Save Your Fork… There’s Pie

First, an admission. I am not as well-travelled as I’d like to be. While I’ve been to most major cities in the US and Canada, I’ve never been across the big pond. Given my feelings about the environmental impact of travelling for pleasure, not to mention the fact that I just hate the process of travelling in general (waiting in airports, jammed onto a plane for hours next to someone with toxic perfume, etc) it is unlikely that I will end up seeing a lot of the world in my lifetime. Living in Toronto, that’s not really a big issue, as I’m lucky enough to be able to hop on a cross-town streetcar and be transported to Athens or Seoul or Bombay for the very reasonable cost of $2.75, but there are occasional things that even the wonders of globalization cannot bring to the most multicultural city in the world.

Things like buffalo mozzarella, that are consumed near where they’re made and generally are past their prime by the time they reach a destination on another continent. I always figured that until I was able to travel to Italy, I’d never get to enjoy the real stuff.

Oh, I’d eaten bocconcini, made locally from pasteurized cow’s milk and sold in tubs. Slightly softer than regular mozzarella, I found the stuff to be pretty bland and tasteless, although the various sizes of little cheese balls were fun to put in salad. I never really got the “silky” description though - most of the stuff I ended up with had the consistency and bounce of one of those hard little superballs you could get in gum machines as a kid. You’d whip them at the floor and they’d bounce forever off of every surface, until your Mom would come and yell at you lest the thing took out a piece of the Royal Doulton collection. Suffice to say that in the grand realm of cheese, bocconcini really wasn’t near the top of my list.

Then Greg called me from the aisles of Pusateri’s. Did I want some real buffalo mozzarella? I was recovering from the stomach flu at the time but said sure, as long as I didn’t have to eat it right away.

When I finally got around to opening the cheese - it came in a sealed plastic tub - I wasn’t expecting much. We had some nice ciabatta buns, some decent local tomatoes and some fresh basil to make sandwiches. I peeled off the wrapper and drained off the whey, holding the single tennis-ball sized lump of cheese in my hand. Right away, I could tell the difference.

The consistency was soft, squishy almost, and when I sliced into the cheese, it cut unevenly. Silky is a great description of this cheese because the texture was almost exactly like silken tofu. I split the ball between the two sandwiches and drizzled both with a mixture of a rare fruity olive oil and some fig balsamic vinegar laced with fleur de sels.

Flavour-wise, there is no comparison with the pasteurized cow’s milk version. Even after its long journey and time spent in my fridge, the buffalo milk cheese had a sweet tang, and smelled of grass. What I mean to say is that it actually HAD flavour, whereas the stuff we have access to most of the time tastes like nothing, just bland and white. To the tooth, the buffalo mozzarella gave way, crumbling almost and falling out of the edges of the sandwich. The rubbery bounce we were accustomed to was not there at all.

At $10 for 200g, this is obviously going to be more expensive than your supermarket bocconcini, but it’s comparable to many other good imported cheeses (for instance, aged Mimolette runs about $14 for the same quantity). It’s a high-fat cheese; 100g has 23g of fat, close to half of the recommended daily intake of fat (the sneaky little Canadian nutritional label shows a serving size as being 28g - about 1/8 of the ball - HA!! with only 6g of fat), so even without it being hard to find, it’s definitely not something you could eat every day.

So the lack of availability is probably a good thing. But if it shows up again, we will definitely treat ourselves. After all, a trip to Pusateri’s is cheaper and easier than a flight to Italy.

If you follow food politics at all, you’re probably aware of the theory that “local is the new organic”. Where we once fought to have food that was pesticide-free, over the past couple of years, what with the attention towards global warming, people have clued in that maybe cutting down on the distance their food travels would be a good thing, too.

The pinnacle of this philosophy would have to be the 100-mile diet in which people make every effort to source all of their food from within a one hundred mile radius. This is easier said than done, particularly when you live somewhere like Toronto. Even if we assume people are willing to give up all coffee, tea, chocolate and citrus, there’s also things like spices to be considered. Imagine living life with absolutely no salt and pepper. Or flour.

Despite the inconvenience and overall lack of logic, the 100-mile diet seems to have its proponents and the San Francisco Gate recently gave coverage to three families trying to stick to the diet. However, the food writer for the East Bay Express made his opinion resoundingly clear…

Unless you make decisions for an entity like Chez Panisse, whose mission involves influencing fellow businesses to reduce impacts, isn’t a complex scheme of artificial limitations on your daily life the kind of self-indulgent game that elites love to play? Isn’t it a bit like masturbation? As the father of the Chron staffer is quoted as saying: “This challenge sounds like something for people with too much spare time.”

I want to focus on the comment about elites within this quote. I attend a variety of conferences, symposia and gathering for the food industry and the elite issue comes up again and again. So much so that it’s embarrassing.

Why is it embarrassing? Because it’s true.

Canadians spend an average of 9% of their income on food. That rate is about 11% in the US and 18% in the UK. We have access to cheap food because of the systems of import that are set up. We get asparagus from Peru because even though it’s thousands of miles away, it’s still cheaper to grow that asparagus in South America and ship it to Toronto than it is to grow it here - even when it is in season.

Those of us who can afford it are happy to eschew the well-travelled supermarket produce and wait for local stuff, when it’s at its peak. In fact, it can even be a sensual delight. But many many more people don’t have the time to run around town to all the farmers markets to find asparagus at twice the price of the supermarket version.

When I look around at these events, after listening to some food expert insist that our food costs are too low and we all need to be supporting local farmers, I see mostly middle-class white people. Educated people who have knowledge about our food systems, but also people who have the leisure to visit the farmer’s market on a weekday morning, or drive to Niagara for wine. I doubt very much that any of us has lately had to compare prices on discount boxes of mac and cheese, or worse, stand in line at a food bank.

This, of course, takes us into a whole range of other issues like minimum wage and support systems for the underprivileged, but it’s something that is always at the forefront of my mind on those occasions. Because trying to follow the 100-mile diet, regardless of where you live, is definitely an activity that only the elite can partake in. That single mom working two jobs who still finds herself having to choose between groceries and new boots for her kids has better things to do than to worry about if the wheat used to make her Wonderbread was grown within a 100-mile radius.

I am absolutely about supporting local farmers, and I am even more in favour of eating seasonally (you really shouldn’t be able to buy strawberries in January), but I’m also practical enough to realize that most people can’t and won’t give up the basic necessities. It shouldn’t be about individuals limiting themselves for a philosophical way of eating, but about changing the system as a whole so local produce is more easily accessible (and affordable) within the supermarket system. Until that happens it will be only the elite who can afford to partake.

It’s been a weird week and it’s only Tuesday.

Some of you may remember the post I made a few weeks back looking for folks who copy restaurant recipes at home. This was for an upcoming article for the Globe and Mail and they actually interviewed me as well. Today they sent a photographer out to my apartment and she took hundreds of photos of me making an apple omelette to go with my part of the article.

I was incredibly nervous - first because I hate having my photograph taken, and secondly because omelettes are one of those things that never turn out pretty when you really desperately need them to. I make omelettes for breakfast fairly regularly and they’re always ugly, messy things.

My friends, I rocked the omelette. I don’t even care if the photos make me look like a fat troll, because that was the most beautiful omelette I’ve ever made. It even flipped perfectly. I was astounded - I had armed myself with plenty of eggs, expecting I’d have to make three or four to get something decent, but no… first try.

The apple filling was beautiful and when we were done, the photographer and I sat down and ate the thing and it was probably the best tasting version of this dish I’d ever done as well.

I’m not sure when it will run, but supposedly it’s going up on the website, so I’ll post a link when it’s published.

Warning – this post contains discussion of vomiting.

Food, being, ideally, a sensual pleasure, is one of those things that we either really love or really abhor. Individual foods, I mean.

As children, we go through phases where we dislike different things, based on taste, texture or smell. As we age, those tastes usually adapt and progress, and we willingly eat spinach or beans or whatever food it is we hated so ardently in our youth.

The one exception to this is when food becomes associated with a traumatic event, particularly something physically traumatic like a serious illness. Watching in all come back up can turn us off from ever desiring a particular food again.

When I was a kid, my Mom was a big fan of cream of tomato soup. She always added additional milk to our soup, in part to cool it and additionally to make it creamier. Except one day, the soup was too hot and the milk curdled, although I didn’t know it at first spoonful. Haven’t been able to eat cream of tomato soup since then. I can’t, to be completely honest, even watch other people eat it, especially if they break crackers into it.

Crackers and jam was the first solid food I was offered once after a bout of stomach flu (which conveniently began while racing around Halifax Harbour in a speedboat - we all thought I was just seasick at first). I can eat crackers with anything else on them, I will happily and joyfully eat jam on anything else, but thirty years later, I cannot eat crackers and jam together.

Cannot is the wrong word to use though, because obviously I can, I am capable of, eating a simple cracker with jam on it. It won’t kill me, and I think I’ve even done it under duress at least once. But the idea of crackers and jam sets something off in my head that sends me hurtling back to my little pink bedroom; I can picture the bed linen, the curtains, the toys and books, the collection of Barbie dolls, and that plate of crackers and glistening red strawberry jam than went flying onto the floor as I made a dash for the bathroom after the first bite.

My most recent bout of stomach flu has done pretty much the same thing. Almost all the foods I ate the day it hit are now verboten. I can’t, suddenly, stand the smell of my beloved coffee. The thought of the bread pudding I had at a local café for brunch freaks me out, and the dear, unassuming piece of lemon meringue pie I ate when my stomach first started rumbling and I simply assumed I had coffee gut and needed more food, may well be lost to me forever. Is there life without coffee and lemon meringue pie? I may have to discover.

More intriguing than the squicks is what I find myself craving. Once I had consumed litres of Gatorade, apple juice and flat gingerale, and the idea of solid food came back minus the shuddering, it was actually to my childhood I went again. Chicken noodle soup, damn the vegetarianism, would be the only cure. Then vegetable soup with beef broth. Both had restorative powers, despite my ethics. A tub of raspberry sorbet wedged into the back of the freezer officially became my favourite food ever. I even found myself craving Granny Smith apples – thin slices, exactly like the ones that garnished my plate of bread pudding. Theoretically, the apple should be off the list, but perhaps because it was crisp and fresh, it’s allowed to stay as a “good” food.

My brain seems to have a category it refers to as “clean, fresh food” that it leans to in times of physical crisis. Hangovers, the day after acid trips back in the 80s, and recovery from illness all demand salad. Not swank fancy salad with sundried tomatoes and olives and cheese, just iceberg lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, maybe some grated carrot. And French dressing. No, I don’t know why. I didn’t even have French dressing in the house today for my salad binge – I had to dig out a recipe and make some, but French it had to be, all brilliant reddish orange and tangy. This was not the time for single-origin olive oil and fig balsamic vinegar and freshly chopped herbs. My homemade stuff wasn’t quite as satisfying as if it had been the cloyingly sweet bottled stuff from the evil corporation (or better yet, if the entire salad had come from Red Lobster, complete with croutons and a slice of cold Bermuda onion), but I do have to draw the ethical line somewhere, even when it comes to cravings.

Over the next few days as my body recovers and I start eating larger portions of richer food again, all of these cravings and squicks will fade away. Of course, I will go back to drinking coffee, absolutely I will patch up my spat with eggs and cheese, citrus fruit (I threw up a whole glass of orange juice) will go back into regular rotation. But in the meantime, I am curious to learn what my body (and brain) thinks it wants and doesn’t want.

I tried to convince myself that I could continue to eat like this forever; little tiny portions of light but nutrient-packed foods, but I know it won’t happen. Eventually I will answer the call of chocolate and red wine, or a nice hunk of aged Mimolette. Definitely the devil’s starchy fingers in the form of double-cooked French fries. Or perhaps Red Lobster or something significantly worse.

The body wants what it wants and right now, it’s my job to see that the good stuff goes in and the bad stuff stays out. I am but a servant to a precocious and temperamental master.

Chocolate amaretto cupcake with amaretto butter cream, garnished with shavings of 85% cacao single-origin Djakarta chocolate.

Note to self - check the publication date on books you borrow from the library. Sometimes you just don’t want to go there.

This note to self is provoked by a recent library acquisition that wasn’t exactly what I was expecting. The Great Canadian Literary Cookbook, while definitely Canadian, in a way only Canadians can be, is unfortunately, not Great. Not by a long shot.

I grabbed this book originally because I thought it would be a bit more… literary, in its content. I’ve had an idea to create an anthology of food memoirs by Canadian authors and sort of expected this would be along those lines. And certainly, there are some great food-related books by Canadian authors out there - Austin Clarke, for instance.

Let me start from the beginning. Every year in Sechelt, British Columbia, Canadian writers and readers come together for The Festival of the Written Arts. It’s now called the Sunshine Coast Festival of the Written Arts, and no, I don’t know where Sechelt, BC, is exactly, although somewhere along the BC coast is my best guess. After one festival the organizers came up with the idea to do a cookbook with contributions from festival participants. In 1994, they published the cookbook.

It’s a nice idea, no doubt, and most definitely a keepsake for the folks who were there and experienced the festival. (Not so much for the original owner of this particular book, though. The inscription on the first page indicates it was a Christmas gift to “Al” who, it appears, donated the book to the Toronto Public Library when he tired of it, which was probably somewhere around Boxing Day.) But the result turned out to be more like one of those spiral bound community cookbooks where locals get together and create and sell cookbooks to raise money for charity. This one looked nicer, but the content was pretty much the same.

See, the problem with the great Canadian Literary Cookbook is that the majority of the writers included are not particularly well-known. There are no secret cookies recipes from chez Atwood, no thoughtful stews from Ondaatje, no Richler family chicken soup. There’s clam chowder from Pierre Burton, beef stew from Ben Wicks, other people’s recipes from Carol Shields, and a recipe for chicken fajitas from that Vinyl Cafe guy. Plus a whole lot of really not outstanding recipes from a bunch of unknown poets and writers, mostly from British Columbia, who no one has ever heard from again.

The other issue, as was the case with the contributions from Carol Shields, is that not everyone knows how or likes to cook. Many of the recipes included are attributed to friends, family or neighbours. Many writers didn’t submit recipes at all, but rather essays on how they can’t cook and have no recipes to contribute. In many cases these were better reading than anything else in the book, because one can only take so many recipes for welsh cakes (3 in total) or dry writer’s bios before one needs a little something amusing.

Of particular note was a piece from BC writer Christie Harris who recounts her attempt at making 7 minute icing by adding gelatin. Harris was born in 1908, so the request for the particular cake and frosting likely came at the heyday of its popularity in the late 40s or early 50s. When, after much whipping and cooking, the frosting wouldn’t set, Harris added gelatin:

So I quickly slathered the cake with the 7 minute icing until it shone like the peaks of the Rocky Mountains. I stuck in the candles before it could change its mind. [...] Only… as the knife went down, down, down, the icing went down, down down with it. So she pulled the knife up… up, up, up and the icing came up, up, up with it. Like elastic. Her sister slashed across the gummy strand with her knife and proved that this elastic had two-way stretch.

Honestly, that passage was the most interesting in the whole book. The recipes are mediocre dinner favourites that almost everyone has in their own repertoire. The writer photos that accompany each biography show ladies with nice perms and those owlish 80s-style eyeglasses, even though the book was published in 1994.

So if you happen to come across the Great Canadian Literary Cookbook in your library travels (because I don’t suspect you can buy it new anywhere), my advice would be to leave it on the shelf. There are no recipes that will blow your mind and unless you like giggling at people with bad perms and outdated accessories, it’s a dish best left alone.