Sheryl Kirby

Wish You Were Here

You would if you could smell this bread.

Since back in November when every single person on the intarwebs went crazy for the no-knead bread, I’ve been playing a little bit. Reducing quantities, changing flours, adjusting baking times, and most recently, tossing in some lovely dried olives and some olive oil to make what is probably one of the best olive breads I’ve ever eaten. And I loves me some olive bread. This is easily better than the $5-a-loaf stuff I get from WholeFoods.

It would appear that you really can’t screw up the recipe. Everything works, everything tastes great. I was a little worried about the crumb, I initially found it a bit too soft and spongy for my tastes, but adjustments aren’t making a difference in that area. It is what it is. And last week when Greg and I had a loaf of the beer sour dough bread at Beer Bistro, we realized that the crumb is very similar to mine. So now I’m ready to accept that the crumb is supposed to be moist, that bread really is supposed to be eaten the same day its made, and my preconceptions were obviously based on loaves of generic store-bought bread meant to last for days.

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The End of Food

I first heard about Thomas F. Pawlick’s The End of Food, when my editor at Gremolata interviewed him last year. I had forgotten that interview when I finally got around to reading the book, and ended up not liking the book very much, mostly for reasons that had nothing to do with Pawlick’s message and more with his writing style. Having just re-read the interview again, Pawlick’s message is more on point.

Offering a Canadian take on the current dire food production issues we’re facing in North America, Pawlick has a unique perspective in that he is both a scientist and a farmer and has worked with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Association. If anyone knows exactly where their food comes from, it’s him.

Starting with a tough rubbery tomato that Pawlick tosses at the fence in his yard only to have it bounce back like a tennis ball, he beings to research exactly why our food doesn’t seem like food anymore. The results are downright terrifying, particularly the statistics he gives indicating how nutritionally deficient our fruits and vegetables are compared to the same product grown twenty or fifty years ago. Modern agriculture is focussed on marketability, not taste or nutrition, and the process of growing just about any food is now highly mechanized and chemically-intensive.

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Chefs!

I’m working my way through a stack of books received as Christmas presents, and while different both topically and stylistically, all seem to have one underlying theme; They’re all about chefs.

The United States of Arugula – How We Became a Gourmet Nation by David Kamp is less the history of gourmet food as it relates to the home cook, and more the evolution of fine dining in the US. Kamp traces the progression of the modern restaurant from the first Escoffier-trained French chefs brought to the US to the current trend towards Food Network “celebrity” chefs and the debate over their validity in the kitchen. Touching on every 20th century food icon from Julia Child to Alice Waters (about whom Kamp seems to have little good to say), he intertwines the history with the development of the careers of two major food writers, James Beard and Craig Claiborne. The book gets more than a little dishy at times (oh, those crazy kids at Chez Panisse!), but that’s part of its charm.

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Julie & Julia – a Review

First up, I should make it clear that I’m not a fan of French food – either cooking it or eating it. I find it excessively meaty, saucy, heavy and especially fussy. Give me a nice spicy curry or some Ethiopian stewed collard greens any day of the week.

That’s not to say I haven’t cooked and eaten French food, as my year of cooking school was based almost entirely around classic French cuisine, it being the supposed basis and benchmark for all other cuisines (which is complete and utter bullshit, but French chefs, and especially French cooking instructors insist it’s true). So when I first heard about the Julie/Julia Project in which one NYC woman sets herself a goal of working her way through Julia Child’s first volume of Mastering the Art of French Cooking (in a year, no less), my first thought was “Why the hell would anyone do THAT???” Then my second thought was that the only other person I had heard of who worked their way right through that book was Martha Stewart, which to me typifies the type of personality you’d need not to go completely nuts in the process.

Turns out Julia Powell doesn’t have that Martha Stewart perfectionist personality, though, and it works against her significantly during the course of her project.

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Gastronaut

The term “Gastronaut” for some reason clicks a switch in my head where I immediately start humming the song “Supernaut” by the band 1000 Homo DJs. One has nothing to do with the other, so it’s more than a little disconcerting.

References to 90s industrial music aside, Gastronaut author Stefan Gates has gone where few of us may ever be brave enough to tread. He cooks the dishes we’ve all heard about but were too busy, scared or squicked to try otherwise.

As Gates rightly points out, food will consume, on average, 16% of a person’s life – this includes not just the eating but the cooking, procuring and the uh… disposal. Seeing as that’s such a high percentage, and seeing as a whole 30% of our life is gone when we tuck ourselves in at night, doesn’t it make sense to make that 16% the very best it can be?

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If Soy Makes You Gay, How Come There Are so Many People in China?

Oh, those crazy Christians. Always questioning the world around them looking for answers to the things they don’t understand. Which would normally be a good thing, except when answers = scapegoating. Now that we’ve confirmed that Tinky Winky and his purse aren’t turning the world’s children into raging drag queens, the time has come for the Christian right to determine exactly what causes “teh gay”.

Apparently, it’s soy.

According to columnist Jim Rutz at WorldNetDaily (an informative site with articles titled “25 reasons to celebrate the nativity”, and why you should pull your children from public school (hint- it’s the debbil!!!), soy, which contains estrogen, is turning the fine, masculine young men of the United States into limp-wristed girlie-men.

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Icons, Landmarks and Singing

This coming August (2007) I will have lived in Toronto for twenty years. I have officially spent over half of my life here. I have spent the last few years writing about Toronto in various forums, and continue to write for websites where I cover the cool and interesting parts of this city that appeal to locals and visitors alike. Yet the list of local landmarks and icons that I have visited is relatively small.

I have never been to Center Island, have only this past summer been to Casa Loma, and have done the full tour of the AGO only once. I have never ridden the GO train, as that would mean having to go to the suburbs. I made it up the CN tower my first year here, but it was rather by fluke, and I was stoned off my ass, and it was before they put in the glass floor; I haven’t been back.

Landing smack dab in the middle of Kensington Market meant that my Toronto experience was a very different one from just about anybody else’s and the little bubble of the market provided everything I could ever need. Combine that with generally being cynical and misanthropic, and the desire to avoid the cliched tourist spots becomes more clear.

It means there is some stuff I missed out on, however, and one of those things is Lick’s.

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The Way We Eat

The Way We Eat – Why Our Food Choices Matter by Jim Mason and Peter Singer

I generally have two concerns with any book about food ethics. First and foremost, that the authors are inadvertently “preaching to the choir”; that is, unless you are already interested or concerned about where your food comes from, you’re unlikely to read such a book in the first place, thus the knowledge shared from reading such a tome is not reaching the people who need it most. Secondly, it’s important to know the author’s personal stance on the issues, because no matter how unbiased they might try to be, generally their own opinions show through.

Which is why Peter Singer and Jim Mason want us all to be vegans.

The Way We Eat examines the eating habits of three different families, and traces their food choices back to their point of origin. Singer and Mason visit with a family that eats the Standard American Diet (SAD); another who are split between a predominantly vegetarian diet focussed on organic foods and a small amount of sustainably-raised meat; and finally a family who are completely vegan.

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Exotic Fruit – Fresh Dates

Just about everyone has eaten dates at some point. From the much-loved date square, to those little styrofoam trays of beautifully arranged dried dates available during Ramadan or Christmas, dates are a well-known treat.

But have you ever eaten a fresh one?

Fresh dates are available in late summer and early fall and can most easily be found in East Asian markets or at some farmer’s markets in California. Fresh dates are reddish or yellow in color and are often hard as they are picked before they have fully ripened. They are sold by weight, still attached to a short branch.

Fresh dates can be eaten “green” or what is known at the ”kimri” stage, where they have not ripened and have the consistency of a firm apple with a slightly sweet, green flavour. They are crunchy and slightly pithy near the seed.

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Choco-holic

After years of writing about events in Toronto, there are times when I still can’t help but feel like an imposter. I’m not – I’ve never attended an event and not covered it fully, but there have been times when I’ve found myself wedged against a buffet table at the ROM, balancing a plate of pastries and a glass of wine, while I try to avoid getting in the shot for Fashion Television or the CBC, that I begin to doubt my credentials. Nevermind that the lovely PR ladies all assure me that the fact that I give them any coverage at all puts me in their good books (you wouldn’t believe the number of people who attend media previews for the free grub and never write a word about the event or show), but as a kind of weird looking gal writing for various Internet sites, I still often feel as if I’ve somehow sneaked in and could get caught and kicked out at any second.

When in the same situation but also presented with all the free chocolate I can stuff into my little chocolate-loving mouth, my guilt does overtime. Not the least because chocolates are one of those things that you are only supposed to have one or two of. You don’t want to make a pig of yourself, after all. So when we walked into the Ganong Chocs-o-Fun party last night, the feeling of being “kids in a candy store” was close to the surface.

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