I’m having a Mitch Albom moment, I want to hug this restaurant as I would a mother. It’s called Sidecar and its in one of those negligible shoeboxes in the Portugese section of College which is still called Little Italy in honour of the late Johnny Lombardi.

Sidecar is a cocktail and I’ve been mulling over when I should confront cocktail creep. Wouldn’t you know it just as we get some good Canadian wines,the cocktail becomes the slug de jour. After all, gin can’t be corky and I know sadly whereof I speak - having just visited a new wine bar where I was served not one but two glasses of different corky wine in a row.

But something else catches my eye. Sidecar offers a $20 prix fixe on Tuesdays, why that’s tonight, then heart sinking a little, I see that its demo is 20s to 40s. What the heck. I slap on my blue mirrors hoping they’ll disguise the laugh lines and make tracks.   more »

Mick Hume writes in the Times On line "This organic view is bananas"

To all of the ill-effects blamed on man-made global warming, we might add one more. It appears that an obsession with climate change can make sane people warm to mad ideas.

Take the Soil Association proposals to make it harder for produce from Africa to be labelled as organic, in order to cut the amount of fruit and vegetables flown into the UK. The justification is that this will reduce “food miles”, CO2 emissions and man-made global warming, and thus protect the developing world from the impact of climate change. The likely effect will be to put some of the most downtrodden farmers in the world out of work.

So how do we save Africa from a possible future disaster? Apparently, by creating a real disaster in the here and now: making poor Africans even poorer. That sounds like madness - or plain badness - to me.

Air-freighted produce makes up 1 per cent of total UK organic sales - and those remain a tiny niche in the grocery market. Only a mind as sharp as an organic Kenyan banana could seriously believe that this is a big factor in Britannia's “carbon footprint”. Indeed, the whole notion of “food miles” is hard to swallow. Research suggests that growing food in the sunshine of Africa and flying them to Europe produces less carbon - not to mention more taste - than growing them under glass and artificial heat in Britain or the Netherlands. Greenhouse effect, anybody?

To paraphrase Diogenes where can I find an honest meal? Tonight I don’t want drizzle or foam or fashionista or an adventure in global cuisine, I don’t want my food labeled and justified, I don’t want to eat an animal whose short ecstatic life puts many human lives to shame. I don’t want to eat a vegetable personally raised by someone who chats to flowers. I don’t want to be worried about what fish I should eat. I don’t want to be confined to a restaurant which only appeals to my demographic - nor do I want to go to one, like a resto lounge. that makes me feel like an outsider. I’d like to be able to have a conversation without having to text my companion.

So I go to Tundra in the downtown Hilton reckoning a hotel must have the broad appeal I’m looking for. The chef’s got a rep: Kevin Prendergast left Toronto more than ten years for the Marriott in Manhattan and he returned in 2006 to the Hilton. The menu is all Canadian but without the customary self-congratulation. And since the Opera House opened right next door, Tundra’s become an opera goer favourite. It even offers dinners themed for operas.I wish I’d tasted how sous chef Kreg Graham had made Tosca taste like.

Tundra is housed in the huge Hilton foyer which has the warmth of an airport terminal. The colours are beige on neutral on vanishing and the pharonoic height, atleast four stories, turns humans into ants pushing wheeled luggage over a vast empty floor.

Tundra itself is a moveable feast, occupying an expandable/contractable space next to a long bar. I gather the same architects (Kuwabara Payne Mckenna Blumberg) who invested JK at the Gardiner with Stasi chic are responsible for Tundra’s triumphant impersonality where patrons remain anonymous in the indirect moonlight cast by a glowing giant pillar.

The welcome is pleasant enough but the greeter, while charming, has no authority. Now why do I expect authority in a welcome? Because I’m going to lay out serious spondulicks for a couple of hours in the sarcophagus chamber and I’d like to feel that the restaurant has the confidence to deliver. The avid eater who’s come along tonight is already fretting about his car. The machine in the lot beneath the Hilton swallows the Visa but fails to spit out a receipt. The greeter promises to investigate and get back to us. She doesn’t.

Service is otherwise brisk, our server Kevin is helpful-plus handing over large plastic-covered menus without being asked. I know it makes sense, the menus are reusable, but why is an expensive restaurant apparently trying to save money this way? Perhaps because it has another big ticket item to worry about. Food safety! Forget the parking problem, think gazillion dollar lawsuits for a rogue pathogen.

The now customary warning about allergies is accompanied by dishes picked out with a star : “These foods may be raw or undercooked…Consuming raw or undercooked meats, poultry, shellfish or eggs may increase your risk of food-borne illness.”

Wow there goes the Quebec foie gras, the carpaccio of angus beef tenderloin, the house cured gravlax, the Digby scallops and the duck breast, the farmed venison and the charbroiled angus striploin steak!


What’s left? We look at each other and decide to live dangerously.

The food is well worth the risk. True, a few slips at first. Why is one side of the bread stale? But the mildly spicy veggie dip is good. And the warm chevre that goes with the roast beet salad is dry and crackly. But I’m so glad I took my life in my hands and ordered the Digby scallops from Nova Scotia. Not only are they dry, which means they aren’t plumped up with dry cleaning fluid, but their sweetness is nicely enhanced by the mushy apple/celery confit and celeriac puree.

To the entrée. We skip the fish although feel deeply tempted by Nova Scotia lobster macaroni and cheese with fresh lumachini (snails) pasta dusted with vintage white cheddar ($26) for the more challenging meat.

Now both duck breast and farmed venison have issues: they can be tasteless and tough. Here both dishes are superb: the duck slices ($36) are moist and tender lapped by a sweet-sour cassis partridge berry sauce – what is a partridge berry? It’s a Canadian lingonberry close relative to a cranberry. Point is that it provides the acid spike in sweet cassis (black current) which doesn’t overwhelm the duck the way other sweet sauces often do. A nice fat savoy cabbage roll is stuffed with wild rice and duck confit.

I guess the juniper rub is what enlivens the farmed Ontario venison ($39). Thick tranches of tender pink meat tasting faintly piney go beautifully with sweet potato/chestnut puree and Saskatoon berry jus and the clincher is the carb of toasted pearl barley. We drink a pleasant California cab from a big list.

It’s ridiculous - but Tundra is too quiet. There are a dozen people scattered round the space and they’re as somnolent as sleeping cats. It makes us yearn for the buzz coming from the bar where a tour is eating dinner. We’d like some of the buzz right here but screens separate us. I guess this is the dilemma of a hotel restaurant – how to please everybody. It also results in a lack of clear identity: Tundra’s good food deserves three stars but it isn’t supported by great presentation.

We end with a classic, a spin on a hazelnut cream millefeuille, made with a crunchy disc. Simple and sophisticated. Now we’re ready to hear the fat lady sing….



**1/2 Tundra at the Hilton. 145 Richmond Street W
Tel: 1-416-869 3456. Wheelchair Access. Quiet. Dinner for two, food and tax:$137

Get over it locavores.....

THE CARBON COST FROM FARM TO FORK
It's the golden rule of the local-food movement: the fewer miles that food travels, the better for the environment. The only problem is, it may not be true. "Very few studies support the idea that local-food systems are greener," says Rich Pirog of Iowa State University's Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture. When it comes to calculating the carbon cost of a certain dish, the method of transport matters as much as the distance from farm to fork. Sea-freight emissions are less than half of those associated with airplanes, trains are cleaner than trucks and a tractor-trailer can be a green machine compared with an old pickup. If you live east of Columbus, Ohio, it's actually greener to drink French Bordeaux than wine from California, which is trucked over the Rockies, according to one study. How food is grown and harvested is also key, says Gail Feenstra, a food-systems analyst at the University of California, Davis. New York state apples, for instance, can be less ecofriendly than those imported from New Zealand, where, among other things, growing conditions produce greater yields with less energy. We need a complete picture of carbon emissions, Feenstra says—not just a mile marker.
March 17, 2008 | Periscope | By Tony Dokoupil

Worldwide, food prices took a 60% leap last year which may be why Country Life, the British magazine that enshrines the countryside, has come out for genetically modified food which promises to increase our food supply. GM food is routinely attacked in Britain by the Soil Association, Britain's original organic organization, which is against any scientific advances in food.

The editorial , says The Independent, "pours vitriol on those who accuses it of ignoring the benefits such crops may offer....future generations will think us crazy, or criminal, not to embrace [GM technology]" and argues that concerns over "Frankenstein foods" have grown into a fear among the public of "developments it doesn't understand". The editor Mark Hedges argues that GM technology could help alleviate the type of problems caused by the recent rise in food prices as well as providing plants that are able to withstand the effects of climate change.

For more go to Independent.co.uk

An absolutely hilarious blog out of Texas....

First posting by Dlander is the dinner party!

"Though many would have you believe that white people come of age at Summer Camp, it’s simply not the truth. Immediately following graduation but prior to renovating a house, white people take their first step from childhood to maturity by hosting a successful dinner party.

It is imperative that white people know how to host a good dinner party as they will be expected to do it well into retirement.

At the most basic level, these simple gatherings involve 3-6 couples getting together at a single house or apartment and having dinner and talking for 5-6 hours. Though it might seem basic, these events are some of the most stressful situations in all of white culture.

Hosts are expected to deliver a magical evening. The food must be home made with fresh, organic ingredients, the music must be just right (ambient, new, but not too loud), and the decorations inside the house should be subtle but elegant. The ultimate goal is to do a better job than the couple at the last dinner party, and attempt to make everyone jealous and sort of dislike you.

For the rest, go to Stuff White People LIke

Well, who didn't know that Emeril was just entertainment...but so it turns out are Nigella, Jamie, foulmouthed Gordon et al in the UK. Only 5% of TV viewers say, according to a Waitrose Food Illustrated Magazine, they are inspired to cook by watching the celebs.

This is a scary story from CP...

Canadian researchers have found antibiotic-resistant Staph bacteria in pork products purchased in retail stores across the country – a discovery that raises questions about how the contamination occurred, how frequently it happens and whether it has implications for human health.

Just under 10 per cent of sampled pork chops and ground pork recently purchased in four provinces tested positive for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus or MRSA, lead researcher Dr. Scott Weese reported Wednesday in a presentation to the International Conference on Emerging Infectious Diseases in Atlanta.

The bacteria would be destroyed by proper cooking, so Staph food poisoning is not a major concern, said Weese, an expert on zoonoses, the pathogens that pass back and forth between people and animals.

But he wondered whether people handling meat with MRSA on its surface would end up inadvertently "colonizing" themselves. People who carry the bacteria on their skin or in their nostrils are at greater risk of going on to develop a Staph infection, which can range from a hard-to-heal boil to pneumonia to a potentially deadly bloodstream infection.

"My main concern is: if there's MRSA on the surface of a pork chop and someone's handling it and then they touch their nose, could they transmit it from the pork chop to their nose?" noted Weese, a veterinarian based at the Ontario Veterinary College in Guelph.

"If they do what they're supposed to do in terms of meat handling, then it should be perfectly safe. But do people do that is the question?"

Bryant Terry, Oakland-based eco chef, a Food and Society Policy Fellow with the W. K. Kellogg and Fair Food foundations and co-author of 'Grub: Ideas for an Urban Organic Kitchen.'

Here's chef Terry's spring menu celebrating resurrection, revival and rejuvenation on The Root.com

"This is a brunch for everyone, whether you observe Easter or not. Think of it as a culinary commemoration of spring, one that celebrates rebirth, resurrection, revival, and rejuvenation in its many iterations.

These recipes are my spring gift to you and yours. You'll notice I've given this menu a creole twist. It is an ode to a city that I love —New Orleans— as well as a prayer for its continued rejuvenation.

I'll be spacing the recipes out throughout the week, to give you time to think and plan. But to whet your appetite, here's what's coming up.

Rebirth Brunch

Agave-Sweetened Double Orange Pekoe Tea

Watercress Salad with Honey-Mustard Vinaigrette

Johnny Blaze Cakes

Cajun-Creole-Spiced Asparagus Frittata

Hopin' Jean

Potato and Sweet Potato Pancakes

Maple-Coated Pecans

Soundtrack

New Orleans Suite, Duke Ellington

Alone Together, Clifford Brown & Max Roach

Requiem, Branford Marsalis Quartet

Resurrection, Common

Ultimate Rebirth Brass Band, Rebirth Brass Band

Act 1: Eternal Sunshine (The Pledge), Jay Electronica

I bought a couple of organic bananas a few days ago as I pursued my research into whether organic food actually tastes better than conventionally grown food.

Two days later the bananas lay on my chopping block looking exactly the way they had when I bought them. Usually bananas go brown pretty fast I find. When I sampled the organic banana I found it denser and more fibrous than the usual banana and without the usual banana's attractive slipperiness.

Moreover, the organic banana had about HALF the flavour of the regular banana which cancels it out for cooking.

My bananas weren't labelled so I couldn't go to the Dole website and check out where my bananas came from. Next time I buy an organic banana I shall find one labelled with a code then I can find the origin of my particular fruit and also find the farm where it was grown, even see pics of farmers responsible for this inferior fruit.

Then I'll email them asking for improvements.

From the online Sunday Times
March 16, 2008

There are several varieties of steamed, roasted and boiled penis at Beijing’s quirkiest diner

Stefan Gates

I’m visiting the Guo-li-zhuang restaurant, a specialist penis and testicle emporium that caters mainly to wealthy businessmen and Communist party officials (who, truth be told, are often one and the same).

It offers every conceivable John Thomas you could ever want, which probably isn’t very many. Nonetheless, the menu is both extensive and impressive.

The place looks like a smart kaiseki ryori (Japanese haute cuisine) formal restaurant, complete with underfloor stream, separate secluded dining rooms and hushed, discreet staff.

I ask a chef to show us the preparation of a penis first, so that I can get a feel for the process. He enters holding aloft an eye-wateringly large yak’s knob. It’s about 45cm long, but thin, so thin. It’s been boiled gently and - I can’t believe I’m writing this - peeled, except for a hunk of foreskin still clinging on to the end. He cuts the thing in half lengthways with a pair of scissors.

As he chops through the very tip of this impressive member, I feel an undeniable empathy twitch in my own penis and a bizarre feeling of nausea in my groin. I can’t help yelping in sympathy. He then uses a knife to make hundreds of little snips along the side of the penis and chops the strips into 5cm pieces. When these are dropped into boiling stock, they curl up into little flower shapes that are so incongruous, I can barely believe my eyes.

For rest of article, go to Chinese Penis restaurant Times online

Recovering from surgery in hospital, I was visited by an old friend who said “I expect you’ll survive” adding hastily “Oh don’t worry I checked to see if any of the docs had been struck off. No, it’s the food that could kill you!”

What was laughingly called lunch arrived in a plain brown wrapper er a cover. Before tasting I asked who the chef was.The answer”Our dietitian.”

I had an immediate relapse.

Dietitians/Nutritionists have been the most baleful of all influences on our food. They believe that you eat to live – period. Food is fuel. The only value it has is in calories which express energy. Nutritionists are puritans redux. Every time I read that chocolate is so good that it’s “sinful” wink, wink, I think of the cartoon of the vicar jumping the lady doing the flowers. “Oh Vicar, that’s not right. “No but it’s nice,”   more »

Delia Smith has started a holy war in Britain with her new book How To Cheat at Cooking and the accompanying TV series. 3.7million tuned in to watch the first show, and the foodsnobs exploded in anger. Burn her at the steak. There she was making cheap and quick recipes using frozen and tinned food and turning up her nose at organic and animals who've led happier lives than most people have.

Mick Hume in the London Times loves Delia who is " a domestic heroine in our house, where my wife, Virginia - a user of frozen pastry and Yorkshires - has long followed her recipes. This week's first episode made me warm to her even more, as she mixed dishes of “wonderful” frozen potatoes with tasty sideswipes at “poncy” cooking involving “drizzling”. She emerged less as the anti-Christ than the anti-Jamie Oliver - enough to have me asking for more. "

In Britain the "gastrocats" are going crazy. As in North America, going green is a class thing.

As Hume writes, the foodsnob reaction " reflects how food has been turned into a moral issue by those who seriously believe that we are what we eat. Thus the way to prove your wholesome character is through conspicuous consumption of the “right” foods. The flipside of such snobbery is that cheap or processed food is seen as the mark of cheap people, morally as well as nutritionally deficient. This heats up an old prejudice. In The Intellectuals and the Masses, John Carey notes how the likes of T.S. Eliot, H.G. Wells, John Betjeman and George Orwell railed against the “soulless” tinned food of the masses. These elitist prejudices are fashionable once more, expressed in the language of eco-ethics.

"To these critics, Delia's real heresy is to shun the politics of food and insist that the only proof of the pudding - such as her chocolate cake made with frozen mash - is still in the eating. Her missing ingredient is the self-raising righteousness of chefs who tell us to research and make friends with our food."

All those chefs incidentally owe their art in large part to Escoffier, the French chef who laid down the rules of the classic cuisine, rules that pertain today wherever cooking is good. Escoffier was so appalled by the starvation he saw in the Franco-Prussian war that he started canning food himself as a prevention against future shortages. He was a truly moral, unlike celebs like Jamie Oliver who take quarter of a million to shill for Sainsbury's supermarkets and then trash them. And so was Alexis Soyer, of London's Reform Club, who cooked for the poor and the British army in the Crimean War.

A strain of misoygny, which is running strong through the US primaries, is also evident in food snobbery. Why won't women stay in the kitchen where they belong ? Read the current gastrocat-lit this side of the pond and you'll find it's the well-off women like Barbara Kinsolving who can afford to go green.

"Delia may simply be offering a practical alternative to those food-porn recipes that few will cook. But she also reminds us of a wider truth about how our society - especially the female half - has advanced by reducing the effort we put into the basics of existence. As another old favourite of mine, Karl Marx, put it, “Economy of time, to this all economy ultimately reduces itself.”

Or as Delia said in Monday's show, she likes quick, easy recipes “because there are other things in life apart from eating - although eating is pretty good”.

Finally, the French are making a stand, albeit a long overdue one, for the authenticity and taste of one of their greatest foods -- soft raw milk cheeses like Brie, Camembert, Epoisses... This week, a committee of experts and new found patriots found for the ancient and amazing RAW MILK Camembert, saying only it should be given the Appellation Controlee label that confirms its authenticity. Pasteurized Camembert doesn't hack it. Anyone who loves the fiery taste of raw milk cheese will be celebrating today.

Not least because the French have been running away from their heritage of raw milk cheese as the EU pushes hyperhygiene. Formerly the French were sanguine to trade a possible gastric upset (even the very rare death) from a pathogen lurking in the milk, but foodborne illnesses are now global scares, and by the eighties the French were getting nervous themselves.

In addition, as I wrote in Last Chance to Eat, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization is now compiling a codex listing how cheese should be made across the board! And the loudest voices on the committee come from the big industrial and international cheesemakers.

The producers of raw milk cheese, and they range from Parmesan, Roquefort to the great soft cheeses,are at a disadvantage beside Kraft when it comes to global politics. The industrial cheesemakers want all cheeses to be made from pasteurized milk ostensibly for health reasons but really because pasteurization is too expensive a process for small cheesemakers who would thus be driven out of business.

The Swiss and the Italians have hung tough but the French have buckled to a certain extent. They began making "thermise" cheese, raw milk heated at lower temperatures and longer times than pasteurization. They claimed the taste was unchanged.

Difference in taste? Definitely.

Thermise Epoisse, which has practically replaced vrai raw milk here in Toronto, is blander and stodgier. Trouble is you can't tell whether a cheese has been thermise because labelling isn't required. You have to ask your cheesemonger and hope she knows what she's selling you.

How did Camembert stop the rot? According to Charles Bremner blogging in the London Times, five small producers (not to be confused with farmhouse cheesemakers who are mostly gone) started a war with the dominant industrial Camembert producers, the Lactalis dairy giant and a cheese cooperative at Isigny in Normandy.

Two premium brands owned by Lactalis -- Lepetit and Lanquetot -- dominate the real camembert market in France. The company decided to start making its cheese termise while Isigny decided to micr-filter its milk. Both cited safety as the consideration.

The small producers cried foul, saying that such tampering ruined it. Heat-treating the milk was a sin equivalent to shovelling cheap grapes into grand cru wine vats, they said. The big firms agreed to drop their "AOC" label of authenticity while a committee of experts investigated.

Their verdict in favour of strict lait cru only was announced yesterday and it will certainly be endorsed in time by the state AOC agency. It has been depicted abroad as a David-against-Goliath victory for the French culinary heritage (soon to be protected by Unesco). "

The victory should alas be taken with a draft of raw milk. The committee comprised fired-up locals. Bremner posts "For France these days, flavour is political. It's one of the last things that France knows it does better than just about everyone else. The purity of camembert, said to have been devised just after the French revolution, is closely tied to the defence of le terroir. Difficult to define in English, this is the notion that wine and all other traditional food products and dishes owe their quality to the nature of the soil and the society in which they originate. Terroir is taken very seriously and taught to school children. "

If this were true why can you only find a farmhouse Brie in the Rothschild Museum, and why are only only 10 percent of the 650 cheeses sold in French supermarkets made from raw milk?

Le Cirque, a temple of french classic cuisine in NYC, is opening a wine bar on the premises. Another sign of the troubles good and great restaurants are having keeping a loyal clientele coming back to eat. The trend is already well pronounced here in Toronto where the bar is front and centre in most restaurants......

From a reader who asked to be anonymous...

"I thoroughly enjoyed reading your review of L'unita. I actually had the displeasure of dining at this establishment . I can not comprehend how so many patrons and or critics have been lead to believe that is fine dining, but then again this is Toronto and most have not left the city and or rely on the herd for direction.

My overall experience was very similar to yours, rude servers, horrible food, a pathetic wine list and a crammed room full of this city's roaming I wannabee seen in the newest establishment for a night, so I better not wear the same outfit as I did to last week's hotspot .

I ordered the vegetable soup assuming that vegetable soup should contain vegetables only to find meat in it, of course the waiter commented that it was a rustic soup so I should have known, the last time I looked up the word rustic - I thought it referred to decor.

Moving along ...the pasta was pathetic, all else was horrible to the point where I passed on dessert complimentary or not , thanks but no thanks,. The experience was shared by the friends that I was with and we vowed never to return and have not. The only decent food item was the bread, and considering you do not bake on site how hard is that to screw up.

Overall , the service was pathetic, the crowd was noisy, the staff inexperienced, and the decor out of place, as if they threw things together . ... the evening was a disaster. Thank you for finally bringing this to light, you made me laugh immensely with your candid but to the point review.

John Shearer writes

"Great review on L’Unita, when I first read the header I thought “oh no, another stellar review of a third rate restaurant”.

Your experience was pretty close to ours ( my wife and I ) several weeks ago:

We arrived, stood around at the front of the restaurant waiting to be seated, greeted the same way you where about to be shown our table when a homeless person entered, we where then abandoned as a the server and homeless person had a lengthy conversation over the use of a telephone. Finally our server sat us down, came back after 2 mins. and then greated us like he had never seen us before. I looked over the wine list and saw little I recognized, I asked the server what was good, he relied “everything is good” and disappeared in great haste.

When the waiter returned we where asked if we would like Focaccia and we said yes, a few minutes latter plain cold white bread was delivered, no olive oil offered or in site.

The rest of the food was pretty bland and uninspired, like a Greek restaurant trying to be Italian, total amateurs.

Everything was so bad we passed on desert and coffee and asked for our check, waited about 15 mins. and decided just to get up and start walking out to see if that would bring some response, it did. We were asked if we enjoyed everything, we said no, and did they want to give us our bill or should we just leave.

I would not go back for free.

Is L’Unita the hottest new restaurant in town? I call twice in advance and can’t get a reservation for three for 7.30. Third time I’m told to come at seven and they will give me a table for two with a seat added. And it’s only Thursday not the blowout Friday and Saturday.

My expectations are high. It’s been three months since L’Unita replaced Arlequin, a veteran French café cum bistro at Avenue Road and Davenport. Arlequin was Annex Slow Food. Now owners David Minicucci and Sam Kalogiros have accelerated to top gear, given the premises an extreme makeover, stripped brick walls, Edison lights that look like transparent molars, gilt edged mirrors, lots more seats, 60, some tucked away in a bowling alley, a bar which has replaced the food counter, and the call of the kazoo.

The moment we enter, I sense a disconnect between the trendy deco, the focus on the bar, the interchangeable servers wearing black sweaters over shirttails and the sit-down resto indicated by a menu that goes beyond macpasta and macpizza. I can see L’Unita is gonna need not one but two reviews.   more »

Breaking from Newsmax.com

More misleading information from scientists....

A new British study has identified the lowly potato as the safest food on the menu, saying it is the least likely food to cause fatigue, irritable bowel syndrome, eczema, and migraine.

But they're like eating pure sugar are linked to diabetes and make you fat. According to the top food cop, Dr. Walter Willett of the Harvard School of Public Health, says we can't tolerate 'em.....
.
"In a contemporary, sedentary society, potatoes are unhealthy, with a very big glycemic load. We've seen in our studies that higher potato consumption is related to a risk of diabetes. They are very rapidly absorbed into the bloodstream-more than eating pure sugar: sugar is only half glucose when it's broken down, potatoes are 100 percent glucose. There's not very much in terms of redeemable nutritional value that you get for the calories.

Unless you are extremely lean and extremely active, you can't tolerate them. If you really like potatoes, you can have them in moderation now and then, but the trouble is that a big mountain of potatoes on your plate twice a day is how many people eat."

"Actually, careful studies have shown, demonstrated that you get a bigger rise in blood sugar after eating potatoes, a baked potato, say, than you do from eating pure table sugar."

I've often wondered why the awkward fork is still beside the plate. It’s unaesthetic, heavy, easily dropped. But unless its heavy and gauche it’s useless as an anchor tool for eating, its tines firmly planted in a piece of food while the decisive knife saws away. Europeans have tamed the fork, keeping firm grip on it with one hand and using the other to grasp the all-important knife, both utensils poised above the plate like a couple of hawks waiting to drop on the prey. North Americans on the other hand cut with the knife then shed it and change the fork to the other hand the better to shovel food into the mouth. This looks, incidentally, terrible. On the other hand, the need to shovel food says something about the inefficacy of our existing eating tools.
No wonder work to find a supertool has been going on for decades...

Now comes the Knork.



No it’s not a Spork – the spoon fork invented during World War II to puzzle Japanese invaders.




Nor is it the Splayde or Sporkfe





which has never caught on even with toddlers maybe because they can't pronounce it.

The Knork, which will be introduced at the International Home and Housewares show next week in Chicago, is a fork with a knifelike edge that the inventor Mike Miller claims can cut through a raw carrot. Miller promotes the Knork as the answer for cutting your food on airplanes (what airline, please) for the blind or disabled or for just eating in front of the TV (Now I can see that).

On the other hand, how about shedding all eating utensils and going back to hands? Limits what we eat of course, hard to enjoy spaghetti when grasped in a gooey mess that gets all over your face. This doesn’t apparently deter the British millennial eater. The UK chain Sainsbury’s survey of young eaters finds that 10% do without any dining hardware at all.

For more on cutlery go to http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/04/AR2008030400613.html

Joel Rebuchon is my favourite chef mainly I guess because I can actually use his book Simply French. He's down to earth. And even though he has a chain of restaurants worldwide, they still appear to uphold the standards of a multi-star Michelin chef. In the US, he has one of the five 3-star restos in the country at the MGM Grand in Vegas. Last week, Eater VegasWire's John Curtas had a chance to chat with the chef about food blogging...

John Curtas: What is your opinion of food/restaurant bloggers and the impact they have on the dining-out public?

Joël Robuchon: They can be helpful and they can be dangerous. Dangerous because anyone can write anything, even if they have no training or experience and don't make any sense. Genuine gastronomic critics bring a lot of experience to the table and you must respect that, but too often the internet can be used as a revenge tool by people who have something against the chef or the restaurant. But the public doesn't know when a review is being used as a way to ambush a restaurant. Too many restaurant critics these days are like me when I'm criticizing a soccer coach; I might have my opinion, but I don't know that much.

JC: How would you advise someone to get a proper gourmet education in this era of very expensive restaurants (like yours) and various cooking/restaurant styles?

Robochon: You must go out a lot. Try different concepts. Form a fine dining club. Try to get a true understanding of what is good and bad cooking. Follow a gastronomic critic whose tastes you understand and learn from them. Unfortunately, people don't take the time these days to become a true gourmand.

JC: What advice would you give a young chef (or a customer) about what to strive for in good cooking and good eating?

Robuchon: Young people/children have an inherent honesty and respect for what is good in food. But as they get older, from 18 to 25 years old, they tend to over think things...which is the most dangerous thing you can do as a chef. Young chefs try too hard to impress and constantly want their food to be exciting, but that doesn't mean it's any good. Too often they get lost in the method and end up overcomplicating things. Doing a simple thing well and perfectly is what great cooking is all about.

Jeff Healey died yesterday. Loss is too meagre a word to describe the great hole that's opened in my musicscape. I happen to be one of those like Jeff who didn't just like but loved the jazz between 1920 and 1940,its infectious spirit and lack of pretension, its sense of fun and delight in life, all attributes that have been eroded in the modern era. I always jotted down his playlists so I could try and track down some of gems he owned himself. Apart from Jeff's own ineffable style which brought back to life long past performers and tracks, his personal collection is what made My Kinda Jazz on 91 Jazz FM unique. And alas, like Jeff, irreplaceable.

Jeff let us know how ill he was over the past year in a casual rather offhand way. I guess I didn't really believe he was going to go until yesterday morning - i always listened to My Kinda Jazz at dawn on Sunday -- when he described some of the punk effects of the drugs he was taking. But it was soon swept aside by the music -- the program was like tracking the progress of a balloon -- first he had the music firmly in hand and then the joyful sexy beat got away from him and it soared into the stratosphere.

A dissonant note. The obits today gave Jeff's gig on 91 Jazz FM short shrift. The CBC which once broadcast My Kinda Jazz never mentioned that the show was going strong on 91 Jazz FM when he died. How incredibly meanspirited. And what a smallminded way to treat a great Canadian musician and his fans.

The little Flemish town of Geraardsbergen was founded in 1068 and its residents are proud of its traditions which include an annual rite of swallowing tiny live fish in red wine. Now the animal rights activists which place the health of fish over the health and culture of people is trying to stop it......for full story go to....

ihthttp://www.iht.com/articles/2008/03/02/europe/fish.php

A couple of months ago I was speculating on the fate of the small reasonably priced family-run bistro in the age of fast food. Like everything else, dining out is being split into more and more categories for marketing purposes. The newest rave is fast casual food, the slow food version of fast food joints. It seems a pretty elastic term as it includes more complex dishes, even wine, McDonald’s Feng Shui makeovers and Tim Horton’s Deli Trio sandwich.

At the high end, fine dining prevails. I always wince when I hear the term “fine dining” which sounds evasive the way “loved ones” - the original mortuary euphemism for surviving family members - does.”Loved ones” is now ubiquitous even in newscasts and sometimes accompanied by a muffled sob. This is a triumph of hope over reality. How on earth anyone knows whether members of families automatically love one another beats me and should surprise psychotherapists. Everyone knows that the true loved one is cute and furry with green marbles for eyes, and added value, the newest medical claim is that cats ward off their owners’ heart attacks. Probably because they don’t talk back. Actually cats could talk but they’re too smart to go there having referenced Saki’s famous story Tobermory where an American psychologist taught a cat to talk between luncheon and tea with disastrous consequences.   more »