The Galiano Club

Tina: What are your favourite recipes?

Dave: I've got lots of recipes! Again, it's like the question about favourite food. I've got a lot of favourite recipes. I like to make paella, which is a Spanish rice dish which has got prawns in it, it's got clams, it's got sausage in it. It's a big rice dish, it's got peas in it. It's made in a big dish. I like clam chowder. My favourite lamb dish is a recipe from the Pink Geranium, which I don't think you can beat. Every time I've served it to people, they go crazy! So, I've kept that and without a doubt, for me it's just the most spectacular lamb recipe that you're going to do on a barbeque. So, how did I choose it? One day I looked at it and it looked pretty good, so I tried it out, and it was fantastic. Although, my favourite way to have lamb is to barbeque a whole lamb. And I've done that from time to time for fund raisers – once for the Conservancy, and I've done it for the Rod and Gun Club, and I've just done it myself, where I just take to whole lamb, and just barbeque it on the spit. I've got a big barbeque for doing that. We put garlic inside the meat and rosemary inside the meat and make a oil with herbs, such as rosemary and basil and pepper, and also put salt inside the cavity of the lamb before I put it on. But there are lots of those dishes, and I like them all! I like to pan fry cod. You know, I've got a big recipe book that I've made over the years, from the newspaper, The Times Colonist, from other things, where I've seen something that looks good, so I'll try it out to see if I like it, and if I do, I keep it, and then I'll cook it. Another recipe, not my favourite, but it's not bad, is an aboriginal recipe for clam chowder, which I think my dad got from Felix Jack. It is cooked with clams, seaweed, dulse and the green, and there's usually a bunch of sand at the bottom, at the end of it. It's a different kind of clam soup because they didn't have milk, they didn't have all kinds of other things to put in it, but it is really quite delicious.
Tina: I 'd like to go back to when you were talking about your garden. Did your grandmother have a garden?
Dave: Yes, she was a fantastic gardener. She had a great garden, so did my grandfather. He had a big orchard, not where we live now, but up at the end of Morgan Road, where they originally settled. They had chickens, cattle, a big orchard. And my grandmother was a spectacular gardener. I've got pictures, paintings of their place when they had it. So some part of my interest in gardening is through my grandparents. My dad loved to garden. I remember when I was a kid he grafted a tree that had four different kinds of apples, and they all came out at different times. That was in Vancouver, and that apple tree is still there today. It was still yielding when we sold it, and the people who bought it were delighted to have this apple tree. And we used to keep bees, and get honey. I haven't done it here, well I was doing it, but the mites took out all my bees, and so I haven't bothered with the bees. But I'm thinking of doing it again. We got all our honey ourselves from the bees. We used to take it out of the combs, and pour it through a cheesecloth and get the bits and pieces out of it. I guess that sort of farming, growing things was something that was in my family. We grew mushrooms for example, at different times. I grow asparagus. I guess that's all how I got interested in doing this stuff.

We were talking earlier about how you keep foods. Well, I never did canning, but my grandparents did it, and my dad did it. I remember that they had a canner, which I still to this day have. I should have mentioned that, because last year I canned cherries, peaches. Some of the fruits like that that don't keep as well, if you can them, in a low sugar mixture, well, we've had cherries and peaches all winter through that. But my grandparents used to can with cans, not jars – we can with jars now – and they would can with tin cans. And I've still got all this equipment, I don't have the cans anymore, or the lids, and they would do that. They had quite a big Bur-pee canner. In that canner I can probably can about a dozen jars at a time. I used to can my salmon a lot too. I don't do that as much now because of the freezer, and because of the vacuum packer, but I still from time to time will can salmon, and I've probably got about a dozen jars of canned salmon still in my big highboy cupboard that I have. So we do can. There's a variety of ways in which you keep stuff. I like salmon better canned than I do frozen because a of of times, even when you put it in the vacuum pack it's a little better, but a lot of times it gets freezer burn. So I just love to have a jar of canned salmon.

Tina: My dad used to can salmon too. I'd put a cracker in it with some cream cheese with the canned salmon...

Dave: Well you can't beat it can you! And the other thing I've done, is I've smoked salmon. OK, and there's two ways of doing it, hot smoke and cold smoke. I don't do the cold smoke because I'm not skilled enough to do that, and you have to be very careful doing that. But I'll do a hot smoke and sometimes I'll take a piece of hot-smoked salmon and put it in the salmon I'm going to can. Now you only need a small piece and it pervades the whole jar of salmon, so you've got smoked salmon in the jar, which is pretty good on a cracker too. That's the way people used to do it. That's how they did their preserved stuff.