Sheryl Kirby

Rolling out the Roti For Caribana

The debate could go on for hours. Long into the night, likely with much ranting and arm-waving, the people of Parkdale are always willing to argue over which neighbourhood roti shop is the best. In an area where residents are alarmed if they don’t wake up to the smell of curry, preference is based predominantly on location and proximity, but the fact that each roti shop offers a different style of roti also plays into each person’s choice. Many of the ‘Dale’s roti shops are also long-standing family-owned businesses, so allegiances can run deep based on how long each customer has lived in the neighbourhood.

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The Land of Chocolate

Today I will write the post about the GD chocolate book!!!

In fact, there’s no need for cursing. The chocolate book, aka. Chocolate: A Bittersweet Saga of Dark and Light by Mort Rosenblum was a magnificent read that I thoroughly enjoyed. Which is why I felt it was so important to review it here, and why it’s remained on my desk for the past 3 months as I never seem to have the time to get around to writing a post about it. The downside to this is that I’ve forgotten much of the content of the book, with my single complaint about the publication being that there is no index of places Rosenblum visited or people he talked to or companies he profiled for me to use as a reference, either to find specific passages or simply to jog my memory.

What’s important to note is that Rosenblum lives in Paris, so much of his research is centred on European chocolatiers in France, Belgium, Switzerland and Italy, as well as much national posturing over who has the best stuff.

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The Market Basket – Nathan Phillips Square

Nathan Phillips Square Farmers Market
100 Queen Street West
Wednesdays, 8:30am – 2pm
June 4th – October 15th

I’ve got to admit that the Wednesday morning market at Nathan Phillips Square is still my favourite of all the farmers markets in the city. There is no face-painting, no snack stalls, no fun activities for the kids. Heck, usually there are no kids. And while there are “Fresh Wednesdays” concerts from noon to 1pm, it’s mostly just farmers and customers who are serious about their produce.

Most of the customers are, in fact, workers from within City Hall or the nearby office towers on Bay Street. To accommodate these customers, many of the produce vendors selling stone fruit ingeniously offer mixed baskets of seasonal items to accommodate snacking. Usually retailing for around $8, baskets can include cherries, peaches, plums and apricots, and as the season moves on, will see the addition of small sweet pears, apples and grapes.

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Remembering Sher

When I started editing the Fit Fare blog on the Well Fed Network back in February of 2006, one of the first writers we hired was a firecracker of a lady named Sherry Cermak. She had trouble figuring out the blog interface we used and would email me regularly to ask me how to upload something or to fix a technical glitch.

In between work stuff, we also started to chat about other things – food, farmers markets, cats, and squirrels. When I left Well Fed, Sher was one of the few people I kept in touch with, and still have her blog What Did You Eat? in my RSS feed. Her weekly updates about her cats, as well as the many recipes she posted, kept me well-entertained.

Last Sunday, Sher died suddenly of a heart attack. She had had a couple of health issues when we worked together – I remember some vision concerns that prompted her to ask me to do careful edits on her work because she had trouble seeing what she had been writing – but the heart attack was apparently completely unexpected.

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Sunday Brunch – The Ultimate Cafe

Ultimate Café
293 King Street West
416-977-9690
Brunch for two with all taxes, tip and coffee: $30

Ultimate is a big claim when it comes to a restaurant. Working with the definition “not to be improved upon or surpassed”, calling yourself the ultimate anything sets the standard of quality pretty darn high. Higher than most places can achieve at Sunday brunch.

The Ultimate Café wasn’t even our ultimate destination – we simply headed out in the rain to the strip of King Street West cafes known as “tourist’s row” to see what was open. Looking like the standard late-90s “Italian restaurant from a kit”, the space boasts an exposed brick wall (check), a yellow-ochre sponge-painted wall (check), some vague prints of impressionist fruit (check), and a whole lot of patterned brocade on the seats (check).

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Harvest Wednesday Dinner – July 23rd, 2008

I never manage to take decent photos of the food at the Harvest Wednesdays tasting nights, but at the actual prix fixe dinners, where the food isn’t rushing past with a hundred hands grabbing at it, the photos are a little easier to snap.

As a recap, Harvest Wednesdays is a weekly event at the Gladstone Hotel throughout the summer where Chef Marc Breton creates a four course dinner based on products from CSA farm Chick-A-Biddy Acres as well as a number of other local suppliers. The fun part is that he often doesn’t know until the day before as to what ingredients and in what quantities he’ll be working with, so the project keeps the kitchen staff on their toes.

We went last week with some friends, and here’s what we had…

Red Fife biscuits, Raisin-Walnut Bun, Epi, and Rosemary Foccacia with herb butter rosettes – didn’t get a photo of these, but they were great; I’m really digging the red fife flour that’s coming available.

Amuse Bouche (above)
Broccoli and Black River cheddar-filled ravioli with basil and toasted walnut pesto.

We all loved this, and wished there was more!

Garden Antipasto
Marinated white and orange carrots, red and candy striped beets, cauliflower and fingerling potatoes tossed with cold pressed canola oil, mixed tender herbs, heirloom radishes and cracked black pepper.

A few complaints at our table that the vinaigrette on this was too strong, but the vegetables were a really nice combination, and were all crisp and bright and tasty.

Honey-Lavender Fresh Ham Roast
Red Tamworth-Large Black Cross brined overnight, slow roasted and sliced thin

This was one of the pigs I met when I went to Chick-A-Biddy with the Gladstone staff, although Chef Marc said it wasn’t the mama pig pictured in the photos for my TasteTO post.

Broiled Leek and Tofu stuffed portobello mushroom
with a honey-sherry glaze

Our guests each had the vegetarian option, but I didn’t try this.

Mains were served with stir-fried three colour beans, shredded baby cabbage and a wedge of chickpea ‘Socca’. We all loved the socca, which was a chickpea flatbread that sort of resembled naan.

Raspberry Whip n Chill

Fresh raspberry jelly topped with raspberry streaked whipped cream served with fresh berries and a ChocoSol chocolate dipped Tuille.

Dessert was perfect – fresh, bright, not too sweet. My only complaint was that the tuiles must have been set out with the dessert early on because they had lost their sharp crispness, but I was overruled when everyone else at our table said they liked the cookie chewy.

Greg and I also had the wine pairing for the meal, although it was a bit much for me in terms of alcohol, particularly because we headed down the street to a pub for another drink afterwards.

We’ll be attending the remaining three tasting events and at least two or three more weekly dinners before the Harvest Wednesday series ends in late October. If you’re in Toronto, the tasting events are $15, and the 4-course dinners are $35 – a great deal all around.

The Food Emporium

When I was a wee thing, one of my greatest delights was stopping at the bakery counter at Simpson’s where my Mom would buy me a gingerbread man. Simpson’s was an old Canadian department store, at that time paired with Sears (old folks referred to it as “Simpson-Sears”), and then later bought out by the Hudson’s Bay Company.

The bakery and candy counter at the Simpson’s store in Halifax was right by the main doors that opened onto the city bus depot, convenient for anyone who had to switch buses to get to where they were going.

In those days, upscale department stores stocked a huge variety of sweets, particularly penny candy, and as a kid, it was a place of true wonderment. I’d clutch my gingerbread man tightly all the way home, careful not to let an arm or leg break off before I could eat him.

At some point in my early teens, Simpson’s moved to the other end of the mall, and Sears took over the space, removing the candy and bakery counter and forcing a bit of a trek for anyone who wanted a gingerbread man or a bag of Chinese Chews for the bus ride home.

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Sunday Sips – Pass the Gin

Earlier this month a note from the late Queen Mum to her assistant asking him to “pack the gin” sold at auction for $32,000 US. Dorothy Parker’s relationship with the spirit is more associated with speakeasies and bathtub stills. Originally medicinal in origin when first created in Holland in the 17th century, by the 20th century, gin was a flavourful and unique beverage consumed by sophisticated people, the most notable of them women.

During the 30 Years War, British troops took a liking to the “Dutch courage” and brought it back to Britain with them where distillers continued to sell it for medicinal purposes, and individuals made it at home, with estimates of 1/3 of all homes at the times creating their own gin, which was said to be very bad. The spirit was popular among the poor, including children, and was the cause of rampant addictions and alcoholism. King Charles 1 passed the gin act which regulated producers, created a better quality product and used surplus corn and barley grown by English farmers.

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Can I See Some ID?

Despite the fact that more and more people are finally seeing the light and are realizing that cars are stinky, obnoxious, and unnecessary within a city, we still live in a society obsessed with the personalized motor vehicle. Everyone above the age of 16 is expected to have a driver’s license, and even in situations that have absolutely nothing to do with driving, or as we encountered last night, in situations where people should absolutely be encouraged to NOT drive and leave the car at home, the almighty driver’s license still sets the standard.

We arrived at the Drinks Show and were asked for ID. Being almost 40, this was flattering, but yes, the rule. I pulled out my Nova Scotia age of majority card; Greg, his Ontario health card.

“I need to see a driver’s license,” barked the security woman.

“This is all I have,” said Greg, “I don’t have a license.” She looked at him like he had two heads. “I’m not supposed to take this.” “It’s the only photo ID I’ve got,” he replied.

Then she turned to me. “What’s this?”

“Age of majority card for Nova Scotia.” I rolled my eyes, because I’ve gone through this so many times before. I expect it in Buffalo, or San Francisco where they’re not familiar with, you know, provinces, but in Ontario, I expect someone checking ID to be at least vaguely familiar with forms of identification from other areas of the country.

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House Mouse

We moved into an apartment building totally paranoid about sharing our space with the usual suspects – that is, roaches and bed bugs. We have neither. What we do have is an ongoing gnawing inside the wall under the windowsill in our office, and the occasional sighting of small grey mice in our kitchen.

Having come from an old turn-of-the-century house, we were accustomed to mice. And roaches and one particularly bad infestation of moths. So Mr. Mouse and his family aren’t finding much to eat in my kitchen where food is always stored in containers and never left out.

Before Spook died of cancer in March, the two cats would do regular kitchen stake-outs, and would catch the occasional mouse. One night Bowie joined in and proved that dogs are actually better mousers than cats. But since then, our remaining cat Mollie hasn’t had much interest.

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