The Kitchen - March 18th

By Chef Moreno & Cinzia Miotto

  Every mid-March my father and I wake up early Saturday morning and make homemade Italian sausage. We have a recipe that’s been handed down through a few generations.

Many people think that making sausages is a lot of work-but with some simple tools and a passion for food it doesn’t take more than a couple of hours.

As I’m preparing the pork meat I can’t help thinking about all the processed food that we consume as a general public and probably don’t even realize or care that we do.  Just walking through one of the big box retailers it’s easy to pick-up the pre-made food already in the box and just throw it in the oven for 30 min. at 400 degrees and dinner is ready. But have you read the ingredients on those packages?  There is every imaginable chemical in there to preserve the one ingredient that you actually wanted to eat.

I feel as a society we have lost some sort of sense where food comes from! For instance at the restaurant, I cook a whole chicken and serve ½ for an order, some people are overwhelmed with the presentation and process of trying to eat the bird which has bones, crispy skin, white meat and dark meat. We have been brainwashed by large chain restaurants that chicken is a boneless breast, overcooked and dry.

As a child I was very lucky enough to spend every winter on my family’s farm in Italy. It was an unforgettable experience that I wouldn’t appreciate until later in life when I opened my first restaurant. Just being around the chickens helping my grandmother retrieving the eggs when they were still warm was amazing. Witnessing my uncle’s butchering a pig and seeing it from live to sausage was incredible. It gives you a better appreciation of food and makes you understand how important it is to support our local farmers who, against big odds in this day and age, keep going to supply us with fresh food.

I know our lifestyle nowadays are busier-I work 65 hours a week but with a little effort and a little planning you can make fresh food from scratch and it doesn’t take a one year culinary class to learn how. For instance you can chop roma tomato add a little garlic, fresh basil, salt and pepper and drizzle some olive oil-let it sit for the day in the cooler and you have a great sauce for angel hair pasta, you don’t even have to heat up the tomato you can simply toss it with the cooked pasta and serve it immediately. Or you can serve it as a side dish with roast chicken or grilled steak. By cooking this way it’s a lifestyle change but not in a big way and you’ll see how easy it is once you get into a groove.

You won’t believe how good food tastes when you cook it from fresh and not from a box pre-seasoned.

Once you start eating like this it is hard to go back to the dark side.

No recipes today –instead try to go to the market and buy fresh food and prepare it yourself and enjoy.

Remember to keep it simple and fresh.

Buon Appetito

Chef Moreno is Chef/ Owner of the award winning White Goose Bistro in Prince George, serving fine Italian and French food in an upscale casual setting.

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