Dill-iciously Decadent Newfoundlander Style

Can you keep a secret?  Good. Neither can I. This post is about a secret Newfoundland gem.  And I want you to think of this particular secret during those lulls in cocktail/dinner party conversations when a well timed secret is likely to strike a big enough spark to ignite a truly wonderful foodie conversation.  And of course, this Food Warrior literally lives for foodie conversations as she hopes you do too.

The secret has two parts.  The first part is to do with the location of this secret.  It is in Newfoundland.  This is a must visit province of Canada that has lately received notable awards and press in the foodie world.  One of the more notable awards is to Raymond's, a non-descript (from the outside) downtown St. John's restaurant that won the best new restaurant in Canada award from Enroute in 2011.  This upscale wharfside restaurant takes local fare to the french cuisine level.  Another example is award winning chef and Newfoundlander Roary MacPherson taking on the world stage and expanding Canada's food reputation to include a born and raised Newfoundlander's unique culinary experience. Chef Roary is the youngest of over a dozen children and credits this experience and the food he was brought up with as informing a lot of his culinary creations.

The second part of the secret is the actual restaurant.  From the outside you might not think much of the cheery but low key signage of the Rocky Harbour Newfoundland restaurant called Java Jack's.  Rocky Harbour is adjacent to Gros Morne and it is a thriving tourist and conference destination from May thru October annually.

If you read the small print on this sign you might take a moment to pause and reconsider what this restaurant might offer your palate.  "Recommended by Frommer's, The Lonely Planet, Fodor's, and Where to Eat in Canada."  Not too shabby a recommendation list eh?

The restaurant prides itself by using many locally grown ingredients.  In fact, some of the ingredients are more than just local, they are grown right outside the actual restaurant and the garden is what you first take note of when you pull into the parking area.  There is a beautiful organic vegetable and flower garden immediately in front of the restaurant.  When I first pulled into Java Jack's one of the cooks, Monica, was snipping lettuce greens for the evening's dinner salads.  She is pictured below amongst the colourful bounty.

Owner Jacqui Hunter had all the time in the world for a chat with this food warrior the morning I went in for breakfast (the restaurant is open from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. every day except Tuesday's..they offer breakfast and a tasty and delicious packed lunch service for the hiker's that abound in these parts during the tourist season).

Jacqui had catered a 60 person conference event the previous night and hadn't got home until 11:30 p.m. and was taking a morning coffee breather before planning her attack on the brand new day.  She told me that when she arrived in Rocky Harbour in the 1990s she nearly starved as a vegetarian.  Back then she was a newly placed park interpreter that had lived throughout Canada (her father was an RCMP officer so between her childhood and her park interpreter career she has lived everywhere in Canada).  As a hat tip to her sentiments regarding typical Newfoundland restaurant food, her restaurant has a large chalkboard sign stating that it is a "Deep Fryer Free Zone".  This sign gave me a huge chuckle at the entrance way since it is well known regionally that the typical Newfoundland eatery is notorious for featuring a huge vat of boiling 'crisco' as the starting point for every meal throughout the province.  This makes healthy eating out virtually impossible whilst travelling in the province. The downstairs portion of the restaurant has cafe type seating and a small deli counter where baked goods and prepared lunches are on display.  The upstairs part is fancier with seating for over 40 people.  Spectacular Atlantic based artisan work is liberally sprinkled throughout the facility and is available for purchase.

Jacqui talked openly about her success and the fact that sales were up 14% over last year. This is her thirteenth year of operation and she is now being called on across Canada to participate in best practice consultations. She remarked that she considers her restaurant venture a social enterprise because of the transformative nature that her food and her workplace has brought to the region. She has educated an entire region about not only the nature and composition of good food but also put this learning into cold hard practice by putting an organic food garden right on the property itself where customers and Rocky Harbour residents can directly observe the source of some of their food. The dinner and lunch menu contains as much local food as feasible and that means including plenty of fish courses and, of course, a few tasty vegetarian/vegan options too.

For my breakfast I had a delicious arctic char scramble with fresh onions and red pepper.  It was scrumptious and reminded me that eggs do mix nicely with fish for a tasty protein dish.  The coffee that accompanied it was well deserving of the Java Jack's moniker and I could have had an espresso if the mood had struck me. Yes, you read that correctly. Espresso.

I had met up with a high school friend that morning at the restaurant who also happens to be the owner of the only upscale Inn in the area (her king sized bed suites each have balconies overlooking the harbour in Norris Point!).  I especially enjoyed listening to the two of them sharing shop talk about the season and the intricacies of operating a seasonally based business in the Gros Morne area.  My high school friend is in her fourth year of operation and she told Jacqui that most people that arrived to stay at her inn already knew of Java Jack's as a go-to restaurant in the area.

It is heartening to know that Gros Morne National Park is not only a world heritage site with 20 well marked day trails, but is also the location of a trail blazing eatery that the rest of Newfoundland and the world is taking note of.  

Pretty good secret eh? Go ahead. Share it. You know you want to.

Hey Vancouver, kale me maybe?

On the left and on the right. 
Up a hill and down a street. 
On the corner and behind the wall.
One for her and one for him. 
It's 'cause they care and 'cause they share.
Community gardens are everywhere!
That was how this food warrior felt while traipsing through the streets of downtown Vancouver. Everywhere I turned there was yet another large community garden with well organized plots and extremely bountiful produce. Each of these gardens had a sign informing people that they were welcome to walk around but to please not pick the produce since it belonged to individual plot owners.  And from what I saw, the signage was observed since there was plentiful ripe harvest throughout the many gardens I walked through last week.
Some of the plots were haphazard and some were meticulously planned out.  Some plots had garden gnomes or other accoutrements of a regular front or backyard garden.  In a city where most people live in apartments or condos due to the highest real estate values in Canada, these plots offer the only access to getting their hands dirty in soil that is attached to the planet (as opposed to container gardening).
This is exactly the case for Mike (pictured below) and his partner Lisa.  This young couple finally got a plot in a community garden operated by Evergreen Canada across from Vancouver's City Hall after a two or three year wait.  They pay a nominal annual fee for a small plot that allows them to grow a variety of vegetables including the very successful purple kale pictured with Mike.
Mike and Lisa are from the Okanagan Valley region of British Columbia which is prime farmland nestled within the Rockies north east of Vancouver. They both miss access to land and are considering leaving the city.  In the meantime they are enjoying the fruits of their first year's harvest but won't grow quite so much kale next year since they had such an abundance. 
Mike said that Evergreen Canada provided loads of workshops to help them and also said that Vancouver's mayor was extremely supportive towards urban agriculture initiatives.  When I asked him if he knew anyone with urban chickens (legal in Vancouver) he said that they didn't know anyone with a house since they are so expensive but they had friends of friends that kept hens. 
Perhaps community chicken coops are next on the scene in forward thinking Vancouver? (There is already a chicken co-op that allows Vancouver hen owners to share costs and info about maintaining city chickens.)

Mike beside his purple kale.

Inaugural Harvest Trek 2012 Part I

Installment 1 of Harvest Trek 2012 occurs in Vancouver, BC where our Food Warrior, Orla.Hegarty, is preparing to embark on a cross Canada drive along the Trans Canada Highway. She hopes to explore this years harvest and collect deliciously radish-al Food Stories across Canada. She will be driving from sea to sea in the next few weeks and sharing some of these stories here. Lettuce Connect hopes to publish an anthology of these stories as a collection within a few months of the tour ending (and in time for a similar Scattered Spring Planting trek around Canada in the spring of 2013. Her first story is below. Please leaf feedback since it's nice to know if you give a shitake :)

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This food warrior seems to have a magnet attached that attracts similarly minded folk. Case in point: I got on a crowded double length bus to visit a friend at UBC (University of British Columbia) yesterday and immediately my food warrior ears started twitching. 

Two young lads were discussing their programs: one of them was a land and food systems faculty student  from Sasketchewan and the other was (ready for it?) a young farmer (and UBC student) from Richmond, BC.  My food warrior ears started twitching when I heard the two making introductions and discussing farming and food issues.  The land and food systems student had wanted to be a vet so that he could work on farms (he was not a farmer but wanted towork in the industry).  The young farmer was living on the family farm and was basically just taking interest courses after two years of college and was hoping to major in Cultural Anthropology and Astronomy.

I navigated my way through the crowded bus until I was close enough to introduce myself to these young men.  The lad from Saskechewan wanted to end up in marketing in the farm or agricultural industry.  He got off well before UBC so that allowed me and the young farmer to talk for quite a length of time.

His family's farm was 200 acres and they owned 65 acres of that and leased the rest.  The land is protected by British Columbia legislation in order to ensure that the land remains agrigulturally zoned in perpetuity.  The young farmer (Lucas) told me that no one sells their agriculture land in Richmond due to the fact that everyone recognizes the possibility that the legislation may one day be repealed and then it will be like the lottery since land values anywhere near Vancouver are easily recognized as the most valuable in all of Canada.  I am sitting here typing on a computer in a cafe on a piece of property probably worth more than I can even fathom.

Lucas also told me that medium scale farmers like his family are concerned about new farming endeavours such as urban farming and new immigrant farms.  He said that as a regulated traditional type farmer they have to meet stringent criteria that is set by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.  He had concerns that food safety regulations were not being met.  He gave an example of a new immigrant family in Richmond that is farming pea sprouts on leased land.  He told me that this farm had had eight harvests so far in this season! Even I, as a non-farmer, know that this kind of intensive farming is in no way sustainable and destroys the soil very quickly.  And as a Management Scientist, I also recognized immediately that this intensive farming allowed these farmers to undersell any other pea sprout farmer. This all too familiar imbalance cascades down the supply system and directly into consumer's pocketbooks.  Consumers are not paying the true value of the food if there is even just one farmer managing to harvest 8 times whilst regular farmers harvest much less and with a mind to conserve the value of their soil.

So Lucas' family and other land owners like him have a right to be concerned and frustrated at these new food iniatives springing up like wildflowers across the continent.  The more quickly they sprout the more bureacratic agencies like the Canadian Food Inspection Agency have to run to catch up in order to ensure the safety of the food on our marketplace shelves.

So, after a nice visit with my friend, I was strolling through the demonstration garden/orchard beside the Land and Food System faculty building (pictured below). As I walked and observed this unprotected garden, I was thinking of Lucas and how wise he was about the whole food system thing.  At 20 or 21 years of age, his multigenerational farming family and others like his feel the effects of any changes in the system that allow shysters to take advantage of regulatory loopholes.  At the end of the day, Farmers Feed Cities, but they also have to feed themselves.

UBC's Land and Food System demonstration garden