Cuisine Canada Scene is taking a short break until September. Next month we’ll be back with a shiny new board, a new approach to sharing the best of Canadian cuisine and a short list of nominees for the Canadian Culinary Book Awards.

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Food Day Canada
Saturday, July 31, 2010
6:00 PM Your time
Cities, restaurants and backyards across Canada

Until last year, Food Day Canada was known as The World’s Longest Barbecue. It is always held on the Saturday of the first weekend in August, which this year happens to fall in July. When I began the event in 2003, the goal was to collectively celebrate the food of Canada, specifically beef because of BSE and the devastation it caused to that industry. After that first event, I expanded the scope to include all ingredients harvested here. And every year since, I have challenged Canadians to barbecue /cook /use Canadian ingredient and share their menus on the dedicated website.

This year, we’ve built a new website and established a new web presence, while ensuring the stories from the past are all still available online for everyone to see.  These menus are a voyeuristic look into the real food life of Canada. Curiously, since launching the site this year, we’ve had hits from 46 countries around the globe, including Russia, all of Europe, Asia and the Middle East.

Food Day Canada is our chance to create a day that showcases our extraordinary ingredients at a time when our farming/fishing communities are top of mind.  The only participation requirement is to cook great local/regional/national foods on Saturday July 31st and post the menus to the website (click here for the easy-to-fill-out submission form).

While the platform on which Food Day rests is virtual, there are also larger live events. Here in my own village of Elora, our local raceway will host a number of Ontario commodity organizations who are coming together to barbecue their products (pork/beef/chicken/vegetables/fruit) for the public — with lotsa good beer and a few cases of wine.  In addition, those same commodity organizations are committed to providing product for Ontario’s Food Banks for every Ontario menu posted on the website.  It’s win/win/win.

Also for the first time, this year, restaurants from across Canada are taking part. This handpicked group of 136 restaurants were carefully selected because they truly walk the talk. They include: Chives Canadian Bistro (Halifax, NS), Atlantica (St John’s, NL),  Bacalao (Clarenville & St. John’s, NL), Rossmount Inn (St Andrews by-the-Sea, NB),  Lot 30 (Charlottetown, PE), Inn at Bay Fortune (Fortune, PE),  Treadwell (Port Dalhousie, ON), Epic (Toronto, ON), Rouge (Calgary, AB) CharCut (Calgary, AB), Langdon Hall (Cambridge, ON),  C Restaurant (Vancouver, BC), Klondike Kate’s (Dawson City, YT) and a whole whack of restaurants in the Ottawa and Toronto areas.

Other national ‘days’ are about the eaters.  Food Day is about the farmers and fishers who feed us so very, very well. And about Canada’s chefs, who through their talent and innovation, bring the best Canadian ingredients to the table.

To celebrate, we are including some pretty neat awards as well. Mine will be given to a member of the general public whose menu shows the most Adaptability. Three other awards will go to  Chefs/Restaurants.  The judges for these awards are James Chatto, Michael Smith, Anthony Walsh, Sinclair Philip and Judy Creighton.

The goal is to build a full on food celebration in every corner of Canada that cannot be ignored.

Having a party never felt so good!

Anita Stewart

Recently, Cuisine Canada members received an email informing them that the deadline for Cuisine Canada Board Member nominations had been extended. Unfortunately, not all computers could read the attached information and some members were left wondering when the new deadline is.

Uh… Tomorrow. That’s Wednesday, July 21st.

So, if you wanted to nominate someone and didn’t, now’s your chance.

The rules?. Cuisine Canada members may nominate themselves or another member (with their agreement, of course. Please, no surprise nominees). Just send the nominee’s contact information and a short biography to cuisinec@uoguelph.ca. Yes, it’s that easy.

Once elected, Board Members will meet via conference call. Their chief responsibility will be to maintain and build membership, manage the organization’s finances and to fulfill the mandate set forth in the Mission Statement.

The names of the new Board Members will be announced at the Annual General Meeting on  August 4th at the Fairmont Royal York in beautiful downtown Toronto. The time has yet to be determined.

Are you a member of Cuisine Canada and know someone worthy of claiming the 2010 title?  If so, check out the information on the Cuisine Canada website and send your letters of nomination to the University of Guelph by August 16, 2010.

While the nominator must be a member of Cuisine Canada, the nominee does not. Their contribution may be in any related field, which includes but is not limited to the following examples:

• Agriculture or viticulture
• Processing or the creation of a value-added product (any food product, including cheese)
• Winemaking, brewing or any other fermentation process
• Journalism/authorship/print media
• Hospitality/restaurant and foodservice/accommodation
• Research
• Broadcast media including radio, television and the internet
• Public relations/marketing
• Government/non-profit/other agencies

Be sure to include as much information as possible in your letter. If you previously nominated someone who didn’t win and want to nominate them again, you will need to write a new letter and include updated details.

Letters on nomination should be addressed to:

The Edna Award c/o Library Administration
Room 356, McLaughlin Library
University of Guelph
50 Stone Road East
Guelph, Ontario, N1G 2W1.

The winner will be announced as part of the Canadian Culinary Book Awards, this year on November 5^th at the Royal Winter Fair in Toronto.

“Last year’s inaugural workshop was a roaring success, so I’ve expanded the workshop to 20 participants and I’m bringing in food writing experts from the US and Canada,” explains independent food journalist Jennifer Cockrall-King, workshop coordinator. “It’s part food-writing workshop, part food and wine tour in the incredibly vibrant Okanagan Valley when local products are at their peak and just before the wine harvest.”

2010 instructors include:

• Dianne Jacob is a California-based writing coach, editor, and author of Will Write for Food: The Complete Guide to Writing Cookbooks, Blogs, Articles, Memoir, and More. Re-issued in July 2010, the book won the Cordon D’Or International award for Best Literary Food Reference Book. www.diannej.com

• Born in Vancouver, Claudia Cusano is Italian by blood, and thus grew up with a love of food, family, and friendship. Claudia is the editor for NUVO magazine, a lifestyle magazine for the Canadian sophisticate. www.nuvomagazine.com

• Liane Faulder is The Edmonton Journal’s food columnist and appears in the Bistro section on Wednesdays, and on Saturdays in Lifestyle. She is also food columnist for CBC radio’s afternoon program in Edmonton, Radio Active. An award-winning reporter, Liane’s features have been published in Reader’s Digest, Today’s Parent, Venture and Chatelaine magazines.

• South Okanagan’s own Rhys Pender, is a wine educator, freelance wine writer, wine judge and consultant to the industry. In 2010 Rhys became the 4th Master of Wine (MW) in Canada. Rhys is a regular contributor on wine to publications Wine Access, Scout Magazine, CityFood and Montecristo. http://www.wineplus.ca/

• Cuisine Canada member Jennifer Cockrall-King is a food writer (www.foodgirl.ca) with over 13 years of contributing to publications in Canada and the US. In 2008, Western Living named her as one of the “Top 40 Foodies Under 40.” She teaches food writing courses with MacEwan’s Writing Works in Edmonton and at UBC Okanagan. And she is the producer of the Okanagan Food & Wine Writers Workshop because it’s just too good here not to share it with like-minded people.

Registration is limited to 20 writers in order to give each writer personalized instruction. The cost of the workshop is $650 — a few early bird spots are still available at $575 (email to inquire), and includes all professional development seminars, field trips, wine touring, meals and activities, excluding travel to and from the workshop and accommodations. Special workshop room rates are available at the host hotel, the Penticton Lakeside Resort.

Detailed workshop information is available on the Okanagan Food and Wine Writers Workshop Website, or by contacting workshop coordinator Jennifer Cockrall-King at 780-242-3663 or jennifer@foodgirl.ca.

Goat Cheese Cake at the 2010 Fancy Food Show in NYC

Summer 2010 Fancy Food Show

By Dana McCauley

With over 180,000 products showcased by 2,500 Exhibitors at New York City’s Javitz Center, the National Association for the Specialty Food Trade (NASFT) Fancy Food Show offers an interesting glimpse into the current culinary landscape. Here, in no particular order, are my observations:

• Pink peppercorns were featured in chocolate products by New Tree and Vosges. At New Tree the chocolate was dark while Vosges used lemon scented white chocolate as foil to this sweetly spiced berry.

• The show was, quite literally, saturated with teas and coffees. While they featured all the typical spicing and flavours, the real interesting flavour story in the beverage category for me came from Ayla’s organic herb infused water. I think cinnamon-orange peel was my fav.

• Artisan goat cheese was being sampled in abundance and much of it was very, very good; however, the most interesting goat milk product at the show was, IMHO, the goat milk caramels presented by Happy Goat.

• Chips made from pulses (beans, chickpeas, lentils) were plentiful at the show as were “puffed” products such as rice cakes and quinoa. In the case of quinoa it was being used to add crunch to chocolate bars and candies by several confectioners.

• Macarons – both savoury and sweet- were not only popular at the show but also in the shops and cafes in NYC. That said, cupcakes aren’t dead yet. They had less presence at the show but were still wildly popular on the streets.

• Baking mixes by popular sweet establishments were also noteworthy. Pat from Fat Witch Brownies (a Chelsea bakery I’ve loved for years) has a new line of baking mixes that bring Fat Witch favs home as does Vosges.

• Sweet and savoury continues to prevail in a number of ways. Sticky toffee pudding cheese, chocolate chip cheese balls, coconut curry ice cream, bacon toffee ice cream …etc were just a few examples of how this trend is maturing.

• Bacon-flavoured products of all kinds: mayonnaise, applewood smoked, lip balm (seriously) and salt are generally poor quality but in abundance.

• Uncured meats. Uncured hams and artisan bacon of excellent taste and texture were available from quite a few companies.

• Stuff on sticks. Apparently, putting a chocolate or cheesecake on a lolly stick is important in this day and age where no one has time to sit down and eat or to wash their hands when they get a bit sticky.

• Savoury jams and preserves are an emerging trend. Interestingly, few of them – unless they were authentically Indian – were called chutneys.  There was also choice between ketchups of various flavours and levels of artisan-ness (is that word?).

• Very thinly sliced, super crisp biscotti were being marketed as a cracker substitute to serve with cheese by at least two companies.

• Beets – to my delight! – were used as a chip and packaged in cold deli style containers so that no cooking or peeling was required before enjoying them.

• Bialy was a new discovery for me. It’s a cross between a bagel and an English muffin and quite intriguing.

• Pickles are in!  From refrigerator pickle kits to spiced pickles to old fashioned pickles in crocks, people were puckering up in delight.

What else did I learn at the Fancy Food Show?  I learned that there is a lot of competition in this world and that, if you’re looking to get into the food business that you should likely avoid choosing these crowded categories:

• Tea
• Chocolate
• Finishing salts
• Artisan goat cheese

Last year, I posted my Canada Day menu and no one (!) posted back. You’ve had a year now to get used to this whole blog-comment-box thing, so I’m trying again.

To celebrate Canada’s 143rd birthday, I’m grilling beef kebabs made with Canadian-grown beef and served on homemade flat bread made from Canadian wheat. A fresh green salad dressed made with local cucumbers, Canadian feta, homegrown herbs and a canola-based dressing will help offset the sugar high the homemade butter tarts will induce. To drink? Red wine –  VQA, of course.

So, what’s your Canada Day menu?

Long in the works, a national honour for the food sector has finally been awarded.  The Nation’s Table is the Governor General’s award for excellence in the food and culinary sector.  Founded by Jean-Daniel Lafond, the award intends to celebrate the leaders and innovators who best exemplify social values, innovation, and cultural impact that we honour in our Canadian food system.

The inaugural inductees range from restauranteurs, chefs, food processors, and scientists.  Of note, awardees include long-time Cuisine Canada supporter  and member Rob McLaughlin, as well as past Culinary Book Award winner John Bishop.

A committee nominated by the Governor General’s office selected the current group of nominees. Future nominations will be generated by the public.  Certainly many Cuisine Canada members, with their remarkable contributions to Canadian culinary culture will be nominated in the coming years. Whose name would you put forward?

Here’s a quick rundown of some of the exciting and interesting finds from Manitoba:

Cold Pressed Prairie Oils
We’ve all seen cold pressed canola oil.  How about cold pressed flax, sunflower and  hemp for salad dressings, dips, or finishing oils.  Grown locally, and often pressed fresh in front of your eyes, the oils are full of Prairie sunshine.  The cool climate is considered a major factor in the higher polyunsaturate content in the oils, meaning heart healthy.  Watch out for mustardy camelina oil which may be coming out soon, thanks to work from the Food Development Centre in Portage la Prairie.

Unique grains, pulses and lentils
Canada’s Prairie provinces are the global production leader for chickpeas, pulses and lentils.  Healthy, and homegrown.  Other unique grains, from quinoa, spices and Cavena nuda “oat rice” are coming out in the mainstream.  How about split pea snacks?  Not just for South Asian namkeen and khoraki snacks any more, these crunchy goodies come in classic potato chip flavours, with none of the potato chip guilt.  Or check out local grains in finished products.  Artisanal bakeries are taking advantage of the goodness.

Hemp everything
Manitoba is Canada’s hemp foods leader.  With over 6000 acres in hemp production, look out for a wide variety of processed product.  Whole or hulled hemp seeds for baking, snacking, and everything in between, through hemp protein isolates for health and wellness, hemp nut butter, and hemp-milk beverages.  Nutty, tasty, and extremely healthy.

Big time for Bison
Bison has come full circle, from being the original prairie delicacy, sustaining the Aboriginal communities, to being the trendy meat of choice in restaurants across the region.  Burgers, satays, stews, bison has come back big time.

Varietal Honeys
Clover or buckwheat honey is beautiful, but how about borage or raspberry blossom honey?  Look for niche varietals with unique floral characteristics.  Blended honey is another treat, look for honey spreads and honey butters with Prairie fruits, or real butter blended in.

Smoked Fish
Who’d have guessed that some of the best smoked fish comes from the centre of the country.  Gimli-style smoked lakefish is unlike anything else.  Smoked goldeneye anyone?

Classic Confectionery
No questions, this is your mom and dad’s candy.  Maybe even your grandparent’s candy.  Classic, comfortable, and oh so kitsch.  Fluorescent pink popcorn, and prizes are just a few of the options.

Multicultural Ready to Eat
Ukranian and Icelandic influences are hitting the multicultural frozen or ready-to-eat fare.  Look for classic pickled foods and other homestyle items to lead the trend.

Marketing, Marketing, Marketing…
How about pairing one of Manitoba’s top tourist destinations with a marketing strategy for Manitoban and Canadian foods?  This is Randy Cameron’s plan. Cameron, General Manager of The Forks Market, along with Manfred Villing, President of Wittmann Foods, are organizing the “Canada’s Home Grown Marketplace”. Here, uniquely Canadian food products will be showcased and sold to the 4 million visitors who come to The Forks each year.  They are actively seeking products, and building contacts with interested vendors.

Photo – courtesy of Travel Manitoba

When Jo Marie Powers retired from the School of Hospitality and Tourism, University of Guelph, in 1998, as a volunteer activity she began the Canadian Culinary Book Awards. In the beginning this was a way of collecting cookbooks for the University’s culinary collection (now numbering more than 12,000 titles) and letting Canadians know who our super-star authors and publishers were. Soon it became such a fun activity that it became her primary retirement activity.

Last fall, Jo Marie turned the awards over to Fiona Lucas and a team of four headed up by Karen Baxter. Before this, at the University of Guelph, Penn State University and Morris Brown College, she taught restaurant management courses, specializing in the history and culture of foods. Her work during the 50 some years since she finished university included almost every job in food beginning with a media job in the late 1950s telling people what foods were in season (does that sound familiar 60 years later?) Before she began her teaching career, she also planned menus for hotels her husband managed. Jo Marie will now manage the Hall of Fame book award for Cuisine Canada.

Her five sons with their families live both in Canada and the United States. She has five grandchildren and five grand-dogs. She and her husband, Tom, will be celebrating their 50^th wedding anniversary this year.

What’s your weakness? Dessert or mains?
Ice cream in any shape or form – it’s a family thing. When we go to a new town we seek out the best ice cream shop.

Who or what got you interested in food?
When I was about three, I cut out pictures of food instead of paper dolls and pasted them in scrapbooks. My mother influenced me the most – she’d send me off to the kitchen to cook something to get me out from underfoot.

What inspires you?
Cookbooks – well written and beautifully illustrated. If I find one recipe in a new cookbook that I love it’s worth the price.

What was your favourite dinner when you were a kid? Do you like it now?
My mother was a nutritionist and you won’t believe that for our birthdays parties we asked her to make our favourite dinner of liver and bacon, baked potato and spinach (not a great hit with our friends as I remember). Now liver is not the “in” healthy food it once was and no one in my family will eat it so occasionally I’ll find it on a restaurant menu and fill up.

What’s the first dish you remember making?
Mud pies with my sister beautifully decorated with wild flowers. Mother put up with it and just had us hose off at the back door. The next step up was Wacky Cake and Magic Mountain Muffins that we made during World War II.

Proudest food-related moment?
There were two, both student-related. The first was in the 1960s when teaching in Atlanta at an African-American college. The students were planning the faculty Christmas party – a traditional Southern African-American barbecue. Just before the party the flu struck and the school closed. Most students left to enjoy a longer Christmas vacation at home. But all my students stayed to cook the whole pig and everything that went with it, and that meant staying up all night turning, poking and basting the pig. The other event was at Guelph when I was teaching  the fine-dining course. A similar situation – a snow storm that closed the University the first time in its history. My students had studied and were presenting a traditional Chinese banquet. They had spent days planning and going to Toronto for supplies. The dinner was the day the university closed. Again, every student in the class stayed to work the dinner. I always found that nothing can hold back students if they get excited about something.

Strangest food you’ve ever eaten?
1987 — a live seafood platter in La Rochelle, France.  My son still claims he was chasing little critters crawling around on the plate.

Favourite sound in the kitchen?
Classical music while cooking or perhaps the sound of the dishwasher running.

Favourite cooking smell?
Least favourite, I have to confess, is smoke, due to my frequent  inattention to what I’m doing. The smoke alarm doesn’t like it either.  If company is coming, with a smokey kitchen I put on a pot of spiced mulled cider (a pinch of 5-spice powder is good cover-up).

Quintessential Canadian dish?
Maple sugar candies and I like mine boiled down with heavy cream. We start the maple with the sap so it takes about a week to get to the candies! That is indeed “slow food”.

Molecular gastronomy, best thing ever or the unwearable haute couture of food?
It’s been around for decades – believe it or not, gelatin and Jello were wonder foods of the early 20^th century – the library has a great collection of Jello recipe booklets with amazing photographs that look like molecular gastronomy today. I think they even made a kind of Jello spaghetti.

Cilantro — can’t get enough or tastes like soap?
Love it but wish I could buy a smaller bunch. It’s a great plant for the garden because I can clip off what I need and it comes back year after year, but I haven’t had much luck growing it in a window during the winter.

What local foods can’t you live without?
A game I play when I go to the Farmers’ market is to see how much local food I can buy, even in the wintertime. In addition to winter vegetables – potatoes, carrots, turnips, celery root, onions, green-house vegetables (tomatoes, lettuce, cucumbers) don’t forget our staples — eggs, milk, chicken, turkey, beef and pork. I’m still amazed to see some of the market produce available — each summer I look forward to the fresh figs brought  in by a man who brings his trees indoors during the winter.

What’s your greatest culinary extravagance?
Really great seafood – lobsters, scallops, large shrimp  and when my son comes home from Vancouver, sable fish.

Most over-rated kitchen gadget?
I have cupboards full of them. All I need is a good knife and cutting board but my kids think I have to have every implement known to humankind. Perhaps the funniest were the special forks for carrying a large turkey!

What’s the most treasured possession in your kitchen? Why?
French knife.

Fill in the blank. If I never cooked / ate / heard about  ______ again, I’d be happy.
Can’t think of anything. I’m like my Chinese students who used to brag that they would eat anything with four legs except the table, and anything that flies except an airplane.

If you could cook for anyone, alive or dead, who would it be and why?
Funny you should ask. This year my husband, Tom, and I will have our 50^th wedding anniversary. We’re planning a weekend with all our children, their partners, grandchildren and grand-dogs. I’m hoping to have a chef friend prepare the big anniversary feast. I love his meals because each course is a surprise, totally different from the previous course.  That’s what I really love – a celebratory meal lasting about three hours with eight or so courses. (We are encountering a problem however finding a place that will take the five dogs!)

What  was the last thing you ate?
Today Tom and I had magret of duck, sweet potatoes, mixed frozen vegetables, tossed  salad and chocolate bread pudding. I don’t usually have duck during the week but found one in the back of the freezer along with the frozen vegetables. I made two meals with the duck. I cut off the breasts and sauteed them quickly with slices of  honeyed orange slices. Tomorrow I’ll roast the rest of the duck.

If you had to work outside the culinary field, what would you do?
I think I’d like to work in a remote park as a forest ranger.