Tag: recipe

Watermelon Mint Refresher

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Watermelon Mint RefresherWatermelon, Lemon and mint are a classic combination of summer flavours. They kick it in salads, smoothies, sorbets, a legion of various desserts and cocktails… So many cocktails.

This is one such cocktail! Elevated miles above the obsessively photographed, overly-sticky mass of vodka/watermelon rabble out there on the interwebs thanks to its high quality ingredients and the careful blending (yeah it’s one of those, dust off ye olde margarita-o-matic) of flavours by my talented mixologist wife. Read More

Miner’s Lettuce Au Lardon

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Miner's Lettuce Au Lardon 1Frisee au lardon is a very French salad of curly endive poached eggs and chunks of bacon. Due to the brunch-esque combination of soft, unctuous egg yolk and crispy/greasy bacon ends it is without a doubt the very best sort of salad to nom after a long weekend’s debauchery. The bitter endive gives it just the right herbal kick to wake up the taste buds (jeezus, it’s already noon!) while croutons give it crunch. Pairs damn well with mimosas too! Read More

Bannock – First Nations Style

Shawn 7 Comments

(Updated 07/04/2021 after a reader named Jane commented about soggy cakes… No one likes soggy cakes! Also long, blistering Canada Day of frying Bannock and tinkering with the traditional recipe.)

Long before Europeans brought wheat and barley to the New World, the First Nations people harvested, processed and milled flour from indigenous plant life. Stuff you’d never think could turn into flour like Cattails, acorns, mosses, lichens and ferns. These became the base for a myriad of bread and bread-like recipes that kept the natives fed even during tough seasons and droughts.

One particularly badass recipe from the Neskonlith people (one that pre-dates European contact) calls for boiling black tree lichen until it coagulates enough to form sticky, licorice-flavoured hand cakes which were seared on rocks laid in charcoal-filled pits… Yurm.

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Bannock – European Style

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Euro Bannock 1My whole culinary career (such as it is) I’ve been under the mistaken impression that bannock was exclusively a First Nations thing.

It must have been all the outdoor cooking demonstrations on Canada Day; bannock broiling up on cast iron beside staves of smoked salmon, always supervised by the local band elders. Every native cook I knew fried a mean skillet full ‘o bannock and on the occasions that Crystal and I went to Uke to see the extended family you could bet there’d be a lot of fry bread involved.

It turns out that although First Nations people may have been grinding nut and berry flour to make something bannock-like, the bannock recipes we recognize today originate in the Middle East. Most historians agree that the recipe came from ancient Egypt and the modern name came from Celtic England. Read More

The Lady Sage Cocktail

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Lady Sage CocktailIt’s now safe to say that 2014 was the year without a winter here on the West coast. I’ve done my best not to rub it in the face of my Eastern relatives, but seriously… T-Shirts in early February. It’s been a good, good year!

Already the fennel, sorrel (more on that in another post!) tarragon and various tough, fibrous perennials are returning to the garden wasteland to stake out their spaces like suburban families awaiting a parade.

The gnarly old rosemary and sage bushes spent the mild non-winter locked in combat for more territory, each trying to stretch wider and taller than the other. I hacked the tops off both of these beasts on the weekend to let the rest of the garden in on the sunshine party, now I’ve got a kitchen table covered in herbs. The rosemary is no problem, just hang it and dry it out for later use. But what the hell do you do with pounds of sage leaves? Read More