FALL’S FRESH FLAVOURS
Build a feast around vegetables
When Mara Jernigan decided to come back to Canada after more than six years as a resort manager and consultant chef in Belize, it was only natural that her path would lead to the Okanagan Valley.
“I’ve always been farm to table and there’s a great selection of produce here,” says the former president of Slow Food Canada.
“What’s interesting to me is, being one of the pioneers of the local food movement, coming back here it’s so easy to find local food now.”
In Kelowna, Jernigan has found a bounty of fresh local produce that makes it easy to eat the way she prefers: generous with the vegetables, light on the meat.
“I like vegetable-driven food. I build my food around the vegetables, really,” Jernigan says, noting that she eats meat only once or twice a week.
“I feel better, and I just love vegetables.”
Increasingly, that’s the way more and more of us prefer to eat, too.
Besides, a veg-forward diet can be delicious, especially at this time of year, when local markets are bursting with the last of summer’s tomatoes, stone fruits, leafy greens, and sweet corn and the first of fall’s apples, squashes and root vegetables.
It’s even easier when you’re a winery chef with their own vegetable garden the way Alex Lavroff at the Chase Wines Garden Bistro or Kai Koroll at 50th Parallel Estate Winery in Lake Country do. They just nip outside for fresh herbs to scatter over their fresh, wine-friendly salads and flatbreads that come to the table still smoking from the wood-fired oven.
Meanwhile, Andrea Callan, head chef at Red Fox Club at Indigenous World Winery in West Kelowna, not only relies on produce from her home garden, but adds foraged finds to her menu.
“Everything is nice and local,” Callan says. “It’s just what the natives ate, only modern. It’s all about respect, and there’s a lot of meaning to the food.”
For instance, Callan recently served fritters made from milkweed pods she found on her property, crispy on the outside, wonderfully melty on the inside, and garnished with savoury pine tree pollen. “You’d never think of milkweed as delicious,” she says. But it is.
It’s also gone now. We talk of seasons, but we should also consider what Callan calls a “hyper season,” the short window when produce is at its peak.
“Here in Kelowna, it’s hyper seasons,” she says. “Milkweed season only lasts a week. You can only have pine pollen for a day or two and then it’s gone. If you don’t pick the cherries on the tree when they’re ripe, you won’t get them. It’s a hyper season. It changes day to day.”
Produce tastes best when it’s at the peak of ripeness. Sure, you can get asparagus in January, but does it taste that good?
That is one of the things that people find intimidating about vegetables. “People don’t know how to cook them, or buy them, or how to build a meal around them,” says Jernigan.
She’s hoping to teach some of those skills at the Summerhill Pyramid Winery guest house, which she’s managing right now, using products from the organic and biodynamic gardens. She plans to add cooking classes and culinary weekends, just as she did when she managed Fairburn Farm, a B&B in the Cowichan Valley.
So bring on the season’s brussels sprouts and kabocha squash, the Jonagold apples, and candy cane beets.
Head to the market and load your basket with things you’ve never tried. Then try them, in an old recipe or a new one. Just enjoy.
“I think vegetables are underappreciated,” Jernigan says. “It’s fun going to the farmer’s market and following the seasons.”