food – Page 41 – Sheryl Kirby

Sunday Brunch – Mitzi’s Sister

Mitzi’s Sister
1554 Queen Street West
416-532-2570
Brunch for two with all taxes, tip, plus coffee and juice: $40

I have a love/hate relationship with the brunch at Mitzi’s Sister. I love the homey, laid back vibe, the friendly servers, the eclectic tunes, and the constantly changing garnishes on what is likely my favourite brunch menu in the city. If it weren’t for the hate bit, I’d be here every weekend. But the hate thing is something I can’t get over. It’s got nothing to do with the place itself, but everything to do with the clientele. Mitzi’s Sister seems to double as a daycare centre on weekend mornings, where local hipster parents come with their kids and pretty much set them free.

Now before I get piles of cranky comments, let me be clear. I don’t have a problem with well-behaved kids who can sit politely through a meal. I don’t have a problem with breastfeeding. And I understand that kids have short attention spans and lots of energy to burn. What I have a problem with is the Parkdale locals who let their kids literally run around the place, annoying other patrons and making life dangerous for themselves and the servers while the parents sit by oblivious, comparing tattoos and discussing their guitars. I watched a kid make it out the door and onto the street one day before his father clued in that he was gone and rushed frantically around the place looking for him. I witnessed a toddler wander into the kitchen, only to hear the crash of plates as the server avoided knocking her over. When I’m looking for a quiet breakfast that doesn’t include top-of-the-lungs screeching, I tend to end up somewhere else.

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Four Scores With Delicious, Healthy Dishes

Four
187 Bay Street, Commerce Court South, concourse level
416-368-1444

Fine dining and healthy eating have never exactly gone together. Luxurious sauces, marbled steaks and decadent desserts are a far cry from the salads without dressing and those awful “diet plates” of cottage cheese and melba toast that we tend to think of as low calorie meals. And pious health food restaurants serve up hefty portions of morality but the food at those places has never been known for being especially tasty.

Four aims to change that.

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In Defense of the Peanut Butter Cookie

A strange thing happened to me in 1991. All of a sudden my peanut butter cookies started coming out hard – like rocks.

I have no idea where the recipe came from. It was the one my Mom always used, so it likely came from my Grandmother, a cookbook, or perhaps a Home Ec course when she was a teenager. It is exactly like the majority of recipes for peanut butter cookies found on the internet today, where creators of “original” recipes try to differentiate themselves by an extra quarter cup of peanut butter or by sticking a chocolate kiss on top.

In all likelihood, however, every peanut butter recipe in use can be traced back to an original recipe, which first appeared some time in the 1930s, possibly 1936.

Which never really explained why my cookies had started turning out hard.

At first, I blamed myself. I must have screwed it up somehow. But subsequent batches were also hard. I adjusted quantities and techniques, even considered that the oven might be acting up. Then I thought to consider the peanut butter itself.

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Can Organics Feed the World?

Can organics feed the world?

This question was posed to the closing panel at this year’s Canadian Organic Growers Conference. Organic farmers, food producers, nutritionists and writers convened in Toronto this past Saturday to examine the issues and explore how organics is changing the world.

The day-long event included a keynote speech by Helge Hellberg of Marin Organic from Marin County California, who is hard at work to make Marin the first completely organic county in the United States. Hellberg, a Certified Holistic Nutrition Counselor recounted a visit to Marin County by Prince Charles, who is one of the world’s leading supporters of the organic movement to visit the Marin County farmers market. Hellberg’s inspiring speech set the tone for the day, as participants broke off into different seminars that ranged in topics directed towards farmers, food producers and consumers.

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Sunday Brunch – Yitz’s Delicatessen

Yitz’s Delicatessen and Catering
346 Eglinton Avenue West
416-487-4506
Brunch for two with all taxes, tip and coffee: $30

One of my very first jobs in Toronto was at Eglinton and Avenue Road, and ever since then, I’ve loved going to Yitz’s. Between the Eglinton location and the old Switzer’s on Spadina Avenue, these two restaurants often made me wish I had my very own Jewish Grandmother who would stuff me with blintzes and latkes and matzo.

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The Lies on Your Yogurt Container

There has never been any debate that yogurt is a healthy food. Yogurt adds calcium and protein to the diet; can positively affect other health issues such as cholesterol, immunity and colon health; and is easier to digest than milk. Plain yogurt contains live bacteria that can regulate digestive issues and restore balance to a system thrown off by things like yeast infections or anti-biotics.

These good bacteria are known as pro-biotics, and occur naturally in plain yogurt made with live bacteria. However, once you get into sweetened or flavoured yogurt of any kind, the sugars kill off the live bacteria and the nutritional benefit is thought to be negligible.

Because food companies are always working to keep and increase their market share, and because our society seems to work on the theory that if a little of something can be helpful then a lot of something must be really, really great, processed foods have been popping up on the shelves of the dairy case touting the inclusion of pro and pre biotic bacteria.

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Sunday Sips – Le Face Cachée de la Pomme Neige

I’ve neglected doing much writing about wine because I know very little about the subject. And when I do plunge into the unknown depths of varietals and oak-aging, I find myself completely overwhelmed. Which is why I thought I’d be able to manage to sound like I knew what I was talking about by sticking to fruit wine.

But not so fast, because when it comes to apples, the definitions get as confusing as with grapes, and sent my Google-fu into overdrive.

The product in question is Neige, an “ice cider” from La Face Cachée de la Pomme in Hemmingford Quebec. Technically speaking, any product made with apples is considered a cider. What we know as hard or alcoholic cider tends to be light, slightly sweet, but not overly so, and effervescent; usually from natural carbonation (although some ciders have carbonation added). Through further fermentation of the cider and the addition of sugar, yeast, pectin and acid, cider can become a more viscous and sweet dessert wine.

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Craving Some Valentine’s Chocolates

Craving Chocolates
119A Roncesvalles Avenue
416-538-1212

Valentine’s Day is commonly thought of as the biggest holiday of the year for chocolate sales, but statistics show it actually ranks third or fourth after Easter, Halloween and Christmas. Due to shopping habits related to the day, however, Valentine’s generates more one-week candy sales than any other holiday. Apparently shoppers are better prepared for the other holidays (something about women doing the bulk of the shopping as opposed to men), and Valentine’s Day purchases are more last minute. Which is a shame, because it means an awful lot of people are getting big ugly boxes of sub-par candy, when a little planning could mean a better product.

Tucked away behind a flower shop on Roncesvalles Avenue is exactly the kind of place where people should be buying their Valentine’s chocolates.

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Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants.

I was ready to dislike Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto before I even picked it up.

While I mostly enjoyed his previous book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, I felt that he did an awfully complicated song and dance in the steakhouse chapter to try and justify eating meat. Then I read a quote from In Defense of Food by another blogger which said “Don’t eat anything your grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food”, which riled me up excessively.

My own grandmother was all about baking fresh bread, canning tomatoes and picking blueberries, but she was also of a generation that fully embraced the new convenience foods. Not to mention that until 1973, she had never lived in a house with indoor plumbing – with four sons to feed, and then a handful of grandkids, can you blame her for throwing store-bought cupcakes and frozen pizza at us? The woman had to boil her dishwater on a kerosene stove!

Turns out Pollan’s quote is actually about GREAT-Grandmothers, which makes a heck of a lot more sense. Well, unless you factor in the lack of indoor plumbing (those great grannies would likely have been all over the Twinkies too!).

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Life’s a Bowl of Cherries

Although I try to eat a mostly seasonal diet, I’ve got to admit that in the dark months of January and February, I start craving fruit. Not just apples and pears, but bright juicy summer fruits like berries. At least once every winter I break down and come home from the grocery store with a bag of cherries, just because I really, really need them, even if they’re nowhere as good as the local cherries we get in the summertime.

Given that this week is the first National Eat Red Week (February 4th – February 10th), I don’t feel so bad about indulging in some cherries. Particularly since local tart cherries are available both dried and in juice concentrate form year round – Ontario is the sole producing province of commercially-grown tart cherries, most of which are the Montmorency variety, and over the past five years, the average annual crop has been an average of 10 million pounds.

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