Make New New Make Drinks
Blow off work on Friday. Call in sick. Or maybe just take an early lunch. Because at 11am Albany Distilling Company will be officially opening its doors.
This is big news. Everyone is excited about it. And you can read stories about the proprietors and their enterprise on All Over Albany, Table Hopping and Keep Albany Boring. I’m not going to repeat what they said. But I did spent a couple hours last night with Matthew and John, learning about their operation, tasting their product, and mixing drinks that highlighted their Coal Yard “new make” whiskey.
It’s unclear if they will be mixing any cocktails at the distillery on opening day. But if they do, there is a good chance that one of these creations be in rotation.
But first let me tell you why you shouldn’t be skeptical of new make whiskey.
Food is Screwed: Kids Today
Banks are awful. That is, unless you have a giant piles of money and the bank falls all over itself to make you a happy customer. It gave me great pleasure to close our accounts with a local bank and move our money over to a credit union.
The reason I love the credit union isn’t because they have a free Flavia machine. But this is a food blog, so for today that is where our story begins.
For those who don’t know, Flavia is a precursor to the scourge of those ubiquitous K-Cups, but instead of pods it uses pouches. Not that I’ll turn up my nose at free coffee in any form. As my children will tell you, “Coffee makes adults go.” The Flavia machine at the credit union also has pouches for hot cocoa, and those are very popular with the kids.
Recently I was at my local branch, and a couple of children were delighting the tellers with their passionate zeal for the free hot chocolate. It was a slow day, and the always friendly tellers were really feeling the hot chocolate love too.
This light and joyous little scene hardly feels like a harbinger of doom about the future of food in America. But it was about to take a surprising turn for the worse.
Judge Me
Happy Sukkot! The Jewish holidays just don’t stop. Luckily, from here on out they involve food. But let me tell you, it’s probably a lot more pleasant to eat outside this time of year in Tel Aviv than it is in Albany.
That’s the deal. Some people build a kind of lean-to against their home, and the idea is to eat in the makeshift shelter. It has something to do with the harvest and our ancestors. But if they were in upstate New York, it’s likely this holiday would have happened weeks ago before things got really cool and rainy.
Anyway, I can celebrate the spirit of the holiday by engaging in a busy season all my own. There are some very exciting things going on this week plus an event on Saturday that I’m thrilled to be judging. Here’s the lowdown.
Food is Screwed: When Ice Cream Isn’t
Score one for the federal government. They aren’t always on the right side of food issues, be it propping up corn with massive subsidies, preventing the testing of cows for BSE, or rushing GMO crops to market without sufficient research proving their long term safety.
But they have established standards of identity for a whole slew of products. Granted, you can still sell “cream” even if it is adulterated with thickening agents. However, “ice cream” has to contain a certain level of butterfat to bear the name. Less butterfat and it can be called “light ice cream.”
There is even a name for those products that contain even less butterfat.
Butterfat is the expensive and delicious part of ice cream. Traditionally, it’s what has made the product so rich and creamy. But now there are cheap thickeners and gums for providing a similar experience. None of this is news. We talked about how Breyer’s had traded on its proud brand heritage of all-natural kitchen cabinet ingredients to bring a cheaper version of their ice cream to market.
So I shouldn’t be surprised that they have sunk to a new low.
Food is Screwed
Over the past several weeks there have been a smattering of stories about the sorry state of food and agriculture. And each one of these is a topic I’ve wanted to discuss further, but haven’t really had the time.
Then they all pile up, and the backlog becomes a little overwhelming. But the funny thing is that when looking at the slew of reports swirling around the collective consciousness of our tribe, one thing is abundantly clear.
Our “food” is totally screwed.
Today I’ll try to piece a bunch of it together without flying too far off the rails. But there are so many shenanigans at play in the food we eat, it drives me crazy.
AskTP – A Clean Slate
Do you want to know the hardest part about fasting? It’s taking your kids out for pizza and not being able to have any. Then, as usual, they eat around the delicious end crust and leave it on their plate. But instead of getting to finish off my favorite part of really good pizza, I have to watch as it gets thrown in the trash.
Officially, I only take the kids to really good pizza places. And it was sad that we couldn’t maintain our annual tradition of Pizza King, as it is still closed in the wake of its proprietor’s passing.
Anyway after a day in temple, I’m beat. It’s a good thing I could come home to a pile of questions leftover from the last two weeks. To say I ignored them is a bit harsh. Perhaps it’s better to say I was saving them for a time when I could give them the attention they deserved. And that time is now.
After all, I’m committed to answering any question, regardless of how silly, just so long as it is asked with proper punctuation. If you omit a question mark, I cannot guarantee a response.
So without any further ado, onto the questions.
The Best Cider Donut Further Upstate
On the map, the route looked positively reasonable. In practice it may have been a bit more daunting. This third installment of the Tour de Cider Donut took us north in search of the best versions of the form. Make that way north.
Hicks-Wilson Orchard in Granville seemed like a perfectly reasonable destination when compared to the much further afield Gunnison’s in Crown Point. But when I dropped the latter from the route, I never stopped to think just how far we were going.
All in all, the loop around Liberty Ridge, Saratoga Apple, Reggie’s, Hicks-Wilson, Sutton’s and back to Liberty Ridge was 120 miles. Still, we started around 10 o’clock and were tasting our final donut at 2 in the afternoon. The upside about tasting five donuts, each separated by a leisurely drive in the autumnal countryside, is that when the tour is over, we didn’t feel completely disgusting.
And now we have a lot more data points on cider donuts to share, including which of these five beloved cider donut makers produces the best of the bunch.
Sorry Again
Once again I have failed you. This week is all out of order. The Tour de Donut was on Saturday. Today I should be bringing you the winner. But dammit, Harvest Fest was yesterday, and it was too nice to stay indoors and tally scoresheets. Besides, I got to see a whole bunch of my favorite local food producers, chefs, bloggers, photographers, librarians, and Yelpers. So the donut results are being pushed back until Tuesday.
On a related note, if you have been counting the days until the next Ask the Profussor, then you know it’s scheduled for this Wednesday. Unfortunately for everyone concerned, Wednesday is Yom Kippur. It’s the Day of Atonement, it’s a big deal, and it involves fasting. So, AskTP is being bumped back a day to Thursday.
Sorry about that.
Apologies are very appropriate for this time of year. So as long as I’m being contrite, I’m going to try the clean the slate of my most egregious acts from the past twelve months.
The Secret Shame of Parsley
Yesterday was the first day of fall, and I could imagine no better way to bring it in than by driving around the northernmost edges of the Capital Region (and maybe just slightly beyond) enjoying some delicious apple cider donuts. The full tale of the day is going to have to wait. But it was fun to spend the equinox eating donuts with new friends and with old.
Transitions into seasons are never quite a cut and dry affair. The first sign of fall was the first leaf that I saw which wasn’t entirely green. The second sign was the closing of Jumpin’ Jacks for the season. And even with the passing of the equinox, one could argue that fall isn’t officially here until one spends the day raking leaves.
And on the flip side there are the remaining vestiges of summer. Mrs. Fussy was saying just yesterday that we may have had our last warm and sunny day for the season. Only time will tell.
The one that’s on my mind however is the parsley.
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