Best Food of a Lifetime

The last day of the year always makes me feel a little melancholy and very close to that veil between past, present and future, living and dead. In that spirit, while catching up with some overdue paper filing this morning, I ran across a list my brother Dwight made not too long before he died of cancer at age 43. Like him, it's idiosyncratic, playful and intelligent: a typed-out list labelled "Top Memories", and covering his best food experiences from age 5 onwards.

Here's the list, in the order the items apparently occurred to him, preserving the original spelling, but with a few notes and illustrations.

• D.Q. BRASIER 1966 – When we were small, my family spent summers in Brockville, where my mother grew up. A frequent family treat was to drive out to the east-end city limits for dinner at the Dairy Queen, one of the few we knew of that served the "Brazier" menu of burgers and onion rings along with the ice cream. Dwight would have been remembering those charcoal-scented burgers in their condensation-dampened yellow paper sacks from when he was five years old.

• Peanut Buster Parfait 1987 – A Dairy Queen opened on Sherbrooke Street not too far from our house in Montreal in the mid '70s. We used to walk down or ride over on our bikes for ice cream. Apparently Dwight was still fond of dropping in when he was in his late 20s.
• Burger King Cheesburger Brockville 1999 – After the era of the Brazier Burger, my parents purchased a piece of land on Charleston Lake near Brockville and built a small cottage there. Dwight had some of the best times of his life there; he liked fishing and swimming and wandering around on the old unpaved back roads. He also enjoyed visits into town to get fast food, a continuing pleasure into his 30s.
• Pineapple Chicken Tchang Kang House 1978 – This is the Tchang Kiang at 6066 Sherbrooke West in Montreal, just down the street from the house where we grew up. It was one of the few restaurants where my dad, a fussy eater, felt comfortable. The irony is that Dwight and my dad would order things like spare ribs and pineapple chicken, given that I was repeatedly assured by a family friend who grew up in Shanghai and other parts of Asia that the place served extraordinarily fine and authentic Szechuan food long before most Montrealers knew much about that regional cuisine.
• Back Bacon Christmas 1980 – This was our family Christmas breakfast treat.
• Pinnochio "Hot Pepper" pizza 1981 – Pinocchio was one of several noble pizza places in the old neighbourhood. I'm not sure it still exists, but I expect Dwight would have ordered many, many of these to his various little apartments on Decarie and Sherbrooke.
• Fries Paul Frigon 1973 – My brother John recalls a small restaurant named Paul's, run by one Paul Frigon on Décarie south of Côte St. Antoine in Montreal. Apparently all the kids from the Catholic boys' grade school would congregate there after classes let out to order some combination of a hot dog, a Dr. Pepper and a Puffed Square (now known as Flaky Pastry or Passion Flaky). This memory would date from about Grade 7.

• Braised Lamb Ritz Carlton 1986 – After my brother John and I moved to Toronto, my dad used to treat the rest of the family to Christmas dinner at the Ritz in Montreal. He had a fascination with big hotel dinners honed during his rather tough time through the Depression in Toronto, when his family would have their Christmas dinner at the King Eddy or the Royal York, a bright spot in an otherwise challenging year.
• Twinkie 1972 – Dwight would have been 11 at this date, and I think part of the subtext here is that Twinkies were not generally available in Canada in the '60s, so although we would have been bombarded with advertising for them during shows like Captain Kangaroo and Huckleberry Hound, we couldn't actually buy them. It's likely that 1972 was the first year we went down to visit our New York cousins, and thus Dwight's first bite of this hitherto unattainable pleasure.
• Peach with cigarette 1983 – What can I say? Dwight also said that an apple and a cigarette was a perfect combination of flavours.
• Roast beef Winter 1974 – My mom tended to cook a roast beef every Sunday night. This may have been the last winter that Dwight felt happy to be part of the weekly family ritual. And those roasts were great, both on the night and later, as sandwiches.
• Chateau BBQ ribs 1985 – This was also a frequently patronized west-end Montreal delivery choice, but I don't think it still exists. It was an employee breakaway from the next entry.
• Chalet BBQ 1967 to present – We did actually hold the memorial for Dwight at this iconic west-end Montreal restaurant.
• Breakfast King Edward Hotel 1975 – This was the year my cousin David got married and we drove up en famille from Montreal to Toronto to attend the wedding. My dad had a nose for urban evolution, and he decided to stay at the King Eddy, which was at that time in a state of relative neglect. "One of these days they're going to diddy it up, and then we won't be able to afford to stay there," he said. "So we should enjoy it now. It's got a lovely lobby." He was of course right.
• Silverwood Ice cream Sandwich / Fudge monster QPC 1980?? – How many ice cream sandwiches did we buy as kids, at 10 cents a pop, from local depanneurs on the way home from school? I don't recall Fudge Monsters, but John says they were a malted fudge frozen bar with a gumball for a nose. QPC = Quarter Pounder with Cheese (see next entry).

• Egg McMuffin?? – McDonalds began to spread out in Montreal in the 1970s, when Dwight was in high school, and it quickly became popular with many of us. Whatever else one might say about McDonalds, the food has the charm of always being exactly the same.
• C.N.E. Bacon Butty – The British-derived sliced bacon-on-a-bun sandwich, which Dwight would have tasted on one or more of our annual family pilgrimages to the Ex as a tween and young teenager.

Looking the list over, it's hardly a list of fine dining experiences; in fact, it's dominated by fast-food burgers. Dwight was never really happy in his body from birth, and I think a large part of his life was spent trying to find moments of comfort. Even the fancier items are certainly comfort food.

Significantly, most are intimately tied up with the accrued memory of repeated pleasant family experiences. I guess what the list illustrates is that, if one is being honest about food, one may have to admit that it's the emotional resonance more than the cost or quality or even taste that makes it memorable. And decoding the list tells me – if I ever really doubted it – that my brother, who was not always easy to get along with, had a profound connection to our shared family life. After all, he called it "Top Memories", not "Favourite Foods".

Inniskillin Wine Tasting at Nancy's Cheese

I got a last-minute invitation to attend an Inniskillin wine and cheese tasting tonight at the delightful Nancy's Cheese (260 Dupont, 647-343-0315). There was a small gathering of local food and wine types there by the time I arrived, primed and ready to try the new Inniskillin Reserve Series Cabernet Franc VQA 2007, released about a week ago at the LCBO, with a succesion of six cheeses chosen to accompany it. The cheeses, pictured above, are (left to right):

• Chèvre Noir (Damafro, Quebec): a salty pasteurized goat milk cheddar
• Île-aux-Grues 2-year-old Cheddar (Île-aux-Grues, Quebec): a "thermalized" cheddar, not as sharp and grainy as Balderson or Forfar. Thermalizing is heating to a low temperature, so it's in between pasteurized and non-pasteurized cheese.
• Piave (Belluno, Italy): A firm, pasteurized cow cheese very like a Parmigiano-Reggiano
• Roaring Forties Blue (King Island Dairy, Australia): A noble, creamy blue
• São Jorge (Loudrais, Portugal): An unpasteurized and very flavourful cheese, quite acidic, with a pleasantly strong, barnyardy flavour
• Blackburn (Fromagerie Blackburn, Jonquière, Quebec): This medium-textured, thermalized cheese seemed to befriend every wine we tried. Its washed rind is robustly nutty.

We tried three other wines before the Cab Franc was uncorked.

• Inniskillin Winemaker's Series Two Vineyards Riesling VQA 2008 (the 2007 is listed at the LCBO as Vintages 105387, $17.95): Very pale green-yellow with a pineapple-mango-citrus nose. I'm used to Rieslings that taste like pears or apples or peaches; this one had a surprisingly tart, citric-acid (Vitamin C) taste that got a little bit sweeter as it sat in the glass, ending up somewhere around the range of pink grapefruit.
• Inniskillin Winemaker's Series Three Vineyards Chardonnay VQA 2008 (the 2007 is listed as Vintages 105379, $17.95): Greenish with extremely tiny bubbles. A very subtle scent of pear or lychee, verging over to pumpkin or melon. The taste was surprisingly sweet in comparison, baked-appley, nicely acidic and rather warming at 13.5% alc/vol. With the 2-year-old Cheddar, it had a finish that reminded me of Cracker Jack. Or you could say caramel and butter with a hint of nuttiness if you prefer.
• Inniskillin Winemaker's Series Three Vineyards Pinot Noir VQA 2007 ($22.95): A dark brownish red with a sweet strawberry-cinnamon scent. Its taste is dark, like Kalamata olives or very dark chocolate, and the finish is pleasantly bitter.

• Inniskillin Reserve Series Cabernet Franc 2007 VQA (Vintages 91140, $16.95): Vincor rep Scott Starra called this "the quintessential red wine from Niagara in that vintage". (Vincor is the parent company of Inniskillin.) It had a deep plum-blackberry colour and a rich blueberry-blackberry nose with a hint of strawberry. The taste was peppery-spicy, close to liquorice, with a tendency to get richer and more fruitcake-like in the glass as it was exposed to the air. For most of the tasters there tonight, this seemed to be the favourite, although I might possibly go for the Riesling, despite my usual preference for sweeter rather than drier wines.

For the record, although all the cheeses were pretty good with the Cab Franc, the Blackburn was the standout. I also enjoyed it with the Roaring Forties and the São Jorge, and would be pleased to have any of those combinations again.

Toronto #Foodiemeet Bake Off at the Samovar Room

Well, I never thought I'd find myself in a roomful of cupcakes and unable to eat a single one. But that's exactly what happened as tonight's Foodiemeet Bake Off on behalf of The Stop Community Food Centre drew to a close.

Not only I, but every person in the room, was so surfeited on butter, sugar, flour – and bacon – that there were no takers for dozens of cupcakes, tarts, bars and squares at the end of the night. But don't worry; they won't go to waste. Most of the leftovers were packed up to be eaten by friends and colleagues tomorrow.

But what a desserty debauch! The picture at the top shows the tower of petit fours created by Madalina Paul of Duhlicious. Then there was the phenomenally complicated and delicious replica of the St. Lawrence Market, measuring close to a metre from front to back and rendered in white velvet cake with caramel pecan cream cheese by Kristin Perez of Cake or Death.

Catherine of Sugar Baking (pictured here) created a beach holiday scene out of Pina Colada and Ferraro Rocher cupcakes topped with sunglasses, beach balls, flip flops, palm trees and luggage fashoned out of fondant.

Bacon, butter and exotic spices were recurring themes in numerous submissions. Some of my favourites: Joel Solish's True North Strong and Frees (maple frosted almond shortbread with "pig candy" – a.k.a. candied bacon); Bonita Mok's decadent Black sesame and white chocolate wasabi cupcakes, the exquisite Lavender French butter with salted butter caramel buttercream cookies by Monica Reyes, Riona Kum's fabulous Coconut cupcakes with kaffir lime icing and Alexa Clark's beautifully presented Spice Route shortbreads in their own mini boats.

I was especially pleased at the announcement of the people's choice overall winner, Paul Morrison, shown here with Niya Bajaj. Paul (@ekkridon on Twitter), developed his own recipe for Tandoori Shortbread Tarts with Passionfruit Curd, combing the city for just the right passionfruit product to make his excellent mini tarts with a creamy, fruity filling and a spicy, savoury crust. For his efforts he won the grand prize of the evening, a box of Fifth Town artisanal cheeses.

Organizers Andrea Chiu (@TOfoodie on Twitter) and Suresh Doss (@spotlightcity) deserve great credit for a well organized event in a great space (the Samovar Room at 51A Winchester, once the fabled Laurentian Bar, which still boasts the gorgeous wood bar) for a great cause. And what's a sugar hangover, compared to all that?

The Springerle Rolling Pin

I think I've wanted to bake springerle cookies (pronounced shpring-early) all my life. One impediment was that I didn't know what they were for the longest time. The journey began with a wooden rolling pin that my mom used for shortbread; she would press it into the dough and produce squares with rabbits, flowers, fish and birds printed into them. I absolutely loved the idea, but I was a little sad that the rising of the dough in the oven caused the images to fade out a lot.

The next part of the story was the first time I saw a picture of springerle in a Christmas cookie recipe book. I was transfixed; I read the recipe over and over, but I didn't know where to get the molds that make these beautiful ornate threee-dimensional German cookies. I asked at numerous cooking stores all over the eastern seaboard. No one had them. I bought some ceramic cookie stamps, but they're very tricky to use and I didn't even test them on a true springerle recipe.

Enter Martha Stewart. I spotted a lovely springerle cookie on the cover of one of her magazines and bought the issue imagining that it would tell me everything I needed to know on the subject. Bad Martha! Not for the first time, I was misled by one of her luscious cover photos. There wasn't really very much about springerle in the issue, but it did clue me in to a business called House on the Hill, which carries springerle supplies. I ordered a catalogue. When it finally arrived, I was a bit horrified to discover that a single mold can cost as much as $60. But there are molds that stamp several patterns at the same time. Some of them are shaped like rolling pins...

Suddenly, the other shoe dropped. My mother's rolling pin wasn't for shortbread! It was for springerle! I called her up right away and asked her to dig it out. For a brief unhappy moment she thought it might have been left behind when she moved out of the family home in Montreal. But no, it was still in her possession, and I yoinked it out of her hands a few days later.

I had fun cleaning it very carefully, but it took me a long time to get a chance to try to make the cookies. Not until today, actually. The dough is made by beating eggs with powdered sugar for a long time, and then adding flour. Hartshorn or baking powder makes it rise, and it's traditionally flavoured with anise extract, but I substituted almond extract as I couldn't find anise in the neighbourhood.

It's an odd dough, and the rolling takes some muscle. It also sticks a lot, so you have to keep dusting everything with flour while working. The idea is that you let the cookies dry on top overnight so the pattern doesn't distort in the baking; that's where I am now. Although I followed the instructions, I feel that I will roll the dough thicker next time. However, I'll wait to see what happens in the oven tomorrow before I modify the plan.

For the moment I have three cookie sheets covered with springerle, and I feel like I've satisfied some atavistic need. Baking them will just be the icing on the... cookie.

Holiday Wine Guide #hohowine

Just a quick note to direct readers to the Spotlight Toronto Holiday Wine Guide. It's divided into regular wines and sparklies, and includes local and international picks: good values, great tastes and unexpected delights.

I'm feeling sort of humbled to have been chosen to contribute to the collection amongst the likes of sommelier and man-about-town Zoltan Szabo, wine writer Rick VanSickle; Krystina Roman of Rosewood Estates Winery & Meadery, writer Joel Wilcox, Steven Campbell (Grand Fromage) and Nicole Campbell (Petit Fromage) of Lifford Wine Agency, Sharon Marks of Nyarai Cellars, Nina Popovic of Spotlight Toronto, Alex Harber of Ravine Vineyard, Alexa Clark of CheapEats and food appreciator Edlynne Laryea.

It's a great group of people and a rather remarkable list of recommended bottles, with a fun, fresh, non-snooty approach. The attitude is possibly summed in in Steven Campbell's comment of a few days ago: "There is not much to know about wine. It tastes good, loosens the tongue and warms the heart. Drink and enjoy."

Meanwhile, head on over to Spotlight TO and find out why this assemblage of wine lovers is sending special holiday love to local wineries Lailey, Le Clos Jordanne, Inniskillin, Chateau des Charmes, Southbrook, Sandbanks, Fielding, Flat Rock, Creekside, Ziraldo, Angels Gate, Megalomaniac, Stratus and especially Malivoire.

Gingerbread Houses for Habitat for Humanity Toronto

That wonderful charity Habitat for Humanity (Toronto) is auctioning off six celebrity-made gingerbread houses online and also holding a Gingerbread House Build at the Delta Chelsea Hotel (33 Gerrard West) this Saturday and Sunday, December 5 and 6. There are still a few spots open for the gingerbread build; register online if you're interested.

As for the designer houses, they're highly covetable. Audra Brown of Citytv has designed a fully-frosted Polar Ice Palace (pictured above). There's a heartwarming Habitat home build featuring Rudolph and his friends by Kristen Peres of Cake or Death (pictured above). International architects HOK have designed an Olympic Village featuring Vancouver 2010 mascots Sumi, Quatchi, and Miga. Kimberley Seldon Design Group has created an intricately ornate Christmas Cottage. Bonnie Gordon Cakes has contributed an unbelievable edible ski chalet, while the always lovable Jamie Kennedy has built a replica of the Francy Barns at Riverdale Farms, complete with farm animals, hay bales and a cute pretzel fence (pictured above).

At the time of posting, the bidding was ranging from $45 to $110. The auction ends on December 10, so there's still almost a week to bid. The homes are displayed in the lobby of the Delta Chelsea to help you make up your mind before you bid for a house online. By the way, if you have about $100 to spare, you could make yourself a two-time holiday hero by winning one of the bids and donating the house to a kids' charity, a shelter or a community centre.

FoodShare Gift Baskets Make Great Christmas Presents

FoodShare has assembled a great collection of gorgeous gifts for people interested in supporting local and sustainable food, nutrition education and good food for all. Here's the selection of what's available. The complete gift basket details are on their site.

• Duo of Chutneys (apple and green tomato): $20
• Trio of Herbed Vinegars (blueberry-mint, thyme-red sage-garlic or rosemary): $25
• Recycled organic cotton apron with calendar and soft Iranian dates: $20
• Baseball cap with calendar and soft Iranian dates: $20
• Water bottle with calendar and soft Iranian dates: $20
• Small Field to Table Basket (contains biscotti, fruitcake, dates, two chutneys, apron and calendar in repurposed wooden produce crate): $35
• I Heart FoodShare Combo (contains apron, baseball cap, water bottle, calendar, plus “How Does Our Garden Grow” and “Compost Breakdown” manuals in recycled plastic shopping bag): $75
• Medium Field to Table Basket (contains biscotti, fruitcake, three vinegars, two chutneys, dates, apron and calendar in a repurposed wooden produce crate): $100
• Large Field to Table Basket - pictured (biscotti, fruitcake, three vinegars, two chutneys, dates, a fresh pineapple, local apples, chestnuts, local kidney beans, apron, baseball cap, water bottle and calendar in a repurposed produce crate): $200

You can pick them up free at FoodShare (90 Croatia, near Dufferin and Bloor) or arrange delivery within the GTA for $10. The deadline to order is 5 p.m. on Monday, December 14.

To order, call or email Liz Kirk at 416-363-6441, extension 280.

Christmas Baking and the FoodieMeet Bake Off

Last night I threw together a test batch of my Green Tea Shortbread cookies in aid of a piece I'm doing for the December issue of City Bites about de-stressing the holiday baking ritual. If you want the complete recipe, you'll have to grab the magazine, but it essentially entails adding two tablespoons of matcha or any green tea, powdered, into a favourite shortbread recipe.

More serious baking is still to come, partly because I like it, partly for serving up through the holidays, and partly because I've promised to contribute baked treats to the FoodieMeet Bake Off to raise money and awareness for The Stop Community Food Centre.

That means I'm one of more than two dozen home and professional bakers who will present their own baked goods on the theme of "Escape from Toronto". A $25 ticket allows tasters to try four different items and vote for the best. (Extra tickets are $2 each.) There'll also be dancing to music provided by The Slow Clap. It all happens at the Samovar Room (51A Winchester Street, just off Parliament), starting at 6:30 p.m. on Sunday, December 13. The $20 early-bird tickers are already sold out, so move fast to get your ticket before they're all gone!

You can also bring donations for The Stop to the event. Their online wish list includes staple foods, baby goods and knitting supplies.