Food Notes for August 29, 2011

Where has the summer gone? August just accelerated by, to the point where I’ve literally been a week behind (note to self: triple check e-mails prior to sending them to everyone in your organization). Hope the season’s been good to you too! On to this week’s food notes:

• Molly’s Eats and Drift will be serving up good eats over the long weekend at Victoria Park on Monday, September 5. Check their Twitter status for more information!
• If you’re not festival’d out yet, check out the Ukrainian Festival happening on September 10, from 11am-7pm at 6103 172 Street. There will be fresh bread baked on-site, and delicious homemade Ukrainian food, in addition to live entertainment and children’s activities. Admission is $2/person or $5/family.
• I hope all goes well with Bamir and Patricia (of Eva Sweet)’s nephews. If you haven’t heard, their three teenage nephews now face removal from Canada.
• Genius: Liv and Marlow Moo have found possibly the best way to sample dessert – eat your way around downtown!
• Vue Weekly wrote a great piece about the gentrification of Whyte Avenue this week – should BRZs be restrictive about the types of businesses that go into the area?
• Courtenay wrote about their local butcher, Real Deal Meats.
• Will we ever reach a point where there are too many farmers’ markets?
• What are we supposed to do now? Gilt Taste says that wine and cheese pairings aren’t meant to be.
• Can you trust online reviews?
• I saw this and couldn’t help but think of Mack – Eater presents New York Times’ food critic Sam Sifton’s starred reviews in charts and graphs.
• Did you hear about the smackdown that took place this week between Paula Deen and Anthony Bourdain? The follow-up from Frank Bruni is worth a read: “When Deen fries a chicken, many of us balk. When the Manhattan chefs David Chang or Andrew Carmellini do, we grovel for reservations and swoon over the homey exhilaration of it all.” Well said, Bruni.
• This absolutely took my breath away: New York just had their first taste of Diner en Blanc (“dinner in white”), a tradition of private dinners that began in Paris. With a harbour front setting, lanterns, and all diners dressed in white, it looked pretty amazing. Diner en Blanc also takes place in Montreal and Quebec City – could we do it here, too?
• It’s official! Remedy is taking over the downtown storefront previously held by Health Fare (10279 Jasper Avenue).

Remedy

• This is a week old, but there was quite a bit of outrage when residents found that the downtown Sobeys had covered up all of their windows, blocking eyes on the street and into the store. We hope this decision will be reversed (there is a meeting this week to discuss it).

Sobeys

• I met up with Annie for dinner at Violino last week. They were featuring pizzas cooked in an outdoor oven, so both Annie and I decided to try them. It was a bit awkward, given the pizza dough had to travel from the kitchen through the dining room to reach the oven (and back to the kitchen to be dressed), but I suppose then we knew it was fresh! Annie’s pizza, with proscuitto, artichoke hearts, arugula and goat cheese was the better of the two – more moist with a crust that didn’t chip a tooth. Dessert was better, a silky panna cotta made with buttermilk. It was more tart than either of us were used to, but balanced out in the end with a blueberry sauce and a warm apricot pastry on the side.

Margherita pizza

San Danielle pizza

Panna cotta