Save Your Fork… There’s Pie

Not well, I’m afraid. You can’t really even call it a garden, seeing as it’s just a few pots on a windowsill. Add to that the fact that it’s an east-facing window and the potential harvest gets smaller and smaller.

Funnily enough, I have my few pots of vegetables and herbs surrounded by various tropical plants; palms that grow so big I need a machete, an aloe vera that will expand to a reach of a foot wide in a year if I let it, and various ferns, ivys and such – all are huge and lush and happy. Yet vegetables – not so much.

I filled a windowsill with pots of stuff to prove a point. Because all the local food folks are always on about people growing *something* at home “even if it’s just a pot of herbs on a windowsill”. Okay, done that. But without a yard or a balcony, or more than the early morning sunlight… well, let’s just say I’m thankful for the farmers market.

The Herb Jungle

The pots of herbs came from a farmer at Liberty Market. Some of them croaked early on, but this is the first time I haven’t completely killed off a basil plant, and the thyme, rosemary and oregano are going crazy.

Some very sad lettuce.

I was expecting big bushy lettuces by now – especially because lettuce doesn’t need a lot of direct sunlight. But these – at 4 weeks old – are an obvious failure. I’m a bit chagrined about this – as I bought fancy organic seeds from a reputable herb and plant supplier. Although, come to think of it, the mint I bought from the same place is doing pretty poorly as well.

Sally Tomato offers some hope

The same organic herb lady who sold me the lettuce and mint pretty much refused to sell me a tomato plant. This mini cherry tomato plant came from the corner variety store. No, 10 cherry tomatoes is not much of a harvest, but at least I get to harvest something!

So what have I learned from this? We can’t all have a garden. I just don’t have enough afternoon light to make the endeavour worthwhile. That’s not a huge disappointment because I love my trips every week to the market, but it does give me some “I told you so” wiggle room with the folks who might insist that anyone can grow their own food. Not in an east-facing apartment with no balcony, you can’t, unless you can live on lemon thyme and parsley sprigs.

I never manage to take decent photos of the food at the Harvest Wednesdays Tasting Nights, but at the actual prix fixe dinners, where the food isn’t rushing past with a hundred hands grabbing at it, the photos are a little easier to snap.

As a recap, Harvest Wednesdays is a weekly event at the Gladstone Hotel throughout the summer where Chef Marc Breton creates a four course dinner based on products from CSA farm Chick-A-Biddy Acres as well as a number of other local suppliers. The fun part is that he often doesn’t know until the day before as to what ingredients and in what quantities he’ll be working with, so the project keeps the kitchen staff on their toes.

We went last week with some friends, and here’s what we had…

Red Fife biscuits, Raisin-Walnut Bun, Epi, and Rosemary Foccacia with herb butter rosettes – didn’t get a photo of these, but they were great; I’m really digging the red fife flour that’s coming available.

Amuse Bouche
Broccoli and Black River cheddar-filled ravioli with basil and toasted walnut pesto.

We all loved this, and wished there was more!

Garden Antipasto
Marinated white and orange carrots, red and candy striped beets, cauliflower and fingerling potatoes tossed with cold pressed canola oil, mixed tender herbs, heirloom radishes and cracked black pepper.

A few complaints at our table that the vinaigrette on this was too strong, but the vegetables were a really nice combination, and were all crisp and bright and tasty.

Honey-Lavender Fresh Ham Roast
Red Tamworth-Large Black Cross brined overnight, slow roasted and sliced thin

This was one of the pigs I met when I went to Chick-A-Biddy with the Gladstone staff, although Chef Marc said it wasn’t the mama pig pictured in the photos for my TasteTO post.

Broiled Leek and Tofu stuffed portobello mushroom
with a honey-sherry glaze

Our guests each had the vegetarian option, but I didn’t try this.

Mains were served with stir-fried three colour beans, shredded baby cabbage and a wedge of chickpea ‘Socca’. We all loved the socca, which was a chickpea flatbread that sort of resembled naan.

Raspberry Whip n Chill

Fresh raspberry jelly topped with raspberry streaked whipped cream served with fresh berries and a ChocoSol chocolate dipped Tuille.

Dessert was perfect – fresh, bright, not too sweet. My only complaint was that the tuiles must have been set out with the dessert early on because they had lost their sharp crispness, but I was overruled when everyone else at our table said they liked the cookie chewy.

Greg and I also had the wine pairing for the meal, although it was a bit much for me in terms of alcohol, particularly because we headed down the street to a pub for another drink afterwards.

We’ll be attending the remaining three tasting events and at least two or three more weekly dinners before the Harvest Wednesday series ends in late October. If you’re in Toronto, the tasting events are $15, and the 4-course dinners are $35 – a great deal all around.

Today I will write the post about the GD chocolate book!!!

In fact, there’s no need for cursing. The chocolate book, aka. Chocolate: A Bittersweet Saga of Dark and Light by Mort Rosenblum was a magnificent read that I thoroughly enjoyed. Which is why I felt it was so important to review it here, and why it’s remained on my desk for the past 3 months as I never seem to have the time to get around to writing a post about it. The downside to this is that I’ve forgotten much of the content of the book, with my single complaint about the publication being that there is no index of places Rosenblum visited or people he talked to or companies he profiled for me to use as a reference, either to find specific passages or simply to jog my memory.

What’s important to note is that Rosenblum lives in Paris, so much of his research is centred on European chocolatiers in France, Belgium, Switzerland and Italy, as well as much national posturing over who has the best stuff.

Rosenblum turns to Chloé Doutre-Roussel – who makes her living as a chocolate taster (tough job, that!), and is widely considered the world’s expert on high-end chocolate – regularly throughout the book, both in terms of profiling the various European companies and in tasting the products from many of the smaller single-origin plantations he visits.

Rosemblum also debunks some myths, such as the idea that most African chocolate is produced with child slave labour. In fact, most small chocolate plantations are family-owned, and while children are certainly put to work on a family farm, the actual harvesting of the cacoa pods requires the strength and skill of a full-grown adult to be done properly.

There are more than a few swipes throughout the book at chocolate giant Valrhona and their attitude towards the chocolatiers who buy their product – even getting in to talk to someone at the company was a trial for the author, and Doutre-Roussel admits to having scaled the fence when she once arrived for a meeting and no one was there to let her in.

But the book is more about the little guy than the corporations like Godiva, of which Rosenblum doesn’t have much good to say. Instead, chocolate fans will recognize names like Pralus, Michel Cluizel and Michel Chaundun. Another reason why an index would have been a good thing.

This is probably not a book that will be of interest to anyone who is happy with a plain milk chocolate Hershey bar. Rosenblum spends much of his time writing about rare, high-end products, trekking through jungles or heading off to almost-deserted islands to visit single-origin plantations or profiling European chocolate makers whose products sell for a premium price. But it’s well written, witty and extremely informative, and is a must read for anyone whose palate turns away from Lindt or Godiva in favour of “the good stuff”.

When I started editing the Fit Fare blog on the Well Fed Network back in February of 2006, one of the first writers we hired was a firecracker of a lady named Sherry Cermak. She had trouble figuring out the blog interface we used and would email me regularly to ask me how to upload something or to fix a technical glitch.

In between work stuff, we also started to chat about other things – food, farmers markets, cats, and  squirrels. When I left Well Fed, Sher was one of the few people I kept in touch with, and still have her blog What Did You Eat? in my RSS feed. Her weekly updates about her cats, as well as the many recipes she posted, kept me well-entertained.

Last Sunday, Sher died suddenly of a heart attack. She had had a couple of health issues when we worked together – I remember some vision concerns that prompted her to ask me to do careful edits on her work because she had trouble seeing what she had been writing – but the heart attack was apparently completely unexpected.

The food blogging community has been hit hard by her loss, particularly her dear friend Glenna who is hosting a tribute to Sher today where food bloggers are creating posts based on their favourites of Sher’s recipes. I didn’t get around to making one of Sher’s many delightful dishes – it’s been a bit of a crazy week – but I couldn’t let the day pass without taking part in some way.

Sher had an energy and an inner light that touched everyone she came in contact with – even if that was only via the wires of the internet. Her enthusiasm was infectious and she always seemed to have a funny story or a kind word. The weekly photos of her beloved cat Upsie, who passed away a few months ago, were a constant source of amusement for me. I am deeply saddened to know that there will be no more recipes, or cat posts to read, or that her witty comments will no longer appear on my own blog.

My sincere and heartfelt condolences to Sher’s family and friends. The loss of someone so vibrant is painful to us all, even if we never knew her in real life, but the loss for those closest to her must be huge. Sher was a true “character” in the very best way, and the world is a darker place because of her passing.

Goodbye, my friend. You will be remembered with great fondness and respect.

When I was a wee thing, one of my greatest delights was stopping at the bakery counter at Simpson’s where my Mom would buy me a gingerbread man. Simpson’s was an old Canadian department store, at that time paired with Sears (old folks referred to it as “Simpson-Sears”), and then later bought out by the Hudson’s Bay Company.

The bakery and candy counter at the Simpson’s store in Halifax was right by the main doors that opened onto the city bus depot, convenient for anyone who had to switch buses to get to where they were going.

In those days, upscale department stores stocked a huge variety of sweets, particularly penny candy, and as a kid, it was a place of true wonderment. I’d clutch my gingerbread man tightly all the way home, careful not to let an arm or leg break off before I could eat him.

At some point in my early teens, Simpson’s moved to the other end of the mall, and Sears took over the space, removing the candy and bakery counter and forcing a bit of a trek for anyone who wanted a gingerbread man or a bag of Chinese Chews for the bus ride home.

When I moved to Toronto in the late 80s, the food emporium at Eaton’s was a treasure trove of delights. Sure, I lived in Kensington Market and could have my pick of bizarre Asian fruit or Portuguese fish or real cream cheese, but the aisles of shortbread, jam and tea in the basement of Eaton’s made me feel safe and happy in a city that was often foreign and scary to a teenager a thousand miles away from home. That it was full of sweet little Scottish grandmothers didn’t hurt either.

Over the years the food emporium areas of both the now-defunct Eaton’s and The Bay (formerly Simpson’s) at Yonge and Queen have morphed with the times. When Sears took over the Eaton’s space, the basement floor became part of the mall – if Sears has ever had a food section, I’ve never found it.

Down at the Bay, the food section still exists, but shrinks every few years as the demand for high-end household goods grows. $500 sets of pots turn a bigger profit than penny candy, which The Bay no longer carries. The bakery, once huge, is a mere counter, and the deli area is one small section of a prepared-food area that specializes in pizza and Caribbean food. There was a big cafe area there for a while, with plush comfy chairs, and at one point about 2000 square feet of interesting prepared items such as mustards, jams, preserves and bread.

It’s not that people don’t want these things anymore – fine food shops are springing up everywhere and high-end products are hugely popular. But department stores, especially those with aspirations of being high-end, would rather take up floor space with expensive items with a larger profit margin. So 600-thread count sheets will always win out over candy. And even the candy that they stock is swank, with names like Godiva taking up most of the small area allotted to sweets.

Now that the Bay has been sold to Lord & Taylor, it will be interesting to see what changes occur. There’s already talk of splitting up the historic building and cutting out certain merchandise segments to allow for not only higher-end items, and a Lord & Taylor floor with designer fashions, but to bring in a small Zellers store, the lower end department store owned by the Bay.

Which makes me wonder if there will be room again for a food emporium area.

Funnily enough, while walking through the small food area of the Bay the other day, I spied gingerbread men in the bakery case. As I bought one and prepared to stick the bag in my backpack, the sweet Jamaican lady behind the counter seemed distressed. “You’ll break his arms off before you can eat them!” she said in that classic accent. “You don’t want that!”

“You’re right,” I said, gently removing the brown paper bag from my pack. “I should be more careful.”

I carried that bag separately the whole way home, despite having a backpack and an additional heavy bag to carry. I resisted the urge to munch on my gingery friend on the streetcar, and was happy to see that he made it home to the plate in one piece, although he did lose one of his royal icing eyes in the process.

I wonder how long the little bakery counter will remain after the store officially changes hands; whether they’ll keep it or scrap it. I wonder if little kids today even care about gingerbread men. And I wonder where Scottish grandmothers go to buy their shortbread and jam now that Eaton’s is a distant memory.

Certainly, you can’t stop progress and things don’t ever stay the same, but carrying home that gingerbread man made me so very happy. Happier than chichi cupcakes or fancy restaurant meals ever have. I hope there’s still a place for bakery counters and gingerbread men once the store is renovated. Treats from the department store food emporium are an integral part of the typical Canadian childhood – it would be a shame to lose that.

Saturday’s National Post had an article about how the Canadian Food Inspection Agency plans to allow companies to police themselves when it comes to health and safety inspections.

The document, addressed to the president of the agency, details how the inspection of meat and meat products will downgrade agency inspectors to an “oversight role, allowing industry to implement food safety control programs and to manage key risks.”

Obviously this is a bad, bad thing. With diseases like bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) still present in our food systems, government inspection is imperative. But it seems that the government doesn’t care, as funding for BSE testing is also slated to be cut.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency is also ending funding to producers to test cattle for bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, or mad cow disease) as part of a surveillance program, the document indicates, a move expected to save the agency about $24-million over the next three years.

Given the number of food borne illnesses that have shown up in the US factory-style food system in recent years, is that really something we want to be emulating here in Canada?

If you weren’t already concerned about where your food comes from, if you haven’t already made friends with a farmer, a baker and especially a butcher, now might be a good time to get that ball rolling. Because once this deregulation comes into effect and food companies don’t have to answer to a government inspector, it’s pretty safe to assume that an already screwed-up system is going to look like the wild wild west.

First, let me say that I’m not happy about the world food crisis in so much as people are starving and dying and rioting over the cost of rice. That’s not really what this post is about. However, in the western world, we’ve had it pretty easy for a very long time in terms of food costs. We’ve demanded cheap food and the corporations have met that demand. Governments are subsidizing farmers to not grow food, and cheap junk or processed food is contributing to a variety of health concerns.

But as food commodity prices rise, along with the cost of the oil required to produce and acquire those foods, it’s kind of refreshing to see articles like this one in USA Today that shows people reverting back to real food, and even growing their own.

For a long time, advocates of Slow, ethical, local and organic food have been bewildered at the fact that people are just not willing to pay higher prices for food. The same person willing to spends $1000 on a sofa, or (sweet sassy molassy) $3000 on a handbag, will go eat at a fast food drive-through because it’s cheap. We care more about the quality of what we put on our bodies, or what we put our bodies on, than we do about the quality of the food we’re putting in our bodies. Which is absolutely shameful.

So while I’m not celebrating the fact that higher food prices are putting people in dire straits, I can’t help but hope that maybe higher food prices will get people thinking more about what they eat, or that it will get them into the kitchen to cook their food from scratch, or out to a farmers market to spend their hard-earned money on real food, not processed fillers and crap.

A Social History of Tea
Jane Pettigrew
The National Trust

Every afternoon at 3pm, I have a cup of tea. It doesn’t matter the weather or the season, if it’s hot I’ll have it iced, but every afternoon, barring some great calamity, I take a break from my day to have a cup of tea and something sweet.

Tea is one of those things that we sort of take for granted; less popular than coffee, it’s still typical in many homes, particularly in Eastern Canada where I’m from originally. There, harsh orange pekoe tea can sit and stew for hours, with a couple more bags and a top up of water the only acknowledgement that the pot might need dumping or cleaning.

Jane Pettigrew is one of the UK’s tea experts, having run a tea shop for many years and written a number of other books on the subject .

A Social History of Tea traces the importance of tea to Britain from the seventeenth century onward, exploring its arrival in England, its origins and the politics surrounding the commodity. Pettigrew looks at how tea became popular, first with the upper classes, then with the middle classes and the poor.

A middle chapter explores the ritual of afternoon tea, covering etiquette and appropriate menus, including the difference between afternoon tea and high tea, which are, in fact, very different meals.

Later chapters cover the 20th century, and North American readers will see similarities in the tea breaks given to British workers with our own coffee breaks, and the section about the rationing of tea during war time including the many uses for used tea leaves is both informative and amusing.

The book also offer a visual history of tea, with images of everything from fine works of art showing the consumption of tea, to photographs of tea sets, pots, table setting and tea gowns. Early 20th century tea rooms also feature prominently, and what history buff hasn’t dreamed of a tea dance at the Palm Court of the Waldorf Hotel, suitably dressed for the era?

Fans of a good cuppa will be intrigued by the history of their favourite beverage, as well as all the trappings, politics and intrigue that goes with it. While there are a few chapters that deal with the types of tea, how they are processed, etc., this really is a work about the social history of tea, and its continued place on the table and in the lives of the British people.

Sometimes it pays to be critical. Many bloggers and writers work on the Thumper policy – if you can’t say something nice, then don’t say anything at all. But twice in the past few months, I’ve been offered opportunities to do something based on a snarky or critical comment I’ve made on TasteTO. The first was an offer to appear on a live call-in talk show on a local cable station (which I didn’t actually do) because of my “City of Toronto, What the Fuck?” rant about street cart vending, and the second was an invitation that showed up in my email box to take part in Dinner in the Sky, after I had referred to it as “some crazy-ass French scheme to feed people dinner while they’re hoisted 50 metres in the air”. The original company is Belgian, actually, but the folks running the Toronto arm are from Montreal.

And since I’m never one to turn down a challenge, I agreed to do it, dragging Greg along for support.

I predicted that Dinner in the Sky would be like an amusement park ride with snacks and I wasn’t far off the mark. Upon arriving at Yonge-Dundas Square and signing three pages of waivers (none of which were of the “I will not sue if I fall off” variety, but all disclaimers allowing use of video and photographic images if I chose to take part) I was directed to a swank lounge area to wait for my “table” to be ready.

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