Food Matters – Safeway and McDonald’s Go Sustainable Seafood!

Posted on January 31, 2013 by Don Genova
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Consumers are demanding more and more responsibility and accountability from the people who produce their food, and large companies are starting to respond. While local foods, fair trade goods and organic groceries have been the most recent buzzwords, sustainable seafood is now on the table in a big way. That was the topic of the week’s edition of Food Matters on CBC Victoria’s All Points West.

It certainly hasn’t been an overnight change, but it’s become clear over the past few years that seafood stocks around the world are dwindling. For Canadians we saw it first in a big way with the collapse of the Atlantic cod fishery, and here in BC we are most familiar with shrinking wild salmon populations, but you can also put rockfish and abalone in the same bucket, we haven’t been able to harvest wild abalone since 1990 and rockfish, while still an important part of the BC fishing industry, is being watched very closely with many more harvest restrictions in place now. What has happened in the past with seafood stocks around the world is that as one stock was depleted, the industry would just find another stock to plunder. But now consumers have spoken loudly enough about wanting more sustainable seafood that major retailers are listening.

They are starting to work in conjunction with the various agencies out there that monitor seafood stocks and certify which stocks can be most sustainably harvested. I’ve mentioned some of these agencies in the past. I think here in BC we are most familiar with the OceanWise and SeaChoice programs, but you will also see labels on seafood from the Marine Stewardship Council. A few years ago some of the major grocery chains started to advertise about how they were selling seafood with those certifications, but the announcement I attended last week in Vancouver was one of the most sweeping commitments I’ve seen so far. Canada Safeway announced a partnership with SeaChoice to launch an information program in all of their stores here, complete with a labeling program on the seafood products in each store.

poster

Safeway has adopted most of the ‘stoplight’ system for labeling the SeaChoice features. First or best choice products are have a green label, and a yellow label for second choice or ‘some concerns’ with that particular seafood. Red represents a product that SeaChoice doesn’t recommend you buy, but Safeway is not labeling those choices. I asked SeaChoice representative Kelly Roebuck the reasoning behind that, and she told me that Safeway has phased out many of those ‘red’ products already, or that other products without labels haven’t been rated yet by SeaChoice or other certifying organizations. 

Cans

So this is still a work in progress… Safeway and SeaChoice started working on this program about two years ago and Safeway has pledged that by 2015 all fresh and frozen seafood, as well as their private label canned tuna, will be sourced from sustainable and traceable sources…or at least be in transition to being sustainable.  Renee Hopfner is Canada Safeway’s Director of Community Investment and Corporate Social Responsibility. She told me that the timing was necessary to go through about 30 different seafood vendors Safeway uses, and certify some 25 million pounds of fish that they sell each year used in thousands of different products. Most of the effort has gone into the fresh and frozen side of things, but now they are also looking at canned seafood products, especially since sustainable fresh and frozen products can be pricy.

“So that’s one thing that’s we’ve learned, is that sometimes our sustainable alternatives, because of the supply and demand issue, can be expensive. And so with our canned tuna product, our first foray into the shelf-stable category, we’re really excited that it’s an affordable alternative for our customers, because it is a Safeway-branded product.”

 

The Safeway brand canned tuna comes complete with labeling that tells you the tuna was caught without using harmful ‘fish-aggregating-devices’ or FADs, which have been linked to detrimental occurrences of by-catch to more fragile species.

Some of the more difficult products to source sustainably are shrimp and farmed salmon. I’ve talked in the past about how much of the very cheap shrimp we eat in North America comes from very non-sustainable practices and it’s an area they are still working on but they are pretty sure they can have something in place by 2015, or at least be on the road to it. They have also managed to secure some salmon that has been farmed in a closed-containment system which is deemed a better choice by SeaChoice. The only problem with that is keeping up with the demand, when people see it in the stores, they’re buying it. That’s just one more sign of the change that is happening with consumers that retailers and suppliers are dealing with.

If any one company can send ripples through a supply chain it is McDonald’s. In Canada, the chain has already been using Alaskan Pollock for its sandwiches for a while, which is on the Marine Stewardship Council’s safe list, and now all the McDonald’s in the USA will be using MSC certified fish in their Filet O Fish sandwiches as well as something new called Fish McBites, which will debut in February. They will even put the MSC blue certification labels on the packaging.

Is there any downside to all of this attention being paid to sustainable stocks? I worry about there being too much pressure put on what are so-called sustainable stocks as demand for these products increases. And I worry about the accuracy of the certification. A report in the Marine Policy journal states that some 31 percent of the fish stocks certified by the MSC had indeed been overfished!  That report has contributed to a growing controversy about how seafood stocks are indeed certified.

OPPORTUNITY: The Victoria Public Market at the Hudson is slated to open on May 1st, 2013. This market will draw plenty of tourists and it is assembled to serve everyday grocery shoppers with such vendors as a butcher, baker, cheese maker, and produce dealer as well as other prepared food. One key vendor that is missing is seafood. Maryanne Carmack of the Victoria Downtown Public Market Society says that. “It’s essential we have seafood as an option in our Public Market. Customers want to have a one stop shop for all of their needs and they demand variety. I would love a place where I can buy a whole fish or try something different such as a fresh sardine.” If you are interested in this opportunity, send me a note at don at don genova dot com and I will put you in touch with Maryanne!

***This just in… today SeaChoice announced another partnership with Buy-Low Foods, which includes both Nesters Market and Shop n’ Save stores. 

To listen to this or past Food Matters episodes, visit this page at the All Points West website.

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Food Matters – FoodWorx Portland

Posted on January 18, 2013 by Don Genova
FoodworxThere is more and more talk going on these days about food. We all have to eat, after all, but food is entering into many more discussions than the simple question of what’s for dinner. This week I traveled to Portland for a food conference that presented a sweeping view on food. It was called FoodWorx, the Future of Food. Organized by the World Food Travel Association, which is headquartered in Portland, Foodworx was an attempt to mount a one-day Ted Talks-style series of a dozen speakers. Each speaker got only 20 minutes to present on their topic with a few minutes for Q and A afterwards. The speakers came from a variety of disciplines, some more closely attached to food than others, and the audience came from varied backgrounds as well, including students from a cooking school, the Thompson-Okanagan Tourism Board, and people who run food gleaning programs and other community based food organizations.

The day was fairly fast-paced, emceed by a Portland Public Radio host who is obviously familiar with the time limit concept, and the topics were quite well-chosen. I could tell it was a good conference because I left with pages of notes and inspiration.

Clare CarverClare Carver

The very first speaker was Clare Carver, co-owner of Big Table Farm in Oregon. It’s a winery, a cattle ranch, a horse farm and they serve farm to table dinners there as well. She really got us to think about farms of the future in a different way…in one sense a return to the diversity all farms used to have, and in another sense about how new farmers don’t really have to have a lot of experience to get started:

I think every reason that anyone would want to start a farm, or a restaurant, or a food business, is valid, don’t worry about it. If you want to start a farm because you think that red barns are romantic, then start a farm. I’m not saying that it’s not gonna be hard, but that doesn’t mean that’s not a perfectly good reason to start a farm. Part of why I wanted to start a farm is because I love animals. And I love horses, and I thought that this crazy idea of wanting a farm with horses would work, and it kind of does, but it’s been quite the road to get there, I promise you. I’ve broken both my arms and have all kinds of adventures I could tell you about.

Clare also noted for beginners it’s farming by Google, but that having good neighbours, either nearby or on the internet helps a lot.

Erik WolfErik Wolf

The wildly-popular farm to table dinners they present are one of the kind of experiences Erik Wolf talked about. Erik is the executive director of the World Food Travel Association, and part of his talk keyed on how foodies spend a lot of money, whether they are traveling around the world or across town, and how they are looking for an experience that will create a good memory:

Food and drink are the only art forms that speak to all five senses. You can’t smell a statue or taste a painting but you can use all five human senses when you are eating and drinking. Food and drink are the most important tenets of culinary tourism, or what we now call food tourism. We like to think that we should be promoting a memory, and not a meal. So a restaurant thinks it is just in a business that means serving a meal, they’re in the wrong business, they need to serve a memory, they need to foster that word of mouth promotion that is the most productive and least expensive kind of promotion.

And isn’t it true that when people come back from a trip they are inevitably asked about how the weather was, and then, ‘how was the food?’  You definitely start talking only about the ‘memorable’ food highlights, many of which have to do with more than the food, it’s the setting, the service, the ambience and atmosphere. 


Sustainability of our food systems was a big topic at FoodWorx, everything from linking architecture to sustainably-built restaurants to some of the food heroes in America that are now being called social entrepreneurs. These are people who are doing good in the world of food by selling healthy products and giving back to society, but who are also doing a very good job at making money at it. Another very interesting talk came from Heather Schmidt, who talked about food waste. She’s the sustainability manager for New Seasons Market, a chain of locally-owned grocery stores in Oregon that feature local and organic foods. Heather has been looking carefully at her own food waste lately and was 

New Seasons Marketsurprised to find she wasn’t as good at not wasting food as she thought she was, despite her best efforts. I’m going to talk more about food waste next week, but Heather trotted out some fascinating statistics linking obesity, hunger and food waste:

The actual size of our dinner plates has increased by 36 per cent since before 1960, and there’s been an increase in calories in common food items like a piece of pizza, which have grown by 70 per cent.  So you’ve got a population increase, and you’ve got a greater demand for food, and we’re supposed to be adding four billion people to the planet by the end of this century or sooner. And we’ve also got a warming planet, it effects our food systems, and then we’ve also seen this increase in food waste. So at a time when we need more food, we’re wasting it.
 

BrianDavidJohnsonBrianDavidJohnson

The conference concluded with a fascinating talk from Brian David Johnson, a futurist from the Intel Corporation. This is a guy who is already dreaming up what your computer will be able to do in the year 2020…and that includes a computer you can eat:

They’re actually making computers that are made out of silicon and silk and magnesium that you’ll be actually able to eat them. Now that may sound a little bit freaky but if you’ve got a really bad stomach problem and have no idea what’s going on, being able to swallow a tiny little analyzer that has some wi-fi attached to it that can just send out what’s going on down there is really important. Oh and by the way the amount of magnesium you would swallow is less than you would get by eating a multivitamin pill. So as we start thinking about the future of food, it’s not only thinking about science fiction stuff like Soylent Green,  
we’re getting a lot closer being able to bring technology and food together, in an interesting way, and in a way I argue can make a pretty dramatic change.

If you want to hear my chat about the conference on All Points West, just go to this page, where the audio will eventually be posted. I’ll have a bit more from the conference next week.

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Food Matters – Food Waste

Posted on January 24, 2013 by Don Genova

Food waste is an insidious problem that just doesn’t make sense. In a world filled with both hunger and obesity, how can we let such a precious commodity as food go to waste? I’ve been pondering this question since learning a bit more about food waste at FoodWorx in Portland last week so I followed up on the topic in this week’s edition of Food Matters.

While at the conference last week I learned some astounding facts and figures, such as: The actual size of our dinner plates has increased by 36 per cent since before 1960, and there’s been an increase in calories in common food items like a piece of pizza, which have grown by 70 per cent.

There were some other stats that I thought were just astounding so I wanted to talk about those and see if we have any Canadian equivalents. First a world stat, from a 2011 United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization report: One third of all food produced each year is lost or wasted. That’s about 1.3 billion tons of food a year. And it’s not just the food that we bring into our kitchens that’s wasted. In the United States, 40 percent of food is wasted just getting to the consumer, some of it never makes it to the grocery store, some of it doesn’t even make it out of the farmers’ fields. When it does get to the average American home, 25 percent of the food is wasted.

Canadians are pretty bad as well. About 50 percent of the food we bring into our home ends up in the trash, mostly in the form of unwanted leftovers. 9 percent is left in the farmers’ fields, 18 percent lost in packaging and processing, about 20 percent between food retailers and the food service industry.

Why this food goes to waste is a tough question, but the easy answer is because we have too much food. And this really puts the blame for food waste squarely on the denizens of the first world. We’ve done such a good job of making food cheap and plentiful it doesn’t bother us when we waste it. If we had less food available to us maybe we would be a little more careful about it. We’re very picky. Producers throw out thousands of pounds of crops because of imperfections that make them unacceptable to our discerning eyes. We don’t want funny shaped potatoes or apples with a bruise on them. We are also bad at storing our foods properly in the fridge or freezer so we get lots of spoilage. Watch this great Ted Talks feature about the topic by Tristam Stuart here.  

Bread WasteBread Waste

I know the numbers on food waste are hard to imagine, but what brought it home to me was the opening scenes of an excellent 2005 documentary called ‘We Feed the World’, by Austrian filmmaker Erwin Wagenhoferd. They show truckloads of all types of perfectly good bread being dumped in the garbage in Vienna, it’s two days old at most. Then we learn that the amount of bread dumped in Vienna every day is roughly equal to what is consumed in Austria’s next largest city. 

That’s quite staggering, especially since I’m sure if you asked anyone if they WANT to waste food, they would say no. But as Heather Schmidt of New Seasons Market in Portland said in her talk last week, food waste is not rational. People are fickle, we buy things with good intentions, but then end up letting them languish in the fridge. I’m really good at saving leftovers by putting them in the freezer, but I’m really bad at using them, I just buy more and more fresh food, and then my freezer gets full and I haven’t labeled things properly and some stuff ends up going right into the garbage or compost. Composting is a good way to take care of some of the waste and get improved soil and food production in return.  But keep in mind that those scraps were actually grown for human consumption. We put an awful lot of land, energy and water into creating that food, which doesn’t end up being used for its intended purpose. So part of the answer is perhaps lowering the production of food that is just going to be wasted at an earlier level of the food stream.

So how do we cut down on food waste? If you’re talking about the big picture, it could mean calling on your municipal or provincial government representatives to make changes in legislation that would prevent food waste. For example, in BC we have the Food Donor Encouragement Act, which was brought in back in 1997. The act allows companies to donate food that they would otherwise be throwing out as surplus to their purposes, but is still perfectly good to eat, without the fear of being held liable for that food. So, a chain like 7-11 may have sandwiches on the shelf that they get rid of because they’ve reached their best before date, but they really have some life left in them, so they can be picked up and used right away by agencies helping the poor or homeless, same thing for unopened trays of food used at banquets.  Anything that can divert food out of the landfill or compost and see it being eaten instead of destroyed.

Love FoodLove Food

In our own homes there are lots of things you can do…in the United Kingdom, there’s a movement called Love Food, Hate Waste, organized by a non-profit organization using funding from various government sources. The website helps you figure out portions and how to store foods, and this movement has managed to get UK residents to reduce their food waste by 18 percent in just five years. Heather Schmidt says a 15 percent reduction in food waste in the USA could feed 25 million hungry Americans, so just imagine if we did that around the world…and got our surplus food into the mouths of people who really need it. 

An Everlasting MealAn Everlasting Meal

Finally I want to recommend a book called An Everlasting Meal, by Tamar Adler, a chef from New York who has really put together a non-cheffy kind of guide to, as the subtitle says, Cooking with Economy and Grace. This is great advice on getting everything out of a whole chicken, vegetable scraps, and even some great uses for orange and lemon peels. 

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Food Matters – Apps, Not Appies

Posted on January 10, 2013 by Don Genova

With the New Year comes new resolutions, many of them falling into the food realm. Eat more fruits and veggies, cut down on the fat, lose some pounds, or maybe even gain some weight. I’ve been looking into how to use parts of your digital life in order to help your real life stay on track and that was the topic of this week’s Food Matters on All Points West.

We spend so much time on our computers and smart phones these days I thought it was just a natural extension for us to be able to keep track of, or even assist in those resolutions.  But I only believe in using software or apps if they make things easier. Anything that is complicated to use or perhaps too hard to understand will only get in the way of you keeping your goals.

WEIGHT LOSS

Lose It

I always think that I eat fairly well, no junk food or fast food, as little processed food as possible. I think I just eat TOO MUCH of a good thing. So the app that I’ve used in the past and one that I have started using again is called Lose It. It’s basically an electronic diary that allows you to enter your age, height and current weight and what your goal weight is and how fast you want to get there. Then it calculates how many calories you can have each day to achieve that goal, but also varies that calorie count according to how much exercise you do in a day or a week.

The Lose It database has a wide range of foods and ingredients already entered, prepared foods you buy at the supermarket, dishes you can order at restaurants, and the raw ingredients you put into your cooking. So you search for what you eat, and enter it under Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner or Snacks. Lose It keeps a running total for the day and the week, both numerical and as an easy-read graph. Once you have entered a food or even an entire meal it saves it so you can easily enter it again if you have the same thing. It also has a wide range of exercise headings so you can keep track of how many calories you’ve burned in the course of the day, everything from weight lifting to running to even raking leaves or chopping firewood.

The basic app for Lose It is free, and you can run it on your computer, your smart phone or your iPad or Android device. It syncs across any of those devices, so you have your data with you wherever you are. And you can custom design a food or a meal by entering its calories that you have figured out for it or by doing a search for it…and there are lots of calorie counts out there for almost anything you can think of. A couple of downsides include the cost to upgrade to a version that allows you to sync with some of the other fitness gadgets out there including digital scales and even a blood pressure monitor, and also get into Lose It communities, join a group or stay in touch with friends also using Lose It, that’s 40 dollars a year.  The other thing is that this is an American app. A lot of the chain restaurants and supermarket brands that make up the database are not in Canada so that seems like a lot of wasted info. But the free app gets me everything I need so I’m going to stick with it. (I’ve lost two pounds already!)

SUSTAINABLE SHOPPING

ow iPhone

People on the West Coast generally care more about the kind of seafood they buy than folks in Central Canada, I’ve found, but they don’t necessarily have the knowledge they need to make wise choices. So download the free Ocean Wise app. It’s free, and one of the best features is that you can touch ‘Restaurants and Markets Near Me’ and it will pull up a map, which gets updated from time to time, of places you can purchase Ocean Wise products at markets and grocery stores, or restaurants that have received certification from Ocean Wise because of the seafood they serve. There is a directory that goes further so you can even look up caterers, schools and suppliers, and individual fish and seafoods to see if there are recommended or not recommended to buy.  SeaChoice is another seafood selection app, but it doesn’t have the listings of restaurants, caterers and so on. But it does have a sushi feature, where you can get the common names of sushi fish selections and their English translations.

goodguideGoodGuide

It gets a little more difficult to find truly Canadian guides to sustainable shopping.  One that is getting better is called GoodGuide. This one allows you to scan a bar code with your smartphone and if GoodGuide has listed it, it will tell you how it rates on a 1-10 scale on health and nutrition, environment and society. A high health score tells you the product is nutritious, Society deals with how the company’s social practices and policies rank against other companies surveyed by good guide, and Environment looks at the company’s effect on the environment. 

You can scan anything that has a bar code, even fresh veggies that come in a bar-coded bag. I stood in front of my cupboards and my fridge for a few minutes and scanned bar codes. Less than half of them actually turned up in the listings…which is actually a vast improvement over the last time I tried it a couple of years ago.

TrueFoodTrueFood

If it’s genetically modified food organisms you want to avoid, try TrueFood, this is brought to you free from the US Center For Food Safety. Gives you broad tips on how to avoid purchasing GMO’s, but then provides a guide to a wide variety of food products, many of which are American, but you can still get a pretty good idea of what kinds of brands to look for that also make appearances on Canadian grocery store shelves. There is also a ‘What’s New Section’ that gives you updates on the latest stories, again mostly American, regarding developments in the world of GMOs.

FoodilyFoodily

I also just started exploring an app called Foodily. It’s kind of social media for foodies who want to share recipes, but it also has hundreds of recipes from chefs like Wolfgang Puck and Cat Cora, and magazines like Self, a searchable recipe data base by ingredients or type of diet, everything from Paleo to Kid-Friendly. I saw a great recipe for cassoulet, hit email recipe and sent it to myself. Seconds later I had a shopping list on my smartphone. Okay, cassoulet isn’t necessarily the healthiest thing in the world but it makes me feel good.  Oh, and one to avoid: Love the website but hate the app for Epicurious.  The Conde Nast magazine empire apparently still can’t make this app keep working after years of trying. What food apps do you like for your mobile device? Share your faves in the comments section below.

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Food Matters – International Year of the Quinoa

Posted on January 3, 2013 by Don Genova

Year of the QuinoaYear of the Quinoa

As you’ve heard time and time again, many people start the New Year with new diet resolutions. While we know you shouldn’t put all your eggs into one basket, a single ingredient has been chosen by the United Nations as a highlight for the year ahead. The U-N Food and Agriculture Organization has named 2013 as the International Year of the Quinoa, recognizing its incredible nutritional value as well as the indigenous people of the Andes who have cultivated and preserved this seed for generations.

It’s not like quinoa is brand new to the North American market…but it is a great source of fibre, iron, calcium, and B Vitamins. It is also gluten-free, in this era of growing gluten intolerances, and it can also be counted as a vegan ingredient. It has really taken off here in North America over the past few years and seems to turn up in almost every pot-luck dinner I go to these days.

Quinoa RevolutionQuinoa Revolution

I have to confess that I am not fond of ingredients that turn up everywhere, just because they are trendy, and especially since most of the quinoa I’ve eaten has been in some sort of stodgy salad. I also already have too much iron in my blood, thanks to my Mediterranean heritage, so it’s not like I need the iron in it. It can also be expensive, about $5 a pound. To try to get over my problems with quinoa I met with Carolyn Hemming, who along with her sister, Patricia Green, has written the Quinoa Revolution cookbook, with more than 150 recipes. This is the follow-up to their wildly popular Quinoa 365 cookbook, which I bought for my wife a year ago, and it can be added to a book I was sent late last year called 500 Best Quinoa Recipes. So I am now in possession of well over one thousand recipes involving quinoa.

Quinoa 365Quinoa 365

Carolyn Hemming couldn’t really recall the first time she ever had quinoa, but she did tell me why she started including it in her diet:

“I was a very functional eater, my sister had convinced me to start eating quinoa just because of its nutritional properties, and that convinced me. Once I cooked it and saw how easy it was to cook, I was sold. Up until then I was eating a certain amount of cottage cheese, a certain amount of yogurt, a certain amount of oatmeal, a certain amount of spinach leaves, so quinoa just made it easy.”

Salad and BlondiesSalad and Blondies

Notice that she didn’t say how much she liked the taste of it? But this seed has hit the mark for many people out there. Carolyn told me about the hundreds of letters they received after they published their first book, people who have used quinoa to lose weight, help control their diabetes, and relieve their problems with gluten intolerance, and so on. So this second book is more than just a cookbook, it lists complete nutritional information and comparisons with other grains and seeds, a lengthy kind of Quinoa FAQ, and descriptions of other quinoa products like flour and flakes. So armed with all of that information I attempted a couple of recipes from the book with other ingredients I had around the house post-holidays. I milled some quinoa into flour with my Thermomix in mere seconds, so I was able to use the flour, almond butter and chocolate chips to make ‘blondies’, quite tasty, and then cooked some whole quinoa to add to a Tex-Mex style salad with shallots, black beans, cooked corn kernels, chipotle chiles in adobo, cilantro, lime juice and olive oil. Pretty good!

500 Best Quinoa Recipes500 Best Quinoa Recipes

Are these recipes changing my mind about quinoa? Meh. I still am not crazy about the taste. But I do want to mention a few tips Carolyn told me that will probably help everyone’s quinoa experiences…and if these tips had been followed I probably wouldn’t have had so many bad experiences in the past. She says people tend to undercook quinoa before they use it in baking, but it does NOT cook more once you put it in something, so it needs to be well-cooked before you puree it. With salads, do NOT add the dressing to a quinoa salad until the quinoa has cooled off, since warm quinoa may still absorb liquid and lead to that stodginess I mentioned earlier…and finally, be patient! Make sure all the cooking liquid is absorbed before you take the quinoa out of the pot.

While much of the world’s quinoa production is concentrated in South America, quinoa grows quite well here in Canada. Here’s a link to a company based in Saskatchewan, Northern Quinoa Corporation.

If you would like to listen to my conversation with Madeline Green of All Points West, the audio link will be posted here.

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Food Matters – Kitchen Gadgets 2012

Posted on December 5, 2012 by Don Genova

Weird Looking GadgetKitchen Gadget or Alien Egg Pod?

Every year as Christmas approaches, the Toy Testing Council of Canada releases its best bets for kids’ toys to help you with your gift giving suggestions. But who tests the latest kitchen gadgets for foodies? I do, that’s who. This week on All Points West I chimed in with my annual look at tools guaranteed not to clutter up your junk drawer because you will use them all the time.

My secret weapon in this venture is Fontaine Wong of Ming Wo Cookware, who I think leads the way throughout the province in staying on top of the trends. This year she guided me towards some really simple yet spectacular stuff.

CremafacileCremafacile

First up is one of those things that is so simple looking and inexpensive you figure it can’t possibly work. It’s called the cremafacile, made in Italy, as you can tell from the name, and this little gadget will make milky foam for your cappuccino in seconds, or you can foam your milk and coffee that’s already been mixed together for a latte, and you can even whip egg whites with it. All you do to clean it is twist it apart and give it a rinse. At Ming Wo this costs just $8, but I’ve seen it for over $20 on e-commerce sites, so why not order it from Ming Wo?

Cuisipro FoamerCuisipro Foamer

For easy clean-up, use some soapy foam from the Cuisipro Foam Pump. I love foaming soap pumps, but you have to buy disposable pumps or special soaps made to refill the foamers. This thing you put just any kind of liquid soap into, and add water. Just one part soap to four parts water, so think of how long this will last. Gets you clean, saves money, and even has a broad suction cup at the bottom to stick it to your kitchen counter. Retails for about 16 dollars.

Fat SeparatorFat Separator

Also from Cuisipro is a new fat separator for $18 at Ming Wo, $40 at Amazon.ca. It holds one litre, it’s plastic, but BPA-free, heat-resistant and see-through, with a valve on the bottom. You can easily see when all the fat has risen to the top, you just push the button and all the good stuff drains into your pot and leaves the fat behind to cut down on your Christmas turkey calories.

PoachiesPoachies

For me, poaching eggs has always been a bit of a mess. Put the vinegar in the water, swirl it around, try to fish it out without breaking. Now, if you want perfect poached eggs, you can buy package of ‘egg poachies’. The name is silly but they work. They look like a small coffee filter, but more pouch-shaped. Spread it open in a cup, crack in your egg, but the whole thing gently into simmering water and six minutes later you have the perfect poached egg. You just fish it out with a slotted spoon, let the hot water drain, peel it apart and the egg pops out wherever you want it. Made from recycled paper and it’s biodegradable. Suggested retail, 8 dollars for 20 bags…

Stressless Pepper MillStressless Pepper Mill

Gadgets are supposed to be all about making things easier for you. A new pepper mill really does make freshly ground pepper without batteries, and without having to hurt your hand or wrist if you have an injury or something like arthritis. This is part of a new line of kitchen utensils from Trudeau, a well-known gadget maker, and the line is called Stress-Less. These gadgets have all been ergonomically redesigned to make them easier to use. So along with the pepper mill there is a can opener, garlic press, rotary cheese grater, pizza cutter and even a corkscrew.

Even though we are approaching winter, keeping mixed drinks or white wine cold is always important. There’s something called a Chill and Pour. It kind of looks like a magic wand. Clear, non-toxic plastic with the same stuff inside as freezer ice packs. You put it in the freezer. When you have a bottle of white wine you want to chill or even keep cold, you open it, slide the wand into the bottle, it sticks in place in the neck and had a spout built in, so you just pour the wine with the wand still in it.

Tovolo Perfect CubesTovolo Perfect Cubes

For cocktails, you want to look for Tovolo Perfect Cube Trays. These are silicon trays that make very precise cubes that look great in drinks when you are entertaining, and you can even get a really large size, a two inch cube, that are great for drinks you don’t want to water down too much, because those big cubes will take longer to melt. There are even molds now to make ice balls, instead of cubes…those are really cool, and would look great in a punch bowl.

To listen to my chat with Jo-Ann about these gadgets, click here to go to the CBC page of  my archived chats. I finally figured out how to get the video off of my iPhone, so below is the video of Fontaine Wong taking me through these gadgets and more!  Next week, Food Matters comes to you from a tropical location…don’t miss it!

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