A La Cuisine!

A tasteTea Reminder and Free Tea Offer

A quick reminder that this month’s Is My Blog Burning? event is only a couple days away.  The theme is Tea, and everyone is invited to write about a dish made with tea and to share their tea rituals and experiences.  Please e-mail me at alacuisine@gmail.com, and include a link to your entry, the name of your entry, your name, and your location.  If you don’t have a blog, please e-mail your entry to me, and I’ll gladly post it on my site.  A very big thanks in advance to everyone who participates!  I will begin the round-up early next week. 

On a related note, Adagio Teas is kindly offering to send free tea to food bloggers in Canada and the United States.  To receive your free tea, please read the directions below.

Adagio Teas Free Tea Offer

• Adagio Teas is offering to provide each food blogger with four one-ounce samples of their teas for free.
• To keep their shipping costs reasonable, they are limiting their offer to the United States and Canada.
• Recipients are under no obligation to use or write about the teas for IMBB or at anytime in the future. However, if you use their teas and then decide to write about a dish that used them, they kindly ask that you mention the name of the tea, and include a link to their site (www.adagio.com).
• To request your teas, e-mail your selection of four teas, your mailing address, and your food blog URL to info@adagio.com. Adagio Teas will dispatch all requests in a timely manner.
• The offer is valid until August 10, 2005.
• Please note that A La Cuisine! is independent of and unaffiliated with Adagio Teas.

Announcing July's Is My Blog Burning?

On July 31st, I’ll have the honour of hosting the 17th edition of the food blogging phenomenon Is My Blog Burning?  Created by the eminent Alberto of Il Forno, IMBB brings together dozens of bloggers from around the world each month to cook dishes with a common theme.

The event has been the inspiration behind many other wonderful food blogging events including Sugar High Fridays, Wine Blogging Wednesdays, Paper Chef, Does My Blog Look Good in This? and of course the eccentric End of Month Egg on Toast Extravaganza.

For July, I’m delighted to announce that the theme will be… tasteTea! 

Huh?

Let me clarify.  tasteTea, as in a tasty dish of your choice prepared with tea.

Any dish or drink that’s made with tea qualifies.  On the weekend of July 31st, simply post an entry about your tasteTea dish on your blog, and e-mail me a link to it at alacuisine@gmail.com.  Beginning August 1st, I’ll profile 10-15 entries each day until we’ve looked at them all.  Hopefully this will give each entry a bit more exposure than normal, and will prevent me from going insane if there are many entries.

Everyone, whether you’re a food blogger or not, is welcome and encouraged to participate.  If you need a place to post your entry, I’d be glad to host it for you.

For many of us, tea is very much a ritual in our lives.  Often it’s not so much about the tea itself, but the events with which we associate tea with.  As an optional part of this month’s IMBB, I’d like to invite you to share with us your own tea rituals and experiences.  Depending on the number of participants, I’ll either link to your entry as part of the main round-up or do a separate mini tea rituals round-up.

I’m very excited about hosting this month’s IMBB, and I look forward to reading everyone’s entries.  If you have any questions, please feel free to e-mail me or leave a comment.

Now, let's get brewing!

Dine & Dish: Solferino Café

In the midst of yesterday’s sweltering heat, I visited Toronto’s newest gelateria and ordered every one of their 25 flavours.  While that might sound crazy and excessive, it was all done in the name of this month’s Dine & Dish event, where Sarah of The Delicious Life asked us visit to a restaurant less than a year old.  To help me with my gelato indulgence, I invited my food loving friends, Ken and Nancy to join me in my visit to the six week old Solferino Café.

Located in Toronto’s picturesque St. Lawrence Market district, Solferino Café is spacious and elegant in décor.  Rows of dimly lit lamps hang from its lofty ceiling, and four tables, an espresso bar, and two Barcelona chairs let customers relax and escape from the humid Toronto summer.  A ten foot window separates the kitchen from the dining area, and gives a glimpse of Solferino’s gelato makers in action.  The store boasts a selection of 17 gelatos and 8 sorbettos that are made in-store daily.

In my two previous visits to Solferino, I ordered the small and medium sized cups, priced at $3.25 and $3.95 respectively.  The scoops were very generous, and Solferino’s staff were happy to let me sample different flavours before I placed my order.  Today however, we decided to order four $6 bowls each containing six medium-sized scoops.

For 90 minutes we sat at the bar eating nothing but gelato and sorbetto.  Our first bowl contained lemon, cranberry, strawberry, mango, guava and Andean blackberry sorbettos.  We unanimously chose guava as our favourite from this bowl for its refreshing and intense flavour.  The sweet and creamy mango sorbetto came in a close second.  My least favourite of the six was the lemon sorbetto, which I reminded me of bitter lemon pith.

Utensibility: FoodSaver Professional II Vacuum Sealer

While my friends dream about buying the latest Bimmer or Porsche, I spend my time fantasizing about kitchen appliances.  A Pacojet tops my list, followed by a Thermomix, and a Musso 4080 Dessert Maker.  Space and money are my only limitations.  Ideally I’d like a kitchen that’s as well equipped as Iron Chef’s kitchen stadium, but realistically it looks like I’ll be hanging out in my 8 by 8 foot kitchen for the foreseeable future.

I’m always on the lookout for unique and useful kitchen appliances, but I don’t have much interest in gimmicky gadgets that I’ll rarely use, or cheap knock-offs that look like they’re about to fall apart.  Fuelling my addiction for kitchen utensils, Sam, the eminent author of Becks and Posh, recently asked food bloggers to write about a favourite kitchen utensil. Although Sam’s Utensibility event was on June 27th, I’d still like to write about my Tilia FoodSaver Professional II vacuum sealer.

As its name implies, this appliance saves food by vacuuming out the air from a bag of food before sealing it.  With no air around the food, the food deteriorates at a slower rate and stays fresh longer.  According to the packaging, the FoodSaver "keeps food fresh 3-5 times longer, prevents freezer burn and saves time and money."  The FoodSaver also comes with special wine corks that lets you vacuum the air out of wine bottles, a jar sealing device, and a large storage canister that lets you remove the air around delicate foods like lettuce without crushing it.

Anyway, this is all fine and good.  It works great, and I’m pretty sure it does what it claims.  But the real reason I bought a vacuum sealer was for sous vide.

Taste Canada

About a month ago when Jennifer and Lyn invited Canadian food bloggers to take part in today’s Taste Canada event, they asked us to answer the question: What does Canada taste like to you?

That shouldn't be too hard I thought, after all I've lived here all my life.  All I needed to do was think of something I liked and associated with being Canadian.  Days passed without an answer, and eventually I realized that I couldn't really say what was Canadian to me, because I had never experienced anything else.  Of course, it would be easy to say that things like maple syrup and ice wine are Canadian, because Canada is a leading producer of those products.  But to figure out what Canadian food I would miss most if I were to move away and live in another country... that’s something only experience can answer.

And so for the past few days I’ve just been sitting here puzzled, twiddling my thumbs, and looking at everyone else’s impressive entries.  I was troubled (and perhaps even a bit embarrassed) that my favourite foods I grew up with, Pillsbury croissants, Jell-O, and chocolate were all distinctly non-Canadian and were abundant in other parts of the world.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that for me, Canadian food is much more about the experience than about a particular type of food.  For the past two years I’ve lived in the heart of downtown Toronto, about a two minute walk from the CN Tower.  Each weekend I make the short trek to at least one of Toronto’s fine food markets.