toronto – Page 33 – Sheryl Kirby

Delight in the Junction

Delight
3040 Dundas Street West
416-760-9995

I shed a little tear the day in 2003 when Citron closed down. The Queen Street restaurant was one of my favourites and I think of it fondly still. A couple of years later, a friend who happened to also be good friends with the folks who had owned the place showed up at my house for dinner bearing a box of chocolates. The gorgeous treats were the work of none other than former Citron pastry chef and co-owner Jennifer Rashleigh. She had created a business called Delight and was making beautiful chocolates and selling them wholesale.

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The Final Harvest Feast

Autumn is undoubtedly my favourite season. It smells fantastic, the air is crisp, you sweat a whole lot less, and in terms of food, there is such a huge variety on offer. It also means the end of the harvest season, though, and I get how some people can find it a bit sad. Things are dying off, the summer is done, and it will be many long months before we can bite into a freshly picked strawberry or tomato again.

Which is why I was so excited to receive the email about one last Harvest Wednesday event at the Gladstone Hotel. Scheduling conflicts made this one a Harvest Monday, but that didn’t matter – the opportunity to sit with friends and enjoy one final meal from the CSA and Chef Breton’s kitchen was worth potentially missing Heroes (we didn’t).

Throughout the summer we enjoyed the rotating events of Harvest Wednesdays, from the cocktail-style finger food nights, to the grand buffets to the family-style passed dishes, with the bright summer sun streaming through the south-west facing windows. This final dinner definitely reminded us it was fall, for it was dark when we arrived and even darker when we left. My photos of the various dishes turned out to dark to use, even with some Photo-Shop tweaking, and I must admit that I forgot to photograph the hot dishes completely. I was too busy eating. Instead, here’s the menu with commentary.

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The Women’s Culinary Network – A Kinder, Gentler Approach to the Kitchen

There’s an old saying that goes “If women ruled the world, there would be no war.” Now I don’t actually believe this for a second, and despite my dislike of Bush and Cheney, I honestly believe they are the “softening factor” that is keeping Condoleeza Rice from turning the Middle East and North Korea into a literal dead zone. And we can all come up with examples of really scary women who really shouldn’t be running anything coughAnnCoultercough because their world view is just the teensiest bit warped.

But in general, women are likely to be more nurturing and empathetic than aggressive. In the realm of the restaurant industry, particularly the more mainstream businesses, being a woman in a kitchen can be pretty tough. There’s generally a lot of cursing, a lot of testosterone, and in some places, cheese throwing. And that’s when service is at its busiest. Downtime can quickly devolve to an adolescent level, which can be even worse.

A partial solution to the concerns that women in the food industry might have is the Women’s Culinary Network. Created in 1990 by four female chefs who found themselves working together in a small kitchen, the Network aims to create a place where female culinary professionals can get together to share experiences and define a supportive work environment.

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Get Stuffed

A block away, there is a mattress and box spring sitting out at the curb to be taken away. They are in front of a tiny little rowhouse cottage built in the 1880s, and probably by necessity, the box spring has been sawed in half, revealing the inner stuffing.

This fabric pulp is mostly grey, but is dotted with various splashes of colour. On further examination, the colour becomes actual chunks of fabric; a teal blue silk, some red wool, a swatch of green jersey.

I examine that fabric pulp almost every time I pass it, which is two or three times a day, depending on which route we take to walk the dogs. And every time, I can’t help but wonder what masterpieces were destroyed to make that melange of threads and fibre.

When I ran a vintage clothing store, back in the 80s, one of the questions I was asked most often was – where do you get your stuff? Where do these clothes come from? This was usually asked by someone figuring they could go directly to the source and cut us out as the middleman. The assumption being that we spent a lot of time at the Sally Anne or Goodwill.

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The Official Dinner

Living just a couple of blocks from both the Gladstone and the Drake hotels, it’s not uncommon for me to be strolling along Queen Street West and come across something that sets my eyes rolling back into my head in annoyance. More and more often, my neighbourhood is too damned pretentious for its own good.

So it was an ominous feeling in the bottom of my gut as Greg and I headed to the Drake hotel on Wednesday night and a block away we could hear bagpipes. As we approached, we could see that the sidewalk was blocked with a carpet and red velvet ropes. In the curb lane in front of the entrance were two Royal Mounted Police officers in the full dress uniform worn when presented to royalty (black serge and pith helmets as opposed to the traditional red serge and stetson), atop two gorgeous horses.

We stood on the sidewalk; confused, embarrassed and guiltily gleeful. If those officers and bagpiper weren’t actually there for us, I’d have growled about how pretentious the neighbourhood is getting. But all I could actually do was give the horses a scratch on the nose, and smile self-consciously as the piper piped us in to the Official Dinner.

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Creating a Delicious Thing

A couple months back I had great fun writing a piece on cupcakes in Toronto, comparing a variety of the pretty little cakes from different bakeries and shops across the city. The result of that taste test determined that the vanilla cupcake from Circles and Squares bakery topped our list, winning as both our favourite vanilla cupcake and our favourite overall.

It turns out that the bakery is just a few minutes from my house and when owner David Baxter invited me to stop by, I certainly wasn’t going to pass up the opportunity.

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When The City Finally Slows Down

Sometimes, this city just offers too much to do.

I’m not complaining, mind you. But it’s been an overwhelming summer. It’s said Toronto is a city of festivals and pretty much every weekend from late May until the end of September, there are multiple things to choose from. Just about every neighbourhood has a street festival now, there’s Caribana, Gay Pride Week, the Outdoor Art Show in Nathan Phillips Square, Doors Open, Taste of the Danforth, Taste of Little Italy, the Vegetarian Food Fair, piles of cultural events at Harbourfront, the Beer Festival, the CNE… it just goes on and on.

All of this culminates in one weekend of craziness. This past weekend saw two marathons (Toronto Waterfront Marathon and Run for the Cure), Word on the Street, the literary festival that takes over Queen’s Park, and Nuit Blanche, a 12-hour all-night art event that encompasses most of downtown. Pity the fool who tries to actually drive anywhere.

Nuit Blanche slipped under my radar last year, and I wasn’t super psyched about it this year, but as one of the 3 zones was in our neighbourhood, we wandered around to check out a few things. We watched parkour athletes climb and then descend the nearby train bridge, we wandered the Gladstone Hotel looking at the exhibits there. Then we headed east, stopping at galleries along the way until we got to the Great Hall where we stood amazed at what appeared to be a storefront filling with water and being taken over by giant fish. We picked up a chunk of carpet from where a group of artists covered a road on the CAMH property with the stuff, then headed to Lamport Stadium to see a giant inflatable locust. This was probably the most fun and interactive piece we experienced – kids were climbing all over the thing, crawling under it, bouncing against it. It was nothing more than a giant balloon, really, but people were truly having fun, including a group of drunk girls who repeatedly bounded into the face of the thing only to bounce back and end up on their butts on the astroturf.

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Over the Moon

Despite the fact that it’s 32 freakin’ degrees celcius in Toronto today, it is actually Autumn. And in Chinatown, where they’re getting ready to celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival, they’re buying mooncakes.

Wikipedia says:

Mooncake is a Chinese pastry traditionally eaten during the Mid-Autumn Festival. Typical mooncakes are round or rectangular pastries, measuring about 10 cm in diameter and 4-5 cm thick. A thick filling usually made from lotus paste is surrounded by a relatively thin (2-3 mm) crust and may contain yolks from salted duck eggs. Mooncakes are rich, heavy, and dense compared with most Western cakes and pastries. They are usually eaten in small wedges accompanied by Chinese tea.

I’ve been able to find non-egg mooncakes all year long throughout Chinatown, but the ones with eggs are more readily available during the Mid-Autumn Festival.

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Cat Food Bandits

There is a house that we pass every morning when walking the dogs. It is a lovely Edwardian, just half a block from a park. The windows are stained glass, the garden is expertly arranged with flowers all in shades of blue and purple or white. Along the sidewalk, someone has embedded a mosiac in the concrete, all bits of old plates and cups and fishbowl stones, also in shades of blue and purple.

A house like this wouldn’t be complete without a cat on the front porch and this place normally has at least two or three. That’s because the folks who like here regularly leave a dish of cat food out, either at the top or the bottom of the stairs to the porch.

Of course, cat food isn’t just attractive to cats, and in a city with an extraordinary amount of urban wildlife, other visitors often stop by for a snack. Continue reading “Cat Food Bandits”

The 21st Century Comes to Chinatown

E-Pan
369 Spadina Avenue
416-260-9988
Dinner for two with all taxes, tip and soda: $50

I have a special place in my heart for Chinatown. Particularly on hot summer nights when the smell of black bean sauce, fryer grease, half dead crabs and that special rotting garbage smell of durian all combine to remind me of my youth. Twenty years ago, I wandered these streets, young, naive and fresh off the plane from the land of pork chops and two overcooked veg. Living in Chinatown was a huge culture shock, and my roommates and I delighted in wandering Spadina and Dundas West, watching the restaurant ladies pushing bins of raw chicken feet from the many slaughterhouses, and bringing home odd fruits or noodles, seeking guidance from our neighbour Mei Ling on what to do with the stuff.

We managed to eat at a lot of restaurants along the Spadina strip as well. The fluorescent lights and plastic table cloths were de rigeur at all of these joints, and not much has changed. The food is always cheap and usually good, but ambiance is generally low on the list in this part of town. Which is why I was so surprised by E-Pan.

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