Posted in Events, Food, Fundraising, Media on September 8th, 2009 Comments Off
Nothing is sweeter than realizing a dream, and another one is coming right up. Thanks to the visionary Mary Luz Mejia and her partner Mario Stojanac of Sizzling Communications, an evening of Latino cuisine is set to blow your mind. We all decided to call it OLA, which stands for Of Latin America. And in [...]
Posted in Coming up, Food, Media, Recipes, Roots on July 24th, 2009 Comments Off
Luminato was so great this year, I’m still thinking about it, even thought we wrapped it up over a month and a half ago. The first year, at the Distillery, was fantastic, but the organizers topped their best efforts this year. We had a little bottleneck situation with ticket sales, but luckily, organizers sorted that [...]
Posted in Food, Fundraising, Learning to cook on May 21st, 2009 Comments Off
My cool good friend Jane Hayes [aka Garden Jane] introduced me to this exciting thing that’s been going on in High Park, just a couple of blocks from my house. For the last 11 years, what Jane and some of her cohorts did was to establish The Children’s Garden, a program that provides kids and [...]
Posted in Food, Latino, News, Roots on March 18th, 2009 Comments Off
I met Mary Luz Mejia last year when she and I were asked to judge some dishes in a Latino culinary competition. Mary Luz is a Colombian-Canadian food journalist and Gemini-nominated TV writer, producer and director. One of her impressive credits is At the Table With ….. Each episode is a biography of a well-known [...]
Posted in Food, Media, Recipes on March 3rd, 2009 Comments Off
For the last four weeks I have been going around town talking to chefs to see who is making charcuterie in-house and tasting some incredible stuff. It got me thinking. Who started this charcuterie frenzy? If memory serves, we have to go back to 1998-99, my Xango days. I just moved here from Ottawa, and [...]
Charcuterie is an ancient art that started nearly 6,000 years ago. The word comes from the French chair cuit, which translates into cooked meat. For me, and many others, charcuterie is the art and science of the pig — butchery, preparation, curing and aging. In a more modern age, this art has been the work [...]
Posted in Coming up, Food, Latino, News on October 31st, 2008 Comments Off
Like food, peliculas are an entrance into understanding a culture. Naturally, as part of how I celebrate Latino culture through food, I’m excited about today’s opening of the 6th annual Toronto International Latin Film Festival, at the Royal Theater on College Street. With films showing the diaspora of the Spanish language, the festival reveals an [...]