War and Cheese

After a particularly bad run-in with a very sad Mac and Cheese this week, I feel I should speak up. I won’t say where, it’s irrelevant anyways as its all bad Mac and Cheese at the moment.

I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore. This city is ruining Mac and Cheese.

We have loads of places to go now if you’re in the mood for comfort food. It would seem that when people need to treat themselves, it’s not necessarily to fancy steak house fare anymore. Complete diet rejection would never be done with something as Atkins as a steak au poivre anyways. As far as I’m concerned if you absolutely have to feel better though food, its fried chicken, corn bread, ribs, burgers, and Mac and Cheese. Sometimes all at the same time.

Now we have two trends at work; Comfort, and the Do One Thing place. I just made this phrase up, The Do One Thing Place – I don’t know how else to describe places like The Mac Shack, Beard Papa, a million different Ramen places – they just make one thing, with the assertion is they do it well. From a business standpoint you can’t miss here. From a practical standpoint, you have a logistical problem.
Comfort food is actually notoriously fussy. There is a reason why so many foods that we crave from childhood were usually cooked by mom, or grandma; they loved you enough to put the time and energy into making these kinds of dishes. Comfort foods often have long cook times, many ingredients, not to mention requiring knack and skill.

The Do One Thing Place is good for business in that you don’t really need to train staff that extensively. They learn one thing, and repeat constantly. It’s a factory, and a system that works. Macdonald did not get to be a business with $22.8 billion in revenues dealing with individualist chefs with creative control.

So what happens when food which requires love and attention is combined with a less than enthusiastic kitchen staff with no prep time and major production pressures? Disaster.

I recently ate (picked at more like) a Macaroni and Cheese side that was just buttered macaroni, in a dish, with some cheese on top, melted under a grill. It was a lost in translation moment. Yes, the name is just Macaroni and Cheese, but there is a little more to it. But this would require the kitchen to know how to make béchamel, and if that skill is absent, I can guarantee that nobody back in the kitchen has a clue about what going on. Why should they care either? For all intents and purposes, they have delivered what it says on the package.

We’ll see what happens to the new stream of Do One Thing comfort food factory outlets popping up. My guess is that either our taste for what mum used to make will go the way of the fast food hamburger, or they will be outmoded with the likes of salad bars and drive-ins.

What will they think of next?

Fusion. What was at first such an exciting word in the world of food has earned a decidedly bad reputation. “Fusion” used to mean daring combination of Asian and classical elements. Now seeing it on a menu, or even worse, the name of the very restaurant, seems to signal to the diner overly elaborate hack versions of dishes that everyone was perfectly fine with in the first place. At its best, fusion can be a celebration of creativity and a well-traveled chef. At its very worst its a flashy pipe dream that disrespect the ingredients and the cultures it sprang from in the first place.
You can eat almost anything in Vancouver . In fact its very diversity makes it one of the best places on the planet to eat. However the restaurant business is a very fickle one. At one time making the menu “fusion” seemed to be insurance against culinary whims. How can your menu grow flat if at any given time you can just combine whatever trendy ingredient is to hand, stuff it into a gyoza wrapper and call it a day? Well of course it’s gone out of style, just like every other attempt at menu immortality. Think Retro Food, Nouvelle Cuisine, Salad Bars.
So how can a restaurant win this battle for hearts, minds and tastebuds? The answer at the moment seems to be focusing on one ingredient. Think the proliferation if Pho, taco trucks, and cheese specialists. Instead of seeing how fancy the chef can be with every possible ingredient under the sun, there seems to be more street cred in being wildly knowledgeable about waffles, for instance. The kitchen is becoming less of a general contractor, more of a specialist.
Perhaps this is an offshoot of the Asian influence whence all this diversification came from in the first place. Think Japanese soba noodle “sobarias”, or Eastern China’s soup dumplings. When you show fanatical devotion to getting one thing right, you get fanatical consumer loyalty to that one beautifully done item.
Will we see an end to chefs using us as guinea pigs? Hopefully soon. In the meantime, rest assured that if any of our newest and most popular places around town are any indication, “loyalty to craft” is our beautiful new buzzword for the year.

Boring

Having a really hard time thinking about stuff to write about at the moment. I know that that’s the dumbest thing to write on a blog ever. It’s the blogging equivalent of “Loving the Sunshine!” as a FB status. Just to let you know, I haven’t gone away, I’m just way overfed at the moment.

Reading a really interesting book called The Compass of Pleasure by. David J. Linden. I suppose in a nutshell it’s about why certain things feel so good and why we can get addicted to them. I’m very interested in this as some sort of insight as to why I wake up on a Saturday morning thinking of nothing but what would be the perfect cola flavored cup cake. I’m sure most people think about other things immediately upon waking.
So if I can figure out why I’m so obsessed with food maybe I can eat less of it? The reading continues, so lets see what happens.

Victoria: Waffles, British Things and Fish

Spent the Easter long weekend in beautiful Victoria, BC. We stayed at the Fairmont Empress, which has always been a little dream of mine, almost nothing else I love more than really expensive hotels.  We booked through BC Ferries Holidays, and all in all it was a pretty good deal with no booking problems. Recommend.

The first thing we did upon getting to Vancouver Island was the Shaw Ocean Discovery Centre in Sidney. Very cool Jules Verne type doorway that does this sort of fake airlock thingy, but all in all not that many fish or displays. Maybe better for kids? But unfortunately, not really very much to it at all. Do not recommend.

After checking into the hotel we immediately found the  Wannawafle cart located directly by the waterfront in front of the Empress. These things are amazing. It’s a totally different things than what you are expecting a waffle to taste like. More like a super fragrant, caramel crunchy baked good. Amazing. stopped and had a chat with a nice gent on a bike hanging out by the cart who turned out to be Renaat Marchand;  founder, Dragons Den celebrity, and passionate advocate of all things waffle. What an awesome guy! ran into him the next day at his other location at Market square on Johnson St. the next day too and had a nice long chat with him, his business partner and I think their marketing director. I could seriously eat one of these waffles daily folks. Lets hope they open up a cart on the Yaletown Waterfront ASAP. Facebook them here and sign up to their twitter here to keep on top of when and where you can get you hands on one of these babies. Could not recommend any higher.

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After taking in the Royal BC Museum (good!) and the attached IMAX (an IMAX!) we headed out for some super bar food at The Bard and Banker. The waitress was even so kind as to substitute one of their pulled pork sliders in my sea sliders along with the fresh grilled fish and fried oyster slider. My word. Dylans lamb burger was phenomenal as well. The band was just warming up while we were there, but they seemed like they would have been pretty good. Just for TMI, now the boyfriend wants me to get a kilt. Damn you hot pub waitresses giving my boyfriend ideas! Recommend.

The next day was all about poking around the bizarre little nooks and crannies of Fan Tan Alley, shopping, and picking up some really interesting illegal cola flavored silver balls from The English Sweet Shop. The punk-rock counter attendant was ever so helpful and shared my sentiments on PG Tips (best British tea) and the impending royal wedding (complete bollocks). Recommended only if you, like me, feel the need to spend $9.45 on Schweppes Bitter Lemon.

Getting my Fish and Chip on while in Victoria was a big priority, and they had to come from Red Fish Blue Fish on Wharf St. The line-up at this place is almost as legendary as the fish; when we got there at 1pm it was as long as the pier itself. I’m not sure exactly how long we waited but during the wait I was able to:

• Go to starbucks, get two drinks, and walk back
• Read Bigfoot: I Not Dead
• Smoke cigarette
• Meet many dogs
• Change mind on order 4 times
• Get despondent

It’s an impressive line-up. However the Haddock and Chips is some epic greasy goodness. My boyfriends first time having fish and chips and now at least he’s starting to understand why anyone would eat fish in the first place. The Tempura Pickles are either the creation on a pregnant woman or a genius. Or a pregnant genius. It’s the kind of thing that Cookie Monster would now be forced to call a “sometimes food”. Worth the wait, I just hope next time Flying Pig shows up. Recommend.

Dinner was not as pleasant. We went to Prime Steakhouse. Here’s the funny thing about steakhouses; they think they have inherited some sort of class factor simply because they serve steak. We turned up to a nearly empty restaurant without a reservation and were told “oh, we probably can’t get you a table until 8:15-8:30.”. I thought, “really? ok. Hey, what time is it anyways? should we go then? stay?”. It was awkward to say the least. The hostess put us in the lounge, we ordered a drink and then a waitress immediately sat us at a table maybe 2 minutes later. Of course, because the place was not in any way lacking in tables.

Our first waitress was dressed like a bohemian (in a steakhouse?) and listed off a list of specials no person could ever remember. I hate long lists of specials. I get distracted and start feeling awkward about blankly smiling at foodie buzz words.

We were put in the restaurant section equivalent of purgatory. Right by the front door at a 6-top, sitting side by side, facing the door. I think eating in this formation alone could ruin a first date. I think also this section didn’t actually belong to any server as we were passed between the English-accented bartender and boho-girl. No one seemed to know who was taking care of us, and at the end of the day, they didn’t communicate it between themselves to find out. Ordering took ages. The food was fine, really good actually. It had just obviously been ready and ignored under heat lamps for ages before it got to out table. Uhg, and they do that really pretentious thing with the bread too, where they bring a basket but just give you one tiny little roll. Leave the basket, if your going to forget about our table anyway. Our soups had really nice flavor, but had skins from sitting. Our mains were fine. A dessert menu was brought eventually but then left for, oh, maybe 20 minutes. At that point we could either give up any chance at the rest of the evening in the hopes of ever seeing a dessert, or go. I always get the giggles when things go this bad in restaurants. I feel like I’m being stitched up, or doing an roll play in “how no to impress you guests and guarantee a shit tip” The British waitress finally noticed, came over, visibly realized she fucked up. “Sorry I took so long! So do you still…” “Just the bill please”.

Oh, and looming over my boyfriend while he used to pin pad to pay, to watch how little tip you were getting? Klassy. Our most expensive meal of the trip and the most disappointing. This is why people don’t care about steakhouses anymore. Do I have to mention that I do not recommend?

Sunday Brunch was spent happily at Floyd’s Diner on Yates St. My Eggs Bennie was really good, not at all heavy or greasy, with really nice ham. The hash browns they do are really nice too, somewhere between a home-fry and a potato chip. Comfy, good value, really tasty, and not at all the wait that we had been warned about on Yelp, even on Easter Sunday. I particularly liked the baby pictures of the staff blown up and displayed on the wall. Makes you feel like the staff are really proud to work there and think of it as a second home. Recommend.

After all this gluttony we visited The Willow Stream Spa at The Empress. To have any last traces of stress soaked and massaged out of our overfed little bodies. Really liked all the nice little touches, like having your own scrubby sponge and razor available in all the showers, lots of tea and water available everywhere to stay hydrated, and lots of encouragement to stay and relax and  use the pools and saunas. Our massages were excellent and they made my massage-virgin boyfriend feel at ease.  They almost messed up our bill, but oh well. at that point it was hard to care.

The ferry ride home was smooth sailing, and I was glad to get home to my pug, who our friends had been watching, and apparently had been farting non-stop for 3 days. That’s my boy.

Well, peace out and word to your moms! Hope you all had a great Easter!

Lemon Meringue Cupcakes

I agree with Nigella Lawson on many, many things. I agree that food is integral to grief, second marriage need not wait forever, and that thinking about doing something is always worse that just doing it. I agree with her thoughts on pie too, lemon meringue in particular.

My chapter in her book Feast expectantly opens onto page 170, Lemon Meringue Cake.

“In all honesty, the origin of this cake is simply that I cannot make a go of a lemon meringue pie. I’ve tried, and I’ve tried, and it’s not that I’ve utterly failed, but I haven’t completely delighted myself. There’s enough of that kind of falling short in the rest of life, without having to usher in disappointment and self-loathing in the kitchen. This, then, is the easy option. “

My thoughts exactly. Now while the recipe on page 170 of Feast is a scratch lemon cake with meringue baked on top of the cake sandwiched with  scratch lemon curd, I had a birthday party to deal with. Mr. Spillycakes to be exact. Cupcakes would have to be made.

BTW good food sometimes comes from mixes, as nothing sours a good meal like over-expectation and panic.

Lemon Meringue Cupcakes

1 – box lemon cake mix, prepared as per box directions

1 – packet lemon meringue pie filling OR jar of lemon curd

1- batch Italian Meringue (recipe in link here) recipe followed EXCLUDING adding butter

Basically, put cake mix in 24 cupcake cups and dollop a big teaspoon of the lemon curd on before popping in oven.  After baking and cooling, make the Italian meringue and put in a piping bag with a large plain round tip. Swirl on your cute little cupcake tops. Take a brûlée’ torch (or a flame thrower, whatever, it’s your counter top) and toast the meringue golden brown.

Disappointing Bread in 5 Minutes a Day

Fresh bread, hot from the oven. No other smell makes a house feel more like a home. This time of year especially, I want bread with everything. Hunks of it with hot soup and chili, cinnamon buns with coffee, garlic bread and pasta. Cold weather and carbs make a happy partnership.
In an effort to warm up my home with the kind of lovin’ you can only get from the oven, I tried out the book Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day by Jeff Hertzberg, M.D., and Zoe Francois. It promises the kind of crispy crusted, soft crumbed, artisan style breads once available in every-ones local bakery, just down the street. Now as those sort of “just around the corner” type places disappear, it is possible to recreate it in the comfort of your own home.
First thing, there is a rather long list of things that the book suggests one must purchase before starting. To get the basics, it required an afternoon spent in Winners and Cookworks trying to find things like an oven thermometer and pizza stone. I was probably a good $175.00 invested before water ever met flour. Not that all this stuff will be useless if I never make bread again, but I’m just saying, there is an equipment investment involved.
The books main premise is that you don’t have to knead the dough. Ever. This is a bit of a head scratcher as all previous bread making teachings and experience, not to mention a stint in a bakery, is adamant about kneading, window tests, and gluten production. In the book it tells you to just mix everything really roughly in a plastic container, that’s it. You don’t even need to mix it well. Just stir together and leave it.
This creates a very slack dough, as in quite on the wet side. In theory this is supposed to give it a sort of spongy constancy that will rise well. I just found I ended up with a very sticky, wet interior and slumped over, flat round loaves. There is a great section in the beginning of the book on suggestions to fix various problems, but I found that most of them were ways of sorting out problems caused by the actual “no knead” technique of the book in the first place.
There is also no way that this is bread in 5 Minutes a Day. Sure, you could mix dough in that 5 minutes, but all other stages still took hours. Before the dough could go in the fridge it had to proof on the counter for two hours. After it then came out of the fridge and was shaped it needed ages as it needed to come to room temperature first, and then actually rise.
Not that the motivation behind the book is bad, not at all. All the recipes are much lower in sugar and have none of the preservatives present in commercially baked breads. This is great. It gets people to try baking bread and hopefully they find that it is not nearly as hard as they thought. It’s also really nice to have a tub of dough waiting in the fridge for when creative impulses strike. I was able to make a pan of cinnamon buns in the time it took to get ready for work, and Friday night pizza took less time than it would normally take to wait for delivery.
This book was a great motivation to get back to making bread again, but I have a bad feeling that someone really not familiar with baking bread would get discouraged by the results pretty quickly. However, now that I have started baking my own bread fresh at home, I’m only more motivated to try to tweak it and get it right.

As a comparison, I will be doing another no knead recipe sent to me by my new mum in law. Is sounds very similar, but involves leaving the dough to ferment at room temperate for 18 hours, proofing on a piece of parchment, and then putting the dough, parchment and all, in a preheated pot in the oven. Sounds just about crazy enough to work. I will let you know!

Now Available Everywhere Good Blogs Are Sold!

Update to my lovely Woman Eats City readers! Funny story. One of the editors of The Vancouver Observer was reading a yelp review I had done, clicked on my profile, clicked on my blog, liked what he read, and now I’m submitting articles for them! Who would have though where a yelp review could take me? Check it out, I’m even on the front page this week and lots of perfect strangers seem to like me. Hurrah!

http://www.vancouverobserver.com/food/2011/02/20/where-are-all-female-chefs

Chef vs. Cook

My paternal grandmother had a giant kitchen. She was an excellent cook by necessity. She could do things like have an entire roast lunch ready on demand for a crowd of people after church, every Sunday. She understood the importance of getting good food onto the table.

One day, when I was maybe in my teens, I was helping her out and having a good time of it and she said something to the effect of “You’re a good cook, you should be a chef!”. At the time I bristled. How un-feminist! How old fashioned! I mean really, grandma, tsk. Little did I know what a modern career suggestion she was actually making.

Statistics show that there are almost double the men, 1.9 to 1, working in Vancouver’s restaurants compared to women (in 2006, 13360 men to 6985 women). Nationwide, 1.4 men to every woman are categorized as in food services or cook, and specifically for chefs the discrepancy is much more pronounced at 3.5 men to every woman (Source 2006 Census of Canada).

It can’t be that women have stopped cooking overall. Women are still the ones doing the majority of unpaid housework including cooking. But when it comes to going into a career in food, lots of women are still stopped short by a male dominated environment and long inflexible hours. The tide is slowly changing as a more even distribution of women are being shown in the media on shows like Top Chef and Chopped. However the majority of women are still shown baking cupcakes (Cupcake Wars, The Cupcake Girls, DC Cupcakes, etc) or as color commentators and eye Candy a la Padma Lakshmi.

So is this still social stereotypes ( take a look at the amount of pink in the cupcakes links) or just the options available? Women can arguably do any job that they want to. So certainly we should be enthusiastically starting work at 5am, burning our inner wrists, coming home smelling of garlic and smoke…?

It’s still the women cooking for love and pleasure. We are still the ones making cookies with the kids, bringing birthday cakes for the office, making consolation casseroles for a friend in need. We cook for those we love to show love. It’s so pleasurable, why muck it up by chasing after a paycheck.

There is no reason why women can’t dominate the professional kitchen, the question is; Do we want to?

I love you, The Oatmeal

*Stolen, gratefully, from www.theoatmeal.com *

Fashionable Food for 2011

Food is incredibly fickle. You may think that hemlines are hard to keep track of, but that’s nothing compared to what can and can-not be served in the better restaurants in the more fashionable districts in the most currently food centric cities.  Food in our century has far, far less to do with what tastes good and ever more to do with the strobe-light like flash of ever-changing new ingredients. Keeping track is hard, and even the smallest pub, cafe, or food stand in the least fashionable area of anywhere will feel the effects of ingredient popularity.

The awareness of ever morphing diets, and the rejection of said diets, has done more to shape what we want to eat than ever in the beginning of our new century. It would seem that our lives are becoming so so virtual or intangible that we are all craving “real” foods. People want heavier flavors, more visible fat, less artificial sweeteners. It makes perfect sense. After spending a day thinking about how whether or not that emoticon you used will add enough emotional value to an email you just sent a client on Singapore, It’s understandable that at 6pm you really just say Sod It, I’m eating the biggest pork chop I can find. These are the modern times we live in.

But if you want to go more microscopic into the small flavor cues that will be showing up on our menus and cookbooks in the year to come, these are my observations and guesses as to what, I think, will become this years vertion of 2005′s sun-dried tomato.

 1. Fennel Seeds – Jamie Oliver is using gobs if them in everything possible at the moment, and their old world pungency works with fatty, porky, smoky flavors. Watch for them in sausages, anything “wintry” and no doubt to be crusting something at a restaurant near you soon.

2. Gelée - Gratefully replacing the foam. Lovely layers of pretty, sparkly jelly over creamy things will making us think of some fantasy dessert buffet in heaven this year.  I also predict the return of the Aspic.

3. Pavlova – As soon as restaurants start realizing that keeping Meringues,  cream, and a few berries around is easier than trying to make tiny little apple crumbles or warm brownies a la minute, the better dessert out will be for all of us.

4. Ramen -It’s taken Vancouver by absolute storm and is carrying on full speed ahead into 2011. Places like Kintaro are bringing real ramen, and less expensive more satisfying food, into the public conscientiousness.

5. Chocolate/Raspberry – Stealing the thunder from peanut/chocolate recipes of earlier this century. If it doesn’t have a raspberry in it in 2011, it’s just not good enough.

6. Blood Oranges – Blame it on Emo kids and vampire enthusiasts thinking they are something that their not. They are absolutely gorgeous and are starting to be seen sliced over salads and tarts and squeezed into all manner of things, most importantly, cocktails.

7. Macarons – Officially displacing cupcakes from their sugary pedestal.  Essentially a meringue made with ground almonds, they have all the capacity for crazy colours and flavors, but are a million times more delicate and sophisticated.

8. Cheese – In all forms this is getting close to replacing bacon as naughty food best eaten in over-the-top quantities.  Mac and cheese in all variants, whole restaurants dedicated to it,  cheese plates replacing dessert, fondue coming back; this is all happening now.