19. Seafood Carpaccio

We are just back from visiting my parents in Bucerias, Mexico, where they have a home that serves as a sanctuary from rainy Vancouver winters.

While there we enjoyed plenty of fresh ripe papayas and mangos, avocados, tomatoes and cilantro. Our weekly trek to the Sunday open air market yielded us as much beautiful fresh queso panela as we could eat. What better setting for fish carpaccio is there?

My parents know when and where the fishermen come in and off we went in search of fresh Mahi Mahi (Dorado), a beautiful white fleshed fish. We learned how to make this from our friend Giovanni who is a sea captain, spearo, fisherman and cook all rolled into one. Below is his recipe:

To make the carpaccio use the 2 fillets that start at the head and run on the back
along the dorsal fin up to half the length of the fish. This is the best part of the fish. The rest of the flesh has lots of ligaments and is best cooked.

Freeze it for a few hours to tenderize the meat, kill any parasites, and make it
much easier to slice. Basically the thinner you cut the slices the earlier you can eat them and the more delicate and beautiful they are. About a 3mm thickness is a good compromise. Slice the fish and put the pieces in a non reactive container with plenty of lime juice. Leave it covered in the fridge for around 4 hours (the time is dependent on the acidity of the lime and the quantity of it). Basically you want the outer part of the slice to turn whitish because it has cooked in the lime juice.

Then you put the the fish in a fine sieve and gently squeeze/drain all the lime completely - you don't want it to be too sour or to continue cooking.

Mix plenty (I mean plenty!) of fine salt, good olive oil and freshly ground pepper with the fish. Gently mix the whole lot together and lay the slices on a large flat serving dish.

Now the important part.

Be patient. Although it is technically ready don't eat it right away! If you leave it for at least an hour or two in the serving dish the enzymes unleash their power and the salt, lime, fish juices and olive oil react magically together to produce a delightful treat.

Giovanni assures me that salmon carpaccio is also delicious, and I will definitely try it when salmon is abundant. Meanwhile, my parents are bringing a Mahi Mahi back with them from Mexico and we're planning carpaccio as an opener for Christmas dinner.

18.

We live in a duplex so our tiny city lot is subdivided into two even smaller portions. Our neighbours have the sun rich south facing back yard and we have the north facing front yard with a long walkway along the eastern side of the house that leads to our side of the shared garage in the back. We don't have a lot of space to garden.

The first thing we did when we moved in was dig up the whole right side of the front yard to make a little herb garden for a bay laurel tree, rosemary and sage bushes, basil, chives, green onions, thyme, sage and a small red currant bush, all planted in a traditional pattern and separated by stepping stones. This little area is my favourite part of the front yard. It gives us all the herbs I need year round and red currants for jam.

Along the front of the fence, Swiss chard and kale seedlings are already inches high, ready to feed us in the winter when fresh vegetables are sparse.

Along the east facing walkway leading to the garage Matt dug up and built two small plots. We plant one with beans in the spring, adding parsley in the summer and sowing mixed greens at the end of August. We nailed the back gate shut and dug up the walkway beside the garage to make a second, larger plot for tomato plants and radicchio. It's also where we keep our compost.

In this back plot my stepfather came and build a plastic cover to create a greenhouse, using the side of the garage and the fence as walls. When he came by the other day to visit he suggested we plant the tomatoes in the middle of the plot, but then, as they grow, train them along the ground until they reach the side of the garage. This enables the tomatoes to develop extra roots over the nutrient rich soil and to stay moist during the hot summer days, while the plants themselves are leaning up against the wall that has absorbed the day's heat, keeping the plant warm after the sun goes down and extending the growing days.

Usually August is all about tomatoes, but this spring was so cold and wet that ours were green throughout August. I've only just begun enjoying them in my salads the first week of September. To make up for our pathetic show, my mom brought me 20lbs of plum tomatoes from the Okanagan and we canned them together last weekend. Ananda is planning on bringing down another 20lbs this week just to make sure we make it through the winter.

17.

On Sunday Catherine and Trevor of Wheelhouse Seafoods & Specialty Meats held a party to celebrate their 10th anniversary in business.

As part of the celebration they held a salmon burger contest. Anyone was eligible to enter; all he or she had to do was make a burger and bring it to the store. Chef Luis Montalvo from El Barrio Restaurante Latino cooked the burgers on the grill, and the judges were Debbra Mikaelsen and Philip Solman, Editor and Publisher of Edible Vancouver magazine.

My mom and Matt both entered, and I suffered as intermediary to their boasts and threats all week long. Of course, I also was delighted to serve as Matt's guinea pig for different recipes and really enjoyed being served fresh and interesting salmon burgers when I got home from work.
Mom's two entries - one served with roast peppers and one with fried onions.

The judges hard at work: tasting, conferring and noting.

Matt and Catherine

Luis paying very close attention to the burgers.

It got ugly for a while there when Matt went after my mom and fellow competitor with a plastic fork.

Matt's Asian style burgers with ginger, cilantro and sesame oil.

In the end, neither of them won. The ingenious goat cheese stuffed burger took it all. But it was a really fun time and excellent eating nonetheless.



Afterward, Matt and I met my sister and her family at my parents' place for dinner.

What did we eat? Salmon BBQ of course!

16. It's Pesto time!

Mamma swears that if we were in Italy we would be thrown out of the country for making a year's worth of pesto in a food processor and freezing it rather than using a mortar and pestle to make it fresh each time it's needed. But when basil flourishes for only a short period in an even shorter summer, you do what you have to to preserve it.

Mom harvested all of the pesto from her garden and Ananda and I brought the pine nuts, olive oil, garlic, lemon and parmesan cheese. In October and November, after the last of the fall tomatoes have been eaten and the rain has become a daily companion, we'll pull out the first of the pesto and that whiff of garlic and basil will carry us back to the sunny day in the kitchen when we put it together. In December, after a long day at work, we will rush home and make a quick dinner of pesto linguini and will remember the perfume of all that basil cut fresh and waiting for us in a huge, aromatic pile. And in January or February, when we've all but lost hope; when we start to believe that there is no blue sky, only a thick, impenetrable mass of grey clouds, we will make pesto pizza and remember the sun.


16 oz Basil
15 or 16 cloves Garlic
16 oz Pine Nuts
2 tsp Salt
4 cups Cheese (either all Parmigiano Reggiano 3/4 Parmigiano Reggiano/1/4 Romano)
4 cups Extra Virgin Olive Oil

Wash your basil leaves gently so as not to bruise them. Be careful and run the salad spinner softly and then place the bundles of leaves on a dry clean piece of cloth, cover them with another piece of cloth and let them dry. Do not rub or dab them, they are extremely delicate.
Using a metal blade, process the garlic and pine nuts with a little olive oil for a few seconds. Add the basil and process briefly. Stop occasionally to scrape the edges of the food processor with a rubber spatula. Add the olive oil and process again. When the ingredients are well blended, pour them into a bowl and stir in the cheese by hand, using the spatula. At this point add a little lemon - not enough to alter the taste! Just enough to keep the pesto nice and green. Pour pesto into clean ice cube trays (continually mixing the pesto so it doesn't separate) and leave for several hours until frozen solid. Then turn it out into containers and zip lock bags.

Summer in a cube. Seriously.

15. Happy Birthday Nonna.

On my grandmother's 70th birthday her children, my mother and her siblings, got together to buy her a pair of diamond and ruby earrings. Though I imagine she reacted to the gift the way that my own mother does, by saying that she didn't need anything, and that they shouldn't have spent any money on her, she loved those earrings.

On my last trip to visit her I remember her wearing them every day. My mother told me that even just before she died in the hospital, when she was suffering a great amount of pain, she would ask about them. The doctor would comment on them, on how much they glittered, and my grandmother would preen like a schoolgirl at the compliment.

After she died my mother brought them home with her and turned them into pendants for necklaces. One for me and one for my sister.

Every time I put it on I take an extra moment to look at it in the mirror - it really does glitter more than any other jewellery I own. When I receive a compliment for it, I remember to stop and pose and let myself feel like a schoolgirl.

There is something so special about this necklace to me. That it belonged to my grandmother, of course, and that it reminds me of her. But mostly that it made her feel beautiful.

She was that, and so much more.

I miss her.

Happy Birthday Nonna.

14.

Matt and I share one thing with our friends Ananda and Mario: We love to eat.

I mean, we really love to eat.

A lot.

And since we like to really eat great food, we're constantly exploring authentic traditional practices and ways to incorporate them in our own preparation and cooking.

Our hobby dovetails perfectly with my idea of trying to squeeze as much information out of my parents as I possibly can. My mom is somewhat used to this. Whenever she is cooking I look over her shoulder and ask questions, taste, and generally try to learn as much as possible. She's game. My step-father, on the other hand, is pretty much an untapped wealth of information. Since Ananda and Mario have joined Matt and I in trying to put away as much good, local food as possible this summer, I thought I'd ask Albino to teach us to make sausages. He was a trooper and we had a great evening together.

Step 1.
Start with pork butt (upper portion of the shoulder). We bought 15 kilos from Columbus Meat Market.



Step 2.
Remove the soft fat from the meat, leaving the hard fat. The names explain the difference. The soft fat is, quite literally, softer and lumpier, and very difficult to digest. The hard fat is whiter and much harder and looks like a solid separate layer of fat underneath the skin and on top of the muscle. Trust me, you want this stuff.



Step 3.
Use those muscles and grind the meat.



Step 4.
Prepare your spices. We used coarsely ground pepper and coarse sea salt in all of the sausages and fennel in half of them. Pretty much any dried spice can be added: red pepper flakes, paprika, whatever catches your fancy.



Step 5.
Mix for an interminable amount of time. Use your hands and keep going long after you think you should stop. Obviously commercial sausage makers can't mix by hand, but since we were only working with 15 kilos of meat, we could. This is the secret to fully developed flavours.



Step 6.
Taste. Yes, really! How else are you going to know if you have the right amount of spice?



Step 7.
Soak the casings for about 1/2 hour and then rinse them in fresh water. This will give them elasticity and make them easier to handle. Thread them onto the sausage stuffer component of the meat grinder and then run the meat through again.



Step 8.
Twist the sausage to make links - otherwise you'll end up with the mother of all sausages!



Step 9.
Taste test.



The whole shebang including clean-up took us less than three hours, and each couple ended up with about 70 sausages at a cost of less than 50 cents/sausage. We vacuum packed ours and put them in our extra freezer. Enough sausages for a year!

13.

Last week I told my mom that Matt and I had some beautiful halibut fillets in the freezer. She had a hankering for halibut so suggested I trade her for some parmigiano reggiano cheese she had. We worked out that I would owe her one fillet and $5. I went home with the cheese and promised her that I would bring the fish the next time I saw her. Then, she called me and told me that she had gone strawberry picking and had picked me a bunch of strawberries for my freezer. She wasn't sure what my cost was, but it would be added to the cost of the cheese. So I owed her one halibut fillet, $5, plus some extra cash. This morning I was going to Columbus Meat Market so I called her to see if she would need anything. She asked for a kilo of ground pork. Now I owe her one halibut fillet, one kilo of ground pork and an unknown amount of cash, and she owes me some strawberries.

I have no idea how we got here. I do know that she does this not only with me but also with my sister and my sister-in-law.

So is my mother running her own black market? Is she the capo of some mafia food ring? Does she watch the market runs on parmigiano in order to pounce when the getting is good?

I have no idea.
I'm just getting my strawberries, and getting out. Quick.

12. Thursday night dinner.

Wheelhouse Seafoods on Hastings has the best seafood we have found anywhere in Vancouver. The seafood is consistently high quality, local, sustainably harvested and fairly priced. The last time I was there, buying mussels, I picked up a can of tuna. Now, I don't usually buy canned tuna. With the abundance of fresh seafood here why pick up something canned? Especially since my mom cans fresh sockeye salmon. But something about the can twigged my memory.

My grandmother used to make something called salamino di tonno. It's a cold dish made with canned tuna or salmon, Parmesan cheese, parsley, garlic, lemon, and eggs, rolled to look like a salame. After being boiled and chilled it is sliced and served with lemon and olive oil. Delicious!

After that a memory of my Zia Luisa's vitello con salsa di tonno followed right on its footsteps. The tuna Wheelhouse sells is Estavan solid white B.C. albacore tuna, sustainably (hook & line) caught. Hmmmm, I thought, how could I go wrong?

Tonight Matt and I both worked late, so I put together a quick Provencal type salad. I used the tuna, greens from our garden,fresh little nugget potatoes, olives, capers, tomatoes, string beans and eggs and we enjoyed it with a glass of dry Merridale "Cyser" cider. Yum. This tuna was truly delicious, nothing like the regular stuff you find in big box grocery stores.

Charlie would most definitely approve.

11.

The idea was an agricultural tour of the Cowichan Valley on Vancouver Island, where we planned to visit a truffle farm. All I had to say to mamma was "truffles"? and we were off, planning the trip. In the end, we were unable to visit the farm as all tours were cancelled due to the introduction of competing fungi by visitors. But, by then, we had already found a kiwi orchard with a cabin we could rent and had learned about the only water buffalo in B.C., so we decided to go ahead with the trip.


The orchard was right on the water and on the beach we found plenty of clams and oysters. Unfortunately, Fisheries had issued a red tide warning so we couldn't harvest them. We did, however, find a shop that sold local (Cortez Island) oysters and bought a bunch for our first evening. We enjoyed them with a dry Ortega from Cherry Point Estate Winery. Then mom kicked our butts playing cards.



The water buffalo at Fairburn Dairy farm are beautiful, but mom and I stayed a little further away than Matt. They are milked twice a day and the milk, which has a much higher fat content than cow's milk, is used to make buffalo mozzarella right in the Cowichan Valley. It is sold all over Vancouver Island and Vancouver under the Natural Pastures label. After visiting the cows and spending time with the friendly farm dog, Apollo, we were invited to the main house for a tasting.



On the final day we visited a lavender farm boasting more varieties than we could count, with a delightful little labyrinth to walk. We stocked up on lavender oil for our closets since it's the best thing to keep moths away, and then rushed to Merridale Cidery for a tasting and to buy lots of good, locally made cider.


We were hoping to visit Little Qualicum Cheeseworks before heading to the ferry but the weather turned on us and we decided to take an earlier boat and beat the rain. Overall, the wine portion of the trip was a little disappointing; Vancouver Island wineries have a lot to learn from the Okanagan. Generally, we felt that the wines were of a lower quality and after spending time in Oliver, believe the wineries on the Island don't do as good a job of making visitors feel welcome and showcasing their product. Still, we managed to try some local cheeses, fresh oysters and the first local strawberries of the season, and the three of us had two lovely evenings together.

We did find some nice wines at Blue Grouse Estate Winery and picked up a few bottles to bring home.

Yes, let's please buy a case of this.

Best of all, sharing a car and a cabin meant that Matt and I got to enjoy many mamma-isms. Gems such as: "Don't tell me that I warned you"; or, "Just chuck it and buy another one, Canadian style". Words of wisdom, to be sure.

10. Cooking for those we love.

Me and Matt got together recently with our friends, Mario and Ananda, for a relaxed afternoon of cooking followed by a long, leisurely evening gathered around the table eating, talking, drinking and appreciating good food and lasting friendships. Our friends have recently moved to a city about an hour away from us, so we decided that this would be a good way for us to reconnect and spend a good amount of time together enjoying what we enjoy most. The plan was that each couple would be responsible for a course and then we would discuss the merits of the dishes and the wine we had chosen to pair with them. We arranged for them to spend the night so we could talk into the late evening without worrying about Mario having to drive home tired after a few glasses of wine.



I made the cioppino from Pino Posteraro's book and Mario prepared Mario Batali's osso bucco with saffron risotto.



With the cioppino we served Oyster Bay Sauvignon Blanc and with the osso bucco Mario served a Masi Campofiorin.

Dessert was tirimisu with espresso.

For comparison, here is a photograph of my mother's osso bucco which she made for Matt and I the week before the competition:

On Sunday my mother and stepfather came over for dinner. Since they love fish as much as we do, Matt and I decided to serve local, fresh seafood. We started the meal with a dozen oysters with freshly squeezed lime and finely chopped jalapeno pepper. Along with this we served vodka straight from the freezer. Next was a salad made with baby greens from my parents' garden with a light lemon honey dressing. The second course was linguine with mussels fra Diavolo - a spicy tomato sauce with capers and kalamata olives. For the main I made a sablefish cassoulet (also from the Posterero cookbook) and served it with an Australian Chardonnay. Dessert was a locally made light and clean mango sorbet. Everything turned out great, but the sablefish (or black cod) was a little rich for my liking.

For me the oysters with vodka stood out from the rest with a taste I can't forget: fresh, clean, mineral. Matt preferred the linguine with mussels. After dinner my mother complimented me so soundly that I was reminded where I came by my great ability to appreciate others cooking. There is nothing quite like serving food to a cook. They ask the right questions, know what techniques were required and can truly appreciate something that requires passion and time and is served with love.

Something else my mother gave me.
Something else her mother gave her.
Another reason to silently toast my grandmother when I untie my apron strings, slip into my seat, and raise my glass to the loved ones around me.