Serious Eats contributor Paul Clarke calls upon mixologists to make cocktails with vodka in his blog The Cocktail Chronicles. He says vodka works well "as a vehicle and softener for bold flavors, rather than simply as an alcohol-delivery device."...
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Artisanal spirits are the new micro-brew. It seems as if small-scale liquor dudes are rivaling celebrity deaths in number these days. Unfortunately, I’ve found that most of these booze-artisans are pretty much snake-oil salesman capitalizing on the human penchant for the little guy while passing off bad-to-mediocre vodka. I pretty much expected the same thing when I toured Wisconsin’s Death’s Door Spirits last week. (My apologies to owner Brian Ellison and his team for the assumption.) But I was pleasantly surprised. Ellison is one of those dudes who reminds you of the great chefs, a guy who works according to a personal standard that exceeds most, essentially competing against himself. From his website to his marketing materials to the quality...
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©iStockphoto.com/YinYang Eric Felten, the drinks columnist for the Wall Street Journal, seems to think so. He cites this year’s edition of Food & Wine’s annual cocktail compilation, Cocktails ’09, as proof of vodka’s demotion in the cocktail world. This year’s book has only ten vodka-based drinks, Felten notes, whereas the 2005 edition had 60. He openly celebrates the decline of all kinds of -tinis in favor of drinks based on gin, brandy, and other intensely flavored spirits. “As a way to inject unobtrusive alcoholic content into sugary drinks,” he writes of vodka, “the spirit is unsurpassed…But vodka's neutrality and uniformity would seem to be at odds with the slow-food crowd's embrace of robust flavors reflecting specific locales.” Is vodka...
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Vodka is the top-selling spirit in the United States, but this liquor-market leader has taken a couple of very public punches in the last few days. In Advertising Age, Bob Garfield takes Grey Goose to task in a column with the two-fisted headline "Obnoxious Ads for Overpriced Vodka." The body copy is hardly more nuanced in taking on parent company Bacardi's ads, which seek to equate the consumption of Grey Goose with enjoying a very exclusive, high-class lifestyle: Bacardi wishes to sell preposterously expensive ultra-mega-super-premium vodka to showoffs, wannabes and snobs. […] It's the hoariest gambit in the world: to flatter customers into imagining they are not conspicuous consumers but discriminating ones. That when they belly up to the bar...
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Erin Hartigan's Sure-Fire Rules for Sparks in the Kitchen is about the do's and don'ts of cooking as a date activity: "When it comes to cooking together, an otherwise compatible new couple can break down faster than a sauce sabayon. The annals of my own dating history are singed with kitchen mishaps. During a triple first-date cooking night at my best friend's place, each couple helped produce a meal of chicken pot stickers, spaghetti with meat sauce and Key lime pie. Nobody wanted to take control; we socialized as pasta turned to mush and pots boiled over. What began as a promising soiree ended early, with six scowls and three inedible courses." Other highlights: In A Drink to Make You...
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- Men pick tomatoes, but women are preferred as they are perceived to be gentler and therefore there is less damage to the crop. Men stack the crates of tomatoes on flatbed trailers which are connected to trailers. - 25,000 Russians die each year from chemical poisoning from illegally produced vodka - Peanuts contribute more than $4 billion to the U.S. economy every year Check out the edification process undergone by the students of St. Cloud University's Sociology 464.....
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