Save Your Fork… There’s Pie

Okay, so I’m flipping through one of the happy housewife magazines that I subscribe to, eating lunch and not really paying attention to what I’m reading ($160 is too much to pay for a hot trend item that looks good on exactly nobody and will be out of style in 6 months) when I come across an ad that makes me choke on my soup.

The eeeeevilest of evil corporations has gone organic.

Sweet motherfucking hell.

Currently Kraft is only offering crackers, salad dressing and coffee in organic form, but you can bet your sweet patootie that there’s more to come.

Although organic products have recently gained an increase in recognition, organic practices are deeply rooted in traditional agricultural methods. Organic farming practices employ a variety of ecologically stable methods to help sustain a healthy environment. Composting, recycling and crop rotations are just some of the holistic practices farmers utilize to ensure a sustainable land, where crops are grown with natural fertilizers such as manure and without the use of synthetic pesticides. Animals raised on organic farms have access to pasture and open air runs to foster their health and natural behaviour, and are raised without the use of growth hormones.

Kraft organic products are created with carefully selected organically grown ingredients, and their organic qualities are maintained at all stages of production. Organic foods are minimally processed and contain no artificial preservatives or genetically modified organisms (GMOs). 

Since when has Kraft been concerned about the environment? Or, for that matter, about people’s health? They’re owned by a cigarette company for fuck’s sake. Oh yeah, I remember now… organics is gaining in popularity by leaps and bounds. Kraft is interested in organics because there’s money to be made. Ka-fucking-ching.

The real question is what this means for everyone else. How does a mainstream company like Kraft getting into organics affect the other companies that have been working so hard for so long to not only sell their products but to help create and enforce the regulations that govern organic growers? Will we now see Kraft items showing up in places like WholeFoods or smaller health food stores? What will Kraft’s involvement with organic coffee do to the many co-operatives that have been created to assist growers? And if they’re going to the effort of producing organic coffee, why is it not also fair trade?

For years, people who supported the organic movement talked about making it more mainstream. Well Kraft is about as mainstream as you can go. I’m torn on this. Obviously, as someone who has made an effort to eat organic foods for almost a decade now, I’d love to see the mainstream embrace this trend. It’s good for consumers, it’s good for the environment… I just really, really don’t want it to be good for evil fucking Kraft Foods. They’re the problem, not part of the solution.

It’s October 24th and I ate local strawberries for breakfast this morning. This is crazy.

There are a few farmers who grow a variety of strawberry that is ever-bearing. That is, the plants produce fruit continuously from June until the first frost. Usually that first frost comes in early October, but this year, October has set record high temperatures, with days in the mid to high 20s. Thanksgiving hit 32′C, with a humidex of 40′C.  This is good strawberry weather.

I happened across this box at one of the fruit vendors at St. Lawrence Market yesterday. I stopped to buy a fresh fig and ignored the berries, figuring they were from California. Then I noticed the sign that said they were Ontario strawberries, and despite my mostly frugal ways (priced at $4.99, they were considerably more than the $3 to $3.50 I had been paying at the Farmer’s Markets all summer) I figured they would be the last berries I’d get until June, so I splurged.

Usually the ever-bearing berries tend to lose their flavour by the fall. They’re still better that the hard woody imported strawberries from the supermarket, but they’re just not as sweet as the first crop of the summer. These, however, taste like June berries. The warm weather and a decent amount of rain has made them plump and gorgeous and sweet.

We ate them with a vanilla-infused rice pudding sprinkled with grated chocolate. It was the perfect way to celebrate the last strawberries of the year.

So we finally broke down and bought a small freezer.

It’s something Greg and I had been discussing since the spring, but we dragged our heels too much and missed the boat on getting one in time to stock up on all the summer produce. My concerns were mostly getting one that was apartment-sized, but then realized that none of the smaller ones had any kind of Energy Star rating.

It came to a head earlier this week when I just ran out of space. I love running the recipe blog for Wanigan, but because of my schedule for TasteTO where I’m often out a couple of nights a week either at events or doing restaurant reviews, I’m just not keeping up with the grub I’ve been getting. So things don’t go to waste, I’ve been making lots of soup; it’s quick and easy for lunches, but those containers take up space, and there’s just no more room in the freezer compartment of the fridge.

So we called up a friend who works at an appliance company and next week, a little sub-compact (5.3 cubic feet, but takes up less floor space than a freezer with 2/3 the capacity) will arrive at my doorstep. I will be able to freeze more than one batch of soup. I will be able to freeze pie and cookies - at the same time! I can buy bread *and* rolls! And come spring, I can buy and freeze fiddleheads, asparagus, berries and more.

I don’t know why I didn’t do this before. (Well, yeah… Energy Star rating, tiny apartment kitchen…)

Many years ago, I lived in a very rough warehouse space (back before realtors got all snooty and called them “lofts”). We had to build in the kitchen from scratch and had to buy a fridge and stove. When we moved in, we realized that the previous tenant had left an old vintage fridge behind. I can totally see why people doing pretentious kitchen renovations add two fridges or a full-size freezer. We got such good use out of that second fridge. It was perfect for parties (because putting booze in the bathtub is just gross), and the rest of the time we cranked it up and used it as a freezer. I made 20 kinds of cookies that Christmas, just because I had some place to store them.

So I am totally stoked for my little freezer to arrive. Just in time, it should be noted, for the Christmas baking.

I once worked for a woman who was a whirlwind. Driven, creative, incredibly knowledgeable in her field, kind as can be, she nevertheless drove me and every other person who worked for her right around the bend. She was one of those folks who took on more and more work, spreading herself too thin, ignoring her family and friends. More importantly, she would swoop in, critiquing things that that we thought were fine, rearranging things that didn’t need rearranging, and generally leaving a path of chaos and destruction in her wake. She once pulled me from the sales floor on an excruciatingly busy afternoon so I could do her personal mending, leaving an inexperienced clerk to deal with a Saturday afternoon crowd, and prohibiting me from supplementing my pay with the commission I’d have made on the stuff I’d have sold had I not been hemming her skirt.

This is the impression I have of Alice Waters.

From its humble beginnings, Chez Panisse has been Alice Waters’ restaurant, but by impression only. She has never been the sole owner, and is in fact, one person on a board of directors. She has never been the main chef, although she would fill in when the place was between regular chefs, and she has always had full creative control of the menu. She has never been the manager of the place, leaving that task to a string of people, including her father, who were all faced with the task of forcing a bunch of flaky hippies to adhere to basic accounting systems. Which can’t help but provoke the question - what exactly is it that Alice Waters does at Chez Panisse?

From reading Thomas McNamee’s Alice Waters and Chez Panisse, we are to believe that Waters is the very soul of the place; the light in the fire, the scent of the flowers, the sweetness in the tart. Certainly, she has always been in control of the restaurant, despite the fact that she hasn’t actually run it alone.

Because Chez Panisse is its own little community with Waters as both the inspiration and glue that holds it together. It is a place where people are family, and Waters’ original dream was for it to be a place where customers felt as if they just belonged. Popularity may have dampened that dream somewhat - Chez Panisse is often considered the best restaurant in the United States, which of course, draws  the attention of folks who don’t fit into the family model.

The early part of McNamee’s book chronicles the trials and tribulations of the restaurant and the efforts to keep it running. Poor accounting and employee theft, not to mention the freebies staff (including Waters) gave away regularly, kept the place in the red until the mid-80s. As was typical of the era, sex and drugs were plentiful, although McNamee glosses over Waters’ trasgressions as much as possible. A less rosy picture of the ingenue-like restauranteur is painted in The United States of Arugula, which implies that Waters slept with just about every man who worked there.

Where things get interesting is when Waters begins spending less time in the restaurant itself (which, despite her being the soul of the place, seems to manage to do fine without her there) and more time on projects such as the Edible Schoolyard. This advocate for local, sustainable food is the Waters that we are more familiar with; the soft-voiced lady who brought the term “Slow Food” to North America, and who is often pegged as “the Mother of America Cooking”.

McNamee paints his subject in a rosy light, and yes, Waters’ achievements are not only laudable and far reaching, they are, as Chez Panisse was meant to be, inclusive. But I’d have liked a bit more grit, a bit more holding her to the fire for her bad behaviour, for letting other people do her dirty work.

And while Waters’ philosophy has permeated every aspect of the culinary world, from our growing  appreciation of farmer’s markets to the arrival of “California Cuisine” on our plates, her recent appearance on TV show The View shows that she can’t rest on her laurels just yet. Middle America has not yet heard the message Waters is preaching, despite her best efforts. Now in her early 60s, Waters does not yet appear ready to settle down and pass the torch on to someone else.

Alice Waters and Chez Panisse is McNamee’s homage to a woman who is definitely a trail-blazer, and for anyone interested in Waters’ later work, it’s a great read that many will find inspirational. But it does gloss over many of the interpersonal details of life at Chez Panisse (especially the early years), and can be overly-forgiving of Waters herself.

Autumn is undoubtedly my favourite season. It smells fantastic, the air is crisp, you sweat a whole lot less, and in terms of food, there is such a huge variety on offer. It also means the end of the harvest season, though, and I get how some people can find it a bit sad. Things are dying off, the summer is done, and it will be many long months before we can bite into a freshly picked strawberry or tomato again.

Which is why I was so excited to receive the email about one last Harvest Wednesday event at the Gladstone Hotel. Scheduling conflicts made this one a Harvest Monday, but that didn’t matter - the opportunity to sit with friends and enjoy one final meal from the CSA and Chef Breton’s kitchen was worth potentially missing Heroes (we didn’t).

Throughout the summer we enjoyed the rotating events of Harvest Wednesdays, from the cocktail-style finger food nights, to the grand buffets to the family-style passed dishes, with the bright summer sun streaming through the south-west facing windows. This final dinner definitely reminded us it was fall, for it was dark when we arrived and even darker when we left. My photos of the various dishes turned out to dark to use, even with some Photo-Shop tweaking, and I must admit that I forgot to photograph the hot dishes completely. I was too busy eating. Instead, here’s the menu with commentary.

Amuse
Pear and Prosciutto Roll
Niagara prosciutto, fresh pear, arugula and red onion wrapped in rice paper
sherry-mustard seed dip

I still don’t *love* that Niagara prosciutto, but the saltiness was countered by the other ingredients, and this was a really nice way to start the evening. Big enough that it didn’t feel like a tease, and an interesting combination of flavours and textures that went well together.

Salads
A Trio of Coleslaws
Savoy Cabbage, red cabbage and carrot, zest vinaigrette

Spinach Salad
Oven dried and fresh cherry tomatoes, polenta croutons, goat cheese vinaigrette

OMG! Polenta croutons. This was the one point where I regretted the family-style passed plate situation, because I’d have eaten every single one of these myself.

Hot Dishes
Chick-a-Biddy Acres Free Range Chicken
braised in red wine with button mushrooms and pearl onions

Brassica Empanadas
fresh baked pastries filled with chard, collards, kale, endive, bok choy, leek, sweet onion and salt cod

Eggplant, Toma Tomato and Fresh Mozzarella
broiled with thyme and oregano

Fingerling Potatoes
baked whole with garlic cloves

I’m still *trying* to stick to a vegetarian diet at home, but at events like this when I know there’s going to be amazing meat that tastes great and is cooked properly, I occasionally indulge. Because this chicken dish was so incredibly worth falling off the wagon for a night.

The empanadas I’ve had at Harvest Wednesdays before, and they’re really good. I do sort of feel that Chef is faced with the prospect of having lots of greens to feed us and feeling that he has to “sneak” them in somehow. Maybe it’s just because I like all the greens listed, but I’d have loved to see them featured more. I’m sure I’m in the minority on that count in terms of the diners, though.

Sweet
Warm Apple Galette
cranberry walnut topping, Price Edward County Ice Cider sabayon

This was a perfect autumn dessert, the walnuts slightly candied, the apple slightly underdone so as not to become mush, and the sabayon… oh. Our friend and neighbour who we were dining with didn’t care for the cream, but I’d have happily taken a bowl of the stuff and a spoon as my dessert.

And then it was over. Just like that, with no more to look forward to until next July.

One can look at events like this, that preach a certain sensibility, that advocate things like a sense of community, or knowing where your food comes from, and say that in the grand scheme of things, it really doesn’t matter. And I’m cynical enough to believe that - usually. Except that Harvest Wednesdays did exactly what it set out to do. It made us think about where our food comes from; allowing us to meet the people who grew our food and cooked our food. In attending these events, and helping to promote them via TasteTO, we became part of the community. We made new friends at Harvest Wednesdays, especially the dynamic duo of Roger and Joanne McLennan (Harvest Wednesday regulars) who were at almost every dinner we attended and who were amazing to sit and talk to. We got to know our neighbours better, literally - at two of the harvest table dinners we found ourselves sitting next to people from our apartment building.

Huge thanks to Chef Marc Breton and his hard-working staff for taking on the weekly task of pulling a rabbit out of a hat and producing a sumptuous feast from a box of miscellaneous produce. Thanks to Sherry Patterson and Chick-a-Biddy Acres for growing the fruit and vegetables and raising the chickens that we happily devoured. And extra special thanks to Christina Zeidler of The Gladstone Hotel for putting it all together, welcoming us so graciously and making our city and our neighbourhood a more interesting and joyful place to live.

Earlier today at brunch, Greg and I were discussing Stella McCartney’s spring line in which she has purportedly brought back the drop-crotch pants of the 80s. No, not those “MC Hammer” pants… that was a the death of a style. I’m think more Visage-era New Romantic drop-crotch pants. In any case, we joked that it would be funny if we had a teenage daughter, because, come spring, we could go to Le Chateau and relive our new wave youth by buying drop-crotch pants, just like we did 20 years ago, only with matching pants for the kid.

What has this got to do with chips? Well, it also made us think that we are now… “of a certain age”, whereby revealing our familiarity with an item from the first time around would date us specifically to a certain time in history.

Again… chips? Well, if I said, hey, remember that one summer when they came out with fruit-flavoured chips? Because anyone who remembers those chips remembers EXACTLY the time and place when they first had them. For me, it was at a peewee baseball game in the field on the next street over and my friend Carol Stewart had a bag of grape-flavoured ones. They came in grape, cherry and if I recall correctly, orange, and tasted like someone had dipped the chips in sweetened Kool-Aid powder. Disgusting doesn’t begin to explain it.

So why am I on about fruit-flavoured chips? Because I have some. In my house.

Not the scary day-glo monstrosities from the 70s, but a bag of Peach Mango Paradise chips from a line called Flat Earth, a division of Frito Lay.

They arrived in a huge box, along with a bag of the Tangy Tomato Ranch flavour and a bag of Garlic and Herb flavour. They were sent to TasteTO, but as we don’t actually cover mainstream, grocery-store type products on that site, I figured I’d write about them here. Because the rest of you need to be warned.

The marketing info (and the website) tries to place these chips in a category that most people would consider to be “healthy”, or at least healthier. They are baked, not fried, contain 1/2 serving of fruit or vegetables per 14 chips, and the press info includes lots of stuff about how they “fit into a balanced lifestyle”. Except that 21 - 25 chips is still going to run you approximately 225 calories and 8 grams of fat.

Comprised of a combination of rice flour and potato flakes, the ingredients lists are loaded with things  that really shouldn’t be in a chip, although there is an effort to include real ingredients - the fruit chips do actually contain dried apples, dried peaches and dried mangoes.

Here’s the real problem - they’re just not very good. The fruit chips are downright weird. When I first cracked open the bag, the sweet smell was cloying and overwhelming. The first few seemed not so bad, and I almost imagined myself becoming strangely addicted to them, although there was still an underlying repulsion. After a few more, I put the bag away, and it’s been sitting in my cupboard for a couple of weeks, untouched. Which is saying a lot in my house. Despite the fact that my main carb craving includes both sweet and salty (I’d kill anyone for some kettle corn), these just grossed me out.

I ate a fair amount of the Garlic Herb chips, but not because I really liked them - more because they were there and I felt I should give them a chance. I managed only one bite of one chip from the Tomato Ranch bag. Euch. Despite the natural ingredients, these just taste weirdly fake and… I want to use the word “powdery”. The chips are coated with the flavouring agents and have a hand and mouth feel akin to cheesies or Doritos.

The website reveals an additional savoury flavour of Farmland Cheddar which holds no appeal at all, and two additional fruit flavours. The Apple Cinnamon Grove chips actually sound vaguely appealing as being the one flavour that would match well with potatoes and rice, however the Wild Berry Patch flavour scares the beejeezus out of me. Berries should not be in potato chips.

A lot of companies have marketed rice or rice/potato chips over the past few year, and many of them have been passable to very good. But they’ve been flavours like Thai curry or wasabi or tamari - things that pair well with rice and potatoes.

As a snack food, these chips leave a lot to be desired and as a health food, they fall into that trend of mediocre items that people will eat when they’re desperate because the stuff they really like is considered too fattening. Me, I’d rather eat a real peach and a few really delicious, high-quality gourmet potato chips than a big bowl of little squares of cardboard that reek of fake peach smell.

Okay, they’re not quite as bad as the scary purple chips I ate with Carol Stewart as we swatted mosquitoes and taunted a terrified 8-year-old with a refrain of “Heeeeeyyy, batter, batter!”, but they’re definitely not good. Those grape chips from the 70s at least have warm childhood memories intertwined with them in my brain. These chips are something that I cannot wait to forget. And as was the case with the drop-crotch pant, I hope they fade away without causing too much trauma.

I’ve got a new food blog. Yes, another one!

I’ve teamed up with the folks at the Toronto produce delivery service, Wanigan, to run a blog about the weekly box of produce they send me, and what I cook with the contents.

The first box arrived today, and I start cooking (and posting) tomorrow.

Please check out The Fork in the Road.

Living just a couple of blocks from both the Gladstone and the Drake hotels, it’s not uncommon for me to be strolling along Queen Street West and come across something that sets my eyes rolling back into my head in annoyance. More and more often, my neighbourhood is too damned pretentious for its own good.

So it was an ominous feeling in the bottom of my gut as Greg and I headed to the Drake hotel on Wednesday night and a block away we could hear bagpipes. As we approached, we could see that the sidewalk was blocked with a carpet and red velvet ropes. In the curb lane in front of the entrance were two Royal Mounted Police officers in the full dress uniform worn when presented to royalty (black serge and pith helmets as opposed to the traditional red serge and stetson), atop two gorgeous horses.

We stood on the sidewalk; confused, embarrassed and guiltily gleeful. If those officers and bagpiper weren’t actually there for us, I’d have growled about how pretentious the neighbourhood is getting. But all I could actually do was give the horses a scratch on the nose, and smile self-consciously as the piper piped us in to the Official Dinner.

Part of Alphabet City’s month-long Food Festival, the Official Dinner was a partnership between Leisure Projects and chef Anthony Rose of the Drake Hotel.

Emulating the atmosphere of official Canadian entertaining, especially the Royal tours of the 1950’s, the evening will include an exhibition, a sumptuous dinner, surprise guests, and a performance by Quartetto Gelato. The menu for the event, designed by Drake is inspired by official meals of the past such as Queen Elizabeth’s Lunch aboard the Britannia.

(more…)

You’ve gotta have a lot of respect, and a healthy does of fear, for someone who can make Gordon Ramsay cry. Anyone who has spent hours watching Hell’s Kitchen wondering where the hell Ramsay learned to run a kitchen like THAT can look no further than his teacher and mentor, Marco Pierre White.

The original enfant terrible chef, White tells his tale in an autobiography entitled White Slave. The product of an Italian mother who passed away when he was very young and a perfectionist father who was also a chef, White was driven early on to become the best chef in the UK. He racked up Michelin stars, wives and restaurants.

White Slave details White’s childhood struggling with dyslexia (the book was “ghost” written by James Steen), his early days in the kitchen, his various romances and his philosophy for running a kitchen. He became notorious for kicking out customers who complained about any aspect of their meal, often with a system in which the front of house staff completely cleared the table, including tablecloth, and left the customers sitting there, speechless. His drive and perfectionism were passed on to his proteges such as Ramsay, Mario Batali and others.

White recounts an incident where the cheese cart, normally wheeled out to customers by front of house staff, was looking picked over before dinner service. He took each piece of cheese, whipped them against a wall in the kitchen near the entry where they stuck fast, and insisted they be left there until the end of service, as a lesson to the employee who neglected to replace the cheeses with larger ones.

In 1999, White, the youngest chef in the world to receive three Michelin stars, gave back his stars and retired from kitchen work. Running a kitchen is physically and mentally demanding and White claims he finally realized how much of his life he was missing out on, hidden away in a kitchen. He now had a family, a wife, and was the owner of a number of restaurants. He claimed he would never cook again.

Like most autobiographies, there is much left unsaid, but White isn’t one to spare feelings. He’s straightforward in his accounts, and with the help of Steen is able to convey his drive and determination. He’s even able to justify the poor treatment of his chefs with the the excuse of a haute cuisine restaurant needing to be perfect.

Earlier this year, White did the one thing he swore he’d never do again - donned an apron and went back into the kitchen, this time to run the show at a UK version of Hell’s Kitchen, once hosted by his protege and former friend Gordon Ramsay. Whereas Ramsay is all spit and vinegar, screaming, cursing, and throwing dishes, White simply needs to loom over the contestants (all UK celebrities), give them a certain look, and say something as simple as “that’s terrible”, to strike fear in their hearts. He is a terrify man, even without the cheese projectiles.

White’s behaviour is softened in his retelling within White Slave, but this is definitely a read for anyone with a morbid fascination for back of house antics, the exquisite perfectionism of haute cuisine, or a love of high end food. White will never escape his bad boy reputation, even though it was mostly temper and not a true rock and roll lifestyle.