Category: BiteClub

Lobster Bisque & Viognier @ J Winery: Two of a Perfect Pair

Forgive the hackneyed analog, but I've just eaten a Lennon-McCartney harmony of food and wine over at J Winery; OK, maybe that's too much, but a solid Bee Gees, at least! Seriously, if we wore socks on our teeth, then Chef Mark Caldwell's Lobster Bisque, together with winemaker George Bursick's Hoot Owl Vineyard Viognier, would knock them clean off. And I don't even like Viognier, as a rule.

My Favorite $5 Kitchen Gadget

I buy too many kitchen toys, and I suspect I'm not alone. Admit it: Anyone who watches Food TV, buys cookbooks, or owns an up-to-date Zagat's, to say nothing of the hardcore amongst us who actually read blogs about food and cooking in our spare time, owns an extravagant number of culinary gadgets. That many of them go unused is a virtual certainty, strange, medieval-looking devices that seemed so indispensable in the Williams-Sonoma catalog, but which turned out to be hard to clean or - worst of all - to require more work than the task they were originally meant to simplify...

Make-Up Bread

My eldest daughter is one of my very favorite people in the world. Really, that's not just a parent talking: The child has an innate happiness, a fullness of heart, and a spontaneous grace that simply disarms everyone she meets. Like her good looks, I take very little credit for any of that, but I cannot abdicate her Mr Hyde self, so we have to find ways to make up with one another, and this is what we've found: There is no better splint for fractured family love than the baking together of fresh bread.

Fancy Food Show 2011

Fancy Food Show 2011 gourmet food products recap includes Happy Goat caramel sauce, Guy Fieri's BBQ sauce, yuzu marmalade and wine alternative beverages

A Red Lentil Soup w/ Meyer Lemons

So, back to school: As I mentioned last week, with the wanton optimism of the truly ignorant, I enrolled myself in a continuing ed course. Now, having survived Week 1 (technically, my first grade pending, survival remains a speculative condition), it is Week 2's turn with the lash; the good news is, my homework has converged with my dinner, in the form of this wonderful recipe for red lentil soup with lemons, and my lemon trees are hemorrhaging little egg-yolk colored balls like some vainglorious tree at Christmas.

Eat Pig, Drink Pinot, Save Our Schools

I have mixed feelings about school fund-raisers: On the one hand, like most parents, I have kids in public schools that fall chronically short of financial resources; on the other, I believe that I already pay more than enough in taxes to expect a properly funded system of public education, that the root of the problem is not the quantity of money available, but rather the means by which it is allocated. In any case, on the morning after our Pigs 'n Pinot fund-raising dinner, I am hungover, fat, and happy all the same.