alberta Archives - Patent & the Pantry

Touring to Torrington’s Gopher Museum with #GoFurther150

June 4, 2017 No Comments

I love a road trip.

Likely because I’ve always loved driving.

(Barring that one time when my stepdad was teaching me standard and I rolled a fraction of an inch and then stalled at a tiny slope in Vancover and the woman behind me honked and I said, “Nope,” got out of the car as traffic grew behind me, switching seats with my stepdad who easily, and quickly, navigated us out of the situation. Funnily, I later taught myself how to handle a stick shift and now it’s my preferred way to drive.)

This really translates into a love of a quick escape.

I once drove from five hours from a small town in the B.C. interior to Jasper just to swim in a lake (worth it) and did a round trip from Victoria to Tofino – 9 hours of driving – because I wanted to see the pounding surf.

All the aspects of a road trip appeal to me. Snacks! Good music playlists! Podcasts (definitely wished those were a thing in those early days of day-long road trips)!

I’ve poked around Southern Alberta quite a bit on such quick escapes. Over to Drumheller to see the museum and hoodoos, west to Banff or Canmore to poke around the mountains, south to the Crowsnest Pass and many, many trips to Turner Valley for a burger at the Chuckwagon – often looping down and over to Nanton for some antiquing before turning the car home.

(All road trips in my life need a stop at some tasty/interesting/unexpected/intriguing place to eat, obviously.)

But I haven’t done much exploring north of the city. And one thing has been on my list for a while: the Gopher Hole Museum and Gift Shop in Torrington.

When Ford Canada offered to loan me a new Fusion Sport and send me to the museum as part of their #GoFurther150 campaign, I was game. Road trip? Nice car? Stuffed gophers in display cases? Let’s do this.

Across the country, in celebration of Canada’s 150^th anniversary of Confederation, Ford has been sending people on trips in their vehicles to see local landmarks as part of their #GoFurther150 campaign.

[Disclosure: I was given a gas card to offset travel costs, plus Ford paid the $2 admission fee at the museum for myself and a friend.]

Iphone synced, music filling the car, we slipped north on the highway and then east over to Torrington, testing out the sport mode, which makes the car more responsive and adjusts torque and engine sound. (Confession: I also totally tried out the seat warmers/air conditioners – cooling! – heated steering wheel and the lane assist, which, after a few tests, prompted the car to suggest I pull over because I might be tired.)

For 21 years, the gopher museum has attracted visitors from around the world – and more than its fair share of controversy when PETA inevitably protested its opening, to which the museum responded with a note that they could “get stuffed” – to view the dioramas of daily life in the community featuring taxidermied gophers.

Volunteer fire gophers, Silver Willows Seniors’ Club gophers, gophers visiting the local Pizza n’ More Eh and gophers on dates. All the background art for each of the dioramas was done by local artist Shelley Barkman, while a retired carpenter built the cabinets and local women dressed the gophers in their little outfits, right down to an RCMP gopher in red serge.

Dale Heinz, a taxidermist in nearby Didsbury, had the task of getting the gophers display ready.

(OK, they’re actually Richardson Ground Squirrels, if you want to get technical – and there was a copy editor at the Herald who always wanted to get technical on that front – but for the sake of consistency, I’m going with gophers here. After all, that’s what the museum calls them.)

The one-time village opened the museum, capitalizing on the numerous gophers in the area, as a way of drawing in tourists. Judging from the pins on the map that visitors have used to mark their homes, it has attracted people from all over.

The museum is open for four months a year – June 1 to the end of September, though they will open outside of those dates for visitors who call or email – and sees about 6,000 visitors each season.

(We were a couple of days early, but they opened for us and a couple who had initially been disappointed to learn it was closed.)

The whole hamlet of Torrington has embraced the gopher. Fire hydrants are painted like the small creatures in outfits and there’s a statue along the highway denoting the community mascot.

And so, with the museum finally checked off my list of things to see in Alberta, it was time to seek something to eat.

Never one to skip a chance to take secondary highways, we took the long way around to Bowden, circling up to Innisfail along ribbons of road undulating over the foothills and then down the QEII to the Starlite Diner Car – another landmark that’s long been on my list.

The diner was bustling for a Thursday afternoon, parking lot full of tourists and truckers who wanted to stop for a chance to eat at the retro-styled diner just off the highway.

While mostly typical diner fare, the menu has an extra-terrestrial theme (as does some of the décor) with Romulan or Crop Circle salads, among other options.

It was all about the clubhouse sandwich for me and this one didn’t disappoint. Slices of real turkey, ham, cheese, a thick layer of bacon. Perfection. Also? Inordinately good fries.

We took the long way back to Calgary, heading west and then down Highway 22 through to Cochrane. (One of my road trip preferences, when possible, is to never take the same road back.) Everything was lush and green and we were able to watch the edge of a summer storm push toward the city.

Another great day of exploring.

If you go: the Torrington Gopher Museum charges $2 admission for adults, 50 cents for children under the age of 14. It’s open daily from June to September, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Baking

Stephen Duckett’s Oatmeal Raisin Cookies

November 24, 2010 10 Comments

If you live in Alberta, chances are good you’ve heard about “cookiegate.”

If you don’t, there’s still a chance you may have heard about it. (Even DListed caught wind.)

Here it is in a nutshell: after a week that saw harsh criticism levelled at Alberta Health Services, the board’s chief executive Stephen Duckett spent the day Friday in a meeting examining Alberta’s emergency care crisis. At the end, he came out to find three reporters looking for comment.

And what did he say? “I’m eating my cookie.”

Repeatedly.

You can see the entire exchange on YouTube here, though I also quite enjoyed this Cookie Monster/Duckett mash-up that someone later posted.

I’m not saying he had to stop and give a quote. My point is merely that this is a highly-paid official and a professional. It would have been much easier to simply stop, say he would not be giving a comment but that there was a media availability in 30 minutes if the reporters wanted a quote. To wave the cookie in a reporter’s face was rude. To continue for two minutes going on about eating the cookie was just comical. And not in an endearing way.

Anyway, I’m not here to wax on about politics. This is a food blog and I’m a baker at heart, so for me the curiousity became increasingly about the cookie at the heart of the controversy.

On Monday, I tweeted that I wondered what type of cookie Duckett had been eating. Turns out I’m not the only one that thought that way. The Edmonton Journal’s political columnist, Paula Simons, tracked down the chef behind the now-infamous cookie and he supplied the recipe. And all I could think after that was, I have to bake these things.

Turns out, he is Emmanuel David of La Persaud catering, a man who believes the secret to a chewy and soft oatmeal cookie lies in using lots of butter and sugar. And this recipe has it in spades. In fact, I was a bit surprised when I saw the ingredient list because it seemed to consist solely of those two ingredients. (Turns out there was some misinformation initially, which the chef later corrected. Below is the corrected version of the recipe.)

Still, only 1 teaspoon of baking powder didn’t seem to be enough leavening to give these cookies some height when competing against all that butter. And a complete absence of salt seemed strange.

But this chef must know what he’s doing, I figured and I confidently moved ahead, creaming together the copious amounts of butter and granulated sugar, beating in the four eggs one at a time and then gently folding in the dry mixture of flour, oatmeal, chopped raisins and the tiny amount of baking powder. (I love the idea of chopping the raisins first so you get little bits of them rather than just complete ones every once in a while.)

OK, I threw in two pinches of salt. It seemed crazy not to have some. Yes, even though I used salted butter.

I threw a tray of six rounded balls of dough in the oven and then set the timer for 10 minutes. (The recipe doesn’t specify how long they go in for, just to bake until “golden.”) When the timer went off, the edges were verging past golden and into “crisp” territory, but the tops of the cookies, while cooked, were almost as pale as snow. I would let them bake for another minute, but just don’t like burnt cookies, so I pulled them out and tried again. For the second batch, I moved the rack in the oven up a rung so it was in the top third and not in the middle. These cookies fared a little better.

I tried making them smaller; I tried making them bigger.

But nothing I did made them look the same colour as the cookie Duckett brandishes in the video.

Perhaps the best thing I did was sprinkle a scant pinch (just a few grains really) of sea salt on top of the last few batches to try to even out the sweetness.

It was only halfway through as I was trying to puzzle out why they weren’t working (the perfectionist in me was absolutely beyond annoyed) when I began to wonder if David meant brown sugar when he just wrote “sugar” in the recipe. That certainly would have changed the colour and given them a bit more heft. It’s too late now, but I may revisit this later and make that swap. Or do half granulated and half brown to see what happens.

Because, ultimately, these are very light, soft cookies and worth a second attempt.

As the last tray came out of the oven, news began to trickle out over twitter that Duckett had been given the boot.

I guess that’s the way the cookie crumbles.

Stephen Duckett’s Oatmeal Raisin Cookies

from Emmanuel David, converted into imperial measurements by me. The instructions are exactly how he gave them on Simons’ blog.

500g butter (about 2 1/8 cups. One block of butter is 454g, so it’s more than that)
450g sugar (2 cups)
4 large eggs
200g organic oatmeal (2 cups)
100g California Golden Raisins, chopped (scant 3/4 cup and I used purple ones because that’s what I could find.)
400g flour (2 3/4 cups)
5 mL baking powder (1 teaspoon)
Dash cinnamon, optional

Method:

1. Cream Butter & Sugar Until Fluffy. Add Egg Gradually

2. Fold Flour, Oatmeal & Raisins Mix Well

3. Shape cookies into small round balls. Do not flatten – place on cookie sheets as balls.

4. Bake 180 degrees C until golden brown.

(Gwendolyn’s note here: Most of mine baked for about 12 minutes to get a golden edge and bottom. They were fully cooked, though still pale.)

Yield: Makes approx. 30- 90g Cookies

(Mine made more than 30, for sure. Somewhere closer to 45.)

Dinner

In search of the perfect burger

August 7, 2009 15 Comments

In the moments that followed the first bite, as the flavour of beef and bacon and cheese filled our mouths, we knew this was one of our more brilliant plans.

Of course, it didn’t start out that way.

It started out as a tongue-in-cheek joke, a nod to our mutual love of burgers. But as my sister’s trip from the coast to Cowtown neared, it morphed into a serious scheme.

The burger tour of southern Alberta was born.

You see, a truly great burger is more than the sum of its parts.

A solid, but not too filling, bun provides the backbone. It needs to hold the burger together, soak up the juices from beef and sauce, but not be too tall, too bread-y or so flimsy it becomes an annoyance.

Sauces–relish, mustard, ketchup, special or otherwise– should add to the flavour and not overpower the patty taste.

Lettuce and tomato are optional. Onion is not.

The burger should just fit into your hands and be bitten through without feeling you have to dislocate your jaw.

It should be messy. Bonus points for burgers that cause juices to trickle down your hands.

(The trick, I would come to learn, is to turn your plate so the burger drippings fall onto your french fries.)

Establishing a plan took several e-mail exchanges and thorough research.

A cruise through the Chowhound online forums, suggestions from friends and even a photo posted on Flickr — a photo-sharing website — gave us our plan of attack: five burger joints in four days.

There were tentative discussions about beef detox after that point.

And so, to the journey. From Calgary International Airport, we made our way to the first tour stop: Boogie’s Burgers on Edmonton Trail.

The little sister was off to the races with a double patty burger, adorned with cheese, bacon and pickles. (And a bacon, banana, peanut butter milkshake to wash it all down; if I hadn’t been around when she was born, I would swear she was adopted.)I wanted a slower pace and went with a single with bacon and cheese.

The burgers were the size of my outstretched hand, with a tangy red sauce. The buns were fresh-tasting, with a slightly crisp crust that gave nicely when bitten into. Thick slices of bacon and melted cheddar cheese rounded out the burgers. And they passed the requisite messy test with me having to go through several paper napkins.

We were off to a good start. Day 2 took us down Highway 22 to Turner Valley for a stop at the Chuckwagon Cafe. Charmed by the red barn exterior and the slightly kitschy decor inside, we were eager to see what this little restaurant had to offer.

We both ordered the House Burger, minus the mushrooms, featuring a six-ounce patty of beef raised on a Longview farm with no hormones or steroids, topped with fried onions, bacon and marble cheese.

After the plates were set down, the first five minutes were punctuated solely with the sounds of beef contentment, echoed by little more than groans of acknowledgment.

Mmmm. Uh-huh. Mmmm. Seriously.

The thick patty was juicy and flavourful, had nice charred bits and was well-spiced and complemented by the homemade relish.

For the next hour as we drove further south on Cowboy Trail–she marvelled at the expansive Prairie sky while we sang along with bubble gum pop songs –there were moments when we stopped to talk about those burgers again.

In High River, we pulled up to a little red-roofed burger shack whose reputation is well known. The Hitchin’ Post is a local favourite and the steady line of traffic in and out of the dirt parking lot surrounding the tiny takeout restaurant spoke volumes.

Cheeseburgers topped with a full slice of onion and sitting atop yellow mustard and relish were ordered up and washed down with orange soda. The burgers were about the size of my palm and tasty, but more akin to a burger from a fair. It filled the burger need, but not in the way that would keep us talking about them for days after.

By 11 a. m. the next morning, we were ready for round four: Rocky’s Burger Bus –literally, an old red bus jammed into the city’s southeast industrial area just off Blackfoot Trail, with a few picnic tables in behind.

The cheeseburgers were adorned with little more than a generous helping of mustard and relish and a piece of processed cheese. But the thick wedge of beef was the star attraction of this meat-centric burger. It was juicy and tender, likely because the patties are shaped by hand. And it was hot off the grill, which was deliciously unexpected.

The final stop on the tour was at downtown steak house Saltlik, where friends joined us to try the double-fisted bacon cheeseburger. This was not just a turn of phrase. A thick patty topped with bacon, cheddar, a healthy tomato slice, lettuce and red onion, all jammed into a tall bun–two hands were definitely necessary.

But, as we entered a virtual beef coma at the end of day four, there was no debate about who served the best burger. Even now, weeks later, I think about the Chuckwagon Cafe and how easy it would be to climb into my car and head south.

The sister has already marked it as a must-do for the next tour.

This story first appeared in the Real Life section in the Calgary Herald. For more delicious recipes, visit CalgaryHerald.com/life.

Touring to Torrington’s Gopher Museum with #GoFurther150

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Stephen Duckett’s Oatmeal Raisin Cookies

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In search of the perfect burger

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