Seattle Food & Wine Experience-Coming soon!

The Seattle Food & Wine Experience is Feb. 28 at Seattle Center.

For the wine part of the experience, the posted list of participants includes DeLille Cellars, Erath, McCrea, and 100+ more. There will be breweries, too. Around 20 eateries are signed up, from Maximus/Minimus and Frost Doughnuts to Artisanal and Campagne, and more!

Tickets are $49 apiece (benefitting the non-profit Beecher’s Flagship Foundation), which gets you unlimited samples of food and non-alcoholic beverages, and 50 tasting tickets for alcoholic drinks (at 1-3 tickets per taste).

Anyone up for making a group outing of it?

via Eat All About It

Our own Theo Chocolate Helps Haitian Relief Effort

Theo Chocolate in Fremont is donating profits from two popular bars toward Haitian relief. The money from sales of both the Theo's 45% Classic Milk and the 70% Classic Dark chocolate bars will go toward clean-water efforts by the NGO CARE.



via Voracious

Whiskey, whisky, brandy, rye - Do you know the difference?

A really nice summary by a bartender named Doug, who was asked:

"I feel stupid asking, but can you give me a simple answer to what the differences are between various brown liquors? For instance, how is brandy different from whiskey, and what are cognac and eau de vie? I started getting into Scotch recently, and I notice the word whiskey on the label, too. Does Scotch mean that it just has to be from Scotland?"

Doug has a very succinctly-put answer:

"I'm sure some nerd will pick this apart, but this is what I would tell you over a Macallan or a Dickel if you were sitting at my bar. (In fact, I wouldn't even tell you this much before I shut up and let you drink.) Those brown liquors are all the same in the same way that wood is wood. However, there's a far cry between bourbon and Scotch, just as there can be between pine and rosewood. So I'll generalize for brevity's sake, and first separate the brandies from the whiskeys.

To make a whiskey, you start with grain. To make a brandy, you start with wine, and sometimes other fruit. Bourbon, rye, and Scotch are all whiskey (or whisky, depending on place of origin), while grappa, marc, Armagnac, and cognac are brandies one and all, with a few distinctions.

Eau de vie is a catch-all for a clear spirit distilled from fruit. Brandy is an eau de vie, but it's generally accepted that brandy comes from grapes and is a subset of eau de vie. Italian grappa and French marc are clear spirits distilled from wine that fit in the category of brandy and see no barrel aging, which is why they are clear. Brandy--and all brown spirits--get their brown coloring from spending time in wood (except cheap brandy, which uses coloring agents). Armagnac and cognac are the two most popular brandies, so named for places in France that are considered some of the finest areas for brandy in the way the Champagne region is considered the best for bubbly.

Whiskey comes from the old Gaelic term uisge beatha, meaning "water of life" (or eau de vie, what do you know). Different styles of whiskey used to be more pronounced. Bourbon whiskey, for example, has the distinct requirement for the usage of a grain mixture that is a majority of corn, and also has traditionally meant a whiskey aged in charred oak barrels to achieve a particular caramel and vanilla edge.

Nowadays, some distillers flirt with a taste that's on the drier side of what many may think of when they order bourbon. Each distiller develops a house style for a flagship product, like Jack Daniels' black label (which is a whiskey but not a bourbon), and may experiment with greater aging or oak treatment for other labels.

Scotch whisky does indeed come from Scotland, but it has its own hallmark flavors (and again, this is all generalizing). The process of malted barley happens over fires fueled by peat moss, which is why the levels of smokiness and peat are often used to categorize different brands of Scotch. Scotch often has a dry, savory flavor profile, but not always. The other characteristic of many Scotches comes from their proximity to the sea, as many can have a mineral or salty character, from spending years in barrels close to the water, and the salt air leeching into and out of the wood."

via Voracious

Blind woman learning to be a chef

Wow - what an amazing story! A young woman, Laura Martinez, is learning to become a chef at the prestigious Le Cordon Bleu culinary program at the Cooking and Hospitality Institute of Chicago. She has been blind since she was an infant, and has no memory of seeing. I thought her experience captured exactly what William tries to demonstrate: the way the food you are preparing communicates with you.

From the article:


The image of a blind person slicing meat is ripe for mockery, but Martinez made the act a delicate ballet of moving fingers and firm, precise cuts. She sees the meat with her hands, positions it just right for cutting, brings the strips around again so they can be cubed, constantly grasping and feeling around the edges to monitor her work.

"I had to learn to feel the food or to smell or listen to the sound it made in the pan," said Martinez, 25. "I can tell by feel whether meat is raw, medium or well done. You just learn through time."

Read about this fascinating and determined woman here.

Tabasco lover?

Love love love LOVE this video!! I'm not sure if it's because I love Tabasco on my pizza or because I love the idea of a barbershop quartet channeled through porky rounds of pepperoni, but this video is a new favorite. Enjoy!

Make your own goat cheese

Anything that comes from a blog named "Kiss My Spatula" is probably going to interest me. Behold: homemade goat cheese!



Word on the street is that it's tremendously easy, and completely worth the effort, as it will surely exceed your expectations. I will absolutely try this!

Homemade Goat Cheese

Feel free to experiment with the herb(s) of your choice. Be careful not to drain your cheese for too long, as it may begin to dry out and lose that supple, creamy consistency you’re going after. If you do happen to lose track of time, reserve the whey “drippings” and fold, 1/4 tsp at a time, back into the cheese until you reach your desired consistency.

Ingredients

• 1 quart pasteurized goat’s milk (avoid ‘ultra’-pasteurized)
• 1/4 cup freshly squeezed lemon juice
• 1/2 clove freshly grated garlic
• a few pinches herbs de provence
• freshly chopped parsley
• coarse salt, to taste

Method

In a medium saucepan, slowly heat milk until it reaches 180 degrees on a candy thermometer. Remove from heat and stir in lemon juice. Let stand until milk starts to curdle, about 15-20 seconds. If milk does not curdle, add a little more lemon juice.

Line a colander with several layers of cheesecloth and place over a large bowl. Ladle milk into colander. Pull up and tie the four corners of cheesecloth together and hang on the handle of a wooden spoon, set over a stockpot or very deep bowl. Allow to drain until the consistency of slightly dry cottage cheese is reached, about 1-1.5 hours. Transfer to a bowl and fold in salt, herbs and garlic. Serve immediately atop warm crostinis. Can be stored in an airtight container, refrigerated, up to 1 week.

via Serious Eats

What is it?

Any of you know what this is? I know, and I love it...I think I just hadn't realized how disgusting an appearance it has.

Seattle's teriyaki scene in the New York Times

Fascinating! Especially since I don't believe I've eaten teriyaki since we've lived in Seattle...They had me at "This isn't Dallas." Could it be time to expand my teriyaki-related horizons?

Article found here.



Great quotes from the piece:

“Seattle has a thousand teriyakis,” Mrs. Ko said one afternoon...This is Seattle food,” she said, extending her argument. “For Seattle people. This is what we eat here. Seattle people eat teriyaki. This isn’t Dallas.”

“Seattle likes to talk about local foods, about ridiculous things like fiddlehead coulis,” Mr. Berger said. “Seattle yuppies love the idea of going to some obscure Chinese place for dim sum but won’t dare tell you that they eat chicken teriyaki. Those places are so much a part of the streetscape that we can’t even see them.”

“The Washington State Restaurant Association has identified 83 Seattle restaurants with teriyaki in their name, including I Love Teriyaki and I Luv Teriyaki. (A concurrent search yielded about 40 restaurants named Burger King, McDonald’s or Wendy’s.)”

via The Food Section

Home Sous Vide Machine: A review

Sous vide cooking has been all the rage in many restaurants for years now, praised for the method's virtual inability to overcook foods and for its grand success in turning even the toughest cuts of meat into fork-tender morsels. In this article, Serious Eats' J. Kenji Lopez-Alt presents one month's experience using the new home version of the SousVide Supreme ($449) - with overall good results! This unit does NOT come with a vacuum sealer, which was cited as a negative in the review, but seems to have provided good performance.


From the Sous Vide Supreme website:
"The SousVide Supreme™ is the world’s first water oven designed specifically to bring the gourmet sous vide cooking method into home kitchens. Sous vide cooking involves vacuum-sealing food in airtight pouches, then submerging it in a water bath at precisely controlled temperatures, often much lower than those used in traditional ovens, but for a longer time. The result is perfectly cooked foods with enhanced flavors and nutritional benefits.

The SousVide Supreme is a sleek all-in-one solution. Simply set the temperature, and let the SousVide Supreme do the rest, controlling the water temperature to within one degree Fahrenheit – the key to sous vide success. The SousVide Supreme is similar in size to a bread maker, and meals are cooked with it in a few simple steps..."

via Serious Eats

When fruits and vegetables are in season: A geographic guide

Very neat resource I found recently about determining what fruits and vegetables are in season at different times during the year for different areas of the country. Click on the image to see a zoomable, interactive version - Washington State represents!



via Serious Eats