Our guest blogger today is Andrew Vernon. He is a mechanical engineer who is living in the middle of a remote Australian rainforest doing dishes to afford beer and meat pies. Warning: there is some foul language, not suitable for kids.
Andy’s Guide to Being a Dishy (aka; dishpig)
Amongst the toil and froth of every restaurant, amongst the chaos and noise of a kitchen getting slammed, there will always be the dishy. While the wait staff are the smiling, happy faces of the business, the chefs the heroes of legend, the dishy is the unsung cog in the machine, pounding out the dirty work so that the rest of the show can go off without a hitch. The dishy is the one who makes sure your garbage is always empty, your shelves full of shiny dishes, your workplaces clean and organized.
Somebody must carry the burden of the grunt soldier, and that is the duty and honour of the dishy.
Is it a job that reaps heaps of praise and glory? No, but that is not the way of the dishy. Being a dishy is a role of honour and pride. The satisfaction of watching the circus that is the restaurant business play out in a seamless manner and knowing that it plays out the way it should because of the teamwork of all involved is satisfaction enough. Continue »
Submitted by Chris Alward. Chris is Director of Market Development at Local Food Plus. That means he’s one of the people responsible for certifying food as local and sustainable food so consumers can make better choices.
This photo was taken the very day Chris’ Granny taught him to make fried chicken.
My mother moved to Eastern Canada from Louisiana in the early seventies and went from boiling crawfish to boiling lobster. Most years, we’d trek from New Brunswick to New Orleans and, after a long day in 3 or 4 airports, we’d wind up in the small southern town where my Granny lived. We’d usually spend a couple weeks fishing on the bayou, shooting fireworks, complaining about the heat, and being teased about our “ehs” and “aboots”.
But there was never any joking around when it came to food.
Granny’s house was where I complimented her pumpkin pie only to learn that I’d eaten sweet potatoes (which I refused to eat at the time), where I learned that a bowl of Butter Beans doesn’t contain any actual “butterbeans”, where I learned about fishing and hunting and respecting the animal (“If you ain’t gonna eat it, then don’t shoot it”, my uncles would preach). I learned about po’boys (aka subs) and crawfish and roux and gumbo and cast iron and cornbread. Those last two are inseparable, apparently. You can’t get a good crust without a good cornbread pan – it turns out all that cast iron pans are cornbread pans, and that these two go together like macaroni and cheese.
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This Apron Strings post was submitted By Mike Schreiner, Leader of the Green Party of Ontario. He’s also well known for his leadership in co-founding the award-winning organization Local Food Plus.
Also, please keep sending in your own stories and recipes. This project will continue long past Mother’s Day.
Wheat harvest on my parent’s farm was a time of hot, hard work and celebration. Our extended family helped during those tense days of harvesting, hoping to get the crop in before a storm wreaked havoc on our hard work and income.
Most of our wheat was loaded onto one of my dad’s eighteen wheelers and shipped directly to the local co-op to be transported by train to distant markets. Unlike his corn and soybeans, which dad sold to local feed mills for cattle, our wheat travelled far from home.
The one exception was the annual ritual of collecting bins of wheat berries for my Grandma Boyd, my mom’s mother. Idabelle, my ten year old daughter Isabelle’s namesake, collected wheat each year from our harvest, in order to grind it into fresh flour for her famous breads, buns, and cinnamon rolls. Thanksgiving and Christmas, in particular, would not be complete without a large assortment of her fresh baked goods celebrating the bounty of our harvest. Continue »
Shayma Saadat, a Pakistani-Afghan with Persian ancestry, is the author of the food-memoir style blog, The Spice Spoon: Cooking Without Borders. She is a Senior Policy Advisor for the Minister of Energy and Infrastructure. Shayma lives in Toronto with her husband.
I watched Ami, my mother, as she stirred the pot in a circular motion. Round and round her arm circled, the gold bangles glistening on her wrist. Clink, clink, they went as she stirred and stirred. The same gold bangles given to her by her Ami, when she married my father in her China-red and gold brocade gharara.
All twelve of them, 22kt gold, passed on to me as part of my trousseau. I don’t wear mine when I cook. They lay wrapped in muslin and velvet, in a safety deposit box.
I stand in my kitchen alone, making Ami’s Pakistani Ginger Chicken, and I think of her milky arms and hands, as I stir the pot.
And I hear her.
“A small pour of oil, just enough to make the bottom of the pot glossy,” she says as she tilts the bottle into the pot.
She chops an onion through its crisp layers. Not like a chef, but like a mother.
Meticulously, slowly. Continue »
I was pretty young when I started to realize that my family didn’t eat quite like everybody else’s. I was 10 years old and we were spending the summer in upstate New York traveling with Circus Flora (I’ll save that story for another blog post) when we happened on an Italian restaurant. Hurray! I’d be able to have my favorite meal at the time, fried calamari on top of Caesar salad. But when I ordered it, the blond waitress cocked her head and looked at me real confused. “Sorry Sweetie, we’ve only got red and white house wine here.” Bummer.
My childhood consisted of a lot of moments like these. Requests to my parents for popular snacks foods, like Cup of Noodle soup, were met with good intentions but somehow I always ended up with Knorr Bacon and Corn instead of the chicken flavor everyone else had. And hell hath no fury like a scorned 5th grader. Sitting at my desk, tears in my eyes, I was wishing death upon my father for the inedible Genoa salami, tapenade and sriracha sandwich I had to force down. Couldn’t he have just made pb & j? But the way my parents saw it, being ordinary when it came to food was the worst sin one could commit. Continue »
Joshna Maharaj describes herself in three terms “Chef. Writer. Activist.” In truth, she is that and so much more. She is a leader in the good food fight who effortlessly marries the best of the past with the best of the present, and at her core, she’s a teacher who loves to share her passion for quality food lovingly prepared. Enjoy this latest instalment in our Apron Strings series.
My mom and I at a family wedding. It’s a family tradition for one of the pre-wedding events to turn into a small food fight, and that’s what’s all over us.
I come from a family where the kitchen has been the domain of women for countless generations. As a child, I remember being in the kitchen with my mom and my aunties as they cooked our food, giggled, shared recipes, confided in each other and gossiped about each other. The kitchen was (and continues to be) where the action was, the source of tempting smells, the joyful clucking of a group of women and delicious things to eat. This team of women catered every special occasion and family gathering we had, frying samosas, rolling rotis and making chutneys with a sort of dutiful generosity.
As I grew older, I was put to work in the kitchen too. One of the first things I remember doing was sealing samosas with a flour water paste and my little 6-year old finger. As a kid and teenager, I was the prep cook in this kitchen, peeling potatoes, trimming chilies, grating carrots and grinding spices and aromatics for my mom and my aunties. I say prep cook, because I never worked at the stove, where the magic really happened. I was part of the labour force behind processing all those raw ingredients. But there was always the thought/hope in my mind that at some point in the future, I’d be a mother and an aunty and would also know how to put vegetables, aromatics, meat and spices together in this same way.
When I was in my teens, I started to pay more attention to the conversations in the kitchen, and would be told stories about how my mom and aunties were forced into work in the kitchen at very early ages by their parents, and didn’t have as much freedom as I did. My mom was cooking for her whole family at age 10, and one of my aunties was a bride at 16, and thus cooked for her in-laws at that age. It was just expected that women knew how to cook, and would do it, the way their husbands and families liked it.
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This next Apron Strings Mother’s Day blog post was written by Mary Luz Mejia. Mary Luz is a Colombian-born, Canadian-raised writer who is passionate about food. She’s also a researcher, presenter/speaker, food event curator/organizer, non-fiction documentary producer and cook.
1972, Medellin, Colombia. Mary Luz’s favourite photo of herself with her mom.
Agustina joined our family before I was born. She was twelve when my mom took her in and taught her how to run a household which of course, included how to cook. This was Medellin, Colombia in the 1960s and Agustina came from a disadvantaged home. Her ability to earn a modest living that offered room and board in a decent family home was seen as a Godsend to many. By the time I came along in 1970, Agustina was my nanny.
When friends or relatives would ask, “Mari, how is your mother?” I’d innocently respond, “Which one?” I loved them both.
Agustina excelled at cooking. My mom Mary Laserna, tells me that as a toddler, I could always be found with Agustina in the kitchen. I’d tug on her dress to pick me up so I could see what she was doing at the stove. Mom would walk in saying, “Agustina– put her down. You’re frying platano (large tropical bananas) and she might get splattered with hot oil.” I’d be put down, apparently only to insist I be picked up as soon as my mom left the room. Poor Agustina was torn– but she always indulged my two-year old self. And this included frequently making my very favourite thing in the world back then, a smoothie bursting with Moras Andinas (Andean Blackberries). As soon as I’d see her washing the fruit and hear the clink of ice cubes hit the blender, I’d jump around the kitchen. Continue »
Below is the first guest blog post in our Mother’s Day series called Apron Strings–dedicated to preserving and celebrating our foremom’s culinary traditions.  This first guest blog post was written by journalist Sarah B. Hood whose writing covers food, film, fashion & more. She’s also an editor at Suite101.com and a professor at George Brown College.
The attached image shows my mom’s extended family at the cottage in the mid 1940s. My mom is farthest right front, with bare legs. Her father is farthest left, holding the camera shutter trigger. Her mother is seated or kneeling just left of centre, with a hairstyle that mirrors her daughter’s.
My mother, Noreen Mallory, is about as Ontarian as you can get. Her mother was a descendant of a German-Dutch settler who came to North America in 1661. In the 1700s, her great-great-great-grandfather fought alongside the British during the Revolution and was settled in the still-wild Niagara region by the Crown.
Her father was similarly descended from a Revolutionary War veteran who founded Mallorytown, near Brockville, in the 1790s; His family had already been in North America for generations by then. He grew up in a small village and was used to providing food for the dinner table by fishing and bird-hunting. Continue »
