Torontonians love the cottage like no one else. Let those Vancouverites camp out in their organic hemp tents and the New Yorkers slouch in their Hamptons mansions, we want the cottage and we don’t care if it’s five hours away or surrounded by an impenetrable wall of mosquitoes.

So here we present some tips for making your cottage experience the best it can be.

Bring a can opener. Even if the cottage has a can opener it’s probably a cheap Giant Tiger version that’s slightly rusted out and only useful for banging on the water heater with. Buy a really good quality can opener and keep it in your glove compartment, you’ll be amazed at how much it aids in your existence. Especially when the zombies have taken over and there are only canned goods available in your neck of the woods.

Paper towels. They aren’t great for the environment but sometimes they are necessary. If you’re worried about the planet carry a bundle of rags, and when they run out grab your stash of paper towels to clean up the beer you just spilled all over your Muskoka chair.

Ice. This is the most important thing to have in your kit. The kit that reads “Crazy for Cottages” and contains the aforementioned super duper can opener and 100% recycled paper towels. Going to the cottage means ice cold beer, lemonade and hot hot sun. You need ice.

Garbage bags. Leave it like you found it. That means no old issues of the National Enquirer or empty cans of gingembre, no burnt out sparklers or paper plates stained with rib sauce. Clean it all up and load it in the back of the Volvo big daddy.

Bug spray. It doesn’t matter what time of day or night or even what time of year – there will always be mosquitoes and they will always be hungry for your blood. That guy who says he doesn’t need bug spray because “bugs just don’t bother me” will be found dead in a ditch soon, covered in welts and completely drained of DNA. Ontario mosquitoes don’t just like you man, they love you.
Skin so Soft. Call your Avon lady and if you don’t have an Avon lady call your grandma and get in touch with hers. Only Avon sells Skin so Soft and only Skin so Soft can repel even the most ravenous of midnight mosquitoes.

Memory card. The first night at the cottage is the most fun night ever, until the next day when you look at all the pictures you took. Don’t just delete it, throw your memory card out. If you don’t your friends will steal your bundle of rags and your stash of Skin so Soft and put you out to pasture.

Have fun out there, keep it clean and only flush when absolutely necessary.

Baby it’s hot outside!

The perfect weather for salads, grilling, ice cream sandwiches and now, how about a little icy cold soup? We sent out a tweet the other day asking for cold soup recipe suggestions and quickly got overwhelmed by the response.

@JoMakesStuff suggested this chilled chickpea soup with yogurt and mint. @Lucers suggested a beautiful white gazpacho courtesy of Hugh Fearnley-Whittinstall. @SweetKeet recommended a cold raspberry soup with tapioca, garnished with mint leaves and sour green grapes. @ikapai and @saskyah both recommended chilled tomato soup using roasted tomatoes and dill. So many unique recipe ideas, how to choose?

A peek in the fridge helped make the decision. A head of romaine lettuce, a tub of plain yogurt, and a healthy dill bush in the front yard. Sauteed onions deglazed with white wine and simmered in chicken stock with a few new potatoes made the base. They were then blitzed up with chopped zuchinni, romaine, a few handfuls of frozen petit pois and a beautiful cold soup was born. Once chilled just garnish with plain yogurt and a sprinkle of dill. You could get fancy with some smoked salmon or caviar. Serve with champagne.

Not a clubhouse, or a BLT, not ham & swiss or tofurkey and tomato. We’re talking about a different kind of sandwich people! The greatest sandwich you could ever have in the blazing heat of summer. Ice cream sandwiches!

Bake your cookies late at night. It sounds crazy but it is much better than cranking the oven in the heat of the day. Try to make the cookies all a similar size and keep them as thin as possible because each sandwich will use two. Chocolate chip with vanilla filling, peanut butter with chocolate, oatmeal with butterscotch, sugar cookies with strawberry….the possibilities are endless. After the cookies have baked let them cool on a rack. Make some space in your freezer and bring out the ice cream you’ll be using, it will need to temper for 20 minutes or so at room temperature.

Once the ice cream is nice and soft (scoop from the sides, it gets softest there) you can begin. Scoop some ice cream onto the bottom side of a cookie and spread it around, put the other cookie on top and gently squish together. Run your finger around the middle to smooth out the filling and place sandwich on tray in freezer to set.

You can also roll the sandwich in a garnish to add more flavour and character. Roll the ice cream centre through shredded coconut, chopped nuts, sprinkles or cereal like Rice Krispies or Corn Flakes.

This is the perfect treat for summer, easier to distribute than a cake and it doesn’t even require plates, just lots of napkins!

It was officially Canada Day yesterday but that doesn’t mean we can’t celebrate all weekend. This is the best time of the year for Canadians. We get to drink a few beers in the sun and set off a lot of fireworks at night. Whether you’re grilling some fresh caught trout up at the cottage or roasting veggie dogs over a hibachi on a tiny downtown deck enjoy the blue skies, gentle breezes, the free healthcare and all that is great about our county.

There is so much that is great about this land, where to start?

the Tragically Hip, Stompin’ Tom, Anne Murray, Buffy Saint Marie, Alanis, Justin Beiber, the Kids In the Hall, Four on the Floor, Codco, SCTV, This Hour, Rick Mercer, John Candy, Pam Anderson, Shannon Tweed, Shania Twain, Celine Dion, Josee Chouinard, Kurt Browning, Barbara Frum (what?).

Hamilton Tiger Cats, Montreal Canadiens, Toronto Blue Jays, PEI lobster, Alberta Beef, B.C. oysters, Newfie Screech, Moosehead beer, poutine, rappie pie, sugar pie, flipper pie, Vachon cakes.

Pierre Trudeau, Brian Mulroney’s chin, Jean Chretien, hockey, CFL, lacrosse, ringette, Chief Dan George, the Beachcombers, Prairie Gas, Wayne Gretzky, Mike Weir, loonies, toonies, Roll up the rim, Tim Horton’s, White Spot, Beaver Gas, Shoppers, Canadian Tire.

Farley Mowat, Margaret Atwood, Stephen Leacock, Diana Krall, Ben Hepner, Measha Bruggergosman, Great Big Sea, Ashley McIsaac, Rita MacNeil, the Trailer Park Boys, Rush, Bob and Doug MacKenzie, and oh that free health care….

Every time we use the barbecue we’re always left with a bunch of beautiful coals after our grilling is done. The steak is ready for the table, the grilled potatoes are already being tossed with olive oil and chives and the zuchinni is dressed with basil and chevre. Dinner is ready, but what about those lovely coals?

It’s a shame to let them go to waste. Here’s a great way to use them up, make an easy dessert at the same time and stock your freezer with one of summer’s greatest treats.

After dinner, grab a bunch of sticks, a bag of marshmallows and a plate. Start toasting the marshmallows over the glowing embers of your barbecue (be sure to remove the grate first). Eat as many as you want and save the rest on the plate, it takes a few tries but you will soon find the perfect degree of doneness to get the marshmallow from stick to plate without dissolving into a sticky mess.

Take the plate and put it in the freezer for an hour or so then pull it out, pop the now frozen roasted delights off the plate and into a freezer bag. You now have a supply of roasted marshmallow to pull out and slice or chop as a garnish for sundaes, blitzed into milkshakes or chilled into a Jell-o mold.

We are enjoying the sunny days of summer and most of us are cooking every dinner outside. It’s that time of year to give the  kitchen stove a rest and spend some time with the beloved barbecue.

What’s your favourite condiment? What makes for the perfect barbecue party?

We asked, you answered and here are the lovingly compiled results.

The majority of you like to make your own homemade BBQ sauce rather than use store-bought, but when you do buy it from the store you stick to President’s Choice.

Hank Hill would be very pleased, you chose propane over charcoal as your go-to incendiary unit.

Out of the following choices for favourite food to grill – steak, chicken, hot dogs, burgers, pork chops, eggplant, fish, shish kebabs – you chose steak. With shish kebabs coming in second and eggplant (?!?) in third. The porkchop got no love at all with 0% of the vote. Poor little pork chop.

When you cook that steak most of you like it between rare and medium, but 9.1% cook it blue rare!

When it comes to essential burger toppings, you’re not crazy about mayo, avocado, relish or banana peppers (each 16.3%) and you hardly give bacon a passing glance (only 8%). Lettuce, cheese & pickles get you more excited (each 33%) than sliced tomoato (25%) but not as much as red onion (41.7%). That just leaves the top two – ketchup and mustard. Who do you think was on top?

Ketchup did very well with 50% but mustard took the win with a whopping 83.3% of the vote. What an upset for ketchup, he thought he had this one in the bag. Mustard, the little underdog of the competitive condiment scene, reigns supreme.

Finally we asked you what the secret to a great barbecue party is and you overwhelmingly replied “Cold beer!”

While we definitely have to agree, we would also like to share a few more responses with you.

“Simple good quality food. None of that pre-fabricated, mass-produced, chemical laden crap.”

“Cold bevvies and good friends…even if someone burns the burgers you can still have a great time!”

“Sunshine, a kiddie pool, at least one dog and classic rock on the radio.”

“You can’t have a barbecue without watermelon and crack pie.”

“Cold drinks, warm food NOT warm drinks and cold food.”

Follow us on twitter for more surveys in the future.

Happy Birthday!

Here in Canada we don’t have much in the way of food magazines, no Saveur or Food & Wine, no Martha Stewart Living or Cook’s Illustrated. No, we might not have those big glossy tomes, but we’ve got something better.

Small, independent and local magazines like Saltscapes in the Maritimes, Occasions in Alberta, Eat Magazine in British Columbia, and a growing number of Edibles popping up (like our very own Edible Toronto -recently nominated for a 2010 Le Cordon Bleu World Food Media Award. Congratulations Gail!) showcase the unique cuisines of each province.

Instead of one Holy Grail that every chef, cookbook author, restauranteur & sommelier aspires to get their name into, we have many. As readers we are able to read a slew of different writers with vastly varied opinions and voices, rather than a clique of five or six patting the same people on the back month after month.

Today we want to congratulate one such publication, City Bites, the little local magazine that could. Five years in and still going strong. Through the worst era in print the world has ever seen, this little rag kept on publishing. Every few months there would be rumors of it’s demise but then you’d bump into the editor, Dick Snyder, at some charcuterie-laden schmooze-fest and he’d be all smiles handing out copies of the latest edition hot off the press.

With superlative content provided by the brilliant minds of John Szabo, John Gundy, Konrad Ejbich, Signe Langford, Malcolm Jolley, Maia Filar, Eric Vellend and many others, Dick has managed to provide this city with a magazine that speaks honestly and passionately about our food and wine scene. It is not sponsored by Hellman’s or dependent on ad revenue from MacDonald’s, and while the content may be skewed to our neck of the woods it still maintains a finger on the pulse of the food world at large.

Celebrate with Dick and the whole City Bites family tonight at the Drake Hotel. Everyone is welcome, free h’or d’ouevres provided by Hall’s Kitchen, the Drake and Madeleines, Cherry Pie & Ice Cream.

Please take a moment to read this message. It’s about a great opportunity that exists for us to shape the way our city engages with food, and it’s something I believe in quite strongly. I send this message to all of you in the supportive and collaborative spirit that exists among our kitchens. – Joshna Maharaj

(This message was originally sent to city chefs, but due to considerable enthusiasm from others, I’d like to extend this invitation to anyone who cares about food.  Please join us at city hall next Tuesday and lend your support to a great new vision for food in our city.  Also, you can show solidarity with chefs in their whites by wearing an apron to the meeting.)

There is a new food strategy being planned for our city. The Toronto Food Policy Council, in partnership with the Medical Officer of Health has created a brilliant 6-point strategy for food system renewal in this city. The goal of this strategy is to “unlock food’s potential to contribute to personal health, vibrant neighbourhoods and a great city.”

You are all food industry professionals, who have chosen Toronto as your home. You understand the glory of the diversity and authenticity available to us in this city, and I’m sure, have your favourite spots for dumplings, brunch & burgers. Food is the city’s number one service and industrial supplier, boasting annual sales of $7 billion. This strategy recognizes the holistic nature of food…that every one of our challenges have food connections.

This food strategy also offers a great opportunity to strengthen our city and raise its profile. Our diverse restaurant sector alone is a signature of Toronto’s creative edge, and taking these next steps in food leadership can help Toronto reach its social, economic and environmental goals. This is about the untapped potential of food to address a wide range of urban priorities.

For a while now, I’ve been going on about the role that chefs can play in advocating for social change. Now, more than ever, food needs a champion, an advocate, and I am convinced that chefs are the perfect people to answer this call. In some way, we all work in the service of food, and we understand its power. The first reason for people to collect around a fire was to share a meal, and as chefs, we have the responsibility of nurturing and preserving this very primal human tradition.

On Tuesday June 1, this food strategy will be presented to the Board of Health. As with all city government meetings, the public is welcome to both attend and address the committee regarding the issues they’re about to consider. This is where you all come in: I am going to speak to the committee, urging them to endorse and fully support this food strategy, on behalf of the food and hospitality industry. The dream is that we could fill that meeting room with as many chefs in their whites as possible, everyone there to lend their support to this plan and vision for food in our city. This is a very visible way for us to collect and voice our opinions to our government on one day at a meeting, but our celebrity and profile can also draw attention to food and make it a central election issue in the fall.

Here’s what I’m asking for:

Your support for a more sustainable, engaged and celebrated food culture.

One hour of your time, at 12:45pm on Tuesday June 1. Deputations are limited to 5 minutes, and you’re free to leave afterward, though you’re also welcome to stay. The meeting is held at City Hall, 100 Queen Street West, in City Hall Committee Room One. We are first in line, and deputations are given at the beginning of the meeting, which starts at 1pm. Though you are not compelled to speak, and this is simply a request for your presence and support, everyone is entitled to some time at the microphone, if they wish.

I know you’re all busy people, but I wouldn’t ask if this wasn’t so important. If you’ve ever wanted to say something about the way our food system works, or if you’ve ever wished that government would take more leadership in promoting good food, this is your chance to speak and be heard. Please consider this, talk to me if you have any questions, and hopefully join us next Tuesday as we start the conversation that could reconnect everyone in our city to good food.

Please feel free to distribute this to other peeps in the industry, this is totally both a front and back of house issue, and we need all the support we can get. Here’s the link to the city’s website on the strategy, and i’ve attached a pdf of the food strategy to this message as well: http://wx.toronto.ca/inter/health/food.nsf

With my sincerest thanks and warm regards,

Joshna

Here we will introduce you to the young, passionate entrepreneurs behind some of the products on our shelves. These are the people who are helping to shape the way we eat with their new and innovative products.

Hall’s Kitchen

Katherine Hall, Executive Chef

At Hall’s Kitchen we believe in healthy, handcrafted vegetarian foods that are made with fresh, wholesome ingredients of the highest quality and prepared without the use of chemicals, preservatives or additives. We recently launched a new and unique line of vegan soups and stews that are doing very well in many specialty food and health food stores around Toronto and the GTA. All of our soups and stews are made fresh, are GMO free, gluten free, dairy and yeast free.

Each one of our products is also carefully made by hand, not machine, and is slow cooked in small batches in stainless steel soup kettles.

Where did you start out in the food world?

I did my apprenticeship at George Brown in Toronto in the 80’s and my first job was at the Ramada Inn. I spent 3 years at the Ramada where I worked through all the different kitchen stations including saucier, garde manger, pastry, butchery, banquet service etc. After that, I took a position with The McGill Club in Toronto as saucier and soon afterwards became Chef de Cuisine for the Accor Group – a European hotel chain (eg. Novotel). With the Accor Group I had the opportunity to train in France and then held Executive Chef titles at several major hotels, resorts and restaurants in southern Ontario.

What inspires you to do what you do?

I think that the aspects of plate design, menu and recipe development feed the creative side of my personality and knowing that people enjoy eating the food I’ve worked hard to make for them, feeds my nurturing side. Being a chef is a very satisfying career for me, it always has been. With soup in particular, they are heart warming, comfort foods. When someone is sick, people will bring them soup. There is something very healing and therapeutic about a hot bowl of soup. I also like how so many different flavours can be layered together in just one soup or stew dish.

Why make vegetarian soup?

We originally started with chicken in our Bangkok Curry Coconut soup actually, but found that the shelf life was considerably less with meat than without meat. Meat can spoil quickly and to be honest, after all the processed meat scares this past year with the listeria outbreaks etc. we just didn’t want to work with meat. I’m a “flexitarian” not a vegetarian currently, but I can see  myself becoming a vegetarian in future.

Fresh vegetables are just so much cleaner and easier to work with. People can add their own meat to our soups and stews if they want. It’s a fresher way to eat in any case. And, now the vegans have some more interesting options to eat!

What has been the biggest struggle or obstacle you’ve had to overcome in order to get your product onto shelves?

I think the biggest struggle was finding the right space to set up our production kitchen. It took months to find the right space and it was incredibly frustrating! It was like shopping for your first home all over again. We finally found this great space in the west end with lots of light, high ceilings and lots of artists as well as other small food companies and caterers around. It’s the perfect creative space for me to work and get inspired!