Edible Tulip

What's For Lunch on Yonge Street?

Toronto, how I've missed you.

In the short block north from my office, I can get a tattoo, enjoy a jerk chicken dinner for $2.99 (if I was male, I'm sure I could also get a jerk to go if you know what I mean), and browse adult porn at Kinky Times. Yonge Street is an odd stretch of commerce, prostitution, and panhandling, a street the blends government offices with homeless shelters, a street flooded with public servants and those they serve. I stand in line to get a coffee and I chat with the young boy who is all bitching and complaining about having to go up to the second floor. I know what he's talking about, it's where the provincial courts are. It's like trailing a migration pattern watching the young men flock to the entrance to the correctional services. The street outside is sketchy and melancholic. It will exploit you the moment you look away. It's a neon strip, a sleazy tack of fly paper, a short story in a Raymond Carver novel. The narratives are dark and they are dirty. I am not a street urchin comfortable with oily embraces. I often turn away. I do not groove to the urban hum of bass from open windows. I steel my glance to the pavement, away from the crazies, the pimps, the teenage trannsexuals.

But they are here, and they are living large, on Yonge Street, and combined with the student population just south at Ryerson, the staff at Women's College Hospital on Grenville Street, and the various government offices along College and Bay street, it's a transient hive that expands exponentially during the day, specifically at lunch hour. I figured there must be good eats out there. Good, cheap, hole-in-the-wall food. Food that might reflect the complexity of the people and the location in itself. I took a walk north to Maitland and spotted Caribbean jerk, Nepalese, Napolitan pizza parlours, Korean Barbecue, Persian/Iranian, Middle Eastern, Halal, Thai, Mexican, and too many Japanese sushi and fusion Asian joints to list. Next week I begin my Yonge Street culinary exploration.

** In the realm of sharing good finds: Grace at 503 College Street (new spot in the former digs of Xacutti) is having an incredible Thursday night barbecue deal. For $10 you can savour a plateful of chef Dustin Gallagher's slow-braised pork shoulder, char-grilled chicken, and house-made sausage, sided with roasted Indo-spiced corn on the cob, coleslaw, and potato salad. A complimentary domestic brew is included. Only after 8 pm. And first come, first served.

Yogurt-Mint Salad & Chicken Tacos Alambres

I love having company for dinner. And I don't mean a dinner party event with a huge meal planned and prepped in advance, no, I mean sharing a meal with a friend, a sibling, a parent, a lover, an ex-lover, a once upon a time lover, a potential lover (in some cases the previous four examples are actually one in the same person!), a neighbour, your nana, your niece. Whatever, and whoever, it doesn't really matter, cooking with, or cooking for, someone helps get us all out of our personal food comfort zones. I use chicken quite a bit when I'm cooking solo but it's usually in a Thai influenced curry, boiled, then shredded, and added to a hot skillet with baby corn and lemongrass, fresh basil and green beans. In this case, I decided to cook a Mexican-inspired taco (soft shell made of corn) and have the chile-seared chicken cut into small pieces and tossed with fresh corn, ample cilantro, and lots of lime juice. A soft, mild cheese is added just before the final toss of the ingredients and the result is a spicy, citrusy, cheesy mound of chicken-tortilla-filling that is absolutely delicious. We lay flat warm corn tortillas and made a mound in the middle of the chicken filling shown above. We topped the filling with guacamole and Herdez brand Mexican salsa which I find less tomato-y than most store brought salsas and more typical of a Pico de Gallo flavour. A tomatilla Salsa would also be great. I served the tortillas with a salad of hearty greens and radicchio and tossed in a slightly sweet, yet tangy, dressing made with whole fat plain yogurt, a bit of honey, and lots of fresh mint.

Lentil Soup with Pancetta

 

As I continue to flip through my Joy of Cooking cookbook, I see my entire childhood memory of meals all grouped together like a scrapbook. I had no idea that my mother consulted this cookbook for so many dinners, over so many months and years, but here it is, all laid bare, a repertoire of those tastes and flavours that I grew to love or to hate for the rest of my life. I fault an early experience with pearl barley in some sort of soup as turning me off from the grain for eternity. I'm pretty sure the barley was used in a turkey soup, with leftovers from Thanksgiving or Christmas, but either way, I always associate the taste of barley with that of floating fat gobules. Barley aside, I decided to consult the cookbook for a soup that would suit a cold wintry pre-holiday week night. I settled on a simple lentil soup, with canned tomatoes, with an option for bacon (I used Italian pancetta). The recipe follows below.

The results? Not salty enough for my tastes. I added a few drops of tamari into mine and also lots of ground pepper. I also prefer my lentils in a pureed form with a backdrop of curry and lime, more like an Indian dahl. This recipe wasn't bold enough in my opinion to merit another try at it.

Chili con Carne

  

Now that I've cracked the spine of my new Joy of Cooking, I feel like an archivist starting in the basement and wending my way around the stacks of a 70-storey reference library blinded by the desire to rapaciously pull everything off the shelves. It's musty down here but it's also strangely romantic. It's about fingering the worn pages of history, and in a single book like this one, there are about 1200 of them. And that's just one book. The stories it tells are tragic and hopeful: Families reconciled over swedish meatballs (p. 513) and lovers torn apart over a breakfast of homemade jelly doughnuts (p. 655). Someone brought pickled watermelon rind (p. 949) in a jar to your uncle's funeral and when your sister lost the baby that wet, cold fall, you brought over Fruit Fool (p. 210) made with macaroons and lady fingers and fresh blackberries and you both drank sloe gin in the backyard by the apple tree in the hovering silence of heartbreak. Flipping through a recipe book is like the morning hours of vivid dream - it's all just flashes of memory, bold and rivetting, but not real. It's about memories, and then about taking a recipe and recreating it, and thus spinning the wheel of life anew, making food, making peace, or not, cooking for hunger, or for pain, or for resolve, and leaving a floured fingerprint behind like a scar.

Chili is a dish I make around this time of year. I hate the month of November. It's a month of shadows and frozen pavement. It's a time of somber dreams and dark circles. It's chili month in my world, if for no other reason than the faultless desire for inspiration, for spice, for heat.

Now I've made this dish a hundred times and it's always sightly different, with variations included to adjust for ingredients on hand. I like to use a mix of black beans and red kidney beans. I also sometimes add kernal corn. I tend to use ground beef, not beef chuck or round steak. And the level of spice depends on where I've bought my dried chilies from, and how much of the blend I use. Here is the original recipe for Chili Con Carne from The Joy Of Cooking. I'll share my additions, or alterations,  just below.

Thin Crust Homemade Pizza: Meat and Vegetarian Versions

 

Even someone who is irascible as I am has to learn to modify behaviours when sharing space. And by space, I even mean air. If I could have controlled my former office environment entirely, I would have banned bringing leftovers. Especially if they needed re-heating in the microwave. And even more especially if the dish included salted dried cod or nam pla sauce or pulled aged pork. I was a strict vegetarian for pretty much my whole life until a few years ago when my B12 levels plummeted so low walking became a trapeze act. I still pretty much eat that way accept for the random excursion into the meat underworld. My heightened sense of smell keeps me vigilant to my surroundings, but it can also be a bit of a liability. When a co-worker (who I shared a draft-free work space with) and I were going through tumultuous warfare over petty things like who had more work and who slacked off more well you can imagine what she brought for lunch every day. Oh, things like shell fish chowder and burritos. And she'd heat them up at 10:30 in the morning in the microwave that was located about 3 feet from my face from where I sat. (The public washroom was right across from the microwave, just to paint the picture properly). And then she took 3 long, leisurely hours to eat the meal, reheating when necessary, or just leaving the plate idle on her desk emanating smells. Those particular odours pretty much ruined all possibility of my own enjoyment at food or drink. How could I drink a nice creamy cup of sweetened strong arabica coffee when wafting through the air are smells so heinous they can only be described as being hit with teh smell of walking into a barn full of sows with ear infections and athlete foot - a foul mustiness seasoned with bile.  My boyfriend is also guilty, although less vindictively, of using my nose against me. If he's mad at me, he smokes in the car (to be fair, it is lawfully his car). Or if I'm acting especially moody, he'll fry a whole bunch of bacon on the stove top so the bed sheets smell like a diner's tablecloth. I guess my point, after all this, is that I know I can't carve boundaries into thin air and thank god I live in Canada where the personal space index is so enormous.

Chicken Tikka Masala; a Cabbage Carrot Saute; Potato Stir-Fry; Coconut Snow Pea and Bok Choy Side -- Indian Night!

 

Not sure which part of my personality begs the over-achiever to rear up (middle child syndrome STILL?!?) but anyway I set myself up for ridiculous tasks sometimes. The idea seems intriguing. Challenging even, but always easily overcome in thought. But often when I begin the task I've enunciated out loud I feel so burdened, even angry, and all at myself, mostly pissed off that I can't just sit on a couch for an evening and eat a non proper meal and do nothing. I'm just not sure how much of my rigid upbringing around food, formality, getting dressed up for dinner (I'll almost always still change for dinner, put on lipstick, tie up my hair, etc.), selecting wine, prepping, lighting candles, even when I'm alone for god's sake. It is what I do to complete my day, to celebrate the evening, oh how I love the fall of dusk, the welcome quiet, the silent and thoughtful company of lamp light, and those first absolutely indulgent sips of wine. It's quiet here. We're still getting used to living in a smallish town. The crickets are still here and yet the coyotes have also arrived. Ten years ago a glass of absinthe, a mattress somewhere in Paris or Moscow, a typewriter, the constant sensation of feeling drunk on nicotine and soothed by booze, ravaging a loaf of bread, was all pretty much in an evening. Now I like a "family" meal. Even if there's just two of us. Or one of us. (My dog is also a perfectly good dining companion.)

So at 7 pm, I decided to start cooking my Indian meal, 4 dishes, from scratch. Granted, I had all the ingredients. The meal would consiste of a Chicken Tikka Masala, a Cabbage and Carrot Saute with Cumin and Lime, a Potato Stir Fry with Ground Coriander and Mint, and an improved Snow Pea and Bok Choy Side Dish based on a Green Bean and Coconut Recipe but in fact it was nothing like it (the grocery store was out of green beans, I brought home shredded coconut but could not convince myself to add it to the bok choy.) As you can see above, it turned out nicely. Everything came out suprisingly authentic Indian tasting, if perhaps more subtle, and less overtly saucy or heavy on the ghee. My boyfriend is now wowed by my multi-tasking, prioritizing, efficiency. That is, until I turn it towards home projects.

Taco Tidings

My new life of traversing mountain sides, getting lost on trails in the woods, wading through running rapids, and generally just walking my ass off (sadly it was small and inconsquential to begin with) is SLIGHTLY different than my old life of 8 hours at a desk apart from the odd scamper up half a flight of stairs to share combustible gossip. All the fresh air and the (sorry for the following trite descriptor, but it's true) breathtaking scenery makes a gal a wee bit hungry. The energy output has altered my eating habits as equally as moving in with a carnivorous Mediterranean male. His life is about: pasta, red wine, and meat. Mine used to be about: tofu and stir fried vegetables mixed with Indian pickles four times a week, cheap white table wine, and every variation on the raw vegetable imaginable. I still get away with my ridiculously over zealous salads but my wine standard has been raised as has my meat intake. For those new to this blog, I was vegetarian for over 15 years. And strictly so. I would gag at the thought of quivering fish flesh on my plate or the soft flaky noxious taste of egg yolks or the slightly acrid animal-taste that is in butter. One day not too long ago a friend was over and he made some eggs and he put ham in those eggs. They weren't intended for me but the oddest sensation came over me as the eggs started to firm and the cheese began to melt and the ham got a bit crispy in the pan. I took a bite of his eggs, ham and all. Anyone who knew me would have fallen over dead if they'd witnessed that. Out of pure shock. I wasn't a rampantly righteous type of vegetarian; I was simply a rampant meat-hater since the age of 3. Around the age of 30, my body had some sort of internal dialogue with itself and rebelled. All of this was I guess lucky otherwise I would never be in a relationship with someone who had such a fond relationship with the animal flesh. I just don't know that it wouldn't have made me sick. Now that we live together, we eat meat (or fish, which I consider meat in that it's not a vegetarian dinner) most nights. That is a huge adjustment for me from eating meat only when I went out to eat. There are still some dishes I get a bit trembly and queasy over but tacos are not one of them.

I love the crunchiness of a corn taco shell matched with the heat of spiced ground beef and topped with a cool zesty salsa. It's totally addictive and I can eat about 7 of them.

We copied the spices that are in a pre-made package of taco flavouring minus all the crap. We seasoned our beef with chili powder, cumin, cayenne, garlic powder, salt and pepper. We cooked down a chopped onion beforehand and added the beef. Once it had stewed and began to turn brown and there was ample moisture we added in the spices, tossed again, and let cook for a few more minutes. For the salsa, we chopped off the kernals of 3 cobs of corn, diced a few field tomatoes, chopped up some cilantro, minced a whole jalapeno pepper, seeds included, diced an avocado, chopped a few tsps of white onion, and then topped with fresh lime juice, and some salt. We grated old cheddar cheese and sliced some iceberg lettuce. And took sips of a spicy shiraz in between total taco explosion. They aren't pretty to eat but they sure are tasty.

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.