If you live in Canada and haven’t been hiding under a rock for the past three months, you’ve heard about the flooding in Alberta. In just a few days, the rivers running through Calgary and other communities broke their banks, and destruction ensued.

It was shocking to see pictures of Calgary’s iconic Stampede grounds filled with water, and devastating to hear of homes either hugely damaged, or washed away altogether. Even if people’s houses or apartments weren’t directly hit with water, many were evacuated and couldn’t return home for weeks. After the waters receded, two things were certain: nobody has seen flooding like this in decades, and southern Alberta proved itself as a tenacious and overwhelmingly supportive community.

High River, located just south of Calgary, was hit especially hard. We heard about it first-hand when we visited Highwood Crossing Farm, operated by Tony and Penny Marshall.

I met Tony years ago when I lived in Calgary, and was delighted to see where the canola for his famous cold-pressed canola oil is actually grown. The land he and Penny farms has been in his family for over a century.

Their canola oil is usually pressed in nearby High River, but that all changed when their production facility was badly flooded. They had to rent a truck, pack up what equipment hadn’t been damaged, and drive it back to the farm.

Not that it was safe from the water, either. Their house sits directly on the river, and its basement flooded, as well as one of their fields. Stoic as ever, Tony and Penny spoke of this misfortune as only farmers would – it was something to get through, and many others were worse off than them.

Tony showed us the small facility on the farm where they’ve temporarily setup their flax oil and canola oil press; the seeds are brought through pipes, come down into the machine, the oil is extracted, and the ‘leftovers,’ which look like giant bran pellets, are dumped into a bin. They still contain oil, and are a rich, healthy feed that local farmers buy from Tony to feed to their cattle. For a full list of their products, see their website here.

We also had a chance to explore their perfectly green garden.

Penny dug up potatoes for us, we picked handfuls of haskaps (our faves!)

and we saw our first bush of seabuckthorn berries, a super food I’d only ever seen in oil form at Whole Foods. I always assumed seabuckthorn was exotic, sourced from a remote corner of Nepal or perhaps a rural micro-climate of southeast Madagascar. Nope, apparently it is available right here in Canada, and it’s been added to my ever-increasing list of berries-I’d-never-eaten-before-FEAST.

Not yet ripe.  At full ripeness, seabuckthorn berries are bright orange, and taste like unsweetened orange juice. — Not yet ripe. At full ripeness, seabuckthorn berries are bright orange, and taste like unsweetened orange juice.

We sat on their deck overlooking the river (now back to its low, easygoing self), and had the most wonderful haskap/berry/cornmeal cobbler with ice cream.

When we left, we were sent off with more haskaps, potatoes, honey from their farm, ‘pre-flood’ Highwood Crossing granola, flax oil, (awarding-winning!) steel-cut oats, rolled oats, turkey jerky, and some banana bread, just in case we got hungry.

We had the most lovely afternoon with Tony, Penny, and their visiting friend Paul. If we take only one thing away from this project, it will be that Canadian food producers are not only hardworking and resilient, but also wildly generous. Also, they make a mean, mean cobbler.

If you’d like to match them on the generous front, you can donate to the Alberta flood relief effort here.

Here's Corb Lund, who played at the recent Alberta Flood Aid Relief Concert, which raised $1.5 million.

-LA

I didn’t expect to go to Europe while in Edmonton, but that’s exactly what we got when we visited Kevin Kossowan.

We sat at a weathered wooden table under an apple tree, the air a bit hazy from the cob oven, a trellis of grapes within view, and homemade charcuterie in front of us. How could we not feel like we'd gone abroad?

Kevin is a local food innovator, with his hands in many an Edmonton pie. His fleet of projects include Story Chaser, a video production company with a focus on agriculture and food; Shovel and Fork, which provides workshops on craft food production including charcuterie, fermentation, raising backyard hens, and cob oven construction; and Lactuca, an urban ag business he runs with partner Travis Kennedy. They supply Edmonton’s best restaurants with micro-greens grown in their own backyards.

They’re dedicated to building up a successful urban ag business model, and by the looks of it, they’re doing pretty well. I'm not sure if Kevin actually sleeps, but I was too busy admiring his cob oven to ask.

We had the amazing fortune of joining Kevin for lunch. The meal included a frittata made with his hens’ eggs, local butter, Lactuca greens, edible flowers, and foraged mushrooms.

He’d scored a bunch a day or two earlier, and the caps and stems were laid out on his dining room table to dry - an exquisite graveyard of fungi.

His Lactuca micro-green ‘greenhouse’ boxes are arranged tidily around his yard; he and Travis use a simple yet incredibly effective type of box gardening with lids, meaning they can trap geothermal heat (giving them a longer growing season), and protect the greens if it rains or hails, simply by closing the lids. With these kinds of methods, a huge amount of food can be grown in very small spaces.

Shovel and Fork’s head teaching instructor, Chef Chad Moss (and his adorable blondie son, Max), also joined us for lunch.

Chad is the company’s charcuterie guru, and contributed various kinds of salumi to our lunch, as well as homemade Red Fife bread and cold-smoked salmon.

The meal was phenomenal, and we drank homemade apple cider to wash it all down.

Thanks to Kevin and Chad for this most gorgeous, lazy, sunlit summer lunch. People of Edmonton - don't bother buying a ticket to Europe! Just take a few Shovel and Fork classes and you'll be ready to setup your own piece of French or Italian countryside in the backyard.

We'll leave you with one of Kevin's videos featuring two of our very favourite peeps, Dana and Cam of Joy Road Catering: