Here’s some food for thought for today…
- We’ll raise out pints to this new study that shows some beer (not that light, corn-based crap) might help prevent osteoporosis. But only 2 pints, because after that, it’s actually increases the risks.
- Mexico is lobbying to have its food heritage protected by UNESCO.
- Is anyone else thinking that if the UK adopted a “no open liquor on the street” policy like we have here (that is, no standing around on the street in front of pubs with a pint), they might not need to build a shatter-proof pint glass? Yeah, some glassings happen inside pubs, but if you’re already outside, swinging the glass is a lot more likely in the event of a fight.
- That day where we give each other chocolate is coming up. If you truly love your recipient, why not make it fair trade chocolate?
- For people with a green thumb, seed catalogues are what get them through the winter.
- When they say “grab-n-go” they mean the coffee, not the baristas. Bikini-clad baristas charged with prostitution… what a surprise.
- Small businesses at a shared industrial kitchen facility get seriously screwed by the Chicago Dept of Health who intentionally (and incorrectly) destroyed ingredients and product during an inspection.
- Will the new format for ketchup packages create even more waste?
- Now with free frozen frog – the grossest food stories of all time.
- Look out, all you office fitness group organizers – the trend for cake clubs continues. Let’s have some peer pressure in the other direction now!
Here’s some food for thought for today…
- Who says there’s no “local” food in Dubai? It appears the camel burger is a regional specialty.
- How to feed 9 billion people.
- Getting over the revulsion of hospital food – ganga, of course. THC prescribed to people with no appetite.
- Losing weight at high altitudes – why fat farms may some day all be located in the mountains.
- After being a crusader for real food for the past decade or so, Eric Schlosser is ready to move on.
- New York restaurateurs object to a letter-based sanitation rating system, citing, among other things, 200 year-old buildings and neighbouring lots full of rats as issues they must overcome to keep their restaurants up to code.
- Tins aren’t sexy – in an age of fresh and local, we may have a low opinion of canned food, but good stuff can come out of tins, and who among us doesn’t fall back on canned beans or fish from time to time?
- In case you need another reason to boycott the Olympics – corporate sponsor McDickhead’s object to a First Nations chef calling his burgers, well, “burgers”. What? The? Fuck? Dear VANOC – you’re a bunch of whores.
- Expect your bags of chips to get smaller. The US Food & Drug Administration is looking at bringing serving sizes for foods like chips, cookies, breakfast cereals and ice cream into line with how people really eat.
- And – some other ways to let people know what’s in the food they’re eating.
Here’s some food for thought for today…
- No shirt, no shoes, no service – apparently in the UK, you can wander around in shops in your bare feet . Well, except at Tesco’s.
- “In that second my life changed… all because of a glass.” Well, that and because you were drunk and got into a fight. Hooligan-proof glassware will protect the punters during a piss-up.
- Are wine writers really just taking the piss?
- At a medical-themed restaurant in Florida, people over 350 pounds eat free and cheese fries come in a bedpan. There’s also an on-site heart defibrillator, dialysis machine and CPR classes. Because after a bedpan of cheese fries, you’ll probably need all of those.
- But, but… toilet paper?? Who says we need supermarkets?
- “I’m pretty; I’m attractive; I take care of myself” – what salad says about single women.
- Good and bad restaurant names. The cute, the funny, the trendy and the annoying.
- How’s this for a dream job – snack consultant! And some extreme snacks, just to make you even more envious. (Pssst – crispy fried chicken skin!)
- Can we trust all those sustainable fish organizations if they’re certifying fish that are on the verge of disappearing?
Here’s some food for thought for today…
- Britain is finally realizing that the cooking bug skipped a generation and now everyone from Chuck and Cammy to Heston Blumenthal have shown up to promote the Chefs Adopt a School program.
- “…a long-overdue rising up of the masses against the elitist overlords of the culinary realm.” Or not. An indepth history of the restaurant reviewer, from Craig Claiborne’s standards to the skeezy practice of bloggers asking for free food in exchange for a favourable review.
- And the sad, scary future of food media.
- A BBC shows called Britain’s Really Disgusting Food is getting flack from fish processors over how they’re portrayed. (I’ve seen the show in question and while it is a bit goofy, the facts are still facts.)
- I don’t care how much you love food or cooking or certain chefs – it is not a good idea to get their faces tattooed on your thigh.
- Sweet merciful crap – I’m glad I don’t live in the US. The discrimination against fat people when it come to insurance and even work-related benefits blows my mind.
- We know there’s a lot of processed food in our own culture, but Indian processed foods are also on the rise.
- We spend a lot of time talking about local food here in North America, but that trend is picking up elsewhere too. In Israel, they’re cooking with freekah, a type of green wheat that dates from biblical times.
- If you can never figure out how to rewrap your wedge of cheese from the cheese shop – here’s a cheat sheet from the pros.
I am generally sceptical when being served game meat. Having grown up eating wild caught stuff, the flavour of the game meat served in Toronto restaurants is generally subdued. Ontario law dictates that wild game meat cannot be sold to the public, so most of the venison, rabbit, elk, kangaroo, etc., that we eat here has been farmed. Farming has its pros and cons, of course, but one of the the most noticeable differences is the lack of a gamey taste because the animals are eating controlled feed instead of foraging in the forest.
This is a good thing, in a way, because it means that people will try game meat and not be put off by the strong flavour. But folks like me, who expect the strong flavour, often find game meat lacking. What is needed, then, is for the meat to be prepared at the hands of a skilled chef who knows how to nuance, accentuate and tease out the flavours. Last night, 9 sets of those skilled hands took on the challenge.
The Ontario Game Dinner at Hank’s was a benefit for Slow Food Toronto – money raised went towards sending Toronto chefs to Slow Food’s bi-annual conference in Italy.
Here’s some food for thought for today…
- Is it laziness or to make ourselves sound more hip and English? Curry is not synonymous with Indian food.
- How to set up a bakesale for Haiti.
- A UK woman has found 6 double-yolk eggs in a box of a dozen, the odds of which are something like one in a trillion. This, of course, has sparked a flurry of discussion about other food find rarities and mutations.
- You know, that tasty butterfly cheese – a survey of 6 to 8-year olds revealed some interesting ideas as to the origins of basic foodstuffs.
- “No one wants to grow coca in Tocache. Everyone is thinking about chocolate.” Peru dumps the cocaine for other addictive substances – chocolate and coffee.
- Oh look, another reason to not frequent fast food restaurants – the customer service sucks.
- Using your right hand, pick up a fork… the dumbing down of cookbooks and recipes.
- Those fake food items in the windows of Japanese and Korean restaurants are big business back in Japan.
- If you buy salad greens from a bag – do you wash them first?
Here’s some food for thought for today…
- Fine dining to go with the fine art – museum restaurants can range from cafeterias to fine dining establishments but as we know here in Toronto, they don’t always do well.
- Food is finally getting out to people in Haiti. How and why? UN distributors starting handing out ration coupons, and then only to women.
- NYC is on the warpath against salt, with processed food taking the biggest hit. But how much salt is in restaurant food? A corned beef sandwich at Katz’s deli will run you over 4000 milligrams (more than 2 days’ worth) of sodium.
- The sheer ecstasy of being a lunatic farmer – Joel Salatin talks to the Guardian preceding the UK opening of Food Inc.
- Eel is more endangered than bluefin tuna – sustainable sushi, not so easy to do, but what a way to make a difference.
- Of course, without plankton, there will be no fish at all.
- The Italian agriculture minister is not impressed with the criticism of his endorsement of McItaly sandwiches. Or, you know, you could not be such a whore and actually do what’s best for the people and the agriculture of your country.
- Aw, that Madge, always trying to stay relevant. This time, she’s investing in a coconut water company, because the hipsters, they dig the coconut water.
- That Woolworth’s lunch counter that became such a symbol of the civil rights movement is a featured exhibit at the International Civil Rights Center in Greensboro, NC. A museum built right in that old Woolworth’s store!
- So that’s why on TV they just order “a beer” – most customers have a hard time pronouncing cocktail or spirit names.
The flavour combination of dark chocolate, dulce de leche and sea salt is not new. You might even say it’s a bit passé, but it could also be one of those things that become a classic, like chocolate and mint.
I had wanted thimble (aka. thumbprint) cookies, but I was also craving chocolate. And when my pal David at Circles and Squares Bakery tweeted about making dulce de leche brownies, the idea hit me.
This first batch is really a prototype – I made one pan and put the caramel into the thumbprints first, before baking, as you do when making the regular version with jam. This created a big oozing mess of melted caramel. Filling the prints as soon as the cookies come out of the oven works better – it melts just enough to smooth out, without creating too much of a river.
I also used 100% cacao chocolate, because that’s what I had on hand. It’s not readily available, but I don’t think I’d go below about 80% or the cookie will be way too sweet – otherwise the amount of sugar would have to be adjusted. And, I cheated and used dulce de leche from a jar, but the caramel is not hard to make.
Here’s some food for thought for today…
- But it’s got whole grain! I’m always telling people not to believe the labels on their processed food – here’s proof that I’m right.
- A weekly cake club at the office would be a great perk to an otherwise dreary job. And would be an awesome way to get back at the freaks at those workplaces that try to get everyone to diet together.
- NYC cuts 4.6 billion calories by switching to a low-fat milk in schools. You know what would cut even more calories? Cutting out milk completely – humans don’t need it.
- Why bloggers will never be able to get their photos as good as the pros. The truth from a “food slut”.
- You can’t throw an espresso machine without hitting a swank little coffee shop these days, but the future of good coffee is uncertain.
- There’s always lots of talk by media and naysayers about how there is no legal definition of “organic”, but there actually is. It’s the “beyond organic” crowd that are watering down the meaning and confusing people.
- I’m not a huge fan of most of the subject matter, but these jelly bean portraits are pretty awesome from a technical standpoint.
- I wonder if these figures are worked into those “OMG the obeses will keel you” statistics that always get rolled out – turns out, if you’re a fat woman, you might be more likely to die from poor medical treatment due to discrimination than hauling a few extra pounds around.
- Wanna know a secret? Food writers, chefs, gourmands… none of us eat fancy when we’re alone.
- Hail Seitan! Honest, you don’t need meat.
It’s no secret that I would rather watching UK food shows than anything made in Canada or the US. Chefs like Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Jamie Oliver, Valentine Warner and even Gordon Ramsay do a lot of good work for Channel 4 and the BBC when it comes to promoting seasonal, local, sustainable foodways. For years, Greg and I have had no choice but to download these from online file-sharing sites (shhh!!) because they seldom get shown here and there’s few, if any, domestic equivalents.
Except, bit by bit, Food Network Canada has been picking these shows up. Heston Blumenthal’s Big Chef Takes on Little Chef series that ran last year recently got aired here. Likewise his feasts series in which he recreates (with his own twists, of course) historic meals. Jamie Oliver is a big commodity on this side of the pond, so most of his stuff eventually shows up, but sometimes up to a year after its original air date.
This delay is annoying enough, but makes sense – Channel 4 wants to rerun these shows before selling the rights to anyone else. My frustration is that when Food Network Canada finally gets them, they do very little to promote them.
