Cape Breton: A Forager Finds Home

As John Lennon wrote in his song about his son, "life is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans." In Earlene Busch's case, it happened when she ordered a curly maple bedroom set made in Cape Breton by a local craftsman.

An inveterate forager and Colorado native, she flew out to pick up her purchase and fell in love with the island's beauty and the profusion of native plants and mushrooms she found while hiking its woods. Her decision to move lock, stock and bedroom set to the island was further reinforced by her disgust at the political turn in the States when Newt Gingrich and the Republicans swept into power in the mid-90s.

After looking around for land, she came across a 100-acre property overlooking the North River and St. Anne's Harbour that had woods loaded with native mushrooms as well as a spring that could supply water. On the crest of the hill she built an inn modeled on a traditional Cape Breton barn and used wood salvaged from an original barn on the property, naming it the Chanterelle Inn after her favorite mushrooms.

Our room was at the top of the stairs on the second floor, a large, comfy, wood-lined room with Oriental carpets, a queen bed and private bath with a big window looking out over green hillsides. We took a few minutes to clean up and went down to the big screened-in dining deck to have a glass of local wine and unwind before dinner.

As you might expect, Earlene is dedicated to local foods, especially those she forages herself, and she seeks out organic growers on the island to supply her restaurant. Dinner started with a salad of roasted beets and island blueberries, a combination that I'd never had before. The robust sweetness of the beets was perfectly offset by the intense flavor of the local berries that had been brought in by a friend of Earlene's that morning.

Next was a to-die-for creamy wild mushroom and fiddlehead soup, followed by an applewood-smoked chicken with fresh corn on the cob and sautéed garden greens. The local shiraz poured with it was terrific, and sitting on the deck made us feel like we were having a private picnic.

Hummingbirds were buzzing around having their breakfast as we sat down for ours the next morning. Strong coffee, with a spread that included Earlene's homemade granola with island cranberries and cream, soft-boiled eggs, toast and an apple compote made from trees on the property gave me plenty to load up on before heading out on a kayaking trip with North River Kayak Tours that morning, to be followed by a mushroom foraging expedition with Earlene that afternoon.

After paddling the pristine waters of the North River estuary for a couple of hours with a diverse group from Britain, Japan, Toronto and the States, I came back ready for a good tramp in the woods. And Earlene knows her woods like the back of her hand: this time of year meant going to the best spots for chanterelles, which grow in the sphagnum moss under spruce trees, unlike our Northwest chanties that prefer the duff beneath Doug fir. She also pointed out the various amanitas and other outliers that popped up randomly on our walk, and the ones she couldn't quite identify she took back to look up later.

It was tough to tear ourselves away after that, but the all-powerful itinerary said we must…I would have happily stayed for days, talking politics and walking the hills with Earlene.

Read the other posts in this series: Arriving in Nova Scotia, The View, Redux, Talk about Good Stuff! and Stirrings of an Artisan Economy.

Cape Breton: Stirrings of an Artisan Economy

Standing with Ron Muise in his sheep pasture on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, you'd think that this would be the perfect setting for a thriving dairy industry. And, according to Ron, you'd be right, except that it ceased thriving a few decades ago. Growing up on the island, he remembered fifty or more dairies dotting the countryside, with happy cows munching on the rich grass that thrived on the island's sea air.

By the time I met him this year, there were only a handful left…one of which was his own Wandering Shepherd creamery near Sydney. He himself had left the island as a young man, moving to Europe to become a chef and eventually owning his own restaurants. As a chef, Muise said he'd always had a strong interest in cheese and, as is common in European restaurants, had always featured a selection of favorite cheeses for his cheese courses.

The desire to make his own cheese coincided with an opportunity to move back to his wife's family's farm on Cape Breton's Mira River, a property of about 24 hectares (just under 60 acres). He sought out the advice of Vermont's Peter Dixon, the Johnny Appleseed of the artisan cheese movement and a go-to guy for anyone getting started in the cheese biz.

Because of Canada's dairy cow quota system, and not being a big fan of goats or goat cheeses, he decided to throw in his lot with sheep. It didn't hurt that his grandmother had a sheep farm when he was growing up, and he really liked cheeses made from their milk. He built a cheese room next to the family farmhouse and last October got a license to start production of his own raw ewe's milk cheeses.

Muise makes a Roquefort-style cheese he's calling Gorm Ailig (Gaelic for "Alec's Blue") and Lauchie's Tomme, both named for his two sons, as well as an Ossau-Iraty type called Caora Caise (“Sheep Cheese” in Gaelic). Currently he's selling them at the Cape Breton Farmers' Market in Sydney and three other markets across the island, and is finding an eager audience among local chefs interested in featuring his cheeses on their menus.

He's become a mentor to a batch of young farmers eager to join the nascent local food scene. With only 45 sheep of his own and his cheese production soon growing beyond the milk they can provide, a couple of local farmers have started flocks of their own with the idea that they'll help provide the additional milk Muise will need. He's also working with the government to implement programs that will see more development in artisan production for small scale producers.

Muise is inspiring when he talks about the potential for the island to develop an artisan sector, with the rolling terrain perfect for small farms and with plenty of land available at affordable prices. The drawback? A six-month growing season, from May through October. But with the Cape Breton farmers' market and a local bank providing microloans for farmers and producers to develop their businesses, Muise is optimistic that the island can become a center for artisan products in Eastern Canada.

Read the other posts in this series: Arriving in Nova Scotia and The View, Redux, Talk about Good Stuff! and A Forager Finds Home.

Cape Breton Island: Talk about Good Stuff!

Here's a brilliant idea: Ten well-known international chefs team up with ten local chefs to cook up a series of dinners, each one featuring the very best of the area's bounty. Not only that, but each dinner takes place at a spectacular local destination (Top photo: Dinner Under the Stars overlooking Bras d'Or Lake).

Outdoor dinner on the beach at Cabot Links, Inverness.

Get it? The visiting chefs experience ingredients right from the source and meet the people who grow it, fish it or produce it. In some instances they'll actually help with the harvest of a featured ingredient. Plus they get to collaborate in creating dishes with the men and women who work with these ingredients every day, not to mention the brewers, winemakers and distillers who turn grapes and grain into liquid magic.

Ocean perch ceviche at Bras d'Or Lake.

The local chefs get to express their passion for the region and its incredible producers, and work side by side with chefs from other places, sharing ideas and inspiration, creating dishes that meld the best of both worlds. And joining them are ten "aspiring" chefs who have been chosen from essays they wrote about why they wanted to participate in the event.

Well, if it sounds like it could only happen in a place as special as the Pacific Northwest, you'll have to think again. Because that's exactly what Pearleen Mofford did when she started the Right Some Good culinary festival in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia.

Chef Surjan Jolly of the Renaissance Marriott, Mumbai, with rock crab.

A relatively small island off the western coast of the peninsula that makes up the bulk of the province, it is home to just 100,000 resident. But the seafood that is fished off its coastline, including lobster, haddock, snow crab and ocean perch, is getting big notices across the world in no small part because of the festival, which just finished its second year.

Restaurant Take-Over at the Keltic Lodge, Ingonish.

With a booming fishing industry and a nascent artisan agricultural movement that's shaping up to be the next big thing for the island, this year's festival boasted that 80 percent of the ingredients used were from local sources (up from 65 percent its first year).

Candlelight dinner at the Louisbourg Fortress.

The festival draws not just international chefs, but travelers from around the globe who come for the event and stay to tour the island, then go home to share the amazing experiences they've had. There are also a host of media people who are brought in to taste and tour, and I was lucky enough to be one of those at this year's event, attending four dinners and meeting farmers, fishers and producers from around the area courtesy of Tourism Cape Breton.

And the name Right Some Good? Even it's a nod to local, being one of the superlatives islanders use to denote quality, starting with "good," "some good," "right some good," and "right some Jesus good." My opinion? I'd say that next year's festival deserves the latter descriptor.

Read the other posts in this series: Arriving in Nova Scotia, The View, Redux, Stirrings of an Artisan Economy and A Forager Finds Home.

Cape Breton Island: The View, Redux

As we crisscrossed the island over our week in Nova Scotia, the weather improved and we never got tired of this panorama.

See our first view of it here. Read the other posts in this series: Talk about Good Stuff!, Stirrings of an Artisan Economy and A Forager Finds Home.

Cape Breton Island: Arriving in Nova Scotia

We've only just arrived here, but I wanted to share one of our first views of this large island. She's been a bit shy revealing herself, swathed in clouds and fog, and she even tried frightening us with thunder and a drenching downpour our first morning. But as Northwesterners, we know that it'll just take a little patience and she'll see we're not easily discouraged by bad weather.

Definitely not Kansas.

The video above is a view of the Great Bras d'Or channel from the Seal Island Bridge, which connects Boularderie Island and Cape Harris, to where to the channel empties out into the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Oh, and just so you know, "Boularderie" is pronounced buh-LAHR-dee here. And place names are in English and Scottish, as in the sign above. We're definitely not in Kansas.

Watch a video of the same panorama in clear weather.  Read the other posts in this series: Talk about Good Stuff!, Stirrings of an Artisan Economy and A Forager Finds Home.