Travel Saskatchewan: A Day in Regina’s Organic World!
Travel Saskatchewan: A Day in Regina’s Organic World!
By Habeeb Salloum and Muna Salloum
Travel Saskatchewan: A Day in Regina’s Organic World!
‘We’re all going organic’ a long time friend from Regina explained as we dug into organic omelettes at the Brickhouse Bistro. It was the beginning of our search for organic food in Regina and its environs. We had decided to begin our tour at Lumsden some 30 minutes drive from Regina. The Bistro was our first stop on our road to organic discoveries. The dishes served in this Bistro were unique creations – tasty and wholesome and made with mainly organic and local products.
Since we were starting our organic tour early that morning, we began with the breakfast menu. It was unbelievable – from omelettes to chicken or maple glazed bacon waffles to white chocolate banana bread French Toast. As one of our group, while chewing on her waffles announced, “OMG! That’s a mouth full of awesome!’
Heliotrope Organic Farm in Regina, Saskatchewan
Our next stop was the Heliotrope Organic Farm owned by a lovely couple Rick and Hayley who are devotees of organic agriculture. Some of the products they grow are asparagus, artichokes, kale, chard, lettuce, spinach, rhubarb and seed potatoes all on two plots of land – one 9 acres and the other 25.
Honeycombs at Heliotrope Organic Farm in Regina, Saskatchewan.
With a combination of greenhouses, and various coverings, Rick and Hayley are able to extend the growing season and the variety of vegetables. Not only vegetables, the couple also harvest Saskatoon berries and have plenty of rhubarb for sale. Added to this, they produce their own seeds. One cannot but admire this couple who have forfeited city life for that of the rural in order to grow and sell home-grown products. There is indeed a great demand for these organic products grown within an ecological and local setting. Rick and Hayley who are true believers in the healthy organic way of life market their vegetables and fruit, in the main, at the Regina Farmer’s Market.
Heliotrope Organic Farm, owners Rick and Hayley and Chef Tim.
Back in Regina we made our way to the Willow on Wascana, an organic- based fine dining establishment that, as it announces, ‘celebrates all things Saskatchewan’. Perched overlooking Wascana Lake, it is a great eating place with a fine patio from where guests in a quiet setting can enjoy a romantic dinner.
View From Willow Restaurant on Wascana Lake in Regina
The Willow has become quite famous due to the culinary skills of Chef Tim Davies who is able to take garden grown products to create dishes of gourmet fame. The Chef firmly believes that the best dishes are produced when the ingredients come fresh from the field to the table. Saskatchewan, according to Chef Tim, is a land of bounty and he has no trouble in creating new dishes or redeveloping traditional ones, using organic ingredients.
Enjoying a light salad at Willow on Wascana Lake in Regina, Saskatchewan.
We enjoyed our lunch of Willow’s Greens, a delicious light salad with a sour cherry vinaigrette, and then a crusted trout fillet served over a bed of a mildly spiced ratatouille. To end the meal, we relished a vanilla custard with banana slices over a crusty cookie. It was a lunch of luxury foods, a sampling of Saskatchewan’s haute cuisine that is emerging thanks to the great talents of the new generation of chefs.
Dining on encrusted trout at Willow on Wascana Lake in Regina, Saskatchewan.
Leaving the Willow and its tasty cuisine, we took a tour of Wascana Lake, a man-made waterway in the heart of Regina – Saskatchewan’s capital and a city of some 200,000. A verdant oasis in the heart of Canada’s so-called Queen City, the lake, which is part of the Wascana Centre, established in 1962, is the heart of the mass of greenery that one sees in the city today. Regina has come a long way from the time when it was established in 1882, beside a scraggly creek on a treeless plain, as a tent city, called ‘Piles O’ Bones’. It flourished along the creek where the Indigenous peoples once prepared their buffalo meat, then moved away and left the bones. At that time, there was not much to attract people to the area.
Today there has been a drastic change. Around the creek there has sprouted a 930 ha (2,300 ac) area of beautifully landscaped and tree-filled parkland surrounding a 120 ha (300 ac) man-made lake. Riding its gentle blue water we sat back and dreamed of the healthy and wholesome food that we had just eaten while man-made greenery enveloped us within its loving folds.
If You Go:
Brickhouse Bistro
235 James Street N, Lumsden, Saskatchewan
Tel:(306)731-2859,
Heliotrope Organic Farm
Hayley Lawford & Rick Letwinka
Craven, Saskatchewan
E-mail: [email protected]
Willow on Wascana
3000 Wascana Drive, Regina, Saskatchewan S4P 3B2
Tel:306-585-3663
Bio:
Habeeb Salloum is a Canadian author who grew up in Saskatchewan, joined the RCAF during the Second World War, and then worked for the Canadian Department of National Revenue for 36 years. For the last 30 years he has been a full-time freelance writer and author specializing in food, history and travel. Besides 7 books and 20 chapters in books, he has had hundreds of articles about culture, food, travel, history and homesteading in western Canada appear in such publications as the Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail, the Western Producer, Contemporary Review, Forever Young, Vegetarian Journal and Saveur.
Among his most important published books are: aFrom the Lands of Figs and Olives: Over 300 Delicious and Unusual Recipes from the Middle East and North Africa (Interlink Publishing, 1996); Journeys Back to Arab Spain (The Middle East Studies Center, 1994); Arabic Contributions to the English Vocabulary (Librairie du Liban, 1996); Classic Vegetarian Cooking From the Middle East and North Africa (Interlink Publishing, 2000); Arab Cooking On A Saskatchewan Homestead: Recipes And Recollections (CPRC, University of Regina. 2005) – winner of the Cuisine Canada and The University of Guelph’s Silver Canadian Culinary Book Awards in 2006, Bison Delights (CPRC, University of Regina, 2010) and The Arabian Nights Cookbook (Tuttle Publishing, 2010).
His most recent books, co-authored with Leila Salloum Elias and Muna Salloum, are Scheherazade’s Feasts: Foods of the Medieval Arab World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); and Sweet Delights from A Thousand and One Nights: The Story of Traditional Arab Sweets (I.B. Tauris, London, UK, 2013).
