Save Your Fork… There’s Pie

First, an admission of guilt. I download television shows off the internet. Specifically, I download British shows off the internet, because other than stuff like Little Britain, they’re next to impossible to find in Canada. Recently, on the latest season of Gordon Ramsay’s series The F-Word, he featured UK food writer and television guy, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. If you’ve been a food network fan for the past decade, you’d remember Fearnley-Whittingstall from a fun show he hosted called TV Dinners. He also hosted a food series on Edwardian cookery to accompany the PBS series The Edwardian Manor House. So you know who I’m talking about now, yes?

In the UK, Fearnley-Whittingstall is most well known for his River Cottage series. Starting in 1999, he left London for the wilds of the Dorset countryside, where he rented a small cottage and lived close to the land. He gardened, raised pigs, hunted rabbits and trapped eels in the nearby river. With the locals offering assistance in their various specialties which ranged from jam-making to meat-curing to sheep-shearing, Fearnley-Whittingstall learned firsthand about life in the country. He enjoyed it so much he returned to shoot four years worth of the show, and finally bought a large farm for himself and his family nearby.

What is unique and very important about the series and the process is that, in an era when small farms are being bought out by giant corporations, Fearnley-Whittingstall has returned to the land with the notion of creating a sustainable farm. Both in the television series, the accompanying books, and in the very extensive website, he espouses eating locally and organically. And especially, seasonally.

I believe passionately that those who shop and cook in harmony with the seasons will get immeasurably more pleasure and satisfaction from their food than those who don’t. I’ve also observed, with mounting alarm, that our sense of seasonality is under threat. The supermarkets must take the lion’s share of the blame. For the most part, they seem not merely uninterested in seasonality but often keen to suppress it. They source produce throughout the world that homogenises their product range into a year-long display of cosy familiarity. Of necessity, the seasons still exert some influence on their stocking policy. Yet they will do everything possible to disguise this fact when presenting produce to their customers. They fear that seasonally driven marketing will result in inconsistent spending. They don’t want their customers to think seasonally, because they believe seasonality is not profitable.

The River Cottage website offers a wealth of information on eating seasonally and sustainably, including a list of what’s currently in season (in the UK, of course), seasonal recipes, info about events and competitions in the Dorset area, as well as a collection of Fearnley-Whittingstall’s essays on food production.

You can also shop on the River Cottage site, which offers all of the River Cottage books, DVDS (VAT format only, unfortunately), or vouchers to River Cottage events. Their line of seasonal products which includes the amusing “pig in a box” (“everything but the oink!), as well as a selection of soups, oils, and even stinging nettle beer are available through various UK retailers and farm markets.

The television series revels in the wonders of good food, from scallops fresh from the sea (caught by divers, not trawlers which cause environmental damage), to stinging nettle gnocchi, real mince pies, Hugh’s famous “bunny burgers”, local hard cider, and of course, the sausage and hams made from the River Cottage pigs, you get the feeling that this is truly what food is all about, not the chemical-ridden junk from the middle aisles of the fluorescent-lit supermarkets.

For anyone truly interested in where their food comes from, both the River Cottage series, as well as the website and cookbooks, are amazing resources. With a philosophy of seasonal, sustainable organic food where all parts of the plants and animals are used, Fearnley-Whittingstall is both a throwback to a more simple time, and shockingly progressive. By setting his own high standards, to the point of growing and raising his own food, he proves that we don’t have to be trapped by the chain supermarkets and giant food corporations.

This post originally appeared on Growers and Grocers, part of the WellFed Network.

One of my first posts when I started up this journal was about how I hated the Food Network, about how I thought it was becoming insipid and fluffy and annoying.

Turns out I’m not alone. Bill Burford of the New Yorker has written a piece for the latest issue on the dumbing down of the Food Network.

What’s really sad is that genuinely talented chefs with information and skills and techniques to share, chefs such as Sara Moulton, Anthony Bourdain and David Rosengarten, are being pushed out by talentless hacks with a schtick. There should be no comparison whatsoever between Moulton ands someone like Rachael Ray, yet the viewing audience would rather watch Ray unwrap packages of cooked ham and pound skinless bonelss chicken breasts into tasteless goop. I don’t get it.

That’s not true, actually, I do. Because the world of cooking is a lot like the world of fashion.

Bear with me for an explanation.

Both are necessities - we have to eat and, in most cases, we have to wear clothes. Just as there are fashionistas who buy designer gear or spend hours or even days creating an outfit, the same goes for foodies. Some of us will hunt for the perfect purse, some of us will hunt for the perfect cheese.

And just as there are people out there for whom clothing holds little interest other than to cover their personal bits and keep them warm and dry, there are, believe it or not, people for whom food is simply fuel.

Those are the extremes, of course, but in between is a whole grey area - the mid-range folks. These are the folks who, when it comes to fashion, aspire to look good, but don’t want to put in a lot of effort or money. They’ll shop at department stores and pull together something easy to wear and easy to care for. Mid-rangers hate dry-cleaning, mending or anything that requires alterations, hand-washing or polishing. They tend to buy cheap knock-offs of current fashions and then ditch them when they go out of style. The food equivalent of a mid-ranger is the 30 minute meal ideal. These folks want the cachet attached with a “home-cooked” meal, they want to be able to say they made it themselves, but they’re not willing to put in the effort to cook food that truly looks and tastes good. Mediocre is acceptable, excellence is too much trouble, and the slop they see on many of the Food Network shows becomes their goal, under the theory that, hey, if it’s on the Food Network, it must be acceptable.

It’s the mid-rangers, many of whom are not actually dumb, but who simply believe that they don’t have enough time, who are provoking the dumbing down, not just of the Food Network, but of society as a whole. Those of you familiar with my regular journal know that I regularly rant about succumbing to the lowest common denominator with regards to social standards.

The Food Network isn’t really about cooking, or teaching home cooks skills and techniques - it’s about entertaining people long enough to keep their butts on the sofa to watch the advertising. Real chefs intimidate the mid-ranger, they make them feel inferior and stupid. Mid rangers are busy driving the kids to soccer, you see, they don’t have time to learn anything themselves, and often they can’t bring themselves to admit there is anything they don’t know. They’d rather watch idiots like Rachael Ray - who makes the same mistakes the untrained home cook makes - than learn how to do something properly and safely.

Unfortunately, there is no real solution to the problem. As long as people watch the fluffy insipid shows, the Food Network will continue to produce them. As long as people are intimidated by real chefs with genuine knowledge to share, there will be no place for those chefs on the Food Network. It’s a tragedy that there are folks out there watching Rachael Ray use a metal whisk on a non-stick pan or spreading salmonella across her set as she uses the same tongs to handle chicken and then toss a salad without washing the thing in between, who believe that someone like this is not only a good cook, but a good teacher, and that they in turn, by making her dishes, are themselves “good cooks”. One can only hope that they’ll somehow be inspired to move beyond the quick and easy slop into real, healthy meals and will seek out real chefs with real knowledge to guide them on their journey.

If the salmonella they picked up from Rachael Ray doesn’t kill them first, of course.

I did a bad thing last night. A bad, terrible, not-at-all good thing.

I bought pots.

Lots of them.

From the shopping channel.

I have been using the same set of pots for seventeen years. A decent set of Lagostinas bought for under $100 at Consumer’s Distributing (remember them?) back in 1989 or so. They’ve mostly held up well, and the insides are still fine - they’re good solid pots and I more than got my money’s worth from them. But they’re really badly tarnished on the outside, and a couple of them are dented pretty badly where I’ve dropped them on the concrete floor.

So I’ve been thinking about new pots for a while. I was leaning towards amassing a set of Padernos, piece by piece by piece, likely with the inclusion of some not quite perfect items picked up at a deep discount at the Paderno warehouse in PEI, which ’s Mom passes on a regular basis.

But last night I was flipping channels and stopped to watch XXcelebrity chefXX demonstrating their wares. A 22-piece stainless steel set of pots with right and left-handed pouring spouts (yay, left-handed spouts!), colander inserts in the pot lids for draining stuff, a paella pan, an omlette pan, something that could be used as a wok or a salad bowl, a steamer, a bunch of utensils and a bazillion other things. About the only thing I wouldn’t use would be the one non-stick piece included in the set - a grill pan. It was all under $200 CAD. We watched the whole segment, got a decent look at the handles (screwed and soldered!) and the bases (heavy-duty) and figured what the hell - if I hate ‘em, I can send the whole thing back.

So we went online to order them and discovered that XXcelebrity chefXX was also hawking a knife set. For someone who trained as a chef, I have crap knives. It’s one of my secret shames. I couldn’t afford the really good knives while I was in school, so I ended up with a mishmash of assorted pieces of the lowest end Henkels - the ones that are constantly dull and will never hold a sharp edge from either a steel or a stone. They’re so difficult to work with, in fact, that for the majority of my cutting needs, I use a crappy little 7″ serrated knife that I found in a pile of stuff that got left behind at Hallowmas in 1999 (Hallowmas was a Halloween music festival I worked on). I think it was a knife that brought for the band The Brickbats to carve pumpkins with. I don’t know why I haven’t thought to go buy decent knives before this, because I’ve been making do with some pretty crap tools. And since you get free shipping on smaller items when you “multipak”, the knives are shipped for free. Again, if they suck, I can send the things back.

I can’t say I’m happy about the prospect of owning something hawked by a celebrity chef, just on principle. I hate the whole cult of celebrity in general and most celebrity “chefs” are not chefs in any sense of the word, but this person is, at least, a real and genuine chef, with proper training, a pile of restaurants and decades of hands on-experience. When they say “this is what we use in the restaurant”, that has more creedence to me than someone with a show geared towards soccer moms and quickie dinners whose main interest in buying cookware is whether it matches their $500 mixer and $10,000 stove.

Shipping is 7 to 10 business days, so I’ll know whether I made a wise choice or a horrible mistake sometime next week.

I happen to live on the edge of Toronto’s “hipster” neighbourhood, which has both its good and bad points. Bad = hipsters (ewww!), good = the cool restaurants, hotels and shops that have taken over what was once a barren strip. One of the hotels is an old Victorian, gingerbread-looking thing, complete with gargoyles, renovated to its former glory. We often eat brunch or lunch there, as the atmosphere is considerably more laid-back than the other “trying really hard to be cool” boutique hotel a few blocks away.

In any case, we discovered that the Gladstone had set up a summer and fall dining series called Harvest Wednesdays where every Wednesday the chef put together a menu based on what came in the CSA boxes from a local farm. The first few weeks were buffet-style, but we managed to score seats for last night’s prix fixe 4-course dinner.

As is the case with CSA boxes, where you don’t really know what you’re getting until it arrives, the menu was slightly imbalanced. (I think there was a lot of basil!) Food-wise, I’m not positive it was worth the $36 per person, particularly when you’re ordering the vegetarian main - but that is the case with prix fixe deals far and wide - it’s never a deal for the vegetarians.

Soup
Garden Basil Minestrone with Pesto

See what I mean about the basil? This was a decent minestrone, but didn’t make me yell for more.

Salad
Spinach, Herb and Carrot Ribbons, tossed in a port vinagrette, topped with warm pumpkin-studded goat cheese

Fried goat cheese! OMG! This made up for the really sloppy baby spinach that hadn’t been torn properly (it was more like bunches of baby spinach) and which caused almost every diner to soil their tablecloth with dressing. I ran into the chef on the way out and he gave me instructions on how to do the cheese in the oven, as frying cheese can be tricky.

Main
Grilled Portobello Mushroom and Eggplant Napoleon, drizzled with a balsamic reduction and served with Panzanella, a fresh tomato-basil grilled bread salad. (Meat option was an herb-roasted cornish hen with the panzanella)

The Napoleon also contained roasted red pepper, fennel and cheese. The fennel was undercooked and made cutting into the stack of veg a bit of a chore. I dug the panzanella, though, despite my aversion to soggy bread. It seems Greg got all the soggy bits of bread, and I got the crispy serving. What I saw of the cornish hen looked slightly undercooked. Everyone ate it, but the skin wasn’t nearly as crispy as I’d have liked, had it been me eating the poor birdie.

Dessert
Pear Rye Whiskey Tart with Almond Semi-Fredo

This might have been the hi-light of the meal. The rye was subtle, and the semi-fredo was like a little ball of heaven.

Overall, a bit too cheesy for this dairy-allergic gal. There was dairy in every course - parmesan on the pesto, fried goat cheese with the salad, cheese in the napoleon and cream in the semi-fredo. That struck me as a bit of an oversight. Some things seemed undercooked, like the fennel and the hens. The soup was just so-so, but the salad was delicious, despite the sloppy spinach.

Beer and wine were local as well (Beer from Churchkey Brewing - the bottle of Holy Smoke I had went wonderfully with dessert) and wines from an Ontario winery, the name of which I’ve forgotten as they didn’t offer a Merlot, and thus, held no interest for me.

Next week, is a big charity event dinner, but the final Harvest Wednesday on October 4th is buffet style, no reservations required (it seems reservations are required now, but it’s not yet sold out!) and $20 per person. We’ll definitely be going to that.

Even if the meal wasn’t the best I’ve ever had, I’ve gotta give props for a local hotel making the effort to serve seasonal, local food. The Gladstone has bought three shares in the CSA and plans to do so again next year, so hopefully there will be more harvest feasts in 2007.

We’ve known for years that the term “natural” when it comes to food is a dubious one. Technically, everything is “natural”, even chemical additives – hey, they started as something found in nature. Any savvy food shopper knows that “natural” as a marketing term is meaningless.

But what about when it comes to the ingredient list? “Natural” flavours and colours don’t necessarily mean that they’ve come naturally from the product at hand, and synthetic colors haven’t necessarily been cooked up in a lab – strawberry candies don’t contain any actual strawberries. But what makes those candy strawberries red?

Bugs. Pretty little red bugs. C’mon. Bugs are natural. Although on ingredients lists, you’ll often find cochineal extract listed simply as “synthetic color”, the product itself is made from dried female cochineal beetles, a tiny insect that lives on cactus plants in Central and South America.

If you’ve inhaled the occasional fly, this might not worry you so much, but for vegetarians and people with allergies, eating bugs is a big deal. Problem is, cochineal extract (sometimes listed correctly, often listed as “carmine” or simply “artificial color” or “synthetic color”) shows up in some rather interesting products – I’ll be reconsidering my morning glass of pink grapefruit juice now that I know it’s made pink not by the actual grapefruit, but by the inclusion of bug juice. Yoplait strawberry yogurt, Good & Plenty candy, red popsicles… yep, all made with bugs.

The US Food and Drug Administration has received complaints about the lack of appropriate labelling with regards to cochineal extract, and food activists hope to have the law changed by the end of the year so the ingredients are labelled more clearly. While allergic reactions to cochineal extract are rare, they do occur, particularly in factory workers who are regularly exposed to the product.

In the meantime, it’s hard for the average consumer to know what contains cochineal beetles and what doesn’t. A reasonable rule of thumb is to assume that any and all candies and junk food probably contain synthetic dyes. When it comes to foods otherwise considered healthy such as that yogurt or grapefruit juice, you’ve got to read the labels and watch for flags like “synthetic color”, “artificial color”, or the term carmine. Also beware of the term “natural color”, because it doesn’t necessarily mean that the color comes from the ingredients in the product.

This post originally appeared on Growers and Grocers, part of the Wellfed Network.

Remember in the 70s when the humble granola bar resembled a stick of particle board and tasted about the same? We found them in our lunchboxes because they were supposed to be a healthy treat that wouldn’t rot our teeth. Then in the 80s, someone came up with the idea to make those granola bars chewy. With the addition of corn syrup to both sweeten and hold the cereal bits together, the hard nasty granola bar was a thing of the past and the cuts on the roofs of our mouths from the sharp granola corners healed up quite nicely.

Somehow, in the past twenty years when I wasn’t paying attention, the once lauded granola bar went from a healthy nutritious snack to well… candy. First came the chocolate chips, then the chocolate coating, then peanut butter, and finally caramel and even frosting. The scary part is, there are people out there buying these things for their kids (or themselves) believing them to be a reasonable treat, or even a good replacement for a meal.

My husband, who will hereafter be known as the Granola Bar Guinea Pig (or GBGP for short), was one of those folks who would grab a granola bar as he was walking out the door to catch his bus in the morning. Along with a travel mug of coffee, that was usually his breakfast, eaten on the subway on his way to work. No amount of whining, pleading, cajoling or demanding on my part would convince him that the junk he was eating for breakfast wasn’t healthy. He’d point to the “Whole Grains” claim on the package, roll his eyes at me for being such a crazy organic-loving crunchy-granola (heh!) hippie and run for the bus.

Recently, I took my GBGP to the local supermarket and set him free in the granola bar aisle. Including products such as oatmeal and cereal bars (but not PopTarts), we counted over 50 different products that were either granola bars or some version thereof - keep in mind that I’m in Canada, so you folks in the US probably have about double that number of options. We brought home 7 different boxes, purposely avoiding any that included chocolate, caramel or anything resembling candy – and there’s actually one with candy-coated chocolate bits – selecting products that were marketed in some way to be healthy and nutritious. Here’s what we found:

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As someone who makes a point of avoiding most pre-packaged food that comes from the typical North American supermarket, it is undoubtedly hypocritical of me to admit the following…

I buy pre-packaged Indian food.

Not on any regular basis, mind you, but whenever I make it across town to Little India, and I go a little wild in the Indian grocery stores. We fill our shopping basket with little boxes of things like paneer, frozen iddly, gulab jamun mix (or even canned gulab jamun) and then we come home and compile dinner.

In our defense, most pre-packaged Indian foods are pretty healthy to begin with - most stuff is completely absent of preservatives, the methods of canning and boil-in-bag packaging being more than enough to keep the food tasty.

We do this mostly to allow us to try new dishes that aren’t always available in restaurants and to be able to see what things are like before attempting to cook up a pot of stuff ourselves.

This is our most recent “Boxes of India” meal.

Clockwise from the top: frozen paratha, pulao rice (homemade), Goan fish and eggplant (made from a spice mix blended with coconut milk with fresh sole and eggplant added), Sarsan ka Saag (stewed mustard leaves), Patra Curried with mango chutney, frozen veggie samosa, and channa daal (homemade).

For dessert, individually packaged soan cake, complete with a teeny tiny little spoon.

It’s not the same as making everything from scratch, to be sure, but just as soon as I can track down fresh mustard leaves, I’ll be trying a homemade version of the saag.

Here’s one for the “What Were You Thinking????” file.

Every now and again, I get a craving for Pillsbury Cinnamon Rolls. Really, really bad cravings. Pillsbury Cinnamon Rolls are one of those weird comfort foods from my childhood - I can remember making the things with my Mom, being allowed to lick out the little plastic container of icing, waiting impatiently for the rolls to bake.

I try not to succumb to these cravings more than one or twice a year, given that Poppy Fresh is an evil little wad of dough full of trans-fats and corn syrup and other shit that will clog the arteries and send the insulin levels catapulting. But when I want the things, I really, really want the things. And today was one of those days.

Greg willingly allowed himself to be dispatched to the two variety stores nearby in search of the tantalizing blue can of fat and sugar. I offered to come with, but I had my nose in the paper and his assurance that he’d only be a minute left me complacent. Surely I could trust my husband to walk the half block to the Hasty Market and select a package of pastry.

He was a long time in returning, though, and when Greg finally entered the apartment again, my first thought was: “Why did he pick up a Burger King bag off the ground and put the can of dough in it?” Because this is the only thing my mind could come up with to explain why there was a Burger King bag inside my apartment.

Now I never really ate at Burger King back when I ate fast food. Mostly because there just wasn’t one nearby. MacDonald’s was far more prevalent and if I wanted a burger, I tended to prefer the Canadian chain Harvey’s, although I was more likely to head to Kentucky Fried Chicken or Swiss Chalet. So the Burger King bag left me mighty confused, mostly because the idea of actually entering the place and buying something there would be as likely to pass through my head as going to the salon beside the Burger King and having a set of fake nails with airbrushed palm trees applied to my fingers. In other words - not at all.

So with great fear I asked, “Why do you have a Burger King bag?”

Apparently, Burger King sells cinnamon buns.

“You bought food at Burger King?”

At first, my darling husband got defensive. “You wanted cinnamon rolls! You don’t have to eat them.”

The Burger King is next to a Coffee Time, a donut chain where he could have purchased a reasonably passable cinnamon danish. Not quite Poppy Fresh with that sickening sweet icing that works like crack for the carb-addicted, but an acceptable substitute.

“Dude… you bought food from BURGER KING!!!!!!”

Then, I watched the various levels of realization cross his face. First, that he had presented burger chain food to his wife who is inordinately proud of the fact that she hasn’t eaten food from MacDonald’s since 1989, who stopped eating at burger chains not because of the food itself, but for ethical reasons. Then, as he took the little boxes out of the bag, and the smell hit his nostrils, that what he had carted home was a little box of grease masquerading as breakfast.

The cinnamon rolls at least were baked. Hard, nasty little thing that not only tasted like cardboard, but actually had the same texture, they were redeemed by the dipping tub of Pillsbury-like sugar and shortening, aka frosting. But… why was there also a container of table syrup?

French Toast sticks. These looked, smelled and tasted like chicken nuggets. Yes, I did taste one, and promptly spit it out. I don’t know if they were fried in the same grease that the nuggets are deep fried in, but that was by far, THE most disgusting thing I’ve ever had in my mouth.

We gave the dogs one of the French toast sticks and threw the rest away. The cinnamon rolls we did eat, I am ashamed to say, but they continue to sit like a rock in my gut, even now, hours later, reminding me that it’s not just some elitist sense of moral superiority that keeps me from the junk food chains, but the fact that the food is really and truly awful.

Greg is good-naturedly enduring my quite merciless taunting, honest and accepting in the fact that we all make some really terribly misguided decisions in our lives every now and again and that this most definitely was one of his.

I worry about the people for whom French Toast sticks from Burger King constitute a real breakfast, however. The people who think such food is actually tasty, and even delicious. Do those people exist? Are they all smokers with no tastebuds? Because I can’t believe that anyone is able to sell what Greg brought home this morning as “food”.

Maybe it’s just because my hockey season superstition is kicking in, but I think I jinxed the spinach.

In case you weren’t aware, there is a huge recall of bagged & washed spinach from the US due to an e-coli outbreak.

See, yesterday, I bought a bag of spinach. From the US. Much to my chagrin. In fact, I stood in the middle of the produce department at No Frills, and looked at Melsky as I wondered (very loudly so that the produce guy could hear me) why the hell the only spinach available in a supermarket in Toronto, mere miles from the main growing region in southern Ontario, was from fucking California.

I think I made the spinach gods angry.

But hey, I was right, wasn’t I? If there had been Ontario spinach, I’d be eating it right now. Instead, we had a spinachless dinner.

And now the word “spinach” is starting to look all weird, like it does when you write it out too many times. But I’d just like to apologize once more for cursing the spinach and putting everyone in jeopardy.

I meant to write a recap of a couple of food events I attended on the weekend and it’s already Wednesday.

The Vegetarian Food Fair (my interview with the Executive Director can be found on the September 8th issue of Gremolata) was bigger than ever and sadly, less interesting than previous years. They’ve segregated all of the political groups to one area so there are no rabid Peta volunteers glaring at the folks from the happy dairy farm booth beside them. And maybe we’ve just run the gamut of new and exciting soy-based products to try, but there wasn’t much of anything there that I hadn’t had before.

What there was a lot of was protein/energy bars. Six different booths that we counted, all of them touting various health benefits and all of them vegan. I’m assuming the regular ones are not vegan? I don’t know for sure, as I have very little interest in the things - they all taste like plastic and cardboard to me. The other thing there was a lot of was tea. Tea and energy bars. One of the sponsors of Harbourfront Centre (where the fair was held) used to be Lipton and there was a weird clause that vendors at the various events that took place over the summer couldn’t sell tea. Looks like that sponsorship is done because you couldn’t move without hitting a table of tea samples. Or protein bars.

We ate dinner in the makeshift vegetarian food court tent and I made the mistake of getting the combo plate from Vegetarian Haven instead of the wiser decision of a dosa. Greg said it best with the comment “This is exactly the kind of food that gives vegetarianism a bad name.” He wisely headed to the Hare Krishna booth, which made me recall my punk-rock days in Halifax when we’d all go to the dinners at the Krishna temple for the free food.

***

On Sunday we hit the Taste of Toronto event at Metro Hall. Besides the fact that it was fucking cold (the park at Metro Hall is surrounded by tall buildings on three sides and it was shady and windy), much of the food was dubious. Originally dubbed “Taste of the Entertainment District”, the event features food from local restaurants. Problem is, most of the restaurants in the entertainment district are less than stellar to begin with. Take that less than stellar food and slap in on a steam tray and you’ve got well… not very good food getting cold and soggy.

We found oysters for a buck a pop - New Brunswick oysters as opposed to the $2 each, 6/$10 PEI Malpeques at the other oyster place. Then I had a passable vegetarian combo from Southern Accent, a cajun/creole place. The blackened tofu was mediocre, but the coleslaw and corn bread were pretty decent. Greg hit a booth of Chinese food and was quickly disgusted as soon as he started eating. It was gawdawful. Torontonians - avoid Bright Pearl - if that was any indication of their regular menu, it was terrible. He tried again with fish and chips from Elephant and Castle - a pub-themed chain that we usually avoid because the ambience is just awful.

After that we hit the bar and Greg had a beer. Having recently discovered that I am able to drink Merlot in small quantities without my head exploding (fewer tannins, apparently) I experimented by branching out and having a glass of Cabernet. Which I quickly returned. Despite the chilly weather, the bottle had been sitting in the sun and my wine was actually hot. A bit of sugar and a cinnamon stick and I could have mulled the stuff.

That night we went out for dinner to celebrate my birthday the following day. As is usual with my birthday celebrations,it was a giant fuck-up, possibly caused by the stupid Toronto International Film Festival filling up every decent restaurant and bar in the city. In any case, we had planned on dinner at Terroni a decent southern Italian place, but they don’t take reservations and there was a line down the block when we arrived. A phone call to Fressen, a local vegan place was not fruitful, and we so started walking. We hit a new Mexican place that had room for us, but it was loud and tighly packed and not conducive to conversation. So we ended up at Epicure, which seems to be our fallback for situations like this, but which should really be our first and only choice. It’s one of the best French bistros in town and they’ve expanded their menu to include pizzas and wraps, alongside the French bistro fare and stellar burgers (regular, chicken, veggie and soy!). Something for everyone, decently priced and a big quiet table at the back with room for all of us.

***

In my last bit of food news, this is my last week at the WellFed Network - both in terms of writing and editing. I want to concentrate on other stuff (like that damned novel!) and the administrative aspects of the gig were beginning to frustrate me. Not a people person, me, and the chasing after writers for their work really started to get to me, making me even more of a curmudgeon than usual. In any case, you can check out my final fire and brimstone posts on Growers and Grocers and FitFare.