Mock Turtle

I went to the brand-new Cherry St. T&T’s today. It does seem like it should have a place in our grocery routine, though I’m still working out what it would be. TMQ and I cook from a set of ideas that are mostly English and Italian, while T&T as far as I can tell is assuming a Cantonese kitchen.

My point of comparison is the Leslieville Loblaws, as our sort of comprehensive regional grocery store:

- Their seafood counter is far better than Loblaws, though the dead catfish floating in the tank didn’t inspire confidence (in fairness, I’ve seen the same kind of thing in the lobster tank in Loblaws). It’s about as good as the one at the Ancaster Fortino’s, where watching the seething eel tank is a Christmas treat.

- Their butcher counter is quite a lot better. Loblaws never seems to have any braising cuts, let alone the one I actually want in any given case. The last time I braised a cut of beef, I had to go all the way to these people to buy it. I’m happy to support an old-fashioned butcher, but it’s miles out of the way.

Anyway, T&T has:

- fresh goose. Loblaws never has goose, though I’m sure you could order it, and they certainly never have fresh duck.
- whole chickens graded by age, heads still attached. Is the idea that the younger ones are for roasting, and the older for stewing? I assume so.

I do see the thrifty logic of including the head to add to broth, but the one time I made broth with a chicken head, it kept floating to the surface and eyeing me impassively, which was a bit creepy. That probably doesn’t reflect on anything except my own lack of honesty as a carnivore, but there you are. The broth was fine.
- fresh duck hearts and tongues (we have an Italian recipe that calls for duck hearts somewhere; I’d have to look for it. At the time, I didn’t think we could source them.)

I guess where this is going is pointing out the odd paradox that T&T is the better option for Western-style meat preparation that goes beyond a few familiar North American ideas, because of their willingness to butcher and offer the whole animal in any given case.

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I recently had a conversation with an acquaintance who had bought a house to renovate and resell in the Bloor and Ossington area. She mentioned that she was amazed by the price rise in the area, and noted that if she wasn’t able to sell the house, she wouldn’t be able to rent it out for as much as the mortgage would cost her. I made a preliminary attempt to look at the cost of renting vs. buying in Toronto by looking through some MLS listings. The first house, a very large 3 bedroom, is for sale or rent, which makes the comparison easy:

147 Delaware

For sale: $749,000
For rent: $2,400/month

Mortgage payment on sale price, assuming 25% downpayment, 25-year mortgage at today’s prime rate of 6.25%: $3,678/month

Price to rent value: 312 x rent

The second listings are in a townhouse complex near Queen and Bathurst.

TH6-68 Carr St.
For sale: $324,900

TH12 – 68 Carr St.
For rent: $1690/month

Mortgage payment on sale price, with 25% downpayment: $1595/month (+276.98 monthly condo fees)

With 10% downpayment: $1914.50/month (+276.98 monthly condo fees)

Price to rent value: 192 x

Irvine Housing Blog goes through some metrics for assessing a house’s real value, one of which is price to rent. He assumes that closing costs etc. are offset by tax deductions in the U.S., which of course doesn’t work here, so one would think the multiple should be lower in Canada. He pitches the price/rent multiple at 180 to 150 times rent for those buying as a principle residence, and 120-150 for investors. A Scotiabank report shows that growth in house prices is roughly doubling rent increases (and I don’t believe the housing price includes property taxes, which would increase the gap).

There are also other metrics, of course, such as price to household income. Those multiples have grown in Canada as well as in the U.S. in recent years.

The Scotia report also notes that growth in housing demand, like population growth, will slow over the next decade, and what growth there is will likely come most at the older end of the age spectrum, with “late-stage ‘move-up’ buyers and ‘downsizers’” potentially dominating the market. Which leads to the possibility of bond guru Bill Gross’ 1980 “plankton theory” taking hold of the more overheated parts of the urban Canadian real estate market:

We’re all familiar with the rapid escalation of home prices over the last 10 years. For most Americans, their homes have been the best and in many cases the only investment that they have made in their entire lives. Some have gone so far as to invest in several homes and have endured ‘negative carry’ on the cash flow in anticipation of leveraged capital gains a few years down the road. But where does it stop? Can housing continue to increase at twice the Consumer Price Index for the next 10 years?

One way to measure might be via the Plankton Theory. In the case of real estate, the plankton would be the first-time buyer (perhaps a young married couple) with a desire to own their own home but with very little capital to carry it off. When the time comes that they can’t pull it off – either through an inability to come up with a down payment, or to service the monthly mortgage – then the ‘plankton’ would disappear and the rapid escalation in housing prices would ease as well. For, unless the current homeowner has someone to sell his house to, he’ll be unable to afford the house with the view or that extra bedroom, and the process would continue into the echelons of Beverly Hills and Shaker Heights. In the end, the entire market would wither on the investment vine and home prices would stop increasing at the same rapid rate. So to gauge the health of the housing market, look first at the plankton. Without their presence and financial vitality, the market’s not going to repeat the experience of the past 10 years.”

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We missed Taste of the Danforth, except for the first night, when we got to enjoy the all-night whooping afterparty in Withrow Park. (1) Needed. 2) More. 3) Cops.) We went camping after that, not at all coincidentally.

But Val Dodge went, and wrote a satisfying rant for Torontoist:

So the question remains, why do people come to the Taste of the Danforth? It’s absolutely the worst way to experience the neighbourhood because much of what is imported for the event is so generic that it could be called the Taste Of Some Random Place Where We Happen To Be Holding The Corporate Branding Festival This Week. The restaurants are too crowded for all but a lucky few to get tables, the stores are too packed to enjoy shopping, and it’s impossible to walk anywhere along the street without merely flowing with the crowd. It can’t be for the live shows, which you can get any Friday or Saturday night at more than a dozen venues along the strip, running the gamut from bouzouki and blues to flamenco and belly dancing, with a dash of comedy for your enjoyment. It can’t be for the bargains, which are harder to find this weekend than any other. And it can’t be for the atmosphere, which is best described as, “walking down the street with 100,000 of your most disappointed friends.”

The comments are worth a look: #13 claims the local restaurants lose money on the thing.

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From the Daily Mail:

A hedge fund tycoon who ran up thousands of pounds of motoring fines abandoned his £80,000 supercar in a pound for three months – because he was too busy to collect it.
…

When they towed away his Maserati Cambiocorsa from a square in Knightsbridge in May, they were certain he would come forward to pay his fines and collect his car from the pound.

But he ignored all attempts by [Transport for London] to contact him and let the fines increase at the rate of £25 a day until the Evening Standard newspaper tracked him down and warned him the car was about to be auctioned.

According to the hedge fund manager, Bernard Des Pallieres:

“Some of my colleagues have teased me about the car. I can understand how people might find this quite strange but it was always my intention to pick it up. I only ever use the car in the summer and this summer I have hardly been in London.

“In my defence, I would say that parking in the TfL car pound is not that expensive relative to the cost of parking in central London.”

Why was he so busy? He was setting up the £170 million SQPR fund, which specializes “in complex investments in the debt markets.” Aren’t those the kind of investments that are now being unwound as the market for opaque investments dries up?

Good thing he’s now recovered the car — he may need it.

(H/t to Infectious Greed)

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Our first attempts at foodie-oenophileness in Ottawa were not auspicious. A kinda boring Italian wine with a middling pizza, a non-VQA Ontario Merlot that I accidentally bought with a downright bad pizza, and then, worst of all, a highly-rated Austrialian Bordeaux Blend (Parker 89 etc.) that we travelled all over to Ottawa to find and buy (almost) the last *two* bottles of, which turned out to taste exactly like the Western Australia white we had with Christmas dinner last year that none of us liked. (We cooked that with “fresh” Pacific sole purchased late Sunday afternoon at a semi-local Loblaws that had clearly been sitting there since the fish delivery on maybe Thursday morning.) We returned the second bottle of the Aussie white, but we couldn’t do anything with the fish except feed it to the racoons (not deliberately, but as a foreseeable consequence) and make a mental note about trusting our instincts when buying fish.

(Actually I must have made up the bit about the non-VQA Merlot going with the really bad pizza because I now remember we bought the really bad pizza after throwing out the fish, and I don’t think we made our way through two bottles of bad wine that night.)

Anyway, I am pleased to report that slowly, our wine experiences are improving. Most worthy of mention is an LCBO general list Primitivo, Lapaccio Primitivo Salento 2005 (IGT Puglia), at $12.05 (with deposit) and 13.5%. Outgoing, vivacious nose: starting with plum, dark fruits, oak and becoming warm, baked goods, raisiny, earthy, cocunut richness even inky. Medium minus acid, lots of body, enough tannin to keep it interesting. A nice crowd wine or for pizza or pasta with tomato-Italian sausage sauce, which is what we drank it with.

Also interesting if a bit odd is a white Rioja in the August 4 Vintages release, Leza Garcia Rioja 2006 at 12.5% and $14.95. Some of us probably remember those oaked “Riojas” that we used to make with the able assistance of the Wine Druid at Quality Plonk (dba Wine Not). This is actually surprisingly reminiscent one of those wines, only far more subtle and with the benefit of actual aging. Generous oaky-tropical nose: coconut, lemon-meringue, burnt sugar, tropical melon. Rather confected with a hint of plastici-ness. Barely dry, medium body, not much acid. Sort of thing you might drink with a Paella, I think. Also goes well with Balsamic vinegar (!!). J., who doesn’t much like oaky whites, calls it a classier Little Penguin (referring to the oak-chipped Aussie chard, not to the birds).

Random additional notes. As of this release Tio Pepe is back at Vintages, much to J.’s delight. There is also an excellent Lustau dry Amontillado available here and there, about $17-18 for a normal 750mL or so which is pretty good for what you get. We also bought an Oloroso from the same producer, $14.95 for 375mL. We are saving that for a special occasion.

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– and hold a spot on page one. Microsoft product leads to crash:

Skype: Outage caused by Microsoft update
MATT MOORE
Associated Press
August 20, 2007

FRANKFURT — A two-day outage that left millions of Skype users unable to use the popular Internet phone service was caused by an abnormally high number of restarts after people had downloaded a Windows security update, the company said Monday.

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Watch the British housing market, says Howard Archer, chief UK economist at Global Insight in the Guardian:

“The overall impression we get from the very latest data and survey evidence is that the housing market has peaked and is gradually and erratically coming off the boil.”

Mr Archer added that prices were unlikely to slow sharply, but he cautioned: “There is a danger that tighter credit and sustained financial market turmoil will hurt the mortgage and housing markets in the UK.

“This increases the risk that the UK housing market could see a sharp slowdown, and subprime mortgage problems could become more apparent.”

Another interesting tidbit from the Financial Times:

Defaults on UK subprime mortgages have been far lower than in the US but the level is rising. Last week the Council of Mortgage Lenders said that home repossessions had jumped 30 per cent year-on-year.

The Council estimates that subprime mortgages make up 8% of the UK mortgage market, vs. 20% in the US. However:

U.K. consumers are the most indebted in the Group of Seven nations, according to data from the National Institute for Economic and Social Research in London. The ratio of household debt to personal income is 1.62, compared with 1.42 in the U.S., 1.36 in Japan and 1.09 percent in Germany.

Housing price inflation in Britain continues, with annual growth in house prices ranging from 7.6% in Wales to 55.9% in Northern Ireland. Annualized CPI was 1.9% in July, according to the Economist.

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