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The first Ontario farmers’ dinner party

The way I see it, I am only as good as my last dinner. Thesedays, however, as I wait for Union to open, I guess I am only as good as mylast blog post. So here goes: I cooked the first farmers’ dinner last Sundayup at the farm, and it was one of the best dinners I have ever made. There issomething special about cooking food for the people who raise and grow theingredients. This was a five-course meal cooked on the wood-burning stovewith everybody sitting around the kitchen table.

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Smoking my way to a unique charcuterie plate

The cold weather makes for good smoking, so I’ve been in the farm’s smokehouse a lot lately with duck breasts and suckling pork bellies from Cumbrae’s. I’ve been experimenting with Union’s future charcuterie plate: curing the duck breast overnight with a mix of coriander seeds from the garden, brown sugar, salt and some chili flakes, then smoking them with plum wood the next day and slowly roasting them afterward with maple syrup. Sliced thinly, it’s a beautiful mix of sweet, spiced fat and subtle smoked breast that is going to be a great addition to the menu. As for the pork bellies, I am still working on them. I was a little overzealous the first time around, and I gave them an unsavoury “campfire” finish. I think the smokehouse will give the meat the uniqueness I am looking for in the charcuterie plate, so I scrapped the efforts to get it from Spain. It doesn’t feel right anymore for Union to search for stuff beyond what is right here. Keep it local and do great things with it—that’s the idea.

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Butchering with the big boys at Cumbrae’s

While Union is being pieced together, I’ve been taking apart whole lambs and pigs at Cumbrae’s. I go in on Wednesdays because it’s the day they get the bodies in—that’s what they call the animals there, “bodies.” I’ve been working mostly on the lambs, which is more intense than cleaning chickens and rabbits and beef tenderloins. The atmosphere in the shop is great—full of happy, patient butchers who don’t mind taking a bit of time to show me how it’s done. The art of butchering is all about knowing where to stick the knife, and then slicing with force and conviction in order to make good, clean, straight cuts. When the knife hits bone, you take the saw and cut right through with long, strong strokes. It takes a while to get a feel for it, or you over-think and the lamb takes you apart instead (and drinking whisky the night before doesn’t help much, either).

But I tell you, there are some beautiful bodies coming into that shop. Last Wednesday, a big Angus came in. Stephen took apart the forequarter (where the prime rib lives) as it was suspended from a swivel hook. The hanging method lets gravity help; the pieces come apart when you find their seams. Stephen makes it look easy. An incision here, a cut there. It’s a beautiful thing to watch. For me, the best part is finally seeing where all the cuts come from—like the bavette, the hanger and the New York. I saw the tenderloin nestled in there, clinging to white fat, and watched the technique used to take it out. I finally understood why every tenderloin I’ve cleaned up has had ridges along its back. They sent me off with a piece of super-aged prime rib to try. I cooked it up at the farm, and the flavour in the aged fat and meat shot my dad back 50 years, to when my grandmother insisted that the butcher hang her stuff as long as he possibly could. I can’t wait to get back in there.

• Watch a video on the dry-aging process (and a number of other meat-related subjects) on Cumbrae’s TV.

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A taste of the food to come

My last stint in Italy was in Siena. I got into town at 3 p.m. and found a dingy little hotel room, then stopped at an enoteca (wine bar). I had brought my A game, so I was talking to everybody in there like it was my birthday or something. I was just so damn happy to get out of that lonely hotel in Alba where I was working and living up in the storage room with a leaky roof and a hose for a shower. By dinnertime, I had drunk enough brunello to kill a small deer, so I asked for the bill, but the bartender charged me nothing because she said I had done her job for her. Then she quickly declined when I asked her to come for dinner with me. My mother had told me about a slow food restaurant called Osteria le Logge, so I drifted there by my weaving, weary self. The place looked like a library inside, with big old shelves full of books. The kitchen was beautiful and glassed-in and had all the stoves and ovens set in an island that the chefs worked around. I wasn’t looking forward to eating on my own, but luckily an Italian couple that I had just met earlier at the enoteca spotted me and invited me to their table. The guy, Francisco, has his own vineyard, and the woman was a tree farmer. They were both nice and had their hands in the earth. We talked about tree farming and wine, and we ate like kings—ravioli and rabbit and a steak that barely fit on the plate—and then we sat with Mirco, one of the owners, till three in the morning, sipping grappa and talking about the restaurant business (by then I was telling the world what I was going to do). He stressed that the big part of the game—half the battle, really—is serving stuff in your place that nobody else has and to keep it simple, “like a good engine.”

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The romance is gone. Let’s just open this place already

Part of the reason why it has taken so long to build this restaurant is that I romanticized the whole process. I envisioned myself coming home from Europe and building Union with old friends, bringing everybody together. When I left Alba on an early morning train, I felt like a ripped-up five-dollar bill. As I watched the big fields and trees shoot past my window, I was hit with a vision and desire to create this restaurant, and then everything started to make sense. I don’t know if it was a survival instinct kicking in—some desperate realization that I know what I want to cook and don’t need to wait for somebody to show me anymore—but after that, I felt like a million bucks. I rode that feel-good train all the way home. But in feeling good, I got too many heads involved in my restaurant project. They clogged up the process with their visions and ideas, and the momentum got slower and slower. Bad decisions were made. And now that there is finally a clear, bright path to the finish line, I am so damn tired of the place that some days I feel I would chuck it in the river if I could.

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Union rising

Things are looking up here at Union. It’s a good thing, too, because I don’t think they could have gotten any worse. But a good team is taking shape to finish the place. Two young guys are doing the rest of the plumbing, and a high-energy, two-man contracting team will finish the drywalling and all the rest. They are the types of guys who make their lunch the night before so they can plow through the day. My cousin Willy referred me to them. They came from a good source, they have experience in restaurants, and they happened to have time between jobs. I also have a master electrician working at the place, a funny French dude who K.K. introduced to me as “the best.” He has a ton of experience and is fair. And to top it off, the windows are finally coming in—energy efficient and all that—so things should get a bit warmer and brighter at Union soon. So just maybe I can stop climbing walls and pacing and generally causing more harm than good. Anxiety blows. It clogs your head, makes you restless and wakes you up in the middle of the night for no reason. So with fingers crossed and an eye on the finish line, I am going to get back to cooking and focusing on getting things in place for opening night.

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It was Foodstock!

I was at the very first Canadian Chefs’ Congress last month. Its creator, Michael Stadtländer, is a chef, farmer, artist and dreamer; when he gets a yearning, he acts on it and creates. So when he wanted to know what chefs were cooking along the coasts and in the mountains and prairies, he found out by inviting them to his farm and calling it a congress. But it was bigger and more significant than that. It was not just about food and cooking. It was about protection and awareness; it was about how chefs must now be creative and aggressive about keeping things local, organic and sustainable; it was about protecting small farms and artisanal producers; and it was about taking a stand against cooking with harmful genetically modified ingredients. It was art.

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Two turkeys, Hank Williams and getting back to the way things should be

I’ve been feeling a little bit stressed and stung lately—full of panic and sharp pains in my stomach—but I had some relief at the farm over Thanksgiving. My brother and I decided to give ourselves a little gut check and kill our own turkeys. I guess we were looking to reconnect with the way things used to be, for a chance to do what our grandmothers used to do. We headed over to the Chicken Lady’s place, JoAnn’s farm, to pick up two birds. When you walk around her farm, an army of turkeys, chickens, ducks and geese follows you around. It can get a little uncomfortable if you’ve got the fear. She raises heritage birds of all types, trying to strengthen their gene pools and get away from the mass-produced broiler birds that, for fattening purposes, have had all their survival skills bred out of them—to the extent that if you don’t control their feed, they will eat until their hearts cease to function. My brother and I picked a couple of turkeys. As the Chicken Lady put them in feed bags with holes cut out for their heads, she said to them, “This will be the only bad day you two are going to have.”

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Do the hustle: How opening a restaurant is like finding a camel festival

The reason this whole thing is dragging on and leaving me to the wolves is because it is tough to find good tradesmen these days. To avoid ending up with half a restaurant and no money to finish, I have had to make changes to my initial plan. I would have to take a job on a cruise boat for a few years, otherwise. It’s tough right now. No other way to put it. We just need one big run of good luck and we’ll be done. That ain’t easy. I have heard that many workers don’t want to do restaurants because they have been screwed over too many times. So I guess it goes both ways. It is a nasty world out there, and I walked right into it, full of trust and hopefulness. When Union does open, I know exactly what I am going to do in it. I just assumed that other people would not try to get involved if they didn’t know what they were doing, as well. I was wrong about that. I’ve been getting picked apart since I started.

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Opening Soon

Ed, the plumber

The best part about this whole awful process has been the people I meet on site—salt of the earth types, like Ed the plumber. He’s from Newfoundland and is a real rock-and-roller (well, kind of like a caged bear in sweatpants, with long flowing locks and a trucker cap on backwards). He’s a great guy and a hell of a plumber. He’s got a thing about straight pipes; he just cares. When I asked him if getting a sink in some spot was possible, he said, “Oh yeah, anything’s possible. There ain’t no money in fucking around.” Or, when he got in the crawl space to lay some pipes, he said, “Ah, I hope there aren’t any Christians above me because I’m going to be cursing something awful down here.”

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