Sunshine Natural Foods
942 College Street
416-533-9582

Andrew and Leila Ois had always wanted to start their own business, and when they spotted the “for lease” sign on the former convenience store on College Street, they jumped at the chance to open an organic food store at the location, which is close to their home and in a happening part of town.

With the help of friends, they cleaned the store up, inside and out, and got it ready to go in record time. The store has become an asset to the College and Dovercourt neighbourhood. I live in the area, and it’s been great to have somewhere that offers healthier foods - the Ois’ friendly attitude is a total bonus.

Continue reading Sunshine Natural Foods: A Local Shop for Local People »

Happy Canada Day!

Here’s a selection of what Toronto food bloggers are up to this week:

Two bloggers participated in the Daring Bakers Bagel Challenge. Ivonne from Cream Puffs in Venice baked many varieties of bagels with great in-process photos and instructions. At Jumbo Empanadas, Brilynn gets creative in the heat and makes barbecued bagels.

Tracy takes the local food challenge at Fear and Loathing in the Kitchen.

Continue reading Blog-A-Log - Sunday, July 1st »

It looks like the food bloggers are back in business this week. Here are some favourite posts:

It’s mint season, and Torontovore has many mint ideas, including a recipe for Mojitos.

Tara enjoys the summer weather with some chickpea salad on the back patio in Seven Spoons.

At Save Your Fork, Sheryl made baby pies, but not with real babies.

The Nutritionista makes some truly veggie lasagna. It’s a very imaginative recipe that I can’t wait to try.

Continue reading Blog-A-Log - Sunday, June 24th »

Cora’s
Mississauga (Clarkson) location: 1865 Lakeshore Road West
905-823-2672
Downtown location: 277 Wellington Street West
416-598-2672
Breakfast for two with all taxes, tip and coffee: $28

“That’s a little O.T.T.,” says my husband as we walk into Cora’s, pointing at a sign in the entryway.

“What’s O.T.T?”

“Over the top.”

I read the sign. “Please allow us the pleasure of accompanying you to your table.” Okay, a little over the top, but I’m happy they tell us that they want to seat us. I have a problem in restaurants where I’m not sure if I should seat myself or not. I either end up standing there like an idiot or sitting down somewhere I’m not supposed to be. In due course, the server accompanies us to our table, which I allow her to do. She even asks if we want a booth or a table. Cora’s is one of those breakfast places that get incredibly crowded on weekends, so we are glad to be eating there at 7:30am on a weekday morning to have our pick of seats.

Continue reading Cora’s Serves up the Big Breakfast »

And I thought last week was slow! This week Toronto food bloggers must be out enjoying the lovely weather. I wonder if we will start seeing a huge explosion in the amount of posts once the weather gets humid and unpleasant. I imagine bloggers on their laptops huddled in front of the air conditioner finally writing about that fabulous patio they discovered or that funny thing that happened at the barbecue.

In Blog From OUR Kitchen, they got a great mixer at a garage sale and made a super-fluffy cake, finding that an electric mixer works quite a bit better than a whisk.

Megan the Vegan celebrates her 200th post-aversary with a cake, and finds some interesting bean curd products in Chinatown.

Sands from All Things Dolce makes a family recipe, the crown-shaped Sicilian specialty cookie Cuddrireddra which she got from her grandmother from Delia, Sicily. I like the technique of wrapping them around a stick to get the circular shape.

Brilynn from Jumbo Empanadas knows that it’s going to be another one of those hot summers, so she gets a new ice cream maker and includes her recipe for Strawberry Mango ice cream.

Wasabi Cowgirl has a pleasant dining experience out at the unassuming Back To The Garden Cafe.

It’s been a quiet week on the Toronto food blog front. Hopefully people are getting out from behind their computers and enjoying the beautiful weather, which is what I should be doing.

At Blog From Our Kitchen, EJM writes about sunchokes, a little known plant native to this part of Canada.

Paul from Diary of a Feeder needs to use up his seasonal vegetables before they go bad so he takes his ramps, morels and asparagus and whips up a little free form ravioli.

At Do You Know the Muffin Man, it’s coconut week, with both coconut cookies and coconut cake.

This week we have two travel entries with many photos. K-Chan eats her way through Halifax in I Can’t Believe I’m Back In Toronto and Candy from Desert by Candy shows us the luscious food of Barcelona.

In Confessions of a Cardamom Addict, Jasmine reviews Vegetable Harvest by Patricia Wells, making several of the recipes.

South Indian Dosa Mahal
1284 Bloor Street West
416-516-7701
Lunch for two with all taxes, tip and drinks: $26

South Indian Dosa Mahal has the ambiance of a fast food joint, in all its formic and linoleum glory. The tables are crowded together and it’s hard to move around them — you really get to know your neighbours, for better or worse (it was a pretty cool crowd on my latest visit, truth be told). The lighting is bright and glaring. They have no liquor license. The Bloor and Landsdowne neighbourhood, aka Bloordale, is the kind of place I usually get asked for change several times in a couple of blocks. But inside South Indian Dosa Masala the clientèle seems to have enough scratch for great food at cheap prices, so discreet gawking and eating became the happy orders of the day.

Continue reading For Me, It’s All About The Dosas »

Here are this week’s highlights from Toronto food blogs:

At Champagneminimalistfoodie, Heather eats her way through the Distillery District with photos.

Ivonne of Cream Puffs in Venice gets her first catering job, baking up some lovely coconut cupcakes. Congratulations!

Hungry in Hogtown deep fries some Oreos, with instructions. I am alternately repulsed and fascinated. I’d be afraid to try them for fear I’d like them a lot.

Alana shows off her balcony herb garden on Wasabi Cowgirl.

Megan bakes up some damn tasty chocolate peanut butter shell cookies in Megan the Vegan.

In I Can’t Believe I’m Back In Toronto, K-Chan goes to Chinese Traditional Bun(s). It’s unclear what the official name of the restaurant is, but it’s clear that the food is tasty and cheap.

Brilynn bakes an impressive four-layer banana cake at Jumbo Empanadas.

At Save Your Fork, Sheryl finds out how delicious President’s Choice Frozen Sushi is. Here’s a hint, it’s as bad as it sounds.

I’ll be relieving Sheryl of her Blog-A-Log writing duties so she can go out and have fun on Sundays and I can experience the wonderful world of Toronto food blogging.

I enjoy writing about food and reading about food, but mostly I like eating it! I’m originally from California and I love living in Toronto except for the fact that I haven’t found any good California-style Mexican food here.

In addition to the Blog-A-Log, I write for Taste T.O. every other week.

At All Things Dolce, Sands speaks in praise of growing fresh mint, and has some suggestions for using it in teas and salads. This is a very seasonal post, I know that the mint I planted last month is really taking off now, and it’s still early enough to start some now for a bumper crop this summer.

On the newly redesigned Cream Puffs in Venice, Ivonne perhaps doesn’t share Sands’ enthusiasm for mint, as she ditches the mint when making cucumber sandwiches from Tracy Stern’s Tea Party. She substitutes her own chive butter and includes the recipe.

Continue reading Blog-A-Log - Sunday, May 27th »

Thai Chef
233 Roncesvalles Avenue
416-915-0095
Dinner for two with all taxes, tip and iced tea: $57

The first thing I thought when I walked into Thai Chef was “Oh dear, this is going to take a long, long time.” It was semi-crowded, and the waitresses were rushing around looking, well, rushed. Vacated tables had not been cleared. We almost went somewhere else, but we were there and we were hungry, and I had noticed a lot of the restaurants we had passed on the way had been closed either for Victoria Day or were closed on Mondays in general. So we stayed.

We were seated quickly, at a table under the gaze of a pretty, yellow and bejewelled statute of a Thai woman, two-thirds life size. With 108 menu items, the choosing took awhile. Despite all the pleasant menu perusing, we still waited a while to have our order taken, and I thought it was going to take forever for our meal to come. Pleasant surprise: our drinks, soup and appetizer came very quickly. Unpleasant surprise: the Shrimp Chips with Peanut Sauce ($3.50) were slightly stale, and oddly thin, yet dense. They were like something that would come from a health food store in the low fat section. My husband said they tasted “partially hydrogenated,” but I really don’t think that is a flavour. The peanut sauce that accompanied them was good, though a bit peanut-buttery.

Continue reading Good Food, Bad Service at Thai Chef »

So my blood pressure is a little higher than I would like it. It’s “high normal” when I want it to be “normal normal.” You probably know the drill: cut the salt, check! join a gym, check! actually go to gym and sweat several times a week, check! From the exercise I seem to be losing inches and getting firmer —good things to be sure, but my blood pressure has not budged. Maybe I am just carrying around too much weight, even if it’s more muscle and less fat than it used to be. I decided to try a nutritionist.

Now, I like my doctor, an old guy who listens and has a sense of humour. I respect my doctor, because he seems to know what he is doing. So, at my annual checkup, I get him to refer me to a nutritionist, one who had just started practicing in the medical group he belongs to. It seemed like an auspicious beginning.

What I wanted from a nutritionist was someone who would look at my activity, and say, “Calorie / protein / nutritionally, etcetera, here is what you should be eating on days you work out. On days you don’t work out, eat like this.” I was hoping for someone who would spend some time figuring out about my workouts and what my nutritional needs were on those days, as opposed to the days I was less active. Perhaps there would be some tests that they would run; something medical or physiological or clinical or needful of instruments. I had general expectations, ballpark ideas of how it was going to go down. These expectations were dashed pretty quick upon arrival. After some prelim chit-chat in the hall on the way to her office, she cut to the chase.

Continue reading My Trip to the Nutritionist – Sponsored by the Dairy Industry »

Tikki Tikka Indian Bistro
2057 Royal Windsor Drive, Mississauga
905-823-2000
Dinner for two with non-alcoholic drinks including tax and tip: $65.00

This week my husband got to pick the place. For our ninth anniversary, he took me to his favourite strip mall Indian restaurant out near where he works, out by the invisible line separating Mississauga from Oakville, out in the complex with the police station (Region Of Peel!), the Firestone Tire, a surviving Harvey’s, a bank, a dry cleaner, and other stuff that is hard to notice or remember. Moderate was my trepidation, hopping the Go Train out from Union Station on the (not quite) last train to Clarkson, but great was my pleasant surprise. Tikki Tikka Indian Bistro met and exceeded my Toronto-city-cat expectations. I was surprised to find such an innovative and interesting Indian food out in the land of the big boxes, many-axeled trucks and red light cams, but, really, on reflection, why not? This bistro was unique and it was good, darn good.

Tasteful was the interior of Tikki Tikka, making one forgetful of the prefab exterior and the police to one side and the bank tellers to the other. Mellow, yellow strings of lights defined the ceiling plane of the interior space, so far removed from the heavy traffic of commerce beyond the frosted glass outside, creating a pleasant, self-contained ambiance. Butcher paper and unprepossessing IKEA-ware on the tables kept things on the casual tip, but the overriding impression is one of cleanliness. I mean, the place is done up in earthtones and soft yellow lights – it is no hospital – but it is exceptionally clean, and there ain’t nothing wrong with that.

Continue reading Tikki Tikka Indian Bistro »

Pho Phuong Vietnamese Restaurant
1603 Dundas West (Between Dufferin and Brock)
416-536-3030
Dinner for two with beverages and tip: $60

Village of Brockton. That is what the street signs say where I live. It is crying for a nice slightly upscale restaurant or two. It doesn’t need to be Little Italy West, but a dab or two of gentrification would be a good thing. This winter Pho Phuong, the newest Vietnamese place seemed like it might be it. Sadly, no. There was good and bad in my dining experience there, so I will play good thing, bad thing in no particular order.

Good thing. Goi Cuon Tom Thit, or rice paper with shrimp, pork, vegetable and vermicelli ($3.50), is your basic Vietnamese spring roll. Pho Phuong nails this Vietnamese staple. The rice paper plays like tacky dough on the tongue, so thin that the shrimp at each end of the roll seems to be lighted from within. First bite with shrimp number one is the best. Working my way through the chicken and pork-bearing middle stretch, squeeze bottle of sweet hoisin working, I anticipated that second shrimp at the far end. The last bite tied for best. Real good roll.

Continue reading Pho Phuong Phair, Not Phabulous »

Tap Phong, located in the heart of Chinatown at 360 Spadina Avenue, is a restaurant supply store like no other. If you’ve ever eaten in an Asian restaurant and wished you could find the crockery, utensils, pots or pans used there, chances are you can find them here. A word of caution for neatfreaks: Tap Phong is big and disorganized. Many items have no prices. Some things are incredible bargains; others overpriced. Some of the merchandise seems like it’s been there since the 1970s, shopworn and outdated to the point of being back in style again. You really never know what you’ll find, but it’s always interesting to look. Take your out-of-town visitors for a shopping experience they just can’t get back home.

The best bargains I have found are the discounted ceramics in on the back wall. All sorts of odds and ends in the form of coffee cups, plates, ceramic soup spoons and bowls – always a bargain at twenty-five cents to two dollars. Especially impressive are the rice bowls at two for a dollar.

Continue reading Tap Phong Trading Company - Minor Chaos, Unique Bargains »

It looks like spring has finally come to Toronto, and it’s time to start thinking about gardening. Even if you only have a small yard or deck, you can grow at least some of your own food. Now is the time to start cultivating most varieties of seeds indoors for transplanting - herbs, beans, and tomatoes are easy to grow and can be grown in containers. It’s a relaxing hobby that can save you money. In addition, you can help keep heirloom plants in circulation.

Many of the fruits and vegetables in supermarkets have been bred for their ability to withstand automated cultivation processes and long shipping distances. They may look good on the shelves, but we lose much of the flavour. Heirloom plants have been passed down though generations in part because they taste good and grow well in smaller gardens. With fewer people growing any of their own food, we are in danger of losing some of the varieties that have been around for centuries.

Continue reading Grow Your Own - Food, That Is »