burnt embers

It is the time of year when the Moss Street Market opens for business every Saturday. I have previously done a very long post on the Market featuring various vendors, mostly those we frequent (see that post here). By and large those vendors are all back again this year – check out their great products on my earlier post. You can find out more about Moss Street Market vendors here on their website. You can follow MSM on Facebook if you want.

This post is about two new vendors that both have wonderful food – one flaming hot, the other freezing cold – with an emphasis on local and organic ingredients. My thanks to Cold Comfort creator Autumn Maxwell, and to Passioneatfood’s Chef Dwane MacIssac for permission to use these pictures of them and their food. (I bought my food and benefit in no way from this post.)

Cold Comfort was out in the bright sun, with little shade and harsh light, and thus I only have a couple of pictures that worked out. Chef Dwane’s booth was in shade, except for his white cobb oven, which glows brightly in a patch of sun, all ‘burned out’ in most of these photos. I don’t claim any of these pictures to be more than documentary, but the food was so good, I had to feature them with what I had.

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Cold Comfort

Cold Comfort is an ice cream vendor, though that is a very mundane name for this unique small business with a very high quality product. My partner and I  had one ice cream sandwich each – by far the best either of us have ever had. The more commercial ones will never again be interesting. Autumn serves these out of a freezer in the back of her tiny van. They consist of her own ice cream sandwiched between her own macarons which are flavoured to complement the ice cream.

Check out Autumn’s website for more information, or her Facebook page, including other places you can find her products. Her list of ice creams in the “flavour archive” is incredible. I want to try many different types, starting perhaps with  these ones:

• Belle Royale Belgian Cherry Beer ice cream
• Blood Orange sorbet
• Cranberry & Grapefruit sorbet
• Fennel & Citrus ice cream
• Strawberry & Black Pepper ice cream

My partner had a Ginger’s Revenge ice cream sandwich which I sampled a bit of too. The label says it is made from organic cream and milk, organic egg yolks, organic cane sugar, macarons (almonds, powdered sugar, egg whites, ginger), fresh ginger, sea salt. There is just the right amount of ginger in both the ice cream and the macaron.

My own choice was a Ginger Tea and Sour Cherry ice cream sandwich – ingredients are listed as above but with sour cherries instead of the fresh ginger, and oolong tea in the macarons instead of ginger. It was delightful! A great balance of flavours.

The ice cream sandwiches are highly recommended, and I expect that the ice cream in its other forms is every bit as good.

And as an aside, I was amused that Autumn was wearing such a great vintage dress – she was right across the street from the vintage mannequin that I posted about a few days ago, an odd kind of reflection.

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Passioneatfoods – Chef Dwane MacIsaac

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Dwane MacIsaac creates pizzas at the market in a trailer mounted wood-fired oven. You can find out more about his many endeavors as a chef at his Passioneatfoods website.

I chose a pepperoni and bocconcini pizza, the other combinations on offer that day (and I understand this changes from one week to the next) included a Breakfast Pizza and Caramelized Onion and Chevre. My partner did not have any pizza (we were late arriving and the vegetarian option was sold out). There was theatre to watch as the pizzas were constructed and slid from a wide paddle into the oven among the flames. And then Dwane would retrieve them steaming from the cobb and put them on a large slab cut from a tree trunk, where they were slice and placed on wax paper for the customer.

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Not only was it fun to watch the making, but the eating was sumptuous. The tomato sauce was superb, the pepperoni of some special sort and the bocconcini, well it is one of my favourite cheeses and it was perfect in this combination. The only slight downside was that there was a bit too much sauce, or perhaps it was a bit runny. And I say this not because it did not work well in terms of flavour or texture, but because there is no ready place to sit down at Moss Street Market that has a flat surface to put the pizza and thus it was difficult to contain the sauce. This was a mild inconvenience, unrelated to the quality of the food. Next time you go to Moss Street Market, leave room for one of these pizzas, or a half of one as there is more than enough to share one of these with a friend.

All of the images in this post can be seen in the gallery view below. I wish I had more Cold Comfort pictures, but the two that I do have say it all, and Autumn’s Facebook page is crowded with fantastic shots of her product if you want to see more. To launch the gallery view, click on any image below and use the arrows to navigate and escape to return to this page.

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Canon 5Dii, Nikkon-F 24mm/f2.8 pre-ai lens, ISO100, various exposures.

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