Sheryl Kirby

Down and Dirty versus Clean and Serene

For Christmas, my brother sent me a book called Dirt: The Quirks, Habits and Passions of Keeping House. It has been on my wish list for some time now and I was delighted to receive this book of essays about people’s relationships with the spaces they inhabit. I was disappointed once I started reading it though, since most of the essays appeared to be from people attempting to justify their own sloth. Sure, there were a few where the writers dealt with the dirt of others – having to clean the house of a deceased relative who had been a hoarder, for example. There’s also a section of essays written by people who have worked as maids or housekeepers. And even a couple where the essayists wrote about a specific chore; Laura Shain Cunningham loves to wax her floor, Juliet Eastland is obsessed with sheets.

But most of the essays were from people who hated to clean, about why they hated to clean.

Which is where I begin to feel like a freak, because I like to clean. A lot.

There are things I dislike, and downright hate – hate cleaning the shower for instance, and the shower is the only place in the house where mainstream cleaners make an appearance. I live with wall to wall carpeting and would prefer hardwood floors but it’s a rental and the choice is not mine. So I vacuum and steam clean carpets a lot more than I would like, because with two dogs, you can’t NOT keep the rugs clean or else the places gets too doggy smelling. But I don’t think I actually hate the task itself – just the time it takes up.

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(Robert DeNiro’s Waiting) Talking Italian

We have wine writers here at TasteTO for a very good reason – because neither Greg nor I know squat about wine. Oh, we like wine well enough, but we tend to stick to a few things that we know, and more often than not, we prefer beer, which we’re both much more comfortable with. Because while beer is made by huge numbers of craft brewers around the world, most offerings are a variation on a dozen or so styles. Wine, however, varies not just from winery and grape variety, but by region, and don’t even let’s get into the difference in harvests from year to year.

Particularly intimidating are the wines of Italy. A country famous for its wine, and various wine regions, wine from Italy can be intimidating, especially to someone who doesn’t speak the language. What I needed was a simple, basic, get you started kind of course that would let me compare a few wines without overwhelming me.

So when Angela Aiello of iYellow Wine Club invited me to check out iYellow Wine School, I jumped at the opportunity to attend the class on Italian wines.

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Nose in a Book

It’s a sad fact that most of the reading I do nowadays is work-related. 200+ news articles a day to sort through for Save Your Fork and TasteTO, books to review, articles to edit. And even my “just for fun” stack of reading tends towards food theory.

Before the holidays I combed the book guides in the newspapers and spent an afternoon on the Toronto Public Library website requesting books, a number of which were novels. Three of them finally became available last week and I bemoaned my misfortune and lack of foresight in not making some of them inactive (TPL lets you stay in the queue for popular books but accept them only when you’re ready). How was I going to get through all of these in the three weeks I was allowed to have them checked out?

Of course, I forgot how fast I can read fiction. I forgot what’s it’s like to get my nose in a book. I forgot that when I’m in the middle of a story, nothing else matters and nothing else registers. Being pulled from that story, whether by interruption or necessity is physically, agonizingly painful. Like being awakened in the middle of a sound sleep and dragged out of bed. My facial expression during the 24 hours it took me to read The Book of Negroes was almost permanently at a scowl unless I was actually reading. If I wasn’t in the book, I was thinking about how I could get back to it, or how perturbed I was at having to set it down.

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Y’all Come to Supper!

Hank’s
9-1/2 Church Street
416-504-9463

A few weeks ago, when I interviewed Scott and Rachelle Vivian about their take-over of the Wine Bar and Hank’s, the duo let me know about their plans to open Hank’s at night with a menu of southern favourites that Vivian had learned to cook growing up in Atlanta. Hank’s at Night was unveiled and opened to the public this past week, and the menu is indeed a collection of homey and stick-to-your-ribs southern comfort food.

Sourcing all beer, wine and the majority of ingredients from local growers or producers (there’s a chocolate dessert, but no stewed greens until they come back in season locally), the pair are offering up a pretty decent assortment of southern dishes, done really well.

Here’s a few of the things on the menu…

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At the Top of Their Game

I am generally sceptical when being served game meat. Having grown up eating wild caught stuff, the flavour of the game meat served in Toronto restaurants is generally subdued. Ontario law dictates that wild game meat cannot be sold to the public, so most of the venison, rabbit, elk, kangaroo, etc., that we eat here has been farmed. Farming has its pros and cons, of course, but one of the the most noticeable differences is the lack of a gamey taste because the animals are eating controlled feed instead of foraging in the forest.

This is a good thing, in a way, because it means that people will try game meat and not be put off by the strong flavour. But folks like me, who expect the strong flavour, often find game meat lacking. What is needed, then, is for the meat to be prepared at the hands of a skilled chef who knows how to nuance, accentuate and tease out the flavours. Last night, 9 sets of those skilled hands took on the challenge.

The Ontario Game Dinner at Hank’s was a benefit for Slow Food Toronto – money raised went towards sending Toronto chefs to Slow Food’s bi-annual conference in Italy.

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Experimentation

The flavour combination of dark chocolate, dulce de leche and sea salt is not new. You might even say it’s a bit passé, but it could also be one of those things that become a classic, like chocolate and mint.

I had wanted thimble (aka. thumbprint) cookies, but I was also craving chocolate. And when my pal David at Circles and Squares Bakery tweeted about making dulce de leche brownies, the idea hit me.

This first batch is really a prototype – I made one pan and put the caramel into the thumbprints first, before baking, as you do when making the regular version with jam. This created a big oozing mess of melted caramel. Filling the prints as soon as the cookies come out of the oven works better – it melts just enough to smooth out, without creating too much of a river.

I also used 100% cacao chocolate, because that’s what I had on hand. It’s not readily available, but I don’t think I’d go below about 80% or the cookie will be way too sweet – otherwise the amount of sugar would have to be adjusted. And, I cheated and used dulce de leche from a jar, but the caramel is not hard to make.

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Don’t Count Your Chicken Before You’ve Tasted Them

The phrase “tastes like chicken” is beyond cliché. We use it for any whitish meat that we can’t accurately describe any other way – frog’s legs, alligator, lizard – guaranteed someone trying any of these for the first time will compare them to chicken.

But what, exactly, does chicken taste like? The specimens we get in supermarkets or most restaurants are all the same breed (White Rock), probably fed with some mixture of GMO corn and other grain, raised in a barn for optimum growth in a minimal time frame, and likely pumped full of a saline solution during processing to make the meat look plump and full and heavy.

But chickens come in different breeds, and like beef and pork, those different breeds have different characteristics, in the kitchen and on the plate.

At a recent tasting event at Victor Restaurant, participants got to clearly see the difference between breeds, and the phrase “tastes like chicken” no longer applies.

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Buried Treasure – The Hidden Gems of the Food Network and Why You Can’t Find Them

It’s no secret that I would rather watch UK food shows than anything made in Canada or the US. Chefs like Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Jamie Oliver, Valentine Warner and even Gordon Ramsay do a lot of good work for Channel 4 and the BBC when it comes to promoting seasonal, local, sustainable foodways. For years, Greg and I have had no choice but to download these from online file-sharing sites (shhh!!) because they seldom get shown here and there’s few, if any, domestic equivalents.

Except, bit by bit, Food Network Canada has been picking these shows up. Heston Blumenthal’s Big Chef Takes on Little Chef series that ran last year recently got aired here. Likewise his feasts series in which he recreates (with his own twists, of course) historic meals. Jamie Oliver is a big commodity on this side of the pond, so most of his stuff eventually shows up, but sometimes up to a year after its original air date.

This delay is annoying enough, but makes sense – Channel 4 wants to rerun these shows before selling the rights to anyone else. My frustration is that when Food Network Canada finally gets them, they do very little to promote them.

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Stirring the Pot with Angela Aiello

Angela Aiello is a dynamo wine ambassador with 10 year of experience in the local wine industry. She runs iYellow Wine School, an organization that offers events and courses that help teach people about wine in a fun, relaxed atmosphere. Ange is the regular wine host for the CBC’s Steven & Chris Show and for Le Gourmet TV.

How did you become interested in wine? What steps did you take to learn more about it?

The simple and short answer to both questions is “I drank a lot of it”. I started in the wine industry young, but truly developed a passion for wine as I grew older. I believe that you can really only learn about wine if you’re tasting it, so when I stopped working in wine country and in the industry, I started a wine club and starting drinking with friends and colleagues and we all explored, discovered and shared as we went along. And now after close to 12 years in the wine industry I am proud to say I’m still learning! And that is one of the greatest things about wine – every year, every vintage and every wine is constantly changing, so as it turns out you’re constantly learning, and that means you’re constantly drinking, tasting and reflecting on the wines you like. So in reality I am constantly taking steps to learn more about wine including traveling, attending wine schools and tastings at events. I think building your own confidence with your own palate preferences is a very important step to being interested in wine. For me I love Rieslings, Pinot Noir, sparkling wines, Syrah and dessert wines. Knowing what you like is half the battle, anyway!

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Pinch Me – Alexandra Park Comes Together Over the Stove

People who know Alexandra Park can speak to its great ethnic diversity. Like a smaller version of Toronto itself, it rings with the sounds of a hundred languages, and the delicious cooking smells of many different cultures. A Pinch of This – Recipes From Alexandra Parkis an initiative of Recipe For Community, a resident-inspired partnership with a focus on food, convening, youth engagement and neighbourhood beautification. The organization has spear-headed an number of projects that range from window flower boxes and public art to an outdoor commons area that includes benches and picnic tables. An organic vegetable garden has been created in a central courtyard with a variety of plots, two of which are raised to provide access for those with mobility restraints. There is also an outdoor kitchen with barbeques so residents can prepare meals and swap recipes.

A project of the Green Space Collective, Recipe For Community brings together local residents to share their individual recipes, foodways and cultures. A Pinch of This offers recipes from Jamaica, Trinidad, China, Italy, the Middle East Afghanistan, the Philippines and others. With the assistance of food writer Marion Kane, and contributions from Kane, local councillor Adam Vaughan, and mayor David Miller, the book offers a culinary snapshot of the neighbourhood.

Recipes include pastelles (a Trinidadian twist on tamales), a vegetarian version of a Jamaican mackerel dish, kosheree, chicken adobo, and an oxtail stew contributed by resident Effie Henry, whose claim that she doesn’t cook by books inspired the ‘pinch of this’ title. While a few of the recipes, such as Henry’s, are obviously long-standing family specialties, a few are culled from published cookbooks and obviously represent the vibrancy and diversity of the neighbourhood. The ingenious part is that this is how many Torontonians eat – choosing to “visit” different cultures through their restaurants or recipes, so such a diverse collection doesn’t seem odd at all.

Money raised from sales of A Pinch of This will go to the Alexandra Park Green Space Collective to fund a community cooking program and gardens. The book is available for purchase for $5 by calling 416-678-3439 or emailing greenspacecollective@yahoo.ca.

Image: Geanie Sarjue prepares for the launch party of A Pinch of This – Recipes From Alexandra Park in early December. Photo courtesy City of Toronto.