Jennifer Willems is a chef who believes in taking risks with her New Ground Café in Birch Hills, Sask.
This winter she stopped buying imported lettuce for salads and began offering customers a raw root vegetable slaw made from beets, cabbage or whatever Saskatchewan-grown produce she can buy.
She told delegates at the recent Saskatchewan Fruit Growers Association conference that buying local is important to her. She doesn’t have a fixed menu; it changes daily depending on what she can find.
The café offers special dinners themed on a local food ingredient in its season. She has had one dinner based on rhubarb, another for lentils and one that she called “squash-a-palooza.”
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In the summer, she uses produce from a kitchen garden growing in old tires behind the restaurant. She also picks wild blueberries and cranberries on family property north of La Ronge, Sask., and buys frozen fruit from local growers.
“I have a wish list of products I’d like. Dried fruit is a really big one because I have restricted freezer space.”
She rattled some in her community when she decided to brew all her coffee with an ethically sourced Fair Trade brand. That required a price increase, which was a major change “in the land of the bottomless cup.”
Willems showed slides of her trip to Italy to attend a slow food movement conference. She said the Italian places she visited had fruit at every meal. They also bought from local farmers and believed in cooking from scratch.
Willems said the Italians have turned food into a tourism adventure and she suggested that Saskatchewan should do the same. Ordinary food to prairie people is unusual to others.
“Wouldn’t it be fun to bake saskatoon berry pie or make perogies with Joe’s aunt, or attend a fall supper, if you were a foreign tourist?”
Tourism consultant Tim Ouellette told the fruit growers meeting that they need to think of food or entertainment that will draw people off the highway to their rural U-pick operations.
“Think of it as importing your customers” and getting more control, Ouellette said.
A good rule is to offer people an experience that takes at least as long as the round trip drive to get to an orchard. However, drawing people in to your operation requires more skill, knowledge and labour, he added.
Ouellette suggested Saskatchewan growers set up an apple or strawberry festival similar to those established by saskatoon berry, cherry and chokecherry producers.
