I like to eat and sleep.
You would have a hard time finding the real cider, in quantity, outside of Asturias and the Basque Country, never mind Barcelona or Canada, unless it's at a purposed establishment. Even west of Oviedo, to include Galicia which is the largest Spanish producer of cider apples, the consumption seemed to be somewhat more conservative with the majority of the crop being destined to the east.
having grown up drinking the widely available El Gaitero, which tastes like apple-sweet champagne without the higher alcohol content that you'd find in hard ciders (Magners), I was really surprised a couple of years ago when I travelled through Asturias not just by the type of cider that they drink there, but also the culture surrounding the consumption.
First off, it's not like ordering a beer or a bottle of wine even. Universally sold, one orders a bottle and the bartender will come out from behind the bar, uncork it with an intricate and often-used wall-mounted opener and proceed to pour you a throw of cider in a wide-mouth working glass that most resembles a flat-bottomed, thin whiskey tumbler. The pour itself is rather intricate and yes, they do compete on who is most precise and fastest, taking a lot of pride in the process. The bartender/server will then hand you the glass which contains something like a five-ounce pour which is then consumed rather quickly. Anyone else in your party is then thrown another pour into the same glass and the process is repeated. The bartender/server will then leave the bottle at your table and return to throw more pours on what seemed like a random schedule for everyone in the bar drinking cider, but allowed for conversation and/or food consumption. Needless to say, all floors and pavements surrounding a cider outlet in eastern Asturias are in a constant state of cider residue stickiness.
Some restaurants were noted to have a table-side contraption where the bottle of cider is placed inverted and all the consumer needs to is place their glass in a holder and press a button for an automatic throw. It seemed rather bourgeois and out-of-place to me as I got a kick out of having the bartender do it for me.
Also, the numbers of bottles of cider consumed is staggering given the population and what one would expect to be the level of inebriation.
Porterhouse FTW!
I've lived in Boston my whole life and I'm beginning to think that Boston is just a mediocre food city.
Um, Boston has always been a mediocre food city. Three or four semi-notorious chefs with three or four copycat restaurants each, chainfood on every corner of note and nothing really unique or authentic to rave about.
The Food Truck Festival obviously didn't have enough food or trucks to satisfy the crowds, but hopefully we can build on that demand. How much does a permitted truck cost?
I went down there with a friend at 11:30 on Sunday and left by 12:30. My take was two pickle spears and a soda. We waited in line for bbq for about half an hour and we barely made any progress getting closer to the truck. They were taking orders one-by-one and didn't seem to appreciate the fact that they had a hundred people waiting to give them money.
Overall, I think it was a success for a first-time thing due to the large crowd gathered on a summer Sunday, a testament that Christine Liu did a great job of promoting the event. Hopefully, next year the festival will attract more trucks and vendors, including those who think that participating in an event with corporate sponsorship will somehow damage their indie cred and maybe even organize it on the Boston Common. A parking lot on a hot day doesn't make for an enjoyable experience.
My photos from the event: http://j.mp/bDuFN7
Skip any of Jasper White's locations. Woodman's, Kelly's, Clam Box... all very tired and consisting of production-line quality of bland foodstuffs, as is everything within a hundred feet of the Freedom trail. Tourist fare.
Do yourselves a favor and check out East by Northeast, Hungry Mother, Tupelo, Oleana, East Coast Grill and Lord Hobo, all in the Inman, Kendall areas of Cambridge
http://exnecambridge.com/
http://www.hungrymothercambridge.com/
http://www.tupelo02139.com/
http://www.oleanarestaurant.com/
http://www.eastcoastgrill.net/
http://lordhobo.com/
I took a ride over there to see what the fuss was all about. The produce looked good and I even saw orange raspberries for the first time. However, I really wasn't pricing anything out nor did I quiz Cindy the Fish Lady about the provenance of her product.
I'm a regular contributor to Jimmy's Science Newsletter, so I take offense at the unwarranted skepticism. Jimmy uses his spell checker.
That being said, I use half a packet in absence of unrefined sugar, and I'm neither fat nor obese. Try staying away from high-fructose corn syrup.
It has been ingrained that Chinese food should be cheap (in price).
That statement is true in the way that the restaurant operators have positioned themselves. I eat in Boston's Chinatown at least three out of five days a week, everywhere from sit down dim sum to Ding Ho takeout ($4 option), and you know what?, 99% of the food outlets in Chinatown are the equivalent of grubby diners everywhere else. Would you pay top dollar to eat at dingy place with confusing menus, shoddy service and a suspect health code adherence policy? No. Do you expect the exotic at a diner? No. It's simple, casual food with no pretensions on price, where the operator is dependent on daily volume, not the overall customer Maslow satisfaction.
Can you take it upscale and trendy? Of course you can. Just look at the Golden Temple out in Brookline. Food so good that it was rumored that ecstasy was an ingredient. They run a clean operation, provide valet service, a real bar, a DJ and comfortable decor, not to mention a staff that doesn't visualize their customers as cattle. And they can charge at a price level on par with a very good steakhouse, and have been doing it for quite a while now. So it's not that Chinese food isn't hip, it's that the vast majority is sold as simple everyday fare.
There are so many things that can be improved in the Chinese food industry that the list goes ad infinitum, but if you consider the proliferation of Asian restaurants (Thai, Indian, Japanese especially), it leaves no doubt that American are basically begging for more and better choices. There is plenty of business to go around and it's up to the operator to decide which market segment to pursue.
I don't know what is worse: waiting in line at a TGIF or the need to jump said line. I'd hang my head in shame on both counts.
I broke down and had the chocolate-banana thingy with an espresso shot this morning. After filling up the cup, half of it remained in the blender. So much for my caffeine. I'd have to rate it slightly better than chocolate milk, and certainly as something that I could make better at home. For $4.50, I'll pass.
Herrell is still making a living off of Steve's Ice Cream, THE place to go in the mid 70's. Reading the post, it's obvious that they visited many locations throughout New England, but I can't see them making a pronouncement of The Best based on their tasting methods. It would take a general referendum, and there'd still be doubts as to who's ice cream is best. Like Richardson's.
Grrr. By far one of my favorite blogs. I guess that one day we'll look back and remember teh internets when it was interestingly unsanitized.
Definitely a step in the right direction, and yes, it appears that there'll be an outright ban on the manufacture of ultra thin plastic bags. Such was the impact of the yet-to-be implemented ban that the largest plastic bag manufacturer has closed its doors and is selling off all of its equipment. That being said, 10,000 people are out of work.
Yeah, lobbyists.
Let us hope that sometime in the future, archaeologists will not find all of this crap in one place and label our civilization as the Dean People.
I think she'll do well for herself if TFN continues with the "bewbies you love to hate" formula.
Please tell me that the NYT didn't get their info from this blog and a phone call to Santi Santamaria, a man who denounces snobbery yet charges $375pp for a tasting menu in his kitchen. Hutzpah, I say, on both accounts.
The backstory reads like a run of the mill pissing contest between two chefs whose food most of the world, including myself, will never taste. Maybe the hue and cry will go up once McD's comes out with a foam-based McRib, but until then I'll keep both feet on the ground.
Great post. I'll add social unconsciousness to the list of things that make me dislike her so much.
Can a site aiming to cover an entire niche market come from one corporation's mouthpiece?
A site, Brew Blog, aiming to cover an entire niche market, is sponsored by the Miller Brewing Co. I hope that answers your question.
Any use of a blog as a marketing tool is not only sleazy, it is stupid and transparent and the minute the masses get a whiff of it, it loses all credibility.
Both masthead and metadata clearly proclaim the blog to be a product of the Miller Brewing Co. If anyone of the masses had read the article, they would've noticed it revealed not only the ownership of the blog, but also its intent: to further message control in the age-old war between cheap beer manufacturers. Also, as a small note, the Brew Blog is trade publication, with little of interest to people outside of the specific industry. It is not seeking an honest assessment of its product or service, and the fact that they're using a widely adopted concept (the blog) to needle their competition and put anachronistic newsletters out of business is what makes it blogging great.
People, this situation can be easily diffused by blaming an intern: http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/
That being said, does anyone actually have a "family recipe" any more? Aside from tuna casserole.
You could always use Amazon's Mechanical Turk and have hundreds of otherwise unemployed street urchins bang on the....wait, they're getting better publicity by denying Bruni a spot than they ever would by letting him in. Never mind.
I'm almost 40 and I've never owned a microwave, but I have an electric tea kettle if that soothes your soul.
I've been a fan of the oven/tinfoil pouch method for awhile. AB has a pretty good recipe that I saw on his show a couple of weeks back. It's easy, clean and the fish tastes great.
The odds of Rachel Ray disappearing at the height of her celebrity are slim and none. The talkshow may go, but I doubt anything else will.
I have a hankering for pacharan and I need to get ahold of some frozen sloeberries to make my own. I could have a bottle of Zoco, my favorite brand, sent over from Spain, but I'd also like to try making it myself for once.
Does anyone know where they sell them?
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I try and keep my scheduled visits to Sam La Grassa's spaced evenly apart; once every two weeks would be ideal. I'm okay with the price, albeit it's a little high, but their sandwiches are hands down the best in Boston and the amount of food puts me in a meat coma for the rest of the day. They have no equal.
They could easily open a location in the Fort Point Channel area and clean up.