A First Nations Potluck Feast and 200 posts

This is my 200th blog post on Victoria in Person.  I hope someone made a cake for me.  Ah, here it is... but is looks like it got mostly eaten on the way.

The above is a pretty awesome cake made with yoghurt by the Brunette of My Acquaintance. And it was not made for this blog, but instead for a potluck.  This was held outside the Mungo Martin house, next to the BC Museum, in honour of a visit from Kamloops by one of her friends. Forty of her friends and family gathered to meet up and share food from all sorts of places.

There was a massive pot of fish soup which was damn tasty.  Or the portion I had without Oolichan oil (aka Grease) was.  I was warned by the First Nations's folks who invited me to share the meal that it was a rather distinctive flavour and an acquired taste.  Super fishy, and strong, cloying smell.  Reading up on the fish itself, the smoked or fresh meat was a big part of the diet for the coastal peoples, and the oil was traded extensively into the interior. Creating the trade routes known as the 'Grease Trails'.

There was also Bannock.  Bannock was a Scottish way of prepping bread, mostly by frying the dough on hot stone. It was either taken up by the First Nations or very closely aligned to a way of preparing maize before the Scots brought their version over, and the two things became aligned.  In any case, the style here was plain but tasty.  If you took all the bad things on a Krispy Kreme donut away (the terrible sugary coating, the nasty oil taste), and squished them down in a flat patties about the size of your palm, you'd get this Bannock.  Except I'd probably eat it before you got it.

Finally, for dessert, there was Sxusem, more commonly known as Indian Ice cream.  This is a whipped mix of soap berries, water and sweetners.  It makes a big pink-orange frothy mousse, eaten with a spoon.  Soap berries are well, soapy tasty, and bitter. The soap flavour sort of fades after the first taste, and it's a pleasant sort of bitterness, not unlike the pleasant bittering of hops in beer.  What is neat is that berries are a source of saponins, that have the effect of creating the foamy mass to make the dessert.  The saponins might have some positive effects on digestion and reducing inflammation, though the research is still out.  The lady who gave me some of the juice left over swears by drinking some very day, diluted with water.  Though she also said harvesting the berries is not the easiest thing to do either.

I'm very grateful for being part of this gathering, even if my contribution was carrying some boxes, and chopping up a salad (which was not my finest pile of greens ever...).

So here's to number 300, I'm keeping at this, Andrea!