Columnists

Although I’ve been a professional food writer for many years, writing a blog is relatively new for me. I joined the world of glogging (as the mother on Corner Gas would say) only last October. To be honest, this kind of writing is much different than writing for magazines, newspapers or books. On the one hand, it’s easier to write for a blog since you can write about any old thing without a pushy editor breathing down your neck. On the other hand, it’s difficult to write for this medium in ways that aren’t a problem with other published works. With a blog, you can tell whether people cared about what you wrote based on how many comments each post generates and how many page views your writing receives. (Although book sales also give you a barometer of popularity, it takes months to know if your book is hitting bottom or scaling the best-seller list.) It can be a bit disheartening to be a blogger on the days when fewer than expected people drop by to read or comment.

So, when I heard about an online group that was designed to help blog writers meet and interact in a virtual way, I joined. The group is called the Daring Bakers and although you don’t have to tithe your first born to the group or make any blood pacts, you do have to keep the monthly baking projects double top secret until the agreed upon publishing date.

This month the Daring Baker assignment was to bake a lemon layer cake from one of Dorie Greenspan’s books. That’s my effort above. I made it and served it to my family as our Easter dessert (also on the menu was glazed ham, roasted new potatoes and a frisee and mache salad with grapefruit dressing. It was a yummy spring feast!).

Everyone else in the DB group made the exact same recipe and you can have the fascinating experience of seeing how the appearance of their cakes differ from mine by clicking on the Daring Bakers link in the blogroll and then clicking through to their blogs. It’s amazing how each baker found a way to add his or her own creative expression to what is a very well written and specific recipe.

I’m not sure what will be on the menu for next month’s Daring Baker’s challenge, but you’ll see it here once I’ve had a chance to preheat the oven.

Like so many people, I’m intrigued by the idea that I can be a better earthling by making some small changes to my daily habits. As a foodie, I find the locavore movement that sees more consumers and chefs choosing ingredients based on the fewest number of miles foods have been shipped particularly inspiring.

And, like Malcolm Jolley at Gremolata, I see backyard garden plots as a logical extension of this trend. If you want to save fossil fuel use by limiting the kilometres that foods are trucked, the best thing you can do is grow them at home, right?

As some of you may recall, I was for several years the food editor for Gardening Life Magazine. In that post I developed recipes for seasonal produce and offered tips for home gardeners who were keen to grow food. Although I learned a lot writing those articles, my gardening preference as an adult has been to grow decorative rather than edible plants.

This year, I’m ‘between gardens’. We moved into a new house last summer and our home landscaping is very basic right now. In fact, until next summer when our pool, fencing and beds are complete, I have very little digging or pruning to do in my home yard.

Fortunately, my test kitchen is on a large piece of wonderful, fertile growing land with an established garden plot. Since we took the property over, our landscaper has been tilling all of the cuttings and leaves into the garden so that it is filled with wonderful organic matter and nutrients.

I’ve decided to plant a vegetable garden this spring behind the test kitchen. I’ll follow my own advice and talk to experts and see where the project takes me. So far, I’ve assembled some heritage and other seeds and made a mental plan for the garden.

My first step will be to spend this weekend planting seeds for various kinds of heritage vegetables which I’ll harden off and plant later this spring (if that ever arrives). During my big gardening adventure, I’m going to share my successes and failures here with you.

Each Friday I’ll post about what is happening in my vegetable garden and what I’ve learned. I hope that you’ll chime in with tips and advice when you see me going astray. I’m not a complete newbie but I have a lot to learn. Any help you can offer will be accepted with gratitude!

Being half Ukrainian, I have a deep and well-developed respect for dill pickles. In fact, I would say that I’m one of their biggest fans. But even my affection for dills has its limits and they have been tested twice in the last 24 months.

First came the Kool Aid dill. A Kool-Aid dill is what happens when you marinate a classic dill pickle in super strength strawberry Kool-Aid. You get a sticky, candy colored pickle that Mississippi kids (who comprise the fan base of this confection) call a Koolickle. I call it a sweet and sour abomination.

Koolickles are often made in a big jar and then sold by convenience store owners for $1 each. When I wrote about these pickle-flavoured confections in my Topline Trends newsletter the response was a universal yuck! Then, when I made a batch and featured them on Canada AM, the response was double yuck (I wish I could have taken a picture of Seamus’ face when he tried one on air!).

New this year is the commercial product called Pickle Sickles. Like a freezie, these snacks can be thawed and refrozen. Unlike a freezie or a Kool-Aid dill, they aren’t sweet but salty and sour. The press kit says Pickle Sickles are a healthy snack for kids and diabetics because they’re made from whole pickles, have no fat and only 1 g of sugar. I tried one as a professional duty. I have to say that even as a lover of pickles, dill pickle chips and even dill pickle juice (although only homemade dill pickle juice), these frozen snacks are nasty. They’re so salty that any nutritional advantage they have for not containing sugar is negated.

Trust me: when you want a cold, salty and sour snack: grab a fork and eat an actual pickle. You don’t need to try these new pickle creations.

I’ve long been a fan of French bistro classic salads that crown frisee lettuce with poached eggs and a warm dressing. Needless to say, I was thrilled to try the lobster salad pictured above when I was in Las Vegas a few weeks ago since it contained not only those salad elements but also lobster and lentils – two of my other favourite foods! Martin and I happened into Tableau in the Wynn Hotel around lunchtime and had a really wonderful meal. It was one of the best meals we were served in LV, to be honest.

For me the panko dusted, crispy poached egg that garnished my salad was absolutely ingenious and totally novel: light and uniformly crisp coating on the outside, creamy soft orange yolk and a firm but tender set white. It was like a crouton and an egg got married and had a salad lovin’ baby. Delish!

Although crispy poached eggs were new to me, it was only a few hours before I saw this garnish on another menu at ultra fancy Joel Robuchon. A quick Google search this morning finds these crispy little orbs of protein showing up on menus in LA (at 3 Square) and a recipe for something similar from Gourmet. I haven’t had a chance to try this technique at home yet myself but I definitely have it on my ‘to do’ list. In the meantime, I’m keeping track of how often I see crispy poached eggs (with or without panko) mentioned on menus and in recipes so that I can decide if this concept is trending up or just a blip on the food radar screen. If you’ve seen crispy poached eggs somewhere recently, please take a moment to let me know.

I know I wrote about grilled cheese in January but here I am with these crisp, buttery examples of cheesy goodness on my mind yet again. As I mentioned in my first post, I served mini grilled cheese as one of many hors d’oeuvres at my holiday party. I also saw them served at several catered parties I attended during the festive season. Now, well into the spring season, sightings of cocktail party grilled cheese sandwiches continue: triangular grilled cheeses (really a little too big to be considered canapés) were served at the wonderful Queen Street Unmasked party held at the Drake Hotel to raise money and awareness for mental health prevention and treatment. Then, at Terroir II Symposium, the grilled cheese lollies pictured above were on offer by the chefs from C5. So cute and really yummy!

Isn’t it interesting that as much as full-sized grilled cheese are still a wonderful choice for lunches and dinners, they seem to be taking over for mini quiche and spanikopita as the ubiquitous hot, cheesy hors d’ouevres of choice?

One of my first experiences with drinking alcohol involved gin poured into a Sprite bottle so that it could be consumed incognito. I won’t tell you how old I was or where this undercover ‘Sprite’ was consumed (those details will only make people question the quality of the parenting I received and that wouldn’t be fair. My parents were actually pretty good at their job. It was me who wasn’t good at following rules).

But I digress…. this post is not about how I squandered my youth and in the process came to loathe gin, but about how I rediscovered gin now that I am a sensible adult. My cocktail mentor Len Fragomeni, owner and chief mixologist at the Toronto Institute of Bartending (BTW, if you have to be institutionalized, this is the best place I’ve found to be incarcerated) and I worked on a project last year to promote Bloody Caesar cocktails. While I created food to go with Caesars, Len focused on reinterpreting this classic Canadian drink in new and interesting ways. One of his drink creations was gin based and, as the weeks went by and I learned more about gin from Len, I was lured to try this juniper-scented spirit anew.

The rest of the story is rather predictable. Gin and I flirted for a few weeks, which led to a sip here, a sniff there. Then, one day gin and I found ourselves running toward one another in slow motion only to meet and fall into one another’s arms in a passionate embrace. (Oh wait a second, that wasn’t gin and I at all. That was the end of the Hallmark movie of the week, which I watched on PBS while drinking gin).

Regardless of how it happened, I am now a Gin and Tonic drinker. Although I joked about its effects above, I find I need only one gin and tonic to feel satisfied. I’m also fussy about the gin. I’ve fallen for Hendricks gin; it has subtle cucumber and rose flavors that make it a fresh, palate bracing choice. I use a double old-fashioned glass filled almost all the way up with ice for my G&T (that’s what aficionados like me call them). Try one after dinner while you watch Jeopardy. I’ll toast you during the first commercial break.

I hope everyone has a happy Easter full of good food and family, and I’ll be back bright and early Monday morning. See you then!

I mentioned our scotch-tasting party in Monday’s post. Although Martin had the meal figured out in advance, we realized — just before our guests arrived — that we hadn’t thought about appetizers. Given that people were coming mid-afternoon to drink scotch, it seemed imperative to offer a substantial nosh that could sop up the booze and help our guests stay standing for dinner.

Enter my trusted supply of make-ahead caramelized onions. Since time was short and our menu featured lamb curry, coconut-zucchini curry and basmati rice, I picked up a few packages of Naan bread at the grocery store, covered it in a thick swath of thawed caramelized onions and a generous amount of shredded extra old cheddar cheese. I cranked the oven to 400F (200C) and popped in my concoction. Voila! I had a hearty appetizer prepared in less than 20 minutes (fortunately, I live close to the store!).

So, if this weekend you find yourself needing an appetizer to appease your Easter feasters while they await the ham and scalloped potatoes, feel free to fall back on this easy idea. You’ll find the directions for making caramelized onions in my original post.

Tell me about the instant appetizer that saved the day when you needed a last-minute offering for guests by replying in the comments section below.

In my last Topline Trends newsletter, I talked about how salt is interesting because it is trending up as something we want to avoid as well as something we want to use as a gourmet ingredient. On the one hand, we’re trying to get salt out of packaged food so we can reduce our dietary intake of sodium. On the other hand, we’re buying exotic, interesting salts from around the world and adding them to food — both at the table and when we’re cooking.What’s interesting about the gourmet side of the salt trend is that, like wine, salt is always linked to a geographical location. I was on Canada AM last week talking about food trends and I had 14 different kinds of salt on set (one of my favourites from the batch is pictured above and you can see the others here); each salt was from a different exotic geographic area and had special characteristics (again, like wine) because of its place of origin.Interestingly, scientific research shows that our palates can’t discern the difference between the flavours of different salts when they are dissolved in water (once diluted, sodium is sodium). So, when we use a special kind of salt and find it more or less delicious than another type, it is the rate and the way the salt crystals dissolve on our tongues that is actually creating a different taste experience.How does it work, you ask? Different salts have different shapes and different sizes, therefore they dissolve at different rates which means our palates perceive differences in the flavour. Now some salts — such as ones that are filled with minerals (like volcanic salt) — do have distinct tastes, and flavoured salts offer many culinary opportunities. For instance, smoked salt is certainly on many chefs’ ‘must-have’ lists this season for its incomparable rich flavour. But if you were to dissolve any unflavoured salt in water in equal amounts of weight to equal volumes of water and tasted them, you would be completely unable to tell one from another.So, what I’m really trying to tell you is to save your specialty salts to use as a finishing salt. When you’re cooking with moisture, use the cheap and cheerful stuff. There is absolutely no reason to put expensive sea salt into pasta water. If purity is an issue for you, buy kosher salt to avoid the iodine and use it as your basic cooking ingredient.What do I mean by “finishing salt”? Basically a finishing salt is a salt that you use either at the table or just after food is cooked. For instance, if you’re grilling steak, you might sprinkle it with some finishing salt while it’s resting on the chopping board. (This is where smoked salt is a really delicious choice!)Expect to pay a premium for the specialty salts. In fact, a small bottle of fleur de sel can cost as much as $7 or $8, which gives you yet another reason to use it sparingly.How many kinds of salt do you have in your pantry?

Well over a year ago, I heard about a new Nintendo Wii video game that, instead of leading you through the motions to blow up towns or race cars around a track, required players to slice, dice, grate and knead to make various international recipes. Wacky, I thought. What kid would want to make virtual food when they could go in the kitchen and help mom make a salad?

Recently, a friend brought his Wii system over as well as a copy of this game and, I have to tell you, I was right: Cooking Mama is wacky. The graphics seem clunky and flat in this day and age of World of Warcraft and Pixar movies, and the music and narration are just kitschy. That said, Cooking Mama is also a lot of fun and surprisingly appealing (and a little addictive) to kids and adults alike.

The joke that day was that our group of Wii players was made up of 80 per cent professional chefs. We all thought we’d beat the Cooking Mama game in no time and rack up unprecedented scores. Instead, “mama” (the voice of the game) told us to “try harder” at least as often as she praised us for doing ‘better than mama’.

Is Cooking Mama going to teach kids how to make dinner? Not necessarily. Some of the cooking instructions are down right bizarre (how many of you have ever had to open a can to make a scrambled egg?) However, kids will learn that food doesn’t just come out of a frozen package and perhaps they’ll be encouraged to observe and participate in the real life kitchen more often. Likewise, for parents who have kids who like to play in the kitchen, Cooking Mama offers benefits: clean-up happens with the flick of a power button and no one eats extra calories that spoil their real-life supper.

Bottom line: If you need to play a video game, Cooking Mama is as innocent as you can find anywhere and it just may help kids to appreciate food a little more than they did before they played.