Italian cuisine will spice up Canada Day
Karen Barnaby recommends adding Italian flavour to your Canada Day celebration
It’s hard to express the magic I felt the year that Canada turned 100 years old. It wasn’t because Canada was a century old, it was everything that went along with Canada becoming that age.
School that year was a breeze. We rehearsed and performed plays, made scores of centennial symbols out of paper, went to track and field events and sang songs. All the girls in my class — including me — were crushing heavily on Mr. Cook, our Grade 5 teacher which made it even better. It seemed like Bobby Gimby’s Ca-na-da song played constantly in the background and we all sang along.
Despite everything else that happened that year; race riots in the United States, the Six Day War and Vietnam War protests, we were cocooned, insulated against a harsh world by our fever-pitch patriotism, culminating with a spectacular fireworks display on Parliament Hill on July 1st. It was a great year to be 10 years old and living in the National Capital.
I don’t remember much about food that year except for a meal I had at Expo 67 at a Polynesian themed restaurant. It was outfitted to look like a grass hut, complete with masks and tiki torches. The cuisine was anything but Polynesian. My dish consisted of a chicken leg, fried rice, and cherry JellO in the shape of a puck nestled beside the rice and chicken. My parents thought it was as strange as I did. Jell- O is dessert, not something you eat with rice and chicken. Even though many things caught on from Expo 67, this mercifully was not one of them.
In honour of that dish, I’m serving chicken this year, from Italy, not Polynesia. I’m serving grilled zucchini, flecked with plenty of fresh basil and mint, grilling red pepper strips while the chicken cooks on the cool side of the barbecue, cherry tomatoes, and a cauliflower salad. I make it the same way you would make a mayonnaise-based potato salad, but using cooked cauliflower in place of potatoes. Add a loaf of chewy bread to mop up all the delicious juices from the chicken.
The chicken is great cold, so you can pack it and everything else, up for a picnic. If you do want to serve Jell-O with the chicken, I won’t judge you. But may I suggest lemon instead of cherry?
Happy birthday Canada!