by forkitude
I wonder if U.S. customs would notice 30 lbs of speck in my suitcase.
Menu
August 2011
by Emily
I just returned from a paradisaical two-week long sojourn in Denver. I had never been to Colorado before and had heard good things, but wasn’t quite sure what to expect. Let me state for the record: the Rocky Mountain High makes this Western gal’s heart sing.
Not only is Denver full of beautiful weather and beautiful people, but this city takes it one step further: it has an innovative, exciting restaurant scene. Colorado is a playful, active place, and its culinary atmosphere clearly reflects this persona.
The Paramount Cafe on 16th Street, a popular tourist thoroughfare, provides what seems to be standard bar fare at first glance. Don’t be fooled – this is bar grub with a Colorado twist. The burger pictured above is not a run-of-the-mill hamburger, but a patty made from fresh Colorado elk and topped with BBQ sauce, bacon, grilled onions, and roasted garlic mayo. What is ground elk like? A bit cleaner tasting than ground beef, less greasy and a little tougher… in a good way.
Before a long day of hiking in the sunshine, it’s important to fuel up. Luckily Denver has a plethora of great breakfast options, including my personal favorite, Snooze. Featuring a creative and healthy menu, it was overwhelmingly difficult to make a decision on my brunch.
Luckily I chose wisely with the (pictured at top) Upstream Benny: honey smoked salmon on house-crafted bacon-jalapeno spoonbread, topped with two farm fresh Niman Ranch poached eggs, cream cheese hollandaise, and chives. I’m going to go ahead and call it: best benedict I’ve ever had, and I consider myself a benedict connoisseur. The bacon-jalapeno spoonbread made this dish. Word to the wise: Don’t skip the coffee. Snooze offers a damn good cup of joe, brewed exclusively for their restaurants in the volcanic hills of Guatemala.
I also made the fantastic decision to try a pancake, which Snooze is famous for. Behold their intimidatingly gigantic sweet potato pancake, topped with homemade caramel, pecans, and ginger butter. Between three ravenous girls, we couldn’t finish the whole thing. So decadent.
More of Damn Delicious Denver: lobster tacos, herb-spiked lemonade, Colombian arepas and more.
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by tvff
The little slice of heaven that is know as Philadelphia’s Reading Terminal Market is slated for an upgrade.
Business has been booming at Philly’s Shangri-La of gastronomic delights thanks to the overall growth in interest of food and more recently by the expansion of the nearby Convention Center. The folks who run one of the preeminent indoor food experiences in the country are going to shuffle some of the vendors around and move some storage areas underground to free up some space.
Storage areas along “Avenue D,” the aisle closest to 11th Street, will move to the basement to make room for up to five new retailers, which have yet to be named. Veteran tenants – the Spice Terminal, L. Halteman Family Country Foods, Flying Monkey Bakery, Spataro’s, and DiNic’s – will move to new spaces.
New faces are always welcome, but perhaps the biggest impact will be the relocation of a few of the big names. DiNic’s, in particular, is the proud purveyor of what I believe to be the best damn sandwich in Philadelphia. Yes, I’m a cheesesteak man until I die, but the roast pork with sharp provolone and broccoli rabe is otherworldly.
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by ES Guest
Ed Note: Our friend Julia, canning lover and far mar worker, is back to rant about a newly acquired, and blogger-inspired, cookbook. Julia’s previously written about roasted rhubarb and Meyer lemon syrup.
Discovering my inner Southern grandmother has opened up my cookbook addiction in a whole new direction: canning and preserving texts now fill my shelves. Apparently many, many others have also become a part of this “canvolution” (not my word – I swear) and so a whole crop of canning books are popping up. As such, it seems that all sorts of canning bloggers are scrambling to write books to cash in on the craze.
For those of us who love cookbooks, but hate to follow recipes, canning presents a unique challenge in that, not following a recipe or procedure to a “t” can result in some really nasty things. Like death. From botulism. Not a pretty way to go.
As a result, every canning book that I have come across lately has – rightly – dedicated a good amount of space to describing the process of canning safety measures and the history of various methods.
The most recent canning book to my collection, WE SURE CAN! How Jams and Pickles Are Reviving the Lure and Lore of Local Food (courtesy of Arsenal Pulp Press) does not break from that format. In fact, author Sarah B. Hood spends 60ish pages writing about the history of canning…Then the resurgence of canning…Then the people responsible for the resurgence of canning…. Then the way to can…
And then (YAY!) we get two recipes.
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