Sheryl Kirby

Blueberry Grunt

The Grunt is a traditional Acadian dish, made originally by French settlers in a stew pot over an open hearth. The name “Grunt” comes from the burbling sound of the stewed blueberries as they boil. Note that the dumplings will get soft and fluffy, but as they are steamed, will not brown. If you want browned pastry, make a cobbler in the oven, but call it a cobbler, and not a grunt. There’s nothing more disappointing that sitting down to an order of Blueberry Grunt at a restaurant only to discover that someone has baked the thing. And don’t let me catch any of you using canned blueberry pie filling in this recipe, as I’ve seen suggested out there on the Intarweb. Fresh or frozen blueberries only!

Every family in Atlantic Canada has their own blueberry grunt recipe, which is really pretty much just blueberries, sugar and water with sweet dumplings. This recipe comes from Traditional Recipes of Atlantic Canada, which I believe my father collected for me, section by section, from the local gas station, back when gas stations still sold promotional collectibles.

The cinnamon and lemon zest are my additions to jazz up the flavour. The Grunt is meant to be a dessert, but we eat it mostly for breakfast.

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Getting Real About Cereal

I’m sure they must be terribly alluring. Those colorful bins of sweetened treats, the cute workers in their pyjamas to ring up your order. Even the sneaking knowledge that you’re getting away with something, by ordering up a bowl of your favourite childhood breakfast cereal instead of something more, well… grown up.

But here’s the deal. Cereal companies are corporations. They have a duty to their stockholders to expand their market share every quarter. Which means cereal companies have to come up with new and innovative ways to get all of us to eat more cereal. In recent years, someone clued in to the fact that cereal is comfort food for many people, and started marketing it as a tasty snack designed to replace the chips, pretzels and ice cream we used to eat.

Sounds great, doesn’t it? After all, cereal is good for you.

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Food Flicks

We spent Saturday in the darkened confines of Innis Town Hall, a theatre on the U of T campus, watching films from the Planet in Focus film fest. It was a very foodie day with very foodie films.

The morning started off with the organic pancake breakfast prepared by Real Food for Real Kids. For $10 you got two hemp pancakes with organic maple syrup, organic green salad with organic brie, fresh fruit, breads made from the ovens at Dufferin Grove Park, plus a selection of organic jams and hemp spreads. And of course organic fair trade coffee and Happy Planet juice. The price included a free travel coffee mug, and the juices retail for $1.99 each, so it was not only delicious, but a really good deal.

A Fallen Maple
The first film was called A Fallen Maple and looked at one family’s issue with lead content in the maple syrup produced on their farm. Turns out, while the maple syrup industry is highly regulated in Quebec and Vermont, in Ontario, this is not the case, and small family producers using older equipment often have problems with lead in their syrup. The only solution is to replace the entire production system, which, for this family, would have cost in excess of $100,000. The kicker is that the woman running the farm, one of the few women maple syrup producers in Ontario, had voluntarily agree to test the province’s “Best Practices” system, only to discover that they actually caused higher levels of lead in her syrup than she would have had otherwise. The maple syrup production, which had been in the family for generations, had to be shut down because they couldn’t afford to upgrade the equipment.

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What’s That Smell?

Followers of the ol’ Save Your Fork journal will remember that I recently discovered I can eat small quantities of cheese again after suffering from dairy allergies for years. This has led to more and more experimentation in terms of trying new cheeses. We always come home with the favourites; the Mimolette, the Brie de Meaux; but we’ve also started trying new stuff. During a recent trip to St. Lawrence Market, we stumbled upon a whole display of artisinal Canadian cheeses, mostly from Quebec, but also from New Brunswick and even Manitoba. The problem with the market though, is there are so many smells, it’s often hard to zero in one one. And the cheese was too cold, so you couldn’t really get a good nose on it.

After we got everything home, there were a few cheeses that were a little more “feety” than we had anticipated. Double-wrapping the stuff didn’t put a dent in the stink. Finally we broke down and put it all in a Tupperware container. And then, a few days later, when I could take no more, I sent off Greg to Beer Geek night with the smelliest of the lot.

Which is why I couldn’t, for the life of me, figure out why my kitchen stunk like something had died in there. I mean, I literally pulled out the fridge and stove, thinking some food had gotten under there, or maybe a mouse, even though mice in a concrete apartment building seems improbable. I wrapped up the big bag of dogfood, thinking that was the source. I scrubbed down the cupboard where the garbage resides, I took apart the burners of the stove.

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Salad Days

People should not throw wedding receptions on Daylight Saving Time switch overs. Or at least not the day after. We went to a wedding reception last night and stayed out far too late and drank far too much. There were drink tickets and the G&T’s were being made with premium gin and an 8 to 1 ratio of G to T. There was much dancing and eating of cake and sushi, not to mention the spitting out of little tiny quiche upon the discovery of the bacon contained therein.

This morning, after little sleep, combined with too much booze and too much dancing (there’s nothing like a gay wedding for good tunes on the dancefloor), I’m feeling a bit rough around the edges.

Ever since I can remember, a hangover demands a salad. My body just wants something fresh and crisp and cold. I have the makings of an excellent salad in the kitchen, of course, but moving from a reclining to a standing position causes me to emit loud “Urrrnnnnggghhh!” noises reminiscent of Lurch from the Addams family.

The quick lunch choices in our immediate vicinity are few. Two burger joints, two sub places and a roti place which, while I typically adore the roti place, didn’t sit well in my brain today.

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I’m Not Fat, I’m Festively Plump

Denial – not just a river in Egypt.

A recent study of obese adults indicated that 75% of them claim to have healthy eating habits, while 40% claim to exercise vigorously 3 or more times a week. Doctors are not sure whether the study participants are in denial, or if they simply don’t know what constitutes a “healthy diet” or “vigorous exercise”.

“There is, perhaps, some denial going on. Or there is a lack of understanding of what does it mean to be eating healthy and what is vigorous exercise,” said Dr. David Schutt of Thomson Medstat, the Michigan-based health-care research firm that conducted the survey.

The survey found that 28% of obese participants ate two or more snacks per day, compared with 24% of the normal-weight participants, but no records were kept of exactly what any of the participants were eating, or how much.

“In my experience,” explains consumer health advocate Mike Adams, “very few people truly understand what it means to follow a healthy lifestyle. Most consumers suffer under the dangerous misimpression that processed, factory-made foods can somehow be healthy, even though they are stripped of nutrition and laced with chemical additives,” he says. “Part of the problem is that the FDA allows food companies to make ridiculous health claims, such as claiming that chocolate milk powder, made primarily with processed sugar, is good for kids’ bones because it contains a tiny amount of supplemental calcium.”

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Canned Goods and Tinfoil Hats

Greg thinks I’m a bit of a weirdo for laying claim to a section of shelf space in the closet to create a pantry. After Hurricane Katrina, although we are nowhere near New Orleans, or any hurricane, earthquake, tornado, flood, forestfire or landslide danger zone, I got all “emergency preparedness” crazy. Because shit could still happen. It might be another big power outage, like we had in ’03, or an icestorm or an attack by Tara. Or, more likely, it could be an influenza pandemic that shuts the whole city down.

During “the SARS”, I was going for allergy shots every week, and had to do the whole handwash, mask, questionnaire deal just to get in to see the nurse (my doctor’s office is inside a hospital), so I’m familiar with the protocol. And the paranoia. That was bad enough, but a flu pandemic would be even worse.

Apparently I’m not the only one who thinks of these things. The Toronto Star is reporting on a conference held by Canadian Grocers to ensure that grocery stores and supermarkets are prepared for something such as a flu pandemic. Turns out, most of them really aren’t.

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Healthy Breakfasts

Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. It’s true. That’s not just something made up by the cereal companies. Yet this most important meal is often overlooked or neglected by the majority of North Americans as we rush to get out the door each morning.

The way I see it, our problem is two-fold. First, we are over-scheduled and under-organized and just don’t have the time (or don’t think we have the time) to sit down each morning for breakfast. We rush and hurry and end up grabbing something supremely unhealthy like a donut or a granola bar. Secondly, North Americans just don’t think of their first meal of the day as being “breakfast” unless it looks like a Denny’s Grand Slam.

I mean, stop for a minute and think of your favourite breakfast foods. There’s probably some eggs, bacon, of course, pancakes, waffles, toast… Now who wants to get up and cook that for their family each and every morning? My Grandmother used to, but only because she had to, and just recently she admitted to me that she, the woman who inspired my love of food, hates cooking with every fibre of her being – mostly because of having to get up every single day for 50 years to cook breakfast! If my Grandmother, with her pancakes shaped like Mickey Mouse isn’t up to cooking breakfast, then what hope is there for the rest of us?

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Drink Your Greens

There’s nothing like a tasty glass of pond slime to get you started in the morning.

You’ve probably seem them in the supermarket, those bottles of icky green stuff, slotted in with the fancy juices and smoothies. With names like Green Goodness, Extreme Green and Green Energy, they are marketed in such a way as to make you feel super-healthy and pious after drinking one. But are they really the wonder food they’re made out to be?

First, it’s important to note that in all of the products I tested, the primary ingredients are various types of juice; apple, banana and mango top the lists, although some include pear, kiwi, pineapple, and even green tea. But the ingredient that we’re concentrating on is the one that gives each product its distinctive sludgy green colour – spirulina.

Spirulina is a type of blue-green algae, of which there are approximately 1500 species. It is named for its coil-like shape. According to Wikipedia:

Spirulina is a low fat, low calorie, cholesterol-free source of protein containing all the essential amino acids. It helps combat problems like diabetes, anemia and atmospheric pollution. It also helps combat ‘free radicals’ which can lead to ailments like cancer, arthritis, cataracts. Moreover, the gamma-linolenic acid (GLA) present in spirulina dissolves fat deposits, helps prevent heart problems and reduces “bad cholesterol”. The National Cancer Institute, USA, has additionally announced that sulfolipids in spirulina are remarkably active against HIV. Regular intake of spirulina increases anti-viral activity, stimulates the immune system, reduces kidney toxicity, improves wound healing and reduces radiation sickness.

However there is little scientific evidence of the nutritional value of spirulina and blue-green algae and there are many respected sources, such as The Berkeley Wellness Letter who believe there are none. Moreover it has been suggested that such supplements can be easily contaminated with microcystins and heavy metals (see above link). A court in California deemed thirty health claims made by one supplement producer to be false. From the ruling: “[The] defendant’s advertising as to the need for and benefits from defendant’s product imply that there is some reliable scientific basis for the claims such as would be reasonably expected by potential users. There is not.” (more details of court ruling). At this point all claims regarding the health and nutritional benefits of spirulina and blue-green algae should be viewed with skepticism.

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Fruitcake Pr0n – Assume the Missionary Position

Every year there’s at least one of them. The fruitcake-hater. They’re a timid lot. Someone, at some point in time, has put “the fear” in them. In many cases, it was years ago; some manufactured atrocity handed out at the office, or Great-Aunt Bertha’s dry stale creation that’s been handed back and forth from branch to branch of the family for a dozen years or more.

I take my work as a fruitcake missionary very seriously. The thrill of the challenge of fightin’ words laid down with a combination of stubbornness and trepidation; it must have been what brought the religious zealots back to the south seas islands again and again for the chance to convince the heathen natives that clothes really were better than running around naked. Fruitcake really *is* better than no fruitcake, you just have to trust me.

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