events and festivals – Page 11

Taking a Walk on the Green Carpet

Normally, the north building of St. Lawrence Market is the focus of local food only on Saturday mornings as farmers and food producers fill tables with all things edible and Torontonians descend upon the place in search of tasty treats. This past Tuesday evening, the market building was a bastion of local food again as a number of chefs and wineries offered samples of their wares as part of An Evening of Local Cuisine, one of the many events put on by The Green Carpet Series.

Attendees had the opportunity to wander the space sampling food from local restaurants that had been paired with wines from Ontario wineries. Participating chefs and restaurants included Chef Ben Heaton from Globe Bistro, Chef Marc Breton from the Gladstone Hotel, Chef Nathan Isberg from Coca, and Chef Anthony Rose from the Drake Hotel. Participating wineries were Henry of Pelham, Frogpond Farm, Flatrock Cellars and Vineland Estates Winery.

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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 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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When The City Finally Slows Down

Sometimes, this city just offers too much to do.

I’m not complaining, mind you. But it’s been an overwhelming summer. It’s said Toronto is a city of festivals and pretty much every weekend from late May until the end of September, there are multiple things to choose from. Just about every neighbourhood has a street festival now, there’s Caribana, Gay Pride Week, the Outdoor Art Show in Nathan Phillips Square, Doors Open, Taste of the Danforth, Taste of Little Italy, the Vegetarian Food Fair, piles of cultural events at Harbourfront, the Beer Festival, the CNE… it just goes on and on.

All of this culminates in one weekend of craziness. This past weekend saw two marathons (Toronto Waterfront Marathon and Run for the Cure), Word on the Street, the literary festival that takes over Queen’s Park, and Nuit Blanche, a 12-hour all-night art event that encompasses most of downtown. Pity the fool who tries to actually drive anywhere.

Nuit Blanche slipped under my radar last year, and I wasn’t super psyched about it this year, but as one of the 3 zones was in our neighbourhood, we wandered around to check out a few things. We watched parkour athletes climb and then descend the nearby train bridge, we wandered the Gladstone Hotel looking at the exhibits there. Then we headed east, stopping at galleries along the way until we got to the Great Hall where we stood amazed at what appeared to be a storefront filling with water and being taken over by giant fish. We picked up a chunk of carpet from where a group of artists covered a road on the CAMH property with the stuff, then headed to Lamport Stadium to see a giant inflatable locust. This was probably the most fun and interactive piece we experienced – kids were climbing all over the thing, crawling under it, bouncing against it. It was nothing more than a giant balloon, really, but people were truly having fun, including a group of drunk girls who repeatedly bounded into the face of the thing only to bounce back and end up on their butts on the astroturf.

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Over the Moon

Despite the fact that it’s 32 freakin’ degrees celcius in Toronto today, it is actually Autumn. And in Chinatown, where they’re getting ready to celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival, they’re buying mooncakes.

Wikipedia says:

Mooncake is a Chinese pastry traditionally eaten during the Mid-Autumn Festival. Typical mooncakes are round or rectangular pastries, measuring about 10 cm in diameter and 4-5 cm thick. A thick filling usually made from lotus paste is surrounded by a relatively thin (2-3 mm) crust and may contain yolks from salted duck eggs. Mooncakes are rich, heavy, and dense compared with most Western cakes and pastries. They are usually eaten in small wedges accompanied by Chinese tea.

I’ve been able to find non-egg mooncakes all year long throughout Chinatown, but the ones with eggs are more readily available during the Mid-Autumn Festival.

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And I Would Eat 100 Miles, and I Would Eat 100 More…

Spent the morning at our local taking part in a 100-mile brunch hosted by the MPP for the riding, Peggy Nash. I’m still not sure why Ms. Nash decided to put together such an event (we’ve got a Provincial election coming up, not a Federal one), but as the $25 price went to FoodShare, and as it was a 5-minute walk from home, we figured why not.

The event went off okay, but it wasn’t perfect. Food-wise, it appears that the primary food produced within a 100-mile radius is pork. Pretty much every part of the pig was accounted for, to the detriment of the vegetarians in the room. Vegans were completely SOL unless they stuck to the fruit plate. I loaded up on salad, cheese panini and a slice of Spanish potato omelet. While all the food was good, and was created by area chefs, the overall menu lacked cohesiveness. It felt like a potluck where no one consulted anyone else on what they were bringing.

Technical issues kept the coffee lukewarm for the first while and when I mentioned aloud that there was cream and milk but no sugar, some woman wagged a finger at me. “Sugar is not grown within 100 miles.” She came really close to wearing a cup of non-local coffee.

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Here’s to Your Health

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We arrived at the Canadian Health Food Association’s Expo East shortly after 9am with the assumption that we’d breeze through the trade show in a couple of hours. Even when we hit the floor and realized just how many exhibitors there were, we were still optimistic. Four hours later, we stumbled from the Toronto Convention Centre, laden down with bags of brochures, samples and assorted giveaway items. We had wondered why so many people were showing up with empty rolling suitcases – it was to carry home their swag. And we only looked at the food – fully a third of the exhibitors were there promoting either various forms of protein powders and energy bars or other health food items such as cosmetics.

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The Holiday That Canada Gave the World

The Labour Day parade goes right by our apartment. It’s senseless to try and ignore it – it’s loud and raucous and it takes a full two and a half hours for all 25,000 marchers to go past. That’s the right number of 0s there. Crazy, huh?

Parade marchers get into the Canadian National Exhibition (the finish point of the parade) for free on Labour day. Many groups had extras of the wristbands that are given to marchers and were handing them out to people watching the parade at the end of the route where we were. We were offered wristbands a half dozen times – next year we’ll plan on taking some and joining the crowd.

What I didn’t know was that Labour Day actually started in Toronto, but apparently this was the first place where people marched, in 1872. There’s a long history of the city being a “union-town” and with so much history, it’s easy to understand why.

People marched with their kids and dogs and families. Almost all unions had snazzy matching shirts or even jackets. There were plenty of bands, especially steel drum bands. While I still find it hard to muster up sympathy for things like the recent job cuts that will affect unions like CAW (Canadian Auto Workers) because I really believe there should be fewer cars on the road, I grew up in a union household (both my parents belonged to unions, as did I at my first job working at a hospital), so for the most part, I believe and agree with the presence and power of the unions.

The parade is really a celebration of humanity and what people can achieve when they pull together. Our society owes a lot to the work of unions, and while they’re not always perfect, they do a lot to make our quality of life one of the best in the world.

Out of Africa

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One of the coolest things about Toronto’s many cultural neighbourhoods is how they’ve evolved over the years. One group of immigrants moves out, another moves in to create their own community in their new home. During years of overlap, communities exist side by side and somewhat intertwined.

The most recent example of this cultural mosaic is Bloorcourt Village. This short stretch of Bloor Street West from Christie Pits park to Ossington Avenue was at first a predominantly Greek neighbourhood, pre-dating Greektown on the Danforth. Some vestiges of this still remain in the area today with restaurants such as Menalon (841 Bloor Street West) and Astoria Athens Restaurant (865 Bloor Street West) serving up traditional Greek cuisine and the quaint Greek Corner Grocery (859 Bloor Street West) still selling tins of olive oil from home.

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Harvest Wednesday Dinner

We attended our last of three Harvest Wednesdays this past week. The schedule rotated through Tasting Nights at $12 each, which were cocktail-party style, Buffet Dinner at $38 each, which was pre-set seating and a huge buffet table, and the Harvest Dinner, the most expensive at $48 each – a family style dinner where you sit with strangers, and pass large platters of food.

The event continues every Wednesday at the nearby Gladstone Hotel until September 19th, which is the finale of a 7-course meal for $110 with proceeds of that night going to FoodShare a local organization that sells weekly boxes of produce to low income people.

The premise of Harvest Wednesdays is that the hotel works with a CSA, and Chef Marc Breton pulls together a menu with only a day’s notice. He has an idea of what he’ll be getting based on seasonality and talking to the farmer, but it’s only when the boxes of produce arrive on Tuesday that he can really put together the menu for that week’s event.

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