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Posts with category ‘Greece’

Convent olives

Posted on August 13, 2007

My cousin Maggie and her husband, Angus, are staying with us on Corfu. They are farmers in Pembrokeshire (west Wales) and immensely useful guests. Angus has sorted out a plumbing blockage in the bathroom, smoothed the rubble that fills the new terrace, helped me clear the construction site that used to be our parking place and lay a drain across the driveway. Ah, the romance of an Ionian holiday!

Rabbit showdown in Corfu

Posted on December 31, 2007

To Corfu for a week of monklike solitude. Thanks to the technological marvel that is Olympic Airways, I reached the island three hours late (sometime around 11 p.m.) and decided to stay in Corfu Town at the Cavalieri hotel, a former townhouse of great comfort that still retains the elegant and world-weary mood of the Venetians who built it 300 years ago. The fabulous rooftop restaurant is closed during the winter, but Greeks eat late and I was confident of finding the Rex or the Aegli open for business. Walking down Kapodistriou Street towards one of these restaurants, I was thinking of a piquant stifatho of rabbit braised with sweet baby onions in a dark sauce spiked with vinegar. Yeah, that’s it—a stifatho! The roads were wet but the clouds had moved on and an inquisitive moon peered down over the citadel, smirking a little, I thought, as I stood outside the dark and padlocked restaurants. These nights between Christmas and the New Year are treacherous with holidays. Some of the bars along the ’Spianada’s stately stone arcades were still open. Too crowded. Instead, I ended up in a café with an exclusively Latin American menu; I made do with a no-name chicken quesadilla and a glass of Chilean plonk. Did the world find Greece while my back was turned or did Greece discover the world?

Tasting notes

Posted on February 4, 2008

This week, they sent me out prowling the restaurants, bars, bakeries and grill rooms of Ossington Avenue, and there will be much to tell in May’s Toronto Life. But in between all the pho and sucking pig, the tequila-cured salmon and the free-form apple galettes, there was still time to squeeze in some special, extracurricular treats.

Easter onions

Posted on March 18, 2008

I lent my cherished copy of Marnie Woodrow’s short stories, In the Spice House, to my daughter. Now I want it back for rereading purposes, reminded of its resonances by a visit to that aromatic Kensington Market emporium known as House of Spice. I was looking for powdered bay, needed for a particular recipe that I’ll be reviving in a couple of weeks. I described it once in Outlook magazine, but even that public exposure failed to mitigate the private, emotional pungency of the flavours. The dish slipped into our kitchen more than 20 years ago, when our children were toddlers and we were living on Corfu. It was the gift of our nearest neighbour, Kleopatra, the village wise woman, and I cooked it once or twice under her critical eye. When we moved back to Canada, the recipe came with us and eventually found its own place on our calendar, settling there like a cat on a comfortable pillow, as part of a secular Eastertide dinner.

Chatto Bio Pic

James Chatto

James Chatto worked as a dishwasher, actor, waiter, bow tie salesman, choreen, bookseller, nanny, tennis coach, lounge singer, KFC truck driver (fired after 1 day), olive farmer and janitor before moving to Canada in 1987 and becoming a journalist. These days, he writes about food and restaurants for Toronto Life, about wine and spirits for Food & Drink and edits the menswear magazine, Harry. Two of his books are still in print: A Matter of Taste (co-written with Lucy Waverman) and The Greek For Love, a memoir of Corfu. James is married and has two delightful children.

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