Buying bread from a man in Brussels...(he was 5 foot 8 and selling mussels)

At the front desk of the Thon Hotel Bristol Stephanie (largest rooms in Brussels!), Bertrand said – “I never recommend stupid things.  I say you should go to G-EA”, and promptly drew us a map to the restaurant he recommended we try for dinner on Saturday night.

Due to our distinctly North American penchant for eating dinner before the sun goes down, the restaurant, (nestled along a short street apparently famed for the fact that every address on both sides is occupied by a restaurant), was closed when we arrived shortly before 6:00 p.m., jet-lagged but hungry.

My idea was maybe to try one of the others along the street – I mean, my last experience with hotel front desk recommendations for restaurants was decidedly nothing to write home about – and the fragrances wafting from “La Vigne”, “Le Roi des Moules” and even “Japanese Fondu” were not a little seductive…

In a candid burst of diplomacy, however, Bob reminded me that there was probably a particular reason why Bertrand’s recommendation was unusually passionate, so we elected to wander for twenty minutes through the shopping arcades of downtown Brussels.

With a twinge of worry, I noted once we returned that G-EA was teeming with exactly one additional customer.  And in the doorway stood a resigned-looking Greek, with a faraway expression in his eyes.

It turns out that Monsieur Christo was, in fact, the proprietor.  There are two kinds of restaurateurs in the business – those whose goal is to make a business of it, and those whose primary compulsion is their love of feeding people well.  The latter category is characterized by people who stand by the table awaiting your reaction to their presentation on your plate, who lean forward to watch your face change when the first bite goes in, and who beam with obvious relief once they are assured that you really do like what they’ve made.

Bertrand at the hotel had obviously done this before, noting that the clincher for most guests interested merely in getting a decent meal would probably be the additional incentive of getting something free.  What Bertrand knows, (and we didn’t), was that the extra incentive of getting a free aperitif, and “maybe even a free dessert” is actually completely unnecessary…but more about that later.

Christo seated us outside, on his enclosed sidewalk patio.  I asked him my usual question, when engaged in culinary speed-exploration of a city in which I spend too few hours to do any proper cultural immersion… “What would YOU eat on this menu?  What should we eat-something which is particularly Belgian?”

Without hesitation, (as he set down a plate of croutons, olive tapenade, Greek tomato and cucumber salad and a tablespoon of Orzo with black olives), he said that our timing, by coincidence, was excellent.  September, October and November were the season of the mussel in Brussels, and if it were him eating, he would without question have the “moules marinieres”.

And, of course, the house-made frites.  Not the skinny fries, but the wide ones, made here in our own kitchen from scratch.  Yes, to be eaten in concert with the moules.

“Well, that’s what we have to have, then”, we say, sipping our vaguely peach-flavored but nonetheless outstanding aperitifs.  “But which version?  Steamed with white wine, with cream, with garlic?  What about Provencal?  What IS Provencal, anyway?”

“Provencal is a tomato-based sauce.  It’s really good, but I don’t think you should have it with these mussels, because then you’ll get mainly the taste of tomatoes (which really are good, by the way), but I think it’s important that you primarily have the taste of the mussels.  And, many people like combining the cream with the garlic, and having both with the mussels”.

Bob chose that combination.  I picked the vin blanc version.

“And, what should we drink, Monsieur Christo?”

“Oh, this white wine from Chile is really quite good, monsieur.”

“Chile?  Am I allowed to drink a Chilean wine with such a deeply European dish?  Well, if you say so, Monsieur, of course, we will take your recommendation.”

The tapenade, croutons and other introductions disappeared quickly, each one a small but perfect nod to fine French presentation with a generous bow to our host’s ancestry.

And then came the moules.  For each of us, a gigantic black enameled tureen, with a deep cover designed to hold the empty shells.  Christo opened them with a flourish.  I buried my face in the burst of steam (promptly taking five years off my increasingly grandfatherly visage), and inhaled deeply.  There’s a reason wine connoisseurs sniff deeply before they drink – I think the tactic should be employed with everything you intend to put in your mouth.  This was a flourish of intense wine and brine, punctuated with just the right exclamation of garlic, and that singularly unidentifiable but perfectly obvious sense of absolute freshness you can only get from shellfish that mere minutes ago were quite happily feeding in the cool currents of the North Atlantic.

We began to eat.  Each shell contained the fattest, firmest orangey-yellow mollusk I have ever speared with a fork.  Each bite was sublime – buttery smoothness, the essence of the ocean, the pinnacle of food in season.  Bob made a confession later.  He said, with characteristic candor, “I gotta tell you, I’m not really much of a mussel guy, and figured ‘When in Brussels’ – but that was really something!”

Yes, it was.  And to accompany these mussels came a cone of French fries, encased in a paper wrap, and presented with a small dish of mayonnaise blended with mustard (the white wine and Dijon kind).  Saving us from routine barbarian embarrassment, Christo quickly advised that the sauce was for dipping the mussels, not the fries.  Regarding these fries, it does them injustice to call them French fries, because these little gems are in fact an invention of, and gift to mankind by the Belgians.  And yes, they are traditionally supplied with filet mignon, but in the fall months, they sidle up beside the mussels in a second tradition – “Moules Frites”.

Well, they’re just fries, aren’t they?  Non, monsieur.  These potatoes are carefully parboiled first.  That’s what makes the inside so incredibly creamy.  Then they are fried in oil with another secret ingredient.  In your sunflower oil, add duck fat!  (Please refer here to your list of simple pleasures which God intended man to eat).  Not only does this add to the wonderful crispiness, but adds the crowning dimension, that which separates McDonald’s from civilization.

The problem here was that we became greatly distracted – one can’t stop eating the mussels, but if you do, in order to have a frite, then you can’t stop eating frites, either.  The fries started losing the battle to the mussels, but Christo comes prepared.  In his restaurant, you shall not eat cool fries, so the half-empty cones were replaced, quickly, with a second round – this time in a porcelain crock, scathingly hot from the kitchen (along with a quiet reminder that these were also, in fact, house-made, by hand…)

He filled our wine glasses.  This was unusually good.  I am far from an expert in which wine goes with what, but my eyebrows went up…”This is Chilean wine?”

“Ah, pardon, monsieur.  When I thought about what you said about being in Europe and eating such a European meal, I changed the wine for you.  This one is French, as it should be.  But I will give you the Chilean price, of course!”

Meanwhile a face cautiously appeared at the corner of the building, just over Bob’s right shoulder.  It was Bertrand, from the hotel, face full of questioning concern, inquisitive thumbs up, mouthing “Is it OK”?  Firmly nodding, thumbs up in return, a quiet “Thank you!” mimed back to him, whereupon Bertrand nonchalantly strolled by with cellphone on ear, down the street.  Good thing we’d decided to come back.

We’d reached the bottom of the black tureen, the place where the broth that had steamed up through all the mussels lay.  No longer mindful of proper etiquette, I lifted the pot, and drank.  Some say you needn’t.  Well, don’t listen.  My meal was thus blessedly complete.

Well, almost.  It was time for dessert.

I chose a moelleux of chocolate.  (When in Belgium, you know…)  A moelleux is somewhat like a soufflé, I think, but “cakier” with a lovely unctuous flow of pure dark melted lava waiting in the middle.  Bob had a generous dollop of Greek yogurt, flavored with thyme and garnished with drippingly honeyed orange peel, surrounded with an acre of red fruit – raspberries, strawberries, and quartered fresh figs.

We beamed.  Christo beamed.  It was a mutual admiration society!  Christo, his life’s purpose reaffirmed again (which I am sure happens to him on a regular basis) announced that in addition to the aperitif, the house would be pleased to furnish for us an after-dinner digestif, and would we please choose anything.

Naturally, this needed to be properly French as well.  So Bob chose Armagnac, and I ventured where I had not gone before, asking Christo whether a Calvados would be appropriate.  (More beaming – yes, apparently both were entirely to the point).

I wish I could say I became a convert to this apple-based liqueur, but to be honest, I probably need to try it more than once before it becomes a favorite.  As a signature at the end of a meal resulting from being in the right place at the right time, however, it was, how to say, correcte.

What I love about restaurateurs like Christo is that while the money is important, the sheer satisfaction on the guest’s face is the real reward.  So when we added a tip to the bill, something that showed how we really felt about the meal, Christo was visibly moved.  Along with his heartfelt handshake and quiet “Merci a vous, messieurs”, we were each presented with a hand-picked bottle of red from his cellars.

Would we ever go back?  Some would say you can’t repeat the experience, let alone the food.  But yes, we did in fact go back.  Three nights later, this time pulling in 11 colleagues from our meetings in Brussels.  I am pleased to say, our new friend in Brussels did not disappoint, in any way.  I won’t tell you what I had, because I don’t remember – I was having too much fun watching everyone’s faces, and hearing their exclamations as they pushed back from their plates when we finally stopped at nearly midnight.  Christo’s knowing look, punctuated by another bottle of fine vintage slipped to Bob and me as we left Brussels proves it – feeding people good food is fun.

Viens ici, ma petite cherie...

I wish summer would never end, although perhaps its brevity in this part of the world is what makes we Prairie Canadians so passionate about squeezing every last tantalizing morsel out of it.  We sit intently on our decks in the sun, willing the pasty whiteness away and glaring at any cloud with the temerity to block the sun.  Suppertime is but halfway through the daylight, as increasingly sleep-deprived, we stake our claim to overdosing on Vitamin D long into the night, slapping and cursing the mosquitos but unwilling to give away an ounce of the fleeting luxury of nearly everlasting daylight.  Doom is around the corner, and its name is October....or September....or, yes, even August, when the whiteness and the darkness exercise their divine right over the Great White North.

In addition to the blazing light, nature seems to overcompensate on our behalf.  Farmer's markets burst their banks with teeming crowds of the citified, intent on eating a year's worth of truly fresh, truly local veggies - tomatoes whose intensity brings veritable cries of delight, snap peas which were supposed to go in the stirfry but didn't even make it out of the car to the house, giant garlic bulbs that speak boisterous Italian, and berries - berries that burst  like an indigo invasion over tongue and teeth, satisfying the most primal of thirsts....

If you look hard enough, I discovered - you don't even have to spend a red cent to grab some of this for yourself.  For years, our back yard has been quietly but determinedly taken over by a slowly expanding and ever broadening bush.  I had always thought that the Nanking Cherry bush was nothing more than one of those "ornamentals", whose brazen scarlet fruit was primarily designed for small birds and the occasional bear to eat as part of a varied and generally unremarkable wild diet.

Until the day I picked one for myself, late in the summer, after a particularly long stretch of intensely hot summer days.  I have always been a very great and appreciative fan of cherries, this being a fruit which did not exist in my childhood Africa, and which still has me eating large handfuls in fear of there not being any more, ever again.

This particular cherry, about 3/4 the diameter of a penny, was a very pleasant surprise indeed.  It was simultaneously sweet and tart - just the right proportion that induces you to pick some more, which you kinda have to do in order to get a satisfying snack.  They're pretty small.  This got me to thinking - my Oma used to make all manner of interesting juices from the bounty of summer fruit - concentrates which she'd mix with 7-Up for me to make the wildly popular "juice-pop" that shamed any mass-produced drink into submission.

I wondered, if one could get enough Nanking cherries off a bush, whether it would be possible to make my own juice - for juice-pop to be sure, but also for all kinds of other things.

There's only one way to find out.  I started picking.  Five pounds of Nanking cherries later, I realized I would definitely have way more than enough to make some juice.  Here's how we did it:

• 5 lbs. Nanking Cherries
• 2 cups sugar
• 4 litres water
• 1 tbsp. almond extract (optional, but bloody good)

Boil for about an hour or so.  When the cherries are all soft and starting to fall away from the stones, pour the whole pot through a large strainer into a suitably large pan.  Press down on the cherries with the back of a wooden spoon, extracting as much juice as possible.  There will be pulp in your concentrate, but very tasty pulp.  Pour into various juice jugs or other covered containers, and allow to cool, then refrigerate.

There's your base for a couple of weeks of summer in a glass.  You won't believe the vivid redness - all natural, yet incredibly bright.  Don't get it on your shirt, in other words.  Dilute with water, club soda, 7-up, or even straight up on ice.  You could just leave it at that, and get all you need just drinking it.

Or, you could push the envelope a bit, like a sun-obsessed Albertan should...

From medieval times, people have instinctively known that there is a natural marriage between pork and fruit. Pigs with apples in their mouths begat pork chops with applesauce, ham is better with pineapple rings, and so on.  It occurred to us that perhaps the most summer of pork dishes - barbecued ribs - might also benefit from some fruity embellishment.  After all, we had more than a gallon of Nanking Cherry concentrate....

• 2 racks of baby back or side pork ribs
• 5 cloves of garlic, smashed
• 2 tbsp peppercorns
• A handful of chopped fresh thyme, basil, or rosemary - whatever your summer herb garden has lots of.
• Salt - a good handful

Baking rub

• Seasoning salt
• Pepper
• Smoked paprika, if you have it, or chili powder
• Dried oregano or rosemary

Sauce
Mix together thoroughly:

• 1 bottle Bullseye Sweet & Sticky or Honey Garlic Extravaganza or Original Bold Barbecue Sauce
• 2 cups Nanking Cherry juice concentrate

Since I don't have a smoker in the backyard, and my barbecue is propane-fuelled, I have found through some practice, and through keeping my mouth shut and not admitting how it's done, that you can get a pretty decent set of pork ribs falling off their bone right on your plate by judiciously boiling and baking them.

Put the ribs, garlic, peppercorns, salt and herbs into a very large stockpot.  Pour in enough water to completely cover the ribs.  Boil for at least an hour, up to an hour and a half.

Pre-heat your oven to 325 degrees.

Remove ribs from the pot and cut into portion-size lengths.  Dust with the baking rub spices, and massage them in a bit.  Careful, they'll be hot.

With a basting brush, brush the underside of each rib portion with the barbecue sauce/cherry concentrate mixture.  Turn them over and arrange them in a large baking dish or lasagne pan.  Liberally douse them with the rest of the sauce mixture.  Sprinkle with dry herbs and ground black pepper.

Cover the dish with foil, and put them in a 325-degree oven for another 1-1.5 hours.  When they are ready, baste them without reservation with the pan juices.  Serve them with baked beans, corn on the cob, baked potatoes, and salad.  I promise you - the cherries make this a match made in heaven.

What about dessert, then?  Well, the most civilized apparently use fruit sorbets to cleanse the palate.  A Nanking Cherry sorbet would seem logical, after a mess of ribs.  If you don't have an ice-cream maker, maybe go get one.  It also adds considerable meaning to summer, not to mention its great ability to make some mean gelati.

You'll need:

• 3 cups of Nanking Cherry concentrate
• 1/2 cup of sugar (optional - if you like it really sweet)
• 2 tbsp. lemon juice
• 1 pkt. unflavored gelatin, softened in 1/4 cup of cold water
• 2 egg whites, whipped stiff.

Dissolve sugar in concentrate - heat it up in a saucepan and dissolve it.  Add the gelatin and lemon juice, then cool the mixture for about an hour in the fridge, until the gelatin just begins to set.

Whip up the egg whites until stiff, and fold immediately into the juice mixture.  Egg whites give your sorbet (or more accurately, gelato) a nice creamy texture.

Immediately freeze in the ice-cream maker according to the manufacturer's instructions.  When it's done, empty it into a container and chill, covered, in the freezer for about an hour.  Frozen red-hot summer.

And last but not least - what is summer without a decent drink in hand?  After some judicious experimentation, we found two combinations that showcase not only this lovely little fruit, but also the sunshine trapped inside it:

N-37  (Yeah, I know.  But sometimes history is painful)

• 4 parts Nanking Cherry concentrate
• 3 parts Sprite or 7-Up
• 1 part Light Rum
• 1 part Amaretto di Saronno

Combine all ingredients in a highball glass, over ice.

Dramking Cherry

• 4 parts Nanking Cherry concentrate
• 1 part Drambuie

Serve in a highball glass, on the rocks.

(I hate winter).

La Cucina per Famiglia

"My heart nearly stopped", said Shauna, "when I walked into Kingsland Farmer's Market and saw that the space normally occupied by La Cucina Italiana had been usurped by someone else".  All kinds of things go through your mind - first, regret that some perfectly wonderful people with perfectly wonderful food somehow couldn't make a go of it.  Or, maybe they got too successful and moved into the big time world of full-time restauranting and moved out of here.  And so we were resigned to maybe trying one of the other admittedly wonderful lunch vendors at this very friendly farmers market...but wait!  There they are!  They just moved down two stalls to the prime real estate 'corner lot', complete with a wraparound bar and comfy elevated chairs accommodating a good 8-10 people for lunch.

It's odd, because even though Rob Principalli's place in the market looks at first glance like a basic take-out counter - somehow, the longer you spend standing and reading the menu board, the more he makes it feel like one of those family-run Italian places in New York City - you know, the kind where they say "Hey, come in, you're family", and they mean it.  Maybe it's because there's definitely nothing more charming than three handsome Italian guys who make it plain that their business (their only business) for the next 15 minutes is to make sure you're fed, happy, and relaxed.  I couldn't tell you if the guys working with Rob are his boys, but they look like him, and they work like he does, so yeah, this is one of those great little Italian family places.

We actually started out wanting one quick order of Italian chicken and apple sausage for Shauna - no bun, because of the gluten-free thing, of course.  But as she kicked back on her barstool, waiting for it to arrive, I was looking in the dessert cooler, because last time we were there, Rob had promised that the next time, there would be gluten-free dessert.  There was, by the way, and the berry cheesecake looked every bit as delicious and part of the menu as the giant chocolate layer cake sitting next to it.  All this visual stimuli unsurprisingly produced the same stomach rumblings in Alanna and me, so Alanna got herself a sausage too (also no bun, and also garnished with just-perfectly sauteed sweet onions and a rich tomato sauce).  I thought I should have a Porchetta - a cold pork-based cold cut sandwich with provolone, fresh tomato - and an olive tapenade to die for, all stacked on a baguette bun.  Make that with an Orangina soda on the side, with some sweet pickles - yup, that's lunch.

Except that wasn't all.  Shauna noticed there was no cannoli in the dessert cooler yet, but this time she had news.  She told Rob there was a chef in Calgary, who had just published a cookbook including dozens of new gluten-free recipes, and lo! - among them was a recipe for gluten-free cannoli.  Rob immediately wrote down the name of the cookbook, and began musing aloud that maybe he could get the guy to actually make him 100 or so cannoli tubes (clearly, the filling would come from an ancient Principalli family recipe).  I have no doubt that in a couple or three weeks, Rob will be pulling in the crowds for cannoli the same way he does with his gluten-free lasagne and canneloni recipes:  "If it isn't as good as your regular lasagne - come back and I'll give you a free one".

Lunch was nearly done.  I had both Shauna and Alanna's onions along with my sandwich.  Then came cheesecake for Shauna - Rob had something to prove.  It was so good that she got worried, thinking the crust was just a bit too good to be gluten free.  With complete and calming confidence, Mr. Principalli assured her it was completely safe.  He should know - he specializes in distributing gluten-free pastas from Italy (get your orders from him at www.glutenfreepasta.ca).  And for me and Alanna?  Tiramisu.  Alanna had never had it before.  She's been completely evangelized now!  Whoever builds these for Rob, in those perfectly-sized takeout dishes, is a  genius and a credit to the profession.

Somebody around the corner was selling some apricots, and some black cherries so perfect that they stain your fingers with one touch.  They appeared, freshly rinsed, heaped on a plate between us and the next two sausage-seekers who'd joined us at the bar.  "With service like this, we won't ever have to leave!" said the gentleman sitting next to me.

He hit the nail right on the head.  While you stock up on your small-batch roasted coffee and organic farm-grown vegetables at Kingsland Farmer's Market every week, drop in at La Cucina Italiana.  Pull up a chair, belly up to the bar, and let Rob and the guys make you part of the family.  Fine linen and crystal are great, but even more important are guys who treat their food, and their customers with obvious respect.

Buon appetito.

Comfort Me With Apples - (Falling Not Far From The Tree)

The second best thing to eating well is reading about someone else eating well. So it is with no little pride that I cede this space this week to a guest blogger, who has (as you shall soon see) not only discovered the sheer joy of a well-turned dish, but also of a well-turned phrase with which to lavish the experience on the rest of us.  Without further aperitif, then, may I offer these amuses-bouches by Rae, (my offspring and a veritable Smorgasboredette, if you will) - and her recent foray into an altogether comfortable niche....

When I originally started thinking about where to take Craig for his birthday, my only criterion was “one-up the Creperie” (where he had taken me for my birthday in April). Conveniently, I tend to have a lot of illicit Internet-browsing time on my hands at work, and lately I’ve begun to really enjoy reading Liane Faulder’s blog Eat My Words on the Edmonton Journal website, as well as many of the blogs she links to. I spent a good three weeks reading reviews of all the new and classic Edmonton restaurants –because it turns out that this city, for all its faults (and I could name a few) has an excellent, thriving food business. After reading many reviews and fishing around for some recommendations, I decided it had to be Niche.

Niche opened in the winter, although its Grand Opening was last month, and has quickly built a reputation as one of the better dining spots in Edmonton. It’s nestled on the first floor of an apartment building on Jasper Avenue, near the Edmonton General Hospital, and Craig and I nearly missed it walking on the wrong side of the street. It’s a small space, but tastefully decorated in black, copper and gold, and the arrangement of the tables and the gorgeous centrepiece bar reads as intimate rather than cramped. The exposed brick along the walls along with the glass tiles was my favourite design touch – elegant and modern, but not over-the-top.

Craig and I are not millionaires, but we would always rather spend money on a good meal than anything else, and we don’t skimp on birthdays – so once Amanda had immediately seated us at our reserved table beside the kitchen, even though due to the vagaries of public transportation we had arrived nearly a half-hour early, we went straight for the cocktail list. Craig chose a gin and tonic with cucumber and lemon, and I nursed my excellent strawberry mint mojito for the whole dinner. Watching the bartender across the room, I knew there were actual strawberries and mint leaves muddled in the bottom, but the sheer number of strawberry pieces that made their way up my straw made the choice go from good to perfect. There is nothing better than rum-soaked strawberry pieces. I will fight someone on this point if necessary.

We had looked at the menu beforehand on the website, so our appetizer choice was easy – it took us all of three seconds to decide to split the charcuterie plate. It arrived at our table quickly, artfully arranged with pickles, toasts and spicy mustard for our tasting pleasure.

I went Italian sausage first, because I very rarely turn down a good sausage, and tried it both by itself and on a ‘crostini’ with spicy mustard. The sausage itself had a good kick of spice, but not so much as to be distracting, and paired with mustard tasted like the kind of salami sandwich of which Italian grandmas dream.  Craig started with the Pembina peppered ham, and pronounced it by the end of the plate his favourite. He also made a proverbial beeline for the pickles, as he is somewhat of a connoisseur, and said that they had bite but were delicious. I, myself, am not a pickle fan; but I have a rule at new restaurants and in foreign countries to eat whatever arrives on my plate, and so I paired a pickle with another piece of Italian sausage with mustard. It was spectacular – clearly how it was meant to be eaten.  The more acidic taste of the pickles brought out the sweetness in the Dijon-style grainy mustard and married perfectly with the heat in the sausage. We also sampled a smooth, almost creamy wild boar prosciutto that melted in our mouths. I liked this more than Craig did – he was an immediate devotee of the cured, dry musk ox. We nearly fought for the last piece of that – it was what beef jerky aspires to be when it grows up. Its salty taste somehow was not overpowering, and I could have been happy with a plate full of only that. I preferred the musk ox alone – it was so good, it needed no accompaniment – but was also delightful married with grainy mustard and a sliver of toast.

Obviously, however, this was a birthday celebration and we were not settling for only musk ox. Craig picked the beef dish – braised Spring Creek Ranch beef cheeks in wild mushroom cream sauce over egg noodles with Parmesan.  I was allotted exactly three tiny pieces of beef from his plate and not one single noodle, although I concluded from the rate at which said noodles disappeared that they were about which to write home. The beef was silky and nearly melted in my mouth – it tasted like the exact essence of beef, a taste that seemed to be enhanced by the mushroom sauce, and was so tender it nearly flaked off the fork.  It was clearly a winner of a dish, and the fact that it came from a local farm made it seem better: we could eat this every day!

In the spirit of my “eat whatever arrives on my plate” rule, I went for a dish that included one of my lesser-favourite tastes – the Pembina pork tenderloin with polenta, tomato butter sauce and fennel salad. I have never had pork like that = pork you could nearly cut with a fork, which eaten with the tomato butter was almost sweet. The fennel salad was the perfect accompaniment – crisp, sharp and verging on bitter, it balanced the milder, softer taste of the pork perfectly. The polenta I found to be a tad dry and with less of a distinct taste on its own, but again, the tomato butter sauce brought out its full potential. I had to slow down and let Craig taste some before it was all gone.

Once Amanda had cleared our plates, it was all we could do to not quit sucking in our guts and allow full food-baby development right there at the table. We had to forgo the cheese plate, which was tempting with its list of mostly local cheeses. Dessert seemed like a nearly insurmountable feat…but then again, this was a birthday dinner. The special, lemon tart with berry compote, split between the two of us, was the perfect note of….well, tartness to complete the meal.

Staggering back into the Northern late-evening light, we immediately abandoned our somewhat ambitious plan of walking back to transit to go home and jumped in the nearest cab. Birthday dinners always end best when you’re in too much food-induced bliss to walk a block.

Rae Lemke usually blogs about nonsense at http://incandescentlyridiculous.blogspot.com

Bridalled Passion

One of the arcana to which males of our species are matter-of-factly denied (excused?) access is that most complex of preparatory festivals - the Bridal Shower.  Combine in one room people who are decidedly divided into two separate groups, not because of conflict, but because of relationship to the focal point of the event - the bride, a woman related to one group by blood, and about to become a member of the other by marriage.  That combination has all kinds of social complexities, not the least of which is the aspect of food - something which is well anticipated yet fraught with all manner of potential pitfalls.  For men, a communal chili pot, potato chips strewn strategically about, and access to a Coleman full of bottles and cans is all the bonding ritual needed for events like this.  But for the Bridal Shower - the food is an essential balancing point.  For the hostess - will it be impressive enough to satisfy, delight, and yet appear effortlessly done?  For the strangers to each other in the room - how much can I put on my plate before raising eyebrows and receiving the dreaded "Manhattan Once-Over"?  For the bride - can I eat anything here, and not worry about the dress into which I must soon fit?

At least those were the thoughts going through my head as I wondered about how I was going to fulfill my hasty promise to cater just such an affair - for 27 women - a couple of weeks ago.

In the end, it came down to a combination of savor, size, and surprise.  Make it taste good, make it bite-sized, make it pleasantly unique.  Here's what we did.

How about we prepare three kinds of chicken breast on bamboo skewers?  Chicken breast is nearly magical food - the natural choice of those who wish to display dietary sensibility and restraint, yet also a canvas on which a full palette of flavors can be served.  Skewers, for their part, also feature deliberately bite-sized elements, arrayed in a single, satisfyingly slimline silhouette.

Making each bite memorable meant pairing the chicken with the right vegetable or fruit, and then a grilling sauce marrying the two.  The first featured sweet bell peppers (three colors), and bathed in Cattle Boys' barbecue sauce.  The second - a ginger-spiked teriyaki glaze over fresh pineapple chunks.  The third - fresh asparagus slaked with balsamic vinegar and olive oil.  A bit of seasoned and kosher salt, a bit of pepper, and all under the broiler in the oven.  The charring of the bamboo skewers was the crowning touch, imparting just a hint of exotic smokiness to each.

What does one pair with skewers?  Bamboo would seem to call naturally for rice, if we're heading down the Asian path.  (Stern note to self - potatoes are right out!)  Risotto is too fussy, basmati too whispery, long-grain too mundane...but you know, we in North America are just starting to explore the depth and breadth of the Johnny-come-lately of Asian cuisine - the full glory and power of Korea's kitchen.  The answer, then - blend hot cooked sushi rice (or arborio, or other decidedly rotund short-grain) with a sublime blend of soy sauce, lemon juice, butter and sugar - just like halmoni (gramma in Seoul) does, and suddenly, a side dish that very nearly demands center stage.

Do you serve a salad?  Only if you want the same old greens to sit forlornly on the side of the plate, eaten only because they announce your commitment to your figure.  But what if that salad were fruit?  And what if that fruit were slightly naughty - as in tipsy, with Grand Marnier?  See, that's a salad worth getting seconds on - because everyone knows there's not nearly enough liquor there to make a difference, and yet, it's so very nudge-and-wink, isn't it?  (For those who want the feel but not the buzz, take those drizzled with ginger ale and sugar, instead....)

Should one make dessert?  Will one take dessert?  Isn't the fruit salad kinda like dessert?

Hmm.  No, I think you definitely need dessert.  A celebration of this order calls for chocolate, and strawberries, and cream.  But how to do that without looking unseemly and smorgasbordedly decadent?  If you make some really, really tiny shortcakes - plain, unadorned little muffins, and drizzle them invisibly with a mere sip of Grand Marnier, then a glistening dollop of warm Callebaut chocolate ganache, surrounded with four or five brilliant red strawberry slices, and cap with a puff of whipped cream - then there are only six bites, aren't there?  And combined -  with enough power to cover every dessert craving known to man.  You could even have two....

(I think they liked it.)

  

You knew just what I was there for...

One of the paradoxes of living a scant 55 minutes from the mountain town of Canmore, Alberta is that one never seems to find the time to just hop in the car and drive to Canmore for "something to do".  Which is a very great pity, I remind myself on my annual chance trip west of Calgary, promising that we really need to do so more often.

In the past, (deservedly or not), the sleepy little town had inherited a reputation for hyper-earnest ecofreakism - the kind in which hemp-wearing vegetarians could find mass solace in shouting down evil commercial ventures on general principles alone, and gather thereafter for a celebratory organic beverage in one of many equally earnest communal tea emporia.  Or, perhaps more irritatingly (especially to inhabitants) being thought of as a distinctly second-class cousin to Banff, aimed squarely at those who, after looking (but not touching) the rich and famous at the Springs, could still maintain the illusion of having "been to Banff and stayed in the Rockies" once returning from the National Park to the motley motels along the Trans Canada highway.

Well, folks, Canmore is all grown up.  Not simply because of a real estate boom beckoning investors from abroad, finding themselves unbelievably lucky to procure, with what buys a one-bedroom flat in London or Zurich, a 4-bedroom alpine mansion on a golf course.  The money helps, obviously - but fancy houses do not entirely a community make.  Walking through the neighborhoods - tastefully hidden from the highway (to the advantage of driver and resident alike), and into town, one gets the undeniable sense that Canmore has looked up from its Cinderellesque lot in life and suddenly realized it is every bit as pretty as the glamour girl next door - and maybe with even more depth and character.  Canmore has become a destination in its own right, with a new confidence in itself that has allowed it to spread its arms magnanimously to welcome not just those select few with an indentical mindset, but a full range of people who share a love of everything that living as part of the mountains means.

And those who'd like to drop in for a visit.

Which is how we five families, all interrelated by marriage and birth, found ourselves wandering last weekend down from our spacious mountain weekend retreat onto main street, downtown Canmore.  With several members of the tribe in the five-and-under age bracket, it was occasionally less of a stroll than a coordinated evacuation (especially when visiting the enormously well-stocked Candy Store), and by midday, left us splitting up into vague family groupings looking for food.

My clan stopped briefly in front of LunaBLUE, before being automatically turned away by the rest of the name - Pasta, Noodles and Grains.  No point taking a celiac sufferer into a pasta place, after all...But then Shauna stopped and, fatefully,  said - "Well, they do have salads..."

We filtered in, eyes adjusting from the brilliant mountain sunshine to a peaceful, jazz-infused cool room - nearly empty but for two guests left over from the lunch rush (since we arrived at about 1:30) - but were instantly greeted by a calm, friendly and completely attentive hostess.  May as well get the completely crucial and inevitable question out of the way first - "We'd like to try your restaurant, but do you have anything that's gluten-free (it's not a fad, it's medically necessary...)"

Well.  Not only are all their salads expressly gluten-free, but the chef is completely and utterly prepared to make any of the pasta dishes on the menu (except of course for the cannelloni and ravioli) with gluten-free pasta!  That settled it.  We were hungry, and to be absolutely safe, the salads sounded good enough to serve as a meal if the pasta was too risky.

We got our menus.  Outside, another subclan of the tribe gathered, reading the chalkboard menu.  Note that each branch of the tribe has at least one, if not two celiac members...so before long, over the span of ten minutes, all 22 members filed in, independently, to the same establishment.  Kudos to whomever is in charge of curb appeal at LunaBLUE - clearly whatever you do works to bring them in.

While sitting and admiring the constellations hand-painted and named around the perimeter of the ceiling, a flicker from the kitchen, behind the respectable wine rack, reveals an actual working forno - king of Italian wood-fired ovens, which makes pizza (and all other dishes) what they were invented to be.  That is a very good sign - as is the earnest, urgent but unconcerned conversation in front of that oven between chef and waitress, thinking quickly about how to feed the second, perhaps wholly unexpected lunch crush of the day.  Did I mention unflappable, friendly and accommodating?  They never wavered once, as family tables inexorably filled.

The menu is brief, and at first glance, spare - until you start reading the details.  There are but six salads - but listen:  The Spinach Salad has warm brie.  And dried cranberries and almonds.  With a blueberry vinaigrette.  It dawns on you that you've probably never had that particular combination in a salad before, and you can practically taste it as you read it.  The Scallop Salad has just three ingredients - but balsamic vinegar on warm scallops nestled in baby spinach greens makes a similar point - this is lunch!  Warm goat cheese, wild salmon fillet, portobello mushrooms, olive oil-red wine and orange-cranberry vinaigrette confidently round out the salad cast - again each one capable of starring in a midday meal.

In fact, we'd very nearly decided that since supper was not far off, these salads would absolutely do the trick - until we were graciously given an extra couple of minutes to browse the rest of the menu.  There are 11 main dish selections to choose from.  Every one comes in two appetite sizes, which is a stroke of simple genius.  Maybe a small version would be just as good as a salad for lunch....let's see... Spaghetti Al Capone, with grilled beef striploin, tomatoes, spinach, garlic, olive oil, and parmesan.

Now stop - if you hadn't read the salad choices first, that description could actually conjure up the usual boring image of barely-chewable noodles piled with bottled red sauce, the odd chunk of beef and a slap of minced garlic from a jar - found on the "Italian" section of gas-station diners across western Canada....

Well, you'd be wrong.  Shauna went no farther.  She was told they had a rice pasta, and she really wanted beef, so that is what she ordered.  What arrived on her plate was so surprisingly and compellingly unexpected - a skewer of the tenderest beef, grilled without sauce or accoutrement other than salt and fresh ground pepper, laid on a bed of perfectly al dente rice fettucine - properly and expertly tossed with a brace of fresh tomato chunks, and olive oil-enrobed and sauteed garlic, all covered with a filigree of fresh, long strands of grated parmigiano reggiano - (the real thing), and spiked with a heady, piney sprig of just-picked rosemary.  Take a giant sniff first - that long, lingering, heady lungful that promises a full commitment to your mouth with every bite.  The meat was tender, succulently juicy, the essence of the pride of Alberta beef.  The pasta was a perfect example of the magic of garlic, tomatoes, olive oil, and cheese.

My conundrum was that I wanted at least three of the remaining 10 choices.  Rae swiftly came to my rescue - she ordered Ravioli Summer.  They stuff the ravioli with sweet, mild butternut squash, paired with ricotta cheese (well, why not, indeed?) and tossed in ginger butter, almonds, onions and - raspberries?  Again, what an inspiration - ricotta with fruit.  Yes, that makes sense.  And butter with ginger?  That makes the butternut squash sing.  The smooth filling, the silky pasta - set off by the crunch of almonds and the tiny burst of raspberry seeds.  Rae said she should have ordered a large portion.

Craig rode to the rescue on the other flank.  A Vancouver man, ordering oven-baked, Asian-glazed Wild Salmon on Fettucine with Shiitake mushrooms?  In Alberta?  Isn't that a bit brave?  "Salmon is easy to do," he said.  "What's hard is to do salmon well!"   His verdict?  This was some of the best salmon he ever ate.  I got a bite.  I agree, though you should value the opinion of a person from the coast more than mine.

So far, the choices hadn't strayed much from my preconceived notion that this "pasta place" was by definition Italian, or at least Italian fusion.  But wait a minute - nobody made that claim, not on the door nor the menu.  In fact, scanning the rest of the entrees shows a remarkable appreciation and respect for other noodles and grains.  By the time the hostess came back for our order, I was thinking about some Spanish complaints about what I was about to order - a Couscous Paella.  Paella is rice, religiously and often fanatically prepared by men of that country in a certain, time-honoured and inviolable way.  Could you really replace rice with couscous, and get away with it?  What the heck - this is Canmore, not Barcelona.  I ordered it, because I wanted chorizo, and mussels, and shrimp.  I didn't realize that it also came with the freshest baby broccoli and carrots, tender chicken breast, and - saffron.  Real saffron, tiny threads of pure culinary gold suffusing perfect little pasta spheres of couscous.  The mussels were big, and juicy, and as fresh as if they were pulled from the ocean that morning.  The chorizo, with a bang of proper spice, is made right in Canmore, they said, by Valhalla meats.  Perfect.  Everything - the shrimp, the chicken, the vegetables - all were perfectly cooked.  Which means that chef back there, making not just my dish but 21 others simultaneously, knew exactly when to slide each one into the mix to guarantee complete harmony on my plate.

Alanna, whose baby does not yet care for tomatoes or cheese while gaining sustenance from Mommy, was very, very happy to find a Pad Thai on the menu.  I silently figured this would be the acid test - could this place treat that diversity of noodles with the respect they all deserve?  In a word, yes.  The fish sauce underpinning the the chicken, the cilantro, the freshly-crushed peanuts, and the magnificent slippery pad thai noodles...I have not had anything better in any of the good Thai places I have had the good fortune to try.

They have other things - including that great forno-fired pizza, and simple but incredible desserts - which I will try next time.  Before next year, I promise....

LunaBLUE was the icing on the cake for a great Saturday in Canmore.  Family whom you love, but don't get to see nearly often enough, a walk in the mountain air, deer grazing by the back step, and to top it off, finding a place where the people once again so obviously and lovingly care about the food they've found, who've listened to what it taught them, and faithfully shared it perfectly with every guest, whether resident or daytripping tourist.  If you want a one-hour glimpse into the heart and soul of the new and beautiful Canmore, stop into LunaBLUE.  She won't leave you standing alone....

The Next Contestant on "The Rice is Right!"....

Fast food.  In North America, that innocent term has become synonymous with 'fat food', and in much of Europe, it's even worse.  In France, micro-farmer purveyors of spring lamb and fine herbs have, with artisanal cheesemakers and patissiers alongside, taken up arms and Molotov cocktails to underline their opinion that the Golden Arches are nothing less than a mortal threat to nutrition, tradition, and all that has gone into thousands of years of painstaking evolution of everything that is good about food.

Whether you agree or not is the subject for a different forum.  But it does leave one with an interesting conundrum.  Why is it, that when you are on the run - either "starving" after school, or between business meetings, or on the highway between home and vacation, that the choices most often on offer for instant gratification are overwhelmingly bad for us?  Whether it's "Pizza Pockets", or fried chicken (with biscuits AND gravy!!) or burgers featuring three full breakfasts' worth of bacon - all are keenly (and intelligently) targeted towards the most primal and base of human taste cravings - sugar, salt, and fat.  We love it.  All of us do, because we let ourselves love it as if it's hardwired into our DNA.  Maybe it is. Last week's "Maclean's" magazine carried an article which noted that even the new "fruity, healthy" smoothies offered at Tim Horton's each contain more sugar than any of their donuts do.  Bottom line - it's way easier, and faster, and less of a hassle than detouring to find a Safeway to build your own salad, or stopping to sit down and eat in a place that cares enough about food to take the time to make it right....

Lately, there have been some halfhearted efforts to capture that portion of the market which is perhaps tired of yet another flabbyburger - pretty well every gas station now carries a cooler full of at least some variety of sandwiches and the occasional fruit, chef's salad, or vegetable tray.  I don't know about you - but somehow, gas station food does not scream "fresh and nutritious" at me just yet.

Along with having the great good fortune of traveling to a number of other countries, I'm a great fan of TV like "The Amazing Race", "No Reservations" and other excellent programs about food in other places.  It struck me the other day, while watching a bunch of reality show teams having to deliver lunches to shipyard demolition guys in India, that pretty well everyone on the job in India gets lunch this way at least once or twice a week, if not every day.  Every bit of food in that little round "tiffin" tin, often stacked fifteen or twenty high on the front, sides and back of some intrepid courier's bike, is home-cooked in thousands of little kitchens across India's big cities.  They don't settle for anything less - fast food based on quality.

And today, when visiting the Calgary Chapter of the Canadian Celiac Association's annual Celiac Market, I remembered something else.  Among the pretty amazing array of vendor tables set up in the hotel's ballroom, (serving delectable pastas, great chewy cookies, deep, dark brownies, pizza with artichokes...you name it, it was all GOOD, and all safe), there was one table with a nearly zen-like simplicity about it.  Three perfect triangles of shiny greeny-black, set in serried array on a pure white tabletop.

Welcome to the Onigiri Company.  Onigiri.  Now that brought back some excellent memories, particularly related to tearing around Japan on a hectic business mission fifteen years ago.  Onigiri - which literally means "taking something into your hands" is an astonishingly simple yet amazing blend of the essential flavors that have made Japanese food popular all over the world.  It's basically a ball of rice, with a highly tasty filling in the middle, all wrapped up expertly in a sheet of crisp, ethereal sheet of dried nori (extremely flavorful edible seaweed - the kind you find in sushi emporia worldwide).  Onigiri is the ultimate in fast food - something you can literally grab one or two of, and eat with one hand while steering or texting with the other.

The Onigiri Company's founders had also wandered around Japan, and thank goodness something clicked - "we gotta bring this back to Canada".  A couple of hurdles, though - Onigiri was originally designed to be made and eaten pretty much on the spot.  If you leave nori wrapped around rice too long, it absorbs moisture and takes on an insistent quality of really sticking to things it touches - like fingertips.  On the upside, that's an excellent indication of how fresh your onigiri is - if the nori is still dry, it was made mere minutes ago.

Leave it to the Japanese to apply some unique technologies to solve the nori problem.  They made machines that turned out perfect triangles of rice, with a handy hole in the middle in which the fillings were deposited.  Then, they made a machine that actually wrapped the dry nori in a plastic film, and from the land of folded paper cranes, literally origami'd that film around the rice.  The resulting culinary triumph?  Well, I picked up one of the little packages - about the size of half a small sandwich - and read steps one, two and three - zip down the tab, then pull on both ends.  Voila - like magic, the nori shrugs itself free from the wrapper, and somehow wraps itself completely around the rice, leaving you a nice smooth and dry surface to hold while taking your bites.

Nifty, indeed.  But next came the cardinal test.  I don't really care what fillings are put into Onigiri - and in fact, one of the more popular ones in Hawaii includes Spam (!) - but the key for me (and what separates the men from the boys in mass-produced sushi) is - "how's the rice?"

This rice was perfect.  No faint crunchiness, no overly sticky glop, no crumbly disintegration.  It should be noted - this is not sushi rice, which is lightly and sweetly vinegared.  Nothing but salt flavors this rice, which makes it all the more effective in making it willing to blend with a whole host of fillings.  The texture and taste are everything they're supposed to be - savory and smooth.

And the fillings?  Well, the Onigiri Company folks have wisely chosen to jump into North America with stuff we have already eaten, mixed together in interesting and satisfying ways that let you decide, after all, that you could definitely eat this again.  And maybe more than once a week.  Mine today was Yam and Salmon - something I have never paired before, but will definitely find a way to do again, by the way.  Their website explains the three "fusion tastes" they've decided to offer:

Yam n’ Salmon: Baked wild salmon, caramelized yam, fresh ginger, sweet soy sauce, white rice.
Dilly Tuna: Spicy wasabi mayonnaise, garlic dill pickles, flaky yellowfin tuna, white rice.
Sesame Veg: Crisp carrots, cauliflower, broccoli, sweet and spicy sesame marinade, brown rice.

Fusion, shmusion.  That tasted like Japan to me!  The snap of the nori, the slip of the rice, the burst of the ginger and soy sauce against the fresh wildness of the fish....  Who needs a donut!  Who needs fries drowned in gravy!  Like the little paper crane - it isn't really necessary to make a quick meal lovely, but it's lovely precisely because it isn't really necessary.

Remember the days when sushi was something that only crazy people with a culinary deathwish would try?  Have a look around Vancouver, or Calgary or Toronto these days - there's a sushi place virtually on every block now.  It's in our mall food courts too, and the Co-op Stores in Calgary have employees making it on the fly right in the store - it's become mainstream.  So you might still think seaweed is too far out there.  Maybe for some, but you know, all it takes is a few folks who will pick up the triangle, unwrap that magical origami which rewraps itself, and take a big bite.    The Onigiri Company proprietors told me today that they hope to have gas stations here - just like in Japan - have these babies in their coolers alongside the hoagies and fruit cups someday very soon.  I hungrily await the day.

They haven't been here very long - less than a month, I think.  But they will be at the Edmonton Folk Music Festival this year, and in Calgary, you can get your hands on their Onigiri at Amaranth Foods in the city's northwest.  Go get some, if you can.  Yes, they're gluten free, too.  Go check out their website for more information - at www.theonigiricompany.com.

Hey! Play With Your Food!

I had a revelation.  It should have been obvious (but obvious things don't feel very revelatory, do they...). I was on yet another airplane, for yet another one of those short, overnight hops to a city 1-3 hours away, destined for a hotel room with nothing to make it memorable except for knowing when I woke up the next morning, I could confidently say to myself in the mirror "Today, I am going home!"

On that airplane, I finished reading a book which my Shauna had bought, written by her favorite food blogger - the Gluten Free Girl, a.k.a. Shauna James Ahern.  It is an autobiography of a girl who had grown up like the majority of us end-of-the-boomer cycle babies, when pantries in North America were filled primarily with packages of prepared food made by corporations whose commercials on TV confidently assured us of their superiority in producing things that could be guaranteed to be the same every single time you bought a new package, regardless of where in our great continent it was purchased.  This made grocery shopping so routine as to become a point of resignation for our mothers, and quiet glee for our fathers who did not have to do it.  The problem is, that food was, to put it kindly, processed, flattened, homogenized, milled, stripped, sugared, plasticized and pasteurized within an inch of its nutritional life - and so it was that we began our continental odyssey towards obesity, craving variety and without even knowing it, trying to satiate those natural cravings with processed cheese food, white bread, and sugar bomb cereals...

This girl had a problem.  In the midst of malnourishing herself to death, she had the added, undiagnosed complication of having celiac disease.  It was not until she was literally hit by a car that the disease really manifested itself, making her desperately ill as she tried to survive on crackers and soft white bread - the very poisons that she needed to be avoiding.  Without stealing the rest of her thunder - this is where I got my revelation:  Once she was finally diagnosed, she came to the life-changing realization that because gluten was now dangerous to her, she was actually completely, totally free for the first time in her life to taste things that she never, ever would have considered even smelling, let alone putting in her mouth.  And with that kind of ridiculous abandon, she began not only eating a vast new palate of cheese, vegetables, meat, fish, fruit, and every possible way to eat them without a trace of gluten, but actually becoming absolutely driven to preparing them with her own hands, passionately exploring the new, the possible, the exotic, the full spectrum of what God intended his children to find, quench their hunger, and add to the exquisite pleasure of being alive.

This story was absolutely absorbing to me.  I am not hampered by gluten, so by rights my field of experimentation can be even broader than hers.  Yet I also realized that all too often, I don't reach outside my comfort zone, falling back on standbys that are actually bad for me, which don't really satisfy the flavor craver living in me, and making me take more in the vain hope that full equals satisfied.

I read on.  Ms. Ahern has the effortless knack of bringing you into the very moment of her discovery - tasting, smelling and feeling what she is feeling as she laser-focuses on the bulb of fennel, the fillet of wild Alaska salmon, or her very first bite of dark chocolate.  She goes one step further - with effortless grace giving you the exact recipe she used in that epiphany.

One of those recipes became my source of inspiration.  She addresses the humble roasted chicken.  Who among us has failed to thrust this common bird into an oven, for with naught but seasoning salt, a bit of pepper, and an hour or so of time, even the least motivated of us can receive absolution from those who hunger around us - roasted chicken does, at the very least, lend the credible illusion of culinary competence, doesn't it?  But face it - roasted chicken in its humility slips very easily into the same category as waffles - when you can't think of anything else, sigh in frustration and roast a chicken.  You can't go wrong.

Well, if you really can't go wrong with a roasted chicken - - - what would happen if you decided to jazz it up?  I mean, really trust in that rock-solid assurance that you cannot ruin a roasted chicken.  What would happen if you let yourself (mothers of the world, plug your ears!) - play with your food?

Shauna James Ahern played with her chicken.  Because she had become an omnivore, a seeker of things that taste good, she knew that dunking fresh rosemary into boiling water makes it taste eleven times more intense and flavorful when added to whatever you add it to.  She also knew that boiling a whole lemon just before shoving it into the cavity of the chicken gives a sublime, singing, lemony note to the meat as it roasts.  So her recipe, recommended with the same "go for it" urging your best friend feels free to use on you, calls for a whole lemon, fresh rosemary, the zest of two more lemons, and ten cloves of garlic.  Put the whole lemon in place, then take the rest of the ingredients and grind them into a smooth, headily fragrant paste, which you then massage into the chicken for roasting.  (I can smell it just thinking about it, thought I, and resolved to swing by Safeway on the way home from a meeting, to get those things that I did not have in my pantry, because I had a chicken to roast, by golly, and this one was going to make an entrance.)

I succumbed, as usual (much to the derisive delight of my children) to buying a bunch of extra things.  I love grocery shopping.  Among other things, some smoked paprika wound up in my basket.  Never tried that before - but Ms. Ahern said I wouldn't believe what it does when you use it...

I have a granddaughter now - a very small one, who gets her meals from her mommy.  Literally.  Whatever mommy eats, granddaughter gets a few hours later - or at least the essence of it distilled in mommy's milk.  She already knows that tomatoes, citrus, garlic, and broccoli are not yet her favorite foods, and she reminds us late at night that while she'll eat them, her tummy doesn't have to like them yet.

Oh-oh.  Panic?  I can't play with my chicken using Shauna James Ahern's playbook!  Ten cloves of garlic cannot be artfully slipped past my granddaughter.

That's when it hit me.  I don't need someone else's playbook to play with my food.  I grabbed the rosemary, plunged it in the pot a-boiling on the stove, and stripped off the leaves.  It was like walking through a British Columbia rainforest - incredibly fresh, incredibly piney.  In my other hand, I popped the top off the jar of smoked paprika.  A brief twinge of doubt - the kind of doubt you get when you wonder whether ketchup and plum jam go together - but then I jammed that bottle, and that fistful of rosemary right into my mustache and smelled for all I was worth.

I nearly cried.  That smell took me instantly to a campfire with the friends from my youth, in Banff National Park, cooking meat outside on the grill, with twilight and drizzle intensifying the rich enveloping scent of the pine forest around us, and the smoke under the steaks lazily, tantalizingly snaking up past our faces...

I had to put this on my chicken.  I did not need anyone's permission, nor did I want to Google it.  These smells belonged to each other today.  Now, I got to play.  I have never owned Kosher Salt.  But I got some today.  It went on that chicken right after the rich, rust-brown smoky paprika, in gleaming white chunks carelessly covering this nook, that cranny, that gleaming curve of drumstick...then some pepper.  The rosemary went on, in little bunches, here and there.  Man, that green looks good against that deep, deep red...  Then - why not ring the whole thing with those big fat white mushrooms....and put on some of that olive oil that actually smells like freshly mown hay, the kind that you mix with balsamic vinegar to dip your bread in.  Hey - why not put some of that balsamic vinegar on too?  And then some kosher salt - imagine the tiny crunchy explosion matched with the silky smoothness of a mushroom slaked in fragrant olive and balsam.....

I put the whole thing in a 350 oven, for an hour and a half.  That was the most enjoyable hour and a half of this busy day - waiting to see what smell would emanate next from the oven as each piece in this new puzzle took its rightful place in the alchemy of a meal coming together.

I made a salad, slowly.  I put sweet pea shoots in it - not just cucumbers and tomatoes.  Pea shoots.  Like bean sprouts, but without the taste of dirt, and like alfalfa, but without the peppery attitude.

We ate the chicken with mashed potatoes.  Nobody said anything - they chewed with their eyes closed.  That is the greatest gift you can give a cook who loves you - closing your eyes when you chew.  I'm glad I played with my food today.  And tomorrow, I will see what else other people who love making food and eating food play with, because inspiration does not need to come from Morocco or Sri Lanka every day.  It can come from smelling smoked paprika at the same time as rosemary.  Just play with your food, and see what happens.

(By the way - Shauna James Ahern's book is called "Gluten Free Girl".  Her blog is located at www.glutenfreegirl.com.  She has also written cookbooks - as her passion is helping those with celiac disease see that life is not over.  Far from it - it can be the start of something really big.  And that brings up the last point in my inspiration.  I don't have to be celiac to love this food.)

Demilitarized Korean Food

Asian cuisine - a misnomer in itself, since Asia is so vast and diverse - has held a special fascination for my tastebuds because I lived in essentially blissful ignorance of anything related to Asia right up through eleventh grade at boarding school in Nigeria, where to be honest, we rarely had any interaction with anyone from that continent.

Discovering Japan, then China, Korea, Hong Kong, Vietnam, India, and so on came well after high school - starting with my chosen major of Japanese in University, and my introduction to what remains my bedrock favorite cuisine, and on through a job which let me work with, and visit, and immerse myself in at least part of the culture of Japan, Korea and China, and of course, the food for which they are justifiably famous.

So, I started late diving into all the intensity and distillation of thousands of years of evolutionary cooking, and if there's one thing I am discovering, it's that I probably will not live long enough to taste everything there is on offer in even one of these cultures, let alone all of them.  But man, it's beyond fun to try, and even more so to find something every now and then which is so impossibly good that it becomes one of those cravings that you really need to have on a pretty regular basis.

Of all of them, the one I know least, and yet the one that packs the biggest culinary punch in the mouth (in the most indulgent and satisfying way) for me has got to be Korean.  Oh yes, if adventurous, we in the West will occasionally grace our hot dog with sauerkraut, for example.  In Korea, sauerkraut is mere baby food compared to the punishment endured by their cabbage.  Kimchi, the national dish - innocuously translated as 'pickled cabbage' -is a riotous symphony of fermentation coupled with tongue-searing pepper and supersaturations of garlic guaranteed to trail in your wake for four days after eating.  Kimchi is frank, in-your-face, unapologetically direct food.  So is Bulgogi, and other variants of marinated and barbecued meat - soaked for hours in spiky-sweet, vinegar and garlicky goodness, then seared on a blast-furnace griddle in the middle of your table - the very essence of what meat and fire together should produce.  Putting the two together seems impossibly egregious - but match them on a bed of plain white rice, or cold glass noodles (jap chae), and the blend becomes obvious and right - a match which is made in heaven, a result of centuries of experimenting to make it perfect.  Not unlike the perfect giant sushi hand roll, or pad thai, or Szechuan chicken.

It's always deeply satisfying to watch food which you used to have to drive miles to eat, suddenly show up then in places like the food court at the mall.  Look around you next time - next to the A&W, Arby's, Mrs. Vanelli's Pizza and Taco Time - there's a Manchu Wok, a Teriyaki Experience, a Thai Express, or a Pho Noodle House....

The problem is, most of them tend to dumb down the exotic factor which made them so attractive in the first place - maybe because the 'real' flavors are still too exotic to sell.  But at least you can get sriracha hot sauce at just about all of them, in a bottle next to the hoisin.  Not bad - we're getting there.

So, when a new guy shows up in town, hope stirs again that maybe we've made enough progress to get the real thing this time.  Sadly, last night proved again that there's a long way to go.

How could you go wrong with a place that brazenly calls itself Kim Chi at the Market Mall food court in Calgary?  Better order the special - looks like a sizeable pile of beef and chicken piled on rice and sauteed veggies.  Haven't had my Korean quota for the month, but this is a good night to do that, being that my wife had Thai soup, so the garlic will happily cancel each other out.  (It is nice to be considerate and eat garlic when your spouse does.  Trust me.)

I ordered the special, and then cavalierly added a small order of dumplings.  Whether Korean, Japanese or Chinese - all know the essence of a sublime dumpling - pork, garlic and greens nestled in a soft wrapper, crisped on the bottom, juicy throughout, begging for a quick marriage with vinegary-sweet soy dipping sauce....(eyes closed, imagining the first bite, while the chef wokked away at my entree, and gently laid the parboiled meat on the grill to finish it....

Wait.   He's speaking Chinese.  Not that there's anything wrong with a Chinese guy cooking my Korean food, but you know, I was hoping for really authentic.  I know Italians who would laugh at my attempts to make pizza like their nonna does, too.

No matter - it looks pretty good.  The chicken is fiery red - should be a warning of spicy times ahead, okay, okay....the spare ribs are charred in all the right places, okay - that's a lot of rice, but all the more to soak up the garlicky meaty runoff - and the vegetables look al dentishly fresh...

I turn to walk away - "Sir!  Sir!  Don'r forget your dumplings!"  Ah yes, of course, thank you very much.

First bite.  The dumpling.  Remember the porky garlic, the crispy underside?  Think again.  This one tasted exactly like an old sponge, lovingly soaked in old cooking oil.  The dipping sauce?  Aqua Velva aftershave, thanks.

Second bite.  The chicken.  Have you ever eaten chicken that's just barely done?  That uncomfortably cool slithery taste that says "Hey, buddy - put me back in the pan for a few minutes, wouldja?  What are you trying to do, get someone killed?"  I swallowed, hard.   The red color?  Mealy, forgettable - like those gumballs from the machines outside Zellers, where the flavor almost gets there, then disappears into shapeless, taste-free disappointment.  And those lovely black hash marks from the grill?  Like a briquette on the palate.

Third bite.  The spare ribs.  Look - fat is crucial to eating well - it carries taste, it marries with salt, it's no accident that properly used, it deserves its place at the pinnacle of the food pyramid, if only for short bursts of pleasurable reign.  The fat in this meat, though, was trying to avoid my teeth, adroitly slipping out of the way as I, increasingly concerned, tried to find some edible flesh in there between the bones. 

Maybe the rice, then.  It did look brown, and invitingly teriyakish.  But there the resemblance ended.  This was nothing more than the pooling of mediocrity - which I suppose may have been designed to simply not overshadow the bean sprouts and carrots, both of which left no doubt that they had been grown in the dirt.

I am not normally squeamish.  But the spectre of Salmonella, coupled with the odd slithery quality of the flesh made me start to really worry about the prospect of seeing my whole meal once more in its entirety, this time tinged with violence and wreathed in porcelain....

I survived the night.  But I will not be returning to that place.  Even though its name promises a Korean experience you'd normally want to impress your friends with.  Forewarned, dear reader.  If you want real Korean fast food in Calgary, you're way, way better off at Koryo in either North Hill or Northland Village malls.  Those guys make food you remember.

Las tortillas absolutamente auténticas

Today have I taken a solemn vow - never again shall I refer to Taco Time, Taco Bell, or (heaven forbid) Julio's Barrio or Chili's as "Mexican Food", when that particular form of peckishness hits me.  I grant you, the basic flavors have become ubiquitous worldwide - cilantro, chilies, cumin, salsas both green and red - all have become part of the usual North American pantry, which we shake with abandon into various stews, sauces, salads, whatever...mainly because when food is allowed to develop someplace over thousands of years, the best flavors naturally rise to the top and endure.  (See also Vietnamese, Arabic, and Italian cuisine....).  

So why is it that the tacos we order here are really nothing but the palest shadow of what you get when you order a meal at a roadside stand in Playa del Carmen, or Tijuana, or for that matter, Los Angeles or San Diego?

I think it has to boil down to our uniquely Anglo-Saxon penchant for believing that complicated is better.  Look what we've done to pizza - the Italians take dough, tomatoes, and basil, and with perfect heat and perfect timing create a miracle food.  We think - let's add 80 pounds of cheese IN THE CRUST, and five kinds of processed meat, and three kinds of vegetables on that baby, and THEN see how much better it is.  Nope.  Don't get me wrong, deep dish has its hallowed place in satisfying cravings - but is it pizza anymore?  Not really.  Not if it makes Italians gag.

Same goes for tacos.  There's something to be said for the pure simplicity of four or five ingredients, precisely assembled but with speed and alacrity that comes from centuries of knowledge and wisdom, that produces eye-closing, soft-moaning sighs of pleasure with each bite.  But no - we heap on the cheese, the greasy hamburger dripping with orange fat, the guacamole, the crispy tortilla wrapped in the soft one, the tomatoes, the lettuce, the salsa - and all in a vast sheet of floury blandness to make a package as big as your head....

Here's the thing -  there's no doubt, once you've sampled the real thing, what the foundation for a real taco is.  It's the tortilla on which the rest of the ingredients lay in resplendent repose.   

What?  That unassuming disc of white boredom?  That little thing?  Why, it wouldn't feed a child, let alone a man like me!

Yes.  That little thing.  Made out of something called 'masa' - white or yellow corn flour, mysteriously processed, with a mysteriously elusive signature scent and flavor.  On this is what real Mexican food is based.  You can put pretty well anything on a real corn tortilla.  Eggs, salsa, meat fried, shredded, barbecued, boiled, vegetables alone or in concert with others - and for the heretic, pretty well anything else.  It's the real tortilla that makes all the difference in the world.

Incredibly, we found them here in our home town - again not so much by idle foodie searching, but out of the necessity of finding delicious things that do not have any wheat at all in them.  Thank goodness for Google, by the way. Who would have ever found that tiny shop in Northeast Calgary, a stone's throw from the giant LRT station on manic 36th Street NE, tucked into a residential neighborhood.  It's called "Las Tortillas", and that's enough, because the family that runs it knows that Las Tortillas are the basis of both great food, and their well-deserved fortune.

It's a combination grocery store - featuring essentials like chipotles, salsas of all descriptions (both red and green), tomatillos, masa by the sack, and Yerba Mate from Argentina - and a restaurant.  The kitchen is right there, across the counter - and the dining area is an old dining room suite - one table, six chairs.  The cooler is stocked with Mexican pop, and Coca-Cola.  And on the counter are several tidy stacks of fresh-made corn tortillas, tightly wrapped in butcher paper and sold by the kilo in a plastic bag.  Six bucks only - for an extremely impressive pile of tortillas.

We could not leave with just the tortillas.  Why not stay and sample them with fillings made by the same genius who made the tortillas?  So we ordered tacos.  Two each.  Your choices include beef, pork, shrimp, chicken - and something called "lengua".  I ordered lengua.  From which we get our English word "Language".      Yep - beef tongue.  With green salsa.  And that was all.  You can add raw onions and cilantro if you like, but there's no law.

No, it is not disgusting, regardless of your opinions about tongues other than your own in your mouth.  It's absolutely divine.  The proprietor/chef called it "the cleanest meat".  He's right.  It's straight-up muscle, no gristle, no fat, no yucky distractions.  Fabulous, silky, smooth, meltingly tender - the soul of beef in a slice.

Shauna had one barbacoa - beef, and one chicken taco.  Her chicken came with red salsa, the beef with green.  They were so completely different from each other - the beef spiked with cumin, the chicken with a bang of essential tomato, and just piquant enough to make you have to sniff.  We ate in reverent silence, broken only by strongly-worded compliments to the chef, who was beaming like any artist who sees his life's work being appreciated.  He assured us - no gluten whatsoever.  The fillings were just the meat, cooked with chilies, and the salsa.  No added fat.  Ever wonder why Mexico does not have our endemic obesity problem?

Yeah, I know.  It's just a taco, right?  Calm down!

No, it isn't just a taco.  This is how tacos are done in Mexico.  We were only there for a week once, but we ate tacos, and decided we had never had anything like this.  Since then, we have pined often for that fabulously fresh fast food. We found it today at Las Tortillas, and came home with 2 kilos worth.  I think pretty well everything in the pantry is going to wind up in those tortillas for the next little while.  And heck, when we need the complete package, it will be worth the drive back up to the Northeast.  You cannot lose, at just 3 dollars a pop.  Do yourself a favor - give up Vicente and his Taco Time "Mexi-fries" for Lent, and get yourself some classic, ancient cuisine instead.

Winterpeg Redux

When the trip is less than 24 hours, there isn't much chance to develop any kind of a realistic impression of a place, let alone the much more difficult task of changing a preconception, so I have to admit that I had resigned myself to "another trip to Winterpeg" in March.  I have offhandedly dismissed that city as a conundrum - why would anyone really want to live there, given the drab industrial scenery to which I had been exposed between the airport and downtown and the breath-robbing cold and dry blasts of wind alternating with gigantic piles of melting slush when the sun does deign to shine in the long arctic penance.

So when we went to meet with Steve, a transplant from Britain to the coldest city in Canada, I didn't even bother to ask my usual question - "What's good to eat in Winnipeg?"  Bob asked it for me, once our business meetings were done and it was time to fill the void before going back to the cookie-cutter hotel.

Bob explained to Steve my obsession with eating the essence of a place, to at least literally and physically absorb a piece of what forms the soul of a city or a country - the food.  The food that comes from a kitchen of a person passionately devoted to proving that what they do with their ingredients is not a copy of anything anywhere else, but a visual, olfactory, and gustatory signature - "this is part of me, my home, and my place, and I invite you to take a bite.  Go ahead, there's lots, and I can always make more...."

Steve leaned forward, eyes gleaming, no longer a clinical microbiologist/virus hunter, but to my astonishment, a dedicated omnivore also looking for not only what's good, but what's good to share and make a point.  "If it's Manitoba you want, then we have to go to Fude".

"What do they do at Fude?"

"Well, it's bison, (provincial symbol and emblem of Manitoba, name of a hockey team, statue by the legislature, and representation of the stubborn hardy toughness of the folks who live there), and elk, and berries, and pickerel from the big lakes, and herbs...and the most unexpected and vivid combinations that will just blow you away..."

How could we NOT go?

On the way, I drove the rental behind Steve and Bob in Steve's Mini.  It was a roundabout route, and a long way through several streets and neighborhoods, cutting through downtown.  I saw beautiful parks.  I saw beautiful houses with perfect yards.  I saw modern, I saw practical, I saw pride and purpose, I saw architecture that meant something.  I was ashamed of myself.  Winnipeg is not ugly.  Winnipeg is unique.  Winnipeg has a soul - even though I will not be here long enough to be introduced, and more's the pity.

We stopped, and parked, and I saw a place that was once old.  They call it Osborne Village, and in its own way, it is just as assertive as San Antonio's Riverwalk or Medicine Hat's Old Downtown, or Kansas City's Country Club Plaza - a place where people have pushed up their sleeves and made something old into something that lets you participate in the soul of the place.  Sure, it's got some rough edges yet, and that darned winter means you might have to walk quickly and duck into several doorways before getting to your destination, but next time bring a scarf, toque and mitts, and have a good look at what Osborne Village is becoming.

Fude is upstairs in one of the quirky buildings along the street.  Inside, the decor is decidedly casual, but the kind of casual that you go for when you transform your living room at home into a candle-lit sanctuary.  It's cozy and welcoming and modern and jazzy.  The waitstaff look you in the eye when you arrive - the kind of look that says, "just you wait, you won't regret having picked our place tonight".

The menu is split into lightly punny categories - Fude for Thought is salads, Flat Fude is gourmet pizzas, Fude to Share is appetizers, etc.  OK by me, because the real stars that make you concentrate in a hurry are the actual dishes on offer.

Steve had sealed the deal by telling us about two appetizers in particular - the Chili Chocolate Chicken Skewers - this is not a misprint - featuring Manitoba chicken tenderloin dusted in cocoa (!) with chili powder and cayenne pepper, pan-seared and grilled, and then slathered in a house-made Callebaut dark chocolate sauce streaked with a cayenne cream.  What?!?

...and the Hyper Seared Tuna - espresso-seared sushi-grade tuna with Asian vanilla soy sauce reduction for dipping.

Again - huh??  Fish with espresso and vanilla?

So we ordered both.

Look.  Coffee grounds on raw tuna, dipped in sweet vanilla soy sauce just looks wrong on paper.  Doesn't it?  But it was so right.  The coffee hits you with a bitter mini-bomb, which is swiped right clear by the cool tuna, and the vanilla is like a reward for being an exceptionally good boy.  Bite, after bite, after bite.  My question is - who figured this out, and how?

Now - it has dawned on a lot of people that chocolate and pepper were actually made for each other, in certain circumstances.  This chicken came expertly sauteed, and the most intriguing thing was not just how the cayenne and Callebaut played off each other, but how the distinct absence of expected salt in the meat meant that your other taste buds could explore a side of chicken you never thought you'd see.

These two starters did what appetizers are supposed to do - focus your attention, and I mean like a laser, on what's going in your mouth and what is coming next....

They were accompanied by some foccacia pan bread, with balsamic vinegar and olive oil.  But it was a vivid dark pink, and there were dangerous flecks of rust and orange and yellow floating in the mix on the plate.  Somebody added beet juice and hot red pepper flakes.  Let me tell you - this is how bread and dipping sauce should always be done.  It looks wrong, it doesn't make sense - until you let your mouth decide.

Mission accomplished.  I wanted very badly to see what was next.

I ordered ribs.  From a bison.  They make their own barbecue sauce in which these guys are braised.  It has espresso in it.  What's with the espresso, already!  Well - don't forget, in the land where barbecue was invented, the cowboys poured coffee into the dutch ovens swinging above the fire, simmering the beef for six hours while they worked.  There's a reason the best barbecue has coffee in it.

The ribs are as big, or bigger, than the beef ones you order at any Tony Roma's.  Any resemblance ends there.  The meat is unctuous, gooey, and sublimely smooth, with the very slightest touch of wildness still shining through.  I had to ask, when the chef/owner came to see how we were doing - how do you get lean wild meat, famous for its lack of fat, to become so essentially and deeply....porky?

They cook them low and slow, six hours in the oven, and then let them cool right off.  When you order them, they go back in the oven, back up to temperature - and that's where the chemistry happens.  The meat surrenders, falling off the bone when you tell it to.  I ate it like pig.  The sauce is marvelously complex, with little pronounced hits of orange, of nutmeg, of savory, of molasses.  I do not know if they put all that in the sauce, but that's what comes out of the sauce, and it carries the bison proudly to its conclusion.

There were potatoes and vegetables to go with them, but I honestly can't remember how they were done.  They were the chorus that helped push the meat to stardom, just like they are supposed to be.

We could not do dessert.  The chef did not care.  She waited until after our cappuccinos had waned, and then presented us with a scoop of Saskatoon berry sorbet each, on the house.  Steve said "I've gotta get me an ice cream maker".  Point being - Manitoba Saskatoons grow in the backyard.  If she can do it, why can't I?

I left Fude, and Winnipeg, with a new respect, again ashamed for pigeonholing a place which I'd never even thought of giving a chance.  When you go to Winnipeg, take a minute and look around, and taste around.

Fude for thought.