Cookbook offers tastes of the wild - Viki Mather

After 27 years of our guests telling me I should write a cookbook, I finally did, just in time to send out copies for Christmas last year.

Preparing wonderful food goes beyond simply reading and following a recipe. Sometimes I follow recipes, sometimes I just cook. Experience has taught me the basics, and living in the wilds has taught me how to get by when the cupboard is missing a few ingredients.

The nearest store is more than an hour away; including a 20 minute boat ride, a 30 km drive down a gravel road, followed by another 35 km on the highway. If there’s something missing that a recipe wants, well, we just make do with what we have. Living and cooking in the wilderness for all these years, I have learned to make a lot of “do.”

So, while my cookbook has a bunch of recipes with the expected list of ingredients and methods of preparation, it also has some ideas to help folks get by if they don’t happen to have everything on hand. Relax, make changes, experiment, enjoy.

A lot of what I know about cooking has evolved over the years of cooking for a lot of people. I have been inspired to learn about a great variety of vegetarian philosophies, about organic food, raw food, macrobiotic and more. As food fads have come and gone over the years, I found some of the finest each trend had to offer.

These days, the “local” diet has become very popular. We’ve always practised this because it just tastes better. Our small local farmers don’t use genetically modified seed, pesticides, herbicides nor hormones or other artificial methods to grow their produce. The food is healthier for us and for our planet.

Nearly all the recipes in my cookbook are vegetarian. This is because those of us who are not vegetarians will eat anything, and we really enjoy food that is delicious.

You can find copies of the cookbook at Eat Local Sudbury on Larch Street, at Durham Natural Foods on Montrose, and at Small Things at the corner of Regent and Yale. Or, you could send a cheque of $15 (includes postage) made out to Viki Mather, to RR 1, Wahnapitae, ON P0M 3C0.

There are wonderful summer recipes that take advantage of the beautiful flowers in the garden and in the wilds. If you have been reading this column for the past few years, the cookbook will be a reminder of some wonderful ways to enjoy nature’s bounty.

Viki Mather’s column, In the Bush, appears monthly in Northern Life.

- Posted by Vivian Scinto