normal mass of humanity.  Eating salt and sugar and chocolate and coffee and bread.  Lots of bread and pastry.  Relishing in croissants, light and fluffy, laced in butter (the salted type please!).  Cereals for breakfast.  Taking full advantage of the utility of commercial stores, buying food and consuming food while on the move.  Rediscovering the sheer decadence of  grabbing an ice-cream bar when a bit peckish on the road, marveling at not having to peel a potato and watch it boil as the stomach growls in wanton anticipation.

Sometimes we wonder about human progress.  We wonder about the cost of convenience, about skills that have been abandoned, then lost.  We marvel at the rise of dough in a pan or the conversion of agitated milk into butter.  We love to see fresh garden shoots, sprouting from inert seed to vibrant life, made possible with the magical combination of dirt, sun, soil and water. 

It is easy to sentimentally linger in the past, easy to feel that we have become disconnected from the entanglement of chemistry which defines life. But the human quest for convenience is not a recent event.  We have always strived to make life more comfortable, to anticipate future needs and to mitigate risks.  Thus, societies were born, and dependence on agriculture offered more predictability than the nomadic life of the hunter/gatherer.  To grow, harvest and store food with increasing efficiency is to be human.

So, it is no surprise that we have evolved into our current state, where food is  processed, packaged and shipped prodigiously.  And while we can all agree that this process allows for some nutrient loss as well as the addition of some unwanted preservatives and additives, we cannot deny the necessity.  We can’t all go shoot a moose.  Nor can most of us grow and store our own food, regardless of how good it tastes or how nutritious it might be.

So, modern life must be about compromise.  Be attentive to our food and make the most practical and healthy choices we can.  Enjoy our indulgences but try to keep them infrequent enough such that we do not suffer from the health consequences that so often accompany them. And did I mention that adding a few spruce tips to a mug of boiled water is a pleasant drink with which to start the day? .
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Suzanne’s  Blog: Vadzaih Choo Drin, Caribou Days, in Old Crow

Caribou near the Firth River in Northern Yukon. Photo by Cathie Archbould, Archbould Photography.
As part of the Dawson Youth Fiddlers entourage, I have just returned from Vadzaih Choo Drin, Caribou Days, in Old Crow, Yukon – four days of celebrating the Spring migration of the Porcupine Caribou Herd en route to their Northern calving grounds and feasting on food from the land!

Rabbit being prepared for the Caribou Days Festival in Old Crow, Yukon. Beaver, muskrat, whitefish, salmon, and, of course, caribou, were also on the menu. Photo by Suzanne Crocker.
Caribou Days is a wonderful four day celebration of feasts, games and music, with jigging and dancing that continue to the wee hours of the morning.   Everyone takes part, young and old, men and women.  One of the Dawson contingent coined a new slogan for Old Crow: “Old Crow – where men dance!”

Dawson Youth Fiddlers performing at the Caribou Days Festival in Old Crow, Yukon. Photo by Suzanne Crocker.
Much of the feasting celebrates food from the land.  The caribou, vadzaih, features front and centre, but also rabbit, muskrat, whitefish, salmon, duck and beaver.  For me, it was my first taste of muskrat!  (Although I took my tub of Dawson local food with me, I also treated myself to some tastes of local Old Crow food while I was in Old Crow!) There is a wonderful synergism to the games and feasting at Caribou Days.  

The log sawing competition and the kindling competition help keep the outdoor fire going for the huge grill that cooks the food from the land.  The rabbit skinning contest and the muskrat skinning contest are perfectly timed before the meat hits the grill!
  • Muskrat meat ready for the grill, and fur ready for use at the Caribou Days Festival in Old Crow, Yukon. . Photo by Suzanne Crocker. From FirstWeEat.ca, the Food Security North of 60 website supporting First We Eat, a documentary by Yukon filmmaker Suzanne Crocker about eating only locally-grown foods in in Dawson City, Yukon, in Canada's North, for one year.
    Muskrat meat ready for the grill, and fur ready for use. Photo by Suzanne Crocker.
The caribou are vitally important to the Vuntut Gwitchin who have relied on the caribou for tens of thousands of years for food and for clothing. 

All parts of the harvested caribou continue to be used from the head to the hoof to the hide.  The Vuntut Gwitchin and the Porcupine Caribou Management Board, with the support of many Canadians and Americans, continue to fight for the protection of the Porcupine Caribou Herd’s calving grounds, wintering grounds and migration routes from oil and gas exploration. Massi Cho Old Crow for welcoming the Dawson Youth Fiddlers so warmly to Caribou Days with amazing Old Crow hospitality.  We had a fantastic time!

> Read more about the Porcupine Caribou Herd
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Gifts from Alaska: Fresh Eulachon and Devil’s Club Sprouts

by Miche Genest

Fresh eulachon and devil’s club sprouts.
One of my foraging and chef friends in Whitehorse goes over to Haines, Alaska a few times every year to enjoy the sea and the salt air and do some wild harvesting. She might come back with bags of lambs quarters, she might score a clutch of chanterelle mushrooms or a kilo of spot prawns.

The other day, just back from one of her excursions, she texted me, “Want some fresh eulachon for supper?” She was lucky enough to have been there for the weekend of May 5th, when the eulachon were running. I texted back, “Wow! I’m really not sure. Do I?”

The reason for my hesitation was I’d heard that eulachon oil,  a delicacy to the Indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest from California to BC to Alaska, can be really strong for the uninitiated. I’d also heard that the fish are so oily that when dried, they can reportedly be lit to burn like a candle. I’d smelled the eulachon being processed beside the Chilkat River last spring. The aroma was powerful. But I’d never tasted the oil, or the fish.

In many parts of the formerly eulachon-rich Pacific Northwest, this small, smelt-like staple of the Indigenous diet has disappeared. Happily, the run is still strong in Haines. My friend said that the Chilkoot River ran black in places, there were so many fish. She tried catching them in a collapsible camping colander, but they were too quick, so she just plunged her hand in and grabbed them, two or three at a time, stuffed them into a pot on shore, slammed the lid on and waded back into the river to grab some more — bouquets of eulachon, the gift of spring.

Photo by Lyn Fabio
Back in Whitehorse, after our text exchange, my friend came over with a baby cooler. In it were a baggie-full of eulachon and two good handfuls of devil’s club sprouts. (The only time I’ve ever tasted those sprouts is when she has brought them back for my husband and me. ) She just happened to be in the forest at the right time; one day later and the sprouts would’ve been too big, the prickles starting to harden.

That night we feasted on these two presents from Alaska, kindness of my friend. On her advice, we lightly smoked the eulachon whole, then coated them, still whole, in flour. My husband had just returned from a hike with beautiful ripe juniper berries; I crushed those and added them to the flour, which was local; the last of my supply of triticale flour from Sunnyside Farm in the Ibex Valley.

We fried the fish quickly in butter,  and the devil’s club sprouts in butter and garlic. We ate both sprouts and eulachon with our fingers. We peeled the backbone, organs attached, from the fish, split the head to remove the brains and crunched the crispy skulls in our teeth. The flesh was sweet, mild, and silky, not oily at all. The devil’s club sprouts tasted,  as my friend’s partner often says, like pure life. Strong, conifer-like, bracing, almost medicinal. I said to my husband,

“We have to really pay attention because we’re not going to taste these flavours again until next spring.” The bonus of eating seasonally, and locally, is that you can savour these experiences for the special treat that they are.

Eulachon and devil’s club sprouts, sizzling and delicious.
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Suzanne’s Blog: Tree Water

Nature is turning off the tap for birch sap. Photo by Suzanne Crocker.
The buds on the birch trees are just starting to turn green, which means it’s coming to the end of birch sap season.  For the past few weeks you could spot a birch tree being tapped in many Dawson City backyards. Most of us have been tapping a tree in order to drink the cold, refreshing and nutrient rich birch water – loaded with thiamine (one of the Vitamin B’s) and manganese, as well as some Vitamin C, iron, riboflavin, zinc, calcium and potassium. 

Birch water tastes like a super fresh and delicious glass of crystal clear water with only a rare hint of sweet if you look for it. When the sap is running, the tree is actually pulling the sap from its roots all the way up to the top of the tree to feed its leaf buds which is an amazing anti-gravitational feat in itself. Birch water goes bad within a couple of days, even in the fridge, so it needs to be consumed fresh.  Alternatively, you can freeze it  (even in ice cube trays) and save some frozen birch water to consume later in the year. 

The tapping of one tree will produce a lot of birch water, so be careful not to tap more than you can consume. Very few of us will boil down the sap we collect to make birch syrup.  We leave that to Sylvia Frisch and Berwyn Larson and their crew who are currently very busy, working around the clock, collecting sap from about 1500 trees and preparing Uncle Berwyn’s Yukon Birch Syrup to supply us all with the sweet stuff for the upcoming year.

My birch syrup supply is down to the last cupful.  We are consuming about 1  litre of birch syrup per week! So I decided to boil down some sap and see if I could supplement our supply until the end of syrup season when we can get our next 12 L bucket from Sylvia and Berwyn’s birch camp. Birch syrup and maple syrup, although both sweet, are quite different in both taste and components.  

Birch syrup contains fructose, the sugar in fruit, and it does not crystallize like maple syrup does.  Maple syrup contains sucrose, the sugar in table sugar.  One of the major differences between the two is the sugar content of the sap. It takes twice as much birch sap to make a litre of birch syrup, compared to making maple syrup.  In fact the ration of birch sap to syrup is an astounding 80:1! What does that look like in real life?  I took my two largest pots and boiled down 14 litres of birch water.  All that sap produced a scant ¾ cup of syrup!

A big thank you to the birch trees for sharing some your sap and to Sylvia Frisch and Berwyn Larson and crew for all the hard work that goes into turning it into syrup! If you haven’t yet tasted birch syrup, you really must.  It is delicious!  When using birch syrup in recipes, I find I don’t miss the absence of other spices such as cinnamon or allspice.  

Check out the many recipes using birch syrup on our Recipe Page. As the leaf buds start to turn green, the sap will take on a bitter taste, marking the end of the tapping season for another year.

> Check out photos of birch camp here
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Suzanne’s Blog: The Last Onion


April is over and with it, our onion supply.

In bygone days, when folks weren’t relying on freshly stocked grocery store shelves, the months of March, April and May were known as ‘The Hungry Gap”.  The time of year when much of the winter’s store of food had run out and the potential of a new crop still awaited planting season.

We ate the last of our lettuce in September.  Our last squash was consumed in February.  We are close to finishing off the last of the carrots.  And now we have no more onions.

In this new reality, where our consumption is almost entirely based on what we have stored away for the winter, I would have thought that consuming the last taste of onion would cause me anxiety.   But it doesn’t.  It doesn’t seem to matter as much as I had thought it would. Perhaps it is because we are far from hungry. 

My worry last summer about not having enough seems to have resulted in over stocking.  I think I have put away enough tomatoes for two years! Perhaps it is because of our new reality of eating with the season. Perhaps it stems from the challenge of cooking well with what we have instead of pining away for what we don’t have.

So we have run out of onions.  But I still have garlic.  I have one jar of dried chives.  And I still have lots of dried herbs. No more onions, no big deal. Come July, the first taste of a fresh onion will be all the more delicious!
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Local Dairy Products for Sale in Dawson

Local Klondike Valley Creamery products on sale at the Dawson City General Store. Photo by Suzanne Crocker.
It’s something Dawson City hasn’t seen since the 1930’s — local dairy products for sale. Klondike Valley Creamery, a dairy farm in Rock Creek, on the far side of the Klondike River, has been raising the first dairy cows the region has seen in almost 80 years.  And now the Creamery’s first dairy products have just arrived on grocery store shelves in Dawson.

Products for sale at  the Dawson City General Store include  a delicious onion-and-dill cheese spread and, for those with a sweet tooth, Mocha Labneh — the nutella of dairy products. Each container is labelled with the names of the cows who donated their milk for the cause!
The Creamery is planning to have  more local Dawson dairy products after this year’s river break-up.

Then and Now

Betty St. Jean (née Fournier) and a dairy calf in Dawson City in the 1930’s. Courtesy of Betty St. Jean
Loren and Jen Sadlier with Duchess and Lilly. Photo by Cathie Archbould
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Suzanne’s Blog: Mercury Levels in Yukon Fish – Do I Need to Worry?

A burbot liver is 6 times the size of other fish, and provides all the Vitamin D Suzanne and family need. Photo by Suzanne Crocker.
Burbot liver has been providing me with Vitamin D during the long Yukon winter. I know that fish tend to accumulate toxins from our water systems, especially predatory fish.  So I wondered, since I am consuming a fair amount of burbot liver this winter, do I need to worry about mercury levels and other contaminants such as PCB’s and DDT?

To my surprise I learned that, in fish, mercury accumulates in the muscle in levels much higher than in the liver.  This is the exact opposite of terrestrial animals such as caribou where mercury levels are higher in the liver compared to the meat.

Mercury levels in fish vary depending on the location but, in general, predatory fish (lake trout, burbot) have higher levels of contaminants than non-predatory fish (whitefish, grayling, salmon) and larger (older) fish have lower levels of contaminants than smaller (younger) fish.

According the limited burbot data we have available in the Yukon, the mercury levels in burbot muscle are five times higher than in the burbot liver.  However burbot muscle has the highest mercury levels of all the freshwater fish we catch in these parts. Chum salmon has the lowest mercury levels (less than a tenth that of burbot).

Based on Health Canada’s tolerable daily mercury limit is 0.47 ug/kg/day (for adult men and adult women who are not of child bearing age), my daily limit of burbot would be maxed out at 45 grams (1.5 oz) per day!  And my daily limit of burbot liver would be a whopping 225 grams (8 oz) per day. So my Vitamin D needs of 10 grams of burbot liver per day are no big deal.

But a daily limit of 45 grams of burbot muscle is a really small portion!  Of course, I am not eating burbot every day, so it still averages out ok – but it was a good reminder to limit my consumption of burbot.

So my take home message:  Burbot liver is a great source of local Vitamin D.  By consuming sautéed burbot liver one can get enough Vitamin D without too much mercury.   Burbot flesh should be considered a winter treat and if one is going to eat a lot of local fish, grayling and salmon would be better choices.

Want the stats? Here are the statistics from fish in Old Crow from a study by Yukon Research Scientist, Mary Gamberg Mercury per gram of fresh fish:
  • Burbot : 0.62 ug/g
  • Pike: 0.17 ug/g
  • Burbot liver:  0.124 ug/g
  • Grayling: 0.06 ug/g
  • Chum Salmon: 0.04 ug/g
(Based on a sample size of 14 burbot, 11 pike and 12 chum salmon from Old Crow and grayling from other Yukon locations.) For adults, the tolerable daily mercury limit is  0.47 ug/kg/day (Health Canada)  (less for women of child bearing age) This translates to a tolerable daily limit in grams of fish for an adult woman of my size:
  • Burbot : 45 g  (1.5 oz)
  • Pike: 164 g
  • Burbot liver: 225 g
  • Grayling: 466 g
  • Chum Salmon: 700 g
As mercury levels differ from one water system to another, I was curious as to what the levels would be in the burbot living in the Yukon River at Dawson City.  I sent in one 4 pound, 11 year old burbot for testing and levels came back as 0.23 ug/g mercury in the muscle and 0.04 ug/g in the liver.

The mercury levels from the Old Crow burbot are 2.5 times higher than the levels in the one fish tested from the Yukon River.  One sample only, but it suggests that the mercury levels in the Yukon River near Dawson are less than the levels around Old Crow. For PCB’s and DDT, the amount found in 10 grams of burbot liver from the Old Crow study was quite low, one tenth of the tolerable daily intake for PCB’s and one twentieth for DDT.      
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Suzanne’s Blog: Burbot in Exchange for Sunshine

Burbot is a remarkable fish well-suited to the Northern climate. Photo by Suzanne Crocker.
Living in the far North, I usually take Vitamin D, the sunshine vitamin, during the winter months (1000 IU/day).  This year I wanted to see if a local diet alone would keep my Vitamin D levels stable.  Not unexpectedly, my levels dropped below normal as the days became shorter. But, thanks to local Dawsonite and ice fisher, Jim Leary, I was introduced to burbot and it saved the day!

Jim Leary ice fishing for burbot on the Yukon River. Photo by Suzanne Crocker.
Burbot is an amazing fish.  It is a freshwater, carnivorous, bottom feeder that thrives at the coldest times of the year under the ice of the Yukon River.  In fact, it has chosen January as its favourite spawning month.  Burbot live to be decades old.  They have no scales and some folks find them a bit ugly and eel like.  I think they have beautiful eyes.  A survivor if ever I saw one.  Which leaves me with some ambiguity about catching them.  But their flesh is a thick and delicious white fish and their livers are especially nutritious.

A burbot liver is six times the size of most other fish, and provides the Vitamin D that Suzanne and family need. Photo by Suzanne Crocker.
Burbot liver is huge – six times larger than the livers of other freshwater fish of the same size, and comprising about 10% of their body weight!  And their liver is packed with Vitamin D and Vitamin A, in fact 4 times the potency of the Vitamin D and A found in cod liver. Turns out that a mere 10 grams of burbot liver per day would supply me with the equivalent of 1000 IU of Vitamin D.  Chopped into chunks and sautéed in butter, burbot liver tastes similar to scallops.  So consuming 150 grams of burbot liver every couple of weeks was no hardship on the palate.

And it worked!  Thanks to the burbot, my Vitamin D levels returned to normal. Fish tend to accumulate toxins from our water systems, especially carnivorous bottom feeding fish.  I will share my findings on mercury levels in burbot and some other Yukon fish in the next blog. If you’ve ever wondered about the nutrients in wild meat and fish harvested from the land, check out this comprehensive table of data compiled by Centre for Indigenous Peoples’ Nutrition and Environment at the University of McGill:

> Traditional Animal Foods of Indigenous Peoples of Northern North America
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Backyard Grain-Growing in the Yukon: The Logical Next Step

by Miche Genest

Faust Barley, a hull-less variety.
I used to think you needed a prairie to grow grains, or at least a big field. Then I met Dan Jason, farmer, gardener, author, cook, and owner of the seed company Salt Spring Seeds. His dearest wish is that we all become grain growers, whether we have a plot of land, a box in a community garden or a backyard of clayey soil in downtown Whitehorse.

Jason lives and gardens on Salt Spring Island, and he is a legend in British Columbia. For the past 30 years, he has been finding, cultivating and saving the seeds from ancient varieties of grain; grain that has grown in different parts of the world for thousands of years, providing sustenance and a way of life for numerous peoples. Jason is passionate about the beauty of these grains, in the field and on the plate; he loves the way they look and the way they taste, their grace and their nutritional benefits.

In 2017, introduced by our mutual publisher, we collaborated on writing Awesome Ancient Grains and Seeds, a garden-to-table book with growing information and recipes for grains from amaranth to rye. Now he has me convinced that not only can I cook with grains, I can grow them too. “Growing grains is a lot easier than just about anything else,” he says. “It’s like planting grass.”

Despite our short growing season and cold winters, farmers have been growing grain for animal feed and green manure in the Yukon since the Gold Rush era. But we have a history of growing grain for human consumption too. Hudson’s Bay Company trader Robert Campbell harvested a “keg” (about seven and a half gallons) of barley at Fort Selkirk in 1848. In 1901, the Pelly Farm produced wheat and sold it, ground into flour, in Dawson City. Oats, wheat and barely were successfully grown at the federal experimental sub-station at the J.R. Farr farm on Swede Creek, 10 kilometres south of Dawson, in 1917.

Whole grains. Clockwise from left: emmer, hull-less barley, buckwheat, oats, rye.
In the present day, Otto Muehlbach and Connie Handwerk at Kokopellie Farm near Dawson have grown and harvested rye, barley and even wheat, keeping Suzanne Crocker and her family well-supplied with grain to grind into flour for baked goods in this year of eating locally. In 2016 Krista and Jason Roske harvested 40 kilos of triticale, a rye and wheat hybrid, at Sunnyside Farm in the Ibex Valley near Whitehorse. I worked with their grain and flour all year long. Several years ago Tom and Simone Rudge of Aurora Mountain Farm on the Takhini River Road harvested rye and ground it into bread flour; it made beautiful bread.

But this is all grain grown on a larger scale, with the expectation of a fairly substantial yield–if not enough for the commercial market, then at least enough to contribute to the grain and flour needs of a small household. It’s unlikely that backyard grain growers will feed the family more than a few meals with their crop. Their yield will be of a different sort—fun, satisfaction, and beauty in the garden at every stage of growth. And maybe a celebration or two.

This sesaon Randy Lamb, Yukon agrologist and chair of the Downtown Urban Gardeners Society (DUGS), which runs the Whitehorse Community Garden, plans to plant a 4 x 20-foot bed with barley from local farms, a hull-less barely from Salt Spring Seeds, and Red Fife wheat. “I should have enough to make bannock or pancakes for one of our season-end potluck socials at the Whitehorse community garden this year,” he says.

He plans to thresh and mill the grain himself, make hot cakes, and serve them with raspberry jam made with honey and berries from the garden. “My goal is to present it as “100-metre hotcakes”, based on the 100-mile diet theme.” That’s a pretty great incentive to grow some grain.

Dan Jason would add, remember to eat your backyard grains whole, too. Or sprout them. “You get a lot back, sprouting your grains,” he says. Jason thinks hull-less barley is a great idea, because it’s pretty tricky for the home gardener to remove the hulls from other varieties.

He suggests rye, too, for the Yukon climate. “Rye is super-hardy. It can go to -40°C easily. And it’s easy to harvest, because the hulls are really loose-fitting. You just rub them and they come apart.” Flax and buckwheat are also good possibilities for the northern backyard grain grower. They’re hardy, adaptable and produce beautiful flowers.

Flax in beautiful flower.
Those who grew up in the Whitehorse suburb of Riverdale will remember oats and wheat growing in their midst, in the front yard of the Cable family’s house. Jack Cable planted the grains as green manure. “I was brought up in market garden country, so I knew that soil needed amendment, up here. It wasn’t a grain harvesting exercise, it was a soil-amendment exercise.”

Urban grain-growing was so unusual (and still is!) that the 15 x 5–foot plot in the Cable front yard became a local attraction. Cable’s intention was to grow a lawn once the soil had been amended. In my downtown Whitehorse backyard there is no lawn, but there is grass. Long, wild, tenacious grass.

My intention is to replace some of that grass with grain. Jason suggests roto-tilling a few times first to dislodge the grass. He thinks I might even be able to grow amaranth—it’s worth a try. I’m hoping that raising grain turns out to be as low-intervention as raising the wild grasses, lambsquarters and dandelions currently holding dominion in my yard.

Would it not be the coolest thing, to walk through a Yukon community and see not mown lawns, but waving seas of grain growing in all the backyards? That would be some local attraction. As Randy Lamb says, “The locavore movement has been growing for years up here. Every season I’ve been adding something extra to my local diet. Veggies and berries are easy. Fruit, eggs, and honey take a little more effort. Grain is the logical next step.”      
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Suzanne Presents at Northern Food Network Webinar

Suzanne, along with the Yellowknife Farmer’s Market and Food Charter Coalition will be guest presenter for a webinar this coming Monday 12 March 2018  from 10 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. PST on what sustainable food means in the North. There is no charge.


The Northern Food Network (NFN) is co-hosted by the Arctic Institute of Community-Based Research (AICBR) and Food Secure Canada (FSC) as a space for people working in and interested in northern food security to share, learn about best practices across the North and advance collective action on food security. They co-facilitate bi-monthly webinars and teleconferences with focused presentations and discussion around 4 core  themes: environment, health, agriculture, and food security.
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Art Napoleon on Food, Cultural Revitalization and the Need for Balance

Art Napoleon tends to a saute of rabbit and ptarmigan at Our Camp is Our Kitchen.

by Miche Genest

When Art Napoleon found he had to cook a selection of wild and cultivated ingredients from a local food “mystery box” over a campfire with three Indigenous Yukon Elders, he said, “Oh no! You’re going to gang up on me.” He had reason to be fearful—Tetl’it Gwich’in Elder Mary Jane Moses, Teetl’it Gwich’in Elder Dorothy Alexie, and Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in Elder Peggy Kormandy are all experienced campfire cooks with many years of cooking on the land behind them.

But as participants at “Our Camp is our Kitchen” learned, when it comes to campfire cooking Napoleon is no slouch. He and the ladies transformed the ptarmigan, rabbit, caribou guts, caribou meat, sheep ribs, wild rhubarb, cranberries, birch syrup and a host of other delicacies into soup, stew, fricassee, viande grillée and pudding that fed anywhere from 75 to 100 people. Their cooking fire burned in an galvanized metal drum with a grill set over top; their camp was a wall tent and a tarp shelter in the parking lot beside the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in Community Hall.

Traditional pudding made with wild rhubarb and cranberries.
The event was part of the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in Myth and Medium Conference, held from February 19 to 23 in Dawson City. Napoleon was a special guest at the conference, and the organizers worked him from morning till night, calling several of his skills into play. He arrived Monday afternoon, gave the opening keynote address that evening, cooked all day Tuesday, performed a concert Tuesday evening, gave a talk on food and nutrition Wednesday morning and flew out Wednesday afternoon.

As Napoleon told the audience Monday night, he juggles several careers–singer-songwriter, educator, conservationist, naturalist. He holds an MA in Language Revitalization from the University of Victoria and is a former Chief of the Saulteau First Nation in north-eastern BC. Most recently, he’s co-host of APTN’s Moosemeat and Marmalade with British chef Dan Hayes — an exploration of two very different approaches to cooking wild game, the Indigenous and the classically trained.

Food and cooking are the sinews that tie much of Napoleon’s life and work together. He first learned how to cook on open fires and woodstoves as a child living in Peace River country, and later grew comfortable in modern cooking facilities. He has always loved cooking for people, and one of his approaches to cooking traditional food is to “gourmet it up.” “It’s given me great pleasure to serve good food to people, especially if I can present traditional food in ways that people haven’t tasted,” he said. “If you want to show the beauty of your culture, food is one way to do that.”

Ptarmigan, rabbit, and thyme.
Napoleon said that at heart he’s an educator, and cultural revitalization is a cornerstone of his life philosophy. “So food is something that fits in there nicely. Food and philosophy and cultural teachings—I don’t really see much difference between those.”

Napoleon, who lives in Victoria, advised people on how to “Indigenize their diet” in an urban context. In his talk on food, nutrition and planning on Wednesday morning he reminded the audience, “If you live in the city there’s lots of ways you can still access your traditional resources.” He goes back to his traditional territory to hunt; he receives packages of wild food from his family; he learns what wild foods grow in his area and goes out foraging.

“I can still be an Indian down there, I don’t have to be a Victorian.” Napoleon also suggested ways of incorporating better nutrition into modern diets, noting that on the land, “People ate clean and they were very active. They were in great shape. Our meats were the original free range organic meats.” Today, he said, “The food industry sucks. It’s all about the money. You’ve got to make it all about health, and make your own choices.”

The reality is that Indigenous people live in two worlds, he added, and even hunters supplement their traditional diet with store-bought foods. “They’ve just become part of the culture.” He laughed. “Red Rose tea is part of the culture!” He admires Suzanne for her efforts to eat only local food for a year, calling her endeavour “either crazy or brave, and maybe a little bit of both. I think it’s a lot of work, and would take great, great discipline.”

But he shares one of Suzanne’s concerns, mentioned in her presentation on Tuesday evening: how sustainable is her diet? Napoleon asked, “If everybody wanted to do it…would things get over-harvested? What kind of impact would it have on the land? Long ago people managed it in a way that was sustainable, but now there are bigger populations.”

These are questions shared and pondered across Canada and around the world: how do we feed ourselves in a sustainable manner? When the population will potentially reach 9.7 billion by 2050? As Indigenous people who live in two cultures, Napoleon said, “There’s no way we can survive as an island. That’s the great thing about the Yukon–the divide is not so wide as it is in Southern Canada.”

He ended his Wednesday morning talk on an emotional note. “You guys are lucky,” he said, near tears. “You guys who are living in territories that are bringing [the traditions] back.” Napoleon said he always likes to contribute food for thought in his work. Asked what he would like people to take away from his participation at Myth and Medium, he reflected for a minute and said, “The need for balance. Always remembering that we walk in two worlds, and there’s ways to return to your cultural integrity while still living in these modern times.”  


 





       
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Suzanne’s Blog: Yukon Poutine

My daughter, Tess, was having a craving – for poutine. It was then I realized that I could actually make a totally northern, totally local poutine!  And so I did. Dawson potatoes, Dawson cheese curds, and moose gravy!

Norland potatoes grown at Kokopellie Farm are stored fresh all winter in their root cellar.  With a skidoo or a four-wheel-drive truck I can brave this year’s long and bumpy ice road on the Yukon River and head to Kokopellie Farm on Saturdays between 2 and 5 pm to buy them direct from Otto’s root cellar. The potatoes were oiled with rendered beef tallow from the Klondike Valley Creamery and then baked into scrumptious fries.

I made the cheese curds with milk from the Klondike Valley Creamery with the help of rhubarb juice (instead of vinegar). And the moose gravy is from a recent moose roast, thickened with homemade potato starch. My children claimed it was lacking one of the key poutine ingredients – salt.  But in my mind it was delicious nonetheless.
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The Guts of the Matter

by Miche Genest

Guests line up to feast on wild foods,including offal, at Our Camp is our Kitchen.
All manner of foods were celebrated at the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in biannual Myth and Medium conference during the week of February 19, 2018, from whole grains to healing herbal concoctions to wild game. Not surprisingly, animal guts played a significant role, not just in cooking, but also in presentations and demonstrations, and in conversations among Elders and cooks from several Indigenous nations.

Vuntut Gwitchin hunter Stanley Njootli Senior told the audience on Wednesday night that the bag carried by The Boy in the Moon in the traditional story shared by many northern Indigenous peoples was filled with–caribou guts. Elizabeth Kyikavichik remembers that the first thing her family ate after a successful caribou hunt was the guts. Elizabeth, who is Teetl’it Gwich’in, grew up on the land near Fort MacPherson and was an avid student of her parents’ traditional hunting and cooking methods. In traditional Indigenous cooking the whole animal is consumed, from antler to hoof, and guts are a highly valued source of nutrition.

In fact, the same is true of pretty much every culture worldwide — traditionally, guts have been eaten with pleasure and gusto. Think of blood pudding, or liver paté, or steak and kidney pie, or the Greek kokoresti, or the Costa Rican sopa de mondongo. In North America it’s only since the Second World War that we’ve turned our backs on guts, or offal — we’ve grown accustomed to the relatively inexpensive, choice cuts made available through the large-scale industrial raising and harvesting of animals, and by the supermarket retail model of selling food.

The smaller butcher shops that typically carried offal have become harder to find. Now we tend to be squeamish about what we perceive as the stronger flavours of animal guts, and their different look and texture. In recent years Indigenous hunters in the Porcupine Caribou range have noticed that some hunters were leaving gut piles and heads behind in the field when they harvested caribou.

The Van Tat Gwich’in Government and the Porcupine Caribou Management Board collaborated on the publication of Vadzaih, Cooking Caribou from Antler to Hoof in part to encourage a return to traditional hunting practices. The book is both a field guide and cookbook, designed to appeal to hunters and cooks of all ages, pairing old and new ways of preparing caribou heads, shins and offal, as well as other parts of the animal.

When I worked on developing the contemporary recipes for Vadzaih with the community cooks of Old Crow, I grew accustomed to eating, and enjoying, kidney, heart, liver, tongue and brain. But I shied away from the intestines and the stomach. I don’t know why, since one of my favourite dishes as a teenager dining out with my parents was sweetbreads (pancreas) in Madeira sauce. Why was pancreas okay and not stomach? I don’t have an answer.

At Myth and Medium, those who attended the “Our Camp is Our Kitchen” cooking fire during the Shì Lëkąy Food Tastes Good Knowledge Fair were lucky enough to sample two different kinds of caribou stomach, prepared by Tetl’it Gwich’in Elder Mary Jane Moses, Tetl’it Gwich’in Elder Dorothy Alexie, Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in Elder Peggy Kormendy and visiting cook, hunter, musician and TV producer Art Napolean, of the Beaver people in Peace River country in northern BC. I screwed up my courage and tried a piece of tripe. It was mild, sweet and chewy, and I would try it again without hesitation.

The “bible” and tripe — two different parts of caribou stomach served at Our Camp is Our Kitchen.
I’m not alone. Among the Canadian settler population, due to the resurgence of interest in eating local food and the growing concern about food waste, guts are making it back onto the menu. International celebrity chefs like Gordon Ramsay and Hugh Fearnsley-Whittingstall are serving tripe in their restaurants. Canadian chef and author Jennifer McLagan has published Odd Bits, How to Cook the Rest of the Animal, a cookbook devoted to cooking the head, feet and guts of domestic animals. (We relied heavily on Odd Bits when putting together Vadzaih.)

And small butcher shops are making a comeback not only in big urban centres, but, luckily for us, in Whitehorse and Dawson City. At Myth and Medium we learned that Suzanne had taken to eating burbot liver in order to replenish her internal stock of Vitamin D. Suzanne offered samples of the liver during her workshop on Wednesday afternoon. We also ate caribou tripe and caribou head cheese and several different kinds of pemmican cooked by several different Indigenous people. And the Moosemeat Men served moose nose at Thursday evening’s feast.

I went home to Whitehorse with a few pounds of charcuterie made by Shelby Jordan of BonTon Butcherie and Charcuterie, and a surprise bonus. This was haggis, also made by Shelby, from pork liver, pork and wild boar tongues, boar head, boar kidneys and beef suet, all from locally raised animals, mixed with the requisite toasted stone-ground oatmeal and a flavourful blend of warm spices, the whole thing stuffed into beef bung, or appendix, which is in modern times the typical haggis casing.

Haggis, as we know, is the classic Scottish way of eating the whole animal, a traditional dish cooked right after the hunt and now most often served on poet Robert Burns’s birthday. I brought my BonTon haggis to a potluck dinner party on Sunday after the conference, where it was enjoyed by 14 people, some of whom had never eaten haggis or offal before. My husband, who is a Scot, said it was the best haggis he’s ever had. Converting the masses to offal one caribou stomach, one haggis, at a time.

The last of the haggis: breakfast!
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Myth and Medium 2018: Food, Culture, Identity

Every second year, the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in First Nation in Dawson City, Yukon, hosts a colloquium/conference entitled Myth and Medium. The theme in 2018 was Food, Culture, and Identity, so not surprisingly, given her First We Eat project, Suzanne was asked to be one of the  contributors to the event.

Suzanne with fellow speaker Art Napoleon (a.k.a. Travelling Sun). A former Chief from the boreal foothills of Northeastern BC, Art is a recognized cultural educator and faith-keeper, and co-host on the popular cooking show Moose Meat and Marmalade. He is also a talented singer-songwriter and humorist with an uncanny ability to improvise and meaningfully engage audiences of all ages and backgrounds. Photo by Miche Genest.
The week-long celebration kicked off on Monday with a potluck dinner, where attendees were invited to bring a dish that helped denote their heritage or identity. (Suzanne’s contribution to the potluck was her 100% locally-sourced garlic chevre on rye crackers.) But the evening’s main course was the collection of food-centered stories that followed by various guest speakers, including Suzanne and her husband Gerard.

The next day the official presentations began, given by a collection of notable speakers, indigenous and non-indigenous alike, including luminaries like Art Napoleon and Lawrence Hill, to name just a couple. Participating in a session entitled The Land Sustains Us, Suzanne paid tribute to those in the local community whose wisdom and aid have made her local-only experience possible. The audience was also treated to a preview snippet from Suzanne’s film, with very favourable crowd reaction.
Famed author and current Berton House Writer-in-Residence Lawrence Hill was among the conference presenters. He described how food and drink enriched his experiences travelling as a young man and volunteer in West African countries of Niger,
Cameroon and Mali, and how it influenced his development as a writer. Photo by Maria Sol.


Other Myth and Medium 2018 sessions touched on a wide variety of subjects, as one would expect from something as fundamental and far-reaching as food. From looking at wild plants for food and medicine — and a way to reconnect with traditional values — to finding what ancient stories can teach us about our food, the speakers were diverse, knowledgeable, and thought-provoking.

The next two afternoons saw Suzanne at a booth and doing hands-on cooking demonstrations and tastings of some of the things she has learned during her journey — from using colts foot ash as a salt substitute, to frying up burbot liver to help boost her Vitamin D levels.

Myth and Medium wasn’t all business. The event, which told attendees to: “Bring your dancing shoes and your appetites,” included lots of feasting, music, laughter, and activities.  One of the highlights was the outdoor campfire, where there was cooking of all manner of wild local meat, including some rarer fare, such as moose nose, lynx, and a local ‘haggis’ made by stuffing a caribou stomach. Ultimately though, the conference proved the old adage (although perhaps on several new levels as well), that we are what we eat.  
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Suzanne’s Blog: The Search for Salt – Takhini Salt Flats

Takhini Salt Flats, Photo by Bruce Bennett.
I continue to search for a local option for salt in my community of Dawson which is nowhere near the sea.  I haven’t yet had to resort to collecting the sweat off Gerard’s back as he chops wood.
Illustration by Chris Healey 
So far coltsfoot ash has been the most surprising result – a wild plant whose bland tasting leaves magically transform into a salty ash after they are dried and burned.  Dried celery leaves have been my go-to salt substitute – adding a mineral rich flavour to all things savoury.

Burnt coltsfoot ash has a definite salty flavour. Photo by Suzanne Crocker. From FirstWeEat.ca, the Food Security North of 60 website supporting First We Eat, a documentary by Yukon filmmaker Suzanne Crocker about eating only locally-grown foods in in Dawson City, Yukon, in Canada's North, for one year.
Celery leaves. From FirstWeEat.ca, the Food Security North of 60 website supporting First We Eat, a documentary by Yukon filmmaker Suzanne Crocker about eating only locally-grown foods in in Dawson City, Yukon, in Canada's North, for one year.

Coltsfoot ash (left), and celery leaves. Photos by Suzanne Crocker.

I am still researching the possibility of harvesting salt from local animal mineral licks.  In the meantime, the Takhini Salt Flats came onto my radar – an endangered ecosystem that occurs in a small pocket of the Yukon a short drive from Whitehorse. This ecosystem is so unique that it is not even found in nearby Alaska. The Flats are not close enough to Dawson to be considered an option for my year of eating local.  But it did inspire me to question if the salt from Takhini Salt Flats would be suitable for human consumption. 

I contacted Bruce Bennett, Coordinator of the Yukon Conservation Data Centre, at Environment Yukon to find out more. And the more I learned about the Takhini Salt Flats, the more fascinated I became – unique plants that can be watered with salt water, ancient arctic ground squirrel cloaks from the Beringia Era, and inland ponds of shrimp!  Read on and I will share some of the fascinating information I have learned about the Takhini Salt Flats.

Takhini Salt Flats is considered an athalassic salt flat which means the salt does not come from the sea.  Instead, with a mountain range close by, the salt comes from silt from glacial lakes. Areas of permafrost prevent the water from soaking into the ground and there are no outlets to take the water to nearby rivers. So the water gradually evaporates leaving salt crystals on its surface. Besides being very salty, the ground at Takhini Salt Flats is also very alkaline with pH values between 8.5 to 9.5.

For both these reasons, most plants will not grow there.  However there are some unique salt and alkali loving plants that flourish, many of which give the salt flats its distinctive red hue.  And some of these plants are also edible. One such edible red plant, that does not grow elsewhere in the Yukon, is Sea Asparagus or Arctic Glasswort (of the Salicornia family).   Too bad it doesn’t grow near Dawson.   Apparently, the young shoots taste salty and are rich in calcium, iron, Vitamin B and C and are exceptionally high in Vitamin A.

Another fascinating edible plant at Takhini Salt Flats is Salt Water Cress (Arabidopsis salsuginea) part of the mustard family and a relative of canola.  Salt Water Cress, is a ‘super plant’  – you could water it with sea water and it would grow! And it will survive freezing, drought and nitrogen deficiency!  It used to be common throughout Alberta, Saskatchewan but is now virtually non-existent in those areas due to agriculture and housing developments.

Chenopodium (the Goosefoot family) is related to quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa).  The two most common Chenopodium in the Yukon are Lamb’s Quarter (Chenopodium album) and Strawberry Blite (Chenopodium  capitatum) – both edible.  (I ate a lot of both while foraging last summer and Fall!) However there is a rare Chenopodium, Chenopodium salinium, that dates back to the Beringia Era, that can still be found at Takhini Salt Flats.  Chenopodium salinium pollen, which is preserved by freezing, helps archeologists date artifacts uncovered by melting permafrost in the North.

The remains of Kwäday Dän Ts’ìnchi , Long Ago Person Found, was discovered in 1999 by sheep hunters on Champagne and Aishihik First Nations territory in Tatshenshini-Alsek Provincial Wilderness Park in British Columbia near Haines Junction, Yukon.  His remains were found as well as his walking stick, a spruce root hat, a small bag made of beaver skins and a fur cloak made out of arctic ground squirrel pelts. A high portion of preserved Chenopodium salinium pollen was found on the fur of the cloak and that clue showed that he had visited alkaline flats and helped date Kwäday Dän Ts’ìnchi to around 1700 AD.

Arctic ground squirrel cloaks were worn ceremonially by indigenous people long ago and traditional trails can still be found in the Takhini Salt Flats which would have been used by indigenous hunters over 700 years ago. The Takhini Salt Flats were a natural grassland for arctic ground squirrels because the high salinity of the soil prevents forests from taking over.   Although, for unknown reasons they died out for a time, Arctic ground squirrels are now starting to return to the Takhini Salt Flats.

One would expect to have to go to the ocean to find shrimp.  Not so!  Several varieties of shrimp live in the inland ponds of the Takhini Salt Flats. One such variety is the Fairy Shrimp.   Fairy Shrimp are the Sea Monkeys that many of us remember from our childhood!  Many migratory shore birds come to the Takhini Salt Flats for a shrimp feast. But I digress.   What about the salt?

Salt-encrusted stump. Photo by Bruce Bennett.
The salt itself is mainly in the form of mirabilite (Na2SO4·10H2O – also known as Glauber’s salt) and thenardite (Na2SO4).  There is about 5% sodium chloride (NaCl) which is what we eat as table salt, but there is no easy way to separate out the NaCl from the mirabilite and thenardite.  Mirabilite and thenardite are used by the chemical industry to make soda and also used in glass making.  Mirabilite is also used in Chinese medicine and thernardite is also used in the paper industry.

My conclusion?   Even if I did live closer to the Takhini Salt Flats, I’m not sure it would be safe to be sprinkling this salt on my food.   Although I would certainly be taste testing the edible plants that grow there. Regardless, Takhini Salt Flats is a fascinating place to visit.  If you are in the area, Bruce Bennett gives tours of every August.  Details can be found at Yukon Environments Wildlife Viewing Program.
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Cooking with Kate!

Kate shows off her dinner made completely with local ingredients. Photo by Suzanne Crocker.

Kate, 15 years old, made a delicious supper of moose steak with Béarnaise sauce and roasted vegetables using only ingredients local to Dawson. The Béarnaise sauce tasted very lemony despite having no lemon juice in it. Kate substituted rhubarb juice for both the vinegar and the lemon juice. And she used ground nasturtium seed pods in place of pepper.

> Check out Kate’s recipe for Yukon Béarnaise Sauce

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Nunavut’s The Laughing Chef Promotes Local Food in the North

Rebecca Veevee, Nunavut’s The Laughing Chef. Photo by permission, Rebecca Veevee
Inuk chef and cooking show host Ooleepeeka (Rebecca) Veevee, The Laughing Chef, is a familiar and beloved face in Nunavut.   Armed with her ulu, her infectious smile and her sense of humour, Ooleepeeka is the driving force behind the Inuit Broadcasting Company’s popular TV show “Niqitsiat” (which means “Good Food Ideas”) – a cooking show that profiles Northern dishes made with traditional Inuit food from the land or “country food”.

Caribou pizza, goose soup, char casserole, seal pie, beluga muktuk stir-fry are just some of the dishes that Ooleepeeka Veevee cooks up on her show.  Ooleepeeka often brings guests on her show including NHL hockey star Jordin Tootoo (first Inuk to play in the NHL). No one is too famous to learn from Ooleepeeka!

In 2015 Ooleepeeka Veevee received the Governor General’s Meritorious Service Award for her work promoting traditional Inuit foods. In awarding her the honour, the government cited how her TV program has been recognized for combating a growing epidemic of diseases related to poor nutrition in northern communities.

Ooleepeeka has shared her variation of a Traditional Seal Meat Recipe (link) with First We Eat. “Niqitsiat” has been broadcast in Inuktitut on the Inuit Broadcasting Company since 2009 and can be viewed on APTN . Check out an episode of Niqitsiat, Ooleepeeka Veevee teaching how to cook BBQ arctic char and caribou head.

> Click here for Ooleepeeka Veevee’s Traditional Seal Meat Recipe
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New York Chef Champions the Farm-to-Table Food Movement


“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” – John Muir

New York chef, Dan Barber, likes to tell how he experienced an epiphany a decade ago watching his chefs constantly dipping into the flour bin located outside his office. He realized that he knew nothing — where it came from, or how it was grown — about this ubiquitous, and somewhat tasteless ingredient, which was pretty much in everything the restaurant prepared.

He set out to find a healthy, holistic flour alternative, but what started simply as a search for organic, locally-sourced grains, led to a broader understanding of sustainable agricultural methods. He realized there were many secondary crops being planted by the farmer to nurture and protect the soil and yield, but not necessarily contributing to the farm’s bottom line. That’s when Barber realized he needed to integrate his culinary methods and list of ingredients to include all those being used by the grower.

Barber has long been a champion of the local, organic food movement. But his interest goes beyond just serving this type of fare in his pioneering farm-to-table Blue Hill restaurant. Now, with a new book, The Third Plate: Field Notes for the Future of Food, Barber is striving to change not only the way food is grown, but the consumption habits of Americans as well.

Barber’s relates how his pursuit of intense flavor repeatedly forced him to look beyond individual ingredients at a region’s broader story. In The Third Plate he draws on the wisdom and experience of chefs, farmers, and seed breeders around the world, and proposes a new definition for ethical and delicious eating. He charts a bright path forward for eaters and chefs alike, daring everyone to imagine a future cuisine that is as sustainable as it is delicious. Dan Barber, chef and co-owner of Blue Hill in Manhattan and Blue Hill at Stone Barns in Pocantico Hills, New York, and author of The Third Plate: Field Notes for the Future of Food. Photo by Lou Stejskal

In Barber’s view, modern industrial food systems are actually disconnected from the whole because of their large-scale specialization and centralization of food products. For organic farm-to-table agriculture to be truly sustainable, the whole process, including those preparing and consuming the food, need to be treated as parts of an interconnected, holistic fabric.

Barber has now opened a second restaurant, Blue Hill at Stone Barns, a working farm and celebrated educational center in the Hudson Valley region of New York, where he both practices and preaches his philosophy.

And the world is taking notice. He has received several accolades and awards for both his cuisine and his crusading efforts. In 2009, he was named one of Time’s 100 most influential people in the world.

In an article in The Atlantic magazine, Barber describes how one of his inspirations is John Muir, (a naturalist, author, environmental philosopher, and early advocate for the preservation of wilderness in the United States), who wrote: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”
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Suzanne’s Blog: Local Sourdough Starter

The dough rising on a batch of 100%-local sourdough bread. Photo by Suzanne Crocker.
My three kids have been desperately missing bagels.   And toast. You might recall that last winter, in anticipation of this, I experimented with sourdough rye and barley bread  – with mixed results. Our first three months of eating local were entirely grain free.  Then, against many odds, a successful crop of wheat and rye was harvested just as winter started to blanket Dawson with snow. 

Shortly thereafter I found a way to grind the grains and the miracle of flour re-entered our diet. I have no yeast.  But sourdough starter has been around the Dawson area for over one hundred years – introduced during the Klondike Gold Rush.  In fact, there are Yukoners who continue to feed sourdough starter from the Gold Rush days.  With regular feeding, you can keep it indefinitely. Therefore, I decided to classify it as a ‘local’ ingredient.

But I wondered – could you actually make a sourdough starter from scratch, from 100% local Dawson fare?  Bev Gray’s “The Boreal Herbal” held a clue – juniper berries.  I thought I would give it a try. I started with 1 tbsp of flour from wheat grown at Kokopellie Farm, added to that 1 tbsp of Klondike River water and about 5 dried juniper berries that I had picked in the Fall. 

I mixed them all in a small clear glass – so that I could easily see any remote chance of bubbling– a successful sign of fermentation.  I covered the glass loosely and let it sit in a warm place.  I wasn’t very optimistic.  When I checked on it later I was rather shocked to see those wonderful bubbles appearing within the mixture!  Now sourdough starter truly is a local ingredient!

I continued to feed the starter for a few days until it seemed quite active and then proceeded to make a loaf of sourdough bread.  For my first attempt, I decided to be decadent and use only freshly ground wheat flour – no rye.  And it worked!  Beginner’s luck perhaps, as it was the best batch I have made to date.  Subsequent batches have varied between bricks requiring chainsaws to slice them and slightly more palatable varieties.

> View the recipe for sourdough starter

Bread dough is like a living organism and sourdough bread even more so.  Every time I make it, it comes out differently.  It has become a luxury (depending if it is a good batch or a brick batch), not a staple.  But great to know that, even starting the sourdough starter from scratch – a 100 % local Dawson bread is possible!

> See the recipe for Yukon Sourdough Bread

A finished loaf of sourdough bread made with completely-local ingredients. Photo by Suzanne Crocker.
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The New Kids In Town

New goat kid Freddie at Sadlier Farm, Dawson City, Yukon. Photo by Suzanne Ccrocker. From FirstWeEat.ca, the Food Security North of 60 website supporting First We Eat, a documentary by Yukon filmmaker Suzanne Crocker about eating only locally-grown foods in in Dawson City, Yukon, in Canada's North, for one year.
New goat kid Fiona at Sadlier Farm, Dawson City, Yukon. Photo by Suzanne Ccrocker. From FirstWeEat.ca, the Food Security North of 60 website supporting First We Eat, a documentary by Yukon filmmaker Suzanne Crocker about eating only locally-grown foods in in Dawson City, Yukon, in Canada's North, for one year.
New goat kid Freda at Sadlier Farm, Dawson City, Yukon. Photo by Suzanne Ccrocker. From FirstWeEat.ca, the Food Security North of 60 website supporting First We Eat, a documentary by Yukon filmmaker Suzanne Crocker about eating only locally-grown foods in in Dawson City, Yukon, in Canada's North, for one year.
New kids Freddie, Fiona, and Freda. Photos by Suzaane Crocker.

There are 3 new kids in town!  Welcome to Freddie, Fiona, and Freda, born 10 days ago at Sun North Ventures in Rock Creek, outside Dawson City, Yukon.

Goats are a marvellous addition to food security in the North. According to the Northern Farm Training Institute in Hay River, NWT, one person needs approximately 1 million calories per year.  The milk from just one goat provides 600,000 calories per year, more than half our calorie needs!  In contrast, the meat from one goat would only provide 40,000 calories.

Goats are multipurpose.  Female goats will provide milk as long as they are breeding and reproducing.  Goat manure can be added directly to a vegetable garden as fertilizer – it doesn’t need to compost first as does horse, cow and chicken manure.   And goats not capable of milk production or not required for breeding can become a local source of meat.

Becky and Paul Sadlier are two of many farmers who are successfully raising livestock in the North, despite the challenges of overwintering, feeding and breeding.

Becky Sadlier with Freddie. Photo by Suzanne Crocker.
Larger animals, like goats, pigs and cows are able to produce enough body heat to keep their barns warm without needing any external heat – even at minus 40° C.  Finding local feed is important, as shipping costs are expensive to bring feed from down south. 

And then there is the breeding – keeping variety in the gene pool to keep the stock healthy without having to import animals from down south. Congratulations to the Northern farmers who are finding ways to make it work. Do you know of other goats being raised further North than Dawson?  Let us know.
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Sean Sherman: The Sioux Chef


Sean Sherman is known as the Sioux Chef and he is on a mission to revitalize indigenous cuisine across North America. Sean and his indigenous Sioux Chef team create delicious meals using local indigenous ingredients — game meat, foraged plants, and wild grains. They exclude ingredients introduced since colonization such as dairy products, wheat flour, processed sugar, beef, chicken and pork.  No bannock or fry bread! T

he traditional native foods are low glycemic, contain healthy fats and great proteins.  Amaranth, quinoa, wild rice,  vegetable flour, cedar, juniper, sage, bergamot, squash, corn, maple syrup …. these are just some of the staple ingredients in the Sioux Chef pantry. The result, says Sean, is “vibrant, beautiful and healthy. It is a way to preserve and revitalize indigenous culture through food.”



As a chef, Sean found he could easily find food from all over the world but he had difficulty finding foods that were representative of his indigenous culture.  So he began researching what his Lakota ancestors were eating in times past.  His research took him into the foundations of indigenous food systems including Native American farming techniques, wild food usage and harvesting, land stewardship, salt and sugar making, hunting and fishing, food preservation, Native American migration histories, elemental cooking techniques, and Native culture and history.

Sean and the Sioux Chef team take knowledge from the past, apply it to modern day and create something new from it. They have just released a  fantastic cookbook “The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen”   complete with award winning recipes and teaming with knowledge.  This is Sean’s version of ‘The Joy of Native American Cooking’!

Through the non-profit organization NATIFS, North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems, the Sioux Chef team have a dream to increase access to local indigenous food across North America.  They plan to help set up Food Hubs across the USA, Canada and Mexico, each consisting of a restaurant and a training centre that focuses on local indigenous foods of the area.


>Get more information about The Sioux Chef and NATIFS
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2017: My Banner Year With Local Triticale

Triticale bounty!

by Miche Genest

On the last day of 2017, I’m looking back on a year of cooking with local foods and reflecting on the highlights. I was lucky enough to spend much of 2017 cooking and baking with a locally grown grain: triticale from Krista and Jason Roske’s Sunnyside Farm, located in the Ibex Valley close to Whitehorse.

The Roskes acquired some seed from Yukon Grain Farm in the fall of 2015 and planted it on a portion of their land, intending to plow the plants back under to enrich the soil. But 2016 was such a good growing year that the plant actually matured, a rarity for grain in the Whitehorse area.

From that planting the Roskes harvested about 40 kilos of grain, by hand, and sold small quantities of whole grains, bread flour and  pastry flour to customers in and around Whitehorse. I learned about their grain and flour from Jennifer Hall, executive director of the Yukon Agricultural Association, and a great champion of local farmers and their products. The Roskes delivered one kilo each of grain, bread flour and cake and pastry flour to my house in early 2017.

I was in the midst of developing recipes for a cookbook celebrating ancient grains, written in partnership with Dan Jason, a passionate organic farmer and owner of Salt Spring Seeds, and experimenting with all kinds of grains. (Awesome Ancient Grains and Seeds will be released by Douglas and McIntyre in early 2018. Stay tuned for Whitehorse and Dawson launch details!)

The Roskes’s bread flour made a beautiful sourdough pumpernickel-style bread, and the pastry flour produced gorgeous muffins, excellent quick bread, delicious beet gnocchi and most recently, lovely birch syrup shortbread cookies for Christmas.

That triticale got around in 2017. Chef Chris Whittaker of Forage and Timber Restaurants in Vancouver made tiny mushroom tartlets with the pastry flour at a Travel Yukon dinner last February, and in June, chef Carson Schiffkorn and I served whole triticale grain with a morel mushroom-miso butter to guests at Air North and Edible Canada’s Across the Top of Canada dinner at Marsh Lake.

I served the very last of the whole grain, with more miso butter, for a media dinner hosted by Travel Yukon on November 26. Everybody loved the story of the accidental success of this beautiful, locally grown grain.

Triticale is not an ancient grain, but a hybrid of wheat and rye first developed in the late 1800s in Scotland and Germany, combining the grain quality of wheat with the hardiness of rye. In 1954 the University of Manitoba experimented with the viability of spring triticale as a commercial crop, and in 1974 the University of Guelph did the same with winter triticale.

Winter triticale varieties are particularly good for short-season areas like the Yukon. For the Roskes, hand-harvesting triticale grain “quickly lost its charm,” reported Krista. However, the success of growing triticale has whetted their appetites for more grain experiments, and Krista said they’re planting spring wheat in 2018. “Fingers crossed we will have wheat for flour by next September. I’ll definitely let you know if it works out!”

Last time we spoke, the Roskes were contemplating buying more machinery — perhaps a small combine and a small grain cleaner. “It’s farm evolution,” said Krista. I’m sad to say goodbye to the last of the whole triticale grains, but very happy that I will be returning from Christmas holidays in Ontario to a few cups more of triticale flour in my pantry at home. Birch syrup shortbreads anyone?

> Click here for a recipe for birch syrup shortbreads.

Follow the story of the Roskes’s grain growing adventures on their Facebook page, @sunnysidefarmyukon  
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In Far Northern Norway a Chef Strives for Polar Permaculture

Chef Benjamin Vidmar in front of his domed greenhouse. Photo courtesy of PolarPermaculture.com.
Local eco-chef and self-proclaimed foodie Benjamin l. Vidmar, has a dream. He wants to make the remote northern Norwegian community of Longyearbyen, Svalbard more sustainable, and to produce locally-grown food. Svalbard is an archipelago in the Arctic Ocean, located about midway between continental Norway and the North Pole. The latitude of the islands range from 74° to 81° North, making them some of the most northerly inhabited places on Earth.

Like many communities north of the arctic circle, there is no viable soil in Svalbard.  How does one grow local food if there is no local soil? In 2015 Chef Vidmar started a company called Polar Permaculture Solutions, whose goal is to apply permaculture principles and ecological design to create a circular economy in Longyearbyen, and “to connect people back to their food.”

Working at the time as head chef at the Svalbar Pub, he noticed how all the food was being flown or shipped to the island. However, in the past food had been grown on Svalbard, and Vidmar wanted to return to that tradition — but with some modern enhancements and without having to ship in soil. Vidmar started with hydroponic systems using commercial fertilizer, but felt he could do better.

Why ship fertilizer up to the island, he reasoned, when there is so much food waste available to compost and produce biogas? Food waste in his town is dumped into the sea, and he took up the challenge to grow locally-grown food making use of available resources on the island. Polar Permaculture researched what others were doing around the Arctic, and opted to go with composting worms, specifically red worms, which excel at producing a natural fertlizer from food waste. He got permission from the government to bring worms up to the island, which took a year and a half, but “was worth the wait.”

Vidmar’s company is now growing microgreens for the hotels and restaurants on the island.  Fine dining chefs use microgreens to enhance the attractiveness and taste of their dishes with their delicate textures and distinctive flavors. During the growing process, worm castings are produced, and this natural fertilizer that can be used to grown more food.

In addition to composting with worms, Polar Permaculture has started hatching quails from eggs and is now delivering fresh locally produced quail eggs to local restaurants and hotels. Their next step will be to get a bio-digestor setup and to produce biogas with it. The worms are mostly vegetarian, but with a digestor, the operation will be able to utilize manure from the birds, as well as food waste that would normally be dumped into the sea.

This will also allow them to produce heat for their greenhouse, as well as produce electricity that can run generators to power the lights. A natural fertilizer also comes out of the digestor, which will then be used to grow more food for the town. What started as one chef’s personal journey has become a local permaculture operation that is reshaping the nature of the local food economy, and providing an inspiration for other Northern communities interested in food sustainability.

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10 Billion: What’s on Your Plate?

By the year 2050, the world’s population is expected to be 10 billion people.  How will we be able to feed 10 billion people? Valentin Thurn’s documentary “10 Billion:  What’s on Your Plate?” takes the viewer across the world to examine possible solutions to this question – from insects to artificial meat, from industrial farms to micro-farms. 

If you eat food, this documentary is a ‘must see.’ And, although the feature length version is difficult to view from Canada, until Jan 21, 2018 you can watch the 53-minute version for free online thanks to TVO. Ontario’s educational TV network. https://tvo.org/video/documentaries/10-billion-whats-on-your-plate

The conclusion might surprise you.  Or it might not. Start the New Year with a sense of hope for the future and take 53 minutes of your time to watch “10 Billion: What’s on Your Plate” before January 21st.

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Suzanne’s Blog: I Cooked a Steak!

Raw moose steak with its rub. Photo by Suzanne Crocker.
I cooked a steak!  This may not seem like such a big deal, but it is the first time I have ever successfully cooked a steak.  For many years, I was a vegetarian.  Actually this only changed when I hitched up with a moose hunter who liked to cook.  I am probably the only person on the planet who has difficulty roasting a chicken. 

Steak, has also been a mystery to me.  How to cook it so that it is tender and not over done.  Not my forté. Moose steak is particularly daunting, as it is not the tenderest of meats, requiring long, slow cooking or marinating.  So I have always opted to leave the moose steak cooking to Gerard.  He manages to cook it, thanks to marinades and the BBQ (a cooking device that I have also never mastered). Ah, the marinade.  Let’s see – no soy sauce, no vinegar, no wine.  So how to marinade?  Gerard tried marinating in rhubarb juice, but it wasn’t very successful.  Perhaps it just needed more time. 

Dawn Dyce of Dawson City to the rescue!   Dawn marinades her moose (and any wild game) in milk.  I had heard tales of Dawn’s most tender moose roasts, so I decided to give it a try.  In my case I had just made some chevre, so I had whey on hand and decided to marinade the moose steaks in whey.  At Dawn’s suggestion, I put the thawed steaks in a ziplock bag, added some whey, removed the air and set the bag in the fridge for 24 hours, turning it over now and again when I noticed it.

Steak cooking on the grill. Photo by Suzanne Crocker.
Hoping that the whey would impart tenderness to the moose steak, I still had the dilemma of flavour and how to actually cook the darn thing.  Enter Whitehorse chef Miche Genest!  One of the many lessons I had from Miche’s week long visit in my kitchen, was how to cook a moose steak with only the local ingredients I had on hand.  Miche taught me about rubs.  So, remembering her moose rub lesson, I removed the moose steaks from their whey marinade and patted them dry.  

In the  re-purposed coffee grinder (no coffee in this house) I blended together dried juniper berries, nasturtium pods, and spruce tips, and then rubbed the spice mix onto both sides of each dried steak.  Then I wrapped the steaks in plastic wrap and set them into the fridge for a couple of hours. 

Miche also taught me about cooking – hot and fast.  Miche likes her steak rare so she sears it for 1 ½ minutes per side.  I decided to go a little longer – but I did watch the clock. The result?  Yummm!  Tender and tasty.  Drizzled with a moose demi-glaze (made from moose bones – recipe to come later).  Perhaps my ears deceived me, but I think I heard 15-year-old Kate say, “You could open a restaurant after this year, Mom.”  Fine praise indeed for the mother who didn’t like cooking!

> View the recipe for Moose Steak with Yukon Rub
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Suzanne’s Blog: Cut Off!


For two days the North Klondike Highway has been closed due to unseasonably warm weather causing black ice and massive frost heaves.  This means that my community of Dawson City, as well as the communities of Mayo, Fort MacPherson and Inuvik, are all cut off from the rest of Canada.  No road in.  No road out.  No grocery trucks.  No mail.  

Ten days before Christmas. Air North, the only airline that links our communities to Whitehorse and hence, the rest of Canada, has managed to squeeze in extra flights during the short window of December daylight, to help transport the many people who are now unable to drive south. 

But this is not a panacea.  Yesterday the plane couldn’t land in Dawson due to bad weather.  Some folks won’t get a seat on the plane for another four days.  And although the planes can transport people, they can’t supply Dawson  and Inuvik with groceries.

So here it is, another reminder of our particular vulnerability in the North.  It’s not the first time.  It happened on an even larger scale in 2012 when the only road into all of the Yukon was closed due to mudslides – causing the shelves of the many large grocery stores in the Yukon’s capital, Whitehorse, to go bare within a couple of days.

There is no doubt we are seeing the effects of climate change around the world, and especially in the North. Dawson’s average temperature this time of year should be minus 20° to minus 30° C.  For the past two weeks we have had temperatures ranging from plus 2° to minus 10°C.  Whitehorse has had above zero temperatures and rain.

This is the second year that the Yukon River has failed to freeze between Dawson and West Dawson.  Without an ice bridge, the journey to town for West Dawsonites for supplies is now 12 km instead of 2 km – and currently only passable by foot, skidoo, or dog team. These are quickly becoming the new norms in the North.  Another poignant reminder of the importance of increasing our self-sufficiency and our food security. The importance of lessening our dependence on infrastructure that links us to the south. 

The reason why I am putting myself to the test and feeding my family of five only food that can be sourced locally for one full year. I, of course, have enough food to get me through.   Many others have freezers full of moose meat.   Hopefully, the highway will soon re-open and this event will be considered a mild inconvenience in the memories of many. 

But should we pass it off so casually?  Is it actually the canary in the coal mine.  And rather than a temporary inconvenience, a foreshadowing of things to come.  A memory that should inspire adaptation and change. Many studying global food security suggest the answer will be in the development of  more local, small-scale organic farms and growers.  I agree. 

And I believe this will be especially important for Northern Canada along with a renewed understanding of what we can source locally from the land.  The less we need to rely on ‘one road in, one road out’ the better off we will be.
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Suzanne’s Blog: Sugar Beets Sweeten the Deal

Sugar beets can be turned into sugar (in jar, at left) or syrup (right). Photo by Suzanne Crocker.
I love birch syrup and am grateful to Sylvia Frisch and Berwyn Larson who are raising their two daughters in the bush and producing birch syrup commercially.  During the past 4 ½ months of eating only local foods, we have consumed 24 litres of birch syrup.  I have discovered that the flavour of birch syrup alone can substitute for the ‘far east’ spices of cinnamon and all-spice.  I have even been known to down a shot of birch syrup, straight up, during those moments when, in a previous life, I would have grabbed a piece of chocolate – to get me through a moment of emotional or physical despair.

I also love David McBurney’s local honey – it is pure, delicate, and divine.  And it is treated like a delicacy in the family.  It also makes the perfect sweetener to enhance other delicate flavours that would be overpowered by the robust flavour of birch syrup. But there are times, especially in baking, when chemistry is required and a liquid sugar option just doesn’t do the trick. 

Now that I have local flour, and Christmas is coming, baking is on my mind.  So what to do when crystalized sugar is required? Birch syrup, unlike maple syrup, does not crystalize.  I learned this last April while visiting Birch Camp. 

So, with birch sugar no longer an option, I ordered GMO-free sugar beet seeds.  I have never had any luck growing regular beets, so I recruited others to grow the sugar beets for me –  the great gardeners Paulette Michaud and Becky Sadlier.  

Unbeknownst to me, long-time Dawson farmer, Grant Dowdell, also had my year of eating local on his mind and ordered non-GMO sugar beet seeds to see if they would grow in the north.  The sugar beets grew marvelously for all, confirming that they are indeed a reasonable crop for the North.   They like warm days and cool nights – perfect for a Dawson City summer.  

I ended up with 350 pounds worth to experiment with! Sugar beets contain approximately 20% sucrose, the same sugar found in sugar cane.  One quarter of the world’s refined sugar comes from sugar beets. In Canada, Taber, Alberta is the industrial hot spot for growing and processing sugar beets into sugar. 

On a commercial scale, lime (calcium oxide) and carbon dioxide are added to form calcium carbonate which solidifies and pulls out any impurities – thus resulting in familiar white sugar.  No such additions for a local home-made sugar, so the resulting sugar is brown with a richer taste.

There is a paucity of information out there on just how to make sugar from sugar beets at home, so I gave up on research and moved to trial and error.   After all, with 350 pounds of sugar beets, there was room for experimentation and failure. 

And failure there has been!  Although no failure has yet to see itself in the compost.  The family seems more than willing to devour the failures – be they sugar beet toffee, sugar beet gum, sugar beet tea.  Even burnt beet sugar has found a use. (Thank goodness because there has  been a lot of burnt beet sugar!)

In the process, I have also discovered the wonder of the sugar beet – a root vegetable that was previously unknown to me.  Sugar beets are often touted as a food for livestock or a green manure crop so I was expecting the taste of the sugar beet itself to be unpalatable.  But it is just the opposite!   Cooked up, it is a delicious, sweet, white beet. 

The sugar beet leaves are also edible.  And amazingly, even after the sugar is extracted, the sugar beet pulp remains sweet and delicious.  I’m afraid the local Dawson livestock will be getting less sugar beet pulp than previously anticipated this year. One thing is for certain – processing sugar beets into sugar requires time and patience. 

Here are my step-by-step instructions on how to make syrup (easy) and sugar (difficult) from sugar beets. Sugar was first extracted from sugar beets in the mid 18th century.   In the early 19th century, during the Napoleonic wars when French ports were cut off from the rest of the world, Napoleon encouraged wide-scale sugar beet production and processing.  France remains one of the world leaders in sugar beet production and most of Europe’s sugar comes from sugar beets, rather than sugar cane.

Consider adding non-GMO sugar beet seeds to your next seed order.  In Canada, they can be found from Salt Spring Seeds and from T&T seeds.  Sugar beets grow well in the north and are a delicious root vegetable in their own right.  But don’t throw out the water you cook them in, as this water is sweet and can easily be used to make beet syrup and beet syrup candy.   And, if you are brave, sugar! 

If you live in an area populated by deer, be warned that sugar beet tops are a great attractant for deer.  Word is now out to the Yukon moose so perhaps next year Dawson’s sugar beet rows will require fencing!

> View the recipe for Sugar Beet Sugar and Syrup
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Suzanne’s Blog: Moderation Goes Down the Grain


Grains have now entered my local diet.  And, unfortunately, I did not heed the concept of moderation with their re-introduction. Spending almost four months entirely grain free was very interesting.  Certainly, it was the one food that haunted me.  When I ventured outside my house, the smell or sight of baking was associated with a sense of longing.   Plates of bannock at Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in feasts, the smell of Nora Van Bibber’s cinnamon buns at Fall Harvest Camp, the desert table at potluck dinners, the baking at Christmas bazaars – those were the difficult times.   Those were the times when I realized how important it was that my family agreed to the ‘no grocery store food in the house’ policy.   

I do have will power, but I’m not sure how much. I have also come to realize how much grains contribute to a sense of being full.  Without them, potatoes help fill the gap.  As does a mug of steamed milk.  In the absence of grains, these have become my go-to’s when I need a quick snack.  Mashed potato cakes have become the morning staple to replace toast, bagels, or cereal. I have really become quite fond of them and haven’t yet tired of eating them almost every morning.

At the start of this local diet, there was an almost instant melting away of extra pounds.  Gerard’s weight loss was the most noticeable, losing 30 pounds during the first two months!   Was this due to being grain free? The other unexpected result of eating local was a distinct lack of body odour. Could that also have to do with being grain free?  Have those folks who live a gluten free existence noticed the same phenomena?

When Yukon chef, Miche Genest, came to stay with us last week I had to clean up the grains that had been drying in the loft floor so that Miche would have a place to sleep.  The barley is not yet threshed.   And I haven’t figured out how to de-husk the buckwheat or hull the oats. But thanks to Otto and his combine, the wheat and the rye were threshed and just waiting for me to find a way to grind them.  

So, one evening, when 12-year-old Tess started talking about how much she yearned for a bowl of cereal, I came up with an idea.  Why not boil the whole rye grains!  And so Tess did.  Accompanied by warm milk, the first mouthful was an extremely comforting and satisfying experience. 

All my grain longings seemed to come to the forefront as I ate spoonful after spoonful.  Somewhere in the logical side of my brain was a small voice suggesting that downing a giant bowl of cooked whole rye might not be the best way to re-introduce grains after four months without.  But I couldn’t stop.  So I ate the whole bowl. 

I had a fitful sleep that night.  For the next 2 days, I felt like there was a brick in my stomach. I produced enough gas to power our house.  Short-term gain for long-term pain.   Lesson learned.  I will attempt a more moderate re-introduction once I recover from this one.

> Check out the recipe for Mashed potato cakes
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Bee Whyld Produces “the Champagne of Honey”

Despite its sub-arctic climate, the Yukon is blessed with several apiaries. With care, bee hives can survive the harsh winters, even as far north as Dawson City. This is the profile of one of the Yukon’s honey producers.

Bee Whyld is a small apiary in Watson Lake, Yukon, specializing in producing Fireweed Honey. Owned and operated by Courtney and Joel Wilkinson, Bee Whyld was officially founded in June of 2016, although it had been in the works for a few years prior.
Bee hives around a field of fireweed - Photo Courtesy of Bee Whyld
Bee hives around a field of fireweed – Photo Courtesy of Bee Whyld
Courtney originally had a job as a salesperson for an Alberta honey company, and was working towards keeping her own bees. On a visit to the Yukon to visit her then-boyfriend Joel, she noticed the fields of fireweed common in the territory.  Courtney knew from her experience selling honey that Fireweed is not only one of the rarest honeys, and also one of the best for flavour and medicine, and this sparked the idea to bring bees up to the Yukon and make Fireweed Honey.

Bee Whyld’s hives have managed to successfully overwinter – Photo courtesy of Bee Whyld.
Beekeeping in the North is quite challenging, especially overwintering and maintaining the health of the hives, but through trial and error Courtney and Joel have learned what it takes to successfully produce honey in the Yukon.

This brood frame was attacked by a bear, who killed more than half the population of bees - Photo Courtesy of Bee Whyld
This brood frame was attacked by a bear, who killed more than half the population of bees – Photo Courtesy of Bee Whyld
Their honey bees gather all of the nectar that they turn into honey from the Boreal Yukon forests, with fields of flowers that are untouched by pesticides, and not genetically modified. Their honey is also both unpasteurized and raw, meaning they don’t heat it at all. This ensures all the natural antibiotics, pollen, and Royal Jelly are still intact within the honey,  making it a good choice for medicinal uses (such us helping to heal wounds, helping to fight off infections, helping to reduce allergies, and alleviating sore throats). Bee Whyld’s Yukon Fireweed Honey has been called “the Champagne of honey.” It is a rare honey prized around the world for its medicinal qualities, and its light sweet taste.
Bee Whyld’s Yukon Fireweed Honey – Photo Courtesy of Bee Whyld
     
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Sugar Beet Syrup and Homemade Potato Starch

By Miche Genest

Sugar Beet Syrup and Homemade Potato Starch
When I came to Dawson to cook with Suzanne, I was prepared for frugality, for the careful husbanding of food supplies — I had read Gerard’s blogs about the one onion a day, the rationing of juniper berries. I was prepared for ingenuity, too, the experimentation with flavour in the absence of salt, sugar, spices, and oil.

What I was not prepared for was how Suzanne’s frugality and ingenuity would change my way of thinking. I’ve always thought I was experimental, and I am, given a cupboard full of nutmeg and cinnamon and garam masala to complement the juniper berries and spruce tips, the many varieties of sugar and syrups available to me, the wine for wild berry reductions, the fresh leeks and fennel for moose stock.

I’ve always considered myself a frugal cook, wasting little, using the whole vegetable, saving scraps for stock. But here, in this kitchen, frugality and ingenuity have taken on new meaning. Here’s how.

Ingenuity: Suzanne has figured out how to make sugar beet syrup. Simply put, cover chopped sugar beets in water, bring to the boil, simmer for several hours, strain, squeeze excess juice from the beets, boil down cooking liquid into a delicious, complex, earthy syrup, a syrup that goes well with everything on the table, sweet or savoury, livens up a cup of warm milk, and substitutes for sugar in baking (with some adjustments, but that’s for a later post). Sugar beets grow well in this climate, and we speculate: is there a future Yukon industry in sugar beets?

Frugality: Chef Brian Phelan came over and taught Suzanne and I how to make Rappie Pie, a favourite Acadian comfort food. The recipe involves juicing 10 pounds of potatoes and cooking the pulp in boiling chicken stock — there’s more, but that’s for another post. The by-products of the juicing are as many as 14 cups of potato liquid covered with a layer of stiff foam, and, at the bottom of the bowl, a cement-like residue of potato starch.

Suzanne would not allow any of this by-product to be composted. I cooked the potato liquid for use in soup. She skimmed off the foam and baked it into an odd but tasty version of potato chips — a recipe that still needs perfecting, but the basics are there. And she chipped the starch out of the bowl, crumbled it onto a drying screen lined with parchment, and put it in the food drier. The next day, she ground some in a coffee grinder, made a paste with cold water and it thickened our moose stew to perfection.

I helped with all of these endeavours, but Suzanne was the driving force; fierce, committed, consumed with curiosity. I was prepared for her fierceness, but did not know exactly where it might take us. Now I do. It takes us to ingenuity and frugality, sugar beet syrup and homemade potato starch; it takes us to new ways with food we hadn’t thought of.
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Rooting Around in The Root Cellar

by Miche Genest

Sheila Alexandrovitch at Mount Lorne Community Centre in September 2017
Sheila Alexandrovitch has homesteaded on the Annie Lake Road, 40 kilometres south of Whitehorse, since 1981. Over the years she’s raised goats, llamas and sled dogs; she’s brought up her two children on the farm, and pursued an artistic practice there, working with materials like willow, beads, precious stones and wool. These days she raises sheep (producing beautiful felted work with their wool) and as always, vegetables.

Lots and lots of vegetables. Alexandrovitch is locally famous for her vegetable ferments, selling jars and jars of them at the Fireweed Market in Whitehorse and the weekly market at the Mount Lorne Community Centre on the Annie Lake Road all summer long. At Mount Lorne’s last, stock-up market of the year, on September 26, she and her helper stood behind two tables groaning under her ferments, and giant mounds of fresh carrots and potatoes.

As I purchased a few pounds for our house, we struck up a conversation about root cellars — I knew she was pretty much self-sufficient, and curious about her storage methods.

Every winter, Alexandrovitch stores an impressive weight of vegetables in her root cellar — this year, she’s got 135 pounds of potatoes, 80 pounds of carrots, 40 pounds of beets, 20 to 30 pounds of parsnips, 35 pounds of turnips and 7 or 8 cabbages. Asked when she runs out of supplies, she replied, “I don’t. By the end of June I’m out of carrots, but I always have rutabagas and beets, and I always have potatoes. And by the end of June, we’ve got greens.”

The cellar that stores this bounty is a hole dug into the ground under her house, accessed by a trap door in the kitchen floor. The cellar is framed in with 2 x 6 boards, insulated with Styrofoam, sheeted in on the inside and completely sealed. In the 2½-foot crawlspace between the earth and the floor of the house, the walls of the cellar are exposed, so the above-ground portion is wrapped with Styrofoam and foil and banked with dirt.

The space is 7 feet long by 6 feet wide and around 4 ½ feet deep — about chest height for Alexandrovitch. There’s no ladder — she just lifts the trap door and jumps in. She piles whatever supplies she’s retrieving onto the kitchen floor, and then jumps out of the cellar, the same way you’d push yourself out of a swimming pool. (She finds this athletic feat unremarkable.)

In winter the temperature in the root cellar is around 2° or 3°C above freezing. There’s no air circulation system, but she’s never noticed any ill effects from ethlylene — not surprising, because most of the foods she stores don’t produce ethylene. (Learn more about the fruits and vegetables that produce ethylene here.)

Alexandrovitch keeps endive, leeks and chicory in pots, in another cold space, this one on her porch. She runs out of those greens sometime in January, but then she’s got all her ferments, plus frozen leeks and kale, kept in her freezer at a neighbour’s place.

She has canned goods and grains in the root cellar, and she might drive to town for coffee, butter and oil, but she prefers to use goose fat—she’ll render 6 to 8 litres this year–or pork fat, which she’ll also render.

Alexandrovitch estimated that she spends about 95% of her time growing, processing, preserving and preparing her food. “But what a good way to spend 95% of your time,” she said. “It’s not so hard. It’s just a bunch of work.”

Some of Sheila’s work.
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Seal Hunt is Foundation of Traditional Lifestyle

Angry Inuk by Inuk filmmaker Alethea Arnaquq-Baril  documents the economic, social, and cultural devastation caused by decades of anti-sealing activism.
For the Inuit communities of Nunavut, seal meat has been a staple in their local diets for millennia. The meat is a vital source of fat, protein, vitamin A, vitamin B12, and iron. Seal pelts are also prized for their warmth, and since first contact with Europeans, trade in seal products has played an important role in the regional economy.

This revenue is especially crucial in remote areas where many foodstuffs need to be imported, and transportation costs are high. A commercial seal hunt in Southern Canada, most notably the annual spring hunt in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, has generated controversy in recent decades, led by high-profile animal-rights activists, and resulting in a 2006 call by the European Union for a ban on all harp seal and hooded seal products.

The traditional Inuit seal hunt has been swept up in an animal rights activism fervor, adversely affecting an age-old way of life. But now indigenous groups are standing up for their heritage and defending their traditional lifestyles.

Inuit filmmaker Alethea Arnaquq-Baril has released Angry Inuk, a feature-length documentary that defends the Inuit seal hunt. In Toronto, Indigenous chef Joseph Shawana is keeping seal meat on the menu at his Ku-Kum Kitchen restaurant, despite a petition calling for its removal, and is galvanizing a groundswell of public support of his own.

Partially shot in the filmmaker’s home community of Iqaluit, as well as Kimmirut and Pangnirtung, where seal hunting is seen as essential for survival, Angry Inuk also follows an Inuit delegation to Europe in an effort to have the EU Ban on Seal Products overturned.

The film criticizes NGOs such as Greenpeace and the International Fund for Animal Welfare for championing animal rights while ignoring the needs of vulnerable northern communities who depend on the hunt for their livelihoods.

Chef Shawana, whose restaurant specializes in indigenous-themed dishes, says he researched the Northern hunt before opting to serve seal meat. He points out the Inuit seal harvest is very sustainable and humane, and contrasts it with the roughly two million cows, 20 million pigs, and 550 million chickens killed each year in Canada alone during large-scale food production. But at the root of the issue, says Shawana, is the need to acknowledge and support Canada’s aboriginal cultures.

Seal tartare is just one of many indigenous-themed dishes served at Ku-Kum Kitchen by owner/chef Joseph Shawana.
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Singing the Storage Blues

By Miche Genest


Miche here.   In late October my household of two took delivery of a 35 lb box of local carrots, cabbage, beets and potatoes, part of a fundraiser for a local school. It was not an overwhelming amount, but it did bring up again one of our failures when we built our house in Whitehorse. We forgot to include a cold room.

The family home in downtown Toronto, where I grew up, had a cold room. It was a dank, dark, spidery kind of place, and it was, on one occasion, the lair of a roast beef dinner, stored temporarily during a power outage and then forgotten. The roast beef, peeled potatoes and sliced onions transformed over time into an awe-inspiring, slime-covered monster. (We brought our friends to see it until my mother found out. As I recall she threw the dinner away, roasting pan and all.)

But though not altogether welcoming the cold room did what it was supposed to do—it kept whole, unpeeled, raw root vegetables cool enough for long-term storage.

Now, in present-day Whitehorse, my household doesn’t stockpile local root vegetables because we don’t have a cold space, apart from the fridge. Instead, we freeze, can, pickle, ferment, and go to the store to buy root vegetables that someone else has stored. Freezing, salting, drying, smoking, fermenting and canning are all technologies key to the long-term storage of food.

But only cold storage preserves the vegetable raw, so you can eat a crunchy, home-grown carrot in January or grate a local beet into your coleslaw in mid-March.

Over the next while here at First We Eat, we’ll be exploring food storage ideas from across the north. Tell us: how do you keep your vegetables over the winter? Do you have a root cellar? Do you cover your carrots in sand? Do you wash them first or not? What do you do about cabbage?

In the meantime, I see a lot of kimchi in my future.
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Suzanne’s Blog: Good News, Bad News – Grain Drain

Red Fife wheat plant topped with snow. Photo by Suzanne Crocker.
I am often asked which food I miss the most.   I had expected it would be chocolate or caffeine (very strong black tea was my comfort drink).   Surprisingly it is neither.  What I miss most is grains: cookies, pies, bread, bagels, rice, pasta – these items that were once staples in our household are no more.  The potato is trying its best to fill the gap, but after 85 days without, grains are definitely missed.

It is not easy to grow grains in the far north, as our growing season is so short.   But it has been done.

I feel like Northern grain is a character in one of those ‘Good News, Bad News’ stories:

The good news is that in 2016, Otto at Kokopellie Farm had a successful crop of rye and barley that he was able to grind into flour.  The bad news is that I used up all I had last winter experimenting with wheat-free and salt-free sourdough bread recipes.

Fortunately Otto planted rye and barley again this year and it grew well.  Unfortunately, in August, a moose ate the barley.  Fortunately the moose didn’t eat the rye (because it was protected by a fence).  And the GREAT NEWS is that, unbeknownst to me, Otto had also planted Red Fife wheat and it grew well (and was protected by the fence)!

Unfortunately, the combine required to harvest the grain was stuck 550 km away in Whitehorse, waiting for a bridge on the North Klondike Highway to be repaired.  Fortunately the bridge repairs finished just in time for harvest season mid September.   Unfortunately, while hauling the combine to Dawson, the trailer had several flat tires which caused another week’s delay.  Fortunately, the combine did eventually make it to Dawson. Unfortunately by the time the combine arrived in Dawson, it began raining and you can’t harvest grain when it is wet.

Fortunately there was a brief break in the weather in early October.  Unfortunately, there was no time to put the combine together because the root vegetables had to be harvested before the ground froze.  Fortunately grains can withstand frost.  Unfortunately, after all the vegetables were harvested it began to snow.  Fortunately dry snow can easily be knocked off the grain.  Unfortunately this snow was heavy and wet.  Fortunately the combine is now fully assembled and ready to go.  Unfortunately it is already October 23 and the wet, heavy snow remains on the grains.

There’s still a sheaf of hope that Kokopellie Farm’ field of snow-covered wheat can be hearvested. Photo by Suzanne Crocker.
Otto, a very pragmatic and optimistic farmer, still feels there is hope.   The wheat and rye are still standing. Some cold, clear weather might dry up the snow and make it possible to remove the snow from the grain so it can be combined, but time is running out.   

I am not sure how this good-news, bad-news story is going to end. My moose anxiety resolved with a successful hunt.  Now I have grain anxiety.
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Gerard’s Blog: Give Us This Day Our Daily Onion


It’s the rationing that will be my undoing. 

All summer and fall there has been an abundance of harvest coming through the house.  And when working outside, a simple stroll through the garden yielded tomatoes, cucumbers, carrots and the odd berry, which could satisfy those peckish moments enough to get a person through till the next meal.

Now, things are tightening up.  The other day, I was preparing a nice broiler of moose meat, lavishly garnished in onions and garlic, a decadent gesture in celebration of the successful hunt.  Suzanne strolled by, peeked over my shoulder, and did not deliver the expected awe in regards to my culinary efforts.  Instead, she took this as an opportunity for a discussion in realism and restraint.

She reminded me that we had limited stock for the winter, equivalent to “one medium-sized onion and one clove of garlic, a day.”  What we have is what we have.  Till summer.

I quickly realized that there is no room in that calculation for decadent delights.  And that’s when the fear started to crawl into my persona.  You see, my calculations suggest that we often have potato pancakes and scrambled eggs for breakfast, both accented with onions and/or garlic.  Naturally.  Then, a nice on-the-fly winter lunch could be canned moose meat fried up with a little…onion.  And/or garlic.  Something that could sustain a guy through the woodpile at 20 below.  And then there is the supper for a family with almost three teenagers.  That medium-sized onion is going to require some serious divine help.

And then there was last night.  As you know, Suzanne has been making birch syrup ice-cream fairly steadily recently, preparing for freeze-up which is the time when the cow becomes inaccessible.  So, last night she pulls out the ice-cream as a treat.  We all had some, and as a respectful gesture of appreciation for fine taste, I motioned for another round.  No luck.  That would deplete the stock.  What we have is what we have.  You can have today if you don’t mind being without tomorrow.

The problem I’m having is that I really care so much more about today than I do tomorrow.  We are talking ice-cream addiction here.  What has tomorrow got to do with anything?  Eat now.

You see, this is the kind of thing that comes naturally to Suzanne.  She enjoys calculated restraint.  Not everyone does.  She doesn’t know that.  It reminds me of a ten-day hike that she took me on years ago, before kids, when we walked the old Yukon Ditch from Dawson to Tombstone.  She took care of the logistics and food.  I had the simple job of lugging everything. 

Every day, in fact every moment of every day, I was hungry.  Suzanne had “done the calculations,” but the tiny meal allocations and the meager desert allotments of “either one square of chocolate or this sliver of fruit cake,” were not making any impression on my constant state of starvation. It was not till we returned to the land of food and sustenance, and after realizing that we had each lost one to two pounds per day (!!), that a re-punching of the numbers revealed that the calculation was quite incorrect.  No kidding.

So, this whole experience is starting to feel that it could be a déjà-vu opportunity, a chance to test our mettle, and perhaps a chance even for Suzanne to brush up on her math…
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Chum Succeeds King as Ruler of the River

Local fisherman and conservationist Sebastian Jones with a Chum salmon. Photo by Suzanne Crocker.
A Dawson fall tradition — and food staple — continues as the annual Chum salmon run is in full swing in the Yukon River.

Out on the river, several commercial fisherman are catching Chum to help fill the freezers of Dawsonites. There was a time when Chum salmon used to be known as ‘dog fish.’ This was when the King salmon (also known as Chinook salmon)  were running in such great numbers that Chum was reserved for dog food.  

This is no longer the case. The King salmon population has declined significantly and  eight years ago a moratorium on fishing of species was put into place, and there has been no commercial King salmon fishing in Dawson since then.

The Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in First Nation, who have traditional rights to the harvest, also voluntarily stopped subsistence fishing for King salmon in 2014 for a seven-year period,  in hopes that by then the King salmon population will have revitalized.

Dawsonites keep hope of a renewed King Salmon run someday.  In the meantime,  chum has become a staple in a local Dawson diet.  Suzanne especially enjoys it marinated in birch syrup and smoked or poached in the oven with onions and rhubarb juice.
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Think You Could Eat Only Locally?
Take the First We Eat Local Dish Challenge

It is harvest season and, in Dawson City, the end of the Farmers’ Markets.  It is a good opportunity to get what’s left of the fresh veggies before the winter sets in.  It is also a good time to launch our #FirstWeEatChallenge, a fun way in which everyone can help Suzanne come up with ideas to add to her locally-sourced menu.

Suzanne has been eating only 100% local foods for 51 days now, and it has been a real eye-opening experience. Think you could do it?  Perhaps you already do eat mostly local fare.  If you want to show your solidarity for Suzanne’s year, or just see for yourself how challenging or how easy it really is, we invite you to try preparing just one meal with only foods local to your community.  

Alternatively, check out the list of local Dawson City ingredients and make a “Dawson Local” meal. It would be ideal if you could stick to the same 100%-local-only standard as Suzanne for finding substitutes for salt, oil and spices, but we understand if that’s not feasible.

Either way, we trust that everyone’s creativity will blow us away. Come take the challenge, and share it with us on Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook using the hashtag #FirstWeEatChallenge, or send it to us via email .  

If you want, you can include the recipe for your dish so Suzanne can try it at home, with any necessary adjustments. We’ll then include it on our Recipes Page.    
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Internship Program Helps Arctic Communities Run Greenhouses

The Inuvik Community Greenhouse hosted a week-long workshop with community greenhouse coordinators from several Northern communities.
An innovative project led by the Inuvik Community Greenhouse Society is helping small, isolated Arctic communities, where access to fresh produce is scare, set up their own greenhouses and start raising fresh food. In June, community greenhouse coordinators from Aklavik, Fort MacPherson, Paulatuk, Sach’s Harbour, Tsiigehtchic, Tuktoyaktukc and Uluhakaktok attended a week-long internship program in Inuvik. The program covered everything from soil preparation through weeding, trellising, pruning, and soil care to harvesting and worm composting. The interns worked in the greenhouse and in outdoor gardens around the community, even receiving instruction in raising chickens. At the end of the course, each coordinator delivered a 30-minute workshop to prepare them for giving workshops in their own communities. The coordinator from Aklavik focused on engaging young people in the greenhouse, since it has been shown that when youth participate in community greenhouses, vandalism decreases significantly. Emily Mann, coordinator of the Inuvik Community Greenhouse, said that being gathered in once place allowed community coordinators to learn from each other and to establish a network for troubleshooting and sharing knowledge—the coordinators have since set up a Facebook page. The interns are now busy in their own communities, reaching out, teaching workshops and bringing local people in to garden together. In Aklavik recently, local children made hanging flower baskets for the Elder’s home. Every Elder received one. As Mann said, flowers are important for pollination, but they help to build community too. To see Emily Mann’s presentation on the internship project, watch the Northern Food Network’s Webinar # 3
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Farmers’ Markets Bring Local Produce to Dawsonites

For those in the Dawson City area seeking fresh, local produce, this is the best time of year. Local producers are starting to harvest their crops and there are two separate markets available where the freshly-grown vegetables and herbs are available for purchase.
The wealth of produce already available at the Dawson Farmers Market. Photo by Suzanne Crocker.
Every Saturday until mid-September the Dawson Farmers Market, located by the river on Front Street, is in full swing. You’ll not only find produce from several local growers, but there are also trees and plants for gardeners, and crafts as well.  Fresh vegetables and  herbs are already available in abundance, and as the season progresses  there’ll be berries, apples, and preserves as well. The Farmers Market runs from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. but you’re best advised not t wait until late in the day, as the produce is popular with Dawsonites, and some items sell out quickly.
Photo by TH Farm Instagram
Starting tomorrow, Wednesday 19 July, TH Working Farm will also sell their products to the public on their own Farmer’s Market, which will be held every Wednesday from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. at the Dänojà Zho Cultural Centre. The staff at TH farm has been working hard all year to provide local produce for Dawsonites, which will include radishes, green onions, zucchinis, potatoes lettuce and spring mix among others, with more variety of veggies to come as the season progresses. They also have been raising chickens and rabbits that are close to being ready for harvest, as well pigs and ducks, which will be available for purchase in the fall.
Radishes are ready to be enjoyed. Photo by TH Farm Instagram.
With this initiative, they are hoping to increase the variety and amount of locally grown food in the area, while teaching and training younger generations with an interest in agriculture.
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Northern Farm Training Institute’s Founder Receives National Honour

Jackie Milne, NFTI Founder & President.
One of the leaders in Northern food sustainability, Jackie Milne, the Founder and President of the Northern Farm Training Institute, was in Ottawa last Friday to receive the Meritorious Service Decoration from the Governor General. With global warming affecting traditional hunting grounds, Jackie saw a need to increase access to fresh produce in Canada’s northern communities. She established the NFTI in Hay River, NWT to teach the local population about sustainable, environmentally sound farming practices that would supplement traditional diets. Since 2013, the institute has trained nearly 100 farmers from across the north, with Indigenous students making up more than half of the program’s graduates. The Meritorious Service Decorations were established by Queen Elizabeth II to recognize the extraordinary people who make Canada proud. Their acts are often innovative, set an example or model for others to follow, or respond to a particular challenge faced by a community. The best candidates are those who inspire others through their motivation to find solutions to specific and pressing needs or provide an important service to their community or country.
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Listen in to Local Food Initiatives in Inuvik and Hay River, NWT – June 19th

Join the Northern Food Network for its third FREE webinar. This installment is on Growing Food and Community in the Northwest Territories. It takes place Monday 19 June from 10-11:30 a.m. PST (1-2:30 EST).  The webinar will feature presentations by:

During the webinar there will also be updates on the recently launched consultation process for a National Food Policy, and duscussion on opportunities to highlight northern perspectives in that process.

To register for the webinar, click here.

The Northern Food Network (NFN) is co-hosted by the Arctic Institute of Community-Based Research (AICBR) and Food Secure Canada (FSC) as a space for people working in and interested in northern food security to share, learn about best practices across the North and advance collective action on food security. 

AICBR and FSC are facilitating bi-monthly webinars and teleconferences with focused presentations and discussion around 4 core themes: environment, health, agriculture, and food security.

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Vertical Agriculture Coming to Carcross

A vertical agriculture facility is in the planning stages with the goal of having it built in Carcross this fall. This innovative project will be the first  of its kind in the Yukon. Tami Grantham, Natural Resources Coordinator with the Carcross-Tagish First Nation, says:  “What attracted us to this technology is the ability to grow greens year-round. It’s a goal and a mission for the government of Carcross-Tagish First Nation to become food-secure.” Construction would be managed through a new corporation created as a partnership between the Carcross-Tagish First Nation and Northstar Agriculture of which the First Nation will be 51 per cent owner. The system will recirculate water from a fish tank through a vegetable grow bed. Nutrients from the fish waste feed the plants, and the plants filter the water to keep the fish healthy. In normal aquaculture, excretions from the animals being raised can accumulate in the water, increasing toxicity. In an aquaponic system, water from an aquaculture system is fed to a hydroponic system where the by-products are broken down by bacteria into nitrates, which are utilized by the plants as nutrients, and the water is then recirculated back to the aquaculture system. The vertical part of this type of farming will be in the form of stacked layers that could be up to 10 meters high, in order to maximize production, contained in a warehouse-style space. Not only would this mean a possibility for fresh local produce and lower food prices in the community, but also the promise of food security, as this system allows year-round growing of vegetables in a sustainable way. The fish raised would be Tilapia, which is common in farming systems. Vegetables grown would include kale, spinach, and perhaps even strawberries and other vine crops.  
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Easy Tip for Re-Growing Celery

Regrowing celery - photo by Claus Vogel
Regrowing celery – photo by Claus Vogel
Claus Vogel is growing celery from celery! This is a great way to get more veggie from the bottom of a veggie that you would usually cut off anyway. Take the base from a stalk of celery, rinse it off, and put it in a shallow cup of warm water on a window sill. Change the water daily and keep an eye on it to see if any regrowth begins. You’ll see remarkable results in days and if you want, you can transplant the celery outdoors and have a great harvest at the end of the growing season.
Apparently this also works with romaine lettuce and green onions, and veggies similar to celery like fennel and celeriac.  Louise Piché was successful at re-growing ginger from a piece of store bought ginger root, and some adventurous people have even re-grown pineapples from the tops!
Anyone else had any success with re-growing veggies?
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See the Bees, Eh? Dawson Hive Successfully Overwinters

The bees look healthy despite of the challenges for beekeeping in the North
The bees look healthy despite of the challenges for Apiculture in the North
Photo by Suzanne Crocker
David McBurney’s honey bees have survived the winter!
Bees have been successfully overwintered in southern Yukon, but it has been trickier to achieve in the Dawson area due to big temperature fluctuations in March/April,  when it can be +20C in the afternoon heat of the sun and -20C at night.  David and the bee’s success this winter means Suzanne should be able to add a bit of honey to her local diet for this upcoming year.
Suzanne recently talked about sweeteners, as well as her search for vinegar, on a recent episode of Yu-Kon Grow It on CBC North’s A New Day with host Sandi Coleman.
Are you aware of other honey bees that have been successfully overwintered in Dawson or in areas further North? Let us know.
Suzanne visited David McBurney’s honey bees
Suzanne visited David McBurney’s honey bees – Photo by Suzanne Crocker
David McBurney’s honey bees
David McBurney’s honey bees – Photo by Suzanne Crocker
David McBurney’s honey bees
David McBurney’s honey bees – Photo by Suzanne Crocker
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Pemmican – Wild Kitchen Style

Another great pemmican recipe! This “Traditional Raspberry Pemmican” recipe comes from the show and blog “Wild Kitchen”.  Wild Kitchen is a project based in the Canadian sub-arctic about people who harvest wild food. 100% of the cast and crew are from the Northwest Territories and they work with what is available on the land to prepare nutritious recipes with a distinct wild flavor. You can watch Wild Kitchen episodes here and on their website you can find their awesome recipes.
Traditional Raspberry Pemmican recipe by Wild Kitchen
Traditional Raspberry Pemmican recipe by Wild Kitchen
 
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Pemmi-can-do with Ch’itsuh

Ch’itsuh or pemmican - photo by Mary Jane Moses from Old Crow
Ch’itsuh or pemmican made by Mary Jane Moses from Old Crow
Suzanne is looking for ways to keep her ever-hungry 17-year-old son, Sam, full next year.  Sam suggested that pemmican might be a reasonable locally-sourced snack food that will help him get through the year, especially since he spends lots of time doing physical activity.  After all, Canada was practically built on pemmican. Trading posts would seek this high-protein and high-energy food from the natives, and it was used to sustain the voyageurs, especially in winter,  as they traveled long distances. Mary Jane Moses of Old Crow shared some of her ch’itsuh (pemmican) with Suzanne.  Click here for a couple of classic pemmican recipes: Have a recipe for pemmican for Suzanne to try?  Please share here.        
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“Le Refuge” – France Benoit’s charming farm in Yellowknife

France Benoit in Le Refuge - Photo by Up Here Magazine
France Benoit in Le Refuge – Photo by Up Here Magazine
In a beautiful article by Up Here Magazine, France Benoit opens the gate to her home and farm “Le Refuge“, which she has lovingly built and tended to for the past 25 years. On this property, by the shores of Madeline Lake in Yellowknife, France grows a variety of vegetables to feed herself as well as to sell in the local farmer’s market, of which she is a founding member. France has been kind enough to share many growing and homesteading tips with Suzanne, which we have featured on FWE, and her creative and smart solutions for northern greenhouses keep us inspired. Thanks, France!
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Vadzaih: Cooking Caribou from Antler to Hoof

The Caribou cookbook has arrived!  Learn how to use all parts of the caribou. Traditional recipes such as ch’itsuh (pemmican), head cheese, and Caribou Bone Broth combined with new recipes such as Caribou Wonton Soup and Mushroom and Caribou Brain Ravioli.
Vadzaih: Cooking Caribou from Antler to Hoof" published by The Prcupine Caribou Management Board
“Vadzaih: Cooking Caribou from Antler to Hoof” published by The Porcupine Caribou Management Board
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Celebrating the Porcupine Caribou Herd

On April 21 and 22 Vuntut Gwich’in citizens, conservationists, scientists, members of the public and families got together to celebrate the Porcupine Caribou Herd with two days of presentations, films, panel discussions, kids’ activities, and caribou tastings at the Beringia Centre in Whitehorse. The event was hosted by Yukon Conservation Society (YCS), Vuntut Gwich’in First Nation (VGFN) and the Porcupine Caribou Management Board (PCMB), all of whom have a keen interest in the health of the herd. There was lots to celebrate. The herd is robust and growing in size. The relationship between northern indigenous peoples and the caribou that sustains them is respectful and strong. Harvest management strategies and hunter education programs are helping to ensure the herd continues to thrive. But there’s bad news, too. Of 15 barren ground caribou herds the Porcupine herd is one of only two that are known to be increasing. The others have decreased alarmingly in recent years. Barren ground caribou have been listed as threatened in Canada. And the Porcupine herd’s calving grounds in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge are once again under threat from oil and gas exploration. VGFN and their First Nations and Inuvialuit neighbours, conservationists, scientists and concerned citizens are working together to ensure protection of the herd, and Porcupine Caribou: Celebrate and learn about the herd was part of that effort. To watch the proceedings from the Porcupine Herd celebration event, visit yukonconservation.org.
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Yu-kon Grow It – Brian Lendrum: Goat farming pioneer

In this episode of Yu-kon Grow It,  Sandi Coleman interviews Brian Lendrum and Susan Ross, who have been goat farming outside of Whitehorse for decades and producing delicious goat cheese. Pioneers in the dairy business around Whitehorse, Lendrum and his wife found that their area around Lake Laberge had perfect conditions for raising goats, with rolling hills and lots of different vegetation for the goats to enjoy. On a regular basis, they would produce about 30 litres of milk a day, which translates to around 3 to 4 kg of cheese. Every week, they would take around 10 kg of their freshly made goat cheese to the local market, and sometimes sell out within the hour. They also experimented with goat milk yoghurt and sold bottled goat milk. Continue reading “Yu-kon Grow It – Brian Lendrum: Goat farming pioneer”
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Celery Flavor All Year Round

One way to have celery year round from the garden is to grow celeriac root. Weird looking but quite flavorful, celeriac root is edible raw or cooked, and tastes similar to the stalks of common celery.  It grows well in the North, keeps well in cold storage all winter, and apparently can have a shelf life of approximately six to eight months if stored properly. You can serve it roasted, stewed, blanched, or mashed, or added to your favorite stews or casseroles.  Peel it and chop it and use it in place of fresh celery in cooking.  Excellent combined with potatoes when cooking mashed potatoes! 
Celeriac Root - Wikimedia Commons
Celeriac Root – Wikimedia Commons
 
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Traditional Plants Community Info Session in Dawson City

On April 18th, Dawson City based ethnobotanist Leigh Joseph hosted a community information session at the Dänojà Zho Cultural Centre .  It was a great chance for Dawsonites to learn about the area’s traditional plant foods and medicines, as well as an opportunity to take part in the conversation.
Ethnobotanist Leigh Joseph
Ethnobotanist Leigh Joseph working with Devils club, an important medicine plant in Squamish.
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Tickled Pink – How April’s Full Moon is special for growing

Tonight, April 11th, is the date of this year’s Pink Moon, and everyone is talking about it on social media. But what makes the Moon pink on this particular date? Sorry to disappoint you, but turns out the Pink Moon isn’t actually of a rosy hue. The title “Pink Moon” is credited to Native American tribes, many of them practiced the custom of naming every Full Moon according to the cycles of the year (like Cold Moon in December or Harvest Moon in September). In the case of this moon, the “pink” comes from the wild ground phlox that rapidly blooms in the springtime. The different full moons were a way of tracking the seasons ahead, and you can still find this knowledge in the Farmer’s Almanac. Continue reading “Tickled Pink – How April’s Full Moon is special for growing”
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Don’t Judge a Vegetable By Its Cover!

Another tasty, although not so pretty vegetable that grows well in the Yukon is the root called salsify.  Don’t let the hairy dark exterior intimidate you. Peel it, and it tastes similar to a very sweet parsnip, and you can eat it raw or you can cook it as you would cook most root vegetables.
Salsify, peeled and unpeeled - photo by Suzanne Crocker
Salsify, peeled and unpeeled – photo by Suzanne Crocker
Salsify might not be easily found in the average grocery store, but it actually grows wild in many places in the world, especially the Americas.
Purple Salsify flower- Wikimedia Commons
Purple Salsify flower- Wikimedia Commons
But not everything is under the ground: the flowers from the salsify root are gorgeous to look at, and also edible! The shoots can be used like asparagus, either raw or cooked, and the flowers can be added to salads.    
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Ginger in the North?

Louise Piché is experimenting growing ginger this year – by planting a piece of ginger root from the grocery store.  So far it’s doing well!
Louise Piché's ginger is looking great! Photo by Louise Piché
Louise Piché’s ginger is looking great! Photo by Louise Piché
Did you know you can re-grow other vegetables from what you buy in the grocery store? Apparently, you can re-grow celery, romaine lettuce and even herbs like mint and basil. All it takes is a little patience! Have you re-grown any store bought veggies at home? How did it go?
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Early Leafy Greens in a Cold April Greenhouse?

Asian Greens - Photo by Wikimedia Commons
Asian Greens – Photo by Wikimedia Commons
Take advantage of your greenhouse in April and May,  before you plant your tomatoes and cucumbers, to give you an early crop of spinach or Asian greens! Riley Brennan, of Dawson City, direct seeds spinach in her greenhouse as soon as the soil thaws in April.  She leaves the greenhouse unheated and the seedlings don’t require any covering.   By the time she goes to plant her greenhouse proper in late May, she has a crop of baby spinach to harvest. Continue reading “Early Leafy Greens in a Cold April Greenhouse?”
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Seedy Saturdays and Birch Syrup workshops in Dawson

Next weekend, Dawsonites will have a chance to participate in two amazing workshops! Seedy Saturdays will be held on Saturday March 25th at the Recreation Centre, and it will include presentations by Karen Digby and Grant Dowdell about northern gardening and by Scott Henderson about mushroom cultivation. The following day on Sunday the 26th, there will be a Birch Syrup workshop in which participants will meet at the Rec Centre and then go hunting for Birch sap. There are limited spaces on both, so make sure you sign up soon!
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Peanuts and Ground Cherries Growing in the North!

Ground cherries in their husk - wikimedia commons
Ground cherries in their husk – ph. Wikimedia commons
If there is something exotic you wish to grow in the North, ask Louise Piché of Rock Creek, Dawson City, Yukon.  Louise is a well known gardener in Dawson and a frequent ribbon winner at Dawson’s annual Discovery Days Horticultural Fair.  She loves experimenting with new and colorful varieties.  She has successfully grown peanuts and ground cherries (aka golden berries) as well as asparagus, giant pumpkins and buckwheat. Louise has generously shared her ‘tried and true’ cultivars that grow well in Rock Creek, which you can view on our seed page.   This year she is experimenting with ginger, turmeric, artichokes and pink potatoes. We will keep you posted! Continue reading “Peanuts and Ground Cherries Growing in the North!”
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Hear it on the radio: CBC Yukon’s “A New Day” catches up with Suzanne

Great news! The CBC morning radio show “A New Day” hosted by Sandi Coleman on CBC Yukon, has started a  new regular column called “Yu-kon Grow It”, which will air every other Wednesday morning between 7 and 7:30 am. On this segment,  Sandi will check in with Suzanne about her “First we Eat: Food Security North of 60” project, as well as featuring other Yukoners involved in local food issues such as Miche Genest and other guests. Sandi Coleman will next check in with Suzanne on Wednesday March 8th, between 7.00 and 7.30 am on CBC Radio Yukon. Don’t forget to tune in! You can listen to the first interview with Suzanne and Elyn Jones here,  
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Northern Food Network’s 1st Webinar – Dawson’s TH Working Farm School and Shirley Tagalik from Arviat, Nunavut

If you are interested in issues of Northern Food Security, consider signing up for webinars with the Northern Food Network. Their First Webinar is taking place Monday, Feb 27 from 10-11 am. It will feature Dexter MacRae & Darren Bullen,  from Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in Teaching and Working Farm and Shirley Tagalik and team, from Arviat Wellness and Arviat Greenhouse. The Northern Food Network (NFN) is co-hosted by the Arctic Institute of Community-Based Research (AICBR) and Food Secure Canada (FSC) as a space for people working in and interested in northern food security to share, learn about best practices across the North and advance collective action on food security. Sign up here for this great opportunity.
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Local Fertilizer in Arviat, Nunavut

When you live in a fly-in community in the North, shipping by plane can be very expensive, especially for heavy items such as soil and fertilizer. The people behind the community greenhouse  in Arviat, Nunavut, have taken on the very important issue of food security by devising a strategy to grow their own produce. And one of the biggest obstacles they have found is that the local soil lacks nutrients. Commercial soil works fine, but it is costly and it needs to be flown in, which impacts the sustainability of the project.
Arviat's Greenhouse, Photo by Arviat Goes Green
Arviat’s Greenhouse, Photo by Arviat Goes Green
Continue reading “Local Fertilizer in Arviat, Nunavut”
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