Flavourful Saskatoon, June 22, 2020


Local News 
Congratulations to Beth Rogers and Thayne Robstad for Hearth being named one of Canada’s top 100 restaurants. Wonderful recognition for a wonderful restaurant – definitely where I head for a special meal. 

Living Sky Café has added a mini grocery to their restaurant on 3rd Avenue. Good news for people who live in the downtown area and have been without a local grocery store since 2004. 

Food for Thought 
I read a [long] article about the future of BC as a world wine centre. What it boils down to is marketing – and I find that extremely discouraging. “The problem with British Columbia is not its wine—today, just about anyone is capable of producing the good stuff. . . . a large part of what makes a region is how that wine is positioned, for locals and for tourists.” 

Restaurants and food writers strive for authenticity. And yet, how do we define authentic? Anthony Heard’s halloumi-style cheese is not the halloumi you get in a supermarket or a deli. It’s made with British sheep milk in a North London industrial estate. This is cheese that is not trying to reproduce the past but is instead adapting and being shaped by its current home. 

“Cardamom — green, black, pod, powder, as fine green husks buried in amma’s tea dabba, in payasam or paneer curry — has been omnipresent in our family kitchen. It’s there, and yet I never see it sometimes. . . . Until I force myself to think about cardamom again, even though it has always been in my kitchen, and in my life. Like privilege that we don’t really notice, which is itself proof that we are privileged. Privileged enough to ignore something that has given us a leg up all our lives. It is present yet forgotten, like the spices we have at home. I’m not saying that cardamom is a privileged spice. It definitely isn’t saffron, but like saffron it is expensive and extremely labour intensive, and unlike saffron, harvesting is done mostly by migrants.” 


Curiosities 

It’s so important for me to consider how food gets from the field to our kitchen, so I love the ingenuity of shipping coffee from South America to the UK by sailboat. “Sometimes long-distance transport is necessary for a balanced and sustainable supply chain, so sail cargoes have a role to play in that.”

Thank you for reading Flavourful Saskatoon. If you enjoyed it, please share it with someone – or many someones!  

Flavourful Saskatoon is a weekly Monday feature. I also post articles about food that is good, clean and fair; travel; and books. You may also enjoy EcoFriendly Sask profiling Saskatchewan nature/environmental initiatives and events. 

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