Thursday, 29 April 2004
Add duck fat or drink dairy-free, soy-free milk? Eat! Vancouver - PERSPECTIVES - THE COMMENTARY
By Michael Kwan
“He likes to be heckled. It keeps his ego in check.”
Laughing it off, Rob Feenie welcomed the small gathering of 60 or so sitting before him at the second annual Eat! Vancouver – The Everything Food and Kitchen Show. Held under the dome at BC Place Stadium, this year the show featured Feenie, host of New Classics with Chef Rob Feenie and owner of the award winning Lumiere Restaurant. Also at the show were other foodie celebs like Christine Cushing, author of Fearless in the Kitchen. Showcasing about 200 exhibitors, Eat! Vancouver had a little something for anyone who enjoys cooking, like my significant other, or anyone who enjoys eating, like yours truly.
Surrounded by booths offering everything from smoked salmon to portabella mushrooms to fresh mango puree, I started my Eat! Vancouver experience by watching a demonstration by Feenie at the main celebrity stage. Surprisingly, he was visibly nervous at first, “performing” in front of a live audience. Stumbling on his words, he introduced the two dishes he was to prepare: a grilled asparagus salad and a roasted baby chicken with and Alsatian sauerkraut dressing - Alsatian meaning from the Alsace region of France, right along the German border. Rob Feenie, as you may or may not know, is big on anything Alsatian, as that was his area of training and the area that has won Lumiere five consecutive awards for Best Restaurant in Vancouver.
He quickly gained his composure as he began to do what he does best: cook. The salad presented a mix of hot and cold with the warm prosciutto and grilled asparagus coupled with the coolness of the lettuce and freshly grated parmesan cheese. Of course, there was the obligatory olive oil based dressing. We all hear of olive oil, virgin olive oil and extra virgin olive oil, and how they are oh-so-important to the cooking and flavouring of a number of different dishes, but to the layman, like myself, olive oil is just olive oil. Feenie, the enlightener that he is, went on by saying that the variety of olive oils available on the market is comparable to the variety of wines available on the market. You can find the fruitier, sweeter flavoured olive oils on the one end, and you can find the more rustic rougher flavoured olive oils on the other end. Some may be comparable to a fine draught of vintage; others may be on par with the boxed wine you find on sale at your local greasy spoon on the corner. In a like manner, you can find mustard that is light and mild or you can find mustard with more bite; myself, I prefer the latter.
He proceeded to prepare his little baby chicken – which is not the same as just a small chicken or a Cornish game hen, apparently – by creating an Alsatian sauerkraut dressing, bacon, garlic, onions, and duck fat. Yes, duck fat. While we were on the *ahem* health-conscious end of things, Feenie added that to make your roast chicken nice and crispy, place a dollop of butter on the chicken as you put it in the oven. These two recipes, among others, are available on foodtv.ca. And most of these “specialty” ingredients that were included, like the unique olive oils and baby chickens are available at one of the Granville Island outlets.
Meeting and greeting with Rob Feenie was one of the highlights for the show for me, and I have a photo op with him to prove it. Beyond the demonstrations put on by Feenie and other professional chefs, was what was meant to be the “main course” of the show, as it were a sampling of food products. Some were simply free samples being given away, from artificial milk products – made with no dairy and no soy, but rather from potatoes of all things, to Kozy Shack Pudding – which was giving away full individual sized containers of chocolate, tapioca and rice pudding, to a sampling of different mustards – be it Honey Dijon, grainy or ‘regular.’ I was also treated to some food stamps, ahem, tickets to sample some more substantial sized samples. Tickets were selling at 20 for $12, with items ranging from one to six tickets per sample.
Voted “Best Hot Dogs in Vancouver,” Hot Dog Jonny’s on Denman and Comox was offering three different “sample plates,” each for 5 tickets. Being the health conscious person that I am, I went for the healthy living taster plate. I was given three 3-inch dogs, wrapped not in a typical hot dog bun, but rather more like a pita-tortilla type wrap. The bison dog was a meaty chewy sample; the pheasant sausage tasted like chicken; and the venison sausage I overpowered with too many relishes and mustards to tell the difference. I’ve had turkey dogs, beef dogs, chicken dogs, and pork dogs in the past, but this was my first experience with something outside of the typical barnyard PNE-type fare. Joseph Planta was given a $15 gift card that I will definitely cash in later to give Hot Dog Jonny’s a fuller review, maybe.
I was sadly mistaken to think that the ticketed samples would be “better” than the free ones. I spent more time trying to find a good place to spend my tickets than actually using the tickets. There was East Indian food from Rubina, Native food complete with a replica tepee , gyros and other ethnic things I could have tried, but they were basically pre-cooked and sitting on a hot plate to keep warm. Then I saw the light: the Wine and Beer Tasting Pavilion.
I’m not a beer, spirit or wine connoisseur by any stretch of the imagination, but I know I like my alcohol – I’m only a social drinker, I assure you. Beer is more my poison than anything else and I always look for something different. I’ve had German, Dutch, Irish, Canadian, American, Mexican, Japanese, Chinese and a few others, so I had to look for something from somewhere else, and I found it. San Miguel, from the Philippines, is a light beer with a marginal bitter taste bite. Much like the beers you find in Cambodia, Vietnam and other Southeast Asian countries, San Miguel is great company for a spicy meal. Zywiec, from Poland, is a very light brew. Tasting almost like water, it wasn’t worth my time. That being said, if you’re the kind of person who wants to drink beer but without the beer aftertaste, then, maybe that one’s for you. I also tried Yellow Tail Shiraz, a dry red wine from Australia and a raspberry wine from Blossom Wineries. I’m not a big fan of dry wines, more inclined toward medium wines, so no more Shiraz for me. The raspberry wine wasn’t too bad, the raspberry flavour was far from overwhelming; the wine was still wine and not juice, just sweeter.
All in all, the show was quite satisfying. The nearly four hours I spent under the dome felt like little more than fifteen minutes, as my mouth never stopped moving. I just had to try that brownie, that cookie, that catfish. Yes, all the exhibitors were ultimately there to sell you on their product or to simply sell you their product (I took some two cartons of juice myself), but the take home message was to simply enjoy preparing meals and eating them. Indeed, Marnie, a chef at Lumiere, said it best:
“Recipes are guidelines. Throw in anything. Make it your own.”
Visit The Commentary's Senior Contributing Writer Michael Kwan's own website, Now That's Entertainment. . .