Make a Girl Scout Happy
Did you know that Girl Scout Cookie time is different depending on where you live? I’ve already had someone come to my door looking to sell me boxes and boxes of cookies. That means that if you work in an office, you’ve probably already seen the form posted by the microwave in the company kitchen as some parent tries to leverage their job to sell more cookies for their daughter.
I’ve always found that to be cheating.
Here in Northeastern New York, orders for Girl Scout Cookies began on Monday, January 9 with a promised delivery of right around now. But do not fear should you have missed the pre-ordering period. Starting March 10 there will be booth sales all around the region. Most notably the girls will be at Colonie Center and Crossgates, as well as a host of other locations.
Everything you ever wanted to know about Girl Scout Cookies can be found here.
Well, almost everything. They will not tell you that all the cookies are not created equal. And they won’t tell you which ones you should buy if you really want to do a good deed.
That’s what I’m here for.
Building the Ballot – Pizza
Hitting the FUSSYlittleBALLOT 3.0 twice in one week is a bit treacherous. I don’t want anyone to get burnt out, and it takes away from other subjects I should be writing about. But I’ve had pizza on the mind.
Mostly, I wanted to share a lengthy comment I made to Albany Reddit. I’m enjoying the ability to participate in a community that isn’t so food centric, where you actually find people who go to Papa John’s and like it. Fortunately, you also find people who go to Papa John’s and don’t like it.
These are the people who could use our guidance.
Anyhow, this cry for help elicited a fairly comprehensive rundown of Capital District pizza. Without a doubt there are omissions. And despite how many pizzas I’ve eaten around the area, there are still several notable places that I’ve yet to experience. But what does it mean to be the best pizza in the region?
Let’s attempt to get to the answer.
Open That Bottle Night XIII
Man, do I miss my wine rack. It’s funny because I don’t have to look too hard for the damn thing. We moved it into the garage, years ago. Don’t worry, it has long been empty of wine, and now simply stores overflow kitchen gadgets and dust.
At it’s peak the rack was filled with over 100 interesting bottles of wine from all over the world ranging from truly great wines, to Trader Joe finds, to special bottles picked up from wineries, to GroceOut close outs.
With so much wine sitting around, Open That Bottle Night was a breeze. Even wines that weren’t very special to begin with became valued treasures when they were the last bottle from the case of a vintage that was no longer available.
Now all our wine lives in a small bin under a bookcase. It’s a fine sized space for our regular consumption, but it doesn’t hold much more than a couple of cases. The problem is that wine doesn’t linger around in quite the same way. Yes, we do have a couple very special bottles laying down, but they have specific occasions already assigned to their opening.
So while I’m struggling with my own Open That Bottle Night plans, I thought I should at least remind you that this annual wine event is this Saturday, February 25. Never heard of OTBN or feel like you could use a refresher? I’ve got the lowdown.
Building the Ballot – Ethnic Markets
Well here is the third working post of the FUSSYlittleBALLOT 3.0. If you haven’t been keeping up with the blog daily, you may want to take a few minutes and read about the plan to build a better ballot for the Times Union’s 2012 Best of the Capital Region poll.
Today is a working session. I hope you are ready.
The conversations we’ve been having about wine & beer stores and grocery stores & farmers markets have been fascinating. Still, it’s like pulling teeth to get people to list their three top picks for The Best in each category based on a broader set of criteria than their favorite place to shop.
This is the kind of input I’m looking for as I try to assemble a slate of businesses from your comments over the next several weeks. We’ve got a lot more work to do, and if you haven’t weighed in on past categories, they are still open for comments.
But now it’s time to talk about our best ethnic markets. I really really hope Michael Janairo at the Times Union takes my suggestions seriously, because as the questionnaire now reads, ethnic diversity is completely overshadowed by the rich and vibrant Italian heritage that permeates the region. As a realist, I’m not going to hold out hope for a category celebrating each ethnicity that contributes to culinary life here. So let’s talk Italian and then we’ll talk in Esperanto.
Farmers and Purveyors
Sundays to me are synonymous with the Schenectady Greenmarket. We are lucky to have a bunch of great four-season markets, so if you are closer to Troy or Saratoga, Saturday is your day.
At their heart farmers markets are about farmers. The land around the Capital Region is lush and provides a remarkable bounty for the region. But local food advocate Noah Sheetz reminded me that food doesn’t have to be grown out in the countryside.
His website, the Chefs Consortium, is featuring a 30-minute documentary today entitled City Farmers. You can watch it as soon as you are done reading today’s post from your computer. Noah described it as, “A beautiful movie, shot in reel to reel film, that documents the urban gardening movement in NYC in the ’90’s. Many of the gardens in the movie have since been bulldozed as a result of urban housing development.”
You should watch it and be inspired, appalled, delighted or whatever your personal temperament demands. Then on Monday morning, check back into the Chefs Consortium site for a chance to win a copy of the movie.
For those of us who don’t garden there are the farmers markets. And if you’ve ever been to one, you know quite well that they are not all entirely about farms and farmers. They are also about marvelous local purveyors. Mr. Dave just discovered one of these recently. One of my favorite local purveyors also has had a stall at the Delmar farmers market. But it seems he is encountering some resistance. So I asked Eric Paul of The Cheese Traveler to share his thoughts on the matter.
Buzzy Booze
Liqueurs are delightful, but they have a nasty way of really cluttering up your life. Either they turn out to be really special, something like Chartreuse which you sip on rare occasions and marvel at the majestic field of herbs the monks have managed to squeeze into a bottle. Or they are a critical element in a cocktail that you eventually turn away from, and sit on your shelf untouched and unloved for countless months.
That’s the tragedy of my Drambuie. The Domaine de Canton I still use at a rate of about a tablespoon per week, at most.
If you told me that I really should start making my own liqueurs, I’d tell you to take a flying leap. There are some amazing bottles on the market, that one would be hard pressed to replicate. Luxardo’s maraschino comes readily to mind. It’s also one of those things I love, but one I continue to never buy given how little of the stuff I actually am called on to use in practice. But a splash is critical to making a great daiquiri.
However if you are an astute reader, and you happen to know I’m sitting on a large bottle of vodka and a stash of good coffee beans, then you might be able to grab my attention. Especially if you call into service my trusty burr grinder and a few other of my favorite tools.
Strange Days
This is a story about McDonald’s, but it starts with Chipotle. It’s always a dangerous thing to talk about those two companies in the same sentence. Because many people still think that Chipotle is owned by McDonald’s. It’s not.
For a brief period of time when McDonald’s was doing well, and was sitting on a big pile of cash, they started to invest in other businesses. One of these was Chipotle. This burrito chain was growing. The fast casual segment in which it competed was growing. And McDonald’s wanted to have a piece of that pie.
But in that period McDonald’s took its eye off its core business, and sales began to decline. That pile of money started to shrink. And the company divested themselves of their ancillary holdings that included a portion (it never owned the entirety) of Chipotle.
I only mention Chipotle because this story begins with the ad the company ran during the Grammys. It’s hard to call it an ad. Really, it’s more like a two and a half minute music video, which has been freely available on YouTube for a long time. The fact that despite all of its downloads this video is still news speaks to the massive power broadcast television continues to have even in a day of fragmented media and online superstardom.
Anyway, if you’ve been living under a rock you may not have seen the spot.
Ask the Profussor – Digging Out
I started off the year so well. My first Ask the Profussor of 2012 was only eleven days in and totally manageable. But after a few busy weeks and a massive pile up of questions, the second installment of answers wasn’t able to clear out my in-box.
Really, I actually did answer all the questions. It’s just that they took up so much space Mrs. Fussy couldn’t get through them all. And if she couldn’t do it, the thought was that none of you would be able to either. No big deal though. I planned to simply follow up today with the remainder and whatever few stray questions happen to come in over the course of the week.
But what a week it has been.
We’ve talked about all kinds of hot-button issues like diet, what it means to be “The Best,” and diet. To say there are more than a few questions to arise from all these comments would be an understatement. Diet turns out to be one hot topic. Still, I’m committed to answering everything asked, so long as it includes a question mark. Please just bear with me as I dig out.
Hold onto your hats and sunglasses, and keep your hands and arms inside the vehicle at all times. Today’s post is a long and wild ride. Maybe in the future I’ll finally get better about answering questions as they come in. But for now let’s get cracking.
Hey Kid, Want Some Candy?
My kids will do just about anything for candy. But for the most part I’ve tried to keep the junk out of the house. And when it does make it past the door, I attempt to manage its consumption. This is why everyone should have an Albany Jane on call to take their kids out for the annual Halloween rites.
When I was a kid I loved candy too. My grandfather the dentist always kept bowls full of Hershey’s miniatures all around the house. It was wonderful to visit him, and my in-laws are pretty much the exact same way
But that’s what grandparents and friends of the family are for, spoiling the kids.
The reason I don’t buy candy is that it’s full of junk. It’s not that I’m opposed to sweets. It is that I’m opposed to cheaply made sweets that use inferior ingredients. Besides from being a bit gimmicky, I had no problem with the lollipops they handed out at Masa’s in San Francisco after the meal.
So what was I doing at Target yesterday buying not one, but two bags of the stuff?
Building the Ballot – Wine & Beer
Welcome to the second working post of the FUSSYlittleBALLOT 3.0. If you haven’t been keeping up with the blog daily, you may want to take a few minutes and read about the plan to build a better ballot for the Times Union’s 2012 Best of the Capital Region poll.
Today is a working session. I hope you are ready.
First, let me thank those who contributed all their thoughts on grocery stores and farmers markets last week. I’m glad to have the input as I move forward. However, there was one thing that I found to be a bit vexing.
I don’t want to get hung up on this, so let me explain and hopefully we can move on. It seemed that many of you had a difficult time in stepping away from your own personal preferences. There were plenty of responses for Best grocery that told me where you shop, because it is convenient to you. But that’s what makes it your favorite grocery store, and not necessarily a better store from a more broadly conceived set of criteria.
This was illuminating. Because if I can’t get you all to step away from this impulse, then what chance is there of getting the average Times Union respondent to do so. But maybe perceptions of supermarkets are more location-sensitive than other businesses. We’ll just have to see.
So….wine stores and beer stores. What makes them good? And which ones are just a little bit better, rising to the top and qualifying as one of The Best? I’ll spell out my criteria and give you my top three picks for each category. You can feel free to agree or disagree, and leave as detailed a comment as you like. All I ask is that if you play along at home, you submit not just your top pick, but the three best options (in rank order).
FUSSYlittleBLOG 