The joy of meat

Quick note, there’s an article in the National Post this weekend about the resurgence of eating meat in all its yummy glory. Of course, in my life, it never went away.

I babbled a lot during our interview, so I’m grateful Allison didn’t make me sound like a dork. I got a precious three paragraphs at the end. Pretty cool eh?

“She is a consummate carnivore based in Calgary who prefers chicken wings over chocolate and, despite her diminutive size, proudly polishes off giant steaks with the big boys.

The entries on her popular food blog include eating delicacies like lamb testicles, goat’s head soup, snake and camel hoof tendon.

“Some people like to jump out of a plane to seek their thrills. I like to eat new foods,” she said. “I was thinking about why I love meat so much. My dad loved meat. His dad loved meat. Meat has always been around.

“It tastes good. It’s as simple as that.”

Click here for the full article.

 

CALGARY: Bitten by knife envy

We finally took the opportunity of a sunny (last) weekend to wander down to Inglewood to check out the newly opened Bite Groceteria, a gourmet food store carrying exclusive products.

It displays dried pastas, spices and truffle oils and unique cutlery like a boutique, and carries some beautiful-looking, vacuum-packed Rougie duck from Quebec.

A real gem is the fire-red room in the back that’s the physical version of the online store run by a former chef who really knows his knives.

Kevin Kent has a passion, to say the least, for beautiful blades. He lays them out, like precious jewels, on orange lentils in glass display cases for a stunning effect. I’ve never really looked closely at knives before, but here — especially the hand-forged Japanese Murata — they glisten like diamonds. They’re gorgeous!

These knives aren’t cheap, but they’re durable; I can’t even begin to count the number of crappy $20 knives I wasted my money on in my university days.

Putting down his Sunday coffee mug, Kevin chatted to us for a while, explaining the difference between the knives and what they’re used for. He’s a great salesman — because he never pushed anything on us. We left wondering if we could register for wedding gifts there. Hmm…

You can also bring your knives to Kevin for sharpening, but you’ll be tempted to walk out with some new ones.

Check out Knifewear website here.
Bite Groceteria, 1212A-9th Ave. SE, Calgary, (403) 263-3966. Open Tuesday to Friday 10 a.m.-2 p.m. then 4 p.m.-10 p.m. and weekends 12-6 p.m. Closed Mondays.

 

Hello baby foodie…

First off, if you are a friend of mine who has a wee one, you (ie, Shawna) are NOT allowed to buy the products I am about to talk about because these will be guaranteed to be winging their way to you at some point for birthdays et al.

Now, allow me to introduce you to Amy Wilson Sanger’s World Snacks series of kids’ books (which I first saw on Tigers & Strawberries).

In “First Book of Sushi” for example, you’ll find gems like:

Miso in my sippy cup
tofu in my bowl.
Crab and avocado
fill my California roll.

And from “Hola Jalapeno“:

Corn tortillas make my tacos,
my tostada,… and my chips.
Tomato salsa, por favor,
and guacamole dip!

So far, she’s covered soul food, sushi, dim sum as well as Italian, Spanish and Jewish food. The seventh book on Indian sweets is coming out in April.

 

Test the Nation: A win for indoor kids everywhere

So our bloggers team swept Test the Nation: Trivia on CBC Sunday night. We ended the night with the overall top team score (average 50/60), the highest scoring in-studio contestant (sadly not me but Rick Spence, Mr. Smartypants for the night with 57/60), and the highest scoring celebrity captain, Samantha Bee (49/60).

Thanks to Ryan Cousineau, I have this shot with the championship trophy after what I thought was the end of the show. But turns out me posing with the hardware made it into the closing credits for all of Canada to see. (Well, the ones not watching the Amazing Race anyway.)

The screen shot is courtesy of my friend Patrick Morrell, also known as Ali G on the celebrity look-alikes team.

It was a strange, yet strangely fun, experience. Six teams of 36 or 216 of us were herded into a studio as a holding area at 3 p.m., were fed dinner — a passable buffet — at 4 p.m. (is this what I have to look forward to at 75?) and then we sat. And waited. And waited.

Fellow team member Alexa Clark gave us all copies of her Cheapeats Toronto which I’m looking forward to flipping through.

So aside from chatting with my fellow bloggers and trying see if I could remember their names without looking at their name tags, I took pictures.

Here’s chef David Adjey looking for the chicken part of the butter chicken. His team was the last to go up for food after we picked through the Israeli couscous and chicken cacciatore. I swear I saw pork chops on some other plates but I couldn’t track any down.

Speaking of chefs, I was a little too excited to spot Bob Blumer from Glutton for Punishment. I interrupted his conversation with Sugar’s Anna Olson to say, “Hiiiiii. IhaveafoodblogandIloveyourshowespeciallywhenyourantheMedocMarathonand Iwannarunthatmarathontoo. CanItakeapicturewithyou?”

I’m an idiot.

As if I didn’t look goofy enough, check out these photos of me with some of the celebrity look-alikes. Not surprisingly, people were not clamouring to take pictures with us bloggers.

About three and a half hours later, we finally got into the live studio. It was all spotlights and flashy monitors and dry ice — certainly not any CBC I was used to. My hand remote for my answers was pretty cool and official.

There were some props for people to wave around, like spatulas for the chefs and flags for the backpackers. We got keyboards circa 1990.

But our revenge was being the smartest, most obnoxious team ever. I was sitting in the third row and I swear the trash-talking was lead by the fourth row. You know who you are. And man, it was funny.

We did a lot of chanting, and the questions obvious to our team (a lot of them) were met with catcalls of “Blogggggger!” There was unabashed admiration for Samantha Bee (”Bee! Bee! Bee!”), who called us her indoor kids, and widespread mocking of everyone else (”You’re the worst Michael Jordan ever” to the Tupac look-alike.)

There was also much snickering — once when the teleprompter rebooted and flashed Windows 98, and again when the show explained the computers in the “nerve centre were operating at a trillion bytes per second.” OK, that wasn’t snickering then, it was outright guffawing. I don’t think the show is inviting bloggers back. Ever.

We were ordered to cheer a lot but I think half of us were clinically dehydrated because there was little water during dinner and we weren’t allowed to go to the bathroom for three hours which then put the fear of God into the whole drinking water thing. We were begging for water every time the celebrity guests got little water bottles with straws in them during the commercials.

I was on the verge of lunging at a cameraman swigging water below me, if it wasn’t for Adam Schwabe and his Vicks. Bless Vicks. And bless Adam.

I don’t have my official results yet but I think I got 52/60. I learned I watch way too much TV and should study up on which countries don’t use the euro. Also, when in doubt, the answer is Denmark.

This was a pretty fun way of meeting “indoor kids” from across the country. Here’s a roundup of what the other bloggers said about their experiences and a very cool team picture collage here courtesy of Rannie Turingan.

UPDATE: I got my official score — 50 out of 60 — which puts me on par with the average score on the bloggers team, but higher than the average of people who took the test online. Shrug.

 

‘I’ll take trivia for $200 please, Alex’

When I was 8, I wanted to be Annie — until I realized that I did not have curly red hair and that Annie was not Chinese. So I switched to dreams of being a contestant on Jeopardy. Yeah, I was a weird kid.

So it was pretty cool when a producer called to ask if I’d be interested in competing on a team of bloggers on Test the Nation: Trivia on CBC TV on Sunday at 8 p.m.

The show will test how much 21st-century trivia has stuck in my noggin. Just like the Trivial Pursuit that I’m not allowed to play at home — because apparently I’m too competitive and yell at people (shrug) — except live on national TV.

You can play along at home as you watch the six teams duke it out in the Toronto studio. The bloggers are up against:

• cab drivers
• celebrity look-alikes
• backpackers
• flight crews
• chefs

Hopefully all those hours absorbing As It Happens and Perez Hilton are going to come in handy finally.

I don’t know if fraternizing is allowed but I’d love to meet Bob Blumer, the Surreal Gourmet, who ran the 42-kilometre Medoc Marathon through the vineyards of France’s Bordeaux region, pausing at the rest stops to sample the finest wines area châteaus have to offer.

Of course, I hope we win. The online poll has us neck in neck with the flight crew team right now. None of them better be from Air Canada is alls I’ve got to say.

Here are the fine bloggers I get to compete with but I don’t know what we’re going to do without our laptops — and Google:

• Dan Arnold (blog)

• Jon Arnold (blog)
• Christopher Bird (blog)
• Buzz Bishop (blog)
• Rebecca Bollwitt (blog)
• Ryan Couldrey (blog)
• Ryan Cousineau (blog)
• Katharine Hay (blog)
• Jesse Hirsch (blog)
• David Jones (blog)
• Allyson Kenning (blog)
• John Klein (blog)
• Andree Lau (blog)
• Lainey Liu (blog)
• Amber Macarthur (blog)
• John Martz(blog)
• Hugh McGuire (blog)
• Mark McIntyre (blog)
• Patrick Metzger (blog)
• Andy Nulman (blog)
• Ryan Porter (blog)
• Adam Schwabe(blog)
• Craig Silverman (blog)
• Julien Smith (blog)
• Allan Sorenson (blog)
• Rick Spence (blog)
• Graeme Stewart (blog)
• David Topping (blog)
• Kate Trgovac (blog)
• Rannie Turingan (blog)
• James Viloria (blog)
• Karen Whaley (blog)
• Frank Yang (blog)

Tune in on Sunday night!

 

Merry mincemeat holidays!

I had my first mincemeat tart today, made by Jason’s mom, Pam. (In the photo, the mincemeat is the one with the pastry top, surrounded by Pam’s homemade butter tarts. Eat your heart out, Tim Horton’s.)

To answer the burning question, no, there is no meat in mincemeat. But there used to be. In original English recipes from the 15th to 17th centuries, meat and fruit were mixed with vinegars and wines as both flavour and preservative.

It was later made with suet (animal fat) or butter along with venison or ground beef.

I read that preserved mincemeat can be stored for up to 10 years — holy fruitcake Batman — but the one I had was fresh and fairly inocuous with raisins, currants, apple and spices. It reminded me of a butter tart and was a good opening act to our Christmas turducken.

Happy holidays!

 

The butcher, the farmer and microcredit

This is Kamil, a butcher in Azerbaijan, and I just loaned him $25 to go towards buying two calves. I also loaned $25 to a woman in Cambodia to help her buy a plot of farmland to grow rice crops and vegetables.

The money I sent is not a donation; it’s a loan to help build up their businesses and give them a boost to economic independence.

This is my first foray into microcredit, something I heard a lot about when Muhammad Yunus and Grameen Bank won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. It basically means small loans for people who don’t qualify for traditional bank credit, especially the poor in developing countries.

Imagine asking a goat herder to walk from his village to a Royal Bank and filling out paperwork. Yeah, not so helpful.

The amazing part of microcredit is the astonishing rate of repayment and subsequent success of these small businesses.

Kiva.org, inspired by the Grameen Bank, is the first online microcredit site that allows you to direct where your loan goes according to gender, region and industry, and to keep track of where the money is going in a very transparent way.

I’ve become part of a community of microlenders around the world. About 30 of us from New York to Brunei have supported Pnov, the Cambodian farmer who applied for $850 to buy her land. Right now, Kiva is limiting loan amounts to $25 so more people can participate in the process.

Kiva works with microfinance institutions around the world to collect monthly payments and provide updates on the borrowers. The site does not take any portion of the loan for operating costs. So if I commit $25, that’s exactly how much goes to the business owner.

Once I get my $50 back — loans are usually fully repaid within 12 or 18 months — I can choose to withdraw it or loan it again to other people.

You can also buy gift certificates on Kiva to give as presents and get more people involved. Wouldn’t that be a great Christmas gift?

More info at Kiva.org.

 

Hot off the presses

Author Douglas Coupland (Generation X) was bashing Calgary’s food scene, so the Calgary Herald took that to task in an article today.

I got a quick mention before critic-about-town John Gilchrist! But everyone responded the same way. Coupland obviously hasn’t spent enough time in Calgary to know where the great grocery stores and restaurants are.

Anyway, I figured some Herald readers might be clicking here, and since I’m in still in the middle of writing about eating my way through the Maritimes, here’s a direct link to my Calgary posts.

 

Blogger’s Choice Awards

For a bit of web fun, I’ve been nominated for a Blogger’s Choice Award. If you’d like to vote for my little obsession, click on the badge. I think you can vote once every 24 hours. Voting closes Oct 19. Thanks for stopping by!

 

PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND: Last bastion of bottled pop

To Americans, it’s soda. To us Canadians, it’s pop. And to people who live on Prince Edward Island, it’s available only in bottles.

It’s been that way since 1984. Canned beer has not been sold on the island since 1973. The province banned cans to protect jobs at the island’s only bottling plant.

I like it. Fizzy liquids taste better out of bottles. But this unique slice of island life is coming to an end. Starting Jan. 1, 2008, the province will allow some cans and plastic bottles.

Half of the shelf space must still be devoted to refillable glass bottles, but it was nice to see the store coolers full of only tidy rows of cold bottles.

 

A stuffed vacation

Back from our vacation. Lots of new things and places to blog about in the coming weeks. Here’s a hint as to where I went. Can you guess?

 

Food in the mail

I’ve been getting food in the mail from marketing companies. I think they’re targetting food blogs to get their products some more exposure. I don’t hope to make this a habit but if they’re going to spend the postage, I figure the least I can do is try it.

The first package I got was two large jars of mayonnaise from Hellmann’s. The real kind (90 calories, 10 g fat in 1 tbsp) and then the half-fat mayonnaise-type dressing. They’re trying to point out there’s no difference in taste.

I guess not. But I sense a slightly different texture between the two. And while the full-fat version has more calories etc., it also has only eight ingredients, as opposed to double that for the half-fat jar which includes things like phosphoric acid and high fructose corn syrup.

Personally, I prefer the real mayonnaise - and to use a little less - over the chemically altered version.

The other package came from the Spice Depot. They make jars of spices with grinders built into the top. Cute. I used the Jojo Potato seasoning on some of my potato salad. It’s a blend of dehydrated garlic, paprika, salt, rosemary, black pepper, basil, parsley, and oregano.

We also barbecued some bison ribeyes with the New York steak spice, a mix of dehydrated garlic, dehydrated onion, black pepper, salt, anise seed, sugar, chili, mustard seed, dill seed, and coriander.

They smelled fresh coming out of the grinder top but taste-wise weren’t anything special. They were okay. If I bought these in the grocery store, it’d be more for the novelty than anything.

 

Badge of honour

I’m humbled to get my first official blogger recognition as a Rockin’ Girl Blogger. Cool, eh? It comes from Sue at Apostrophe Suz who writes about her family and her life with the kind of honesty and poise I hope I’ll have if I ever become a mom.

The fun part is I get to pass this on. So here’s to Karen, Sara, and Diane.