When Executive Chef Moe Matthieu announced he was going local with his menu, prairie foodies thought he had gone loco. “They said I would run out of recipes in a year,” Moe told me on my latest visit to the pretty Willow on Wascana. “But four years later, I haven’t run out of ideas and I change my menu every season.”
This restaurant in a park has a stunning view: The deck overlooks Wascana Lake and Saskatchewan’s impressive capital buildings. Summer evenings, diners enjoy spectacular prairie sunsets while rowers, urban voyageurs, glide by on the fire-red waters of the Wascana.
But the food holds its own with the view.
Today, on this second visit, I had the Willow’s famous staple - land chowder - a leek and potato puree studded with Berkshire bacon from local Pine View Farms and topped with leek foam. What followed was surely the most creative - and the tastiest - dish on my eating tour of the wild west.
Nearly a century after the Ukrainians settled the prairies and the Scandinavians established the largest fresh-water fishery in Canada on Lakes Winnipeg and Manitoba, Moe cooked up this fusion of prairie cultures - pickerel perogies. I love perogies, in theory, but always regret the heavy hug of pasta around potato, usually after the second pillow thuds in my stomach. But this delicate, sweet, white-fish filling is a stroke of culinary genius that left me, frankly, wishing for another plate of them.
It’s intriguing how, as Moe describes it, “focusing back in” on Saskatchewan’s foods and cultural roots has rent open a cuisine of possibility as vast as the prairie sky.
For inspiration, the chef reads local history and delves into old cookbooks. He uses decidedly non foodie terms to describe the regional cuisine he’s nurturing - aboriginal, explorer, pioneer, homesteader. He described a recent creation: Three Sisters Chicken. The three sisters, of course, were aboriginal staples: corn, squash and beans. But Moe gave them a dramatic update, treating the beans to a hoisen sauce, teasing the corn into a gelee that drapes over the chicken confit that he infused with Labrador tea, a plant that grows wild in the muskegs of Northern Saskatchewan. Said Moe proudly: “It’s beautiful, colourful and radical.”
Last year, the chef took at trip to Batouche to investigate a historic Metis cookbook. He uncovered yet more inspiration — a foodie connection to his own roots. His family, Acadians, were among the original French settlers in the east coast before moving west.
My land chowder arrived before Moe could finish telling me that story, but I plan to return, to taste the results, of, what might it be, bison and Berkshire tourtiere?
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