Menu For Hope III

While BB&B is mainly a beer blog, I do dabble in a bit of food-related posting (as the "Bites" in the name suggests). I've also started reading a number of food blogs recently, and many of them have featured posts in the last couple of days about a fundraising event called Menu For Hope.

The purpose of this annual event, which is being held for the third time this year, is best described by campaign director Pim Techamuanvivit on her blog Chez Pim:

To us Food Bloggers, food is a joy. On our blogs, we celebrate food as a delight or even an indulgence. Unfortunately, for many others who share our world do not share that privilege. For them, food is a matter of survival. This "Menu for Hope" is our small way to help.

The campaign involves a mass raffle that features prizes donated by dozens of food bloggers around the world, often with the participation of other culinary luminaries like bad-boy chef Anthony Bourdain and Toronto's own Susur Lee. The money raised will be donated to the UN World Food Programme, which provides hunger relief for needy people worldwide.

If you're interesting in getting involved, a full list of available prizes can be found at Chez Pim, while my fellow Canucks may be interested in seeing the list of prizes from Canadian bloggers, which is available in both English and Français at Confessions of a Cardamom Addict.

My one complaint about this thing is the complete lack of beer blogs being involved in the project. As the list hosted at Vinography attests, there are plenty of wine blogs contributing prizes, but none of my beery brethren are represented. I think we'll have to do something about this in 2007...

Gourmet Food and Wine Expo

This past weekend, the wife and I went down to the Gourmet Food & Wine Expo at the Toronto Convention Centre. It was our first time attending this annual event - we'd considered it in past years, but because we're cheapasses, we were scared off by the relatively high admission charge. This year, however, we were armed with a 2-for-1 coupon and decided to give it a shot.

All in all, we were pretty underwhelmed. Sheryl has given her impressions in a post to TorontoBits, and I'm pretty much in agreement with her assessment. As she notes, there was a lot about the event that wasn't particularly "gourmet" in nature. For example, the wine-in-a-bag pictured to the right certainly doesn't say "gourmet" to me. And I was especially offended to see Bright Pearl amongst the food vendors, as the food I was served at their booth at the Taste Of Toronto festival back in September was high on the lost of the worst things I've ever put into my mouth.

That being said, we did manage to find a few palatable food options, even for finicky pescetarians like ourselves. The grilled sardines and fish cakes from Cataplana weren't bad, and it's hard to go wrong with oysters from Rodney's (although the ones we were served could've been cleaned a bit better - nothing ruins a nice oyster more than grit between your teeth). But the highlight was definitely the sushi from EDO which was fresh and tasty, and one of the few food items on offer than wasn't sitting in a steam tray for hours. Speaking of which: The other item available at the EDO booth was a small Kobe beef burger, but Kobe beef or not, anyone willing to plunk down 7 bucks for a burger that was cooked hours before and kept warm in a steam tray is a frickin' idiot.

As for the liquids - well, as I've stated before, I'm really not much of a wine guy, so I walked past most of the wine booths with a mixture of confusion and fear. We did try a couple of wines that I liked, including this year's Georges Duboeuf Beaujolais nouveau and some other red wine that made Sheryl feel all melty and fluttery. I also had some fantastic scotch that I completely forgot to write down the name of, but I recall being told that it was a private label release of an 8 year old Lagavulin that sells for about half the price of the regular stuff. It had been a long time since I'd had a scotch, and this reminded me of how much I enjoy it.

On the beer side of things, I started with some Christoffel Blond, a favourite of mine that was being served up the Rubaiyat import agency. At the Embrujo Flamenco booth, I tried a sample of Ambar, a fairly standard pale lager from Spain. And at Black Oak, our pal Ken was serving up this year's batch of his seasonal Nutcracker Porter which was in fine form - rich and spicey, just how we like it.

The final verdict: This event may be great for wine lovers, but for the occasional wine drinker going more for the food and beer, it's a disappointment. Especially if you're paying the full admission price of 15 dollars, plus buying a stack of sampling coupons for a buck each and dropping 2 or 3 of them for each sample. It's definitely not a cheap way to spend an afternoon.

Newsflash: Beer Goes Well With Cheese!

Many newspapers and websites across Canada that get a feed from the Canadian Press ran a fluff piece recently about a shocking new food and drink activity that is "becoming all the rage in some trendy corners": pairing cheese with beer (gasp!) rather than wine! (It also mentions scotch, but since this is ostensibly a beer blog, that's what I'm focussing on.)

Now, I've always argued that good beer is much more conducive to many food pairings than wine - but then again, I'm not much of a wine guy, so that's really just me talking out of my ass. But it seems that executive chef Lee Humphries at FigMint Restaurant and Lounge in Vancouver agrees with me:

While wine seems like a natural to have with cheese, the likelihood of a mismatch is much greater with wine than with beer and scotch, says Humphries.

"Beer and scotch work really well with cheese because the flavours are so complementary," he explains. "Many wines just overpower the delicate nature of cheese, making wine pairings that much more difficult to perfect."

And it's not just chefs who think this - the scientists are in agreement that wine & cheese don't work well together:

Bernice Madrigal-Galan and Hildegarde Heymann of the University of California, Davis, presented trained wine tasters with cheap and expensive versions of four different varieties of wine. The tasters evaluated the strength of various flavours and aromas in each wine both alone and when preceded by eight different cheeses.

They found that cheese suppressed just about everything, including berry and oak flavours, sourness and astringency. Only butter aroma was enhanced by cheese, and that is probably because cheese itself contains the molecule responsible for a buttery wine aroma, Heymann says. Strong cheeses suppressed flavours more than milder cheeses, but flavours of all wines were suppressed. In other words, there are no magical wine and cheese pairings.

It's curious to note that Humphries thinks that wine overpowers cheese, while the science-types argue the opposite. But either way, it's obvious that wine and cheese just don't get along as well as people like to think, and they should just split up now so beer and cheese can get together. I mean, they make such a cute couple. It's inevitable, really. Wine should just accept it and move on.

Anyway, this story comes along at an interesting time for me, as I've got plans afoot with a local cheese guy that may lead to some fun stuff in the new year. More on that as things develop...