This Week in Food

Ice Cream at The Piggy Market

A few coworkers recommended I check out Pascale Berthiaume's (who provides the ice cream for the Wellington Gastropub) ice cream, now being sold in Westboro at The Piggy Market. They're located in the rear half of the old, now defunct, Westboro Market.

I gave them a first visit this week to check them out, and so far I've a very positive impression of the place. I stopped in on my way home from work on Thursday, around 20:45. They had been closed for an hour and forty-five minutes, but they still let me in to buy ice cream as long as I paid cash (the charge machines and register were closed for the day); they get 6 out of 5 stars for service. Again, on a coworker's recommendation, I picked the Peanut Butter Salted Caramel flavour.

Outstanding! And check out the ingredients: yolks, cream, sugar, peanut butter, caramel, salt, vanilla. That's it! Goes for 10$ a tub.

Ron Eade on Butter Prices

Omnivore's Ottawa weekly supermarket specials roundup includes these few words from Mr. Eade:

Anyway, my gold star of the week goes to three chain stores, Price Chopper, Food Basics and Superstore Loblaw for selling various brands of butter, salted or unsalted and sometimes both, at $2.97 to $2.99 a pound. Really, I can't understand how stores get away with charging $4 or more for a pound of churned animal fat. (I'll bet it has something to do with the government-sanctioned cartel marketing board that controls milk prices. Reach for the sky, buddy, this is a stick-up.)

Now a complaint like this about the price isn't too punchy in a vacuum - we need to put it in context to see if there's really anything to gripe about when it comes to butter prices! How does this compare to the rest of your grocery basket?

Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada provides a bit of historical data for retail prices of various dairy products.

They also provide an overview of the butter sector, but this report is quite misleading; it significantly understates (by 50%!) the price of butter as they got the units wrong, claiming an average price of 3.84$/Kg in 2005. In Table 2, they present the AC Neilsen retail price survey data in $/Kg, adjusted to what I assume are 2006 dollars, but the Neilsen price survey measures the price per pound of butter (454g). I wonder how many people noticed the error.

It's best to ignore the above report then, and go back to the original data, in nominal dollars per pound of butter. As we can see from the series representing the price of a pound of butter, retail has crept up towards the 4$ mark for the last few years, but the nominal price, from 2006-2008, has hardly increased.

I've plotted this data against milk prices and the Core Consumer Price Index (which includes dairy products, btw), using 2004 as a baseline:

So it seems that although the price of butter has shot up a bit faster than core CPI around 2004-2005, it's been relatively flat even in nominal dollars over the last three years, meaning it's actually gotten cheaper in real terms.

Hardly cause for panic! Happy cooking.

This Week in Food

Will Ron Eade wake up with a head of lettuce in his bed?

First up is Ron Eade's column from Ottawa Citizen blogs, where he heaps some well-deserved praise on Kevin Mathieson (of Art-Is-In Bakery) for his bread. Eade says it's better than ACE bread (n.d.a.: no shit), and I for one am glad to note that the supply problems I was hurting from a year ago seem to be a thing of the past: whereas last year, getting your hands on Art-Is-In bread required much haste in returning home from the office, this year I find that retailers aren't consistently running out by late afternoon.

Eade calls New York Times' Mark Bittman's bread recipe a good replica of Art-Is-In's, which I have to humbly disagree with. Bittman's recipe is good, it's my go-to recipe for homemade bread, but I hardly think it's close to equal to Mathieson's.

I think it's awesome that he can get away with saying:

I'm not kidding when I say you need a six- to eight-quart heavy cast-iron Dutch oven with lid. Every kitchen should have one.

Yes, every kitchen should have one - but when I say anything like that, people roll their eyes at me. If you're a newspaper columnist though...

Amate

Got around to trying Amate (link goes to ottawafoodies.com) for some quick Mexican take-out. I came in a few minutes before they decided to shut down for the night, and ordered a tostada with some puerco pibil. Unfortunately, I only got a tiny spoonful, maybe 40g, of pork but hey, what I tasted was good. I think they're still going through opening pains and are a bit disorganized, so it's not fair to say more at this time - let's give them a few more months.

I'll probably try my hand at making puerco pibil myself (in more generous quantities) when I get a free afternoon.

Malak Pastry

I've lived in Westboro for over a year and had never tried Malak Pastry, despite it being right at Carling/Broadview - shame! It's a bakery offering up a range of baklawa (which I'll admit I know little about). I asked for the shopkeeper's recommendations and got a few samples to try before buying, and was incredibly impressed. Delicious! They weren't yet listed on OttawaFoodies, so I'm adding them presently.

foods++;

Finally, I've tried sauerkraut (at a corporate event at the office, no less), bringing my 100 Food countdown (previously blogged about) to 57% completion. Moving up 1% in two months is a rather pathetic pace, so I'm going to make a bigger effort.

Sure, but what year?

That's what I call optimistic.

I really, really, wish I could afford one of those condos, the artist's renderings I've seen look pretty sweet. Also, expensive.

Coffee Shop Technology

I'm sitting in the Westboro Bridgehead, working on a presentation on my MacBook Pro.
Observations from the coffee shop:

• A 50 year-old looking woman is texting. She's typing pretty fast, too.
  
• No one is wearing iPod headphones. Everyone is here to enjoy the atmosphere, I like that.
• Among the people typing away on laptops, the Mac market share is 100%. ONE HUNDRED. Way to go Apple.

A Few Snapshots From Westfest 5

Last weekend was Westfest 2008 (Westboro's annual music festival, in Ottawa), and due to a craaaaazy week at work I didn't really have time to post any snapshots until tonight (although they were on my Flickr feed, if you're following that). Here, enjoy!

It pretty much rained the whole weekend (and every single day this week - ugh!), so I only managed a few pics during a rare moment of sunshine:

^^^ A few concertgoers hanging out

^^^ A hip-hop band out of Manitoba called Grand Analog. They were actually pretty great!

^^^ Their lead singer, trying to rev up the crowd (not completely successful, but oh well)

^^^ I like this couple, they have the same weird hairdo and fit together so well

^^^ The Candy Store, a new shop that just opened up on Richmond Rd. Haven't shopped there yet. (I'm not really a sweets and candy kind of guy - I'm sipping a blended nectarine/tofu shake as I write this.)

^^^ This kid was hilarious, more on him in a second

So here's the story: the boy was in the American Apparel boutique, and being rather small and questionably behaved, he managed to sneak right into the display case. He then - and I am not making this up - started caressing the legs of the female mannequins. Then, he started pulling on clothes, on both the male and female mannequins.

The depressing part of the story (for me) is that in a five-minute span, two different women asked me if he was my son. Ouch. To think that I'd have a kid already - that's a huge, depressing, dose of "you're not getting any younger". Maybe my youthful good looks* are increasingly a thing of the past.

 

*: Just "youthful looks" might be a bit more truthful, but who's counting ;)

Westboro Market just died

In local Ottawa news, the Westboro Community Association's blog is reporting that Westboro Market has closed down.

(I took the picture a week before they announced the closure - I had no idea at the time)

This is a real loss for the community. Last year, Westboro Bakery, the lone bake shop in the neighbourhood, had to close its doors after seeing its rent raised to 3500$ a month. This year the still-young Westboro Market, which was the only source in the area for Art-Is-In bread, followed suit. Too bad, I really hope we don't get another sporting goods store.