The ladies of Banff took to the Rockies this past weeknd. Wait, we’re already in the Rockies. We spent a weekend in the woods (better.)

The weekend was spent knitting, napping, chatting, snowshoeing and tanning by a nice wood burning stove. Ahhh.

One fantastic book while in the woods is Off the Beaten Track, stories of Canadian women studying botany, hiking, camping and exploring the Rockies by horseback.  After a few stories I had visions of trying to trace their adventures myself this summer, to test their tracks myself. Until a co-worker told me it would be near impossible in one summer. Oh well, I can still paint flowers down by the river with a basket full of chocolate brownies. And did you know that Mary Vaux married Charles Doolittle Walcott? Dr. Doolittle.  He could apparently “smell a fossil.” I love it.

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.

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.

I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence by Amy Sedaris has lots of little caramel nuggets of ideas, just like my Mum’s. It’s a big hunker of a book, filled with lots of recipe ideas and hosting ideas (like hiding marbles in your bathroom cabinet to trick nosy guests.) I wish Amy was the next door neighbor who would invite me over for fancy themed dinners and stop by with cupcakes and homemade lemonade on Sunday afternoons. In Montreal we had Mr. Piedlourds as a neighbour, and in Alberta most of our neighbours are strangers. Would you take cupcakes from a stranger?

Actually, I might. But they’d need to have a LOT of colourful icing.

If I can’t sway you to buy the book  (for yourself, a friend… your grandmother), maybe Amy can. Here she is in her own deliciously wacky promotional video.

Amy talks about two things a lot in her book: cheese balls and her rabbit. Maybe you have some time this weekend to make a cheese ball for your family. You can follow along as she makes them on Martha Stewart right here. I wish I had both these things, except I am poor and can’t afford cheese at the moment, and Chris is allergic to every conceivable animal. So, in honour of Easter, let’s take a peak into the world of Amy’s Easter Bunny-ish cupcake store. If I lived nearby I would visit every single day.

However, since I do not live nearby I decided to celebrate Easter another way. I visited every single candy store in town, and bought something gooey from every stop.Wooo! There are pics from the Sugar World Tour right here (and to your right if you click that little Flickr image.)

Hope you all have a great Easter weekend eating hams, perogies, cakes and cookies with your Mums!

xo Sarah

The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan’s excellent explanation of industrial and organic food production is a must read for anyone concerned about what they eat.  It’s more informative than preachy, and although it might not change your diet, it will make you more aware of what makes up the food that lines our supermarket shelves.There are a million tidbits I could quote from the book, many of which would scare or disgust the average consumer, but an example of a more reassuring practice is that of organic box salad makers requiring their employees to wear bright blue bandaids with metal filaments in them so that a metal detector can catch them if they fall off.  Nobody wants a bandaid in their salad and it is reassuring to see that the salad makers have taken this to heart.

A favourite quote in The Omnivore’s Dilemma comes from French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss who describes the work of civilization as “…the process of transforming the raw into the cooked…”  I have to admit that I loved that notion, a good book is nothing more than a well cooked idea.