CL: One of the things I love is how you talk about discovering all of these different foods. What are some of the more interesting foods you discovered?
AS: I keep thinking of one we actually discovered well after the 100-mile diet had officially ended, because we're still finding new things -- it's a fruit called a medlar. It was apparently very popular in medieval times, and it's not even ripe until after the first frost. It looks a bit like a tiny apple and tastes kind of like a date.
JBM: For me, it was a couple of things. One was melons, which I'd had no idea grew in Canada. Out on Saltspring Island we ended up getting these canteloupes, muskmelons...just a whole stack of melon varieties that I'd never even heard of that were unbelievably good. I'd never been much of a melon fan, but I guess that's because I'd always been eating melons that had been harvested before they were ripe so that they could still be shipped. When I had them, finally, fresh off the vine, they were so sweet that they could give you a headache if you ate too much -- they were just unbelievable.
The other one for me was discovering the local seafoods. Even something as simple as sardines. All of the sardines I'd eaten in my life had probably come from the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, to the extent that that's where I thought they came from. But there's also Pacific sardines, and we finally ate some of those, and they were terrific.
CL: What foods did you miss the most?
AS: It turned out to be really basic stuff, actually. I thought I would miss bananas, or tropical fruit -- I'd had a banana a few times a week probably for as long as I can remember. I didn't miss that at all, because of how tasty all the local fruits and berries were. Rice I really missed -- we never found a supplier of rice locally. Olive oil. Wheat we missed for a long time but then about seven months in we did find a guy who had both grown and ground wheat on his own farm.
CL: How did your appreciation for food change throughout the diet?
AS: I know when things come into season now.
JBM: I think we just really came to appreciate foods in their time. Seasonality was probably for me the most interesting thing about eating in the year. The foods that were available changed not only with the seasons, but week by week throughout the seasons. It became a real pleasure through the year, discovering what was available and trying to figure out what to do with it, and then having it fade away as the next thing came on.
AS: It tastes so much better when it's actually in season and it's been picked within a day of when you eat it. It makes such a huge difference that all of a sudden, eating that strawberry in January isn't very tempting anymore because it doesn't taste good. Why not just have the perfect luscious strawberry for a month?
CL: And it's fun to look forward to foods -- I'm dying for rhubarb right now.
JBM: Exactly. We just hit a restaurant -- I guess they had the very first coast rhubarb -- that had rhubarb leather with a rhubarb sorbet, a rhubarb juice, a rhubarb sabayon on a rhubarb crumble. It was just fantastic to see.
CL: Where did the recipes in the book come from?
AS: Mostly James's head. Or for things like bread, the recipe for bread is fairly universal. I adapted it to the type of flour that we had. Again, this is something I wouldn't have known -- I started making bread for the first time -- that basically you put so much flour in until it feels like the right consistency.
JBM: Eating locally involved reversing the normal process. Instead of opening up a recipe book and going and buying those ingredients, you go out and say, what's in season, what's available out there, and figure out what to do with that. So sometimes I would find a recipe that was kind of close to what I might want to make and just do some modifications.
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