Posted by Sheryl Kirby in fish and shellfish, where can I find? on January 4, 2009 at 8:45 am

One of the big holiday food traditions in our house is a feed of lobster on Christmas Eve. We don't get fancy - we just cover the table with newspaper and boil up the tasty crustaceans and serve them with melted butter and some potato salad.

While the season has ended in a number of places until spring, inshore lobster fishing is still taking place in southern Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. Lobster fishing is always legal offshore, although purists prefer lobsters sourced closer to land, which means there is still lobster to be had - inexpensively.

Economic woes, particularly in the US, have adversely affected the Atlantic lobster fishery, both in the US and Canada. This means a decent retail price for consumers (normally about $14.99 a pound, lobster prices over the holidays dropped as low as $6.99 per pound in Toronto), but not such a great deal for lobster fishers who have the same costs to cover even though their profit is less. In Halifax this past December, lobster fishers were being offered a wholesale rate of $3 per pound and many boycotted sales to mainstream stores in favour of that traditional Nova Scotian sales method - setting up by the side of the road and selling the things out of the back of a truck. This at least allowed the fishers to charge a still inexpensive $5 per pound and to recoup their operating costs and turn a small profit.

Posted by Sheryl Kirby in holidays, where can I find? on December 21, 2008 at 8:17 am

Whether it's because they don't celebrate Christmas or because they're celebrating later, there's plenty of people who find themselves wandering the streets of Toronto on December 25th looking for a meal. And while there are many hotels offering various buffets or fancy 5 course dinners, not everyone wants the big platter of turkey and fixin's on Christmas Day. While the husband and I will be joining a relative for a hotel holiday buffet on the 25th, our usual tradition is to head to one of our favourite local restaurants with all the other heathens and hipsters and enjoy a hearty plate of scrambled eggs and toast with nary a mention of holly, mistletoe or presents.

Here's a selection of places that are open and serving their regular menu on the 25th.

Posted by Sheryl Kirby in bakeries, cookies, french, where can I find? on December 7, 2008 at 8:07 am

They're elusive little devils. The sandwich cookie comprised of two discs of almond meringue and a buttercream filling is easy enough to make, yet few Toronto bakeries seem to carry the things. Those that do suffer the ongoing criticism from customers who insist, "These aren't as good as the ones I had in Paris!" And who wants to see their efforts ripped to shreds by some self-proclaimed expert over on ChowHound?

Nevertheless, there are some hardy souls in our city who have stocked up on egg whites and ground almonds, and who work diligently each week to create batches of these much-adored cookies. No doubt differences in quality from the ones you had in gay Paree have more to do with ingredients than skill (Californian almonds versus ones from Turkey or Portugal, different regulations regarding what can be fed to the hens that produced the eggs), so consider a trip to a local bakery a less expensive alternative than a plane ride across the pond, and stuff your macaron-hole with the offerings from a few of these places.

Posted by Sheryl Kirby in kitchen equipment, where can I find? on November 2, 2008 at 8:52 am

A friend contacted me recently looking for advice on where to find a kitchen scale. He was making beer and needed to measure various ingredients by weight.

The average home cook doesn't really need a scale unless they're working with dishes that need precise measurements or do a lot of baking. In chef's school, we measured all baking ingredients by weight instead of the Imperial "cups" system to help ensure a level of quality control on our finished products. In countries that have fully adapted to the metric system, all recipe ingredients are measured in grams, so a kitchen scale might also be useful for people who cook from any UK cookbooks.

The other and more popular use for a home kitchen scale is for health and nutrition purposes - to measure out exact amounts of foods to help in following a specific diet.

The type and quality of the scale required therefore depends very much on what you're using it for. There's also the choice between mechanical and digital, with people on both sides of the debate on which is best.

Posted by Sheryl Kirby in books, where can I find? on October 19, 2008 at 8:34 am

We got an email from a reader last week asking about where to find cookbooks, specifically older vintage ones, and I have to say, I didn't really have a good reply. "Used bookstores" seemed like a really patronizing answer, but that's about all I could come up with.

After a bit of research, my answer would be dependant on the disclaimer of "what do you want to do with it?" For some people, the hunt is the best part of the process, and if you're not cursed with asthma, an afternoon spent digging through dusty stacks and boxes of cookbooks at the back of a used bookstore might be sheer heaven. If it's the having of the book that is the goal, then online resources might be a better bet, and if the plan is simply to view, copy and try out the recipes, then I'd head to the library to dig through their treasures.

The Cookbook Store (850 Yonge Street) offers an extensive collection of older titles, as do most of the big chains. Amazon offers many titles at new or used prices, and it's possible to find vintage or rare stuff in the used section here. Alibris specializes in used and rare books, but it helps to know the title of what you're looking for in order to search effectively.

Posted by Sheryl Kirby in holidays, meat and poultry, prepared foods, where can I find? on October 5, 2008 at 8:16 am

Autumn kind of came out of nowhere and with it, the best holiday; Thanksgiving - a celebration focused on food that allows an unabashed, no-excuses day in the kitchen where I get to cook some of my favourite foods. To my surprise, not everyone shares this joy of cooking, so we've got our annual primer of where to get everything for a perfect Thanksgiving, regardless of whether you know a whisk from a broiler.

Cook It Yourself

For those not content with ye olde industrial butterball, there are a few happier, healthier poultry options available. Organic turkey can be hard to track down, but The Butchers (2636 Yonge Street) is offering in-house smoked turkey and ham, as well as fresh organic turkey and a limited number of Heritage Bronze turkeys. Customers are advised to place their Thanksgiving orders at least two days in advance.

Posted by Sheryl Kirby in bakeries, where can I find? on September 21, 2008 at 8:09 am

My first encounter with rugelach was in the early 90s when I worked for a company owned by a Jewish family. During the Jewish holidays, they’d bring in platters of treats to share with the staff and the little rolled cookies had me coming up with all kinds of reasons to wander by the break room.

Yiddish for “little twist”, rugelach was originally made with a yeast dough, but American Jews introduced a dough made with cream cheese. The pastry is rolled around fillings such as chocolate, raisins, nuts or preserves such as apricot or raspberry.

Posted by Sheryl Kirby in butchers, meat and poultry, where can I find? on September 7, 2008 at 8:11 am

This is not a 'where can I find' question! It is a 'Why can't I find' question.

I was just wondering if you know why game is so hard to get in Ontario, relative to Quebec or even many places in the U.S. I know where to find it in town, but it is a pain; and mainstream markets never seem to carry it.

In Quebec the big chains like Metro even carry bear meat in season! Just wondering if there was some sort of law in Ontario that made selling game difficult or something?

There is indeed. Hunted game carcasses cannot be sold to the public, regardless of whether they are processed in a provincially licensed meat plant or not. Hunted game can be consumed by the hunter for personal use, but it may not be sold. As such, a lot of the more rare game meats such as moose or bear just aren't available at the retail level.

Any other game meat available for sale throughout the province is farmed - whether it's rabbits, deer, elk or bison, or more exotic meats - and is subject to the same laws and legislation regarding processing as more standard farm animal slaughter.

Posted by Sheryl Kirby in bakeries, grains, where can I find? on August 24, 2008 at 8:14 am

The "Where Can I Find?" column is a new bi-weekly feature here at TasteTO starting this week. We'll research and track down hard to find items and let you know where they're available. Got a question for the "Where Can I Find" lady? Drop us a line.

I see red fife flour showing up on restaurant menus that have a local food theme, but where can I get this product to bake with at home?

The hot ingredient this summer is most definitely red fife flour. Restaurateurs and bakers from Jamie Kennedy and Marc Thuet to St. John’s Bakery are using this wholly Canadian product, and articles about the history and near extinction of the grain are popping up in a variety of publications from MacLean’s and Toronto Life to Edible Toronto.

The short version – red fife wheat was first planted near Peterborough in 1842 by David and Jane Fife, and it became the backbone of the Canadian wheat industry, giving Canada the nickname “granary of the world”. Immigrants were given free seeds to encourage them to settle on the prairies and become farmers. Over the years, red fife fell out of favour as other varieties derived from the red fife strain became more popular because of shorter growing times and higher yields. The original strain was on the verge of extinction by 1988 when a seed-saver activist named Sharon Rempel got her hands on a pound of seed and planted it in Keremeos, British Columbia.