In 2012 my eldest will be turning 7. He was born shortly before the original incarnation of this blog was – back when Mrs. Foodie and I thought it would be fun to blog about all the great food we found in our favourite restaurants and our efforts to recreate those dishes at home.

Time flies and boy do things change! With 4 kids under our roof, we don’t make it out to many restaurants now-a-days, and with 6 people stuffed into a little urban kitchen – there isn’t a lot of room for wowing the diners (besides, we don’t have many diner parties anymore either!)

Not that I’m complaining about any of it (okay, maybe I complain about the tiny kitchen a bit… er, a lot) but life seems to increase in pace each year, and with each kid, and we never seem to have time to do the things we had planned on doing.

…hence the decidedly sparse number of posts over the past couple of years.

But, 2012 is going to be a year of change – big change. Trust me, I know about these things.

For us, we’re about to put an offer on a big (really big) century home in a quiet little town, across the road from a nice little river. And this big home comes with a big kitchen (really big!) Once all the initial excitement died down around here, Mrs. Foodie and I began to talk about all the great things we could do with that kitchen (procrastinating from the packing and cleaning that needs to be done around our current house of course) – and one of the things that we both kept coming back to, was the relaunch of our sadly neglected, but not quite forgotten food blog!!

So this is a new beginning. Our focus will change around here a little. We are trying to feed a family of 6 every night, while still keeping food fun, adventurous and healthy. We do things a little different, and I’ll be posting again shortly to talk more about that – and updating our About page.

We’re about to launch on an exciting new chapter in our lives and we are looking forward to sharing some of those stories with you – and we hope you’ll share some of your food adventures back with us here!

Also, I wanted to say thank you to everyone who has visited over the past year – visiting an almost dry well. Our traffic is surprisingly good despite our neglect, and we’re looking forward to providing better content again soon!

The Canadian Foodie

Let’s start the new year with a confession… I pretty much neglected the CanadianFoodies blog in 2008 (I’m sorry CF blog! I still love you!)

I didn’t stop eating, or loving food, I didn’t lose my passion to create food, write or share our experiences with you… or anything else like that

What I did do was try and cope with being busier than I ever have been before.

Floods and children, increasing demands at the office, our first major garden and all the while trying to not just survive, but improve life for our kids… you know, that whole life thing…

But it’s a new year, we’re back and this year our focus is once more going to change, or at least shift a bit.

This year, anyone who has stopped by in the past will notice an increased emphasis not just on food, but on healthier, greener, local and organic foods and the ‘greener’ lifestyle that we’ve been attempting to adopt over the past few years.

Mrs. Foodie and I have always eaten well (in a ‘healthy choices’ sense), but like almost everyone else, even we were guilty of the odd quick and easy processed foodstuff for times when time was in short supply (a couple frozen lasagna’s were a definite staple within our deep freezer) But, when we started having kids we began taking a hard look at everything that came into the house.

Foods with transfat were the the first things to go (and Mrs. Foodie felt the pain when our last microwave popcorn was finished).

Then, over the course of a year, we made choices to minimize foods heavy in sodium and saturated fats, we stopped using the microwave, stopped buying grocery store inst-meals and our occasional trips to the local farmers markets became a weekly event. In fact, in the summer months 80 – 90% of our produce comes from a farmers market.

We made a lot of headway that first year (2005) but the next year brought child #2, followed a year later by child #3 (yup, 3 kids in less than 34 months!) and we struggled to maintain our momentum forward.

But heare we are in 2009, the first decade of new millenium is coming to a close and through experience or wisdom the changes that we started 3 year ago have truly become second nature and we’re ready to take our ‘green’ life to the next level.

What exaclty does that mean?

Honestly I’m not 100% sure where the final destination is going to land us, but I do know the direction we’re heading.

The focus of this blog will continue to be food, (we’ll be posting a new recipe/meal of the week column shortly)

and we’ll continue to investigate the back stories and histories of the foods we eat.  But now, in 2009, we’ll start to focus on food as part of our environmental impact, our carbon footprint. We’ll look at the choices we want to make and followup with the ones we’re actually able to follow through with.

And that’s just the first step of the journey…

So please ignore any short term randomness as I disable plugins, upgrade and (hopefully not) troubleshoot. We’ll be back to our regularly scheduled program shortly!

Thanks for your patience.

* Update (15 minutes later) – Upgrade complete. If you notice any further randomness, it is completely my fault!

Thanks for visiting. To any of my old regulars, thanks for checking back.

We’ve been a little quiet around here over the past 6 months or so… what can I say :)

I’ve been hibernating through the long Canadian Winter!

Actually we’ve been really busy with other ventures… a new baby in January (our second daughter!), a flood in February that destroyed our basement, and being generally busy trying to plan out the future of CanadianFoodies.

You see, we really didn’t have much of a plan when we started… we just wanted some good eats, and we wanted a way to share them… That original intent kind of expanded into starting to cover our local restaurant scene (which proved to much with 3 young children :) etc…

To our surprise we were really well received! We were sent lots of great feedback and we eventually decided that if we were going to continue this blog we were going to need to have a better plan as we moved forward…

So here we are. Plan in hand.

And I’m happy to say that not much is going to change… except our focus.

We’re not just interested in eating GOOD food, we’re passionate about eating good HEALTHY food! No factory produced, plastic packaged goods for our family! Some of our other concerns & passions include the environment, green living, healthy lifestyles, family values and organic eating…

Whew… get all that?

So this Blog is about to see a bit of a transformation as you take back seat in my families ride as we navigate our typically transfat, chemical and additive filled lives as we search for a better way to live longer, live stronger and live happier!

This year we had the opportunity to plant our own garden (about 30X30!) on a relatives property. So we’re going to be talking about organic gardening and our struggles there (and there have been struggles already).

We’re also going to try and start incorporating video soon… sorry, that’s all I’m going to say about that for now :)

Whew! (did I say that already?)

I’m spent for now…

Hope to see you soon as we cycle up this conversation that we hope you’ll join us in!

cheers!

The Valiants.

I’ve been out of town a lot recently (with the day job) as well as launching a new blog (MichaelValiant.com – warning, not food related at all!) so I apologize for not being around here much.

Thanks for the comments (that took me forever to moderate)!

I will re-kick things off with a thought for the day:

I try not to eat any veggies that have travelled more than I have!

Have a great day celebrating our wonderful country!

Here’s wishing all the foodies out there get a chance to fit in a good meal, and relax with a good bottle of wine…

Salut, Eh!

I’ve read a couple of these so far :) Guess I’ll have to go shopping to find some of the others:
Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser

Food Politics by Marion Nestle

The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan

Coming Home to Eat by Gary Paul Nabhan

Local Flavors by Deborah Madison

Epicurian Delights: The Life and Times of James Beard by Evan Jones

Serious Pig: An American in Search of His Roots by John Thorne with Matt Lewis Thorne

The Debt to Pleasure by John Lanchester

No Foreign Food: The American Diet in Time and Place by Richard Pillsbury

My Vegetable Love: A Journal of a Growing Season by Carl H. Klaus

The Slow Food Guide to New York City Restaurants, Market, Bars by Patrick Martins and Ben Watson

Slow Food: The Case for Taste by Slow Food Founder Carlo Petrini

Well, from the horses mouth:

“Squidoo is the world’s most popular site for people who want to build a page about their passions. ”

It’s also a great venue for us to reach out to a broader audience and share all the great things we have coming your way in the next couple of weeks, and months!

So checkout our Barrie Food Site on Squidoo sometime too!

I should mention that there isn’t much there so far :)  but we’ll be putting more content up soon!

We created a profile on Technorati which you can find be clicking this link:

Technorati Profile

That’s about it for tonight…

bon vivant \bon-vee-VONT\, noun:

A person with refined and sociable tastes, especially one who enjoys fine food and drink.