Sheryl Kirby

Duck, Duck, Goose

I’ve mentioned before that I’m not a big fan of foie gras. Part of my job requires that I generally eat what is put in front of me, and I’ll eat the stuff if I have to, but it’s never something that I’ll make an effort to search out.

Despite having an opinion on just about everything else, I actually have no opinion on the issues surrounding foie gras production. On the one hand, it seems weird and cruel, but on the other, those duckies sure do come running at dinnertime. I figure it can’t be any worse than the conditions that most of the western world’s meat is produced in, so any issue I have with fois gras would be more to do with farms that are more of a factory setting instead of a happy organic free-range kind of place.

Peta has recently issued a challenge to chefs to come up with a “faux gras” product, offering a $10,000 prize to the recipe that most closely resembles the real thing. Now sure, it’s Peta, and they can’t let it go without getting in a few jabs, calling foie gras the “delicacy of despair”, but the reaction to the contest has been just as childish.

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New Year’s Resolution – Find a Better Word Than Foodie

How To Be A Better Foodie
Sudi Pigott
Quadrille Publishing Limited, 2006, 304 pages

I hate the word “foodie”. I use it, but only grudgingly, because there’s really nothing that fits better. “Gourmand” and “epicurean” are too pretentious; “food lover” just sounds weird, and everything else is awkward. But I find the term simplistic and twee. After all, who isn’t a foodie these days? Everyone loves to eat – with the exception of that small percentage of the population who consider food to be fuel and eat to stay alive – so anyone who eats and enjoys the process is a foodie by default.

So I’m not sure why I picked up and purchased How To Be a Better Foodie by UK food writer Sudi Pigott. Probably the fact that is was $10 helped, because I was pretty sure the book would annoy me. And I was right.

There are lessons to be had from How To Be a Better Foodie, although few of them are specifically about food. The first one is – the times, they are a changin’ – which means a book written in 2006 at the height of the pre-economic meltdown consumer frenzy (especially in the UK) often doesn’t translate well to a recession three years later when, even if you can still afford it, custom-made Poilâne bread flown in from Paris probably looks pretty gauche, and foodie tourism to various dining meccas are out of reach for all but the wealthiest of eaters.

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Where Can I Find – Live Lobster

One of the big holiday food traditions in our house is a feed of lobster on Christmas Eve. We don’t get fancy – we just cover the table with newspaper and boil up the tasty crustaceans and serve them with melted butter and some potato salad.

While the season has ended in a number of places until spring, inshore lobster fishing is still taking place in southern Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. Lobster fishing is always legal offshore, although purists prefer lobsters sourced closer to land, which means there is still lobster to be had – inexpensively.

Economic woes, particularly in the US, have adversely affected the Atlantic lobster fishery, both in the US and Canada. This means a decent retail price for consumers (normally about $14.99 a pound, lobster prices over the holidays dropped as low as $6.99 per pound in Toronto), but not such a great deal for lobster fishers who have the same costs to cover even though their profit is less. In Halifax this past December, lobster fishers were being offered a wholesale rate of $3 per pound and many boycotted sales to mainstream stores in favour of that traditional Nova Scotian sales method – setting up by the side of the road and selling the things out of the back of a truck. This at least allowed the fishers to charge a still inexpensive $5 per pound and to recoup their operating costs and turn a small profit.

This is not a practical option for selling lobster in Toronto, however, and we have no choice but to hand some money over to the middlemen and buy our lobster at an actual store, but with prices like these, it’s an opportunity that might not come along again for some time.

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the Intimidating Mustard

I am intimidated by a jar of mustard.

It’s no secret that I love good food and that I love trying new products. But I’m also a bit of a tightwad, and I’m all about value for money, even before we came into “tough economic times”.

When Greg and I were at the Gourmet Food and Wine Festival in November, we got separated at one point and I eventually found my husband in front of a booth called Made in France. He was sampling products and as I approached, turned around and pointed a mustard-laden pretzel stick in my direction. “Try this! It’s got truffles!!” he exclaimed.

Indeed, it was one truffly mustard, and it made me swoon.

The other mustards on display had prices on the jar. $6 each. That’s a bit of money for mustard, but they were all good, so we asked for a jar of the stuff with truffles and the nice man wrapped it up and bagged it and handed it to me before saying, “That will be $18, please.” The sharp intake of breath from both of us made a startling noise. But once we had our wits about us, we had to make a decision, and fast.

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What Shall We Do With a Drunken Sailor

I can’t believe I didn’t think to put the two together before. Baked beans are a traditional down east dish that I ate regularly as a kid, and still make a couple of times a year. Served up with real brown bread (bread made with molasses, not whole wheat bread), this is a perfect dish on a cold Saturday night in the winter. Also traditional on a cold winter’s night is a glass of rum, and the flavours here combine really well. I was a little heavy-handed with the rum in my test batch, thus the restrained 2 tablespoons in the ingredients list, but rum lovers can add up to a quarter of a cup. Just be warned that not all the alcohol burns off, so these beans have a bit of a kick to them.

I used Sailor Jerry spiced rum because I have seekrit aspirations to be a hipster, but mostly because that’s what I had on hand. But any decently flavoured spiced rum would do.

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Number 5

I haven’t worn perfume for years. Nothing scented really, if I can help it, unless it’s of the all-natural essential oil variety. Allergies and chemical sensitivity see to it that pretty much anything with fragrance gives me a splitting headache.

I don’t mind this especially, as I think most people who wear scent wear far too much of it, but there are a few perfumes that I love and would love to be able to wear again.

At the top of this list would be Chanel No° 5.

I wore Chanel when I first moved to Toronto in the late 80s. Chanel was huge in the club scene then and the perfume was the closest I was ever going to get to a suit or a bag. It was a glamorous scent, not overwhelming, pretty but also mysterious.

I went through perfume phases and had a few favourites after I abandoned Chanel up until I had to stop wearing all fragrances or risk making myself sick. I hadn’t thought about that lovely square-cut bottle for years.

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Haute-Canadian Cuisine at Thirty Five Elm

Thirty Five Elm Restaurant
35 Elm Street
416-598-1766

The stretch of Yonge Street north of Dundas is an odd mix of family dining establishments, peppered with pizza and falafel joints. Turn the corner onto Elm Street and the restaurants are slightly more upscale, but predominantly Italian. And while Barbarian’s Steak House is a long-standing fixture on the block, most people wouldn’t know there’s a little gem of a space serving upscale seasonal and local cuisine just down the street.

Thirty-Five Elm fills the space on two floors of a 140-year-old Victorian mansion. The layout is mostly intact from the building’s original floor plan with a wide hall and massive staircase along with high-ceilinged rooms. The bar sits nestled in the front bay window with additional seating where a porch might have once existed. Through the dining room, guests can catch a glimpse of the pizza oven that was installed when the location was an Il Fornello franchise a few years back. Originally owned by Weir Ross of Barbarian’s fame, the restaurant is now run by his son, Chris, who wanted to turn it into something fun and cool.

That oven is both a blessing and a curse to Executive Chef Andrea Nicholson, who inherited not only the oven but a demand for Italian food from the restaurant’s clientèle, and who is trying to find a balance between the type of food that sells along this stretch and her fine dining background.

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Do Coincidences Travel in Packs of Three?

There’s a book called The Celestine Prophecy, a novel based on some new age spirituality, mostly rooted in some old spirituality. This post is not about that book, which has a number of detractors, as well as a number of fans, although having read the book, it’s what I tend to think of when coincidences occur.

Basically the premise of the book is based on 9 spiritual insights. The Third Insight – A Matter of Energy – is based on the theory that there are no coincidences, that things or people come to us because of a draw of energy, and the more times a theme occurs, the more attention, or energy, we need to focus on it.

No doubt every person has had the experience where something will come up in conversation, and then a day or so later, it will come up again. The phrase “speak of the devil” works on the same premise – you can be having a conversation about someone and then they’ll unexpectedly appear. These things happen all the time, but when they start happening in groupings, then it begins to get a little weird.

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The Gold Ribbon

While I love the concept of public transportation, and use it regularly, there are times when it’s not all its cracked up to be – like rush hour.

Working from home, I seldom experience the crush of people jammed onto a bus or subway car, and given that I’m subject to the occasional panic attack when I find myself in a crowded place and unable to easily get out, that’s probably a good thing.

Last Monday, I had to go uptown at evening rush hour. The streetcar ride was fine, and I managed a seat on the subway, but within a few stopped people were crammed in with no room to move. Directly in front of me were a pair of girls and a guy, talking about music and friends and school as young people do.

The one girl closest to me was a wearing a hounds tooth wool coat. Near the hem were a couple of threads and some lint, which I thought was odd, but not unusual. However when she shifted position, her left elbow ended up very close to my face and I was confronted with a piece of gold ribbon that was stuck to her sleeve.

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Sunday Brunch – School Bakery and Café

School Bakery and Café
75 Fraser Street
416-588-0005
Brunch for two with all taxes, tip and coffee: $40

A good tip for restaurant reviewers who don’t want to get “made” is generally to try to sneak in under the radar when visiting a restaurant and not make yourself too obvious. But just as the husband and I were both keeners back in our regular school days, we are keeners when it comes to running this site, and in checking out new places. Which is how we managed to be the very first customers through the door at School Bakery and Café when they opened last Sunday for brunch. And not only did we arrive to an empty restaurant, but Chef Brad Moore was there to shake our hands and the staff gave us a round of applause. Talk about being the teacher’s pets.

Moore and partner Sean D’Andrade have taken the old Warehouse Grill location on Fraser Avenue and transformed it into a really fun space full of thoughtful touches that could have verged on being twee, but mostly elicit exclamations of “Oh, cool!” Every detail has been thought out; a wall of clocks are all set to 3:30pm; menus arrive on lined paper attached to a clipboard; apples grace every table and are replaced with apple-shaped candles in the evening; salt and pepper shakers are shaped like blocks; chairs and banquettes are covered in a silk-screened fabric that looks like writing and diagrams on a blackboard; and stools along the counter are straight out of science lab.

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