Sheryl Kirby

Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants.

I was ready to dislike Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto before I even picked it up.

While I mostly enjoyed his previous book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, I felt that he did an awfully complicated song and dance in the steakhouse chapter to try and justify eating meat. Then I read a quote from In Defense of Food by another blogger which said “Don’t eat anything your grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food”, which riled me up excessively.

My own grandmother was all about baking fresh bread, canning tomatoes and picking blueberries, but she was also of a generation that fully embraced the new convenience foods. Not to mention that until 1973, she had never lived in a house with indoor plumbing – with four sons to feed, and then a handful of grandkids, can you blame her for throwing store-bought cupcakes and frozen pizza at us? The woman had to boil her dishwater on a kerosene stove!

Turns out Pollan’s quote is actually about GREAT-Grandmothers, which makes a heck of a lot more sense. Well, unless you factor in the lack of indoor plumbing (those great grannies would likely have been all over the Twinkies too!).

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Life’s a Bowl of Cherries

Although I try to eat a mostly seasonal diet, I’ve got to admit that in the dark months of January and February, I start craving fruit. Not just apples and pears, but bright juicy summer fruits like berries. At least once every winter I break down and come home from the grocery store with a bag of cherries, just because I really, really need them, even if they’re nowhere as good as the local cherries we get in the summertime.

Given that this week is the first National Eat Red Week (February 4th – February 10th), I don’t feel so bad about indulging in some cherries. Particularly since local tart cherries are available both dried and in juice concentrate form year round – Ontario is the sole producing province of commercially-grown tart cherries, most of which are the Montmorency variety, and over the past five years, the average annual crop has been an average of 10 million pounds.

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Sunday Brunch – Sunset Grill

Sunset Grill
1 Richmond Street West (and other locations)
416-861-0514
Brunch for two with all taxes, tip and coffee: $23

People like breakfast. They want it hot, fast and familiar. They’re even willing to stand in line for it if that combination can be guaranteed.

Thus is the business plan on which the Sunset Grill is based. And it seems to be working. Starting with one all-day breakfast diner in the Beaches in 1985, this local chain has grown to 15 locations and counting. Most are known for their line-ups, especially on weekends. That’s a lot of bacon and eggs.

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Chinese New Year Banquet

We headed out in the cold last night to attend an 8-course Chinese New Year Banquet at a local seafood restaurant. Hosted by local foodie walking tour guide, Shirley Lum, the evening was both delicious and informative, as Lum explained Lunar New Year traditions and discussed various aspects of the Chinese zodiac as we ate.

Seated at a table of nine people, I must say, the evening, while festive, wasn’t especially banquet-like. Dishes didn’t come out in order, and for the $50 per person charge, we certainly didn’t leave as full as we normally might have if we had gone on our own. it was an opportunity to try many new dishes, however, and Greg even made a new friend.

Because we were at a large round table with a lazy susan in the centre, I wasn’t able to get shots of all the dishes as they arrived, but I did my best.

Each place setting had two kumquats and two candies. The candies represented the red and gold packets of money traditionally handed out at Chinese New Year, while the kumquats also represented wealth and life.

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Playing Chicken – The Chicken Out Campaign

As a huge fan of British TV, and an openly honest stealer of television shows on the Internets, I was likely one of a small number of North Americans to view the series on Britain’s Channel 4 called Hugh’s Chicken Run in which food journalist and farmer Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall tries to get his entire town of Axminster to switch from intensively-farmed (and cheap) chicken to slightly more spendy free-range chicken.

In a three-part series, HFW sets up a chicken farm in which he raises half a barn of chickens as they would be in an intensive farming operation (no poultry operation would give him permission to film on their premises, so he was forced to create his own), and the other half as free-range, with more space, access to the outdoors, toys and activities, etc. He also trolls the aisles of his local supermarket to try and convince customers to purchase the free-range birds.

This is the point where Greg and I looked at each other and went “Waitaminute!!! Whaaaa???”

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Cheers to Winter – Celebrating the Icewine Harvest with iYellow Wine Club

It’s so very easy to become a snob in this industry. Whether it’s food, wine or beer, a little bit of experience can evolve into an awful lot of ego, and makes the atmosphere at any event having to do with food, and especially wine, more than a little intimidating for newcomers. Which is no doubt why the words “wine tour” conjure up images of high-society folks with haughty expressions and snooty attitudes sipping and slurping and generally thinking very well of themselves.

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The Miracle Worker

Some random thoughts about Barbara Kingsolver’s book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life…

I think it should be a rule that books about food should be written by fiction writers as opposed to scientists or even journalists. Kingsolver is just better at describing everything, and she has the skill to make it all interesting, as opposed to dry and clinical. In terms of inspiring people to eat locally, or grow a garden, it needs to be about more than food miles or vitamins. Kingsolver makes it a spiritual quest, and I think there needs to be more emphasis on that.
However… lady sure can get preachy, which, after you’ve read a dozen or more books all espousing the eat local philosophy, sure can get annoying.
OMG – y’all discussed eating locally while on vacation in Montreal, but drove back to the US via Niagara Falls with nary a peep about Niagara wine? For shame!!!
Inspirations – to bake bread at least a couple of times a week (although not with a bread machine as Kingsolver’s husband does), learn to make my own cheese, and stock my freezer and pantry with the summer’s bounty to last throughout the winter. Join a CSA if I can figure out how to get to one to do my required work time given that I don’t drive.

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This is Where the Magic Happens

My dogs always know when the pizza guy is coming. They go crazy when the door buzzer rings and run around the house in a frenzy. Pizza is their favourite food and they believe it is their dog-given right to the uneaten crusts. They are less happy when the pizza comes from Magic Oven, though, since their share of the crust is minimal indeed. I love my dogs, but when I’m having a healthy pizza with organic ingredients, my pups are outta luck because I’m eating the whole thing.

Which is to say, this ain’t your average pizza.

The concept behind Magic Oven’s gourmet pizza was developed when owners Tony and Abby Sabherwal took a trip to California and visited over 100 pizza restaurants in 16 days. They were enthralled with the use of fresh, high-end ingredients and were determined to recreate the delicious pizzas they had tried in Carmel By the Sea back in Toronto. Continue reading “This is Where the Magic Happens”

If the Shoe Fits

I’m having feet issues. A combination of genetics and decades of bad shoe choices have escalated into a diagnosis of flat feet and a need for orthotics.

Now, the word orthotics, in theory, should no longer strike fear in the hearts of people fated to wear the things. It used to be that foot problems meant orthopedic shoes, which were huge and lumpen and deformed, and were really not attractive. These days, those with foot problems fork over big cash for orthotic inserts that are not dissimilar to a plain old insole, except that they’re custom-made to fit your feet, have a whole lot more support along the arch and cost four or five hundred bucks.

Orthotic inserts were meant to solve the problem of ugly shoes, as they fit into most decently-made shoes, and no one would ever know you had uneven legs or were knock-kneed. Friends with orthotics have confirmed that they wear theirs in everything from Doc Martens to Fluevogs, just so long as the shoe has a removable footbed, decent heel support and a high level of shock absorption.

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Mr. Sandman, Bring Me a Dream

I seldom sit at the front of the bus or streetcar. Part of it may still stem from a rebellious youth where the cool kids all gravitated to the back of the bus, although it’s likely more from an innate politeness, since the front seats are generally meant to be reserved or given up to elderly or infirm passengers.

So it was an atypical decision the other day when I got on the streetcar and took the seat two spots behind the driver. I looked down and there was sand all over the floor.

While Torontonians are devoted to their Red Rocket, the things are not particularly modern in design. To create extra traction for the brakes, each vehicle distributes sand onto the tracks as it drives along. The sand is located in a large box underneath the seat directly behind the driver. It is kept in large storage boxes at the turning loops at the ends of the line, where the driver scoops up a bucket of sand, then brings it onboard and lifts up the seat to dump it into the holder. The driver has a lever that will open the sand container from the bottom, allowing them to distribute the sand in small quantities, not dump huge mountains of it in the middle of the road.

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