Save Your Fork… There’s Pie

Remember this quote?

“It has just stopped me cold from eating another burger!”

This was Oprah Winfrey in 1996, talking about Mad Cow disease, and that quote provoked a lawsuit by a Cattleman’s Association in Texas.

Turns out, Oprah must have forgotten that comment, either that or the Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease is already eating away at her brain cells. Because on a recent episode of her show, Oprah mentioned a Santa Monica, CA burger chain as one of her “favourite things”. Predictably, sales at the restaurant went through the roof.

Funny, isn’t it, that they’re still finding mad cow disease in cows in North America, yet ol’ Oprah has changed her mind about burgers.

*sigh* Every now and again there’s a small glimmer of hope that someone with the power to sway the opinion of millions of people will do the ethical thing and speak out against such exploitative industries like meat processing. And just when you think they’re standing up for animals or factory workers or the environment, you realize it was all about publicity and ratings and that a commendable action on Oprah’s part only lasted as long as it took to fire up the barbeque.

First off - a warning to the Rachael Ray fans who might wander by - proceed with caution, because my topic today is RayRay and not all of it is pretty. Okay, very little of it is pretty. Go now, while you have the chance. And I’m logging IP addresses so write your hate mail on a piece of paper and toss it in the “garbage bowl”, rather than send it to me. It’s far more spiritually enlightening.

Okay, so… as I mentioned early on when we moved to the new pad and hooked ourselves up with second tier cable, I discovered lots of new “celebrities” on the Food Channel who weren’t there back in the late 90s when I had had enough and had the service disconnected. One of those new folks was Rachael Ray. Without even knowing why, I took an almost instant dislike to the woman. I couldn’t even truly explain why, and my response was completely unfounded - she annoyed me so much that I couldn’t sit through a whole half hour of one of her shows. Something about her - her voice, her gestures, the infantile phrases she made up - just made me want to grab her and start punching. This is a pretty harsh reaction that I couldn’t quite figure out, especially the punching part. Then I realized that Ray reminded me of someone.

Rollerderby Queen Stacey Blitsch

If not identical, they could certainly be sisters.

That definitely explains the punching, as Blitsch was well known for both giving and taking punches during her time on the banked track. She was also known for taking her clothes off at the slightest provocation, which Rachael Ray is prone to do as well, particularly for vaguely sleazy men’s magazines.

As it turns out, though, I wasn’t the only one Ray rubbed the wrong way. In fact, enough people despise the woman, there’s a whole LiveJournal community devoted to the hate-on for Ray. Now *there’s* some negative energy going on, and in fact, I find many of the sentiments a little harsh, even for someone I don’t particularly care for.

The thing I find odd about the anti-Ray community is that, in order to diss Ray constantly, those same folks have to watch her show(s) to have fodder for their complaints. Which seems like an awful waste of time to me, not to mention terribly petty. If you hate her, don’t watch her.

But I figured I should probably join the ranks of Ray-haters, and plunk my butt down in front of the tube for a few episodes, just to see what all the fuss was about. At the very least, it would maybe help me figure out exactly what turns me off.

And so, while I’ll never ever be a fan, I have to admit that I do get Ray’s appeal. I don’t *like* it, but I get it. She makes reasonably passable dishes that appeal to folks who want dinner on the table quickly, easily and cheaply. Nothing that she made in the two episodes I watched either grossed me out or seemed an unreasonable option for the average suburban family who were trying to put together a real meal. And even if she uses shortcuts (which most of us do at one point or another), at least she’s encouraging people to cook and stay out of the drive-through. In terms of marketing herself, she’s got her demographic carefully pinpointed, and she plays to that both in terms or the dishes she prepares and the manner in which she does so - Ray comes off as the chatty, goofy, slightly ditzy gal next door who just happens to be able to pull together something halfway tasty for dinner.

What I didn’t like, however, far outweighs the positives.

Sanitation - I know it’s a personal quirk, but I hate celebrity cooks who don’t follow proper sanitation practices. Regardless of what people may do in their own homes, celebrity cooks should have their hair tied back and should demonstrate proper cleanliness techniques at all times (this is why I hate Nigella so fervently - her and he glommy-handed little kid sticking his fingers in everything). If people are looking to you as a role model, and you are presenting yourself as such, you had darn well better be perfect. Besides the hair (which, I know, is more a matter of opinion), I caught three different instances where Ray pulled produce out of the fridge and didn’t wash it properly. One was celery, another was parsley. Sandy, gritty parsley.

Knife Skills - Ray cuts as if someone tried to show her proper knife skills once, but she doesn’t quite remember what they are - or how her hands are supposed to be placed. Again, this is one of those things that it’s important to have perfect because you are demonstrating how to do something and fans will follow your lead. From what I’ve read, Ray boasts a lot about being from a family of cooks - but that doesn’t make up for real training and skill. My husband’s grandmother ran a hotel restaurant for decades, but that doesn’t make *him* a good cook.

“Eyeballing” - Ray gets a lot of flack for not measuring stuff on her show - she tells viewers it’s okay to “just eyeball it”, Which *is* okay - most of the time. One of the episodes I watched had her sprinkling paprika straight from an open-mouthed jar into a bowl with other ingredients, though - which is an act that would get any cook fired from a restaurant kitchen. One slip of the hand and you’ve ruined the dish with too much spice - you never, ever, ever dump spice directly from the container into the dish. Another bad habit that Ray passes on to her viewers.

Sooo healthy! - With an eye to the health-conscious viewers, Ray often tries to pass off her dishes as being very healthy. One of the episodes I watched had her referring to creamed spinach as a “healthy side dish”. Just because a dish has one element in it that might be considered healthy, doesn’t mean that it’s still healthy after you douse it with butter and cream and more butter. Likewise for anything with added bacon. It’s like trying to pass off a cocktail made with fruit juice in it as healthy, disregarding the 2 ounces of vodka also mixed in.

Crap ingredients - This is where my food snob comes out a bit. And I do get that Ray is trying to work with the kind of items that the average person might pick up at the supermarket on their way home from work. But twice I’ve seen her use those nasty, spongy pink deli slices of boiled ham where a nice chunk of quality panchetta would have turned what she was cooking into something almost brilliant. Her reliance on frozen pastry also makes me cringe slightly. And when she does come into contact with decent ingredients, her beloved EVOO (is this pronounced E-V-O-O, or Eeevoh? Eeevoo?), aka: extra-virgin olive oil, she uses it incorrectly. There’s no point in paying a premium for extra-virgin olive oil if you’re going to cook with it - just use the regular stuff and save the Eeevoh for dishes where the taste of the oil is more prevalent.

I also find that Ray can’t seem to just talk about what she’s doing. Every episode seems to require a story about her childhood or some kind of annoying catch-phrase that she uses incessantly. In the episode wher she made clam chowder, she used the phrase “soup doctor” or “docterin’ up some soup” six or seven times. Now I know it must be hard to be charming and entertaining all the while whipping up a meal in 30 minutes, but the constant yammering had to be what turned me off the most. I was tempted to watch the last half of the episode with the sound off, but figured I might miss the explanation as to why she hadn’t washed the parsley and was serving sand for dinner.

So there’s the explanation for my RayRay hate (or if you’re a member of the sux community - Raytard, Retchel Ray, Wretched Ray, “Garbage Bowl” or simply “that bitch”). Watching her show helped me figure out exactly what bothers me about her, and it also helped me to see what the attraction was for those who do like her. Ultimately, it comes down to two very different philosophies about food that I don’t think can ever be bent towards each other. I’ll give her points for getting people into the kitchen, but not for what she does once she gets them there.

They appear to have shut down the forums over at The F-Word website. Which is too bad, because I know Greg wanted to give ol’ Gordo a piece of his mind about drinking cherry Kreik beer straight from the bottle.

They killed poor Trinny and Susannah and ate them up in the final episode, and to his credit Ramsay did the girls up good. I’d probably have broken down and eaten that pork loin, had it been placed in front of me. It looked damned delicious.

It was good to see Ramsay choke up a bit on the episode where the pigs go to the slaughterhouse, however. He still killed them (or had them killed - he didn’t do it himself), and his admission that he, a chef with 20 years experience under his belt, had never been to a slaughterhouse, is a huge part of what I think is wrong with the restaurant industry. Ramsay’s whole premise with the pigs, and the turkeys last season, was to show his kids where food comes from. Now I know his point was to get his kids to associate food with real animals, but for him to not know what goes on in a regular abbatoir, where the majority of the population’s meat comes from, is just negligent and ignorant.

I’d be interested to know if he’s in the process of sourcing out humanely and sustainably raised meats for all of his restaurants now that he realizes what’s involved in getting that meat to his kitchens. Given the hard-on he gets for the poor overfished Chilean Sea Bass, I somehow doubt it.

Overall, not as good as Season One, mostly by the regular inclusion of Janice Street-Porter, who, if she’s watching her weight (like she went on and on and on about), should stop trouncing vegetarians and stop putting so much meat in her big yappy cakehole. I much prefer Giles Coren (prat though he is) dumpster diving and chasing after squirrels.

Oh, and Ainsley won the worst celebrity cookbook competition, followed by Gary and Delia. Six of Ramsay’s own cookbooks were turned in, which is far less than I had counted on, given that the man has such trouble with desserts.

Now where the hell am I going to go for my Ramsay fix and some kitchen cursing?

I’ve been to two different tea events in the past week. Both very different in scope and both of which left me with a curious little bug in my brain.

The first tea was an afternoon tea and lecture on the health benefits of tea at Toronto’s Casa Loma. Having never been to Casa Loma after living in Toronto going on twenty years, I figured it was high time to do so and tea in the gorgeous marble conservatory was as good an excuse as any. Casa Loma is, indeed, a big freakin’ castle, and was as marvellous as it had been made out to be. It would have been more pleasant had there been considerably fewer tourists, however, because nothing takes the charm out of tea in the lush conservatory of a castle than a bunch of people in ugly shorts and sneakers and ball caps peering through the glass doors taking your photo.

The meal itself was your standard afternoon tea fare - scones, pastries, fruit and sandwiches. Passable, but not outstanding on any level: California strawberries when local ones are still in season, too many super-sweet pastries that got left behind, clotted cream passed around in the jar (!!!) instead of in a dish (am I at someone’s house??), and, as is always the case, not enough vegetarian sandwiches, because inevitably, the meat-eaters will ignore the roast beef and turkey and scoff *all* of the egg salad before you even knew there were any there.

The actual tea for drinking threw us all for a bit of a loop. It seems that Lipton was a sponsor in some capacity because all that was on offer was different varieties of Lipton tea - in bags. There were prize baskets from Lipton given out at the end, and I suspect that the guest speaker was a shill for Lipton as well, so frequently did she tout their products.

A few days later, my “not a girl’s night” gals and I headed to the Bata Shoe Museum for a demonstration of a traditional tea ceremony. This was an interesting evening that focused on the proper way to brew tea that included more complicated steps than most non-ceremonial tea drinkers would ever think to follow. But it was beautiful and intricate and resulted in some really awesome teas for us all to try. Accompanying the tea demo was an unexpected demo by Stephanie Chin, the Chinese Chef instructor at my alma mater, George Brown. She went through the whole process of how to make traditional Chinese Moon Cakes, one of my favourite treats. I had never had the version made with the salted egg, and while some of my gals were weirded out by the flavour, I found the things quite interesting. I probably wouldn’t make them myself - too complicated and too fattening for something that I only ever want one of, but still, a really interesting demo that was kind of an extra bonus.

The weird thing about the tea “experts” at each event was that both women admitted to not actually being “experts” at all. The woman at the Casa Loma tea admitted that she had just compiled some info and approached the events co-ordinator at the castle and they arranged the whole thing (I’m not sure I believe this especially, I think she was on the Lipton payroll in some way), and I sat through her presentation, whispering corrections to her speech in Greg’s ear. The lovely Chinese lady who did the tea ceremony demo at the Shoe Museum also admitted to not being an expert about tea at all, and she referred regularly to her notes, although you could tell she had the ceremony part pretty ingrained.

So my thoughts are this - what exactly does it take to become an expert on a food-related subject? Is it simply the willingness to write a speech and stand in front of a crowd to present it? Neither woman who spoke about tea had a food or culinary arts related background (at Casa Loma the tea expert sat next to us throughout the meal and we talked with her extensively), and you see all kinds of people on the Food Network with their own cooking shows and no real cooking experience - this is obvious, of course, and makes most of those programmes just painful to watch (hold your knife properly, goddammit!!) - but still, someone was convinced they knew enough to put them in front of a camera.

After the Casa Loma event, Greg tried to convince me that I should become a “tea expert” and offer my services for swank events such as the one we had attended. Were I not an awful public speaker (I curse like a sailor most of the time and often forget to curtail the colourful expletives in polite company - this has made for a few amusing job interviews over the years!), I might actually consider it. Certainly, in my current job at WellFed, the main jist of all my writing involves doing research online and writing about my findings. Maybe I could get back into event planning and catering and do the whole thing - perpare the food and give a talk about it.

I wonder how many people would pay to have me make cute sandwiches and blather on about tea to them?

Those of you who know me reasonably well know that I have bread issues. That is, for many years, bread just wouldn’t work for me. It would come out of the oven okay and would quickly turn into a hard lump. Every single time. In an effort to remove myself from the blame for this, I pointed to an erratic gas oven (I made great bread at cooking school, and I grew up making bread two or three times a week with my Grandmother – I knew how to do it), and headed off to the store to buy bread, having given up on the kneading and the punching and the proofing and the wasting of ingredients.

Something else that has given me trouble over the years is Vegetarian Times Magazine. Not the magazine itself, but the recipes, which always hurt my head a bit in their logic and which come with introductions like “Threw this together last night for the kids!” That’s fine for a blog, but in a nationally-published magazine, I expect some triple-testing going on to make sure the recipe makes sense. Since most of their recipes didn’t make sense, and seemed like a disaster waiting to happen I stopped buying the thing.

Now, remember that I am a food writer and editor. It is part of my job to go over recipes that my writers want to post with a fine-toothed comb to look for anything that might not work. Early on, a young and enthusiastic writer came up with a piece on healthy snack alternatives and suggested that readers should add a tablespoon of cinnamon to a half cup of applesauce. My face turns inside out at the mere thought – a quarter teaspoon of cinnamon would be about the right proportion for this treat – a whole tablespoon would be overwhelmingly unappealing.

So how I managed to completely gap on this knowledge and expectation when reading the recent issue of Vegetarian Times, I’ll never know, but I did. I jumped feet first into 1. a bread recipe, and 2. a badly proportioned bread recipe from that bastion of poorly thought-out recipes, Vegetarian Times. My excuse is that I was distracted by the chocolate and the cherries.

Things were going well until it came time to add the garnish, and this is where I should have caught the problem. 1-1/2 cups of chopped cherries, plus 1/2 cup of chocolate chips to a lump of dough with only 2 cups of flour… seems like a bit too much garnish, hmmm? And look at that… why does it call for less dried cherries than fresh? Given that fresh cherries, even well-drained ones, are going to make a dough very wet, I’m guessing those amounts were transposed at some point. Or that the recipe was only made with dried cherries, without testing it with the fresh. In any case, the full two cups of garnish never made it into my bread, maybe a cup and a half, but that’s an optimistic figure. Also, following the instructions as they were laid out with regards to adding the garnish, there is no way kneading the dough ten or twelve times would fully incorporate that much stuff. It took another five or ten minutes of kneading and a whole lot more flour, and the dough was still freakishly wet.

There was a whole lot of cursing going on, and I considered pitching the whole thing. After proofing and shaping the dough, and letting it rise the second time, I popped the buns in the oven and cursed some more. Twenty-five minutes later, expecting a big wet chocolate glob, I had… chocolate cherry bread. And it was good. Really good.

I really don’t know how that happened, but there they were, little chocolate buns, and they rocked. They were absolutely delicious, the crumb was light and fine, as it should be, the cherries and chocolate were lucious. I’m set to make these again, perhaps with candied orange peel or some spices.

I’m still sceptical about my bread curse, but after having survived trial by fire with the chocolate bread, I’m ready to give an easier recipe a go. And I’ve totally learned my lesson with regards to not checking published recipes more carefully. Particularly ones from VT.

Chocolate-Cherry Breakfast Bread

1 .25-oz pkg. yeast
1/3 cup, plus 1 Tbsp sugar
1 cup warm water
2-1/3 cups all-purpose or bread flour
1/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1 tsp. salt
2 Tbsp unsalted butter, melted
1/2 cup chocolate chips
1-1/2 cups fresh or frozen pitted cherries, drained or 1 cup dried cherries, coarsely chopped (1 cup fresh cherries, chopped and well-drained)

Dissolve yeast and 1 Tbsp sugar in 1 cup warm water. Let stand 5 minutes or until water is cloudy and smells yeasty.

Sift remaining sugar, flour, salt and cocoa into large mixing bowl. Add water and yeast to flour mixture and stir until a smooth dough forms. Fold in butter. Transfer dough to a well-floured surface and knead for 7 – 10 minutes or until dough is smooth and elastic and no longer sticks to your hands.

Pat dough into a 10-inch square. Place chocolate pieces and cherries in centre of square, then fold in sides like an envelope. Press edges to seal. Gently knead dough 10 to 12 times, or until chocolate and cherries are evenly distributed throughout. (Instead of making an envelope, simply sprinkle a mixture of cherries and chocolate chips onto the bread bit by bit and knead each section in, adding more flour as necessary to keep the dough from becoming too wet and glommy.)

Transfer to oiled bowl. Cover with a clean dishtowel, and let rise 1-1/2 hours in a warm place.

Punch down dough, then place on a well-floured work surface. Roll into thick log, then cut log into 16 equal rounds. Roll each round into a tight ball and place on baking sheet coated with non-stick cooking spray. Set baking sheet in warm place and let rolls rise for 30 to 45 minutes.

Preheat oven to 375F. Bake rolls 20 to 25 minutes, or until tops appear dry and centers spring back when touched.