Light Up Your Christmas
Photo by Doug Currie
Even during the hottest days of summer, Kate Cram is thinking about winter.
The chef-owner of Ladysmith’s Wild Poppy Market draws on the bounty of produce available in summer and fall to prepare meals for the colder months. Preserving or freezing fruits and vegetables to use in winter dishes, she says, “brings a pop of summer when it's a cold winter day.”
Cram is just one of several chefs and food entrepreneurs along the east coast of Vancouver Island who relish the quieter winter season. When the summer holiday makers are gone, you can leave the Island Highway south of Nanaimo and explore the communities of Ladysmith and Chemainus, with time to enjoy the region’s festive celebrations, welcoming cafés and sustaining holiday foods.
Hearty Winter Menus
Wild Poppy Market, which Cram and her husband Geoff operate on Ladysmith’s main street, sells ready-to-eat meals, sandwiches and freshly made baked goods. All their products are gluten free, and many are vegan. “We'll pickle and we'll ferment. We braise a lot of veggies,” says Cram, getting them ready to use in hearty winter stews and soups. While summer leaves are still green on the trees, she starts making sauerkraut and kimchi and begins prepping Christmas puddings.
Cram, who trained at the Culinary Institute of America in New York and is also a registered holistic nutritionist, draws on this education to create dishes offering a rainbow of colours and textures and respecting the ingredients that area farmers have grown. “We try to use as many local and small producers and growers that we can.”
On her winter menus, “We use a lot of squash, pumpkin, beets and kale. Lots of cabbage, for slaws or fermenting, or we'll do cabbage rolls. We do a lot of curries in the winter, too,” she adds. “We're kind of famous in town for turkey sandwiches. We make homemade stuffing, homemade cranberry sauce, and we roast all our turkeys. And we do a lot of pumpkin pie, pecan pie and apple pie.”
“We're making this hub of localness,” says the chef, who likes to support other Ladysmith-area food and drink businesses, including the town’s Bayview Brewing. She recommends Maya Norte as well, where owners Anne Manning and Peg Montgomery offer Mexican- and Spanish-inspired fare.
Coffee, Pancakes & Twinkling Lights
Around the corner from Wild Poppy, Ironworks Café & Crêperie offers winter wanderers another kind of coziness.
Photos from Ironworks Cafe & Creperie
Dina Stuehler recalls how her mother, whose heritage is Dutch-Indonesian, made crêpes for the family in the traditional Dutch style. These pannenkoeken were slightly thicker than French crêpes, a tradition Stuehler continued after opening her Ladysmith café. She now operates crêperies in Duncan, Nanaimo and Port Alberni, as well.
In winter, Stuehler recommends crêpes filled with a sweet-salty combination of spinach, artichokes and brie served with a maple sauce, or a seasonal special, like cranberry dessert crêpes. She gets into the holiday vibe by warming up with Ironworks’ chai latte and by decorating the shop during the annual Ladysmith Festival of Lights.
The festival was launched in 1987, when Ladysmith resident Bill Fitzpatrick proposed a winter “light up” to bring residents into town as the days grew dark. The multi-week Festival of Lights now illuminates the downtown streets with more than 200,000 twinkling lights, where over 1000 volunteer hours are put in to make the town sparkle. The event draws people from near and far during its kickoff with a parade and fireworks.
More Winter Food and Drink Experiences
Ladysmith vegan café Plantitude leans into the winter spirit, too, offering private dining in heated outdoor bubbles (photo, left). In Chemainus, you can walk past the dozens of heritage murals painted in its alleyways, then see what’s on tap at Riot Brewing, where the menu of craft brews over the bar is itself a riot of colour. Prefer a hot drink? Drive up Chemainus Road to Coffee Shack Saltair, which isn’t a shack at all but a spacious couch-filled café, where you can linger over an espresso, cappuccino or Americano.
Also on Chemainus Road, Ma Maison is set in the Saltair Station House, a former rail depot. Chef-owner Lauren Cartmel, who opened the farm-to-table tearoom in 2019, says that its location away from the main highway has made it something of a local hangout, especially outside of the summer season.
Like other Island chefs, Cartmel looks to squashes, greens and heartier ingredients like cauliflower and pumpkin for her winter menus. She might create a winter squash salad with feta cheese or a pumpkin bisque flavoured with truffle cream. She enjoys baking different varieties of macaroni and cheese, quiche and pies. “I can’t wait for winter,” she says, as she looks forward to the holiday season, when she decorates the café and begins dreaming of peppermint lattes and gingersnap cookies.
And of course, a holiday visit to the region would not be complete without a date at the Chemainus Theatre Festival. The professional theatre puts on captivating shows throughout the year, and this year’s Christmas show is a holiday classic with a twist, called A Tiny Christmas Carol—a perfect way to get into the holiday spirit before diving into the rest of the festive decorations and delicious food in the area.
