Some of you know that I love Toronto, that I've been coming up here on business trips almost every week for the past six months, that I've just been laid off and that's the end of my fabulous business trips.
So I'm here in Toronto this weekend for one last time. I'm here on my own steam and my own budget and for my own reasons and the primary reason I'm here is to eat.
Thursday
I was supposed to be up here this week for work so I reserved a spot at the Mill Street Brew Pub's Robbie Burns Dinner. Haggis. Beer. Of course I'll be there! I wasn't going to let anything as silly as losing my job stop me. I crunched the numbers (I do that) and figured that it made sense to drive, especially since I had a bunch of stuff to retrieve from the suite where I'd been staying, more stuff than I could reasonably cram into an empty suitcase. The drive would be about 9 hours with a couple of pit stops, dinner was starting at 6:30, I figured I'd be safe if I left home at 8-ish.
Right. I didn't get on the road proper until almost 11:00. I kept my fingers crossed that maybe I'd only miss the opening round of drinks. The Scottish gods were smiling upon me because that's pretty much what happened. In spite of the occasional white-out-condition snow squalls & a complete parking-lot at Niagara & the customs official who couldn't understand why they gave me a visitor's permit not a worker's permit (um, I dunno... ask the Canadian immigration official who gave it to me!), I made it to the table at just past 7:30. Whew!
I was seated next to a group of gregarious twenty-somethings, three men and two women. They were all recent transplants from Nova Scotia except for the woman who grew up in Ontario where they have a 5th year of high school so she was old enough to buy alcohol when she got to college; as twenty-somethings they're all young enough to remember that as being very important. Ontario Girl reminded me of someone but I couldn't put my finger on it. The guy sitting across from me reminded me of Matt Parkman from Heroes. The two women in the group were really into baking which I wanted to find out more about (because, y'know, I'm into baking!) but frankly the guys hogged the conversation. Guys can do that.
Matt Parkman was really nice, as was Snow Board Dude sitting next to me. We engaged in some lovely conversation that I wish I could remember more of. Here's where I confess that I'm a total lightweight because I had the equivalent of three drinks in three hours and I was really drunk. Yeah. I'm a cheap date. I do remember a bit of the shout-across-the-table conversation with the third guy who works for Forex and is a huge fan of Larry Ellison and kale. Details like that are hard to forget.
Matt Parkman (whose real name is Nick) sent me an e-mail that night to preempt my forgetfulness & remind me about mesquite flour which makes amazing cookies and to definitely check out the North Market at St. Lawrence, not just the South Market. This is important because even though I got the e-mail and read the e-mail, I still didn't manage to remember about North Market until it was almost packed up & because of that I missed getting the local buckwheat honey. It's kind of sad that I forget that I've been reminded of something... If you're over 40 you know what I mean and if you're under 40 you'll find out.
Enough of this, so what about the food already?? The beer was far more memorable. This makes sense -- it's a brew pub! Since I arrived late I missed the opening round, MSB's Extra Special Bitter. I'd had it before on a prior trip & it's a damn good brew. Even though I wasn't in my seat on time the wait staff poured me a round and delivered it to the table. I was very happy to hear that Snow Board Dude drank it in my absence because letting a good beer go to waste is unconscionable. Thank you, Snow Board Dude!
First Course: Homemade Scotch Egg with Helles Bock. I missed the first course as well as the opening round but second course wasn't out yet so I was able to catch up. As soon as the waitress came by all I could say was, "BEER!". It was a long drive. Quick as a flash the Helles Bock appeared before me. Ahhhh. Beer tastes so good after a hard day. I loved this beer. I can't remember the full details (when is Santa going to bring me that iPhone so I can blog in real time?) but I recall a wintry kind of almost-sweet like citrus rind & dried fruit. I think this made it pair well with the deep-fried scotch egg to cut the richness a bit. I want to take a moment in praise of really good deep-fried food. This was a thick & crispy sort of deep-fry with a substantial crunchy crust that still carried the whiff of the fryolator oil on it. You wouldn't think this would be a good thing but I love it. Plus the fact that it was the first food I'd had in about 12 hours.
Second Course: Cock-a-Leekie Soup with Cask IPA. The soup was alright, nothing to write home about. I have extremely high chicken soup standards. The IPA was a standout, much lighter than most IPA's I've been having lately with a bit less effervescence & bitterness. Because of this I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. Somehow it was absolutely perfect at that moment.
Third Course: Haggis with Betelgeuse. What's not to like about haggis? Offal & oats boiled in a sheep's stomach! Now I'd never had haggis & the chance to have it was a selling point for me on this meal. Because I have nothing to compare I can't tell you whether this was true haggis or not but I can tell you that it was really, really good food. You might laugh at this description but it reminds me of a rustic sort of risotto, with that creamy-residual-chewy quality about it that comes from the groats. Plus it was clearly cooked with a good portion of animal fattiness and that richness makes my eyes roll around in my head. I liked the Betelgeuse very much but unfortunately I can't remember any details to share with you. It must have been very high alcohol because I was getting on pretty damn drunk at this point.
Fourth (Main) Course: Filet Mignon topped with Dalwhinnie Scotch sauce, served with Bashed Neeps and Champit Tatties with Black Watch. Great stuff, this Scotch Ale! Roasty nutty & savory caramelly and maybe a tad chocolatey. I loved this beer. The steak was good but, again, I have very high standards for steak. Frankly, I make a better steak than most of what I can get in a restaurant, plus I go for a much fattier cuts & the sauce wasn't ample enough or rich enough to compensate. The plate begged for a bit more color to balance the earth tones. I'm picky about this. Give me a token green. But perhaps this isn't traditional with neeps & tatties and beige is all that's allowed. As an aside, I remember that the neeps inspired Forex-Larry-Ellison-Kale Guy to go on a bit about how he loves all vegetables except peppery turnips and we agreed that kale would have been a welcome addition to the plate. I don't think kale is very Scottish, though, and for the record, I love turnips.
Dessert: The Bards Ice Cream Sensation & Scottish Short Bread. At this point I really am drunk so I can't tell you a damn thing about dessert. The conversation wound down & I said my goodbyes to the twenty-somethings. I also wanted to say goodbye to Night Bar Girl (another story there) so I went over to the bar & ordered a pint of the ESB I had missed in the Welcome Beer. Big mistake. Huge epic fail of a mistake. A few sips in & my body could take no more alcohol. No, I didn't get sick but I'm sure I was slurry stupid. A proper thanks to NBG for her amazing bartender skills will have to wait for another time.
And that, folks was my evening. But this is barely the tip of the iceberg of what's yet to come and with that, I'll leave you waiting for more.
Saturday, January 30, 2010
Why I eat
I eat because food is alive. Think about it for a moment. Maybe we modern humans have so many diet-related health problems not because we eat too much salt or sugar or cholesterol... Maybe it's because our food is dead. Every last bit of anything recognizable as having once been a living breathing organism is beaten out of it & shrink-wrapped. How can we survive on that?
It used to be when I went to the grocery store for apples I'd look for the biggest shiniest most perfect-looking apple I could find. Bigger is better, right? I'm American, of course it is! But then I started thinking, and remembering back to when I was a kid. What does an apple really look like, when it's left alone to do its apple-thing and grow in its own apple-way? It's never round and red all over -- it's usually smallish and kind of lopsided with an odd spot here or there.
What makes an apple interesting to me now is the same thing that makes a person interesting: It's absolutely unique. And this, I think, is what's gone wrong. Food has become just another mass-produced assembly-line commodity. We don't care anymore about its character or substance or the craft that went into it. We don't think about where our food comes from. We don't want to think about where our food comes from.
Twenty years ago, I was on a trip to Israel & spent a day in the markets of Jerusalem, the Old City. I took a wrong turn & ended up at the butcher's stalls. I looked up & all of a sudden there were carcasses & heads of all manner of beasts hanging, dangling right in front of me. I looked down & there was a gulley down the middle of the street where the blood could drain. Now, I totally understand where vegetarians are coming from; this is kind of gross and you can make a good argument that it's cruel. But if you are going to eat meat -- and I do -- you have a responsibility to know what it was and that it didn't start off all sterile & shrink-wrapped. This was once a living, breathing, feeling creature & when it's stripped of its skin it sure looks a lot like us. Whether you eat meat or not, you have a responsibility to know the food on your plate and what it looked like before it got there and what it took to get it there.
When I eat with this level of mindfulness, I'm aware that what's on my plate is nothing short of a miracle.
It used to be when I went to the grocery store for apples I'd look for the biggest shiniest most perfect-looking apple I could find. Bigger is better, right? I'm American, of course it is! But then I started thinking, and remembering back to when I was a kid. What does an apple really look like, when it's left alone to do its apple-thing and grow in its own apple-way? It's never round and red all over -- it's usually smallish and kind of lopsided with an odd spot here or there.
What makes an apple interesting to me now is the same thing that makes a person interesting: It's absolutely unique. And this, I think, is what's gone wrong. Food has become just another mass-produced assembly-line commodity. We don't care anymore about its character or substance or the craft that went into it. We don't think about where our food comes from. We don't want to think about where our food comes from.
Twenty years ago, I was on a trip to Israel & spent a day in the markets of Jerusalem, the Old City. I took a wrong turn & ended up at the butcher's stalls. I looked up & all of a sudden there were carcasses & heads of all manner of beasts hanging, dangling right in front of me. I looked down & there was a gulley down the middle of the street where the blood could drain. Now, I totally understand where vegetarians are coming from; this is kind of gross and you can make a good argument that it's cruel. But if you are going to eat meat -- and I do -- you have a responsibility to know what it was and that it didn't start off all sterile & shrink-wrapped. This was once a living, breathing, feeling creature & when it's stripped of its skin it sure looks a lot like us. Whether you eat meat or not, you have a responsibility to know the food on your plate and what it looked like before it got there and what it took to get it there.
When I eat with this level of mindfulness, I'm aware that what's on my plate is nothing short of a miracle.
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Who I am
I'm just a girl who loves food.
My name is Jane. I live in Newton, Massachusetts. Leonard Nimoy is from there. John Krasinski & B.J. Novak are from there, too, which will mean more to you if you're closer in age to my 14-year-old twins than to 45-year-old me. I grew up in Wolcott, Connecticut. Nobody is from there. I came to the Boston area when I was 18 to go to Wellesley College. Hillary Clinton is an alum from there. Susan Sontag gave the commencement address my first year there. I didn't know who she was then. I know who she is now but I don't feel like that quite redeems me.
The point is that I'm kind of a country hick from working-class roots transplanted into uber upper middle class suburbia by way of an uber upper middle class education. I'm now raising my middle-of-the-middle class kids who will hopefully be a lot more comfortable in their singular class bracket than I am in either of mine.
When I was a kid, I never had a bagel or hummus or even a good pizza because Wolcott is nowhere near New Haven. I grew up on food like American chop suey and fried baloney and Frosted Flakes. Lots and lots of Frosted Flakes, which I used to sprinkle sugar on top of when I had it as part of my balanced breakfast. I was raised Polish Catholic in the kind of way that means those two words are inseparable. We celebrated Wigilia (Christmas Eve) every year at my grandmother's house with a quasi-traditional menu that was the epitome of ethnic assimilation, a little bit of this-and-that so the kids would eat, too. My grandmother spent weeks preparing the sledzie. I had to look up how to spell that. It's pickled herring. I think every culture in every square inch of the planet has a recipe for the controlled rotting of fish in order to render it marginally edible. Like sausage, you don't really want to know how it's made. My grandmother made it in the bathtub, or so I was told.
When I was in college, my horizons expanded a bit. Exploded is more accurate. I discovered coffee - real coffee - and cheese - real cheese - and French bread and English cigarettes. I also discovered girls but that's a different story. As the years went by I became more-and-more enamored of the fine foods and drinks that one finds in a place dominated by wealthy liberals. I learned words like macrobiotic and organic and locavore and slow food.
I knew these words already. Sure, I consumed every mass produced soulless packaged food that the 1970's threw at me, but that's not the whole story. My parents also had a large back yard garden and apple trees and blueberry and raspberry bushes. There was a family down the street that raised a couple of cows and my dad got buckets of manure each year to fertilize that garden. We grew corn and and tomatoes and squash and we had green bean plants that were always infested with the grossest looking wormy-type slug things. Ew. In addition to weeding and de-sluggifying and harvesting, my job was to tend the strawberry patch. From all of this I learned that you had corn and tomatoes and strawberries once each year and every other time it might have looked like an ear of corn or a tomato or a strawberry but it wasn't really.
These were the seeds that were sown in me: To love and respect the land and the food that generously comes from it; to enjoy a meal not just as a meal but as a communal experience; to define myself at least in part by what I choose to eat and to not eat and the reasons why I make those choices.
My name is Jane. I live in Newton, Massachusetts. Leonard Nimoy is from there. John Krasinski & B.J. Novak are from there, too, which will mean more to you if you're closer in age to my 14-year-old twins than to 45-year-old me. I grew up in Wolcott, Connecticut. Nobody is from there. I came to the Boston area when I was 18 to go to Wellesley College. Hillary Clinton is an alum from there. Susan Sontag gave the commencement address my first year there. I didn't know who she was then. I know who she is now but I don't feel like that quite redeems me.
The point is that I'm kind of a country hick from working-class roots transplanted into uber upper middle class suburbia by way of an uber upper middle class education. I'm now raising my middle-of-the-middle class kids who will hopefully be a lot more comfortable in their singular class bracket than I am in either of mine.
When I was a kid, I never had a bagel or hummus or even a good pizza because Wolcott is nowhere near New Haven. I grew up on food like American chop suey and fried baloney and Frosted Flakes. Lots and lots of Frosted Flakes, which I used to sprinkle sugar on top of when I had it as part of my balanced breakfast. I was raised Polish Catholic in the kind of way that means those two words are inseparable. We celebrated Wigilia (Christmas Eve) every year at my grandmother's house with a quasi-traditional menu that was the epitome of ethnic assimilation, a little bit of this-and-that so the kids would eat, too. My grandmother spent weeks preparing the sledzie. I had to look up how to spell that. It's pickled herring. I think every culture in every square inch of the planet has a recipe for the controlled rotting of fish in order to render it marginally edible. Like sausage, you don't really want to know how it's made. My grandmother made it in the bathtub, or so I was told.
When I was in college, my horizons expanded a bit. Exploded is more accurate. I discovered coffee - real coffee - and cheese - real cheese - and French bread and English cigarettes. I also discovered girls but that's a different story. As the years went by I became more-and-more enamored of the fine foods and drinks that one finds in a place dominated by wealthy liberals. I learned words like macrobiotic and organic and locavore and slow food.
I knew these words already. Sure, I consumed every mass produced soulless packaged food that the 1970's threw at me, but that's not the whole story. My parents also had a large back yard garden and apple trees and blueberry and raspberry bushes. There was a family down the street that raised a couple of cows and my dad got buckets of manure each year to fertilize that garden. We grew corn and and tomatoes and squash and we had green bean plants that were always infested with the grossest looking wormy-type slug things. Ew. In addition to weeding and de-sluggifying and harvesting, my job was to tend the strawberry patch. From all of this I learned that you had corn and tomatoes and strawberries once each year and every other time it might have looked like an ear of corn or a tomato or a strawberry but it wasn't really.
These were the seeds that were sown in me: To love and respect the land and the food that generously comes from it; to enjoy a meal not just as a meal but as a communal experience; to define myself at least in part by what I choose to eat and to not eat and the reasons why I make those choices.
Thursday, January 7, 2010
Eat Real Food
Real food. That's what this blog is about. So why "surreal", you ask? Let's call it a wry commentary on how far removed we are from the reality of our food -- where it comes from, how it's grown/raised/harvested, what it truly looks like and tastes like -- so far removed that real food is no longer real, it's surreal to us like a bizarre disorienting acid trip.
But I'm not that clever. I'm stuck with "surreal" because every variation of "real food" that I could think of is already claimed by a blog. And yet... Maybe the "surreal food" concept I outlined above really has something to it. Maybe it'll take off in a hip viral kind of way. Maybe I'll be the next Julie Powell. Maybe not. That's definitely not why I'm here. I'm here to eat food.
So let's begin.
But I'm not that clever. I'm stuck with "surreal" because every variation of "real food" that I could think of is already claimed by a blog. And yet... Maybe the "surreal food" concept I outlined above really has something to it. Maybe it'll take off in a hip viral kind of way. Maybe I'll be the next Julie Powell. Maybe not. That's definitely not why I'm here. I'm here to eat food.
So let's begin.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)