Edible Tulip

Pingue Prosciutto

According to James Chatto, Mario Pingue is 'Niagara Penninsula's Prosciutto Maestro'. I'd heard ramblings about this fellow before, most notably when I was drunk on scotch at my friend Jon's farmhouse and playing late night poker out on the back deck about 3 years ago. The other participant was an old friend from high school, Joe, who happens to be Mario's cousin, and who also happened to just find out right then that I write about food. I can't remember now if that was the summer I was slowly becoming a carnivore after 17 years of eating beans and rice because I can't figure out why I didn't JUMP on that story. It doesn't matter. I have now secured the invitation to go to Niagara with Joe (it better be on the back of your motorcycle, Mr. Pingue) to witness the curing process deep in a cave below the escarpment. Apart from the Niagara prosciutto business, Joe's family has a longstanding tradition of cheese and meat production in Italy (since 1889). He sent me the link to his family's business in Italy but it's in italian so I could only look at the visuals and try to eke out their story.

On other serendipitous notes related to Pingue's Prosciutto, I got to the Gladstone Hotel's Harvest Wednesday celebration about 2 minutes too late. It was at capacity. I could hear people stomping around upstairs obviously enjoying the food and wine for a meagre donation of $7.50 and I was downstairs all dressed up with nowhere to go except the Gladstone bar alone. I contemplated waiting but who leaves a festivity like that right after it's began? Not likely. I began riding my bike up Dovercourt and ran into my friend Joe who promptly invited me to join him for dinner at the Drake on the rooftop patio. Now luckily the Drake uses a lot of local ingredients because I am doing the Eat Local Challenge for the month of August (and yes, I will post about it very soon) so there were ample things to choose from the menu without having to feel guilty or paranoid that an eat local challenge cop hiding behind a pillar was taking polaroids of me eating, say, Urugayan flank steak. Although the older man (or did he just look old because of his deep dark Tropicana tan?) with the bleached blonde hair and the white shoes and the white pants who drank many mojitos despite the unappealing fact that his teeth were not processing the raw mint very well would have been the perfect disguise. I know that's not very nice and admittedly I enjoyed watching his antics at the bar, soaking up his Caribbean joie de vivre and his screw Toronto's Presbyterian elistist attitude. I adore these random characters that appear like out of a novel, even if it's Robinson Crusoe, into my world.

Now here's Joe eyeing the menu knowing he offered his cousin Mario to me years prior:

Now this is why he's giggling inside (note menu item number 5):

Unfortunately it was entirely sold out so we never even got to sample it.

Lamb Tagine

I went up north for a girls weekend with my mom since my father is away golfing with his buddies, in Georgia, in a rental house on the beach, watching the SuperBowl. So while he's in a testonerone daze for a few days, mom and I drove the country roads north on Friday afternoon talking about relationships, movies, art, inspiring women we know, finding intent and positivity in both of our rich lives, and trying to secure a moth nest inside a plastic bag. We opened a bag of what looked to be tantalizing European pretzels coated in poppyseeds but as mom pulled a long one out just as she started to turn onto the on-ramp of the highway I saw what appeared to be a thread from my off-white sweater but then as she neared the pretzel to her opening lips to take a bite a moth flew from the bag directly into my face. I squealed. And then to prevent moths and larvae erupting into the moving vehicle I shoved the pretzel bag into a plastic grocery bag and tied it securely into a knot. Those moths are now in a garbage bin just outside Howard the Butcher in Caledon East.

Colourful Palate

Saturday night I wanted to cook something different and I guess by different I mean something I haven't tried before. I had had a 10-hour sleep the night before, something rare and elusive in my insomniac world, and I was beset with so much energy I didn't know what else to do with myself than search for recipes. The new Food and Drink magazine put out by the LCBO was on my kitchen table and when I leafed through it and saw pork medallions I thought "hmm, pork, haven't cooked that before" and set out to my local butcher.

I adore my tiny Bloor Street butcher. It has all the elements of neighbourhood living in a big city that I love so much: a global staff (two small aged Italian men and one Argentinian, odd seemingly animal loving posters on the walls, rustic old European artifacts cluttering small shelves, a small glass enclosed fridge space with a range of fresh cut reasonably priced meats, another fridge with enormous chunks of fresh parmesan and rounds of blue cheese and fresh pesto jars and the friendly informative non-threatening no-airs manner that people who love and respect what they do often emote. Since they had sold out of pork tenderloin, I settled on 3 nicely proportioned pork chops. I bid "Adios" and waved bye to rounds of "Ciao Senorita" and moved on to the next stop.

There are two green grocers in my neighbourhood and I shop at both. One has very cheap produce so if I'm only buying vegetables I'll shop there and the other has an extensive Latin American and Asian dried goods section so if I'm doing a combination shop I'll shop there instead. I bought dried bread crumbs, a butternut squash and a bagful of pole beans. I also bought 3 Mutsu apples. Dinner I had decided was going to be pork chops marinated in milk and then dredged in bread crumbs with herbs and fried in a pan, baked squash, fried beans with whole cloves of garlic and coarse sea salt, and homemade tangy applesauce.

Holiday Eating (or: I ate lamb!)

Oh, the holiday madness begins!

This is a snapshot of my niece Kyra eating. She loves to eat. Mostly strawberry icecream but also just recently TOMATOES which she sweetly calls POTATOES. She is the adorable inquisitive imaginative creative musical tempermental angel of mine through the thick onslaught of holidays.

I will be spending Christmas with my family and my 2 nieces. We'll be comfortable in a farmhouse by Georgian Bay spending most of our time in front of a fire, beside a small spruce tree, drinking wine or coffee or out snowshoeing or x-country skiing. I know once I get up there I'll melt with the relaxation that family and holidays should imbue but don't always do. I start a new job in early January so I have to, as a good friend suggested, enjoy these holidays and as she wrote: "I mean REALLY enjoy these holidays".

Yesterday was dinner at my lovely Aunt's in Cabbagetown, Toronto. We now do a family gathering pre-Christmas because the actual holiday is always too short and the weather too unpredictable to expect long distance travellers.

Our menu was surprisingly spectacularly un-Christmas-like. I loved it. No peas. No mashed turnip or squash. No turkey. No stuffing. And no whipped fruit or pumpkin dessert. Instead it was a leisurely afternoon of drinking wine and visiting with favourite relatives. I also had two front flat tires on my car so an additional bit of excitement in -20 degree weather (thank you Christopher for getting down on your knees in the snow and hand pumping my tires!).

The food, alas, the food. Menu Follows.

Les Saucisses (or ahem, the lowly sausage)

Now that I've come clean about my carnivorous habits, I'll tell you a secret. St. Lawrence Market used to pretty much revolt me when I was a full on herbivore rarely eating cheese and only occasionally ingesting fish or eggs. I used to have to hold my breath and avert my eyes as I made my way past the unloading truck with the piles of distended carcasses with sawed off limbs. I had to duck often as the delivery man, covered in blood, wended his way inside with a rigor mortis carcass on his back. Then there were the display cases with stuffed birds and back bacon and rows of ribs and tongue and ground beef. And while I still don't love the smell of raw meat of any kind and I still don't enjoy seeing blood seep from any living creature, I have come to find myself enraptured in this new ritual of mine of eating lunch at the market in the midst of all these animal parts in order to find something new to cook for dinner.

This sausage maker is at the north west corner of the market. It's the first stall you come to if you enter the doors to the far right of the main entrance off of Front Street. Last time I was there, on Friday actually, there was a charming young boy of about 18 who hails from Siberia serving me. Blonde, blue eyed and a definite sausage connoisseur. I tried the pork sausages with sage last night but I think I prefer the lamb sausages with coriander. Pork tends to be too salty and too 'porkish' for my delicate taste buds! I like the herb tinged subtle flavour of lamb...

I boil the sausages for 10 minutes. Let cool. Then cut up and eat with a horseradish Polish mustard, roast potatoes, roast tomatoes and boiled french beans. The pork sausage which I hastily used in a curried dish the other night would much better suit a spicy tomato pasta sauce.