I'll Try Anything Once

Well, maybe not anything. But someday I think I will have to try the larvae-colonized cheese, casu marzu.

Derived from Pecorino, casu marzu goes beyond typical fermentation to a stage most would consider decomposition, brought about by the digestive action of the larvae of the cheese fly Piophila casei.

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Some people clear the larvae from the cheese before consuming while others do not.

Moonlighting

And in the category of "don't quitcher day job", I would like to point out that I also write occasionally for the wonderful food blog Vivre Pour Manger. I'm sure I've mentioned it before, but plugging it every now and again doesn't hurt. Everyone who writes for Vivre Pour Manger is an amateur food lover and cook and all around great person, including Tiffany, with whom I once took a cooking course taught by Rob Rainford at George Brown. Plus, pretty pictures of food! Bon Appetit!

Tiny Heart Attacks for Everyone!

I made miniature KFC Double Downs in my kitchen!

Mmm... Georgia...

As discovered on This American Life's Georgia Rambler episode.

I think I have a bacon problem...

Synthetically Delicious

Two days ago scientists from the J. Craig Venter Institute reported in ScienceXpress that they have managed to create a viable cell whose genetic material was entirely produced by humans. The AP has posted an interview with the namesake of the Institute (and the final author of the 24 on the paper) to their youtube channel.

I especially like all the Science going on in the background. People swirling flasks of brightly coloured liquid make me feel so much better about the whole thing.

Venter expresses some concern about potential uses for this technology. To that end, Longo's has released their very first synthetic life-form for solving the world hunger problem. I give you the pizzacherry tree:

Review: Tati Bistro

Disclaimer: I am not a food critic. I did, however, grow up on extremely good food. I have worked in kitchens. I also have a food theory course taught by a Food Network celebrity under my belt as well. So everything I say is perhaps amateurish, but not entirely ungrounded.

I had my second meal ever at Tati Bistro tonight. The first time was when I treated L for her birthday. We had a lot of (very good, 2007 Bon Courage Shiraz) wine that night. Since I was treating L, I had to very discreetly read the bill. Also, the lighting in the Bistro is... understated. I put down what I thought was a fairly generous tip (since the service had been excellent) and left. On awaking the next morning, I did a little mental math in a slightly more sober state and decided that there`s no way the bill came to what I had originally thought. I should have been a good $20 more. I realized that I must`ve stiffed the waitress.

Not being one to stiff a waitress, and certainly not when the service was as good as it had been, I returned the next day to set things right. The maître d’ hunted through the previous night`s bills to find one that matched my order. Finally, he asked which credit card I had used. I told him I`d paid cash, at which point he said it was hopeless, they didn`t keep the cash bills past the end of the night. I described my waitress and he said he could go ask her, disappearing into the basement. She hadn`t remembered being shafted. So, either I didn`t misread the bill, or I got away with leaving a lousy tip and not being remembered for it.

Tonight we took L`s mom there for Mother`s Day.

The ambiance at Tati Bistro is about what you`d expect from a modern trendy downtown restaurant: a little loud, a little crowded and a little underlit. However, the food and service more than make up for these shortcomings.

Tonight I had the baked goat cheese salad. Delicious. Excellent balance between the baked, breaded goat cheese, the croutons and the greens. My entrèe was the steak frites. The frites were exactly the crispy thin frites you`d expect from a French bistro and the steak was extremely flavourful and cooked to perfection. For desert we ordered the cheese platter to share between the four of us. I can definitely recommend the camembert, the chevrot cendrée and an Ontario cowsmilk cheese whose name escapes me.

I also had the housemade cassis sorbet. To. Die. For. And I know frozen desserts. The extremely generous portion of crème brûlée also received rave reviews from the guest of honour.

The prices at Tati Bistro are quite reasonable; two can eat well with with a bottle of wine and either appetizer OR dessert for around $100. This number can come down a bit (or add the delicious, aforementioned cheese plate) if one can make it when the prix fixé menu is available.

My only complaint about the evening (and it is a mild one) is that the waitress was slightly less attentive that the ideal. She was quite friendly and emminently knowledgeable about the menu (which is surprisngly hard to find in Toronto, in my experience). But she just didn't come 'round quite often enough. It is also possible that this is because she was a little starstruck: in the corner opposite our table sat Rachael McAdams, treating her own mother.

It's What's For Dinner

Yay! Green things finally come from Ontario again! Not many; just asparagus and baby spinach, really. It's early in the growing season yet. In any case, in our ongoing effort to try to eat more locally, L and I had this for dinner last night. L had hers without the tomatoe sauce. It was de-freakin-licious, I highly recommend it.

And since I can't miss an opportunity to get up on my soap box, this is a friendly reminder that when you eat food grown locally in season you get fresher, more healthful, more delicious food and you put less pollution into the air. It's win-win-win. Your tongue, your waistline* and your lungs will all thank you. So next time you're at the grocery store, take a second to check where it was grown before you buy it.

* I'm assuming that you're choosing local produce over some processed thing full of junk ingredients, here.

Guilty Pleasures

In the last few years I have learned a lot about nutrition. My first foray into that controversial cesspool of knowledge was a book called The Longevity Diet. The idea goes something like this:

In the 30s, an Italian researcher needed dwarf mice for an experiment. So he starved them and sure enough they were tiny. However, a strange thing happened: they lived 50 to 60% longer than normal lab mice. Nobody really paid much attention to this til years later. Now there have been experiments performed on a variety of different types of organisms and it turns out that if you greatly reduce the amount of food a creature eats, it lives longer. Unfortunately, as primates tend to have long lifespans, it's hard to say yet whether this effect actually carries over to humans.

I usually get one of two reactions to this: 1) you are insane; 2) it only feels like you live 50% longer if you don't eat a lot of food. However, living longer is not the real reason I think this book is important. If you eat only the very minimum amount of food required to survive, you have to be extremely careful about what that food contains: simply starving yourself is going to have the opposite effect. So the calorie restriction people have done a lot of research into what things are very important in human nutrition and done an excellent job of compiling that information in the Longevity Diet.

Not a day goes by that I don't hear about the obesity epidemic. I'm never really sure what causes it: ignorance, stupidity, or laziness. I expect the reason varies on an individual basis and exists as a continuum. The internet, however, is perfect for fixing the first cause and so, many people have put up blogs and suchlike in the name of educating people about what they're actually eating, or, in some cases just guilting people into eating better.

If I'm busy, I forget about food. Then, along comes one of these delicious looking links and bam, I'm drooling all over my keyboard thinking "mmm.... blizzard." Or worse, wandering down the hall to the snack machine wishing I had some gravy and cheese curds to put on my overpriced bag of doritos.

I suppose the one consolation in all this is that, whether or not they are helping curb the obesity epidemic, they are at least helping to spur the economic recovery, one chili-cheese-pizza-dog at a time.