Tag: local ingredients

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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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Meet Your Maker: Connecting Yukon Farmers and Food Businesses

by Miche Genest

In this small territory, it’s sometimes surprising how much we don’t know about what’s going on. A case in point: farmers and food businesses. There are 145 farms in the Yukon, but many of the territory’s chefs, caterers, retailers and distributors aren’t tuned in to who the farmers are or what they’re growing. The same is true of the farmers — they know those chefs, caterers and retailers are out there, but they don’t know who’s interested in local food or what products they’re after. A

ll this not-knowing leads to lost opportunity — the opportunity to feature Yukon foods on local menus, in retail outlets and farmers’ markets, and on our tables, and to build lasting relationships that benefit everyone in the local food chain, including we who want to eat more of that food. Over the past several years Yukon farmers and food businesses have started to find each other, with great results, but there’s more work to be done.

The good news is the Yukon Agricultural Association (YAA) and the Tourism Industry Association of the Yukon (TIAY) are on it. For the second year running, the two organizations co-hosted the Meet Your Maker event, held this year on Monday January 14 at the Gold Rush Inn in Whitehorse, bringing farmers and food businesses together. Imagine the scene: Yukon farmers, producers, chefs, caterers, restaurateurs, distributors and a Who’s Who of agriculture and food sector representatives, including Minister of Tourism Jeanie Dendys and Minister of Energy, Mines and Resources Ranj Pillai, all in one big room, cooking, eating, talking, making new friends and business connections, sharing recipes, tips, and growing techniques.
Chef Berna Donmezer O’Donovan demonstrates cooking with local Arctic Char.
“Farmers and producers were thrilled with Monday’s Meet Your Maker event,” said Jennifer Hall, executive director at YAA. Hall noted there were 100 attendees, evenly split between farmer/producers and buyers, including two large food distributors and a representative from a company that supplies groceries for mining camps in the Yukon. There were product samples and tasters at each of the 20 booths in the room, as well as two cooking demonstration stations where local chefs transformed home-grown products into dishes such as hollandaise sauce, ceviche, gravlax, cranberry fudge and mini, coffee-spiced burgers.

Chef Robert Brouillette of the Gold Panner restaurant and his team produced a selection of appetizers made with products from eight local suppliers, proving that not only is local food abundant, it is delicious.
Fresh Micro Greens from Cropbox Canada.
This year’s event was fifty percent bigger than last year’s, and the number of buyers more than tripled. Next year, look out, said Jennifer Hall: “Several farmers/producers said that they wanted a booth next year so we will have to get a bigger room!”

To learn more about Meet Your Maker, or for ideas on how to participate in agri-culinary events such as the Yukon Culinary Festival, contact the Yukon Agricultural Association or the Tourism Industry Association of the Yukon.
Local free-range, hormone-free beef and pork products from Horse Haven, one of several small-scale farmers at Meet Your Maker focused on ethical animal husbandry.
   
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Transplanted Tomato Jam

by Miche Genest

Tomato jam, cream cheese, locally-made bagel — a great breakfast or snack.
On a recent trip to Portugal my companions and I discovered vegetable jams; they played a role on every breakfast buffet table at our hotels and B&Bs, and sometimes at dinner too. The morning offerings almost always included tomato jam, or carrot jam, or interesting (and delicious) combinations like zucchini and walnut jam.

At our first dinner at a tiny restaurant in Porto we enjoyed an appetizer of a deep-fried cheese croquette drizzled with warm pumpkin jam. It was divine. In winter, when fresh tomatoes in season are no longer available, canned, whole plum tomatoes are the best possible substitute. Fine Cooking explains why. For a person like our friend Suzanne Crocker, who canned a whole lotta tomatoes last year and is now looking at a pantry of several dozen one-litre jars and wondering just how much spaghetti sauce the family will stand, tomato jam suddenly looks very appealing.

We have always heard that tomatoes are not really vegetables, but fruits. Well it turns out that tomatoes are actually berries, as are peppers, kiwis, eggplants, bananas and watermelons. So, if your cranberry yield was small in this poor berry year, consider the tomato as a substitute in your favourite berry-based jam.

For future reference and in anticipation of a great tomato harvest next year, the recipe for tomato jam includes amounts for both fresh and canned tomatoes. I like this recipe, adapted from portugueserecipes.ca, because it’s so simple and most closely replicates the jam we enjoyed in Portugal. But if you’re interested in something more complex, there are many recipes to explore among the usual channels that use cumin, hot peppers, lemon juice and other ingredients.

Serve tomato jam on toast or a locally-made bagel with cream cheese or butter, with scrambled eggs, on charcuterie plates, on moose burgers or to accompany roasted meats. The jam is so versatile it flits back and forth between sweet and savoury with ease.

> View the recipe for Simple Tomato Jam
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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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Sourdough Hands

by Miche Genest

Oh, the joy of making sourdough bread at home—building a starter, making a sponge, kneading the dough, shaping a loaf, waiting for it rise, baking it, letting it cool and finally, biting into a slice of freshly made bread slathered with good butter—ooh la la.

But one of the special joys is the intimate and complicated relationship sourdough bakers develop with their starters. It’s like having a pet, bakers say, and indeed, they invent names for their starters, they check their starters into sourdough hotels when they travel, or leave strict instructions for house sitters NOT TO THROW IT OUT. They fret when the starter seems sluggish, they call their fellow bakers for sympathy and advice, they wake up in the middle of the night thinking oh no, I forgot to save a half-cup from the starter before I mixed the sponge! And they engage in endless debate about the strange and magical organisms living in a jar in their fridge.

That wild yeast—is it present in the air, free floating or hanging out on the skin of fruits and vegetables, biding its time until the medium of flour and water comes out of the fridge and then diving in to start feeding? Or is that all a myth, and the yeasts are simply present in the flour? And what of the friendly bacteria, the strains of lactobacillus that enter into a symbiotic relationship with the yeast in the medium of flour and water, creating an acid environment inhospitable to bad bacteria that might spoil it—where does it come from?

Well, it turns out that one of the places both yeast and bacteria come from is the baker’s hands. Ecologist Rob Dunn, author of several books (including Never Out of Season, How Having the Food We Want When We Want It Threatens Our Food Supply and The Future) conducted a controlled sourdough bake-off experiment with 15 bakers from around the world at the Puratos Centre for Bread Flavour in Belgium. Dunn and his fellow ecologist Anne Madden wanted to see if the microbes present on the baker’s hands influenced the bread. And it did.

“There was an essence of the baker in the starter the baker made, and that was conveyed in the bread.” The other thing Dunn’s team discovered was that the baker’s hands looked very much like sourdough starter, that is, up to sixty percent of the microbes on the hands of the bakers were the same bacteria and yeasts found in sourdough starter, compared to three percent on the average human hand. As Dunn said, “…the bakers did influence their starters, but the other way around was true too. The life of baking seems to influence the bakers.”

How cool is that? And if the baker’s hands look like sourdough, what do the cheesemaker’s hands look like? The farmer’s? The beekeeper’s? The full account of the experiment can be found in Dunn’s latest book, Never Home Alone, From Microbes to Millipedes, Camel Crickets and Honeybees, the Natural History of Where We Live.

If the baker’s hands look like sourdough, what do the cheesemaker’s hands look like?
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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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Tomatoes, in Season and Out

by Miche Genest

Bread And Tomato Salad, a seasonal treat.
A tomato still warm from the sun and just plucked from the vine, eaten in the hand without salt or basil or any other addition, is one of the gardener’s greatest seasonal pleasures. At the first bite you understand that yes, this is more fruit than vegetable; a ripe tomato is as sweet and juicy as any peach or plum.

Now, in early November, it’s hard to find such a tomato in these latitudes. But until very recently the next best thing, a local, greenhouse-grown tomato from Yukon Gardens, was available at Wyke’s Independent Grocer in Whitehorse, around the corner from where I live. In the second week of October I had just arrived back from Portugal with tomatoes on my mind.

In Portugal in September the tomatoes were ripe and plentiful, so plentiful they cooked them down for hours into a sweet, spicy jam we ate at breakfast with fresh bread and creamy butter. We ate fresh tomatoes in our picnic lunches with hard cheeses and dry salamis, and at dinner we had cooked tomatoes in fish stew and in one of the many variations of Carne de Porco a Alentejana (Traditional Pork and Clams from Alentejo) we relished in taverns along the Fisherman’s Way.

On our first shopping trip back in Whitehorse there were the Yukon Garden tomatoes, so ripe they were almost bursting their skins. We came home with a few kilos because I really wanted to try that jam, and I really wanted a bread and tomato salad, whose origins are not Portuguese but Tuscan. I had a large bag of sourdough croutons in the freezer leftover from a catering job, and I had visions of chunks of toasted bread soaked in tomato juice and the rich, green olive oil given to us in Portugal by Maria, a family friend.

Maria’s oil is pressed from her own olives, and over the years she has brought members of my family many bottles, and we love it. She decanted ours into an empty cognac bottle and we carried it home wrapped in a beach towel and stuffed into one of our knapsacks. It survived the journey. We ate bread and tomato salad the first night at home. It was everything I had anticipated-the bread both soft and crunchy in its bath of oil and and tomato juices, the tomatoes bright and sweet, the onion sharp, and the cilantro fresh and cool.

The reason I’m allowed to share the recipe here, with First We Eaters, is because every salad ingredient, if not local in October (except the tomatoes), was available in August at the Fireweed Market—tomatoes, cilantro, purple onion. The bread we make at home from a starter brought to Alaska by a German family 100 years ago. Now that Suzanne’s year of eating only locally has ended, and a few items from abroad are creeping into her diet, we agreed that the olive oil got special dispensation. It was local to us when we were staying in Maria’s house and besides, I’ve known Maria since I was 12 and she was 21, and so what’s local to her is local to me, by association. That’s sound logic, right?

> View the recipe for Bread and Tomato Salad
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Suzanne’s Blog: “Terroir” Extends Beyond Wine!

 

Video by  John Sweeney sweentown.com

I have just spent a week at Devour! The Food Film Fest in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, where All The Time In The World was screening. Devour combines two of my favourite things: films and food. And not just any food. Devour celebrates local, sustainable, gourmet food – bringing amazing chefs, both from Nova Scotia and from all over North America, to cook for its patrons. Even Sam Kass, the chef for the Obamas during their terms in the White House, was in attendance.

No living off bags of popcorn at this film festival! Films, gourmet dinners, foraging tours, culinary workshops and wine tasting are all part of Devour. I had the pleasure of spending a windy afternoon on the shores of the Minas Basin foraging for periwinkles during low tide with local chef Sean Laughey who was accompanied by From the Wild filmmaker Kevin Kossowan and Chef Blair Lebsack of RGE RD restaurant in Edmonton. Chef Blair sources all his meat from local farmers and incorporates locally foraged foods into his dishes.

I learned how to cook an amazing spiralized celeriac pasta with a goat’s cheese, onion and wild mushroom sauce from Chef Chris Pyne of Founders House in Nova Scotia, . And from Chef Louis Bouchard Trudeau of The Charcuterie of Québec, named one of the Top 10 new restaurants in Canada by EnRoute Magazine in 2016, I learned the wide range of possibilities for blood terrine.

Locally sourced food was a very common theme amongst the gourmet chefs at Devour. Being in Nova Scotia’s wine country, I have become familiar with the term “terroir” — a recognition that the characteristics of a wine are not simply influenced by a particular type of grape but by the natural environment in which the grape is produced. Everything from the soil to the topography, from the climate to the culture of a particular area influences the grape, and therefore the wine. Clearly ‘terroir’ extends beyond grapes.

The concept applies equally well to local food. Certainly my taste palate has come to appreciate the terroir of Dawson City. The terroir of local food is something every community should be proud of. If you want to take part in a fantastic gourmet film festival during a glorious East Coast Fall, you should keep Devour! on your radar for next year.
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Canada’s Indigenous Cuisine Takes Its Place at the Table

Salmon-and-Bannock-Bistro
NishDish
leleam-at-the-fort
PowWowCafe

Throughout Canada, indigenous cuisine is having a renaissance. Part reconciliation, part ethnic food experience, one of the ways the reemerging native voice is expressing itself is in a return to the foods traditionally consumed by Canada’s First Nations.

While multicultural Canada boasts thousands of restaurants serving food styles from virtually every country of the planet, indigenous cuisine is a relative newcomer with only a handful of venues across the nation — which seems odd, given that indigenous peoples were here long before the arrival of Europeans, and almost 5 per cent of Canada’s population identify themselves as indigenous.

“People understand what Thai food is, what Italian food is, what Chinese food is, what Ethiopian food is,” Shawn Adler, the chef behind Toronto’s Pow Wow Cafe, said in a recent interview. “But people don’t really understand what indigenous cuisine is.”

Part of the explanation lies in the shameful chapter of Canadian history where assimilation of the First Nations was the official government practice, and all indigenous culture, including language as well as traditional foods, was forbidden. In fact, from the outset of colonial expansion, food and food sovereignty were used as a weapon against indigenous peoples.

The current generation, many of whose parents were victims of Canada’s Residential School system, are the first to be able to openly embrace their heritage and culture. And it is this generation that is spearheading the emerging indigenous food scene. In the process, the definition of the term “indigenous food” is itself evolving, not surprising given Canada’s wide expanse and the number of individual first nations – 634, speaking more than 50 distinct languages, according to Statistics Canada.

The predominant foods consumed vary significantly with geography, from salmon on the coasts, bison on the plains, and moose and deer throughout. However, the wild game that makes up the traditional native diet poses a challenge for restaurants, as most provinces have regulations meat that has been hunted cannot be served to patrons in restaurants. Even where meat from a wild harvest can be served, obstacles exist, especially the sensibilities of non-native urbanites. 

Last year animal activists launched a petition demanding that Toronto’s Kūkŭm Kitchen and Chef Joseph Shawana remove seal meat from its menu.  Fortunately,  a groundswell of opposing support sprang up, accusing activists of seeking to impose their values on indigenous practices, especially given the sustainable and humane nature of the seal meat harvest.

Not only has Kūkŭm weathered the protest, it has emerged even stronger, and business is booming. In addition to Kūkŭm and Pow Wow Cafe, another notable Toronto indigenous restaurants is NishDish, started  by Johl Whiteduck Ringuette, which celebrates  Anishinaabe and other indigenous cultures. In addiiton to the restaurant and a related catering operation, Ringuette sees his space as “a food-oriented educational hub,” starting with a course he helped develop and is teaching for Native Child and Family Services of Toronto on indigenous cuisine.

In downtown Vancouver, Salmon n’ Bannock Bistro has become known for its authentic Indigenous experience. In addition to Indigenous cuisine using fresh and certified organic ingredients, offering a modern vision of traditional fare, the bistro provides art and music. It is staffed by members of the Nupalk, Haida Gwaii, Blackfoot and Wet’suwet’en nations.

Elsewhere around British Columbia, Lelem’ Arts and Cultural Cafe is located in Fort Langley, as well as a satellite location, Lelem’ at the Fort, at the  Fort Langley National Historic Site. Kekuli Café has locations in the towns of Merritt (on Nlaka’pa’mux First Nation territory) and Westbank, in the Okanagan Valley. There is also Indigenous World Winery’s Red Fox Club, which is part of the Westbank First Nation, while Victoria’s Kitchens of Distinction offers an indigenous culinary tours of Vancouver Island, including a traditional Coast Salish feast, culminating with a dance ceremony, and a forest hike with an ethnologist who explains about edible and medicinal plants used by Indigenous communities.

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Suzanne’s Blog: Oh Wondrous Fall!

 

Fall in the Yukon is just one of the million reasons I love living here.  The spectacular undulating carpet of yellows and reds and greens takes my breath away every year. And it’s cranberry season!

High bush cranberries for juicing and low bush cranberries, also known as lingonberries, for almost anything else – pies, muffins, scones, pancakes, jam, jelly, chutney, and delicious cranberry sauce. I became addicted to the low bush cranberry when I lived in Newfoundland where they are known as partridge berries. They are excellent keepers for the winter as they sweeten, not soften, with freezing.

Last year was a very poor wild berry season.  Thanks to the generosity of many Dawson berry pickers and some careful rationing I had just enough cranberries to get us through.  This year is better and I am rejoicing in the ability to pick buckets full of cranberries once again.

Check out the Boreal Gourmet, Miche Genest’s, recipe for Low Bush Cranberry Toffee touted as “The Best Toffee in the History of the World!” Or Cranberry Birch Syrup Sauce to serve on Token Gesture Custard or ice cream.

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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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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: Add Lungwort to Your Menu

Lungwort (blue bell). Photo by Suzanne Crocker
One of my favourite edible leaves, lungwort (commonly known as blue bell) is now out and about around Dawson City.  The young leaves are very tasty raw and can be added to salad,  steamed  or added to soups and stews.  The early flower buds are also quite tasty –  (although I always feels a bit guilty eating them before they have a chance to flower).

Important rule of thumb: In general, blue and purple flowering plants are NOT edible. Lungwort is the exception.  Don’t eat lupine or delphinium or Jacob’s ladder which are also starting to appear around the same time (but the leaves look very different from lupin).

These plants are NON-EDIBLE. Left to right: Delphinium, Jacob’s Ladder, and
Lupin. Lungwort is the only blue-flowering plant you should eat. Photos by Suzanne Crocker.
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Eating Prehistorically – Horsetail for Supper

Young horsetail shoots ready for eating. Photo by Suzannr Crocker.
The foraging season is now in full force!   New edible plants are popping up daily. Many of them are only edible when they are young, so the window for a tasting opportunity is short! Horsetail, equisetum arvense, is one such example.  

Horsetail is a relative of a prehistoric plant that grew to over 15 meters high 400 million years ago. Horsetail is eaten by caribou, moose, sheep and bears and, when young, can be eaten by humans too. The young, male horsetail shoots are edible when the fronds are pointing up.  When the fronds start to point outwards or downwards, then they should no longer be eaten as oxalate crystals will be building up inside the stem.

A Patch of young horsetail plants. Photo by Suzanne Crocker.
If you catch them early, the young shoots can be eaten raw or steamed as a wild vegetable.  Or they can be dried and used as a tea.  They are rich in antioxidants and high in minerals including calcium, magnesium. Of note – long-term regular ingestion or horsetail can deplete thiamine levels (Vitamin B1).  Also to be avoided in folks with edema, gout, heart and kidney disease.

If you don’t catch them young, horsetail make good pot scrubbers while camping.   Horsetail is high in silica and when dried and steeped in hot water apparently makes a great foot soak or hair rinse. Look for horsetail in damp open woods, meadows, dry sandy soil and disturbed areas. Research for this post thanks to Beverley Gray and the The Boreal Herbal.
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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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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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The Forest Garden of Agnes Seitz

by Miche Genest

A food forest in the boreal forest.
Guild is an old word denoting an association of like-minded people engaged in a common pursuit — armorers, cobblers, or weavers, for example. In Whitehorse weavers, sewers and felters have organized themselves into a Fibres Guild, and theatre-goers attend plays at the Guild Theatre.

On a small homestead on the Annie Lake Road, there’s a different sort of guild at work, involving players of another kind. They are plants; all kinds of plants from herbs to berry bushes to fruit trees, and they work together in a “food forest” planted and maintained by Agnes Seitz and her partner Gertie.

For the past several years Seitz has been slowly building what has become known in permaculture circles as a food forest, but is actually, she says, “comparable to a really extensive home garden.” This kind of home garden has been grown in tropical climates from the Amazon to India for thousands of years; such gardens are a low-intervention way of ensuring food security. In the mid-1980s,

British gardener Robert Hart began experimenting with “forest gardening” in Shropshire, England, bringing those techniques into a more temperate climate. In the Yukon several gardeners and homesteaders are experimenting with building food forests in a much colder environment, Seitz among them.

“The idea is that a young woodland is the most perfect natural system and the most prolific one,” she says. “And that’s what we’re trying to copy, a young woodland.” A young woodland occurring naturally is basically self-sustaining. While a planted food forest is not entirely self-sustaining, it can come close.

Planting in guilds is a cornerstone in the building of a food forest. “You plant in such a way that throughout the season [the plants] support each other,” says Seitz. “There are nitrogen fixers in there, there are attractants that bring in the bees for pollination, there are plants that bring up minerals from the soil. You bring all these players together in a system that makes it so much easier on us.”

Some of the players in the “guild.”
When she was starting out, “because we don’t have soil here,” Seitz brought in a truckload of compost from the City of Whitehorse dump. Five or six years later, now that the system is up and running, Seitz’s interventions are low-tech and low-key. She fertilizes with wood ash and human urine. “Humans are one more part of the habitat we are building there,” she says. “An apple tree needs about five pees a year to get all the nitrogen it needs.”

Seitz also uses “green manure,” turning plants into fertilizer using a technique called “chop and drop.” After harvesting, “you just cut the plants and let them fall, and they feed the micro-organisms and that’s how you build the soil.” Seitz also grows a huge annual garden of organic vegetables, which she says requires lots of controls and lots of work.

Square foot for square foot, the annual garden uses nearly twice the mount of fertilizer of the perennial food forest. She estimates there are about 80 species of herbaceous plants in her 4,000 square-foot food forest, most of them edible, like sorrel, burdock, mint, lovage, a wide variety of chives and onions, and Old World plants like sweet cicely and Good King Henry. Mixed amongst these plants are nettles, fireweed, lambs quarters and dandelions. “Wild foods, what we call weeds, are an essential part of the system,” she says.

The next layer up is composed of berry bushes such as Saskatoons, gooseberries, red, white and black currants, haskaps and raspberries. Among the next layer, the fruit trees, are hawthorns, sour cherries, pin cherries, several species of apple, Siberian pear, Manchurian plum, Manchurian apricot, Siberian pine (there may be pine nuts in 12 or 15 years) and even hazelnuts.

The more exotic species are still “kind of a research project,” says Seitz. Though the hazelnuts are not yet fruiting, they have lasted three years. “It’s going to be interesting to see how they did with this really cold winter.” Seitz has not planted low-bush cranberries, a favourite Yukon berry, because she can easily walk into the surrounding boreal forest to find them. “They’re right around the corner.”

But for just about every other kind of herb, plant, berry or tree fruit, she says, all she has to do is walk into her backyard food forest and “kind of like just – forage.” For further reading and resources on food forest gardening, a good place to start is Permaculture Research Institute.


Herbacecous greens, ripe for foraging.
               
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Suzanne’s Blog: Welcome Waffles

Photo by Suzanne Crocker
Five days a week for 7½ months translates into 150 breakfasts of eggs and mashed potato cakes.   My family has reached their limit.  Gerard can’t seem to swallow another egg.  Sam is done on mashed potato cakes. Breakfast clafouti and crepes are reserved for weekends because they require extra time.  So that leaves smoothies or cooked rye grains as my breakfast alternatives.

That is until now…. Kate and Sam are away, competing at the Arctic Winter Games.  In their absence, there have been fewer dishes to wash which has translated into more time to experiment.  So I thought I would try waffles.  I was not optimistic as I was missing one of the key ingredients – baking powder – and, of course, salt. But what did I have to lose (other than some precious Red Fife wheat flour).

So I pulled out my 1969 Farmers Journal Homemade Bread recipe book and a General Electric waffle maker of about the same vintage (thank you Evelyn Dubois) and gave it a go. Success!

 Crispy on the outside, tender on the inside.  Smothered in homemade butter and birch syrup.  Didn’t seem to miss the baking powder, or the salt, in the least. I will have a welcome breakfast surprise for Kate and Sam when they return! Next challenge will be to try them with rye flour, as the wheat flour is in short supply. > Check out the recipe for 100% local Yukon Waffles
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Suzanne’s Blog: Berry Bounty Boosts Vitamin C

Diana McCready of Emu Creek Farms picking Saskatoon berries. Photo by Suzanne Crocker.
People often ask what we are doing for Vitamin C over the long Northern winter – in the absence of oranges and grapefruit from the south. Worry not.  No scurvy in this family! Besides spruce tips and some precious local apples, it is berries that are providing most of our Vitamin C this year.

Saskatoon berries at Emu Creek Farm, Dawson City, Yukon. Photo by Suzanne Crocker.
We have one freezer devoted entirely to berries! Two of the many awesome women farmers in Dawson are Diana McCready of Emu Creek Farms and Maryanne Davis of Tundarose Garden.  Both produce succulent crops of delicious berries – saskatoons, haskaps, raspberries and black currents.  Emu Creek Farms even grows some northern cherries!  Diana and Ron McCready have the added challenge of having no road access to their farm, it is only accessible by boat.

Northern cherries at Emu Creek Farms. Phto 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.
Close up of domestic haskap berries on the bush. 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.
Northern Cherries and domestic Haskap berries at Emu Creek Farm. Photos by Suzanne Crocker.

A late June frost wiped out many of the wild berries that we normally count on.   We will be forever grateful to the many Dawsonites who donated some of their precious wild berry stock to help supplement our year.  Wild low bush cranberries are a family favourite! Fortunately, although the wild berry crop was meek, domestic berries thrived!

A bounty of Saskatoon Berries. Photo by Suzanne Crocker.
Berries have become one of our staples: berry sauce on custard, berry  and beet muffins, crepes with berry sauce, steamed berry pudding, breakfast clafouti.  And one of my new favourites:  Saskatoon Berry and Birch Syrup Roast. Imagine a roast moose or roast pork cooked slowly slathered in birch syrup, Saskatoon berries and garlic.  Wicked!

Saskatoon berries and birch sryup  are an awesome combination. Many thanks to the McCready’s and to Maryann Davis for keeping us healthy this winter thanks to their delicious berries. (valorhealthcare.com)

> Check out the recipe for Saskatoon Berry and Birch Syrup Roast.
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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: How Do You Like Them Apples?

A mid-winter treat for Suzanne — a locally-grown apple. Photo by Suzanne Crocker.
It is the middle of winter and in my hand I hold a crunchy, juicy, sweet, locally-grown apple.  Yes, that’s right, locally grown – in Dawson City, Yukon – 64 degrees north.  Further north than Iqualuit, Yellowknife and Whitehorse. It is all thanks to the ingenuity of John Lenart at Klondike Valley Nursery, Canada’s northernmost nursery. 

John has spent the last thirty years studying and grafting apple trees in order to cultivate varieties that can withstand the climate of the north.  The nursery now has 65 cultivars and some of those varieties are ‘winter apples’ – meaning that they keep well in cold storage throughout the winter.

2017 was a tough season on the apple trees due to a late frost in the middle ofJune.  But Klondike Valley Nursery has generously been sharing some of their personal apple supply with me for this year of eating local.  And I can tell you that a crunchy locally-grown apple in the middle of winter is a treat beyond all measure!

John Lenart has been cultivating apples n the North for over 30 years. Photo by Suzanne Crocker.
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Yummy Yukon Crêpes

All ingredients  are 100% local to Dawson City, Yukon.

The batter for these crêpes was made from Red Fife wheat flour from Kokopellie Farm, eggs from Lastraw Ranch and Sun North Ventures, milk and butter thanks to the Klondike Valley Creamery, and honey compliments of David McBurney and his overwintered bees.

The berry sauce was made with black currents from Emu Creek Farm, sweetened with birch syrup. Yogurt was made from the milk from Klondike Valley Creamery and cultured with locally made kefir.

Smothered in birch syrup from Birch Hill Forest Farm.

Deliciously local!

> Check out the recipe here.

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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: Happy Valentine’s Day!

A Valentine’s Day treat. Photo by Suzanne Crocker.
Who needs chocolates on Valentine’s Day. (Don’t answer that.) We will be celebrating with one of our favourite deserts — Birch Syrup Ice Cream Cake. Check out the recipes for Birch Syrup Ice Cream and Creamy Birch Syrup Frosting. Pour the ice cream into a mold and let it freeze overnight, then slather on the frosting. Yumm!! (Just don’t say the word ‘chocolate’ and I’ll be fine.)
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Suzanne’s Blog: It’s Seed Catalogue Time!


I definitely did not have a green thumb prior to starting this project.  Never ask me to take care of your house plant.  I’m not sure my thumb is yet brilliant green, but it is several shades closer than it used to be. So this year I am excited to pull out the seed catalogues and decide what to order for the upcoming growing season. 

In the North, tomato seeds are started indoors the end of February and most everything else gets started indoors in March and April. As you get ready to dog-ear pages in your seed catalogues, check out the seeds that have proven themselves to grow well for other Northerners on the First We Eat Seeds page.  And if you have some favourites that grow well in your part of the North, let us know (there’s a contribution form on the page) and we will share it .

Here are my seed ordering tips for 2018: Fothergill’s Perpetual Spinach.  Spinach is notoriously difficult to grow in Dawson.  Sure we have a short season.  But our short summers are really hot!  And regular spinach just bolts up here.   Both New Zealand Spinach and Fothergill’s Perpetual Spinach grow well in Dawson and do not bolt.   I tried them both last year, but preferred the texture of Fothergills.

My favourite tomato last year was Black Prince. And while you’re at it, consider growing some GMO-free sugar beets.  They grew well in several locations in Dawson last year.  They are a delicious white beet to eat and the pot liquor you cook them in can be boiled down to make a sweet syrup! Salt Spring Seeds, based on Vancouver Island, only carries organic, non-GMO seeds and is your one-stop shop for Fothergills Perpetual Spinach, Black Prince tomatoes, and non-GMO sugar beet seeds!
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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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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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Suzanne’s Blog: Winter Comfort Foods

Dawson City sunset in early January. Photo by Suzanne Crocker.
It is -42°C in Dawson City, Yukon.  At 4 p.m. the sun sets, transforming the sky into rich hues of pink and orange. It is the depths of winter.  The time for comfort food. Brian Phelan, Dawson City chef, shared Rappie Pie with us, a comfort food dish from his Acadian Roots.  Miche Genest, Yukon chef and cookbook author, shared Pork Hock and Rye Casserole another great comfort food. Here is one more wonderful winter comfort food, thanks to Alfred Von Mirbach of Perth, Ontario, who has shared his mother’s Warm Potato Salad recipe.

And, of course, with every recipe comes a story.  This recipe is from Alfred’s German ancestry.  When he was a child it was served every Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve with sausage, mustard and pickles.  Alfred and his  brothers continue the tradition today.  Yet another example of how food connects us with family, tradition, ancestry and, of course, memories.

I have two precious jars of dill pickles successfully fermented, without salt, in celery juice and decided to use half a jar to make an adaptation of Marianne’s Warm Potato Salad.  It was so delicious that the rest of the dill pickles have now been relegated to three more repeat performances.  I will definitely be fermenting more dill pickles in celery juice next year!

> Check out the adapted recipe here
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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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Suzanne’s Blog: A Local Christmas Feast!

The 100-per-cent-local Christmas turkey dinner. Photo by Suzanne Crocker.
Gerard has been suspiciously silent in his blogs over the past three weeks.  I’m not sure if this is because he is taking a holiday from the computer, or because he has lately been so well fed that he has had nothing to complain about.  I suspect it is the former, although I will choose to believe it is the latter. 

If any of you have been worried that his silence has been due to weakness from starvation, fear not.  We have been feasting well over the Christmas season! Our family tradition is to cook up Christmas dinner on Boxing Day.  That way, we can stay in our P.J.’s all day on Christmas Day and hang out together with no time pressures.  (In previous years, we have even been known to have Kraft Dinner on Christmas Day. 

This year we had smoked salmon, marinated in birch syrup, and left-over moose ribs). On Boxing Day, our Christmas dinner feast was complete with all the trimmings!  And it was wonderful to share this 100% local Christmas feast with friends. Our turkey was raised by Megan Waterman at LaStraw Ranch.  The stuffing was made with celery grown by Becky Sadlier with onion, sage, parsley and cooked whole rye grains grown by Otto at Kokopellie Farm and apples grown by John Lenart at Klondike Valley Nursery. 

We had delicious mashed potatoes grown by Otto and seasoned with butter and milk thanks to Jen Sadlier and her dairy cows at Klondike Valley Creamery.  Carrots and rutabagas grown by Lucy Vogt were mixed with parsnips grown by Grant Dowdell.  The gravy was thickened with home-made potato starch.  The cranberry sauce was made from low bush cranberries from the boreal forest (thanks to the wonderful Dawsonites who have shared some of their precious wild cranberries with us during this very poor year for wild berries) and sweetened with birch syrup thanks to Berwyn and Sylvia.

During this year of eating local, I often find myself discovering gems of knowledge from times past, when food was perceived as a precious commodity — perhaps due to rationing or economic hard times, or just the plain hard work of growing your own.  But, whatever the reason, I am struck by the difference in our perception of food today, at least in Canada, where the bounty of food stocked on grocery store shelves appears to have no limits in either quantity or variety.

Steamed Christmas pudding. Photo by Suzanne Crocker.
One of the English traditions that stems from times past and has been passed down in my family is my grandmother’s steamed Christmas pudding with hard sauce.  What better year than this to pull out her recipe.  In the past, when I have decided to re-live my childhood by making Christmas pudding, I have had to search in the far corners of the grocery store freezers for the key ingredient – suet.  This year, animal fat is a staple in my own freezer so, thanks to some beef tallow from Klondike Valley Creamery, I didn’t need to search far for a local suet!

Christmas pudding adapted itself well to local ingredients and the result was eagerly devoured, despite the fact that I burned the bottom of it by accidentally letting the pot run dry. As a child, I remember the small dollop of hard sauce allocated to each of us and the way it slowly melted on top of our small portion of warm steamed pudding.  Its melt-in-your-mouth sweetness always lured us back to the bowl for extra hard sauce, knowing that we would regret it later for its richness.  

My local hard sauce adaptation this year was partially melt in your mouth – other than the lumps which I optimistically referred to as sugar beet gummies, from sugar beet sugar that wasn’t quite dry enough and clumped together irreconcilably.  But even the sugar beet gummies found fans and were consumed with gusto!

> View recipe for Steamed Christmas Pudding with Hard Sauce > See a recipe for Birch Eggnog

Christmas – a time for giving, a time for sharing, a time for family and friends and a time for feasting.  We have enjoyed all – during our 100% local Christmas.
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Suzanne’s Blog: Nothing Says Merry Christmas Like a Moose Nose

Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in elder Victor Henry with fresh moose nose. Photo by Suzanne Crocker.
Drin tsul zhìt shò ä̀hłąy! Nothing says Merry Christmas like a moose nose! Using all parts of the moose or caribou is important when you are harvesting food from the land.  This is one of the many lessons I have been learning during my year of eating local. 

For Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in elders, the delicacies are not the moose steaks or the moose roasts, but the often-overlooked parts of the moose:  moose nose, moose tongue, moose head soup, moose heart, moose liver, kidneys, and bum guts.  Yup, I said bum guts.  Part of the large intestine (cleaned well!) and cooked.   I am venturing into the world of  moose delicacies.  Stay tuned…

Victor and his Moosemeat Men will be cooking up a feast for the upcoming Myth and Medium conference, organized by the Tr’ondëk Hwëchin Heritage Department, and taking place in Dawson City, Yukon from February 19 to 22, 2018. Happy Solstice everyone – the shortest day of the year a.k.a. the longest night.   It only gets brighter from here!

Sunrise on Dec 21st at Dawson City, Yukon at 11:11 am.  Sunset at 3:21 pm.  In between, the sun stays just below the hill tops that surround Dawson. Photo by Suzanne Crocker.
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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: Christmas Experimentation


The Christmas season has arrived –  a season for many wonderful things, not the least of which is Christmas baking.  Holiday baking traditions in my family are melt-in-your-mouth shortbread and rum-soaked fruit cake that has aged for 6-12 months. This year is a little different.

My family recently headed to Whitehorse for various sporting events (and two days of eating contraband!)  So I took advantage of the empty house and settled in for a two-day Christmas baking extravaganza.  Although it might be better described as a two-day Christmas baking science lab. What is unusual about this year’s baking, is that it is all experimental.  No white flour, no white sugar, no icing sugar, no baking powder nor baking soda nor corn starch.  No salt.  No nuts.  No chocolate.  No candied orange and lemon peel.  No raisins.  No currents.  No cinnamon, ginger or cloves.

I pulled out my traditional recipes for short bread, ginger snaps, aspen rocks and fruit cake and attempted to adapt them to the local ingredients I have on hand.  I pulled out old dusty copies of December editions of Chatelaine and Canadian Living and scoured them for recipes that might suit my ingredients.  I have yet to find a recipe for just my ingredients, so adaptations, substitutions and imagination have taken over. I am extremely grateful for the ingredients I do have available.

Thanks to the hard work of Dawson farmers, and the abundance of edibles the Boreal forest can provide, there will be 100%-local Christmas baking in my house this year! I now have flour (thanks Otto) and sugar beet sugar (thanks Grant, Becky, and Paulette).  I also have butter (thanks Jen), eggs (thanks Megan and Becky), birch syrup (thanks Sylvia and Berwyn), honey (thanks David) and berries (thanks Diana, Maryanne, the forest and the many Dawsonites who shared some of their precious wild berries with me this year).  I have potato starch (thanks Lucy, Otto, Tom, Brian and Claus).  I have a few winter hearty apples (thanks John and Kim).  I have dried spruce tips (thanks forest) and dried nysturtiam seed pods (thanks Andrea and Klondike Kate’s).

Of course, experimenting is also limited by quantity.  Every ingredient I have has been hard fought for.  The sugar takes several days to create from sugar beets.  The butter takes several days to make from the cream skimmed off the fresh milk.  And before I have flour, I need to clean the grains and then grind them. 

Whereas I once automatically doubled or tripled recipes for Christmas baking, this year I find myself cutting every recipe in half.  I have become leery of recipes that call for 2 cups of sugar for example – as that would use up almost all the sugar I have on hand before starting the arduous task of processing more sugar beets.

Mixing and matching, substituting, altering quantities – such is the alchemy behind Christmas baking this year. A few recipes have worked out well enough to be shared and repeated – such as Birch Brittle and Yukon Shortbread.

Brittle made with birch syrup and pumpkin seeds. Photo by Suzanne Crocker.
But many have been less than desirable.  My friend Bridget dropped by during my baking frenzy and sampled some of my experiments.  “You can’t call these cookies,” she announced after tasting one of my shortbread trials.  I was deflated.  “But you can call them biscuits.”  She then proceeded to lather some butter onto one of my cookies and declared it quite good. 

After I got over my moment of self-pity, I too tried one with butter and then with cream cheese and had to admit she was right. They taste more like oatcakes (without the oats).   So sweet biscuits they are. 

The recipe included here for Yukon Shortbread did, however, pass the cookie test. My family has now returned from Whitehorse and I will bring out the results of my baking bit by bit to see what they think.  The experimenting will continue – adjusting this and adjusting that.  Trying a few new recipes.  But first … I have to make some more butter, grind some more flour, and peel some more sugar beets.

If you have any Christmas baking recipes that you think might adapt well to my local ingredients, I would be more than happy to have you share them!

> See the recipe for Birch Brittle > See the recipe for Yukon Shortbread
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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:  Chef Miche Gets Me Into Hock

Pork Hocks, Cabbage and Rye Berry Casserole is another delicious dish Chef Miche Genest helped create for Suzanne with 100% local ingredients. Photo by Suzanne Crocker.
Recently, I had the distinct honour to have Yukon chef, Miche Genest, in my kitchen, devoting a week of her time helping me cook! The week went by all too fast, but we covered a lot of ground – soups, dinners, sauces, desserts.  And we started experimenting with grains (more on the grains later).

I promised to share some more recipes and here is another.  (See also previous posts with Brian Phelan’s Rappie Pie and Token Gesture Custard) One of the favourite supper recipes was Pork Hock Rye Casserole, although it doesn’t have to include pork hocks – it is adaptable to any slow cooking meat.  And the rye could easily be substituted with barley (once I thresh it) and probably even with wheat grains (although I think I will preserve every precious grain of wheat for baking!) This, like Rappie Pie, is another excellent one dish winter comfort food – filling, delicious and 100% Dawson City local!

> View recipe for Pork Hock Rye Casserole
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Suzanne’s Blog: Flour Power and the Ol’ Grind

Gerard and Tess grinding fl;our by hand. Photo by Miche Genest.
Despite a very cold November, with several weeks of -35° to -40°C, it looks like it is going to be a long freeze-up for the Yukon River again this year. I am lucky enough to have 25 kg. of wheat grains and 25 kg. of rye grains that were secured from Otto at Kokopellie Farm just before the ferry was pulled.   But Otto’s wonderful grinder is on the other side of the Yukon River.  So, for now, I am left to my own devices.

I tried to grind the grain with a combination of blender and flour sifter.  It took many, many passes.  It was possible to eke out a small amount of flour, but certainly not very efficient. Although Dawson is small (about 1,500 people), it is the kind of community where you can put out a request for an obscure item, such as flour grinder, on the local Crier Buyer Facebook page and expect to get a response. I was not disappointed.

Within a day, I was very grateful to receive a call from Louise Piché.  She had a hand crank flour grinder, not yet tried, that she had picked up somewhere or other and I was welcome to borrow it.   A flour grinder is a wonderful thing!   A couple of passes through the grinder along with a bit of an upper body workout and voilà – flour! Flour!! 

Flour means the possibility of bread and baking! We have flour! Subsequently, I received another call – this time from Becky Sadlier who has an electric flour mill that we could borrow.  However Becky lives on the other side of the Klondike River, now filled with slush.  But Yukoners are never too daunted by the weather.  Loren Sadlier was making one last canoe trip across the Klondike, through the slush, and the grinder could go with him. 

I had thought the hand grinder was a gift from the heavens.  The electric grinder was able to make an even finer flour! There are still a few obstacles to overcome, such as the lack of yeast, baking soda, baking powder and crystalized sugar.  But where there is a will, there is a way. Let the baking experiments begin!  (And let me remember my lesson in grain moderation! )

Miche Genest sent me this wonderful breakfast option, Breakfast Caflouti, which only requires ½ cup of flour and no leavening agent.  It was a tremendous hit in our family – and a very welcome change from our usual fried eggs and mashed potato cakes.

A close look at the hand flour grinder and its handiwork. Photo by Suzanne Crocker.
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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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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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Give tips, get lunch!

Spruce Tips ready to become a delicious syrup - Photo by The North Woods Cookshop
Spruce Tips ready to become a delicious syrup – Photo by The North Woods Cookshop
Your foraging adventures not only can help you stock your pantry with wild goodies, but they could also get you a delicious free lunch! The North Woods Cookshop and Lunchbox, a Dawson City based catering company, is looking for generous foragers to share a bit of their spruce tip loot with them. For every four cups of spruce tips you bring them, they will treat you to a free lunch at their amazing new food truck, located in the lot next to the Westminster Hotel. They have great plans for those spruce tips, including delicious syrups for their homemade sodas, as well as the spice mixes, rubs and gourmet salts they are known for. Hurry up before the picking season ends, and remember to spread your harvest out over many trees to keep them healthy and strong. Georgia and Allie will thank you!
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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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Refreshing and Versatile Birch Sap

Birch sap makes a delicious drink fresh from the trees – refreshing water taste with only a hint of sweetness – but packed full of minerals. Birch sap contains natural carbohydrates, organic acids, fruit acids, potassium, calcium, phosphorus, magnesium, manganese, zinc, sodium, iron and copper, vitamins B (group) and vitamin C.  It is said to have diuretic and detoxifying effects on the body, and it has been used as a folk remedy for many ailments in Europe and Asia for hundreds of years. But birch sap needs to be consumed right away – it doesn’t last more than 24 hours even in the fridge.  Sylvia Frisch, however, tried pressure canning the birch sap and storing it in her root cellar and it preserved very well and tastes great!
Photo by Suzanne Crocker
Also, Sylvia Frisch took advantage of the natural yeasts in birch sap to try and make vinegar.  She bottled fresh birch sap last year and added a few raisins or black currents in each bottle and stored them in her root cellar.  Suzanne and Sylvia cracked one open last week at Birch Camp and it was a delicious light white vinegar. They have bottled some fresh birch sap with local low bush cranberries this year and will see if they have equal success. Will keep you posted! Suzanne talked about her search for locally-sourced vinegar on a recent episode of Yu-Kon Grow It on CBC North’s A New Day with host Sandi Coleman.
Photo by Suzanne Crocker
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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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Sweeeeeeet! A Bucket of Birch Syrup

Suzanne’s main sweetener for her year of eating local will be birch syrup from Berwyn Larson and Sylvia Frisch’s birch camp not far from Dawson. The sap has been running well and Suzanne is starting her year with a 12-litre bucket of delicious Uncle Berwyn’s Yukon Birch Syrup .
Photo by Scott Buchanan
Suzanne recently talked about her experience at the camp on Yu-Kon Grow It on CBC North‘s A New Day with host Sandi Coleman.
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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
Continue reading “Vadzaih: Cooking Caribou from Antler to Hoof”
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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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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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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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