Sheryl Kirby

The Gingerbread Village

Mad Batter Bakers
133 Jefferson Avenue
416-516-4759

People strolling through Liberty Village can often be seen stopping mid-stride, lifting their noses to the air and taking in huge whiffs of the spicy gingerbread smell that fills the air here. It’s not the smell of bread from the nearby Canada Bread factory but the sweet fragrance of gingerbread and sugar cookies from the Mad Batter Bakers on Jefferson Avenue.

Tucked away along a strip of restaurants, Leona Knaup and Mary Young’s bakery can turn out roughly 3000 fully decorated gingerbread and sugar cookies every day during the peak season. And with gingerbread as a specialty, peak season is now, in the last few weeks leading up to the Christmas holidays.

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Sunday Brunch – Cluck, Grunt & Low

Cluck, Grunt and Low
362 Bloor Street West
416-962-5050
Buffet brunch for two with all taxes, tip and coffee: $40

Despite the fact that I write restaurant reviews for a living, I’m never terribly comfortable giving out personal recommendations of places to go, for fear of ruining a special event for someone by sending them to a place they hate. Which is why I never ask for personal recommendations from other people, and don’t take unsolicited ones with much seriousness. And is also why I tend to take the comments on certain online food discussion forums with a big rock of salt – because I have no way of knowing that person’s background, experience or palate in comparison to my own. So when a heated debate started recently on said food forum about the brunch at Cluck, Grunt and Low, I figured it was easier to just check the place out for myself.

The person taking the negative point of view in the above-mentioned debate complained about the lack of Cluck, Grunt and Low’s traditional dinner fare on their all-you-can-eat buffet. But it’s advertised as southern breakfast, and for the jaw-droppingly low price of $12.95, it’s primarily breakfast foods on offer. I wouldn’t expect ribs and fried chicken for that price. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t fabulous.

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Why I’ll Never Be a Real Insider

I understand that, for a business, marketing plays a key role in achieving success. It’s fine to make a product or write something or make a piece of music, but unless people know about it, you tend not to sell much. I also understand that most advertising, as its basest level, is about manipulation – make people want what you have. Make them believe they can’t live without it. And it used to be that advertising was pretty straightforward – run an ad in a magazine or on TV, or maybe a big billboard. Free samples, gift with purchase and other programs that made consumers feel as if they were getting something extra also worked well.

Since the Intarwebs became popular, marketing has kind of been thrown on its head. And while it may take longer than hitting a million viewers all at once with a TV ad, viral marketing directed at “community influencers” is becoming more and more popular. Recommendations from people in “the community”, under the guise of friendship, trust and camaraderie, pull more weight than an ad in a magazine, which can seem insincere.

Bloggers are a key target area for viral marketing campaigns. Sending a promotional product or book to a blogger with high site hits is a cheap and easy way for marketers to have the (usually positive) word spread about whatever it is they’re trying to sell. Marketers depend on the blogger to be naive about the marketing machine; to be flattered, and have feelings of obligation, and in turn write a glowing review of the freebie. Since getting free stuff is fun, most bloggers know better than to rock the boat by writing a negative review, or if they do share their true feelings on a product, it’s usually tempered with political correctness and apologies for not liking it.

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A Goth’s Christmas Story

Yes, that is exactly what it looks like. A black and silver Christmas tree – one of two types available at Honest Ed’s in Toronto. This one, at 7 feet and $99, is the nicer of the two, but even the 5 foot version at $59.99 was pretty cute (no twigs or pine cones on the smaller one). There was a time when I’d have killed for this puppy. Even now, years after my Goth phase has passed, I stood in the store going “Eeeeee!!!!” and fondling the silver-tipped branches.

It would be either a joy or a complete pain in the ass to decorate – finding lights on a black wire would be near impossible unless you shelled out the big bucks and bought them from a window-display place like Visualizer.

But imagine the tree decorated in silver, red and purple, with all the little Goths gathered around it on Christmas morning, hoping that Sandy Claws had left them a Sisters of Mercy CD, or a pair of bondage pants, or a new cape, or maybe a gift certificate to one of those fancy dentistry clinics where they give you fangs… it would be the best Christmas EVAH!

The Incredible Edible Royal Winter Fair

Once again, it’s time for the country to come to the city. The Royal Agricultural Winter Fair is in town until November 16th. Now in its 86th year, the Royal is the largest combined indoor agricultural fair and international equestrian competition in the world, and sees over 300,000 people come through its doors each November.

And since the majority of agriculture is food-related, the fair is a great place for foodies to check out new local products, admire prize-winning produce, and see up close the chickens, pigs, cows and sheep that will eventually end up on their dinner tables.

Here are some not-to-miss high-lights: Continue reading “The Incredible Edible Royal Winter Fair”

Sunday Brunch – Bier Markt King West

Bier Markt King West
600 King Street West
416-862 1175
Brunch for two with all taxes, tip and coffee: $46

Our plan on arriving at the King West Bier Market location was obviously to have a breakfast of champions and drink beer with our bacon and eggs. Unfavourably cold weather thwarted that plan and we entered the basement brassiere shivering, trying to form the word “coffee” through chattering teeth.

The neighbourhood of condo towers has not yet discovered that the Bier Markt is offering brunch and the Sunday morning no-man’s land of King West was relatively still and quiet, as was the restaurant as we sat down. A weak bit of November sunshine trickled in through a front window, but the space remains a dark but welcoming grotto with stone walls and marble tables.

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Inspired By Italy, Made in Toronto

As we revel in the seasonal autumn produce of Ontario, it’s easy to forget that it’s harvest time in other parts of the world as well.In Italy, they’re enjoying tomatoes, root vegetables and cabbage just as we are, but there’s also the addition of fragrant truffles, plump buffala mozzarella, chestnuts, seasonal fish and game meats on the plate.

To celebrate the delights of the autumn season, the Italian Trade Commission and twenty-one Italian restaurants in the Toronto area are putting together special tasting menus that highlight the very best of fall in Italy as part of the Autunno Italian Seasons Festival.

From November 7th to 22nd, participating restaurants will be offering up special dishes and selections from their own menus that exemplify the best of Italian regional cooking. We had the opportunity to visit two of the participating restaurants recently for a preview of their festival menus.

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Cooking the Books

localflavourwastenotwantnot — Waste not, want not: Toronto Public Library (TRL)

In an era when restaurants and food shops come and go, it’s difficult to remember food trends from even a couple of years ago, let alone decades or centuries. But everybody eats – preferably three times a day – and over the years, the changes that have taken place in terms of food in Toronto are vast.

Until January 11th, 2009, the Toronto Reference Library (TRL) is offering a peek into the history of food in Toronto through an exhibit in their gallery space called Local Flavour: Eating in Toronto, 1830-1955.

Curated by librarian Sheila Carleton of the Special Collections, Genealogy & Maps Centre, the idea for the exhibit came about because of the opportunity to restore some historical cookbooks in the TRL’s collection. “In 2006, the Toronto Reference Library was invited to apply for a grant from the Culinary Trust for restoration of up to 4 historical cookbooks in our collection,” explains Carleton. “Our application was accepted and two local conservators were commissioned to carry out the work. As it is an honour to be invited to apply for the grant, we thought that the public would be interested in seeing these and other cookbooks in our collection.”

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Gardens and Jealousy – Both Green

Most readers may not be familiar with the rapier pen of one A A Gill, a restaurant and television critic for the UK Times. Gill has recently had it in for the various UK chefs working to promote healthy, local, seasonal eating in Britain, and appears to take special exception to food journalist-turned-farmer Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. Hugh F-W runs a farm, shop and restaurant operation called River Cottage in the Dorset area, and currently has a series on the air in the UK called River Cottage Autumn, in which he delves into the seasonal delights of local UK food, from the garden harvest, to fish in season to the fine art of foraging.

Gill reviews an episode of River Cottage Autumn in a recent television column, ostensibly killing two birds with one stone. But he’s not especially nice – to Hugh F-W, or to the millions of people who happen to revel in the joy of a home-grown tomato.

Why should poor, fearful folk have to put up with a bucketful of organic new-age anxiety to go with the anxiety their imperfect lives manufacture all on their own, especially when it’s created by a home-made television presenter in a Beatrix Potter set? The idea that ideal people should strive to live like 18th-century crofters is intellectual silage. The enthusiasm may be charming, but this fetishising of food is part of the problem, not the solution. Shirley Conran once said that life was too short to stuff a mushroom. She was wrong. But you’d have to live an awfully long time to make making your own baked beans on toast worthwhile. Self-sufficiency is not an admirable goal, it’s small-minded, selfish, mean, mistrustful and ultimately fascist. It ends up with people waving shotguns at strangers over their garden gates. We live in a complex, mutually reliant society, and the answer to our problems is not each to his own cabbage patch.

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Where Can I Find – Kitchen Scale

A friend contacted me recently looking for advice on where to find a kitchen scale. He was making beer and needed to measure various ingredients by weight.

The average home cook doesn’t really need a scale unless they’re working with dishes that need precise measurements or do a lot of baking. In chef’s school, we measured all baking ingredients by weight instead of the Imperial “cups” system to help ensure a level of quality control on our finished products. In countries that have fully adapted to the metric system, all recipe ingredients are measured in grams, so a kitchen scale might also be useful for people who cook from any UK cookbooks.

The other and more popular use for a home kitchen scale is for health and nutrition purposes – to measure out exact amounts of foods to help in following a specific diet.

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