Archive for the ‘Guest Posts’ Category

The Dishwasher Has Something to Say

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 »



Made with Love: Granny’s Fried Chicken

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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Making and Breaking Bread with Grandma Boyd

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 »



Andaaza: It’s all Estimation

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 »



A Motherly Food Intervention

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 »



Sandwiching Tradition, Freedom and Duty

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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My “Dos Mamas”


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 »



Passing on the Basics of Ontario Pioneer Cooking

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 »