food – Page 28 – Sheryl Kirby

Sunday Brunch – The Drake Hotel

The Drake Hotel
1150 Queen Street West
416-531-5042
Brunch for two with all taxes, tip and coffee: $50

I have no idea why I’ve been obsessed with fried chicken lately, some cold weather comfort food craving, no doubt. But when perusing the online brunch menu for the Drake and discovering that Executive Chef Anthony Rose was serving up fried chicken and waffles, I knew I had to check it out.

A confession – despite living under 10 minutes away, I don’t get to the Drake that often. In part because the Gladstone is closer, and also because, after living in Parkdale for 15 years, I still can’t quite shake that “Drake! You ho!” attitude. Back in my day, part of the basement of the Drake had a dirt floor – and that’s how we liked it!

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Where Are the Chefs?

Today marks the beginning of two weeks of fantastic food-oriented television programming. Gordon Ramsay expands his Kitchen Nightmares series to try and get people to eat at local restaurants; Jamie Oliver takes on the pork industry in an effort to get producers to improve their husbandry standards; Heston Blumenthal has a 3-part series on his reinvention of the UK Little Chef chain of roadside diners; and Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall revisits last year’s Chicken Out campaign to see if his efforts really did encourage people to choose free-range chicken and think about where their food comes from.

Too bad you don’t get to see any of it.

The Great British Food Fight series is an annual event on Channel 4 in Britain, and generally deals with politically-charged issues having to do with food production – this year’s series also includes a show called The True Cost of Cheap Food hosted by Jay Rayner of the Guardian.

Enterprising Canadians who want to see these shows will likely have no trouble finding them available for download online, but everyone else will have to miss out. Which is too bad because many of these shows are dealing with important issues that should be at the forefront of any conversation about where our food comes from, yet those discussions still aren’t really happening here in North America.

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Dream On

One of the really fabulous things about summer is that it keeps me out of the supermarket. Buying all my fruit and veg, cheese, eggs, honey and the small amount of meat we cook at home from local farmers is time not spent trolling the aisles being tempted by junk food. In the winter though, when most of the markets close, my weekly excursion to the local grocery store is fraught with peril. I do my best to stick to the perimeter, although needing flour or dried beans or toilet paper always calls for a trip down the aisles, but sometimes those supermarket folks get sneaky and move the processed food over by the real stuff.

Which is how Greg and I happened upon a giant display of boxes of Kraft Dream Whip. We approached the row of boxes with caution. Arranged behind a selection of wizened, tired-looking California strawberries, we understood that it was meant to be an impulse purchase – the temptation of berries and cream (an allusion to, if not an actual taste of, summer) in the midst of a barren winter’s deep freeze.

Greg tentatively plucked at a box, flipping it over to read the instructions. “How do you make real whipped cream?” he asked.

“You uh.. whip some cream. With a bit of sugar and maybe some vanilla.”

“Huh. To make this stuff you need to add milk and vanilla,” he replied.

“Then what’s the point? Why not just buy cream if you have to buy milk anyway?”

Greg read over the ingredients. “Mmmm… hydrogenated vegetable oil,” he said. “This is full of trans fat.”

He put the box back and we wandered through the store, griping about the crap that people will eat to save a few bucks. But if you’ve got to add milk and vanilla anyway, it can’t be that much of a savings over buying cream, so what is the allure of foods like Dream Whip? You still have to whip the stuff – it’s not a time saver in any way. It’s not a convenience food that can be made just by adding water. So what makes it so popular?

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Where Can I Find – Green Coffee Beans?

Sit for a moment and calculate – how much do you spend every month on coffee? $50? $100? $300? I know I’m not the only one getting tired of the references to tough economic times, but coffee is where many of us will draw the line at cutting back, even when times are bad. But instead of giving up coffee, how about rethinking how you buy the stuff? That cup or two a day habit from the local chain can end up costing $20 to $30 a week, and that’s if you stick to a plain cup of Joe. Since cooking at home is cool again, why not consider dusting off that coffee maker and brewing up a pot each morning?

Of course, grocery store coffee can be kind of yucky and preroasted beans are expensive (averaging $12 to $20 a pound). There’s also the question of freshness. Coffee purists insist that coffee must be consumed within five days after roasting, three hours of grinding, and fifteen minutes of brewing. When you also consider that much of the world’s coffee still comes from plantations where pesticide use is the norm and farmers don’t make a living wage, sourcing out organic fair trade products is also important.

The next logical step then, if you love coffee and care about how it is grown, and want to save cash – is to roast it yourself.

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You Can’t Eat Just One

A few years back, food bloggers went all wacky for homemade microwave potato chips. I remember making the things, and while they were good, they were a bit of a pain in the butt. Basically you sliced a potato, sprayed the slices with non-stick spray and laid them out on a plate and microwaved them for 5 minutes. Problem was – some microwaves are more powerful than others, and if you had a not especially powerful one, it often took 7 or 8 minutes to get the chips crisp. Given that you could only do one plateful at a time, it could take half an hour or more to make a small bowl of chips.

I always knew you could do something similar in the oven, and figured that it would probably take about the same amount of time. So over the past few days, I’ve been experimenting. It’s crazy cold outside, and my body wants comfort food and that generally means chips – or French fries. But it’s still January and I’ve been mostly good about keeping to the resolutions, so I wanted to avoid the greasy salty bagged potato chips from the variety store. These have a bit of oil, just to keep them from sticking, but I’d still count them as being healthy – leave the skins on and they even have fibre.

And – they’re really good. Not nearly as greasy as fried ones, but still crisp and satisfying. And way cheaper than a bag of crappy junk food chips.

My next project is to play with some other root vegetables; sweet potato chips, beet chips, parsnip chips… definitely cheaper than those bags of root chips from the health food store. And probably better.

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Sunday Brunch – Cafe Du Lac

Café du Lac
2350 Lakeshore Boulevard West
416-848-7381
Brunch for two with all taxes, tip and coffee: $30

If Toronto wasn’t already known as a brunch town, just wait until people really start feeling the recession pinch. Already considered much more economical and family-friendly than dinner at a high-end restaurant or a business lunch, brunch is poised to be the main weekly meal out for many families. No matter how tough times get – there’s still not many people who can be bothered to poach eggs at home.

This brunch popularity is already evident at Café du Lac, where families filled almost every table during our visit last week. Unfortunately with but one server for the entire room, the smooth relaxed brunch mood was a bit lost in the confusion.

Things start well enough and we’re set up with coffee and water while our order is taken. The menu is short and to the point, with a selection of crepes, omlettes, and bagels as well as French toast, and we select a couple of dishes and sides that we think will best represent the Quebecois theme.

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Eat Your Almonds

I know it’s not technically possible, but anyone looking in my cupboard would swear that I have all the almonds from the state of California. I know, I’m exaggerating, but it does seem that way. See, I’m still working through the swag from the almond event I went to back in November. The almond slices and slivers are unopened but I started to get concerned about the 3 pounds of almond flour.

Nut flours tend to go rancid pretty quickly – all that exposed surface area. So after a couple of attempts at macarons (I lied – so NOT as easy as you would think, those things are fussy!), I figured it was time to track down some other recipes that use almond flour or ground almonds.

I found this recipe in Gregg R. Gillespie’s 1001 Cookie Recipes where there are 57 recipes with “almond” in the title. These are “Almond Cakes III”; not to be confused with Almond Cakes II or VI, or almond cookies, almond crisps or almond crescents, all of which offer multiple recipes with their own Roman numerals.

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Duck, Duck, Goose

I’ve mentioned before that I’m not a big fan of foie gras. Part of my job requires that I generally eat what is put in front of me, and I’ll eat the stuff if I have to, but it’s never something that I’ll make an effort to search out.

Despite having an opinion on just about everything else, I actually have no opinion on the issues surrounding foie gras production. On the one hand, it seems weird and cruel, but on the other, those duckies sure do come running at dinnertime. I figure it can’t be any worse than the conditions that most of the western world’s meat is produced in, so any issue I have with fois gras would be more to do with farms that are more of a factory setting instead of a happy organic free-range kind of place.

Peta has recently issued a challenge to chefs to come up with a “faux gras” product, offering a $10,000 prize to the recipe that most closely resembles the real thing. Now sure, it’s Peta, and they can’t let it go without getting in a few jabs, calling foie gras the “delicacy of despair”, but the reaction to the contest has been just as childish.

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New Year’s Resolution – Find a Better Word Than Foodie

How To Be A Better Foodie
Sudi Pigott
Quadrille Publishing Limited, 2006, 304 pages

I hate the word “foodie”. I use it, but only grudgingly, because there’s really nothing that fits better. “Gourmand” and “epicurean” are too pretentious; “food lover” just sounds weird, and everything else is awkward. But I find the term simplistic and twee. After all, who isn’t a foodie these days? Everyone loves to eat – with the exception of that small percentage of the population who consider food to be fuel and eat to stay alive – so anyone who eats and enjoys the process is a foodie by default.

So I’m not sure why I picked up and purchased How To Be a Better Foodie by UK food writer Sudi Pigott. Probably the fact that is was $10 helped, because I was pretty sure the book would annoy me. And I was right.

There are lessons to be had from How To Be a Better Foodie, although few of them are specifically about food. The first one is – the times, they are a changin’ – which means a book written in 2006 at the height of the pre-economic meltdown consumer frenzy (especially in the UK) often doesn’t translate well to a recession three years later when, even if you can still afford it, custom-made Poilâne bread flown in from Paris probably looks pretty gauche, and foodie tourism to various dining meccas are out of reach for all but the wealthiest of eaters.

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Where Can I Find – Live Lobster

One of the big holiday food traditions in our house is a feed of lobster on Christmas Eve. We don’t get fancy – we just cover the table with newspaper and boil up the tasty crustaceans and serve them with melted butter and some potato salad.

While the season has ended in a number of places until spring, inshore lobster fishing is still taking place in southern Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. Lobster fishing is always legal offshore, although purists prefer lobsters sourced closer to land, which means there is still lobster to be had – inexpensively.

Economic woes, particularly in the US, have adversely affected the Atlantic lobster fishery, both in the US and Canada. This means a decent retail price for consumers (normally about $14.99 a pound, lobster prices over the holidays dropped as low as $6.99 per pound in Toronto), but not such a great deal for lobster fishers who have the same costs to cover even though their profit is less. In Halifax this past December, lobster fishers were being offered a wholesale rate of $3 per pound and many boycotted sales to mainstream stores in favour of that traditional Nova Scotian sales method – setting up by the side of the road and selling the things out of the back of a truck. This at least allowed the fishers to charge a still inexpensive $5 per pound and to recoup their operating costs and turn a small profit.

This is not a practical option for selling lobster in Toronto, however, and we have no choice but to hand some money over to the middlemen and buy our lobster at an actual store, but with prices like these, it’s an opportunity that might not come along again for some time.

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