Here’s the kind of thing you can do with fresh herbs and fruit.
Saute a diced onion (we used a vidalia last night)
Add a couple of diced celery stalks to the onions and cook a bit more.
Add as many sliced drained olives as suits (we add about 1/2 cup).
Add three medium tomatos chopped, and maybe 20 [...]
When you get right down to it, most of the ingredients in our food our quite dull: meat, starch, veg. If you want to improve them you have to dress them up. Onions and nuts to the rice, butter and lemon over the broccoli, and hollandaise over the meat (and everything else for that matter.
In [...]
So I spent most of yesterday afternoon putting together a new shelving unit, for the office. It goes well with the tres cool Hermann Miller desk.
The unit is a Blu Dot Chicago 8 if you care. I quite recommend Blu Dot stuff based on this (our only Blu Dot) piece.
Celebrated with [...]
Having got my little rant about the value of organic off my chest, here’s a lineup of interesting organic whites.
Villa Teresa was a ground breaking organic winery, at least in the sense they deliberately stayed organic. (There are many European wineries that are organic, because they refused to change anything their great-great-great grandfathers did; while [...]
This is the official ‘hate me’ post: Why organic/biodynamic/green wine is beyond dumb.
Understand I have a great deal of sympathy with organic wineries. In general I find organically produced wines are much less likely to provoke allergies, and are often unique and tasty. However I’m impervious to environmental guilt. The entire [...]
This was a popular European cocktail at the dawn of the jet-set era.
Like most cocktails, it was gin based. (Smirnoff had yet to hit their stride, substituting for all white liquors.)
Vermouth (wine and wormwood and other spices and sugar) and gin was the first martini. But there are huge varieties in vermouth. [...]
If you ever drink vermouth, either on the rocks or in a cocktail, you’ve probably come across Campari. Unlike all the other vermouths, it is extremely bitter. You either like it or you don’t. The classic cocktail with it, is Gin and Campari, or a Negroni, gin, sweet red vermouth [...]
If you really want to make a cocktail (’martini’ in the current parlance) that stands out, you’ve got to get away from gimmicky liquor (goldschlager anyone?) and alco-milkshakes. These appeal to the adolescent drinker with their undeveloped craving for sweets and fat. Hey when your bodyfat is under 15% this makes perfect [...]
And what a ripasso! I don’t know if Masi is getting better; perhaps 2006 was an exceptional vintage; or maybe it was just the right meal and the right wine…
I was feeling all zorba-esque this week, so I bought three Greek wines to try.
If you’re thinking retsina, you probably have bad memories of a party long long ago involving inappropriate behaviour.
No one who actually likes wine, likes retsina. Near as I can tell, the popularity of retsina stems from [...]
