White Food

I've never partied with white food. White chocolate, white pepper, white truffles, white balsamic -- none of them has any integrity in my warped scheme of food values. They're all diluted versions of the real black or brown thing. And until today, the same went for white asparagus -- albino colour, ridiculously expensive, just generally weird.

But here it is: poach the little weirdos in butter and white wine and taste the magic.

My job has some excellent perks, like being invited to wine tastings and such like. Today I sat next to the charming young oenologist from Dom Perignon while he introduced us to the Dom "oenotheque" series -- 12 yrs old++ vintage bottles. Lunch was provided by one of the city's best chef's, designed to match the 1993 Champagne. And while the wine nerds can speak volumes about the wine, I'll just say one thing: YUMMMM.

Butter poached white asparagus beneath very delicately grilled halibut and a few shaved radishes, paired with extraordinary Champagne. Lucky me.

Mango Love

Blackberries in cassis sauce, Liberté's out-of-this-world 10% plain yogurt, and the ubiquitous mango....


A decent breakfast.

Best Burger

At this moment it's kind of hard to type -- my arms (and back and legs) are so very very stiff and sore from the weekend's dirt biking adventure. It was super, all mud and puddles and wet rocks and I leaped over a large log and caught about 3 inches of air in a jump. But the after effects on my poor little body are staggering. If this is age 34, I'm not interested in age 60. Yikes.

As fuel to heal our bruises and aches, we feasted on burgers when we got home.

Now, "hamburger" is one of the top-Googled recipes on this planet. But why? Good beef + salt & pepper + hot grill = good burger. There is simply no need to complicate matters with bread crumbs, relish, onion soup mix, eggs etc.

Really, the only "secret" ingredient is fat. Extra lean beef makes tough, dense burgers that taste like nothing. Fat delivers flavour and keeps the texture loose. But since it's hard to find anything richer than lean ground these days, here's my solution: buy a bag of shredded suet.

A few weeks ago I hooked up with the daughter of a farmer who sold me 5 lbs of very lean grass-fed ground. So I mixed a few tablespoons of frozen suet into the meat before shaping the patties. There were some flare-ups on the grill, but the burgers were so moist and yummy that we both ate 2 (!!). And so quickly there wasn't time to take a photo.

Mango Failure

I didn't do it. The final 4 mangoes had to go into the composter yesterday, too bruised and funky-smelling to keep in the kitchen for another day. This after I hit a new level of mango ingenuity when I had toast with peanut butter and sliced mango for breakfast. Delicious!

Let this be a lesson to all you single gals and guys out there: 20 mangoes is too much.

Sad but true.

A Case of Mangoes

I got a little excited at the Asian superstore the other day and bought a case of Ataulfo mangoes for $10. That's 20 mangoes, all at the peak of perfection. Granted, these are the good mangoes -- all silky sweet, thin-skinned, easy-to-peel lusciousness. But 20. I've eaten 2 today and frankly I'm a little afraid of the potential consequences of eating too many mangoes. Stay tuned, friends.

Mango Salsa
Finely dice 4 mangoes. Add lots of chopped fresh cilantro and the juice a large lime. Serve with grilled fish, then toss the leftovers on top of a green salad.

Rotisserie Love

It wasn't strong enough for the 17-lb piglet, but my cheap new rotisserie was all over these 2 small chickens. We only made a few novice mistakes (forgot to put a fat-collector below the birds and so set the whole bbq alight, and the birds ended up a bit overcooked).


As a new fan of the craft, this weekend I learned that one of the best parts of rotisserie-ing is the enforced relaxing time. Once the birds are rotating slowly on the spit, there isn't much to do but sit nearby, drink in hand, and stare out at the setting sun. The gentle groan of the spit in the motor lulls you into a seriously chilled-out state of mind. We smoked a cigar to add to the effect, then served the birds (to ourselves, on the couch) with leftover Mediterranean orzo salad and sugar snap peas.

Cuba

We knew the food was going to be bad, ok? Everyone said, oooh, Cuba, great beaches, shit food. No worries, dude, I can survive on salad, my secret supply of roasted almonds, rum and cigars. We went to flake out on the gorgeous beach, sleep 10 hours a night, and generally not give a crap about the world for a few days. It was a wonderful trip.

But oh man, the food. It ranged from fairly good (Cuban black beans and shredded beef) to bizarre (smoked fish-pea-mayonnaise salad) to bad (pasta coated in something pasty... cornstarch?) to scary (marinated mussels at room temp in a 3-hr buffet) to oh honey no, please, no, please (a pork chop destroyed by an unidentifiable sauce and cold days-old soggy spring rolls).

Thankfully, there was decent ham, cheese and tiny buns, and we lived on this miraculous trinity of International Foods That Save the Day -- for breakfast with great coffee, for supper after running out of the pork chop-wet spring roll debacle, even at the airport while our flight was delayed.



(But speaking of oh honey, no, what's up with resort-stayers bringing their own oversized travel mugs to fill up with free mojitos? There is something about the all-u-can-eat/drink resort that brings out the primitive gimme-gimme in people. Yikes!)

There will be no photos of the Monte Cristo

I'm against taking food pictures in restaurants; that's why you'll never see covert snaps of "what I got served last night at Such-n-Such" here. Taking the snaps requires a kind of guerrilla-style no-flash photography that I'm simply too untalented to succeed at, and furthermore it interrupts a lovely meal. And there's something just so 21st century - "me me me" rude about it. My mom wouldn't approve.

So allow me to describe in words the breakfast that we destroyed this past Saturday. The Brit (bless him) had run an 8km race to end prostate cancer and I'd had rather an exhausting morning of cheering him on (hard work, I deserved a big breaky). We pulled into a local diner, cold, tired and hungry. Since there's no love lost between me and restaurant breakfasts, I dove into a triple-decker Monte Cristo sandwich instead.

Of course, this being a diner, the sandwich was not the artisanal ham-sourdough bread concoction of a posh brunchery. It was 3 layers of supermarket challah interspliced with deli ham and turkey, processed Swiss, then dipped in egg and grilled. You might wonder what is served alongside such a behemoth. Chips and salsa of course, and a warped little metal teapot full of orange pekoe.

So much yum I couldn't even think about having a Scotch egg at the football game.