Category: food

Good Phở Fo’ Shizzle

Phở Asia 21
1208 King Street West
647-436-0680
Dinner for two with all taxes, tip and beverage: $30

My immediate neighbourhood is not well known for its fine dining. Sure, there’s a couple of awesome Ethiopian places within walking distance, not to mention The Gladstone, The Drake, Beaver Cafe, and some interesting Tibetan restaurants if I’m willing to trek a bit. But anyone who’s ever found themselves at King & Dufferin looking for good food will know it’s a bit of a wasteland.

Once you rule out the two fast food burger joints and the two fast food sub chains, what you’re left with is a pretty awesome roti shop (Island Foods), a decent greasy spoon (The Gate) and a passable sports bar (Shoeless Joe’s). Which is why we were happy to see that a Vietnamese place had opened up around Christmas.

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Buffalo Gals

First, an admission. I am not as well-travelled as I’d like to be. While I’ve been to most major cities in the US and Canada, I’ve never been across the big pond. Given my feelings about the environmental impact of travelling for pleasure, not to mention the fact that I just hate the process of travelling in general (waiting in airports, jammed onto a plane for hours next to someone with toxic perfume, etc) it is unlikely that I will end up seeing a lot of the world in my lifetime. Living in Toronto, that’s not really a big issue, as I’m lucky enough to be able to hop on a cross-town streetcar and be transported to Athens or Seoul or Bombay for the very reasonable cost of $2.75, but there are occasional things that even the wonders of globalization cannot bring to the most multicultural city in the world.

Things like buffalo mozzarella, that are consumed near where they’re made and generally are past their prime by the time they reach a destination on another continent. I always figured that until I was able to travel to Italy, I’d never get to enjoy the real stuff.

Oh, I’d eaten bocconcini, made locally from pasteurized cow’s milk and sold in tubs. Slightly softer than regular mozzarella, I found the stuff to be pretty bland and tasteless, although the various sizes of little cheese balls were fun to put in salad. I never really got the “silky” description though – most of the stuff I ended up with had the consistency and bounce of one of those hard little superballs you could get in gum machines as a kid. You’d whip them at the floor and they’d bounce forever off of every surface, until your Mom would come and yell at you lest the thing took out a piece of the Royal Doulton collection. Suffice to say that in the grand realm of cheese, bocconcini really wasn’t near the top of my list.

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100 Miles to Nowhere

If you follow food politics at all, you’re probably aware of the theory that “local is the new organic”. Where we once fought to have food that was pesticide-free, over the past couple of years, what with the attention towards global warming, people have clued in that maybe cutting down on the distance their food travels would be a good thing, too.

The pinnacle of this philosophy would have to be the 100-mile diet in which people make every effort to source all of their food from within a one hundred mile radius. This is easier said than done, particularly when you live somewhere like Toronto. Even if we assume people are willing to give up all coffee, tea, chocolate and citrus, there’s also things like spices to be considered. Imagine living life with absolutely no salt and pepper. Or flour.

Despite the inconvenience and overall lack of logic, the 100-mile diet seems to have its proponents and the San Francisco Gate recently gave coverage to three families trying to stick to the diet. However, the food writer for the East Bay Express made his opinion resoundingly clear…

Unless you make decisions for an entity like Chez Panisse, whose mission involves influencing fellow businesses to reduce impacts, isn’t a complex scheme of artificial limitations on your daily life the kind of self-indulgent game that elites love to play? Isn’t it a bit like masturbation? As the father of the Chron staffer is quoted as saying: “This challenge sounds like something for people with too much spare time.”

I want to focus on the comment about elites within this quote. I attend a variety of conferences, symposia and gathering for the food industry and the elite issue comes up again and again. So much so that it’s embarrassing.

Why is it embarrassing? Because it’s true.

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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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Cravings and Squicks

Warning – this post contains discussion of vomiting.

Food, being, ideally, a sensual pleasure, is one of those things that we either really love or really abhor. Individual foods, I mean.

As children, we go through phases where we dislike different things, based on taste, texture or smell. As we age, those tastes usually adapt and progress, and we willingly eat spinach or beans or whatever food it is we hated so ardently in our youth.

The one exception to this is when food becomes associated with a traumatic event, particularly something physically traumatic like a serious illness. Watching it all come back up can turn us off from ever desiring a particular food again.

When I was a kid, my Mom was a big fan of cream of tomato soup. She always added additional milk to our soup, in part to cool it and additionally to make it creamier. Except one day, the soup was too hot and the milk curdled, although I didn’t know it at first spoonful. Haven’t been able to eat cream of tomato soup since then. I can’t, to be completely honest, even watch other people eat it, especially if they break crackers into it.

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Cafe Bernate – What Have I Been Missing All These Years?

Café Bernate
1024 Queen Street West
416-535-2835
lunch for two (including a cookie) with taxes, tip and coffee: $30

Regularly for the past ten or twelve years or so, I’d pass Café Bernate and say to myself, “We’ve really got to go there sometime!” Located on Queen West at Ossington, I’d be reminded of it twice a day as I rode the streetcar back and forth to work, yet somehow I never made it over there. Not for lack of trying through – a couple of times Greg, the husband, and I set out with the express intention to have lunch at the little gem of a café only to find it closed or packed.

So when we were walking along Queen Street a couple of weekends ago and both of us found our stomachs rumbling for lunch, we were surprised, astounded even, to find the place open. Finally, we would get to eat at Café Bernate.

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Ginger – Is This What Health Tastes Like?

Ginger “Taste of Health”
521 Bloor Street West
416-536-3131
Lunch for two with all taxes, tip and bubble tea: $35

I never liked this location when it was Juice for Life. I found the place cramped and loud and terribly claustrophobic, the chance for any type of conversation that didn’t involve screaming an impossibility over the noise of the juice blenders. So when we stuck our heads in the door while cruising Bloor Street for a place to eat, the décor won us over immediately. Shiny white tables actually had space between them, walls of orange light panels gave the place a warm glow and futuristic ceiling fixtures made this once stuffy room feel sleek and spacious and clean.

Despite the weird name – what exactly does “health” taste like? – we were hoping for the same from the food.

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The Words “Author” and “Great Cook” are not Synonymous

Note to self – check the publication date on books you borrow from the library. Sometimes you just don’t want to go there.

This note to self is provoked by a recent library acquisition that wasn’t exactly what I was expecting. The Great Canadian Literary Cookbook, while definitely Canadian, in a way only Canadians can be, is unfortunately, not Great. Not by a long shot.

I grabbed this book originally because I thought it would be a bit more… literary, in its content. I’ve had an idea to create an anthology of food memoirs by Canadian authors and sort of expected this would be along those lines. And certainly, there are some great food-related books by Canadian authors out there – Austin Clarke, for instance.

Let me start from the beginning. Every year in Sechelt, British Columbia, Canadian writers and readers come together for The Festival of the Written Arts. It’s now called the Sunshine Coast Festival of the Written Arts, and no, I don’t know where Sechelt, BC, is exactly, although somewhere along the BC coast is my best guess. After one festival the organizers came up with the idea to do a cookbook with contributions from festival participants. In 1994, they published the cookbook.

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The Making of a Chef

First, a disclaimer. The content of this post is not intended to sound pretentious or condescending. It is not my intention to look down on the home cook (I am one myself), or to sneer at people who have not gone through a culinary arts programme. I’ve always hated when people with university degrees look down on tradespeople, and it’s very easy for people with professional training to look down on home cooks.

Which is why I’m not recommending Michael Ruhlman’s The Making of a Chef to anyone.

Oh, it’s not that it isn’t a great book – it is. But it would be like me trying to sit down and real a programmer’s handbook. Or a book of Latin. Most of what Ruhlman discusses in this book about his time at the Culinary Institute of America would appear to anyone who hasn’t trained professionally or worked in a professional kitchen to be in a completely different language.

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Have You Got the Balls?

Somehow during Chinese New Year celebrations last month, I missed out on the sesame balls. I had Dragon’s Beard candy and dumplings and many other traditional foods, but no sesame balls. As deep-fried sesame balls are one of my favourite treats, regardless of the time of year, I set off to Chinatown one day last week to rectify the situation. But I was curious – who had the best sesame balls? In recent years, I swore by Furama Cake and Desserts Garden on Spadina Avenue, mostly because it was the place I passed most often, yet my husband Greg frequented Yung Sing Pastry on Baldwin Street, as it was close to his office, and was adamant that the best sesame balls could be found there. So, we did a taste test – each of our favourites plus two others thrown in for good measure. I did my taste test knowing which ball was which, but Greg tasted each dessert “blind”, not knowing which ball came from which bakery. Our results were the same.

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