Hungry In Hogtown

Ravioli without borders, Part II: Liquid mango ravioli with coconut foam and toasted rice

Inspiration is everywhere in Toronto.  The dish that inspired these mango spheres with coconut foam and toasted rice powder is a dessert Rachel and I have eaten countless times, Salad King's mango sticky rice.

Salad King is one of Toronto's most popular Thai restaurants.  Nestled just off Yonge Street, it's a popular hangout for student and office worker alike, who fill every last seat around Salad King's gleaming stainless steel cafeteria tables to devour some of the best cheap eats in town.  I'm partial to the panang curry and Thai basil noodles; Rachel reserves a special spot in her heart and stomach for green curry.

For years, we've finished our Salad King meals with our favourite dessert, mango sticky rice.  It's a charmingly simple, almost rustic dish: just some savoury steamed rice, sweetened coconut cream, and ripe mango, a perfect send-off before the brisk trip home on a cool night.

After eating this dish for the umpteenth time, I began to toy with the idea of deconstructing it.  It's not as easy as it sounds.  There are only so many ways to reconfigure rice, coconut milk, and mango.  As my interest in molecular gastronomy blossomed, my exposure to ever more ingenious ways to deconstruct flavours and dishes made reinterpreting the coconut and mango elements a less daunting task.  For the coconut I turned to my trusty iSi cream whipper, having already made a decadent coconut espuma for el Bulli's piña colada, although I adapted a different foam, which includes heavy cream, from El Bulli: 1998-2002 for this dish.

Menu for Hope III -- Susur: A Culinary Life

In the wake of the Asian tsunami two years ago, Pim, the globetrotting gourmand behind Chez Pim, organized Menu for Hope, a charity event to raise money for the victims of that disaster.  Pim's idea was simple and elegant: food bloggers from around the world donate prizes, and their readers donate money by buying raffle tickets for those items. The event was such a success that it has now become a fixture of the food blogging calendar.  This year, in its third iteration, Menu for Hope III is raising money for the United Nations World Food Programme from December 11-22.

The simple fact is that while people like me spend hours singing the praises of Nutella, dinner at Alinea, and liquid pea ravioli, many millions of people lack access to basic sustenance.  The World Food Programme's mission is to right this horrible wrong.  In 2005 alone, WFP food aid reached 96.7 million people in 82 countries.  Menu for Hope II raised USD$17,000 for this cause, and those of us participating in this year's event hope to shatter that record.

You say tomato

Has nature ever created anything more delicious than a perfectly ripe tomato?  I think not.

And yet, with the possible exception of the peach, there is no other produce I can think of that is so hard to find at its ripe, flavourful best.  You know the story: your typical tomato in your typical North American Megamart is green and hard as a golf ball.  Slice it open and the flesh inside is mealy and tasteless, suitable, at best, as a garnish on a sandwich, and even that's a stretch.

That tomato is the crowning glory of mass-market, industrial food production.  Smothered in pesticides in the field, picked while green, then gassed within an inch of its life, and somehow available fresh year-round, this lipstick-covered pig is then devoured by consumers who value looks over flavour.

What's a tomato-lover to do?  For this tomato-lover, the solution is to ask everyone you know with even a modicum of greenspace if they grow tomatoes, and, if they do, to see if you can snag a few for yourself.  Then, limit truly rapacious tomato consumption to late summer and early fall, when tomatoes are actually in season.  Come fall, it's time to go canned (but that's a separate post).

If you're really lucky, you may even have Italian friends whose fathers have massive backyards and a green thumb.  Thank God I do.  My friend and co-worker, Carlo, also known as "my best friend" come late-August, is just such a person.  For the past two summers, he's stopped by my desk every few days with a massive bag of homegrown, organic, vine-ripened tomatoes.

Now, a fresh, ripe tomato demands to be the star of whatever dish it ends up in.  This is not the time or the tomato to contemplate a couple of slices as a garnish on a sandwich.  Nope, you've got to seize the moment -- eat the damn thing on its own like an apple, or, if you're like me, consider a salad.

Scooped again: raspberry white chocolate ice cream

Damn you, Judiaann Woo!  Sticky toffee pudding ice cream was, is, and forever will be my brilliant idea.  And yet I wake up one Sunday morning, flick on my computer, and discover that you've taken sticky toffee pudding ice cream, entered it in a competition on Food Network, and -- here's the kicker -- won!

That's right, and now Häagen-Dazs is releasing sticky toffee pudding as a limited edition ice cream available only until January.  I'm not bitter, oh no, though I have to admit some disappointment at the fact that Häagen-Dazs has released the flavour only in the United States.

In all fairness, her idea of sticky toffee pudding ice cream varies considerably from my own.  Whereas I created a custard infused with sticky toffee pudding, hers is basically a vanilla ice cream studded with hunks of sticky toffee pudding and "swirled with a sticky toffee sauce."  You know, that does sound good.

Now if I can just find a way to get my hands on some....

Asparagustatory delight: wild asparagus two ways

My love for the St. Lawrence Market is boundless, but I'm the first to admit it has its faults.  Perhaps the most glaring is that, despite two floors of greengrocers, butchers, bakers, fishmongers, and other purveyors of delicious foods, there are few organics on offer.

I know this sounds odd coming from someone whose pantry includes such earthly delights as calcium chloride, but I'm really quite sincere.  Given the choice, I prefer using organic products.  I'd like to think there are countless others in Toronto who feel the same, but the dearth of organic vendors in the market leads me to think otherwise.

If you go to the market looking for organic produce, for example, there is only one option: Golden Orchard Find Foods.

As something of a regular, I've begun to develop a relationship with the people there.  That's important, and not because I'm looking for a discount.  What I'm really after is a chance to get my hands on their highest quality and rarest ingredients.  That's why the first thing I do after work every Friday is head to the market to see what special items are going to be available that weekend.

Sometimes it works out nicely.  Like the Friday a few weeks ago when I asked what interesting items were going to be available the next day and was promptly shown a large box of wild asparagus.  My eyes almost popped out of my head.  Here was an ingredient I'd never seen for sale in Toronto.  At almost ninety dollars per kilo it wasn't cheap, but I was quick to buy a large bag of it.

What to do with it was a dilemma.

Ramp-age! Our introduction to wild leeks

You can tell someone takes eating seriously when they measure the seasons in food.  You know the type (because you probably are the type).  To the food obsessed, spring isn't about snow melting or the Earth reaching a particular point in its orbit, nor should it be.  Nope, to the perpetually food aware the advent of spring is really about the arrival of baskets of wonderful produce in local markets.

Take me, for instance.  Come late April and early May, my eyes are peeled for asparagus.  Once I see local asparagus at the St. Lawrence Market, I know without doubt that it's spring.  Ladies and gentlemen, spring has arrived.

Weekend Cookbook Challenge #5: Cochinita pibil, guacamole and pickled red onions

I've just experienced my first El Bulli recipe failure.  It wasn't pretty either.  I was trying to make El Bulli's Mexican fried tacos.  The observant among you will notice this post is about cochinita pibil.

There are a handful of recipes in the El Bulli: 1998-2002 that call for fried corn.  Fried corn?  I guess there are just some things you have to figure out for yourself in this world, because nowhere in the book or accompanying CD can I find a preparation for it, and I've certainly never heard of it used anywhere else.  That should have stopped me, but it didn't.

So I set about the other day -- two tins of sweet corn and some olive oil in hand -- to making an improvised version of fried corn.  I fried and fried, and occasionally slapped Rachel's hand as she tried to eat kernels of hot, freshly fried corn.  It is tasty, especially with a dash of salt.

Corn fried, I was ready to make the taco shells, which are a mix of the corn and a croquant made of fondant, glucose, and isomalt.  The ground fried corn should have the consistency of a powder, but when I tried grinding my fried corn I ended up with a paste -- a sort of Mexican-Italian fusion fried corn pesto.  It's not pretty, trust me.

It helps to have a backup, though ours doesn't come from a cookbook, unfortunately.  We had some leftover banana leaves from our Kalua pig adventure, and we were pondering ways to use them when our friend Ryan asked me if I'd ever heard of puerco pibil.  I hadn't, but after a quick search I decided it was the answer to our banana leaf surplus, and our dish for the Mexican edition of the Weekend Cookbook Challenge.

I think I pulled a muscle: Kalua pig and some pulled pork sandwiches to remember

Bet you didn't know I'm a little obsessed with pork shoulder, did you?  Yes, I love the occasional steak, pork tenderloin, or lamb chop, but dollar for dollar I can't think of a better piece of meat.  I must be alone in this opinion, because many butchers do not carry this cut.  When asked, the butchers I've spoken to say that people simply don't want to buy it.  "People want steak and chicken breasts," they add.  Those people should be beaten senseless with a veal shank.

On second thought, that too would be a horrific waste of yet another delicious cut of meat people don't buy enough.

Though you may not know it, many of you are familiar with pork shoulder (aka Boston butt) via pulled pork, a dish so good I think it may be the reason God gave pigs shoulders.  From my perspective, the problem with traditionally barbequed pulled pork is that it requires long, slow cooking over low heat with lots of smoke.  When you live in an apartment like we do, twenty hours of smoking is an impossibility.

But I still want my pulled pork.

Ooh la la! Rillettes à la Bourdain with Poilâne bread

We love Paris, with its wide boulevards, stunning art, and remarkable cuisine, and our hearts beat a little faster every time we reminisce about La Rambla, Gaudi, and the glories of Barcelona.  Yet more than any other place, our hearts belong to Italy.  From our first glimpse of the Colosseum, to our first bite of our first meal in Rome, we've been in love with Italy and its food.  Rob went so far as to learn the language -- taking great delight in shocking his Italian teacher by asking her the meaning of particularly titillating words with feigned, wide-eyed innocence -- and we flirted with the idea of moving there.  We gaze at the belpaese every day, or at least the map on our wall.  We even honeymooned there. 

So why the heck do we have so much French food on our blog lately?

Gnocching on heaven's door: Boulud's braised short ribs with homemade potato gnocchi

We fell upon Italy and its food like a two-person swarm of locusts.  After five days in Malta -- the British started leaving in the 1960s, but apparently forgot to take 1960s British food with them -- we were ready to eat.  Malta is a beautiful country with a remarkable history and, for Rob, a deeply personal history too, given that his father was born there.  Nonetheless, after living on pastizzi, the delicious flaky pastry turnovers filled with ricotta or mushy peas, for the better part of a week, we approached Italy with eager appetites.

We arrived in Florence after several days of gluttony in Rome (to read a little about that, click here).  Not knowing a pesce from a pesca made eating well a challenge, but we wandered throughout the city and opened our minds and our stomachs to every tantalizing experience we could find.  I guess it's no surprise then, that we stumbled into an almost-empty restaurant at seven one evening, an unthinkable hour for any self-respecting Italian.  Thanks to the patience and kindness of our remarkable waiter, we eventually ordered a meal using a clumsy mix of broken English and heavily-accented pidgin-Italian.

But, oh, what a meal!  The highlight was a steaming plate of tiny potato dumplings sauced in a rich truffle cream that were like clouds on the tongue.  Our eyes met as I realized I was in gastronomic heaven.  Then I turned away from the waiter, and smiled at Rob.  We started laughing out loud -- it was that good.

Once back in Toronto, we put a lot of effort into recreating those lighter-than-air gnocchi.