Tag: winter

Miso-Roasted Oysters

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Oyster MotoyakiI know it seems like I throw miso in everything – like Jamie Oliver with all that damned rosemary – but if you’re a fan of oysters stay with me. If you have friends and family that are a little oyster-phobic this is the recipe that will turn ’em around. It’s that damned good!

And that’s impressive because there aren’t many things that people eat more polarizing than oysters. Shuck a couple and half the people at your dinner party will gag while the other half dig in with wild abandon.  My wife was one of the former (an unrepentant hater of oysters and most other bivalve mollusks) up until only recently. Now she tolerates a few raw oysters now and then but only if they’re the size of a dime and the larger ones get only scornful looks unless they arrive slathered in miso mayonnaise.

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Pickled Red Cabbage

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Pickled Red Cabbage 5Walking around the local Megalomart produce section in the depths of a rainy West coast winter is a real lesson in our dependency on other places for our food. Yeah, I’d love to eat strawberries, tomatoes and mangos all year long, but the costs (financially and environmentally) of supporting the industrial mega-greenhouses of Mexico, Argentina and China outweigh my base cravings.

So I obsessively scan the “Product Of…” signs, hoping to hit something Canadian, or better yet, from our own backyard. Drives my wife freakin crazy!

These local eats are often hardier root veggies, or tough fibrous greens that look a bit scrubby next to piles of supermodel red peppers and dragonfruits. The kind of tubers, berries and brassica that need a little bit more processing to be as tender and sexy as the subtropical stuff. Read More

Salt-Cured Salmon With Aquavit and Dill

Shawn 1 Comment

Gravlax 1Using salt to draw out the moisture in fish is a technique of preservation that almost every civilisation in human history has employed. The Mesopotamians did it, and passed their techniques on to the ancient Greeks and Romans (who gave us our word cure, from the Latin curare, meaning “to take care of”). First Nations people along both coasts have used salting as their primary mode of preservation along with smoking and sun-drying. It’s the same story with the Portuguese, Irish, Scots and especially the Scandinavians throughout most of their respective histories. Read More

Portuguese-Style Kale Soup

Shawn 1 Comment

Caldo Verde1Caldo Verde is the ubiquitous Portuguese soup made from potatoes, thinly sliced kale and maybe a bit of paprika-spiked Linguiça sausage thrown in for a little Shazam! I’d heard the name mentioned in cookbooks and on other food blogs plenty of times, but I’d never researched or attempted to cook this “green broth” everyone seemed so hot on.  Then winter hit, and I got sick, and all I had left in the garden was a single miserable little kale plant to comfort me. Read More

Winter Kaiseki Night @ Wasabiya

Shawn 2 Comments

Kaiseki Course 3On a Monday night just before the Christmas holidays, an entire roomful of food service professionals (if any member of our clan can be called that) sat down to a very special dinner at Wasabiya Japanese Sushi Cafe in Campbell River.

Our illustrious guests were the kitchen and front-end staff of Quay West Restaurant and Catering, who had just hosted our Christmas party the night before. Chef Marc McGraw’s only request for the night’s food: “Make it something really unique, something Japanese… Stuff they may never have the opportunity to eat again.” Read More