Tag Archives: food

Get Spring Ready with The Seed Library!

Seed Library

With food prices remaining stubbornly high and a greater focus on healthy, organic and sustainable living, growing your food from scratch has never been more tempting. We’re proud to partner with York Region Food Network to help make this dream a reality by giving you the seeds and know-how to get started. This year, we will host a series of gardening-related programs, which will provide step-by-step instructions on growing plants and getting the best out of your edible garden.

The current program lineup is as follows:

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Food of the Gods

Chocolate by Kay Frydenborg

In 1947, children across Canada went on a chocolate bar strike to protest the 60% overnight rise of the price of candy bars from 5 cents to 8 cents, which, kudos to them for banding together and trying to affect change*, but it does make you wonder: how does pushing down the price of a commodity such as chocolate work out for everyone along the supply chain? If it’s anything like coffee, I’m going to hazard a guess that the answer is: not well.

For all that chocolate is ubiquitous and beloved**, to the point that children back in ’47 expected it not to be a luxury good but an affordable treat that should be readily available and affordable, what it comes from, where it comes from, how it’s processed – all of this and more are fairly removed from the final product. I don’t think I knew until very recently that anything other than the cacao seeds were edible from the pod, that the stuff encasing the cacao seeds isn’t a useless byproduct but a refreshing treat in its own right (and possibly the reason that the cacao fruit was picked up by people in the first place, since the seeds are bitter and wouldn’t have been immediately appealing, in theory). And if you were to ask me where cacao was grown, I’d probably have known to say Ghana, but not Côte d’Ivoire, nor immediately think of South America despite that being the provenance of chocolate (Ecuador and Brazil being the big contributors as far as cacao farming goes; I think the idea that we have the Mayans or the Aztecs to thank for chocolate is fairly widespread^*), though I’d probably have said India (thanks only to this spice company). If you’re thinking that maybe I just know a bit less than the average person about chocolate (or geography, or history), that’s probably fair – my knowledge of geography and history in general is abysmal – but which of the following would you wager is more strongly associated with chocolate? Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, Brazil and Ecuador, or Belgium and Switzerland (as in Belgian and Swiss chocolate)?

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Recreating Recipes From Movies and TV Shows

For Christmas, I gifted my partner, Quinn, a cookbook written by a favourite YouTuber of ours, Andrew Rea. The book and channel both are called Binging with Babish, each episode recreating iconic dishes from our favourite movies and TV shows. Missing the holiday food you have come to know, love, and crave? Try Ross’s Thanksgiving sandwich from Friends! (Yes, that sandwich.) Or, for something sweeter, Buddy the Elf’s delicious (?) dessert pasta! Want to “leave the gun, take the cannoli”? This cookbook has you covered, Coppola fans. Buon appetito.

Binging with Babish book coverAs part of a sort of fun, communal New Year’s resolution, Quinn and I decided to make one recipe from the book every other week. Sounds manageable, right? We love cooking! We might love cooking even more than we love Uber Eats (marginally)!

Not wanting to bite off more than we could chew, our first dish was one of the simplest recipes in the book: a Philly Cheesesteak Sandwich, a la Creed. We heeded the author’s advice from to skip the mayo as featured in the movie. Similarly to the author, we also used our artistic license to purchase a more moderately priced steak (the recipe called for ribeye).We popped those in the freezer, got in our PJs, and after 30 minutes began cutting the meat into thin slices, which is around the time I realized the preparation of this meal was more of a quick-and-dirty one-man operation, especially with our limited countertop space. While Quinn did a lot of the leg work on the meat, I laid out the toppings and convinced myself that I was Integral to The Mission. The whole affair took 15 minutes flat and it was one of the best sandwiches of my life. Here is a bad picture of it:

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