Catching up with Natalie Smith

Last year, Passable posted an interview with Natalie Smith, a farmer working in Roberts Island, Yarmouth County. Since our last interview, Yarmouth has found a permanent home for its farmers market, and Smith’s CSA has grown from 17 families to over sixty. We checked in with her recently.

So how many people do you have in the CSA now, both as buyers and producers?

This year so far we have signed up 65 families with half of them to be supplied 52 weeks of the year with veggies and meats! We have 8 main producers with vegetables, meats and fish and have added some others that will provide some of their surplus vegetables based on them having advantageous locations to grow certain crops such as tomatoes, sweet and hot peppers and eggplants!

Read up on it!

We here at Passable are a bit of a literary bunch.

As well as writing about food, we spend a lot of time reading about it. Sometimes it’s books, but often it’s online, reading websites, blogs, boards and whatnot. And like most things culinary, we like to share.

Here’s a collection of some of the things we’ve been reading here at Passable.

A CBC.ca story about how local agri-tourism and the “buy local” movement in Nova Scotia. But the reasons why may surprise you…

The Coast takes a quick peek at the sixth annual Nova Scotia Fall Wine Festival.

Wired Magazine recently published an article on the mysterious properties of the miracle berry, a berry that changes the way your tastebuds react.

From a recent Globe & Mail article: The ultimate bartering party: my food for your food.

The print edition of Saveur is a fave, but they recently started posting videos on their very own Youtube site.

This one minute video has everything: enviable kitchen space, great tips and a grown man who says “shake the dickens.” ‘Nuff said.

Big Day Downtown – Try Something New

“Try Something New.” That was the vague challenge of this year’s Big Day Downtown, a marketing strategy by the Downtown Halifax Business Commission that sees bloggers and media types wandering the downtown core with a $100 credit card, checking out businesses that interest them and then—clearly—writing about it.

Last year there was no theme. Kristina and I just wandered from coffee shop to market to brewery to restaurant, exploring food and drink found on the peninsula. This year, there’s this pesky twist. “Try something new” is a simple conceit, but I didn’t want to try some random, new restaurant or store just for the sake of fulfilling a brief. I wanted to really embrace the theme. I wanted to have a bit of an adventure.

So I decided to email someone new. I fired off a missive to Chef Craig Flinn, the chef/owner of Chives, one of the best restaurants not only in downtown Halifax, but in Halifax, period. There! New thing: done. Mission accomplished! Checklist completed! Blog. Save. Post. Exit. Thanks for the money, Downtown Business Commission. See you next year!

But wait! Craig emailed me back! So I guess there’s more to this whole thing.