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I get a lot of press people calling and asking me to tell them my most used kitchen tool because they’re writing an exciting article about the tools chefs use in their kitchens. Also, they desperately need to fill up the endless pages in their papers and on their websites. I always disappoint them by telling them that my most useful tool…

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My apartment is now a storage unit containing…Dirt Candy t-shirts! I’m getting the online store up and running soon, but in the meantime, a huge “thank you” to Chris Andrews, who created this design.

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Expect the online “Taking Your Money In Exchange for Dirt Candy Swag” Store to be operative in just a couple of weeks.

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To celebrate this year’s Canada Day Week, five reasons why Canada rocks!

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Reason #5: our TV is awesome. Besides such classics as SCTV and The Kids in the Hall, and besides the fact that Saturday Night Live was basically a showcase for famous Canadians (Dan Aykroyd, Martin Short, Mike Myers) we’ve also got a ton of shows you’ve never seen that will Blow! Your! Mind!

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Big Top Talent!

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Even more Big Top Talent!
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Then there’s the inimitable Mr. Dressup.
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The Littlest Hobo!
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Today’s Special!
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Ready or Not! In this episode, Busy becomes a woman!
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The greatest TV show ever made: Degrassi High!
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Even our commercials are awesome!
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To celebrate this year’s Canada Day Week, five reasons why Canada rocks!

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Reason #4: our junk food is better. I’ll match up Canadian junk food against any other junk food on earth. Just look at the salty, sweet, bad-for-you, amazingness that Canada has to offer its hungry citizens.

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Timbits!

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They’re not “doughnut holes” – they’re Timbits!

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Adventurous potato chips!

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Okay, no one wants to eat roast chicken chips, but the
fact that they exist is what’s important.

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Best chips ever!

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Better candy!

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Maple candy!

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Butter tarts!

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To celebrate this year’s Canada Day Week, five reasons why Canada rocks!

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Because you can play our national anthem on nothing but Molson cans and bottles.

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And for the record:

Reason #1

Reason #2

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To celebrate this year’s Canada Day Week, five reasons why Canada rocks!

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Reason #2: because when an artist painted a portrait of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, naked and being served a cup of Tim Horton’s coffee, it was placed in a traveling art exhibit about sex that was designed for teenagers. This is how we do birth control up North – we simply make nudity look very, very confusing.

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Yes, the Canadian government pays to mount exhibits about sex that are geared for kids 12 and up. Because we care!

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To celebrate this year’s Canada Day Week, five reasons why Canada rocks!

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Reason #1: Because when Radio Canada International ends its 67-years of shortwave broadcasts (June 22, 2012, RIP) the host goes out Canada style: lots of gratitude, a tearful breakdown, and at the end he gets applause, a hug, and a puppy.

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Why does he get a hug and a puppy? Because that’s how Canadians roll!

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The Great Dirt Candy Logo Mutation T-Shirt Contest has drawn to a close and we have a winner. Which doesn’t mean that the dozens of other entries we got were losers. In fact, there were so many awesome designs that it took me a week to pick the best one, and even then there were three that I loved. So there are three winners!

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The first winner, and the person whose t-shirt design is going to be the standard-issue DC shirt once they go on sale, is Chris Andrews! His design is super-simple, but I wanted something that wasn’t too bizarre or funky to be the basic shirt. However, I needed the DC logo to pop more than it does, and he solved it. Behold! This will be on a white shirt when it’s ready, and it’s going to be the main Dirt Candy t-shirt:

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Two other people turned in designs that I loved, however. Lindsay Cave turned in several submissions that were some of the most mutagenic, colorful, crazy things I’ve seen. I’m going to talk to him about picking one, but for now his gallery of graphics got him into this spot as winner #2. And Gregory Jericho turned in a logo that was, hands-down, the cutest thing I’ve ever seen.

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I’m going to be releasing Lindsay’s shirt and Gregory’s shirt later on this year as limited editions and you’ll see how awesome they are then. But for now, bask in the mighty power of Chris Andrews‘s design. Simple, but it just looked right to me.

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And THANK YOU to everyone who sent in designs. Truly, you guys are the most creative bunch of customers a girl could ever want. You all did Dirt Candy proud!

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Peter Ross has been archiving and cross-indexing the post-it notes, scraps of paper, and marginalia he’s found in the massive collection of Elizabeth David‘s cookbooks that went to the London Guildhall library. What he’s discovered is that Elizabeth David liked to write notes to herself  and often, they were very mean.

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“Waverly Root is a pitiful phony.”

- scribbled in the margins of The Cooking of Italy by Waverley Root

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“The kind of pretentious rubbish that has brought French cooking into disrepute as a snobs preserve.”

- from the margins of Full and Plenty by Maura Laverty

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“Italian salad p50. Sounds just about the most revolting dish ever devised.”

- from a post-it note in Ulster Fare by the Belfast Women’s Institute Club

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Ah, the true meanness of the straight-shooter. Sometimes I think the food world needs a bit more of it these days.

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The recipe for Italian Salad and more on the marginalia of Elizabeth David, food writer extraordinaire.

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When I first came up with my stone-ground grits, I wanted it to be an ode to corn. I was determined to get as many different versions of corn as possible into the dish, so there are stone-ground grits, corn cream (simply corn blended with water, the starch in the kernels thickens it), fresh corn kernels in the grits, and finally there’s huitlacoche. This is what freaks everyone out. Huitlacoche (hoot-la-ho-chey) is Mexican corn smut, or corn fungus, or Devil’s corn, or (in a literal translation) “raven poop.” It’s a fungus that attacks about 5% of corn crops grown in Mexico and it actually fetches a higher price than the corn.

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Huitlacoche in the wild.

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The fungus gloms onto the corn kernels and causes them to get so big and mutated that some farmers like to slice them off and fry them in butter. In the US, they’re mostly available canned or jarred since they’re highly perishable and they don’t grow in fields that have been treated with pesticides, meaning they don’t grow in too many American corn fields. They have a dark, rich, earthy taste, almost like Latin American truffles, and I blend them into a cream that I dot around the plate.

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“You say cuitlacoche/I say huitlacoche…”

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They add a deep, inky, almost smoky flavor to the dish. When people ask what they are, I tell them that they’re Mexican truffles, which is a term supposedly invented for them at a dinner in 1989 at the James Beard House when Josefina Howard, the founder of Rosa Mexicana, gave an all-huitlacoche dinner there which included huilachoche ice cream, tortillas, and soup.

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That black dot is the huitlacoche cream on my grits.

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(Learn more about huitlacoche)

(See fresh huitlacoche being harvested and cooked)

(One blogger’s terrified reaction!)