Please follow me in congratulating dear friend and foodiePrints follower, Yannick. It has been a week since he stepped triumphantly onto the blogosphere with EndorphinBuzz, a running blog that serves as a diary for his training, "endurance adventures", and subtle reflections on life, the universe and everything. While I'm not sure if Yannick is a Douglas Adams fan, I enjoy reading about his progress to transition from marathon runner to triathlete. Those of us who know him are betting that, after he masters the triathlon, he will look for another challenge like the iron man. Last week, he even invented a new sport, aquatic cycling.

Did I mention that Yannick is a quasi-foodie? During the only forecasted sunny day of the weekend, he and his better half trekked out to the Temple's "Sugar Shack" in Lanark Country. There, they tucked into buckwheat pancakes and baked beans drenched in freshly made maple syrup. As he writes on his latest blog, his foodie followers would more than likely have enjoyed pictures. Yup!

Jenn and I would have liked to have joined them, but we had to attend to that pesky Maytag incendiary-fridge-device recall business. The best time estimate we had of the repair person's arrival was anytime between 8:00 am and noon. Happily, he showed up at 10:00-ish, so Jenn and I headed out soon thereafter to enjoy the sun and run some weekly errands. Since we were city bound, we started off our day out at the Harvest Loaf Bakery in the Wellington Village for something sweet and maplely.

Maple Tarts in the Butter Tart tradition

Only Maplely
They sated the maple syrup craving, perfect balance between sweet (not cloyingly so) filling a flaky pastry. I'm actually developing a dislike for the stodgy thick biscuit-like crusted butter tarts that you find at most coffee shops.

After picking up groceries and visiting Chinatown for lunch, we headed downtown to Canada Computers to pick up a hard drive for the new used IBM Thinkpad that I will use to maintain foodiePrints' blogging platform. Once I had the hard drive secured in my backpack, we wandered next door, discovering that our favourite purveyor of rye bread in Ottawa was still open, the Rideau Bakery.

It being the end of the day, pickings were slim. Still, there was an intermittent stream of locals coming in to pickup bakery for dinner. Jenn and I settled on some dessert. She had a piece of "Strawberry Shortcake." Me, a chocolate glazed donut.

Strawberry Shortcake

Layers of cake, strawberries, and pastry cream
The cake was from scratch and not too sweet. The strawberries were from fresh and provided both sweetness and tartness that the pastry cream carried well. Yum!


Chocolate Glazed Donut

Not your ordinary donut...
This being a bakery, the donut was quite the departure from the typical cakey Tim Horton's equivalent. The donut had both developed flavour and a pleasantly firm texture, neither bread nor cake. Its colour lent to egg being a potential ingredient. This was a donut with character, something that I have not seen in more pedestrian donuts for a long time.

Speaking of which, the lone person working the till, let us eat our desserts at the lunch counter. It was like stepping back in time.

Lunch Counter

Clock, Rye Bread is our Specialty
Yes, dear readers this is an authentic lunch counter, complete with fixed spinning stools and chrome finishings. It was great.

The Rideau Bakery on Rideau Street just drips history. Much of its furniture, wall decorations, doors, and feel hail from an era long past. Yet, the quality bakery that previous generations enjoyed remains. Jenn and I will definitely be returning, not only for the bakery, but for the legendary lunch that has been written up in Cheap Eats Ottawa. It's no wonder that Loblaws and the Superstore carry Rideau Bakery's goods. Rideau is an Ottawa institution and should be frequented whenever possible.

Here is the Rideau Bakery's Business Card

Business Card

Particulars:
Harvest Loaf Bakery
1323 Wellington Street West
(613)722-7797

Rideau Bakery
384 Rideau Street
(613)789-1019

What do you do when you've a final exam in your evening French course, you've decided to head down to your former university's main library (Morissette) to study, and you're famished?

You determine that the most efficient path to sustenance is to go to the main campus cafeteria. There, you re-discover the horrors of post-secondary cafeteria food.

Apparently, my former university, the illustrious University of Ottawa, decided to renew its exclusive food service contract for its entire campus with Chartwells, an organization whose principle customer are local area public high schools.

Rationale? Perhaps management collectively decided to provide familiar tastes and smells to former secondary school students so they can quickly acclimatize to post secondary life. Same taste. More education?

Then again, the University of Ottawa is a research institution. Perhaps the decision is part of a broader inter-disciplinary experiment to determine the extent to which the human body can handle high school cafeteria food. At least 4 faculties benefit. The faculty of life sciences can determine physiological effects: weight gain, lethargy, and early-onset of cardiovascular disease. The faculty of social science can determine psychological effects of eating foods that high school cafeterias normally serve. The faculty of medicine can develop new methods to treat the toxic build-up of chemicals from processed foods.

If you think I'm exaggerating, I saw students with open face card board boxes of fried-from-frozen shoe-string fries. Burgers came wrapped in aluminum foil thermal pouches. Soup seemed to be made once a day in barrel-sized vats that encourage an unsightly crust to form around the soup's edge. The salad bar violates the law of conservation of mass. A true anomaly of physics, new salad is heaped upon old, assuming that the old salad disappears into nothing.

Not surprisingly, the most popular cafeteria food seemed to be pizza from the in-cafeteria Pizza-Pizza establishment. However, for some odd reason, a slice of pizza in the cafeteria runs you a dollar more than in any other franchise location throughout the city.

So...Same taste...More Education...Emptier Pockets....Great!

Thankfully, my better half and I came prepared. We stopped for provisions at the Richtree Market in the Rideau Centre on our way to campus. While our smuggled food cannot be considered healthy, it is far more edible than the vast majority of the cafeteria-served food.


Richtree Market

Focaccia Pizza (Bread with pizza toppings)

Focaccia Pizza Cross Section

Oversize Chocolate Chip Cookie

Given that it was almost Christmas, we picked up a ginger bread man from Richtree as well.

Gingerbread Man

Left Leg Missing

Limbless

Even with its mal-shaped icing, its impossibly thick and dense texture, and it sitting in a school bag for a couple hours, the gingerbread man provided much needed calories to continue studying into the evening.

To current students at the University of Ottawa, it is a telltale sign when students assigned to provide information to visitors encourage them to eat offsite.

As a former student I am left to question the quality of the my education when my university can be seen, subjecting its students to a large scale unethical experiment.

Particulars:
Richtree Market Restaurant
50 Rideau Street, Level 1
Rideau Centre Food Court
(613) 569-4934

In 2006, I was invited to celebrate the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival with Jenn's family and friends. Also known as the Moon festival, the event celebrates the harvest and dates back 3000 years. According to wikipedia.net, the festival originated in China's Shang Dynasty and is now held on the 15th day of the eighth month in the Chinese calendar, which translated to sometime mid or late September in the Gregorian calendar. The legend and lore that are associated with the festival are rather complicated to explain and come in several versions. Five, are included in the wikipedia entry on the festival.

Today, the festival is celebrated amongst family and friends who gather together to eat moon cakes and pomeloes after partaking of a large meal.

Here are some after-dinner highlights:

Wifey Cakes
Somethings are lost in translation. Yes, the box reads wife cakes. Wife cakes are flat round pastries containing a melange of candied winter melon, almond paste, and sesame seeds. Made badly, their crust tends to be too thick and their filling too firm. Made well, the crust is slightly buttery, light, and flaky. It encases a soft sweet filling. While not traditional to the festival itself, the cakes were well received as they were purchased and brought to Ottawa from overseas by a family friend. Here are two example recipes of wife cakes from the "Little Corner of Mine" and "Do What I Like" blogs.


Keefer Bakery Moon Cakes and Pomelo
Moon cake and pomelo are much more traditional. Pomelo is essentially a very thick rinded Asian grapefruit. Instead of being tart, ripe pomelo is honey sweet. Unripe, pomelo is mildly tasteless. The skin between each segments is actually too fibrous to eat, so each segment is split open to retrieve the citrus flesh inside. Moon cake is a pastry with a thin brown crust and a thick red bean filling. Though, an alternative filling includes lotus seed paste. Some moon cakes come with one or more preserved egg yolks. Others do not. They are extremely rich and need to be shared. Often times, an 1/8th wedge is a sufficient serving.

Packaged Moon Cakes

A Single Serving
The moon cakes pictured were manufactured in Canada by Vancouver's extremely well regarded Keefer Bakery. What sets Keefer's moon cakes apart involves their being made exclusively with vegetable oil, not lard or peanut oil. Every year, Keefer's moon cakes are shipped across Canada and exported overseas. They can be purchased 4 or 8 to a tin at most Asian grocery stores during the months leading up to the mid-autumn festival. I have actually seen places that sell Keefer's moon cakes individually as well.

If you want to purchase moon cakes as a gift, make sure to pickup one of the custom paper bags that are displayed with the tins. They are specific to each tin and serve as gift wrapping.

Speaking of paper, here is some careful paper folding by the elder of my better half's younger sisters. These piggies sparked several conversations that evening.

Piggies on Moon Cake

Close Up
BTW, it was unanimous. Everyone wanted to adopt the red piggie.

Particulars:
Keefer Bakery Ltd
251 E Georgia Street
Vancouver, British Columbia
(604)685-2117‎

During our visit to Le Petit Bill's Bistro last week, an item on the tasting menu had us discussing the virtues of choosing artisanal bread for dishes. The tasting menu was meant to celebrate the bistro's first birthday. The menu item that had us discussing bread was a two ways serving of lobster: bisque and creamed. The creamed lobster was served on a rather stale piece of pan fried rye bread. It was an unfortunate dish. Were the bistro to have employed fresh artisanal white bread such as a baguette, the base of the creamed lobster dish would have been lighter. It would have fried up crisper, and it would have been slightly more resilient to handling. Instead, we found ourselves thinking about requesting a knife and board to cut through the soggen slice of toughness. I spent so much effort chewing that the lobster flavor was completely lost to me.

I strongly recommend the chef re-think bread-based servings and consider the texture, flavor, and aroma that comes from artisanal bread.

When it comes to artisanal bread, my thoughts immediately goto one bakery and the oft-sought after skills of its master baker, Kevin Mathieson. During the past 2 years, it has become difficult pickup a foodie magazine in Ottawa without seeing some mention of Mathieson, his wife Stéphanie, or his Art-is-in bakery. I first read about this bread virtuoso in the November 2006 edition of the Ottawa magazine. He had just closed up shop in the Thyme & Again catering kitchens on Wellington and started a venture with Chef Robert Bourassa, former executive chef of Café Henry Burger, in Hull.

Today, Art-is-in baked goods are prized commodities and grace the shelves in many stores. According to its website, Mathieson's hand crafted wares can be found year round at Thyme and Again, the Ottawa Bagel Shop, Il Negozio Nicastro (Wellington West location), Epicuria, Jacobsons, and Pastina (Gatineau). From May to October, Art-is-in bread is sold at the Ottawa Farmer's Market at Landsdowne Park. Of course, you will also be served Art-is-in bread when you visit Beckta, Social, Juniper, and Le Café (National Art Center).

According to dictionary.com, the following is a definition of an artisan

a person skilled in an applied art; a craftsperson

What does an artisan's bread look like? It looks like this:

Art-is-in Display at the Ottawa Bagel Shop

Potato Onion Bread

Sliced

Amazing Texture

The experience Mathieson developped from working in New York, Monaco, and Paris shows and you can taste it. A slice of Art-is-in bread betrays the expert care taken to work and raise the dough. Just try holding a slice of factory-made bread to the light. Art-is-in bread's taste reflects the organic flour used and the fact that Mathieson takes two days to bake it: 1 day to develop a mature pre-ferment and the next, to work, score, and bake it.

As the Art-is-in entry on ottawfoodies.com site states, "every time you pick up a loaf of bread from Art-is-in, you are not disappointed." They're absolutely right. The bread carries a well developed flavour and exceptional texture. Most importantly, it is fresh, usually baked the morning of.

Can you live on bread and water alone? No, but artisanal bread once in a while enriches the soul.

Sometime last fall, around Thanksgiving, the Trillium Bakery at 1311 Wellington Street West closed its doors to customers. The bakery specialized in making bakery and deserts that were free of wheat, sugar, or dairy. It catered to people with specific dietary restrictions and was highly recommended by various health-related associations. This includes the Ottawa chapter of the Canadian Celiac Association.

According to a review in the Ottawa Xpress, Trillium made a "mean" Chelsea Bun. Unfortunately, when my better half chanced by the bakery during its last days, there were no Chelsea Buns left. Happily she was able to purchase a honey ginger cake to serve with Thanksgiving dinner.


Honey Ginger Cake

Served

The cake was very dense, owing to it being gluten-free. However, it was very flavorful, tasting distinctly sweet and gingery. We split each slice into three and served the squares individually.

With the seemingly growing number of people suffering allergies, there should be more establishments like this one. On the bright side, the Trillium Bakery on Wellington was the second bakery owned by Trillium Bakery Limited. The original Trillium Bakery is located in Ottawa South, at 209 Belmont Avenue (near the corner of Bank Street and Sunnyside Avenue). According to the Ottawa Xpress review, that location was open during the summer. We at foodiePrints are not certain if it survives today.

The retail space left by the Trillium Bakery was filled several months later by Amate Food and Gifts.

Amate Food and Gifts
This new store sells Latin-inspired goods and snacks. Unfortunately, Jenn and I have not yet found the time to try its wares. Nevertheless, it seems to be enjoying a steady stream of business for the time being.

Particulars:
Trillium Bakery
209 Belmont Avenue
(613) 730-1316

Amate Food and Gifts
1311 Wellington Street W.
(613) 728-6822