She’s done it again… What a woman! (And, full disclosure, Dear Friend.)  But with this new book, The Boreal Feast, chef Michele Genest leaves her Whitehorse home to forage the food cultures, ingredients, recipes and cooks of other boreal forest nations. Just what, she wonders, are northern folk cooking (and with what ingredients and in what spirit of fun and adventure and gratitude?)  in parts of the world that share with her Yukon home, the largest biome on earth.

And so the award winning author of The Boreal Gourmet takes us to Scandinavia, to Norway, Sweden and Finland and in the spirit of how she lives her life, her focus is on The Feast. The long and leisurely sumptuous banquets in celebration of many things that matter, and the spontaneous gathering of front porch neighbours over someone’s morel patch find or pickerel catch. A cup of Labrador tea and a hunk of bannock is also a feast, of sorts, on a break from berry picking a northern hillside.

The book is a stunner. An absolute feast for the eyes. With photographs by Cathie Archbould and illustrations by Laurel Parry, Genest brings us the bounty of the north, of the north she knows intimately, and the new norths and its people she has come to know. Part travelogue, part adventure tale, part love story and lament, The Boreal Feast is a recipe collection and storybook that no good Canadian should be without.

Come to the launch! Thursday June 26th, at 7 pm, in the auditorium of the Main branch of the Ottawa Public Library.

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