Laughing with My Mouth Full: Tales from a Gulf Islands Kitchen

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

It is not often that you meet an award-winning food writer who admits
that she is not the greatest cook in the world. It is equally rare to
find one who publicly claims that she prefers chicken fat to garbanzo
beans or that she gets the “icks” peeling the skin off a poached cow
tongue. Meet Pam Freir, an ex-Toronto copywriter who moved to B.C.’s
Gulf Islands and, since 1997, has been a food columnist for the Victoria
Times-Colonist. What sets Freir’s writing apart is her ability to put
the reader at ease by admitting that she is not a domestic divinity and
that just like the rest of us, when she bumps IT up a notch, sometimes
IT blows up in her face.

The text is divided into seven chapters. Each chapter contains several
essays linked by a loosely related theme—sometimes very loosely—but
each essay is connected to the others by the common element of humour.
For example, here’s Freir’s advice on how not to let other mushroom
hunters know where your best foraging sites are located: “First of
all, there is a dress code: what you wear must in no way reveal what you
are up to. Surveyors equipment, for instance, will take you almost
anywhere without your true mission being uncovered. If you are in the
woods, you could carry a chainsaw. In an open field, a butterfly net. Or
a picnic basket. Whatever it takes to throw your fellow forager off the
scent.” Other subjects covered in the essays include the challenges of
running a bed-and-breakfast, foraging for wild fiddleheads, finding
excuses not to diet, being frightened by a fondue, and how to improvise
a bouillabaisse when you are missing half the essential ingredients.
About three dozen recipes are included.

Reading Freir’s prose is like bumping shopping carts with a witty
self-deprecating friend whom you both know is really a better cook than
she lets on, but where’s the fun in that?