Rants & Raves -

by tvff

Beer > Wine

Anyone worth their fleur de sel knows that wine is the proper drink to accompany good food. It’s time-honored, suitably French (therefore snooty) and an excellent way to blow a whole lot of money to impress your date.

But what if there was another beverage? One which offered just as much flavor, went just as well with your meal and wouldn’t break the bank? Is that something you would be interested in?

As I made my way around town during my second annual Philly Beer Week Pub Crawl, it occurred to me that — in so many ways — beer is superior to wine. It’s sacrilege to say this, I know, and it would certainly not have been true twenty years ago, in the days before the craft beer revolution. But in 2011, the flavors, experiences and overall vibrant culture attached to beer appreciation offers a more dynamic experience to a larger audience than wine does.

How so? Well…

1. It’s Cheaper than Wine. Think of the best wine in the world. Then think about how much it would cost for a glass of it. The mind reels. I had what I believe to be the best beer in the world — Russian River’s Pliny the Younger — and it was about $10 for an eight ounce pour. While frugality isn’t the main thing you want to strive for when you’re talking about booze, just think about how quickly you can develop your palate and learn to enjoy the “big boys” when you only have to lay out single digits for the privilege.

by Miss K

Good Enough to Put Your Name On

Once, last year when I was pregnant, my husband and I had Chipotle for dinner. He ate his whole burrito. I ate half of mine. I put mine in a container in the fridge with a note that said, “Do not eat this burrito. If you eat it, you will be stealing your baby’s food.”

In the same vein, my friend Colleen is one of the most generous people I know. She lives in community at a Catholic farm in West Virginia, where she, her husband and a handful of other year-rounders play host to hundreds of volunteers every year. She is a master at cooking food for a crowd. And, sometimes, she puts her name on her food.

So, what is it about certain foods that turn normally mild-mannered women into petulant 3-year-olds, yelling, “Mine!” while clinging to a beloved box of truffles? Well, it’s not a character flaw. It is simply a sense that certain foods and beverages deserve special treatment and savoring. I don’t want my husband scarfing my burrito at 11pm when he could just as easily make a peanut butter sandwich. Similarly, volunteer coming across some tangerine Spritzers in the fridge would probably not recognize that they were imported from the nearest Trader Joe’s, which is four hours away. Which brings me to the tea.

by BS

Plate It or Hate It

Recent food world discoveries the ES crew is loving and hating…

Plate It: Saffron Chai

We’re already fans of chai lattes, but adding a hint of rich, flavorful saffron makes this taste like drinking a cup of gold. Available from Jaipur Avenue.

Hate It: Bacon Soda

We’re told you many times that bacon will never die, but it’s time for fake bacon flavor to take a hike. We loved this idea when we heard about it last year, but now that it has hit the market it turns out we actually like our soda to taste like corn syrup, not pork syrup.

Plate It: Whipped Cream Vodka

in Bacon / Celebs / Drinks / Rants & Raves / Trends 3 comments

by Emily

Burns My Bacon: 1 Tequila, 2 Tequila, 3 Tequila, FAIL

The Irish bar next door to my office always has a sandwich board advertising the day’s food/drink specials. To my intense annoyance, said board often has misspellings and a ton of misplaced apostrophes (“$3 Bloody Mary’s!” etc). It has become a private, daily tradition of mine to check the board and make snarky mental comments about how dumb they are.

Today, though, this bar has taken it TOO. FAR. Time to get the venting out of my mind and into the world.

Come on, guys! As much as I hate bad grammar and spelling, I can usually let things slide. But tainting the hallowed name of tequila?! This offends me on a personal level. Please take note that this abomination occurs not once, but twice. Then they add insult to injury with the whole “qesadilla” situation. I mean, maybe Spanish isn’t their first language. It isn’t mine, either. But I at least know that Q is generally followed by a U. It’s like they are actively trying to spell everything wrong. You have a job in the bar industry! You are physically and metaphorically surrounded by food and drink words! How…?!

And don’t try to give them the benefit of the doubt by saying “But they’re an Irish bar, maybe they never learned basic Mexican food words because”… no. Not a legit excuse. (This also begs a whole different question — why aren’t they serving colcannon and Guinness as a special? I’ve almost never seen them touting any sort of Irish dish.) Plus it’s not just foreign languages that trip them up. Don’t think I didn’t notice that “provalone” travesty near the bottom of the sign. I got my eye on you, Sailor Jerry-themed specials board.

If you want to make your living hawking food and booze, at least attempt to respect your trade and your customers through attention to detail. If correctly spelling menu items is even considered a “detail” and not a glaringly obvious priority.

More rants: check out our Burns My Bacon archive. Better yet, feed us back and tell us what burns your bacon.

in Rants & Raves / Restaurants 4 comments

by Miss K

Friday Fuck Up: Peanut Sauce Doesn’t Look So Good on the Counter

Too much liquid + food processor = Sadness

If there is one liquid my husband and I love, it’s beer. If there are two: beer and peanut sauce. We have yet to combine them, but that doesn’t mean we won’t someday. Might be a little thick, but I do love a good shandy now and then.

So, last week, my dear one set out to make a mega-double batch of the good stuff. Peanut sauce, that is. I was chillin’ with the babe in the other room when all the sudden I hear, “Oh, God.”

Based on recent events, I figured something was on fire, or my darlin’ had cut off part of his finger. But no, instead I came upon the scene above.

in Rants & Raves 2 comments

by gansie

Rustic: Officially Jumped the Shark

We are in the age of rustic: girls with long, ratty hair and boys in shaggy beards. We are not polished. We are not all like Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge. Food has followed in the trend. Turn to any cooking show and the chef will surely praise her rustic pasta dish or rustic roast chicken. Nothing is refined. Everything has an air of ease. Unfussy is modern. The word rustic is used to sell. And just like hipster, it’s been used so much that it’s starting to not mean a thing.

This sign in front of the DC bar Asylum exemplifies my point. Hash was never a dish put together with great care or excruciating detail. It’s a dish brought forth from the humble potato. And there’s absolutely no need for the word rustic to proceed the word hash. Hash is rustic. And rustic has jumped the shark.

in Rants & Raves 0 comments

by gansie

PlanEat: An Education in Our Food Choices

PLANEAT.co.uk Trailer from planeat.co.uk on Vimeo.

Ed. Note: More from our resident evolutionary biologist Ph.D., EvoDiva.

The AFI Theatre in Silver Spring, Maryland presented a special viewing of “PlanEat,” a documentary that broadly examines how the food choices we make affect everything around us. The title leads you to believe that it’s all about the planet, but it’s that and so much more.

We were lucky to have the young British filmmaker Shelley Lee Davis introduce her first film to us via Skype. Three years ago, she used to argue with her vegetarian boss over his dietary choice. But the more she discovered, the more urgent it seemed to get her newfound message to the masses. She quit her job and co-produced this film (with Or Shlomi) with no start-up money and no budget for marketing. Given all this, the film itself is impressive.

Of course it’s not about the killer special effects though – it’s about the content. We’ve heard morsels of much of this stuff before. The filmmakers interviewed scientists who study the relationship between food production and its impact on the environment. The wastewater from America’s breadbasket factory farms flows down the Mississippi River and creates a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico the size of New Jersey. The most striking (and frankly depressing) finding was that ovo-lacto vegetarians tend to have a worse impact on the environment than poultry eaters. This was based on the assumption that ovo-lacto vegetarians consume LOTS of cheese, and those cows really drain our resources.

Meanwhile, for those of you out there who can’t afford a new hybrid, you don’t have to get your tree-hugger card taken away: simply maintain a plant-based diet and you can have over 30% more of an impact than your flesh-eating, hybrid-driving friends.

As an evolutionary biologist and anatomy geek, I was most fascinated by the undeniable findings on the impact of animal protein on human health.

in Rants & Raves / Trends / Veggie 9 comments