My Artisanal Bread Making Class at NAIT Continues

Our homework, until we meet again on Tuesday, is to feed our levain, or bread starter. This means taking 40 grams of starter and combining it daily (twice a day if you're a keener) with 100 grams of water and 100 grams of flour every day for a week.

For this I need a scale, as weighing ingredients is at the heart of baking, as much a science as an art. So far I've been using an old Weight Watchers scale, and it's tippy at best. Thinking about upgrades. Still, it seems to be working as daily, the yeasty smell increases. "Wild yeast" from the air is settling into my flour and water mixture, making is all goopy and sweet.

I really enjoyed my class this week, when we made a "ladder" bread, studded with cheese and hot peppers. But, as usual, I am the least talented in the bunch (this is my fifth NAIT course since I became food writer three years ago and I am now used to my bottom-rung position - these are extreme foodies, don't forget). Still, I amuse myself, always the key. Check out my ladder bread dough, more Edvard Munch than Peter Reinhart.

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Dangerous Dan's dangerous ads calculated to cause offence

Published Wednesday, Nov. 10, 2010 9:25PM ESTLast updated Thursday, Nov. 11, 2010 6:57AM EST37 comments

If controversy can be good for business, the owner of one Toronto diner may be laughing all the way to the bank.

Or at least giggling uncontrollably.

Dangerous Dan’s, a gritty Leslieville joint popular among big eaters and night crawlers, has launched an ad campaign calculated to cause offence, positioning itself as a purveyor of aggressively gluttonous fare that is perfect for addled recreational drug users.

The campaign includes three radio spots featuring a group of stoned people semi-incoherently ordering takeout food and chatting about the musical Grease and tattooed genitals.

Three other radio ads boast that some of the restaurant’s more outrageously proportioned menu items have the potential to cause serious illness. One of those, for the so-called Coronary Burger Special, begins with a clinical description of a heart attack (“First, a blockage occurs in the arteries ... oxygen depletes...”) before concluding with a narrator jauntily proclaiming: “Beef, bacon, cheddar, a fried egg – mmm, mmm, deadly.”

The radio ads are airing only once each on the Ryerson University station CKLN, concluding Thursday. They are also posted on YouTube.

The campaign also includes six posters with pictures of the diner’s massive sandwiches and provocative lines like, “While We Still Have Health Care,” and “Meat is Murder. Tasty, tasty murder.”

The campaign originated with a pair of employees at a local audio production house eager to do work that reached beyond the conservative sensitivities of most advertising clients, in hopes of submitting it to industry awards competitions.

They figured they had a willing partner in James McKinnon, the owner of Dangerous Dan’s, who is known for instructing customers to place their orders with him because, “the waitress is dead.”

“He likes being non-PC, he understands to be provocative is worth its weight in gold,” said Drew Frohmann, a writer with Tattoo Sound + Music who said he was one of five people who recorded the stoner commercials while genuinely “baked.”

“If you’re trying to do something that’s fun and interesting, that’s a wonderful place to start.”

The gross-out campaign comes in the wake of the fast-food chain KFC bringing to Canada its Double Down, a gut-busting bonanza of two fried chicken breasts, bacon, cheese, and sauce that contains 540 calories, 30 grams of fat, and 1,740 mg of sodium. KFC claimed 300,000 of the items were sold in its first 10 days on the menu.

Mr. McKinnon suggested economic pressures may be playing a part. “In a recession, you always hear that people order more comfort food, they order more desserts and stuff like that. They really are in this recession,” he said. “So I think it’s sort of a backlash against the whole healthy eating thing.”

Promoting that stance also helps his restaurant stand out. “Nothing makes Dan happier than to [upset] a vegetarian,” said Mr. Frohmann. “He’d love to have PETA picketing outside his place.”

So far, no one is taking the bait. “The ads speak for themselves in their outrageousness,” wrote Susan Sperling, a spokeswoman with Toronto Public Health, in an e-mail. “Clearly we have concerns about rising rates of obesity in our population and so we obviously have issues with the kind of food portrayed in these ads. However, we do not want to spend a lot of time engaging in discussion on something this outrageous and contributing to the publicity the restaurant is seeking.”

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Electoral injustice: Cities are getting the shaft

Jeffrey Simpson5 comments

Voters of Greater Toronto, Calgary and British Columbia’s Lower Mainland: Beware! You’re about to get shafted again by your federal Parliament.

These areas, and other urban and suburban ones across Canada, are already being shafted by the electoral map that heavily favours rural and northern areas. Ridings there already have many fewer voters – tens of thousands, in some cases – than those in urban and suburban areas. And, of course, the Atlantic provinces and Quebec already have too many seats relative to the rest of Canada, courtesy of deals made at Confederation or later.

The latest shaft apparently comes from a very quiet agreement by the Conservatives, Liberals and New Democrats to shelve a bill that would have given Ontario 18 new seats, B.C. seven and Alberta five – seats to which they’re entitled under the last census.

Apportioning seats among provinces is supposed to be a technical, straightforward matter that starts with the decimal census. Based on the population of each province and territory, seats are allocated after taking into account the special deals for Atlantic Canada and Quebec. Then it’s up to non-partisan redistribution commissions (made up of political scientists, retired judges and the like) to draw the constituency boundaries within each province. There’s an appeal to the process that sometimes can wind up in a parliamentary committee.

Generally speaking, the system is established to prevent politicians from fiddling with the law and the principle of one person/one vote that underpins the law.

Politicians, however, have been known to fiddle, and they’re fiddling again. They should be stopped as fast as possible, because Parliament belongs to the people, not the political parties or the self-seeking provinces.

Before the last election, seized of the census count and the apportionment of seats among provinces that flowed from the census, the Harper government tried to pull a fast and dirty on Ontario.

With then-House leader Peter Van Loan actually from Ontario, the government concocted a convoluted explanation why Ontario shouldn’t get 18 more seats but something less. B.C. and Alberta, Conservative strongholds, could get their fair share, but not Ontario. Premier Dalton McGuinty (and others) rightly blew a gasket, and the Conservative deviousness died on the order paper.

Why did the Harperites even try to be devious, mocking the one-person/one-vote principle? Because Quebec objected, pure and simple. The province, knowing its relative strength would decline under redistribution for the unassailably logical reason that its population was not growing, concocted a plea of its own. Quebec is a “nation,” said the National Assembly, and therefore doesn’t deserve to lose seats. In typical Quebec fashion, the National Assembly unanimously passed a resolution endorsing this fiction.

This self-definition, whatever its cosmological, epistemological, atavistic, cultural or descriptive power, had nothing to do with seats in Parliament. It was just a power play, and the Harperites folded because they themselves had declared the Quebecois to be a “nation,” courtesy of a snap decision by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and were trying to tickle Quebec’s fancy by any available means.

That destined-to-fail flirtation was rebuffed in the last election, so the Harperites actually began to stand on principle. Ontario would get its new seats, after all, as would B.C. and Alberta. So said the Harper government, repeatedly. Case closed.

Now fear of irritating Quebec, plus renewed special pleading from the already overrepresented Atlantic provinces, has caused all major parties to push the pause button on the legislation, thereby shafting the urban areas in these provinces that, by law and right, should have more seats. The Bloc Québécois, being only interested in Quebec, obviously wants no change in the electoral map.

It’s also possible that rural and northern MPs in the provinces due more seats might silently be cheering on the special pleaders, since their areas within provinces will lose relative clout. No doubt, they’d argue that their ridings are already too big geographically.

Bottom line: Fast-growing and urban/suburban parts of Canada are about to be done yet another electoral injustice by a Parliament whose electoral composition already mocks contemporary Canada.

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Hot Ticket: Hard Core Logo Live

Published Friday, Jan. 28, 2011 9:17PM ESTLast updated Friday, Jan. 28, 2011 9:18PM EST0 comments

It’s a classic Canadian rock ‘n’ roll tale – a Vancouver punk band lines up an ill-fated, against-all-odds reunion tour, trying to make the impossible happen.

First it was a book by Michael Turner, then a hit movie by Bruce McDonald; now Hard Core Logo: LIVE is one of the mostly hotly anticipated shows at this year’s PuSh Festival.

The brainchild of Michael Scholar, Jr., the stage adaptation tells the story of the fast-talking, hard-living front man Joe Dick, who struggles to regain the band’s former glory, along with his band mates who come along for the ride.

While it honours Mr. Turner’s poetry, and the film’s narrative, the play also veers off in new directions – and was given an edgier score by Vancouver punk legend Joe (Shithead) Keithley.

Mr. Scholar, who admits to an obsession with classic punk, plays Joe Dick – a role that allows him to live out his own thwarted rock ‘n’ roll aspirations, even if it leaves him a little worse for the wear.

“It’s like putting myself through a blender every night. I come out beat up and exhausted. My doctor says I need to go on permanent rest immediately,” says Mr. Scholar with a laugh. “But I said, ‘I’ll do that after the show closes.’ ”

Hard Core Logo: LIVE runs through Feb. 6 at the Rickshaw. The PuSh Festival continues through Feb. 6. Other must-see shows this weekend include Veda Hille’s Happy Birthday Teenage City, Berlin’s Bonanza, Company Drift’s sound machine and many more (pushfestival.ca).

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Vigil honouring Canada’s First World War dead planned for Ypres

Published Friday, Oct. 29, 2010 7:15PM EDTLast updated Friday, Oct. 29, 2010 7:19PM EDT0 comments

The historic city of Ypres will be the site of a seven-day vigil beginning Nov. 4 to remember the 68,000 Canadians killed in the First World War.

The names of the war dead will be projected in sequence, one by one, in the centre of the city opposite the Cloth Hall, the location of the In Flanders Fields war museum. Each name will appear for 25 seconds between sunset and sunrise.

“We'll be projecting through an open window of the museum and across a street onto the side of an old building above the Belgian war memorial,” said Ottawa-based lighting designer Martin Conboy, co-creator of the project along with Canadian actor R.H. Thomson.

“You won't even see where the beam of light is coming from, and so the images of these names will just emerge from the stone as if they were inside the stone. ... It's quite magical and extremely evocative.”

The vigil, with funding from Veterans Affairs Canada, will be streamed live to the website www.1914-1918.ca, ending early on Nov. 11. It will also occur simultaneously at over 150 schools across Canada and at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa.

The names of the dead include those killed in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, the Royal Newfoundland Regiment, the Canadian merchant navy and the Canadian Army Medical Corps.

In 2008 Mr. Thomson and Mr. Conboy developed a similar vigil with names projected at the National War Memorial in Ottawa and in cities in Canada and the U.K.

Canadians fought in the area surrounding Ypres during the First World War. Thousands of Canadian graves are located in the region.

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Ottawa halts change that would leave low-income seniors in lurch

Published Friday, Nov. 26, 2010 12:45PM ESTLast updated Friday, Nov. 26, 2010 1:28PM EST150 comments

The Harper government has suspended a new policy change affecting low-income seniors after The Globe and Mail reported it could lead seniors to unknowingly surrender their federal income support.

Human Resources Minister Diane Finley made the announcement Friday in the House of Commons. She said she has instructed federal officials at Service Canada to contact all Canadians who might be affected.

Some seniors were poised to lose a key part of their monthly income because of a new policy approved by the federal government without public notice, according to internal guidelines.

The rules would have changed the way lump-sum withdrawals from Registered Retirement Income Funds affect Guaranteed Income Supplement payments.

However, in Ottawa Friday Ms. Finley said seniors who were caught up in the problem this year will be contacted directly and allowed to use the old rules.

“I was very concerned by what was reported this morning,” said Ms. Finley, when asked about the issue by Liberal MP Gerry Byrne in the House of Commons. “That is why I have instructed departmental officials to immediately put a hold on this policy while we review it completely. I have also instructed officials to contact those individuals affected directly so that their applications can be reviewed and evaluated for eligibility under the old policy.”

Mr. Byrne, who first raised the issue in the House earlier this week, responded with skepticism to the minister’s suggestion that she first learned of the issue in Friday’s Globe and Mail.

“Mr. Speaker, review is not reversal. No notice, no consultation, no information and no compassion,” he said. “The minister now says it is brand new information. Allow me to table letters the minister signed to senior citizens across Canada informing them of this policy just recently. Now she says that she will review it.”

Opposition MPs said the minister should go further and scrap the policy permanently.

The new policy meant that if seniors withdrew more than the minimum allowed from their RRIF – which is what a Registered Retirement Savings Plan becomes in retirement – it could affect the threshold for receiving GIS payments, which are meant to ease the financial burden of low-income seniors. In the past, seniors could have their GIS eligibility calculated based on projected income, which did not take into account large RRIF withdrawals.

The issue is surfacing as new data show the number of Canadian seniors living in poverty jumped nearly 25 per cent between 2007 and 2008, to 250,000 from 204,000, according to Campaign 2000.

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Michael Ignatieff courted Julian Fantino but was rebuffed

Morning BuzzPosted on Friday, November 26, 2010 8:26AM EST430 comments

Stephen Harper’s star candidate, Julian Fantino, was asked by Michael Ignatieff to run for the Liberals in Vaughan – but turned him down, according to the Conservatives.

Now, on the eve of Monday’s vote, the former Toronto police chief and OPP commissioner is being subjected to what the Conservatives consider character assassination by the Liberals.

And so the Tories are fighting back. They are charging hypocrisy and are breaking their silence on a secret they’ve kept since the beginning of the by-election campaign.

“We were aware from the beginning of the campaign that Mr. Ignatieff asked him to run for the Liberals,” Conservative Party spokesman Fred DeLorey said. “We had no intention of making it public – but to see the Liberals actually attack his character and integrity, a man who has committed his career to public service and fighting crime, is just too much.

“The Liberals need to be called out for their hypocrisy.”

The Grits confirmed they had spoken to Mr. Fantino but said discussions did not go very far. “Early on, before Maurizio [Bevilacqua, the former Liberal MP in the riding] formally resigned, we spoke to him,” a senior Ignatieff official told The Globe on Thursday night. “But nothing ever gelled on either side. We didn't like him, and he didn't like us. So we both moved on.

The official added: “We got the right candidate for Vaughan – Tony [Tony Genco]. And Fantino got Harper. Happy ending all around.”

And so the by-election campaign just got nastier, with only days before Monday’s vote in the suburban Toronto-area riding. The race between the Liberals and Tories is tight and the stakes are high.

Mr. Harper has given a lot of support to his hand-picked candidate; there is strong speculation Mr. Fantino will go straight to cabinet if he wins. For Mr. Ignatieff, a loss in Vaughan would be troubling as it has been a Liberal seat for 22 years.

For the past week, the Tories and Liberals have been exchanging barbs in the House of Commons, and elsewhere, about Mr. Fantino and his Liberal competitor, Mr. Genco.

The Grits charge that the Prime Minister’s Office is keeping Mr. Fantino out of the public eye, given the former police officer has turned down invitations to debate Mr. Genco. Liberals are circulating a YouTube video and still photos noting Mr. Fantino’s absence from a recent all-candidates debate. But the Tories noted he had to attend a mass for his wife’s family so wasn’t available.

The Conservatives, in turn, have accused Mr. Genco of not releasing past expenses. Public Safety Minister Vic Toews seems to delight in mispronouncing his surname – repeatedly using a hard “G” so that he sounds like some sort of lizard.

And Thursday two Liberals stood up in the Commons to attack Mr. Fantino over his handling of the native protests in Caledonia when he was the OPP commissioner. They noted that Human Resources Minister Diane Finley, whose represents the troubled corner of Ontario, had signed a petition calling for an inquiry into Mr. Fantino’s actions.

“The member was a minister when she signed a petition demanding the Prime Minister’s hand-picked candidate in Vaughan, Julian Fantino, be investigated. She wanted his pay docked,” Toronto MP Maria Minna charged. “She wanted him suspended and she wanted him fired. Does she still hold the same view now?”

And another Toronto Liberal, Rob Oliphant, made a statement concerning Mr. Fantino and Ms. Finley’s actions. “If the Minister did not have the confidence of the Prime Minister’s hand-picked candidate then, how can she or the Prime Minister expect the voters of Vaughan to have confidence in him now?”

Such is the state of play in federal politics ahead of Monday’s by-election.

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