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Dairy-Free Coconut Cream Pie

It’s hard to be allergic to dairy and have your favourite foods be dairy based; cheese, ice cream, cheese cake, banana splits. It’s sad and lonely to stand by on a hot summer day while your husband eats one of those soft-serve cones from the ice cream truck and you can only live vicariously through him. It’s especially hard when your most favourite dessert ever happens to be coconut cream pie.

Thanks to the good folks at Tofutti, however, I can now make a variety of formerly dairy-based desserts with their soy cheese products.

Setting aside the controversy regarding whether soy is as virtuous as it seems (and that really depends on who pays for the study; studies paid for by the soy industry indicate that soy is a complete miracle food, studies paid for by the dairy industry tend to skew in the other direction), there are still some pros and cons, and the idea that soy sour cream is healthier than regular sour cream is not license to eat the whole pie.

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Book Review – What To Eat

What to Eat – An Aisle by Aisle Guide to Savvy Food Choices and Good Eating by Marion Nestle

The supermarket can be an intimidating place if you’re trying to eat healthy. Figuring out good food choices can require an advanced education in math, science and possibly even advertising. It’s enough to send one running to the pastry aisle to drown your sorrows in a bag of donuts. But wait – do you know what’s in those donuts? Marion Nestle does.

What to Eat is an aisle by aisle synopsis of the good, the bad and the ugly of your average supermarket. And although I might be accused of spoiling the plot, I’ve gotta tell you, most of it is bad and ugly. Nestle explains everything you need to know about every category of item in the grocery store; from eggs to bottled water, from produce to packaged cereals. She explains how to read a label, how to calculate serving sizes, and how to talk to the staff at your supermarket to get the information the labels don’t tell you – such as the origin of fresh fish or produce.

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Dumb and Dumber

One of my first posts when I started up this journal was about how I hated the Food Network, about how I thought it was becoming insipid and fluffy and annoying.

Turns out I’m not alone. Bill Burford of the New Yorker has written a piece for the latest issue on the dumbing down of the Food Network.

What’s really sad is that genuinely talented chefs with information and skills and techniques to share, chefs such as Sara Moulton, Anthony Bourdain and David Rosengarten, are being pushed out by talentless hacks with a schtick. There should be no comparison whatsoever between Moulton ands someone like Rachael Ray, yet the viewing audience would rather watch Ray unwrap packages of cooked ham and pound skinless bonelss chicken breasts into tasteless goop. I don’t get it.

That’s not true, actually, I do. Because the world of cooking is a lot like the world of fashion.

Bear with me for an explanation.

Both are necessities – we have to eat and, in most cases, we have to wear clothes. Just as there are fashionistas who buy designer gear or spend hours or even days creating an outfit, the same goes for foodies. Some of us will hunt for the perfect purse, some of us will hunt for the perfect cheese.

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Bug Juice

We’ve known for years that the term “natural” when it comes to food is a dubious one. Technically, everything is “natural”, even chemical additives – hey, they started as something found in nature. Any savvy food shopper knows that “natural” as a marketing term is meaningless.

But what about when it comes to the ingredient list? “Natural” flavours and colours don’t necessarily mean that they’ve come naturally from the product at hand, and synthetic colors haven’t necessarily been cooked up in a lab – strawberry candies don’t contain any actual strawberries. But what makes those candy strawberries red?

Bugs. Pretty little red bugs. C’mon. Bugs are natural. Although on ingredients lists, you’ll often find cochineal extract listed simply as “synthetic color”, the product itself is made from dried female cochineal beetles, a tiny insect that lives on cactus plants in Central and South America.

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Granola Bars – Not For Breakfast Anymore

Remember in the 70s when the humble granola bar resembled a stick of particle board and tasted about the same? We found them in our lunchboxes because they were supposed to be a healthy treat that wouldn’t rot our teeth. Then in the 80s, someone came up with the idea to make those granola bars chewy. With the addition of corn syrup to both sweeten and hold the cereal bits together, the hard nasty granola bar was a thing of the past and the cuts on the roofs of our mouths from the sharp granola corners healed up quite nicely.

Somehow, in the past twenty years when I wasn’t paying attention, the once lauded granola bar went from a healthy nutritious snack to well… candy. First came the chocolate chips, then the chocolate coating, then peanut butter, and finally caramel and even frosting. The scary part is, there are people out there buying these things for their kids (or themselves) believing them to be a reasonable treat, or even a good replacement for a meal.

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Boxes of India

As someone who makes a point of avoiding most pre-packaged food that comes from the typical North American supermarket, it is undoubtedly hypocritical of me to admit the following…

I buy pre-packaged Indian food.

Not on any regular basis, mind you, but whenever I make it across town to Little India, and I go a little wild in the Indian grocery stores. We fill our shopping basket with little boxes of things like paneer, frozen iddly, gulab jamun mix (or even canned gulab jamun) and then we come home and compile dinner.

In our defense, most pre-packaged Indian foods are pretty healthy to begin with – most stuff is completely absent of preservatives, the methods of canning and boil-in-bag packaging being more than enough to keep the food tasty.

We do this mostly to allow us to try new dishes that aren’t always available in restaurants and to be able to see what things are like before attempting to cook up a pot of stuff ourselves.

This is our most recent “Boxes of India” meal. It’s not the same as making everything from scratch, to be sure, but just as soon as I can track down fresh mustard leaves, I’ll be trying a homemade version of the saag.

Clockwise from the top: frozen paratha, pulao rice (homemade), Goan fish and eggplant (made from a spice mix blended with coconut milk with fresh sole and eggplant added), Sarsan ka Saag (stewed mustard leaves), Patra Curried with mango chutney, frozen veggie samosa, and channa daal (homemade).

 

Booger Thing

Here’s one for the “What Were You Thinking????” file.

Every now and again, I get a craving for Pillsbury Cinnamon Rolls. Really, really bad cravings. Pillsbury Cinnamon Rolls are one of those weird comfort foods from my childhood – I can remember making the things with my Mom, being allowed to lick out the little plastic container of icing, waiting impatiently for the rolls to bake.

I try not to succumb to these cravings more than one or twice a year, given that Poppy Fresh is an evil little wad of dough full of trans-fats and corn syrup and other shit that will clog the arteries and send the insulin levels catapulting. But when I want the things, I really, really want the things. And today was one of those days.

Greg willingly allowed himself to be dispatched to the two variety stores nearby in search of the tantalizing blue can of fat and sugar. I offered to come with, but I had my nose in the paper and his assurance that he’d only be a minute left me complacent. Surely I could trust my husband to walk the half block to the Hasty Market and select a package of pastry.

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Queen of Donairs

A couple of weeks ago, someone posted to the Toronto LiveJournal community, asking about where to get Nova Scotia style donairs. After we collectively determined that there is no place in Toronto to get this much-loved street food, I fessed up and admitted that I have a copy of the original recipe created and marketed by the chain King of Donairs. And despite encouragement to start my own donair stand here in Toronto, I’d still rather just make the things at home.

Now while the donair resembles the traditional Greek gyro in many ways, it’s not a gyro. Not even close. The meat is different, and more importantly, the sauce is different. How Halifax became the place where the gyro or doner kebab was bastardized and grew in popularity, I’ll never know, but donair joints are on every block in downtown Halifax. Most of the shops that sell donairs also sell pizza, most famously on the corner of Blowers and Grafton Streets, aka “Pizza Corner”, where three of the four corners (the fourth is a church) have some variation of a pizza/donair joint. There’s even a donair pizza for those who can’t decide.

It should be pointed out that Halifax has three different institutes of higher learning in its rather miniscule downtown area, which means a lot of students (note to anyone considering a trip to Nova Scotia, do NOT go to Halifax during the first few weeks of September), which means a lot of bars. At one point in the 80s, Halifax had more bars per capita than any other city in North America. What this means is that there are a lot of drunk people looking for something to eat after last call.

And nothing is more satisfying than a donair.

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Two For Tea and Becoming an “Expert”

I’ve been to two different tea events in the past week. Both very different in scope and both of which left me with a curious little bug in my brain.

The first tea was an afternoon tea and lecture on the health benefits of tea at Toronto’s Casa Loma. Having never been to Casa Loma after living in Toronto going on twenty years, I figured it was high time to do so and tea in the gorgeous marble conservatory was as good an excuse as any. Casa Loma is, indeed, a big freakin’ castle, and was as marvellous as it had been made out to be. It would have been more pleasant had there been considerably fewer tourists, however, because nothing takes the charm out of tea in the lush conservatory of a castle than a bunch of people in ugly shorts and sneakers and ball caps peering through the glass doors taking your photo.

The meal itself was your standard afternoon tea fare – scones, pastries, fruit and sandwiches. Passable, but not outstanding on any level: California strawberries when local ones are still in season, too many super-sweet pastries that got left behind, clotted cream passed around in the jar (!!!) instead of in a dish (am I at someone’s house??), and, as is always the case, not enough vegetarian sandwiches, because inevitably, the meat-eaters will ignore the roast beef and turkey and scoff *all* of the egg salad before you even knew there were any there.

The actual tea for drinking threw us all for a bit of a loop. It seems that Lipton was a sponsor in some capacity because all that was on offer was different varieties of Lipton tea – in bags. There were prize baskets from Lipton given out at the end, and I suspect that the guest speaker was a shill for Lipton as well, so frequently did she tout their products.

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The Chocolate Cherry Bread Monster

Those of you who know me reasonably well know that I have bread issues. That is, for many years, bread just wouldn’t work for me. It would come out of the oven okay and would quickly turn into a hard lump. Every single time. In an effort to remove myself from the blame for this, I pointed to an erratic gas oven (I made great bread at cooking school, and I grew up making bread two or three times a week with my Grandmother – I knew how to do it), and headed off to the store to buy bread, having given up on the kneading and the punching and the proofing and the wasting of ingredients.

Something else that has given me trouble over the years is Vegetarian Times Magazine. Not the magazine itself, but the recipes, which always hurt my head a bit in their logic and which come with introductions like “Threw this together last night for the kids!” That’s fine for a blog, but in a nationally-published magazine, I expect some triple-testing going on to make sure the recipe makes sense. Since most of their recipes didn’t make sense, and seemed like a disaster waiting to happen, I stopped buying the thing.

Now, remember that I am a food writer and editor. It is part of my job to go over recipes that my writers want to post with a fine-toothed comb to look for anything that might not work. Early on, a young and enthusiastic writer came up with a piece on healthy snack alternatives and suggested that readers should add a tablespoon of cinnamon to a half cup of applesauce. My face turns inside out at the mere thought – a quarter teaspoon of cinnamon would be about the right proportion for this treat – a whole tablespoon would be overwhelmingly unappealing.

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