Last week, I attended a Prince Edward Country (PEC) wine and cheese fundraiser for Third Wall Theater Company's 10th Anniversary season. The event, dubbed "Go Local-Go Loco", was held at the Wallspace Gallery (358 Richmond Road). Its caterer, The Piggy Market (400 Winston Avenue).

Go Local Go Loco with Third Wall
Me, I was on assignment for Cheryl Gain's OttawaTonite.com when I attended the event and was delighted to have the opportunity to showcase The Piggy Market's food.

Chef/owner Dave Neil provided Prince Edward County raw and pasteurized goat, sheep, and cow's milk cheeses; locally-produced smoked meat; locally-reared heritage pork rib rillette; in-house marinated mushrooms; in-house pickled red and golden beets; and in-house baked mini-Jamaican patties.

At the end of the event, Chef Neil looked visibly relieved. He then informed me, The Piggy Market celebrated its first birthday. Indeed, it was a year ago, April 10th, when Jenn and I took our first Good Friday food tour down Wellington Street West and Richmond Road. We stopped into The Piggy Market, then newly opened. Chefs Neil, Warren Sutherland (Sweet Grass Aboriginal Bistro), and Pascale Berthiaume were just profiled in the Ottawa Citizen (a local newspaper).

A year later, The Piggy Market's storefront is ostensibly the same. Pascale is still making her now celebrated ice cream.

Pascale's Ice Cream Makers
It earned the 2nd spot on Ottawa Magazine's 101 Tastes to Try Before You Die list in its September 2009 edition. She is fast becoming a household name in the city.

Pascale's Image
Her image, now synonymous with rich and natural ice cream.

The Piggy Market still stocks many locally-produced products from preserves to juices, vinegars, and pickles.

Preserves and Pickles

Juices and Vinegar

And, loyal customers keep furnishing the foodie shop with pig-related memorabilia. In fact, every pig in the store is a gift. That is with the exception of the pig paintings at the front of the shop.

Flying Pig Paintings
These painted works are being displayed by The Piggy Market. They are for sale. The price tag: $300/painting.

More after the jump...

This year, from June 1 to June 15, Amnesty International organized the "Taste for Justice" fundraiser to support its work to stop violence against women. Many participants hosted Taste for Justice events or "dined in", by registering online, planing an event, ordering a "Host Kit", inviting guests, distributing donation forms, and directing all proceeds to Amnesty International. Others "dined out" at number of participating restaurants in several Canadian cities.

In Ottawa, 20 restaurants participated as "Taste for Justice Friends." One, Infusion Bistro (825 Bank Street), a "Partner for Freedom." Taste for Justice Friends donate a portion of proceeds from June 1-15. Partners for Freedom restaurants donate a minimum of $750 and actively promote Amnesty campaigns year-round. Chef Matthew Carmichael's e18hteen (18 York Street) donated a percentage of sales from its seasonal strawberry shortcake.

In the Wellington West neighbourhood, we had three participating restaurants: Agave Grill (1331 Wellington Street), Caffé Mio (1379 Wellington Street), and Thyme & Again Catering (1255 Wellington Street).

While I'm told that Agave Grill makes a stunning mojito and is owned by the former owner of Feleena's Mexican Restaurant (Comida Mexicana) in the Glebe (corner of Bank (742) and Third), Jenn and I decided to support Amnesty International by finally giving Thyme & Again a try. After all, we've passed by the caterer/eatery hundreds of times during our 5 years, living in Wellington West.

Thyme & Again
According to its website, Thyme & Again caters events of various sizes, from dinner parties to weddings, and operates a popular brick and mortar retail space, called its "food shop." They also supply the dishes served at the nearby Great Canadian Theater Company's (GCTC) in-house restaurant, mostly food that the establishment can heat up or serve cold.

Regarding their food shop, it is stocked with frozen dinner ideas from game-meat stuffed pasta, vegetable stir fries, soups, desserts, breakfast scones, and even tourtiere. Their "eat-in" options include various pastries (both miniature and full-size tarts), cookies, chocolates (mostly in-house made truffles), soups, pot pies, and sandwiches. They also serve entrees that change from month to month. Everything is listed on their website.

Me, I love sandwiches, so we went to Thyme & Again for a light dinner after work. Unfortunately, we were served sandwiches that were wrapped in plastic and chilled for several hours. We surmise this is because the majority of the store's "sandwich" business comes from its lunch service. Because workers from surrounding office buildings, including from the large government campus called Tunney's Pasture, pile into the establishment during lunch time, sandwiches may be made en-mass in the morning. Such leaves whatever remainder after the lunch rush for the afternoon and evening.

Originally, I wanted a calabrese sandwich: capicolla ham, soprasetta, orovolone cheese, red onion, and spicy eggplant finished with a lemon herb mayonnaise. They were all out. Instead, I had the "Green Thai Curry Roast Beef with Lemon Grass Aioli and Smoked Gouda." Jenn, the dilled Egg Salad: egg salad with fresh dill and chives.

Green Curry Roast Beef ($5.25)
My roast beef sandwich was less than impressive. The roast beef tasted bland and had a refrigerated texture. The seeded kaiser had succumbed to the cold, hardening and tasting somewhat stale. The smoked gouda added some sharpness. The featured "green curry and lemon grass" flavours came from the aioli, which was unevenly spread throughout the sandwich. As such, some bites carried faint flavours. Others, much more.


Dilled Egg Salad ($5.25)
Jenn was equally unimpressed with hers. Her egg salad had only fleeting dill flavours, which is normally a powerful herb. She tasted no chives. Her kaiser was equally hard and stale. In fact, she had difficulty eating her sandwich as the egg salad kept spurting out the opposite end. She also found it somewhat too salty for her linking.

At $11.87 after taxes, but before tip, I was glad a portion was going to charity. Else, this would have been a rather expensive "cafeteria"-style sandwich.

Here is Thyme & Again's card:

Front

Back

In fact, I was so non-plussed that the next day, I moved up my visit to a Portuguese bakery and sandwich shop near my workplace, so I could remind myself what a made to order sandwich tastes like.

Estoril
Located in Gatineau (89 rue Eddy), Boulangerie Estoril is family owned and run. It supplies ethnic Portugese products along with more French-style freshly baked bread. Its signage is tattered and well worn. There are domestic chest freezers in the middle of the retail space. Its eating area only has a handful of tables. However, it serves deli-sliced made-to-order sandwiches, something I readily appreciated after my experience with Thyme and Again. It's owners, an older couple that speak mostly Portuguese and French, are also warm and friendly.

And yes, Estoril is located nearby two large government complexes Place du Portage and Terrasses de la Chaudière, furthering the comparison with Thyme & Again.

For a measly $3.95 (before tip or taxes), I was able to pickup their "Portuguese Special": deli-sliced Portuguese sausage (whose Paprika flavours have me thinking it was linguiça); Portuguese cheese; all, on a freshly baked roll with mayonnaise and yellow mustard.

Lunch

Portuguese Special

Linguiça?
It was delicious, every flavour playing well with one another: savory, spice, sharp, and bright. Best of all, the textures met my expectations for an ethnic sandwich shop: fresh bread, slicer thin meat, and a generous amount of cheese. None, cold!

For dessert ($1 more), I picked up a Portuguese egg tart, which differs greatly from the Chinese variety that is served at dim sum.

Egg Tart
Served chilled, the egg tart's custard was dense and sweet, tasting of vanilla and slight hints of caramel. Its pastry was light and flaky.

If you work in walking distance of Estoril, I urge you to drop by.

It seems the only redeeming quality of our visit to Thyme & Again is our discovering a cache of Pascale's ice cream.

Pascale's Ice Cream
Thyme & Again sells Pascale's ice cream a dollar more ($10.95) than she does at the Piggy Market. This is good information for those evenings when we have surprise guests and we need to make an ice cream run.

Nevertheless, with its reputation, I promise to try Thyme & Again again, perhaps when I find them supporting another charity campaign.

More after the jump...

Sunday afternoon, my better half and I took our guests to the Piggy Market in Westboro to visit Dave Neil and Pascale Berthiaume. Apparently, we arrived two hours before closing. Pascale had just returned from the Landesdowne Farmers' Market. Both she and Dave was visibly worn, but happy to answer all of our friends' many questions. Suffice it to say, Abby and Mlle Ling were curious about just about everything in the self professed "fine food delicatessen with a focus on artisanal pork products, and locally produced foods."

Bread and Smoked Duck Breasts
In the end, we picked up a loaf of oat and cranberry Art Is In bread and a pair of smoked duck breasts. Originally, I promised Mlle Ling duck confit, but Dave was all out. He offered me some frozen ones, but I substituted smoke duck breasts instead.

Abby Carefully Slicing the Art Is In Bread

Pair of Smoked Duck Breast

Sliced, served chilled
Mlle Ling's boyfriend Thomas picked up a tub of Pascale's Hazelnut and Chocolate ice cream for dessert.

Dave also graciously invited me back to see a batch of in-house hot smoked pork belly bacon. Were I not just in the market for appetizers for that evening's dinner, I think I would have walked away with an entire side. It looked and smelled incredible.

Total cost of duck breast and bread: $32.25 (and worth every penny!)

When I tweeted what I planned to serve as an appetizer (thinly sliced smoked duck breast on artisanal bread), Epicuria's Chef Tracey Black mentioned that smoked duck breast goes very well with fruit chutney. Yes, Chef! I then walked up to my fridge and demanded ingredients. My fridge coughed up a pair of mangoes, so I made mango chutney.

Mango Chutney
With limited ingredients and time, I settled on FoodTV's Anna Olson's recipe with slight omissions. The modified recipe follows:

Recipe

Ingredients

Diced Onions

Baking Chutney

Done
Things you'll need:

• 2 cups diced mango - I know, mass would be better. Still, 2 regular large mangoes produce 2 cups of diced flesh
• 1/2 cup diced onion
• 1/2 cup light brown sugar
• 3 tbsp rice wine vinegar
• 1 tbsp finely grated fresh ginger
• 1 tsp ground cumin
• 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
• zest of 1 orange
• white granulated sugar to sprinkle

Prep:

1. Disassemble the mango, onion, and ginger
2. Pre-heat an oven to 375°F

Method:

1. Combine all ingredients in a non-stick pan and simmer on medium to medium-low heat until the onions are tender and the liquid reduces to a syrup
2. Spoon the mixture into heat proof ceramic containers. I used oval gratin dishes
3. Sprinkle with sugar
4. Bake for 20 minutes

The latter oven baking is meant to create a sugar syrup on top of the chutney. Had I a butane torch, I would have brullé'd the top.

Since there was no time to cool the chutney or allow it to mature its flavours, I chose to add some caramel sweetness and serve it warm. My intention was to pair savory and smokey with spicy and bright. The pairing worked.

Served

Playful Plating
Think duck breast. dry cured with spices. hot smoked. sliced thin, served chilled. Accompanying it, on slices of expertly worked bread, was something sweet, bright, and spicy.

Stew
Here is the additional entree I was asked to make: slow cooked beef stew (4 hours), using beef rib meat.

Beef Stew
Regarding the sauce, it came from blening the onions I stewed the beef with, forced them through a strainer, and using the resultant puree to thicken leftover braising liquid. Major flavourings: light soy sauce, fish sauce, and black pepper.

Bacon Waffles
For breakfast the next Monday, I snuck out of the condo early in the morning to barbecue a typical supermarket-sized package of bacon.

Barbecued Bacon

Bacon Mountain
When I came back, I whipped up a batch of cookingnook.com's waffle batter: 1 1/2 cups milk, 2 egg yolks, 1/4 cup sugar, 2 cups plain flour, and 1/2 tsp baking powder via the muffin method; thinned with 2 oz melted butter and 2 tbsp cold water; and lightened with firm peaked egg whites. While the mixture was hydrating, I ran the crisped and cooled bacon through a food processor and added the fine crumbs to the batter.

Batter

Then, my better half ran the batter through our waffle maker. Result: bacon waffles, which tasted really good with pancake syrup.

Waffle maker

Waffles

Texture
Think light waffles, crisp, and loaded with savory bacon bits.

Lunch in the Byward Market follows after the jump...

More after the jump...

If you head over to Costco, you can pickup a box of 6 sealed 6 oz packages of deli-sliced Montreal-style smoked meat in the cold-cut section. They come from Dunn's, an authentic purveyor of smoked meat, whose various establishments sell really tall smoked meat sandwiches. Each package is meant for an individual serving, which, as I found out, equates to an entire meal. Instructions on the box recommend storing the packages refrigerated if they are to be eaten soon or frozen for the long term.

Great! So what happens when it comes time to put together a sandwich? The meat is cold and uncooperative. It's not clear if the packaging could survive being submersed in boiling water. Solution: make like a deli and steam the meat like it were pastrami.

Step 1: Cut the meat out of its packaging and place it into aluminum foil

Wrapped and ready for steaming

Step 2: Bring 2-3 inches of water to a boil in a pot at medium heat. The pot needs to be able to accommodate either a steamer basket or a colander.

Step 3: Once water has been brought to a rolling boil, turn the heat down to medium-low. Place the wrapped meat into the steaming apparatus and steam for 5 minutes

Step 4: Remove, let stand 2 minutes, plate up and serve.

Serving Suggestions:
Single Decker with Dijon mustard and medium cheddar cheese on rye

Layering

Served
Suffices a regular appetite at supper time.

Double Decker with Dijon mustard, medium cheddar cheese, sliced baby tomatoes, on rye

Served
Eat when starving for dinner at supper time.

On February 21, 2009, a user named Carlos Kelley (handle: Ourselves), submitted a website to digg.com with the title "the Top 1 Greatest Sandwiches of All time. Ever." The website was wikipedia and the subject, the iconic Peanut Butter and Jelly (PB&J) Sandwich. As of today, the wikipedia entry on the PB&J has garnered 1703 "diggs" and is the second "best match" item when you search for the word "sandwich." The first, is a top 10 list of sandwiches from a video game blog called Screw Attack. The PB&J placed first on that list.

Since I am allergic to peanuts, here is my answer to the classic PB&J:

Cashew Butter and Jam Sandwich
Meet the CB&J. It is a perfect balance of flavor (nut and fruit) and texture (smooth and crunchy).

My better half packed the sandwich for my breakfast this morning. Remembering that we had leftover homemade cashew butter from making a batch of hummus, she sandwiched just the right amount of it with store bought strawberry jam in two slices of Rideau Bakery light rye bread. It was delicious.

BTW, Jenn and I are presently substituting rye bread for our usual week's loaf of whole wheat. Rideau Bakery's rye bread is our favourite light rye to date. Its texture is pleasantly dense and its flavour is unmatched. It can be purchased from many of Ottawa's megamarts. Loblaws, Superstore, and Farmboy resells Rideau Bakery bread.

Particulars:
Rideau Bakery
384 Rideau Street
(613)789-1019