food – Page 31 – Sheryl Kirby

Cooking the Books

localflavourwastenotwantnot — Waste not, want not: Toronto Public Library (TRL)

In an era when restaurants and food shops come and go, it’s difficult to remember food trends from even a couple of years ago, let alone decades or centuries. But everybody eats – preferably three times a day – and over the years, the changes that have taken place in terms of food in Toronto are vast.

Until January 11th, 2009, the Toronto Reference Library (TRL) is offering a peek into the history of food in Toronto through an exhibit in their gallery space called Local Flavour: Eating in Toronto, 1830-1955.

Curated by librarian Sheila Carleton of the Special Collections, Genealogy & Maps Centre, the idea for the exhibit came about because of the opportunity to restore some historical cookbooks in the TRL’s collection. “In 2006, the Toronto Reference Library was invited to apply for a grant from the Culinary Trust for restoration of up to 4 historical cookbooks in our collection,” explains Carleton. “Our application was accepted and two local conservators were commissioned to carry out the work. As it is an honour to be invited to apply for the grant, we thought that the public would be interested in seeing these and other cookbooks in our collection.”

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Gardens and Jealousy – Both Green

Most readers may not be familiar with the rapier pen of one A A Gill, a restaurant and television critic for the UK Times. Gill has recently had it in for the various UK chefs working to promote healthy, local, seasonal eating in Britain, and appears to take special exception to food journalist-turned-farmer Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. Hugh F-W runs a farm, shop and restaurant operation called River Cottage in the Dorset area, and currently has a series on the air in the UK called River Cottage Autumn, in which he delves into the seasonal delights of local UK food, from the garden harvest, to fish in season to the fine art of foraging.

Gill reviews an episode of River Cottage Autumn in a recent television column, ostensibly killing two birds with one stone. But he’s not especially nice – to Hugh F-W, or to the millions of people who happen to revel in the joy of a home-grown tomato.

Why should poor, fearful folk have to put up with a bucketful of organic new-age anxiety to go with the anxiety their imperfect lives manufacture all on their own, especially when it’s created by a home-made television presenter in a Beatrix Potter set? The idea that ideal people should strive to live like 18th-century crofters is intellectual silage. The enthusiasm may be charming, but this fetishising of food is part of the problem, not the solution. Shirley Conran once said that life was too short to stuff a mushroom. She was wrong. But you’d have to live an awfully long time to make making your own baked beans on toast worthwhile. Self-sufficiency is not an admirable goal, it’s small-minded, selfish, mean, mistrustful and ultimately fascist. It ends up with people waving shotguns at strangers over their garden gates. We live in a complex, mutually reliant society, and the answer to our problems is not each to his own cabbage patch.

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Where Can I Find – Kitchen Scale

A friend contacted me recently looking for advice on where to find a kitchen scale. He was making beer and needed to measure various ingredients by weight.

The average home cook doesn’t really need a scale unless they’re working with dishes that need precise measurements or do a lot of baking. In chef’s school, we measured all baking ingredients by weight instead of the Imperial “cups” system to help ensure a level of quality control on our finished products. In countries that have fully adapted to the metric system, all recipe ingredients are measured in grams, so a kitchen scale might also be useful for people who cook from any UK cookbooks.

The other and more popular use for a home kitchen scale is for health and nutrition purposes – to measure out exact amounts of foods to help in following a specific diet.

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The School’s Too Cool

When I toured the George Brown Centre for Hospitality and Tourism back in January to write about their Yes, Chef! fundraising program, there was only an inkling of what the renovated building would look like. There was still hoarding up outside the two street-front eco-labs; the railing that looked down onto the centre atrium was blocked; and the dust and dirt from the construction was being tracked throughout the building as students hurried off to class.

What a difference a few months make.

This past Tuesday’s open house event at the 300 Adelaide Street East facility revealed a bright, inspiring space in which students could learn and grow, a starting point in which they would develop the roots of the career knowledge that will take them to jobs in some of Toronto’s best restaurants and beyond.

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Quincy

Toronto is known as “the city within a park”. Just about every resident lives with walking distance of a park, although most of these are not huge multi-acre swaths of land, but are little in-fill parkettes. Parkettes pop up in the middle of residential streets, and at one point, probably had houses on them. Now they are mostly home to swing sets, jungle gyms and a few benches.

The parkette closest to us, the place where we end up a couple of times a day while walking the dogs, has some landscaping along one side. It’s hard to tell if the city planted the bushes and shrubs or if they predate the park back to when there was a house on the property.

Last year, I joined a group of locals in cleaning up the park, as it regularly attracts crack dealers and hookers from the area. Underneath the hedges and shrubs, we came across a pair of quince bushes. The bushes were covered in vibrant scarlet flowers in spring, and piles of little green orbs in the summer.

Regular quinces grow on trees and get as big as apples. Quinces are, in fact, part of the same family that includes both apples and roses. But these were tiny fruit, about the size of crabapples. I had wondered if the fruit were edible, and a neighbour who is involved with the local horticultural society couldn’t tell me, but my Google-Fu told me that what we had stumbled across was an ornamental quince from Japan, appropriately known as a Japonica quince. Further Googling determined that not only were Japonica quinces edible, but they made awesome jam and jelly, because of the natural pectin.

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Lunch at the Palais

When most people think of the Palais Royale Ballroom, they think of, well… dancing. Or the bands that have graced the famous stage. Maybe if they’ve attended a wedding or other event where they were served a meal, they’re aware that the Palais actually turns out some pretty great food.

Executive Chef Steffan Howard has worked at some of the top restaurants in Toronto (Truffles, JOV Bistro, AGO) but he also has a background in agriculture, having spent three years working on an organic farm as a product developer and initiating an organic catering company. He was also the chairman of the 15th annual Feast of Fields event.

So how does a chef with a background in organic farming bring his love of organic and local produce to a venue where most of his work is for weddings or corporate events? By opening the doors for a local food lunch, that’s how.

Each Wednesday until the end of November, Chef Howard will create a casual buffet-style lunch menu from ingredients sourced at the Brickworks Chef’s Market. This Wednesday morning market, open only to local chefs, allows farmers and chefs to connect, strengthen ties and build networks that help promote local economies.

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We’re All Family Here

Mother’s Dumplings
79 Huron Street
416-217-2008
Dinner for two with all taxes, tip and soda: $25

I’m not exactly sure how I’ve managed to miss this place for so long. Shortly after Mother’s Dumplings started getting good buzz in the food-loving community, the husband came home with some leftovers from his lunch there and it’s been on my to-do list ever since. Maybe it’s because I tend to gravitate to Spadina when visiting Chinatown, or that I just don’t think of the place when I’m going past, but this week I finally made it to Mother’s Dumplings, and am kicking myself for waiting so long.

At first glance, the basement space seems very much like a hole-in-the-wall kind of deal, as if someone has cleared out the regular furniture in a basement apartment and set up a handful of plastic-covered tables on a spur of the moment whim. But further inspection reveals an amusing wink and nod sense of humour that makes the place feel even more homey and welcoming.

Yes, the two-room space feels very much like someone’s low rent apartment. Four tables in the front room and four along the wall by the kitchen are the extent of the seating here, with a television in the front room showing images of soothing scenery. In the back room, the show is all about watching owner and chef Zhen and her staff hand make the dumplings and cook them on a pair of electric 4-burner stoves. Despite a short wicker screen, between the chatting women rolling dough and the cups of hot tea atop the plastic tablecloth, it really does feel as if we’re in someone’s home kitchen instead of a restaurant.

The walls are covered in picture frames plastered with comment cards filled out by past patrons (some of these can be seen on the restaurant’s website) – poetry, artwork and heaps of love and praise for the food here makes this the restaurant equivalent of a child’s artwork stuck to the fridge; another taste of home that gives this place such a great vibe.

And those comment cards don’t offer false praise, they mean every dumpling loving word!

Since there’s just the two of us, we stick mostly to dumplings for our meal, although Mother’s also offers noodle dishes, rice and congee, and a couple of stews – and while I’m sure they’re great, we see nothing but the beloved dumplings leave the kitchen while we are there.

Dumplings are available steamed, boiled or pan-fried, and we choose one of each, plus the much-touted green-onion pancake ($3.25). Approximately 6-inches wide, this fried savoury is fluffy and thick and full of bright green onion chunks with a crispy exterior. Gorgeous.

The boiled dumplings arrive first. We had ordered chicken and mushroom, but they were out and we opted for chicken with dill instead ($6.49/12 dumplings). They’re not beautiful – dumplings aren’t really an especially attractive food – but the flavour has us both groaning with pleasure as the scent of dill wafts through the air with each bite.

Next up, steamed vegetarian dumplings ($5.49/10 dumplings) with bak choy, mushroom and tofu. These are earthy, slightly sweet, and remind me of wandering into a Chinese herbalist shop.

The fried pork and bak choi dumplings ($5.99/10 dumplings) are our least favourite, as they’re missing the big flavour punch of the other ones we tried, but they’re still pretty darned great, each dumpling full of sweet ground pork inside the crispy wrapper.

We make it about 2/3 of the way through all the food on the table and our server arrives with a knowing smile. “Too much?” she asks, having seen this type of greedy customer before, no doubt. But she is happy to pack up the remainder and I’m just as happy the next day when I reheat the leftovers.

Besides offering two servings sizes in the restaurant, Mother’s Dumplings also offers their product frozen, to take home. Ranging in price from $9.25 to $12.10 for 30 frozen dumplings, it’s definitely worth having some of these on hand for those times when the craving strikes.

Finally, even the bill arrives with a dose of motherly advice and humour, offering proverbs, and a list of celebrity birthdays for the day printed down the side. It’s obvious that someone here “gets it” and is working the mother angle to their advantage, but it doesn’t seem stilted or slickly marketed. Rather, the owners have put a bit of thought into how they want their business to be perceived, while still injecting their own sense of fun and personality into the place. The end result is a charming little restaurant that not only serves up fantastic and inexpensive food, but offers the comfort and warmth of a family home.

It may have taken me a long time to finally check out Mother’s Dumplings, but I can guarantee this visit won’t be the last.

Chocolate Not For the Faint of Heart

One of the perks of my job is that I often get to try new products and food items before they’re generally available. Last week, I was at a local restaurant called Cava for a chocolate and spirits pairing featuring the chocolates from Michel Cluizel, a French chocolatier that I particularly enjoy. The owner of Cava also runs a chocolate shop called Xococava, located next door to the restaurant, and when we left, all in attendance received a selection of chocolates from the shop, as well as this half dozen special edition collection made with some of the single origin chocolates from Michel Cluizel.

Xococava specializes in pushing the boundaries of the typical ganache filling and offers chocolates filled with chorizo sausage, black olive, black trumpet mushroom and sumac, to name but a few of their 25 regular offerings. The selection shown above was created specifically for the tasting event I attended, but chef Christopher McDonald and chocolatier Laura White mentioned that it might also be available for the holidays.

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Where Can I Find – Cookbooks

We got an email from a reader last week asking about where to find cookbooks, specifically older vintage ones, and I have to say, I didn’t really have a good reply. “Used bookstores” seemed like a really patronizing answer, but that’s about all I could come up with.

After a bit of research, my answer would be dependant on the disclaimer of “what do you want to do with it?” For some people, the hunt is the best part of the process, and if you’re not cursed with asthma, an afternoon spent digging through dusty stacks and boxes of cookbooks at the back of a used bookstore might be sheer heaven. If it’s the having of the book that is the goal, then online resources might be a better bet, and if the plan is simply to view, copy and try out the recipes, then I’d head to the library to dig through their treasures.

The Cookbook Store (850 Yonge Street) offers an extensive collection of older titles, as do most of the big chains. Amazon offers many titles at new or used prices, and it’s possible to find vintage or rare stuff in the used section here. Alibris specializes in used and rare books, but it helps to know the title of what you’re looking for in order to search effectively.

Newer titles – published in the past couple of years – can often be picked up at those remaindered bookshops that tend to pop up in malls or empty storefronts on main shopping stretches. I actually do most of my own cookbook shopping at these places, and my favourites include the one in Dufferin Mall; the one on Yonge Street, south of Bloor on the east side; and the one on the corner of Front Street East and Church. I don’t know the names of any of them, but everyone’s been to them, I’m sure.

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Thanskgiving Brunch at the Palais Royale

Holidays are a little weird at our house. Both our families live down east, and being childfree, there’s usually less incentive to get into the decorating and feasting than if we had spawned. Because it’s just the two of us, we seldom end up doing anything huge for occasions like Thanksgiving or Christmas. And while we’re mostly good with not having to get on a plane to go eat some turkey (and not dealing with the potential squabbling about who “gets us” and for how long), the various holidays often seem to be missing a sense of celebration.

I always cook the traditional dinner, but it ends up being like any other evening meal, only with more dishes to wash. So this year, we decided to do something different.

We found out that the Palais Royale was serving a Thanksgiving brunch. It was over $40 per person, and we waffled for a bit over the price, but threw caution to the wind and went anyway.

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