Foodie for a Day

On the weekend I had a chance to check out the Catch Seafood Festival - because I wasn't about to say no to a whole festival about seafood! I met up with my foodie coworker Kristen, the lovely and talented writer of With Bite for a morning or fishy yumminess. I have never seen anyone get quite excited about food, and Food Network stars, ass Kristen, and I must admit some of the excitement rubbed off on me. The first thing I checked out, before Kristen arrived, was a talk by Dr. Alex Richardson of Food and Behaviour Research in the UK. She, aside from being quite funny, gave a fascinating talk about why fish is good for the brain. Among the tidbits she shared were some stats about maximum-security young offenders in the UK who showed significant reduction in antisocial behaviour JUST from being given a multivitamin and essential fatty acid supplement, and stats showing that the children of women who ignored the "for heavens' sake don't eat more than 2 servings of fish a week while pregnant or your kid will have mercury poisoning" recommendations and ate as much as they wanted had a significantly lower chance of having suboptimal IQ. Really interesting stuff - check out the website - with the moral of the story being, eat fish! So I did.

They had this weird system set up where you bought 10 tasting tickets for $10 and then used 1 or 2 tasting tickets to buy samples at each booth. Some booths gave you lots for your 1 ticket - like the booth where I got to try smoked shrimp (yum!), crab leg, crab dip, and two flavours of smoked salmon, all for 1 ticket - but the amount you got for each ticket varied hugely from booth to booth. That aside, I did try lots more yummy stuff, including a delicious chowder from the Annapolis Basin Conference Centre, complete with whole mussels and big chunks of scallops. I also tried lots of different smoked fish, including both hot smoked (Cajun flavoured) salmon and cold smoked salmon rolled with salmon cream cheese; cold mussels in blueberry maple sauce; a delicious mini lobster sandwich on a squishy white roll; some hand-churned fresh butter; a quahog (did you know they harvested them in St. Margaret's Bay?); and some sea cucumber - which I expected to be mushy, but apparently that's just the outside, and the inside is orangey-pink and has a smiliar texture to squid! For dessert I had a delicious maple cream. Once I had had my fill, I went back to the main stage to watch the famous Anna Olsen of the Food Network. She prepared a delicious-looking salad with scallop skewers and fresh local strawberries, and then some lobster tacos which looked delicious. 4 lucky people got to try all this out on stage with her. She chatted the whole time she was cooking, which would cause me to mess something in my recipe up but which of course she is paid to not do - the point being she gave some interesting tips along the way. Including, she always adds garlic LAST, which is the opposite of what I always do which is to add it as soon as the oil is hot.... hmm.

Once Anna was done, and Kristen had run home to charge her camera battery, I decided I was full of enough fish and I headed home. Then, later that night, I went to another coworker's house for a BBQ and was treated to.... mussels! Made from a recipe from the Food Network, no less. So, I got enough Omega-3's for a whole week, but had a delicious fishy day!

Look for Kristen's post about the festival, which I am sure will be full of much more technical foodie terms than mine, as well as, I hope photos which I do not have, coming soon on With Bite I am sure!

A Taste of Teaching

This week I had the opportunity to play teacher a little bit by volunteering for Junior Achievement. I visited a Grade 6 classroom for a total of 4 hours over 2 days to teach the "Our Business World" program. This program is a great introduction to business for 12-year-olds, covering what you need to know to create and staff a business, produce goods and market to your audience. This was a great chance to interact with the kids, get to know their names and a bit of their personalities, and see what kind of cool stuff comes out their heads. They were asked at various times to create company names, figure out how much rent would be, and create an ad for their product. I was very impressed at some of the ideas the kids came up with, and also with the media savvy of some of them - they already seem to realize that advertising does not necessarily equal truth, which is awesome. It is very interesting to watch them work through things, like when we were discussing how much to charge for hypothetical skateboards at a hypothetical skate shop we were opening. Using a very simple cost-per-skateboard model, we decided that if we bought the boards for $50 from the supplier we would need to sell them for $300 to make a profit once we paid for staff, overhead etc. For some of them this seemed to be quite a revelation and you could almost see the gears turning - very similar to how my dog looks as she is trying to figure out what I want her to do in our obedience class. I love seeing the learning process happening before my eyes. I also found myself wanting to spend more time with these kids and get to know them better. One girl asked me at the end of the presentation if this was my first time doing it and she told me I did a good job, which is appreciated from a girl who showed during the class that she wasn't afraid to make her true opinion known! I'm now wondering if volunteering in a school would be enough to scratch my teaching itch, or if it will simply make it worse...