We always like to promote small farmers specially close to home in the Cowichan Valley. We worked with Brock and Heather of Makaria Farm in our Food Security Documentary.

Makaria Farm has launched a Food Security Club for Vancouver Island residents who are interested in receiving bulk amounts of easy-to-store organic produce (e.g. garlic, carrots, squash). Cowichan residents can also sign up for the 5th year of Makaria Farm's Vegetable Share (CSA) Program, and receive weekly bags of fresh-picked vegetables from June through October. Visit www.makariafarm.com for details.

This is your opportunity to make spectacular chocolate desserts at home! Using a few basic ingredients, Chef En-Ming Hsu, Gold medal winner at the World Pastry Cup in Lyon, France, will guide you, step-by-step, through classic techniques that will become fabulous chocolate creations.

DV Cuisine, together with En-Ming, has created this beautiful instructional DVD with easy to follow recipes, tips on equipment use, the best ingredients and much more. This 2 hour DVD will entice you and get you in the mood to make a wide variety of chocolate creations.

DV Cuisine is also working on creating our first e-Cook Book of this DVD that can be used on your I-Pad and will contain more stories and pictures of these fabulous desserts made by En-Ming. We will let you know as soon as it is available, so please keep checking this website.

With the summer behind us it's time to give you an update on our latest productions.

We are almost ready with a great DVD and download of a show on "Chocolate" presented by the well-known American Pastry Chef En-Ming Hsu. The one-hour program has great recipes on Chocolate Puff Pastry, the famous Chocolate Macarons, the beautiful Chocolate Sable tart, just name a few.

At this time we have shown the Food Security Documentary more than ten times to hundreds of people. We will take a break in the summer and continue in the fall. We hope to visit the Fraser valley and the Lower Mainland. The reviews have been excellent and it is rewarding to see that more and more people are starting their own vegetable gardens. We still need more, and therefore we have to talk to our politicians and get them to take our movement seriously. Every report on food security and food sustainability confirms what we have been saying over the last three years and that is that we have to get back to small scale farming, close to the urban areas. We will continue our reports in the fall.

In Courtney we had a panel of three small-scale organic farmers. One of the things that struck me was the story of one of the panellist who told the audience that after five years of farming she did not feel that people where taken her seriously. Somehow we still see small scale farming as something for hobbyist.

The same is true for our politicians. When they discus agriculture they always talk about large scale Agri business, but it’s a proven fact that if we need to go back to small scale diversified farming if we like to keep on feeding the world. A recent United Nations report confirmed this.