22 November 2010 by pat.

A coming event is TEDxHartHouse.

The theme is The Future of Food, and it’s going to be held here in in Toronto on Dec. 6th.

I’ve applied to be invited: we’ll see if my application is accepted.

Posted in Food - farmers' market, Food, processed, Food, grown, Food, SOLE food | 4 Comments »

3 November 2010 by pat.

Yes, I love them.

I’ve loved them for a looooooong time.

I remember, in grade 7, when the orthodontist was two hours late with my appointment, his assistant took me for lunch to a pizzeria nearby on Cote des Neiges, and I had, for the first time in my life, an anchovy pizza. Not a pizza with a few anchovies on it, which I had had before, because my parents like anchovies, but an honest-to-god, anchovy pizza. It is still awesome in my memory.

I get anchovy pizzas these days up at the corner, at Stratenger’s, from their wood-fired oven.

I’ve had fresh anchovies that I pan-fried in Tuscany. I’ve had white anchovies from the Cheese Boutique, slightly pickled in lemon, then put into olive oil to preserve them. Both of these are very different from the typical anchovies we use to add some umami or saltiness to dishes.

I always want to have anchovies to do something with at home.

Sometimes just to put a fillet on top of a buttered cracker.

I’ve tried canned anchovies. Honestly? I didn’t find a brand that made me happy.

Last time, I bought a jar of anchovies in sunflower oil. The brand was Allessia. Meh. They were OK, but I felt the texture was harder than it should be, like the oil wasn’t keeping them soft, or they had been dried too much in salt before they were preserved in oil. I figure I can use the leftover oil for frying something in my frying pan, because sunflower oil has a pretty good smoke point if it has been refined.

Today I went back to Domino’s on the hunt for more anchovies, and found a glass jar — pretty much identical to the Allessia one with its metal pressure closure and rubber ring between the glass lid and bottle. But the label was blue instead of red. The brand was Paese Mio — and these ones were in olive oil instead of sunflower oil. I opened the bottle when I got home, and ate a couple of anchovy fillets.

Not as salty as Allessia’s. More tender. These will mash better into a paste. And they had more fish flavour: it wasn’t all hidden behind salt.

I’ve just got to hope I can keep getting them: they didn’t have many jars of this brand!

How about you? Do you have a favorite brand of anchovy? A favorite dish made with them? A memory that rings out? Tell me about it in the comments!

PS: almost forgot. I’ve got a package of dried anchovies that I bought at T&T Supermarket that I haven’t done anything with yet. If you’ve got any ideas of what I should do with them, other than grind them in my mortar with my pestle, or munch them as-is, I’d like to hear your suggestions!

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3 September 2010 by pat.

I was contacted by a marketing manager at Lassonde, a Canadian conglomerate that sells a number of well-known brands of juices, asking if he could send me a new product. I told him sure, but was clear that there was no onus on me to blog about it, or to give it a good review.Well, I’ve now had all six bottles: three teas, three fruit-flavoured beverages.

Honestly? I can’t think of a single reason to buy these beverages. The tea flavour (black, white, and green teas) was very muted. They need to be steeping their teas more. The most strongly flavoured tea was the pomegranate green tea, which did taste of pomegranate (moreso than of tea).

For all three of them, sweetness overwhelmed the flavours.  The teas are flavoured with organic cane sugar (about 40 grams per 473ml bottle, which is supposed to be almost two servings). To my mind, that’s a lot of sugar, organic or not.

The organic designation comes from an American company, Quality Assurance International, which has approval from the US FDA to certify products as organic. I emailed Lassonde to ask why the products don’t have Canadian certification; to this date, I haven’t received an answer.The three fruit “beverages”:

• “Take it easy” Red Orange Guava Hibiscus
• “Live calm” Lemon Honey Aloe
• “Peak [sic] Your Senses” Strawberry Dragon Fruit Ginseng”

Suffered similarly from being overly sweet. The beverages were sweetened with beet or chicory syrup instead of cane sugar. As with the teas, sugar was ingredient #2, right after water. The fruit flavours were muted — strawberry came through most strongly — and I think one thing that really appalled me is that the predominant fruit juice seems to be apple juice, which is probably considered mostly neutral in fruit flavours, but adds more sweetness.

For the Red Orange Guava Hibiscus beverage, the fruit juice list is: concentrated (lemon, apple, blood orange) juices, natural hibiscus, guava, and other fruit flavours, citrus pectin

For Lemon Honey Aloe, it’s: concentrated (lemon, apple) juices, natural fruit flavours and honey, aloe vera gel, citrus pectin

For Strawberry Dragon Fruit Ginseng, it’s: concentrated (lemon, apple, elderberry, strawberry) juices, natural dragon fruit and other fruit flavours, ginseng extract).

Why bother?

Just buy some fruit juice and dilute it if you want a weak beverage. I don’t recommend buying these beverages, which don’t seem to be offering much over kool-aid.

Posted in Food, processed, Food | 1 Comment »

27 August 2010 by pat.

So it seems that, now that I’m blogging, I occasionally get asked my opinion on things. I’ve been asked to write positive things, and do a link exchange (said no). I’ve been asked to taste things. To that, I said yes. But that I wouldn’t promise I’d blog about it, and I wouldn’t promise to say positive things about it.  Despite those caveats, Lassonde Canada wanted to send me the different flavours of *ahem* Flavür (wow, I’m glad I’m on a Mac and could find the umlaut).

I got home this afternoon, and a Purolator box was on my front porch. I opened the box to find another box, this one with pretty pictures and marketing speak about it being samples. I opened it, and took the bottles outside and photographed them.

I’ll tell you what they taste like as I work my way through the samples. Right now they’re in the fridge, cooling.

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28 June 2010 by pat.

This afternoon I finally removed the gummy bears from the refrigerator to see how they looked, and more importantly, how they tasted.

Here’s the line-up, in the same order as the before picture. You can see the changes (I’ve put both the before and after images in line so you can compare easily. Lots of expansion on the bears, not so much on the wine gums.

I really don’t like the look of the wine gums. They’ve gone pale and pastel, and make me think of waterlogged dead things. Not to be recommended.

The large gummy bears, next in line, fared better.

The fruit juice gummy bears, next two containers, both absorbed a lot of alcohol. But look how shiny and clear the ones at the end are: these are the ones soaking in rum.

I took them out of the alcohol and put them all on a plate to check that it wasn’t just the fact they were continuing to soak in the alcohol that made the visual difference: the gummies are arranged clockwise from top left, which means the rum-soaked bears are in the lower left.

Somehow, they’re more reflective and more refractive than the vodka ones.  So visually, the rum-soaked gummy bears are definitely the winners.

Next: how do they taste? The wine gums have a really awful texture. They’re slimy on the outside, and still overly chewy on the inside. The taste isn’t that great either. I give them a big Fail. I’m not quite sure how I’ll dispose of them… do they go in the compost, or flush?

The large gummi bears are sweet. The taste of alcohol does come through after a couple of chews. The texture has improved, and it’s more like some jello that’s a bit hard-set instead of overcooked squid. Meh. It works, but doesn’t thrill me.

The fruit juice gummi bears soaked in vodka first hit you with a fruity flavour (honestly, I couldn’t tell you what kind of fruit flavour it is, just that it’s fruity) and then, like with the large gummi bears, the alcohol hits. It’s a pretty intense taste of vodka.

The fruit juice gummi bears soaked in rum (ah! so pretty! They look like gems) also first hit me with the fruity taste, but I think I can distinguish between some of the flavours: the dark red ones are more berry-ish, the clear ones are almost lemonade. (I was only eating half of each, so I don’t think I had a significant amount to drink). The transition to rum flavour was better than the transition to vodka, I think.

So the winners are fruit juice gummi bears in Bacardi rum.

The last question to resolve is: how to serve them?

On a ceramic spoon?

With chopsticks?

Voodoo doll gummi bears impaled with cocktail picks?

Hmm. Gummi bears on toothpicks didn’t work so well. Less than 5 minutes after this shot, all the picks had canted over to one side or the other, and beheaded all the bears!

Sandra had another suggestion when we were having a beer at Stratenger’s last night: freeze them.

Unfortunately, because all the rum ones had been beheaded, I had to conduct the experiment with vodka ones. I took a few of the leftover ones and put them on a piece of parchment paper in the freezer for an hour.  I then tried mounting them on cocktail picks like lollipops. It works with the vodka ones, which are a bit firmer than the rum ones. And it’s kind of like gellied antifreeze! They’re cold, but not frozen.

Go ahead! do your own experiments and tell me what the results are!

Postscript:

 I repeated the experiment using some vegan gummi bears (also from the Bulk Barn). They’re made using tapioca starch instead of gelatin, and all the coloring is vegetable-based. They absorbed the rum more slowly… they were still quite tough after 3 days, so I let them continue to soak until the next Leslieville Patio Club meeting, which was 9 days. Stuck toothpicks in them (worked better than with the fruit-juice gummis) and took them to the Patio Club for sampling. Responses indicate that they work!

Posted in Food, processed, Food | 1 Comment »

23 June 2010 by pat.

I never had gummy bears growing up, or even tasted them until today. The most exposure I had was from Nicole Vogelzang’s paintings and I loved the way they reflected and refracted light.

A few months ago, I read a blog posting about an experiment to create vodka-infused gummy bears. Cute.

Sandy was recently talking about jello shooters, and it put me in mind of the blog posting, so I decided to try to replicate the experiment, with a few variations: no worms, no fish; no sugar-free gummy bears in the bulk barn, so I’m using fruit juice ones; trying some wine gums, since it sounds to me like something that should work with alcohol. Also going to try some rum with fruit juice gummy bears, since rum seems to go with sweet things.

To start, I tried one of each of the gummy bears (wine gums I know). Interesting. Very sweet. Texture is chewy. Given the texture, though, I’d generally prefer to eat squid or cuttlefish sashimi

I laid out the four different containers.  From left to right, they are:

• wine gums
• large gummy bears
• small fruit juice gummy bears
• small fruit juice gummy bears

Aren’t they cute? I arranged the bears like they’re in a hot tub. But I didn’t realize until I was looking at the photos that the orange gummy bear in vodka’s upside down. Oops. Guess he had too much already.

Then I added vodka to the first three dishes, enough to submerge the gums. To the fourth dish, some white Bacardi rum.

Here are the photos. This is the wine gums. Am a bit concerned, because there seemed to be some dissolving of the gums immediately, resulting in some floaty stuff. We’ll see what happens.

 These are the large regular type of gummy bears. Look at the way the green feet seem to glow! Oh, I just love that. Does the fact I’ve submerged them mean I’ve drowned them? Oh dear.

 These are the little fruit juice gummy bears in vodka. As you can see, the orange one (on the right) is upside down.

 Here are six more fruit juice gummy bears, but this time they’re in Bacardi rum. Since rum is used as a base with so many fruity drinks, I thought it might be more interesting than vodka, which is neutral.

We’ll see what happens! I’ve covered the dishes with plastic wrap and put them in the fridge. I’ll keep my eyes open to see when it looks like they’ve absorbed as much alcohol as they are likely to. We’ll see what the experiment differences are:

• Do wine gums fare better than fishies?
• Do fruit juice gummy bears do as well as, better, or worse than sugar-free gummys? (I didn’t see any sugar free ones at bulk barn).
• What happens to the large size gummy bears? Do they muscle their way out of my fridge?

Stay tuned for the results!

Posted in Food, processed, Food | 2 Comments »

19 May 2010 by pat.

I’m a sucker for a good cheese! I was looking for one last week, before having Oliver and Melissa over for dinner. I went to Chris’ Cheesemongers: actually, it was funny how I ended up there. I was next door, at the organic Golden Orchard, buying some zucchini and cucumbers, and told the cashier how much I love using my LCBO partitioned bag for shopping. One of the cheesemongers was right behind me, and promptly told me that if I liked that bag, I’d like the ones they sell at Chris’ Cheesemongers even better: longer straps, better compartments, larger size!

Nothing would do but I had to have one of those bags, so I went next door with him, and told him that, in addition to the bag, I wanted a mild cheese to serve at the start of dinner. We started with a pretty uninspired camembert (I think that was my suggestion) and by the third cheese, he had talked me into this, which I had a runny taste of.

Let it come to room temperature, and enjoy the delicate flavour. I served it with some rosemary and sesame flatbreads and some almonds.

It’s made of a combination of goat, sheep and cow milk. I’m eating the last of it as I write this. The taste of goat and sheep is there slightly, giving it more character than a straight cow’s milk cheese frequently has. It’s imported from Tuscany, $19.95.

Posted in Food - farmers' market, Food, processed, Food | 1 Comment »

9 May 2010 by pat.

Yet another food recall is happening, this time around some Italian-style processed meats and cheese.

The larger the plant, the greater the chance that one machine’s lack of cleanliness is going to impact a whole bunch of food, because everything from that line (or perhaps the plant) gets recalled.

It just freaks me out how much food is being recalled these days: worse in the USA, where food poisoning can result in millions of pounds of meat being recalled and destroyed.

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27 April 2010 by pat.

Like, an ingredient you’ve not used before? Something you have no idea how to prepare?I need to look some things up.I love anchovies. I like white anchovies, I like salted anchovies, I like salted anchovies in olive oil… and then I saw these at T&T supermarket (I biked over there yesterday afternoon).

I have no idea what I’m going to do with them. Maybe they’re something that I add to soup, or grind up, or just munch on for a snack (like dried capelin, which my Dad used to buy long ago in Montreal).

I’ll do some research and let you know what transpires!

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17 April 2010 by pat.

I use Grocery Gateway to buy the heavy stuff: kitty litter, laundry detergent, milk, cleaning supplies, juice. Since I’d have to take a cab to bring it home, it’s even easier if I go online and order it and get them to deliver. I tweeted yesterday that I missed the cutoff for Saturday delivery, and now Grocery Gateway is following my tweets. They’re using the new media intelligently!

Posted in Food, processed, Food | 1 Comment »