Historic Dining at Hearth and Garden

We’ve given a lot of grief lately to restaurants serving rustic comfort food. But recently we came across a new restaurant where it would be wrong for them to be serving anything else.

Hearth & Garden is located within historic Campbell House Museum (160 Queen Street West), and serves up a weekday lunch menu of classic dishes that not only speak to regional sustainability but also the historical foodways of the area.

Created by event planner and caterer David Vallee (you might know him from the TV show Rich Bride, Poor Bride), Hearth & Garden was originally the catering arm of Campbell House where Vallee and his team would organize weddings, tastings and other events. Working with Executive Chef Margaret MacKay (whose resume includes a long stint with Jamie Kennedy), Vallee moved incrementally to expand the business to a restaurant within Campbell House. After a trial by fire situation where they served 40 guests each night during Winterlicious, they proceeded to a soft opening a few weeks ago, allowing the signage in front of the museum and some flyers to local businesses to be their main form of promotion.

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This Shit Is Bananas, B-A-N-A-N-A-S

Who among us hasn’t stolen a look at another shopper’s cart in the grocery store line-up and passed judgment? And if you happen upon a lost grocery list, why, it’s as much of a vicarious thrill as reading someone’s diary. You can tell a lot about a person by what they put in their grocery cart, after all.

This grocery list, found at a Wal-Mart store, has been making the rounds online for the past week or so. The spelling, as has been noted everywhere, is atrocious. The list itself, while including some fruits and vegetables and cooking basics, also calls for a lot of ready-meals, dump and stir mixes, or outright junkified prepared foods.

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Snack Attack – A Visit to 416 Snack Bar

The day before the opening of 416 Snack Bar (181 Bathurst Street), I was standing on a street corner in Little Portugal, eating a fried codfish ball and thinking, “man, Toronto really needs a chain of international snack food stores, because you should be able to stand on any corner in the city and eat a Portuguese cod fish ball, or a Tibetan momo, or some taktoyaki…”

Adrian Ravinsky and David Stewart, who have worked in some of Toronto’s top restaurants, were thinking along the same lines when they created their bar at Queen West and Bathurst. “Only with beer!” enthuses Ravinsky when I share my story. Indeed, a month in, with a packed house almost every night, it seems that we’re not the only ones thinking that way. 416 Snack Bar seems to have hit on something special.

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SalivATE – February 2011

Yeah, we thought we’d bring back the SalivAte column, because there’s so much good food going on in our city and it’s fun to share. Above is the soon-to-be-infamous duck confit French toast from Origin (107-109 King Street East). The toast is a soft cinamon-ny brioche style bun with plenty of tender duck meat, pickled blueberries, hoisin sauce and crème fraiche. Maple syrup on the side. It’s a fantastic combination of sweet, savoury, salty and tart.

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When Life Gives You Really Big Lemons

This is a Cedro lemon sitting on my butcher’s block beside a standard size lemon. It’s, um… big. This huge, sweet lemon is native to Sicily and is most commonly used for salads. Really. I bought this one at St. Lawrence Market but have seen it in other fruit markets since, labelled as a “salad lemon”. They’re meant to be thinly sliced and added to salads, and some people sprinkle them with a bit of sugar and/or salt.

The unique thing about the Cedro is that the actual area of pulp is the same as a regular lemon. All of that extra space is spongy pith. Unlike other citrus fruit, however, the Cedro’s pith is sort of sweet and not bitter.

I had the idea that I would candy the Cedro. But I wasn’t sure whether I was supposed to discard the pith and just used the fragrant outer peel (the Cedro smells like a cross between a lemon and a bergamot) or use the whole thing. I had little luck searching out recipes, and a couple people on Twitter pointed me to a David Lebovitz recipe for candied peel. But I had this idea that I wanted to to do thin cross-section discs so that the pulp in the centre would look like stained glass and dry to an almost crunchy consistency.

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Flowers and Chocolate

I actually came across these dark chocolate and floral bars well before Valentine’s Day, and if I had my act together, would have posted about them before now. The collection is by Belgian chocolatier Dolfin and is called The Parfums d’Eden. It features 4 different flowers (rose, violet, verviene [lemon verbena] and orange blossom), offered in 30g bars of 60% chocolate.

We found these at Aren’t We Sweet in St. Lawrence Market, but they should be available wherever Dolfin chocolate is sold.

All of the bars smelled and tasted strongly of the included flower, although I didn’t get a lot of lemon either on the nose or the tongue with the verveine. In fact, the dried flowers within the chocolate had an almost tobacco-like taste and smell. No sign of lemon whatsoever. I wasn’t familiar with verveine as a flower – didn’t know it was “verbena”, so imagine my surprise to discover that the flavour is meant to be lemony.

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Adjusting

Wow. Time flies.

I’m not sure how two and a half months passed since I’ve updated this blog. Yes, I’ve had a lot going on, but not THAT much.

I have a theory, though. I’ve seen a lot of people abandon their blogs after dealing with a loss and subsequent grief. There are plenty of reasons for this – changes of habit, depression, or just not wanting to return to the place where you’ve poured your heart out and exposed your wounds.

I think it might also include, at least with blogs, not wanting the memories to scroll off the main page. You keep updating, eventually the story of your loss won’t be as visible. It’s like you’re somehow no longer honouring those you lost and miss. By not having it out there, right in front, it’s as if you’ve forgotten or moved on.

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The Rustic Rut

Do you know this man? Have you seen him recently in a food service capacity, either as a server or a chef/cook? Or possibly making your morning coffee? Do you live in a backwoods logging camp, hundreds of miles from the nearest town? Because that’s the only reason why we should be eating food served and prepared by lumberjacks. No, really, take another look at him. Minus the axe, he could pass for any Toronto barista, hipster server, or chef at a place that serves “rustic” fare.

Yes, yet another “rustic” Italian restaurant is opening in Toronto (4 since the new year). We’re still desperately trying to find more things to put on poutine. Late night comfort food now has its own cross-border trend – “stoner haute cuisine” for the after club crowd (back in my day, all we had at 2am were donairs, and we were happy to have it! /end old geezer Haligonian rant). And while all those things are good and tasty… I can’t possibly be the only person longing for a little bit of elegance and sophistication on my plate occasionally.

This rustic comfort food thing – it made sense two or three years ago when a recession loomed over our heads. The world was a scary place, high-end restaurants were shutting down with some regularity (RIP Perigee), and we just wanted something familiar on the plates in front of us. Nonna’s spaghetti, plenty of fries, some “of the people” pulled pork, piles of game meat to assuage our inner wannabe hunter, and bacon on every damn thing in sight. Like our pioneer forefathers and mothers, we ate all the parts of the animal, preferably off a slice of log, complete with bark around the outside. We canned and pickled and imagined ourselves as a modern day Laura Ingalls (or Catherine Parr Trail if you want to keep it local and Canadian). We lumbered through the spring growth of local woodlands stomping down (or over-harvesting) the very jewels of the forest we claimed to prize and revere. We rejected anything that wasn’t “local”, which meant we ate an awful lot of “white people food”, in the process making many immigrant citizens feel that their cuisine was second class.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s all been very tasty. And homey and comforting and… rustic. But man, isn’t it getting boring?

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Getting All Medieval on Your ‘Licious

Visitors to Casa Loma don’t normally get to wander around with drinks and food. As a museum and historic site, food is generally restricted to the basement cafe area. Yes, there have always been weddings and special events in a few of the larger rooms where it’s safe to have food in a seated environment, but food stations and samples throughout the castle? Unheard of.

Which is why it was so cool on Friday night when the Pegasus Hospitality Group took over the castle to offer a Medieval taste and tour as part of Winterlicious.

You might have heard the name Pegasus Group before. They run a number of restaurants in the GTA, but their hospitality division, under Executive Chef Steffan Howard, also runs the food service at the Palais Royale and Casa Loma. This normally encompasses things like weddings and special events, but as part of Winterlicious, they turned the castle into a Medieval market place.

Staff wore Medieval costumes as they greeted guests at the door. From there we were handed maps and encouraged to explore.

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The Dining Room

As a rule, Greg and I generally avoid the seasonal ‘Licious campaigns. We’d rather support our local restaurants when they’re not so busy, and ‘Licious is always crazy for most participating establishments. This year, however, we’ve been attending a few things in the Winterlicious Culinary Events Series, one of which was The Dining Room event at Campbell House.

Designed as a sort of two-step dinner theatre, guests first eat dinner in the basement dining room (two lovely rooms with fireplaces and period furniture) and then move up to the ballroom on the 2nd floor of the museum to watch Down n’ Out Productions perform the 1982 hit play The Dining Room. The play features 6 actors portraying 57 characters in 17 vignettes, all set around a formal dining room table. Playwright A. R. Gurney is said to have created an anthropological study of the WASP, and indeed, the scenes mostly feature well-to-do upper and middle class families throughout the 20th century, exploring the role that the dining room and the dining room table play in that culture. My only complaint about the play was that, for anyone not familiar with it, they’ll spend most of the first act trying to piece together the different vignettes to make sense of who is supposed to be who, and that’s quite distracting until they realize that this is indeed, vignettes, and not a linear play with recurring characters.

But of course, the food is why we were really there.

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