The craziest question I get asked when I’m talking about local foods and farming is this: This thing about local foods is all fine during the summer and fall, but what are we supposed to do in winter? This is Canada, eh?
Well, take a meander through historical cookbooks and I think you’ll find that the pioneers who founded this country knew how to feed themselves through the winter.
The more pertinent question, it seems to me, is why can’t we feed ourselves when the January winds start howling? Why do we have to rely on California, South America and China for our groceries?
Sometimes we have to go way back, to find ourselves. Sometimes to go forward, we have to go back to a time when area farms and ranches supplied produce and meat directly to frontier cafés.
Pincher Creek is the stunning backdrop for parts of the Oscar-winning movie Brokeback Mountain, but the tiny dusty town has sold its soul to fast-food restaurants. And they wonder why they’re having trouble attracting tourists eager to follow the Brokeback Mountain trail. Really, what tourists wants to go to a place full of fast-food signs?
But there is one lunch spot serving food that tastes like this town - authentic, real, beefy! At the tiny Celestial Sweets, Celeste Fouillard makes foothill-high sandwiches on wholesome prairie grain breads. She buys her grass-fed organic beef from a couple of Diamond Willow ranchers, Jan and Larry Frith. She makes bread and pastries from scratch - she estimates that 80 percent of her ingredients are organic. And she says she has no trouble getting organic ingredients here on the prairie, though produce can be a little tougher.
Just outside of Lethbridge, a larger cowboy town about two hours east, Paul de Jonge is tackling the problem of local produce on the Canadian prairie. While root veggies last quite well through the winter and freezers can keep peas, corn and beans for months past harvest, the immigrant from Holland knows that California has hooked Canadians on their tasteless lettuce (aka California water) and rubber-ball tomatoes bred for their shipping rather than for taste. With the help of coal-fired greenhouses - two acres of prairie under roof - de Jonge grows butter lettuce, mustard greens, tomatoes and peppers virtually year round.
In 2004, he opened the Broxburn Café on his 80-acre farm in 2004 to add value to his produce. I happened by on a blistering cold day near the end of April and tucked into a refreshing salad picked that morning, followed by a steaming bowl of grilled red pepper soup — the soup that put the café on the map, for good reason.
Shortly after the café opened, a chef from a high-end Calgary restaurant happened by, tasted de Jonge’s cherry tomatoes and peppers and gave the farmer agriculture’s equivalent of an Academy Award - he placed an order. Word got out that fresh, intensely tasty local produce was available on the prairies virtually year round and now de Jonge supplies restaurants like the River Café and the western Fairmont chain, including Banff Springs Hotel.
To keep up to demand, de Jonge turned to other local farmers and now markets their produce and meats - preserving each farmer’s name on the label, he says proudly. Heather McGee is one — she grows organic herbs that apparently send Calgary chefs into swoons.
Says de Jonge: “We can pick one day and deliver the next. We’re delivering something chefs can’t get otherwise.”
In a word, local taste, a taste of this region. What a discovery!
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