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 »