Photo courtesy of Kim Bosch.
Post by Kim Bosch
It’s freezing. You’re starving. The wind is blasting you from all angles like an actress in a cosmetics commercial. The skate home on the canal you were so looking forward to earlier in the day has now slapped you into exhaustion. In moments like this a (albeit delicious) Queues de Castor won’t give you the energy you need to make it to Dow’s Lake. There is a rumble in your tummy that cannot be smothered into silence with cinnamon encrusted dough.
Luckily, there’s an oasis ahead. At Pig Island (the 3.8 km marker), sits a fireside food truck: a lime green restaurant-on-wheels serving up delicious bowls of broth.
Stone Soup Foodworks shares its name from a folk tale about poor, hungry travelers visiting towns and serving “stone soup”. They’d fill a large cooking pot with water, drop in a stone, and place the pot over a fire in the centre of the village. Eventually, this hearty-sounding recipe would intrigue the villagers, and they would offer their own ingredients to the broth until finally, a delicious pot of soup would be enjoyed by all.
The moral of this tale is one with the Stone Soup Foodworks philosophy: A soup is only as good as the ingredients provided by those around you.
“Our soup is real soup, made with real stuff,” explains owner and head chef, Jacqueline Jolliffe. “Real stuff” that can be found really close by, too: carrots from Quebec, local beef, pork and chicken, squash from Shawville, are just few of the local and organic sources Jolliffe mines for her soup components. The tie to these local organizations are important to Jolliffe, an passionate environmentalist, who before opening the truck was a teacher, “a burned out teacher, trying to change the world” who quickly realized she’d enact more change with the bowl as opposed to the blackboard.
Plus, as environmentally responsible as Joliffe’s food is, it’s also delicious. The Chicken and Rice is made with real fowl broth, peas, sweet potato and generous hunks of meat. The Thai Squash carries just enough spice to clear the sinuses with an added sweet crunch from a toasted coconut garnish. Not a huge fan of soup? The Veggie Chili, has a satisfying molassas-y finish and a texture that is NOT WATERY (huzzah!!) and of course, the Stone Soup best seller, the Beef Chili, topped with full fat chorizo sausage and cheddar cheese, will make your stomach smile.
Top it off with delicious bread from True Loaf, and a pudding-esq hot chocolate with help from CoCao Camino, and you’ll swear you’re eating at a gourmet restaurant and not out of a green machine.
The truck is scheduled to be open Thursday/Sunday 10-6 and Friday/Saturday 10-10 until the end of Winterlude, but with the soupy conditions on the canal, where will Jacqueline go next? “I have a dream of a small fleet of trucks all over the city” a great long term plan. But in the immediate future? You can find her on the University of Ottawa campus outside the Engineering building.
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