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| 11 November 2011
“A culinary desert” is how Janna Gur, editor of Israel’s leading food and wine magazine and an authority on the country’s culinary history, described the food scene in the 1970s. Few people in the 70s looked to Israel as a culinary centre. Gur explained that food was considered frivolous, as the populace was more concerned with fighting for its future due to political and civil turmoil.
According to Gur’s The Book of New Israeli Food, food has always played a role in Jewish history, but Jewish cuisine evolved over two thousand years in the Diaspora as Jews scattered to neighbouring regions and beyond. The cultures and countries in which they settled influenced them. The differences, Gur continues, arose from keeping kosher, which meant avoiding shellfish and pork and not mixing dairy and meat.In the 1900s, Jews began immigrating to Palestine led by those coming from Russia, Poland, Eastern European countries, and Germany in the 1930s. In the 1940s and 1950s, immigration to the new state of Israel continued with Jews arriving from Arab countries, North Africa, Europe, Iraq, North America, and many other countries. Each brought their own style of Jewish cooking and dishes shaped by the lands from which they emigrated.
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| 27 September 2011
Before I was a wine lover, I was (and still am) a beer lover. I drank a lot of beer while going to university, and while the large commercial breweries dominated the market, a couple of small (at the time) microbreweries (Granville Island and Big Rock) began producing beers that stepped outside the flavour box and introduced many western Canadians to unique, handcrafted brews.
But it wasn’t until I went to grad school in the States (the summer class in Europe helped too) that I really got into the craft beer scene. Craft beer producers are united by a philosophy to produce unique, flavourful handcrafted brews. Small breweries such as Rogue, Pike, Goose Island, Brooklyn and, a little later, Dogfish Head were providing many sought-after options to the mass-produced generic offerings of brewing giants Miller, Coors & Anheuser-Busch.Even the giants have forayed into the craft beer market by either acquisition (Granville Island is now a Molson property and Goose Island part of Anheuser-Busch) or producing faux craft beers (the motivation for Molson introducing Rickard’s Red, which many sceptics believe is simply Molson Canadian with food colouring).
| 13 January 2011
I'm not a picky wine drinker (okay, I am), but my pet peeves stem from a desire to drink good quality and be able to enjoy it. Wineries, wine importers, retailers and restaurants should all endeavour to enhance the consumer’s enjoyment of the grape, not detract from it.
Those who love and enjoy wine may have noticed many of the following annoyances. Someone who finds these pet peeves troublesome shouldn't be considered picky or pretentious. After all, no one should have to drink from wine glasses that smell like the musty cabinet where they are stored, or suffer a discussion with a restaurant server on whether wine that is oxidized is “supposed to taste like that.”The following list of wine pet peeves is a compilation based on an informal survey of consumers and wine professionals.