My adventures in food....

Many of my friends and all of my family are aware of how keen a cook I am. My current journey through George Brown College on Saturdays is helping to elevate, not only my understanding of food; but also my abilities around techniques, style and recipes. At the same time my immersion in this topic has me pursuing charcuterie, new braising techniques and a whole bunch of other things. One of the things that I started to do a number of years ago was make my own gravalax.


I would say at this juncture I am able to create a superior product to what i can generally get in the store at a smidgin of the cost. Recently I have started to make a much better product however, by not only curing my lox for 2 to 3 days based on size; but by air drying it in my fridge for 8 to 20 hours to allow for the creation of pellicle and then cold smoking for a couple of hours at 50F. Yesterday I shared the end result of this approach with colleagues at work and it seemed to have been very well received. I am also experimenting with curing for a shorter period by using my food saver to vacuum seal and cure smaller pieces (half a side) that from all accounts should substantially shorten the cure. I also tried that with the smaller piece in the picture which delivered a firmer product with a much better colour.

There are only a couple of places that i believe provides a truly superior product and one of them is J Willy Krauch in Tangiers, Nova Scotia. Their approach is the more traditional Danish method of salting for one day and then smoking over 1 to 2 days. A truly amazing product. Great write up here. http://snipurl.com/t7wtg

Feel free to contact me if you would like my recipe.

Where and What Next?

I haven't thumbed a message on the train for some time. Is suspect part of it has to do with the inconclusive nature of the data of late as well as the fact that a direct function of that has been reflected in my market marking time. Equities while off recent highs still show resilient performance looking at the returns of the last six months, gold recently hit new highs and I imagine that the commodity currencies in particular are highly likely to take another run at recent achieved highs.

This weekend , I read two interesting pieces, one in the Globe and Mail and the second in the New York Sunday Times.

The first suggested that economists generally speaking invariably get it so wrong, that in fact we may well have a new economic nirvana ahead if we simply take a contra outlook. Now admittedly the focus was more Canadian. The second which was an editorial in the NY Sunday times pointed out a couple of rather scary numbers, that suggested that the underemployment rate was close to 17.5%.

Now note that's the underemployment rate, not unemployment rate. Its all a reflection on what's officially recorded and in the light of Fridays non-farm payroll, many would have you believe that the trend of the officially reported numbers is obviously positive. Clearly, that's one interpretation; but the brute reality is substantially different for the many that have exhausted unemployment benefits, and can no longer claim, and effectively fall of the rolls.

This however does not make them less unemployed and that number is becoming increasingly significant, to the extent that the notions of a second stimulus package or an extension of the very pervasive rescue package already underway will have to continue.

****The unemployment rate includes only jobless people who have looked for work in the past four weeks. The underemployment rate - which also includes jobless workers who have not recently looked for work and part-timers who need full-time work - reached 17.5 percent in October. And the long-term unemployment rate - the share of the unemployed population out of work for more than six months - also continues to set records. It is now 35.6 percent.

The official job-loss data also fail to take note of 2.8 million additional jobs needed to absorb new workers who have joined the labour force during the recession. When those missing jobs are added to the official total, the economy comes up short by 10.1 million jobs. *****[NY Sunday Times Editorial] http://snipurl.com/t5gxs

This rolls into the contention I have expressed previously in these comments and that is the hands of the FED will be tied for longer than they would necessarily like. Its evident that despite the massive amounts of largesse, only a few industries might have benefited and in fact many of the programmes undertaken have yet to yield fruit.

The G20 this weekend seemed to be in agreement

***The MSCI World gauge of equities in 23 developed countries increased 0.9 percent at 10:18 a.m. in London and futures on the Standard & Poor's 500 Index climbed 0.9 percent. Russia's 30- stock Micex Index added 2.9 percent. Gold gained 1.3 percent to $1,109.50 an ounce and crude oil jumped 2 percent. The dollar weakened against 14 of 16 major currencies tracked by Bloomberg.

Policy makers from the U.S., U.K., Japan and 17 nations said on Nov. 7 that it's too early to withdraw spending intended to revive growth. The MSCI World has surged 66 percent since March 9 as governments spent $12 trillion, by International Monetary Fund estimates, to rescue the global economy from its first recession since World War II.

"Markets don't need to be worried that these governments and central banks are suddenly going to take away all the stimulus measures," Stuart Bennett, a senior currency strategist at Calyon in London, said in an interview on Bloomberg Television. "Risk appetite should remain supported into the end of the year.". *****[Bloomberg]

We have a ways to go and this is hardly about a pessimistic outlook and more a realistic one. That would suggest to me that our markets will continue to stay range bound even as we creep higher from the lows of 13 months ago.