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Food and drink: What’s in Chili Thom’s fridge?

From liquid Freezies to beer with labels featuring his art

Living in a 380-sq-ft bachelor pad like Chili Thom's is something like living in an Airstream trailer without wheels. Located in, and I quote, the narrowest kitchen in the universe, his fridge is only six feet from his bed.

Along with a sink and three-burner stove it forms a singular, sleek 3-in-1 stainless steel and white enamel unit called SpaceAid that would be at home in a Tokyo tube hotel.

For Chili, who's been voted Whistler's favourite artist every year since 2002, home for the past three years has been at Adventures West, overlooking Alta Lake and the marshland, where you can see every type of bird imaginable.

It's pretty ironic that's where he lives. Chili grew up in Chilliwack - ergo his nom de guerre, Chili, for his hometown, despite the spelling like a red-hot chili pepper. (He got the alias from Sushi Village, where he used to work with three co-workers who had the same first name.) His parents brought him to Whistler in February to ski Blackcomb for his fifth birthday.

"My godparents had a place at Adventures West, and it's really funny. I remember walking out on my fifth birthday - I couldn't remember where - and I started walking on the ice and snow near a river, and I broke through and got super wet," he says.

"It was super shallow so it wasn't a big deal, but the whole time when I was living here I was trying to figure out where that was, and a few years ago I moved in here and walked down to the little dock at the riverside and was like, oh my god, this is full circle for me - this is where I fell in and started my whole Whistler experience."

That chilly baptism by ice water didn't put him off. Chili kept coming back every year for the mountain biking, the rock climbing, the skiing.

Now he's lived in Whistler 15 years, seven of them with fridges without a functioning freezer. That includes this one, where you can put something in the freezer for days and it will just get the lightest dusting of frost but never become frozen. Ergo the cold, weirdly juicy bananas he finds in the so-called "freezer" from maybe two years ago.

"I think the next place I get, I want one of those big double-door fridges that you can sleep in if you have to," he says.

Double-doors or no, Chili's fridge holds an amazing amount of food for its size.

On the top shelf we find a jar of Vlasic zesty dill pickles, a packet of three-year-old Freezies in assorted fruit flavours that have never been frozen due to the freezerless freezer, but were intended for friends coming over for a barbecue.

There's some miso shiro, the lighter coloured miso that Chili learned about at Sushi Village and likes the best of all the varieties of miso. He also learned to make sushi working there, something he still does once in a while.

Next there's a giant bottle of Santa Cruz organic apple juice, perfect for blended drinks with Greens Plus, yogurt and fruit before he goes to the gym; a carton of unsweetened vanilla Almond Breeze (he's not lactose intolerant but Chili doesn't enjoy drinking milk from "chemically enhanced cows" or otherwise).

Finally, there are two Fuji apples, some organic broccoli and a small jicama, which he likes to cut into strips the size of wedge potatoes and marinate with salt, pepper, dill and lime juice.

This way of eating jicama, a deliciously sweet and juicy root veggie native to Mexico and Central America and unfamiliar to most Canadians, he learned from guiding guru, Bruce Wilson, while working for him.

Over the years, Chili has worked as a guide in a lot of settings, from ocean kayaking and canoeing to winter survival trips - he was even the host and guide for the outdoor TV program, Wild at Heart.

The jicama could play a pretty fun role on some kayaking expeditons. (Remember this story if you ever go out with Chili.)

"We used to actually fool people on the trip. I'd be like, okay, we've got to find some food right now because some of the stuff has spoiled, so I'm going to go see if I can find some vegetables," he says.

"I'd go and bury the jicama in the sand and then pretend I found it. Then everybody would go, like, oh my god, and dig around looking for more jicamas."

On the second shelf, there's a head of cabbage; a bottle of Kokanee; sugar snap peas that remind him of his grandparents; Old El Paso pickled jalapeno slices; an organic orange pepper; a couple of nectarines; a bag of Earthbound Farms organic carrots; an ancient and very disgusting piece of wiener in a Ziploc bag left over from a barbecue last summer; and some raw, unsalted almonds soaking in a cup of water, which his friend, Lara Cooney, taught him to do - "they taste good and they're more alive, and they're way easier for your body to digest."

At the bottom of the fridge is a little mini-shelf. It holds, among other things, a bottle of rum from Nicaragua, where Chili was shooting his latest creation for this year's Heavy Hitting Films' B-Grade Horror Fest (the brainchild of Chili and Feet Banks), and a couple of bottles of Whistler Brewing's Powder Mountain beer, which sport labels featuring artwork by none other that Whistler's favourite artist. (Don't tell anyone, but it's actually an image of Mount Fissile).

This is the first time Chili's done a label, but his artwork has been featured on T-shirts, snowboards, skateboards, skis and surfboards. Pretty amazing for a self-taught artist and gallery owner who kicked off his career one Christmas when he did a scene from a hiking trip on Mount Robson for his mom using some old acrylics he found left over from high school.

"I just thought I'd give it a shot, and it was pretty fun. Then I went guiding and I was out in nature and I'd see the coolest sunrises and sunsets and scenery, and I'd come back and paint."

So how does it feel to have something in your fridge with labels that feature your own artwork, or to stand in a lift lineup and see people holding skis and snowboards with your art?

"It's pretty rad," he says.

 

Glenda Bartosh is an award-winning freelance writer who sometimes keeps her paints in the fridge.