IT WAS the toughest challenge in our year of eating Scottish. Forget the endless supplies of winter kale and cabbage – the summer delivered the biggest obstacle of the project so far. Having made it from Burns Night to Midsummer's Day, what on Earth
were we going to do during a two-week holiday in Canada?
The rules of engagement agreed with my wife, Sheila, and son, Jack, at the start of this experiment were quite clear: the requirement to eat Scottish stopped the moment we left these shores. After all, taking food supplies abroad is a bit mad when half the joy of a holiday is discovering and enjoying new tastes. On top of that, smuggling a black pudding and Arbroath smokie onto an aircraft probably earns you about five years eating porridge in Guantanamo now. Yet having come this far, it seemed a bit lame just to put our commitment to Scottish food in the deep freeze for a fortnight.
So a compromise was agreed. We would enjoy the fruits of Canada as long as they too were seasonal and local. By local, we meant British Columbia, where we would be based. Like Scotland, it has long, dark winters that are good for depression but not much help when it comes to cultivation. Fortunately, we arrived as the fruits of summer were in abundance. In scorching sunshine we drove to our friends' house outside Vancouver through fields filled with blueberries and beehives. That night we had local beef tenderloin, cooked on the barbeque and served with potatoes and salad from their garden and wine from near Lake Okanagan.
The next morning I woke to a hangover and the job of shifting the broodie hens in the barn to collect the ingredients for breakfast – scrambled eggs. Every day we ate locally because, like many other people in Canada, our friends have been gripped by a desire to end the madness of importing food from far away when the same – or better – is available right on their doorstep. In a part of the world famed for its natural beauty and clean environment, this vision really seems to have caught the mood of the nation.
While I've been eating Scottish with my family here in the UK, two Vancouver journalists have spent a year consuming only food grown and produced within a 100-mile radius of their city. Their book of the project is a national bestseller and has been called "one of the most important ways we can save ourselves and the planet". A bit of North American hyperbole, perhaps, but it shows they are preaching to the converted.
The proof of that was everywhere, from the roadside fruit stands to the British Columbia salmon burgers on the menu at a beachside takeaway, not to mention the numerous good food stores marketing, labelling and celebrating local produce. The whole trip proved to me what a long way we still have to go as a nation in terms of our attitude to food.
This was a conviction only reinforced on our return to Scotland by the sight of a branch of Greggs the Bakers in Glasgow Airport. What kind of message does that send out? Welcome to Scotland, land of opportunity … as long as you are partial to a pizza baguette or a sausage-and-bean pastry bake. Heading back along the M8, our post-holiday blues were lifted a little by the sight of the garden vegetable patch. Obviously it had been well watered by the great Scottish summer because the potatoes, carrots, onions and lettuces had all doubled in size in the fortnight we'd been away. Having never grown anything except a rather scary beard before, I was really proud of my efforts.
Over the next few weeks, the pickings should help form the basis of more Scottish meals. As in Canada, it is prime produce season here. The strawberries and raspberries are now in abundance and even the most recalcitrant supermarkets are starting to feature Scottish lettuce and other salad crops. I even picked up some Scottish tomatoes this week from the Co-op, who are doing far better than other bigger, noisier major retailers when it comes to really supporting Scottish food.
We're enjoying the fruits of summer while they last. But having endured the dark days of February and with our experiment due to last to St Andrew's Day, I'm also planning to create some chutneys and fruit pickles to keep the tastes of a Scottish summer alive for as long as I possibly can.
Meal of the MonthScottish Strawberry SurpriseIngredients:
1 punnet Scottish strawberries
a dash of sugar
a dash of whisky
meringues, broken up
double cream, softly whippedMethod:
Mash the strawberries with a little sugar and whisky, and fold in broken meringues and softly whipped cream.
Disaster of the MonthThe in-flight meal. Airline food could be a fine promotional tool for Scottish produce – instead it is barely edible.
Taste SurpriseWild sockeye Pacific salmon. Much redder, richer and more intense than the farmed fish we've become used to.
The full article contains 894 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
