Tag Archives: reading groups

Foodie February

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This week I’ve spent a fair amount of time enjoying the foodie communities of Toronto through three events: my cookbook reading group, Seedy Sunday and A Lovely Feast.  It was hard to pick only one to write about so here is my recap of my fantastic week of delicious food and dreams of food to come, including my top 3 favourite things about each event.

Cookbook Reading Group
The cookbook reading group is a monthly gathering of a group of friends where a cookbook is the centre of conversation and a potluck.  Jim has already profiled the first meeting of the group a year ago on the Daily Gumboot.  This month’s book was “Vij’s at Home: Relax, Honey”.  Vancouverites may know Meeru’s and Vikram’s restaurants, Vij’s and Rangoli, but I’ve never been to the restaurants.  It was quite well received by the entire group, with only a few minor complaints (including recipes calling for too much water or roasting and grinding large amounts of spices just to use a fraction of them in the recipe).  But overall everything was delicious.  My favourite things about the cookbook were:

  1. Spices – I’ve learned a lot about cooking with Indian spices with some hands on cooking lessons from a friend.  Jim and I have more or less been able to replicate curries in our own kitchen, but Vij’s has added another layer to our knowledge and has a great reference section describing less familiar ingredients to help out when shopping in little India.
  2. Local Ingredients – While the spices are Indian and veggies are almost all things that grow in Canada and it was easy to find lots of curries that could be made entirely of available Ontario produce, even in the winter.  And it even gave us lots of great options for all the celery root we’ve been collecting from our CSA over the last few weeks.
  3. Pressure Cooker – This cookbook embraces the pressure cooker, one of my new favourite kitchen tools.  It means that even complicated curries or brown basmati rice can be done in a fraction of the time, making the cookbook a winner for even weeknight cooking.

Seedy Sunday
Seedy Sunday (previously Seedy Saturday) is a long-time favourite of mine and focuses on looking forward to the upcoming spring.  Coming just in time to get tomato seeds started, Seedy Saturday/Sunday has become a regular part of my mid-Februaries in Toronto.  The idea of Seedy events is to bring together the grassroots groups in your community that are interested in organic, heirloom seeds to sell, swap and giveaway seeds.  Since I’ve been in Toronto, Seedy Saturday/Sunday has grown exponentially, starting in a community centre, moving to the The Stop’s Green Barns and this year being held in the University of Toronto’s Hart House.  And there are two more events planned this year in March for Scarborough and North Toronto.  Seedy Saturdays and Sundays happen all over Canada in late winter and early spring and the full listing can be found on the Seeds of Diversity website (including in Vancouver on February 26th).  My three favourite things about Seedy Sunday were:

  1. I always learn something new – this time it was the new work being done by the Vineland Research and Innovation Centre on growing a wider range of foods in Ontario that appeal to the GTA’s increasingly diverse communities, like bitter melon and okra.  There were even lots of seeds that they were giving away.
  2. Great timing – every year it comes just in time for me to start planting my seedlings.  As an apartment dweller space is limited so I focused on tomatoes and basil, but this year I’m adding peppers and garlic to the mix.  Most of these I’ll give away, but some will end up on my balcony as my container garden.
  3. It feeds my tomato addiction – it is no secret on the Gumboot that I love tomatoes.  And Seedy Sunday has hundreds of different kinds of tomato seeds available in all shapes, sizes and colours.

A Lovely Feast
A Lovely Feast was a community Valentines dinner organized by my CSA farmers at Kawartha Ecological Growers and my coffee/chocolate traders ChocoSol that celebrated eating locally and sustainably in winter.  They teamed up with Hot Yam! from the University of Toronto, who are a volunteer-run vegan food collective to deliver a delicious 5 course vegetarian meal for the reasonable (at least by Valentines/foodie standards) price of $50 per couple at the Chocosol loft downtown.  Dinner was served family style at two large tables, giving a great chance to get to know your neighbours a bit.  My three favourite things about A Lovely Feast were:

  1. Mexico meets Ontario – as one might expect when eating locally grown food in February there were a lot of root vegetables and squash, but Chocosol brought a mix of Mexican flavours and spices to the meal that are ethically traded, including handmade corn tortillas, epazote (a Mexican herb), and of course chocolate.
  2. Random conversations – ranging from how to best pour out of pitchers that had a very high chance of spilling (we concluded that they should be under half full for best results), to how lentils grow (we guessed in a pod like peas and beans), and looking up nostrils (there was a 4 year old at our table).
  3. Thanksgiving II – on a number of occasions over the course of the night Jim and I referred to the day as Thanksgiving rather than Valentines.  And as someone that has never really celebrated Valentines with anything more than cinnamon hearts that is how I preferred it.  The whole event had a vibe that celebrated community and food, which is what I love most about Thanksgiving.

So that was my week.  Have you been to any great community based foodie events lately?

Making friends with liver and raw beef

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Two weekends ago Katie and I were in Kingston to meet our friends’ new baby.  At some point during our deliberations on what kind of interesting meat dish we should try to make we decided to use the two pork livers hidden unused and unloved in his freezer to create a pate.  Now, for the most part I’m a very adventurous eater, but I have never gone out of my way to eat organ meat and aside from some commercial pates that I’m sure I’ve tried over the years, I don’t think I’ve eaten too much liver.  I remember finding it really odd as a child when my grandfather willingly ordered liver and onions at restaurants.  I guess one of my parents doesn’t like liver as we never had it at home.  My friend and I searched the internet, found a You Tube videos demonstrating how to make a pate and we set about making a bacon heavy pork liver pate – it is really easy once you assemble the ingredients.

The reason for my recent inclination to try organ meats is that I’ve been reading through The River Cottage Meat Cookbook for a new cookbook reading group some of my friend started. As the idea developed we decided to meet once a month at one of our homes and to try and cook some of the recipes out of that month’s selection to eat while we discuss the book.

The first liver pate we made in Kingston was so good that I decided I would try and make it again and bring it to the first meeting  last night.  Not having any liver hiding in my freezer, I ended up buying duck liver from the local Healthy Butcher.  Everyone was inspired to try new things having skimmed through the book and watched clips of the author Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s TV show on You Tube.  Hugh expounds a ‘nose to tail’ philosophy and argues that thrifty meat consumption helps off set the increased cost of sustainably raise animals.  I believe almost everyone in the group tried the liver pate and most seemed to enjoy it.

Another friend brought some beef tenderloin and prepared an amazing beet root and raw beef Carpaccio.  I’ve tried a few Tartars over the years, but this was the first time I tried Carpaccio.  It was really amazing and wonderfully tender.  Finally our hosts made a great stew with the much more affordable and therefor plentiful chuck cut of beef, nicely complementing the delicate but limited Carpaccio.

As we enjoyed the meal and a glass of wine we talked about Hugh’s food politics and the challenges of finding affordable and sustainable meat in Toronto/Canada.  We assessed the strengths and weakness of the many butchers around town and shared advice on where to buy pork belly or whole chickens.  The cookbook reading group model was a great way to bring together a diverse group of friends to not only cook interesting food for each other, but also to talk about our approaches to buying, cooking and eating food.

Here is a link for a liver pate recipe