Edible Tulip

Toxic tamarind?

I live in such a diverse grocery neighbourhood that I am constantly stumbling across new and wondrous goodies. The other day I stepped into a small store that serves as a dry cleaner and an asian grocer. There on the counter were these chewy looking brown clumps rolled in sugar and placed neatly in a plastic box. The ingredients read simply: tamarind, sugar and salt. Hmm. I'm all for simplicity so I bought them for $1.19. The first taste that hits you is the granulated sugar and then you begin to taste the exotic appeal of tamarind which is its tart sweetness. The salt I couldn't decipher but it might act as a preserver of the fruit.

Feeling a little more curious about tamarind tonight since I've only really ever used it in a paste before I did a bit of research online and lo and behold the tamarind candy is a mighty FDA red flag for lead poisoning and, ah, contamination of FILTH.

Wine gums from the bulk store, minus the red ones, don't seem so bad after all.

Truffles, anyone?

I took a well deserved road trip today through the country to get my snow tires put on before we get swept up in wintry weather (where is that first blast of flurries by the excited way? I can't wait to skate round and round and catch snowflakes on my tongue). It was marvelous to drive up and down the hills with nobody else on the road and I decided to make a stop at Aarden's chocolates in Stayner, Ontario (off Airport Road, south of Wasage Beach, North-West of Barrie).

Aarden's is owned and operated by Mark and Monica Aarden of Holland. They settled in Stayner 7 years ago and opened their chocolate shop. Mark is 38 years old and he's been working with chocolate for 21 years if that makes any sense. It must be the European mentality of specializing early on in life! It's a lovely store with a festive and charming window display -- Christmas trees, enormous chocolate sleds, chocolate wreaths, 3 foot chocolate santas, trees on lollipop sticks -- and then an absolutely jam packed interior full of cake trays of truffles, bonbons and adorable chocolates with gold glittering mini sparkly trees. Don't take children into this place. They'll have a visual sweetness overload and collapse out of eternal indecision! Well, the same applies for adults I suppose.

They import the best grade chocolate from Belgium and they hand make everything on site with individual tempering machines for their dark chocolate, milk chocolate and white chocolate. They also import their marzipan from Germany and their walnuts from France. I got to take home a truffle log handmade with a piping tube and filled with a champagne ganache interior and then decorated with dark chocolate shavings. I'm still in heaven!

Aarden's Chocolates
270 Main Street East
Stayner, ON L0M 1S0
705-428-3385

Raspberry Lattice Top Pie

There still seem to be an abundance of red raspberries at the green grocers in my neighbourhood and they still seem to carry that succulent flavour that borders on the slightly sweet over mellowly tart. That is my favourite essence in a fruit. I've never been fond of the saccharine type of sweet (an overripe pear, banana or mango). I prefer the crisp refreshment of a fruit just embracing maturation (melons, apples, kiwis). I love berries of all kinds because even when they are perfectly ripe they still have a complexity that the taste buds go wild over.

Raspberry pie like rhubarb pie tastes exactly like the fruit that it is made from. Given that fall is here, despite the warm weather, my baking and kitchen nurturing and fattening-up-for-winter instinct is in full swing. Invite a loved one over in the afternoon and lie around eating pie!

Belgian Chocolate Surprise

Last night was an opening dinner for the playwright Linda Griffith's creativity writing workshop. She's a well known multi award winning writer and she attracted, from what it appeared last night, quite an eclectic group of students. Some old, some new, and some repeat students from other workshops from earlier in the season. Kari would be one of these repeat students. I cooked for that particular workshop and so she brought me a culinary treat, a surprise she said, to utlitize and challenge my creativity in the kitchen. An ingredient to use at my discretion. Hmm, I wondered, what could it be? Then as I was in the crush before dinner time as people's spouses decided to stay for dinner left right and centre and I tried to volumize the look of the food Kari left me a little brown bag on the counter.

This is what I found.

Throughout the week I will find ways to break down the enormity of this heavy hunk of Belgian chocolate. And it won't be me nibbling away on it for shocks of instantaneous energy like I did as a child, my two front teeth spaced far apart as evidence left on the bittersweet baking chocolate: "No mother, it wasn't me".

Double Zucchini Loaf

When spring first arrives I become enchanted with everything it seems. It's one thing to go wild with the first whiff of earth after the retreat of snow or the sight of apple blossoms climbing the hillside horizon or drinking by the river after 7 in daylight still WITHOUT a parka on. But I suppose it's quite another to not be able to chill out at the supermarket while standing in the produce section. Zucchini got the best of me a week or so ago: it had clear, taut, blemish-free skin the colour of deep emerald and they were all lined up in rows piled atop one another. What could I do but destroy the pyriamid and take them home with me. What I had forgotten was how much I dislike eating the same vegetable in repeat. Of course, there are a few exceptions to this rule but the zucchini is not one of them. Unless it's baked into a sweet bread, that is.