Char Siu Pork in Lettuce Cups Served at a Launch for “Farm to Table”
It was the year 2005. In search of a geographical cure with an escape to the bucolic countryside, I moved lock, stock and barrel from the big smoke of downtown Toronto where I had lived and worked for 30 years to the small rural Ontario town of Stratford – the land famous for swine and Shakespeare.
This article appeared in the Toronto Star on December 28,2008.
Home for the holidays? ‘Tis the perfect time for relaxing between festivities to savour some screen cuisine.
Happily, there’s no shortage of tasty offerings on several channels.
In particular, our appetite for food TV is unstoppably fed by Food Network Canada’s eclectic 24-hour menu, one that has attracted an ever-burgeoning, increasingly varied audience since it was launched in the fall of 2000.
Being snowed in, as I was last Saturday, can be a good thing. On this occasion, cooking seemed like the ideal way to spend the day inside as I watched the blanket of snow reach several feet high outside my kitchen window.
In case you didn’t catch my chat with host Jeff Goodes on Fresh Air on CBC Radio on Saturday morning, January 27, here’s a list of places I mentioned during our discussion about eating out in winter:
Down the Street, Stratford, Ontario, especially for its warm welcome but also for the cozy decor and excellent food.
When my daughter came back from a recent trip to Sri Lanka, she brought some loose black tea in a plain paper package. Knowing that this country, formerly called Ceylon, is prime tea-growing land, I had high hopes for those aromatic leaves.
I was right. They brewed up the most deliciously balanced, flavourful yet not at all bitter, slightly sweet cuppa. With milk and a little sugar, as I like to drink tea, this was unequalled.
A couple of years ago, I moved to Stratford, Ont., a lovely city of 30,000 about an hour-and-a-half’s drive south-west of Toronto nestled in the snow belt on the scenic river Avon amid farm country. It’s home to a famous theatre festival, pig farming, car part factories and a well-known chefs school. A real town with enough eccentricity to welcome a vintage-clad urban type like moi who’s wont to call it the land of Shakespeare, swine and swans.
