Do you remember when the cupcake was just a lowly children’s birthday party treat—just yellow Betty Crocker cake with some shelf-stabilized, not-even-sure-if-it-contains-cocoa chocolate frosting? It was simpler then, before New York’s Magnolia Bakery threw down the first whisk in the cupcake wars. There was no sneaking off into the bathroom to eat a Sprinkles carrot cake cupcake where no one could see you lick off all the cream cheese frosting first, no hiding the pink cardboard boxes from your coworkers in the bottom drawer of your desk, no snatching the paper-wrapped delights out of a little girl’s hand saying you just want a bite… Continue reading »
I have teamed up with the super-awesome wine shop K&L Wine Merchants (who also happens to be my employer!) for this year’s Menu for Hope, a campaign to benefit the UN World Food Programme. Started by Chez Pim after the incredibly devastating tsunami in Southeast Asia, Menu for Hope combines the efforts of food bloggers around the world to serve a higher purpose, namely getting food to those who need it. This year’s campaign is already underway and will continue through Christmas. The proceeds of this year’s Menu for Hope will benefit the school lunch program in Lesotho. This program sources food locally, supporting the local economy, and helps keep the kids in school, which can help end the cycle of poverty. It’s an incredible cause and one we’re thrilled to be a part of. Menu for Hope IV raised nearly $100k to feed the hungry.
So what does this mean?
There are a whole host of food-related goodies being raffled off for your charitable donation. For every $10 you donate, you earn one virtual raffle ticket to bid on a prize of your choice. At the end of the campaign, the raffle tickets are drawn and announced on Chez Pim. My dear friend and amazing writer/photographer Matt, of MattBites, is the West Coast coordinator, so check out his site to see all of the prizes available from the West Coast partners.
Our prize!
Hold onto your hats wine lovers. K&L Wine Merchants and me, SpicySaltySweet, are offering two magnums of Bordeaux with a combined retail value of $500!
2005 Pichon-Lalande, Pauillac (1.5L) This Left Bank second growth comes from the 2005 vintage, possibly the best vintage ever in Bordeaux and definitely among the top five. Beloved by the critics, the ‘05 Pichon-Lalande was rated 93 points by Wine Spectator and 90-92 points by Stephen Tanzer’s International Wine Cellar. Wonderfully aromatic and elegant, this wine has ripe, sweet black cherry aromas and flavors, spiked by currant, anise and spice box on both the nose and palate. Not a powerhouse Bordeaux that thinks it’s a California cab, but a beautifully integrated wine that will continue to gain complexity in your cellar over the decades.
1999 Cos d’Estournel, St-Estèphe (1.5L) This inimitable second growth Bordeaux is already starting to show, though like other top-notch Bordeaux it can continue to age for decades. Made by the talented Jean-Guillaume Prats, the 1999 is an elegant blend of 65% cabernet sauvignon and 35% merlot made from the estate’s best fruit–only 40% of the year’s harvest went into this grand vin. We love its mineral notes and classically restrained structure. Robert Parker says: “The dark ruby-colored 1999 Cos is a supremely elegant effort. The wine offers notes of dried Provencal herbs, smoke, licorice, black cherries, and cassis. This medium to full-bodied St.-Estephe is cerebral, intellectual, and refined…”
Special Note: Due to the complex shipping rules in the U.S. it is illegal to ship alcohol to the following states: DE, FL, GA, IA, KY, ME, MD, MI, MT, NH, NC, OK, PA, RI, TN, UT, VA, but there are plenty of non-alcoholic prizes to bid on.
Donation Instructions
1. Choose a prize or prizes of your choice from our Menu for Hope at Chez Pim. The code for this prize is UW25.
2. Next, go to the donation site at FirstGiving to make a donation
3. For every $10 you donate, you will get one virtual raffle ticket. **Please specify which prize you’d like in the ‘Personal Message’ section in the donation form when confirming your donation.** You must write-in how many tickets per prize, and please use the prize code.
For example: If you make a $50 donation, you will get 5 raffle tickets that can be applied however you like. You can put all 5 toward UW25 (you would write: 5xUW25) or 2 tickets for EU01 and 3 tickets for EU02 (write: 2xEU01, 3xEU02) Please feel free to email me questions if this is not clear, the system isn’t perfect.
4. If your company matches your charity donation, please check the box and fill in the information so we could claim the corporate match.
5. Please allow us to see your email address so that we could contact you in case you win. Your email address will not be shared with anyone.
There are obsessions and then there are cooking obsessions. The first kind can land you in counseling (and occasionally behind bars), the second will blow through your kitchen like a tempest, leaving every pot, pan, knife, cutting board, baking sheet and bowl lying in your sink like debris. I developed my first cooking obsession in the seventh grade after taking Wilton Cake Decorating classes with Debbie, the woman I babysat for. I learned how to make buttercream icing and transform it into pretty pansies and roses, shells and, of course, all of my friends’ names. Every time I made I cake I left icing fingerprints—leafy green and daffodil yellow—to dry on the kitchen drawers, the refrigerator handle, the doorknob and even the mailbox. By eighth grade the obsession had started to lose its sweetness, and I started scraping every inch of that pound of powdered sugar and Crisco off of each cake before I ate it. Continue reading »
If Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday, Repeal Day, which wine-lovers and cocktail hounds alike will be celebrating this Friday, runs a close second. Repeal Day marks the passage of the 21st Amendment to our constitution, effectively overturning the 18th, which banned the manufacture, sale and transportation of alcohol in the U.S. for 13 long, dry years. But while everyone is running around Friday, celebrating the 75th anniversary of the repeal of Prohibition by getting appropriately schnockered, I thought I’d pay tribute the creative spirit—the speakeasies, the wine bottles market “for medicinal purposes” and, of course, the moonshine—that helped Americans survive the Noble Experiment by offering up a recipe for some homemade hooch.
Thanksgiving is, hands-down, my favorite holiday. Any day dedicated entirely to eating, drinking, friends and family gets my vote under most circumstances. But Thanksgiving has the added benefit of being about gratitude, and I have a lot to be thankful for.
This will be a special Thanksgiving, the first, I hope, of many with my cousin and her family. It’s long been a dream of mine—complete with long rustic tables piled high with food, kids feeding dogs Brussels sprouts and someone gnawing on a turkey leg under the table—to have a big, family Thanksgiving. Maybe I’ve watched too many romantic comedies, but that’s what I want. Too bad my cousin’s son Max is a self-imposed vegetarian; I can easily imagine his sticky hands wrapped around a turkey leg the size of his head.
Some girls buy shoes. Some buy handbags. I buy cookbooks. Well, at least I used to buy cookbooks. These days, like most people, I’m not buying much of anything. A couple of months ago I took my dear friend Brooke’s suggestion and started borrowing cookbooks from the library. But I am seriously horrible when it comes to returning library books on time. With the money I now owe in fines, I could have easily bought a half dozen used cookbooks.
Fortunately, I just learned about a new website called Cookstr, which is currently is Beta stages. Continue reading »
“Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world.”
—from “Concord Hymn” by Ralph Waldo Emerson
There are revolutionaries in every generation, individuals who buck the status quo, who take up the mantle of a cause and push—sometimes violently, sometimes just with words—changing the course of our culture irrevocably. Our recent history has a preponderance of them, from Martin Luther King Jr. leading freedom marches through the segregated south to Bobby Kennedy advocating for the poor, from Cesar Chavez organizing farm workers to Mario Savio, standing on a police car in Berkeley, California demanding his right to freedom of speech be protected. Our modern revolutionaries struggled against the prevailing tide, changing how people think, how they act and, sometimes, how they ate.
Food Fight, a new film by Chris Taylor, documents the American food revolution, from family farms to factory food to farmers’ markets. The film is an homage to the revolutionary spirit of Alice Waters, who, by simply seeking out the most tomato-y tomato and the earthiest greens for her restaurant, Chez Panisse, began to revolutionize the discourse about food in our country. The film also focuses on the entire generation of chefs that Waters inspired, from Suzanne Goin (A.O.C., Lucques, Hungry Cat) to Dan Barber (Blue Hill) and other chefs, like Wolfgang Puck (Spago, Cut), who, through his food, helped spread the philosophy that the best ingredients, treated simply, trumped fancy cooking techniques.
But the documentary doesn’t stop there. It also includes conversations with the small farmers who are battling agri-business to bring their communities fresh, healthy produce free from pesticides and herbicides and those who are struggling just to get produce to their neighbors at all. And it talks to the people pushing to get the conversation about our food culture into the mainstream, people like Michael Pollan (Omnivore’s Dilemma, In Defense of Food), Marion Nestle (What to Eat, Food Politics) and Russ Parsons (How to Pick a Peach).
Whether you’re already interested in the politics of food or just good eats, see this documentary worth seeing.
Food Fight premiers this Saturday, November 8, 2008 at 3:15 p.m. at the Mann Chinese Theater in Hollywood as part of the AFI Los Angeles Film Festival.
If you don’t live in L.A. or are unable to attend the festival, join Food Fight’s Facebook group to keep apprised of upcoming events.
Share a meal with Diane and Todd from White On Rice Couple and you know you’ll learn something or eat something you’ve never tried before you leave. So when Diane excitedly handed out mottled grey branches at a dinner party a few weeks ago and told us to nibble on them, I went with it. I bit, rabbit-like with my front teeth, slowly breaking down the small, fibrous piece, mixing it with my saliva as instructed. Slowly my mouth filled with a sweet heat. The branch I was eating tasted exactly like the cross between an Atomic Fire Ball and Red Hots. I was struck at first by the spicy, lingering flavor, then by the idea that Fire Balls and Red Hots actually tasted like anything in nature.
The basil plant was the first to go, its fragrant leaves curling in, then turning yellow and limp. Next it was the mint. I can’t remember who told me that mint grows like a weed and is impossible to kill, but they were wrong. The only thing weed-like about my spearmint plant is the apocalyptic-looking skeleton it left behind when it died, like it was doused by a gallon of Roundup. Now you can count one dead rosemary bush among my summer’s worth of failed gardening achievements. Loved and, perhaps, a bit over-watered, I thought I’d let it dry out a bit. But then I forgot about it altogether. Now my rosemary looks like a tiny Ponderosa pine sapling struck by lightening. So much for developing a green thumb. Mine is black and blue.
On Monday the Dow plunged like Paris Hilton’s neckline. It continued to fall on Tuesday and again yesterday, all the while our national debt has climbed. The economic turmoil might drive you to drink, if you could still afford a quaffable bottle of wine.
Fortunately, affordable wine is my specialty. Working at K&L Wine Merchants, I have the opportunity to taste dozens of wines a week, from the dirt cheap to the “I wish I could afford this.” One recent discovery on the “dirt cheap” end of the spectrum is this delicious, snappy Côtes du Rhône from Château Suzeau. This beauty comes from winemaker Cecile Chassagne’s negociant project, where she buys fruit and occasionally finished wine and helps to get it to market. K&L has done business with Chassagne for years, importing her wines directly and passing the savings on to customers, which is why this incredible little wine only costs $8.99 a bottle!
Surprisingly fresh and approachable for such a young wine, its deep crimson color has a purplish rim, like velvet trimming on a royal robe. Comprised of 80% grenache and 20% syrah, the wine’s black cherry and blackberry aromas mingle with a little garrigue and black pepper spice. On the palate the wine is soft and giving (as in: give me more), with savory herb and black fruit flavors, fresh acidity and barely there tannins. Sure this doesn’t offer the complexity of a Châteauneuf-du-Pape, but it has enough intrigue to enjoy on its own and the style to enjoy with everything from braised lamb shanks to short ribs with parsnip puree or a even a warm Brussels sprout salad with pancetta and sherry vinegar. Because it’s so young, I recommend decanting for an hour before drinking to full appreciate everything this wine has to offer. And if your belt isn’t too tight, buy a little to stash away. This kind of deal doesn’t come along everyday, but the wine will continue to develop over the next five years.
2005 Pichon-Lalande, Pauillac (1.5L) This Left Bank second growth comes from the 2005 vintage, possibly the best vintage ever in Bordeaux and definitely among the top five. Beloved by the critics, the ‘05 Pichon-Lalande was rated 93 points by Wine Spectator and 90-92 points by Stephen Tanzer’s International Wine Cellar. Wonderfully aromatic and elegant, this wine has ripe, sweet black cherry aromas and flavors, spiked by currant, anise and spice box on both the nose and palate. Not a powerhouse Bordeaux that thinks it’s a California cab, but a beautifully integrated wine that will continue to gain complexity in your cellar over the decades.
1999 Cos d’Estournel, St-Estèphe (1.5L) This inimitable second growth Bordeaux is already starting to show, though like other top-notch Bordeaux it can continue to age for decades. Made by the talented Jean-Guillaume Prats, the 1999 is an elegant blend of 65% cabernet sauvignon and 35% merlot made from the estate’s best fruit–only 40% of the year’s harvest went into this grand vin. We love its mineral notes and classically restrained structure. Robert Parker says: “The dark ruby-colored 1999 Cos is a supremely elegant effort. The wine offers notes of dried Provencal herbs, smoke, licorice, black cherries, and cassis. This medium to full-bodied St.-Estephe is cerebral, intellectual, and refined…”
