fresco

Even if you are being completely selfish about it, all the evidence points to well treated animals yielding tastier food.

Despite that, Canada is not banning U.S. beef. (turn the other cheek I guess) Not completely true. Canada has banned "certain processed products" but is allowing most US beef in. http://canada.com/national/story.asp?id=52...81-2B795AE554F5

Some Toronto restaurants and butcher shops market their product as "Alberta beef". So maybe it is coming here. Although I have bought whole fresh tenderloins and rib eyes and found labels identifying the meat as Australian. A lot of Canadian beef is shipped to Japan and Korea, among other places. It's a big old global meat economy.

If you mean how long should they cook, I'd think a dozen, or a hundred, eggs would take the same amount of time as one, but you might want to start timing it from when the water boils. I've heard, incidentally, that you can prevent the dark ring around the yolk by cracking eggs immediately after you've boiled them and putting them in cold water. This apparently allows the gas which causes the dark stuff to escape. But never bothered with it myself.

I use it, although not with her ironclad exactitude for time. It works for me.

I don't think that's the point, fresco. You're right, of course. The point was that dogs have keen hearing and was panning the concert. How obtuse of me.

The samples used in polls of all sorts (and I believe for all sorts of medical testing) are much smaller.

Yes, those damn blind people. They're a nuisance and should be dealt with.

Sounds like a regressive tax to me. If you're going down that road, why not make it progressive and add 50 cents a pound to every prime cut of beef sold in the US? Not that I think that's a good idea, either, but at least it doesn't hit the poor disproportionately.

On the whole, I think it is less harmful to treat one's pets as human than to treat one's infant offspring as adults.

I'm beginning to wonder if this is a cultural thing. Thinking back, I cannot recall one instance of small children in a high end restaurant in Canada or anywhere in Europe or Mexico. Or India.

Jack, you are too modest by half. Before you end this blog, I'd love to know what other British occasions you mark with food and drink, or what occasions you mark in a typically British way with food and drink. If you are not utterly blogged out...

Although the anti-SUV lobby would have you believe that behind the wheel of every SUV is a prick.

One dining situation where children seem to fit in well is dim sum restaurants, especially the large places with a continuous flow of carts. There's enough general din that even if kids get noisy, it just blends in. And if a child starts to cry, a parent can take him or her outside for a while and resume eating later without missing much, if anything. But there is one very high end dim sum place in town, and I have never seen young kids there.

Apparently my college experience was a bit different than his. I used to moan about not being able to afford decent scotch. No parents of any friends ever filled that need however. Funny thing. I have noticed that no matter how broke my son and his friends say they are, there is always money for beer and pot. And on the rare occasions when there is beer in our fridge, they root it out like pigs after truffles.

Got: The complete Monsieur Pamplemousse Omnibus, in three volumes. Cookbook by Nigel Slater. Extremely neat looking Swiss made pizza cutter. Wusthof chef's knife, with steel. Three (!) sets of brandy glasses, from three different people. Bottle of 2000 vintage port. Gave: The new Alford-Duguid baking book. A tagine. A large hunk of Parmesan (to an impoverished college student friend of son, who was moaning that he couldn't afford things like that.)

Taking a very young child to a high end restaurant may not constitute child abuse, but it is cruel, thoughtless and inappropriate for the child and for the other diners. And why on earth would parents want to ruin their own night out by bringing their child along?

The dairy industry also supplies most of our veal, in the form of bulls that are culled because they are not needed.

The Star is a broadsheet, but has the largest circulation (500,000 plus) of any newspaper in Canada. So, yeah, it has to cover the waterfront. It is closer to the Tribune than the Sun-Times, but I've never thought the Tribune was much of a paper, either. Still, $C65 for that particular wine sounds like an odd call.

Christmas morning, and not a speck of snow in Toronto. Last night we had a traditional Quebecois dinner--salad, tourtiere, baked beans, baked apples, with a rose "feral" cider from Waupoos Winery, east of here, and a 2001 Pierre Sparr gewurztraminer from Alsace.

Isn't most real change incremental change?

A few places you may want to check out in Toronto--Noce, Romagna Mia, Giorana's Really Really Nice Restaurant. Maybe Grano as well.

With all the talk about U.S. - the topic is "outside of Italy". The new Gourmet makes it sound like Toronto does a mighty fine job with Italian cuisine. Speak up our Northern neighbors! The arrival of 300,000-plus Italians postwar helped to transform Toronto from a dreary, puritanical place with bad food to a much more fun loving place with quite a lot of good food.

The prospect of the entire beef market collapsing is, I'd think, a pretty good incentive for producers to be careful. In any case, I would trust the food system in Canada or the U.S. before I would trust the food system in many other countries.

What is reassuring is how quickly, decisively and transparently this was handled. After the recent Canadian experience, there was no doubt that announcing the discovery of a single case of mad cow was going to have serious and expensive consequences, but no one delayed or equivocated.