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Table scrapes

Farming out new shopping

By Nicole Fitzgerald

Normally, my grocery shopping is a two-question process: what am I going to cook and what product is available?

I used to sigh and roll my eyes at empty bins where Roma tomatoes should be at the local market. I’d reshuffle my menu for the week on discovering organic, free-range chicken was out of stock at the meat counter, again.

But what I really needed to reshuffle was my two-step shopping routine.

Weekly visits to the Whistler Farmer’s Market re-choreographed my shopping routine, switching up the order and adding one more crucial phase: look for local seasonal product then figure out a fitting recipe followed by the most important step, Googling to solve the mystery of how to prepare it. Good luck trying to say portulaca oleracea five times fast, let alone knowing what to do with the twiggy, leafy vegetable.

  “So what are we going to have for dinner this week?” I asked my shopping buddy.

We weren’t looking at a recipe book. We weren’t making a shopping list. Instead we were looking at the 50-something stalls at the Whistler Farmer’s Market open every Sunday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. in the Upper Village until Thanksgiving weekend.

This reshuffle grew at a pedal pace.

When participating in this year’s Slow Food Cycle Sunday event – an organized bicycle tour of Pemberton farms and local food artisans in August – I talked with authors Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon about their new book The 100 Mile Diet (Random House Canada, 2007).

The book sprouted from a dinner one night where the two foraged, fished and mulled from local lakes, forests and farmlands to create a meal where every ingredient had a story and identity. Could they eat like this everyday? Almost a year of no pancakes and bread followed (they couldn’t find a wheat producer on Vancouver Island) and The 100-Mile Diet was born. The book’s premise is eating product only available within a 100 miles of where you live.

I thought back to my dinner the evening before. I couldn’t put one farmer’s name to anything on my plate. But more than vegetables and meat gathered in my dinner round; little nuances you often take for granted.

I couldn’t imagine tracking down something as simple as a local peppercorn farm or olive oil producer. And even if you can find the product close to the 100-mile gauge, a basket full of goat cheese from Salt Spring Island, Lower Mainland Terra bread and Denman Island organic chocolate can tax a grocery budget.

MacKinnon grounded his local eating for global change theory into something a little more palatable, a first baby step.

“Instead of drinking orange juice from Florida every morning, try drinking local apple juice instead,” he suggested.

I didn’t need to clear out my cupboards or hire a private investigator to search out locally grown oatmeal. Committing to buying a few local items each shop would get the planet-friendly way of chomping into action.

I aimed to plate one local ingredient with at least one meal a day.

The summer growing season and the Whistler Farmer’s Market has me off to an eating start.

B.C. raspberries, blueberries and blackberries bejewel my morning cottage cheese. Whistler Pocket Chocolate’s dark-chocolate-dipped dried cantaloupe and mango is a heavenly afternoon break. Helmer Organic greens with Whistler Cooks candied ginger dressing brown bag it for lunch along with Pemberton purple-potato salad if I am really organized.

Dinner is the most exciting adventure of my farm to fork efforts. Vegetables from William Hayward’s Lytton farm build my now favourite side dish. I roast the colourful purple and orange beets then marinate them in white balsamic and olive oil. Don’t throw the beautiful beet greens away rather lightly sauté them with portulaca oleracea for the salad base. This weed contains more Omega-3 fatty acids than any other leafy vegetable plant along with vitamin C and B.

A few stalls over at Glenn Valley Artichoke Farm, I played with dragon beans (beautiful purple-streaked green beans), small summer squash (perfect for dinner for one) and tomatillos (a tart almost citrus-tasting firm tomato). Dice up the small green tomatoes with black beans, mango, onion, cilantro and lime and you’ve got a killer salsa for Cajun spiced chicken.

My culinary adventure hasn’t been all sunshine, however.

A few tips:

Boil artichokes rather than sauté them or even better buy a jar of Glenn Valley artichokes already prepared – I will never take an artichoke pizza for granted ever again.

With no preservatives and produce picked ripe and ready, anything that is not a potato expires fairly quickly.

And lastly, homegrown meals don’t magically make themselves (contrary to my dine-out-and-dial upbringing).

And while new foods can take a little more time and planning, all that effort really makes a difference not only in taste, but with Mother Nature and our local producers.