Sheryl Kirby

Germans Love David Hasselhoff

Greg and I once had this idea to do an anonymous blog about events and restaurant openings. We were going to call it Hors D’oeuvres For Dinner and it was going to chronicle the weird and bizarre things we find ourselves at while writing for TasteTO. Like the event at the hotel where the PR lady was in the lobby having a nervous breakdown because the hotel didn’t shut down regular restaurant service for the media event and she couldn’t tell the paying customers from her media guests. Or the things where you show up, expecting dinner based on the wording of the invitation only to end up eating a couple of canapés and too much wine (hence the title). We never followed through with it because we figured everyone in the food community would eventually figure out it was us, and because we already get in enough trouble for calling people on their crap as it is. But sometimes, there are events so bizarre or “fail” that they need recounting. This is one of those.

Greg attended the German Beer Festival last year and admitted it was a bit of a dud (mostly because there was only 1 beer) but insisted that it was going to be much better this year. So I agreed to go. Normally I don’t bother to attend events that we’re not going to write about, but for some reason I believed him when he said it was going to be good.

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BBQ and Temaki Too – Fall Food Promotions at the Drake

Word spread like wildfire last week when the Drake Hotel (1150 Queen Street West) announced they would be shutting down their Drake Scoops + Tees ice cream shop located a couple of doors east from the hotel proper and replacing it with… the Drake BBQ shop. Featuring sandwiches made with Carolina-style pulled pork and Texas-style beef brisket, and open Thursday to Saturday only from 6pm (starting October 22nd), the shop will offer counter seating and is geared towards the club crowd looking for a quick bite. Although I fully expect that, living a few blocks from the hotel, it will also become a quick and easy dinner option for Greg and I when we don’t feel like cooking.

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Longo’s Maple Leaf Square – Something For Everyone

In the food community, many of us have love/hate relationships with supermarkets. Corporate-minded and stocked with processed food, the supermarket is a place we prefer to avoid, shopping instead at farmers’ markets or small family-owned artisanal food shops where the focus is on fresh, wholesome and delicious products. But what if that actually described your local supermarket?

Longo’s has been around since 1956, and just opened their 23rd store. Yet this company that employs more than 4000 people is still family-owned and run. And while their latest venture, the 48,000 square foot store that opened yesterday at Maple Leaf Square, is most definitely a supermarket, they’ve taken great care to ensure that high quality, artisanal food is a priority.

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Market Mondays – Sweet Potatoes

We’re in the Thanksgiving stretch now, and in our house it’s not Thanksgiving without sweet potatoes. However, sweet potatoes are a nutrition powerhouse and should be part of a varied diet all year round. With this much Vitamin A (262% of your recommended daily intake) in 1 77gr potato, it’s hard to go wrong with this tasty root vegetable.

Native to Central America, the sweet potato dates back to prehistoric times. Carbon-dated relics found in Peru are thought to be over 10,000 years old. Columbus took sweet potatoes back to Europe with him on his first trip to the Americas. Sweet potatoes are also grown in southern Pacific countries like Phillipines, New Zealand and the Cook Islands, but it is unclear whether they got there via Spanish travellers after Columbus, or whether they made it to Polynesia directly from Central America.

There are over 400 varieties of sweet potato, varying in colours that include white, yellow, bright orange and even purple, and ranging in shape from typically potato-shaped to long and thin. There are firm, dry varieties, and some that are softer and moist. Ironically, the sweet potato is not related to the potato, nor is it related to the yam, although in many places, the name is used interchangeably. General theory is that the Taino (Bahamian) name for the vegetable was batata, which sounds an awful lot like “potato”. The sweet potato earned its “yam” moniker from African slaves in the Caribbean and southern US where the soft, moist (usually orange) sweet potato was often used in place of the yam in traditional African cuisine.

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SalivAte – Toronto Beer Week Edition

By all accounts Toronto Beer Week was a resounding success. Many beers were consumed, and there were some outstanding beer dinners and other food pairing events that took place at restaurants across the city. Greg made it out to more of them than I did (stupid allergies), so many of the photos here are his (which explains why they might get a touch out of focus as we go through each course, as pretty much every one of these dishes came with an accompanying beer pairing.)

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Stirring the Pot with Chef Joshna Maharaj

Joshna Maharaj is a chef and writer and who is passionately committed to good food and ideas of sustainability. A dedicated food activist, she works to promote the awareness of the power of food to nurture, build and strengthen communities. Joshna is a regular guest chef on CBC’s Steven & Chris, maintains a blog, and speaks to anyone who will listen about the importance of good food.

What inspired you to become a chef?

I lived in an ashram in India for a year after I graduated from university, and was put to work in their very humble village kitchen. I learned so much about the power food has to transmit love and nourishment to people in this kitchen, and had the time of my life! I came home from India, and enrolled in the George Brown Chefs’ School.

What is your favourite dish to cook and why?

I don’t work in a restaurant, but one of my favourite things that I make at home a lot is a mighty BLT. The other day I made one on olive bread with avocado and chipotle mayo, and it was outrageously delicious.

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Know Your Farmers, Trust Your Chefs

It’s easy to target locavores for their sometimes elitist and naive world view when it comes to what and how people should eat. (And for the record, I’m not saying they’re wrong, just that they should get their heads out of their asses when it comes to preaching at people who can’t afford to make food a priority…) But it appears that there’s a whole new way to take advantage of the gullible foodies who think they’re saving the world by “knowing where their food comes from”.

CHOW has an article this week about vendors who show up at farmers’ markets claiming to be farmers but who aren’t. Journalists from NBC Los Angeles bought produce from an LA-area farmers’ market and then made a point of visiting the farms the food came from. Except that some of those farms didn’t actually exist.

This is exactly the kind of thing that the Toronto area MyMarkets attempts to weed out, requiring that all vendors be certified and that vendors sell only the food that they themselves have grown. This unfortunately rules out co-operatives like the Kawartha Ecological Growers (KEG), but does a good job of culling the people who would head to the food terminal and load up on imports and sell them as their own. CHOW’s got a list of things to look for to ensure that you’re dealing directly with the farmer and not some scoundrel reseller.

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Market Mondays – Apples

Is there any fruit that typifies September and the Fall harvest better than the apple? Boy Scouts apple day, an apple for the first day of school, a roadside produce stand groaning with different varieties… we love us some apples. And despite what your supermarket might have you think, they come in more types than red, green and yellow. 7500 varieties, to be specific, with the fruit originating in Western Asia and showing up throughout history in Norse, Greek and Pagan mythology. One theory about the apple being the unnamed “forbidden fruit” in the Bible is based on the fact that the Book of Genesis was written by Romans at a time when the Christian church was trying to convert pagans. Since the pagans revered the apple, making it evil or forbidden contributed to the number of new converts.

Apples now grow in almost every part of the world. Here in Ontario, growers have focused on about a dozen common varieties, but there are over 100 heritage varieties that can be found at local orchards and pick-your-own farms. Apples are typically harvested from late July until October. Growers’ associations like the one in Norfolk County provide storage facilities for area apple growers in a climate-controlled, low-oxygen warehouse that allows Ontarians to have local apples year-round. There’s no reason to be eating apples from China (where 35% of the world’s apples are grown), when we have a great year-round variety right here.

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Patio, No

I have a question for restaurant owners everywhere.

If your restaurant has a patio (or even if it doesn’t), why is it necessary to have your front windows and doors open on a hot day? Is it because you assume that everyone loves sitting on the patio, and by opening doors or installing big garage-style windows that open to the street that customers seated indoors will feel like they’re on that patio? Or is it just a way to get around running the air conditioning?

Because not everyone wants to sit outside.

Greg and I went out for lunch today. We arrived at our destination to find that the place had all the windows and doors open, and that it was actually hotter inside than outside on the patio, where there was at least a breeze.

I’m currently balancing on a very thin precipice with my allergies. Six weeks in and having tried three different medications, I’m finally at a point where I can actually go outside to get from point A to point B, but sitting for an hour or more in air full of astronomical amounts of mold spores is really not fun.

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Stirring the Pot with Chef Brian Morin

Brian Morin grew up in Toronto, where he studied at George Brown College, and then moved on to working in small restaurants like Napoleon and Truffles. In the 1980s, he moved on to work in hotel kitchens such as The Four Seasons, Sutton Place, and the Intercontinental. He then became the executive chef of Prime restaurants, and in 2003 opened his own restaurant, beerbistro(18 King Street East).

What inspired you to become a chef?

I loved cooking from an early age, probably about 10 years old.

What is your favourite dish at the restaurant where you cook and why?

Hard to say because it would depend on my mood. I think our mussels are some of the best things we do and are the best in the city.

Three ingredients you couldn’t live without and why?

Beer, butter and cheese.

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