toronto – Page 34 – Sheryl Kirby

You Don’t Know Jack

I’ve been working on getting Greg to try durian fruit. He’s a big ‘fraidy cat, and while he’s made it past the sniff test, he still won’t buy one. Granted, they can get pretty big. So I figured we’d start off small, and picked up a baby jackfruit in Chinatown on Saturday.

Jackfruit can grow up to 80 pounds each, so this little 1.5 pounder definitely qualified as a “baby”. What I didn’t realize is that jackfruit come in crunchy and custardy versions, and while I was familiar with the crunchy one from 20 years ago when I first moved to Toronto and ran around Chinatown buying anything I didn’t recognize, I’d never had a custardy one.

Related to breadfruit, jackfruit comes from Southeast Asia. It can be eaten raw or cooked, and the seeds can be eaten as well. To cut the fruit open, all surfaces (knife, hands, board) must be oiled, as the fruit oozes a sticky white latex that sticks to everything.

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And I Would Eat 100 Miles, and I Would Eat 100 More…

Spent the morning at our local taking part in a 100-mile brunch hosted by the MPP for the riding, Peggy Nash. I’m still not sure why Ms. Nash decided to put together such an event (we’ve got a Provincial election coming up, not a Federal one), but as the $25 price went to FoodShare, and as it was a 5-minute walk from home, we figured why not.

The event went off okay, but it wasn’t perfect. Food-wise, it appears that the primary food produced within a 100-mile radius is pork. Pretty much every part of the pig was accounted for, to the detriment of the vegetarians in the room. Vegans were completely SOL unless they stuck to the fruit plate. I loaded up on salad, cheese panini and a slice of Spanish potato omelet. While all the food was good, and was created by area chefs, the overall menu lacked cohesiveness. It felt like a potluck where no one consulted anyone else on what they were bringing.

Technical issues kept the coffee lukewarm for the first while and when I mentioned aloud that there was cream and milk but no sugar, some woman wagged a finger at me. “Sugar is not grown within 100 miles.” She came really close to wearing a cup of non-local coffee.

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My Little Dumpling

Yu Shan Dumpling Cuisine
771 Dundas Street West
416-869-0606
Dinner for two with all taxes, tip and beer (no dessert): $40

I’m always jonesing for the dumplings from that other dumpling place over on Huron Street, but never seem to make it over there. So when I found myself at Bathurst and Dundas recently, and in need of sophonsification, there was Yu Shan Dumpling Cuisine. That wasn’t there before, I thought, as the streetcar rolled past.

That’s because the space was formerly the Side Door Grill, abandoned after a round of Restaurant Makeover and a boiler explosion. The story circulating on local forums is that the landlord, once the previous tenants left, decided to try her hand at running the place herself.

With a fancy renovated front of house that really is more bar than “dumpling house”, all Jenny Tiao needed were some great dishes. And who doesn’t like dumplings?

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Here’s to Your Health

chfapamela

We arrived at the Canadian Health Food Association’s Expo East shortly after 9am with the assumption that we’d breeze through the trade show in a couple of hours. Even when we hit the floor and realized just how many exhibitors there were, we were still optimistic. Four hours later, we stumbled from the Toronto Convention Centre, laden down with bags of brochures, samples and assorted giveaway items. We had wondered why so many people were showing up with empty rolling suitcases – it was to carry home their swag. And we only looked at the food – fully a third of the exhibitors were there promoting either various forms of protein powders and energy bars or other health food items such as cosmetics.

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Black Creek Pioneer Village

A couple of weeks ago, Greg and I went to Black Creek Pioneer Village for their first annual beer festival. It was a bit of a trek by TTC (about an hour and twenty minutes each way), but that you can even get there at all by public transportation is kind of cool. Not getting out to the ‘burbs all that much, I sort of expected the village to be in the wilderness, but it’s bounded by Jane Street, Steeles Avenue and the York University campus. But the village itself is secluded and genuinely feels as if you’ve gone back in time. Based around the original farm buildings from the mid-1800s, many of the other buildings came from other areas of Toronto and Ontario and were all put together in the 1960s to form a park. It’s a favourite with school groups, as would be expected.

I didn’t take a lot of photos of the buildings, but more of the flora and fauna we encountered.

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You Should Just Buy

I was at the corner store a few minutes ago, buying baklava to have with tea, when I discovered myself in line at the cash in between two separate men buying multiple bags of injera, the Ethiopian bread.

Because I am my father’s daughter and have picked up the habit of chatting to strangers, I joked to the guy behind me, “Is this as good as homemade?”

Apparently Ethiopian folks who have immigrated to Canada don’t make their own injera. The mitad, the flat pan the bread is cooked on, doesn’t fit on our traditional stovetops. In faltering English he also said, “it’s also hard… to get right… when it is prepared…”

“When it’s fermenting?” I asked. His face lit up.

“I’ve always wanted to try and make it, ” I said. “My husband and I eat Ethiopian food a lot.”

He shook his head. “Even our ladies have hard time. You should just buy.”

Now I want to try it more than ever. But the teff, the grain used in injera, is expensive, so I’m worried about screwing it up. Maybe I should just keep buying my injera at the Hasty Market. If it’s good enough for the local Ethiopians, who am I to argue?

The Holiday That Canada Gave the World

The Labour Day parade goes right by our apartment. It’s senseless to try and ignore it – it’s loud and raucous and it takes a full two and a half hours for all 25,000 marchers to go past. That’s the right number of 0s there. Crazy, huh?

Parade marchers get into the Canadian National Exhibition (the finish point of the parade) for free on Labour day. Many groups had extras of the wristbands that are given to marchers and were handing them out to people watching the parade at the end of the route where we were. We were offered wristbands a half dozen times – next year we’ll plan on taking some and joining the crowd.

What I didn’t know was that Labour Day actually started in Toronto, but apparently this was the first place where people marched, in 1872. There’s a long history of the city being a “union-town” and with so much history, it’s easy to understand why.

People marched with their kids and dogs and families. Almost all unions had snazzy matching shirts or even jackets. There were plenty of bands, especially steel drum bands. While I still find it hard to muster up sympathy for things like the recent job cuts that will affect unions like CAW (Canadian Auto Workers) because I really believe there should be fewer cars on the road, I grew up in a union household (both my parents belonged to unions, as did I at my first job working at a hospital), so for the most part, I believe and agree with the presence and power of the unions.

The parade is really a celebration of humanity and what people can achieve when they pull together. Our society owes a lot to the work of unions, and while they’re not always perfect, they do a lot to make our quality of life one of the best in the world.

Out of Africa

africaplate

One of the coolest things about Toronto’s many cultural neighbourhoods is how they’ve evolved over the years. One group of immigrants moves out, another moves in to create their own community in their new home. During years of overlap, communities exist side by side and somewhat intertwined.

The most recent example of this cultural mosaic is Bloorcourt Village. This short stretch of Bloor Street West from Christie Pits park to Ossington Avenue was at first a predominantly Greek neighbourhood, pre-dating Greektown on the Danforth. Some vestiges of this still remain in the area today with restaurants such as Menalon (841 Bloor Street West) and Astoria Athens Restaurant (865 Bloor Street West) serving up traditional Greek cuisine and the quaint Greek Corner Grocery (859 Bloor Street West) still selling tins of olive oil from home.

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Harvest Wednesday Dinner

We attended our last of three Harvest Wednesdays this past week. The schedule rotated through Tasting Nights at $12 each, which were cocktail-party style, Buffet Dinner at $38 each, which was pre-set seating and a huge buffet table, and the Harvest Dinner, the most expensive at $48 each – a family style dinner where you sit with strangers, and pass large platters of food.

The event continues every Wednesday at the nearby Gladstone Hotel until September 19th, which is the finale of a 7-course meal for $110 with proceeds of that night going to FoodShare a local organization that sells weekly boxes of produce to low income people.

The premise of Harvest Wednesdays is that the hotel works with a CSA, and Chef Marc Breton pulls together a menu with only a day’s notice. He has an idea of what he’ll be getting based on seasonality and talking to the farmer, but it’s only when the boxes of produce arrive on Tuesday that he can really put together the menu for that week’s event.

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Hail to the ‘Dale

gatefish People don’t really think of Parkdale as being a foodie paradise. And yes, if you’re looking for high-end health food items, organic meat or artisanal bread or cheese, you’d be mostly out of luck. But as one of the most multi-cultural neighbours in one of the most multi-cultural cities in the world, we’ve got a lot of variety working in our favour.

Most folks tend to think of the ‘Dale as a low-end neighbourhood full of nothing but greasy spoons and burger joints. For sure, we’ve got two of the best. The Gate (1206 King Street West) sits at the corner of King and Dufferin and offers up filling breakfast, burgers and some damn fine fish and chips. Peggy, the waitress who’s been working the tables here since the late 60s when she came to Toronto to be a go-go dancer, tells regulars to help themselves to coffee. Further west along Queen, The Skyline (1402 Queen Street West) is about as retro as you can get in terms of diners, with that famous neon sign out front, and fast and efficient service inside from the flurry of activity that is Doris, once voted “best waitress in Toronto”. Other places that serve up a mean burger or all-day breakfast includes Harry’s Burgers (160 Springhurst Avenue) and Stavros (1530 Queen Street West).

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