Sheryl Kirby

Lucky Dip – Tuesday, May 31st, 2011

Would ketchup on steak be a deal-breaker in a new relationship? How about if they won’t eat blueberries? [Globe and Mail]

That brings a whole new meaning to “franks and beans” – a worker at a Heinz factory in the UK loses a finger in some machinery. [Food Manufacture UK]

Eat fruit, it’s good for you. [Globe and Mail]

Oh, no they didn’t… Cadbury UK (which is owned by Kraft, which is owned by cigarette manufacturer Phillip Morris) has run an ad that references model Naomi Campbell and compares her to chocolate. The ad has been pulled to avoid a racial backlash, but expect some lawsuits in the near future. [The Independent]

A history of whisky (part 1) in Toronto. [Toronto Standard]

Food prices will double by 2030. Before you start whining about the price of corn flakes, think about how this will affect the 44 million people who have been pushed into poverty just in the last year. [The Guardian]

Archaic liquor laws in Utah are hurting restaurants, where not every customer is Mormon, and some of them might want the occasional drink. [The Salt Lake Tribune]

Lucky Dip – Monday, May 30th, 2011

Lentil chips? Fruit snacks? Is the end nigh for good old sugar and powdered beetle wings?? Sing it with me folks, I Want Candy! [The Atlantic]

The USDA’s food pyramid is so ubiquitous, most Canadians think it’s the system we use as well. But it’s getting a redesign and will apparently look more like a plate, which might actually be a better gauge for people to calculate their food portions. [CBS Atlanta]

Would you like some tea with your Secret Pickles? This supper club is laid back and unpretentious. [The Grid]

Heston Blumenthal creates a pommery mustard ice cream for UK supermarket Waitrose. [Daily Mail]

Canadians share a common border with our neighbours to the south, but we have very different tastes in snack food. [Toronto Sun]

If you could redesign the nutrition label on packaged foods, what would it look like? Now’s your chance to show the world. [Food Politics]

Could foods containing a potentially lethal chemical have been shipped to Canada? [Globe and Mail]

An e.coli outbreak in Germany has killed 14 and may be linked to cucumbers. [Toronto Sun]

Recipe For Change Recap

Foodshare‘s fabulous Recipe For Change event migrated to the North St. Lawrence Market this year, allowing for more space, which in turn allowed for more chefs and more guests. I love that organizers make a point of not overselling the event, so it’s never packed; line-ups at food stations are short or non-existent and there is no sense of frenzy involved.

Recipe For Change is FoodShare’s annual fundraiser in which they raise monies directed toward their Field to Table Schools program which teaches school children about where their food comes from. Everyone I talked to on Thursday night considered the event a great success; hats off to Adrienne De Francesco and everyone at FoodShare for a fantastic time.

Below, check out some of the offerings from participating chefs. We didn’t try everything (and I somehow missed most of the desserts, which has got to be a first), but everything we did have was wonderful.

Above: Chickpea polenta topped with ratatouille and fresh mozzarella from Chef Marc Breton of the Gladstone Hotel.

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Feeling Lucky?

As promised last week on TasteTO, the Lucky Dip column will be migrating to this site as of tomorrow.

There will be some changes, however, and it will morph into a combination of the local Toronto news links we were running on TasteTO and some international food stories and issues that I featured daily in the Food For Thought column on Save Your Fork. Part of what caused me to burn out over at TasteTO was the idea that we had to link to everything, which meant that I had to at least read everything, which got frustrating when the posts were bad, not to mention that it also ate up many hours of my day, every day.

This version will be a curated selection of food-related stories that I personally like and/or find interesting; either because they are well written or because the topic is important or unique. This may not be to everyone’s satisfaction, but it will keep me from getting cranky, which, in my world, is my top priority.

In those other columns, I also tried to always have at least 10 articles each day; even if some of them were not so great. In this version you’ll get what I like; that may be 10 or 15 or 5 different things, it will depend on the day. Plus, I reserve the right to say “to hell with it” occasionally and go to the beach. Well, probably not the beach, but you get my jist. One of the things that I grew to loathe was the required commitment to churn out those posts every day, even if I didn’t feel like it, even if there was no good content to include. On days when I’m busy or would rather read a book, y’all are outta luck. (Get it?… heh.)

Canadian Wine In Your Cooking

Built in the late 80s, our building, while considered swank in its day, still boasts a shared laundry room. Inside the door of the laundry room is a small counter that serves as a makeshift swap shop. Got old books and magazines? Leave them there. Old dishes, baby clothes, or home decor items? Somebody wants them!

Greg returned from the laundry room this morning and handed me this little pamphlet, published in 1966 by the Canadian Wine Institute, which, as best I can tell, no longer exists.

Now, if you know anything about Canadian wine, you’ll know that it really wasn’t taken seriously until about a decade or so ago. Canadian wine, what little there was of it, was notoriously bad. More amusing is the fact that there are no wineries, regions or specific varietals mentioned at all. The recipes included call for things such as “Canadian sweet or cream sherry” or “Canadian dry white table wine”, never giving the reader a clue as to what they should be looking for when buying said Canadian wine. I’m also a little taken aback by the number of recipes calling for sherry, although that might be the flashbacks to the bottles of “Fine Old Canadian Sherry” my teenaged friends and I consumed on the wharves of the Halifax dockyards in the 80s.

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Grain on the Brain

I’m not typically a cake mix purchaser. When you still need to add milk, eggs, etc., it’s usually just as easy to make your baked goods from scratch. So I bought this bag of Grainstorm muffin mix at the Green Barns Farmer’s Market out of curiosity more than anything else.

The premise is that the various mixes (muffins, pancakes, oatmeal cookies and a vegan muffin) are all made from ancient grains, grown in Ontario and ground and mixes and then vacuum-sealed for freshness. They’re also peanut and nut-free. The grains though are not all that exotic – to me anyway – and include spelt, kamut, oats and red fife grains, all of which can be purchased as flours with relative ease, at least in Toronto. So I don’t know that buying a mix would really be saving me anything – I have most of these flours (plus buckwheat) in my cupboard at any given time and cook with them regularly.

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Reach Out, Reach Out and Touch Someone

Dear PR people,

Please, I am on my knees begging to you – stop using the phrase “reaching out to you” in emails where you really just mean “contacting you”.

I don’t know who started this trend, but it’s pretentious and, well, really fucking creepy.

Seriously. Reaching out has two connotations. We “reach out” to offer assistance to those in need. I’m not in need, you’re just sending me a press release.

The other connotation of “reaching out” is of a dirty old man trying to cop a feel. I get emails now that include the term “reaching out” and I picture the perfectly manicured claw of the PR person in question, coming at me as if to grab my tits.

Trust me when I tell you that this is NOT the image of yourselves that you want me to have.

Stop reaching at me! Just contact me. I promise that you’ll get a much nicer response. Because the next person that “reaches” at me is getting a smack.

Brisket on Wheels – Caplansky’s Gets Around Town

The problem with the restaurant biz is that most restaurants are stationary. Folks have got to come to you to enjoy your food. But Zane Caplansky of Caplansky’s Delicatessen (356 College Street) has his wheels spinning in other directions with a bunch of new initiatives that take the restaurant to the customer.

Earlier this week, Caplansky’s did their very first bicycle-powered lunch delivery. The deli owner bought two large, sturdy bikes with sizeable baskets, and now customers within a downtown delivery area (Dupont to Queen, University to Ossington) can, for a $5 delivery fee, have their smoked meat sandwich delivered to their home or office. Caplansky points out that the bikes are a low-maintenance, high-capacity delivery apparatus – each bike can hold a minimum of 2 orders and with 2 bikes, he can send staff in different directions at the same time. It’s also a respite for his kitchen staff, who can take a break from bussing or dishwashing for a quick bike ride to make a delivery. And while Caplansky works with a local food delivery company to serve a wider geographic area, he points out that the bike system is more local and more personal. Not to mention more efficient in downtown traffic.

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Gilting the Lily

I am… um… well, a little bit at a loss for words. I’ve just viewed the Beta site for Gilt, the new website/online magazine/food shop by Ruth Reichl and co.

I mean, I guess it’s been done before. Certainly, businesses put out advertorial publications to help sell their products (remember the IKEA magazine?). But this just seems so blatant. A post containing a recipe includes a sidebar full of the over-priced ingredients required to make said recipe. Certainly (hopefully), people will go out and at least buy locally-sourced ingredients instead of buying the stuff from the Gilt website. (Because – $36 for 2 pounds of asparagus? Plus delivery. Are you fucking serious??)

What about that whole idea of keeping editorial content and advertising content separate? It’s one of the basics of journalism. Okay, maybe it’s a different game when you’re writing about the stuff you’re selling. Maybe we need to think of Gilt as just a slicker, better-written online catalogue. But I feel a little cheated. I want lovely food writing for the sake of lovely food writing.

And while the name is obviously supposed to evoke idea of luxury, it becomes farcical when compared to Guilt Taste, which not-so-subtly points out the hypocrisy with faux listings for Ortolan and Chilean sea bass.

As a society, we buy into ideas of luxury every day. And Gilt is definitely selling luxury. It will probably do well. But despite the great writing, I don’t think I’ll be returning. It touches off some emotions (greed, self-pity, anger, frustration) that are too uncomfortable to endure when all I want to do is read some nice food writing without having someone trying to sell me stuff, even if it is really nice stuff.

Yogurt – Still Full of Lies

Am I beating a dead horse if I link to yet another article pointing out that health claims on packaged food are (intentionally) misleading?

This NY Times article doesn’t really reveal anything new if you’ve been following the whole story over the past few years, but it speaks to the stretches of truth advertisers will make and the overall gullibility of consumers when you consider that people are still buying these products.

It just feels like a battle food advocates can never win. Between advertisers and media willing to repeat any study that touts a “superfood”, or an ingredient with nutritional properties, the people standing up and saying, “hey now, wait a minute, do more research” are the ones made to look like kooks.

But how sad is it that we’re willing to buy yogurt, or juice or cereal because of false promises of restored health? I’m angry that people don’t take more time to inform themselves about what they’re buying and putting into their bodies, but I’m also a little shocked at the desperation of people willing to try anything that offers any kind of promise of improvement, be it weight loss, digestive health or, scariest of all, cancer prevention.

I don’t agree with everything said by author Michael Pollan, but “don’t buy food with health claims on the package” has to be one of the wisest things I’ve ever read.