Restaurant: Savera

Food critic Joanne Kates once glowingly reviewed an Indian restaurant in Toronto. During the course of the glowing review she said how it was so nice that there was finally an Indian restaurant that catered to the upper class. All the others, you see, were centered on serving the plebeians and thus could not devote the proper resources to preparing sauces and such (I'm paraphrasing, but not by much). Savera is not the kind of chic-chic Indian place that Kates was lauding. It's a cute, small family-owned place that has good food.



Like many Indian places, I find the waiters are very attentive and are always refilling my water glass. I like having water, though the problem is I inevitably drink it whereupon it is filled up again and the cycle continues. The end result is that I leave the restaurant having had far too many glasses of water. We maybe ordered a little too much food – though its never a bad thing to have leftovers. We started off with samosa, which were solid – not great. Next we had some naan and rice (we had too much naan and not enough rice) with the Aloo Gobi, Channa Masala and Dal Makhani.



I really liked the Aloo Gobi, though then again I always like the Aloo Gobi. As always, I secretly prefer the potato element. The Dal was a little soupy, but that wasn't a problem for me when spooned over rice. The chickpeas weren't my favourite but they did a pretty good job with them. For those who like that sort of thing, the ambience was very nice: there was a lot of light and the interior was pretty. All in all, an enjoyable meal.

Savera Indian Cusine
815 St Clair Avenue West, Toronto, ON

I'm bored of cheap and cheerful

The Wall Street Journal reports that the reccession is causing consumers to shift away from premium beers. And – btw – by "premium" they're referring to beers like fraking Budweiser so its even worse from a beer snobs perspective. Ironically, I'm going the other way [That's not what ironic means! Was Alanis Morisette your english teacher --ed]. I have decided to move away from cheap beer.

Oh we had some good times, cheap beer and I. I fondly remember drinking, say, warm Lakeport Honey at parties. Heck, I was drinking Lakeport before it cool: back when it was a lucky find at The Beer Store. I thought the romance would never end. But lately, I've felt a sense of estrangment from buck-a-bottles. I've been feeling this way for a while but I think what clinched it was last week when I was having some beers with my friends at our old drinking hole. We were drinking their sourbrew house ($8 a pitcher!) but after a couple of pints I felt sick. If I'm going to feel sick from drinking I expect to be drunker!

So goodbye, cheap beer. Its not like I'm going to turn into one of the aforementioned beer snobs (not that there's anything wrong with that). Probably, I'll just be drinking Steamwhistle or Sleemans or even Keiths. How will I afford it? Drink more at home/parties and less at bars. Or brew my own beer. Or brew my own mead! I can put a beehive round back.

Note to my foreign readers (yes, I do have readers in other countries or, more accurately, people who have visited TFV from other countries): Steamwhistle, Sleemans, Keiths and Lakeport are all Canadian beer companies. I guess that should be "Canadian" as Sleemans is owned by the Japanese and Keiths and Lakeport are owned by the Belgians. The Beer Store is a business that has a monopoly on selling beer in Ontario for the protection of the public. Naturally, it is also not owned by Canadian companies (although, technicially speaking no one can "own" a corporation as they are legally people). The monopoly is limited as you can buy beer from, inter alia, the LCBO: a government-controlled corporation.

Four sad vegetables and their story

As I left Toronto, my parents reminded (via phone) that I could take some food back with me. I grabbed some pasta (because I was out of pasta) but I allow opened up the refrigerator to salvage some food that was just going to sit their until it got thrown out. I felt like a real humanitarian, saving those vegetables (though I guess they probably would've prefer a slow rot than a fast burn). I retreived an old cauliflower, a fragment of a red onion, part of a cabbage and a piece of celery that was actually holding up pretty well.

I decided I would turn these into a meal. Unfortunately, it did not end as well as I hoped. I decided that you, the reader, might be tired of my 3CSBOOS (curry/cumin/cayenne/small bit of other spice, pronounced three cees booze) method of cooking so I decided to do some experimenting.

Four Vegetable Experiment

1 onion, chopped

The four vegetables above (say 1/4 cabbage, 1/2 red onion, medium cauliflower and 1/2 celery stack)

1 carrot, chopped

2 cloves garlic, minced

1/2 tbsp soy sauce

1/2 tbsp vineger

1 teaspoon chili paste

1 teaspoon black bean paste

Rice

Start cooking the rice – I used my rice method. This gives a 20 minute opportunity to cook the vegetables on medium-high. I added the onions to the pan and started steaming the cauliflower. 5 minutes later I added the red onion and celery. 5 minutes after that, the carrot. 5 minutes after that the garlic, cabbage, steamed cauliflower and sauces. I cooked it for 5 minutes until the rice was done.

Serves 2

So what went wrong? In a word, blandness. Now, I liked the vegetables fine but there was no kick. I had made a rocky mistake and underspiced, fearing an outcome that was too salty or too vinegary. But all is not lost! Note the "serves 2". Tomorrow, I will reheat the leftovers and add more flavourings. Hopefully, it will be a better dish.

Restaurant: Mexitaco

Mexitaco is a wretched little restaurant. That means that this review will be less promotional than the others I have written, therefore there will be none of the accoutrement in other reviews. To make up for that, I will write up the evening akin to the game of Fortunately/Unfortunately.

Fortunately, I was going to Nazereth with my friends.
Unfortunately, it was closed for renovations.
Fortunately, that meant that, hopefully, when it reopened there would be more room.
Unfortunately, we didn't have anywhere to eat and we were hungry.
Fortunately, there was a mexican place nearby.
Unfortunately, one of my friends had a bad feeling about it and didn't want to go inside.
Fortunately, we convinced him it would be good.
Unfortunately, we were very wrong.
Fortunately, we didn't know that yet and had some delicious guacomole (though as Chris Rock says you shouldn't get credit for shit you supposed to do and its easy to make good guacomole).
Unfortunately, the entrees were about $10 each (way overpriced for the quality as we shall see).
Fortunately, the rice was alright.
Unfortunately, the burrito that I ordered had not-particularly-great beans and as for the vegetables... The vegetables were insipid carrots, peas and lima beans whose flavour had been cruelly boiled away. I thought I had gone to a Mexican restaurant – not WASP family dinner from the 1950s.
Fortunately, well actually there weren't any more fortunatelys there...
Unfortunately, there was a piece of chicken clinging to the bottom of my friend's quesadilla. When we brought it up the waitress basically shrugged it off. Then, after we'd paid for the $42 meal amongst the 3 of us with 3 twenties, she had the chutzpah to ask if we wanted change.
Fortunately, I bought a cheap Korean dvd from a random Korean dvd store afterwards.
Unfortunately, I then walked past Tacos El Asador which would've been a far better restaurant.

Mexitaco
No, I'm not giving an address – I'm not going to make it easier for people to find this awful place

Restaurant: Khmer Thai

It's a bit disingenuous of me to review Khmer Thai as a restaurant. Sure, it has my usual likes in a restaurant: not expensive, a little shabby and vegetarian selections but that's not why I go.



I only go to eat a Cambodian tofu dish I used to eat all the time back in Kingston. Alas, I haven't been able to get back to Kingston recently and thus have not been able to have the real thing at Cambodiana Restaurant. I had it last when I was in town for a wedding, staying at my grandfather's empty condominium. Everything had been cleared out for his move to Toronto, leaving rooms hauntingly devoid of anything. I sat on the floor (as there were no tables), eating the tofu with a plastic spoon (as there was not cutlery) and hoping not to drop anything and stain the carpet. That's a rather long winded way of saying that since then I have to get my spicy basil-chili-tofu fix at Khmer Thai:



I generally don't like sweetness in my meals but this dish combines sweet, sour and hot beautifully together. If this dish doesn't sound appealing to you, I can't recommend this restaurant in good conscience. After all, I'm only in it for the tofu.

Khmer Thai
1018 St Clair Avenue West, Toronto, Ontario

More Absorption

In what I hope won't become a trend, I'm going to yet again recap one of my earlier entries– infusion pasta. I could say that the recipe below is sufficiently distinguishable from the first post – which is true – but that's not the whole story. Really, I don't know if the first post made the best argument for absorption pasta. Firstly, the picture is kinda ugly. If a parodist wanted to aim low and lampoon my blog they would probably start by noting the number of dishes that resemble some sort of brown (or dark orange) mess on a plate. When I'm trying to preach a new form of pasta making I should've probably led with a more vibrant colour (to say nothing of grounding it in tradition with tomato sauce). Secondly, its about twice as fast because you don't need to boil the water first. Thirdly, you don't have to bother with straining the pasta. Straining isn't the end of the world but its difficult if you have a full sink and a big pot. WIth this method, it just goes right on your plate. Finally, I mentioned that it was a better method for the environment but didn't break it down: If everyone in the US cooked pasta this way it would save half a million gallons of oil. Here I use whole what pasta – you don't need to of course – which I think really benefits from this style of cooking:

Whole Wheat Absorption Pasta with Tomato Sauce

Pasta

1 cup whole wheat pasta

2 cups liquid
Tomato Sauce

1 can (28 ounces) tomatoes

1 large carrot, chopped

1 onion, diced

3 cloves garlic, minced

Sautée the onion in the oil on medium-high for a few minutes. Put some oil in a pot, turn to high and add the pasta and then the liquid. Cook for the normal pasta cooking time. Normally I use stock, but for this meal I used a mixture of 1 part chickpea liquid to 1 part water (from cooking dried chickpeas, not that awful liquid from a can. More on that story later). I turned out quite well, I think. Meanwhile add the garlic, carrot and then the tomatoes to the onions. Turn down to medium and simmer for about 10 minutes. Puree and pour some over the pasta.

Serves 1, but its easily scalable.

Observent persons may notice that there are no mentions of mushrooms in the recipe, yet the picture shows mushrooms. That's because I made the pasta sauce in advance (that recipe will sauce many different meals) and sauteed some mushrooms for this meal. I don't know if I'd really recommend having three burners on the go as a routine matter as I did talk up environmental considerations.

"Thy head is as full of quarrels as an egg is full of meat"

I've always compared vegetarianism to Judaism, we look down on those less observant but think those more observant than us are crazy (I guess I'd proably be a equivalent of Conservative; the vegans are Lubavitchers). Yet veganism does have a compelling intellectual draw for vegetarians. If its wrong to eat a chicken, then why is it right to eat its eggs produced as they are by a killing of male chicks and locking the female ones up in a tiny cage where they are treated horribly? I don't have a particularly good answer for that, though I guess I can say I'd never, for example, murder a Congolese child but I did buy a cellphone that is produced, in part, by the death and exploitation of people in the Congo. There are actually long periods of time I am effectively vegan, I don't eat out that often and I don't usually use a lot of animal products in my house. Now is not one of those times though, I took the advice of my co-workers and bought some eggs. While you can use eggs for many things, I'd like to sing the praises of the softboiled egg. Many people don't particularly care for egg yolks, but they are glorious here: like silky delicious lava.

Soft-Boiled Eggs

Egg

Boil water in a small pot. Place the egg in the pot with a spoon and set it to a simmer. Cook for about 4 minutes and extract the egg.

Serves 1.

Let us have lentils

So I've had this blog for – what – a month? And I'm already doing another dahl recipe. But I guess there are sufficient enough differences. The usual caveats about inauthenticity apply. Though, of course, the concept of inauthenticity itself is quite problematic. I once read a review of a Toronto Indian restaurant praising it as "authentic" while slamming other Toronto Indian restaurants as "inauthentic". The highlighted item had chili peppers, potatoes and tomatoes in it: all foods from the Americas and thus recent arrivals in India.

Dahl With Lettuce

1/4 cup red lentils

1 cup water or stock

1/4 cup rice

oil or butter

1 onion, diced

1 chili pepper, minced

2-3 cloves garlic, minced

1 cup lettuce, chopped

1/2 tbsp curry powder

1/2 tbsp cumin
Combine the lentils and the stock in a pot on medium-high. Wait till it boils and then turn to medium-low cook for about 15-20. Prepare the rice, maybe using this blog's rice recipe.

Sautee the onions on medium-high in the oil or butter for ten minutes. Add the garlic and chilli and cook for 5 minutes. With a few minutes left add the lettuce

Combine the lentils and the vegetables. Serve either on top of the rice.

Serves 1.

Is There No Lemon Balm In Gilead?

As I've mentioned I have a bit of a garden. It's tiny, but I get some food out of it. My neighbours, on the other hand, have a gigantic garden – one even vaster than I thought because it also takes up a hill on a side of their property (as I wrote "their property" I mentally felt one of my professors hitting me upside the head). Occasionally, some of the garden's bounty will end up with me, e.g. some of the chili plants came from there. The other day, we were talking about the herb section of her garden and I received some lemon balm. Lemon balm is an herb that can be turned into a delicious, calming tea. It wasn't the only thing in the garden that was tea-worthy: Catnip, apperently, can become a medicinal tea. Tastes awful though.

Lemon Balm Tea

Lemon Balm Leaves

Boiling Water
Add 2 tablespoons of fresh leaves for each cup of boiling water.

The tea had a nice subtle lemon flavour. I'm currently letting some of the leaves dry out and will try it again with dried leaves (where the proportion is 1 tablespoon per cup of boiling water).

The Red Pill is a Lie

Ezra Klein has a great post up at the IFA (actually I found it first at his Washington Post blog, but as this is a foodblog I should probably link likewise). The backstory is that a foodie sneered at another foodie for liking an upscale chain restaurant. The sneeree challanged the sneerer to visit said restaurant and if they didn't enjoy the Miso Salmon the sneeree would buy 15 copies of the sneerer's book. The sneerer lost.

As Klein says:
Foodies have an unfortunate tendency to alight on a Unified Field Theory of Corporate Food: It’s bad for the environment and bad for workers and bad for animals and bad for waistlines and, above all that, a fraud, because it also tastes bad. This would be convenient, if true. If people weren’t actually enjoying what they were eating, then getting them to change their eating habits would be pretty easy. But it’s not true, of course. They keep going back to the Cheesecake Factory because, well, they like it.

This rings very true to me. I like the cookbooks I have, but they have the annoying habit of saying stuff like "this is so much better than the stuff you'll get in restaurants" and such, but often its not necessarily true. For example, the Moosewood Restaurant Low-Fat Favourites says of their Asian Noodle Soup: "This soup is so much better than the freeze-dried ramen noodle sopus in the supermarket, there is no comparison. And you'll feel good that your soup is filled with fresh wholesome ingredients instead of who knows what." Well, the second part may be true but the first part an overstatement at best and just wrong at worst. Raman noodles are, in fact, often better and always comparable.* Which makes sense. When you pack your food with lots of fats and salt they are going to have a inherent taste advantage. That doesn't mean you can't overcome it, but often a lot of the, say, organistas are blind to that simple fact.

Klein's solution is mandatory nutrition labelling for restaurants. Although interesting it might have some downsides. It could impose costs on smaller restaurants that chain restaurants could absorb easier, leading to more chain domination. More ominously it could backfire. Hardee's has embarked on a corporate strategy of embracing their unhealthiness. They flaunt their Monster Thickburger's 1,400+ calories and 107 grams of fat and use the outrage about it to sell burgers. I don't know if I have a solution, but it seems like changing the way we pour billions of dollars into agribusiness might be a good start.

*Plus, the ramen noodles are very cheap and just go in boiling water. The Asian Noodle Soup recipe has a crazy Rube Goldberg construction where part of the recipe is on another page and part of that recipe is on yet another page.

Ketchup Soup!

So all of my past entries have been about soup. This is not entirely a coincidence. I made a big pot of stock, so now I have ready-made broth for all kinds of different soups. Given that all of the soups have yielded leftovers, I suspect I'll be eating (or should that be drinking?) soup for quite some time. Today's meal sounds pretty ghetto*, even for me: especially given the story of how I acquired the ketchup. I wanted some ketchup to put on my veggie burgers so I asked a friend to give me some of her ketchup packages when she bought a lunch. She did, though I was roundly mocked for of it. Still, mockery is worth getting free food. Today's recipe is modified from Mark Bittman's Egg Noodles With Soy Broth so it was probably not entirely on the level for me to go with the title I picked. Still, ketchup is the most unusual ingredient in it. It adds a nice flavour to the soup, but is by no means as overpowering as I feared it might be when I was cooking.

Noodles with Soy-Ketchup Broth

3 cups water/stock

2 tbsp soy sauce

2 tbsp ketchup

1/2 tablespoon rice vinegar

A few drops sesame oil

1 chili, diced

1/2 pound noodles (but see below)

Bring a large pot of water to a boil and salt it. Bring 3 cups of liquid to a boil. I didn't want to go full on stock with this, so I cut 1c stock with 2 cups water. One the stock/water mixture is boiling turn the heat down so the water is only gently bubbling: add the soy sauce, ketchup, vinegar and diced chili. Stir and let simmer. Add the noodles to large pot and cook until they're done, so not yet mushy. Divide noodles into bowls and pour in the broth. Sprinkle with sesame oil.

Serves 2 but without adding something like tofu this isn't a very substantial meal (I had more food after). I'd recommend using this as a starter and serving more people with it.

I actually have no idea how much 1/2 lb of noodles is so I just eyeballed how much Bittman used, and used half that. I probably could've added more. In lieu of sriracha sauce or a dried chili, I used one from my garden.

*I use the term ghetto only in the most respectful sense, e.g. "When I was at Queen's I lived in the student ghetto".

Fiery Chickpea Soup

Mere days after I derided Ben Thanh's "spicy for white people" labelling policy, I fell into the same track with this post's headline. Think of the soup as "Fiery for White People Chickpea Soup". It's got a nice, but not strong, heat to it. I adapted the recipe from The Paupered Chef crowd over at Serious Eats (who in turn adapted it from here who adapted it from here. It's turtles all the way down). The soup is orginally called Tunisian Chickpea Soup, but given that I'm using an asian chili paste I don't know if I should claim that.

Fiery Chickpea Soup

1/2 large onion, chopped

Oil

14 ounce can chickpeas, drained and rinsed

1 1/2 tablespoons olive oil

3 garlic cloves, minced

2 1/2 cups stock

1 teaspoon cumin

1 teaspoon red chili paste, I used Lee Kum Kee's Guilin Chili Sauce

Salt

Pour the oil into a soup pot and turn the heat to medium. Add the onions and cook until translucent. Add the garlic, cook for a minute, and then add the chickpeas, cumin, stock and chili paste. Simmer for 30 minutes. Season with salt, and serve.

Serves 2

Red Lentil Soup

One of my favourite recipes is also one of the simplest and most proasically named. Naturally it involves lentils. The original was from the Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home: Fast and Easy Recipes for Any Day and over the years I have honed the recipe done into simpler and simpler versions. Simple does not mean simplistic, after all. Like chess. Or this recipe.

Red Lentil Soup

1 1/2 cups red lentils

6 cups vegetable stock

5 garlic cloves

2 medium carrots (1 cup)

1 cup canned tomatoes or 1 chopped medium fresh tomato

1 small red or green bell pepper (1/2 cup)

1 1/2 cups choped onions

2 teaspoons cumin

2 teaspoons curry powder

couple of shakes of cinnamon

pinch of cayenne

2 tablespoons soy sauce or lemon juice

Put lentils, stock and garlic in a soup pot, cover and bring to high heat. Chop the vegetables and add to the pot. Bring to a boil, stir and reduce heat. Add the spices. Simmer for 15 minutes, or longer if lentils are not tender. Add the lemon juice or soy sauce. Let sit and blend. Puree, reheat and serve.

Serves 4-6.

You don't actually have to puree this, but I don't like the texture of the lentils if you don't. I guess you could cook the lentils seperately in, say, 3 cups of the stock and then transfer them back into the soup. I had an interesting experience pureeing this particular soup as it hiccoughed some soup out of the top. That's funny, I thought, I guess I didn't attach the lid right. So I tightened the lip and turned it on again. More soup sputtered out. Would that happen again? I wondered. This time the blender vomited up soup all over my kitchen as I tried to turn it off without getting a facefull of hot soup. I guess there's a moral there.

Restaurant: Ben Thanh

Ben Thanh was alright. Is there any more boring way of starting a review? A praiseful review's lyrical prose can make you almost taste the food; a biting review can schadenfreudeistically mince up a place like an onion. Ben Thanh's not bad but not great either. The price's are also alright, in the $9 for an entree range. Alright, but again that's not a great price. To be fair to them, I enjoyed it a lot more the first time I went. When I went on Sunday I had the Saigon Chow Mein so it was probably my fault. I fell into the "spicy for white people" trap, where such restaurants list their mild stuff as medium and their medium stuff as hot. So it was too bland, plus the noodles were too eggy [you didn't like the fact that egg noodles were eggy?! --ed]. The broccoli was great though (though I'm a cheap date with broccoli, doesn't take much to make me like them). Plus, I was looking to go somewhere else but the two restaurants I checked were closed on Sundays (ick).


My parents both had leftovers – a noodle dish and a tofu dish – which they didn't want to cart back to Toronto. So I took them home and poured the tofu and the sauce into the noodles and – like magic! – turned it into a kind of soup. The soup was a lot better than my entree. The tofu was a bit rubbery, but the vegetables were good and it even had a bit of a kick to it. I even ate half of it cold because I like cold spicy things.



Actually just thinking about the soup made me change the name of this post from "Pho-Gettable" to the blander title it has now. The downside is that I might have locked myself in for the banal "Restaurant: [Restaurant's Name]" formula for restaurant reviews. But I don't want to knock it – I've enjoyed most of what I had there (over my two visits and the leftovers) and they have 2 pages of vegetarian options.

Ben Thanh
57 York Street London, Ontario

CSI: My Kitchen

I awoke the day after Canada Day eager to have some toast. That's funny, I thought to myself, I don't remember tearing the bread covering open with my claws and then devouring it on the floor... scattering crumbs and remnants everywhere. After surveying the scene I also didn't remember ripping open all of my staples and scattering them about either.

Surveying the damage, the intruder had ate my bread and torn through my pasta, cornmeal, lentils (two types) and barley. I decided to throw everything that was pawed through out, given some the diseases animals carry. So I guess I draw my frugal line at "might contain brain-eating parasites".

The intruder entered through the window, I guess I hadn't secured the screen enough. At this point I'm guess it was a raccoon, squirrel or crackhead. A crackhead who wanted bread I guess.

Half Baked

I'm not much of a baker (aside from rice that is). Calling myself an intuitive cook might flatter me, but I have a very ad hoc approach to cooking. You can get away with that with cooking. Baking though, is a science. I have a series of horrible baking disasters under my belt that would make your hair turn white if you were really into baking or just generally very sensitive. Still, I had promised I'd bring in something for all of us working on Canada Day so I made some of my mom's peanut butter cookies:

Irresistible Peanut Butter Cookies

3/4 cup peanut butter

1/2 cup butter

1 1/4 cup firmly packed brown sugar

1 egg

3 tbsp milk

1 tsp vanilla

1 3/4 cup flour

3/4 tsp baking soda

3/4 tsp salt

Preheat to 375°
1. Cream peanut buter, butter, sugar, egg, milk and vanilla in large bowl until smooth and creamy.
2. Combine four, baking soda and salt. Add to creamed mixture gradually, beating at low speed until thoroughly blended.
3. Drop by rounded tablespoons onto ungreased baking sheets. I f desired press wit fork
4. Bake at 375 for 7-8 minutes or until set and just beginning to brown. Cool slightly, then remove to cooling rack
If you want, you can add chocolate chips at the end of mixing--about a cup.

Given what I said above, you can assume everything did not go perfectly. It did not. Kids, here's a simple tip for baking. Check whether you have the ingredients before you start baking. I did not. I didn't have any brown sugar, milk or vanilla extract though these could be replaced by, respectively, white sugar, water and nothing. As I was mixing everything together I noticed I didn't have enough flour or sugar. I decided to eyeball the baking soda and add a heaping 1/2 tsp. I ended up cooking them slightly longer in the oven but they turned out good. So I guess this story has a happy ending.