Sheryl Kirby

Food, Life and the World at Large

Archive for December, 2007

Good-bye 2007, and Take Your Little Plates and Locavores with You.

December 27th 2007 - Posted in Food, food trends
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Everywhere you look in the media are round-ups of the best and the worst of 2007. Food writers are no exception and over the past week or so we’ve been inundated with Top 10s, predictions, best recipes for the year and more.

Being the crank that I am, here is my list of the Top 5 things from 2007 that I officially deem to be over.

5. Fois gras. Issues of inhumane treatment of geese and ducks aside, I just can’t get into fois gras. I’ve tried, really I have. But it will forever remind me of eating liver-flavoured Crisco shortening. In fact, as disgusting as the concept may be, I think I’d actually prefer to have to eat a gob of plain Crisco.

4. Teeny tiny burgers. 2007 seems to be the year Toronto discovered White Castle without actually having one in our city. The slider hamburger showed up at almost every foodie event I attended this year. Yes, they’re cute. No, I don’t want one.

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To Hell With It – Pass the Cheese

December 23rd 2007 - Posted in books, fashion, health and nutrition, Life
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I’m a terrible girlfriend. That is, I am never really comfortable hanging out exclusively with a group of women. I like to cook and I like fashion, but mostly I don’t get women things. I hate when my female friends talk about their partners behind their backs, and I’m never exactly sure what I’m supposed to say when other women start talking about their weight.

Sure, I have a critical Virgoan eye, and I notice physical changes, but – and I don’t want this to sound heartless – I don’t really care. A loss or addition of 5 pounds or 50 pounds isn’t going to make me change my opinion of someone. As someone who has been fat since puberty, I know better than to judge another person by some arbitrary number on a scale. Which is why I so dearly wish other people would stop judging themselves that way.

These thoughts are prevalent in my head at the moment for a couple of reasons. First, because I’ve just finished reading Rethinking Thin: The New Science of Weight Loss – and the Myths and Realities of Dieting by Gina Kolata. When I put that book down the next thing I read was a series of three essays in the most recent Utne Reader, all on the topic of fat politics and fat acceptance. Combine that with the recent discussion with a friend about her need to lose 35 pounds, despite a plethora of other health and life concerns that make that task very difficult, and I’ve got fat on the brain.

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Decades – One Down, Many More to Go

December 21st 2007 - Posted in celebrations, Life
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Ten years ago today, I was frantically putting the finishing touches on my wedding cake. And maybe my wedding dress. Or more likely, I was frantically cooking, which is what I do when I am stressed, and also preparing for the sumptuous party spread that I used to put on back then.

Everyone thought they were simply coming to a new year’s eve party. No one guessed of the cake hidden away upstairs, or that my Empire style red velvet frock was in honour of anything other than the new year. We stopped at five to midnight and our friend John from Boston performed the ceremony. Everyone was surprised. Greg’s wedding vows quoted Cartman from South Park. It was the perfect wedding – no gifts, no shower, no puffy marshmallow dress. Just us and our friends and a promise.

Ten years later, we’re still together and going strong. There’s been sickness and health, riches and poverty, good times and bad. I annoy him with my control-freak, perfectionist tendencies, and he frustrates me with his pokey old man ways and inability to hold a conversation first thing in the morning.

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Order Up

December 11th 2007 - Posted in books, Food
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Service Included
by Phoebe Damrosch

With all the hype about celebrity chefs these days, we tend to overlook one very important component of any restaurant crew – the server. While cheffing is most definitely hard work, it can pay off in cookbooks, endorsement deals, TV shows or at the very least, chef groupies.

No fame and fortune awaits the humble server – the front line contact for any restaurant meal. Yes, servers generally get paid better than kitchen staff, but they’re also the ones who are forced to navigate the choppy waters of unruly customers and egotistical chefs.

Phoebe Damrosch’s Service Included tells the tale of a server at Thomas Keller’s New York restaurant Per Se, dishing the dirt on the goings on front of house where so many others have written about what goes on behind the pass.

While this is Damrosch’s own story, based on her experiences as a server, it is actually the personal bits that drag the book down.

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And Visions of Sugarplums Danced in Their Heads

December 9th 2007 - Posted in candy, Food, recipes
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Okay, class… hands up if you actually know what a sugar plum is.

The Oxford Canadian Dictonary description is “a small round candy of flavoured, boiled sugar”, which is the oddest description I’ve ever seen. Larousse Gastronomique, that bastion of all things edible, disappointingly, contains no entry at all.

If you do a Google search on “sugar plum” you get sugar plum fairies, sugar plum balls (as in, the dance), a website for a gift basket company, and even a brand of tea. None of those have anything to do with actual sugar plums, however.

I first ate a sugar plum in Simcoe, Ontario in about 1990. Some neighbour of my ex’s grandparents discovered an old Victorian recipe and made boxes of the things to give as gifts. We had a box of a dozen to share between six or seven of us. I think I managed to score three of the things, based on a relative or two disliking dried fruit. Brilliant things these. Dried fruit and nuts, essentially the ingredients in a fruitcake, minus the annoyance of the actual cake, all soaked in booze and rolled together, coated with a sprinkling of sugar to balance the flavours. The sugar plum is so named for the inclusion of the sugar coating and prunes (dried plums) along with a variety of other ingredients.

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Being Tasered

December 7th 2007 - Posted in health and nutrition, Life
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I’ve been noticeably absent. Busy, in part, finishing up Christmas stuff (8 kinds of chocolates – done), but also because I’ve been having terrible pain in my hands and wrists. Numbness, too, which is scary. Numbness in one foot as well. I have enough acquaintances suffering from Multiple Sclerosis that I wasted no time in heading to the doctor.

The foot things seems to be my flat feet catching up with me. I had been seeing a chiropodist for ingrown toenails a couple of years ago, and she kept pressuring me to get orthotics, and I think I’m going to have to break down and do it.

The hands confounded the MD though, since one was numb and the other just hurt like a mofo at the wrist. They got me into the neurologists for an EMG pretty quickly, and Wednesday morning I lied around on a hospital bed while a nice lady zapped me with a mini-taser.

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Cookie Day

December 2nd 2007 - Posted in baking, cookies, events and festivals, Food, The World at Large, toronto
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I have had what might possibly be the best day ever. The only thing that could make it better would be if someone were to show up at my door with a huge tray of oysters.

I hauled my butt out of bed this morning and headed to my alma mater, George Brown College, to take part in the Peace of Cake event. Every year staff, students and assorted volunteers get together and back a thousand or so fruitcakes, cookies, brownies and other treats and then package them up to be given to needy families, youth centres and the veterans in the long-term care facility at Sunnybrook hospital.

As is always the case when I leave early to give myself time to get somewhere during a storm, I arrived a half hour early. I was given an apron straight away, though, and was quickly put to work wrapping fruitcakes in saran wrap. As more volunteers arrived, I was put in charge of a group of kids from a local high school.

Many of the cakes meant for the veterans have to be diabetic-friendly, but when the baking was taking place yesterday, someone didn’t label the cakes made from Splenda properly. All that hype about how it tastes “just like sugar” is not exactly true. Sugar doesn’t make your tongue tingle.

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