Corazón de México (1)

  Yesterday I went to the Toronto Mexican festival which is a joint production of the city’s Mexican community and the Mexican consulate. There’s too much to put into one post so I’m going to spread the experience over several posts of which this post deals with something near and dear to my heart – food!

  The festival was on the Lake front and the dining area overlooked the harbour.

  This is a tamale which I bought - beats the hell out of Taco Bell.

  Here’s some more Mexican food prepared on site while I watched.

  View from my dining area.

  Mexican sweet breads.

  The prices were excellent!

Mexican candy

  They had food preparation demonstrations by the Escuela de Gastronomía Mexicana with Chefs Edmundo Escamilla and Yuri de Gortari.

“The Escuela de Gastronomía Mexicana (School of Mexican Gastronomy) is the only school dedicated to the research, promotion and development of high Mexican cuisine. It was opened by Yuri de Gotari and Edmundo Escamilla who have studied and researched Mexican cuisine from anthropological, social, historical and cultural perspectives for over a decade.

 

Classes include those given by anthropologists, historians as well as more traditional classes about cooking techniques and ingredients. Teachers and students come from abroad to teach and learn with the goal of developing Mexican cuisine at an international level.

 

Mexico has developed a cuisine that is unique to the world and that has been recognized by the United Nations as part of our world heritage. Going beyond the clichés of tacos and burritos, outstanding chefs from Mexico introduce and teach the public the tastes of diverse regions and the techniques and ingredients will allow you to make authentic Mexican dishes.”

Saturday shopping

My favourite food store

  This is my favourite food store where I like to shop for items since I’m very particular. Below is a short video giving an overview of the store and the pictures were taken with my camera.

  I was shopping here today and later went to Aroma which is my best coffee shop. Beats the hell out of Starbucks.

Biscotti di Prato selection table

Cakes and pasteries

Part of the Cheese section

  I'm partial to Quebec artisan cheeses. The secret is that the best cheese is made from unpasteurized milk. I discovered this at a young age when I lived on my uncle's farm in the Yorkshire Dales not far from Haworth where the Bronte parsonage is located.  Shades of Jane Eyre. He had goats so we had goat cheese, goat milk and goat butter. I got into trouble one day when I had inadvertantly let part of the herd into the greenhouses. The farm was on the moors which were the flat tops of hills and the fog used to fill the valley in the morning so looking out the bedroom window it appeared to be like a sea of clouds beneath the house.

Tomato table

 
Any kind of tomato that you can imagine.

One of my favourite Olive Oils

  You can use it on ice cream (really!) since it is more like a sweet syrup. In the picture below you can see the cherry apple pie which I purchased along with the store paper grocery bag and my Tilley hat. I buy my clothes from Tilley when I travel and it has the best travel clothes in the world. All my clothes in the pictures from the Egyptian posts came from Tilley.

Cherry Apple pie from McEwans

Gourmet Entomophagy

Sushi anyone?         photo: thepirata.com

  Check out the latest in sushi for the adventurous!  The new hot trend in dining is bug food and I mean let’s nosh on those pesky little critters. This should be good news for you folks that live in the warmer, insect challenged locations if you’re bored of gator bits and swamp salad. According to Radio Amsterdam:

We want to continue eating animal proteins and if we have a growing world population, we can’t continue consuming the same amount of “regular” meat. In Europe and North America, we eat about 80 kilos of meat per person per year, and you can’t feed a growing population on that. So you have to search for other animal protein sources. Insects are a very good, very efficient alternative and they don’t have the problems of other animal production.

But what happens when you start to replace mass-production of beef, pork, and chicken with mass-production of insects? Will the animal-rights activists start protesting?

 

Wikipedia states:

Entomophagy can be divided into two categories: insects used as a source of nutrients and insects as condiments. Some insects are eaten as larvae or pupae, others as adults. Though not insects, arachnids such as spiders, tarantulas and scorpions are also eaten. A total of 1417 species of insects have been recorded as being eaten by over 3000 ethnic groups. These include 235 species of butterflies and moths, 344 species of beetles, 313 species of ants, bees and wasps as well as 239 species of grasshoppers, crickets and cockroaches, amongst others. Other commonly eaten insects are termites, cicadas and dragonflies. Insects are known to be eaten in 80% of the world's nations.

This could be the beginning of a new food group although in Canada we like to think that beer is the fifth food group which is why we get “Molson muscles”. The funny thing is that you're already eating insects in your regular diet since the government allows a certain percentage of insect parts in food. Anyone for a tarantulapop?