FoodTrek: Enjoying a Slice o' Heaven in Steveston...and Wanting Seconds

You hear stories from people describing the riches and plentiful nature that is north of the Border. Streets of gold, milk and honey, the whole ball of wax. Oh, what -- you think I'm talking about people making a run for the US Border? Heck no -- I'm talking about the real El Norte, Canada, and more specifically the seaside village of Steveston within the city of Richmond in BC. Picturesque waterfront, a rich seafaring history and all the comfort foods of home (including tasty Poutine). Welcome your new emigre-to-be, Steveston, the Prime wants to make a run for the border and settle on your shores!

Welcome... to Jurassic BBQ Park, at Hog Shack in Steveston - Photo by Wasabi Prime

Is it scary that I'm letting a giant platter of meat be the opener to this post? Well, take a breath, count to three, and think of warm fuzzy puppies to calm your meat anxiety/excitement. Of all the delightfully delicious discoveries one can make in Canada, a good barbecue joint is probably the last thing you'd think of stumbling across. The Hog Shack Cook House is right near Fisherman's Wharf in Steveston, serving up farm critters over ocean dwellers -- pork and beef ribs, beef brisket, chicken, all smoked in-house and done in the Kansas City-style of BBQ, with a slow-cooked smoke flavor, a tomato-molasses based sauce, and generally a little more evenly balanced between sweet and spice. It wouldn't be fair to say there's no seafood on the menu -- they do offer calamari and local prawns, but come on, you're here for BBQ. Invertebrates have nothing on mammals -- Darwinian deliciousness rules. The beef rib "Dino Bones" are epic caveman food, named aptly because they look like someone took the Flinstones' pet, Dino, out for a long walk into a smoker and doused him in BBQ sauce. The real secret treat are the burnt ends from their smoked brisket. It's pretty much that -- the carbon-encrusted nuggets of flavor that usually flavor side dishes like baked beans, but Hog Shack periodically Tweets that the burnt ends are available to order and the thundering hooves you hear is the crowd of people converging on this place to get a plateful of the off-the-menu treat. They're very adventurous souls, putting whatever temps their curiosity into the smoker -- you can get smoked cubes of Spam, which will pretty much rock your world. Another off-the-menu carnivorous delight are the pulled pork pancakes. Shreds of soft pork, soaked in the house BBQ sauce, covering a stack of sweet, fluffy pancakes. Kaboom. Congrats, Hog Shack, you just blew my mind.

Eat, drink, be merry. Repeat. - Photos by Wasabi Prime

They're also big beer nerds, which I can appreciate. They have the benefit of being right in the heart of Pacific Northwest craft brew Beertopia, with the lion's share of good beers to offer, but they know how to pick beers that go well with intensely-flavored meals, so they offer interesting things like the Hitachino Nest White Beer, a Japanese beer done in the Belgian Wit style, a lightly citrus-flavored brew with a little spice of cardamom, and it probably has one of the cutest beer labels I've seen in a while. Owls make things better. This is just a simple fact that you're going to have to accept. You don't see Harry Potter walking around with a cormorant, do you? Owls = Better.

Rocanini rocks my coffee socks - Photos by Wasabi Prime

You need a breather after all that protein. And very likely a nap, but if you take on the Rambo attitude of eating with all-American gusto, you'll sleep when you're dead, soldier, so find the quickest way to get a kickstart of caffeine to keep the food momentum going. I have to say, I was glad there was not a Starbucks on every corner of Steveston and Richmond. Maybe every other-other corner, but not like how it is here in Washington, where the wily and agile Starbucks roam free and multiply in their native territory, a jittery wild herd of half-caf/double-foam cappuccinos. I'm pleased to say there's a charming and lovely specialty coffee shop that would bring a tear to the eye of any coffee nerd, Rocanini Coffee Roasters. Their roasting facility is in Vancouver, but their beautiful, brightly-lit cafe is in Steveston. It reminds me of many places in Seattle, with the smart minimalist interiors, decorated with a mix of modern and vintage pieces.

Cold brew coffee - where even the caffeine needs a chance to chill out for a bit - Photos by Wasabi Prime

I had my usual latte, along with a wonderful buttery almond croissant, but Rocanini gets extra coffee nerd cred for having a cold brew setup, which is this complicated-looking tower of glass and wood on their counter that looks like how Steampunk geeks would want their coffee before jumping on their recumbent unicycle. Cold brew is just another way to extract the flavor from the grounds, but using cold water to slowly absorb the richness of the coffee with less of the acid or bite that heated brewing methods tend to develop. Having a tall tower that lets gravity do a lot of the work to draw the water through the grounds helps speed up the process a little, and let's face it, the equipment just looks wicked cool. While this method takes more time, it yields a more smooth cup of coffee that's all the more enjoyable as an iced drink.

A glass of wine and bountiful treasures of the sea at Tapenade Bistro - Photos by Wasabi Prime

I've been going through all these creature comforts as a reason to leave the States behind, and I could say another reason is seafood, but that would be a little silly as we can get plenty of seafaring meals around here. But not all of them can prepare the food as delightfully as Tapenade Bistro. The menu is Mediterranean-styled, but that's just a quicker way of saying fresh flavors, simply-prepared and being respectful of the local ingredients with a nod towards sustainability. It's very close to the way a lot of Seattle area restaurants treat their food, especially seafood, which benefits so often from a light hand for seasonings and sauces. At the time of this visit, the spot prawns were in season, so it was prawn-a-palooza celebration everywhere, with all the local restaurants offering it on their menus. But Tapenade knew to give the little creatures their due, and served them up steamed with piles of fresh herbs, potatoes, sausage and fresh lemon. A bit like a crawfish boil, but in an elegant way, even if it's not the most elegant way to eat them -- which is to say, dig in like there's no tomorrow. Paired with the prawn feast was a really clean, light crab salad over a crab cake, which, like a Double Rainbow, is Double-Crustacean-OMG good. Everything just felt wonderfully garden-fresh, like no aspect of this celebration of land and sea edibles was overlooked. I was pretty much ready to rip up my passport and say, home is where my full and happy stomach is.

When cupcake mania strikes! - Photos by Wasabi Prime

So all the savory delights of Steveston seemed well-investigated, but what about the sweet? Surely one cannot live on smoked Spam and buttery spot prawns alone... although it would be pretty nice, wouldn't it? Cupcake mania hasn't just stayed local to the US -- the frosted mini-cake craze has jumped the border and invaded Canada with a sugar high as well. Sure, the Seattle area has its share of cupcakeries, but walking through Steveston, there was a moment of comfort to see the sign for Bell's Bake Shop, and its lemony walls with sprinkle-hued polka dots. Maybe it was the wall color that reminded me of my old childhood bedroom, or the vintage chairs that were like the chairs in my grandparents' kitchen, but the place had a worn-in feeling of home. No fussy princess-themed, sparkly maribou-feather wonderland. You didn't feel like Tinkerbell up and exploded the way some cupcakeries doll up their shops. Bell's was like a nostalgic afterschool treat in someone's kitchen, and the seasonal rhubarb cupcake I had sure would have gone well with a tall glass of milk.

I thought about staying. I let my brain stray into the danger zone of, "You don't need a pesky ol' visa -- no one will even know you left the US and never came back...right?" But the drive back across the border to US-terra-firma was a reminder that Richmond, and more specifically Steveston, is not that far away. Its seaside village charm and ample restaurant choices make me think it's a place ripe for invasion by Cher or P. Diddy, so head up there while it's still pristine and untouched by annoying celebrities looking for the next great city to ruin. Hurry. Pack your bags right now. I hear the Diddy is a wily one. And if you want to let fate or luck guide your hand, you can still enter to win a food trip to Richmond -- just head over to Richmond's Ultimate Food Experience to enter for a chance to party and eat like a rockstar.

FoodTrek: From Farm to Sea, to a Table in Richmond, BC

Eating will sustain us, but knowing more about what's on the plate is what truly nourishes us. I visited so many restaurants in and around the city of Richmond, BC in Canada, but it really meant something when you got to see where the ingredients come from. We're fortunate to live in a culture of abundance, but that concentration of selection ends up squeezing out the origin of how those choices came to be. I continued to eat and drink my way through Richmond, but it tasted so much better knowing where things came from!

Terra Nova Farm Share, how does your garden grow? Awesomely - Photo by Wasabi Prime

It's likely the Green Thumb Geek in me, but I was blown away by the Terra Nova Farm Share, which is an impressive community garden at Terra Nova Rural Park, a large public greenbelt right in the middle of residential neighborhoods in the city of Richmond. The farm share is sectored out with rasied garden beds that anyone can rent and plant fruits and vegetables, with open access to visit and tend to their spaces as they please. It's literally cultivated by the public, both financially and physically. It's not just a couple of scraggly fields in the middle of track housing -- this place is huge. It's so big, it doesn't even have an official site I can provide a link to! Terra Nova Farm Share is sort of a nexus of multiple community projects, ranging from school classes and camps, to food banks, and local chefs wanting to be more educated and involved in growing the food they handle every day.

Handmade cob oven, early currants, one of many rented garden beds - Photos by Wasabi Prime

If Terra Nova Farm Share is like a blank canvas of potential, then founder and chef Ian Lai could be considered the artist behind its picturesque vistas. Ian guided a tour through the grounds, showing how vital a project like this is for a community, as it encourages education about sustainability and makes it approachable for all ages. The process of planting something from a seed, watching it germinate and grow, eventually yielding something edible, is a pretty profound thing. Ian's background as a chef is particularly poignant as he described how people in the restaurant industry could work with food day in and day out, but never really understand how these ingredients came to be. As a result, foods become cogs in a mindless network of turning gears, ingredients lose importance and he described the soulless cooking very fittingly as, "angry food." And so he encourages the local restaurant kitchens to get their hands dirty and grow their own ingredients. For the future generation of possible chefs and restauranteurs, the school programs get children involved, showing them how to harvest wheat, make their own flour, and make their own pizzas in the farm share's outdoor "cob" or mud oven, built by hand, decorated with found objects in the fields they harvested the mud from.

Cool bugs, disco chickens, and ah... a field of buttercups - Photos by Wasabi Prime

The tour through Terra Nova showed off other areas, like beehives which produce honey and help keep their orchards and surrounding plants pollinated. There's a chicken coop that had what I like to call Disco Chicks -- young Bantam hens with awesome feather outfits. Ian Lai showed off some of his own personal projects, like a collection of old wasp nests and beehives to show what architectural nerds insects are, and a really stunning and elegant example of the bug world, a dome of silk spun from silkworms when they resided in the half of a globe. We know clothing is made from silk, we know chicken is tasty with the Colonel's herbs n' spices, but to really see how these creatures live and flourished inevitably adds a new dimension of understanding and appreciation.

Fruit wines and honey from Sanduz Estate and out of this world puffed blueberries  - Photos by Wasabi Prime

Education ultimately leads to innovation, and Sanduz Estate Wines is one example of traditional agriculture taking a step outside of the norm. The Sandu family has a long history of blueberry and cranberry farming -- they still harvest a healthy crop of fruit, but they chose to expand and diversify their business, moving into the making of fruit wines. I know, people kind of roll their eyes or get a white-knuckle flashback of one too many wine coolers at a college party, but likely any bad experience with fruity beverages were a result of lesser quality fruit wines that used less fruit, more sugar and ultimately a big hangover. Sanduz Estate's fruit wines are made with just the fruit, generally a single type, like blackberry, blueberry, apple or strawberry, the method is similar as with grapes, using yeast and the magic of fermentation, but with their fruit winemaking process, the finished product is ready within three months, versus grape wines that can take up to a year or more to be ready. The resulting fruit wines are sweet and refreshing, with a pure, intense flavor of the fruit it's made from. I have to say my favorites were their Granny Smith and a crabapple dessert wine, which really retained the tart crispness of a fresh apple, no over-sugared appletini-flavored headache in a bottle.

Even more interesting than tasty fruit wines is their newest innovation -- puffed blueberries. Sanduz Estate has some NASA-like equipment behind the quaint, charming wine tasting area that's transforming their blueberries into delicate crispy snacks that are almost like a round blueberry cracker, but it's 100% berry, baby. No additives or extra flavors, they have this incredible machine that dehydrates the berries in an atmospheric chamber that literally boils the moisture so quickly out of the fruit that the shape remains and you have these funky dried fruits that are intensely flavored but crispy like a chip with a wicked-long shelf life -- two years, they were saying. Puffed blueberries are such a new product, you can't really go online and buy them yet; the best way to get a bag is to go to the winery, or just wait until a celebrity gets wind of it, as this is a trendy food waiting to blow up. It's so sci-fi the way they're made -- I think if MIB's had a favorite snack, this would be it, and they'd have offered puffed blueberries to E.T. who would have liked them way more than Reese's Pieces. He would not have phoned home, he'd have stayed here. Because even his planet didn't have puffed blueberries.

Punch your timecard and hit the line when you're visting the Gulf of Georgia Cannery - Photos by Wasabi Prime

Moving from land to sea, I had the opportunity to experience the past and present of Richmond's fishing industry. In the booming era of salmon fishing, there were over a dozen large canneries lining the Fraser River near Steveston, a maritime neighborhood of the city. One cannery remains, built in the 19th century and preserved as a historic landmark. You can visit the Gulf of Georgia Cannery National Historic Site and walk through their museum, which is full of exhibits showing methods of fishing, from artifacts once used by First Nation tribes, to commercial vessels like the large-netted seine boats still used today. Restored equipment once used in canneries for the preparation of the fish are set up to tell the story of not only how a salmon went from fins to a tin can, but the people who endured real hardships to keep the cannery moving and ultimately grow the city. There are really sobering exhibits like a set of overalls chemically stained and burned to shreds from the use of lye in the tin can processing, and a gruesome plaster cast of a hand that was mangled by the machines. The most shocking exhibit of all is the old scale that's calibrated to show price per pound of salmon, at least for a century ago, and you can weigh yourself to find out how much you're worth. For all the endless eating I had been doing, let's just say I'm worth a small fortune in salmon. But jokes aside, the museum is as much a symbol of a foundation-building industry as it is a testament to the human cost that  is a harsh price to pay for progress.

Boats in the harbor and ruh-roe, it's urchin! - Photos by Wasabi Prime

People visit the Fisherman's Wharf in Steveston for its quaint, picturesque charm, but I think visiting the cannery is almost a prerequisite, as you appreciate the sense that ghosts of true fishermen persevere along those pier docks that still have locals selling their fresh catch right off the back of their boats. Many of these boats in the docks are independent and family-owned, and they sell their catches directly to the restaurants right by the water. Much like a produce farmers market, this is a fishermans market, with fresh, sometimes still-live catches. The walkways are busy with locals buying fresh-caught salmon, sea urchin and at the time, still-moving spot prawns, which were in season during my visit. They were beautiful, translucent candy-striped little critters, getting ogled by hungry customers taking full advantage of buying what was fresh and in season.

The most fresh and sometimes still wriggling catch of the day - Photos by Wasabi Prime

It was a really enriching experience to take a break from just eating and get into the cultivation of what  ultimately winds up on our plates. Seeing skeletons of industry, the early stages of what could become "angry food," and then seeing the pursuit of traditional, as well as cutting-edge methods and community action persevering today left me with a really hopeful sense of a sustainable future. This is just one picture, in one city in the world, but I do hope it's seen as an example of thriving stewardship that other cities can take inspiration from.

Okay, okay, I'll get back to the tasty eats -- I've got one more post detailing my calculated resettlement into the Steveston area of Richmond, based on three simple elements: cupcakes, coffee, and Spam. Stay tuned! And if you're like, "Shut up, Wasabi, I'll just go there myself," then you're in luck - Tourism Richmond has a contest where you can win your own food adventure.