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Probiotic Salad

Mar 13th, 2013
by David Ort.
2 comments

A probiotic salad of sauerkraut, dill pickles, and a yogurt dressing.

The recipes I share here on Food With Legs vary along a spectrum that runs from Old Favourites straight to What the Hell Experiments. This one happens to fall much closer to the latter end than the former. I was having friends over for dinner, had plans for rich and meaty pasta and main courses and wanted to start with a salad. I figured I could lay down an acid base and get everyone salivating for what was up next. And that’s how the “probiotic salad” that combines both my wild-fermented dill pickles and spicy Sichuan sauerkraut was conceived.

I am being a bit tongue-in-cheek by using that word “probiotic” in the title. Yogurt companies have adopted it–along with belly-dancing models and stomach-shapes lines–to make a back-handed claim about their products’ health benefits. The connection between live bacteria in food and the digestive health of those who eat hasn’t been definitely established, but I’m willing place a tentative bet that it will pan out–especially when the probiotic food is cultured with more than just a yogurt companies patented strains of lactobacilli. (more…)

Come and Get It

Feb 12th, 2012
by David Ort.
1 comment

Come and Get It's graffiti-style sign suits their temporary status.

Is it possible that Queen and Spadina is replacing King and Portland as ground zero for inventive, affordable, and delicious food in downtown Toronto? First Banh Mi Boys opened with their tightly focused menu of cheap deliciousness and now Come and Get It has opened around the corner.

Come and Get It's menu has a pleasingly simple matrix-style.

Come and Get It's menu has a pleasingly simple matrix-style. Click for a larger version.

Through a matrix-style menu, each of Chipotle Short Rib, Hawaiian Pork Belly, Granny Smith’s Chicken Caesar, and Herbed Crunchy Green Beans are served as an $8 sandwich, a $9 salad, or a $7 poutine. The sides menu follows the obvious options of fries ($3), salad ($4), or poutine ($5) and sandwich combos add fries and a drink ($11), salad ($12) and drink ($13), or poutine and a drink. (more…)

Manic Organic Salad

Jun 8th, 2010
by David Ort.
2 comments

The Saturday before last I had the great pleasure of touring Stratford’s culinary treasures with a group food-blogging friends.  I’ll put up a post summarising what we saw, did, and most importantly ate but first I want to write a bit about the application; demonstrate how I brought back ideas and product and used them with delicious results.

Our second stop was the Soiled Reputation organic farm run by Antony John (of the Manic Organic show on the Food Network) and his family. Half of their eighty acres are certified organic and it became clear as he took us on a tour of the farm’s fields that Antony really believes in what he’s doing.  A great trick that I picked up from Antony is the practice of picking greens directly into a bucket filled with water.  A lot of the dirt and grit will sink to the bottom of the water and the greens will remain vibrant for a lot longer.

Floating row cover is one of the most important tools of the organic farming trade

(more…)

First Salad of the Season

Apr 28th, 2009
by David Ort.
1 comment

Lettuce growing beside radishes

Lettuce growing beside radishes

All the way back on Valentine’s Day I started some lettuce seeds on our south-facing windowsill.  For the last few weeks they have really thrived in the backyard greenhouse and did especially well under this weekend’s warm sunshine.

For dinner this week we trimmed off (the lettuce is, apparently, of the cut-and-come-again variety) the first batch of fully-grown leaves and made a very simple salad.  Kat created an excellent dish by dressing the lettuce with olive oil, balsamic, salt and pepper.  It tasted especially good, I think, because the distance from soil to plate was literally less than two feet.