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Putting the fun back in dinner

New store in Squamish partnering with local producers for improved grocery shopping experience

There are few people on this green earth who can recall every ingredient in a variety of well-balanced, healthy meals without the help of a recipe book. That little memory glitch can become a major bother when hungry and shopping for dinner in a crowded grocery store filled with similarly rushed, irritable shoppers stumped by the same question: "What am I going to make tonight?"

Newly opened Kitchen Quickies in the Spectacle Building in Squamish has an anecdote for the unplanned meal quandary - a number of seasonal recipes posted on a bulletin board just inside the door. A step away from the giant grocery store model, this little grocer doesn't need half an acre of square footage to do its job, which is to provide fresh, local food to customers with guidelines on how to prepare it.

Kitchen Quickies was designed to ease the grocery shopping experience, improve on culinary skills, and incorporate more B.C. products into daily meals. Shoppers can decide whether it's going to be a night for Fraser Valley chicken schnitzel, Pemberton purple potato gratin, or any variety of ethically-caught seafood from the Diamond Head Fish Market next door.

"One of the main benefits of my idea is that we can provide people with inspiration and ideas for how to use what's in season, because usually when you're looking through a recipe book it's filled with normal recipes that use ingredients that aren't necessarily in season," said owner Daniel Jensen, who created the model with the help of his sister Mila Winter, a Master of Finance student studying in Zurich.

"It takes a lot of planning to use local produce more often."

Born and raised in Whistler, Jensen had always been interested in the food business. But after trying his hand at established restaurants like Araxi, he decided the restaurant world wasn't for him.

"I wanted some sort of a business idea where I could work with food and food ideas but have somebody else do the cooking," he said. "One of my biggest pet peeves is having to navigate the whole after-work routine when you walk through the grocery store hungry and you don't know what to make for dinner. We had a good solution to that problem and it fit into what I wanted to do so the idea grew from there."

For Jensen, the joys of eating depend entirely on how fresh the food is and it can't get much fresher than if it is grown up the road. Organic Pemberton potatoes, Gabriola Island apples, Squamish eggs, Fraser Valley chicken, pork and beef - Kitchen Quickies relies heavily on B.C. producers to keep its shelves stocked. Jensen took a cue from a wildly successful local-products-only corner grocery store called Home-Growin in Vancouver.

"I definitely think it's a good idea because so many people want to cook more at home and don't really have the time. They want to do it for health reasons and want to know where their ingredients are coming from, so it's fantastic if some of the initial steps are done for them," said Home-Growin's communications representative, Jesse Veenscra of the Kitchen Quickies model.

"In the summer market it's a lot easier because everybody loves the berries and tomatoes and the stuff that's in season. But I think it's definitely harder in the winter and people don't necessarily know what to do with the winter vegetables, they find them kind of boring so giving people neat recipes for cooking up kale and squash and things like that is going to play a huge part in helping people not think it's such a pain."

According to Kitchen Quickies sales associate Jeana Duncan, customers are glomming on to the concept and since opening in early October, feedback has been positive, though the store is located in what Jensen describes as a "difficult" location. Duncan is clearly passionate about food as she lists some of the most recent recipes featured at the store like squash soup, orange glazed chicken, short ribs in cumin broth, spice-rubbed pork with creamy mushroom spaetzle and pumpkin stew.

"We're huge with the moms in Squamish, we're huge with the seniors community, and the native community is starting to catch on to us - they're so close to us and they want more specialty, more natural and organic things too so it saves them a trip downtown, it's really exciting," she said.

"It's Squamish, right, it's a whole community and you can't just do things independently. Well you could, but it's more fun when you get to do it with somebody and you get to achieve something with somebody."

The local food movement has gathered steam in recent years. The publicity of the Vancouver-based 100 Mile Diet project and subsequent book raised questions around where and how food is produced. As a result a savvy public is now pushing for more local and organic options, although they're not always willing to pay the higher prices. Experts say that lower price tags come with a dark side, including a heightened carbon footprint from shipping, deplorable labour and animal treatments in unregulated markets, and highly chemical production norms.

"I think the one thing to keep in mind when choosing groceries is know where they come from," said Tara McDonald, executive director of the Vancouver Farmers Market. "How food is produced, it's how it's grown, the labour standards under which it's grown, how animals were raised, that sort of thing is so, so critical to long-term health of humans and the planet."

Evidence in the interest surrounding food is everywhere. Food and Beers, a popular Vancouver lecture series organized by online newspaper The Tyee and hosted by Tyee editor David Beers, is providing a platform for public discourse regarding various obstacles in the food industry. Farmers markets have morphed from tourist novelties to full-fledged affairs relied upon heavily by buyers and sellers alike.

"The strangest thing is unfortunately the local stuff is more expensive, and people wonder why it's expensive from our own backyard. The reason is when these guys are growing cabbage or whatever down in California and Washington, they grow thousands of acres and their labour is cheap as well," said Pemberton farmer Marty Van Loon. "I hate to say it but our local produce is as much as stuff that comes from California, if not more, but it is way better tasting and way more responsibly grown."

A major barrier to the local farming movement has to do with the Ministry of Agriculture's definition of local, which currently means it has to be grown within 50 kilometres of the point of sale. That means a potato grown in Pemberton might not be considered local if it's sold in Squamish.

"We would say that that's too restrictive and a lot of the organizations and businesses we work with say the same thing," continued McDonald, who lauded the Kitchen Quickies model for making it easy for consumers to buy products produced in-province, which in turn improves and stabilizes the often-precarious farming industry.

"We want to be able to include local as being from within British Columbia, that everyone can make of Okanagan fruits and vegetables as well as fruits and vegetables from other places."

Van Loon and Jennie Helmer of Helmer's Organic Farm in Pemberton agree that the eat-local movement is a positive thing for local farmers. Efforts of the kind being made by Kitchen Quickies will serve to shorten the road between their fertile fields and dinner plates throughout the Sea to Sky corridor.

"I think we import around 60 per cent of our food here, even into B.C.," continued Van Loon. "That's not good. We should be eating 75 per cent, if not way more, of local food and eat that first and then bring food in from elsewhere."