Toronto Tasting Notes...Eat locally. Blog globally.

Pounding Almonds and Roasting Chicken, 1800-style

2012-01-29T21:51:00.002-05:00

If you're curious about cooking in a kitchen designed in the 1790s, you'll like this picture. Not so much for the fact that it documents me in the process of laboriously rendering down half a pound of almonds to a flourlike consistency with a mortar and pestle (that took a while!), as because it shows several antique cooking implements in use in the background.

Behind me to the left is the open door of the wood oven, heating up. You let the logs burn for about four hours, then rake out the coals into the firebox below. When it's cool enough that you can (just) stick a bare arm in without discomfort, you can start baking. It makes a big difference how far in you slide your trays; 15 inches or so can make the difference between deliciousness and charcoal.

To the right of the image, in front of the hearth, there's a reflector oven baking a chicken and a griddle with Derby Cakes (1831) browning over the open flame.

Here's a closeup of the chicken to show you how this simple but very convenient and effective device works. The chicken gets pinned to the skewer with something like a large steel hatpin to hold it in place as you turn and lock the skewer in various positions. Dripping fat is collected on the bottom.

Here, my pal Gillian and I arrange the 1796-vintage"mackaroons" we made from the pounded almonds on a baking tray ready for the oven. The "receipt" did call for lining the tray with paper, though perhaps not parchment paper that comes in a cardboard box with a serrated metal tear strip. Also, as you see, we have not yet been issued period clothing.

Here's the exhibit of baked goods produced by the historic cooks-in-training today. In the foreground are the finished Derby Cakes. Next, in clockwise order, are hard gingerbread (1831), Rout Cakes (1806), Queen Cakes (really a type of muffin with orange flower water and rosewater) and our almond mackaroons, which are essentially little almond meringues. Not an enormous output by modern standards, but you really feel a sense of accomplishment when you manage to work with the tools and instructions of 200 years ago and the results are this good.

Many thanks for the photos by Mark D'Aguilar!

Berry Nice Fruit Baskets

2012-01-27T19:51:00.000-05:00

Call it a case of the midwinter jickers, but I think I fell in love yesterday. In love, that is, with some of the most frivolous, generally useless and kind of splurgy knickknacks I've ever wanted to buy and take home right away.

I resisted, but when you have a look at these ceramic berry baskets (I know, I know), you may see what I mean. They're available at Anthropologie, but I'll help you avoid temptation by refraining from posting the link.

A Day of Historic Baking

2012-01-05T17:59:00.001-05:00

Honestly, have you ever seen a simpler, lovelier baked good than this lemon cake? The recipe was adapted at Fort York from John Farley's 1800 The London Art of Cookery. It's flavoured with rosewater and lemon, made to rise solely with egg whites, and baked in a great kettle in the coals of the open hearth. I must say, it was every bit as delicious as it looked, and was only one of a great number of baked goods that emerged today from the historic kitchen that was once used to prepare dinner for the officers' mess at the fort

The fire was lit in the wood-fired brick oven at 9:05 this morning, and burned (if I understand correctly) about 15 small logs to embers before it was ready, somewhere around 1 p.m., for us to start loading it with baking. I had the fun of helping to shovel the embers out into a bucket before the ashes were swept out with a wet broom.

While the oven was hot enough for baking, it cooked a couple of dishes of apples, a quince tart and a great many gingerbread cookies. Half a dozen "York cakes" (smallish currant loaves) had to be evacuated to a modern oven at the end of the day, as there was not enough heat left to finish them properly. One has to think twice before opening the oven when you've already burnt up a small tree to heat it, and every opening of the door diminishes the temperature within.

Here, one of the experienced cooks puts the lid on a quince tart made with apples, lemon and cinnamon in a crust that contained four egg yolks and more rosewater.

Isn't it lovely?

Here's my squadron of gingerbread soldiers. I went with the old-school approach and grated the nutmeg and ginger by hand (much as one might do today in any case). Apparently some of these pieces of functional kitchen equipment are more than 100 years old.

While we were cooking, a sleepy wasp appeared. Likely he had been hibernating somewhere in the walls, but was awakened by the heat of the oven and the open hearth.

While all the baking was underway, the experienced cooks baked a chicken in a reflecting pan on the open hearth and arranged a couple of salads artfully with a garnish of boiled eggs. They went down a treat with the baked apples, prepared with apricot jam and wine, along with some of the baked treats. And no, that couldn't possibly be a wristwatch.

Happy New Year!

2012-01-01T00:00:00.000-05:00

My wish for all the food gardeners and farmers out there, as well as for anybody who eats their produce: a happy, healthy and prosperous new year to all!

I included most of my favourite plants from the community garden. Can you spot anise hyssop, basil, beans, beets, carrots, chives, echinacea, eggplants, grapes, peas, peppers, radishes, raspberries, sage, strawberries, sunflowers, Swiss chard, three types of tomatoes, radishes and zucchini?

Merry Christmas 2011!

2011-12-25T00:00:00.000-05:00

Best wishes for peace, joy, health and prosperity to all!

Christmas Cookie Baking 2011

2011-12-23T11:22:00.000-05:00

I did all my cookie-baking within about 36 hours this year. At the top, gingerbread from a recipe of 1831 that I'm supposed to master (with a wood oven) as part of my training for the historical cooking program at Fort York. Right: Scandinavian Sand Cookies from Dede Wilson's Baker's Field Guide to Christmas Cookies. They're made from an eggy Swedish recipe that calls for dipping them in sugar, cardamom and cinnamon, like rather sophisticated snickerdoodles. Bottom: Pecan Tassies from The Joy of Cooking. A great recipe: tiny pecan tarts with a shortbread crust. Left: The wonderful Mayan Chocolate Sparklers from Robin Hood. Centre: Roberta Schiff's Thumbprint Cookie recipe, published in my own book and featuring raspberry jam made with berries I was given for an appearance at the Markham Fair. And now to package them up to hand out to my friends and relations!

PS: My mom's making the shortbread this year.

Books for Christmas Baking

2011-12-06T11:00:00.000-05:00

As the temperature drops and the days darken, it’s getting nicer to have the oven on for hours at a time. I think that’s half the allure of holiday baking. Then of course there’s the pleasure of giving and serving (and snacking on) rich, buttery treats, and the fun of decorating them and wrapping them up beautifully. Here’s a short list of some enjoyable books to help with the seasonal sugarfest.

First, though, an inspiring mini-interview with one of my baking gurus, Montreal-based master baker Marcy Goldman of Betterbaking.com (pictured above), a lovely person and the author of A Treasury of Jewish Holiday Baking, A Passion for Baking and The Best of BetterBaking.com (discussed further below).

Sarah: When it comes to baking, are some people gifted? Is there a magic that some people have and others don’t?
Marcy: I think there is a magic. There are people who will have success by following the rules and those who just have the touch. Sometimes people email that they’ve always baked bread, and they don’t understand why the bread doesn’t rise. There’s a karma in the kitchen; we can’t always trace the energy that’s going on.
Sarah: What’s the single piece of equipment a home baker needs?
Marcy: A good stand mixer is really the heartbeat of your kitchen. It’s an investment to make at the beginning.
Sarah: How can a good baker become a great baker?
Marcy: Ingredients that are the best of the best: the best extracts and the best butter. It makes a very big difference which rack you bake on; the right rack can give you loftier muffins and more tender shortbread. And doubling up baking sheets or putting your pan on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper will help you make chewy cookies, and not overbake them.

The Joy of Cooking Christmas Cookies by Irma von Starkloff Rombauer, Marion Rombauer Becker and Ethan Becker (Scribner, 1996): Bought on impulse from a remainder bin, this convenient little hardcover is my own treasured go-to for Christmas cookie baking. The Pecan Tassies (little tarts with a shortbread crust), the shortbread and the Snickerdoodles are among the surefire winner recipes. Good luck finding it, though; it seems to be out of print.

The New Best of Better Baking.com by Marcy Goldman (Whitecap, 2009): A huge, beautiful and inspiring cookbook that covers far more than cookies. It's especially rich in biscotti recipes: Tiramisu; Soft Cherry; Triple-almond; Chocolate Chip Cinnamon-almond: in short, numerous potential holiday treats. There are also rafts of recipes that would eminently suit a luxurious winter brunch, like the Madison Avenue Orange and Lemon Frosted Scones; the Country Plum Tart; the Weekend in New England Cranberry Scones; the Bread Pudding Muffins and the lawsuit-dodging "Fried Flaps of Dough that Resemble the Tail of the Castor Canadensis". And don't get me started on the pies and cakes!

Robin Hood Baking (Robert Rose, 2010): With over 250 recipes for cookies, bars, muffins, cakes, pies, desserts and savouries like quiches and turnovers, plus a substantial how-to section, this is a great all-round home baker's book. It would be a good choice for family baking, because it has lots of unfussy drop cookies, squares and bars that kids could master without too much trouble, in a handy ring-bound format.

A short holiday section at the back offers some basics like Pinwheel Cookies, Fruitcake and of course Sugar Cookies, along with a few twists. For instance, the shortbread recipe includes rolled oats. There are also some really fresh ideas, like Chewy Cherry Bars and Cranberry Orange Bubble Bread. Still, I am puzzled why they didn't include one of my all-time favourite Christmas cookie recipes: Robin Hood's own Mayan Chocolate Sparklers, an attractive dark-chocolate cookie with extra bite from a dash of cayenne. (You can really make it fancy by using the best possible chocolate.)

Gourmet Gifts to Make Yourself and Wrap With Style by Dinah Corley (Harvard Common Press, 2011): I have a love-hate relationship on for this book. On the one hand, it's gorgeous to look at. Also, it goes far beyond traditional baking to include pickles, preserves, teas, and even cheeses and pâtés. On the other, even though I'm as crafty as they come, I found myself a little daunted that the wrapping supplies checklist includes découpage medium, a sewing machine and a power drill.

I truly do want to try making the candied Seville orange slices, to be packed in nests of waxed lime-green tissue paper in flat round metal tins. I love the recipe for "100 cookies to pinch and press or slice and bake". The Italian-style grissini (breadsticks), to be packed with red, white and green paper flags, look awesome (although the recipe is marked as "challenging"). The one that tempts me most is "a rich and buttery yeast dough, and five breads to make with it", which can be transmuted into Sunny Orange Marmalade Danish (a natural for me); Greek Savory Sweet Rolls; Black Currant Buns (which use grappa or marc in the recipe!); Sweet Baby Brioches, or Asiago and Pine Nut Twists.

Somehow, though, I doubt I'm going to find the time to dive into this book. However, even if you never get around to making any of its 100 projects, it's certain to offer an afternoon or two of sensual enjoyment merely in imagining yourself doing them.

A Baker’s Field Guide to Christmas Cookies by Dede Wilson (Harvard Common Press, 2003): If you can't find the Joy of Cooking book (above), have a look for this one. Devoted to Christmas cookies alone, it includes all the traditional favourites from Germany, Sweden, Austria, Poland, Italy, England and across the U.S. (among other locales), and the instructions seem really good.

There's a plethora of gingerbread and sugar-cookie recipes, and a more vegetarian-friendly version of the delicious Mexican anise-flavoured cookies known as biscochitos, made with vegetable shortening instead of lard. It includes the fancy types of cookies that require special molds, like springerle, speculaas and spritz cookies, as well as easy, kid-friendly recipes and some fun add-ons like rolled cinnamon-applesauce dough and salt-flour dough for modelling (inedible) ornaments. There are meringue mushrooms, and there's even a recipe for dog biscuits.

To add to the fun, the book is indeed laid out like a field guide (author Wilson has written a number of cookbooks with this format), so each recipe has a picture and standard notes like "habitat", "description", "field notes" and "lifespan". Finally, I have to credit Wilson with one of the least scary explanations of how to temper chocolate that I've ever seen: a real bonus compared to some books that don't even warn the inexperienced baker about the possibility that molten chocolate will seize or go out of temper. All in all, a real winner of a book for the dedicated Christmas baker.

Charcutepalooza Farewell

2011-12-01T01:49:00.001-05:00

I could say it's been a grind... but in fact it's been swell, it's been fun and I've learned a lot. However, it's with a sense of cheerful relief that I've decided to bow out of the last two Charcutepalooza challenges. Jonathan and I just don't constitute a big enough crowd for the December challenge; I'm not going to prepare three meat dishes, only to throw them out.

I still have enough curing salts to pickle a bison (more than enough, probably), but I won't be posting a dry-cured sausage recipe. I have Christmas baking to do, and assignments from the historic cook program at Fort York to tackle, a recently renovated house to clean... and a living to earn. So dry curing can wait.

I'm immensely grateful to the Charcutepaloozans all, especially Mrs. Wheelbarrow, The Yummy Mummy and Michael Ruhlman himself. I had already bought Ruhlman's book Charcuterie, but might never have delved into it so deeply if not for the Charcutepalooza challenge. Now I feel ready to attempt anything in the book,and I've acquired some key equipment and even more crucial skills. So there will be more sausages. But not yet.

Photo by Niamh Malcolm.

Taste Ontario at Longo's

2011-12-01T00:16:00.001-05:00

Is this not a picture of culinary concentration? Here, chef Matt Kantor of Little Kitchen carefully disposes his handmade caramel over the tops of several dozen chilled Cremes Catalan, a crème brulé dessert with a Catalonian twist. It's a delicate task involving molten sugar; see how the steam billows upward from the pan, and watch his careful maneuvering as reflected in the mirror above!

The occasion of all this kitchen intensity was an event titled Taste Ontario, Taste the World, organized by Alexa Clark of Cheap Eats Toronto, a one-woman empire who's also involved in Second Harvest, HoHoTO, BookCampTO and (with Kantor) the Secret Pickle Supper Club. The special meal, prepared for about two dozen people, was lovingly designed to illustrate the wealth of local Ontario food (and wine), even at this off season for fresh produce, and also to show off the wide range of ingredients in regular stock at the big, bright and shiny Longo's at 15 York Street.

I hadn't really checked it out yet, so it was fun to get a look inside. I made a mental note to pop back in, if not for my regular groceries, certainly to spend a little time at their wine bar Corks, which frankly has my dream wine, beer and cheese list, with a huge selection of Ontario VQA wine by the glass, a $10 craft beer-and-pizza special, and even an oyster night! All this in a cozy corner with TVs tuned to whatever big game happens to be in progress at the time.

The meal started off with a Swedish-inspired salt, lemon zest and sugar-cured Ontario trout on a bed of pickled beets and Honeycrisp apples (pictured above). This was brilliantly paired with a musky, pearlike blended white wine, Tolgate White 2007 from Stratus. Alexa informs me that Honeycrisps get sweeter the bigger they are; the opposite is true for most apples, so it's a good shopping tip.

The fish was followed by my favourite dish of the night, cubes of Ontario squash lightly cooked in a Thai-style red curry sauce featuring ginger, lemongrass, lime and coconut milk. The curry was paired with a sweet local beer, Duggan's #9 IPA, which made a great partner for the richness and spice of the Thai ingredients.

Moroccan cuisine was the starting point for the evening's third dish, an Ontario chicken tagine served over couscous with dates and almonds, absolutely delicious in its caramelized skin, redolent of cinnamon and saffron. It was served with Tawse Grower's Blend Pinot Noir 2008, which was also the accompaniment for the meat course, a Persian-inspired Ontario spice-rubbed lamb dish with sweet potatoes and raisins (pictured above).

A selection of Ontario cheeses, and the pièce de résistance, the Spanish-influenced dessert, were both accompanied by the gently sweet Cave Spring Indian Summer Late Harvest Riesling 2009: the topper to a feast fit for a king. An impressive roster of dishes to come from just one grocery store, indeed, and a fine celebration of Ontario's late fall bounty.

Still a Chance to Save Red Rocket?

2011-11-28T12:55:00.001-05:00

Leslieville residents have been downcast at the news that Red Rocket Coffee's original location at 1402 Queen Street East will be closing as of the new year. Owners Pam MacDonald and Liako Dertilis have announced they will be opening a new location at 1364 Danforth Avenue, between Greenwood and Coxwell; however, that's a little too far for many devoted regulars to go for their habitual coffee, sandwich or muffin.

The move has been prompted by an increase in rent beyond what Red Rocket can absorb, given the narrow profit margins of even the most popular and successful of coffee shops. Ironically, the café's presence over the past five years has been one of the key factors in turning the Greenwood section of Queen East from a slightly depressed strip into a dynamic retail hub. I have just found out that MacDonald and Dertilis would still entertain a discussion over a renewed lease; if a price compromise could be reached, they would be able to operate both on Queen East and on Danforth (as well as at their other current location on Wellesley).

If they close, it will be a huge loss to the neighbourhood in general, and to many individuals for whom it has become a dependable home away from home. I am certain, for instance, that Red Rocket has been a vital sanity-saver for scores of new parents who have used it as an inexpensive and convenient getaway when they were starting to burn out from the stresses and isolation of child care. I have watched kids from the local grade school doing their homework there, and observed innumerable business meetings in progress. And it's a critical resource for at least a few individuals in unusually difficult circumstances, who can always look forward to a cheerful welcome from someone who knows them by name at Red Rocket.

Apart from all this, it's easy to understand that property owners need to be able to make a profit from their buildings. However, in the case of Red Rocket, my guess is that the owners may be killing the proverbial goose that lays the golden eggs, as it's generally wise to keep a dependable tenant, even at a slightly lower rent, than to risk a succession of vacancies and short-term occupancies by other tenants unable to earn enough revenue quickly enough to cover costs.

And I am certain that if a chain coffee shop tried to occupy the same spot, a large proportion of Red Rocket's current business would evaporate in favour of independent alternatives like Voulez Vous, Tango Palace, Sideshow and Lazy Daisy's. A Toronto Life online article about the closure has provoked numerous comments. There's even a Facebook group that has sprung up over the issue.

The café's current building, which is known as Leslieville Place, is owned and managed by Queen Street Partners, which also owns the dynamic Burroughs Building on Queen West near Bathurst. Leslieville Place houses the thriving Queen Margherita Pizza, as well as The Ten Spot (a beauty salon), Yoga Yoga East, and several office tenants upstairs. Should you wish to offer your opinion on the matter, there is a contact page on the Queen Street Partners website that offers an email feedback form, as well as the address and phone number of the company.

Photo from Red Rocket's blog.

Open Hearth Baking at Fort York

2011-11-27T21:01:00.001-05:00

Okay, I've come home. Honestly, have you ever seem me look so happy as in this photo of me in the cinders, cast-iron implement in hand, tending the griddle-baked Derby Cakes I've just helped concoct? I must be the only girl in all the land who prefers to escape the ball, doff the enchanted gown and flee to her corner in the ashes. (Sorry, Fairy Godmother!)

In all seriousness, I've just had a very engaging day at Fort York with a small group of other people who have begun the training to become historic cooks and possibly volunteer interpreters in the 200-year-old kitchens at Fort York. I've already learned a number of useful and interesting things.

For instance, I've occasionally wondered what "pearlash" is in antique recipes. I found out today. First of all, it's "pearl-ash", not "pear-lash". Second, it can be used to leaven baking, like baking soda. Third, its scientific name is potassium carbonate. Fourth, you can actually make it by pouring water through the white ash from burnt hardwood and then letting that water evaporate to leave a powder residue. Fifth, they didn't use it much in Europe because they weren't burning so much hardwood as the North Americans. Finally, you can buy it at this time of year from some German delicatessens (on Roncesvalles, for instance).

One of my clues that I was really in the right place came when we were presented with a version of the very same 1820s Twelfth Cake recipe that I myself tried to replicate last year. It was a half-size version, or double the size I made.)

You can see the Twelfth Cake on the far right of this plate; it's the one that looks like fruitcake. Next to it, the things that look like small brownish pancakes are my Derby, or Short Cakes, based on The Cook Not Mad of 1831. The large round cutout cookies are Shrewsbury Cakes from John Farley's The London Art of Cookery, 1800, which were delicious, flavoured with caraway seeds. The pale drop cookies at the top left are Rout Cakes, which contain orange-flower water, rosewater, wine and brandy, from Maria Rundell's The New System of Domestic Cookery of 1806. These happened to get baked without their sugar, so they were paler and perhaps slightly less flavourful than they might otherwise have been. The larger pale tan cookies at the top right are "Mackeroons" from The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy by Hannah Glasse, 1796. These are not a coconut confection, but instead a meringue made with pounded almonds. They were wicked good. (All these except the Derby Cakes were baked in a wood oven.)

During the first part of the training, we will attempt to master (through at least two attempts at each) these and a list of other biscuits that might have been baked in the late 1700s or early 1800s at York, including King Cakes, Hard Gingerbread and Jumbles. So I have one batch of cookies down, with 13 left to go. Later we'll cover other types of baking, then work our way through the culinary branches until, theoretically, after a couple of years or so, we'll be qualified to spit-roast a joint with the best of 'em.

I for one can't wait.

Many thanks to Mark D'Aguilar for permission to use his photos. I must mention that the top photo was taken in near darkness with no tripod and no flash; it does not do justice to his photographic skills.

Why I Love My Market Food Box

2011-11-20T20:07:00.000-05:00

This was the joke of the Leslieville Farmer's Market crew today during the pickup of the weekly Winter Food Mix boxes. One of these two items is a bunch of kale that's imported from Texas and sells for $2.79 at a large chain grocery retailer that shall remain nameless. The other is a bunch of kale grown a short drive away from here using organic practices; it sells for $3 at our very own market. I leave you, dear reader, to figure out which is which. Well, as I pointed out to the other market volunteers, I wouldn't look my best after 1,450 miles in a truck either.

Photo courtesy of Sandra Brunner.

Unusual Wine Grapes at the Gourmet Food and Wine Expo

2011-11-20T00:49:00.001-05:00

Sure, every Ontario wine drinker knows about chardonnay and cabernet sauvignon. But at this year's Gourmet Food and Wine Expo, I thought it would be fun to explore some of the more unusual grapes being grown in this province.

Pelee Island Winery has been established for a long time, and its bird- and flower-labelled bottles are a staple for Ontario drinkers of modestly priced wines. A few years ago, the winery partnered with the Nature Conservancy of Canada to rehabilitate a walking trail in their neighbourhood, and they marked the event with the release of a pair of unusual blends named Eco Trail, both priced at about $10. The red (LCBO 612465) is a blend of baco noir, cabernet franc and chambourcin, which, explains Pelee Island sales manager Darryl MacMillan, is a French native varietal sometimes grown in Australia that winters well and yields small, intensely-flavoured grapes.

In combination with the baco noir, he says, the chambourcin lifts the flavour and adds elegance. For the price, I was pleased with the blend's light juicy taste that reminded me of roses and cherries. In Ontario, Konzelmann and Frog Pond also use chambourcin grapes.

The Eco Trail White (LCBO 591719) blends chardonnay with another relative rarity: auxerrois, a grape related to pinot blanc that is grown in Alsace and in the Moselle region of Germany. Although it isn't as prominent here as some other grapes, MacMillan says that auxerrois is "grown quite a bit in Ontario", since, like the chambourcin, it withstands our winters well.

I found the Eco Trail blend to have a bright citrussy scent of sweet melon with pear undertones and a sweet-sour nectar flavour with a pineapple quality; for the price, it seems a bargain. Some other wineries that use auxerrois grapes are Southbrook, Château des Charmes and Ancient Coast. Mike Weir Wine has recently launched a second label called Underdog, with White (LCBO 248476) and Red (248484) blends that sell for $14. The White uses auxerrois with sauvignon blanc, riesling and gewürztraminer; both red and white were being sampled at the expo.

Incidentally, in 2010, Pelee Island launched a couple of new wine series: Lighthouse (a riesling and a cabernet franc, soon to be joined by a merlot and a chardonnay), and Alvar, named for a landscape type consisting of a thin layer of topsoil over limestone (a pinot noir, a cabernet sauvignon, a cabernet sauvignon-merlot, a semillon blanc and a chardonnay-gewürztraminer). The Lighthouse and Alvar wines sell in the $12 to $15 range.

Alvento Winery is a much newer establishment; their first vintage arrived in 2006 and was released in 2009. Their portfolio includes a wine called Aria, which is made from nebbiolo grapes, common in Italy but extremely rare here. However, says Alvento winemaker Bruno Moos, "it's a similar climate. [In Italy], nebbiolo grows up to 2,000 metres. It doesn't get as cold in the winter there, but it does get quite cold."

I didn't previously know that nebbiolo is famously a wine that's supposed to be opened hours before it's drunk. I was told the 2007 bottle I tried had only been open for a shockingly brief two hours. That might explain why it seemed to have so little scent; however it was a pretty amber-red colour and offered a pleasing taste of woody herbs like thyme and oregano. There's still some of the 2006 Aria at Vintages ($21.35, 176874) Ridgepoint Winery may be the only other Ontario winery to use nebbiolo grapes.

On a side note, I enjoyed tasting some British Columbia wines, courtesy of Jamie Crain of Terroir Wines and Spirits. He handles about 40 of the best known BC wines, which are rather difficult to come by in Ontario. He sells mostly to restaurants and private clients who can afford to buy a case at a time, but through his agency several interesting choices are launching at Vintages, including LuLu Island Cabernet Sauvignon ($19.95, Vintages 254219), Aces Wine Seven Deuces Red ($29.95, 273631) and the pricey but delicious Cassini Cellars Collector's Series, a juicy syrah with a rich aromatic scent and a fruitcakey blackberry-plum flavour ($45.95, 255752).

The 2011 Gourmet Food and Wine Expo continues until 6 p.m. today.

Christmas Crafts Boutique on the Toronto Islands

2011-11-17T09:30:00.001-05:00

For me,the Christmas season doesn't start until I attend the Algonquin Island Christmas Boutique, a supremely Dickensian community party organized by Toronto Island residents, who make and sell gift-type goods to one another to share each other's talents and raise a little cash. For me, it's every good thing about community spirit and a local focus. (That said, the event generally channels some money into a few international causes like the Stephen Lewis Foundation Grandmothers Campaign too.)

It's a heart-warming event at which you might purchase a construction-paper-and-glitter Christmas card from a seven-year-old, or a painting from a well known artist. What else would you find? Glazed tiles; bike bags; jewellery; cards and prints of all kinds; t-shirts; hand-painted baby wear; unique crafts made from found natural objects; glassware; organic soaps, creams and lotions, and a plethora of creative items you'd never have thought of. My annual contribution is our Nip Trip catnip toys. (I dare your cat to resist 'em!)

Since this is after all a food blog, I should mention the edible treats you'll likely find there. These include home-made jams and jellies (not mine!), baking, olive oil and fair-trade chocolate. Last year someone turned up with a sensational medieval treat of nuts and dried fruit. I sometimes whip up fancy shortbread or pecan tassies; I have a few thoughts for this year. There is always chili (meat and veggie) by the bowl, and you can buy plates of mixed Christmas cookies to munch on the spot from entrepreneurial nine-year-olds. But the greatest lure in the comestibles department is the famous eggnog, which must be about half whipped cream and half alcohol.

This year, the Algonquin Island Christmas Boutique falls on Saturday, December 3. It runs from 11 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. at the Algonquin Island Association (AIA) Clubhouse. The night before (Friday, December 2), there's a preview from 7 to 10 p.m. where you can peruse the offerings but not buy them, so everyone gets a fair chance at the most popular and unique items. (There'll be eggnog then as well.) You can catch a ferry almost every half-hour; the full ferry schedule is posted on the event site. You can check it all out on Facebook too.

Ticket Giveaway: 2011 Gourmet Food & Wine Expo #gfwe

2011-11-16T14:19:00.001-05:00

I don't do very many of these sorts of promotions, but I was pleased when the folks at Toronto's Gourmet Food and Wine Expo contacted me to see whether I'd be interested in giving away some tickets to tomorrow's VIP Preview Evening. I really enjoy going, partly because I'm sure to bump into people I like and partly because it seems like a cheerful way to face the coming chilly season, but mainly because I find it educational. It gives me a chance to try lots of wines (and beers and spirits) that I might not otherwise taste. In particular, of course, I'm especially interested in local wines, but it's also great to learn more about wine from Chile, Germany, Austria and other locales.

The preview runs from 6 to 10 p.m. tomorrow, Thursday, November 17 at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. I have two pairs of tickets to give away. Each pair gives you free admission; once inside, you can purchase strips of 20 $1 tickets to sample food and drink. To win, be the first person after 3 p.m. or the first person after 4 p.m. Toronto time to leave a comment below responding to the following questions. (Remember, I need an email address or some other way to contact you so I can send you the code you'll need to claim your tickets!)

Which of the Tutored Tastings at this year's Gourmet Food and Wine Expo interests you most? Or is there a wine-related topic not covered that you'd be keen to learn about?

See you there!

Autumn Vegetable Soup Recipe

2011-10-24T23:12:00.000-04:00

I've signed up to receive vegetables through the winter via my local farmer's market, so this week I decided to get in gear by trying to rustle up a soup made mainly of the kinds of ingredients I'll still be getting in midwinter. It turned out very well, and Jonathan ate it all up two days running, which around this household is considered a victory indeed.

One point: I'm not fond of gadgetry in general, but I once had a roommate who owned a Braun immersion blender, and I missed it after we went our separate ways. Lately I've been looking at them, and found them too expensive to justify getting one; however, I spotted one in fine working order for $6 at the local thrift store. After a thorough cleaning, I'm delighted with it, and it makes all the difference with the texture of a soup like this one.

Also, you could use a whole squash and a whole cauliflower, but we had already eaten parts of ours, so I have faithfully transcribed what actually went into the soup I made.

Olive oil
2 carrots, 2 shallots, 2 stalks of celery, all chopped very fine
¾ head of cauliflower, ¾ butternut squash, 2 sweet potatoes, all roughly chopped
1 tbsp each of dried sage, thyme and oregano
2 tiny dried Thai chilis, sliced in half
8 cups of homemade or store-bought chicken broth
Salt to taste (not needed if you use commercial broth)
(optional) black pepper, chopped chives, sour cream, yogurt and/or grated cheese for garnish

Cover the bottom of a good-sized soup pot with olive oil.
Over a medium flame, toss in the carrots, shallots and celery (that'd be a mirepoix) and sizzle them, stirring occasionally, until the shallots are starting to brown slightly.
Toss in the dried herbs and the chilis, and stir to wake them up.
Add the broth, stir and bring to a rolling boil. Turn down heat and boil very gently, partly covered, until the vegetables are soft. Use an immersion blender to purée the mixture.
Serve hot with a garnish of your choice.

It would be easy to vary this soup according to the ingredients at hand. For instance, you could use onions instead of shallots, potatoes instead of sweet potatoes, or a vegetable broth instead of chicken broth. Whatever the specifics, I'm feeling one step closer to being ready for winter.

Port Wines for the Holidays

2011-10-19T16:42:00.000-04:00

My idea of port was formed by a childhood friend whose family liked always to spend some of the evenings around Christmas sipping port and cracking open walnuts before a roaring fire. With that idea still firmly lodged in my mind, I had a chance to attend yesterday's port and Douro wines tasting, and took note specifically of fairly affordable bottles that might figure in that particular scenario.

Among the Douro wines (from the Douro Valley in Portugal), one of the bargains was the Veedha DOC 2008 (LCBO #255851). At $12.95, it's a great, spicy, juicy, gentle, slightly sweet red wine that would go over well at the next chili night. Veedha, incidentally, means "life", and 50 cents will be donated to an environmental charity for each bottle purchased. Can't beat that.

I was sorry that the Quinta do Vallado 2009, priced at $19.95, is not available at the LCBO; their smoky, juicy, peppery Quinta do Vallado Touriga National (Vintages #137018) is, but it costs $32. (I tried the 2009; LCBO carries the 2007). I'm also hoping the LCBO picks up the Quinta do Infantado Douro Red Wine 2009 ($21.95). This passionate family-run company makes only single-vineyard wines, and this one had a shiraz quality, with a lovely strawberry-pepper nose and a gentle, balanced, juicy, spicy taste.

At the Graham's table, I was impressed by the Chryseia 2007, a deep purple Douro wine reminiscent of rich raisins, dates, fig jam and spices. It goes for a pricy $73.95, but only 60 cases were made, so it won't be available to the general public. In Toronto, you may perhaps find it on the wine list at Canoe.

After the Douros, I moved on to the port wines. These can be kept open for a week or so; the prices reflect their potential to be sipped and enjoyed on more than one evening. I tried six different ports from Warre's, and to my taste the best value seemed to be the Quinta da Cavadinha Vintage Port 1996 for $44.30 (Vintages #189605). It's dark brown, with a scent of dates and figs and a pronounced caramel flavour. Vintage ports are supposed to be kept for a while, so it might be worth buying one of these and opening it a few years down the road.

More affordable among the ports is the Quinta da Noval Black (LCBO #235689). It's a strong wine that conjures up molasses and raisins, priced at $24.95. The big bargain, though, was the Sandeman VAU Vintage Port (LCBO #251090). Granted, it doesn't have the magnificent and complex flavours of some of the more costly bottles, but for just $19.95 you'll get a dark brown-red wine that smells pleasantly of raisins, butter and brown sugar, strong and warming, with a taste like butter tarts.

Finally, Taylor Fladgate is generally known as a dependable, good-value brand. Yesterday I sampled seven of their ports, ranging in price from $17.95 right on up to their $275 Vargellas Vinha Velha 2009, of which only 300 cases are being circulated worldwide, with as few as 10 available in Ontario. So good luck getting your hands on this inky-red wine that bursts with dark chocolate and vanilla flavours.

However, there is good news: for a comparatively less splurgy $67.95, you could pick up a bottle of their delicious 20 Year Old Tawny (LCBO #149047). It's a golden-copper liquid that's redolent of fruity Christmas pudding with brandy-butter hard sauce. There's also a Ten Year Old Tawny for $34.95 (LCBO #121749). It has a pale brown-red colour, a scent that will remind you of cognac, and a taste like rich dark maple syrup.

There were dozens more bottles on offer, and I did my best to work my way through them, but even when you're spitting most of it out, port is a heady drink that makes its way into your pores and clouds your judgement so an amateur like me can't hope to do justice to a roomful of bottles like these. I can only say I did my best, and look forward to more such chances in the future.

Smoked Trout Rillette for #Charcutepalooza

2011-10-15T10:00:00.000-04:00

Well, I was prepared to be grouchy about this one. Truth is, I'm hanging on to Charcutepalooza by by fingernails. The day I had to try this recipe I also had to squeeze in moving furniture out of my office to be ready for the contractor who's going to give me paint-ready walls and a wooden floor; design, cut and sew a Victorian cycling outfit for the Tweed Ride, and cook something with 15 pounds of local pawpaws, which I've never seen before. Oh, and did I mention work? (It remains to be seen how many of these deadlines I'll end up meeting.)

At risk of sounding as though I'm complaining, I found that smoked trout rillettes are a breeze to make. Not (as vaunted) thrifty, though. Smoked local trout runs about $35 a pound hereabouts, so it cost about $10 a ramekin to make a dish that is – though decidedly delicious – normally off the menu for me (because of all the butter).

That said, I was intrigued as the way the hot butter boiled up into a froth when I added the fish. I was wondering what was happening at the molecular level when the butterfat met the fish oil. Some kind of crazy emulsification, I'd be guessing. The wine would help that along. And I got a lot of satisfaction from using up a bunch of garden chives, which are still nice even at this late season.

Here's the finished product, which will be served with baguettes, sautéd greens and lightly mashed root vegetables. I'm sure it will be delicious. I just can't see doing it again very often.

Pawpaw Experiments

2011-10-13T17:08:00.001-04:00

This week I was given the opportunity by the folks at Not Far From the Tree to play with some local pawpaws, a fruit I've never before had the chance to cook with. To me they conjure up the American South, and the homey wisdom of Huckleberry Finn, Brer Rabbit and their ilk. But we here in Toronto are part of the Carolinian ecosystem, so we have fauna and flora like opposums and pawpaws here too.

Turns out a pawpaw looks like a small green mango. Inside, though, its flesh is mealier, and almost full of rather attractive large dark seeds (see photo), which don't leave much room for pulp. The skin is like that of a pear. They seem to have a very narrow window between underripe and overripe; not unlike bananas, which they also somewhat resemble.

The scent and flavour are somewhat like a cross between a mango and a banana; they have the gentle sweetness of those fruits, with a firmer texture than a banana, but none of the sharp bright citrus tang of a mango. When they ripen, they rapidly turn brown.

I initially thought I'd make jam with them, but when I smelled and tasted them, I couldn't imagine they'd make a good jam. The pulp is too mealy, and the flavour too subtle. Also, they are said to lose the best of their flavour when heated too long, so boiling for half an hour seemed like a bad idea.

Many sources said they bake well in the same kinds of recipes as bananas, so ultimately I made muffins of them. I used quite a few blackened, overripe ones (after all, black bananas bake beautifully.) They smelled and tasted just fine, and were easier to prep than the underripe ones. The brown ones did have a marked caramel smell and taste, which some sources described as unpleasant, but which I rather like. The bowl above contains the golden pulp that's a mix of white, less ripe, and browner, riper, fruit.

The muffins – which smell great – will be served up, as will some of my sumach jelly and my wild grape and apple jelly, at Not Far From the Tree's upcoming festive harvest event.

Talks, Demos and Book Signings, Oh My!

2011-09-30T09:30:00.000-04:00

It seems every weekend since mid-September has been busy for the Toronto food community, and this coming one is no different, with events like Picnic at the Brickworks, among others. Before I realized how very crowded it would be, I said yes to a pair of events where I'll be talking and signing books.

This Saturday, October 1, I'll be talking about canning basics and demonstrating microbatches of jam at the Markham Fair. I believe my sessions are at at 10 a.m., 11:30 and 1:30 p.m. in the Agri-Food Tent. I'm looking forward to getting a chance to have a look at the fair between sessions!

On Sunday, October 2, I'll talk about growing your own garlic in the "Incredible Edible" program of talks at the second annual Soupalicious in support of the Plant A Row, Grow A Row program. I'm on at 3 p.m. at Heritage Court, Exhibition Place. I'm pleased to be able to support a good program that uses some produce from my own neighbourhood Ashbridges Eco Community Garden.

If you plan to be at either of these events, please come and say hi!

Wines of Chile Tasting

2011-09-29T16:18:00.001-04:00

Of notable wine countries, Chile, I must admit, has been one of the ones I was least familar with; at least until Tuesday, when I had the chance to visit the Wines of Chile tasting. Possibly the most surprising fact I learned, however, was not about Chilean wine, but about the LCBO. Until now, I had no idea that the LCBO's Vintages Online sold some wines that are not available in the bricks-and-mortar stores. An advantage over some online wine retailers is that it allows wine buyers to order a single bottle of unusual and premium wines rather than being required to buy a case.

For instance, the dark red-brown Altaïr 2005 (LCBO #38430) is only available online. Priced at $65, its scent reminded me of the sea, and it tasted of woody things like cedar and pine. It's a wine that's recommended to be aged for two to four more years. Same with the Emiliana Coyam 2007 (LCBO #63891). At $29.95, it's a pretty dark red colour with a flavour of berries and maybe balsamic vinegar. It's also expected to age well.

If you want to really impress your dinner guests with a rarity, though, you'll head to shops as soon as the October Vintages catalogue comes out; there will only be 25 bottles in Ontario of the 2009 Casa Lapostolle Borobo. Priced at $99, it's an inky-red blend of carmenère, syrah and pinot noir that offers a combination of strong, dark flavours like blackberry and tobacco. It could also apparently age well for as much as five years.

I was joking with one of my co-tasters that a decent cheater's tip for Chilean wine might be to head for wineries that start with the letter E. I enjoyed wines from El Principal, Emiliana and Errazuriz, especially the Emiliana 2010 Novas Viognier, a pale yellow wine with a celery scent and a nicely balanced apple-pineapple taste. It's a good value at $14.95, but not available in LCBOs. However they are carrying the Emiliana Coyam ($29.95, LCBO #63891), a very dark raspberry-coloured wine that tasted like rich raspberries, leather and tobacco. It's quite high alcohol: 14.5%.

I was one of the people who really liked the 2007 Don Maximiano Founder's Reserve, also not appearing on LCBO lists. At $79.95 it can't be called a bargain wine, but I enjoyed its rich aromatic berry scent and its rich, tanniny, raisiny taste, which comes mainly from cabernet sauvignon grapes with some merlot.

One section of the event was devoted to wines produced "naturally", including some that are organic or about to be certified. I found many of them to be delicious. Among the whites I liked the pale yellow Carmen 2009 Nativa Single Vineyard Gran Reserva Cabernet Sauvignon, which is Certified Organic ($19.95, LCBO #975359), for its very pleasant grapefruit taste; the Cono Sur 2011 Organic Chardonnay ($11.95, LCBO #230565), which was pale yellow with a very slight sparkle and a sharp, clean citrus-green apple taste, and the Emiliana 2011 Adobe Sauvignon Blanc ($12.95, LCBO #211912), another pale, clean-tasting wine redolent of bright lemon. It's due for release in LCBOs in Spring 2012. I especially enjoyed the organically grown Via Wines 2010 Chilcas Organic Sauvignon Blanc, sadly, not in the LCBO. It's a very pale white with a bouquet of lemon, lychee and grapefruit.

Among the reds, I enjoyed the gently spicy Yali Wetland Cabernet Sauvignon-Carmenère, the dark and juicy San Pedro 2010 35 South Cabernet Sauvignon Merlot B.O. ($12.95 LCBO #218859) and the fruity and spicy San Esteban 2010 In Situ Cabernet Sauvignon Eco-Reserva, all priced under $15. (The pricier Emiliana Coyam is also "natural".)

Having finally taken a step towards learning about the diverse geography and prolific production of Chile and its winemakers, I'm now looking forward to learning more!

Thanks to Alexandra Hood for the photo of me with affable pourer Michael Anderson.

Ontario Apple Tasting at Spadina House

2011-09-27T09:30:00.000-04:00

Partly in honour of the 200th anniversary of the discovery of the McIntosh apple and partly just for curiosity, a group of inquisitive apple lovers gathered last Saturday at Spadina House (or, more accurately, in the historic gardens) at the invitation of apple aficionado Suzanne Long to taste more than 30 types of local apples. These included an intriguing collection of mystery specimens from an old Loyalist farm, supplied by Laura Watt of Cubit's Organics.

Having once set up a less ambitious version of the same kind of event, I was keen to expand my pomological expertise. I was amazed how few types I had tried before, and delighted that Suzanne had managed to get her hands on a few genuine antiques and rarities. I had a chance to look at a beautiful little book I now know I want: Apples by Roger Yepsen.

One one table (pictured above), she grouped all the types that were descended from the McIntosh. On the other (below) were samples of other strains developed from the 1600s onwards. We led off the tasting with a good old, tart and delicious McIntosh, the apple everyone knows. Then we tried the McIntosh descendants.

Princess Louise: A Canadian apple of the1880s, originally named Wolverton. Looks like a large McIntosh, and tastes pearlike. Slightly less crisp than the Mac but still good and crunchy.
St. Lawrence: Another early Canadian type. Softer, less tart, with beautiful red and green tiger stripes.
Lobo: Discovered near Ottawa. Pearlike, with a yielding texture. This is the hero of all apples, according to one of my friends who grew up in eastern Ontario.
Cortland: Bred in New York. Sturdy, chewy,with a thick skin and moderately tasty.
Sunrise: A large, yellowish B.C. apple, a very soft and pearlike cross between a Mac and a Golden Delicious.
Macoun: A cross of McIntosh and Jersey Black developed in New York's Geneva Research Station in 1923. It looks like a very large Mac, and offers just a hint of ginger in its juice.
Burgundy: Child of the Macoun and the Russian Antonovka from 1953. Beautiful pink flush under the thick skin. Dense, with a subtle winelike flavour.
Freedom: Like Burgundy, the child of Macoun and Antonovka with a more matte skin texture and a tart, reserved taste.
Spartan: A familiar grocery store apple. Crunchy but not very crisp; a little sour.
Empire: Also fairly familiar, another New York apple with a good firm texture and a gentle taste.
Novamac: A gentle texture and a skin that felt nice to bite through.
Dayton: Very pearlike, with an agreeable texture.
Shawnee: Nice crunchy, dense texture and a mild taste.

Next we sampled the fruit from the table of mixed varieties of many shapes, sizes and colours. I was excited to try some that have become famous to me but which I've never knowingly tasted, like Gravenstein and Tolman Sweet. Some of the other names are so redolent of past eras; they tell the whole history of the settlement of northeastern North America in their allusions: Belle de Boskoop, Blenheim Orange, Golden Reinette... not to mention the cheeky pair of Irish Peach and July Tart.

Irish Peach: An old Irish apple with a soft and very uniform texture and a pleasingly dull taste.
Blenheim Orange: An English apple of about 1740. Firm, with an unusual orange-apple taste.
Golden Reinette: A child of Blenheim Orange. Very pearlike, with a firm, even texture.
Gravenstein: A beloved apple in New York, dating from 1669 and an important crop used in the making of applesauce and dried apples for American troops in WWII. Pale green with red tiger stripes, it has a winey, cidery taste and a pleasantly mealy texture.
Golden Russet: Once very popular, this apple keeps a long time. Dark yellow green with the characteristic scaly "russeting"; hard to cut into, with a gentle taste.
Belle de Boskoop: A Dutch apple that goes back to 1850 with an odd, lumpy shape. Pink and greenish yellow with a matte finish. Hard to cut into, and able to be stored for a long time. Its taste is a little sour, but complex.
Mother: A North American apple of the 1800s with a delicious yielding texture, yellowish flesh and a gentle cidery taste.
Baldwin: This used to be a big commercial apple, but was reduced by one bad winter. Firm and chewy, with an almost piney taste.
Jefferis: A small and lumpy US apple of the 1800s. Yellow, with a mellow taste.
Tolman Sweet: Looks like a large Mac with a chewy texture and a gentle taste.
Wealthy: Looks like a large pale matte Mac. Soft, pleasant texture and a good taste.
July Tart: Looks like a Granny Smith. Soft, crunchy and tasty.
Pink Pearl: A seedling of an apple called Surprise from 1944. Like its parent, although the skin is mainly yellow with a faint pink blush, when it's cut open it reveals a gorgeous pink-fleshed interior. Tart and tasty.
Chestnut: Actually a large crab apple, a beautiful pink-red colour, and very sweet, tart and tasty.

All in all, a completely satisfying event, which gave me the chance to taste quite a few apples on my geeky imaginary life list of heirloom varieties. Now, if they're available around here, and whenever they come into season, there are only a few more I long to try, including Rome Beauty, Cox's Orange Pippin, and above all the very early Canadian apple that may have been the progenitor of the Mac: the Fameuse or Snow apple. Anybody have one of these babies in their lunchbox? Please invite me over!

Toronto Underground Market

2011-09-26T23:16:00.000-04:00

I dropped into the first-ever Toronto Underground Market at the Evergreen Brickworks on Saturday night as part of a marathon day that saw me biking all over; from one of the highest points of downtown (Casa Loma) to almost the lowest (the foot of the Don Valley). Along this trajectory I had my first-ever chance to explore Milkman's Lane, which was mildly hair-raising due to the current "severe erosion issues", but definitely a fascinating part of the city I intend to explore further.

I wasn't quite sure what to expect from the Underground Market; what I found was a bustling food fair with an avid, youngish crowd eagerly lining up, tasting and comparing the foods on offer. I have been told that, in other cities, the wares tend to be prepared, packaged foods like the spices above, or sauces, preserves and so on. Here, however, the emphasis was squarely on street eats and sweet treats.

If TUM is to be judged as a trend indicator, then French-inspired baking is still a force to be reckoned with; macarons are holding their own, and cupcakes are nowhere. Whether by coincidence or otherwise, Philippine cuisine was well represented. And of course there was a huge lineup for La Carnita, the renegade pop-up taqueria that doesn't actually sell tacos. Instead, they sell t-shirts that entitle you to sample tacos, in order to circumvent regulations that would make their operation inadmissible in this town.

Which of course is the point of TUM: it showcases skilled food vendors whose wares would currently be outlawed under our health and business codes. As such, it's an interesting part of the network of battlegrounds over the regulation (or deregulation) of small-scale and artisanal food production; and I look forward to seeing where the next action on this front will occur.

Café Fiorentina Opens on Danforth

2011-09-23T09:30:00.000-04:00

Can it possibly be an entire week ago that I attended the launch party for Café Fiorentina (236 Danforth, east of Broadview, 416-855-4240), the charming new project of Tina Leckie and Alex Chong in the former Dash space? Amazingly so.

The café is one of this city's many lovely little spots where you can find soup and sandwiches, coffee and fresh baked goods. Only difference is that Leckie (daughter of the late councillor Dan Leckie) and Chong have ridiculously high credentials to be running a coffee shop. The roster of places they've worked is formidable: Susur, Didier, Célestin, Dufflet, Opus and Niagara Street Café, not to mention Michael Stadtländer's revered Eigensinn Farm and a stint by Chong at La Petraia in Chianti, Italy.

Not only will the two be offering a range of home baking (a delicious, not-oily carrot cake and chocolate chip cookies will be staples, with other treats, like beignets, tarts, shortbread, bread pudding and cheescake available as well), but they plan to create a changing seasonal menu of local farm-sourced light lunch and weekend brunch items, with some meats cured in-house. I sampled their porchetta on a house-made olive oil and rosemary bun with sauted rapini, havarti and roasted garlic aioli. It was gently sweet, not too salty, and subtly scented with a touch of lemon confit.

They'll also be serving and selling their own house-made preserves. I surveyed the labelled jars displayed around the space and admired their approach to flavour combinations: Cherries in Sambuca; Fig, cardamom and ginger jam; Raspberry mango jam, and Onion fennel jam. (Incidentally, their Faema E61 was praised by James Chatto. I don't know from espresso machines, but who am I to disagree?)

Café Fiorentina had its soft opening at the beginning of August (and sold their house lemonade as fast as they could brew it up throughout the Taste of the Danforth). They're now open Tuesday to Saturday from 8:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Sundays from 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Photos courtesy of Café Fiorentina's Tumblr site.

Cooking for Geeks Book Review

2011-09-22T09:30:00.000-04:00

I was originally sent a review copy of Jeff Potter's Cooking for Geeks by a publicist who thought I might want to write a Father's Day piece about it – in June, of course. I was instantly attracted to the book by its pre-ripped and pre-stained cover, and started to read it right away. Four months later I am only now posting about it because I swiftly realized I wanted to read every single word of every one of its 400-odd pages. And they are odd.

Here is Jeff. If you've been to Toronto's Colborne Lane or any other temple of molecular gastronomy, you'll already know that you can make instant ice cream with liquid nitrogen. But how many people do you know who are geeky enough to try this at home, folks?

Some of the other potentially unsafe (i.e. life-threatening) kitchen tricks that Jeff gets up to include turning a home oven into a fearsomely hot pizza oven by disabling the automatic lock that engages during the self-cleaning cycle, and cooking a hot dog (or making it light up a bunch of LEDs) by connecting it to a suicide cable. But Cooking for Geeks is not really about applying for the Darwin Awards. It's actually the most complete and interesting manual of kitchen science that I've ever had the pleasure of poring over for hours on end.

In this book, which I will from now on consider to be an indispensable reference book, fit to stand on my cookbook shelf right next to the Joy of Cooking, Potter explains in delightful detail what a Maillard reaction is, and all about how it works. (If you don't already know, that's the change that makes certain cooked foods like steak delicious for their browned, slightly crunchy exterior.)

He provides all kinds of simple, useful tables and lists where you can easily check things like the ideal interior temperature of rare beef, how much alcohol will remain in a liquid that's been boiled, and how hot an egg must be to have a solid white and a liquid yolk. The book is also a bible of food safety information. It tells you in detail what the risks of foodborne illness are and how to avoid them.

Cooking for Geeks assumes no prior cooking experience, and tells you how to set up your kitchen in the most efficient way (with top-labelled spice jars in a drawer, for instance). And yes, there are plenty of recipes for the absolute beginner; the first three are for hot chocolate, pancakes... and duck confit. It has a thorough description of sous-vide cooking – including an inexpensive hack with store-bought, vacuum-packed salmon.

Potter also explains, in an easy and engaging way, with plenty of pictures, the science behind "fancy" cooking techniques like the preparation of mousses, stocks, roux and various leavened breads. When he runs to the end of his own (astonishing) expertise, he includes interviews with other extremely cool people in the cooking and tech worlds, as well as a wealth of links to their websites.

Cooking for Geeks is my new favourite culinary guide. I think every curious home cook needs a copy. How could I not love a book that explains how I can count my own tastebuds to find out whether I am a Super Taster, mill my own flour, or cook brownies in an orange? Cooking for Geeks is exuberant, charming, funny, good looking and intellectually stimulating. And what more could one possibly ask in a kitchen companion?

Baking With Jams and Jellies

2011-09-21T09:30:00.000-04:00

Around this time of year, people who like making preserves probably have a fair supply of jams and jellies in the pantry. In fact, some may be wondering what they're going to do with all those jars. If you're among these, here's a quick list of some of the baking projects you might like to try over the fall and winter.

Brown Butter Bars: You had me at "brown butter".
Crepes: Made to be filled with fruit, but you could use jam instead.
Devonshire Scones: Cream tea, anyone?
Fruit bars: Gluten free!
Granola Bars by Karen deMasco of The Art of Baking, as suggested by Cathy Barrow of Mrs. Wheelbarrow.
Hamantaschen: Get ready for Purim...
Homemade Pop-Tarts: Not a full recipe, but lots of inspiration.
Jam Sweethearts: I just tried a variant of these, and they were great!
Jam Tarts: Little ones from a contributor to Jamie Oliver's site or big ones from Smitten Kitchen, based on a David Lebovitz recipe.
Jelly Doughnuts: You'll have to buy this one, but all the Better Baking recipes are wonderful.
Jelly Rolls: Again, not a complete recipe, but lots of food for thought.
Pancakes: Buckwheat, no less!
Thumbprint Cookies: From Tigress' kitchen, and a nice vegetarian version suggested by @VeganTriangle.

And please feel free to share your favourites below!

Recipe for a Microbatch of Raspberry Jam for Filling Cookies

2011-09-18T09:00:00.000-04:00

Last weekend was a milestone for our family: the first time my sister has ever been away overnight since the birth of her daughter nine years ago. I was pleased to be asked to step in and pinch hit as the overnight grownup for two nights in a row, and it was my niece who decided that one of our key activities for the weekend would be to make some Jam Sweetheart cookies from a rather nice children's recipe collection: the Mom and Me Cookbook by Annabel Karmel."And," she added, with the touching confidence of youth, "We'll make the jam!"

In fact, heading over to my sister's place for the weekend, I armed myself with a jar of Beverley Barnett Graham's gorgeous bright pink and cinnamon-scented apple jelly, an acquisition from the Well Preserved preserve swap of last February. When I opened it, Tara was clearly entranced by the colour and the smell, and would happily have used it instead of our own jam. But as we were waiting for the dough to rest and chill, I noticed a plastic clamshell of raspberries in the back of the fridge, and thought "Oh well, let's go for it!"

I had so much fun making Tara a single serving of grape jelly a few weeks ago that I thought I'd cook up a batch of raspberry jam just big enough to spread on one batch of cookies. As you can see from the picture above, Tara and my brother John are delighted with the results of the baking, and so was her mom when she returned home to a happy household.

We did also use some of Beverley's jelly, which meant we had a little leftover raspberry jam – never a problem, to my mind. And – kudos to Annabel Karmel – Tara was able to follow almost all the steps herself, with a little measuring advice and some final dough stirring assistance.

The recipe for the jam was simplicity itself, but in case there are any novice jam-makers out there who'd like to make it their first foray into jamming, here's what you do:

Raspberry Jam for a Batch of Cookies

Makes about ¾ cup of jam.

¾ cup of raspberries
¾ cup of sugar

Combine the berries and sugar in a non-reactive pot with a thick bottom. Heat to the boiling point over medium-high heat, stirring constantly to make sure the sugar dissolves.
Boil gently, stirring constantly, until the berries have mostly dissolved and the jam has reached the setting point. This will only take about 5 to 10 minutes. The jam will have reduced and become thick and sticky by this point.
Remove from heat, cool and assemble your cookies!

English Pork Pie for Charcutepalooza

2011-09-15T09:00:00.000-04:00

"Here in Shropshire is a farm that's frozen in time, lost in Victorian rural England..." Channeling my inner Ruth Goodman to create this honest-to-goodness Shropshire meat pie, I had my best experience of Charcutepalooza so far, which demonstrates two points:

At heart, I'm a baker, not a cook.
Although I'm genetically about one-quarter French, clearly, when it comes to meat appreciation, my inherited predilections are Rule Brittania all the way.

The English Pork Pie recipe in Michael Ruhlman's Charcutepalooza is fairly cheap, quick and simple. The filling is ground meat with a few seasonings and some chicken broth, well mixed to help it emulsify (see! I'm learning!) In my atavistic British fervour I left out the ham and garlic, which, after all, seemed a little... French. (And did I mention that Niamh and I watched watched back-to-back episodes of the latest Doctor Who season while we cooked?)

I also completely forgot to sauté the onions – thus breaking a Two Fat Ladies rule by missing an opportunity to add more butter to the dish – but they were not at all injured by being tossed in raw to sizzle in the butter, lard and pork fat that were already in the mix. And there is no aspic or gelatin in this pie. In fact, I'm delighted I didn't slave away over Madeira-soaked reductions, because there is simply no room in this pie to add any aspic.

I had planned to pick some fresh thyme from the garden, as the recipe calls for fresh, but it was so dark by the time I got to that stage that I axed the fresh thyme and used dried, but added in some sage. It was great anyway.

The crust is equal parts butter and lard with flour, water and a single egg. I thought the dough was so soggy that it would have no flakiness when baked, but it's a genius recipe: somehow it puffs up delectably (that'd be the egg). Nonetheless, it's immensely sturdy and resilient, so I was able to build a proper Medieval-style coffin for the filling. I brushed the outside not with an egg wash, but with 1% yogurt, which gave a pleasant matte finish.

There was lots of dough left over, so I baked cutout hearts on the sheet next to the pie. They were done within about ten minutes; none, however, made it to the photo stage.

I am very grateful that I laid parchment paper on the baking sheet because it was immensely helpful when it came time to transfer the pie, now piping hot and dripping with rich oils, onto a serving plate.

In the photo, the meal shared by Niamh and me, with some well boiled carrots and beans, and the final remaining jar of the apple chutney I made last year from a recipe by Audra of Doris and Jilly Cook. (The posted recipe is for a peach chutney, but if you leave out the lime you can switch out apples for peaches. In fact, Audra allowed me to include the recipe in that variation in my book.)

As I rarely eat meat these days (despite my Charcutepaloozitude), I was floored by the richness of a dish in which the crust is fattier than the pork filling (!), but I loved making it and will certainly think of incorporating it into my own Christmas seasonal rotation. And that crust! I can't wait to use the recipe again in many variations, like a huge apple pie, or a series of smaller ones. Thank you, Charcutepalooza, this month's assignment was a complete delight.

Catch Byron Ayanoglu While He's Back at Avli!

2011-09-09T10:30:00.000-04:00

As a fan of the charismatic chef and former NOW Magazine food editor Byron Ayanoglu, I was pleased to see he's making a visit from his current home in Montreal to tweak the menu and cook a special lineup of four-course dinners (priced at $40) at Avli (401 Danforth near Chester, 416-461-9577), whose original menu he helped create back in 1995. Ayanoglu will be a guest in the Avli kitchen every night until Sunday, September 18 (except next Monday, September 12). I was especially excited to be invited to taste some of the old and new menu offerings.

The modestly sized room with the little patio has a comfortable, traditional ambiance, with its tan-and-coral walls, its painted terra cotta vases and its warm wood floor. The menu includes specialties from all over the Greek mainland and Crete, and the signature dishes include somewhat unusual fare like rabbit pie. Among the new menu additions created by Ayanoglu are Grilled calamari served chilled with a dressing of almonds and cherry tomatoes, Roasted leek with feta and olives, Turkish-inspired Eggplant Begendi with octopus, Grilled scallops with blackberry sauce, "and a couple more surprise dishes," says Avli owner Lambros Vasiliou.

I was especially taken with the Horta-pie with kasseri, a wedge of filo garnished with fresh dill that encloses chopped rapini, mustard greens and dandelion greens along with a mellow sheep and goat cheese called kefalograviera. It was not as salty as I had expected; instead, the warm flavour of the greens shone through.

Why redesign the menu now, after 16 years? "It's not me; it's the boss," quips Ayonaglu. "He wanted some new things." Although there's lots of indulgence on the menu, it's kind to those who are trying to eat lighter, more healthy fare. Of course, as he says, "People go to restaurants to break their diets;" nonetheless, his interests are "taste and health; I only cook things I eat."

Vasiliou is considering the possibility of bringing Ayanoglu back several times a year and moving to a more seasonal menu. "I believe personally that Greek cuisine is very rich in variety, and it has not been introduced in North America properly," Vasiliou says. "This is the only way I can have a menu of a fair size but also introduce that so-rich cuisine."

While Ayanoglu is in the kitchen, there are several special events planned, including the launch of the third edition of his hugely successful Simply Thai Cooking. Co-written with Wandee Young, it's a great primer in Thai cuisine, and newly embellished with new colour photos. Although Ayanoglu's own background is Mediterranean, he's a dab hand with Thai dishes (I have very happy memories of him ebulliently churning out brilliant pad thai on the spot for several hundred guests at one of the NOW Magazine staff parties in the '90s. Ah, those were the days.) In any case, the book launch and signing takes place at Avli on Wednesday, September 14 from 5 to 7 p.m. Rumours suggest a few Thai snacks will be on offer for attendees.

Also, tonight, beginning at 11 p.m., Marion Lewis of the Hummer Sisters will perform cabaret songs. On Thursday, September 15, you can catch an 11 p.m. screening of the short film Mortar&Pestle, about Greek food and joie-de-vivre by Ayanoglu and his photographer partner Algis Kemezys. (That night, TIFF cardholders receive a $5 discount on dinner).

I'm glad to be reminded of Avli, and to taste Ayanoglu's cooking again. If you haven't been there for a while, it might be a good time for a repeat visit.

Photo of Byron Ayanoglu by Algis Kemezys.

A Niagara Wine Tour

2011-09-08T10:02:00.001-04:00

I was fortunate enough yesterday to be among a group of bloggers and other journalists invited to spend a day touring wineries and sampling wines in the Niagara region as part of the kickoff to the LCBO's Go Local campaign promoting Ontario wines. My group visited Coyote's Run Estate Winery, Creekside Estate Winery and a particular favourite of mine, Malivoire. We tasted characteristic wines from those wineries, as well as Jackson Triggs Winery, Peninsula Ridge Estates Winery, Cave Spring Cellars and Strewn.

I think we're very lucky in the Toronto area to be so close to two important wine regions: Niagara (which includes several subdivisions like Beamsville Bench) and Prince Edward County. Scores of wineries lie within a short drive of Toronto, and all of them offer free or extremely inexpensive tastings; often $1 to $2 per glass, and very often without prior notice; you can simply drop in. In the photo above, our group gets to talk to Coyote's Run winemaker David Sheppard.

I always find it such a treat to talk to someone who actually makes wine, both because I usually learn something and because they tend to be so excited about what they're doing that they're the opposite of the "wine snob"; they seem to just expect everybody to think wine is as much fun as they do, and don't seem especially bothered about the depth of your knowledge or what you're wearing or how you hold your glass.

The other benefit of going right to the winery is that they offer some wines that you can't even pick up at the LCBO. I was very pleased to spot a bottle of Malivoire's "Albert's Honour" Old Vines Foch 2009, which I've been dying to try again since I shared a bottle of it with friends at a lovely dinner at La Palette (now on Queen West; then in Kensington Market). Some time ago I had a chance to ask aptly named Malivoire winemaker Shiraz Mottiar about it, and from what I recall, it's made from a grape that's a hybrid of a Canadian native grape and a European one, and it's fussy to make, so they don't do it every year. I look forward to trying this bottle.

Here's a fun detail for a fruit geek like me: David Sheppard led us out to the vineyard to look at the grapes, and showed us that the darker ones, which are pinot gris, are spontaneously mutating into pinot blanc – sometimes on the same bunch of grapes!

Part of the exercise was supposed to be to search for a favourite wine, but I'm afraid I couldn't possibly name one; that would be like trying to name a favourite jam: beyond me. However, the visit introduced me to some new chardonnays and especially sauvignon blancs available at the LCBO in the $12 to $20 price range. Much as I enjoy travelling to the vineyards, I'm pleased to know that I can walk round the corner to pick one up for dinner any time I like.

The Nip Trip 2011

2011-08-31T13:35:00.002-04:00

Okay, not quite food, but foraging, certainly. For over a decade, Jonathan has been gathering catnip when it's in flower. He hangs it in a cool, dry spot for about six weeks until it's crispy, and then strips the flowers and leaves from the stalks. Here is Daisy, guarding about a quarter of this year's harvest.

Later, I'll sew hundreds of little pillows, which Jonathan will fill with catnip to make them aromatic, and with stuffing material to make them bouncy. My best guess is that we've probably made about 3,000 of these over time. They'll end up all over Toronto and beyond; Jonathan's view is that when he turns up at the pearly gates asking for admittance into heaven, and St. Peter asks why he should open up, a thousand cats will appear, meowing "Let him in!!!"

Single-serving Grape Jelly Recipe for Just One PB&J

2011-08-23T21:46:00.003-04:00

My niece Tara was with me on Tuesday morning, and we walked over to the community garden to feed the tomatoes and pick some beans. "I'm sorry, but I'm just obsessed with string beans," said Tara, munching them on the way home. "If there was bean jelly, I'd be right into that."

She was also intrigued by the stray grapes that hang on the fence next to my plot, which are getting ripe and taste a little like sour Concords.

"Could you make some jelly from these?" she asked. (Tara is also a grape jelly connoisseur.) When I said I didn't think there were enough for a batch, she suggested I make a small batch. And then it hit me: why not make enough jelly for just one single solitary sandwich?

So I picked a handful of the ripest grapes, we walked home, and I made the smallest batch of jelly I've ever made in my life. It only took about 20 minutes, which was oddly freeing. Here's what I did.

Grape Jelly for Just One Sandwich

About 20 grapes
1 cup water
½ cup sugar

Combine grapes and water in a non-reactive pot with a thick bottom. Bring to a boil and crush the grapes with a potato masher or the equivalent, until the liquid has reduced by half and has taken on a strong grape colour.
Strain the grapes and liquid through a jelly bag. It should yield about ½ cup.
Return the liquid to the pot. Add the sugar and stir to mix.
Put the jelly bag with the seeds and skins back in the pot and bring it to a full rolling boil.
Boil until jelly reaches the setting point (about 5 to 10 minutes).
Remove the jelly bag and pour the jelly into a small, clean jar that has been gently warmed up under a hot tap so it doesn't break when the hot jelly hits it.
Add a lid, but don't process. Eat at once.

How to Carve a Watermelon into a Lotus Blossom Serving Bowl

2011-08-23T15:42:00.008-04:00

I agreed some weeks back to take on a challenge from the National Watermelon Promotion Board to design and carve out a watermelon to serve fruit. Now, if you Google "watermelon carving", you'll come up with an array of images so daunting in their complexity as to terrify the amateur melon carver entirely. So I decided to focus on ease of preparation... and to keep myself tranquil and calm while working, I thought it would be nice to meditate on the perfect, lovely lotus blossom for inspiration.

The finished version (above) features watermelon and a few honeydew melon balls, but you could mix it up with any kind of fruit pieces. To make a fancier presentation, you could stand the lotus in a shallow bowl of water surrounded by floating candles.

Here's how I did it. First, I marked and cut guidelines to divide the melon into six wedges. I also cut guidelines for the 12 petals. I should have made them shallower; it would be best if they don't cut right through the hard part of the rind.

Then I cut a slice off one end large enough to act as the base of the lotus (see top), and a second, thinner slice off the other end. This made it easy to slide a knife around the inside, top and bottom, so as to be able to pull out the core (pictured above).

To form the petals, I cut out a W shape across the top of each of the six sections. I looked at some pictures of lotuses online to get an idea of how their petals curve.

Then I shaved the green part of the rind off every second petal. I carved the sides of each pink petal back at an angle so they would slant in a bit. This also made them white below and pink on top, which is how many lotus blossoms look.

If you wanted to be very fancy indeed, you could make all the petals pink and white. However, the bowl would be less sturdy.

Remember that very thin slice I cut off one end? If you check the third photo, you'll see that I squared the edges, and in the photo above I'm fitting it onto the bottom of my lotus bowl so it will show off the fruit piece better and keep them from leaking juice out the bottom. (If you were really worried about leaking juice, you could line the inside with plastic wrap or a small bowl too.)

Now the melon baller comes into play. I used it to turn the core into tasty little balls, but you might prefer to cut it into quarters lengthwise and then into wedge-shaped slices.

Finally, you assemble the lotus by standing the flower on the base (inserting toothpicks as needed to guarantee stability) and fill it with cut fruit. Your lotus blossom serving bowl is complete!

Grateful thanks for the lovely photos to Niamh Malcolm.

Cornfest Time in Athens, Ontario

2011-08-22T13:58:00.010-04:00

There are culinary delights to be found everywhere you go. For about 45 years, my family has been spending parts of the summer at a cottage on Charleston Lake, about 35 kilometres northwest of Brockville, Ontario. The nearest spot to buy groceries, hardware and so on is Athens, Ontario, and we've grown to know the town pretty well over the past five decades. (In fact, both my mother and my brother painted murals on town walls back in the early '90s.)

You might not think a town of just over 3,000 souls would have any notable culinary offerings, but you'd be wrong. Even a small place like Athens (which was renamed from the original "Farmersville" in 1888 for the excellence of its three schools) boasts a heritage of cultural treasures, as you can see from this lovely 1936 Ford V8 Bickle Seagrove pumper truck that the local fire station brings out for special events, and the elegant Victorian commercial buildings along main street (top photo).

And have a look at this gorgeous wood-fired steam tractor, being used – as it is every summer – to heat the big pots to cook fresh ears of corn, likely grown a short walk away and picked in the past 24 hours for the annual Athens Cornfest, which I attended this past weekend.

No shortage of takers at $1 an ear. We had some of that sweet corn for dinner, and it was delicious. Of course, Athens also has lots of other beautiful local produce: tomatoes and potatoes, maple syrup, beef and pork, as well as cheese from the single remaining nearby cheese factory at Forfar (within my memory there also used to be one at Plum Hollow, but it closed decades ago).

So here I am, pulling back the top of the corn husks to choose half a dozen for us to take home (for $2). But there wasn't a bad one in the lot.

Athens is also the home of Willard's Bakery, which ships its specialties all over the county. The star attraction is the locally famous Willard's Fried Cakes. These were already a venerable tradition back in the '60s when we started to spend time around Athens; they're simple doughnuts made with a very, very old recipe, which gives them a moist mouth feel and just a few crackly bits around the edges when they're fresh. I suspect the basic formula hasn't changed in 200 years or more.

I'm sorry, but next to a Willard's Fried Cake, any iced, glazed or filled product from your Tim Horton's, your Krispy Kremes or any other doughnut emporium you care to name must retire in shame. Cakey, oily and delicious, Willard's Fried Cakes take their perfectly satisfying savour from the soupçon of nutmeg that is the final item in the list of ingredients.

They contain milk and eggs and butter and lard, so each one contains a hefty 230 calories with 14 grams of fat. (In case you're curious, that's about the same as a comparable doughnut from Krispy Kreme or Tim Horton's.) They're not really meant to be eaten by people with a sedentary lifestyle; they're supposed to power you through a day of winter camping.

Finally, should you ever find yourself in Athens, especially on a grey fall day with a nip in the air, hope that the noble local chip wagon is open. It has, says my brother John, the right kind of fat to fry the potatoes in (he thinks it might be beef tallow), as well as "the right cut, the right kind of salt shaker, the right wooden sticks, the right boxes, the right bags, and a good turnover." The recipe for the perfect fries? Try some and decide for yourself.

Thanks to John Hood for photos!

Shrimp and Salmon Terrine for Charcutepalooza

2011-08-15T18:41:00.021-04:00

There's a show business truism that dictates that if you say "ta-da!" enthusiastically enough at the end of the show, people will think your act was a success, no matter what came before. Since cooking is a form of show business, allow me without further ado to say:

"TA-DAAAA!!!"

I launched a book and embarked on a house painting project this month, and Charcutepalooza kind of got away from me. Also, I really was all primed to do a pig's head, especially since one of my heroes, Ruth Goodman, tackles one with ease at some point in Victorian Farm. However, since there are only two of us in the house, and as I don't eat much meat, and as Jonathan doesn't really like leftovers, when the reports began to come in about the large quantity of head cheese you get from one pig, I decided I needed to rework my strategy.

Thus, on the last possible day, I tackled the Shrimp and Salmon Terrine with Spinach and Mushrooms, encouragingly described as "probably the simplest terrine to make at home". It calls for a food processor to reduce the shrimp to paste, the modern equivalent of forcing the shrimp meat through a sieve. Now I don't own a food processor; what to do? I tried chopping with a knife. I tried a food mill. I even tried a sieve.

Allow me to inform you at this point what a pitiful grey teaspoon of sludge you get after forcing a perfectly good, $10-a-pound tiger shrimp through what I think of as a sieve.

Reader, we will draw a curtain across the lamentable kitchen scene that constituted the middle section of the exercise. We will rejoin our heroine as she drizzles one cup of light cream (not 1¼ cups of heavy cream, as per the recipe) into a mush of shrimps and egg white, when things were starting to look up again.

We may even follow her to the kitchen garden where she chooses some beans and very pretty chard, a head of dill and a few cloves of garlic for the rest of the meal. It's starting to feel more like a French country kitchen again, thank goodness. (There will be a baguette too, from yesterday's market. Better and better.)

It was pretty much all good news from there on in. Despite the shrimp-chopping difficulties, the texture was pleasant. Despite the use of light cream, it set just fine. Despite a hurry-up chill-and-press involving cold-water baths, it held its shape. And despite the omission of plastic wrap inside the mold (because I like to avoid contact between plastic and food when possible), it unmolded beautifully – with a little help from a spatula (thank you, Le Creuset!)

Now, if only my poor old camera would take photos in indoor light, I could show you a picture of a lovely meal! The best I can do, by morning light, is show you the leftovers:

Canning Workshop at Red Rocket Coffee

2011-08-11T11:40:00.003-04:00

To celebrate my book launch, I'm offering a beginners' canning class this coming Sunday, August 14 at Red Rocket Coffee (1402 Queen East, just east of Greenwood). It starts at 3 p.m. and will last two to three hours. I'll be demonstrating a simple berry jam. Everyone will have some hands-on time, and also go home with a jar of jam. It will be a small group, so everyone will have a chance to ask really in-depth questions about canning techniques, safety, recipe developing and how to tell whether your jam has set.

Participants should wear closed-toe shoes (leather or equivalent rather than canvas), and might like to bring an apron, although we will have some on hand. A pen and notebook would be handy too. Everything else will be provided.

The cost is $25, which goes to support the Leslieville Farmer's Market. If you'd like to participate, please email me directly.

First Tomatoes from the Garden

2011-08-10T11:37:00.002-04:00

Jealous? I could have let this baby stay on the vine a little longer, but last year I lost so many tomatoes to human and/or animal thieves that I chickened out and picked it (and its vine mate) last night to ripen on the counter.

It's a Jeff Davis, a late Victorian tomato named for Jefferson Davis (1808 to 1889), leader of the Confederacy in the US. It has odd leaves that make it look more like a potato vine than a tomato. However, this is clearly a tomato, and I look forward to cutting into it.

We Sure Can! Toronto Book Launch on August 7

2011-07-31T16:30:00.006-04:00

In case you haven't heard, my book about food preserving, We Sure Can! How Jams and Pickles are Reviving the Lure and Lore of Local Foods, has its official Toronto launch next Sunday, August 7 from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Leslieville Farmer's Market at Jonathan Ashbridge Park (Queen Street East between Greenwood and Coxwell).

I'll be signing books, answering canning questions to the best of my ability and also holding a jar swap. While you're at the market, you can pick up awesome warm baguettes, eat a fresh-cooked waffle, buy a few pounds of fresh fruit for canning, or a whole bunch of other delightful things.

There's a Facebook page for the event, if you feel like signing in. If you read the blog and I don't already know you in person, please say hi!

Pictured, above: great excitement in the family as my niece discovers Auntie Sarah's book on display at Book City on the Danforth! Photo by Alex Hood.

Trying Out The Unofficial Harry Potter Sweet Shoppe Kit

2011-07-30T13:00:00.007-04:00

Now that we've read all the books and seen all the movies, we Harry Potter fans no longer share that sweet anticipatory pleasure of speculating what will happen next. However, there's still plenty of fun to be had with J.K. Rowling's characters and the world she created for them to inhabit. For those who aren't about to hop on the plane to visit Orlando's Wizarding World theme park, there are simpler pleasures, like The Unofficial Harry Potter Sweet Shoppe Kit. When I was offered a sample to test, I wasn't sure whether to say "You had me at Harry Potter" or "You had me at Sweet Shoppe Kit".

The cover of the box says the kit's appropriate for ages 8 and up, so last Saturday I got together with my nine-year-old niece Tara and my stepdaughter Niamh, who's in her early twenties, to try it out. The Harry Potter connection was more or less lost on Tara, who's still two years younger than Harry was at the beginning of the first book (she has a great treat in store for her later). However, the box wowed her; it's made of satisfyingly solid cardboard with an attractive brass-bound corner look.

There are two layers inside, and the top one displays the most important component: The Unofficial Harry Potter Sweet Shoppe Book by Dinah Bucholz. There's also a mold for making chocolate frogs, brooms, bugs and owls, a collection of nice-looking reusable plastic "broomsticks" for the chocolate broom pops, and about 15 cello bags and ribbon ties for packaging the treats. There's enough extra space in the box to store ingredients, like chocolate pellets or candy decorations.

Looking over the recipes, Tara was attracted to the one for sugar mice (as served at Honeydukes, the Hogsmeade confectioner's shop). I thought it seemed like a good choice for a nine-year-old, because it required no cooking and called for only four common ingredients: confectioner's sugar, butter, vanilla and corn syrup.

Niamh, who, like me, is enough of a Harry Potter fan to have bought books at midnight on the release dates and attended some of the movies on their opening days, was most keen on the chocolate frogs because - as she pointed out - discovering the chocolate frogs from the trolley on the Hogwarts Express was one of Harry's first happy magical experiences, and they were connected with his first meeting with Ron and Hermione. I pointed out that the ones we made probably wouldn't hop. She seemed resigned to this.

We concocted the sugar mice first, and it was immediately clear that the recipe instructions were not written for a nine-year-old. Tara's a good reader for her level, and she knew "confectioner's sugar", but had trouble with words like "indentations" and "consistency". I noted that there was no mention of the tools that would be needed for the job. Still, we assembled the ingredients mainly from her following of the directions, and she only needed a little help combining things. We fridged the mouse mix and set to work on the chocolate while the mixture was cooling to a workable "consistency".

Here, I'm sorry to have to point out that Bucholz and her editors have permitted at least one serious error to creep into the text, a bad enough one to spoil the half-dozen or so recipes that call for melted chocolate. The chocolate tempering instructions say to melt chocolate in a double boiler "until the temperature reaches 220°F for dark chocolate or 110°F for milk or white chocolate". Apart from the question as to whether you can heat anything above 212°F in a double boiler (because it ought not to be able to get hotter than boiling water), the correct temperature for dark chocolate is 120°F. I don't know what happens to chocolate at 220°F, but I can't imagine it's anything good.

Luckily, I've taken a couple of chocolate classes, so I caught the typo. However, I think Niamh, who's a very able cook, would have been led astray. Again, some mention of tools would have been useful, since it's extremely hard to skim excess chocolate off a mold without an offset spatula (as in the photo above). On the other hand, after I tempered the chocolate, Tara had a very good time spooning it into the molds provided, and when it hardened, the nine shapes popped out very neatly.

I was quite taken with the chocolate brooms on their plastic broomsticks, and the frogs looked really good. After Tara bagged and ribboned the chocolates, the family members she gave them to were really impressed with the results. "Did you really make these?" they asked. "We molded them," she replied proudly.

But back to the mice: when we started to work with the refrigerated mouse mixture, it was very, very tricky to follow the directions to make satisfying mice. Niamh bowed out early. Mine looked like polar bears, cats, hamsters, hippos, and in one case a gravely ill rat. At this point, Niamh's roommate, a trained pastrychef, poked his nose in. "Making fondant from scratch?" he asked. "Oh, man!" ...and promptly disappeared. You have to feel a little anxious about a kids' recipe that scares a grownup with pastry papers.

However, alone of all of us, Tara managed to make pretty convincing mice. She had fun doing it, she loved the taste of the mouse dough (which she kept dipping into), and she was really proud of the results. She also loved the squdgey feel of the fondant, and was with difficulty persuaded to stop squeezing the bag of leftover dough - and at that only after the first freezer bag had sprung so many leaks it had to be double bagged.

The five at right are Tara's mice. The two at the back seems to be a cat and a very sad rat. The lump with eyes at left is either Jabba the Hut or the unused mouse dough.

Of the 35 recipes in the book, 10 call for an ice cream maker, at least three call for special-order ingredients like citric acid and invertase, and many call for boiling sugar to precise temperatures. There are a few simpler things, like a list of ice cream sundae variations, hot chocolate and a very tasty looking frozen lemon pop. But in the final analysis, I think it's inaccurate to call this a child's cooking kit.

I see that The Unofficial Harry Potter Sweet Shoppe Kit retails around $25, with discounts through some of the online retailers. At that price (and apart from the chocolate gaffe), this is a pretty good beginner's guide to basic confectionery; it also covers boiled fudge, marshmallows, nougat and hard candies (no recipe for many-flavoured beans, though).

I think the kit would be great for 18- to 24-year old Potter fans who are also kitchen geeks, or for the parent with spare time who's comfortable engineering some fairly complex cooking manoeuvres with their child in such a way that the child feels empowered rather than overwhelmed. And I'm not exactly the target audience, but I do feel somewhat inspired by the initial experiment to try further recipes in the book myself.

Now if only someone with a working wand could just wave it and say "typo reparum!"

The second photo was taken by me; thanks to Niamh Malcolm for all the rest!

Let's Share Our Food Bounty with Hungry Children

2011-07-27T12:20:00.012-04:00

As a child, I was horrified by the news images of Biafran babies who were starving to death, but I had no way to help. Now I can, and so I'm challenging my Twitter followers, Facebook friends and blog readers to help raise $50,000 towards the relief of the East African famine.

You don't have to attend an event or bake a cake or bid on anything. Just click the button in the right nav bar to make a donation via PayPal or credit card to The Humanitarian Coalition, which is made up of CARE Canada, Oxfam Canada, Oxfam-Québec, Plan Canada and Save the Children Canada. Or you can choose your own charity, like the Red Cross Horn of Africa Drought campaign. Until September 16, the Canadian government will match donations from individual Canadians.

Americans can donate too, but it won't be matched. Or you could set up something similar on your own site.

If you were able to spend $20 this week on a restaurant meal – or a batch of local fruit for preserving, or a pork belly to turn into charcuterie – please express your gratitude for our bounty by putting your next $20 into feeding kids who really, really need a break.

Let me know via email or in the comments, so I can post a list of donations with your name or anonymously and keep tabs on how much we've raised so far.

THANK YOU!

Photo from The Humanitarian Coalition's Flickr feed.

Alison Fryer's Summer Canning Cookbooks Roundup (including We Sure Can!)

2011-07-26T10:03:00.003-04:00

Canning Books with Alison Fryer from GoodFoodRevolution on Vimeo.

Almost 15 years ago I took a trip to The Cookbook Store and asked owner Alison Fryer what book I should buy if I wanted to learn how to make jam. She sold me a copy of what is now known as The Complete Book of Small-batch Preserving by Ellie Topp and Margaret Howard (in those days it was called Put a Lid on It!), and I've never looked back.

Now, imagine my pleasure to see her naming my own book along with Small-batch Preserving, as well as books by some of my most admired food preservers and writers like Elizabeth Baird and Yvonne Tremblay, in this great roundup of summer food preserving books shot by Malcolm Jolley of Good Food Revolution!

Stinky Tofu at the T&T Night Market

2011-07-22T12:35:00.016-04:00

It was Patrick McMurray (AKA @shuckerpaddy) of Starfish and Ceili Cottage who reminded me via Twitter that the T&T Waterfront Night Market was opening last night. In the comparative cool of a sweltering day, I thought it would be fun to bike down and check it out. Also, he mentioned stinky tofu, which I'd heard of but never tried. My curiosity was piqued.

Stinky (or "smelly") tofu is soy bean curd marinated in a fermentation based on milk and sometimes seafood. As far as I understand, it's a favourite at (especially) Taiwanese night markets (popcorn at movies, cotton candy at the fair, stinky tofu at the night market, I guess?) Wikipedia offers the note that "the nature of the stinky tofu production process makes it extremely difficult to pass government food regulation even in Asia" – and what could possibly be a more irresistible provocation to try something than that?

A night market, incidentally, is something like a carnival midway, except instead of games of chance, it's all about street food. I arrived around 10 p.m. to find that, what with last night's crushing heat and the occasional only slightly less stifling gust from the nearby lakefront, Cherry Street really felt like a different country. As I walked my bike into the crowd, I was assailed by a knock-down stench of supreme awfulness, sort of like an outhouse in a heatwave. My, I thought, could this possibly be that stinky tofu I've heard about?

I wasn't very hungry, but I was curious to try at least one thing I'd never eaten before, and I wandered around the jungle of food tents, very tempted by all manner of seafood: squid and prawns and many other delights quick-fried on sticks; the folks from Diana's laying out fresh Fanny Bay oysters, and a most delectable looking item called an oyster omelette, made with eggs, oysters, and something glutinous that a stranger I spoke to thought might be tapioca.

Innumerable pineapples gave their lives to the event, to spend their last hour garnished with umbrellas and straws. There were green coconuts, peeled and embellished with funny little cartoon faces. Hello Kitty merch was also on offer, and the folks from Ten Ren Tea were there with bubble tea and other cooling beverages. There was a midway; there was live music, there were some free food samples, and T&T was open for shopping too.

I asked a woman working the tea booth whether there was anything special I should try at the market. "Stinky tofu," she said. "It smells bad. It tastes good." By this time I figured the universe was making its point clearly, so I made my way to the tent marked "Smelly Tofu", which had a big lineup (always a good sign). It also smelled utterly foul (yes, this was the source of that gobsmacking odour I'd noticed when I arrived.)

There was a man (see the blurry photo above) swirling the stinky sizzling concoction in a large wok, and I took note as people in the line in front of me received their little cardboard clamshells, each with six biggish chunks of tofu (for $5). A brown sauce was squirted on top from a plastic condiment bottle; there was a dollop of bright red hot sauce and a topping of something that looked like cabbage.

Eventually I got mine, and armed myself with the thin, pointed wooden skewer provided as the weapon of choice with which to attack the dish. And you know what? The Ten Ren staffer was right: it doesn't taste like it smells. I think the appeal of stinky tofu is really the texture: the steaming hot inside was almost as soft as scrambled eggs, but the outside was crispy and crunchy. The brown sauce was not strong-tasting; it seemed to be a salty vinegary soy condiment. The hot pepper sauce was great, and not deadly. The cabbage topping was like cole slaw, but in huge chunks instead of grated. The combination of tastes was great.

I must say, there's also a lot of garlic in there somewhere, whether in the condiments or the wok; I could taste garlic all the way home. (Another plus, as far as I'm concerned.)

The T&T Waterfront Night Market continues until Sunday (6 p.m. to midnight tonight, 5 to midnight on Saturday and 5 to 10 p.m. on Sunday). I have a feeling it's going to get more crowded every night. Very useful to know: there's a free shuttlebus service running every 30 minutes from Union Station, Spadina at Darcy (north of Dundas) and Bay Street at the back (north end) of Toronto City Hall.

I can't stop thinking about the squid, the prawns and the oysters, so I might be back. I might even want a little more of that stinky tofu.

Making Emulsified Sausage (Bratwurst) for Charcutepalooza

2011-07-15T18:26:00.009-04:00

Well, you might think that bratwurst would be the most badly behaved of sausages, but in this instance it has proved to be neither bratty nor the worst, by any means. After struggling, rather, with some of the other Charcutepalooza assignments, the brave Niamh and I had a lot more fun with the emulsified sausage exercise.

Perhaps I had a less fibrous cut of meat; perhaps I chilled it better. Perhaps I simply assembled the stuffer properly. For whatever reason, this time we had no great difficulty using the Waring Pro to stuff the casings. Here was our method: soak the casings for half an hour. Chop the meat into small cubes and pop it into the freezer with spices. Grind twice with the old-fashioned iron hand grinder. Emulsify in a KitchenAid stand mixer (rather against my normal predilections, but we were at Niamh's place, and her cohabitant CJ has attended culinary school).

I also found a different rhythm for feeding the meat into the stuffer (smaller bits at a time, and less plunging down the tube with the pushing tool), while Niamh said she was concentrating more on the meat that was entering the casing than on the casing that was leaving the funnel (if that makes sense). In any case it worked, and if the last Harry Potter movie weren't starting in 26 minutes, I would write more. As it is, I'll simply leave you with Niamh's lovely pictures.

Our hope is to BBQ some tomorrow at the first of the summer family birthdays...

PS: As you will see from the top photo, even Niamh's fridge is stuffed with my jams and pickles. Oh dear. - ed.

Photos by Niamh Malcolm (top) and CJ Cushieri (bottom).

Ontario Raspberry Jam vs the World

2011-07-12T12:56:00.004-04:00

Okay, so these two little jars will soon be on their way to Scotland, nestled in a protective shell of bubble wrap and cardboard, to try their luck against all comers at the first annual World Jampionships in Blairgowrie, East Perthshire.

I thought for some time about what kind of raspberry jam might be judged best in the world. Some prefer seedless, but I generally make it with the seeds in, which helps it set (I didn't want to add extra pectin). Besides, I personally like crunching the tiny seeds with my front teeth.

I thought of adding other flavours, but I noticed the judging criteria don't include "originality", so I thought I'd go for a straight-up raspberry jam. The ratio is about four parts fruit to three of sugar, which is good and sweet, but not quite Christine Ferber intensity. I did my best to nail the set, using a thermometer to check it had reached 220°F (which I wouldn't normally do). But what else could possibly make it better than all other raspberry jams?

I finally decided the best jam would have to come from the very best-tasting berries, so it would come down to terroir in the end. I used about three-quarters red raspberries from Bizjak Farms in Niagara via the Leslieville Farmer's Market, and about one-quarter mixed red and black raspberries picked at my community garden. After some consideration, I included some overripe black raspberries that had aged and slightly dried on the bushes; they're dense and seedy, but they have a really intense flavour.

As soon as I have a chance to download the registration form and acquire the requisite £5, I'll be sending the little jars (well polished, mind you!) off on their mission.

You go, Ontario!

Why I Love my Local Farmer's Market

2011-07-08T22:34:00.002-04:00

Beef farmer and vendor Jeffrey Arnold sent me this picture after I commented on the ironic juxtaposition of enterprises in the second week of the Leslieville Farmer's Market. Need I say more?

Ten Foods to Forage in the City

2011-07-04T15:04:00.007-04:00

It seems everyone I know is out picking serviceberries (AKA Saskatoons) this week, and I'm just waiting for the mulberries to ripen at the community garden. So here are some ideas for would-be urban foragers: to the best of my knowledge, all of these can be harvested without destroying the plant.

I encourage anyone who wants to start harvesting city fruit, berries, fungi or greens to be conscious of the health and ethical questions that will arise.

Use your own judgment about whether the plants you're harvesting may be too contaminated (a former petroleum refinery's probably a bad place to pick edibles).
Read up: for instance, morels can make you sick if you eat them raw. Some edible flowers have poisonous lookalikes. And no one who doesn't know what they're doing should eat foraged mushrooms.
Get permission from land owners when it's feasible to do so, and exercise discretion, courtesy and a sense of sharing when gathering food in public space.
Avoid gathering plants like wild garlic, which won't grow back, and limit the amount of food you take in any genuinely natural setting to 5% to 10% of what's there, if any at all.

Dates given are for the Toronto area, and even here the season can be as much as two or three weeks early or late.

Crabapples (Malus – August-September): Yes, you can eat the little apples from those ubiquitous ornamental trees. Some taste better than others, but all can be used to make tangy pink jelly.
Dandelions (Taraxacum – April): Before they bloom in early May, you can gather young dandelion leaves for salad. Wash them before eating, of course.
Garlic Mustard (Alliaria petiolata – May): This is a slender, leafy green that produces small white flowers. It’s also massively invasive, so you’re doing local forests a favour if you help eradicate it. Related to broccoli and cabbages, it has a pleasant garlic scent. Remove the toughest stalks and cook it like kale or Swiss chard; it makes a hearty soup with potatoes.
Mint (Mentha – June on): Mint relatives have square stems and alternating perpendicular pairs of leaves; they grow prolifically all over the place. Spearmint (Mentha spicata) and peppermint (Mentha × piperita) smell just like your toothpaste; lemon balm (Melissa officinalis) has a distinctly lemony-sweet scent, while catnip (Nepata cataria) is pleasantly skunky. Any of these can be steeped as refreshing tea, either dried or fresh. Just don’t confuse them with nettles (taller and darker green), which sting.
Morels (Morchella – June, pictured): This is the foraging jackpot. Look for a pale grey-brown, pinecone-shaped mushroom with a texture like honeycomb, especially where there has been a fire. They’re only around for about three weeks in the spring, and they cost $35 to $50 per pound in shops. Store them in an open paper bag in the fridge; they’re delicious sautéd in butter.
Mulberries (Morus – July): You may have noticed the messy splatters below this underappreciated fruit tree, which can grow to 45 feet. Mulberries look like thumblike overachieving raspberries. They start out green and hard, but ripen through red to purple-black (or occasionally greenish white). They’re not as intoxicating as strawberries or raspberries, but they make fine pies and jams.
Quinces (Cydonia oblonga – September-October): As a shrub that puts forth brick-coloured or salmon-pink flowers in late April, the quince is a traditional park and garden plant. However, even the ornamental type can bear late-summer fruit, which looks like a hard yellow apple-pear. Quinces aren’t good eaters, but they make great jam and can be boiled to a paste and dried into “membrillo”: a highly coveted item on cheese and charcuterie platters!
Serviceberries (Amelanchier – June-July): These are the same thing as Saskatoon berries: a dark purple blueberry relative that grows on a shrub or small tree with white flowers in early spring. They’re plentiful in Toronto, where they seem to be popular with landscape architects. The berries freeze well, so you can save them for the winter, or make them into jam, jelly or pie right away.
Shiso (Perilla frutencens – June on): A knee-high herb with dark purple leaves that seeds itself abundantly and turns up uninvited in many front yards. It’s popular in Asian cooking; the leaves can be shredded and added to sandwiches and salads like basil. The flavour is unique, but reminiscent of licorice and cinnamon.
Sumac (Rhus glabra, Rhus typhina, etc. – August-September): These short trees spring up in abundance on vacant lots and along the edges of highways. Their fruit forms in conical clusters of fuzzy dark red berries. To make sumac lemonade like the early North American settlers, cover these “sumac bobs” in water and steep them like tea until the liquid is dark red. Strain and drink hot or cold, sweetened to taste. (Sumac is related to poison ivy and poison sumac, so if you think you could be allergic, proceed with caution.)

Photo by jdurham at Morguefile.

Ostriches are Our Future

2011-07-01T12:27:00.008-04:00

And I for one welcome our long-necked avian overlords. Okay, I may be exaggerating, but I'm fascinated to discover that ostrich farming is a booming business in Ontario, to the point where the supply of ostrich chicks, eggs and meat simply can't match the demand.

This revelation comes from my excursion of last Wednesday to the rural territory around Guelph and Milton with Tastes of Tomorrow, the student-run chef's club at George Brown's culinary school. They run a great series throughout the school year, with an annual farm visit each summer. All the Tastes of Tomorrow events that I've attended have been great, and I highly recommend them.

In this case, for an amazing $10, I had a full day's worth of farm touring plus lunch and lots of time to ask questions of the farmers and representatives of Foodland Ontario and the Ontario Farm Animals Council.

Our first stop of the morning was White Rock Ostrich Farm near Rockwood, which is a little over an hour from Toronto via the 427. There, farmer Deb Simmonds recounted how she and her husband just drifted almost by accident into raising ostriches 25 years ago after reading an article about them.

Now, with 17 breeders, a small herd of "teenagers" (pictured above) and an incubator room full of chicks, the farm can't handle the market for ostrich meat. She describes visits from top chefs and their emissaries begging to be supplied regularly; she turns them down. (The farm does attend some farmers' markets, including Nathan Phillips Square, however.)

"We're training two other families to raise ostriches," says Simmonds."Quebec will buy any ostrich chick, and we're now selling fertilized eggs to BC." The farm experienced a 30% business increase after the "buy local" campaign started. Sidelines include selling the egg shells and moulted feathers, which people use for decorative crafts, and tanning the hides.

An ostrich farm will keep one male for every two or three females. Females can lay 30 to 60 eggs per season, each of which has 42-day gestation period. Ostriches can live for about 70 years, but the best meat comes from an 11-month-old bird. "They're lower fat than chicken or turkey, and there are no antibiotics because they're so disease-resistant," Simmonds comments. "It makes good carpaccio."

An ostrich egg is equivalent to two dozen chicken eggs. Simmonds mentions one family that created a monster devilled egg for a party after using a band saw to cut an ostrich egg in half. The demand is so high that Simmonds only sells eggs for eating in April and September, by reservation.

I must say that as we bumped around the ostrich enclosures on a tractor-pulled wagon, the theme from Jurassic Park started running on my inner iPod. Of all birds, ostriches have to be among the most dinosaurean. Look at those feet. Like something from Tatooine or what?

After our ostrich experience, we were treated (by Foodland Ontario) to a really lovely lunch featuring local ingredients cooked by Chef Hubert Bielmann of Heaven on 7 Bistro and Pub in Rockwood, before heading to Andrews' Scenic Acres, which is not far from Highway 401 and Trafalgar Road. Lauraine and Bert Andrews grow a wide range of fruit and berries, with 100 acres of pick-your-own crops and an additional 700 or so acres under cultivation.

Although most of their soil is the alkaline limestone of the nearby Niagara Escarpment, they also have one patch of very acidic soil that enables them to grow blueberries, which are rare in the neighbourood. Other crops include strawberries, raspberries, gooseberries (pictured), rhubarb, asparagus, apples, sour cherries and a few grapes.

The Andrewses also run Scotch Block Winery, where they sell wines made with their own fruit. As someone with a weakness for fruit wines, I tried several, and ended up taking home a bottle of their Raspberry Rouge, which I may or may not serve with my chunk of roast ostrich.

Joey Eaton Centre Opening in Toronto

2011-06-30T22:50:00.005-04:00

Well I wasn't planning to attend the opening of the new Joey at the Eaton Centre, but as I walked by in my grubby clothes, not so fresh from an all-day bus trip and an unsuccessful shopping expedition at Canadian Tire, I became aware of wide-open windows from which were issuing the sounds of clinking glasses and animated chatter – not to mention a considerable flock of foodie friends clinking and chattering away. So I changed my plans and marched in, grubby clothes and all, and am now able to report on a venue I didn't really expect to be so taken by.

The story so far: Joey is a mainly western Canadian chain operation that opened its first Toronto location at the Shops at Don Mills in September 2009. I wrote about that launch at the time, and also interviewed Executive Chef Chris Mills.

The Joey experience is slick and sparkly. The food is a snappy mix of various cuisines (butter chicken and burgers, sushi and spaghetti); the serving staff would not look out of place at the Victoria's Secret fashion show, and the cocktails are of the no-holds-barred variety. Which is to say: I don't think I fall into their target demographic.

Now, any slightly upscale Toronto restaurant faces a big challenge; there are so many great meals to be had here for $10 to $15, especially so if you're talking about Italian, Chinese, South Asian, Japanese, Middle Eastern or African cuisines. So, to be honest, at the price point (burgers about $15, pastas $17 to $20, steaks $23 to $35), I would be unlikely to visit Joey for the food alone. I'm not much of a cocktail drinker, either. But...

...picture the room above filled with happy, excited people having a really good time. Then imagine that you're sitting in a big banquette next to a huge open window with bustling Yonge and Dundas unfolding right in front of you. Toss some genuinely tasty Bombay Butter Chicken or a well-handled steak into the mix, with maybe a premium Canadian beer ($6.25) or something from the well chosen by-the-glass wine list (likely $10 to $20) or something indulgent from the cocktail menu ($6.49 to $10.99), and you're probably paying somewhere between $20 and $45 (plus tax and tip) for a genuinely entertaining urban experience.

I was also more than a little impressed by a brief conversation with one of the young women recently hired as a server; she was transparently happy to be working there and praised the organization warmly for its professionalism, especially in regard to the training she had been given about the food.

So if you should spot me through that big window one day as you're leaving Canadian Tire, and I'm snacking on a Panang Prawn Curry Bowl and sipping a deliciously dark, fizzy, orange Aperol Spritz, don't be all that surprised.

Strawberry Rhubarb Jam with Organic Sugar

2011-06-30T13:46:00.003-04:00

Every once in a while you hit the utter sweet spot with a batch of jam. This one is so good that I'm torn: I think it would do very well in the Royal Winter Fair preserves competition, but I would be very sad to send any of my few precious jars away. I'd rather eat them (maybe with a spoon!) or give them to dearly loved friends and relations.

In case you think I'm exaggerating, here's the recipe.

Perfect Strawberry Rhubarb Jam with Organic Sugar
Makes 4-5 cups

2 pounds organic sugar
2 quarts fresh, just-ripe ripe local strawberries
2 cups washed and diced fresh, just-ripe ripe local rhubarb (thanks to Amy of Playing in the Dirt!)
4 tbsp lemon juice

Sterilize jars.
In a wide, deep non-reactive pot over medium-high heat, combine all ingredients and mix well to dissolve sugar.
Bring to a full rolling boil and boil, skimming and stirring occasionally, until mixture stops frothing up to a large volume, the scum pulls back to sides of pot and the jam thickens so it dribbles rather than pours off the spoon. It will have reduced in volume by about half, the rhubarb will mostly have dissolved, and the strawberry chunks will be well integrated into the mixture rather than bobbing on the surface.
Pour into hot sterilized jars, seal and process at a full rolling boil for 5 to 10 minutes. Refrigerate any jars that do not seal.
See how long you can last without eating it!

The Bowery Launches on Colborne Street in Toronto

2011-06-29T23:41:00.011-04:00

The Bowery has taken over the Six Steps space at 55 Colborne Street with striking decor and a menu so seasonal that it's going to have to be updated about every 48 hours. A launch on Tuesday night allowed food reporters (including David Ort of Food With Legs) to view the space and sample some of the fare.

The food is masterminded by Executive Chef Tawfik Shehata (pictured, right, who used to be at Vertical) and Chef de Cuisine Jason Maw (Starfish and Boba). It's amazing that Shehata has the energy to open another new place so soon; it was only last November that he launched The Ballroom, the buzzy hipster bowling alley in the former Montana's space across from the Chapters/Paramount complex at John and Adelaide.

Despite the daunting phalanx of Absolut Orient Apple bottles in the emergency-orange cabinet at the entryway, The Bowery's wine list ought to be a draw. It's a not-too-long international selection with whites from California, France, Australia and New Zealand, and reds from South America, the US, Australia, France, Italy and Spain.

All this goes alongside a solid showing of interesting Canadian (mainly Niagara) labels like Megalomaniac, Malivoire, Foreign Affair, 13th Street, Tawse and Southbrook. There are also a Tawse Cabernet Icewine, a Tawse Late Harvest Gewürztraminer and a Fielding Late Harvest Gewürztraminer among the after-dinner drinks, with some Taylor Fladgate ports.

There's a modest by-the-glass offering (cheekily classified as "Cheap", "Decent" and "Good"), and a note that almost any wine on the list is available by the half-bottle.

As for the food, whereas the decor suggests a quasi-New York-esque 20th-century vibe that matches the name (for the old Dutch south end of Manhattan, which became synonymous with tough, hardscrabble street life), the menu is straight 2010s Toronto. As mentioned above, Shehata and Maw are staking out a ruthlessly local/seasonal turf that includes ingredients like spot prawns, asparagus, morels, strawberries, rhubarb and peas... several of which will be out of season as early as next week.

They're also using lots of lovely seafood, mainly sustainable (I'm wondering whether Hooked is their supplier). Besides the delicious spot prawns, Lake Huron pickerel, BC Lingcod, branzino and Albacore tuna are featured.

It's hard to judge a dinner menu when it's served as finger food in a bustling party environment with terrifying cocktails, but from the starters list, we tried bite-sized portions of the Grilled Octopus with tomato confit, tomato chips, Niçoise olives, baby arugula, polenta and squid ink aioli. My arugula had been heated to the point of crispiness, so its characteristic taste was lost, but the polenta had a delectable fried texture and the overall flavour was dark, smoky, umami. It will be priced at $15.

I'm going to guess that the pizza will be popular. Their crust may not quite be the equal of Queen Margherita, but it's pretty darn good all the same: thin and crispy outside; tender inside, piping hot and topped with an interesting choice of items. At the launch,we were able to try the Pizza Capricciosa (seen above) with buffalo mozzarella, tomato sauce, mushrooms, marinated artichokes, candied prosciutto and green olives. It was pleasantly sweet-salty, and the prosciutto chunks had a very good brown sugar-bacon flavour and chewy texture.

Asparagus Pizza with pickled spring onions, asparagus, thyme, chèvre, mascarpone cheese, and mushroom puree was smoky, rich and buttery. I believe the pizzas will be priced at $19 for dinner or $15 for lunch.

With its custom wood grill, The Bowery could be a contender in the eyes of serious meat eaters too. We were treated to tastes of Grilled Rib Eye with lemon shallot honey vinaigrette and shaved Parmesan cheese, which was certainly delicious, if a tad artery-clogging. On the regular menu it will be served as a 24-ounce cut for $40.

We tasted samples of Strawberry Semi-freddo with pistachio praline and macerated strawberries, which will be a dessert item at $9. Local fresh strawberries are among the best foods in the world; the custard sauce was tasty but not particularly ravishing, rather like very good melted vanilla ice cream.

Not listed on the menu but delightful were cubes of watermelon with slight concavities in one side (exactly like pool cue chalk), filled and drizzled with cherry vinaigrette and mint.

The decor is heavy on glossy tiles, with brilliant orange subway tiles on the walls and those tiny vintage-flavoured black octagonal floor tiles. (Warning: the tall bar seats are apt to skate alarmingly across the glazed surface!)

Incomprehensibly, there's a flatscreen to the rear of the bar that was tuned to CP24 during the launch. I'm hoping that the plan is to use it for something more thematically appropriate – a custom slideshow, or movies set in gritty Manhattan locations like On the Waterfront and Musketeers of Pig Alley would be more in keeping.

On the other hand, there are plenty of delightful, quirky design details around the room. This elegant cast iron pig was much admired.

World Jam Awards Call for Raspberry Jam!

2011-06-21T13:15:00.006-04:00

I'm trying to resist this new challenge, but I'm not at all certain I'll be able to keep myself from entering the first-ever World Jampionships in Blairgowrie, East Perthshire, the "Berry Capital of Scotland". In this inaugural year, the fruit of choice is the regal raspberry, my very favourite (and that of Albus Dumbledore too, if I recall correctly). Raspberries make such a lovely jam that the hardest part may be mailing two jars to Scotland; however, I have no doubt that the competition will be ferocious.

There are three categories: Aristan (commercial), B&B / Hotel / Restaurant house jam, and Homemade. In each category, awards will go to best in Scotland, best in UK and best "overseas". The judges will base their decisions on Appearance, Set, Aroma, Taste, Flavour and Texture. The entry form has the full rules. There's a £5 entry fee for the Homemade category (more for the professional categories). The deadline is August 12, which should allow even us northern cooks sufficient time.

The organizing body, a local tourism initiative called "Love to Eat", is also searching for a "Junior Jampion", whose three-ingredient recipe will be made up into jam and labelled with the competitor's own design. There's a separate entry form for the kids.

Thanks to Amy of Playing in the Dirt for pointing this news out to me!

Tomatoland by Barry Estabrook: Book Review

2011-06-17T15:35:00.003-04:00

In its opening chapters, Barry Estabrooks' Tomatoland seems to be following the same road as Arthur Allen's wonderful Ripe: The Search for the Perfect Tomato. Specifically, this road is a bumpy track across the Atacama Desert, where an intrepid group of food adventurers are pursuing a fabled Lost Tomato of Peru (AKA Solanum pimpinellifolium, a genetically important wild tomato variety).

But no sooner have we become engaged in this quest for tomato breeders' gold than Estabrook jumps the track and, instead of keeping up with these horticultural Indiana Joneses, carries us away to even more gripping and dangerous territory: the evil empire of Big Tomato, where the innocent are enslaved, beaten, imprisoned and even murdered for trying to escape from the appalling press gangs of Florida's tomato fields.

He crafts thrilling true-crime documentary from court transcripts as he tells of daring infiltrators who engineer midnight escapes, and brilliant legal battles reminiscent of Erin Brockovich or Silkwood that centre on the efforts to establish an evidentiary connection between tomato pesticides and three tomato pickers' children born without arms or legs in one small area within a few months of one another.

In case you're now about to give up tomatoes forever, know that Tomatoland also documents the brave and dedicated crusaders who are trying to reform the commercial tomato industry and increase the potential for small-scale and organic tomato production... not to mention the ones who are trying to make sure every tomato sold in a North American grocery store is a tasty one.

Tomatoland, How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit by former Gourmet magazine contributing editor Barry Estabrook (Andrews McMeel Publishing LLC, 2011) is the most exciting and inspiring food book I've read for years. If you haven't already done so, this is the book that will make you swear off grey, cardboard winter tomatoes for good.

Sausage Stuffing Mysteries of Charcutepalooza

2011-06-14T22:56:00.008-04:00

Having jumped the gun and stuffed sausages last month for the Charcutepalooza challenge, not realizing we were only required to grind sausage meat, I had hoped to build on my stuffing knowledge this time around. Instead, I feel that a bout with Maple Breakfast Sausages has only left me with more questions than answers.

Since I had already tried a stuffed sausage recipe from Charcuterie, I pulled this recipe from Home Sausage Making by Susan Mahnke Peery and Charles G. Reavis. In fact, it's pretty close to the basic Garlic Sausage recipe in Charcuterie – minus the garlic but with sage, mustard powder and maple syrup.

I persist in finding it easier to grind with the old-fashioned manual grinder than with the electric one. We bagged the ground meat in three batches as it came out and popped it into the freezer so none would sit very long on the counter.

The whole thing does make me feel a little too much like Mrs. Lovett, and I do wish that it were possible to see raw meat contamination; as it is, I find myself imagining it's everywhere, and compulsively scrubbing surfaces at every opportunity, which is far from my usual kitchen behaviour.

To fill the casings, I once again used the Waring Pro electric stuffer/grinder. Whereas last time the stuffing went quite smoothly, this time my co-stuffer Niamh and I experienced a range of challenges. We got a lot of big bubbles into the sausages, and managed twice to burst the skins (which didn't happen last time). I had soaked the casings for quite a while first, and they came from the same source as before, so I'm puzzled.

Also, we didn't manage to solve a problem I encountered last time: some of the sausages refused to hold their seal, leaving us with filling pushing out one end. Were we filling the casings too full? Was I twisting the links too tightly? Did I use too big a pipe to fill them?

Niamh is keen to try again, so perhaps we will answer these questions ourselves. Meanwhile, I plan to read up on other Charcutepaloozan experiences to see whether I can find the answers to these and other intriguing sausage questions.

Photos by Niamh Malcolm (for which many thanks!)

Food Sustainability Events: Recipes for Sustainability & Hungry For Change

2011-06-14T11:42:00.004-04:00

On Saturday, June 18, Films That Move invites everyone interested in food sustainability to a networking and information event called Hungry For Change at George Brown's Centre for Hospitality & Culinary Arts (300 Adelaide East). Representatives of many different groups will be there for a chance to connect with volunteer opportunities and engaging local projects. Footage will be shot at the event for a documentary about food activism in the Toronto area.

Hungry for Change starts with a reception at 10 a.m, followed at 10:30 by a more formal welcome and screening of short movie clips. A panel discussion starts at 11:30, with:

Mark Cutrara of Cowbell
John Higgins of George Brown Chef School
Chris Wong of Young Urban Farmers
Darcy Higgins of Toronto Youth Food Policy Council
Olivia Rojas of Regent Park Community Health Centre
Lauren Baker of Toronto Food Policy Council
Meredith Hayes of FoodShare

A community market with free food samples runs from 12:30 to 2; it's a chance to meet and chat with people from the local food scene. Admission is free; register online for free tickets.

On Monday June 20th,7 p.m., Toronto Green Community’s Speakers Series presents Recipes for Sustainability at 40 Orchard View Blvd, Room 200. Emily Martyn of Toronto Green Community will discuss local food politics and several food sustainability initiatives around Toronto and the rest of Canada. Admission is $10 (free for Toronto Green Community members).

Call for Preserves and Baking for the Book Bakery

2011-06-13T12:39:00.003-04:00

Can you spare a couple of jars of jam or a dozen cookies for a good cause? Alana Wilcox of Coach House Books, author Derek McCormac and "rogue editor" Michael Maranda have announced the opening of a different kind of bakery, and they could use your help.

Following the lead of Matthew Stadler's Publication Studio in Portland (which has sister projects in Berkeley, Vancouver and a "centerless terrain in the middle of North America"), Publication Studio Toronto, AKA the Book Bakery, is an artist-accessible printery that will operate out of a Parkdale storefront basement to produce small limited editions of odd and idiosyncratic books.

The publications will literally be handmade. Some will be created for particular events; many will be more about art than words. A selection of the output will be sold through TYPE Books on Queen West. The Bakery's first three projects are Why We Fight by Pasha Malla; Selected Business Correspondence by Andrew Kaufman, and It Must Be As Tall As a Lighthouse: A Valentine, with words by Tabatha Southey and drawings by Will Alsop.

The Bakery already has its printing equipment, but to raise money for paper and sundries, they're holding a launch and fundraiser starting at 7 p.m. on June 29 at the Burroughes Building (639 Queen West, third floor, at Bathurst). The Book Bakery Fund-Fair will feature carnival games, a celebrity author kissing booth, raffles, books and prizes, as well as readings by Matthew Stadler, Andrew Kaufman, Pasha Malla and Tabatha Southey.

In the community spirit of the event and the project itself, the Book Bakers would be grateful for modest contributions of preserves or baking. If you are going to attend the event, you can bring them along with you; otherwise, contact Alana Wilcox for more information.

Please Support the Fight Against Women's Cancers

2011-06-08T21:53:00.004-04:00

A break from the normal routine: my sister (pictured above, with her daughter) is walking the 32-kilometre (roughly 20-mile) Shopper's Drug Mart Walk to End Women's Cancers in memory of our grandmother Jeanne Mallory. Alex, who teaches pole dancing and hula-hooping, is doing it as part of Pink Pole Power, an initiative that uses pole-dancing energy towards the good cause of fighting cancer.

Here's my sister's donations page. If you feel able and inclined, please drop in and donate even as little as $5 towards her $1,500 goal. This great interactive thermometer shows you how she's doing.

Thanks!

A New Rack for the Jars!

2011-06-02T14:28:00.003-04:00

I'm ridiculously pleased about yesterday's project, which I've been daydreaming about for six months. These salvaged jars, which mainly contain dried herbs from the garden, have been cluttering up my kitchen surfaces since last fall. Now they're tidily out of the way, and I am far less likely to murder the cat by mistake (by dropping a jar on her head).

I did have to buy a new bottle of wood glue for five bucks, but otherwise, I had all the bits and pieces of materials, tools, fastenings and paint in the basement. And to make my brother happy, I even used a level to position it.

Planting the Community Garden Plot

2011-05-31T19:46:00.006-04:00

The California crew may well scoff because they've been enjoying their veggie gardens for weeks now, but I'm sunburnt, achy, and extremely happy after three days of putting my vegetable garden in order

As I observed on Twitter a couple of days ago, 70 square feet seems very small indeed while planting, but huge while weeding. I needed to pull out lots of weeds, enrich the soil, transplant the "volunteers", sow seeds and plant seedlings.

Here it is, good to go, with some two dozen crops planted, including tomatoes, hot peppers, eggplant, Swiss chard, bok choi, carrots, beets, radishes, onions, garlic, sunflowers, lettuces of all descriptions and many herbs. (Please don't hate me for my fondness for Chinese-made dollar-store decorations like the sun-on-a-stick!)

Especially exciting are the strawberries, which were either gifts from friends last year or strays that crept into the community garden walkways and were going to be pulled out. Aren't they pretty?

I really edited the garden this year: only four types of tomatoes instead of eight, and space carved out for stepping stones, which I found I really missed round about August last year. The four tomato plants I chose, after much deliberation, are:

Heirloom Beefsteak, which I hope will yield well
Blondköpfchen, the yellow cherry tomatoes that gave and gave and gave last year
Paul Robeson, a full-sized dark purple-black tomato that's highly recommended by my friends
Jeff Davis, my experiment for this year. Likely named for the Confederate leader (1808-1889), it's a slightly ribbed red and yellow beefsteak-style tomato. I'm intrigued by its very simple leaves, pictured above.

Now to wait and weed and water, wait and weed and water...

Learning How to Make Sausages

2011-05-11T20:32:00.001-04:00

I did not expect to be so taken with pig intestines, or sausage casings, as they are more decorously known. I think they're rather lovely: translucent and delicately patterned, and they move in unexpected ways when you run water through them. They remind me of some sort of sea creature; they almost seem to have a sense of humour. And they truly are a miracle, these discerning little organs that are able to turn refuse into the most versatile of meats.

For this month's Charcutepalooza sausage challenge, it took me a while to locate them, but in Toronto, sausage casings are regularly to be had at The Healthy Butcher and Cumbrae's, among other spots (neither Fiesta Farms nor Rowe Farms had them in stock when I checked).

I am cheered to see that, like jam, sausages are rigorous as to method, but allow considerable freedom as to ingredients. In future, I could quite see myself making up all kinds of interesting variations. For the first time, though, I thought I should stick to someone else's guidelines, so I made the basic Fresh Garlic Sausage recipe from the Charcutepalooza Bible, Charcuterie by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn.

I also used a recipe from Home Sausage Making by Susan Mahnke Peery and Charles G. Reavis. I found this book to be a wonderful complement to Charcuterie. Because it's more specialized, it goes into great detail, and it offered a few pointers that I didn't spot in Charcuterie, like waiting for the ground meat to start to emerge, then tying a knot in the end of the sausage casing, and wetting or greasing the funnel to make it easier for the casing to slide on and off. (I'm not sure that either book gave the excellent suggestion that I was given by Manny of Cafe del Manolo: chill the removable parts of the meat grinder and/or sausage stuffer before you start to work!)

I was astonished and inspired by all the recipes in Home Sausage Making, but finally settled on Luganega, which is apparently an ancient Roman recipe. (Since I actually have a Classics degree, anything ancient and Roman is apt to appeal to me). Luganega is a basic pork sausage with orange and lemon zest, pepper, coriander, garlic, nutmeg and Parmesan cheese. It also calls for Madeira, but I didn't have any around, so – as I expect the ancient Romans were occasionally out of it too – I just used wine.

One of my personal challenges with Charcutepalooza is that I live in a small house, and we don't even a have full-size fridge with a freezer. (I foresee difficulties this summer in trying to carry out meat projects during a heat wave, as we certainly don't have air conditioning.) I'm very happy with my modest carbon footprint, but I wasn't sure whether I'd be able to make sausages successfully without some specialized equipment, which I was loathe to acquire for reasons of space, economy and liking to do things the hard way. (Home Sausage Making was very helpful on this topic.)

After much deliberation, I bought a reconditioned Waring Pro Electric Meat Grinder, which comes with sausage stuffing attachments. It tends to retail around $125. I got mine for $80 and am very glad I didn't pay more. It is possible that my cutting blade needs sharpening, but it failed every half-pound or so due to fat and fibre buildup. It was fine if I kept cleaning it, and the motor didn't seems to be overworking, but even when I preground the meat with my Victorian-style cast iron hand-cranked grinder, it was a grinding FAIL – it simply stopped extruding meat every minute or so. It's supposed to grind and stuff in one step, and I'm delighted I didn't attempt that, as I'd have been disappointed.

I will happily accept any advice out there about what I may be doing wrong, but in future I plan to grind the meat by hand (quieter, faster, more energy-efficient, easier to clean) and use the Waring Pro as a stuffer. It is, I must say, a top-notch sausage stuffer, and I had a lot of fun winding up the gradually lengthening coils. Sausages are inherently cheerful and funny, and I really enjoyed the stuffing process.

Tonight we had spaghetti with one of my last few jars of tomato sauce from last summer and chunks of the Luganega. Absolutely delicious. As soon as I post this, I'm biking the rest of my haul over to my mom's place to freeze until needed (possibly to be reclaimed as soon as this weekend). All in all, one of my better Charcutepalooza experiences.

Eight Life-changing Cookbooks

2011-05-09T21:22:00.020-04:00

A very few cookbooks can change your approach to cooking forever. An even smaller number can change the way you look at the world. Here's a personal list of cookbooks that have had a big impact on me. I'm not mentioning The Joy of Cooking, only because I think it's influenced so many people; I would count it as an essential source; here are eight others that have been very important for me.

1. Betty Crocker's New Boys and Girls Cook Book (1965)

I suppose my parents knew me well enough to have some idea what they were doing when they presented this to me on my eleventh birthday with the inscription "Happy Birthday Sarah. This will add another cook to the family. With much love, Mom and Dad". I became fascinated by this book, which not only provided many fairly useful, practical recipes, like Grilled Cheese Sandwiches, but a whole lot of instructions for making food that looked like other things (radish roses, animal pancakes, sandwiches made using cookie cutters).

The instructions were good, and the photography was highly coloured and very appealing. I stared countless times at the illustrations of the Circus Cake with candy animals parading around the outside, the Jack-o-lantern Cake, the cupcakes for each month of the year. But the one that really brought on true obsession was the Castle Cake with chocolate drawbridge, ice cream-cone turrets and pillow-mint crenelations. I don't know how many times I replicated that cake, although I believe my last try was for my first boyfriend's 16th birthday. I'd sure like to make that cake again.

2. Let's Cook it Right by Adelle Davis (1947 and later editions)

Author of several books about nutritious eating, including Let's Eat Right to Keep Fit, Davis was way ahead of her time. In fact, she was swimming against the current. As the industrialized world, filled with relief at being freed from the restrictions of World War II, embraced "convenience food", she advocated making soups at home, shopping for lesser-known cuts of meat and mixing homemade salad dressing with nut oils.

It's hard to believe that advice to serve fruit with yogurt for dessert seemed so revolutionary, but it was a real eye-opener at the time. She warned of the dangers of oils heated to high temperatures, cautioned that many foods are exposed to toxic chemicals, and suggested substituting fish and vegetable protein for meat. The book is also a thorough basic food-shopping and cooking primer, and I can't say I really used it a lot as a cookbook myself, but Davis' thinking permeated my teenage years via my mom and her friends, and certainly helped form my understanding of the relationship between food and health.

3. Diet for a Small Planet by Frances Moore Lappé (1971)
4. Recipes for a Small Planet by Ellen Buchman Ewald (1973)

These were also bellwether books. Long before Michael Pollan, these two books were opening the eyes of North American readers to the voracious environmental demands of animal production, and the nutritive benefits of eating plant protein instead of meat.

They were ground-breaking in many ways. Consider this passage: "Some children will grow up never knowing the difference between a carrot and soda pop, some will learn directly by not being able to plant soda pop in their gardens, and others will learn through their own ability to read and question what they have been eating all their lives." If I told you Jamie Oliver just said it, you'd likely believe me. But it was written almost 40 years ago by Ellen Buchman Ewald.

5. The Moosewood Cookbook by Mollie Katzen (1977)

If Diet for a Small Planet made vegetarian eating seem imperative, The Moosewood Cookbook and its follow-up, The Enchanted Broccoli Forest, made it seem fun. Katzen's compilations from the Moosewood Restaurant in Ithaca, New York are international in scope and just plain delicious. These are not vegan recipes by any stretch of the imagination; they use full-fat sour cream and yogurt, blue cheese and mayonnaise galore.

Every single recipe is hand-lettered, with delightful pen-and-ink drawings that make fruit and vegetables seem like cute, charming buddies that you can't wait to have over for lunch... maybe as gazpacho, calzones, pizza or curry. When my friends were moving into their first apartments, this was considered a must-have book and the most obvious housewarming gift. Which it still would be.

6. Madhur Jaffrey's Indian Cooking (1983)

As my friends and I became more interested in authentic examples of food from around the world, exploring it in as many restaurants as we could, we also wanted to learn how to duplicate those flavours at home. Around the time I first moved to Toronto in the early '80s, it was beginning to become easier to shop for international foods. This classic Madhur Jaffrey book discusses ingredients that were at the time not terribly well known to most Canadians, like garam masala (mixed spices) and vark (edible silver foil).

I was amazed to find myself producing butter chicken, saag and aloo gobi that tasted just like something from a restaurant. More important, perhaps, I learned that starting a hot, oiled pan with ginger-garlic paste, then onions and South Asian spices, can turn any combination of vegetables and proteins into a freestyle Indian-inspired meal, giving me confidence to play.

7. Byron's New Home Cooking by Byron Ayanoglu (1993)

Apart from the fact that I had a slight acquaintance with Ayanoglu, who was then food editor for Toronto's alternative newsweekly NOW Magazine, this book is very dear to me because it exemplifies the growing cosmopolitanism and creative energy that infused this city in the '80s. At a time when "fusion" was becoming a culinary buzzword, this book expanded my own cooking repertoire by introducing me to ingredients like nam pla (Thai fish sauce), filo pastry, tamarind, sesame oil and rice vinegar.

Coming from a Mediterranean background, Ayanoglu embraced the best of tasty, light, fresh Greek and Turkish cooking. Through a varied career (that seems to have included cheffing for Mick Jagger), he married these flavours with his favourite Asian tastes. But also, there's something very freeing about this book. It's both joyful and practical, and may have given me my love of bowls of many sizes for mise-en-place.

I have two favourite recipes from this book. One is Poached Salmon Chinese Style, which uses wasabi, ginger, green onions, limes, sesame oil and tamari and is heavenly delicious. The other is a really by-the-book pad thai recipe, of which I have only two things to say: it calls for 16 ingredients, of which I normally have to make a special shopping trip for six, and its last page unaccountably seems to have bits of rice noodle stuck all over it.

8. Put a Lid on It! Small-Batch Preserving for Every Season by Ellie Topp and Margaret Howard (1997)

When I decided I wanted to learn how to make jam, I went to The Cookbook Store in Toronto and asked Alison Fryer what book I should get. Now published simply as The Complete Book of Small-Batch Preserving, this book told me everything I needed to know to teach myself how to can jams, jellies and pickles from scratch. It gave me a solid understanding of the safety precautions I'd need to take, and enough recipes to get me started. To me, the most important page was page 16, "Shorter-Time Food Processing", which told me how to process the jars for most jam recipes.

Almost 15 years later, having now written an entire canning book myself, I think the best part of this book, like most of the others that I've listed here, was that it gave me both confidence and specific information that I could absorb and then improvise with. Perhaps what this says is that the best cookbooks change the reader just enough that they no longer need to consult the books to use them.

Presents for Food Preservers

2011-04-30T22:45:00.010-04:00

Not many people are marketing merchandise for jammers and picklers, but that hasn't stopped me from acquiring some treats for myself and Jonathan over the years. Here are some things I really like, starting with my latest gift to self, a very nice, cheerful green Mason jar t-shirt by "beryllynn" of Florida, on Etsy. (It also comes in pink.) The XL size is a good fit for me, which is lucky, as I'm about a size 16.

I got this one for Jonathan when we got our community garden space. It's by "Happy Family", also on Etsy. I really like the typography a lot.

I got this one from a table at Union Square Market in New York last spring, but it's also available online. It's by Brooklyn artist Jen P. Harris. and proceeds go to Just Food, a group that works on food-related social justice projects. As you'll see, the "we can" theme has inspired quite a few designers. I don't have these other two... yet.

You may recognize the work of Punk Domestics here; PD also has a range of saucy men's undergarments with food preserving themes. Note that the apron seems to come pre-splotched.

I'm very tempted by this organic shirt. It's from a company called Northern Sun that sells t-shirts and other items with funny, pithy left-leaning messages. I think this particular one is clever, simple and attractive. And maybe just a bit sanctimonious, but that's okay too. Next time I feel like giving myself a present, I may well put in an order.

Finally, it would perhaps be remiss of me to fail to mention that the Charcutepalooza meat curing challenge has spawned a whole raft of merch for the discriminating carnivore with the delightful sectioned piggie logo: shirts, hoodies, caps, aprons, bags and baby clothes, all available at Cafepress.

Heirloom Tomatoes and Citron Melon Seedlings

2011-04-26T10:35:00.007-04:00

With happy anticipation we look forward to another year in the organic community garden. Heirloom variety tomato seedlings are popping up: Red Pear, Green Zebra, Blondkopfchen, Heirloom Beefsteak, Paul Robeson, Ropreco Paste, Amish Paste and Jeff Davis.

Some of these are new to me, but I already know that Red Pear is a pretty little red, pear-shaped cherry tomato that bears well. Green Zebra is a medium-sized, sweet-tasting, decoratively green-and-yellow striped tomato. Blondkopfchen yields its tasty little yellow cherry tomatoes magnificently, while Amish Paste can be large, full-fleshed bright red sauce-makers (though not for me last year!)

There are also Genovese Basil and Jalapeño Pepper seedlings, and five exciting Citron Melon sprouts grown from bright red seeds I was given at the Culinary Historians' marmalade event last February. An African ancestor of our watermelon, citron melons have lots of pectin and, though they make poor eating raw, they are a prolific and hardy crop for pickles and (especially) sweet preserves.

If there's anyone around Toronto with space to grow a melon vine, let me know. I can use at most two of these five plants!

Quiche Lorraine Recipe for Easter Brunch

2011-04-24T19:45:00.013-04:00

If Anthony Bourdain ever comes over, I'm making quiche. It's my go-to recipe for when I have to produce something basic but fairly impressive. If you think people will be turned off by the idea of quiche (admittedly not such a risk since it's become less trendy than it was 20 or so years ago), you can always call it ham-and-cheese pie.

I've made it on the fly in many places: at a spontaneous whatever's-in-the-fridge dinner at a friend's house on the Toronto Islands (where you can't run out for extra groceries); at a post-bike-race courier get-together (and it's no joke to feed a posse of famished bike messengers), at a guest house in the Jura region of France, where I used Comté cheese (which was fabulous).

This year I made it for an Easter brunch. In fact, I made two, and they turned out very well indeed. Here's my recipe for a pair of quiches. I love eating it cold the next day, by the way, but they do reheat fairly well.

Pie Crust for Two Quiche Pans

This is my mother's pie crust recipe, which she came up with after intensive experimentation in about 1957. It will be best if you have time to make it in the evening and refrigerate it in two separate balls, wrapped in plastic or waxed paper, overnight.

3 cups flour
1 cup lard
½ cup very cold water
pinch of salt

With a knife or pastry blender, cut up lard into small cubes.
Add flour and salt and continue to cut up until well blended. It should have a consistency like meal. (You can use cool fingers at the end, in a gentle pinching, flicking motion).
Add water a bit at a time. A whisk is useful at this stage for blending. Don't overwork it; it should remain flaky instead of coming together into a smooth mass like clay.
Divide into two equal parts and gently press together two balls. Wrap each one in plastic or waxed paper and allow to rest, chilled, for at least half an hour.
When you're ready to roll the dough, press each ball into a slightly flattened round, repairing any major cracks in the edges as you do so. Using a rolling pin or wine bottle, roll out on a floured surface, reflouring both the counter and the roller as needed.
When the dough is evenly rolled and about ¼" thick, roll it onto the rolling pin to lift it in one piece into the quiche pan or pie plate. Unroll it and gently tuck it into the pan. Trim the edges with scissors or a knife, leaving about 1½" to 2" of overhang.
Fold the dough under and tuck the edges inside the lip of the pan, then pinch the edges all the way around to make a raised, fluted crust.
Using a fork, pierce the bottom of the crust in about half a dozen places.

Quiche Filling

200-250 g (about ½ pound) very thinly sliced Black Forest ham or equivalent, cut into fine strips or squares
200-250 g (about ½ pound) Swiss cheese, very finely grated
8 eggs (at room temperature)
5 cups of milk (at room temperature)
¼ tsp grated nutmeg
¼ tsp pepper (grey or white or black)
pinch of salt

Preheat oven to 425°F
Layer the ham and cheese evenly over the bottom of the two pans.
In a medium-sized bowl, use a fork or whisk to beat the eggs until they're slightly frothy.
Add the milk, nutmeg, pepper and salt, and continue to beat until the mixture is well combined and slightly frothy.
Divide the egg mixture between the two quiche pans or pie plates. Don't fill over the top of the pan, because the raised crust is probably not strong enough to hold the filling in while it's baking, and it's annoying to have eggs all over the inside of your oven.
Bake at 425°F for 15 minutes, then turn the oven down to 350°F. Continue to bake for about 45 more minutes, until the top is slightly browned in a few places. The filling should still be just a little jiggly but not at all liquid.
Allow to rest for about 20 minutes before serving. The centre of the quiches will sink a bit.
Serve as a main course with a green salad or as part of a larger meal.

Variations:

For the milk: You can make it richer, with half-and-half, or even switching out a cup or so of milk with whipping cream. Or you can go leaner; I've made it with 2% milk, or with equal parts milk and yogurt.
For the cheese: You can use any hardish, gratable cheese (but I wouldn't use a blue cheese). As mentioned above, Comté is divine; I also like to use fairly old cheddar. You can use up bits and pieces of dried-out cheese from the back of the fridge.
For the ham: You can substitute bacon, but fry it fairly crispy first, and drain it well. I expect other salty preserved meats would be nice, but the quiche should have a light, sweet flavour, so I wouldn't advise using things cured with garlic or other strong heavy tastes. A maple-cured meat would be fine, I think.
Veggie (but not vegan) variation: Various types of mushrooms, sweet peppers and onions are delicious instead of the meat. I'd still avoid garlic, but I think broccoli, asparagus or cauliflower could be nice. They must be chopped fairly small and sweated first, perhaps in olive oil, until they lose a good deal of moisture. (I learned this by trial and error as a teenager. I used to actually slit holes in the bottom of an aluminum pie pan to let the extra moisture drain out of my cooked quiches until I learned about sweating the vegetables first.)

If you only want to make one quiche, you can halve this recipe, but the results will be better with two.

This extra photo from our Easter brunch is only here because I'm so pleased with myself for making hot cross buns and my best-yet loaf of plain white bread (already half eaten in this picture). The excellent fruit loaf is from my mother's charming neighbour Polly.

Put 'em Up by Sherri Brooks Vinton

2011-04-16T19:04:00.012-04:00

As someone who's just spent a year writing a book about food preserving, I have to take my hat off to Sherri Brooks Vinton, author of Put 'em Up, A Comprehensive Home Preserving Guide for the Creative Cook (Storey Publishing, 2010). It's a book I'd love to have written myself: a lot of fun to read and very informative.

Brooks Vinton is also the author of The Real Food Revival: Aisle by Aisle, Morsel by Morsel, and is active with Slow Food USA. With Put 'em Up, she's produced a cheerful, readable and comprehensive reference and recipe book not only for jams and pickles, but also for food drying, fermenting, freezing, root cellaring and several related methods.

If it has a flaw, perhaps Put 'em Up offers so many illustrated step-by-step guides in its first 99 pages (for blanching vegetables, cooking jams and jellies, preparing hot- and cold-pack pickles and so on) that the timid reader might feel shy about diving in; however, the lighthearted and encouraging writing style should negate that possibility.

And some of the projects really are simple ones: for instance, she provides full instructions for hanging a bunch of herbs for drying and for roasting vegetables.

The second half of the book (or, rather, the next 200 pages) are devoted to her 150 recipes. These are organized alphabetically according to the main ingredient, so if you come home from a countryside afternoon with 25 pounds of cherries, you have but to turn to page 155 ("Cherries") to find out how to freeze them, dry them or make Black Forest Sauce, Drunken Cherries, Cherry Leather, Cherry-Walnut Relish or Classic Cherry Preserves. Brooks Vinton's instructions, incidentally, are meticulously safe and adhere firmly to the USDA guidelines for safe food preserving.

Besides the preserving recipes, there are also recipes for using up the preserves; in this case, Duck with Cherry and Black Pepper Preserves. Also, for every fruit or vegetable in the book, Brooks Vinton gives the always-useful and often overlooked instructions for storing them fresh until needed.

Again, some of the recipes are extremely simple, like garlic purée, ristras (strings of dried chilies) and frozen strawberries. But very experienced preservers will also find new ideas and inspiration: I'm very tempted to try her Figs Preserved in Honey Syrup (which she suggests serving with blue cheese) and her Sparkling Rhubarb Jelly.

There are two things that really distinguish Put 'em Up from most other preserving guides. First, Brooks Vinton uses very low sugar in her recipes, and whenever fruit being made into jam or jelly is low in pectin, she uses Pomona's Universal Pectin to keep the sugar content as low as possible. Second, she provides a lot of recipes for syrups and alcoholic infusions with rum, vodka or brandy that would be useful to anyone who's experimenting with the most fashionable trends in mixology these days, which are increasingly calling for imaginative drinks made from artisanal infusions.

Brooks Vinton is based in the US (just north of NYC, I think), so although Put 'em Up includes a list of farmers' market associations and food preserving resources, none of them are in Canada. However, listed at $24.95, Put 'em Up is a practical guide that's also an enjoyable read for those of us in any country who may not have time to get to all the food preserving projects we'd like to explore.

Fiddlehead Season and NorCliff Farms' Culinary Challenge

2011-04-12T21:48:00.018-04:00

In about a week or two, if warm weather prevails, fresh Ontario fiddleheads will begin to be available for their short (two-week!) spring growing season. Fiddleheads are one of those polarizing foods: on one side of the room we have those people who've either never heard of them or simply hate them. On the other is the passionate contingent for whom they hold an almost mythic status.

The unobtrusive little unfurled frond of the ostrich fern is one of the very first edible plants to rear its head above the last snowdrifts in northeastern woodlands. Thus, like ramps, it has a specially precious quality, and must have seemed like a miraculous blessing to anyone who lived through a northern winter in pre-industrial times.

As an ingredient, a fiddlehead is a tricky thing: somewhat bitter, occasionally tough, and apt to be gritty if not properly washed. Last night, Ontario fiddlehead producer NorCliff Farms tested the fiddlehead skills of three professional chefs in the final round of their annual culinary competition So You Think You Can Cook? I had the fun of attending as one of the 14 judges, and learned some interesting details.

Fiddleheads are antioxidant and a good source of iron, as well as various other minerals.
To keep them, one should snip off the ends and stand them in cold water with a little lemon juice in the fridge.
Fiddleheads grow so fast that you can hear them.
There is some confusion around the question as to whether fiddleheads are toxic in some circumstances and to some people. The commercially marketed ostrich fern fiddlehead has been known to cause illness in people with a particular sensitivity. However, cooking for about ten minutes is thought to eliminate any toxic qualities, which means that fresh rather than frozen fiddleheads give the best results. They should not be eaten raw.
Some foragers confuse ostrich ferns with bracken ferns; however, bracken fern fiddleheads contain both toxins and carcinogens. So if you intend to pick your own fiddleheads, you should be certain about your identification.

This is the first of the dishes we were served, and my personal favourite. Titled "Fiddlehead Riding Hood", it was created by sous chef Eric Henry Anderson of Inn On the Twenty in Jordan, which is the sister property to Cave Springs Cellars; its On the Twenty restaurant was one of the first Niagara establishments to begin championing the idea of matching local foods with Niagara wine.

The dish consisted of a raviolo stuffed with one fiddlehead and Upper Canada Ricotta over mixed greens, garnished with a delicious fiddlehead-Riesling purée, and topped with a candied fiddlehead "coin". Pale green on medium green on dark green, it offered a crunchy-creamy contrast to the fiddlehead texture, and that puree was mouthwateringly good. It paired well with the very citrusy Peller Estates Reserve Riesling 2009. I liked it because it faced the challenge head-on and put the fiddleheads at the forefront of the dish.

Our second plate was "Fiddlehead Frenzy", presented by executive chef Kyle Christofferson of Luxe Bistro, which is located in Ottawa's Byward Market. This was a far more complex construction; on the right of the plate was a morsel of butter-poached lobster with fiddlehead beurre blanc sauce on a pearl barley risotto of butternut squash, fiddleheads and walnuts. Next came a palate-cleansing sip of a "fiddlehead smoothie" made with pineapple, lime, mint and honey.

Finally, there was an ahi tuna tartare with fresh herbs, fiddleheads and wasabi tobiko (flying fish roe), which had a delicious cucumber-wasabi flavour. It was served with Peller Estates Sauvignon Blanc 2009, which recently won a gold medal in California. The wine started out with almost no scent but quickly developed a strong natural gas aroma; its vivid apple taste went well both with the buttery lobster and with the strong wasabi-tuna. This dish was certainly accomplished, but the tastes of lobster, fruit and wasabi overwhelmed the pleasant green taste of the fiddleheads.

Batting third was executive chef Brian Scott Pingle of Gossip Restaurant in Toronto, which is a little off the beaten track, next to the rose garden inside Exhibition Place. He presented an ambitious and imaginative "Gossip Fiddlehead Maki", which consisted of bison carpaccio and fiddlehead sushi rolls topped with fiddlehead tempura and a side of wild garlic ramp mayonnaise, all accompanied by Peller Estates Gamay Noir. The wine's sweet raspberry scent and a lightly tannic peppery fruit taste was very pleasant, but perhaps a weaker pairing than the other two.

Chef Brook Kavanagh of La Palette (which moved some time ago from Kensington Market to Queen West near Bathurst) also showed off his fiddlehead prowess – though not as a contestant – with a generous amuse bouche consisting of morel mushroom stuffed with duck leg mousse, served over a warmed leek and fiddlehead salad with duck bacon, floating in a rich duck brodo – er, that's broth to most of us – and topped with a single lightly cooked quail egg.)

When the judges' scores were tallied, the winner was Kyle Christofferson of Ottawa's Luxe Bistro, for his elegant and impressive Fiddlehead Frenzy. (I did hear that the competition was tough; apparently the margin between first and second place was a mere six points over a possible total of 1,400.) I believe all the recipes will be posted on the NorCliff site. If not, and if you're interested, I have them all, and I intend to keep them.

Fresh fiddleheads are stocked by Food Basics, Longo's, Lococo's, Price Chopper, Fortino's, No Frills, Whole Foods and The Big Carrot. Both fresh and frozen fiddleheads are carried by Loblaws, Metro, Sobeys, Zehrs, The Great Canadian Superstore and IGA. I expect other places, like Fiesta Farms, will have them too.

Fiddlehead image from NorCliff Farms. Fiddlehead raviolo photo by executive chef Jason Parsons of Peller Estates winery, used with permission and thanks.

Maple Syrup Musings

2011-04-06T00:01:00.006-04:00

Strange revelation: I'm a sugar geek. Or maybe I've come late in life to an appreciation of physics and chemistry. Either way, it seems I'm fascinated by the natural laws that govern the behaviour of sugars in a change of state. These are demonstrated in the setting of jam, but it didn't occur to me until I attended a maple tour of the Stratford area that maple syrup follows similar rules.

Ontario writer, artist and pioneer Susannah Moodie, in her memoir Roughing it in the Bush, writes about an episode that might have come from any modern food-blogger's Fail Files: she describes trying to make maple syrup, and boiling away the sap on her wood stove for days and days, only to have it suddenly burn and turn to inedible muck on the bottom of the pot. As it turns out, she apparently didn't know a simple but profound physical law about change of state: when water is in the process of moving from solid to liquid (e.g. boiling) or liquid to solid (e.g. freezing), the whole mass will maintain a constant temperature.

Thus all boiling water at sea level will hold a temperature of exactly 212°F (100°C). So will a mixture of boiling water with fruit or vegetables. But as soon as the water is all gone, the temperature of the remaining mixture will suddenly start to rise to equalize the difference between it and, say, the wood fire or the electric burner.

Maple sap is 2% to 6% sugar, while maple syrup is 66% sugar. Depending on the sugar content, it takes about 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup. It may take days to boil off the water, and throughout that time the liquid will remain at 212° (in fact, the dials on syrup evaporators are calibrated so that "0" equals 212°.

But after all those hours of boiling, suddenly at some point there will be too little water in the mix to maintain the temperature of 212°, and the thermometer will start to climb rapidly. As soon as it hits 219°, you have syrup (and beyond that, disappointment!)

Incidentally, the difference between the grades of syrup (known in most of Canada as extra light, light, medium and amber) has nothing to do with cooking time. The light maple syrup comes from the sap that runs earliest, and it darkens over the course of the sugaring-off season.

For a sugar geek like me, the book Maple Sugar, From Sap to Syrup, The History, Lore and How-to Behind this Sweet Treat by Tim Herd (Storey Publishing, 2010) is a lot of fun. It discusses the earliest methods of maple syrup production, passed from Native North Americans to Europeans, with a sprinkling of Iroquois, Eastern Woodland and Ottowa legends about maple sap – mainly explaining that the Trickster (in whatever guise) arranged that maple syrup would be hard to produce, lest lazy humans be tempted to lie around all day sucking back the syrup right from the tree.

It also shows how hollow sumac twigs were used to make the "spiles", or sap spigots, that are pounded into the tree, and how the sap was boiled away in hollowed-out trees. In short, it covers a pretty detailed history of maple syrup, with great illustrations of old tools and vintage syrup labels and ads, not to mention some pretty tempting recipes.

While in the Stratford area, I got to taste several samples of maple syrup. It was the first time I'd ever tried drinking syrup straight, and it was way too good. We tried some from McCully's Hill Farm in St. Mary's (pictured above), where we had an idyllic tour of the trees via horse-drawn wagon, and also from Hoover's Maple Syrup just outside Listowel, which is certified organic. Hoover's handles 1,850 taps; you can have one, two or three taps in the same tree, depending on its width. (I found out a lot more geeky stuff about maple syrup production while chatting with Diane and Terry Hoover, but I'll spare you. For now.)

There's still some time to visit one of the maple farms mentioned above, or, nearer to Toronto, the Kortright Sugarbush Maple Syrup Festival, running until April 10. Hoover's organic syrup is also available in outlets around Stratford, including the Slow Food Market that runs 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Sundays at Anything Grows (235 St. Patrick Street).

Now, are you craving pancakes as badly as I am?

For more maple musings from Stratford, visit:

Canadian Sparkling Wines at #tinybubbles

2011-04-02T17:22:00.009-04:00

So I kicked off my birthday in style today with #tinybubbles, a tasting of sparkling wines from across Canada, including lots of Ontario choices, rare east-coast wines like Benjamin Bridge, and a selection of Okanagan bottles from Sumac Ridge and See Ya Later. One glance at the cork litter tells you that this was a great event (organized by Suresh Doss of Spotlight Toronto and wine writer Rick Van Sickle as part of an occasional ongoing series of events designed to raise awareness and appreciation of Canadian wines).

It was especially pleasant for me to have another go at the Sumac Ridge wines, which I tried last summer when I was out there. Their Stellar's Jay Brut is very popular in B.C. It got its name around 1989 when Stellar's Jay was designated as the provincial bird. It's a blend of pinot noir, chardonnay and pinot blanc, and has a gorgeous pale peachy pink-gold colour and a bready nose. Its bubbles are gently frothy, and the taste is apple. You can get it for $24.95 at LCBO in Ontario, which is a bargain sparkle, as far as I'm concerned.

Sadly not available here is their delicious Sparkling Rosé, which is a bright ruby peach with a sharp fizz of bubbles and a brilliant strawberry taste.

If you look carefully at this picture you can get a sense of the ambiance: we were at Canoe on the 54th floor of the TD Centre, with the southern portion of the downtown core and Lake Ontario arrayed below us on a sparkling spring day. Look very, very closely and you can even see the CN Tower!

I managed to miss the $100-a-bottle Benjamin Bridge, which many people declared as their favourite of the morning. However, there were lots of other standouts for me, including (in no particular order):

Chateau des Charmes Sparkling Wine (traditional method), a very pale pinot noir-chardonnay blend with a faintly pink-bubblegum apple scent and a nice light fruity taste ($22.95 at LCBO)
Hillebrand Showcase Sparkling Riesling 2006, a pale green-yellow with an olive-oil scent, a pleasant petroleum taste and small sharp bubbles
Secco from Pelée Island, a very pale yellow wine that reminds me of birthday cake, with a gentle pineapple-syrup scent and a taste like strawberries coated in icing sugar ($15.95 at LCBO)

Or maybe I'm just anticipating my birthday dinner tonight, to which I must run!

...postscript after a lovely family dinner at Il Fornello: There were lots more wonderful wines to talk about. It just shows that you don't need to go to France to find a delightful sparkling wine. There are plenty in Canada.

Monsanto Changes Policies on GM Seeds

2011-04-01T11:49:00.005-04:00

The US-based agricultural biotech giant Monsanto announced today that it is making a big shift in its corporate policies relating to Genetically Modified (GM) seeds and related plant products. The company has recently been on the receiving end of a lawsuit from a group of 60 organic farmers through the Public Patent Foundation who claim Monsanto's patented GM seed stock has "contaminated" their organic produce.

"We realize now that some of our policies, particularly those that make it difficult for farmers to opt out of using GM seed stock, may have been wrong," said company spokewoman Daisy Proofall. "From now on, we think it should be up to the farmer to choose our seed, saved seed, or seed from any other supplier."

Image by luisrock62 at Morguefile.

Back to Basics, A Complete Guide to Traditional Skills

2011-03-30T10:00:00.002-04:00

When I was a kid I was indelibly marked by the illustrations in one particular camping book I had; I still feel a wash of incredibly powerful, positive emotions when I think about the neat line drawings that illustrated how to use a triangular stone to dig a trench around your tent to keep dampness out, how to make a twig implement for cooking your just-caught trout on an open fire, and how to pour plaster-of-Paris into a homemade ring mold (crafted from a tin can, perhaps?) in order to make casts of animal tracks.

It was with a thrill of familiarity, then, that I opened Back to Basics, the third edition of Abigail R. Gehring's delightful manual of low-tech life skills. By my late teens, I had already attempted numerous projects along the lines of those described in the book: making natural dyes, rug hooking, canoeing, fishing, candlemaking and (like the fabled Lumberjack) pressing wild flowers. As I still seem to be trying to grow up to be a farm lady of 1835 or so, I was delighted to find that Back to Basics also covers such indispensable topics as scrimshaw, beekeeping, wattle fence construction, wood splint basketmaking, trapping crayfish, installing a water wheel and (so useful for those long winter nights!) building a dulcimer.

Beginning, confidently, with the steps needed to buy a piece of land in the country, Back to Basics proceeds to outline the rudiments of home and barn construction, as well as the establishment of a water supply and necessary paving and fences.

It canters cherfully in Parts Two and Three through the essentials of providing a green energy supply and how to raise your own livestock and produce. Part Four is a substantial primer on food preservation, including root cellaring, canning, freezing, fermenting, curing and smoking. There are recipes for jams and pickles, instructions for cheesemaking and of course the lowdown on ice cream, maple syrup, bread, cider, wine and beer – not to mention cookery on an open fire or a wood stove.

That leaves only (in Part Five) traditional textile crafts (spinning, weaving, dyeing, quilting), smithying, furniture making and so on, plus an array of antique recipes for home cosmetics and cleaners, and (Part Six) recreational activities ranging from cat's cradle to country dancing, building an igloo, tying a fishing lure, and, of course, elementary first aid.

Most surprisingly, although Back to Basics does cover projects like making a coonskin cap and shoeing a horse, it does not offer knitting instructions!

The entire text is full of the types of photos, charts and – yes, neat line drawings – that evoke for me the same deep pleasure I got from my childhood camping book. In fact, those illustrations of a keyhole campfire, and the hand fileting the fresh-caught fish are so very evocative for me that they're almost spooky.

Lest you leap to conclusions, know that this 456-page compendium may not be enough to save you should you suddenly be hurled through time and space onto an abandoned farm in the 19th century. In a book of this size and scope, Gehring is only able to devote about as much space to Small-Diameter Well Construction as she does to Sprouting Seeds for the Dinner Table (half a page, if you want to know).

"While Back to Basics is a book for doing, it is also a book for dreaming," state the editors in their introduction. It may not teach you everything there is to know about the many skills and crafts it describes, but it might well start you on the journey to find out more.

The Kitchen Gardener's Handbook

2011-03-29T09:21:00.006-04:00

There was a discussion at Doris and Jilly Cook the other day about the divide between "preservationists" and "artisans", in which (if I've got it right) preservationists are those who grow, cure, can, pickle and dry foods for socially, economically and environmentally responsible reasons, while artisans are those who are merely interested in the aesthetics of the food they produce and preserve.

In this context, I fear I must confess to a weakness for "artisanal" pleasures, and books like garden designer Jennifer R. Bartley's The Kitchen Gardener's Handbook aren't doing anything to help. As soon as you start talking about your "potager" instead of your "truck garden", "vegetable patch" or "allotment", you're on the slippery slope to artisanism, and I fear I'm sliding along with you.

Yes, The Kitchen Gardener's Handbook is a gardening manual and a cookbook. It's partly about creating sustainable edible gardens that yield throughout the seasons. But it's also a mouthwatering picture book, from the absolutely gorgeous magenta radishes against their bitter chartreuse plate on the cover to the plentiful close-ups of swelling fruits and berries and the numerous brilliant bouquets of "whatever was in bloom at the time", artfully presented in ostensibly spur-of-the-moment containers: galvanized buckets, earthenware, pressed tin.

Picking it up at this time of year, the last gasp of Canadian winter, I'm so starved for colour that I find myself almost drooling over the vivid crimson of spring strawberries, the manic orange of fall squash and the melting mauve and olive of autumn artichokes. When I can tear my eyes away from the photos, I find that the book in fact offers a practical capsule description of scores of useful edible plants, along with instructions for seasonal garden design and lots of recipes of the type I like best: simple ones that let the ingredients shine, like Tomato and Basil Quiche, Sweet Potato Muffins, Rustic Cherry Tarts, and Spring Peas with Mint Cream.

A warning for new gardeners in Canada: Bartley is based in Ohio and writing mainly with Americans in mind, so not all of the plants she mentions will thrive in the same way here. But the book has inspired me to take a little thought this year about the appearance of my community garden plot – not just how many plants I can crowd into the row, but also perhaps what they'll look like. (Some gratuitous nasturtiums, maybe?)

To that end, I do wish Bartley had offered some instructions for a couple of absolutely ravishing rustic trellises she has photographed... but I bet I can figure it out with some leftover bamboo stakes or windfall branches and a few yards of spare grapevine.

"The goal is to pick something for the vase or to munch on throughout the year" writes Bartley. Not quite a preservationist manifesto, one must admit, but there is something to be said for enjoying beauty as well as utility. Now pardon me while I run over to cut some of my mom's forsythia for forcing before the weather warms up...

David at Foodwithlegs offers a thoughtful analysis of this book too.

Smoked Salmon for Charcutepalooza and Deus Ex Machina in the Guise of Chef Wendy

2011-03-28T14:18:00.010-04:00

I don't know how many times I've told my students to be sure to read the whole assignment through carefully before they start working. So I can't explain how it was that I only noticed that Michael Ruhlman does not recommend hot smoking salmon until I was already curing a big chunk of wild-caught B.C. Sockeye. I had been planning to smoke mine in my friend Harriet's "Big Green Egg", but feared it would be hard to keep it below the requisite 90°F; I was, in short, dismayed.

But fate works in mysterious ways. During the one day I had to sort out the problem, I attended a trip to the Stratford, Ontario area (yes, the home of Justin Bieber) to learn about maple producing and cooking. To my surprise and great delight, part of the day's activities included a demonstration by Chef Wendy Seguin at the restaurant and dessert cafe called Let Them Eat Cake of maple recipes – including a cheater's way of smoking fish!

As you can see, from the photo above, with inspiration from Chef Wendy, I have achieved smoked salmon. Today I am taking my cue from all the Scandinavian crime fiction we've been reading around here, so it's served on a Finnish cracker atop a Swedish plate (from Ikea, of course!) As an ex-Montrealer, my very favourite way to eat smoked salmon is on a halved Montreal bagel over cream cheese with just a scattering of julienned green onions and a few drops of lemon juice. As for Jonathan, he likes to toss chunks of smoked salmon into his Kraft dinner (truth!)

Chef Wendy presents her dollar-store smoker.

But back to Chef Wendy Seguin's process. The fish in question was a trout; she suggested curing it for 12 to 36 hours in a mixture of 1 part coarse salt to 2 parts sugar, with spices to taste (no nitrites). She also brushes the fish with maple syrup before smoking.

She gave numerous practical suggestions, such as:

Slash the skin in a few places to help the cure penetrate.
Use less cure at the tail and any other thin places.
If the fish is to be served as an appetizer, it needs little rinsing after curing, but if it is for cooking into recipes, it should be soaked for 10 minutes in warm water to release some of the salt.
If there isn't enough time to let a pellicule form over several hours of drying in the fridge, the fish can be set on the counter in front of a small fan for half an hour.
The rack upon which it is to be smoked should be brushed on both sides with oil.

She prefers hardwood chips, but not in the rather large chunks that one gets from commercial BBQ suppliers. Instead, she commissioned her husband to request a leftover block of dry but non-chemically treated hardwood from a carpentry shop, and he simply planed it down into an almost hay-like consistency (it must have been rather like a cross between zesting a lemon and grating a carrot).

Instead of a half-hour soak to dampen the wood chips, Seguin simply pops a cup of her wood shavings into a plastic bag with 1 tablespoon of water, and shakes it around until it fluffs up.

Cold smoking maintains a temperature below 90°F. Chef Wendy says one can also hot smoke fish, including salmon, (at 145°F to 175°F), and her method does produce a hot cure. She starts with two large aluminum roasting pans from a dollar store. The damp chips go into the bottom, and a metal rack (also from a dollar store) sits about 2 inches above them, supported by large loose balls of tinfoil.

She cuts a small hole in the second roasting pan, which acts as a cover. The two pans, which now resemble a giant rectangular clam, are sealed with more tinfoil (leaving the top hole open, of course!) She sets them directly on a gas burner on medium heat; as soon as smoke begins to emerge through the hole, she turns the heat down and lets the fish smoke for about 10 minutes per inch of thickness until it reaches an internal temperature of 145°F. (She has done this enough, reading the temperature of the cooker when she opens it, that she can do it by feel now.)

She smokes her fish indoors, either turning the kitchen hood up to full blast or opening windows (the windows must be open if the stovetop hood does not vent outside). She recommends leaving a sticky note to remind oneself that the battery has been temporarily removed from the smoke detector. If commercial wood chips are being used, it's also important to read the bag in case it notes that they are only safe for outdoor use.)

Chef Wendy estimates that her whole kit costs about $10; she saves the pans and foil for future reuse.

The electric wok as salmon smoker.

Since it's still too cold here to open the windows (as evidenced by the icy snow on the picnic table), I modified the Seguin method a little. I had no dry hardwood, so I did buy a bag of applewood chips from the local fireplace shop and soaked them for half an hour.

Having cured the fish using the Charcuterie recipe for about 40 hours with a stone weight on top of it, having soaked the salt off for 10 minutes, and having let it air-dry in the fridge for about six hours, I greased a dollar-store spatter guard (with the rubber handle removed) as the rack for my fish. I put a layer of tinfoil inside my electric wok and laid the damp chips on top, then sat the fish rack on tinfoil balls, à la Wendy.

I temporarily removed the handle from the top of the wok to create an air hole and sealed the wok with tinfoil, as per the photo above. Since the weather was very cold, I simply took a blind guess and turned the wok to about 150°F, imagining that the chilly air would keep the fish from reaching more than 90°F. This seemed to work out just about right, by sheer fluke.

The resulting smoked fish was an honorable first try; nowhere near the quality of our wonderful neighbourhood shop Kristapsons, or the fabulous salmon I've brought sometimes brought home from Nova Scotia smoke shacks, but worthy of eating. The level of saltiness and the colour are just fine. The texture is a little soft, and the smoky taste is too subtle.

I think another time I would give the pellicule more time to form, so as to increase the smokiness. I would also like to experiment with different types of fish, and to grate up my own wood chips. I will certainly also try the recipe without the sodium nitrite, since the salmon's pink enough without it and, frankly, around our place even mediocre smoked salmon won't be around long enough to worry about having it spoil!

Toronto Joins the International Movement of Bake Sales for Japan

2011-03-24T16:02:00.010-04:00

As soon as I started writing this piece, I realized that it was going to be hard to avoid analogies that sound like "too-soon" humour; suffice it to say that a whole lot of people across North America are getting together online and in real life over the next few weeks to hold bake sales to help support those affected by Japan's recent earthquake, tsunami and nuclear reactor crisis.

Our local edition, Toronto Bakes for Japan, takes place on Saturday and Sunday, April 9 and 10. The Saturday component runs from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. during the Farmers’ Market at Evergreen Brick Works. From 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Sunday, folks will be selling their wares at Liberty Noodle (171 East Liberty), The Rivoli (334 Queen West) and Cafe Diplomatico (594 College), with a possibility of additional venues to be added later. All proceeds go to the Japanese Red Cross Society.

Toronto Bakes for Japan is being organized by Heena Punwani (above) of Tiffin Tales and Niya Bajaj (below) of Destiny, Domesticity and Dirty Secrets. Punwani was initially moved by images of destruction and suffering following Japan's triple tragedy, then inspired by two recent projects: The Great Kiwi Bake-Off, which raised $16,420 after the Christchurch, New Zealand earthquake, and Samin Nosrat's BakeSale project, based in the San Francisco area, which raised $23,000 for Haiti last year.

Punwani got in touch with Nosrat, and Toronto is now a sister event with Samin's latest project, a US-wide Bake Sale for Japan, which at last call had attracted participants in Portland, Seattle, Boston, Philadelphia, NYC, Chicago and Austin, as well as Utah, North Carolina and Hawaii. No doubt new cities will still be joining up.

Samin Nosrat. Photo by Bart Nagel.
And that's not the end of it! Akron, Ohio is holdiing another sister event, a Vegan Bakesale for Japan, also scheduled for April 2. The SF blog Eat the Love is holding a Vitual Bake Sale for Japan. And on March 30, Sabrina Modelle of The Tomato Tart is hosting an online Bake Sale for Japan that has already attracted the support of more than 60 food bloggers.

I'll be adding my humble efforts to our Toronto edition, alongside such awesome and formidable baking masters as Vanessa Yeung of Aphrodite Cooks, Brick Street Bakery, Gabriella Caruso of Cake Bites, Cake Star, Cat of Sugar Baking, Bonita Mok of Bon Eats, Kristin Dorsey of Cake or Death and Mardi Michels of Eat Live Travel Write.

The Toronto Bakes for Japan blog will be carrying updates as they develop. Please spread the word, and remember: somebody has to buy and eat all this floury, sugary goodness!

If you somehow manage to miss out, you can still buy baking for Japan at Yoshi's Sweets (2359 Queen Street East), and also at Pickering's The Cupcake Place, which is making these most excellent Japanese flag-inspired goodies.

Homemade Corned Beef Sandwich on Rye for Lunch and Charcutepalooza

2011-03-19T18:24:00.005-04:00

It may not be immediately apparent, but this lunch is a trifecta of food preserving. It's not just any old corned beef on rye, but corned beef cured in my very own fridge for the March Charcutepalooza challenge, topped with awesome Tarragon Mustard made with local wild garlic by Dawn of Dawnabelle's, via the Well Preserved jar swap, and a side of my own Spicy Pickled Carrots from Tigress' Can Jam of last year, more than a year old and still as crisp and sweet as the day I put them in the jar. (Of course, I was longing for a dill pickle to accompany this sandwich, but I never ended up making them last summer.)

Just one shadow to dim the pleasure of this feast: when I sliced the corned beef, I noticed that there was a strongly defined grey section in the centre. As far as I can guess, this must mean one of two things. Either the salt cure did not penetrate a four-pound brisket within seven days, or the heat from the simmering pot did not penetrate the centre in four hours.

Either way, I mercilessly sliced my corned brisket in half and excised the grey part and a good bit of the pink around it. I don't want to take any chances. I would be very interested to hear whether any other Charcutepaloozans found similar manifestations within their slabs of meat.

My Favourite Bacon Recipe for Charcutepalooza

2011-03-17T10:35:00.003-04:00

Well, now I know how to cook potatoes just the way my sweetie Jonathan likes 'em. They have to be local and organic to start with, parboiled, then cooked with garlic, large chunks of onion and – the kicker – homemade bacon. I don't think he noticed the Swiss chard, which was for me the main point of the exercise. But he did tell me that tonight's dinner featured the best potatoes I've ever cooked (in more than a dozen years together!)

Above you see my bacon, brined for eight days, waiting to go into the oven for a short roast at 200°F. Below, you see it after cooking: nice solid slabs.

We had bacon two ways tonight. I fried up a few rashers of the maple bacon with a couple of eggs over hard for Jonathan. I did blanch the bacon first for 60 seconds because it seemed a bit salty to me. However, I hardly eat any salt at all, so I may not be a fair judge. After it was blanched and fried, Jonathan ate all his. At first he agreed that it might be too salty. Later I heard him mumble something like "Maybe I'm just getting used to it" between mouthfuls. I did distinctly hear him say: "You did got the crunchy part just right."

I had half a rasher of the maple bacon (who could resist?), but the main part of my meal was a recipe I was given verbally at the community vegetable garden last summer, which featured some of the bacon flavoured with garlic and pepper.

Sorry for the poor image, but my old camera only takes decent photos in daylight now.

Swiss Chard with Potatoes

Serves 2-3

6 medium potatoes
Olive oil
3 cloves garlic, finely minced
2 medium onions, chopped into chunks
2 slices of bacon, choppped into chunks
1 big bunch of Swiss chard, washed and chopped into large pieces
(optional) Salt, black pepper, crushed hot peppers, cumin to taste

Wash the potatoes. If you have time, boil them in their skins until they're somewhat soft and let them cool, then chop them into large pieces. If you're short of time, chop them into pieces first, then parboil them. (Peel them only if you think they need it.)
In a large pot over medium heat, cook the garlic in a few tablespoons of olive oil for about one minute.
Add the onions and bacon, and cook them until the onions are transparent and the bacon has lost its raw look.
Add the potatoes and stir to wake them up. Add any spices at this point.
Add the Swiss chard, toss the ingredients together and cover. Check and stir occasionally to make sure nothing is sticking to the bottom, burning or being left undercooked. When it has all heated through and the chard has wilted into the mix, it's ready.

I would serve this as a one-pot meal, but it could also go along with other dishes.

Eating Meat Consciously for Heart Health and Weight Control

2011-03-16T11:35:00.000-04:00

I've been meaning to write about this for a while, and since I noticed that Canadian Beef is offering to pay the entry fee to Eat, Write, Retreat in Washington this coming May on behalf of a certain number of food bloggers who write about beef, I thought I'd take the bull by the horns (or, more likely, by the short ribs) and write something about the food reflections I've been having over this past year.

You see, I now weigh just about 40 pounds less than my top-recorded weight, 30 of which have come off over the past year (while I was cooking 100 pots of jam, attending numerous wine tastings and eating out at a lot of restaurants!) I've also reduced my LDL ("bad") cholesterol by about 15%. The big secret? I started to see a nutritionist regularly, and to really pay attention to the nutritional value of whatever I put in my mouth. I certainly haven't stopped eating fatty meats, baked treats and sugary sweets, but I have been paying a lot more attention to the proportion of them in my diet.

I would have said I knew quite a lot about nutrition, but I have been finding there's more to know, and it can get complicated. In order to make it easier, besides teaching me more about things like glycemic index, the risks of skipping meals, and the roles of calcium and fibre in lowering cholesterol, the wonderful Julia pointed me to a very useful chart at BeefInfo.org (which is coincidentally the site of Canadian Beef). It gives the nutrition breakdown for 100-gram portions of numerous beef cuts. The really salient ones for me are fat content and calorie count.

The page lets you check from among a wide number of choices, but you can only display four nutrition labels at a time. The interface does, however, allow you to toggle between raw and cooked nutrition figures; it's amazing how many calories some cuts gain in the pan! On another page, there's also a handy comparison of beef with chicken and fish.

Pork Marketing Canada's site, PutPorkOnYourFork.com, has a similar chart showing the nutritional value of various 100-gram pork cuts, which is handy to compare with the beef information. It's all available at a glance, but doesn't give raw versus cooked figures.

The Canadian Sheep Federation's site, FreshCanadianLamb.ca, doesn't package their data so neatly, but does post clickable nutrition labelling of 100-gram lamb cuts as PDFs.

The Chicken Farmers of Canada's newly revamped Chicken.ca offers lots of recipes and quite a wealth of health information, but – unless it's so hard to find that I actually couldn't spot it – they don't seem to have the same type of basic nutrition facts for chicken cuts. (There is a comparison of white and dark meat, but you have to do some arithmatic to match the 100-gram figures on the other sites.)

In these days of nose-to-tail eating, it's too bad that none of these sites even mentions liver, let alone any of the more obscure parts of the various beasts under discussion.

As I enjoy the wafting aroma of two slabs of pork belly roasting themselves into bacon that I'll be sampling for dinner tonight as part of my Charcutepalooza February challenge, it seems like a good moment to share some of the nutritional information that can be learned from these sites. You'll notice that, whereas chicken is generally a good choice, there's quite a difference between white and dark meat. Meanwhile, although you may have thought of beef and pork as fatty meats, some of the leaner cuts, grilled or roasted, come in at 5 to 6 grams of fat or less per serving, which is pretty good.

The luxurious cuts like tenderloin are generally pretty lean. The big red flag goes up for ground meats, though; even the leaner ones are high in fat, and when you're cooking it into chili or spaghetti sauce it's very hard to control how much fat you're getting (unless you chill it for serving the next day, when much of the fat will rise to the surface and can be lifted off).

Fat and Calorie Content of Various Meats

The sites above give these figures for a standard 100-gram serving (roughly the size of the palm of your hand), cooked as lean as possible. Please be sure to double-check the numbers I give here against the sites mentioned above in case I've introduced an error in retyping them!

Beef

Eye of round: 2.8 g of fat, 204 calories
Sirloin tip: 5.1 g of fat, 209 calories
Top sirloin roast: 5.9 g of fat, 178 calories
Rib: 10.9 g of fat, 244 calories
T-bone steak: 12.3 g of fat, 247 calories
Medium ground beef: 15.1 g of fat, 257 calories

Chicken

White meat: Skinless chicken breast (raw?): 2.3 g of fat, 148 calories (my calculation; the CFC gives figures for a 130 g serving)
Dark meat: Baked or grilled leg: 5.4 g of fat, ??? calories

Lamb

Whole leg of lamb: 3.5 g fat, 120 calories
Ground lamb: 17 g of fat, 230 calories

Pork

Roasted pork tenderloin: 2.5 g of fat, 144 calories
Lean deli ham: 2.9 g of fat, 110 calories
Grilled centre loin chop: 3.8 g of fat, 174 calories
Lean roasted ham: 5.4 g of fat, 125 calories
Pan-fried back bacon: 16 g of fat, 182 calories
Medium ground pork, pan fried: 22 g of fat, 299 calories
Roasted back ribs: 27 g of fat, 365 calories

Unfortunately, making good food choices is not as simple as reading a nutrition comparison chart. One must remember, for instance, that fat content is not the only determining criterion; fresh meat is generally better for you than meat preserved by any method (sadly, including charcuterie). The fats in fish are "healthy" fats, so a higher fat content can actually be desirable if the calorie count's not too high.

However, it's also useful to bear in mind that so far the naturally occurring trans fats found in meats and dairy products have not been shown to have the same bad effects on heart health as synthetic commercial trans fats. So as I work my way through the Charcutepalooza Year of Meat, I will continue to indulge in everything I salt, smoke and cure. I just won't be having it at every meal.

Lemon Confit: A Charcutepalooza Add-on

2011-03-15T12:27:00.003-04:00

When I was working on my canning book, I called up Joel of the blog Well Preserved to ask whether he had a recipe for Moroccan-style salt-preserved lemons that he felt he had the right to share for publication. There was a pause. Then he asked: "Who owns 'Slice crossways into a bunch of lemons. Bury them in salt. Be sure they don't touch'?"

I never ended up using a Lemon Confit recipe in the book, but I've finally decided to try making them myself. These lovelies have been resting in their salty bower for about six weeks now, and they've reached a very mellow, aromatic flavour without the top note of sourness that you get with fresh lemons. I plan to report back when I use them in something worth writing up.

I have essentially employed David Lebovitz's recipe, which calls for a few spices to be tossed into the jar. There is also a recipe for Lemon Confit in Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn's Charcuterie, and Ruhlman has recently written about it on his blog too.

Homemade Corned Beef for Charcutepalooza

2011-03-12T15:28:00.011-05:00

When I first purchased Michael Rulhman's Charcuterie cookbook a year or so ago, the recipe that most intrigued me was corned beef. Growing up in Montreal, with its vibrant Jewish deli scene, corned beef (always refereed to simply as "smoked meat"), was a staple. You could take the trip downtown to order it at one of the city's renowned deli palaces: preferably Schwartz's, but possibly Dunn's, or the late lamented Ben's.

To tell the truth, though, I most often ate the humbler home alternative: Coorsh brand heat-and-serve smoked meat, which came in a plastic envelope to be dropped into boiling water and cut open when hot. Either way, it was served between two slices of rye bread; the correct presentation involved a hefty mound of meat atop which the bread halves balanced precariously. That is, the meat should not be enclosed by the bread, but, as it were, garnished by it.

It is a Toronto joke that expat Montrealers, of whom I am one, are always whining about their inability to get enough of several beloved items: including real bagels, of course, and what's known here as "Montreal smoked meat". However, I hesitated to try making my own corned beef from Ruhlman and Polcyn's recipe, for two reasons: first, because I was daunted by the challenge of acquiring pink salt. (I have now overcome that obstacle.) The second thing was that I'd heard in discussion with other Toronto food experimenters that the five-day brining period suggested in the book might be too little.

Motivated by the Charcutepalooza March brining challenge, I decided it was time to get going and corn some beef. I consulted with local charcuterie hero Zane Caplansky of Caplansky's Delicatessen (he whom Adam Sachs of the NY Times Style section named "among the farmers, chefs, butchers and restaurateurs credited with turning the city into a carnivore's dining destination"). He says to brine a five-pound brisket for seven days, so that's what I'm going to do.

Here's the beef.

Because I am such a newbie, and as with the bacon, I am otherwise going entirely by the book. It started with the acquisition of a four-pound piece of beef brisket raised by a Mennonite farmer near London, Ontario (which is to say: locally). Rowe Farms being out of brisket, I went instead to another worthy butcher: Meat on the Beach.

I spent a little time figuring out how to refrigerate the meat for the requisite week. For reasons of economy, philosophy and practicality, our household has only a dorm-sized fridge, like they do in Paris. Given that the veggie crisper is still full of jam and pickle jars being used up from all the recipe testing for my canning book, and that I already have three pounds of bacon salted away in there (literally), there's no way a pot of brine will fit too.

I admired some fine $20 glass pans with lids in a kitchen store, but none was big enough. I ended up buying a $2 plastic lidded container from a dollar store (it's actually labelled as BPA-free, to my surprise!), which just fits in the top of the fridge along with the bacon and enough space left over for a bit of broccoli and one condiment jar. If I enjoy this experiment and make more, I may well invest in a couple of the glass containers, though. Who knows what besides BPA will be leaching into the meat along with the salt?

Here's my pickling spice, ready to go.

I assembled my own pickling spice according to the proportions given in Charcuterie (one of the nice things about being a middle-aged householder is tending to have all those spices on hand, and fairly fresh). The top photo shows them after toasting in one of my favourite cast-iron frying pans. They smelled great.

And when I poured the salt, sugar, garlic and spices into the pot, the steam that wafted up took me straight back to my Montreal childhood: it was exactly the right bouquet, so redolent of those hot, squishy packets of fatty meaty goodness that we used to slice open for our weekend lunches. I await the final result with excitement.

Meanwhile, I also took up the challenge to brine something besides flesh this month, so I have a glass jar full of salted lemons maturing on the kitchen counter. They've been marinating for several weeks now, and may be ready, but I suppose I'll have to make some Moroccan food to test them out. I've been eyeing the Chicken Tagine recipe from David Lebovitz's new Sweet Life in Paris book, a companion to his wonderful blog, where he offers a similar recipe with lamb.

But first I think I'll have to cook up some bacon and eggs. And some corned beef hash. And maybe some corned beef and cabbages. And of course, a good old-fashioned smoked meat sandwich on rye. With yellow mustard. And a kosher dill.

(And here's the sandwich!)

A McIntosh Apple for the Great Big Crunch #GBC2011

2011-03-10T14:30:00.000-05:00

I'm tweeting my own CRUNCH!!! for the Great Big Crunch 2011, which is all about getting students involved in good nutrition through the satisfying crunch of a crisp apple. Here are my George Brown College colleague Kate Lamorie (left) and me (right). Fittingly, our apples are McIntoshes: not only a Canadian apple, but one that originated not too far away from here in eastern Ontario 200 years ago. Happy 200th anniversary, McIntosh, and happy Crunch day!

Thanks to Preethi Gopinath for the photo!

Makin' Bacon – Finally! – for Charcutepalooza

2011-03-08T12:47:00.007-05:00

Well I finally feel as though I'm on track with the meat fest, or pork party, known as Charcutepalooza. It took me a long time to get my hands on the curing salts. (You may recall, gentle reader, that they hadn't arrived by the bacon deadline, so I posted instead about sodium nitrate, hoping that would count as my February submission in the monthly Charcutepalooza roundup.) Now I have enough nitrites to cure a piece of meat the size of a Volkswagen, and here are my two 1.5-pound slabs of pork belly, curing themselves into bacon, from Rowe Farms, who got them from a local Mennonite pig farmer.

I have had some very interesting conversations around town about meat curing in general and bacon in particular. Kyle Deming, the chef at Toronto oyster restaurant Starfish and its sister establishment Ceili Cottage, was especially enlightening. He's planning soon to open a retail outlet for his business Sausage Partners (how does he have time? He also has a small child!) As you might guess, Sausage Partners is about the foods he creates with raw ingredients from Kawartha Ecological Growers. His shop, which may be located near Queen Street East and Greenwood, will offer preserved foods of all kinds, including charcuterie.

But back to the subject at hand... After all my travails in acquiring pink salt, Kyle D. informs me (as does Michael of Hand Crafted) that bacon can safely be made with no nitrites, as it is cooked before eating. (Twice-cooked, actually, if you smoke or bake it, then fry it.) I suppose boiling it would not kill botulism, though, because boiling soup or stew only reaches 212°F, whereas botulism survives up to 240°F; this is the problem with hot water-bath canning of low acid produce... but I digress once more.

Since I'm a bacon newbie, I went straight by the book. One of these batches (the one on the right) includes maple syrup; the other is Ruhlman's suggested blend of bay leaves, peppercorns and garlic, which I smashed up coarsely together in a stone mortar and pestle. Jonathan will no doubt want to fry some of this up for breakfasts when it's ready; I have dreams of a French Canadian pea soup to honour the Habitant quarter of my gene pool.

Just an aside: having read of the dangers of ingesting large quantities of sodium nitrite, seeing that the curing mix really does resemble something that might go into morning coffee, and having a remarkably forgetful husband, I am taking no chances!

Persian Marmalade History

2011-02-20T15:03:00.013-05:00

The tradition of making marmalade out of quinces and bitter oranges goes back at least 14 centuries in Persia (modern Iran), and likely even farther. This post is boiled down (so to speak) from a presentation I gave yesterday at the fourth annual "Mad for Marmalade, Crazy for Citron" event presented at Fort York in Toronto by the Culinary Historians of Canada.

“For countless generations, the Persians have preserved all manner of vegetables, fruits, and flower petals, first in honey or molasses, and later in sugar to serve them as dessert or at the breakfast table,” writes Forough-es-Saltanah Hekmat in his book The Art of Persian Cooking. But precisely how long ago did the tradition begin? This image, from the Walters Art Museum, shows a Persian dining scene from 1209, but I believe that Persian diners were enjoying marmalade long before this.

Sweets concocted of sugar, fruits and flowers would not only have been considered tasty, but would, it seems, have fit into a traditional philosophy of dining as an almost spiritual practice. Hekmat writes that “a healthful diet of vegetables, fruits, fish, fowl and certain delicacies composed of mixed petals and blossoms of roses was believed to have unusual powers that could transform a man into a gentle and noble creature.”

We have some evidence for the long history of quince and apple preserves from a Pahlavi text entitled "King Husrav and his Boy", published and translated by Jamshedji Maneckji Unvala. King Husrav II of Persia (pictured on this coin, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons), was a historical figure who reigned from 580 to 628 AD. His name is more often spelled in English as "Khosro" or "Khosrow", but can also be rendered as “Khusrau”, “Chosroes” or “Xosrov”. He was also nicknamed “Parvez”, which means “Ever Victorious”. (I'll use another spelling, Khusro, because it seems like a good compromise among all the variants.)

Khusro II is also a character of literary legend. For example, he is the hero of a poetic tale called “Khusro and Shirin” pictured here in a 16th-century illuminated manuscript), which tells how he met and courted his Armenian bride and future queen. In the story "King Husrav and his Boy" (also known as “King Khusro and his Page”), a noble young man named Vasphur whose family has become impoverished requests to be tested for the king’s service. King Khusro poses thirteen questions to Vasphur to test his nobility; not, as one might expect, having to do with his fighting prowess, learning or virtue, but instead about his knowledge of luxurious living.

In what becomes a catalogue of 6th-century Persian fine dining, Khusro questions Vasphur about the best and most desirable fowls, meats, broths, fruits, grains and wines (as well as music, flowers, women and horses). For example, when questioned as to which dish is the finest and most savoury, Vasphur describes the organ meats of a two-month-old lamb fed on its mother's milk and also cow's milk, rubbed with olive juice and cooked in a beef broth.

The fifth question is “Which pastry is the finest and the best?” Vasphur answers: “In summer: the almond-pastry, and the walnut-pastry, and the walnut-bun, and the bun made with fat, and the finger-pastry (...) that they fry in walnut-butter. But with the fruit-jelly that is squeezed out and filtered from the juice of the apple and the quince, no pastry can stand the contest!” In other words, by the 6th century, Persian nobility already thought of quince and apple preserves as the best of all desserts!

Persian cooks had all the raw materials at their disposal very early on. It is thought that the quince tree may be native to Persia. There does not seem to be consensus as to where oranges were first cultivated, but some say bitter oranges first grew wild in Persia on the shores of the Caspian Sea, and were hybridized to produce the sweet orange in China, then returned to Persia by Portuguese traders. Najmieh Batmanglij, in her book A Taste of Persia, points out that “The sweet orange reached Europe in the first, tenth, or fifteenth century, according to various sources, and ironically, took its western name from the Persian narenj, or bitter orange, while in Iran, the sweet orange is called porteqal, after the Portuguese merchants who imported it.”

Clear evidence for the cooking of bitter orange preserves in Persia by about 1300 is found in these lines from the poet Bos-hac of Shiraz, quoted in The Art of Persian Cooking: “Do not be grieved, O Sour Orange! Like the sweet orange, turn into preserves / And then your sourness will change into sweetness.”

Sugar was also known very early in Persia; it was encountered in India by the soldiers of Darius I of Persia around 500 BC, and by those of Alexander the Great around 300 BC. Anne Wilson, in The Book of Marmalade, postulates that "the Persians may have been the first people to have employed sugar as a foodstuff" (as opposed to a medicine).

However long the tradition has been going on, fruit and flower preserves are still today cherished as part of a classic Persian breakfast (sobhaneh), which consists of elements familiar to any European or North American: tea and milk, bread and butter, cheese, eggs, fruit, honey and some kind of preserves. These would most likely be made from tree fruits like quinces, apples, pomegranates, plums, cherries or citrus fruits, rather than berries.

Whereas the English and French jam-making traditions tend to use lemon juice to raise the acid level of preserves, Persians use limes. Also, writes Hekmat, “cardamom seeds are the favourite flavoring [sic] for all preserves. They should be crushed fairly finely in a small mortar with a pestle and added to the preserve 2 to 3 minutes before it is to be removed from the heat.” Rose water and orange blossom water are also common; ginger, cloves, mace, nutmeg and vanilla are less often used.

The Persian word for both jam and marmalade is “moraba”, also rendered “morabaa”, “murabba” and many other ways. It is a borrowing from Arabic, although Persian is an Indo-European language like English. Here are some Persian jam and marmalade recipes to try:

Moraba-ye Narenj: Seville Orange Marmalade: New Food of Life, p. 277. This recipe makes an extremely tart marmalade, since it uses very little sugar indeed. I have posted a variation of this recipe that I call Persian-style Three-fruit Marmalade, using sweet oranges and lemons instead of bitter oranges, and a higher sugar ratio.
Moraba-ye Beh: Quince Jam from Persian City
Moraba-ye Albalu: Sour Cherry Jam from Persian Mirror. The secret of thickening this jam is to macerate the cherries first. It uses vanilla as a flavouring.
Moraba-ye Alu Zard: Golden Plum Jam from Persian Mirror.
Moraba-ye Havij: Carrot Marmalade with rose water, from the excellent food blog Turmeric and Saffron.
Moraba-ye Havij: Carrot Marmalade, a Food.com recipe using saffron and orange blossom water.
Moraba-ye Havij: Carrot Marmalade: Here, the blog Family & Food & Other Things explores a recipe from the book Middle Eastern Kitchen by Ghillie Basan.
Moraba-ye Bahar Narenj: Orange Blossom Jam, The Art of Persian Cooking, p. 164. I can't see where this recipe gets enough acid to make it safe for canning, so I suspect it should be refrigerated and used up fairly quickly.
Moraba-ye Goleh Sorkh: Rose Petal Jam, a grandmother's recipe (and you know these are always good) from another great Persian food blog, My Persian Kitchen.

Bibliography

Abbott, Elizabeth, Sugar, A Bittersweet History (Penguin Canada, 2008).
Batmanglij, Najmieh, A Taste of Persia: An Introduction to Persian Cooking (I. B. Tauris & Co. Ltd., 1999).
Batmanglij, Najmieh, New Food of Life: Ancient Persian and Modern Iranian Cooking and Ceremonies (Image Publishers, 2005).
Hekmat, Forough-es-Saltanah, The Art of Persian Cooking (Doubleday & Company, 1961).
Loohuizen, Ria, The Realm of Fig and Quince, (Prospect Books, 2010).
Ramazani, Nesta, Persian Cooking, A Table of Exotic Delights (University of Virginia Press, 1974).
Wilson, C. Anne, The Book of Marmalade (Prospect Books, 2010).

Mad for Marmalade at Fort York

2011-02-16T13:25:00.005-05:00

I'm going to be doing a talk with tastings about the Persian marmalade tradition this coming Saturday, February 19 at the fourth annual Mad for Marmalade, Crazy for Citrus!, presented by the Culinary Historians of Canada and Fort York. It runs from 10 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. at the Fort.

The entrance fee ($43 for members, $45 for non-members) includes:

a historical lecture
your choice of workshop
tastings and a wonderful marmalade-themed lunch of historical recipes
tours of the 1800-vintage working kitchens at the Fort (where I took the photo of marmalade being cooked on an open hearth, above)
a marmalade marketplace with various raffles or door prizes

But – let's face it – the main attraction is the chance to mingle all day with a roomful of canning aficionados as geeky as you are.

The keynote presentation, by 19th‐century Ontario social historian Joyce Lewis, is titled "The Bells of St. Clements: a History of Citrus in 19th‐Century Ontario". Besides my session on Persian marmalade, there are eight other workshops to choose from, most of which include tastings or hands-on cooking demos:

Pig Bladders & Brandy: Evolution in Sealing Techniques with Mya Sangster (a favourite of mine, with hands-on work in sealing jars by traditional methods using pig bladders, sheep suet, brandy and beeswax)
Mrs King’s Marmalade with Carolyn Blackstock
Judging Marmalade Quality with Pat Crocker of Riversong Herbals
Pudding, Pond, Sussex with Rosemary Kovac (a lesson in historical cookery with marmalade)
Marmalade with Asian Twists with Shirley Lum of A Taste of the World Tours
Tomato Trends with Janet Kronick of Dundurn National Historic Site (did you know about 19th-century tomato mania?)
Citron Peel Smackdown: Citrus Fruit vs. Watermelon with Amy Scott
Candied Peel with baking teacher Jan Main of Danforth Collegiate

There's also a marmalade competition, now with five categories: Pure Seville Orange, Pure Citrus, Other Fruit, Vegetable and Marmalade Baked Goods. To enter, bring a 125 or 250 mL jar along with a $2 fee per jar to the registration desk between 9 and 9:55 a.m. (I'm going to enter a few spare jars, but I'm not feeling they're really champion quality; just a few things I have left around the house.) I'm hoping some of the Twitter crowd will put their handiwork out there to see how it fares in competition.

Charcutepalooza February Challenge – Bacon FAIL!

2011-02-15T14:23:00.021-05:00

So on January 15 I read the Charcutepalooza rules for February and excitedly resolved to cure some bacon. The only barrier was one necessary ingredient: what Michael Ruhlman calls "pink salt", the curing agent that prevents botulism.

Problem is, it's a slightly controlled substance where I live, and civilians (those not employed in restaurants and meat curing facilities) aren't supposed to be able to buy it locally. I understand that there are various packaged meat curing products in some of the Asian grocery stores and in the fabulously well stocked Highland Farms chain, but I wanted to go with a very predictable product and resolved to go online for the well recommended Instacure #1. I ordered some online weeks ago, but, what with northeastern blizzards and some ball-dropping on the part of a supplier I will not name, it has still not been delivered.

So instead, I'm posting some thoughts about sodium nitrite, the main active ingredient in "pink salt"; I'll just have to post a bacon report later. (Update: the bacon report is right here.)

If a substance is regulated by government, you have to wonder whether you want to be eating it, and most consumers have probably heard that "nitrites" are something to be avoided. The benefits of sodium nitrite as a meat additive are that it improves the pinky-red "fresh meat" colour (who cares?) and that it prevents botulism (a biggie!)

"What's with all the 'nitrite free' labels on meat packages these days?" asked Christy Mercer in a November 2007 article in Delicious Living. "When heated above 350 degrees, nitrites in processed meat form nitrosamines, which can be carcinogenic if consumed frequently and in large quantities."

On August 3, 2010, Heidi Blake on the Vancouver Sun reported on a study of 300,000 men and women aged 50 to 71 by the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland that found "sodium nitrite and nitrate, types of salt that are added to meats such as sausages, bacon and packaged ham as part of the curing process, can react with stomach acid to form carcinogenic N-nitroso compounds during digestion. Adults who consumed the highest amounts of nitrate and nitrite were almost 30-per-cent more likely to develop bladder cancer than those who consumed the lowest amount."

On August 27, 2008, Susan Semenak published an article in the Montreal Gazette that mentioned the report entitled Food, Nutrition, Physical Activity and the Prevention of Cancer: A Global Perspective, published by the American Institute for Cancer Research and the World Cancer Research Fund in October 2007. Pointing out that the report "is considered the most comprehensive study ever published on the evidence linking cancer risk to diet, physical activity and weight," Semenak writes that "It advised consumers to limit cooked meat to about 500 grams a week. But the panel of experts concluded: 'There is no safe level of consumption' for smoked, cured or salted products such as bacon, ham, hot dogs, sausage and luncheon meats."

She names sodium nitrite as the main culprit among cured meats' health drawbacks, adding that "Research in Sweden found that Swedes who ate on average three ounces of processed meat each day had a 15 per cent greater chance of developing stomach cancer than those who consumed two ounces or less."

Even if you're not eating it, sodium nitrite can harm you. It's interesting to read the Material Safety Data Sheet (MSDS). If you don't know about MSDSs, they are the straightforward scientific description of the known hazards, health effects and recommended storage and handling instructions for every chemical substance normally used by human beings in industry of various sorts. (Useful to know: you can google the MSDS for just about anything, from cleaning solvents to art supplies.)

The MSDS on sodium nitrite warns that the raw material is a toxic substance that can cause harm if ingested, inhaled or brought into contact with skin or eyes. That's why it's artificially coloured pink in the US: to guard against accidental ingestion. (In Canada it's not always coloured.)

The American Meat Institute (incidentally, the same organization responsible for this jaw-dropping piece of 1950s advertising) has led the charge to balance the public perception of sodium nitrite. A 2005 issue of The National Provisioner reported that sodium nitrite may have some medicinal benefits; following a study carried out by the National Institute for Health on behalf of the AMI, "scientists say they have infused the anti-oxidant sodium nitrite into volunteers to assess its potential as a treatment for sickle-cell anemia, heart attacks, brain aneurysms, and other conditions caused by problems with low oxygen."

Back in January 2001, Gourmet Retailer magazine reported that the AMI was publicizing a study by the National Toxicology Program (NTP) that "shows that sodium nitrite is a safe food additive. ...its findings help lay to rest any concerns about the use of sodium nitrite as a safe curing ingredient. The multiyear study showed that not only did sodium nitrite fail to produce clear evidence of cancer, it actually showed a strong, dose-response reduction of some cancers. The evidence was strong enough that California's Developmental and Reproductive Toxicant Identification Committee voted not to list the curing agent as a developmental toxicant under the state's Proposition 65 law."

Wikipedia lists quite a few other interesting resources at the end of their entry on sodium nitrite. I was especially intrigued by one study that proposes that falling US rates of gastric cancer since the 1930s may be linked to reduced use of nitrites in cured meats.

Not being a scientist, I feel I have to take the arguments on all sides with ... um ... a grain of salt. Knowing how much less cured meat I eat than the average American (or, probably, the average Swede), I feel I'm not likely to be at greatly elevated risk of cancer after consuming a few rashers of bacon. However, I'm not about to start dosing myself with sodium nitrite as a heart-attack remedy either.

As I understand it, Instacure #1 (also known as Prague Powder #1) contains 6.25% sodium nitrite and 93.75% regular salt, and one pound is enough to cure almost 500 pounds of meat. If this is so and if (as I believe), one pound is equal to 453.592 grams, then a one-pound box of Instacure contains about 28 grams of sodium nitrite. If Wikipedia's arithmatic is correct, a 65-kg person could be poisoned by ingesting 4.615 grams. (That's a person weighing just under 145 pounds for our metrically challenged neighbours to the south.)

So the chances of an adult human poisoning themselves with a box of Instacure #1 are not particularly high, but if I were going to store and handle it regularly (especially in a house with small children and pets), I would heed the warnings in the MSDS ("Keep locked up. Keep away from heat. ... Do not ingest. Do not breathe dust. ... Keep container tightly closed.")

Bottom line: botulism can certainly be fatal, whereas many people have lived long lives eating some cured meat, so as soon as my delivery arrives, I'm makin' some bacon. But I will be very careful about how I store and handle my Instacure.

PS: Want to read more? I just found out that Ruhlman himself has posted a similar piece on his site.

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Seedy Saturdays 2011 in Toronto

2011-02-07T11:01:00.005-05:00

Three editions of Seedy Saturday are coming up soon. Don't be confused that two of them are actually being held on a Sunday; Seedy Saturday is a national series of events that were originally dreamed up by people working with Seeds of Diversity, the organization that protects heritage seeds to conserve plant diversity.

Seedy Saturdays are held across the country (click here for a list of the southern Ontario events). They offer gardeners a chance to swap or buy seeds, and they're a great source for organic and heritage varieties, as well as lots of bargains and even free seeds.

Organized by the Toronto Community Garden Network, our local Seedy Saturdays and Sundays are joyful, bustling events. Entrance is by donation ($2 recommended) and there's usually a raffle of plant-related books and other prizes. There'll be kids' activities, talks and food, and a great wealth of people who can give you advice on topics ranging from heirloom tomatoes to windowsill herb growing.

In short, if you've never grown any food before, this is a great place to get started, and if you're an experienced urban farmer... well you probably never miss one. Here are the details for the Toronto-area events:

Downtown Toronto

Sunday, February 13 from 12:30 to 6 p.m. at Hart House (7 Hart House Circle on the U of T campus). Contact: Melissa Benner.

Scarborough

Saturday, March 12 from noon to 4 p.m. at Heron Park Recreation Centre (292 Manse Road). Contact: Kate Fullerton at 416-691-5173.

North York

Sunday, March 27 from 1 to 5 p.m. at Lawrence Heights Community Centre (5 Replin Road). Contact: Melissa Benner.

How to Make Quince Cheese

2011-01-25T23:08:00.014-05:00

Thanks to Fiona Lucas of the Culinary Historians of Canada, I have been reading about "bimbriyo", described in the article "Tante Stella's Quince Sweetmeat" by Audrey Levy as "a very stiff jelly of mysterious deep rose-brown hue" (Petits Propos Culinaries 82, Prospect Books, January 2007). This substance, as Levy explains, is known as bimbriyo among Sephardic Jews, as cotognata in Sicily, as cotignac in France, as membrillo in Spanish-speaking countries, as kythonpasto in Greece, as chabush in Israel, and simply as quince cheese to many English speakers.

The quince (illustrated above, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons) is known in Latin as the Cydonian apple, and was sacred to the love goddess Venus. But it hardly lives up to its sexy reputation on first sight. Quinces look rather like underripe pears, and are too hard, woody and bitter to eat out of hand.

In fact, when a mysterious bag of them appeared on my front steps last summer, I didn't know what they were, but – after some research, and knowing they're rich in pectin – I managed to develop a recipe for quince butter that's going to appear in my book. Now I've learned that, apart from being good as a thick spread, this quince butter can be set out to dry in a layer to make the aforementioned bimbriyo.

And wow, what a taste! It's like the best version of a sour candy that you can imagine: packed with flavour and with a tangy bite of fruity sourness at the end. It's great with pork and delicious with cheese. I have been blissing out combining it on a thick round rye crisp with some of this young soft white Figaro from Glengarry Fine Cheese in Lancaster, Ontario (to which I have been introduced by the fine folks at the Dairy Farmers of Canada).

It's a while until quince season, but I strongly suggest you find a tree and try to make some next summer. Or bug me for some at the Culinary Historians' Mad for Marmalade day on February 19 at Fort York... but I may end up hoarding most of it for myself!

Quince Butter for Cheese
Makes 4½ cups

This is more or less the recipe that I wrote for my upcoming book.

3½ lbs quinces
4 cups water
4½ cups sugar
3 tbsp lemon or lime juice
½ tsp cardamom (optional)

Wash the quinces, quarter them and remove the seeds and stems (don’t worry about removing the hard shell that encases the seeds.)
In a wide, deep non-reactive pot with a thick bottom, combine fruit and water. Boil for 10 minutes, then reduce heat and simmer, covered, until the mixture resembles the consistency of pea soup (about 25 minutes).
Run the mixture through a sieve or food mill and return it to the pot. Add the rest of the ingredients, stirring well until the sugar dissolves completely.
Boil on medium heat until the mixture thickens to the point where you can draw a spoon through it without seeing water seep from the sides (about 30-45 minutes). The mixture should turn quite dark red or red-brown. Be very careful, because the mixture will spit a lot. If you have glasses, wear them; long sleeves and an apron are also a good idea.*

At this point you may either ladle into sterilized jars and process for 10 minutes at a rolling boil (15 minutes for pint/500 mL jars), or spread the pastelike mixture into a shallow pan lined with waxed or parchment paper. It will take several days to dry; you may speed up the drying process by baking it in a very slow oven (150-200 degrees).

*When I read Levy's piece, I was amused to note that my observation about the spitting was borne out by her 92-year-old Tante Stella, who advised her to "wear rubber gloves, since as the water evaporates, the bubbles splutter ferociously and the splutter is fiercely hot".