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NEXT EVENTS: FRIDAY, MAY 4 Sonoma, CA Friday, May 4 5:30 - 6:30 pm Reader's Books 127 E. Napa Street SATURDAY, MAY 5 San Francisco, CA 2 - 3 pm @ The Ferry Building, Market at Embarcadero 1 Ferry Building #42 hosted by Book Passage with CUESA For the full West Coast book tour schedule, see the May 1 blog entry. MAY 3, 2007 -- I promised to talk about an incredible 150-mile meal we had on the eve of our West Coast tour, now in its third day. It was a meal with the Bonnie Stern School of Cooking book club, and set Bonnie the challenge of preparing a fully local meal just as the leaves are beginning to bud in Ontario. Like Alisa and I, Bonnie jumped into the experiment cold turkey, and it wasn't easy. Take cooking oil, for example. She heard about one guy who sold sunflower oil at a local market, but then heard he was off lambing. Weeks later, she learned he had retired. So she gave him a call. Didn't he just maybe want to come back to the market one more time, even just to say goodbye? His reply: "I can't go back - I'll cry. And people will say, 'Come back next week!' and I'll say, 'Okay, I'll see you next week.'" So what did she come up with? An incredible taste of the place she lives. The salad alone contained marvels we'd never eaten before: a winter lettuce called Tango (among 11 other lettuces), marigolds, chickpea sprouts, popcorn shoots. On top of the greens, roasted white beets with smoked ricotta cheese and smoked, sun-dried Principe Borhgese tomatoes (an Italian food tradition that has faded so badly that Ontario's David Cohlmeyer now ships his to Italy - so it goes in the global-local food chain). Then came sweet potato and maple syrup mash, roasted carrots, and braised short ribs from Cumbrae Farms, a group of selected small farms working with special breeds. (Someone asked Cumbrae's Stephen Alexander if there was a simple way to tell small-farm meat from industrial, factory-farm meat; he replied, "Forget claims and trust your eyes and trust your palate." He says he can instantly smell the sulfates from industrial animal feed.) We drank apple sangría and local wines. Dessert was caramelized apples with maple syrup semifreddo over crepes. Right. Just the way Alisa and I eat all the time. And did Bonnie ever find oils? She did. By a fluke, she bumped into a guy at a conference in Chicago who'd grown up in Ontario and had a connection to cold-pressed canola and soya oil. "When I tasted them they reminded me of the first time I tasted extra virgin olive oil," said Bonnie. "So much flavour you don't know what to do with it." But why a 150-mile meal? The answer: salt. Bonnie had almost given up on local salt after trolling (in vain) every shop carrying specialty salts. The she found out the world's largest salt mine was 150 miles away, cranking out a brand called Sifto - the standard table salt familiar to every Canadian kid. She found a box at the back of her cupoards, and the 150-mile meal was set. Add Bonnie to the list of pioneers proving that we can eat - and eat as well as we want - within ecological limits. She was also gracious enough to provide the recipe (below) for one of her appetizers - a dish that should be possible (using different smoked fish) on almost any landscape I can think of.-JBM Egg and Smoked Trout Salad with Mayo by Bonnie Stern 6 hard cooked eggs 8 ozsmoked trout fillets, flaked 1 tbsp chopped fresh tarragon or dill salt mayonnaise: 2egg yolks or 1 whole egg 1 tbspcider vinegar 1/2 tsp salt 1 cup vegetable oil 1/2 cupsour cream Method 1. Chop eggs and combine with trout. 2. Whisk egg yolks with vinegar and salt. Drizzle oil into egg mixture drop by drop, whisking all the while. Once it starts to thicken you can add oil a bit faster but barely. Season to taste. Refrigerate (up to a few days). Add sour cream just before serving. 3. Combine approximately 1/4 cup (50 mL) mayo with egg and trout. Serve on bread.

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