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Food and drink: The 100-Mile-House diet

Or: What’s in Marlene and Max’s fridge?

You’ve heard all about the 100-mile diet, so how about the 100-Mile-House diet?

Cast your eyes north, way north, past Green Lake, past the festival fields of Pemberton, then east and north again, over the Duffey Lake Road, through Lillooet, along 99 to the junction with Highway 97 north of dry, rabbit-bush-country Cache Creek, along to cowboys’ Clinton, then up the rise onto the plateau that holds 100-Mile House, where you turn right and go east and north-ish for 30 minutes to Sulphurous Lake, so named, says our hostess, for the weird yellow spot that mysteriously appears in the water on certain sunny days.

Here is where you find (drum roll)… the meat eaters, Max (a.k.a. G. D. Maxwell) and Marlene Siemens (a.k.a The Tax Lady), and their fridge ensconced for the summer in a hip-roofed, wood-centric cabin, otherwise known as “the cottage”, as in the cottages of Ontario, where Marlene spent her early-adult years, after her earlier incarnation in southern Manitoba as a “Menno”, her word not mine for “Mennonite”.

After a thoroughly post-post-modern conversation, which rambles through software that will break out the nutritional content of food and leave you feeling too anal, the pros and cons of eating carbohydrates in general and bread in particular, including the whole wheat stuff Max makes, women’s body shapes before and after menopause, including leathery mummies and how marvelously fleshy, and sexy, Marlene Dietrich looked in her 1930 break-out movie, The Blue Angel (Der Blaue Engel), we come to the cottage to site the whole adventure. At least the outside of it, where one can find the quintessential reason M&M have come to this northern setting with its 100-Mile-House diet: the garden.

“I had a jones to do some gardening,” says Marlene, our hostess for the tour given that Max, the self-proclaimed agoraphobic cowboy, is off on an errand. (Having a jones for something, for those not familiar with the expression, is to have a craving for something, originally heroin, but, hey, gardening can be addicting, too.)

“My mother always had huge gardens because she had eight kids and she fed us all from home. I really feel blessed that I was able to eat lots of garden stuff. She put lots of it in the freezer, and we raised all our own animals in southern Manitoba.”

So M&M have Saskatoon berry bushes for homemade jams and syrup, an asparagus bed and a round strawberry bed. Three raised beds comprise the main veggie garden with rows of raspberries, onions, spinach, beans, potatoes, peas, lots of lettuce and mesclun mixed greens, beets for greens more than anything, carrots, and a hugely successful rhubarb plant.

“I don’t grow a lot of root vegetables,” she says. “Max is a bit picky, he doesn’t like beets. His mother never made him eat stuff he didn’t like.” He also doesn’t like tomatoes, so a small plastic-enclosed area has been given over to growing fresh basil for pesto. Tomatoes didn’t do too well, anyway.

And then we come to the fridge: a boxy, almond-coloured Kenmore, and in keeping with the cottage’s overall wood theme and 1970s vintage, it’s tricked out in brown wood trim counterpointed with fridge magnets. It sits snugly in a galley kitchen with a retro orange countertop and dimensions best suited to one working cook at a time, overlooking a brick half-wall toward the living/dining room and beyond.

“If I open the fridge door, all the cartoon food (after Pee-Wee’s Playhouse claymation food) can look out at the lake,” says Marlene.

Normally, we don’t do freezers in “What’s in your fridge?”, a) because it’s weird enough to ask people to keep their fridge doors open while you go through the thing, and b) there’s barely enough room in a 1,000-word column to go through a fridge, never mind a freezer.

But Marlene has avoided a) by being smart enough to make a list beforehand, and b) she wants us poking in her freezer because there’s something very 100-Mile-House-ish about it, namely 10 pounds of hamburger they got from rancher Monty up the road.

But there’s tons of other meat in there, too: pork chops, pork tenderloin, Italian sausage, shrimp, a salmon, and beef for making rouladen, a German dish Marlene learned to make from her mom. (“You put in a pickle, mustard and parsley, roll them up and tie them, brown them, then cook it all in the oven with a bit of beef stock and tomato paste.”) And green chilis they haul up from New Mexico whenever they go down.

The freezer also speaks to something eternally Canadian and 100-Mile-House-ish, namely stocking up on meat when it’s on sale, because the price is good plus it saves time, gas and money when “town” is 30 minutes away.

Now, we’re almost into the fridge, but Marlene has a quick interjection: “I often wonder about these people who live in Whistler and say they can’t afford it. I think they don’t know how to cook and shop. Like this weekend, Save-On has pork on sale, so I’m going to go buy a whole pork loin and we’ll have pork chops for the next two months.”

We then discuss the joys — and cheapness and ease — of “peasant food” and cooking black beans from scratch for bean burritos or garbanzos for homous.

“I think Max and I eat extremely well and yet some people would probably think we were deprived because we aren’t going to the store every day and buying a filet or sea bass,” she says.

She will buy organic, but only if it’s on sale.

“I don’t really worry about my food poisoning me because I think I have enough good food in my diet. I don’t eat any junk, crappy foods, so I don’t really worry too much about it,” she says. “Although I am getting more worried about meat and getting more into buying organic meat. In fact, I’m thinking of raising my own chickens, but the foxes up here would probably eat them.”

And she likes the idea of the leftover trout from a local lake that’s in the fridge — which we’ll get to in a minute — a nice big rainbow trout a neighbour brought over that will go into a frittata for dinner that night. So her concern about food sourcing is more for personal health reasons, as opposed to the bigger questions of soil and water table health.

“I do think about that stuff,” she says, “but it hasn’t really entered my consciousness at a very high level yet. So, no, I have to be honest, so far it hasn’t influenced me, even though when you say it in those terms, yes, it is an issue.”

And so begins our tour inside the happy Kenmore, but, alas, as I warned you, a freezer can be a dangerous distraction: my word count is up. But as we’ve seen, a freezer, even a small one, is pretty typical of 100-Mile House, as is the local hospitality. As for what’s on the rest of the shelves, we’ll just have to visit again and see if we get to sample that trout or burger, maybe barbecued Maxwell-style.

 

Glenda Bartosh is an award-winning freelance writer who loves the Chartreuse Moose in 100 Mile House.