On tapas and yuzu ponzu.

I know I'm way late on this one but I finally checked out the much-raved Foxley resto (207 Ossington, Toronto) for the first time yesterday. I normally detest the whole tapas thing – especially pan-Asian tapas, which more often seems like bad Chinese-lite. Going for Asian tapas to me is like thirsting for a pint of beer but being asked to make do with a teacup of Miller Lite followed by a thimble of Michelob. I have to admit, though, I was thoroughly impressed.

Two dishes worth talking about: First, the artic char ceviche ($15) which was loaded with lime juice and chili sauce and topped with klumquats. Sounded great on the menu, and tasted fantastic – if you ate the klumquats separately. They were just too overpowering. I admit the words "ceviche" and "klumquat" on the menu caught my eye (and also the eye of my dining companion) and we were instantly sold upon reading about the item. But the dish would have been perfect without the fruit. And so I thought about the chef's conundrum: Do you always have to have that go-the-extra-mile twist to upsell your customers, even when a humbler and simpler version would work just as well, if not better? In chef Tom Thai's defence, I'll assume he stands by his dish thinks it kicks ass. I wish it did for me, but unfortunately, it didn't.

The standout dish? A Japanese-style grilled mackerel in a yazu ponzu sauce ($8). This was simple made divine – you really can't get more humble than a mackerel fish (which also happens to be one of my favourites) and for this dish, it was simply grilled, then topped with a few finely chopped chilis and lightly bathed with a yazu ponzu sauce – a lemony-like light soy. It was the best east-meet-west dish I've eaten in a long time and yet, so elegantly simple. Grilled mackerel always makes me think of Portugal (where they eat the stuff by the ton, always with boiled potato) and this dish combined the smoky taste of grilling with the light uplifting citrus notes of yuzu ponzu. I plan on replicating this along with the yuzu ponzu at home.

One last thing about tapas: If you haven't read the New York Times piece from early Decmeber about how the tapas trend is killing the entree, you really ought to. Unfortunately for me, I'm one of the few diners who still loves the meat+starch+veg combination (likely because growing up in a Chinese family, I rarely ate that way), but that's a whole topic for another day.

What? No gizzards?

Funny story I found today about people buying turkeys and - to their horror! - not getting the little package of turkey organs inside the cavity to use for their gravy.

Ah, gravy. I admit I'm a sucker for anything covered in gravy: The sides can be cold and the meat can be dry, but as long as there's good hot gravy, then it really doesn't matter. If it says gravy on the menu, I'll order it. (Chicken fried steak with cream gravy? Yes, please!) I love white gravy, dark gravy, gravy with onion mix, coffee red-eye gravy, and tomato gravy. And who can forget the heavy significance of Stephannie's gravy fantasy from last year's Survivor? Poor Stephannie. In the middle of the competition, the girl mentionned she'd die for a plate of mashed potatoes and gravy after days of jungle crap. Who could blame her? But her tribemates interpreted the comment as a sign of weakness and voted her off that same episode. The lesson: Gravy is a temptress, a fantasy, a powerful dream that can make your mind wander from the task at hand.

But back to giblets. I like the idea of giblets in gravy, though I've yet to try it out. Last time I made turkey – a gigantic feast for 15 animals (uhh, friends) who left my kitchen looking as if I had invited Charles Bukowsksis and Jim Harrison for an eating and drinking contest – I ended up using the remaining drippings and spiked it with chicken broth and thickened it with a cornstarch slurry. Simple, yet effective. The evening was mentionned in a story I wrote for AOL Canada, which you can find here.

Feast as performance art

Interesting read in the NY Times about how the art set celebrate the holidays.

Agathe Snow is an artist whose latest work looks like a pile of dumpster refuse that serves as a comment on... well... whatever. More interesting to me is that she's apparently a good cook and invited her artist-friends to pig out for an event she dubbed the Fist Postapocalyptic Christmas Dinner.

First, the visual: in the entryway, an installation of jarred potions, oils and jams. Off-kilter cookies tumbled out of a Joseph Beuys-worthy suitcase. In the main room, a table fashioned from upended bookshelves was covered end to end with food in mismatched pots, pans and trays, while an explosive centerpiece assemblage underscored the evening’s the-end-was-near theme. Every few minutes, another riotously garnished dish appeared: goose stuffed with kale, a glossy ham, Campari-cranberry relish, green eggs, a terrine of chicken-liver pâté, poussin with garlic and pears, roast quail, empanadas, leg of lamb, a tray of beef shanks . . . wild rice with pomegranate, lentils, sweet-potato purée, cauliflower-eggplant gratin . . . rough-hewn breads. The volume of food became a performance in itself.

Sounds like an orgy of consumption. Given the fact allusion to the apocolypse in the title of the event, you'd imagine something a bit more stark, bleak and far less decadent. The apocolypse? Party on, apparently.

Comer mangu de plantano.

My Ingredient column this weekend was about plantains and the Dominicain sidedish of Mangu, a mash of plantains that is served at breakfast with a Full Dominican breakfast (eggs and sausage - similar to a Full English) or as a starchy accompaniment for dinner.

I chatted with a few Dominicans about their cuisine and with one man, the conversation went from mangu to smoked pork chops to langoniza and finally to sancocho, the hearty stew that uses seven different kinds of meats. After expressing his delight over the heavy food – it's the greatest cure for a hangover, he tells me – he added that sancocho is an imperative part of the mating ritual of Dominicans. The three elements: First sancocho, add a bottle of rum and end with sex. "We call it the 1-2-3," he laughs. Stewed goat meat + pork ribs + rum = powerful aphrodisiac, apparently. I imagine the rum is the most important element.

The baseball diet

Sitting behind the bullpen of a Blue Jays game this past week reminded me of an obvious fact that I had forgotten: Ball players are pigs.

Hardly a revelation, but the extent of a ballplayers' junk food snacking is beyond belief. There is no other sport where a player can indulge almost as deeply as a fan (minus the beer) during a game. Case in point: At a recent Jays game, rookie pitcher Brian Wolfe, from the dugout a pink Hello Kitty bag and within the first inning, a bored Brandon League dug into it for a bag of chips while half of the others were eating sunflower seeds and, later, beef jerky. In the bullpen, only the booze separates the players from the fans: The pros watch the game as leisurely as we do and stuff their faces like the rest of us.

Ballplayers are notorious for their poor eating habits though sportswriters, unfortunately, don't have the food-obsessed in mind to document the junky diets. But the question of what ballplayers eat has long interested me and it's why this feature about Mike Piazza and the 2002 New York Mets in the New York Times Magazine has stuck with me so long:

The clubhouse is designed to help the players relax and bond -- a cross between a frat house rumpus room and a Chuck E. Cheese's. But in the weeks I spent around the Mets, I witnessed little bonding amid the tubs of Bazooka bubble gum, packets of sunflower seeds, boxes of doughnuts, bags of chips, bottles of soda, beer, Gatorade, M&M's, Hershey bars, Power Bars, ice cream, pizza, pasta, ribs and macaroni and cheese.

Last month, I indulged my passion for baseball and junk food in one move, writing about Blue Jay relief pitcher Brian Tallet and his culinary adventures in making his own beef jerky. Check it out here. Included is a recipe to turn 21 lbs of inside round into beef jerky. How long does it last? "About two weeks." Pigs, I tell you.