Category: food

Proscuittotarian

I’ve fallen off the wagon. I blame Greg – he fell first and dragged me down with him.

I did make a resolution that I would “sample” things when I had the chance, just for the sake of expanding my palate and increasing my knowledge about food. I’ve been doing that when the opportunity arose, but with little enthusiasm; the proscuitto and salami I had at the Green Link event didn’t wow me, the burger Greg ate last week grossed me out (I spit out the tiny bite I tried), and the massive brontosaurus-sized ribs he ate for lunch on Saturday made me think that I had maybe just lost the taste for meat. I got them down and it wasn’t gross, but it wasn’t a pleasant taste – just kind of… dank. Maybe that’s why ribs need so much sauce – to cover up the yukky grey taste.

Then we wandered into St. Lawrence Market and a nice man handed me free proscuitto.

I always had this running joke that I’d like to be a proscuittotarian. Pescetarians are folks who eat fish, but are otherwise vegetarian, pollo-vegetarians eat chicken. I wanted to be able to eat proscuitto. And somehow I always knew that proscuitto would be my downfall.

Continue reading “Proscuittotarian”

That’s Just Nasty

I have a great deal of respect for Anthony Bourdain. Not for his ex-junkie, drinking, smoking, vegetarian-hating, pig-killing, squeasel-eating antics, but because he tells it like it is. He’s one of those folks who talk first and think later, someone who regularly gets pegged as being the guy who says what everyone else is thinking but are too afraid to say out loud. And most importantly, someone who puts his honest opinion out there and is willing to take the heat when it doesn’t go over favourably.

I also respect Bourdain for being a real guy who’d rather eat pho on a streetcorner in Vietnam than put on a suit and tie and go to an upscale hot new restaurant just because it’s the thing to do.

The Nasty Bits is a collection of Bourdain’s writing from the past few years since he left his gig at Les Halles in NYC to become the punk rock version of a food celebrity, with shows first on The Food Network and then with the Travel Channel. Published in a variety of magazines and newspapers, The Nasty Bits touches on anything and everything that touches Bourdain – from being seated on a plane next to an obese woman on his way home from a conference where he took on the heads of McDonald’s, to the interview with molecular gastronomy chef Adria Ferran of El Bulli which ultimately led to the decision to leave The Food Network (they were against spending the money to send him to Spain and instead were trying to force him to into the more traditional celebrity chef niche).

Continue reading “That’s Just Nasty”

Mostly Meaty at Shoeless Joe’s

Shoeless Joe’s
1189 King Street West (and other locations)
416-534-3666
Dinner for two with drinks, dessert, taxes and tip: $60

Okay, stop me if you’ve heard this one… two vegetarians walk into a sports bar, what do they end up eating?

Yup, salad. Hold the bacon bits.

I’m not quite sure what came over me, but I’d been craving a meal at one of those family-type chain restaurants. Some place inoffensive, with the 20-page menu, and massive cocktails where you get to take home the glass. Yes, I know, I’m a food writer; I should be craving tiny little bits of exotic tasting menus or expensive wines. But the belly wants what the belly wants, and in this case the belly wanted a really good Caesar salad.

The belly also didn’t want to venture too far, which is how we ended up around the corner at Shoeless Joe’s on a Saturday afternoon.

Continue reading “Mostly Meaty at Shoeless Joe’s”

Treat of the Week – Lassy Mogs

Have you ever rejected something from your childhood based on a memory that was either partially or wholly incorrect? As adults, our palates expand as we try new and different types of food. For some people the food of their childhood becomes the comfort food they return to when the cornucopia of choices just doesn’t satisfy. For others, especially those of us for whom food created very mixed emotions, the stuff we ate as kids can be the fodder for terrible memories.

I thought of this last night as I watched a documentary on CBC called XXL about a “fat camp” for overweight teens in Nova Scotia. One of the families was eating a traditional boiled dinner; corned beef, cabbage, carrots, potatoes and turnips, all boiled together in one pot until it all tasted the same and was pretty much mush. I gagged a bit and had to cover my eyes until it was done, something I never have to do even when there are surgery shots on TV.

My reaction to lassy mogs was almost as bad. I remember them as being soggy; sweating to a mush where they all stuck together in the cookie jar where they would remain until they were eaten, regardless of how long that took. This ideology of not wasting food, even if it was going bad or stale, or had lost its appeal, remains with me to this day, and Greg regularly remarks on stir-fry nights that I must have cleaned out the fridge.

Continue reading “Treat of the Week – Lassy Mogs”

Manic Organic – Part 2

Today we’re looking at the organic options in the higher-end grocery stores in my ‘hood. And the options really appear to be all about location. In Parkdale proper, even the prepackaged organic items can be hit or miss, but once I headed over to Roncesvalles Avenue where the supermarkets face stiff competition from a plethora of greengrocers, the organic options were overwhelming.

Loblaws
2280 Dundas West

With 300 products in the PC Organics line, I’m not about to list them all, and I’m going to go with the assumption that the Dufferin Mall No Frills offers a good cross-section of the prepared organic products. Instead, at Loblaws I concentrated on the produce section where there was, indeed, a decent amount of organic options to choose from. Organic strawberries were posted as being $5.99 compared to $4.99 for conventional and that price must have been attractive to customers as there were no organic strawberries left when I was there.

Of the organic cabbage, beets, radish, kale and carrots, all were imported. Pineapples, grapes and pears were also sold bagged, so there was no picking and choosing. Organic onions and sweet potatoes were sold in bags only, which might make the conventional versions of those items more of an option for anyone who needed only one or two of each. There was a decent selection of loose organic fruit, however, with mangoes, oranges, pears, lemons, avocado and kiwi all represented, as well as 5 varieties of organic apples.

Continue reading “Manic Organic – Part 2”

Manic Organic – Part 1

A few months back I read something in one of the newspaper food columns about how relatively easy it was to get organic produce at local supermarkets. The article specifically mentioned the No Frills in Dufferin Mall, and it left me scratching my head. See, I shop at that No Frills and I can’t really recall seeing a whole lot of organic produce there.

This provoked the desire to start exploring. Maybe there were hidden gems in my local shops that I wasn’t even aware of. So over the past few weeks, I’ve been wandering the supermarkets of the west end of downtown to see exactly what there was out there in terms of organics.

You’ll notice that I stuck to supermarkets and chain grocery stores, as this is where most people shop. My own grocery shopping excursions take me regularly to St. Lawrence and Kensington Markets, Whole Foods and Pusateri’s, as well as a variety of farmer’s markets, shops in ethnic neighbourhoods and small health food stores, in addition to frequenting the stores listed below.

In my travels for this article, I looked for specific items such as milk and soy milk, eggs, produce and prepared foods.

Continue reading “Manic Organic – Part 1”

Beer and Chocolate and the Yeti Bo Betty Song

I know, I know, I know. There’s no excuse for the negligence. Not even that I was busy, because I wasn’t (not that “busy” is a real excuse for anything anyway – no one is too busy to attend to their priorities), I was sitting on my butt in front of the tube, watching People’s Court. Yes, for the past four days.

See, I got a new desk chair. The old one is a ten-year old piece of crap from IKEA and it was time for it to go. Except the new chair is aligned much differently, and while in the long run it might actually be a lot better for my back, in the short term, my back and neck were not appreciative, and responded by mostly seizing up and not really allowing me to move without pain from the waist up.

Thus, I stepped away from the computer for a few days, and armed myself with pain killers, a heating pad and a tube of Rub A535 and hung out with my gals, Judges Judy and Marilyn. Others get sucked into soaps and talk shows when forced to watch daytime TV, but for me it’s all about the small claims court.

What has this got to do with beer and/or chocolate? Not a damn thing, I’m just explainin’ why I’ve been gone.

Continue reading “Beer and Chocolate and the Yeti Bo Betty Song”

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.

Continue reading “The Meat of the Matter”

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.

Continue reading “Building the Green Link”

Candy Freak

One of the cool things about writing a book about a particular food item is that, whether you consider yourself to be or not, other people will look to you as an expert on that topic, and will heap free samples upon you in the hope that you will write about them. I met author Steve Almond as he was being gifted with container after container of free organic cotton candy. Despite his polite insistence that he couldn’t possibly carry six tubs of cotton candy home on a plane, the manufacturer wanted him to try every flavor.

Almond was in Toronto this past spring to give what he thought was a reading at the unfortunately named Canadian Sweets Expo (www.sweetsexpo.ca). Badly promoted and equally poorly organized, what was meant to be on par with the big candy shows in the US turned out to be a sad collection of local vendors of mostly waxy chocolate, oddly flavored jellybeans and some crazy chocolate-flavoured energy balls that made me extremely ill. Also present were a few Canadian Food Network celebrities, a face-painter (for the kids) and a circus troupe. Not exactly the type of forum where a well-known author and creative writing professor is going to be known for his non-fiction work on rare US candy bars.

Which is too bad, because CandyFreak is a sugar-laced tour of the rare, the wonderful and the delicious. It’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, minus Johnny Depp. A self-defined candy freak, Almond traveled far and wide to learn the story of some rare and wondrous local favorites. From the southern icon the GooGoo Cluster, to the darling of Boise, the Idaho Spud (which yours truly has never tried but desperately wants to – readers in Idaho, help a poor Canadian gal out, won’t you?), Almond tours factories, talks to chocolatiers, and waxes poetic about enrobers.

Continue reading “Candy Freak”