Sheryl Kirby

Peelings… whoa, whoa, whoa, peelings

The problem with making really tasty and delicious holiday treats is that once you start making the things, people expect you to make them every year. This is how I’ve found myself roped into making the fruitcake, truffles, cookies and particularly the candied orange peel every Christmas.

Candied orange peel isn’t at all difficult to make, but it is incredibly time consuming. To make enough to send even a small amount to family at Christmas, I need to use at least a dozen oranges, and pithing all that peel out can take at least an hour, before I even get to cooking the things.

Then there’s the dilemma of what to do with all the juice. I use the juice for breakfast rice bowls, where I create a donburi-style rice bowl with stewed tropical fruit instead of a savoury topping. Dried fruit, marinated in juice, is cooked with coconut milk and tofu and served over brown rice. This usually leaves me with lots of orange skins to throw away, so it’s a great time to make the candied peel.

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Eat Cake and Lose Weight – The Truth About “Moderation”

All things are fine… in moderation.

How often have we heard that phrase in regards to health and dieting? But what does it really mean? Experts tout a “balanced diet”, which, in theory, offers a bit of wiggle room for an occasional piece of cake, but what they really mean by “balanced” is choosing a variety of foods from all four food groups (the veg and grain and protein food groups, not the sugar, fat, alcohol and caffeine version) and eschewing junk food completely.

Oh, but that’s no fun, is it? We are drawn to diets that encourage moderation because we don’t want to feel deprived of our favorite foods. You’ve got to treat yourself occasionally, right? The problem is – few of us seem to know exactly what occasionally is. A recent study on obese people indicated that 75% of the study respondents claimed to have healthy eating habits which has led doctors to believe that most people don’t actually know what “healthy eating habits” are.

And the term “moderation” or the encouragement to “eat snack items in moderation” doesn’t help. Is moderation a junk food snack per day? Once a week? Or once a month? Do we save cake for a special occasion (such as a birthday), or is every day a special occasion because there’s cake?

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Can Following the Food Guide Make You Fat?

Both Canada and the US have versions of a food guide which outlines recommended daily intakes for the four main food groups. Started during the rationing of WW2, both countries have revised their guides a number of times since then.

Canada’s last revision was in 1992 where we went from “the four food groups” to a rainbow design to show that some items can and should be consumed more frequently. The US went with a pyramid design, although both guides are fairly similar in regards to quantities.

The main thing both guides have in common is that both are heavily influenced by the various food lobby groups (what boards, cattle farmers associations, dairy boards, etc) whose clients have a vested interest in having the goverment encourage people to eat specific foods.

The revised Canadian guide was supposed to have been released in spring 2006, and is now slated for some time in early 2007.

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Cultured Meat – Frankenfood or Brave New World?

What if I told you that you could have a steak, or a breast of chicken or a nice slice of ham, without having to worry about antibiotics, hormones, over-crowding of factory farms, environmental damage or the death of an animal?

And how about if I told you that in a decade or two, you’ll be able to make that same steak or chicken breast yourself, on your kitchen counter?

Welcome to the wonderful world of lab-grown or “cultured” meat. Invented as a source of easily accessible protein for astronauts, cultured meat may be available to consumers in as little as five years.

To create the meat, small amounts of muscle cells are removed from an animal and grown in a culture or solution. Stem cells from embryos may also be used. This culture is usually made from bovine fetal tissue, although researchers have had some success with a mushroom-based solution as well.

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The Fish List

It’s the middle of summer and there’s nothing tastier than some lovely fresh fish. But wait – aren’t fish bad for you now? Or are they good for you again? And some of them have been overfished, haven’t they? And what about pollution?

Buying fish can be a confusing process. Besides obvious concerns about taste, freshness and price, we now have a plethora of other issues to worry about. Is the fish contaminated with PCBs? Is it being overfished or does the manner in which it is fished contribute to destruction of the oceans or the environment? What about farmed fish versus wild fish? And how the heck is the average consumer supposed to know any of this?

The fact is, it’s hard to buy fish without some kind of guide. Farmed salmon is bad, farmed catfish is good. Cod from Alaska is fine, while Atlantic cod is almost non-existent. Farmed mussels are good, while wild ones may be contaminated. Imported shrimp contribute to the destruction of lands in India and Thailand, not to mention the unnecessary deaths of a variety of sea creatures who get caught in the trawlers.

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There’s No Knead

Last week, mt friend Drew posted a link to Mark Bittman’s column in the New York Times about a bread recipe that required very little yeast and almost no kneading. The secret, according to Bittman, was to let it sit for a good 18 hours, letting the yeast do all the work in creating the gluten.

Anyone who’s been around these parts for a while knows of my ongoing struggle with bread. I gave up for years because I couldn’t get anything close to the heavenly stuff that came out of my Grandmother’s oven. So I was game to try Bittman’s recipe, but sceptical.

I had the loaf in the oven this afternoon when I came across a post about the bread on the Live Journal food porn community. Like everyone over there, my bread turned out fantastic, although it was not without its problems.

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Blueberry Grunt

The Grunt is a traditional Acadian dish, made originally by French settlers in a stew pot over an open hearth. The name “Grunt” comes from the burbling sound of the stewed blueberries as they boil. Note that the dumplings will get soft and fluffy, but as they are steamed, will not brown. If you want browned pastry, make a cobbler in the oven, but call it a cobbler, and not a grunt. There’s nothing more disappointing that sitting down to an order of Blueberry Grunt at a restaurant only to discover that someone has baked the thing. And don’t let me catch any of you using canned blueberry pie filling in this recipe, as I’ve seen suggested out there on the Intarweb. Fresh or frozen blueberries only!

Every family in Atlantic Canada has their own blueberry grunt recipe, which is really pretty much just blueberries, sugar and water with sweet dumplings. This recipe comes from Traditional Recipes of Atlantic Canada, which I believe my father collected for me, section by section, from the local gas station, back when gas stations still sold promotional collectibles.

The cinnamon and lemon zest are my additions to jazz up the flavour. The Grunt is meant to be a dessert, but we eat it mostly for breakfast.

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Getting Real About Cereal

I’m sure they must be terribly alluring. Those colorful bins of sweetened treats, the cute workers in their pyjamas to ring up your order. Even the sneaking knowledge that you’re getting away with something, by ordering up a bowl of your favourite childhood breakfast cereal instead of something more, well… grown up.

But here’s the deal. Cereal companies are corporations. They have a duty to their stockholders to expand their market share every quarter. Which means cereal companies have to come up with new and innovative ways to get all of us to eat more cereal. In recent years, someone clued in to the fact that cereal is comfort food for many people, and started marketing it as a tasty snack designed to replace the chips, pretzels and ice cream we used to eat.

Sounds great, doesn’t it? After all, cereal is good for you.

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Food Flicks

We spent Saturday in the darkened confines of Innis Town Hall, a theatre on the U of T campus, watching films from the Planet in Focus film fest. It was a very foodie day with very foodie films.

The morning started off with the organic pancake breakfast prepared by Real Food for Real Kids. For $10 you got two hemp pancakes with organic maple syrup, organic green salad with organic brie, fresh fruit, breads made from the ovens at Dufferin Grove Park, plus a selection of organic jams and hemp spreads. And of course organic fair trade coffee and Happy Planet juice. The price included a free travel coffee mug, and the juices retail for $1.99 each, so it was not only delicious, but a really good deal.

A Fallen Maple
The first film was called A Fallen Maple and looked at one family’s issue with lead content in the maple syrup produced on their farm. Turns out, while the maple syrup industry is highly regulated in Quebec and Vermont, in Ontario, this is not the case, and small family producers using older equipment often have problems with lead in their syrup. The only solution is to replace the entire production system, which, for this family, would have cost in excess of $100,000. The kicker is that the woman running the farm, one of the few women maple syrup producers in Ontario, had voluntarily agree to test the province’s “Best Practices” system, only to discover that they actually caused higher levels of lead in her syrup than she would have had otherwise. The maple syrup production, which had been in the family for generations, had to be shut down because they couldn’t afford to upgrade the equipment.

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What’s That Smell?

Followers of the ol’ Save Your Fork journal will remember that I recently discovered I can eat small quantities of cheese again after suffering from dairy allergies for years. This has led to more and more experimentation in terms of trying new cheeses. We always come home with the favourites; the Mimolette, the Brie de Meaux; but we’ve also started trying new stuff. During a recent trip to St. Lawrence Market, we stumbled upon a whole display of artisinal Canadian cheeses, mostly from Quebec, but also from New Brunswick and even Manitoba. The problem with the market though, is there are so many smells, it’s often hard to zero in one one. And the cheese was too cold, so you couldn’t really get a good nose on it.

After we got everything home, there were a few cheeses that were a little more “feety” than we had anticipated. Double-wrapping the stuff didn’t put a dent in the stink. Finally we broke down and put it all in a Tupperware container. And then, a few days later, when I could take no more, I sent off Greg to Beer Geek night with the smelliest of the lot.

Which is why I couldn’t, for the life of me, figure out why my kitchen stunk like something had died in there. I mean, I literally pulled out the fridge and stove, thinking some food had gotten under there, or maybe a mouse, even though mice in a concrete apartment building seems improbable. I wrapped up the big bag of dogfood, thinking that was the source. I scrubbed down the cupboard where the garbage resides, I took apart the burners of the stove.

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