The Seaport market has a fishmonger and butcher who are both open every day in the week. Haven't bought fish there, but have heard good things. Getaway farms has FANTASTIC meat - I believe they supply Brooklyn Warehouse and Ace Burgers.
While you're at the market, check out Foxhill milk, which is also open every day(except for Monday?) and has lovely un-homogenized milk and great yogurt. A lot of people only go to the market on weekends, but these places have regular storefronts in the building so are open every day.

That's what it sounds like to me, too.

Oooohhh... Kielke. I tried making it once and it was just NOT like my Oma's... She'd sometimes add some tomato and carmelized onions to the cream sauce. So good.

I'm curious about your sweet borscht? I grew up mennonite too and I still regularly make Kommst borscht and Somma borsct, but never anything sweet. Do you mean pluma moos? My oma's pluma moos really grossed me out as a kid - she'd always put in whole prunes in with the other dried fruit. It was always quite intimidating!

Come to think of it, I made chicken noodle soup last week with homemade noodles and I was wondering what was missing - I left out the star aniseed!

I still depend on my Mennonite Treasury cookbook to get me through my Menno cravings now that I moved to the East coast. (Don't even get me started about the lack of farmer sausage out here!)

I think the different rates for cruise ship days are actually for the artisan and souvenir vendors, not the primary food vendors, but I could be wrong.

I don't live in the city, but I commute during the week and go to the seaport market on a regular basis for a few of my everyday staples. I often go on thursdays, when there aren't any veggie producers other than Noggins, but I can still get milk, cheese and yogurt from foxhill every day, meat from Getaway, and fruit from Noggins... My CSA kept me stocked up with veggies until a few weeks ago, so the market was able to fulfill my needs even on the slow days.
Selwood Green and Elmridge and a few other smaller producers were pretty regular at the Wednesday market this summer, but I haven't been by on a Wednesday lately. When I worked on Spring Garden road, I made it down to the International market a few times. A little far for a 1/2 hour lunch break, but worth it!

My main beef this fall was that they closed off the street in front of the market when the cruise ships were in, which made it very inconvenient to drop in for a quick 5 minute grocery pickup - which honestly is what they're going to have to provide for people to make it a viable part of their weekly grocery routine rather than a saturday foodie attraction. I kept going - it's not the vendors fault that the seaport authority closes the street - but it was pretty irritating.

Just a comment on the Mennonite Heritage Village - Mennonite borscht doesn't have beets in it. It's a thick cabbage and tomato soup with a meat stock. Flavoured with dill.

The Menno food at the museum is great, but since it's served cafeteria style, it isn't as good as it could be. I never cared for their platz, but then - whose can compare to Oma's?
For the best Mennonite food in Steinbach, go to M.J.'s Cafe on Main street. Great, great Mennonite food. Now that I live on the East coast I really miss it.

Cafe Aroma Latino isn't huge, but I'd agree that they might be your best bet.. They have corn tortillas and tamal in their freezer, and have a good pantry supply of dried peppers, spices and bottled salsas.

Great post!

We just moved to the Eastern Shore last fall and we've found lots of great places to eat. I completely agree with John's Lunch and Two If By Sea. (I go to TIBS specifically when I want over-the-top baked goods!) I had a bad experience with hot and sour soup at Pho Hoang Minh - maybe I should try them again.

My favourite place for fish and chips in Dartmouth is a chip truck named Fran's that usually parks on King Street in Dartmouth. Incredibly fresh fish and clams, and they cut all their potatoes fresh on the truck. So good! (Yes, better than John's. John's has frozen fries and fresh cut ALWAYS trump frozen!)

Chezzetcook

- Tin Roof Mercantile has a great restaurant along with their beautiful gift shop. I was there last Christmas and the food was really great. Sandwiches come on thick slices of homemade bread. http://www.tinroof.ca/index.html

Musquodoboit Harbour

- Dobbit Bakery is great - nice to have organic bread and fair-trade coffee out here.

- Harbour Fish and Fries has really great fish and fried clams. Fries are frozen though. I don't remember seeing lobster rolls on the menu, but I love their fish so I never look at the menu!

- The Tourist Trap is another great breakfast/lunch spot to go along with their fantastic gift shop which features lots of local artwork and jewelry and organic beauty products. It's a little further down the #7 past the bridge in Musquodoboit Harbour but worth the visit. A tiny cafe, but everything's tasty and homemade. http://www.thetouristtrap.ca/cafe.htm

- For the kitsch value, and for really inexpensive homestyle food, there's also the Bear Den, across the highway from the old school right in Musquodoboit Harbour. The decor is intensely teddy bear related in a kind of yard sale aesthetic. Great if you enjoy kitsch! (Which I do!) I had a really fantastic lobster roll there last summer. They also have huge milkshakes that are almost more like smoothies - they put bananas and yogurt in along with the icecream.

Ship Harbour

- Family Fries. This is a 'blink and you'll miss it' kind of place, but a nice spot to grab a bite on the way to or from Clam Harbour Beach. Good fries, good fish, but again - it's most noteworthy for the kitsch value. The owner collects troll dolls and there are hundreds of them on display. Creepy! This is the kind of place that has pizza pops and donair eggrolls on the menu - but the fish and chips were top notch when we went there.

This is an old post, but I'll just mention that there are Polish pierogy vendors at both farmer's markets. The one at the Brewery market has a smaller variety, I think, but sells them with an AMAZING mushroom sauce(And also sells wonderful giant cabbage rolls!) The one at the International market at the Seaport on fridays has a pretty big variety, some stuffed with mushrooms. I think she's sometimes at the Saturday market too.

Yummmmm.

I recently bought a bag of Masa Mix at the Mid-East Food centre on the corner of North and Agricola. I definitely wasn't going there to look for central american food, but they have a pretty good selection of 'ethnic' ingredients from just about everywhere. There's a helpful guy at the counter willing for suggestions of what to carry at the store as well.

This was a 2KG bag for $6.75.

Yeah, the traffic flow was still a bit problematic. People need to figure out if it's going to be a clock-wise or counter-clockwise traffic flow, I think!
Maybe when it's open during the week in fall it may be easier to actually shop there.

Did anybody check out the new Farmer's Market this weekend?
I'm new to town so I found it absolutely amazing and will look forward to going there regularly. I had only been to the old market once and while it was charming, I felt like I was going to miss some little corner of the market that had the most amazing food.

After-market lunches are always exciting - yesterday it was spicy lamb sausages, za'ttar bread and pan-roasted kale, peas and yellow beans.

Love the Paddlewheel!
I was last there about 5 years ago - the big paddlewheel fountain that use to 'paddle' the water has been completely dry for years. Sigh.
Jello cubes were still definitely present, along with 'weigh as you go' salad bar and surprisingly good fries with gravy. We were probably the only ones there under 65...

There's a big Mexican Mennonite community in Winkler. I think they have 'Sunny' in the title or something like that. They weren't my favourite, but they're probably your best bet for fresh.
El Izalco is also the only place I've seen in Winnipeg where you can get a wide variety of bulk dried peppers like anchos, chipotles, guajillo.. and cocoa beans and hominy corn and pepitas in bulk.
Just make sure to check the best before date on the canned and refrigerated stuff.

Try El Izalco market on Sargent - close to Morden's Chocolates. It's a Salvadorean shop run by an extremely friendly lady. They have a couple of different brands of frozen corn tortillas which I've bought a few times - I try to stay away from the the ones made in Winkler since they kind of taste like cardboard. Maybe if you'd get them fresh from Winkler they'd taste better?

I bought a few packages there until I figured I'd try making my own so I bought a tortilla press and a big bag of masa and now I have fresh tortillas whenever I want. They're pretty easy and quick to make. El Izalco has Masa mix in bulk - you can also try Dino's market on Notre Dame to find presses and masa mix.

I just finished an enormous batch of potato soup - it fed me lunch for over a week.
Navy beans and potatoes and carrots cooked in chicken stock, thickened with yogurt and flour right at the end and piles of fresh dill mixed in. Delicious recession food!

I feel like my all-time favourite cookbooks aren't as fancy as all of yours, but I love, love, love my Mennonite cookbooks. More With Less and Simply in Season are my long-standing favourites.
More With Less was published in the 70s and is kind of a Granola-hippy, kind of 'stretch your dollar', make your own bread and yogurt kind of recipe book with an Anabaptist Christian edge. Sounds really exciting compared to food porn cookbooks, huh?

I just love this book because it taught me how to cook when I was a poor student. It showed me I could make a tasty lentil soup that cost almost nothing, it taught me how a simple white sauce could be used in a million ways, and it taught me to really think about my food in a global way. Simply in Season is a cookbook published by the same folks and it really focuses on eating local and in season. Both of these books have piles of substitution suggestions that encourage you to use the recipe as a guideline rather than fixed instructions, which has definitely influenced the way that I cook every day.
Neither of these books really have much of a 'wow' factor, but I think that's why I keep going back to them time and time again. Both books can be a little preachy, but maybe that's why I like them too - they remind me of my Mennonite grandmothers!

http://www.worldcommunitycookbook.org...

I saw this post a little late - but I thought you might like to see how I dealt with two bison tongues a few months ago:
http://planetborscht.blogspot.com/200...

I have two pork livers that I'm planning on making an unsmoked liverwurst or perhaps some country pate. I'm not really a huge liver fan, so I'm looking for something that will have a relatively mild liver flavour. I have lots of fatback and ground pork to incorporate into this project.
Any ideas?

I just smoked some garlic myself a couple of weeks ago.

I feel it adds a more 'rustic' flavour to my autumn food that I'm really liking right now. I like roasting it with root vegetables. It also makes 3-bean salad taste much much more interesting. And today I stuffed a massive zucchini with red cabbage, kale, spicy turkey sausage and lots of smoked garlic.
Yum.

It's usually around the same price. The quality is overall really good, but it depends of the specific crop - I bought some peas in the pod a month ago that looked a little tired but still tasted great. I found garlic and gooseberries before I saw them at St Norbert. So it's not necessarily cheaper or better, but sometimes they have different stuff.
They also carry hothouse produce - the Ste. Anne tomatoes and cucumbers that you don't always see at St Norbert and other large but local producers like Vita eggs, New Bothwell cheese, that kind of thing. They also have non-MB fruit like peaches and limes and cherries. What I like about it is that it's this tiny little perfect supermarket that has all the stuff you need with an emphasis (but not dogmatic devotion to) local food.

And I think they have a gelati window open in the evenings.

Has anybody else been to this great market? I did a search and there's been no mention of it on the boards.
We came across Cramptons one day on the way to the St. Norbert Farmer's Market. I had seen this little place by the driving range at the corner of Kenaston/Bishop Grandin and Waverly before and thought I'd check it out because there wasn't anything specific I needed at the Farmer's Market. I had kind of been expecting one of those 'fresh fruit' shacks, but I was blown away by this place once I got inside. There was tons of fresh produce, a dairy section, a meat section, ready-to-eat stuff, snacks and a full bakery which made it smell amazing.
They have done some serious research into local producers and have fantasic stuff produced in Manitoba - tons of local produce, New Bothwell and Oak Island cheese, bison and elk meat, local berkshire pork, jams and condiments and THE BEST cinnamon buns in the city that have been warm and dripping with melted butter every time I've got them. The only time I've ever been to the shop is Saturday mornings, so maybe that's the time to go!

Baraka is very good - I love their hummus and fresh pitas and I go there all the time since I only work a couple of blocks away.
However, I have to stick up for Shawarma TIme - the place on Ellice mentioned above. The service at Shawarma Time is a little more intense (in a good way) than Baraka - the owner's kids are hanging around and there are goofy pictues of the family eating the food on the outside of the restaurant. They are a bit more hit and miss... when they're good, they're really amazing, but I too have had one shwarma that was hard and dry. I haven't been there in a while, but I wouldn't rule them out.

These are all great ideas!
Tonight I tried making the pan-fried quinoa cakes, as per okaygo's suggestion. Yum!
I used about two cups of the quinoa glop, two eggs and about two tablespoons of flour. And I also added some grated parm and browned onions. They fried up quite nicely and were a lovely accompaniment to my fresh green bean soup.

I also like thejulia's suggestion.... I have a few zucchini from my CSA that I also need to use up. I was also thinking of using some of it in venison meatloaf as a filler.

Cornbread sounds interesting. I've seen some recipes that use creamed corn - do you thing a straight swap would work?

I kinda feel like an idiot.
Yesterday night I cooked up 3 cups of quinoa to make a salad and it came out really mushy. Too much water, I guess. It didn't seem too bad at first - I figured I could still use it and so I proceeded to add tomatoes, olive oil, garlic, basil, and balsamic vinegar for the salad. Unfortunately, the oil and vinegar took the already soggy quinoa and made it into a gloppy, gluey, oatmeal like mess.

Needless to say, I'm going to start over with the salad because I still need to bring something to a picnic today, but here's where I need your help - What can I do with the gloppy batch that still tastes really good? I was thinking about finding a savoury quickbread recipe that could incorporate this stuff - I've made bread with cooked oatmeal before that was really tasty. Or maybe some kind of pancake?

Anybody have any ideas? My frugal genes can't allow me to throw it out, and I'm going to still eat it one way or another!

Where on Osborne is Vi-ann? I can't think of it right now... Do they have decent pho there? Because that might totally do the trick.

VJs is fantastic - no doubt about it, but sometimes you want to eat inside, you know?

Yeah - over $15 for an entree is kind of pricey for me too. This is directly related to my income at the moment - my partner went back to university about 4 years ago (one more year to go!) and since then, eating out has been a lot more rare than when we were both working full time. I can't say that this has hampered our eating style, though. We tend to eat at a lot of small mom and pop ethnic joints that have great inexpensive food ($9 at the MOST expensive for entrees...) and when we want to splurge on lobster, we buy it from the store and steam it ourselves! If we want steak, I'd rather source out some good meat and grill it over charcoal at home than pay a premium for a fancy steakhouse to do it for me. We go out for those $100-150 dinners maybe once a year these days, and I usually try to pick a place where I'll never be able to duplicate the food!

I still love reading about the nicer restaurants though, and often get ideas for sourcing my own food from restaurant reviews.

After a decade or so of early nights due to work schedules, I've been hankering for the late night Wpg chow experience again, but I can't find anything to equal the awesome late night eateries of my university days. Remember Pure Lard in the Exchange District? The Gothic (or was it Gotham?) cafe where Mise now lives? There's probably a lot of lounges or bars with good pub food, but my partner's a twelve-stepper who's not terribly fond of hanging out in bars anymore.

Right now I can think of Papa Georges, Salisbury House, Denny's, Perkins for the standard chain type grub. The Sum Hay in the Exchange District for soup (which does have great ambiance) and Ken's Restaurant on Ellice for Chinese. I heard Mise is open late, but it seems a little 'fine-dining' for my particular craving. Or do they have a different late-night menu?

I totally admit I'm out of the late night loop - but there's got to be more out there!

I'm so glad this topic came up! I've promised a co-worker that I'd make him a key lime pie for his birthday next month, but as I am not (yet) a key lime connoisseur, I wasn't quite sure where to start.
Rockycat, do you have this 'Nellie and Joe's' recipe?