A Taste of Nova Scotia

I'm back!  And alive!  My parents' goutweed experiment proved tasty, and we all survived.  It made for a very lovely soup, made with potato, leek and mushroom, as well as the goutweed, much like a warm vichyssois, but with mushroom and goutweed.

In the meantime, I enjoyed every bit of my time in Canada.  Along with sailing and beach time, we did a lot of eating.  The first day I was there, I discovered that my parents had gone without me to a smokehouse, where they bought three different kinds of smoked fish: smoked mackerel, cold smoked salmon (just smoked, no heat, known in the U.S. as lox), and “cajun style” hot smoked salmon (both heated and smoked). This is possibly the most amazing smoked fish I’ve had in a long time.The lox melted in my mouth, the mackerel was delightfully smoky and mild, and the hot smoked salmon was delightful.

A Pocketful of Porcini

I consider my parents the ultimate locovores.  When most people talk about eating local, they mean produce from local farms and family gardens.  But when my parents talk about eating local, they mean exploring the native vegetation and trying out what grows in an area naturally. 

I have been visiting a lovely small town in Nova Scotia (hence the recent lack of blog posts – Internet is difficult here), where my my parents have a summer home.  This summer, they have been enthusiastic about trying out “goutweed” (or more pleasantly, “bishop’s weed”), a decorative plant that has run wild throughout the town.  Ok, technically it is not “native,” but near enough.  They have an entire field of these pretty, yet invasive, plants, so, upon finding that it was edible, they decided to do an experiment.  I will tell you  more about that as it unfolds (provided I’m not in the hospital).