I Hate Bees
This past weekend was my maiden voyage to the Schenectady Greenmarket. For those who are unfamiliar with the institution, it’s the four-season farmers market for those in the western half of the Capital Region. It’s still outdoors, and I have to say that Sunday was a lovely fall day to be strolling around the market. Except of course for one thing.
For some reason the air was full of them on Sunday. To make matters worse, it was just me and Little Miss Fussy, and she wanted juice. It turns out bees love warm apple cider. But you probably knew that.
I was doing my best to try and be brave.
There is absolutely no way an objective observer would read my behavior this way. A bee would come close and I’d squinch up my eyes and face while pursing my lips. My entire body would tighten up, and when the buzzing bee flew out of range I found my shoulders up at the level of my ears. But for the most part, I was good at keeping pretty still, if maybe not so brave.
Bad Dreams
First, two pieces of business.
Number one: Let’s not forget that Downtown Albany’s Restaurant Week is underway. I’m still not sure if I’ll be able to get out any night this week, but I’m hoping it works out so I can try one of the more promising menus.
Number two: Yesterday’s post should have totally been titled Good Vermouth Hunting. I apologize for the complete missed opportunity to reference Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. Moving on.
Every independent restaurant and every small store starts as somebody’s dream. Regardless of how misguided that dream may seem to every other person who comes across it. Even regardless of whether that dream turns into a nightmare in short order. Each of these ill conceived ventures was somebody’s hope at creating something special.
The ones that are doomed from the start are especially tragic.
Not that every small-scale venture is destined to wind up like this. Some indeed do very well, and it’s those enduring businesses that drive others to attempt to duplicate their successes.
Why am I mentioning this now? Well, I recently encountered two such places and it made me think about my approach to reviewing.
Dry Vermouth Hunting
When it comes down to it, I’m a hoarder. I like to keep stuff. I like to hold onto things for a special occasion. The last few sips from a precious bottle of booze seem to linger in my liquor cabinet for far too long. There are still a couple of bottles of wedding wine left, and Mrs. Fussy and I have been married almost a decade.
I’m trying to get better, and luckily there are events like Open That Bottle Night aimed at getting people like me to loosen up a bit.
But last week I hit a setback.
To understand the situation, you might need a bit of history about one notable brand of aromatized wine, Noilly Prat dry vermouth. In some ways vermouth is like sherry. People think they hate it because there is so much cheap bad stuff on the market. Finding good vermouth in a wine and spirits shop is much harder than it should be.
For countless years, the gold standard for martini drinkers was Noilly Prat. It had a dry crispness that was unmatched in the category, and produced a refreshingly aromatic but bracingly lean drink. In January of 2009 The Wall Street Journal announced the impending change to this classic formula.
This is when I began to amass a small but valuable stockpile of the stuff.
Adam’s Last Apple
It’s not easy coming up with new cocktails. No sir. It’s hard hard work. Very hard work. Right up there with coal mining. Well, maybe not that hard, but it’s not as easy as it sounds. First, almost every combination of ingredients has been used in some form or another. And second, all the good names are taken. Many of them are taken multiple times over.
So I’ve been tinkering around with a few bottles lately, and came up with something I thought was special. It has an apple base, an aromatic bitterness, and an enchanting red hue. The first thing that came to me was The Poison Apple cocktail, but that has been taken many times over. And like other drinks with catchy names, they are complete train wrecks.
Even the Fallen Apple cocktail is taken.
I was amazed to see that the phrase Adam’s Last Apple has only two listings on Google and none on Bing. One of those listings is a photo, and the other refers to some kind of poem. But not only is it completely evocative of this drink, this drink never would have happened if it were not for my friend Adam.
Grinding to a Halt
I have failed you. But I cannot go on. Officially, tasting week has eaten my lunch.
After coming home last night, overstuffed for a second night in a row, an ice cream tasting would have been unwise. I also couldn’t bring myself to do a soda tasting. Truth be told I don’t even have all the materials at home I would require to do the tasting right. The good folks at Snow who sent me a bunch of their sodas will hopefully be patient while I assemble a set of similar products for comparative purposes.
So with that, tasting week unceremoniously grinds to a halt.
Hey dad, speaking of grinding… I’m also delinquent on my review of the Cuisinart coffee grinder I’ve been trying out complements of CSN Stores. It has been so long, maybe you had forgotten. Since I’m not tasting anything right now, let me take a moment and tell you about it.
The story begins much like another more famous one, with a bag of magical beans.
Steak Tasting
Tasting week goes on, although this steak tasting wasn’t on the original slate.
As I’ve mentioned before, my in-laws are in town. So Mrs. Fussy and I went on a date to Garden Bistro 24, a great restaurant with a terrible name. The menu offers a few bistro classics, most notably moules frites in addition to two kinds of steak frites. I wanted to taste them all, and Mrs. Fussy was game for sharing. She’s the greatest.
But after a half bowl of mussels with crusty French bread, two orders of fries, one and a half steaks, and a crème brulee I couldn’t really face sitting down for my scheduled ice cream tasting. Even the soda tasting seemed a bit much. All I wanted was a nice, soothing absinthe.
As it turned out, when I got home one of the ice creams was eaten by the in-laws anyway. So I’ve got to go back to the market before attempting the ice cream challenge again. Maybe tomorrow.
Still, thanks to Mrs. Fussy and her parents I get to talk about different cuts of beef.
Butter Me Up
RealFoodMom, this one is for you.
Did you know that I declared this tasting week? If you didn’t, shame on you for skipping Sunday’s wine post. Well, anyway, it is. And of all things, today I am tasting butter. That’s right, butter.
Why?
Well, that’s where RealFoodMom comes in. Last week, I was very excited to find the following blurb on a pound of butter at Target:
Our farmers pledge not to treat their cows with rBST. No significant difference has been shown between milk derived from rBST treated cows and non rBST treated cows.
To which RealFoodMom had this to say:
You can buy amazingly delicious, high quality, non-hormone local NY or VT butter. You could even call up the farmer to talk about the product directly. You could drive over to meet the cows personally. (Try doing that with Target butter.) You could support your local store/co-op/farmer’s market with the purchase. I can see the advantage in buying less expensive, less tasty butter, and keeping it around in the freezer for baking, but I wouldn’t brag about it. Go for the best stuff for table use or cooking eggs.
Perhaps it wasn’t her intention, but I felt like I had been served. So I have only three words for RealFoodMom: It. Is. On.
All Cider Donuts Are Not Created Equal
Turns out last weekend, there were two Tour de Donuts. One was ours, in which 12 intrepid New Yorkers set off to determine who makes the best cider donut in the region. The other was out in Michigan where hundreds of bicyclists rode for thirty miles, taking breaks for donut-eating contests along the way.
I think ours was probably better. At least it was more productive.
We only ate five donuts apiece. And while a few of us may have been a bit uncomfortable towards the end, nobody was drenched in donut sweat. And while we did not burn off nearly the calories that we consumed, we ended the day wiser in the ways of the cider donut. Clearly they are not all created equal.
The judging was very close, and ultimately we unearthed two different camps of cider donut lovers that divided the pack of tasters right down the middle. But at the end of the day, there can be only one.
The Blind Leading the Blind
The next few days are going to be all about tasting. Yesterday I completed the Tour de Donut with an intrepid band of readers, and I am looking forward to running all the score sheets through the computer and telling those who could not come about what you missed. Also in the next few days I will attempt to conduct a tasting between Snow (a new natural soda) and other similar but different products.
Plus remember how excited I was to find the good butter at Target? Well, I have some very local butter purchased from the Honest Weight Food Co-op, which is about three times the price. We’ll see how those stack up against each other.
I love tastings.
It’s one thing to taste something, but it’s entirely different to taste it and be able to directly compare it to something similar. The process of direct comparison magnifies the strengths and reveals potentially hidden weaknesses that may have otherwise gone undetected.
Friday night, my in-laws came up from the farm with a few bottles of wine in tow. My mother-in-law, bless her heart, had the fantastic idea of conducting a blind tasting with two bottles of California Zinfandel they brought along.
The question was, “Do you think you can tell which of these is more expensive?” Did I mention that I also love a challenge?
The Miracle Cure
Wednesday night I came home and felt sick. It wasn’t a virus. It wasn’t allergies. It was something that I ate. Scratch that. It wasn’t something that I ate, it was the entirety of what I ate.
Sometimes I just get carried away. I’ve talked about that before, and I’m not here to tell you all about my gluttonous exploits. After a while that gets old. But I do realize that I am not alone in occasionally eating well beyond satiety. There are others who indulge in too much rich delicious food, and who may be looking for anything to make them feel better. Sure, I suppose there are a laundry list of over-the-counter medicines one could take. But that’s not really becoming for a bon vivant.
Medicine implies that you’ve done something wrong. That your body is broken and it needs to be fixed. Medicalizing the condition is an admission of failure.
Luckily there is something much better to soothe your ails, and it has a much better cachet than Tums or Rolaids. Frankly, it’s amazing that I haven’t spoken more about it in the past. Naturally, I’m referring to the digestif.
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