(Still) wild about cooking

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This article was published 13/01/2018 (3120 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If you love cooking in the great outdoors, the great indoors or both, you’ll want to be ready for the third season of Moosemeat & Marmalade, premièring Jan. 18 on APTN. The culinary docu-series pairs up traditionally trained bush cook Art Napoleon (renowned Cree musician, educator and activist) and classically trained Dan Hayes (chef/owner of The London Chef), who set out to explore and compare Indigenous and European culture and cuisine.

The Mooswa Films production is very much “boots on the ground” (even if the drone footage is not).

The ingredients Napoleon and Hayes cook with are hunted, gathered or otherwise gleaned from their immediate environment.

That introduces an element of unreliability (“Sometimes, you don’t get the animal you’re after”) as they explore the idea of sustainability, though Napoleon says that element shifts somewhat in the third season.

“We shot in the northwest, and I think those episodes are more culturally led and more participatory with the communities, because they are very much into their hereditary system, and they very much want to manage their territory there using that hereditary system, so the show had to kind of fit into their format, in a way,” says Napoleon, a former chief of the Salteau First Nation. “It was almost like travelling into a different little country. I wasn’t shocked by it, but I’m pretty sure a lot of crew members had never seen that before, so it was good for them.”

Season 3 also changes things up with a cuisine that puts more emphasis on fishing.

“This season, we didn’t hunt as much and there was more of a focus on seafood and river and lake food, so not a lot of four-legged animals were harmed during the shooting of Moosemeat & Marmalade 3,” he says.

Neither fishing nor hunting have guaranteed outcomes, of course, so sometimes people will donate food to help them out on unsuccessful days.

“We’re always left in a predicament — a predicament that’s not often recorded that’s going on behind the scenes, more serious than the one you see on camera,” he says.

Napoleon, who credits his Cree-speaking grandmother and his aunt for imparting the traditional cooking skills he hones to this day, is happy to share a few of those off-screen upsets from past seasons and from the one coming up.

In the third season, the show travels to the North — a place where the elements are front and centre. The location led to an unexpected adventure on the water.

“We set off on a sunny day in June, and up there in the Great Slave (Lake in the Northwest Territories) there’s still a little bit of ice out there, and once you’re in the middle of that lake — it’s huge — you could be on a boat going so many knots, and you could be on that boat for a couple of hours and still be way out in the middle,” he says.

“Sometimes, you can’t see the shore, particularly when the clouds and the storms hit out of nowhere — and that’s exactly what happened.”

The boat met with a storm when they were checking gill nets. “There were 10-foot waves, and the skipper was getting a little worried there. We’re sure taking on a lot of water… and he’s not the kind of guy that gets very excited — he’s a very calm, very experienced fisherman,” Napoleon says.

“And you know, I’ve never really hung out on the ocean much, my legs can’t handle it, they turn to rubber… and I start barfing.”

Both the director of photography and the director also succumbed.

“Our second camera had to keep going and we just winged it after that, but luckily he caught us on camera barfing over the edge of the boat there into the water,” he says, laughing.

The waves pounded the boat for more than 45 minutes.

“I really did have faith in the skipper because he was very, very experienced, but I knew I couldn’t stand and I was very nauseous. I had to sit down inside the cabin — water was actually shooting right through the door and filling up the cabin as well,” he says. “Dan stayed calm; he’s been out on the sea a lot of times… but I haven’t. So it turned into an adventure but it didn’t feel that good physically at the time.”

Napoleon considers facing the elements part and parcel of the kind of show he co-created, but he knows TV broadcasters and production companies don’t always want their stars and crew putting themselves in danger: “They all say: ‘Oh, no, no, no, no, don’t!’” he says, laughing.

He recalls another instance when he and the crew had a much shorter water-borne adventure that could have easily become airborne.

“We were motoring along on the (Skeena) River (in British Columbia) at quite a high speed and hit a big gravel bar so we came to a sudden stop.” he says.

There have been adventures overseas as well.

“We had a guide in England who showed up drunk and he sent us to the wrong location,” Napoleon says. “Dan… wanted to come back and shoot wood pigeons — they’re wild pigeons in England and they’re very tasty. Dan made a downpayment and he said he’d come back after we were done shooting.

“He never saw the dude again.”

The woods and the water aren’t the only places that present an element of danger. Napoleon recalls being sideswiped by another vehicle, and an incident where they were almost T-boned by a speeding vehicle on a rural road.

“We were about two feet away when the other vehicle swung by, so that was a bit of a close call… I think we switched drivers after that.”

Sharp knives in the kitchen aren’t the only clear and present danger.

“In England one year, one of the guns went off and son of a gun, it could have got one of us, but luckily no — it was a malfunction of the gun,” says Napoleon. “We always have safety meetings before we go on any hunt.”

Things can get a little calmer at the end of the day and there are rewards that come with the risks. Napoleon says there is a genuine camaraderie between himself and Dan Hayes.

“We kind of lean on each other, feed each other ideas, and we’re always in discussion, even when we’re not filming,” he says. “If we have an opportunity to go take a drive in the woods or go scope out a farm or go see what the deer situation is in a nearby woods, we’re always talking ideas. It never really stops. It’s nice to have that.”

Napoleon says the two often go running together at the end of the shooting day.

“Quite often, that’s an adventure in itself and I wish there was a camera following that — it might be a whole other show.”

Twitter: @WendyKinginWpg