Groundhog Day
Once upon a time, Groundhog Day used to be about a furry little rodent coming out of its hole in the middle of nowhere Pennsylvania to predict the end of winter. Then this happened…
Now more than anything else, Groundhog Day makes me think of Bill Murray and reliving the same experience over and over again. So instead of making the drive to Punxsutawney to drink hot cocoa and dance to the Pennsylvania Polka, I’ve got another plan.
Food For Football
The Super Bowl is on Sunday! And today is Thursday? Egads! I’m not ready for this. Heck, I don’t even know if I want to try and have a healthy and virtuous Super Bowl, or if I’m going to throw caution to the wind and go for the gusto of a more traditional football feast.
Was it just last year that I made the most American thing ever? Who remembers the Big Mac Tater Tot Nachos? Man, those were delicious. Since obviously I’m rooting for Philly this year, part of me wanted to make Philly Cheesesteak Tater Tot Nachos. Because Super Bowl. Amiright? Or amiright?
On the other hand, I’ve been trying hard to be moderate. For the most part it’s been working, even with the pizza and beer party, judging the Schenectady Soup Stroll, and all of the other food shenanigans that come my way through Yelp and the blog. Except yesterday while driving back home from Saratoga Springs, I caught what might have been the most depressing twenty minutes of radio ever. It was a Commonwealth Club interview with Daniel Ellsberg on WAMC about nuclear holocaust.
The bottom line is that now I just want to eat all the things.
Pizza and Beer
Mental note. Don’t schedule a morning meeting the day after an Official Yelp Event. That’s apparently the recipe for a super duper late blog post.
Last night, I gathered with about fifty of my closest Yelp friends at Great Flats Brewing in Schenectady to get a tour of their operation, meet the owners, and try some of their beers. There is a lot of good stuff going on in that converted tire store on Lafayette Street, from using New York state grown hops, buying malted grain from a place in downtown Albany, and repurposing old dairy equipment.
One thing I didn’t get to try was their root beer, which I heard great things about. But I’ve enjoyed their dark and grainy dunkel, the aromatic double IPA, and even their novelty cinnamon toast crunch stout. That last one was a bit unexpected, but I heard from Scooter at Lupulin Events that it was worth a try.
What Great Flats Brewing does not have is a kitchen. So when it came to the feeding of the Yelp crew, we had to look elsewhere. The obvious choice was pizza. The question was, which one?
The Best Way To Eat Seasonal Citrus
It’s Cara Cara Navel Orange season! Say what you will about the gloom of winter, but it’s hard to be gloomy when you are cutting into a bright sweet piece of seasonal citrus. This is just one of the many reasons why I believe in eating seasonally, but am not willing to sacrifice myself at the altar of local food.
So there I was yesterday with one of these glorious pieces of fruit when Little Miss Fussy came home from school, and I thought I would make her a special treat.
A Soup Stroll Without Bowls
Saturday was the Third Annual Schenectady Soup Stroll, and it was a ton of fun. For the second year in a row, thanks to my role with Yelp, I got to be one of the official judges of the event.
The judging was very similar to last year, a few members of the Yelp Elite Squad evaluated each three-ounce soup sample on the liquids, solids, overall taste, and temperature to come up with a score. In the end, we were tasked with determining the top three soups, and offering a list of honorable mentions.
What was different this year was that we added more judges. Instead of three of us, there were five. And while we started together and ended together, the judges broke up into two different packs, so we were trying the same soups but at different times throughout the day.
When it came times for the judges conference at the end of the stroll, it was clear that some soups were better earlier in the day of this five hour soup marathon. It’s an incredible amount of work for the restaurants, to be sure. But it’s also a great opportunity to get people to explore the charms of downtown Schenectady.
You can see the full official results here, but what I wanted to talk a bit more about today was the very good point that Scooter Clifford brought up as we discussed the results at Great Flats Brewing after the stroll.
Fermenting Dairy
The Instant Pot has not changed my life. Yet.
Every day I’m learning about new ways to use the thing. Just yesterday I learned that it’s great for soft and hard boiling eggs, with easy to peel shells. I’m looking forward to giving that a try. Maybe even later today. Earlier this week I used it as a slow cooker for the very first time, and that was pretty cool too. It’s quite the versatile tool.
Soon after I announced my purchase of this device, a reader asked if I was going to use it to make yogurt. The question requires a bit of a longer response, and today I finally have the chance to talk about why I will do no such thing.
Six and Twenty Soups
Soup has been on my mind a lot lately. One day my kitchen smells deeply of chicken stock. A couple days later, the beef bones have their turn in the pressure cooker. My refrigerator and freezer are an embarrassment of riches.
My son loves brothy soups. So I told him that any time he gets an hankering, all he needs to do is dilute one of the homemade frozen concentrated stock cubes in some boiling water. He can even do it in the microwave. All he needs to add is salt. It’s like instant soup.
The Instant Pot provided me with an easy winter root soup that’s filled with rutabaga, celery root, and potatoes. They were cooked and pureed into some of that rich chicken stock I had on hand. But nobody else in the household will eat this thick, silky, and comforting soup. That’s okay. More soup for me.
As much as I love soup, Saturday is going to be almost more soup than I can handle. Almost.
Breakfast of Millennials
This unseasonably warm weather is wreaking havoc on my two car freezer. Even though we may have more winter weather to come, today is a reminder that it will not be here forever.
That means it’s time for those big cooking projects, and to start eating all those things I put away in the freezer to remind me of the spring to come. Pesto, I’m looking at you.
One of those big cooking projects was a beef stew. I had picked up a boneless chuck roast back in the fall, and tucked it away in the freezer. And on Sunday at the Schenectady Greenmarket, there was a sign at Bella Terra about their beef bones. Making beef stock sounded like a great idea at the time.
What does any of this have to do with breakfast? I’m getting to that.
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