Category: Cucina

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.

RIP Beer Hunter Michael Jackson, whose writing taught me everything about beer that I never learned at college. The front page of All About Beer has a tribute and his final column, ironically about surviving a near-death experience earlier this year (sorry, no permalink). They also have a guestbook, which currently features signatures and stories (some quite lengthy) from various beer luminaries including homebrew club members, Finnish brewers, and Sam Calaglione of Dogfish Head.

No, I’m not planning another project. I’m referring to Pete Brown’s Blog, one of the funnier and more observant blogs I’ve read about beer, pub culture, and other related matters. Pete is the author of several books on beer, none of which I’ve read; sounds like a trip to the library is in order.

I’m particularly taken with this little piece of whimsey: he plans to take a pin (4.5 gallons) of IPA from the brewery in Burton-on-Trent to Calcutta … via boat. The purpose is to find out whether the sea journey really does “condition” the India Pale Ale style as we were always told. Should be an interesting story to follow.

Ireland.com: Diageo mulls options for Guinness brewery. As consumption of Guinness falls, multinational conglomerate Diageno contemplates shuttering the St. James Gate Brewery in Dublin. I think I speak for every Guinness drinker when I say, No way.

The State:
These ain’t no chuggin’ beers. I missed the report earlier this month (on BeerAdvocate, naturally) that the state finally repealed its misguided ban on beers stronger than 5%.

The question of course is how long it will take for Alabama, Mississippi, and West Virginia (the remaining states that have such a ban) to finally lift it. Well, these may be the “hell freezing over” states, given how legislators in Alabama responded to a similar proposal this year: “I don’t know what you said, but you’re wrong,” and “I don’t have to read the legislation to know how I am going to vote.” Oy.

Sad, really, considering that at least in Alabama’s case the legislators who are so concerned about underage drinking aren’t doing anything to restrict wine or hard liquor, and don’t recognize that a Belgian Trappist ale hardly constitutes a gateway to perdition. (To mussels in Brussels, yes, but that’s another story.)

The ironic part? South Carolinians were driving over the border to smuggle high-alcohol craft beer back… from Asheville, NC. Yes indeedy, my dad’s home burg has come a long way. I still remember how blown away I was when I visited for the first time after he retired back there and found a Newcastle truck in the streets; not to mention the Asheville Wine Market, where I found Old Engine Oil Stout, Radgie Gadgie, Workie Ticket, and Bluebird Bitter for the first time.

Relatively light Easter meals yesterday. It was just the family at home, so we took it easy. We went to the early service at Old South, came back, and had fried eggs with prosciutto and hot cross buns for a late breakfast. Then I made my wasabi deviled eggs (recipe below) and White Lily biscuits, Lisa prepared some asparagus, and together Lisa and I baked a ham. But really: that, plus a chocolate cake that was lying around, plus Easter marshmallows (not Peeps) and some pretty spectacular sauvignon blanc: who needed anything else?

The wasabi deviled eggs, by the way, are dead easy. I use the recipe for deviled eggs from the late 1990s edition of The Joy of Cooking, scaling it up for a dozen eggs, then add two tablespoons of dry wasabi powder that have been mixed with two tablespoons water. That, plus adjusting the other spices to taste, is really it. Sometimes I get aggressive and add more wasabi, but at the proportions above it’s just about right. I got the idea one year when I was trying to replicate my dad’s eggs, which use horseradish, but the only thing I could find at the store was wasabi.

Lisa and I are trying to branch out a bit and eat healthier, and for me that means trying some more Asian recipes. Tonight we cheated, buying some pre-marinated boolkogi from Trader Joe’s and trying a recipe for generic Korean greens. The recipe wasn’t bad, but in retrospect I would have used a stronger vinegar and some hot sauce. The bookogi, on the other hand, was excellent.

Which brings me to my question: is there a good Korean cookbook out there for beginners? I haven’t found one I like. If you have a favorite, contact me with the link below this post.

Eric Asimov in the New York Times writes Quiet Cover for a Vital Brew, another in his series of beer tasting adventures. Reading these is almost as much fun as reading the great Michael Jackson’s beer writing; one gets the sense that if Asimov were not constrained for space by the newspaper, he would be fair competition for Jackson when writing about New World beers.

One of his Top 10 brown ales this week is the Double Bag Ale from Long Trail, a Vermont brewer whose stuff shows up in my local package store—interesting, since according to a 2001 interview with the president of the company they had pulled out of Massachusetts. Perhaps things turned around. I have enjoyed both the Double Bag (an appropriate name for a Vermont beer) and the Harvest Ale in the past; I think I’ll have to check out their other offerings…