Save Your Fork… There’s Pie

Despite the fact that it’s 32 freakin’ degrees celcius in Toronto today, it is actually Autumn. And in Chinatown, where they’re getting ready to celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival, they’re buying mooncakes.

Wikipedia says:

Mooncake is a Chinese pastry traditionally eaten during the Mid-Autumn Festival. Typical mooncakes are round or rectangular pastries, measuring about 10 cm in diameter and 4-5 cm thick. A thick filling usually made from lotus paste is surrounded by a relatively thin (2-3 mm) crust and may contain yolks from salted duck eggs. Mooncakes are rich, heavy, and dense compared with most Western cakes and pastries. They are usually eaten in small wedges accompanied by Chinese tea.

I’ve been able to find non-egg mooncakes all year long throughout Chinatown, but the ones with eggs are more readily available during the Mid-Autumn Festival.

I became interested in the traditional version last year after attending a tea ceremony demonstration at the Bata Shoe Museum (no, I still can’t figure out the connection, either). Besides the tea, there was a demo on how to make mooncakes, with plenty of samples, and I was one of the few who actually enjoyed them. A lot of people were put off by the saltiness of the preserved eggs against the sweetness of the filling.

The Wikipedia entry has a great deal of info on various fillings, healthy versions, and even ice cream versions, and it should be pointed out that regular mooncakes are made with a lard-based pastry and can weigh in at about 1000 calories each. Which is alot for something the size of a hockey puck.

For our mooncake shopping, we headed to Kim Moon Bakery on Dundas West, the premiere spot to buy bakery versions of this delicacy. All the supermarkets in Chinatown have stacks of tins, ranging in price of about $9 up to $50, but the flavours tend to all be the same. Kim Moon had about twenty variations on offer ranging from $4 each up for eggless cakes to about $10 each for ones with four eggs. As the eggs represent good luck, the more eggs the better, unless you’re watching your cholesterol. We grabbed a coconut mooncake and a red bean mooncake, both with one egg each, but could have had green bean paste, traditional lotus paste, nut or nuts and ham. And that was at the end of the day, with lots of empty shelves.

The “Golden Pig” came from Oriental Harvest on Spadina, and was not nearly as tasty as the regular cakes. The pastry was dry, the filling not especially sweet, and while the pig was very detailed on top, there was only half of him, with no feet or belly. They took the time to give him a teeny bumhole, though, so let’s not assume there was a complete lack of attention to detail.

For a more authentic perspective on mooncakes and the Mid-Autumn Festival (what, you’re not going to take the fat white girl’s word for it?) Serious Eats has a great piece by Wan Yan Ling, and over at TasteTO, Irene Ng did a taste test for us on some of the new flavoured versions.

 I’ve been working on getting Greg to try durian fruit. He’s a big ‘fraidy cat, and while he’s made it past the sniff test, he still won’t buy one. Granted, they can get pretty big. So I figured we’d start off small, and picked up a baby jackfruit in Chinatown on Saturday.

Jackfruit can grow up to 80 pounds each, so this little 1.5 pounder definitely qualified as a “baby”. What I didn’t realize is that jackfruit come in crunchy and custardy versions, and while I was familiar with the crunchy one from 20 years ago when I first moved to Toronto and ran around Chinatown buying anything I didn’t recognize, I’d never had a custardy one.

Related to breadfruit, jackfruit comes from Southeast Asia. It can be eaten raw or cooked, and the seeds can be eaten as well. To cut the fruit open, all surfaces (knife, hands, board) must be oiled, as the fruit oozes a sticky white latex that sticks to everything.

Herein lies the problem. I had no real trouble cutting the fruit open. I had no trouble dealing with the stench of rotting onions that the exterior emitted. But those little blobs of custardy fruit tasted like… latex.

Flavours and especially smells, being connected with emotion and memory, can sometimes take us to unexpected places. For me, that first mouthful of jackfruit (and all the ones after that - I kept trying, hoping I’d get over it) reminded me EXACTLY of sitting in the dentist’s chair as a kid.

I had a lot of dental work done as a child, lots and lots of fillings in my soft, British-gened teeth. And every time the dentist did a filling back then, they’d put a dental dam around the tooth to keep bits of stuff from going into the rest of the mouth. Nowadays, they come in flavours, but are still made of a “natural latex”. But the taste of latex is a very distinct one, and as I chewed away at the little gobs of jackfruit, I started to gag.

I was eight years old again, sitting in the dentist’s chair, with that awful, horrible taste of latex against my tongue.

Fortunately, Greg liked the jackfruit, and has no such childhood trauma. Also fortunately, it was just a baby jackfruit, not a massive 80-pounder.

Spent the morning at our local taking part in a 100-mile brunch hosted by the MPP for the riding, Peggy Nash. I’m still not sure why Ms. Nash decided to put together such an event (we’ve got a Provincial election coming up, not a Federal one), but as the $25 price went to FoodShare, and as it was a 5-minute walk from home, we figured why not.

The event went off okay, but it wasn’t perfect. Food-wise, it appears that the primary food produced within a 100-mile radius is pork. Pretty much every part of the pig was accounted for, to the detriment of the vegetarians in the room. Vegans were completely SOL unless they stuck to the fruit plate. I loaded up on salad, cheese panini and a slice of Spanish potato omelet. While all the food was good, and was created by area chefs, the overall menu lacked cohesiveness. It felt like a potluck where no one consulted anyone else on what they were bringing.

Technical issues kept the coffee lukewarm for the first while and when I mentioned aloud that there was cream and milk but no sugar, some woman wagged a finger at me. “Sugar is not grown within 100 miles.” She came really close to wearing a cup of non-local coffee.

And this brings me again to my regular ranting about how truly **stupid** the 100-mile diet actually is. I get local. I’ve made a point of eating locally-grown food, when it is available, all my life. Yet the same people who preach what is really an unsustainable, elitist, racist diet when you take our climate and population into consideration are more than happy to make exceptions for the foods they cannot live without.

Fortunately, Debbie Field of FoodShare spoke at the event and it pleases me to see that someone else sees beyond the trendiness of the local food movement. She pointed out that we need to focus on feeding the poor, giving them access to healthy food, regardless of how far away it was grown, and that in a city with such a large immigrant population, it’s not at all appropriate to dictate that everyone must eat food grown in this region.

Thanks to Field’s involvement in the event, funds were directed to three local drop-in centres that offer meals to those in need. Which is a cause that I can totally get behind, even if it means some finger-wagging from the elitists.

Chow has an interesting piece this week about how entree prices in Boston-area restaurants are breaking the $40 mark.

Now I eat out a lot, here in Toronto, and I’ve come across a few $40 entrees, although most still hover in the high-$20 range. But I’m seeing a lot less food on the plate for that >$30 cost. I recently paid $25 for a piece of trout and a handful of vegetables. The trout was probably 1/3 to 1/4 of a filet, so 6 to 8 portions from the entire fish. That’s a $200 fish in terms of profit! And yeah, sure, there’s associated costs and overhead, but still - it was an appetizer-sized portion. I needed a snack when I got home.

The Chow piece quotes Anthony Bourdain, who indicated that for a place like Boston, which no one really thinks of as a “foodie” town, chefs overcharge because it imparts a mystique. In other words, patrons are willing to pay because they can boast about it after the fact, and it makes everyone feel terribly cosmopolitan.

Which makes me wonder if Toronto is suffering from the same kind of insecurity. Local chefs get a lot of hype from a few key media and they start to believe that they have to overcharge in order to preserve some kind of status and cachet. As a customer, this kind of attitude burns my ass. If I’m paying $25 for a tiny portion of trout just so some hotshot chef can wank over how hot and trendy his restaurant is, the least he can do is not cook the thing to mush.

I don’t mind paying a fair price (or even a slightly inflated price) to a restaurant where the food is outstanding, but for $40, or $30, or even $25, you’d best not be serving me chintzy portions of bad food.

I am a season pusher. By then end of winter, I’m so ready for spring, and by the end of summer, I’m really ready for fall, especially fall foods.

We had a lovely cool weekend, with cold nights and crisp but sunny days. I made a list of all the fall foods I can’t wait to get started on, both for cooking and eating.

• squash soup
• minestrone soup
• cabbage rolls
• lasagna
• risotto - mushroom, roasted beet, spinach and squash
• hearty roasted root vegetables
• mushroom pastries
• mashed potatoes
• pumpkin pie
• chili
• fresh-baked bread
• baked apples
• roasted stuffed squash

Then I checked the weather and realized that we’ve got summer temperatures still for the next week. And since the heat was turned on yesterday (and thus, the central AC turned off), I would have one stinking hot apartment if I were to make bread or lasagna.

Soooo impatient.

So what amazing fall foods are you guys excited about finally making again?

I’m eating chocolates and it’s bittersweet. I had been craving “box o’ chocolates” (as opposed to the swank organic, fair-trade, single-origin stuff I usually eat) and grabbed a box of Pot of Gold the other day. They’re getting hard to find.

The Pot of Gold brand was developed in the 1920s by a confectionery company in Halifax, Nova Scotia called Moir’s. Moir’s had started in 1815 as a bakery, but by 1873 was exclusively making candy and chocolates. Moir’s was actually the first company to come up with a mixed assortment box, and the Pot of Gold was an instant hit, becoming and remaining the best-selling boxed chocolate in Canada for decades. In most of the Maritimes, it wasn’t Christmas without at least one box under the tree, although you might also find rival Ganong as well.

Moir’s was sold to Nabisco brands in 1967 and in 1975, moved across the harbour from their location on Argyle Street in Halifax, to a modernized plant in Dartmouth. Hershey acquired the Nabisco confectionery division in 1987 and expanded the Pot of Gold line to a variety of different assortments.

In recent years, poor old Pot of Gold hasn’t been doing so well and the plant in Dartmouth is slated to close by December of this year. Besides putting hundreds of workers out of a job, it destroys the last vestiges of a company that got its start almost 200 years ago and that has been a part of Halifax culture for just about everyone in that city.

I can remember the old factory on Argyle street only vaguely. My mother worked nearby and the couple of times I visited her at work as a child, I remember the smell of chocolate permeating every part of the downtown. I also remember when the factory was being torn down (I would have been 7), to make way for the Halifax Metro Centre, and thinking how sad it was that the wonderful smell of chocolate would be gone.

So interwoven are these chocolates with my childhood memories that I based a novel around the old Moir’s factory and the Pot of Gold chocolates. It hasn’t been published yet, but now, more than ever, I am determined to do so, to help keep a piece of Halifax history alive.

I’ve seen different statements as to the fate of Pot of Gold. Hershey originally announced their intention to sell off the Pot of Gold brand because “it does not fit its corporate strategy.” (In other words, it wasn’t selling well.) There’s a lot more variety out there now, so people have more choices. Hershey’s also messed around with the collection too much, making Pot of Gold dark, milk chocolate, caramel collections, and removing a number of old favourites from the original. It’s not Pot of Gold without my roman nougat!

The latest indication seems to be that the collection will remain but the jobs will move to Mexico, where pesky things like unions don’t get in the way of profits. Moir’s never had a great reputation for the treatment of their workers back in the early days, but unionization improved that. Nova Scotians bought the chocolates regardless because they were locally made (and back in the early days, were probably all that was available), and because it became a long-standing tradition.

This will be the last Christmas where a Nova Scotian-made box of Pot of Gold will pass under the Christmas trees of Canadians. Even if they are still available, coming from Mexican factories, it just won’t be the same.

Time to stock up before the rainbow fades.

I found Eric Cartman’s dream food.

At the Health Food Expo yesterday (report coming Tuesday to TasteTO), a good third of the vendors there were representing companies that sold either those awful Powersauce bars, or Weight Gain 4000 type protein powder. Usually with big banners adorned with steroid-laden weightlifter types. Then we came across the Muscle brand of products.

 The box and the nutritional info I found online both say these are made with real cheese. Greg, cheesy poof fan extraordinaire, insists they were disgusting. I couldn’t actually bring myself to try them.

And for breakfast, let’s not forget the Muscle Oats and Milk. Apparently, there are people who really eat this stuff.

One of the things I’m loving about WordPress over LiveJournal is that WP gives you a whole page of blog stats. Not only can you track your daily number of hits and referring sites, but you get a list of “search engine terms” for each day.

That is, the exact word or phrase that someone plugged into Google that led them here.

Some of these crack me up.

There are the obvious ones: donair, lemon bars, donair pizza, cupcakes, save your fork, bouillabaisse,  fish and chips. All stuff that I talk about occasionally if not regularly. And then there are the ones that just hurt my head, such as: Rachael Ray lawsuit, Rachael Ray holds fork in left hand (you folks all need to get over Rachael Ray, yo!), what is bouillabaisse (2 of those yesterday), chef ricardo larrivee biography, spring rolls chain toronto nutrition, and the very best of all… jack the ripper + victims.

The last one floors me. At one point, long ago, I made mention that I had read every available published book on Jack the Ripper, but it was a brief example I used to illustrate that I’m a bit of a completionist.  The Google search led me through 20 or so pages before I gave up trying to find the link to Save Your Fork, so I have no idea how someone did a search on Jack the Ripper and slogged through hundreds if not thousands of Google entries before finding me.

The intarnets are a wild and wonderful thing, no?

I was at the corner store a few minutes ago, buying baklava to have with tea, when I discovered myself in line at the cash in between two separate men buying multiple bags of injera, the Ethiopian bread.

Because I am my father’s daughter and have picked up the habit of chatting to strangers, I joked to the guy behind me, “Is this as good as homemade?”

Apparently Ethiopian folks who have immigrated to Canada don’t make their own injera. The mitad, the flat pan the bread is cooked on, doesn’t fit on our traditional stovetops. In faltering English he also said, “it’s also hard… to get right… when it is prepared…”

“When it’s fermenting?” I asked. His face lit up.

“I’ve always wanted to try and make it, ” I said. “My husband and I eat Ethiopian food a lot.”

He shook his head. “Even our ladies have hard time. You should just buy.”

Now I want to try it more than ever. But the teff, the grain used in injera, is expensive, so I’m worried about screwing it up. Maybe I should just keep buying my injera at the Hasty Market. If it’s good enough for the local Ethiopians, who am I to argue?

Today on Serious Eats, Ed Levine mentions a piece in The New York Times about a crackdown on parents sending kids to school with cupcakes for birthday celebrations. Apparently, in an effort to stave off childhood obesity, cupcakes are now forbidden.

Folks in the comments section bring up some relevant issues, such as:

• How can schools get away with selling/providing pizza and french fries in the cafeterias, yet ban occasional treats?
• If you’re banning cupcakes, does that mean kids are going to stop selling candy bars or Girl Guide cookies as fundraisers?
• Maybe sending kids to school with a healthy lunch as opposed to cash to spend at McDonald’s every day would mean the occasional cupcake would actually be okay.

The thing to consider is that in the original case, in a Texas suburb, every child was bringing cupcakes for the class on their own birthday. Over the course of the year, that’s a whole lotta cupcakes. It’s also creates a mini class-system within the school; kids whose families cannot afford to supply the class with treats, kids whose parents send store-bought cupcakes instead of homemade, or kids whose birthdays fall outside of the school year, are all kinda screwed in the cupcake wars.

One of the suggestions in the comments was to have one event a month to celebrate all the birthdays that have taken place. This is still excessive and still leaves out the summer-born kids. I can’t recall ever having treats in school to celebrate one person’s birthday. We had parties throughout the year based on seasonal events or holidays, and I can remember bringing in treats for Halloween, Christmas or Valentine’s Day. In a multicultural school with children celebrating both typical Western holidays and things like Rosh Hashanah, Diwali, Eid, etc, I would think there would be plenty of opportunities for treats that also encompassed a cultural learning experience. (Or that may just be me wishing someone had turned me on to rugelach and burfi at a younger age.)

I loves me some cupcakes, and plan to bake some for my own birthday (despite being well past the age where I get to take them to school), but I am sort of on the fence in terms of a full-on cupcake ban. I think that school is not the place to celebrate each child’s birthday with treats (so maybe it’s more that sense of entitlement I’m against), but that occasional cultural holidays or parties can and should include treats, especially traditional or festive foods.

Children obviously need to learn about and practice healthy eating habits, but they also need to learn about eating treats in moderation - which is impossible if we don’t allow them any treats at all.