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Introducing: Stasis Local Foods, the new Roncesvalles emporium for all things pickled and jarred (and preferably local)

Inside Stasis Local Foods, looking out onto Roncesvalles (Image: Caroline Aksich)

Up at the northern tip of Roncesvalles, just south of Dundas, sits the neighbourhood’s newest gourmet food shop, Stasis Local Foods. The store carries a tightly curated selection of local and seasonal gems, but the focus is on the made-in-house jams and preserves prepared by the shop’s young owner, Julian Katz. Katz has cooked his way across the Toronto dining landscape (C5, The Drake, Lucien, Ruby Watchco), but when not preparing $30 mains, he would pickle in-season produce and whip up scrumptious jams. One day, he had a revelation: “I looked around and saw that I had 30 or 40 cases of jam in my house, and I was like, ‘This is ridiculous! I can only give away jam as Christmas gifts for so long!’ ” Katz left his gig with Lynn Crawford in January to brave the city’s farmers’ markets, and then founded his company, Stasis Preserves. After a year of pestering his chef friends for access to their kitchens, Katz decided it was time to get his own.

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The Informer

A Message from Toronto Life

October 15, 2011 | 10:25 am

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Weekend Reading List: top stories from our sister sites, from an autumn walk to the King of Rock

Every weekend we round up the highlights from the other websites in the St. Joseph Media family. Check them out, after the jump.

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The Dish

From the Print Edition

August 5, 2011 | 10:30 am

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Best of the City 2011: Three stops for your meat, fish and fruits and veggies

(Image: Carlo Mendoza)

Game Fish Farmers’ market

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The Dish

Pantry Raid

May 11, 2011 | 5:03 pm

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What a waste: UN reports that one third of the world’s food becomes garbage

(Image: Alfred Ng)

We already knew we probably waste way more food than we should, but we didn’t know it was this bad. As the BBC reports, a recently released United Nations study has found that one billion tons of food is discarded across the globe every year, prompting food retailers to re-evaluate their practices. After the jump, five things we learned from the study.

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The Dish

Opening

May 9, 2011 | 2:11 pm

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Introducing: The Lakeview Storehouse, Dundas West’s new corner store and communal pantry

(Image: Gizelle Lau)

Back in November 2010, we told you that the owners of the Lakeview Restaurant were planning on going retail in early December with a new shop next door to the hipster late night and brunch staple. As with most new shops and restaurants on the Ossington strip, the opening was delayed, this time for five months. Now, we’re happy to report that the Lakeview Storehouse finally opened last week on May 2.

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The Dish

Pantry Raid

April 29, 2011 | 2:42 pm

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Want to know how much salt and fat there is in your food? Tough luck, thanks to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency

Do you know what’s in your food? (Image: Jason Lam)

While Canadians decide who they want leading the country, the bureaucracy in Ottawa is largely spinning its wheels until the next guy comes to boss them around. With all that spare time on their hands, some bureaucrats are turning to the time-honoured tradition of leaking to the press, and in this case we’re glad they are: it looks like the Canadian Food Inspection Agency has gotten out of the business of checking out the nutritional claims made by food producers on their labels.

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The Dish

Pantry Raid

April 8, 2011 | 9:59 am

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Leslieville strikes oil: Montreal-based Olive and Olives to open up shop this spring

Leslieville’s recent boom in new gourmet food stores—including Foodist Market, Hooked and Sausage Partners—shows no signs of abating. The latest addition? Olive and Olives, the first Toronto location of the Montreal-based purveyor of high-quality olive oils. Danièle Beauchamp and Claudia Pharand, who run five shops and a thriving mail order business in Quebec, have partnered with Torontonian Mia Sturup to open up the Leslieville location.

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The Dish

Rumours & Rumblings

January 24, 2011 | 3:27 pm

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Cookstown Greens goes up for sale after 22 years

(Image: David Cohlmeyer)

Cookstown Greens, the pioneering supplier of specialty produce to top Toronto restaurants, is up for sale. Founded in 1988 by former restaurateur and food columnist David Cohlmeyer, the farm built its reputation on its rare and organically grown produce. Now, after 22 successful years, Cohlmeyer has put the 95-acre property and business up for sale for $1.2 million, and is hoping to sell it as a going concern.

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The Dish

Food Porn

December 8, 2010 | 1:12 pm

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Holiday Gift Guide: 13 edible present ideas

We prefer to pass the holiday season by eating our way through it and forcing loved ones to do the same. So we’ve come up with 13 inventive edible gifts (and not a mini-muffin basket in sight).

See our foodie gift guide now >>

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The Informer

From the Print Edition

August 25, 2010 | 8:57 am

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Wild Thing: the story behind the Brick Works

The bucolic eco-paradise between Rosedale and the DVP almost never was. How big money and one ambitious entrepreneur remade the Brick Works By Sasha Chapman

On May 29, the opening day of the Brick Works farmers’ market, I pedalled past the savvy people who had parked their cars illegally outside the Mount Pleasant Cemetery’s southern gate, knowing there would be no parking spots below, and through the Moore Park ravine. The air was cool and moist, the trees still. Then, the vista of the Don Valley opened up: the sun was shining on the pretty quarry garden, burning away the morning clouds and reflecting off the wetland ponds. I couldn’t yet see the market, but I could hear it: at 8 a.m., the site was already alive with happy chatter and the slow strum of “You Are My Sunshine” on guitar.

(Image: Jeremy R. Jansen)

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The Dish

From the Print Edition

August 16, 2010 | 9:02 am

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Introducing: Nature’s Emporium, a 50,000-square-foot organic grocery utopia

(Image: Sian Richards)

Just walking past the juice bar and the pesticide-free garden centre and into the almost ridiculously beautiful produce wing of this 50,000-square-foot organic grocery utopia makes you feel healthier. Nature’s Emporium is a sumptuous testament to the new heights of our food obsessions. Signs detail provenance (the trout is smoked near Wiarton, and Picton’s Fifth Town supplies an army of flavoured chèvres), and a naturopath is on hand to offer advice. Two pastry chefs create gluten-free sweets; the zingy vanilla-orange cupcakes topped with rosettes of vegan icing are pure dairy-free decadence. At the raw bar, living pizzas (crisped slowly in a dehydration oven in the belief it preserves key enzymes) are stunning, especially the one with collard greens and cashew cheese. Luckily for kale-loving downtowners, this behemoth of health is scouting locations south of the 401.

Nature’s Emporium, 16655 Yonge St., Newmarket, 905-898-1844, naturesemporium.ca

The Dish

Pantry Raid

July 5, 2010 | 11:49 am

2 Comments

The great scapes: five ways that Toronto chefs are using garlic shoots

A bunch of garlic scapes (Image: Joe Shlabotnik)

For the past few weeks, garlic scapes have been cropping up on menus throughout the city. An early summer treat, these shoots are the sweeter, mellower off-growth of the more pungent bulbs that come later in the season (cutting them from young plants helps the bulbs grow plumper). But as they are delectable in their own right, scapes have lately found a following from locavore chefs. Below, five ways of the best ways to enjoy scapes in Toronto right now.

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The Dish

Aprons & Icons

June 15, 2010 | 2:52 pm

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We ask the top chefs at Toronto Taste what’s in store at George, Splendido, Scaramouche and the rest of the city’s hot restaurants

This past Sunday marked the 20^th anniversary of Toronto Taste, the annual event that unites Toronto’s food lovers and food makers for a day of innovative cooking, tasking and fundraising for Second Harvest. 60 of Toronto’s top chefs—including Jason Bangerter, Donna Dooher, Chris McDonald, Mark McEwan, Anthony Walsh and Anne Yarymowich—doled out top-notch cuisine to an estimated 1,600 guests at the ROM. We caught up with the chefs and asked them what’s in store for them and their restaurants this summer.

Urban Decoder

June 10, 2010 | 11:00 am

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My neighbours are growing pot plants in their garden. Our houses are attached, and there’s only a low fence separating our yards. If they were busted, could I get in trouble? Am I being paranoid?

As long as Mary Jane stays on her side of the property line, the fuzz has no reason to knock on your door. And it’s unlikely a rogue plant will sprout in your yard, since pot can’t reproduce without the presence of both male and female plants (the less potent male plants are usually weeded out early on). Moreover, you are not legally obliged to snitch on your neighbours, so if they were to be busted, you would not be considered an accessory to the crime. Anyway, the chances of said bust are slim. The five-0 doesn’t comb Annex yards in search of drug lords. Assuming your neighbours aren’t cultivating a miniature weed forest, they’re probably safe. Should you want to wreak vengeance on them for, say, hogging the prime street parking, you can place an anonymous tip, which could result in them facing up to seven years in the clink. As for the question of paranoia, it’s a well-known side effect of marijuana use, which begs the question: are you sure you’re just watching the ganja grow?

• Question from Lucy Bazelon, the Annex

The Hype

Mother Atwood

June 8, 2010 | 9:15 am

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Margaret Atwood calls plan to close prison farms “dumb as a stump”

Margaret Atwood scared us into improving our recycling habits with her novels about environmental apocalypse, but the CanLit queen doesn’t confine her eco-activism to the realm of fiction. She was in Kingston this weekend to head a protest against the closure of the country’s six prison farms, where inmates currently produce much of their own daily bread. Before the marchers posted their demands on the door of the Correctional Service of Canada, Atwood rallied the crowd with a feisty speech in which she argued that, besides being a big step back from sustainability, the supposed cost-cutting measure is penny-wise and pound foolish: the farm program helps rehabilitate prisoners and equip them for a life outside prison, where they won’t continue to eat up taxpayers’ dollars. The author did serious research on Kingston Penitentiary for her 1996 book Alias Grace, so she probably knows what she’s talking about.

True to form, the ever-candid Atwood didn’t mince words in her conclusion:

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