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Food and drink: What’s in your fridge, Nancy Wilhelm-Morden?

On the stainless shelves with a down-to-earth lawyer who loves to cook

An earlier incarnation of their current Sub-Zero fridge, in fact, the very first fridge popular lawyer and politico, Nancy Wilhelm-Morden, and her husband, Ted, owned at Whistler is still around. It's a cooler that bears claw marks (pun intended) from the black bear who found it outside their first home at Whistler, a cabin Ted built in '75 alongside Crabapple Creek, where said cooler was stored in summer.

Better an old cooler with claw marks and a tale to tell than a new one, I say. The Mordens apparently ascribe to similar values, for they've held onto their genuinely storied "fridge" all these years, a memento from their days living in the bush.

In the context of Whistler, for readers not informed about such matters, this is a badge of honour not disrepute, for being a squatter, as in squatting on Crown land in the days when the village site was the local garbage dump and Blackcomb Mountain never dreamt of a ski run but people lived their dreams, means you are about as bona fide a Whistler resident as they come.

The Mordens have also held onto their second and equally storied house they built themselves in 1979 in Alpine Meadows, one they've renovated six times because they didn't know their family was going to include daughters Jessie and Sarah. The latest reno, done in 2001, brought the Sub-Zero into their bright and lovely kitchen, alongside the walk-in pantry that Ted had to be convinced to include but now loves and across from the door that leads outside to a small but productive kitchen garden, even now bearing herbs.

So off we go on a tour of the Mordens' fridge, and the first thing we find is something of a condiment shelf, at eye level, with all kinds of preserves, jams, and assorted delights, many of them made by Nancy.

"I'm kind of an old-fashioned person. I do and always have done a lot of canning and preserving," she says, ergo the jars of cranberry chutney, chili sauce and apricot jam made from the "ginormous apricots" they get from the ancient, gnarly trees growing around what was once the old fishing camp at McGillivray Falls on Anderson Lake, where they've also built a cabin.

There's also a jar of beans from their garden up at McGillivray that she pickled using a recipe from a long-time former Whistlerite, Margaret Long.

"I have to say that I absolutely love cooking and Margaret was really, truly a mentor to me when I was young and first came to Whistler. She's a very good cook who has very sophisticated tastes and she introduced me to the world of fine dining, but she's not a snob about it," says Nancy.

We also find some ghee, which she uses in the Indian cooking she loves to do, along with a big jar of Spanish capers from Pasta Lupino, a wonderful little locally-run Italian place behind the IGA that has some of the best and cheapest capers anywhere.

Below, on the main shelf, sits cranberry juice, some San Pellegrino mineral water, a couple of bottles of white wine, two big jars of mustard, homemade hollandaise sauce, Avalon milk, and a tall bottle of Lizano salsa, a vegetable and molasses-based salsa from Costa Rica that Nancy really doesn't like - "tastes like Worcestershire sauce." But Ted and Jessie love the stuff, which is delivered by friends who spend every winter in Costa Rica and have a standing order to bring some back, please.

The other interesting thing on this shelf is a big jar of Moroccan-style preserved lemons that Nancy put up herself using a recipe from the new Gourmet cookbook (see recipe below).

"They're fabulous in a lentil stew, or salads, or something I'm serving these days is Irish soda bread with smoked salmon and cream cheese and then little bits of preserved lemons on top," she says. "They're dirt-easy to do and they're so flavourful."

On the next shelf down we find something that Nancy is not at all happy about: store-bought eggs. "I've always had a bit of farmer in me and I desperately want to have my own chickens," she says. "I'm not sure if we're allowed to have them but Margaret always did when they lived up on the ridge. They had goats, too."

Fortunately, there's also stuff here she's happy about: clams, mussels, chorizo and cod fillets to make a cassoulet for friends coming over for a hockey dinner and to watch the game.

Below that are the fruit and vegetable crispers with an assortment - an orange, a grapefruit, asparagus to go with the cassoulet, an English cuke, carrots, new potatoes and onions - plus the meat area. Here we find a nub of Mennonite summer sausage that she bought at the farmers' market outside St Jacobs, a tiny town near Kitchener, Nancy's hometown. Coming from a farming family and parents raised during the Depression, she's been sourcing local, organic, farm-made, homemade, homegrown food way before it was cool to do so.

This is the best sausage in the world, Nancy declares, though I counter that the stuff from Mundare, Alberta is. The former is another product that anyone who visits back East has standing instructions to bring back. When she gets really desperate her Mom actually mails her a sausage. Alternatively, Ted has brought them back in his carry-on luggage, which leads to interesting airport security encounters, as you can imagine.

The fridge door holds another assortment of condiments and cheeses, vital ingredients for one who loves to cook - Nancy - and those who love to eat what she makes - the rest of the family and friends.

As for those preserved lemons, here's the recipe. Enjoy the results and every time you do, think of the Moroccans who have learned to live without refrigeration for centuries, and the Mordens, who learned to live without it for four years in their little cabin on Crabapple Creek.

Moroccan-style preserved lemons from The Gourmet Cookbook

Take 12 lemons, and wash them well. (Editor's note: this would be the perfect occasion to use organic lemons so you don't have to worry about what they are dipped in.) Take six of the lemons and blanche them in boiling water for fice minutes, then cut each one into six or eight wedges. Try to pick out as many seeds as you can. Toss them with 2/3 cup of kosher salt and put them into a jar. Take the remaining lemons and squeeze enough juice out of them to make 1 cup. Pour that over the lemons in the jar. Let stand five days at room temperature. Add 1/4 cup of good-tasting olive oil and then put the jar of lemons in the fridge. They will keep for six months.

Glenda Bartosh is an award-winning freelance writer who is terrified of killing someone with home preserves.