Alison Colwell

Tina: When you were a child, how did you get your food?

Dave: Well, over here on the island I used to only come over here in the summer time with my grandmother. And we used to stay down at her cottage and we used to get some of our food from some of the local farmers here. They weren’t big farms but they were small farms. We would get our vegetables in the summer time from them, that’s the only time I can remember. I don’t remember much beyond ten years of age, but when I was ten and twelve I used to go down to the rocks with my cousins and we would catch fish, we would catch rock cod off the rocks, off of our place, off of the Lawrence’s. We also used to get some salmon from Felix Jack, who was an aboriginal person across the Pass on Mayne Island on Helen Point. We used to get blackberries when they came out. Other than that, Eddie Bambrick used to have a store, and Stanley Page, who was the taxi driver at the time, would take my grandmother down to the store and get food from Eddie Bambrick’s store. I remember that. My grandmother would bring some over, but not a lot. We had dried foods like Kraft dinner from time to time – that was big! And my grandmother was a really spectacular cook, so we would have ham and things like that – does that answer your question?

Tina: Yes

Dave: Here’s some more….we would also get clams from the beach too, OK. At that age I wasn’t into oysters, so, clams I liked but I didn’t care for oysters. Now I do.

Tina: How would you get the clams? How would you find where they were?

Dave: Oh well they were on the beach in their little holes. You could just go down their at the low tides and in the summer time, when you have your low tides there were lots of clams on the beach then, you know Little Neck clams and Butter clams and not so much now, but then there were lots. And what we used to do is, we put them in a bucket with salt water and oat meal so that they would clean themselves. And then you’d eat them the next day. That was the theory anyway.

Tina: When you were young, how did you keep your food?

Dave: Well, there was no electricity, so my grandmother would sometimes get an ice box, and actually we had a boat house, and the boat house was over the water under a maple tree. There was a little attachment to the boat house, with screens on it, and it was out over the water, you know, on the high tides. At low tides, of course, it wouldn’t be. And it was cool because the maple tree shaded everything and there was an ice box, and she would get some ice, and I don’t know where she got the ice from. That would be stuck in the ice box and you would keep your butter there, keep your milk there, and all your perishables. There was a lot of them, but you would keep them there. That was how you used to keep them. So, you’d walk down from the cottage if you needed some more butter. There were no fridges. That’s how it was done. And the cooking was all done on a wood stove. We had a wood stove, there was no electricity like I said. But eventually we had an oil stove, and Mr Lorenz, who lived on the island and had the gas station at that time, would bring down a big 45 gallon barrel of stove oil, and we got pretty fancy with this stove – we had an oil stove!

Tina: How was getting your food different when you were a kid?

Dave: It was a lot different because you didn’t have anywhere near the selection. You didn’t have cold storage like you’ve got now. Although, I’m sure Eddie Bambrick did, he probably had a generator, but I don’t remember much about that, except that the variety wasn’t the same. You’d have ham because it was preserved, but if you didn’t catch your own fish, you didn’t have that. There wasn’t as much access off the island as there is now. It was a lot different. There were way more fresh vegetables when we got them from various places on the island. So, that’s how it’s different than now. Nowadays, we’ve got fridges, we’ve got freezers. We also had a cold storage, I should mention this too. We also had a cold storage on the north-east corner, where we would put apples and vegetables that don’t need to be kept really cool, but have to be cool, but not as cold as butter and all those other things. So,that would be kept, and I still have that. That’s where I…I guess I’m getting ahead of myself on the questions, but that’s where we still keep all our apples and stuff, over the winter now, and our fruit.

Tina: What was your favourite local food?

Dave: I like it all! I liked the clams, I like oysters, I like salmon, I like cod. I like apples from our apple trees, I like the lamb that we raise, I like the lettuce that we grow. I don’t know that I have one particular favourite food – I like it all. Sorry I can’t be more specific. I like everything. Arugula, we grow that, I like arugula in my salad.

Tina: Tell me about a food memory that you have from your childhood?

Dave: Well, I guess my favourite food memories were the pies that my grandmother used to bake, and the pastries that she used to make. It was amazing because she had this wood stove, and it was pretty hard to maintain, at least for us nowadays, yet she could cook unbelievably on that stove. She used to take the pies and and pastries and put them out on the window to cool, and my cousins and I would try and sneak more cookies, and we’d try to filch some when she was having a nap or something. They were blackberry and apple pies, and she used to make a German cinnamon roll which was really pretty good. That was my favourite memory. Also, we used to make some ice-cream the old fashioned way with salt, and real cream that wasn’t pasteurized, that I think she probably got from Allen Stewart’s farm. Then you’d spin that with salt, and bust up these blocks of ice. But that was only once a summer that we’d do that.

Tina: What seasonal foods do you eat?

Dave: I eat mushrooms, I eat lettuce and cabbage, we grow our own. We buy some too, but we do grow it. Garlic, carrots, peas, beans, we grown that and we freeze it for the winter. Kiwis, we grow kiwis.We grow grapes, but the raccoons get the grapes before I ever get them. Various types of apples – we’ve got 40 apple trees, so we have orange cox pippin, we have graven-stein, gala, newton pippin, grimes golden, transparent – those are the sort of foods that we have. I like it all.

Tina: How do you overwinter your food?

Dave: We have a freezer, a desiccator, which dries food. Sometimes we take the apples and dry them, and preserve them that way over the winter. We have a vacuum packer, so we vacuum pack a lot of our food. We vacuum pack our blackberries, freeze them first. You put them on a tray, put them in the freezer. They get hard, and then you vacuum pack them. If you do it when they’re soft, they squish, and you get nothing because of the pressure. So, things like fish, if we catch fish, which we do from time to time. We get crab, but we haven’t been very successful at getting prawns. We get them off Lloyd Baines when he gets prawns. But we do a lot of vacuum packing of our stuff because it preserves it longer. But my son and I, both, we go fishing from time to time to Renfrew or other places, and we catch our fish, and put it in the vacuum packer, and store it in the freezer. The freezer is big now. The other stuff, like the apples, I keep in the cold storage we talked about, and they keep right through. I actually made an apple pie four weeks ago from apples that I kept over winter. But you have to look at them regularly, because sometimes if they’re bruised when you put them in there they might rot, so you’ve got to make sure you take them out. You know the old saying, “one rotten apple ruins the barrel.”, you know what I mean. So you’re looking at them and checking them, and you shouldn’t put vegetables with certain apples because they give off certain gases, which problems in terms of deterioration. So, that’s sort of how we do it.

Tina: How and where do you shop for your food?

Dave: I shop on the island to some extent, I shop in Sidney sometimes, but I don’t do a lot of shopping for food. We have our lambs. We sell our lambs, but we always keep a couple for ourselves, and we both really like lamb. I catch a fair amount of fish, not as many as I used to but I still catch fish from time to time. I eat more vegetarian now than I ever used to. I get fish off Lloyd Baines, for example, and when I hear Lloyd has some prawns, I try and get some off Lloyd, so there’s a variety of ways to shop. And as I said, there’s clams, I dig for clams sometimes. I make a clam chowder or I’ll make a chioppino, you know, a clam fish dish and stuff like that. So I try to use a lot of natural stuff. I don’t like to buy too much from other places because I’m concerned….ours is all organic and we don’t use any pesticides or any fertilizer. We only use sheep manure for our fertilizer, and I’m a little nervous about the stuff they put on food today.

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: How did obtaining food change for you when you moved to Galiano?

Dave: When I lived in town I had a bit of a garden, but I didn’t have the time, and I didn’t have anywhere near the garden I’ve got here. So, I grow way more of mu own food than I ever did. I tend to my apple trees, like I have to prune them, so I get apples, and blackberries and so on. I think I eat a whole lot healthier than I did before. Don’t go out for dinner like I used to go out for dinner,but I think that’s better for me. I think it is a real bonus in terms of what has happened to my diet, and food – and I like growing it, I get a kick out of it.

Tina: What foods make you think of Spring?

Dave: I guess, lettuce. It is something you can grow in the Spring and eat early. But I also think about other things like brussels sprouts and broccoli, because I plant my own seeds in my greenhouse to put in my garden. You think of a whole variety of things like that. And then this arugula I talked about. It self seeds, same with mustard grains which we grow, they self seed so we have some of that early on in the Spring, but when the weather gets warmer it bolts, so the spring foods are the ones that don’t bolt in the heat, and grow in the cooler weather. You think about tomatoes so you can get them growing for transplanting later. There’s a whole variety – Spring is one of my favourite times. And Fall is one of my favourite times, mainly because in the anticipation of planting and growing it, then in the Fall, not all of it, but then for some of it, harvesting it. Then your apples are there, your brussels sprouts, your broccoli can be done in early Spring too. Radishes are something to think about in early Spring. They grow easy and grow quick and they’re tasty. Also, in the Spring, oysters. It’s the best time to harvest oysters, in the months that have an “r” in them, so that’s January, February, March, April. After that they start getting milky. That’s when they start their reproduction cycle, so May, June, July, August, again you’re not eating many oysters. You start thinking about it again in the Fall.

Tina: What foods make you think of Summer?

Dave: Maybe, salmon. It used to be that we’d catch most of our salmon, the best fishing for salmon used to be between July 7 to the end of August. Sometimes you’d get winter springs, but they weren’t as big and they weren’t as predominant. We used to catch a lot of salmon in those summer months because the fish were moving through, feeding on herring.

Tina: What foods make you think of Fall?

Dave: Apples, kiwi, brussels sprouts of course, beans, scarlet runner beans, long green beans. I harvest them usually in the early Fall. Another Fall vegetable is a pumpkin.

Tina: What foods make you think of Winter?

Dave: Squash, and chard. Turnips, they’re not in the real winter, but just when winter is starting.

Tina: Why do they remind you of Winter?

Dave: I guess because that’s when you start harvesting them or storing them. It’s later on in the year when they’re ready. I used to get venison in the hunting season, so you think about deer at that time. I’m not a fan of venison, but my dad used to shoot them from time to time. Elk, moose, you get that in the Fall. I like all that kind of meat, because I have friends who do that and will give me some from time to time.

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.

“I do have a food memory, and it’s about lack of food. I was a child in the 1930’s when there was a nasty depression, as we’re having a recession now as they call it. But then it was The Great Depression.

And many, many people were out of work, particularly the miners in the north of England, and they set out on a long march to London, to plead their case. They had no money, they couldn’t afford to buy food, they had no housing. And I was in school when they came through. I was 11 at the time, and my school was in Stafford, which is in the middle of England, and we went to feed them. All the school children, all my school mates anyway went to give them food. Our parents made soup and we took it to the county hall, a big place in the middle of the city. It made a profound impression on me because they hadn’t any shoes, they’d got bits of cloth wrapped round their feet, and they had absolutely nothing. And that was probably my first social learning, that people really were starving in the country that you were living in. And that was pretty hard to take.”

When she was a child her family grew their own vegetables in their allotment, and also went to the local grocery store. They went to different stores for their food because in England everything was separated. There were greengrocers for vegetables, and grocers for sugar and tea. She kept animals for eating only during the war, especially remembering the importance of keeping bees because that meant they had sugar. During the war they also kept pigs and rabbits.

They had a cold pantry with cold marble shelves in it for keeping pheasants, hares and rabbits. She didn’t like eating animals that she had known!

As a child she ate less exotic foods. The only exotic foods were bananas and oranges, but never saw a mango until she came to Canada.

She loves oysters. That’s her favourite food on Galiano.

One of her strongest food memories is of the lack of food during the great depression. She saw miners who had marched to a public place where school children, and Margaret was one of them, brought them food. She noticed that some of them had no shoes. Overall, people actually were starving.

Noal asked her how she adapted to living here, food wise. Margaret said that the only differences were maple syrup and corn.

“We eat corn in Canada, but not in England. Corn was something we called maize and fed to the chickens”.

Her favourite food is seafood. She likes cooking seafood on Galiano.

For the cook-book, she brought a recipe for marmalade. She chose it because it is the recipe she knows best, and people on the island know her marmalade well. That’s what she does best. It’s made of sour oranges, Seville oranges.

Nettles remind her of spring. She has always eaten nettles, since she was a little girl. The beginning of spring here also makes her think of carrots and parsnips which she digs up after they’ve been in the ground all winter – they seem to have a special taste.

Summer makes her think of strawberries.

Winter is a time for all the Christmas special foods, like mince meat and Christmas pudding. When she was a little girl she had jelly, all the coloured jellies that they used to make themselves.

“We used to have jellies, coloured jellies. We made them ourselves. We used to make our own jello from calves’ feet. You’d boil the calves’ feet and get the jelly and add it to the fruit”

Fall makes her think of apples, plums and all the fruit we get in the fall.

At the end of the interview Noal asked a few more questions:

Noal – Did you ever have big Christmas feasts when you were young?

Margaret – Oh yes, very big Christmas feasts and very big Easter feasts as well. When I was a child in England we didn’t have easter bunnies, we had easter chickens. Chickens were the thing. So living on the farm we always used to get new chickens at easter time.

Christmas dinner in our house was usually roast goose and bread stuffing, which was lovely, and all sorts of vegetables, whatever we had in the garden. And then we had Christmas pudding and brandy sauce, and mince pies, and Christmas cake with icing on it. It was all decorated. And I’ve still got the decoration that we used to put on our Christmas cake when I was a little girl. It was a Santa Claus, only he was called Father Christmas then.

Noal – What’s your favourite food that you used to eat in England?

Margaret – You know, I really like porridge, real oatmeal porridge with cream, which is very bad for you when you get old. I liked other special foods, but that’s the daily food that I really liked.

Depression Kid

I grew up during the depression on a farm in Northern Alberta. I was born in 1931, right at the beginning of it. I was never hungry. This was one advantage we had over city or town kids. We grew almost everything we needed to eat. The garden was huge, we grew enough vegetables to last to spring or even past spring and then started the cycle again. We were a lot better off then city kids. Meat, moose or deer we could kill them if we needed meat. When I think back on some of the dishes we ate there couldn’t have been very much in the old larder because it wasn’t a real sophisticated type of meal; it would just fill us that’s all….sometimes just hot milk and dumplings or something that created bulk and was warm and filled you now that I think back on it but to us as kids we always left the table full.

Lutefisk

There was something Mother made around Christmas that I haven’t had since I left the country. It was called Lutefisk. It’s cod, it’s a Norwegian dish and it’s dried for the sake of preservation. It was hard, as hard as this board. What you did was restore it back to an edible food. This doesn’t sound very good but you soaked it in lye, but then you soaked it in water and flushed all the lye out of it and then it was restored back to cod, good and soft, served with butter. And that is a dish I haven’t had since I left the farm.

Cabbage Rolls

This was another favourite recipe of mine. These were not Ukrainian style. I asked Mother one time if she brought that recipe over from Norway. She no, no I found this one in the Free Press Prairie Farmer, which was a Winnipeg paper. Ukrainian cabbage rolls have no meat, theirs is cabbage and rice but Mother’s were just loaded with hamburger and she served them with whipped cream, not whipping cream but at the end of the cooking cycle she poured cream over it and let it cook into the food. It is very rich.

Jacob: When you were a child, how did you get your food?

Kate: Well I grew up in England and I grew up during the war. So that was a special time in England and most of our food was local becase there were a lot of submarines and warships all around the island of Britain and so we couldn’t have food brought in from outside. We used to buy most of our food in stores, but not super markets like you have today, more little stores which would sell one particular kind food, like fish shop, or a meat shop or a veggi shop. There were a few little stores, more like our corner stores that would sell a variety of things. We had a few thing delivered to our door, and one of the main things was milk. Our milkman came every day, and during the war there was a great shortage of gasoline in England, so he brought it in a van pulled by a horse. We also had a little farmers market where some of the farmers would bring veggies and fruit, and occasionally things like chickens, although they were rather rare, and eggs to that market on a Saturday so that’s mostly where we got our food.

J: When you were young, how did you keep your food?

K: Well, we shopped basically every day. We kept some root veggtables and potatoes in a cool room in the house. We had a refrigerator so we could keep food. If we bought fish in the morning we could keep it cool, or meat and eggs or stuff like that. We also canned, in England that’s called bottling, so we bottled a lot of fruit and some veggies in the summertime for the winter. We also pickled things and spiced them, veggies particularly, we used to spice onions and beetroot and other veggies too, I think. Some people, I think, dried things .We were not very much into drying things in my family.

J: How was getting food different when you were a kid?

K: Well, getting food was different in the sense that we used to walk, and we walked quite long distances to get food. Now, my mother was a doctor and because she was a doctor she had a car and gasoline, so my mother and my father, (my father was ill,), but he used to drive my mother, and so they would go to some of the stores for big heavy things. Now, because my mother was a doctor, she worked in some of the rural areas around the little city were we lived, because a lot of the male doctors had been called up and were in the war, so she had a huge practise. She worked very hard but she would go out to the farm houses if there was a serious illness or particularly to deliver babies. And there was a maternity nurse who would go out and deliver the babies with her, but she would usually come for the deliveries if she could, and the farmers would often give her a little gift of food. It could be butter or eggs, or if we were really lucky, a chicken, because she had done that and there was also a convent nearby. She looked after the nuns in the convent and they kept bees. Now, in England during the war, if you kept bees you were allowed a big ration of sugar to feed the bees, and so when she went out to the convent she often came back with honey, and sometimes the nuns would sneak a little bit of the bees’ ration of sugar, and would make candies, called sweets in England, and we would get a little present of sweets, usually fudge. It was very good.

J: What is you favourite local food?

K: Well, one of my favorite local foods for sure, is blackberries. I had a lot of blackberries growing in my garden or all around my garden. I pick those in the fall and enjoy them a lot.

J: Tell me about a food memory you have from childhood.

K: Well, I can remember going with my father, because as I explained, my father used to drive a car, and while my mother was in her office he would sometimes do some shopping. And he was a very good shopper because of course it was unusual for a man to go shopping in those days, and some of the storekeepers were men and they really liked to chat with my father, who was a very good social person .And I remember particularly going to the cheese shop with him and in those days the cheeses were huge big things. They were great big round things and we had rations of cheese that were tiny, really minute, about 2″x3″x1″ – that would be the ration for an adult for a week. But i remember going in there and being lifted up beside these cheeses which were actually taller than I was, and having the cheese monger chop a piece of cheese that was big enough to fill my hands, and eating it. So that was a very special thing to do while my father and the shop keeper were chatting away, and I was chewing on the cheese.

J: What seasonal foods do you eat?

K: Well, I have a garden and, oh I forgot to mention, actually in England we had a house that was built around a square and that usually that had a nice lawn in the middle and bushes and flowers and things, but during the war that was dug up and turned into allotments. Each house around was able to have a little allotment if you wanted. And so we had an allotment, so we grew some veggies, but not very many, and the person who did our gardening for us liked to have the veggies for us when they were very big. they were usually very tough and so people form the house would try to sneak out and pick beans and peas and carrots while they were kind of small, and would get into a lot of trouble. So we grew a little bit of our food. I grow veggies and things in the summertime. Nowadays I freeze my food so I freeze corn, I freeze a lot of fruit and I eat fruit through ut the winter that I’ve frozen in the summertime. So I buy rather little fruit in the wintertime because of that.

J: How and where do you shop for your food?

K: Nowadays? Well, I shop partly here on the island in the stores on the island, but it is very expensive to shop here, and the choices are a little bit limited, so when I’m in town I also shop in town, and I don’t very much like shopping in really big supermarkets, so I prefer to shop in small stores, and these days I’m trying to buy a lot of organic food. So I tend to shop in stores that sell organic food.

J: Why did you choose these recipes?

K: Well, partly I chose them because I thought a lot of people would choose sweet things, so I decided to do pickled things, and because we used to pickle things when I was a child and I thought it would be nice to include things that were sort of pickled. I included one jelly recipe because those are actually fruits that are growing around my yard here. I have hawthorn trees which have a lot of bright red berries that the birds eat in the wintertime, so do squirrels I discovered, and rose-hips too.

So I included those because I have them growing around me. I also have a crabapple tree out on the road where there are lots of crab-apples. The ketchup was just fun, and I don’t actually pick mushrooms myself but I know a lot of people who do, and I thought it would be fun to have a mushroom recipe so people could make something fun with mushrooms.

J: How did obtaining food change for you when you moved to Galiano?

K: Not really very much. When I was younger and kids at home and we used to have a lot of food because I had four kids and so the shopping was huge especially when they were teenagers. Of course I used to shop in a supermarket getting huge quantities of stuff. But once they were grown up and I was living in a smaller arrangement I used to shop particularly in the smaller stores. I’ve kind of kept that habit going. I’ve tended to, and still tend to shop locally, here and in the city because I like to support local stores as I do here.

J: What foods make you think of spring? Why?

K: Well, the big food that really makes me think of spring is rhubarb., because I’ve got masses of rhubarb growing. I’ve got a really big rhubarb patch growing and I picked my first rhubarb last week. I really like it stewed with strawberries, a little bit of honey and then I eat it in the morning with some yoghurt and granola and it is very very good.

J: What foods make you think of summer? Why?

K: Well, in summer we have such wonderful veggies, so I really like to grow peas and beans and beetroot and garlic. I grow a lot of garlic and onions. So I would say that I tend to think of the food that I eat particularly in terms of veggies and fruit. Of course we have a lot of fruit, I have a great big strawberry patch. They’re really delicious. I expect a huge crop of strawberries this year and a few raspberries, but then I grow currants and apples and plums too.

J: What foods make you think of fall? Why?

K: Fall, well, late summer and the beginning of fall is really blackberry season, and so I’m out gathering blackberries. And apples, I think, go into the fall too. I see people gathering mushrooms and things then so I think of mushrooms in the fall, and I do eat them, that other people have collected.

J: What foods make you think of winter? Why?

K: Well, one of the foods that I really dislike makes me think of winter. And that is the brussels sprout. I hate it! But there it is, a common food in the wintertime, which I try to avoid. So in the wintertime I’m eating my frozen fruit and some frozen veggies which are very delicious. I like those a lot. I don’t really pick much to eat in the wintertime. I’m growing some things usually in the winter. The other thing in the spring which I didn’t plant last fall, which I usually do, which I like very much are broad beans, and they usually are ripe in the early summer as I leave them in over the winter.

by Jacob Parfitt