The biggest concern that I’ve heard is noise and smell. I’m saying your neighbour’s dog is noisier and your green bin is smellier.

—Rookie city councillor Mary-Margaret McMahon in a Globe and Mail article, in which Joe Mihevc also points out that hens can go through nine pounds of compost in a month [Globe and Mail]

Riverdale Farm, one of the few locations in Toronto where chickens are permitted (Image: Matt Jiggins)

An end to Toronto’s backyard chicken prohibition could be in sight, depending on the contents of a city staff report expected next year. The report will make a series of recommendations on whether urban chickens, outlawed in 1983, should be allowed to peck and scratch their way back into the city’s backyards. The news came courtesy of councillor Joe Mihevc in an interview with the Toronto Sun (which once again unleashed a torrent of terrible poultry puns).

From the Sun:

Chickens are allowed in most U.S. municipalities and several Canadian cities are starting to hatch plans to allow limited numbers of egg-laying hens, Mihevc said. “It’s part of an urban food movement,” he added.

Mihevc pointed out Toronto Public Health officials say allowing the chickens wouldn’t create a human health issue. “There is no public health reason why it couldn’t go forward,” he said.

Councillor Mary-Margaret McMahon, who pitched the idea at the last marathon council meeting, is “egg-static,” according to the Sun, which points out that others are not as “egg-cited.” The paper quotes Deputy Mayor Doug Holyday dismissing the whole affair, wishing city council would “apply their talents to trying to solve our budget woes.” As for Rob Ford, he voiced his disapproval in 2010 as a mayoral candidate, pointing out that Torontonians are “not living on the farm….This is the city.” While that may be true, Toronto Chicken and the small legion of other, quieter chicken keepers out there don’t seem to have a problem bringing a bit of the farm inside city limits. Heck, even the New York Times is on board with urban hens: the Grey Lady selected a $650 coop for its holiday gift guide this year.

• Chicken runs for Toronto [Toronto Sun]

In a chirpy video posted to the corporate blog, Google executive chef Scott Giambastiani (yes, Google has chefs) notes that Recipe View is a great way to find recipes for ingredients one may not have cooked with before, or inspiration for dishes for specific holidays or events. (Best line: “Here at Google, we always prepare something fun for Cinqo de Mayo.”) In honour of the weekend, we present the the results of a search for poutine recipes.

• Slice and dice your recipe search results [Official Google Blog]

Myhrvold described the book—underwhelmingly, or perhaps aptly, titled Modernist Cuisine—to the L.A. Times as “an encyclopedic treatment of modern cooking.” Topics include the physics of food and water, culinary history, emulsions, barbecuing, food poisoning and much more. Of course, there are also about 600 pages dedicated to recipes. Publishers are calling it the most ambitious cookbook they’ve ever seen.

Now all Myhrvold has to do is finish the book. It’s been in the works for four years and has grown exponentially in scope during its progression (it started at 150 pages and last year was described as a work of 1,500 pages in three volumes). The original December release date on Amazon has been pushed back to mid-March, which is unfortunate because we need to master the intricacies of sous-vide ASAP.

• The extremist: Nathan Myhrvold and ‘Modernist Cuisine’ [L.A. Times]

Gourmet

The first edition is called Gourmet Quick Kitchen, a 120-plus-page compendium of recipes from older issues, as well as new content in the form of photos, kitchen tips and menus with wine pairings. Publisher Condé Nast hasn’t named the other two print editions, which are expected to come out in 2011.

To the optimists, there’s a ray of hope here, as Condé Nast has been known to suspend publications in order to rethink their brands (this happened with Details). To skeptics, this is just a cash grab from a well-known and once-reliable brand.

Will it be any good? Only time will tell.

• Gourmet Brand to Return to Print—As Special Newsstand-Only Issues [Folio]

“________’s Specialty PMS Bar” (Milk Chocolate with Blueberries, Sour Cherries, Cornflakes and Toasted Hazelnuts)

Nuts and Jolts (Milk and White Chocolate with Coffee, Macadamia Nuts, Bourbon Vanilla, Cocoa Nibs and Roasted Cashews)

Recipe Web sites have been around for a while, but it’s good to see the media is catching up to the on-line culinary movement. We still won’t be trying many of the recipes—except on Sundays, when we have six hours to braise pork—but that rhubarb and apricot bread pudding will look mighty good as wallpaper.

• Gourmet Magazine revived for the iPad (New York Times)

Mintz’s latest adventure takes him to the suburbs to teach basic cooking techniques to a bunch of kitchen-adverse young people:

The literal objective is to teach [the 14- to 16-year olds] to make the sauce and cook pasta, something that everyone should know before they’re 20…It turns out that Catherine and Jacky are 23 and have fibbed about their age to attend the class.

Mintz goes on to wonder if he’s been lied to by the other children—maybe they’re “just jockeys or shaved Ewoks.” Mintz has many talents, but age-guessing is not one of them. He would make a very poor carnie.

• Mintz: teaching the TV generation to cook [Toronto Star]

That's all, folks: simply adding rosemary can reduce cancer-causing agents in charred meat (Image: Tambako the Jaguar)

There are still some things that don’t cause cancer (yet), but barbecued meat is not one of them. Charred flesh contains heterocyclic amines (HCAs), a toxic substance that bonds to DNA, causes genetic mutations, and has been linked to pancreatic, prostate, stomach and breast cancers. The good news is that HCAs can be greatly reduced—and flavours can be greatly boosted—by barbecuing old school.

While simply avoiding the most charred portions of meat can reduce carcinogen exposure, that’s not always feasible—and, let’s face it, nobody wants to be that guy. Instead, marinating meat with spices high in polyphenols (that’s science lingo for chemicals that are good for you)—like rosemary, thyme and oregano—or in antioxidants (like garlic, red wine and onion) will do the trick quite nicely.

Studies have shown that meat marinated with spices has significantly lower levels of HCAs in it. That’s how they’ve been doing it in the West Indies for a while now, and they apparently invented this whole putting meat on fire thing.

• Sizzle your meat safely [Toronto Sun]

More details of Marc Thuet’s cookbook are out as he and Biana Zorich prepare to head out west to work on the second season of Conviction Kitchen next month. The Post reports that the surprisingly expletive-free title is French Food My Way and that the book will be released in November. This may be cutting it close in terms of promotion, since the chef is scheduled to shoot a third season of his reality show in the States starting in September. The book includes 100 recipes covering breakfast, lunch and dinner, plus desserts and special meals for get-togethers.

• Celebrity chef Marc Thuet has new cookbook coming: French Food My Way [National Post]

Don't have a cow, man (Image: FotoosVanRobin)

With all the fuss over students struggling to buy food using OSAP funds, it’s easy to miss other victims of Toronto’s high cost of living: expat European investment bankers. One individual has bravely blown the lid off of their plight. On the U.K.-based financial services Web site hereisthecity.com, next to an article called “My Bonus Isn’t Big Enough,” we found (with the help of the Post) Polar Roller’s scathing missive: “The Canadian Rip-Off.” In it, he discusses his horror at having to spend more than $10 for lunch here and takes umbrage at his maid’s paycheque, which, by his reckoning, is a full 20 per cent more than he pays his cleaner back home.

The greatest consternation for the poor banker, who valiantly survived the credit crunch of last year, was the whopping $30 his wife spent for some cuts of organic, grass-fed beef. “Surprising, also,” he writes, “how the absence of medication increases the price of a product.”

We wonder what whine went best with that beef.

• The Great Canadian Rip-Off [Hereisthecity.com]

The soon-to-be-starving students are pledging to give up their Starbucks and Subway, with one student—gasp—deciding to crack open a cookbook: “I guess I’ll start trying out recipes.” Despite such preparations, and since success on the budgeting front would spell disaster for the campaign, we’re left wondering if it makes sense for students with an agenda to participate in such an undertaking.

• $7.50 a day is all you get on the student OSAP diet [Toronto Star]

The food printer: ASCII seems like a distant memory (Photo courtesy of MIT)

Hungry nerds are rejoicing over the invention of two graduate students at MIT: a three-dimensional food printer. This strange next step in food technology, dubbed Cornucopia, resembles a mutant toaster oven that, in theory, mixes up liquid flavours in canisters, heats or cools the mixture, then “extrudes” the ordered dish at the press of a button. Its inventors extol such virtues as “ultimate control” over a dish’s origin, yet something tells us 100-mile dieters won’t trust goop from a canister.

At present, the idea is only on paper, but lazy eaters and sci-fi fans across the Web have blogged about Cornucopia with gusto, hailing it as  “the next major revolution in food preparation.” Traditionalists—otherwise known as eaters of non-extruded food—are predicting that if the concept ever becomes reality, the food will likely taste like garbage.

• Cornucopia: Digital Gastronomy [MIT]
• MIT’s Food Printer Is Making Ferran Adrià Weak at the Knees [Gizmodo]
• 3-D Food Printers [Trendhunter]

Poutine: breakfast of champions (Photo by JoePhoto)

With little more than a week until the 2010 winter games, Americans are apparently stressing out over what to serve at their Canuck-themed Olympic parties. “I remember doing a viewing party for the Beijing Olympics, and we got a bunch of Chinese takeout,” a clueless party planner told the Sacramento Bee. He asked his Canadian friends, the local paper and even the Canadian consulate for help with his menu (since they clearly have nothing better to do).

Rather than recommending whale blubber and Tim Hortons, the Bee seeks advice from Michael Smith, the P.E.I. chef presently trying to forget his landmark trouncing on Iron Chef America by cooking for Olympians in Whistler. Smith recommends seafood chowder to represent the Maritimes, chinook salmon for the West Coast, and grains and legumes for the prairies. The piece also recommends tourtière and baked beans to reflect Montreal, “Chinese ginger beef” from Calgary (this baffles us, too), Nanaimo bars for Vancouver and, of course, poutine.

• Canadian food for Olympian appetites [Sacramento Bee]

Backyard chicken

Since we first reported the story of Toronto Chicken, a local renegade who illegally keeps backyard hens, her struggle has galvanized pro-pullet movements across the country. Her notoriety has made it as far as Washington, D.C., where The Atlantic ran a Web piece about how fowl keepers in Vancouver and Waterloo have used petitions, public education programs and blogging power to persuade city councils to legislate hen-friendly laws. These are people fuelled most by what Toronto Chicken calls the “broader issues,” like rising food prices, E. coli scares, the local food movement and “nutritionism”—Michael Pollan’s term describing humans’ growing obsession with all that’s nutritious (or not) in their food.

If backyard hens were legalized in Toronto, the city would still have to regulate most aspects of the practice: prohibiting roosters, capping the chicken count and limiting the size of enclosures. But it will be a while yet before a coop section is unveiled at Home Depot. One of the primary complaints about inner-city chickens is the clucking: the birds could drive residents of densely populated areas mad. And if there’s one lesson to be taken from the city’s response to noise complaints along Queen West and Ossington, it’s that city council has no wrath like that of grumpy residents who aren’t getting enough sleep.

• Contraband Chickens Invade Canada [The Atlantic]