Category: events and festivals

Good Eats at the CNE

cnecorndogsImmediately after entering the CNE grounds on opening day, we ran into a neighbour and her young daughter. The little girl was eating slices of fruit. Not an odd sight normally, but at the Ex, not the kind of thing you’d expect to see. The mind really isn’t able to connect watermelon slices and the midway full of vendors selling cotton candy, candy apples and corn dogs.

On one hand, I sort of felt sorry for my little friend – coming home from the fair with a big bag of spun sugar was always part of the allure when I was a kid. But given the fuss about childhood obesity, trans fats, plus additives and preservatives, I can understand why her Mom would want to limit the amount of junk. Which left us wondering if it was even possible to eat healthy, let along vegetarian or vegan at the CNE. The midway is almost a barren wasteland of healthy options; burgers, corn dogs and candy corn aren’t going to register on anyone’s healthy eating scale. We did encounter a couple of booths with roasted corn, and if you lay off too much butter, this could be considered a passable treat.

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Turning Apples – and Berries and Peaches and Maple Syrup – Into Wine

blueberrywineI know nothing about regular wine. I spent much of my adult life fighting off allergies that came to a head while I lived in a house with a serious but unknown mold problem. Wine – red or white – killed me. Besides the inevitable headaches (migraines, really), I’d also become slightly anaphylactic – getting stuffed up and uncomfortable.

A relative turned me on to blueberry wine from down east. Newfoundland, Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia all have wineries that make various styles of blueberry wine, and where the grape-based wines made me all kinds of miserable, it turns out that wine from other fruits does not contain the histamines present in grape wines, and I could drink to my heart’s content.

Except that the availability of fruit wines in the LCBO is minimal with only about a half dozen on offer – mostly dessert wines – and often only seasonally. So when I discovered that the Ontario Wine Society was hosting an event that featured non VQA (Vintners Quality Alliance) eligible products, and that most of the offerings were fruit wines, I was happy to fill in for our resident wine expert Sasha Grigorieva and do some sampling myself.

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Beer and BBQ – The Perfect Pair

So how does a gal who only drinks dark beers and eschews meat end up at a BBQ hosted by a brewery that makes nothing but pilsner?

I still haven’t figured it out, but on Monday I joined Greg, and we trekked down to the Steam Whistle Brewery for a BBQ. Not just any BBQ, mind you, but the work of Team Cedar Grilling, currently the Reigning Canadian BBQ Champions. They are using Steam Whistle Pilsner in a number of their sauce recipes and the day was meant to feature some of their creations.

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Sweet Treats on the Street

streetfoodlinejkTo say that the City’s Street Treats Fair was a resounding success would be a huge understatement. That line-up provoked a refrain of “Holy Shit!” from any number of people who entered Nathan Phillips Square from the north-east corner and were confronted with the throngs of people as they rounded the Peace Garden.

Crowds were lining up by noon and booths were selling out shortly thereafter. And sure, some of it was definitely the attraction of getting a meal from Jamie Kennedy or Rain for $5, but I think it’s safe to say that the people of Toronto really do want more than hot dogs and sausages. Another common refrain of the day was “Where did you get THAT??” as people walked past with melon soup or empanadas.

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The Hidden Treasures at the Total Health Show

We approached the Total Health Show this past weekend with a bit of trepidation. Although it’s a well-respected event, now in its 30th year, and despite the focus organizers put on the more credible aspects of its participants, featuring things like massage and natural foods, there’s still an element to the world of holistic health that provokes me to peruse the schedule for the tinfoil hat fashion show.

We went with the intention of checking out the food vendors, since people are finally cluing in to the fact that good health is directly related to good nutrition, but were consumed with the fear that we’d get roped into trying some bio-feedback aura testing or buying the $30 bottles of magical juice that purports to cure everything from halitosis to cancer.

There were some of those folks there, to be sure, and we tried to keep our cynical comments to ourselves, but we were actually very pleasantly surprised to find a great number of vendors with really interesting, and tasty, products.

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The Meat of the Matter

So back at the end of December I came up with a list of “foodie resolutions” for 2007. While I have been fairly slack about trying to do everything on my list – I have yet to find the time to make a souffle, for instance – I did have the opportunity on Monday to cross one thing off.

Greg and I attended a conference put together by the Toronto Slow Food chapter and part of the event included a free buffet lunch. One of my foodie resolutions was to break my vegetarianism and try small samples of meat at events like this in an effort to expand/retain my palate.

Now all through the seven years that I’ve been vegetarian, I’ve still eaten fish. I try and go off it every couple of years or so, more because of the issue of overfishing than of eating an animal (I’m sorry, I know animal rights activists would call me a hypocrite, but I just can’t look at an oyster or a lobster and equate it with a deer or a cow), but I inevitably come back to it. I like to joke that you can take the girl our of Nova Scotia, but you can’t take Nova Scotia out of the girl, but jokes aside, pescetarianism was always as far as I was willing to go. However, even though I still eat fish, I was still under the impression that meat would make me quite ill.

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Building the Green Link

The folks at Slow Food Toronto have issues.

This past Monday, February 26th, they met at Hart House, along with a variety of local farmers, food purveyors, chefs and media to discuss how to best deal with them.

The issues being, of course, how to set up links between small local farms and the restaurants and consumers (aka. co-producers) who want their products.

A panel consisting of farmers, farmer’s market organizers and restaurateurs discussed the hurdles faced by everyone in ensuring local produce made it to local plates. Speakers included Stephen Alexander of Cumbrae’s; Susan Benson of the Culinary Tourism Initiative; Pamela Cuthbert, food writer and Slow Food Toronto founder; Anne Freeman of the Dufferin Grove Market; Jamie Kennedy of Jamie Kennedy Kitchens; and Mark Trealout of Kawartha Ecological Growers, as well as panel moderator Wayne Roberts of the Toronto Food Policy Council.

With a goal of forging partnerships between local growers and both restaurants and farmer’s market customers, the panel took turns speaking on various initiatives to increase awareness and dialogue.

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Choco-holic

After years of writing about events in Toronto, there are times when I still can’t help but feel like an imposter. I’m not – I’ve never attended an event and not covered it fully, but there have been times when I’ve found myself wedged against a buffet table at the ROM, balancing a plate of pastries and a glass of wine, while I try to avoid getting in the shot for Fashion Television or the CBC, that I begin to doubt my credentials. Nevermind that the lovely PR ladies all assure me that the fact that I give them any coverage at all puts me in their good books (you wouldn’t believe the number of people who attend media previews for the free grub and never write a word about the event or show), but as a kind of weird looking gal writing for various Internet sites, I still often feel as if I’ve somehow sneaked in and could get caught and kicked out at any second.

When in the same situation but also presented with all the free chocolate I can stuff into my little chocolate-loving mouth, my guilt does overtime. Not the least because chocolates are one of those things that you are only supposed to have one or two of. You don’t want to make a pig of yourself, after all. So when we walked into the Ganong Chocs-o-Fun party last night, the feeling of being “kids in a candy store” was close to the surface.

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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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