Read Mia Stainsby in today's Vancouver Sun, Wednesday, January 21, 2004.  We made the top banner + the front page of Arts and Living on page C1.  The picture was taken by my friend Don Montgomery.  Check out: http://www.canada.com/vancouver/vancouversun/archives/story.asp?id=B8C3CA44-CA46-4BD8-887E-5E051F0C5421 (Here's the PDF of Mia's story)

Mia focusses on fusion cuisine.  The Haggis Wun-Tun is really making the rounds and capturing people's attention.

NEWS STORY

Have a taste of 2004 Umami foods are savoury, pungent, delicious and meaty   Mia Stainsby Vancouver Sun Linda Meinhardt's hot chocolate is the new 'in' beverage.   CREDIT: Ward Perrin, Vancouver Sun   Rob Clark of C restaurant shops for the freshest ingredients, such as this halibut.   CREDIT: Ward Perrin, Vancouver Sun   Todd Wong pioneered Toddish McWong's Robbie Burns Chinese New Year.   CREDIT: Ward Perrin, Vancouver Sun   ADVERTISEMENT This is the year of umami, a taste you probably didn't know you had. It forms a pentagon of taste along with sweet, salty, bitter and sour. Umami has been a seamless part of Asian cooking and has been present in western cuisine, too, only it's been nameless. Scientists at the University of Miami recently pinpointed umami taste receptors on our tongues, making it legit in the West. Translations of the word umami from Japanese have included savoury, essence, pungent, delicious and meaty. A direct translation is "delicious (umai) essence (mi)." In science-speak, umami foods are rich in glutamic acid and nucleotides. In food-speak, they include cheeses, aged beef, soy sauce, green tea, fresh tomato juice, sun-dried tomatoes, peas, dried shiitake, rich red wines and beers, Asian fish sauces, condiments. Dried, cured, aged and fermented foods are umami mines. Describing umami in Wine Spectator magazine, Shirley Corriher, a food science maven, could only say: "It makes the taste receptors go 'ding-ding' in our brain and say 'this is good.' " Not surprisingly, the Japanese scientist who first discovered and named it in 1907 also created monosodium glutamate (MSG). The theory is, umami makes us crave protein, just as our sweet receptors dream of carbohydrates and salt receptors cry for salt and minerals. As the new year dawns, a restaurant called Umami just opened on Davie Street, offering a fusion of Japanese and Mediterranean cuisines and loads of umami potential. This is the year when you'll hear someone sip some red wine or take a bite of Saltspring Island cheese and say: "Mmmm. Such umami!" And the year when we begin to expand knowledge of how taste works, how salt improves dessert (add it to cake and it lessens the sweetness but gives it a more complex and enhanced finish) or how a tiny bit of bitterness -- such as from bitter orange, coffee or chocolate -- makes a sweet dessert less cloying. As passé as it may seem, fusion remains the soul of food in Vancouver. Cuisines continue to co-mingle and canoodle, forming unique edible tableaus of this fascinating city. Take, for instance, Toddish McWong's Robbie Burns Chinese New Year. It sounds like a Monty Python skit but it is, frankly, the natural evolution of Todd Wong's life. His fifth-generation Vancouver family is a mix of many races. He used to cook for his non-Chinese friends on Chinese New Year and seven years ago, they decided to celebrate Robbie Burns Day and Chinese New Year in a grand-slam event. It was a riotous party involving a 12-course Chinese banquet, Scottish kilts, bagpipes, songs, highland dancing and haggis with plum or sweet and sour sauce. The event is now open to the public. This year, they introduce what's probably a world first: the haggis won ton. Who in their right mind would have thought of it previously? "The Chinese cooks from Flamingo restaurant are working on it right now," says Wong. "We're going to wrap the haggis in won ton wrappers and deep fry it and serve it with a special sauce. They'll be bite-size. I think it should fit in very well with dim sum lunch, too, which literally, means pieces of the heart." Haggis, as any Scot would know, contains lamb heart as well as lamb liver, onions, and oatmeal, stuffed in sheep's stomach. "Taste-tested by some of the best Scottish and Chinese clan chefs, it was declared the 12th wonder of the world," Wong jests. (Toddish McWong's Robbie Burns Chinese New Year dinner will take place Jan. 24 and 25 at Flamingo Restaurant. For information, call 604-987-7124 or go to www.gunghaggisfatchoy.com) Alongside this meta-cuisine, the cult of micro-cuisine is also heating up. Chefs like Rob Clark of C restaurant hunt for cooking ingredients with smart-bomb precision, as close to home as possible. "I'm very conscious of where food comes from. Personally, I've gone from worrying about how I put food on the plate, all sexy and fancy, to spending most of my energy on how I get the food to the plate, sourcing quality environmentally friendly organic foods. It's so ironic but quality is closely connected, like a Siamese twin, to sustainability." Clark works with individual fishers -- the tuna fisher, the sable fisher, the salmon fisher, the sardine and scallop fisher; they all pass his quality test. The same applies to his hunt for perfect produce. He knows the farmers who specialize in different fruits and vegetables. His cheeses are from Poplar Grove in the Okanagan, David Wood on Saltspring and Moonstruck, also on Saltspring. And all this talk about food quality bolts nicely into the slow food movement, which, contrary to its name, sprints along, gathering speed and advocates. In the U.S., the movement, which celebrates quality foods, artisanal producers, traditional and regional methods of cookery, has grown twenty-fold in the U.S. in the past three years. It blows a raspberry to homogenized, industrialized, technologized, mass-produced foods. Slow food keeners in B.C. have much to celebrate with our wines, cheeses, chocolates, heirloom produce, organically grown meats and poultry. I draw the line, though, at fireplace cooking. For the purists, there are now fireplaces with where you can hang a pot of simmering soup or stew. Uh-unh! And that brings us to farmers' markets, where the true slow foodie would shop; they're getting more and more successful each year. Wild salmon will be in high demand. Some restaurants played up their "I Switch" move to wild salmon in the past year. Margaret Chisholm, executive chef at Culinary Capers Catering, has switched. "I feel like finally, we've reached the critical mass that's required for people to accept the additional cost. It's gone over very well and it's related to the slow food movement." She predicts Spanish-meets-Moroccan-meets-Tunisian food will be big. "We've got a long way to go in terms of recognizing the potential in spices -- cinnamon, fennel seeds, cumin seeds, saffron, mint and lots of others. These countries appreciate vegetables in a way that's different from the French and Italians. Vegetables play an important role." In the restaurant industry, the tapas trend still has legs, especially when it comes to Japanese restaurants, a welcome change from the carbon-copy Japanese restaurants of previous decades. The low-carb craze, the Sherman tank of all food trends, will ramp up even more, with low-carb replacement foods coming at us from every direction -- chocolate, pastas, baked goods, beer, wine. As long as the pounds keep dropping, the low-carb business will be fertile with ideas. Restaurants are hopping on the bandwagon one by one. There's also the idea of "metro" food, a syncopation of refined urban and retro comfort food. Here in Vancouver, it's epitomized by Rob Feenie (the prince of culinary posh), who put Feenie's Weenie, a gourmet hot dog, on the menu at Feenie's, right alongside shepherd's pie made with duck confit, great burgers with great fries, and, if you wish, foie gras. In trend-setting New York, the big boys of haute cuisine, like Alain Ducasse, has succumbed to macaroni and cheese; Daniel Boulud serves a $50 US burger; Alan Miguel Kaplan at Salon Mexico played Henry Higgins to the burrito, glamourizing it with filet mignon and truffle burritos and charging $45 for it. Meanwhile, our high-velocity lifestyles have spawned sophisticated fast-food outlets. Rangoli, Vikram Vij's swish deli-style Indian eatery, set to open any day, is but one. Linda Meinhardt, of Meinhardt Fine Foods, opened Picnic; Mad About Food on Fourth Avenue and Home Plate on Arbutus also cater to hurried middle-class lifestyles; Sean Heather of the Irish Heather opened Salty Tongue next to his popular Gastown eatery with take-away for hurried nearby condo dwellers (pay no heed to carbs and try his delicious soda bread). Is Feenie's Take-Out or Drive-Through next? Mints might take a skyrocket this year, if only because Esquire and Vogue magazines both carried articles on them. And pomegranates, too, since studies have shown they contain natural estrogens and are a great source of antioxidants. Style, O, Time and Saveur magazines chimed their approval (despite the fact you'd have to eat 700 to 800 a day for the estrogen benefits). I think consumers are now aware of fair-trade coffee, enough to consider buying from companies such as Vancouver-based Origins, which sells nothing but fair-trade beans. The concern of the fair-trade movement is to ensure that poor farmers are paid a fair price for their harvests and that they are produced under fair labour conditions. And on a northerly note, Scandinavian foods might enjoy a spotlit moment thanks to award-winning wunder-chef Marcus Samuelsson of the acclaimed Aquavit restaurant in New York. He recently published Aquavit, a ravishing cookbook, showing Swedish food to be chic and glamorous -- more molten foie gras ganache with truffle ice cream than herrings and lingonberries. Chocolate has really gone crazy thanks to availability of quality chocolate. Hot chocolate has become the "it" New York beverage -- and so we will follow. Meinhardt, at Picnic, serves a classy hot chocolate, replicating her favourite from Angelina's in Paris. Cindy Evetts of the Tools and Techniques kitchen store in West Vancouver adds smoked paprika to the foods to watch for. "It just boggles my mind how many people are experimenting with it," she says. Spaghetti sauce, for instance, can be vamped up with it. And the home cook now loves demi-glace (a rich meat stock) as it's available at places like the Soup Meister at Lonsdale Quay. "A couple of tablespoons of demi would be transcending in shepherd's pie," Evetts says. At her store, silicon-based kitchen items are big. She sells pastry brushes, baking tins, oven mitts and baking mats made from the durable heat-resistant material. "It's so easy to clean, you don't have to grease the cookie sheets or baking pans. If you get goo on the baking mitts, just wash it off in five seconds. It really makes life a lot less complicated in the kitchen." Just remember, trends are not law. Some are ideas whose time has come. Some are confection and fashion made to evaporate. Buy the fair-trade coffee and the B.C. cheese, but you'll still make the hip list without pomegranates and mints. - - - VANCOUVER SUN RECIPES Looking for a recipe from past issues of The Vancouver Sun? Recipes from 1987 to the present are now available through INFOLINE. Call 604-605-2607 or send e-mail to infoline@png.canwest.com. Search fees apply. Recipes will be mailed, faxed or e-mailed to you. © Copyright 2004 Vancouver Sun