Wonderful crazy patio madness in Toronto It doesn’t matter whether a delivery truck’s engine is vibrating in your ear, or whether a tapocketapocketa is going on next door, or the wind comes up a storm, or lightning strikes… I may have enjoyed my dinner under Boba’s purple and yellow striped canopy MORE because of the thudding downpour. Come summer, Torontonians HAVE to eat outside. Eating alfresco changes the rhythm, the tempo, the mood of Toronto dining. The word is unbuttoned. People who usually hurry through lunch are now drowsing under an umbrella as they sip pernod – and staying up later than usual to just absorb the warm inky night vibes.   more »

the port....   Mme Mouny..sole a la Dieppoise...Mowbray & Jim ..

Madame Mouny of  Port, a dishy little resto hard on the pretty port of Dieppe, is my kind of  acceuil.  

And my family agreed.  

Dieppe is an easy trip from England, a short ferry ride across the English Channel. You ask why the English insist on claiming La Manche as its own? Well, it's a matter of history. The French have failed to invade England since William the Conquerer, 1066 and all that,  and the English don't forget. Inscribed on the D Day memorial in Bayeux are the words (in Latin) "We, the descendents of William, have liberated your land."

We started our family reunion in Varengeville -sur-Mer at Dieppe, via the Eurostar. It was a brisk two-hour drive  from Calais. As we drive along the beachfront,my nephew Mowbray, whose greatest ever-school trip was touring the D Day beaches, says "Look at those German gun emplacements in the cliffs. No wonder the Canadians didn't have a chance." He was referring to the Dieppe disaster when Canadian troops were slaughtered during on an inept invasion rehearsal in 1942. The Normandie coast is drenched in world war II memorabilia which is profoundly moving.

Last time i was in Dieppe, about ten years ago, I remember eating the local specialty Sole a la Dieppoise, which is Dover Sole with mussels and a rich wine sauce. So after getting recommendations from my hotel's concierge, I set out to find it. Wasn't easy. Dieppe has more fast food joints, taco bells, than good French restos.

First resto said it didn't have any Dover Sole! Second resto was the New Haven,  the quality, and while they said they had Dover Sole, they were fully booked. The third place was the Port restaurant, a family place. I liked it right away. Madame Mouny, her son is the chef, immediately said yes, they had Dover Sole and while A La Dieppoise was not on the menu, they would bien sur cook it for me.

Our party had grown larger by the time we arrived. The restaurant was packed. But Madame Mouny wasn't fazed at all. She simply added a couple of stools to the table. Later she  shooed away people who'd booked the table next to us so we would be more comfortable.

 She had to be reminded what the ingredients of Sole a La Dieppoise were,  but once up to speed, she said no problem.

We had a lovely dinner. We felt loved which is not entirely usual in today's restos. She clucked over the wine, she urged the wonderful fresh fruits de mer as a starter, and she delivered with pride an irresistible Sole a La Dieppoise.

We ended with Calvados. She appeared with a huge bottle of the very finest . There'll always be a France  as long as there's Madame Mouny.

 Restaurant Port, 99, Quai Henri IV. Tel: 0033 235 84 36 64.

I posted a new photo to dieppe.

I posted a new photo to dieppe.

I posted a new photo to dieppe.

Guillaume’s amazing Garden…
Normandie’s horticultural treasure, Le Bois Des Moutiers

In early May, our family renunion took place in Varengeville-sur-Mer near Dieppe, the coastline memorialized by the impressionists, and where Georges Braque is buried. My Huguenot family meets regularly – a habit started with the French Huguenot diaspora in the 16th century – and this year we got together at Le Bois des Moutiers, a 30 acre spread along the Normandy cliffs where 110 years ago, Guillaume Mallet inspired the building of an Arts and
Crafts house with views stretching over woodland to the sea.

Guillaume may or may not have known he was making history – he simply had a vision of an Arts and Crafts house surrounded by a beautiful garden. But history came with Edwin Lutyens, then 29, just starting his career as the architect of empire, notably the layout and planning of New Delhi,  along with his associate, the most influential garden designer of the last century,  Gertrude Jekyll,  who helped Guillaume create a uniquely English garden. In those days, French Huguenot families were  close to their English cousins. My English father remembered French cousins called Pip and Topsy.

The house is whimsical Grimm’s fairy tales, while the gardens are
enchanting, laid out in what is now called the Jekyll style,  a series ofoutdoor rooms, informality enlivening formality, a long herbaceous border on both sides of a path and packed with perennials in waves of colour, clematisis draped over everything, and then great waves of lawn sweep down into woods.

The garden was mined during WWii when Nazis occupied the house. It took years for Mary Mallet, Guillaume's daughter-in-law to restore it with the help of her son Robert. He has  enhanced the original design with rare plantings, the largest collection of hydrangeas in the world, and carefully cultivated azaleas and 60 foot high rhododendrons enlivening bosky settings.  

Today gardeners, horticulturalists from around the world  make a
pilgrimage to Moutiers – and often compare it favourably with the
Sissinghurst of Vita Sackville West across the channel. It has the same idiosyncratic charm and family references. I spot an original Lutyens bench given to Mary Mallet by my cousin Philip who lives in a Lutyens house in Kent. Robert and his wife Corinne, the hydrangea expert, are at the gate, and Robert’s nephew Antoine is the one who knows where every plant is.

It’s a glorious day for the rassemblement – standing on the terrace scoffing champagne and foie gras canapés, you can see over the tops of giant budding rhodas a vivid blue glimpse of the sea. But who on earth are all these people? I only know a handful of the 126 who're here to celebrate our common ancestor, one Jehan Mallet, merchant of Rouen who hitched up his wagon to escape the Massacre of St. Barthelomew (1572) and headed for Geneva. Dull to be sure, church five times a day, but Calvin okayed moneylending. At a piffling 6 percent. Revenge was at hand. The indigent French king was always begging for cash. The Genevois obliged - at 23%. "We're descended from userers" cried a nephew in disgust. If only we'd kept the trade says another cousin.

Today we are all merged into the polyglot middleclass. Jim's a geneticist, butterflies his specialty, Victor's with the Financial Times in Madrid, Hugo's an opera singer, Mowbray's in advertising, Larissa's at Goldman Sachs, Mary from Connecticut is a pastry chef, Arthur from Versailles just went down with Bear Stearns, Amy's a freelance journalist in Hamilton, Ontario,  Steve's a carpenter in Hampshire, Peter from Georgia sports a ponytail...Mikkie is half Japanese, Charles is half Vietnamese.   We have one star, we reckon, my cousin John who has written the defnitive catalogue for the ceramicist Xanto of Maiolica. "What's Maiolica?" asks a millenial Mallet.  

We first assemble at the local Huguenot church, scarce as hens' teeth in these parts, and the pastor tries to connect the flight of the mallets to an illegal muslim trapped in Sangiatte seeking a better life - the English are enraged. "Typically French, they try to  shed their refugees by pushing them to England." Last time around at St Peter's in Geneva, the pastor urged the congregation to ethnically cleanse the world of Catholics OMG but our Catholic cousin Louis smiled blandly throughout. Just family.  

There's a bit of a tussle over history. Jim and Johnny from the English branch are compelled to correct the perfidious French cousin taking people round the house. "Cher cousin you are entirely wrong' they interrupt as he brushes over the role played by our particular ancestor, a crotchety upholder of liberty, a journo no less in the French Revolution. Competition continues when Alice, the chic daughter of the house, challenges everyone to go swimming. Mowbray, watched  with ambivalence by Swiss and American cousins, is the only one to jump in the freezing English channel or le manche as the French insist on calling it . "Call me icecube" he howls. Later he explains "A necessary gesture."

As the day winds on, so does speechifying. My grandfather's gen spoke French and English. Today, few of us do. So the speeches drag on in translation. The Americans are quarrelling over precedence, and one describes at length her bootlegger grandfather who wasn't actually a cousin.  Heads nod over the Calvados. An ancient cousin suddenly springs to life and waves his stick "Where's my cousin?" Just family.  



If you go: Le Bois des Moutiers, Varengeville-sur-Mer. Tel 33-(0) 2 34 85 10 02. Open March 15-Nov 15, 10 am-12.pm, 2 - 6 pm. House and Garden: $10 C. Garden is free.

From London, 6 hr drive including Eurostar crossing. By
train from Paris: 2 hrs.
We stayed at the ***Aguado on the beach, upwards of $100 a night but check
for deals. www.booking.com <http://www.booking.com>

Square Peg Colborne Lane makes its own niche in a round hole city. . Colborne Lane is the most controversial restaurant in Toronto. That’s a bad thing to be in a city which shrinks from controversy. Toronto is an uneasy blend of Babbitt (Sinclair Lewis’ satire on hometown boosterism) and pc dogma which rejects success unless it’s tied to doing good. Restaurants, one of the most efficient sponges of culture, reflect the dichotomy. Sometimes I wonder how Toronto’s chefs have time to tend to their restaurants - so busy are they cooking for charity.   more »

SAVE SQUIRREL NUTKIN>>>





A campaign to ethnically cleanse Britain of the invasive grey squirrel has begun.  The red squirrel is indigenous to Britain while the grey squirrel was brought to Britain from the US in 1880 and since then has wreaked havoc on the pretty little red - because it carries a virus that is lethal to the reds.

Squirrel Nutkin, as readers of Beatrix Potter will know, was an independent person, tetchy and unforgiving.  And as well, indomitable.  ...

"Old Brown carried Nutkin into his house, and held him up by the tail,intending to skin him; but Nutkin pulled so very hard that his tail broke in two, and he dashed up the staircase and escaped out of the attic
window."

Now the government-supported Red Squirrel Protection Partnership (RSPP) has managed  - with a committed volunteer force --  to kill some 18,000 greys in the past year...despite the RSPCA which says a squirrel cull is unethical. Rupert Redesdale writing in The Guardian  asks "Is it ethical to watch the extinction of a native species when a cheap and effective means of saving that species exists?" Spot of bother over disposing of the bodies but that's been resolved by Ridley's Fish and Game marketing - the ultimate organic free-range game.  Squirrel and chips anyone?

Last Supper By Gina Mallet gina@ginamallet.com I’m reeling away from the future in shock and awe. Forget the current debate over what to eat to keep healthy. In the future, as outlined by some starry futurists at last week’s IdeaCITY, the nature of food is immaterial as we change into cyborgs and robots and live to be l000.. Dr. Ray Kurzweil, acclaimed as a genius futurist, says that soon we will be able to reprogram our own biochemistry with software, human body version 1.0 then the dramatically upgraded 2.0 - with the killer application of nano technology – nanobots, blood cell sized robots that can travel in the bloodstream destroying pathogens, removing debris,correcting errors in DNA and reversing ageing processes.    more »

Can I stand a tomatoless dinner?By Gina Mallet gina@ginamallet.com For the past couple of weeks the big terrorist story has been the tomato. Around 250 Americans have been felled by tomatoes infected by Salmonella saintpaul, a rare form of E Coli bacteria but one, luckily, that is still treatable by antibiotics. But for how long? Bacteria are our imperial masters, we have more of them in our bodies than we do cells. We couldn’t survive without them doing bodykeeping , among their benefits, they keep our digestion in good nick, and most of them are neutral toward us. They are not purposefully helpful, it just so happens that it suits them to be so. But there is a Mao cell with its motto Sieze the Day aka let’s exploit any colony’s weakness. And here they have the upper hand. Bacteria evolve faster than we do – they reproduce every twenty minutes - so the new gen comes online ready to battle the latest antibiotic initiatives, shaping itself into a killer like 0157:H7 which struck so devastatingly at Walkerton a few years ago.   more »

I returned to see how C-5 in the ROM was doing a  year after its opening.

I found the Dorset Lamb Sausage,Grapefruit Panzanella, Olives, Prune Purée  ($15), a lamb sausage with pink grapefruit and cubes of bread, delicious. A small helping which suited me fine. A pastrami sandwich, which appears to have gone from the menu, was also very good. Only thing that bugged me was the MUSIC! In a room like a barn with an open kitchen, you just don't need more noise. The last manager there acknowledged customers complained about the noise, but customers apparently don't mean anything !

A customer's comment was posted recently.

Edward:

The large room is coldly austere with what looks like whitewashed vaulted ceilings, somewhat like those in the film Son Of Frankenstein.

The acoustics are terrible: canned music booms through the room making it easier to hear someone 10 tables away but hard to keep up a conversation with a table mate.

People at valued windows may have a nice view  but in the middle of the room we felt trapped in Grand Central Station.  The din at times made us laugh.

 Service and presentation were excellent although the portions were so very tiny my companion said it would have been nice to have just one more scallop. I had the steak frites --the frites were ever so minuscule but done to perfection, the steak was very juicy and i was promised it had been aged 60 days --no more, no less.  the "cheese" plate I chose for desert had three very small cheese pieces artfully arranged with walnuts and crispy toast slices and did the trick.The hot tea may have come via a tea bag but it was fine. It may be that C5 is pitched just a little too high for the average Toronto museum visitor's palate.......

The two ladies with me complained about trying to find the restaurant in the first place and wondered if the ambiance increased after dark with a twinkling skylight as backdrop. Finding the restrooms made for an adventure. 

The Bon Vivant has returned from a long pilgrimage to find his inner soul and now longs for something rich and luxe and rewarding. Where else to go but Auberge du Pommier, faux France in North York? Auberge du Pommier is France as most people who aren’t French would love it to be, undemanding and pretty French provincial. This isn’t the icy France of perfectionism, of visionaries like Chanel and ascetic chefs like the late Alain Chapel who was known as the monk. Rather it has the ingratiating charm of St. Laurent and the rustic appeal of Bofinger, the delightfully blowsy brasserie in Paris. It is the kind of restaurant where Colette’s cocottes went together when they were past it and finally got to eat what they liked rather than what their sugardaddies wanted to see them eat. “With teeth like that...” sighed Gigi’s mentor Aunt Alicia as she examined her great niece’s superb incisors …”I could have devoured all Paris and most of Europe. “   more »

"Most of us are not likely to give up spices, olive oil, rice, oranges, coffee
chocolate, nor should we feel guilty for consuming them:  they are
simply not grown in our climate. But we should feel ashamed about buying apples from
New Zealand and Washington state, garlic from China and Argentina, and peaches from
California and Chile.  " writes Gail Godwin Oliver, editor and publisher, Edible Toronto

Whaaaa? What's with this "guilt and shame".

What kind of person prefers to eat inferior food because it's local and shuns better imported food?

A political eater, that's who.

For myself, I eat for taste.

Anyway, where can i find right now a "fresh" apple from Ontario? They're senior citizens in the market. If there's a fresh picked Jazz flown in from NZ where I reckon they're picking apples now, I'd buy it like a shot. As for pears, Taylor's Gold is a knockout pear from NZ and again should be being picked right now.  Bring em on I say.

A couple of summers ago, I bought a peach flown in from Romagna-Emilia the day before. It was absolutely amazing! And it cost exactly the same as a peach from Niagara which funnily enough had been picked unripe and didn't match the full ripened flavour of the Italian.  

From London comes this report of a 12 year old girl - who was brought up by her parents on a strict vegan diet  - who is in hospital with a degenerative bone condition said to have left her with the spine of an 80-year-old woman.

The girl, who has been fed on a strict meat and dairy-free diet from birth, is said to have a severe form of rickets and to have suffered a number of fractured bones.





The condition is caused by a lack of vitamin D, which is needed to absorb calcium and is found in liver, oily fish and dairy produce. Decalcification leads to the bones becoming brittle and can cause curvature of the spine.

Last year, an American vegan couple were given a life sentence for starving their six-week-old baby to death. In 2001 two vegans from west London were sentenced to three years’ community rehabilitation after they admitted starving their baby to death.

   
When I got to London, I was hustled off to L'Autre Pied  where a young, 27, chef called Marcus Eaves, veteran of several Michelin starred kitchens, was producing scintillating fashionista cooking, the kind that comes with sous-vide, beignets and foams.

We booked for a Friday and were given a 7pm slot and could we leave by 9? OK.

Service was brisk: we loved the huge pale and mild  green olives but the waitress didn't know their name - however she went and found out where we could buy them.  I kept wondering whether the poached egg cooked for two hours sousvide really tastes any different from a regular poached egg, but I do know it tastes wonderful with  morteaux sausage puree, crushed peas and smoked butter emulsion. That is to say the serving is so small that I swallow two delicious mouthfuls in less than a minute. This is food that literally slips down -- teeth are redundant.

But the appetizer that really juiced us  up  was the button mushroom and smoked bacon duxelle garnished with two intensely musty French wild mushrooms,  girolle veloute and trompette de la mort. Just had to hold your breath and hope the forager was an expert.

The entrees were all tempting --  a superb loin of Gloucester Old Spot Pork with smoked pureed potatoes, glazed white beans and a dribble of majoram jus packed an aftertaste that dwarfed its small size, and ditto cornish lamb with zucchini puree, confit tomatoes, a dab of polenta and black olive jus. Nothing wrong with the roasted hake with baby squid, fennel, basil crushed potatoes and Gazpacho consomme....you do have to work hard  though to identify the complex flavours.

Price;  appetizers around $18 and entrees from $36 to $45, and very good wines by the glass start at $10 for 125ML.  We went way past 9 as one guest was late but the staff made no fuss although there were people drinking in the pub across the street calling in to see when their table was ready.

And what a relief -- no music on the menu. Instead, people still talk to each other in restaurants over here .

German deli, and by that I mean the takeaway food of the peoples of the former German and Austro-Hungarian empires which stretched like the Iron Curtain from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste on the Adriatic and beyond is one of my favourite tastes. Sweet and sour like Elizabeth Schwarzkopf's soprano . When I lived in New York, I'd go to Bremen House on Yorvilles broadway, E. 86th street and buy lachshinken, translucent slivers of cured pork loin, marinated cucumber salad, dill flavoured potato salad, that very fine light rye.   more »

This Sunday, June 8, Second Harvest is holding its annual Toronto Taste fundraiser at the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre.  It features a variety of chefs from Mark McEwan,J.P. Challet to Ben Heaton cooking for the occasion and will include silent wine auctions featuring 30 vintners, wine merchants, brewers and brand name spirits.  Over 50 top Toronto chefs will have mouths watering with everything from caviar to Strawberry and Cream Cookies and dishes from JP Challet to Jamie Kennedy Wine Bar.  Silent, fine wine and live auctions and the brew of over 30 vintners, wine merchants, brewers and spirits purveyors will top off the evening’s indulgence.
 
Every day, Second Harvest picks up donated fresh food, which would otherwise have gone to waste, and delivers that food to social service programs in the Greater Toronto Area.  Second Harvest currently provides food for about 14,000 meals a day to children in breakfast programs, seniors on fixed incomes, women fleeing domestic abuse, psychiatric patients, homeless people, and many others who have fallen on hard times.

 Toronto Taste is the timeliest of appeals because wasted food is fast becoming the shame of the world - it's reckoned that 33 percent of all food is thrown away in North America and just when the third world is starving.

 Toronto Taste Tickets:  $225 each (tax receipt for $125). Call  416-408-2594 or www.torontotaste.ca.

Here I am in Normandie, in  Pont Ecrepin to be exact, a little village pop 1000 - and look at its main street!

-- two charcuteries, a baker, a grocery shop a bar/brasserie, a hairstylist, the Lion D'or hotel with a riverside restaurant. How relaxing. No need to take the car anywhere. As I say this, a shiny tanker truck trundles by -- Pont Ecrepin is seeing growing traffic on its main street because the bridge is the only one for twenty miles around.

"Ah" says my host Annabelle "That's our milk coming from Wales!"

From Wales? What happened to the terroir on which Normande cows browse to produce the great milk that goes into one of the world's greatest cheeses - Camembert. On the ferry to Portsmouth I learn from an English farmer who regularly travels cross channel that milk tankers are lined up at Dover taking milk to France.

Oh um. I check out the cheese in the grocer and can only find an industrial camembert. When I want one with the AOC label that insures the cheese is truly raw milk and not thermise (partial pasteurization) we have to drive to a supermarket in Caen! A supermarket? Yes, the best food is found no longer in the village shops but in the supermarket.

That night eat at the Lion D'Or. These village hotels were once the unsung treasures of browsing through France. I see that it got a Gault Millau citation in 2004. Tonight, we have a lovely view of the river, we also have a noisy French family with toddlers screaming! I thought they didn't do this in France! The mother has a cell phone clamped to her ear.

Annabella says the food has been going down for the past three years -- "It's the internet." Once commercial travellers routinely stopped off at the Lion D'Or. Now the internet has superannuated the commercial traveller. Lion D'Or is up for sale.

We eat a rangy steak, wedge potatoes indifferently roasted, good house red....total cost about $70 for two. And where is Madame, wonders Annabella. The owner-chef bustles out, all smiles because he has fallen in love. Madame? She is watching TV on the other side of the river in Putanges.

 Next day I buy a baguette at the boulangerie from an english speaking baker. The bread isn't as good as the little pastry which is as light and airy and wrapped up in that neat, delicate way that the French have made their own. The charcuteries have brains in little cups. One owner is all charm. The other says not a word. Sixteen years ago Annabella paid her first visit to the grumpy one and has never returned. "Nobody goes." Can't help liking it - an antidote to our slavish consumer culture, here a shopowner can just do her own thing.

he Monarch butterflies that go to Mexico to breed  are ending up as tapas on to Mexican menus.  Butterfly larvae are selling for around $25 in top Mexican restaurants.

Can beef can be replaced by insects which are packed with nutrition? The late Emperor of Japan's favourite dish was wasps with rice, Colombians like ground fire ants (13.9g of protein)  spread on toast and Filipinos go for crickets. In Papua New Guine, roasted dragonfly is a high. Butterflies, ants, moths,  grasshoppers (20 g of protein)  and beetles are set to replace beef on green menus as they are protein packed  and put less strain on the environment as they don't destroy rain forests.

I posted a new photo to blog.

College Street Rocks-it......... It’s around 9 pm on a Friday night and Grace, the new madeover Xacutti on College and Bathurst is doing Toronto’s version of Sex and the City: hipless chicks dangling Carrie’s favourite Jimmy Choo’s and shaven-headed metrosexuals from the fashion/promo trades darting out to have a smoke between cosmomartinis. Gone is the faux friendliness of Xacutti’s communal table. Instead, a brightly lit white space, the backdrop for the most desirable demographic, young impulsives. The playbook is slick.Small concise menu, no entrée over $25, good list of wines by the glass.   more »

Jamie Oliver believes that women should abstain from sex with their husbands or boyfriends to punish them if they refuse to cook.

“Men are driven by sex,” the celebrity chef said this weekend at the annual Hay-on-Wye festival. “So the best way for women to get their men into the kitchen would be to stop having sex with them until they start to  cook.

 Chef Gordon Ramsay wants restaurants to be forced to serve only in-season fruits and vegetables of be fined. In a BBC 5 interview he said  he wants chefs to use home-grown produce only, not Kenyan strawberries in March for example.

IT's LSD for taste buds, it's a trip for sweetaholics, it's an innocuous looking red African berry synsepalum dulcificum that makes everything you eat with it taste sweet. Sour lemons become sweet lemonade, lime slices turn to candy, goat cheese tastes as if it is "powdered sugar" and "cheesecake" and Guinness turns into a murky milkshake.  

The miracle berry was first scouted as a new fake sugar in the seventies. But it's difficult to extract miraculin from the berries and purify it. Its future seems to lie in changing the taste of food itself -- scientists are experimenting with genetically modified miraculin tomatoes.

And it could upstage avant garde chefs who are struggling to achieve way out wacko flavours.

But the berry's true vocation is a trip. According to today's Gawker "Internet-savvy hipsters flock to Long Island City rooftop parties where a dealer/ guru named "Supreme Commander" hands them crazy berries to chew on, sending them into blissful fits of uncontrolled food-sampling.

     At his first party,,,  in January, guests murmured with delight as they tasted citrus wedges and goat cheese. Then things got trippy.

    "You kept hearing 'oh, oh, oh,' " ... and then the guests became "literally like wild animals, tearing apart everything on the table."

    "It was like no holds barred in terms of what people would try to eat, so they opened my fridge and started downing Tabasco and maple syrup."

Marc Lepine of Ottawa's new restaurant Atelier says " I ordered a pack of the freeze-dried version from the UK.   My staff and I are going to play around with it a little.  I can see at the end of a meal serving it with some unusual 'dessert' ingredients. "

To BUY -- Go to MiracleFruitman-Curtis Mozie

I posted a new photo to newfruit.

There's a funny piece in the LA Times http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-rooster25-2008may25,0,4480585.storyabout how an Hispanic neighbourhood is turning into a barnyard -- and not everybody's pleased-

"The crowing -- and bleating, quacking, honking, oinking and neighing -- has been a growing source of irritation, with callers lighting up city phone lines demanding that officials do something" writes the Times.  

Particularly about the Cockadoodle doo! Tony Johnson, who lives in Southeast L.A..... has fantasized about silencing the birds permanently. "Boom. Boom. Boom," he said, pantomiming how he would do it.

 "I can't sleep," said Perry Partee, 55, who lives near Watts. He sternly dismissed the conventional wisdom that roosters crow at dawn; in fact, he said, they often get going much earlier.

I found an NYT report from September 14, 1904, about the art of cock crowing -- in France, the best crowers were considered to make the hens lay better, and cocks were being trained to crow effectively.  The cocks were kept in covered cages, the covers whipped off once a day to ensure a burst of long sustained arias.

Complaints about cocks' lousy timekeeping miss the point. According to the Aberdeen Bestiary, the cock's crow has a message.  Cocks crow loudest in the darkest hours of the night and thus "evoke the terrors of eternal judgement at the top of their voice" and only when "they realize that the light of truth is already present in the hearts of their listeners" do they crow less forcefully.

Just what we need: one more moral arbiter.

Here' s Didier Duran of Cyrano's Bistro with his pet duck Nicolai....


Old news now but still significant - on May 14 the Chicago City Council led by Mayor Daley struck down the ordinance banning foie gras in city restaurants. The Mayor said that he didn't think the city should be saying what people should be eating -- Hear Hear.

Much was made of the fact that star chef Charlie Trotter inspired the ban because he didn't serve foie gras in his restaurant.  Now however he says he was never in favour of the ban. Why didn't he say so then?

Fresh'n'Local is ever so posh in Britain. First it was the Duchess of Devonshire's farm shop, then the Prince of Wales' farm shop and now it's Lady Bamford's Daylesford Organic. Lady Bamford, a multimillionaire's wife, has leapfrogged over her rivals by taking her brand and  her organic produce  to London.  Her newest outlet is in chic Pimlico, a croissant's throw from Sloane Square, a three story cafe and emporium, with a private dining room in the basement next to the "loos". The walls are marble throughout. Nobody has exploited the organic brand so unabashedly - and the original greens are calling her Martha Stewart with a title and organic for WAGs -- the shopaholic wives and girlfriends of the millionaire soccer players who don't just buy organic food but even more important the ORGANIC LIFESTYLE, cosmetics etc.....

Food Report: the wild mushroom risotto $26 was ok, the scrambled eggs were left on the hot plate too long -  the Epoisses cost about $22 and was definitely thermise and the DAylesford organic blood orange marmelade was as bland as guava jelly.  But the weather was gorgeous and made sidewalk sitting a delight..



                                                                 
Right next to Daylesford is the Saturday Pimlico Farmers' Market where you can buy nice fat Dover Soles for the bargain price of 12 bucks. The fishmonger takes pains to educate the customers in how to cook a gurnard, a small red spiky fish which was going for less than $2.   Half a dozen organic free range eggs are going for around seven bucks...  And "then there's the organic hay for pets which is labelled "Not for Human Consumption" - after all you never know what Greens will eat.

It’s no fun eating green… Is Fresh’n’Local a con job, is organic faux? Has food been turned into an indigestible pot au feu simmered with cups of aggression. Last weekend, the Vegans held a parade in New York City with a woman dressed as a pig carrying a sign “I have no spare ribs” followed by a giant pink replica of a human colon with polyps and a dirty colostomy bag. It’s not enough that our world is fragmenting before us, now food is going to pieces too.   more »

I picked up Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food: an Eating Manifesto and thought oh great, a defense of foie gras and just when it needs it. Both Chicago and California have given in to animal activists and banned the luxuriant duck/goose liver that can turn the sternest ascetic into a voluptuary. Already four European countries have banned the supreme food and so, I should add, has the Prince of Wales. Philadelphia may be next.

But Pollan doesn’t give a fig for foie gras. He is no foodie. He is a political writer who has made food an emblem of what’s wrong with the industrial world where food is grown and sold for profit and little concern for our health and welfare. And he’s just one of a throng of critics who are making food a surrogate for everything they find rotten in our way of life. The public is  gobbling it up. Nutritionist Marion Nestle, the author “What to Eat” says “What I hear as I talk to people is this phenomenal sense of despair about their inability to do anything about climate change, or the disparity between rich and poor.” So they kick food.  

Wait a minute.

 What about the back story, why we eat at all? A huge chunk of human experience is being shorted. Once necessity is satisfied, we eat for pleasure. Food is memory, the rituals of dining are mnemonics for the high and lows of our emotional lives. Those of us who can eat out and love doing so feel our spirits rising at the crackle of a fresh starched tablecloth, the clink of wine glasses, the fragrance  of lamb slowly braised in a tagine, the shock and awe in confronting a black bean threaded on to a pine needle. The senses aroused by the sight, the fragrance, the taste of great cooking has become a rich literary subculture. Here is MFK Fisher confronting a cook’s genius in France.”Maybe it was boiled shoe…but by the time Madame got through with it, it was nourishing and full of heavenly flavor and so were all the other courses she wrung daily…from the third-rate shops of Dijon and her own ingenuity.”

Now an aspiring MFK can get her baptism in great cooking from an American chef. American chefs have achieved rock star status, replete with Michelin stars, and they’re not content with transforming boots but have embraced and encouraged the artisanal food movement, seeking out local suppliers of meat and veg, handmade cheeses, individual creameries.

Still, If I were a chef I’d be very afraid. Politically driven eating isn’t just a fad, it’s tapping into America’s conscience, Puritanism. The Puritans ate to live and industrial food was perfect for the ethos, cheap and quick. Pleasure had nothing to do with it. Of course there were those who crept out of church and bought Playboy, I mean Gourmet and licked their lips over the stapled rib eye.

But then along came Julia Child and delicious French cooking and a glorious interregnum followed with Americans basking in the sensual pleasure of food and wine  -  only interrupted by an occasional puritan burp. In 1977  Craig Claiborne of the New York Times, got carried away and dropped four grand on dinner at Chez Denis in Paris. Retribution was swift, Harriet Van Horne wrote in the New York Post “This calculated evening of high-class piggery offends an average American’s sense of decency. It seems wrong, morally, aesthetically and in every other way.”

She’s Baaaaackkkkkk. Another very important American agreed with her. Alice Waters, as  Totemic as Julia Child, the organic growing evangelical who aroused nostalgie de la boue in the boomer breast. But soon she revealed her inner John Winthrop. Organic food’s real mission was to protest the evils of industrial food, inorganic chemicals, toxins, genetically modified ingredients which are a devil-driven shortcut to increasing our food supply.

The tipping point came when the organic evangelicals joined forces with eco warriors, health cops,nutritionists, animal activists to become a band of neo-puritans with formidable advocacy groups. The commentariat loved it. Food, once banished to the style aka women’s pages, is now public enemy No. l. It is killing us. Worse it is killing polar bears, and rain forests. Animals,fish cause kneejerk guilt. Avoir Dupois is sinful. No month goes by without a study, usually based on dodgy data, revealing that a favorite food is lethal.

Across the pond, neo-Puritanism is called food snobbery. After the food snob Prince Charles said that Big Macs should be banned, Three star chef Marco Pierre White defended his fellow restaurateur, saying McDonalds offers better food than most restaurants “Their eggs are free range and the beef is from Ireland..and they offer excellent value.” …
After watching Jamie Oliver sob over a battery hen’s carcass, acerb AA Gill snapped: “Animals are bred into humiliating, unnatural shapes … in strange, unnatural habitats, and then die for dinner. Get over it or eat grass. The only thing you should campaign about is whether they’ve improved eating.”

Hear, hear added the Queen. Delia Smith, Britain’s Julia Child, told the BBC that the taste of food mattered more than whether it was organic or environmentally friendly. She couldn’t get into the politics of food.  The poor and pensioners needed cheap battery chicken.She was skeptical about food miles. She loved fresh shelled peas from Kenya in the winter "I'm conscious there are people in Kenya getting employment and money to bring up their children."
Her new book How To Cheat At Cooking, how to make good food with any ingredients, has been hailed “…looks like being one of those ground-breaking cookbooks that genuinely changes our whole attitude to food.”
Who wrote that? Delicious irony. William Sitwell is editor of the food snob glossy published by Waitrose supermarkets where all food is fresh,local,organic and labeled and $$$. So when he writes that Delia’s book declares an end to “food snobbery” he should know.

Tomorrow, Friday, Michael Schmidt goes on trial at Newmarket for selling raw milk to the public. Meanwhile the Queen is drinking raw milk at Windsor Castle without a qualm. She's done all right heading toward 90.  It is legal to sell raw milk in Britain, and in most US states and throughout Europe.

Free Michael Schmidt

It costs 17 bucks to buy this plate of unpeeled carrots whiskers and all at the luxury Hazelton Hotel's resto ONE.

What happened to cooking?

And I'll be posting to the National Post's Appetizer blog only from England and France......

Au revoir....

For the true butter connoissieur nothing less than the best, the great cultured butters from France with the AOC label will do -- the crown going to 84 per cent butter fat Echire.

We can't usually get Echire - or any foreign butters - here because of the quota system. But now online cheesemonger Andy  Shay  has broken the great butter barrier and is offering Echire (unsalted)  in his mother's day cheese collection ($80).  http://www.shaycheese.ca, or mail him at ashay@shay.ca

It's legal too - unlike some of the foreign butters that do pop up here and there. Andy's getting it from a Quebec importer.

Canadian butter is only just butter - 80% butter fat (the minimum for something called butter)  which means it has 19% water in it and when melted puddles water. By comparison, Echire is 84% butterfat with 15% water. The percentage sounds small, but in taste terms it's big.

Echire, which is made from pasteurized milk, is also cultured - a starter is added to the milk to turn it into something like creme fraiche, giving the eventual butter a very subtle sour taste. The lactic acid produced is also what makes pastry great.

The drama uncoils as we arrive at 55 Mill Street in the Distillery District expecting to walk into a restaurant called Perigee. Instead we’re in a staircase well, have to walk up a steel staircase. We can see ahead a low-ceilinged restaurant glittering with candles, the tables grouped around three sides of a glassed-in kitchen. Then we’re in the thick of it: we’re seated at a table within a couple of yards of a chef in whites and black skull cap with a huge knife as sharp as Sweeney Todd’s open blade, and a cook wielding a blow torch on meringue.   more »

On May 10 in Bologna, Norman Lofts' documentary Michael Schmidt - Organic Hero or Bioterrorist opens at the Slow Food on Film Festival and international foodies will learn how one of the most basic organic foods is banned in Ontario (Canada). .

Michael Schmidt is an Ontario farmer who sells raw milk from his own cows to a list of subscribers. They love the taste. Raw milk is a food, it is rich in nutrients and tastes of flowers and grass, the cow's food.  But the sale of raw milk is illegal in Ontario (and Canada) and Schmidt is being prosecuted by the Ontario government on  a variety of non criminal charges. His trial starts in Newmarket on May 23, 2008.

That's the tip of a huge iceberg - enough for a whole chapter The Last  Brie in my book Last Chance to Eat. Raw milk is the basis for one of the world's greatest foods -- raw milk cheese, cheeses like Parmigianno, Roquefort, Brie, Epoisse, Livarot, Camembert, Munster, Comte, Gruyere, Vacherin Mont d'or and hundreds of others, including a growing number of excellent raw milk cheeses in North America.

The ostensible reason for banning raw milk is that it isn't 100% safe and may contain pathogens like e coli bacteria that could kill you.

That's why all commercial milk is pasteurized, a heating process that kills all pathogens -  but it also kills the good bacteria that give milk its taste and nutrition.  

That's why people people all over the world, including Europe and 28 states in the US, prefer raw milk.

Raw milk dairies like Schmidt's are squeaky clean, routinely inspected, the milk comes from his own cows that he keeps healthy.  

So why doesn't Ontario (Canada) say fine: the risk is minuscule and the buyers are aware of it and still want the milk.

Because the government is protecting Ontario's millionaire dairy farmers.

The farmers have  a lockhold on the milk we drink: no variety is allowed. The reason we can't get richer cream and butter (which is essential for making light pastry) is because the dairy farms don't want to make better dairy because it isn't as profitable as inferior dairy. I've asked individual farmers whether they would make say a 48% butterfat cream and they all said no, unless there was a big market for it. That's why the rich milk from Jersey cows isn't sold any more. The farmers don't want ANY competition.

How different it is down South. There a revival of individual creameries, selling rich products and raw milk, which  is being greeted by ecstatic consumers.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/20/dining/20dairy.html?sq=marian%20burros&st=nyt&scp=2&pagewanted=print  

Schmidt is getting alot of support from his customers, from Jamie Kennedy, and others. He's facing five prosecutors.  Originally he was to have been defended by Clayton Ruby but money's run out. http://www.foodrightsalliance.ca/

A reader, Tony Asrilen really nails the issue of Torontonian's lack of outrage over restaurant wine charges - and he asks why when you bring your own wine, is there a corkage charge at all? There isn't a corkage charge in Montreal.


"I am mystified about why Torontonians aren't more outraged about restaurant
wine charges.  You mentioned that restaurant costs double when wine is
included, and that Alice's Restaurant allowed you to bring your own
wine - at a charge of $20!  That's $20 for bringing your own wine!  And
in my experience this charge is typical in Toronto, if they allow you
to bring your own wine at all.

I'm often in Montreal, where hundreds of restaurants, if not thousands,
encourage you to bring your own wine - at no charge whatsoever!  They
put big signs to that effect all over the front of the restaurant.
Their costs can't be much different from Toronto's.  The only
difference seems to be the greed factor.  I don't know of a single
Toronto restaurant that allows you to bring your own wine for free.  I
would love to see food writers make more of an issue about this, but so
far I've seen almost nothing."

What do you think?

boulud        rebuchon      Vong      kennedy    ramsey    Mcewan       white


Vancouver is crowing over its ability to attract New York superstars Jean-Georges Vongerichten and Daniel Boulud to open restaurants there.

just a minute, these restaurants are gonna be the equivalent of Mcdonald franchises, tonier of course and far more expensive.  Ronald McDonald's sent out to scout new venues and does a little tap dancing to get the folks in and then buzzes off to find more venues. Ditto star chefs. Or rather, staf chefs' companies.

I want to eat the real thing not a canny replica. I can't believe all the Atelier Rebuchons now opened round the world keep up their standards after the star has come and gone. In London, Gordon Ramsey and Marco Pierre White have slapped their name on what are becoming chains of restaurants, and in Toronto, Mark McEwan's restaurants include N44, Bymark, and One , Jamie Kennedy has JK Winebar and JK at the Gardiner,and another opening at the Brickworks.

Chefs franchise themselves to make money. Fair enough. The star brand name pulls in the customers. But it also diverts money from local restaurants and saps energy out of new ones struggling to be recognized in an increasingly competitive scene.

I'm a locavore when it comes to chefs.

After looking all over town, I finally find the real thing at Tundra :wienerschitzel made with veal, the veal fillet rather than wavy kind, that comes with a superb marinated cucumber salad and sauteed fingerlings.

Savingtheplanet.org is now a religion. Any skepticism about the terminal state of the planet, any criticism of  Greenpeace or as many call it Greenwar, any doubts expressed about "going green" -- all are now regarded as heresy. Any moment now I expect to see a large green brussel sprout anointed as head of the United Nations or as it will now be called United Church for the Planet.

Today I'm just going to focus on two  issues that the earthhood would rather we didn't know about.  

Today in an WSJ editorial Why I Left Greenpeace, Scientist Patrick Moore describes how he co-founded Greenpeace in 1971 and how subsequently he became disillusioned.  Money quote:
 
"The breaking point was a Greenpeace decision to support a world-wide ban on chlorine. Science shows that adding chlorine to drinking water was the biggest advance in the history of public health, virtually eradicating water-borne diseases such as cholera. And the majority of our pharmaceuticals are based on chlorine chemistry. Simply put, chlorine is essential for our health.



this kid's drinking safe water because there's chlorine in it.
 
My former colleagues ignored science and supported the ban, forcing my departure. Despite science concluding no known health risks – and ample benefits – from chlorine in drinking water, Greenpeace and other environmental groups have opposed its use for more than 20 years.
 
Opposition to the use of chemicals such as chlorine is part of a broader hostility to the use of industrial chemicals. Rachel Carson's 1962 book, "Silent Spring," had a significant impact on many pioneers of the green movement. The book raised concerns, many rooted in science, about the risks and negative environmental impact associated with the overuse of chemicals. But the initial healthy skepticism hardened into a mindset that treats virtually all industrial use of chemicals with suspicion."

To read the whole article go to WSJ.comEditors<access@interactive.wsj.com>

Second issue also concerns industrial chemical hysteria. In Mother Nature's Pesticides, the NYT's John Tierney posted research by biochemists Bruce Ames and Lois Swirsky Gold showing that humans ingest a lot more natural pesticides than industrial pesticides.

"Dr. Ames was one of the early heroes of environmentalism. He invented the widely used Ames Test, which is a quick way to screen for potential carcinogens by seeing if a chemical causes mutations in bacteria. After he discovered that Tris, a flame-retardant in children’s pajamas, caused mutations in the Ames Test, he helped environmentalists three decades ago in their successful campaign to ban Tris — one of the early victories against synthetic chemicals.

But Dr. Ames began rethinking this war against synthetic chemicals after thousands of chemicals had been subjected to his test. He noticed that plenty of natural chemicals flunked the Ames test. He and Dr. Gold took a systematic look at the chemicals that had been tested on rodents. They found that about half of natural chemicals tested positive for carcinogencity, the same proportion as the synthetic chemicals. Fruits, vegetables, herbs and spices contained their own pesticides that caused cancer in rodents. The toxins were found in apples, bananas, beets, Brussel sprouts, collard greens, grapes, melons, oranges, parsley, peaches — the list went on and on.



these are organic pesticides.....and there are many more....

Then Dr. Ames and Dr. Gold estimated the prevalence of these natural pesticides in the typical diet. In a paper published in 2000 in Mutation Research, they conclude:

    About 99.9 percent of the chemicals humans ingest are natural. The amounts of synthetic pesticide residues in plant food are insignificant compared to the amount of natural pesticides produced by plants themselves. Of all dietary pesticides that humans eat, 99.99 percent are natural: they are chemicals produced by plants to defend themselves against fungi, insects, and other animal predators.

    We have estimated that on average Americans ingest roughly 5,000 to 10,000 different natural pesticides and their breakdown products. Americans eat about 1,500 mg of natural pesticides per person per day, which is about 10,000 times more than the 0.09 mg they consume of synthetic pesticide residues.

Even though these natural chemicals are as likely to be carcinogenic as synthetic ones, it doesn’t follow that they’re killing us. Just because natural pesticides make up 99.99 percent of the pesticides in our diet, it doesn’t follow that they’re causing human cancer — or that the .01 percent of of synthetic pesticides are causing cancer either. Dr. Ames and Dr. Gold believe most of these carcinogenic pesticides, natural or synthetic, don’t present problems because the human exposures are low and because the high doses given to rodents may not be relevant to humans. " For more discussion go to

 http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/06/06/synthetic-v-natural-pesticides/#more-93

New Chip off the old block… There’s a surge, a small but significant one, in the neighbourhood bistros in Toronto. Usually the bistro adheres to the French model, onion soup, seafood bisque, escargots, mussels, steak frites, apple tart. But now young Torontonians are refashioning the genre in their own image, adding and subtracting ingredients at will, putting their own spin on familiar dishes. The price is good, coming in under $100 for two - as long as you forget the wine (the albatross around Toronto’s neck) which can easily double the food bill.   more »

Lobster bisque, Chicken Veronique, Coffee ricotta mousse, Patatas Arequipa (made with McCain’s frozen potato wedges), Dhal Curry, No-Panic Hollandaise – are among the doable cheats. Many recipes do require tweaking with substitutes for British cheats. Problem is that British supermarkets (according to industry analysts) are about five years ahead of us in terms of innovation and nuanced marketing. Not only is there a far greater variety of processed food but the packaging is more flexible. When I went looking for a small (167 ML) can of coconut milk, I could only find one standard – 400 grams.

I found lots of applicable cheats, fresh pinapple and mango chunks, Thai curry paste, fresh pesto sauce but some of the most significant were unavailable. I had to go to an upscale grocery for canned lobster bisque, but I couldn’t find fresh dressed crab, frozen chargrilled aubergine slices, half-fat crème fraiche,  frozen squid,ready- prepared diced mixed carrot and swede, canned fried onions, buttermilk pancakes (For delicious-sounding Kaiser’s pancakes I’ll have to make my own). It was galling to discover that while I can only get McCain’s wedges and fries here, British supermarkets stock other kinds, including rosti. I could’nt find frozen mashed potatoes which cancelled my plans to make Delia’s famous/infamous chocolate cupcakes and wild salmon fishcakes both requiring Aunt Bessie’s discs of frozen mash. Cultural differences explain why I couldn’t find such English passions as toffee sauce and edible commercial meringues for Eton Mess.

Cheat’s value is as much inspirational as practical. There are enough adaptable ideas in the book to keep collage at bay a little longer.

Last year I fulfilled a long ambition: I made an authentic lobster bisque. I dusted off Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, II, and embarked on a marathon requiring strength, endurance, persistent attention to detail, not to mention dropping a wad on ingredients. Didn’t matter. The bisque was bliss. Only problem, I was exhausted and almost fell asleep before I served it. This year I turned to the lobster bisque in Delia’s How To Cheat At Cooking. A can of lobster bisque, coconut milk, lemongrass, ginger, Thai fish sauce, a few coriander leaves, and I was done in twenty minutes. And it was delish. So why I wonder is Cheat a cause celebre in Britain? Why are cries of betrayal and treachery filling the air?   more »

Apart from The Escoffier CookBook and Delia's How To Cheat At Cooking (which I review in this Saturday's Post)  - which cover the gamut of twentieth century cuisine, I have a pared down shelf of cookbooks. Cookbooks have been so plentiful that I found my shelves crammed with books i'd never read let alone used. So I started weeding. First to go the coffee table books because I don't have a coffee table - anyway I want information not pictures. Well not too much info -- I decided I never referred to the Cambridge World History of Food and out it went. I saved the Oxford Companion to Food out of respect to its author, the late Alan Davidson, but the book is after only a few years, literally falling apart so it will have to go soon. Then I dumped the global cookbooks like Joy of Cooking and Gourmet. I want small specific cookbooks.  I began to  weigh books: I found the thinner books and soft covers had more information in them -- with the exception of the bible which taught me how to cook,  Julia Child's hefty Mastering the Art of Cooking I and the far less used II.




And at one point i said to hell with chef's books, they're vanity. But then I realized this wasn't always true and in particular, I have found plenty of use in the delectably modest  Simply French by Patricia Wells/Joel Rebuchon, not only Rebuchon's Roast Chicken Grandmere but his Aromatic shrimp bouillon.





I saved the books which really opened my eyes to foods I'd never tried to cook -- Claudia Roden's Book of Middle Eastern Food and Elizabeth Luard's Old World Kitchen.

And books that are fun to read not only once but twice -   Kettner's Book of the Table, a wonderfully wry and informative dictionary of food/cooking. Lady: If thou be indeed a lady, remember thou art by name a cook, or atleast a baker. La-mean a loaf of bread; -dy means a maid; and lady means the breadmaid."

And another, Roy Andries de Groot's In Search of the Perfect Meal which  includes the recipe for Troisgros Brothers' effulgent scalloped potatoes.

And of course - Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential.  What a relief to read a book that doesn't kiss the hem of cooking's skirt.


More favourites....






I still can't do without Cooking with the New American Chefs (1986) which is now in tatters. I call it early Delia. It's simple, breezy and unpretentious and the recipes are foolproof. Wolfgang Puck's Wild Mushroom Soup has never been surpassed nor Jimmy Schmidt's Caramel ice cream and barquette of chocolate pralinee made in litre milk carton, Patrick O'Connell's rhubarb mousse, Barbara Tropp's grilled chinese chicken wings with orange peel and garlic, Anne Greer's roasted corn soup.

French cooking in Ten minutes by Edouard de Pomiane, slim enough to slip in the pocket and fast food by any other name:   scrambled eggs to hollandaise sauce in a trice.

Susanna Foo's Chinese Cuisine. Where I learned to Tea Smoke and ever since I've never failed making a smoked leg of lamb. Amazing pineapple salsa for deep fried curried chicken dumplings.

Cooking With Master Chefs for two terrific recipes, Lidia Bastianich's wild mushroom risotto and Roberto del Grande's filet steaks in Pasilla Chile Sauce.

Foie gras recipes are everywhere. I was inspired however to try a mi-cuit foie gras by Peter Graham's Mourjou, the Life and Food of an Auvergne Village. I love this kind of book which entwines cooking, food and the culture of a specific small region. I like The Year at Les Fougeres - the esteemed restaurant outside Ottawa -  by  Charles Part and Jennifer Warren Part for the same reason. Also, Graham is an amateur like me. 

Back in 2002, lawyer Petra Cooper had a dream of making cheese. Now she's the powerhouse of Ontario artisanal cheese. Not bad for six years hard work.

Cooper's first move was to start the  Ontario Cheese Society, a clearing house for all cheese matters. On Monday, April 28, the OCS has its fourth Annual Meeting at Hart House 8.30am to 6.30 pm. Keynote speaker is Dr. Catherine Donnelly of the Vermont Institute for Artisanal Cheese, the first such institute in the U.S. Dr. Donnelley is going to talk about the viability or raw milk cheese. Anyone interested in the future of raw milk cheesemaking (and raw milk cheese eating)  in North America MUST hear Dr. Donnelly. For info, go to www.ontariocheese.org/conference/

Then on May 19, Cooper opens Fifth Hill Artisan Cheesemakers in Prince Edward County. Fifth Hill's cheesemaker Stephanie Diamant, a great goat cheesemaker in her own right, is heading the team making goat and sheep's cheeses. The first batch were cooked up off premises while the splendid Fifth Hill premises were being completed, and Torontonians,  if you're quick you can still pick up FT's zippy Bagel Chevre from Pusateri's at Avenue Road and Yorkville.
Email: petrac@fifthtown.ca

In Prince Edward County:

Fifth Town Artisan Cheese
4309 County Road #8
R. R. #4
Picton, ON
K0K 2T0

Phone: 613-476-5755
Fax: 613-476-5855
Toll Free: 1-800-5th-Town (1-800-584-8696) 

Not so long ago, gastrophobes,  critics of our industrial food system were saying things like we should have to PAY more for food then we'd respect it more or eat less of it or point to some other moral designed to make us feel guilty about eating at all....

But as food prices continue to rise all over the world and the price of rice -  the staple food for 4 billion of the 6 billion people on the planet - doubling in the past year, the gastrophobes have been blessedly silent.   Maybe they're realizing that ANY food is better than NO food.