Our Thanksgiving Dinner
OCTOBER 9, 2007 - So, Canadians, how did 100-Mile Thanksgiving go? Don’t forget to share your stories.
Here’s what we ended up with at our place. For salad, nothing more than fresh, sliced yellow tomatoes (why get complicated?). Then, huge artichokes - my mom, it turns out, had never eaten a fresh ‘choke - dipped in orange tomato and butter reduction, and as simple as that sounds it absolutely exploded in the mouth. Then there were Locojo’s Potato Muffins topped with honey-sweetened homemade cranberry sauce (why buy it when it takes barely five minutes to make?). Finally, poached pink salmon from the mouth of Vancouver Island’s Conuma River served with dill and white wine cream sauce, with white wine filling our glasses. We finished with Alisa’s absolutely incredible no-spice pumpkin pie - a brand new inventio
n that was the highlight of the meal - done up with whipped cream and slices of Asian pear. I’ll leave it to her to share the recipe…
The cooking, not including the pie, took only two hours even though I cooked alone; I didn’t want my mom to help, because a meal never tastes quite as good to the cooks as it does to a guest. Everything was local, right down to the salt, most of the ingredients were organic or biodynamic, and almost all of them came with memories. It was a feast and a celebration, and I want to share two things my mom (whom I haven’t seen a lot of lately) had to say about the whole experience. The first was this: “I wish I could shop with you guys all the time. You get things so cheap!” It caught me by surprise, because so many people tell us - without ever having tried it themselves - that eating locally must cost so much more thansupermarket shopping. It was good to have someone looking from the outside in on our world confirm what I strongly believe: that you can eat better, and more affordably, on fresh, local food. And believe me, my mom isn’t someone who takes the question of value lightly…
The second thing my mom said was simpler, and it came near the end of a weekend standing on farms and at fishdocks; if I remember correctly, she was helping me shell Goat’s Eye beans from the garden while Alisa loaded dried cranberries into a jar. Suddenly she paused, looked around her, and, sounding surprised, said this: “James, you have a beautiful life.”-JBM
