The Food Podcast

This episode is for all of you who love the Christmas season - the traditions, the decorations, the nostalgia and the baking. It’s also for those who have softly cried on Christmas, because the traditions, the decorations, the nostalgia and the baking have pushed you over the edge. We understand, we’ve been there. Here you will find solace, comfort, and a primer from Vicki Grant - a mother, writer and Christmas Guru - on how to avoid those inevitable tears. So cozy up with a blanket, wrap yourself in Jenn Grant’s Christmas album that’s sprinkled throughout the episode, and breathe. All will be merry and bright, I promise.

Kate Inglis is a multi-creative - a writer, photographer, a brand strategist, a champion thrifter with the best tickle trunk around. She’s a magical host of workshops, of outdoor gatherings, she’s a lover of the outside, a skier, a mountain biker, and a wood chopper. And now, a person who’s been diagnosed with an autoimmune disease that required her to overhaul her life. Kate is here today to tell us about this diagnosis, how it dragged her through the fire, and what it feels like to be living on the other side.

We discuss:

This episode is all about leaning into what brings us comfort. Comfort is different for everyone; it’s all about finding out what resonates with you. Teacher and multi-creative force Sherrie Graham weighs in on her ultimate comfort - old episodes of the television show Murder, She Wrote. For her son, it’s gaming. I love to make quince paste. My husband plays D&D. We’re all different. There’s beauty in those differences, and privilege that we get to choose comfort in the first place. Celebrate it, if you can.

In this episode writer and political organizer Anna Lee Hirschi shares her essay Having your Cake. The essay prompted thoughts on food as an escape, as a tool for sharing, and the importance of cherishing food all alone, just for the pleasure of it. We dip into the wisdom of Claudia Roden and we eat a Sephardic orange and almond cake. There’s a moment with M.F.K Fisher and a tangerine, and a peanut butter sandwich with my dad. Thanks for listening. 

In this episode I talk with Kris Warman, a cookbook reviewer living in Halifax, NS, whose weekly meals are shaped by recipes tested from the cookbooks that come through her door. Kris has amassed hundreds of cookbooks in the process, and together they have become one of her many collections. I set out to ask Kris what makes makes a great cookbook, but we ended up exploring what it means to collect things, what stewardship involves, and what it takes to let these collections go. It’s an honest, funny, soul searching and very flavourful conversation, this week, on The Food Podcast. 

Kris Warman

In this, our second episode of the season, we patch in abstract artist Nicola Bennet from her studio in New Zealand. Nicola’s art practice is fed by food. For Nicola it all begins in the kitchen where she gets to know an ingredient -  like ripe apricots, black truffles, or feijoas - then she cooks with the ingredient, tastes it, inhales it, perhaps squishes it in her hands until a connection is made. Then, she heads into her studio and begins the process of creating a painting, usually as big as Nicola, inspired by what’s on the plate. We explore this process, how it came to be, how her senses inform each painting, and how Nicola knows when the work ‘tastes just right.’ This episode is a sensory explosion, a trip to a home by a waterfall, it’s a riot of colour, of flavour, and a chat with a friend. 

Thanks for Listening.

Nicola Bennett

We’re back with a new season of The Food Podcast!

In this episode I’m talking with Canadian cookbook author, writer, teacher and champion of home cooks Julie Van Rosendaal. We spoke last spring, just as the world was gently opening and rhubarb was popping up in Julie’s garden. It all sounds dreamy, but this chat was real. Julie is a community activist. An accidental poet. A champion of bodies, in all shapes and sizes. Her energy is infectious and her messages are evergreen. I couldn't have asked for a more joyful launch back into the world of podcasting. Thanks for listening.

Follow Julie

Today on The Food Podcast, I talk with Jennifer Elizabeth Crawford, a chef, food creative and the host of ‘My Queer Kitchen’ with Xtra Magazine. Jennifer, who identifies as They, has recently moved back to Nova Scotia from Toronto, where they studied political theory and worked as a policy analyst for over a decade. Toronto is also where they struggled with alcoholism and PTSD, it’s where they became sober and where their culinary skills reached artistry levels. And, it’s where they won MasterChefCanada 2019. Today Jennifer is back home in Nova Scotia, living in an old house in the valley, writing a memoir, filming recipe videos with her sweetheart, Logan, and cooking with wild abandon, with dreams of opening a ‘supper and sleep’ culinary outpost on their property. It’s all about learning to heal, day by day, surrounded by pillowy loaves of challah and moon-mist ice cream, on this episode of The Food Podcast.

Fanny Singer eats a green salad every day. Her ritual begins with the washing of lettuce: rinsing in cold water, a few times, then scattering across a tea towel and rolling said towel like biscuit dough into a cinnamon roll. The cinnamon roll, or ‘lettuce baby’ as it’s known in the Singer/Waters kitchen, is then tucked into the fridge until it’s time to eat. It’s these little windows of detail - gentle guidance mixed with whimsy - that Fanny shares in her recent memoir, Always Home. Fanny is a writer, art critic, curator, editor and co-founder of the design brand Permanent Collection, and daughter of the chef, educator and organic farming champion Alice Waters. Singer spent over a decade studying and living in England, but has recently returned home to Northern California. We explore the concept of home in this episode, through travel, words, memory, our senses, and of course salad and soup. And we’ll discover how it feels to find home, wherever you go, on this episode of The Food Podcast.

New Episode Preview!

Aimée Wimbush-Bourque posted a photo last year on Instagram featuring vegetable scraps sprouting from water: garlic cloves, half an onion, the tops of swiss chard and green onions, growing tall, stretching towards the light. It’s a glorious sight - kitchen cast-offs, finding new life. It’s her most popular image, she says, by far.

Aimée is a cookbook author and creator of the blog, Simple Bites. She is also a champion for kids in the kitchen, zero waste living, urban homesteading, and all things colourful. Her clothes are colourful, her food is colourful, even her sprouting table scraps are colourful. Perhaps this love is a reaction to growing up off-grid in the Yukon, where the sun only shone for a few hours each day during the winter months. Maybe it’s her love of the wild outdoors and a desire to pull nature inside. I think it’s her unwavering optimism, for a life where we can all learn to cook, where life can be spent connecting with nature, and vegetable scraps can grow into beautiful, colourful food.

When I spoke with Aimée, I didn’t realize we were creating an episode to air during a pandemic. But here we are, and we couldn’t be in better hands. Anyone who learned to meal plan, ferment food, and run a market stall as a young kid, all without electricity, running water or refrigeration, is the person we want at our side right now. This is Aimée. Yes, it's all about celebrating a lot with less, gathering together and perhaps taking our food outside, if we can, today on The Food Podcast.

Welcome to an episode of The Food Podcast’s Side Dishes, where we explore the Flavours of Home. This one is coming to you live from the Atlantic Podcast Summit in Halifax, Nova Scotia. This episode is born from a live workshop, where host Lindsay Cameron Wilson and Village Sound Studio producers Luke Batiot and Jason MacIssac teach the audience how to produce an episode from start to finish. The episode explores the flavour of Lindsay’s home, shared through the lens of an old typewriter, an anniversary and a little sheep barn. It’s filled with food, love, and, a nod to scrunchies and Kylie Minogue...  Thanks for listening!

Mentioned in this episode:

Aube Giroux is an award winning documentary filmmaker, an organic gardener and creator of the blog Kitchen Vignettes, a farm-to-table cooking show on PBS. Aube is also a seed saver, a question asker, a knitter, a dog owner, a forager, and, a loving activist. It’s this last part - love and activism, and understanding how the two need each other, that’s what this episode is all about. And, her mother’s pea soup. It has nourished Aube, it has nourished me, and we hope it will nourish you, on this episode of The Food Podcast.

Aran Goyoaga, a cookbook author, photographer and stylist, has a playlist on Spotify that’s 113 hours long. She calls the playlist Rain. Rain is fitting. Aran lives in Seattle, a city that’s grey, melancholy. But great photographers, and Bob Marley, know that in the darkness there must come out to light. This theme resonates throughout Aran’s work, from her photography, to her food, to her music. In this episode, we wanted to capture the sound of Aran’s kitchen, the flavour and the feel. So we go inside her playlist and through her music, Aran shares her food story.

Welcome to Part Three of Side Dishes, The Food Podcast mini series exploring the Flavours of Home.

Jasmine Oore is a filmmaker, she is a writer, she’s a visionary, she’s a friend. She’s also an Israeli/Polish/ Canadian pickle soup maker.

In this episode, Jasmine explores the flavours of her home, a home filled with mustard seeds and dill, crunchy pickles, nasturtiums and arugula. It’s a place where eastern European heartiness merges with sunshine and spice, where grief and salty tears are swirled with sweetness and music. It’s where hunger has lived, alongside illness, dinner parties and laughter.

Jasmine’s home moves from Halifax to Baltimore to Montréal and back again. Halifax is the constant. It’s where her family settled, it’s where she has her garden, it’s where she kept her pickles, it’s where she met her husband Matt.

Salty, garlicky, fermented and sour are her common flavours in every home. They’re flavours that are new to me - a carbonated crunch, full of history and strife. But in a soup, these pickles mellow into something gentler, something we all can share.

“Lindsay, this got complicated,” writes Jasmine at the end of her letter, “but you know, that too is one of my flavours of home.”

-----

Mentioned in this episode:

Jasmine Oore Films -

Episode 30 Baby’s on Fire with Marianne Pfeffer Gjengedal

Have you ever been to a rousing dinner party when towards the end, you insist everyone gather round to watch a video on your phone? They agree because they’re your friends, but then they lean closer, they shh the others, because what they’re watching is so mesmerizing? This is what happens with Marianne Pfeffer Gjengedal’s work, and I was the shh-er. Marianne is a Norweigan food stylist, author and stylist of Kvinnfolk. But on the weekends, when time is her own, she makes cakes inspired by music videos. Female, powerful, colourful music videos. Then she weaves them together - the music, the colours and the cakes - into instagram videos. On this episode we talk about cake as a medium: how this simple food can tell stories full of colour, sound, female strength and sparkle. We talk about cake as memory, as a portal to another time. We take a walk, we eat flowers along the roadside, we put them on cakes. It’s a tribute to edible art, women, song and sound, today on The Food Podcast. So gather ‘round and shh your neighbour, because this is a good one. 

Episode  28: Jell-O Girls with Allie Rowbottom

Jell-O: we’ve all eaten it, swished it around, gulped it down and watched it wobble. But who knew this innocent dessert has a complicated past, one where money, greed, love, hate, cocktails, and misunderstandings lie beneath its sweet, jewel toned exterior?

Allie Rowbottom, author of Jello-O Girls - A Family History, puts it all together for us. Allie is the great great great niece of O.F. Woodward, the man who in 1899 bought the patent for Jell-O, and the man who sold it to General Foods for what would now be worth billions of dollars. Mr. Woodward's money has supported his many descendants ever since, Allie Included. In this episode Allie shares her story, one that’s woven into that of her mother’s, her grandmother’s, and the many other women who were part of the Jell-O legacy. We talk women’s roles, the importance of finding a voice, an outlet, a purpose, and how to break free from the Jell-O mould, on this episode of The Food Podcast. 

Today on The Food Podcast Lindsay sits down with Alexander McCall Smith, Scottish writer and Emeritus Professor of Medical Law at the University of Edinburgh. What begins as as a conversation on his use of tea in writing becomes a deep dive into tea etiquette, kindness and the importance of ritual. Of course the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency is discussed; tea breaks are at the heart of detection, I’m sure Mma Ramotswe would say. Meditation is also woven in, along with the importance of packing tea (and a tea pot) when traveling. So put the kettle on, curl up, and have a listen. But remember to be polite, unless of course you switch to coffee. 

Many thanks for listening. 

Did you grow up in a place that you didn't appreciate until later in life? A place that your father chose, a place you didn't understand, a place you couldn't wait to escape from, only to find, many years later, that you too love that place, and your father was right all along? Yes me too.

A Joyous Look at Fat, Sugar and Moderation

Episode 15 Life After Gluten 

On Episode 13, I went to Apple School. You could say on Episode 14, I go to Whiskey School, but this time personal stories are woven in between the sips. Specifically, from women.

Episode 13: The Apple School

This episode is a celebration of the apple - from its origins, to the fruit, to the branches and its soil below. We’ll visit Josh Oulton of Tap Root farms, a request for a recipe comes in from Sistah J of sistahspeakproductions.com, and Jennie Dobbs, owner of Morris East, a woodfired-pizza restaurant in Halifax (morriseast.com) teaches us all about the power of apple wood in a wood-fired oven. The secret? it burns slow and hot.

It’s apple 101 today, on The Food Podcast. 

We're on:

On this episode, Lindsay talks with Beth Kirby - stylist,

photographer, writer, teacher and woman behind the award winning blog,

On today’s episode of the food podcast, dive into the world of Bean to Bar

Today’s episode is all about how one food writer shaped her career by writing a letter to her then hero, Julia Child. And guess what? Julia Child wrote her back. And a friendship followed.