Category: toronto

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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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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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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