About this Ethicarian

 

I’m Shauna.

This blog is all things food. From seed to pantry and all the growing, harvesting, frying, entertaining and preserving in between. Not so many years ago I was the owner and CEO of two great Calgary bakeries, I was the cookie queen, but my passions for real foods lead me from the rolling foothills around my home town where I strived to meet real farmers, to the Kootenay Mountains, where I am becoming a real farmer! This meant packing in the whites for a pair of rubbers (boots that it!)

I up and moved my family leaving behind everyone we love to really connect to our food system. And our adventure in living the rural life, building and growing with Permaculture has been a wonderful one! For the first few months out in the bush I didn’t even have a working stove, and most of our meals were cooked on the open fire, or eaten right from the ground… this was a big change for this “food snob” leaving behind the cities amazing selection of fabulous restaurants and my dream kitchen complete with custom bamboo and walnut full extension pantry pull outs deep enough to swallow my collection of micro appliances. Now I am cooking on a vintage art deco wood / electric stove with painful temperature controls in a tiny kitchen with the best view ever, and my food has never tasted so good! my 4000 sq foot garden is my produce isle and I ramble through it 7 months of the year deciding what’s for dinner.

I am learning every day and each seasonal how to put up food, and all the forgotten skills from our past like animal husbandry, feather plucking, gutting, grain threshing, fermenting, canning, drying, smoking, foraging, wild crafting, tincture making … you name it I am doing it all. And this is the place I am sharing my tasty successes.

My recipes and cooking styles cover my love for ethnic foods and certainly my passion for baking with and without common allergens. One of my bakeries was gluten free and dairy free so I have had many a year to play with baking without wheat and butter! I am focused on eating within my communities food shed, so my recipes are seasonal or from the pantry for the most part.

There have been years in my life where I didn’t eat meat, or wheat, and for a year or more our family even followed a strict A blood type diet… So I tend to cook with out those ingredients often, but these days we eat the food we grow and know and trust, and with all of the scary industrialized food practises out there this is the only way I feel safe putting food on the table. I like to call my self an ethicarian, as a Permaculturist my ethics are pretty simple: care of earth, care of people, and return of surplus… I live and eat this mantra!

I hope you find some culinary inspiration here, and I hope you can tolerate my frequent and sometimes painful typos 😉 what can I say I’m a designer not a copy writer! Fair warning.