Category Archives: food

When I was a teenager, I used to babysit for a family down the street that had a candy drawer. It was, just as it sounds, an entire drawer full of candy. After dinner, if it was a weekend, the kids could each pick one item out of the drawer. And once they went to bed I would settle on the couch with a selection of  licorice, gummy worms, and various chocolatey treats and devour them until my teeth ached.

I remember this particularly because back at my house, we definitely did not have a candy drawer. To be fair, I probably didn’t have enough self control to have a drawer of candy, and we did have a cookie jar filled with homemade goodness, but as everyone knows, cookies aren’t candy.

Whether it was the lack of a dedicated drawer or my naturally ravenous sweet tooth, I have great nostalgia for candy. Most of it centres around the following:

1. The obvious annual Halloween bonanza.
2. The customary giddy anticipation of corner store candy purchases where I could spend my allowance however I wanted (generally a box of nerds, a ring pop, or a lick-a-stick because they lasted the longest and I have long been a girl who values a good deal).
3. Skittles. My Dad would occasionally come home with a coveted package of these shiny fruity wonders. I associated Skittles so closely with being a “Dad candy” that I was actually surprised years later when I realized that anyone could just walk into a grocery store and buy them.
4. And finally, the eatmore bar. At some point in my later childhood, after she went back to work full time and we started packing our own lunches, my mom began buying bulk packs of eatmore bars. Usually we had granola bars, but when the eatmores were in the house, each of us kids were allowed half of one in our lunch. It was the ultimate treat: soft and chewy, salty sweet, peanuty goodness, and it’s something I’ve missed since we headed down the zero waste path and stopped buying things like plastic wrapped candy bars. (I told you I was nostalgic about this stuff)

Anyway, today I unexpectedly discovered that my Whitewater cookbook had a recipe for eatmore bars in it. Even after all my do-it-yourselfing it never even occurred to me that I could MAKE them. And now, after all of 5 minutes, I have a whole pan of candy bars in the house.

If only I could figure out how to make skittles, I’d be set. . .

PS-If you want to try eatmore bars for yourself, there’s a similar recipe here

perfect handmade soup mugs from http://www.mugrevolution.com

Yes, it’s that time of year. My mystery volunteer squash that threatened to overtake the garden have been harvested. The raised beds are looking a little bare, save for a few remaining carrots and beets, a scrawny row of last minute radishes, and the over-producing kale and swiss chard (Grant was done with kale back in June).

The wet weather has blown in. In short, it’s soup time.

My friend Keith called and insisted we go hunting for wild mushrooms. Dreaming of mushroom soup, I grabbed a few containers and we headed out to harvest a local and zero waste meal. Turns out that the mushroom patch wasn’t, as I’d expected, in the forest. It was right downtown. On the edge of a large grassy median in the heart of Yaletown (which, if you’re not from Vancouver, is a pretty fancy pants area).

And that is how I ended up in my gumboots harvesting mushrooms on a median in downtown Vancouver at rush hour as streams of business people walked by. (Never one to draw attention to myself in a public place, I found it a tad embarrassing). I was a little worried about the toxic traffic fumes impregnating the mushrooms, but Keith insisted he’d done this before.

In the end, we had wild, urban, shaggy mane hungarian mushroom soup for dinner (hungarian mushroom soup courtesy of The New Moosewood Cookbook – that recipe alone is worth the price of the book); zero waste, local, and pretty darn fun.

We recently played host to some friends and fellow zero wasters who were visiting from Iqaluit. I have to say, living in the extreme north, they definitely have a harder time of it finding low-packaging food, but, armed with a pantry of bulk food, they’re doing an amazing job!

After enthusiastically taking full advantage of all Vancouver has to offer in terms of restaurants, we got together for a home-cooked meal. It turned into a collaboration in local food; we picked greens from the garden, boiled spot prawns, and, most excitingly, we made butter from scratch.

I’ve made butter a couple times before, but I realized I hadn’t posted on it. It’s dead easy, and definitely worth a try. It’s especially fun in a group or with kids because you can all take turns shaking. All you need is a jar and some whipping cream.

Put the cream in the jar.

Shake shake shake until the cream turns to whipped cream. . .

which in turn becomes a solid lump of butter in a watery liquid (buttermilk).

You can salt it if you wish.

Drain the buttermilk to use for baking or making pancakes the next morning.

That’s it!

Quick note – if you are storing your butter for awhile, you have to wash the remaining buttermilk out of it or it will go rancid.  Ours never stays around long enough, so we skip this stage, but I gather that you either put it in a strainer or just knead the lump of butter in your hands while running it under cold water.

PS – If you’re still wondering how you can live zero waste in the Frozen North, check out  subzerowaste (the name of which cracks me up) .