Cloudy, grey, soggy. That, for the most part, was June in Vancouver. This Province isn’t named  British Columbia for nothing, you know.

Well, come July, and it’s an Indian Summer to the rescue!

Back for the second successive year, the Indian Summer Festival 2012 brought back the sunshine and lots of fun in the form of food, film, literature, music, dance, and more. We headed downtown to the opening event, hosted by celebrity chef Vikram Vij. In my haste, I left my faithful camera behind, but by happy chance, the festival venue – the Simon Fraser University  Woodward’s Centre for the Contemporary Arts, just happened to be right beside a branch of London Drugs. Very handy! Ten minutes to choose a cheap point and shoot, and I was set to join the merry crowd, to eat, drink, and people watch. My apologies for the grainy images, but hopefully, you”ll get the picture ;–)

Glimpses of the opening event of the Indian Summer Festival on the fifth of July.

Overall, a most engaging evening, with tasty food and drink provided by Vij’s, Atithi, Saravanaa Bhavan, and W2 Media Café.

It finally feels like summer!

Take a look at the pictures below, in sequence, working your way down, left to right, beginning in the top left corner. Readers in India, they look awfully familiar for the most part, don’t they ?

Well, see if you can guess where they were taken!

(Hold off on reading the captions until you guess).

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The California Avocado Commission has declared June “California Avocado Month”. With 90% of avocados grown and consumed in the USA (and I’m guessing Canada too) coming from farms in California, that’s reason enough for this month long celebration of all things avocado.

Avocados are native to Central Mexico and have a long history of cultivation in Central and South America. Now here’s something interesting. Avocado cultivation seems to have arrived relatively late in California. According to a California Avocado Industry report, the first report on record of avocados being cultivated there dates to 1856, coming from an import of mixed tropical fruit plants from Nicaragua by Dr Thomas J. White. A more definitive attempt was made in 1871 by Judge R.B. Ord of Santa Barbara who imported trees from Mexico. I say relatively late, since given the proximity of California to the original source of these fruit and with its ideally suited climate, one would expect the avocado would have found its way north far earlier. Meanwhile, a whole world away, there seem to have been recorded sightings of avocados in India as early as the middle of the 18th century.

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Curb your inner Godzilla – that’s just the title of  Vancouver’s annual 3 day “food expo”, as it bills itself. Back for the 10th year running, Eat! Vancouver is the place to catch celebrity chef’s like Vancouver’s Iron Chef, Rob Feenie in action.

It’s also a fun way to discover new cuisines and ingredients about town, take a crash course in wine, beer or cheese appreciation, shop for things you never knew you needed, and generally ponder the ubiquity of butter chicken and samosas on the local culinary landscape.
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Fiddleheads!

That’s the evocative name given to edible fern fronds that curl out of the forest floor in spring. They’re beautiful to look at, and are considered one of the delicacies of the season. With a flavour that’s reminiscent of asparagus and artichoke with woodsy notes of moss, they are quite the tasty mouthful.

I eat fiddleheads in very modest quantities, however, and only a couple of times in a season at most. The reason?  Well, as Langdon Cook asks  about bracken fern in Fat of the Land, “To eat or not to eat?”

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Springtime means it’s spot prawn season in Vancouver!

Kicking off on the 5th of May (watch the first catch being hauled in) with the 6th Annual Spot Prawn Festival, for us prawn lovers it’s two months of glorious indulgence in one of the most delicious things to come out of our neck of the Pacific. Spot prawns (or spot shrimp, if you prefer) have a clean sweetness to them, and the succulent flesh makes for very satisfying eating with minimal cooking and seasoning, though I draw the line at eating them straight out of the water!

Besides enjoying them as sashimi, with creamy pasta sauces, in salads, grilled and dripping with garlicky butter, I can’t resist the temptation to cook them in a myriad Indian ways. And thanks to the long harvesting season, it’s possible to try out plenty of recipes featuring these luscious crustaceans at their freshest and best.

Here’s a spot prawn curry I recently made, based on a simple Coorg fish curry recipe.

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