Covert Awesomeness

For me the standout of yesterday’s harvest tasting had to be Guerrilla Gourmet. Not that I don’t love the CSA contingent, but after you’ve had the concept explained to you once (concept being farm fresh and seasonal produce is delivered to members from farmers directly, thus ensuring the farmer get maximum profit, and members get total security that the food is organic/local or whatever particular shade of green floats their boat) you get it. Farmers are my favourite people to talk to – learned loads about this year’s strawberry crop by a charming man while happily putting a dent it at Brooks Farms (also learned that a prerequisite for the industry is optimism) but seeing someone take a different path is always interesting particularly with that person is winsome and charming.

Maria Solakofski’s (AKA Guerrilla Gourmet) mission, to connect us city folk to the nature around us, is open enough to allow her to do some pretty cool things such as edible nature walks, catering dinners at her house, and cooking classes. You have to admire the creativity of finding multiple paths to your goal, and then walking them all at once. At the tasting event she chose to showcase the multitude of herbs (and plants that some would call weeds) she cultivates in her Kensington Market yard, demonstrating to those of us with less drive or ingenuity that a little space (and a medium amount of effort) can produce pretty vast amounts of natural deliciousness. She made incredibly flavourful tisanes for the crowd (I was particularly a fan of the sage orange tyme – very warming) from her bounty and sold bouquets to be turned into tea at a later date (pretty and tasty). Her website currently seems to be MIA (apparently actually doing a multiple of cool things leaves one a dearth of time to promote them) but this Food Nerd is making a note to track her down in the near future and learn more. A guide for the edible urban jungle sounds like a very good thing.