Work off your turkey coma with these Nova Scotia-baked podcasts

If you got a shiny new device for Christmas and want to feast your ears on some made-in-Nova-Scotia podcasts, we've got some choice cuts.

The Food Podcast

If you aren't more stuffed than the turkey, tune into Lindsay Cameron Wilson's The Food Podcast. The polished show tells personal stories through the lens of food.

The Halifax-based food writer draws an international audience. She says most people take an interesting path into the food business, and she wanted to share those stories.

"I love the celebration of the day-to-day. And figuring out how I connect to that person is really important to me, because the more I connect with their story, the more the listener can connect as well," she told CBC.

Cooking up great stories

She gets that radio-ready sound at Village Sound Studio in Halifax, which provides recording studios for her interviews. Wilson writes a script, voices it and a Village Sound Studio engineer cuts it together.

"My focus really isn't the food. It sounds crazy. I love to cook, I feel really comfortable in the kitchen, but my goal is for people to feel comfortable while they're cooking, to remember and to connect with their ingredients and with the recipe itself."

Wilson says her regular listeners are not all foodies, but they all love a good story. She sees the monthly podcast as combining her food books and TV show.

"The podcast is a culmination of all the things that I've done."

Starter episodes:

• Letter Writing (episode five): The story of a food writer who wrote a letter to Julia Child — and Child wrote back. 
• Stories from the Kitchen Table (episode 17): Funny stories and the odd F-bomb from a Seattle kitchen table. 
• Fathers of Confederation (episode 18): Canada's 150th birthday party is just about over, so grab a last piece of cake with this tour of Canadiana foods. 

Taggart & Torrens Podcast

Who better to guide you through "Canadianity" than the drummer from Our Lady Peace and the Jono from Jonovision?

Each episode of Taggart & Torrens brings Toronto's Jeremy Taggart and Truro's Jonathan Torrens together for a chat-heavy Wayne & Shuster-esque mix of silly party games, character comedy and conversations about "Canadianity" — a word they coined to describe nostalgic affection for Can-con culture in the 1970s and '80s.

"Mostly it's about everyday struggles that we have as parents and as human beings in the world. It's sweet and sometimes serious — and usually silly," Torrens says.

"What appeals to people is our reactions to situations that come up in conversation. It became what it is because every time we talked on the phone we would laugh our heads off," Taggart adds.

Torrens says they don't prepare, but trust their vine-to-vine swinging reflexes, which keeps the show fresh and engaging.

Off the rails, into the ditch

Taggart says fans let them go off the rails — and sometimes into the ditch — because it often leads to the best sections of the show.

"Even at the live shows, it's all about taking a swing of the bat. We have pretty good averages," he says.

They thought about turning the podcast into a radio show, but their listeners didn't want that.

"The challenge with doing a podcast for fun — and while it is very fun and it exists solely because we want to do it — it's hard to monetize," Torrens says.

So they wrote a bestselling book, Canadianity.

"The kind of interesting side salad has been people wouldn't have us on media outlets to talk about our podcast, but for some reason now that we have a book about our podcast, that's legit," Torrens laughs. "It's helped us cast a wider net."

They talk live on the phone, but each records his own side separately. To add even more Canadianity to the show, they both send their audio to Tim Oxford, the drummer with the Arkells, for mixing.

Starter episodes:

• Hit the Post! (episode 28): Samantha Bee ordering room service and Gordon Lightfoot, the greatest bahd — that's Taggart and Torrens for "buddy" — of them all. 
• The Joey Kramer story (episode 57): Tiny roommates, campfires and Top 5 get-me-out-of-here jams.

The Night Time Podcast

Jordan Bonaparte's grandfather told him about a UFO he saw in in 1984 and the story entranced him. In 2015, he decided to record his grandfather telling the story. He called it the Night Time Podcast and fell in love with the modern hobby.

"Although I'm covering Atlantic Canadian and Canadian stories, a lot of the people who listen to my podcast, they have no idea that I'm covering a certain geographic area," he says.

Think of the classic 1990s show, Unsolved Mysteries, with its mix of paranormal, crime and aliens.

True crime and strange UFOs

"The true crime and the darker stories are the ones people gravitate to. But I think I would need psychiatric help if I spent all my time [on the dark stuff]," he says.

"If I covered something I wasn't genuinely interested in, people listening would hear it. Often people's compliments for my show is that I'm passionate about it and they can tell I've done my research. That wouldn't be the case if I was just guided by money and downloads."

Bonaparte writes, hosts and produces the show, and also has a full-time career and a young family in the Halifax area. He has become friends with the producers of the Sickboy podcast, another Halifax-based hit.

Starter episodes:

• Esther Cox: The Great Amherst Mystery: Part 1 tells the legendary Nova Scotia poltergeist story about 18-year-old Esther Cox and Part 2 brings a modern, skeptical take via author Laurie Glenn Norris. 
• Munros Point UFO sighting: The story that started it all begins with his grandfather's account of the paranormal activity in Nova Scotia and part two gets his grandmother's version.
• Pictou County: Bigfoot Capital of Nova Scotia?
• Emma Fillipoff is Missing: A series looking into the B.C. woman's disappearance five years ago.

What are your favourite local podcasts? Post them in the comments below.