October 2007 -- Dana McCauley's food blog archive

Candy hangover anyone?

So, raise your hand if you have a Halloween candy hangover? Just me? No, I didn't think so!

While it's tons of fun to traipse around the streets in a costume and visit the neighbours, I really wish that we all gave out less candy. Every year I over buy and feel badly if I shell out less than two or three treats to each goblin. I know my neighbours are the same because my son comes home with way more treats than the number of houses he visited.

It's all fun and games the first night when we have a sugar fest but what do you do with all the sweet and salty snacks after that party is over? For a few weeks we all pick at the candy more than we should and then, awash in junk food fatigue and regret, around November 20th or so I'll toss the remaining treats out, feeling guilty not only about how much of the stuff we ate but also about how much food I'm wasting.

There just has to be another way to keep the fun of the Halloween tradition alive but reduce the amount of junk food involved. So, while the event is still fresh in your minds, send me your ideas for inexpensive useful or fun items that we can all shell out next year instead of candies or chips. To get you started, take a peak at the picture above. It shows some of the ideas the test kitchen team and I had for alternative Halloween treats that cost about the same amount as candy.


Comments

Indian-inspired lunchbox

I've long been a fan of Indian food and I'm very glad to see Indian frozen foods, sauces and curry pastes turning up in more Canadian grocery stores. My hope now is that tiffin-style take out will soon be available here, too.

I first learned about Tiffin when I visited southern India on a spice company sponsored trip for journalists. Our hosts at one event generously gave each of us a monogrammed metal tiffin carrier (mine is pictured below). The idea behind tiffin is that there's a compartment for each part of your lunch: rice, curry and condiments such as chutney or pickles. It's a brilliant concept for transporting foods easily!

In the UK, takeout tiffin carriers have been available for a number of years. The chain Tiffin Bites sells mix-and-match Indian meals in stacking plastic containers that are combined as you like and then taken home and enjoyed. Recently, the UK's Waitrose Supermarket borrowed this concept and started packaging Indian meals in a similar manner.

Although Indian food is the original filler for these containers, I don't see why they aren't used more often for all kinds of foods. In fact, I'd like to have a tiffin container on my desk to hold a layer each of bittersweet, milk and white chocolate and right next to it I'd like another one containing olives, cheese, and little bits of cacciatore sausage. Yum! There are literally layers of possibilities!


Comments

Cutting edge mystery food

Several years ago I wrote a book called Pantry Raid that was about how to make foods using common pantry ingredients. In the front of the book I gave a lot of freezing and storage tips. One of the tips used my mother's habit of freezing foods without labels as a ‘bad example' since weeks later she has no idea how to identify the frosty lumps she pulls from the freezer.

While some people would've been upset to be singled out in print, my mom isn't one of them. In fact, one of the qualities I love about her is that she can take almost any negative situation and find something positive to focus upon. Such was the case with the freezer story. In typical form she made lemonade out of lemons and created ‘mystery lunches', her signature method for keeping lunchtime interesting. She's been eating mystery lunches at work now for ages. The way it works is that whenever she has tasty leftovers she fills plastic containers with single portions and pops them into the freezer unlabeled. To complicate the game she purposely uses empty yogurt and sour cream containers so that there's no way to see the colour of the contents and guess what's inside. Each morning she grabs a container, adds it to her lunch bag and heads off to work.

"Sometimes I get the same thing three days in a row and sometimes I get rice pudding or applesauce for lunch,' she says. "Regardless, it's a fun way to avoid having to figure out what to pack in my lunch bag."

I was having a great time laughing at my mother's mystery lunches until discovered that she's on the cutting edge of youth culture. Two new soft drinks, one called Anything and the other Whatever, are gaining a following of young, adventurous hipsters in Singapore. The premise behind these drinks is the same as behind mystery lunches since you don't know what you're going to get until you take your first sip. Anything is carbonated while Whatever is tea based. Both drinks come in six flavors, sold in identical cans.

When I told my mother about these drinks I expected her to gloat but she didn't go there. Instead she said, "Can you get me some Whatever? It would be perfect for lunchtime."


Comments

$500 worth of truffles

The fall truffles are now in season and truffle augmented dishes such as risotto and meat sauces are turning up on swish restaurant menus across the country.

It's difficult to understand how some gastronomic delights were ever even discovered to be food stuffs. Truffles are a prime example. If you've ever seen a truffle up close, you may wonder what the fuss is all about. At best truffles resemble little lumps of coal and at worst...well, that's better left unsaid. It's truly difficult to imagine how hungry a person would need to be to find a truffle in the woods and wonder if it would be yummy with eggs.

It's how truffles smell and taste that are the true selling points of these curious little fungi. I could shyly describe their aroma as earthy, but the truth is that the allure of truffles hinges on their sex appeal. That's right, sex. Truffles prove the point that advertisers have been making for years: sex sells. Truffles contain testoserase, which is chemically similar to testosterone, the ingredient that gives sperm its characteristic smell. This sexy smell drives sows mad; the aroma acts as an aphrodisiac and makes the poor gals urgently want to locate truffles. That's why truffle hunters often take female pigs on their woodland treks; they make locating truffles easier.

This aroma affects humans much more subtly but it still elicits a voluptuous, sensuous response that made truffles fashionable with Egyptian Pharohs 4600 years ago, scandalous to medieval religious zealots and popular with hedonistic humans from the Renaissance until today. Composed of over 73% water, truffles are one of the most expensive foods. In fact, in the picture below, my husband Martin is holding about $500 worth of white truffles that he purchased for Pangaea last year. Truffles also have very little nutritional value so the price they command is solely because of their unique taste and evocative perfume.


Picture = martin's hand with white truffles - Dayna can we add a caption that he is holding about $500 worth of truffles?


Comments

Be punctual out of courtesy for the host

How long do you wait?

Recently I found myself sitting dejectedly in a busy restaurant waiting for my lunch time date. I arrived starving so I could only wait until the 20-minute mark before I had to order my lunch (seriously, I was ready to eat the salt and pepper). As a result, 35 minutes after our appointed meeting time when my apologetic but directionally challenged friend arrived, I was already eating my meal.

I felt a bit awkward about eating while she waited for her food but was it rude to have ordered? Is there a standard amount of grace time for tardy meal companions? I took the question to my sophisticated; socially successful associates in the test kitchen. Interestingly, there was no clear consensus on how long to wait before leaving and/or ordering. Some of my colleagues said to wait for an hour, most said a half hour while one said she would wait for no more than 15 minutes.

Still unsure of the rules, I emailed Letitia (Tish) Baldrige, former social secretary to Jacqueline Kennedy and well-acknowledged etiquette expert. I met Tish in the 1990's when I contributed to two of her books: In the Kennedy Style and Legendary Brides. (Meeting her vastly increased my ability to play Six Degrees of Separation successfully!)

"Many guests today, even at White House functions, don't even bother to give an excuse for their tardiness," notes Tish, whose most recent book is Taste - Acquiring What Money Can't Buy. "They expect people to understand if they are late, for whatever reason. They feel a kind of social entitlement to act this way. Thirty years ago, no one DARED to be late to a White House or any official kind of function. Today, some people misguidedly think they can be as late as they wish, often incorrectly believing that their arriving breathlessly late is a sign of their great importance in the business or social world. I have noticed through the years that the really important figures in the world of business, education, the arts and entertainment, are the most punctual, out of courtesy to their hosts."

As for how long to wait, Tish says "I tell young people in business today that if it's their boss or an important client or possible would-be client, one waits an hour, if necessary. At the end of a half hour, however, one makes a telephone call to the missing guest's office (or hotel or wherever). If the person's secretary says the date was not even on his or her agenda book, then one should depart - always leaving a generous tip for the poor waiter who has held that choice table for its important occupants. After all, the tip is a major part of his daily bread."

And to Tish's good advice all I can add is to always have a book, a magazine or some work with you so that you don't look like a stood up loser while you're waiting. That's never a good look.


Comments

•

•

•

•