Top 10 B.C. Foodie Treks

Posted on 16. Feb, 2010 by BCAA in Living


FOOD & WINE

Eat It Up B.C.: Where the foodies roam


1. Vancouver Island

Highway travel subverts the charm of southern Vancouver Island in a blur of heavy traffic and high-speed glimpses of mountain, forest and ocean. Wine aficionados, however, can escape such freeway madness by traipsing along scenic back roads from one charming vineyard to the next on the Saanich Peninsula and in the Cowichan Valley. [Continued at AVin-Couver Island Roadtrip ]

2. Vancouver Island

Sighs of contentment rise and fall in steady waves as one score and 10 fortunate souls tuck into the fruits of the Cowichan Valley. A collection of leading chefs from this rapidly emerging culinary region has pooled its talents to raise funds for Providence Farm, a 160-hectare spread in the Vancouver Island countryside east of Duncan. For a century, the historic property was run as a boarding school by the Sisters of St. Ann. Today it serves as a therapeutic retreat for those with physical and mental disabilities, where a central part of community life is horticultural therapy. The organic produce sold at the Duncan Farmer’s Market and Providence’s on-site store is the result of willing hands sunk deep into healing soil. In fact, the crisp greens that follow the appetizer platters of Denman Island oysters were plucked from the ground here minutes earlier. As one wag at our convivial table puts it, the salad is a classic example of the “100-metre” diet . . .   [Continued at 100% Cowichan ]

3. Cortez Island

Plump, dark clouds obscure the Coast Mountain summits that brood over the misty reaches of TobaInlet, B.C. Here on the eastern shores of Cortes Island, the Pacific has rolled out to reveal the broad, rocky tidal flats of Squirrel Cove. Now the air has a thick, briny aroma, as though someone has pried open an oyster shell and placed its slippery contents beneath my nostrils. To breathe in is to inhale the enduring mysteries of the ocean, fecund and remotely unsettling. [Continued at Daytripper: Shuck it Up ]

4. The Okanagan’s Naramata

Kurt Flaman isn’t happy. We just started biking and already we’ve run into a pickup truck. B.C.’s Kettle Valley Rail Trail, the old Kettle Valley Railway converted into a hiking and biking route that stretches 455 kilometres from Hope to Midway, has regulations regarding vehicles that the Penticton region, it would seem, has agreed to bend. “The legacy of the KVR is to avoid exhaust and car marks,” gripes Flaman, owner of the Penticton-based Freedom Bike Shop, and I can see his point. But the interloper doesn’t bug me one bit. I’m just happy to be out of the bike van and breathing some fresh Okanagan air; the bumpy ride up to our drop-off point on nothing but espresso and pear galette has left my stomach a tad edgy. . . . The pear galette does another flip. Sigh. How can I possibly say no? [Continued at  Daytripper: Wine Country MTB]

5. B.C.

No matter where one travels in B.C., there’s food in the forest. But determining the difference between delicious and deadly — be it mushroom, moss or seaweed — can be scarier than skydiving, which is where B.C.’s foodies of the wild come in. Ardent supporters of dining locally, but for free, these pros have grub-gathering neophytes turning stinging nettle into sweet tea and seaweed into trail snacks within hours . . . [Continued at Prime Picks: Wild Edibles ]

6. De Courcy Island

Wine bottles clank together in the boat beside me as a mountain of provisions disappears into the hatches of seven other red, orange and yellow sea kayaks. My fellow travellers fuss around their crafts, securing gear-filled dry bags and plastic bins pregnant with culinary potential. We snap together paddles, tighten life jacket straps and apply sunscreen like war paint. Meanwhile, from a seaweed-strewn log, leader James Bray surveys the activity with a benevolent smile. At eight sharp this morning, he greeted us at the Nanaimo ferry terminal with a mischievious grin. Within minutes, we were rattling across the Nanaimo River in his 15-passenger van, a hula doll wobbling manically on the dashboard, power chords of Franz Ferdinand beating out the triumphant rhythms of “Take Me Out.” Now, with the provisions almost loaded, all our party of 10 has to mull over is what lies ahead: three days of Gulf Island paddling, two nights camped luxuriously on De Courcy Island and an introduction to some of the finest cuisine that local ingredients can yield . . .   [Continued at Getaway: My Paddle, My Pie Lifter ]

7. The Fraser Valley

Brian Harris’s most famous photograph was taken outside the doors of a nunnery in Dharamsala, India, the adopted home of the Dalai Lama. The shot depicts two shaven-headed Buddhist nuns laughing. “They had just come outside to bang a gong to signal lunch, and I asked them if I could take their picture. Evidently, they thought this was pretty hilarious,” recalls Harris, whose iconic photo captured the nuns’ joyful amusement. The image subsequently appeared on the cover of his 1996 book Tibetan Voices: A Traditional Memoir, and later on posters and greeting cards. However, it was just one of thousands of shots Harris took during a 20-year span working as a photographer and fundraiser for Seva Canada, an organization with a mandate to eliminate treatable blindness in India, Tibet, Nepal and Tanzania . . .    [Continued at Profile: Brian Harris ]

8. A Fraser Valley Culinary Weekender                                                                                                                                                  by Sonu Purhar

For many travellers, the upper Fraser Valley calls to mind Harrison’s iconic mineral springs and spa, a 100,000-visitors-a-year attraction. Yet the region is ripe with lesser-known discoveries. Amply irrigated by the 1,368-kilometre Fraser River, the valley is one of B.C.’s major farming hubs, generating more than half of the province’s agricultural revenue. Perhaps not surprisingly, its diverse mix of fresh, organic produce and gourmet specialties is fast becoming the common denominator amongst the upper boroughs’ hundreds of family owned farmsteads…[Continued at A Fraser Valley Culinary Weekender]

9. Vancouver Island Travels With Taste

Notes toward a screenplay based on the life of Kathy McAree (think the book Eat, Pray, Love, as directed by Alfred Hitchcock): In 2001, while recuperating from surgery after a car accident, a 33-year-old woman spends a few weeks as a slow-food traveller in Europe. What happens while she’s there – the tour of Spain’s Basque region with the Texan chef, the armed man on the French night train, the 9/11 attacks, the Puglia cooking school in Italy – changes her life forever. 

In an area roughly the size of Belgium, Vancouver Island has more than two dozen wineries, five artisan cheese-makers, two Old World ciderhouses, wild seafood galore and farm-raised everything: beef, chicken, duck, lamb, water buffalo, even emu.

 Fast forward almost a decade and McAree is head of Travel with Taste, B.C.’s first culinary tour operator – leading locals and international travellers into the West Coast food culture of Vancouver Island. Her specialties: walking tours in her home city of Victoria (“urban foraging,” as she calls it) and longer treks to the farms, wineries and under-the-radar restaurants of Salt Spring Island and the Cowichan Valley. As founder of the Victoria Taste Festival and director of the B.C. Culinary Tourism Society, she is also helping give B.C.’s west coast its status among food lovers – one formerly reserved for Europe – as a gourmet wonderland of wine, cheese, meat and seafood. “Kathy’s one of our pioneers,” says Eric Pateman, founder of Edible B.C., the largest culinary tour operator in Canada. “She’s definitely been one of the most visible forces in promoting culinary tourism and local food…”[Continued at Vancouver Island Travels With Taste]

10. Salt Spring: A Gulf Island Getaway                                                                                                                                                       by Daniel Wood

As it turns out, this moment contains everything that follows. Three round mounds of goat cheese, each originally the size and shape of a flan, sit beside half-empty glasses of wine and a diminishing supply of crackers. The cheese is so soft the weight of the descending knife slices effortlessly to the cutting board. Wisteria grows above and hummingbirds zing past in the warm, early autumn air. David Wood, the cheesemaker and no relative of mine, looks out onto a flock of 100 sheep, their lugubrious faces just beyond his fenced hilltop yard.

Wood, 66, is explaining how he has found peace on Salt Spring – far from his former high-profile Toronto job – making cheese on this quiet Gulf Island. It’s a theme reiterated by his neighbour, Robert Bateman, 80, one of the world’s leading wildlife artists, who moved from Ontario to Salt Spring 25 years ago and is – on this same afternoon – sitting in his waterfront studio painting a Siberian crane. It is a theme mentioned again and again here by those who have sought a retreat from the urban hubbub to pursue their dreams. On this 185- square-kilometre island – where no road runs straight or level for 100 metres, where residents would fight the construction of a single traffic light, and where the roadside verges contain dozens of unattended stands piled high with string beans, free-range eggs, apples, dahlias and “honour boxes” for payment – time drains away in unhurried increments, cracker by cracker, glass by glass…[Continued at Salt Spring: A Gulf Island Getaway   ]

>>For more island noshing: Swallow Tail Tours

>>For the chance to take home an Edible B.C. Tour Giveaway

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