Dragon’s Beard Candy. A traditional Lunar New Year treat.
The making of Takoyaki – fried squid balls – in a special Takoyaki pan. The process was fascinating to watch, especially when the balls were flipped.
Category: food
Growing Up Organic
What do a soy bean farmer, a nurse who runs a community garden, an activist working to stop toxic chemicals, an environmental architect and a food writer all have in common? We all shared a table at the Canadian Organic Growers (COG) conference this past Saturday.
With a theme of “Growing Up Organic”, the various presentations focussed on how organic food compared to conventionally grown food and how that might affect children’s health, as well as looking at the various organic food programmes in daycares and schools that were encouraging parents and teachers to choose and promote organics at home.
Speakers included Thomas Pawlick, author of The End of Food, Dr. Rick Smith from Environmental Defence Canada, Wayne Roberts of the Toronto Food Policy Council and Kim Crosby of Real Food For Real Kids.
The event also featured the first ever “Organic Food Hero” awards, with honourees in various categories. For her series “Organic Goes Mainstream”, Jill Eisen of CBC Radio received the Organic Media Hero award. Chef Michael Stadtlander was a awarded the “Organic Supporter” award for his work championing organic food and farming. The Organic Organization Hero for this year was Anne Slater of the Ecological Farmers Association of Ontario. Bread and Roses Café in Hamilton, Ontario won the award for Best Restaurant Serving Organic Food, and The Canadian Organic Growers Volunteer award went to Anne Macey.
C is For Cookie – The Nitty Gritty
I spent Saturday in a conference room full of farmers and nutritionists. I scored a media pass to the Canadian Organic Growers conference, and besides the free organic lunch, everyone went home with a bag of organic swag. Most of the stuff was from President’s Choice Organics and included cereal, chocolate and tea. Some of the bags included pasta, while mine had a box of Nature’s Path organic chocolate chip cookie mix. We use other Nature’s Path products such as some of their cereals, and even the frozen waffles, so I was vaguely interested in the cookie mix.
As a die-hard home baker, I can’t remember the last time I bought a pre-made mix of anything [1]. My folks sometimes send me one of those “beer bread” mixes in a clay pot things at Christmas, but I think I still lived with my folks the last time I used a mix for anything. Certainly, they got used frequently when I was growing up, and I can recall my Grandmother using mixes for various things quite frequently, but then, it was the style of the time (her being a 50s housewife, after all), she had a brood of kids and grandkids to feed, and she hated cooking.
I was going to set the box aside for a food bank donation, but my curiosity got the better of me. Maybe they had figured out some way to make box mixes better these days. Maybe thirty years on, they were better tasting than stuff made from scratch.
Chefs Are the New Rock Stars
Imagine for a moment that you’re walking down the street and you pass a punk-looking kid wearing a black t-shirt with Anthony Bourdain’s face on the front. Or you’re in the mall and the gaggle of girls outside of Old Navy are all wearing sparkly pink shirts emblazoned with the Rachael Ray logo. Or maybe you’re watching the news to see thousands of women mobbing the airport when Jamie Oliver deplanes and races to a limo to be whisked away before someone gets injured.
To people in the industry, the concept of chefs as celebrities seems vaguely uncomfortable. The people who cook the food for restaurants, events, and hotels are meant to be behind the scenes. They’re part of the great machine that makes a dinner or an event happen seamlessly and beautifully; the kitchen is called “back of house” for a reason. Most dedicated cooks don’t want the attention – they want to do their jobs and do it well, and don’t much care for the cameras and interviews and face time.
But most is not all, and as more and more of the celebrity chefs we watch on TV sign endorsement deals or create product lines of their own, the desire – we’ll even call it a “need” to be seen, to be out there promoting the gadgets, the cookbook, the product lines and oh, yeah, the restaurant – becomes overwhelming.
Cooking For Dummies
It’s pretty much been determined that The Food Network has been dumbed down to make it more “entertaining” as opposed to educational. Cooking shows never give you the recipe for things anymore, and viewers choose their programming based on pretty hair, big boobs and which TV celebrity chef has the most gadgets for sale.
Apparently this desire to want to cook but not really put the effort into the process has created a whole new (lowered) standard in cookbooks. As today’s cooks are bewildered by basic techniques and standardized cooking terms, recipes get longer and more detailed in an effort to explain the process enough so that the inexperienced home cook can turn out a halfway decent product.
In today’s Toronto Star, Susan Sampson explores the difficulties faced by both cookbook publishers and food writers.
We don’t sauté. We cook, stirring.
We don’t combine. We toss gently. Or stir in. Or whisk.
And we never, ever julienne. We cut in matchstick strips.
It’s our way of speaking very s-l-o-w-l-y and enunciating as home cooking skills continue to slide downhill.
We are not alone. Cookbook editor Rux Martin, for example, also tries to avoid terms readers may not know, like blanch or baste.
The catch? “If you can’t use those terms, how do we educate cooks?” wonders Martin, an executive editor at Houghton Mifflin in Boston.
This is Why People Go Out For Brunch
I cook breakfast. Every day.
Some days I do nothing more than put some fruit on cereal, but most mornings, Greg and I eat a real breakfast; buckwheat pancakes; quinoa and maple-glazed trout; scrambled eggs or sometimes oatmeal.
So when the weekend comes around, I am more than happy to toss aside my spatula and go out to brunch.
While brunch is the new dinner according to NOW Magazine food critic, Steven Davey, my colleague over at Gremolata, Ivy Knight, is more than happy to explain why a restaurant brunch is a very unhappy thing for the folks who actually have to cook it.
But, see… people like to go out for brunch because it allows them to eat foods they wouldn’t, or couldn’t, cook at home.
Many breakfast dishes are fussy, with many ingredients, all cooked á là minute, and if keeping two pots and two frying pans and maybe the oven all under control at the same time isn’t your cup of tea, going out for brunch where someone else can do the juggling for you probably is.
Eat Like a Canadian
Canadians at Table – A Culinary History of Canada
Dorothy Duncan
When I was in junior high school, I was very excited about taking history class. That was until I got to that class and realized “history” was really all about who won what war, and not about how people really lived. Feminists would interject here and mention that what I really was interested in was “HERstory”, and I guess to some degree, that would be right. Because what really turned my crank was learning about how people lived, and most of that centred around women. How did the pilgrims keep their teeth clean? What did the Egyptians use in place of pads or tampons? How did cooks make all of the things we cook today without the convenient appliances we take for granted?
This interest was so intense that it almost led me to become an archaeologist, until I learned that archaeologists spend an awful lot of time digging in the dirt under the hot sun. Turns out what I really wanted to be was an anthropologist, but by the time I figured that out, I had moved on to wanting to be a fashion designer, and my interest in history got set aside until I got into the study of food.
Getting Taken For a Ride with Canada’s Food Guide
Yes, it’s the day that Canadians have been waiting for with bated breath – the release of Canada’s first new food guide in fifteen years. The media can’t stop singing the praises of the thing, but much of the media write their articles based on press releases. The truth is, the new Food Guide is not especially useful to anyone.
The guide has been redesigned to allow more personalization of choices; there are more ethnic foods to accommodate the cultural changes within our population, and it allows individuals to make specific choices with regards to which foods they will eat from each section.
But while the new Guide does offer serving sizes, it doesn’t differentiate it terms of calories or fat content. In the milk and milk “alternatives” section (to which I must emit a giant “HA!” – the only non-dairy “alternative” offered is soy milk), skim milk, 1% and 2% milk are all considered equal. And in the alternatives section, you can have pudding instead of a glass of milk. Not that milk should even be there to begin with (it’s really not necessary to good health and nutrition), but the Food Guide really wasn’t created with the health of Canadians as its primary focus anyway, and marketing boards have a much bigger say in the final draft than the real and genuine health concerns brought up by doctors.
Continue reading “Getting Taken For a Ride with Canada’s Food Guide”
That’s Not Healthy
I came across a cooking magazine a couple of weeks ago that I’d never seen before. Healthy Cooking Magazine has a tagline of “simple solutions, healthy alternatives”. I don’t buy a lot of cooking magazines, to be truthful, and grabbed this one only because it was on a shelf next to Eating Well and I was at a friend’s shop and wanted to be a good customer.
It sat around for a few weeks after I brought it home – I’ve been crazy busy the last little while and never really had time to sit down with it. On the weekend I started flipping through the pages as I was eating lunch and noticed something rather peculiar.
Now, maybe it’s just because I’ve been thinking about ethical policies lately; I’ve been drafting up guidelines for writers at TasteTO, as well as the framework for an info package for advertisers. But what I noticed about Healthy Cooking was that the majority of ads within the magazine were for products created by the writers themselves.
Mitzi’s Cafe and Gallery
Mitzi’s Café & Gallery
100 Sorauren Avenue (at Pearson)
416-588-1234
lunch for two with coffee, tax and tip; $35, cash only
Think for a moment about your perfect neighbourhood café. It would be small and cozy, hidden from the beaten path, but still busy enough to flourish. There would be funky mismatched furniture, artwork on the brightly-coloured walls, and an open kitchen where the staff regularly broke into song (in a good way). There would be a cute patio and maybe a big picnic table out front under an old apple tree, where locals gathered each sunny day, kids and dogs in tow, to sip coffee, share gossip, watch the birds flutter by and enjoy their breakfast.
Oh yeah, and the food would kick some serious ass.
Don’t have one of those in your ‘hood? I feel bad for ya, dude, because here in Parkdale, we’ve got Mitzi’s, and we love it.