Beer Today, Beer Tomorrow
There may have been beer yesterday too. Actually, there was totally beer yesterday.
In between events on Thursday, I was putting up a little post about oysters on Instagram, and that’s when I saw a notification from my local beer store. They had received a case of 3 Fonteinen Cuvée Armand & Gaston. The limits were one bottle per person, and I just so happened to notice within the hour. So I made a beeline to the bottle shop and bought my full allotment.
This has been an incredible week for beer, and it just keeps on getting better. You do know what today is, don’t you? It’s the launch of the 2019 Capital Craft Beverage Trail passport! I’ll let you in on a little secret, I already got one, and it’s amazing.
Do you know what else is amazing? The latest line up for the Saratoga Beer Summit tomorrow! Hey, it’s Friday. If we’re going to talk about beer and other adult beverages, today is the day to do it.
So what makes these two things so amazing? I’m glad you asked.
Emily L Gets Cozy
We’re in the doldrums of winter. It’s feeling like we’ve entered “The Unlocking” although technically that is still over a week away. But regardless of the calendar date, the coldest, most brutal part of winter is now behind us.
Which doesn’t mean it’s going to get warm anytime soon.
The good news is that the Capital Region is particularly well suited for long cold winters. We have amazing snow plows, vast quantities of road salt, and marvelous neighborhood taverns. For the most part, these are long standing institutions with a bar on one side, a dining room on the other, where you can warm your bones with hearty food and refresh your spirits with an adult beverage or two.
Today, we have a guest post from Emily L who has just discovered the joys of these cozy dining rooms. But I have the feeling she’s not quite keenly aware just how deep a well she has tapped. And at the end of her post, she asks a question which I think FLB readers are very well equipped to answer.
On Diets
This time, I think it’s going to stick. In the past, my efforts at healthful eating have really been about gaming the system. My doctor would want to run a lipid panel, but I had just spent the last few months eating chicken wings, bacon cheeseburgers, and duck fat roasted potatoes. So, I’d put off the test for a few months, and engage in a period of extreme healthful eating.
My test results would be great. The doctor would say I’m healthy. And I’d go back to my deep fat fried fueled fantasies.
Right now, I have no blood tests on the horizon. I was just approaching the heaviest weight I had ever seen on the scale. It never crossed the 200 pound threshold, but it was pretty close. And that was my wakeup call. So once again I did something drastic.
Here’s the thing. I don’t believe in fad diets. It’s not that I don’t believe they work. I’m keenly aware that they work. I just don’t believe they work in the long term. Nor do I think they are particularly healthy. And it really all comes down to one reason.
Crispy Chickpeas
One of these days we’ll talk a bit more about some of the larger issues I see behind diets designed to help people lose weight. Everyone has to find their own way, and do what’s best for their own health and wellbeing. So while I may try to turn people against fake versions of real foods, if you want to trim down and you’ve found something that works for you, mazel tov!
My approach has been eating smaller quantities of real food, and prioritizing plants. For some, that may seem like madness, because instead of snacking of carb free pork rinds, I’m munching on carb heavy vegetables.
Blah, blah, blah. Say what you will, but the weight is off and it’s been staying off, even now that I’ve reintroduced beer back into the system! Huzzah! And there was great rejoicing.
The problem with vegetables is that they aren’t terribly convenient, and the ones that are convenient aren’t very good. Mrs. Fussy eats so many of those bagged baby carrots, I don’t know how she does it. For her, I think it’s a form of self punishment. I mean seriously, does anyone actually enjoy bagged baby carrots? If you tell me you enjoy dragging them through store bought hummus, I may scream.
All I ask is that at some point soon you try dragging a freshly cut carrot through homemade hummus, so you can know what you’re giving up for the sake of convenience.
Thankfully, there is a plant-based source of food that’s both convenient and delicious, but I’ve found making this treat at home to be surprisingly hard. That is until I finally found someone who unlocked the secret to crispy chickpeas.
What to Drink with Dumplings
People are often surprised to learn that this blog is not a revenue generating enterprise. It brings in zero dollars. Actually, every year it costs money to keep it running. Very small amounts of money, to be sure. But I want to pay to keep it ad free and clean. Plus I’m happy to support WordPress. It’s a great platform, and it has been very good for me.
The thing I do for money is the Yelp job, which I love. But it too has come at a cost. Perhaps one of the biggest challenges I faced, simply from time management and social media bandwidth concerns, was managing two separate Instagram feeds. In the early days of the Yelp gig, I was curating content for the YelpAlbany and FUSSYlittleBLOG Instagram pages.
That just was not sustainable. It required too much time and attention, so I parked the FLB IG page. For over two years it has sat untouched, unloved, and unchecked upon. But I’m happy to report that just this weekend I have brought it back to life!
What changed?
Well, I can’t talk about it quite yet, but there will be a big Yelp announcement tomorrow. No, I haven’t quit. But we do have someone new on board who is on the cusp of being officially announced. The Yelp community continues to grow and thrive in the Capital Region, and it’s really an incredible pleasure to be a part of that.
What I can talk about is the Official Yelp Event that we have on deck for later this week. Mostly because this weekend I spent a little bit of time trying to make #YelpDreams come true. Everyone has dreams. My dream was to give people an amazing beverage pairing for Dumplings Around the World.
The Blue Cheese Dip Spectrum
Remember, I did not grow up around these parts, and that means I don’t have a lifetime of experience with buffalo wings and their classic accompaniments.
It’s an interesting exercise to think back to when I had my first encounter with buffalo wings. Memory is a funny thing, but my best guess is that it was when I lived in Miami, most likely when I was in high school. It was certainly during my late teens that I fell in love with the crispy, fiery, and juicy combination of flavors and textures that I still enjoy today.
However, the wings I fell in love with were not buffalo wings at all, because they were most definitely breaded. And while I may still have a soft spot in my heart for crisply fried breaded wings tossed with hot sauce, I have a much deeper love for the unbreaded wings more widely available throughout the Capital Region.
One of the issues that came up on the most recent Tour de Wings was the wide range of different opinions on the blue cheese dip that is served with the wings. Today, I was hoping to get a few people to weigh in on the matter, just so I can gain a bit more perspective on the form.
Here’s the spectrum of blue cheese dip as I see it.
A Day of Love
Let’s put aside all the saccharine expressions of romantic love for the time being. That’s the roses, the chocolates, the stuffed animals, the jewelry, and the like. This morning I was reminded that today is the one year anniversary of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
One year?
I encourage you all to take a moment and remember the seventeen people who were murdered that day. Here is a report with their names, ages, photographs, and a little about their lives. It’s impossible for me to make it through the list without welling up with tears.
That feeling right there, that’s love. It’s love for strangers. For people who I’ve never met. It doesn’t matter what their political ideologies may have been. Or where they came from. This hits deep in the gut. For the lives lost. For the families who are left behind. For the friends and teachers who witnessed the horror.
It’s a very Jewish notion that all of our joys are tinged with sorrow. We don’t forget. We always remember. And we make sure to celebrate joyful moments whenever we can, like today.
A Savoy Galentine and Savvy Valentine
Egads! How is tomorrow Valentine’s Day already? I guess that makes today Galentine’s Day. For those who might begrudge someone a made-up holiday, take a walk. They are all made up. We choose to celebrate the arbitrary things we think are important. Be they the Earth’s position around the sun, the resetting of a calendar year, or the date which some notable person was thrust from the womb. They are all kind of ridiculous.
What’s important is the meaning with which we imbue these occasions. So what we are really celebrating are things like love, renewal, and justice. The names and the specific dates that accompany these holidays matter less than the feelings they inspire in those who observe them.
If you’re not feeling it, then these dates are just another day to skip work, get drunk, and eat.
So today some people want to take a moment and celebrate sisterhood. Tomorrow, it’s about romantic love. Yes, I’ve been cynical about Valentines Day in the past, largely based on the commercialization of the holiday. Or rather, its modern popularity, which has been driven by a desire to capture consumer spending.
But these days, I’m looking for all the joyful moments I can find. And a celebration of romantic love sounds like a great idea. And if you don’t know how to celebrate sisterhood, I was just sent a great idea from my Facebook friend Jason Pierce who is one of the owners of Albany’s Savoy Taproom.
The Bettering of The Orchard Pizza
The Orchard and I have history. Not nearly as much history as those families who have called the Capital Region home for generations, but history nonetheless. This is arguably Albany’s oldest tavern, and a little over a year ago, it switched hands.
But old pieces of Albany history don’t stay in the same family forever. The building that is now Rolf’s has been a butcher shop for over 100 years, but it’s only been Rolf’s since the 1960s. The Orchard has been a tavern since 1903, but its unique style of pizza didn’t appear until after prohibition when the place became Gorman’s Grill.
For years the Noonans kept the Gorman’s pizza recipe exactly the same. Brendan and Mike told me the story about beseeching the cheese manufacturer to keep producing the same block cheddar that crowns these rectangular pies.
Now, under new ownership, these signature ten-cut tavern pizzas have changed. The change is very very small. And I would argue it’s a change for the better. Before I’m accused of being a heretic, maybe I can take a few moments to explain.
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