Personal Chef and Catering Services

Ok, update.
It's been a while. How do I update after this long?
I started taking a nutritional course which will certify me as a Registered Holistic Nutritionist. The course is through the Canadian School of Natural Nutrition. So far, I am about four months into the two year course and, while it is more work each week than I thought it was going to be, it is going really well. I am about to enter into the Anatomy and Physiology section of my course which I am excited about.
I worked the past year at the Parkside Restaurant in Squamish and now I am currently unemployed.
I've thought more and more recently about having my own business. I would like to start a business offering Personal Chef and Catering services for individuals, couples or families in Squamish, Whistler and West Vancouver. I think that this would be a good balance for my creativity, urge for independance, drive and motivation for work and of course my love and passion for cooking. Now, how do I get clients?
Next weekend, I've signed up to volunteer for Cornucopia, the food and wine festival that is held every year in Whistler. Should be an interesting experience!
Oh, and I just turned thirty. Yesterday. Flirty thirty as my sister calls it. Ha.
That's all for now.

A few photos of Cravirola Cooperative and an update

Le Cooperative Cravirola


Les Aubracs - wild meat cows


Britta et le fromagerie! Ladling out the cheese curd


Le Tomme de Maquis - a hard, cooked cows cheese


The wood fire bread oven built in Spring 2009


These are a few photos from my home at Cravirola Cooperative during the summertime.
I recently got an update from the group of lovely individuals at Cravirola and even though it is winter there , they are busy busy busy. They are undertaking a variety of projects to improve their facilities for next winter. New electrical lines, a new line for water for fire safety, improvements to the campground, new sanitation facilities on the campground, and of course all the other projects that are ongoing there! There are always animals to milk, animals to slaughter, animals to be fed, cheese to be made, wood to be cut, paper work to be completed, gardens to be prepared and merry making to be done!
They have a call out to any supportive individuals who might like to donate or potentially loan money to support all of these costly upgrades to their wonderful little utopia in the south of France. Visit www.cravirola.com for more information about their projects and the life at this cooperative.

On hot chili sauce and wood oven dried tomatoes - ie. the simpler things in life.

My journey in France has recently come to an end (hence the change in the title to my blog) and I have come back to Canada with fresh perspectives, knowledge that is new to me and unique experiences that I will never recreate in my lifetime. It seems that this has little to do with the title of my blog post but despite the lack of obvious links, it all has to do with a shift in my perspectives. I believe that I've evolved. No, evolving - into a human being who wants to have time in their life for the simpler things in life, like making a damn fine hot chili sauce from the garden or drying the excess garden tomatoes in a wood oven, to have a garden, to have friends, to have kids, among so many other things.
Now of course food has been on my mind for years in one way or another and I find myself being less attracted to the service side of the industry (one reason being that the lifestyle just seems unrealistic for me at times - although I still do believe that there are alternate routes to every challenge) and more attracted to the production side of food, where the quality of the food is nurtured literally from the ground up.
I am secretly nursing an urge to start a farm. A pig farm actually, with vegetables of course and perhaps some other animals as well. While I am still working on the route to take in order to get there (and whether I'll end up there is another question entirely) I have found some interesting resources in my internet travels. Throughout Canada there are many programs that promote apprenticeships on farms so that a person can get a real, hands in the earth experience of what it is like. SOIL is one program that is Canada wide and offers a wide range of apprenticeship opportunities on a variety of different types of farms. Of course there is WWOOF -ing, the international organization of Willing Workers on Organic Farms. The Organic Agriculture Centre of Canada offers a large resource of interesting information on training, apprenticeships, jobs, volunteer opportunities and research links. FarmStart is an interesting program based out of Ontario that, among other things, offers mentorship programs and even "incubator farms" where people can start there project before getting there own land! Another website I happened along was PlanetFriendly.net , which, while not being focused on farming and agriculture, is a really interesting resource for environmental information, "green" jobs that are available, and other related links.
Now, that is enough said for one day I do believe.
Let me end on a recipe.

Hot chili sauce

6 large hot chili peppers
1 onion
4 cloves of garlic
olive oil
salt
pepper


*The quantities of onion and garlic are a bit of an estimation so taste is really, always the best guidance to what you like.

To start, char the skin of all the peppers on a gas flame or if you only have an electric stove, char the skin under the broiler. Remove the skins, the seeds and the stem of the pepper.
Place the peppers in a food processor and puree. Add the onions and the garlic. Slowly add a stream of olive oil to the mix. (This is where the tasting begins, so forewarn your taste buds!) Add salt and pepper to taste.
The mix will become thick and a fairly homogenous puree.
Place in a pot and heat over a low flame until it simmers. Simmer for five minutes or so.
Remove and store in airtight container in the fridge. Keeps well. If you want to can it in glass jars, have your jars ready after you heat the mix and put it directly in them. Seal the jars and turn over on their lids until cool so that a good seal is formed.

As for the wood oven dried tomatoes, that will have to wait for another opportunity.

Cravirola Cooperative - Summer season

Time flies by quickly here in this bustling niche in the south of France. It seems to me that the summer flies by especially fast because I have a tendency to work especially hard during these months where the daylight hours are slowly, ever so slowly starting to retract.
The summer season really started up here around the end of June with the start of the concert schedule and since then, the momentum has only been growing. The camping is constantly renewing itself with great new faces and the music that passes through this corner of France has been original, funny, entertaining, dancable and all in all good fun. (A few groups that were especially notable were the Troublamours who played here this past weekend, Astataboops, a hilarious comedy musical mix, Goulamas-K who have not played here yet but will in the next week and who I saw in Mons La Trivalle in the springtime, french ska and Bob's Not Dead, french punk. Also to mention is the Mal Coiffée who I saw perform at a wine festival in Minerve.)
On the work side of things, as soon as the summer started, I jumped into full time cooking mode, working in the snack bar\restaurant here. Since then, things have been going full steam. I have been commissioned as the head of and the only member of the pastry department here. This has been great because I get the opportunity to make a lot of tasty treats for others to enjoy and exercise my creativity with it too.
Other than pastry, I also work the grill, prepare salads and salad ingredients, make vegetable and goat cheese terrines each week, make the plat du jour an average about two times a week and well, always a host of other activities too! It is good fun, hard work but good fun.
As for what comes next, all I know is that I've decided to leave here in September but I am still not sure what I am headed for... any ideas? It has been great here but it is time to move on.
To finish off, I will leave a recipe for brownies that is really good and easy.

Brownies
To make and 8 inch square pan ( double the recipe for a 9 by 13 inch pan)

Ingredients:

4 oz chocolate
1/2 cup butter
1 cup sugar
1 t vanilla
2 eggs
3/4 cup flour
1/4 t salt
1/4 cup roasted walnuts

Ganache
3 oz chocolate
1/3 cup cream
1T butter

Methode:

1. Melt the chocolate and the butter over a pot of simmering water.
2. Add the sugar.
3. Add the eggs one by one and add the vanilla.
4. Add the flour, salt and walnuts.
5. Spread into a greased baking pan.
6. Bake at 325 degrees fahrenheit for about 25 minutes.
7. For the ganache, melt the chocolate, cream and butter together.
8. Mix well and let cool to thicken slightly.
9. When the brownies are cooled , spread the ganache evenly over the brownies.
10. Let set in the refrigerator before cutting.

L'Atelier de Vaour

This past week I went with two other people from the farm here to a meat and vegetable transformaion workspace in Vaour, a small village in south east-ish France. Apparently this is the only atelier of its kind in France because they are permitted to transform all different varieties of meat, fruits and vegetables in the same building. Now if someone wishes to start a similar cooperative it is limited to one sort of product. ie: pork etc. They have over seventeen members who each use the facility for different purposes. I went there on one other occasion as well to cook prepared meals for a music festival that we were going to be selling at. Our mission this time around was to transform four Gascon pigs that were raised on the farm here into tasty charcuterie treats for the summer season to come on the farm. Mission well accomplished! We arrived with four hundred kilograms of porc and left with fresh cuts, roasts, sausage, boudin noir in sausage, four hams sent to be cooked and duly returned to us, bacon and rillette, fromage de tete, patés, boudin, and jambonneau in tins. Wow is all I can say and YUM!! It is tasty when you know where your meat and derived products is coming from. Fortunately I brought my camera along but unfortunately, I forgot to take photos while I was there. Boo.

Slaughter and butchery . Queasy readers take caution.

I eat meat. However, for as long as I remember I never have had any contact with the animals that I eat. It confuses me a little to think that I do not know where my meat comes from, how it is killed, how it is skinned and then subsequently butchered and cooked. (the cooking part I know well enough, but it is a small step on a long chain leading to the food on my table.) So in this vain, I slaughtered a baby goat last week. I can't say that I liked it but I don't think it is something anyone would particularly take a shine to. There were two goats to be slaughtered that day so that they could be sold to customers at the farm. Fateh slaughtered, skinned and gutted the first one to show me how to do it as I watched and he asked me if I wanted to do the second one. So we drove up to the barn and picked out the baby goat who was to be killed. It was a male because they are less usefull on the farm to keep around because they do not produce any milk and he was marked with blue paint on his back and had a string tied around his ankle. We loaded him into the truck and he sat between my legs as we drove to the workshop. Fateh explained how I was to kill him. I took the goat out and set him on the ground being careful to always have one hand on one of his feet so that he could not run away and sat over top of him to keep him in one position. The killing is done with a bolt gun that propels a quick bolt into the skull of the animal. It is quickly done and over with. Afterwards, the animals throat must be slit to let out the blood. Two cuts are made on his lower legs in the gap that is formed by the tendon connecting the feet to the legs. I pick the goat up, bring him inside and hook both his legs so that he hangs upside down. I take a knife in hand and make an incision in the skin at his belly so that I can start to skin him. For skinning, the knife is used to make the first cuts and to work the skin loose from the membrane that attaches it to the meat. I work up his belly and into his hindlegs. I am advised to use a cloth and my hand to separate the skin once I have detached enough skin with the knife to get a good grip. Once the skin is separated from this portion of his body, a cut is made around his hindlegs and the skin is halfway off the body. I work the other half and then work the skin off the head. This is hard and time consuming because there are so many small areas to detach. Once skinned, a slit is made in the belly in order to empty the contents of the body cavity. I am warned not to puncture the stomach because it really smells and his messy if this happens. I work my way through the organs, salvaging the liver (detaching the bile duct - not sure if this is the right terminology- because if it is punctured it ruins the liver for eating, the kidneys, the heart and the lungs for food. All the rest is waste. The animal is sawed in half, the tendons on the ankles cut to release the animal, the feet removed and that is that. A done deed. The head is left on because the brain can be eaten as well as a little of the meat in the head. ( Although it was a small animal because it was still quite young.) The animal is rinsed of all remaining hairs and blood and stored in the fridge. I think that the animal has to be kept in the fridge for about three days before eaten.
And that is a small snapshot of one way meat can come to our table.

Cravirola Cooperative

It has been about three weeks since I have been working at the Cravirola Cooperative and time has gone by very fast here. How do I start to explain life here? The farm is on 280 hectares of land set in a rocky landscape just north of Narbonne in southern France. It is a group run farm where the products that are produced are used to sustain the farm and life here. There are approximately 150 animals, cows, goats and sheep, a cheese atelier, a wood fire bread oven under construction, two large gardens, rooms for rent, a campground and a performance stage. In the summer, the campground is open and there is a snack bar that makes food for the visitors using produce, meat and cheese all from the farm. Impressive! Apart from all of this, the products are also used to sell a local organic markets in the region.
Last week I left the farm to travel with two people to an transformation atelier. This is a cooperative processing building that is used for a variety of purposes. From what I gathered, it is the only one of its kind in France, where meat of all kinds, fruit, vegetables, fish etc... can all be transformed in the same building. We were there to make use of two cows from the farm that had been slaughtered the week before. The idea was that we were to make chili and curry to sell at a music festival that starts tomorrow. It went well. The atelier was really interesting. Most of the people working there either raised animals, slaughtered them and then used the atelier to butcher, make sausages, tinned pates or package the meat sousvide or some people used it for catering operations and still others, thre was one man in particlar who used it to make tins of cassoulet to sell at the markets. All very local.
Tomorrow I am going to a 40000 person music festival t sell the meals that we prepared at the atelier. I think it will be a riot, tiring bu entertaining at the same time.
Salut for now. Nadia