Sheryl Kirby

It’s Hip to Be Square

Art Square Café
334 Dundas Street West
416-595-5222
brunch for two with all taxes, tip and coffee: $33

I have a thing for tiny little tucked away cafés. They’re the kind of place I’d open if I ever became a restaurateur; someplace cute and cozy with great food and no pretension. The only problem with cute little tucked away cafés is that it’s hard for people to find them. Hidden behind a bright gallery space, Art Square Café likely gets overlooked more than it should.

We arrive for brunch on a Sunday morning to find only about half of the dozen or so tables occupied. Of the customers, all are students frantically studying for the last of their mid-terms.Every occupied table holds at least one open laptop amidst cups of coffee and plates of crepes in various stages of consumption.

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Berry, Berry Good

It’s October 24th and I ate local strawberries for breakfast this morning. This is crazy.

There are a few farmers who grow a variety of strawberry that is ever-bearing. That is, the plants produce fruit continuously from June until the first frost. Usually that first frost comes in early October, but this year, October has set record high temperatures, with days in the mid to high 20s. Thanksgiving hit 32′C, with a humidex of 40′C. This is good strawberry weather.

I happened across this box at one of the fruit vendors at St. Lawrence Market yesterday. I stopped to buy a fresh fig and ignored the berries, figuring they were from California. Then I noticed the sign that said they were Ontario strawberries, and despite my mostly frugal ways (priced at $4.99, they were considerably more than the $3 to $3.50 I had been paying at the Farmer’s Markets all summer) I figured they would be the last berries I’d get until June, so I splurged.

Usually the ever-bearing berries tend to lose their flavour by the fall. They’re still better that the hard woody imported strawberries from the supermarket, but they’re just not as sweet as the first crop of the summer. These, however, taste like June berries. The warm weather and a decent amount of rain has made them plump and gorgeous and sweet.

We ate them with a vanilla-infused rice pudding sprinkled with grated chocolate. It was the perfect way to celebrate the last strawberries of the year.

There’s No More Room on the Bandwagon

Okay, so I’m flipping through one of the happy housewife magazines that I subscribe to, eating lunch and not really paying attention to what I’m reading ($160 is too much to pay for a hot trend item that looks good on exactly nobody and will be out of style in 6 months) when I come across an ad that makes me choke on my soup.

The eeeeevilest of evil corporations has gone organic.

Sweet motherfucking hell.

Currently Kraft is only offering crackers, salad dressing and coffee in organic form, but you can bet your sweet patootie that there’s more to come.

Although organic products have recently gained an increase in recognition, organic practices are deeply rooted in traditional agricultural methods. Organic farming practices employ a variety of ecologically stable methods to help sustain a healthy environment. Composting, recycling and crop rotations are just some of the holistic practices farmers utilize to ensure a sustainable land, where crops are grown with natural fertilizers such as manure and without the use of synthetic pesticides. Animals raised on organic farms have access to pasture and open air runs to foster their health and natural behaviour, and are raised without the use of growth hormones.

Kraft organic products are created with carefully selected organically grown ingredients, and their organic qualities are maintained at all stages of production. Organic foods are minimally processed and contain no artificial preservatives or genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

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Delight in the Junction

Delight
3040 Dundas Street West
416-760-9995

I shed a little tear the day in 2003 when Citron closed down. The Queen Street restaurant was one of my favourites and I think of it fondly still. A couple of years later, a friend who happened to also be good friends with the folks who had owned the place showed up at my house for dinner bearing a box of chocolates. The gorgeous treats were the work of none other than former Citron pastry chef and co-owner Jennifer Rashleigh. She had created a business called Delight and was making beautiful chocolates and selling them wholesale.

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The Final Harvest Feast

Autumn is undoubtedly my favourite season. It smells fantastic, the air is crisp, you sweat a whole lot less, and in terms of food, there is such a huge variety on offer. It also means the end of the harvest season, though, and I get how some people can find it a bit sad. Things are dying off, the summer is done, and it will be many long months before we can bite into a freshly picked strawberry or tomato again.

Which is why I was so excited to receive the email about one last Harvest Wednesday event at the Gladstone Hotel. Scheduling conflicts made this one a Harvest Monday, but that didn’t matter – the opportunity to sit with friends and enjoy one final meal from the CSA and Chef Breton’s kitchen was worth potentially missing Heroes (we didn’t).

Throughout the summer we enjoyed the rotating events of Harvest Wednesdays, from the cocktail-style finger food nights, to the grand buffets to the family-style passed dishes, with the bright summer sun streaming through the south-west facing windows. This final dinner definitely reminded us it was fall, for it was dark when we arrived and even darker when we left. My photos of the various dishes turned out to dark to use, even with some Photo-Shop tweaking, and I must admit that I forgot to photograph the hot dishes completely. I was too busy eating. Instead, here’s the menu with commentary.

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The Women’s Culinary Network – A Kinder, Gentler Approach to the Kitchen

There’s an old saying that goes “If women ruled the world, there would be no war.” Now I don’t actually believe this for a second, and despite my dislike of Bush and Cheney, I honestly believe they are the “softening factor” that is keeping Condoleeza Rice from turning the Middle East and North Korea into a literal dead zone. And we can all come up with examples of really scary women who really shouldn’t be running anything coughAnnCoultercough because their world view is just the teensiest bit warped.

But in general, women are likely to be more nurturing and empathetic than aggressive. In the realm of the restaurant industry, particularly the more mainstream businesses, being a woman in a kitchen can be pretty tough. There’s generally a lot of cursing, a lot of testosterone, and in some places, cheese throwing. And that’s when service is at its busiest. Downtime can quickly devolve to an adolescent level, which can be even worse.

A partial solution to the concerns that women in the food industry might have is the Women’s Culinary Network. Created in 1990 by four female chefs who found themselves working together in a small kitchen, the Network aims to create a place where female culinary professionals can get together to share experiences and define a supportive work environment.

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Alice in Wonderland

I once worked for a woman who was a whirlwind. Driven, creative, incredibly knowledgeable in her field, kind as can be, she nevertheless drove me and every other person who worked for her right around the bend. She was one of those folks who took on more and more work, spreading herself too thin, ignoring her family and friends. More importantly, she would swoop in, critiquing things that that we thought were fine, rearranging things that didn’t need rearranging, and generally leaving a path of chaos and destruction in her wake. She once pulled me from the sales floor on an excruciatingly busy afternoon so I could do her personal mending, leaving an inexperienced clerk to deal with a Saturday afternoon crowd, and prohibiting me from supplementing my pay with the commission I’d have made on the stuff I’d have sold had I not been hemming her skirt.

This is the impression I have of Alice Waters.

From its humble beginnings, Chez Panisse has been Alice Waters’ restaurant, but by impression only. She has never been the sole owner, and is in fact, one person on a board of directors. She has never been the main chef, although she would fill in when the place was between regular chefs, and she has always had full creative control of the menu. She has never been the manager of the place, leaving that task to a string of people, including her father, who were all faced with the task of forcing a bunch of flaky hippies to adhere to basic accounting systems. Which can’t help but provoke the question – what exactly is it that Alice Waters does at Chez Panisse?

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Chipping Away at Flavour

Earlier today at brunch, Greg and I were discussing Stella McCartney’s spring line in which she has purportedly brought back the drop-crotch pants of the 80s. No, not those “MC Hammer” pants… that was a the death of a style. I’m think more Visage-era New Romantic drop-crotch pants. In any case, we joked that it would be funny if we had a teenage daughter, because, come spring, we could go to Le Chateau and relive our new wave youth by buying drop-crotch pants, just like we did 20 years ago, only with matching pants for the kid.

What has this got to do with chips? Well, it also made us think that we are now… “of a certain age”, whereby revealing our familiarity with an item from the first time around would date us specifically to a certain time in history.

Again… chips? Well, if I said, hey, remember that one summer when they came out with fruit-flavoured chips? Because anyone who remembers those chips remembers EXACTLY the time and place when they first had them. For me, it was at a peewee baseball game in the field on the next street over and my friend Carol Stewart had a bag of grape-flavoured ones. They came in grape, cherry and if I recall correctly, orange, and tasted like someone had dipped the chips in sweetened Kool-Aid powder. Disgusting doesn’t begin to explain it.

So why am I on about fruit-flavoured chips? Because I have some. In my house.

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Get Stuffed

A block away, there is a mattress and box spring sitting out at the curb to be taken away. They are in front of a tiny little rowhouse cottage built in the 1880s, and probably by necessity, the box spring has been sawed in half, revealing the inner stuffing.

This fabric pulp is mostly grey, but is dotted with various splashes of colour. On further examination, the colour becomes actual chunks of fabric; a teal blue silk, some red wool, a swatch of green jersey.

I examine that fabric pulp almost every time I pass it, which is two or three times a day, depending on which route we take to walk the dogs. And every time, I can’t help but wonder what masterpieces were destroyed to make that melange of threads and fibre.

When I ran a vintage clothing store, back in the 80s, one of the questions I was asked most often was – where do you get your stuff? Where do these clothes come from? This was usually asked by someone figuring they could go directly to the source and cut us out as the middleman. The assumption being that we spent a lot of time at the Sally Anne or Goodwill.

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The Official Dinner

Living just a couple of blocks from both the Gladstone and the Drake hotels, it’s not uncommon for me to be strolling along Queen Street West and come across something that sets my eyes rolling back into my head in annoyance. More and more often, my neighbourhood is too damned pretentious for its own good.

So it was an ominous feeling in the bottom of my gut as Greg and I headed to the Drake hotel on Wednesday night and a block away we could hear bagpipes. As we approached, we could see that the sidewalk was blocked with a carpet and red velvet ropes. In the curb lane in front of the entrance were two Royal Mounted Police officers in the full dress uniform worn when presented to royalty (black serge and pith helmets as opposed to the traditional red serge and stetson), atop two gorgeous horses.

We stood on the sidewalk; confused, embarrassed and guiltily gleeful. If those officers and bagpiper weren’t actually there for us, I’d have growled about how pretentious the neighbourhood is getting. But all I could actually do was give the horses a scratch on the nose, and smile self-consciously as the piper piped us in to the Official Dinner.

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