Autumn Heritage Apple Tasting

After a lovely Autumn Equinox, I had a vigorous start to the fall, kicking it off with a full Saturday. First, an early morning race at the Toronto Zoo where I ran 10km in about an hour, then a visit to the Spadina Museum near Casa Loma for a heritage apple tasting hosted by the lovely Suzanne Long.

At Spadina, the gardens and orchard were beautiful, and the apples plentiful. There were two long wooden tables covered with plates, hand-labelled, and ordered on one side by generation (ye olde small French St. Lawrence begat McIntosh, who begat Cortland, fathering Macoun and Spartan also…)

…and in a more eclectic grouping on the other side by age and family, dominated by russets and other peculiarities including a pink-fleshed crabapple hybrid (the Pink Pearl). So many great names! Sunrise, Baldwin, Burgundy, Freedom, Golden Reinette, Gravenstein, July Tart, Jefferis, Tolman Sweet…

Many of the varieties in attendance were on the endangered apples list: sadly, since commercial farming is all about maximizing yield, the diversity of breeds is dying out, and many apples are disappearing not just from marketplaces, but from existence.

Think: when was the last time you went to your local Sobeys, Loblaws or Metro and saw more than the usual 10 standards? (Red or Golden Delicious, Granny Smith, Macintosh, Gala, Pink Lady, etc) One hundred years ago, North America sported over 15,000 apple varieties; now, only about 3,000 varieties still exist and most of those are endangered.

At the tasting, I heard stories from people who are friends with small orchard owners, saying that lots of local farmers are chopping down stands of Russets because they’re too hard to grow commercially. Extreme sadface. I love Russets.

Some of the more obscure varieties we tried were, alas, some of the tastiest. On the Macintosh table, there was an old parent-of-Macs variety that was described to me as “something you’ll never taste again”: the Princess Louise apple was a sensory delight – sweetly perfumed, crisp, with a rich honeyed flavour made all the more poignant by its rarity.

Before I select the pick of the crop, I should give a disclaimer: not only do I love Macintosh apples, I adore all apples, and could eat them until I have a full-on bellyache. There is no stopping me with apples. I have a witness to the fact that, after eating apples for two solid hours at the tasting, I went home and had TWO slices of apple tart for dessert. True story.

My favourites of the day were Mother, a rich red beauty with a cream-coloured interior that had a bright, snappy sweet flavour, and Chestnut, another rare find, a crabapple with an edible, nutty-sweet flesh. The Chestnut was hardly bigger than its namesake, a glowing ruby red on the outside and a warm yellow on the inside. I could have eaten the whole plate.

As LeVar Burton would say, “you don’t have to take my word for it.” There were food bloggers a-plenty in attendance, snapping photos with cameras that were far superior to mine. Here’s a list of some other Toronto writers who might have covered the event, go check out their opinions of the tastiest pommes:

• Kate from IKnowWhoGrewIt.ca
• Lex from Unsweetened.ca
• Andrea from CanadianFoodieGirl.com
• Lisa from VeganCulinaryCrusade.com
• Chef Matt of MattKantor.ca and SecretPickle.com
• Laura of CubitsOrganics.com

Feeling left out? Wish you were there? Don’t despair! As Yoda would say, “there is another.”

Another heritage apple tasting event coming up, that is! Yes, great news; Toronto’s own Cookbook Store at 850 Yonge Street (Yorkville) is holding a combined heritage apple tasting and apple pie contest on October 1st. I will, of course, be competing in this baking competition. If you choose to enter, be forewarned: you will be throwing down against Moi. I HAVE PUFF PASTRY AND I’M NOT AFRAID TO USE IT.

I think I just ate yak vomit

Food is a popular topic of conversation at my workplace. We have an even mix of ectomorphs (slim folks) and mesomorphs (solid, muscular people), vegetarians and carnivores, health nuts and gourmands. The most passionate and heated debate usually surrounds the question of “where do you draw the line” with things you’ll put into your mouth. Raw vs. cooked. Domesticated vs. wild. Local vs. imported. Kosher vs. cheeseburger. Cows vs. dogs.

A few months ago, I went to a restaurant on Dundas ominously named “The Black Hoof“, where I ate bone marrow (did not like – gelatinous, flavourless, icky) and raw horse (was okay, not something I’d eat every day). I texted a colleague and her response was “OMG RAW HORSE??!?! WHY?”.

Curiosity is the simple answer. I’m an adventurous gal, and I often like to say that, within reason, I’ll try anything once. I’ve got a pretty relaxed attitude towards what is edible, so usually when we’re talking about eating dog-meat (in the context of visiting a country where dog is part of the cuisine, NOT in the context of me coaxing Fido into my personal abbatoir so I can enjoy dog burgers on a Saturday night in Toronto – let’s be real) I’m the one nodding while others are gagging.

However, I have recently run into two experiences that are taking my “try anything once” attitude to the wall.

1) Dessicated Ox Bile
2) Entomophagy (Eating Bugs)

Dessicated what now?

So, the dessicated ox bile is a component of the evening digestive pills that form part of the “Innocleanse” 7-day cleanse that I thought I’d try out this week as a sort of personal challenge. There are the usual regimen of enzymes, purgatives and thermogenic (temperature-raising) ingredients in these pills – alfalfa leaves, sennosides, papain, cayenne pepper) but let me stress that this is emphatically not the crazy Beyonce cleanse where all you drink is spicy maple syrup lemonade. The list of foods you can eat is restricted, but you still have to eat.

The “NO” foods for this cleanse include wheat grains, fruit, caffeine, milk, carrots, tomatoes, pork, shellfish, yeast, oats, barley, potatoes, vinegar, sugar and margarine.

At first, looking at that list, all I could think of was celery sticks. But as it happens, if you’re willing to shell out about $150 in groceries at Whole Foods, you can eat a lot of things that are included in the “YES” food category, namely: yeast-free sprouted grain breads, lemons, limes, fresh cranberries, unsweetened almond butter, organic plain yoghurt, butter, eggs, herbal tea, sunflower seeds, vegetables, hummus, tzatziki, olive oil, garlic, onion, lean beef, chicken, turkey, all fish, beans, yeast-free grains (millet, quinoa, spelt, amaranth, brown rice, kamut, teff, buckwheat), unsweetened soy milk, rice milk, almond milk, and tofu.

We’ll see if I can last out the whole 7 days. Yesterday was day one and I had a screaming, eyeball-splitting headache all night from caffeine withdrawal. This morning my head is still hurting, but not as badly, but my upper arms feel like someone administered a series of clumsily-injected flu shots into them. Achey and heavy and sore. Apparently the first three days are the worst. I’ll keep everyone posted.

So, what was that about eating bugs?

There’s a surreptitous supper club in Toronto called “Charlie’s Burgers“. The idea is, you go to their website, fill out a survey about your food fantasies and they may (or may not) invite you to dinner. The mandate of this mysterious enterprise is to give great chefs “a blank canvas to create whatever menu they want, with no boundaries whatsoever.”

This month, they’re really pushing those non-existent boundaries by offering up an extravagant 9-course meal made up of… insects. Yes, for just $155, guest chefs Matt Binkley & Jeff Stewart will tantalize your tastebuds with tarantulas. Okay, not really (there are no spiders on the menu), but they WILL serve you crickets, grasshoppers, forest nymphs, scorpions, queen ants, water beetle, rhinoceros beetle, wax worms, meal worms, super worms and butter worms. See the complete menu if you dare! (or, if you want to know which wine goes with scorpions)

I have to make up my mind if I’m bold enough to eat these things before the dinner happens on Jan 24. If I’m honest with myself, I think I already know the answer. As an old-school nerd, the moment I think of eating worms, the image that springs to mind is of Riker staring down the parasite-infected Starfleet Admirals in episode #25 of ST:TNG, “Conspiracy”.

The valuable life lesson that episode taught me? If you eat bugs, your head may asplode.