"canada" news and stories

Maybe it's all that shivering.

Who knows, but public health experts are scratching their heads trying to figure out why Canadians, on average, are so much slimmer than Americans. This after a recent report by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control found a full 10-point spread between the adult obesity rates of the two countries, with 24 percent of Canadians weighing in as clinically XXL versus a ballooning 34 percent of Americans.

As one researcher, quoted by NPR, said: "I really think it's interesting to look at why it's so much higher in the United States. We share a border. What's going on?"

Each Thursday, we round up a selection of scrumptious links from our friends over at YumSugar. Here's what they've got cooking this week:

• Hard-boiled, farm-fresh eggs are harder to peel.
• Moving past a prestigious academic career, Goldschlager is a gold-medal winner in the Cocktail Olympics.
• Daikon radishes are fresh and eager to take the field.
• Continue celebrating the Year of the Tiger by making chicken with broccoli.
• Do you have what it takes to win a medal in the Olympic Food Fact event?
• The fudgy Nanaimo Bar shouldn't be kept a Canadian secret.
• Like some folks collect snow globes or baseball cards, do you collect recipes?

Seal meat. Photo: tootsmabel/flickr

Here's one food that may or may not get your seal of approval.

Seals -- the same lovable, clapping sea creatures that are a favorite zoo attraction and poster child for animal activism -- are being served for dinner by our neighbors to the north.

The New York Times reports a small number of fine dining institutions in Canada are incorporating seal meat into their menus.

Combine the unusual nature of the meat (the taste has been described anywhere from gamey to beefy to fishy) with the fact that the European Union recently banned imports of Canadian seal products, and suddenly the seal-serving restaurants have become both a target for hate mail and unforeseen hungry tourists.

Hear from one seal-serving chef after the jump.

One of the classic food and wine pairings is Roquefort and Sauternes (French blue cheese made from sheep's milk and sweet botrytis wine, respectively), so it's no wonder the Canadians created their own pairing of blue cheese and icewine. Now Chef Jason Parsons at Peller Estates Winery Restaurant in Niagara has taken the pairing one step further: infusing blue cheese with icewine.

Essentially, Parsons takes a 4-lb wheel of Canadian Blue Cheese, a Blue Benedictine made at the Benoit Monastery in Quebec, scoops out a shot glass-sized chunk of cheese from the center, and fills it with Riesling icewine. The icewine is absorbed by the cheese through the natural blue cheese veins. Over a period of six weeks, the cheese absorbs 2 bottles of icewine.

The cheese is smoother, but not sweeter, and because its sugar content is so high from the icewine, it makes a killer brulee. Unfortunately, Peller Estates isn't shipping to the U.S., but if you're a cheese fanatic and you find yourself across the border, it might be worth seeking out.

A weekly look at the draft selection at beer-friendly bars across the country (and this week, beyond).

It's been a couple weeks since I last dropped a "What's On Tap" post for inquisitive craft beer heads who can't travel across the entire country, so I figured I would have to go an extra mile to make it up to you. Hopefully using that extra mile to cross the U.S. border will do the trick as we take a look at the draft selection at Volo in Toronto, Ontario, Canada!

At the risk of offending some of our neighbors to the north, Toronto is probably Canada's most cosmopolitan city. One can only expect they have a few beer bars to back up such a reputation. Checking in at my old standbys -- BeerAdvocate and RateBeer -- a number of pubs got high marks. BeerBistro looks like it's worth a stop. And Smokeless Joe not only sounds like a healthy guy, he sounds like he has a healthy beer selection as well.

But both sites have Volo positioned at the very top of their lists. Seems like they way to go, right? Let's see what Volo has on tap...

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