Hot Librarian
I have a friend. Let’s call her Jen. She’s a librarian. And one Halloween, she had the best costume ever. She went as a hot librarian. I think she had a whip, or a riding crop, but it could have been a stiff ruler. It was hot. I wanted to give her all my overdue books…if you know what I mean.
This is not about that. Thankfully.
There are several things that I keep libraries of in my pantry. I have a library of aromatic cocktail bitters. There is the library of rice varieties, in both refined and brown versions.
And then there is the library I came here to discuss: my library of pepper sauces.
First Pull the Cork
Here is a bit of wine knowledge I picked up from a brief encounter with the wine industry. Do you know why Americans don’t drink more wine? Because they are not opening up bottles of wine.
Seriously.
Apparently opening up a bottle of wine is a major barrier to consumption. And there are a few reasons for this:
– Wine is often put away and saved for a special occasion, yet no occasion ever feels special enough.
– Wine often sits waiting for that mystical time when it will be at its peak (more on this later).
– Wine is sealed with that pesky old-fashioned closure made out of the regenerating bark of a tree.
Well, as they say, if you are not part of the solution you are part of the problem.
Small Market Envy
Maybe I got a little bit carried away.
Last night I contributed two comments to our big local food blog. Really I wrote the same comment twice. And now I am going to write more about it here. In part because there is certainly a chance that the Table Hopping mob may pounce on me for being less than gentle with their beloved Steve Barnes.
Through Steve’s blog I was clued into Bon Appétit’s “2009’s Top Ten Best New Restaurants in America.” And it was this article that really got me fired up.
These things are usually of minimal interest.
Have you ever heard of a DMA? It stands for Designated Market Area. And Nielsen breaks up the country into 210 of them. Every piece of land and every person living or dead is within one of the 210, like it or not.
Well, these lists usually are just the newest hot restaurant in each of the top 10 DMAs. The magazines aren’t dumb. That is generally where the bulk of their readership lives. And it’s not as if Condé Nast can send reporters to Zanesville, OH to see if a new awesome restaurant opened in the past year. Occasionally, a lucky restaurant or two from DMAs 11-20 will sneak in as a token gesture to the rest of the country.
But this list included a restaurant in Austin, Texas.
Eating Dim Sum Like a Native
The vacations are done. I’m traveled out for the summer. And now I’m back in Albany ready to hunker down and get back to regular blogging.
To thank you for your patience, I will spare you yet another coffee story that takes place on my way back from New Hampshire this past weekend. It turns out that even if you bring your computer to the country, it does little good without a reliable Internet connection.
But I will dip back into my recent San Francisco trip, to pull out an example of me behaving badly. Although to be fair, this post had its genesis well before I headed west. There just was no time to sneak it in.
So I don’t want to hear any guff from Mr. Sunshine.
How Cheese Came Into My Life: An Ocean Away
We are at the end.
Is there more to my love affair with cheese? Certainly.
Did I leave out a few stories over the course of the series? Probably.
Have you learned a bit about one of my first food obsessions? Hopefully.
The culmination of all these weeks of cheese pornography happens after I had been smitten with a cheese for the third time (the first was my Nana’s cheese, the second was my own selection, and the third was possibly by divine providence). I had gained the respect, or at least the curiosity, of the cheesemongers at the Pasta Shop in Oakland.
This week’s story begins as I was planning a trip to London with the woman who would later become Mrs. Fussy.
A Reliably Good Cappuccino
Thank you all for your patience. Today will be my last planned post about coffee, at least for a while. And I really feel the need to pull all of the coffee experiences together, and use it to explain one overarching thing about my thoughts on eating in San Francisco.
Yes, I absolutely had the best espresso of my life last week.
And yes, I had some remarkable brewed coffee from proprietary blends.
But I do believe that these stores just happen to be in San Francisco. I imagine Blue Bottle could have started in Seattle or Philz could have been born in New York City.
The Other Place
Here is a bit more about the current state of coffee in San Francisco.
Yesterday I may have left some of you hanging again. Although this time nobody called me out on it. Maybe Brent is still grumping in a corner, or perhaps by now he has learned that I will never leave you hanging for long. Just enough to heighten that antici…
[wait for it]
Between a Rock and a Hard Place
Did I really let a week go by without a word of fuss? How did that happen?
Time did crazy things to me during my recent California trip. First, time made it seem that my two-year absence from the state was just a long holiday, and flying into SFO felt just like coming home from an extended trip. Mind you, a trip I was retuning from with an extra child in tow, but still. Second, time made my twelve-day marathon seem like a fleeting dream upon my return.
I was expecting to gain ten pounds. I gained three. Which means I failed. Though that is not to say I didn’t try.
Before I talk about anything else from the trip, I need to talk about one thing. In one of the few posts I was able to fire off while away, I cruelly teased about some stunning espresso, and Brent called me out on leaving all of you hanging.
Where’s the Love?
It’s Philadelphia that is the city of brotherly love. Certainly it’s where you can find the iconic LOVE sculpture.
And even here on the FUSSYlittleBLOG there is a lot of love. But as we mentioned recently the tide may be turning.
Even still, there are a few posts, some old and some new, that just haven’t received much love at all. Maybe they didn’t have catchy titles, maybe I failed in my Twitter / Facebook teasers, or maybe they just were posted on a beautiful summer’s day and were neglected.
Read more…
Whole Lot of Love
For being a fussy blog, there has been a lot of talk about love recently. There will be plenty of chances to re-balance the scales once I am back home and back into my regular posting routine.
But for the time being, let me take this chance to remind all of you about a few things that get under my skin.
Read more…
FUSSYlittleBLOG 