Sheryl Kirby

Food, Life and the World at Large

Archive for February, 2007

Candy Freak

February 23rd 2007 - Posted in books, candy, Food
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One of the cool things about writing a book about a particular food item is that, whether you consider yourself to be or not, other people will look to you as an expert on that topic, and will heap free samples upon you in the hope that you will write about them. I met author Steve Almond as he was being gifted with container after container of free organic cotton candy. Despite his polite insistence that he couldn’t possibly carry six tubs of cotton candy home on a plane, the manufacturer wanted him to try every flavor.

Almond was in Toronto this past spring to give what he thought was a reading at the unfortunately named Canadian Sweets Expo (www.sweetsexpo.ca). Badly promoted and equally poorly organized, what was meant to be on par with the big candy shows in the US turned out to be a sad collection of local vendors of mostly waxy chocolate, oddly flavored jellybeans and some crazy chocolate-flavoured energy balls that made me extremely ill. Also present were a few Canadian Food Network celebrities, a face-painter (for the kids) and a circus troupe. Not exactly the type of forum where a well-known author and creative writing professor is going to be known for his non-fiction work on rare US candy bars.

Which is too bad, because CandyFreak is a sugar-laced tour of the rare, the wonderful and the delicious. It’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, minus Johnny Depp. A self-defined candy freak, Almond traveled far and wide to learn the story of some rare and wondrous local favorites. From the southern icon the GooGoo Cluster, to the darling of Boise, the Idaho Spud (which yours truly has never tried but desperately wants to – readers in Idaho, help a poor Canadian gal out, won’t you?), Almond tours factories, talks to chocolatiers, and waxes poetic about enrobers.

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Lunar New Year Food

February 20th 2007 - Posted in events and festivals, Food, holidays, toronto
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Dragon’s Beard Candy. A traditional Lunar New Year treat.

The making of Takoyaki – fried squid balls – in a special Takoyaki pan. The process was fascinating to watch, especially when the balls were flipped.

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C is For Cookie – The Nitty Gritty

February 19th 2007 - Posted in baking, Food
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I spent Saturday in a conference room full of farmers and nutritionists. I scored a media pass to the Canadian Organic Growers conference, and besides the free organic lunch, everyone went home with a bag of organic swag. Most of the stuff was from President’s Choice Organics and included cereal, chocolate and tea. Some of the bags included pasta, while mine had a box of Nature’s Path organic chocolate chip cookie mix. We use other Nature’s Path products such as some of their cereals, and even the frozen waffles, so I was vaguely interested in the cookie mix.

As a die-hard home baker, I can’t remember the last time I bought a pre-made mix of anything [1]. My folks sometimes send me one of those “beer bread” mixes in a clay pot things at Christmas, but I think I still lived with my folks the last time I used a mix for anything. Certainly, they got used frequently when I was growing up, and I can recall my Grandmother using mixes for various things quite frequently, but then, it was the style of the time (her being a 50s housewife, after all), she had a brood of kids and grandkids to feed, and she hated cooking.

I was going to set the box aside for a food bank donation, but my curiosity got the better of me. Maybe they had figured out some way to make box mixes better these days. Maybe thirty years on, they were better tasting than stuff made from scratch.

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Cooking For Dummies

February 14th 2007 - Posted in books, Food, in the news, The World at Large
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It’s pretty much been determined that The Food Network has been dumbed down to make it more “entertaining” as opposed to educational. Cooking shows never give you the recipe for things anymore, and viewers choose their programming based on pretty hair, big boobs and which TV celebrity chef has the most gadgets for sale.

Apparently this desire to want to cook but not really put the effort into the process has created a whole new (lowered) standard in cookbooks. As today’s cooks are bewildered by basic techniques and standardized cooking terms, recipes get longer and more detailed in an effort to explain the process enough so that the inexperienced home cook can turn out a halfway decent product.

In today’s Toronto Star, Susan Sampson explores the difficulties faced by both cookbook publishers and food writers.

We don’t sauté. We cook, stirring.

We don’t combine. We toss gently. Or stir in. Or whisk.

And we never, ever julienne. We cut in matchstick strips.

It’s our way of speaking very s-l-o-w-l-y and enunciating as home cooking skills continue to slide downhill.

We are not alone. Cookbook editor Rux Martin, for example, also tries to avoid terms readers may not know, like blanch or baste.

The catch? “If you can’t use those terms, how do we educate cooks?” wonders Martin, an executive editor at Houghton Mifflin in Boston.

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This is Why People Go Out For Brunch

February 11th 2007 - Posted in Food, kitchen cursing, restaurants
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I cook breakfast. Every day.

Some days I do nothing more than put some fruit on cereal, but most mornings, Greg and I eat a real breakfast; buckwheat pancakes; quinoa and maple-glazed trout; scrambled eggs or sometimes oatmeal.

So when the weekend comes around, I am more than happy to toss aside my spatula and go out to brunch.

While brunch is the new dinner according to NOW Magazine food critic, Steven Davey, my colleague over at Gremolata, Ivy Knight, is more than happy to explain why a restaurant brunch is a very unhappy thing for the folks who actually have to cook it.

But, see… people like to go out for brunch because it allows them to eat foods they wouldn’t, or couldn’t, cook at home.

Many breakfast dishes are fussy, with many ingredients, all cooked á là minute, and if keeping two pots and two frying pans and maybe the oven all under control at the same time isn’t your cup of tea, going out for brunch where someone else can do the juggling for you probably is.

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Eat Like a Canadian

February 8th 2007 - Posted in books, Food
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Canadians at Table – A Culinary History of Canada
Dorothy Duncan

When I was in junior high school, I was very excited about taking history class. That was until I got to that class and realized “history” was really all about who won what war, and not about how people really lived. Feminists would interject here and mention that what I really was interested in was “HERstory”, and I guess to some degree, that would be right. Because what really turned my crank was learning about how people lived, and most of that centred around women. How did the pilgrims keep their teeth clean? What did the Egyptians use in place of pads or tampons? How did cooks make all of the things we cook today without the convenient appliances we take for granted?

This interest was so intense that it almost led me to become an archaeologist, until I learned that archaeologists spend an awful lot of time digging in the dirt under the hot sun. Turns out what I really wanted to be was an anthropologist, but by the time I figured that out, I had moved on to wanting to be a fashion designer, and my interest in history got set aside until I got into the study of food.

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That’s Not Healthy

February 5th 2007 - Posted in books, ethics, Food
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I came across a cooking magazine a couple of weeks ago that I’d never seen before. Healthy Cooking Magazine has a tagline of “simple solutions, healthy alternatives”. I don’t buy a lot of cooking magazines, to be truthful, and grabbed this one only because it was on a shelf next to Eating Well and I was at a friend’s shop and wanted to be a good customer.

It sat around for a few weeks after I brought it home – I’ve been crazy busy the last little while and never really had time to sit down with it. On the weekend I started flipping through the pages as I was eating lunch and noticed something rather peculiar.

Now, maybe it’s just because I’ve been thinking about ethical policies lately; I’ve been drafting up guidelines for writers at TasteTO, as well as the framework for an info package for advertisers. But what I noticed about Healthy Cooking was that the majority of ads within the magazine were for products created by the writers themselves.

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The Battle of Ethiopia

February 3rd 2007 - Posted in beverages, coffee, Food
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I had planned on pulling together a big long piece about the differences between the types, but oddly, there’s very little information out there that doesn’t originate from a coffee-selling site. If I had more time, I’d even pull together what I’ve got and replace the stub on Wikipedia under the Ethiopian coffee section.

So here are the basics – coffee was first grown in Ethiopia, discovered by a goatherder named Kaldi. While coffee is now grown in a variety of other regions, many of the beans from Ethiopia are still considered the best in the world.

Like wine and chocolate, the flavour of the coffee beans can vary greatly from region to region, and even farm to farm, depending on a variety of growing conditions. Personally, I prefer Ethiopian beans because you can roast them really dark and the flavours really pop. Some people find they taste like dirt, and they can be very earthy.

The three beans I tried were Yirgacheffe, Sidamo and Djimmeh.

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