Cachinnate and maieutic

oh boy oh boy oh boy!

Tonight is the 19th annual Spelling Bee and Trivia Challenge at the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies. It’s one of the more brainy activities as part of Banff’s Winter Carnival happening right now in town. Now, this would normally be the type of thing you read about in the back of the community news section of your paper a week after the fact. But in a small town this is the place to be on a Tuesday night!

Chris and I will be going head to head on opposing teams this year; he’ll be playing with the Banff Centre marketing team, and I with the Cranium Crawlers (the nerdy ladies from softball!). There’s about a dozen teams ready to take on such subjects as local history, geography, and “name that tune.” My rock and roll history class will finally pay off! heh.

I sure wish these ladies were at the carnival this year. May the biggest brain win!

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Garden of Eatin’

When I came to Banff last spring, I had visions of living in a little cottage, with a little garden, growing tomatoes and flowers. Quickly I discovered no one had gardens here. Bears will eat your berries. The elk will eat your veggies. So a few fantasies were quickly put to rest. Oh well.

But there’s something about living in the mountains that makes me want to be able to grow my own food. As I’m still not quite at that stage yet, a couple of books filled in the gaps nicely and got the ‘ol melon a turnin’.

In The 100 Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating a couple from Vancouver, Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon decide to eat locally for an entire year. At first it sounded impossible to me; no avocados, mangoes, Aunt Jemima pancake mix, Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, Coke and no potato chips. But they do much better than you would expect, or than I expected, anyhow, finding farmers around the Vancouver area who grow everything they need (from veggies to livestock). I think Chris and I might kill each other with a project such as this one, as I thought the authors might half-way through, too. Canning corn at midnight sounds like a recipe for disaster. But the fact that they make it all the way to the one year mark, happy, feeling healthy, and not desperately missing junk food was fascinating. It’s also caused me to start looking a little more closely at what I eat. Maybe not so far as to grow my own food yet, but to at least question buying blueberries from New Zealand and to enjoy Canadian fruits and vegetables when they are in season.

Doug Fine is a man in New Mexico with a similar mission: to not only eat locally, but to stop living off fossil fuels. He’s written about his successes and failures in his book Farewelll my Subaru and also on his website. I’m particularly interested to hear of his success with goat’s mik ice cream. mmmm

He’ll be speaking as part of the Mountain Culture series tomorrow night, which I am really disappointed to be missing. Hopefully the Banff Centre will have videos of the talk available online in the near future.

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A little Nigella for Alexis

Hmm, what to have for brunch on New Year’s day? I had oatmeal and coffee, which was fine, but I would’ve really loved to have Nigella Lawson’s tomato and bacon hash. Oh mama, so salty and bacony. This recipe was on the Food Channel a few months ago and it’s been stuck in the ‘ol melon since then. I can’t think of a better kinda-healthy-after-party-breakfast.

Why not take a moment and watch the video right here?

If you’re looking for some ideas for breakkie tomorrow, here’s the recipe taken from the episode “Breakfast all Hours.” Hope you had a fantastic New Year’s Eve!

Bacon and Tomato Hash

Ingredients

• 4 rashers streaky bacon
• 2 teaspoons garlic-infused oil
• 1 tomato, diced
• 2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce
• 2 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley leaves
• Freshly ground black pepper
• Serving suggestion: bread

Directions

Cut each piece of bacon into 3 or 4 pieces. Heat oil in a skillet. When oil is hot, fry bacon until crispy (the bacon will also give up flavorful fat of its own). Remove the bacon to a piece of kitchen towel.

Add the diced tomato, with all its seeded, gluey interior, into the hot oily pan, which will cause a great spitting and sizzling, and stir for a couple of minutes. Add the Worcestershire sauce and stir again, then put the bacon back into the pan, mixing it into the tomato before transferring to a plate.

Scatter with some parsley and freshly ground black pepper, and serve with bread to dip in the oily juices.

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