Month: August 2011

The Grandview Woodland Food Connection and Britannia Community Centre are pleased to co-host the 8th Annual Corn Festival with the Canada El Salvador Action Network. This Festival is a popular event within the Latin American community here in Vancouver, celebrating the social, cultural,and political importance of corn to the people’s of Latin America.

Increasingly, genetically modified corn, much of it imported from the US, is threatening the biodiversity of indigenous varieties and corn, the sovereignty of corn growers, and ultimately of food security in Latin America. In response, communities around Latin America are struggling to re-appropriate corn as a vital and healthy food crop and important cultural identifier.

Join us on Sat. Sept 10th, 11 -5pm at Britannia Community Centre, Gym D for a wonderful fiesta celebrating corn in all its tasty forms. Share fun, music, song and food. This is an all ages Fiesta and all are welcome!

This past Saturday the Vancouver Fruit Tree Project in partnership with the Grandview Woodland Food Connection hosted a Canning 101 workshop at Britannia Community Centre which I taught. 9 participants joined us to can apricots.

The workshop went pretty well, though as usual I feel like I am still learning. And as usual there were a few jars that just did not behave properly, leaking upon removal from the boil. I still cannot figure out why this is as we were so careful to get the correct headspace and all. Maybe there were too many air bubbles that we missed getting out. Anyways, like gardening, canning is a continuous learning and experimenting experience

I actually just returned the day before from a trip to the Rockies and back through the Kootenays and then Keremeos and Cawston where we stopped to load up on amazing fruit. There are three wonderful organic fruit stands that I know of – Blush Lane, Parsons Farm and the third I forget, but which also has organic wine to taste and buy. Basically we stopped at each thinking we had already bought enough, but then laid down another $50 for more fruit. My favorite fruits are the small ping pong ball size (or smaller) apricots from Parsons Farm. I forget the name of the variety, but they are wonderful.

Ian Marcuse, Coordinator, Grandview Woodland Food Connection