Category: Cucina

It’s been a while since I wrote a food-oriented post—and of course a holiday weekend is just the thing to trigger one. Lisa’s parents were here this weekend, so our relatively freewheeling Easter dinner that we have honed over the past few years got expanded a little stylistically while reining in a few of the more eccentric ingredients.

The menu: deviled eggs for hors d’oeuvres; glazed ham; mashed potatoes; asparagus; and mushrooms. The deviled eggs were the most restrained compared to past years, where I used wasabi in place of the horseradish my parents always used to perk things up. Instead of wasabi, I just used hot sauce, slightly increased the salt for flavor, and diced up some shallot very fine to mix into the filling. The eggs were superb: eminently edible but leaving one still hungry—and thirsty. As is also traditional at Easter, I accompanied mine with a small amount of bourbon over ice as I was cooking. This year it was Blanton’s, a serendipitous find that I was delighted to have in my liquor cabinet. No juleps this year, though; for one thing, at 30-something degrees, it was too damned cold out to have them or want them.

The potatoes were simple too—half and half and butter in the place of the chicken broth and buttermilk that I’ve used in the past to give them flavor, and I thought the potatoes were bland as a result. But! They were a perfect foil to the mushrooms (sliced, cooked in olive oil and butter with more diced shallot and two cloves of garlic, and then finished covered in the pan), which were a hit. The garlic was definitely the thing. Alas the asparagus! cooked much too long.

The ham was tasty, but—and here regional prejudices rear their head—I do wish I could have found a proper ham. And by proper, I mean country ham, dry-aged, the kind that comes in a burlap bag and tastes a little like a salt lick and a little like a smoky prosciutto. That’s the ham I had a lot of growing up, both at home and at church, where ham biscuits were the order of the day after a sunrise service. But this ham—a spiral sliced ham with a brown sugar and orange juice glaze, was pretty good in its own way—just not quite the way my mouth remembered it.

After dinner, of course, the requisite ham biscuits. Mine reflected my inner culinary struggle, with mustard on top and butter on the bottom. Yes! Butter with ham. And if you think it’s insane, ask the street vendors in Provence selling jambon cru sandwiches with thick local butter about it, and then come back and tell me I was right. Of course it‘s not the Provençal coming out in me so much as the Pennsylvania Dutch grandmother, but oh well.

Others had clam chowder with dinner—Legal’s, sold prepackaged, and it occurred to me how much easy access to the greatest ambrosia breeds contempt. Watching the others eat it made me think about the Bull Island clam chowder I grew up with, cooked with a clear broth, not milk, and certainly not with tomato.

I’ve been drinking some pretty high hop content beers lately. A few days ago, I brought home (finally) the new Sam Adams Hallertau Imperial Pilsner, which bears approximately the same relation to regular Sam Adams as regular Sam bears to a Budweiser (American version). Floral, elegant, bright with hops (Hallertau, of course) without being overly bitter, and pleasantly complex. The beer raised Lisa’s eyebrows, and that’s hard to do.

Her eyebrows were raised a bit higher when she tasted tonight’s beer, the Unearthly Imperial India Pale Ale from Southern Tier Brewing Company. Imperial, connoting a higher-alcohol variety of a standard beer variety, is getting a workout here, taking a standard IPA to unheard of heights. 11% ABV and high but well-balanced IBUs are the start of the story, as is the unearthly orange glow and the aroma, reminiscent of standing over an opened bag of fresh hops. Little to no head, lacing the side of the glass very slightly. Initial sharpness from the hops gives way to a lightly malty back of the tongue with good strong floral character throughout. I wasn’t familiar with this brewery before tonight but I’ll be seeking it out in the future.

Update: Nice article from the NY Times Food section tasting a variety of “extreme” beers, in which the Unearthly is namechecked (though not actually tasted).

The title of this post is a reference to an old Bloom County strip in which Opus, promoted to the “Lifestyles” section (then a new concept) of the local newspaper, does an article on eggnog (“Everyone’s agog over eggnog!”), inadvertently starts a trend, and picks up a check for a couple thou from the U.S. Eggnog Association. He closes in the last panel with an aside to the audience: “I knew this was a racket!”

The thought crossed my mind after seeing articles about absinthe in the Boston Globe and the New York Times today (the latter owns the former). Hmm. If one were to follow the money, would one find a big absinthe concern behind the apparent coincidence?

I’m encouraged by the honest discussion in the latter article about the quality of modern absinthe prior to this latest revival. I tasted the stuff in the late 1990s—a former Cheeselord brought back a bottle from Europe. I thought it was interesting, but ultimately not something I would want to drink much of, thanks to the overwhelming licorice-like flavors. But I knew the drink’s reputation and was curious about how it might have been better in its heyday. Looks like I won’t have to wait long to find out.

(Oh: and regarding “agog over eggnog”: if you are a lifestyles editor yourself, don’t use this phrase in a headline. It’s been done.)

WSJ: Trappist Command: Thou Shalt Not Buy Too Much of Our Beer. The article makes me want to hunt down some Westvleteren 12 for my birthday, as do the comments on BeerAdvocate.

Two unrelated beverage news items in my browser this morning. I was just thinking the other day about how you never see Dixie Blackened Voodoo anymore, when I saw this article about the devastation at the original Dixie plant as a result of Katrina. The brand is being brewed in Wisconsin on a contract basis, but I hope they can bring the original brewery back around. Blackened Voodoo and the original Dixie are too good with Cajun food to continue to be brewed that far north.

And Ardbeg, which I enjoy as a fallback when I am drinking Scotch away from home if Laphroaig is unavailable, has been crowned the World Whiskey of the Year and the best Scotch Single Malt. I like Ardbeg for combining the peatiness of Laphroaig and other Islay malts with the smoothness of a blend.

I keep meaning to write this post about the vile branding job that the Mars Company did with Flavia, their single serving coffee offering, and deciding that the names of the product suite really kind of tell the whole terrible story. First of all, there’s “Flavia, the Café of Choice,” which is the oddest tagline ever. I know it’s supposed to make me think that I have options, but I think it just makes it sound like a third tier Roman household god. Is a Café the household god that watches over coffee related items? Flavia, Café of Choice! Lavia, Café of Coffee-Related Metabolic Disorders! Starbuck, Café of Ubiquity! Tremora, Café of Caffeine Withdrawal!

Then there are the product packets, of which the worst offenders are:

• Creamy Topping: OK, not supposed to be a flavor by itself. But just picking up something that says “Creamy Topping” feels wrong. I don’t care how many “recipes” you can make with it.
• Milky Way Swirl: it’s caramel and … something, OK? I don’t need to envision a candy bar in my coffee. I’ve made that perfectly clear before.
• Exotic Chai: After you make the flavor packet, you can go and watch Exotic Chai do a little dance for you! (Oh, wait, not that kind of exotic.)
• Green Tea with Jasmine: nothing wrong with this one. Oh, except that brewed into your average paper cup, it tastes like drinking the water that I soak cedar chips in for the grill. Woody, astringent, nasty. Much like Flavia’s Ethiopia Sidamo… or most of the product, actually.
• Choco (grand prize winner): Based on the name of this drink, I always assumed that Flavia was from a Middle European country where people didn’t speak English as their first language. Choco sounds weird because the word it comes from doesn’t actually get pronounced that way. It’s pronounced chock-lit, not choc-o-late. Choco sounds like a character in The Sopranos, not like a drink. Finding out that Flavia is a British company makes me even more ashamed to be in marketing. Someone who is conversant in the language of Shakespeare shouldn’t come up with a name like this.

Saying Choco makes my flesh crawl. And that’s even before you taste it. It’s reminiscent of the Peanuts cartoon in which Lucy tells Linus that the hot chocolate he has made her is terrible; “it’s too weak! It tastes like someone dipped a brown crayon into hot water!”

Linus replies, “You’re right… I’ll go and add another crayon!”

So here we are with our little single serving machine, adding another crayon to hot water and washing it down with … shudder… creamy topping. Er, ™.

The inexplicable thing is that people get attached to these machines. Take this guy. Please. At least he provides a useful service for those that are incapable of reading directions that tell you how to use the coffeemaker… the directions that appear right on the screen as you make the coffee. And people really do make their own beverages, like the unspeakable Creamy Topping®/Choco/Espresso combination that this guy dubs “Flavia Mother of All Beverages.” I think the mother of all beverages is actually some kind of vodka.

No mention of Flavia would be complete without a reference to the Urban Dictionary article, which is pretty much complete actually.

The Boston Globe writes about the newest competitive threat to Starbucks: the McCafe. The problem with shifting your product mix from premium coffees to candy milk drinks isn’t just that you lose your soul in the process. It’s that it is so much easier for other players to imitate you and horn in on your turf.

Because, really, could you imagine Dunkin and McDonalds imitating really good high quality coffee? But it’s really easy for them to steam some milk, dump in some flavored corn syrup, and call it a latté.

Howard Schultz is right: once you take that first step, it’s a long slippery slope down to slinging fast food with everyone else.

Lew Bryson: Flat Tire. A well written piece about how beer aficionados tend to dump on beers that have broken out of the enthusiast ghetto—beers that once defined craft brewing, like Sierra Nevada, Sam Adams, and of course Fat Tire. Lew is right that part of this is the indie obscurist habit of not liking anything that has more than three fans (”I was listening to Jet Engines before they were cool!! What? What did you say? What? What?”).

I also wonder if part of it, for beer drinkers, isn’t just palate fatigue. After you’ve been tasting 9% ABV and 150 IBU beers for a long time, maybe the beers that started you up the taste path just don’t tickle your taste buds any more.

One thing I find is that beers that I obsessed over when I was younger, like Samuel Smith and Newcastle Brown, just don’t taste as good to me now. Part of it is the difficulty in getting bottles that aren’t skunked—have people forgotten how to handle beer in clear glass bottles? (And why after all these years does Merchant du Vin continue to insist on using them?)

And the other thing, of course, is that omnipresence is relative. There is no Fat Tire in Massachusetts, for instance. Much to my everlasting chagrin.

We’re babysitting our neighbors’ vegetable patch while they are visiting family this week. Which is a wonderful responsibility, because it requires us to pick the vegetables as they ripen, and eat them.

Right now what’s in season is the beginning of their tomatoes and the end of their zucchini. While I’m very happy about the former, I’m unexpectedly pleased about the latter as well. I always remember drowning in zucchini as a kid, but now that we only get it occasionally—even though then it comes in large doses—I’m excited about getting it now and figuring out how to cook it.

I grill it a lot. And my mom, growing up, cooked it a number of ways, including cooking it covered in a pot with onions. Tonight I tried a simple Italian variation of that technique, in which a cup of thin-sliced onions is cooked in butter until golden brown over medium heat, then a pound and a half of thin-sliced zucchini are added with salt and cooked over high heat until the zucchini gets tender and golden at the edges. Never covered, so there’s no steaming or moisture involved. The flavor turns out to be sublime and the texture is pretty darned good too. I’m looking forward to trying some more things I’ve never tried before with zucchini.