Sheryl Kirby

Plates From Brazil

Cajú
922 Queen Street West
416-532-2550

The word authentic gets bandied about a lot these days – to the point where I wonder if some writers know what it actually means, especially when it comes to food. In our cultural mosaic of a city, where so many cultures have their traditional foods on offer, it’s easy to confuse authentic with watered down versions made to appeal to Caucasians.

Ironically, at Cajú, where they’re upfront about the fact that their dishes have been modified to make a “Canadian” dish, Chef Mario Cassini is more respectful of the foodways of his native Brazil than most places claiming to serve only authentic cuisine.

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Soma – Home to the True Chocoholic

Soma Chocolatemaker
Historic Distillery District,
55 Mill Street, Building 48, unit 102
416-815-7662

It’s a sad fact that many people who deem themselves to be “chocoholics” have never tasted anything made from good quality chocolate. That’s not meant to sound snobby, but I make the statement to illustrate a point. There are “chocoholics” who get their fix by buying a bar at the corner store and then there are those of us who make special trips, across town or around the world, for the truly spectacular stuff. In terms of the folks who create the confections, you can’t beat the devotion of Cynthia Leung and David Castellan of Soma Chocolates who installed an 80-year old Catalan Melangeur (that’s a chocolate grinder to the rest of us) via forklift, and then built the walls of their shop around it.

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Flour, Sugar and Art at the Queen of Tarts

The Queen of Tarts
283 Roncesvalles Avenue
416-651-3009

Not many people can count watching Martha Stewart bite her own leg off as a hi-light of their culinary career, but for Stephanie Pick, proprietor of The Queen of Tarts bakery on Roncesvalles Avenue, it was an event that garnered her already popular shop international attention.

Someone at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia got hold of some of Pick’s gingerbread cookies decorated to look like Martha’s famous getting-out-of jail poncho, and very quickly Pick was invited to appear on the show where Martha happily bit off the gingerbread likeness of her ankle, complete with royal icing ankle monitor.

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Review – Comfort Food For Break-Ups

comfortfoodforbreakups Comfort Food for Breakups: The Memoir of a Hungry Girl
Marusya Bociurkiw
Arsenal Pulp Press

There is a time, immediately after the breakup of a relationship with a serious other when we all seem to require comfort food. Ice cream, cake, mashed potatoes, something in which to drown our sorrows, that reminds us of better, safer times when we were not so vulnerable and hurt.

Comfort food can be anything that reminds us of someone we love, whether it’s the safety of a childhood home, or the memory of a loved one who has passed. Regardless of our culture, food is woven into the fabric of our lives and every dish, every forkful evokes memories.

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Who’s Sorrel Now?

While reading a review copy of Comfort Food for Breakups The Memoir of a Hungry Girl by Toronto-based author Marusya Bociurkiw, I was intrigued by her description of “green borsch”, a soup she was served while visiting Ukraine.

Green borsch contains no beets whatsoever, but instead is comprised primarily of potatoes, carrot, sorrel, broth of some denomination and spices. It sounded interesting and Bociurkiw’s description made it doubly so, but then I quickly put it out of my mind as I made my way through her book of food memoirs.

A few days later, I found myself in Benna’s, that delightful bakery/deli/grocery store in the Polish neighbourhood of Roncesvalles Village. I cannot pass Benna’s without going in and buying something, and I’ve found everything from delightful sweets and pastries to cheeses and Polish canned good there.

On this day, Greg and I were admiring the many varieties of both pickled herring and headcheese when I spied a jar of green stuff. In a total Celestine Prophecy moment, I reached up and realized I was holding the elusive green borsch or sorrel soup. And it was vegetarian.

Of course, I had to buy it.

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Restaurant Profile – Indus Junction

Indus Junction
811 Queen Street West
647-428-7119

If I say “let’s go for Indian food,” to any of my friends, their first thought is going to be buffet, where we all fill our plates over and over again with passable but not especially memorable food. Sure, there are some upscale Indian restaurants in Toronto, but even there, the focus is on traditional, with the compartmentalized plates reminiscent of a cafeteria. Like so many ethnic cuisines that are now part of the culture of our city, we have this idea that Indian food must be traditional. But India as a culture has embraced the 21st century, and there’s no reason why Indian food can’t be modernized as well.

Enter Alka and Poonam Dhir, whose month-old Queen Street restaurant Indus Junction serves up beautiful Indian food, laced with authentic flavours and techniques, but with a modern twist. It is the junction where east meets west, old meets new, and the traditionally male-dominated industry gets a feminine touch that is as breath-taking as a jewelled sari.

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Culinary Mis-Adventures

Giving props where props are due, I’ve got a lot of respect for Loblaws and their President’s Choice line for opening up new gastronomic horizons for the good people of our country and our neighbours to the south. Without the folks from PC offering us everything from peanut sauce to cheesecake, mango dressing to balsamic vinegar, we’d likely still be a society in which meat and two veg was the order of the day. President’s Choice has allowed Canadians to expand their palates and learn about the food of other cultures without shrinking their wallets.

I buy a lot of PC products, and have been known to get ornery as a bear when various items that I like but which sell poorly are discontinued – hello! Wasabi rice chips!!

However, the one thing President’s Choice really doesn’t do well – at least to my taste – is their prepared foods. Their chana masala is bland. Their fish pie lacking in fish, their pad thai is a glommy clomp of noodles that tastes of ketchup.

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Is Something Fishy?

This article is from last week, but I’ve had it bookmarked because I really wanted to talk about it. It needed some thinking first though, some pondering. I’m still not sure how I feel about it.

I stopped eating imported shrimp many years ago after reading one of the many books by Dr. Vandana Shiva in which she details how shrimp farms in India and Thailand are destroying the local ecosystems.

To operate effectively, shrimp farmers destroy mangrove swamps to create a flat, shallow area underwater – conditions in which shrimp thrive. This allows them to harvest the shrimp by trawling.

However, the mangrove swaps are home to many sea creatures whose habitats are destroyed and trawling is indiscriminate – anything in the way of the trawler – including thousands of sea turtles – gets scooped up.

The removal of the mangrove swamps also removes a layer of protection against tidal waves caused by tsunamis. It is widely believed that the Tsunami of 2004 would have done considerably less damage were it not for the shrimp farms that lined the coast of Thailand. Shrimp farms also cause seawater to leach into nearby groundwater, ruining other crops, such as rice.

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Hello Alphanso!

Look what I have… All the way from India, aboard a British Airways flight. 6 whole luscious, juicy, much-coveted Alphanso mangoes.

Okay… now there’s only 5.

Quite possibly the best mangoes in the world, definitely the best in North America, available for only a few short weeks. Actually, I advise my readers not to seek these out, because once you have one, regular old supermarket mangoes will be dead to you. You’ll never be able to eat another one of those hard, yellow woody things.

We went across town yesterday with the sole purpose of bringing home a box of these babies. The flesh is dark orange, juicy and sweet. They’re smooth, melting away to the consistency of purée in the mouth. They’re so fragrant, you can smell them through box and all the paper. All are perfectly ripe.

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Oyster Boy – A Down East Difference

oysterplate Oyster Boy
872 Queen Street West
416-534-3432
Dinner for two with wine or beer, plus all taxes and tip: $100

I’ve never been a fan of claiming you know about something because you’ve lived in close proximity to where it became popular. I once worked as a barista in a tourist area where a customer dissed my cappuccino because, “we’re from Seattle, so, you know, we KNOW coffee.” Apparently just by standing in the original Starbucks people are able to absorb absolutely everything there is to know about the beans, the production and the roasting of coffee. The same goes for people who have lived in London, England, and claim an expert-level knowledge of Indian food.

So it makes me feel like a bit of a hypocrite to write a review of a seafood restaurant and pull out the old “I’m from Nova Scotia, so I know seafood” line, but if the cliché fits, you’ve got to wear it. See, we made two visits to Oyster Boy on Queen Street West; one with another Bluenoser who had a similar opinion of the food, and once with some friends from Moscow for whom many of the dishes on the menu were a completely new experience. Seafood appears to be a matter of perspective.

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