Sack Lunches

On my drive home from work in the afternoon I’ve been seeing the same group of five construction workers ending their day. They’re walking to their own cars, all of them still wearing orange vests, and all five carrying small lunch coolers. I always wonder what was packed in their cooler that day. I imagine meatloaf and ketchup sandwiches or maybe ham on white bread with mayonnaise and a bag of chips. Maybe Tupperware filled with leftovers from last night’s dinner or a long, slim piece of cold pizza wrapped in tin foil. I love packed lunches. The anticipation! The joy of seeing a sandwich snug inside a Ziploc bag! I miss the grade school lunch hour when I walked down the hallway tightly holding two dimes that would buy a small carton of milk from the milk wagon. (I know that makes me sound like a pioneer – I wasn’t – but I swear, my grade school did have a milk wagon.)
The Husband is not so big on the packed lunch. He thinks it's sad, and I understand why. A half-squashed paper bag with a flap folded down. The sandwich bread that sometimes gets soggy. Knowing that your freedom from work will be over in 30 short minutes.
But what if you had a shiny, metal lunchbox? Something with a nifty little handle and three different compartments? A friend brought such a thing back from India recently and although I don’t think it’s meant to be a lunch box, that’s the first thing I thought of when I saw it. This little lunchbox would make you the envy of lunch room.
This week, plan ahead one night and pack yourself a lunch. Don’t scrimp - make it hearty. Pack yourself a lunch so good that your co-workers might actually consider negotiating a trade. Your homemade salad with fresh chicken and blue cheese in exchange for the gut-bomb burrito they bought across the street? Or perhaps your large square of leftover lasagna for their boring old bagel?
Yeah, right.
If you really want to make ‘em jealous, take my cue and bring the lunch box back into your life. It feels good to swing a lunchbox by your side. Makes me feel like skipping.

Horseradish Bloody Mary

The way I view the world, today is called "Nacho Sunday" not "Super Bowl Sunday." Watching the game (who are the teams again?) is simply an excuse to eat. I'm not really into the half-time show or the commercials either. But I am definitely into the nachos. Nothing fancy - just chips and cheese garnished with jalepenos, chopped tomatoes and beans. Some guac and salsa on the side. This day is also one of the few times in the year when I indulge in one of the few cocktails that is acceptable to drink for breakfast: The Bloody Mary. I like mine on the spicy side with the earthy flavor of fresh horseradish. You can buy horseradish root at almost any grocery store. I serve the Bloody Marys in a pitcher and let people add their own vodka. Pepper vodka is great, although regular vodka works just fine too. Serve with a celery stalk or pickled asparagus and a wedge of lemon.

Horseradish Bloody Mary
64 oz tomato juice (two large jars)
3 Tbsp grated horseradish root
1 Tbsp Tobasco sauce
1 Tbsp + 1 tsp fresh squeezed lemon juice
2 tsp worcestershire sauce or soy sauce
5 grinds black pepper
1 grind or shake of salt

Smart Grocery Carts

Just when you thought companies had run out of ways to infiltrate your life with their “helpful” technology, you walk into a grocery store and there it is: The Smart Grocery Cart. Equipped with a computer, the cart will let you download the grocery list you wrote at home, map out where products are in the store, suggest sale items it is just sure you will want, and keep a running tally of your bill. Smart Carts aren’t anything new – they’ve been in various stages of development for years – but have never really caught on. The newest version was rolled out by Microsoft recently and will be debuting in ShopRite stores on the East Coast. I ask you: is this really the best use of technology? Couldn’t Microsoft re-focus their efforts on figuring out why the Microsoft Word Help Wizard never helps you with a damn thing? I hate that little wizard, and I hate the idea of shopping with a Smart Cart. If you shop in a store that’s so large you need a GPS to help you find the canned peas, then maybe you need to re-think where you shop. All these carts make me want to do is start shopping with a basket, or better yet, shop at smaller stores and markets. Maybe I’m wrong and this new technology will make our lives easier, but I don’t know. . . I’m already feeling nostalgic for my shopping lists scribbled on the back of an old envelope.

Perhaps a sharp knife is not what you want everyone in your circle of acquaintances to have, but for those who can be trusted (and more to the point, like to cook) getting their kitchen knives sharpened for them just might make a great holiday gift. Sharpening knives is one of those things people rarely get around to doing for themselves. Case in point, myself: a culinary school graduate who cooks regularly and until last week hadn’t sharpened her knives in…this is a little embarrassing…four years. Perhaps I got away with it for so long because I have great knives (Wüsthof). But a sharp knife really does make a huge difference in your ability to cut well and cut quickly, making life in the kitchen much easier. Although when I asked the knife sharpening guy how often I should have them sharpened, he just shrugged and said, “When they need it.”
He did, however, chastise me for not using my steel to give the knives occasional touch-ups, just as a dentist would lecture his patient for not flossing. A steel is a tool used to maintain the edge of the knife, not to actually sharpen it. It was a culinary instructor who scared me away from steels by pointing out everything that could go wrong. “If you hold your knife against the steel at too much of an angle, it will dull the blade!” "If you stroke it against the steel too many times, it will dull the blade!” “If you don’t run the whole length of the knife against the steel it will . . .” – you get the point. But I am afraid no more. I’ll hold the knife at a 20 degree angle to the steel. I’ll make even, light strokes. I’ll do it regularly and once or twice a year I’ll go see the knife guy. It’s inexpensive (several dollars for each knife) but invaluable.

Beware the Stacks!

It’s that time of year again, when we all find ourselves running into wine stores for a bottle on the way to a party. Inevitably, stacked on the ends of the aisle are ginormous displays, cases stacked on cases of wines. The signs promise red wine bursting with some luscious red fruit or another and white wine with what they swear is pleasing acidity. Unless the wine on display is one you have tasted before and like, my holiday advice to you is this: Step away from the stacks. In most wine stores, my friends, the really good wine is in the aisles, never stacked on the ends. Wine stacked on the end is what the employees are supposed to sell because it makes money for the store. If the employees are truly wine lovers, however, what they want to sell you is the non-descript bottle somewhere on the shelf that they drank the other night and thought was fantastic. Here is a short list of a few affordable wines I’ve tasted recently (none of them stacked at my place of employment) and enjoyed:
Artazuri Garnacha, Navarra Spain, $10-13:A great balance of cherry fruit with tannins that are soft enough to be enticing but dry enough to keep the wine from being fruity.
Araucano Pinot Noir, Chile, $12-15: A good, affordable Pinot is hard to find. I brought this one to Thanksgiving dinner and my family lapped it up. Lots of fruit with a little spice. Made by the French brothers Jacques & Francois Lurton who make wine in five different countries.
Domaine du Bel Air “Jour de Soif” Cabernet Franc, Loire Valley $13-16: Organically farmed, this light-bodied red hints at jammy fruit then quickly turns minerally and musty. A nice English Cheddar, or better yet a French sheep's milk cheese, would be a great pairing.
Domaine du Salvard Sauvignon Blanc & Chardonnay blend,Cheverny France, $12-15: Tangy, minerally and light. An elegant looking and tasting bottle.
Trapiche Malbec, Argentina, $7-10: Rich fruit with a little kick to it. Trapiche also makes a Cabernet and a Chardonnay, but I haven’t tried them yet.
Cuvee Jean Philippe Brut, Blanquet de Limoux, $11-13: If you’re like me and love Champagne but can only afford those expensive bottles once or twice a year, Jean Philippe will become your new best friend. The sparkling wine is from the somewhat obscure appellation of Limoux in southern France and made with the even more obscure grape, Mauzac, with a little Chardonnay and Chenin Blanc blended in. The people in Limoux (Limouxians?) claim to have started putting wines through a second fermentation in the bottle to create bubbles long before the region of Champagne ever started doing it. Who knows if this is true - all I know for sure is this bubbly is cheap and good, with a rich texture and yeasty,green apple flavor.

Red Wine Headaches

Whenever I get a headache from drinking wine, I have no one to blame but myself. The equation is simple:
One or two (or three) glasses too many = pounding head.

For me, avoiding the headache is simply a matter of self-control. Not so, however, for countless unlucky wine lovers who seem to get a headache just by looking at a bottle of wine. Red wine takes all the blame, but why?
Many consumers mistakenly place the blame on sulfites. Sulfur dioxide is a naturally occurring substance in wine, produced during fermentation. Most winemakers also add additional sulfites to prevent oxidation, which affects wine’s flavor and stability. There is no such thing as sulfite free wine, but there is a growing market for wine with no additional sulfites added. I haven’t tried too many, but one I can recommend is Casa Barranca’s Arts and Crafts Red. What you’ll get from a bottle of Arts and Crafts Red is a delicious wine, but not one that will cure your headache woes. Unless you are an asthmatic or have a severe allergy to sulfites, there are really no studies out there linking sulfites with headaches.
When I was in culinary school the wine instructor blamed headaches on histamines, and said a sure way to avoid a headache was by popping an anti-histamine like Benadryl before you went to bed after a night of drinking. Many foods contain more histamine than wine, but alcohol can exacerbate the effects of histamine in the system.The Oxford Companion to Wine,a hefty 800-page wine bible, also brings up the matter of histamines, although wisely points out (unlike my wine instructor) that taking an anti-histamine is not recommended when you’re drinking, so you’re better off drinking wines with low histamines levels. Histamines are found in the skins of grapes. Red wine contains more histamines because in order to color the juice red, the wine must soak with the dark colored grape skins.
The Oxford Companion also blames phenolics, which “liberate the chemical messenger 5-hydroxytryptamine (serotonin) which plays a part in the initiation of migraine.” Phenolics are chemical compounds found in the juice and pulp of grapes, and in much higher levels in grape stems, seeds and skins. For red wine, it’s a double phenolic whammy: phenolics are more abundant in dark-skinned grapes to start with, and then the wine picks up even more phenolics when the juice is soaking with the dark grape skins to add color. While the phenols may give you a headache, they are also the reason red wine is so heart healthy and packed with antioxidants.
This week, a study was released by a group of chemists who have nominated “several culprits for ‘red wine headache,’ including biogenic amines like tyramine and histamine.” Their studies are not entirely conclusive, but they warn headache sufferers to stay away from pretty much everything that makes my life worth living: wine, sake, chocolate, cheese, olives, nuts and cured meats. All of these things contain high levels of amines.
But there is hope. Kind of. The chemists have created a device that can determine amine levels in about five minutes. The device currently only works with liquids (so you can’t test that wedge of cheese) and is about the size of a briefcase. A smaller, hand-held version is being developed, and researchers say you could “take it to a restaurant and test your favorite wines.” But I can tell you that no server in their right mind will open a bottle of wine so a diner can test out their hand-held amine detector. And if the wine has too many amines, what are you going to do, send it back? Perhaps more realistically, the scientists also say the device could be used to test wine before it is bottled, and the amine level could be listed on the label.
Ultimately, I don’t know how useful this study is. But I do love that food and wine has become a topic of discussion in the otherwise dull-sounding “Journal of Analytical Chemistry,” where this study was published. And I don’t think headache sufferers should despair. There’s an exciting and delicious world of low-amine beer and white wine out there just waiting to be discovered!

Location, Location, Location

This week at work I tasted three Napa Valley Cabernets, all three costing between $20.00 - $30.00, and all three were wines that I did not feel the least bit bad about spewing into the spit bucket.
If I got on a plane, I could be in Napa Valley in just over an hour. The French wine I am drinking right now is half the cost and twice as good. How, I ask, is it possible for a guy in France to grow grapes, harvest them, turn them into wine, buy a bottle, buy a label to put on the bottle, buy a cork to seal the bottle, ship it across the world, and then still have that bottle show up on a shelf at a retail cost of $16.00? Why can’t our friends up in Napa do that?
Real estate, baby.
Livin’ in Napa ain’t cheap, whether you’re a person or a grape.That guy in France is probably pulling his grapes from a vineyard that is sitting on land that was paid off a hundred years ago or so. His land is less costly to own, therefore his grapes are less costly to grow, therefore you can buy his wine for $16.00. Not so for a winemaker in Napa.
It’s a simple and obvious fact that the cost of grapes is one of the things that affects the cost of wine, but one that consumers often forget about in the wine aisle. Sometimes you are paying for an address, and that’s it. Drinking those Napa Cabs this week was like living in Manhattan in a crappy little shoebox studio apartment. Sure, you live in Manhattan. But some guy living in the far outskirts of Brooklyn probably has a much nicer apartment, for a quarter of the rent. When you’re apartment or house shopping, it pays to venture into lesser known neighborhoods; likewise, when you’re shopping for wine, the real bargains are usually from regions that are a little less hyped up. The $16.00 wine I'm drinking tonight is French, but is it from from Bordeaux or Burgundy? Nope, it’s from the much lesser known region of Anjou.
In the states, that same theory applies. In my opinion, if you venture out of Napa Valley, the odds of finding a wine that is both affordable and delicious go up. According to my buddies at Wine Press Northwest,Cabernet Sauvignon grapes in the Napa Valley cost upwards of $2,266 per ton. Roughly speaking, one ton of grapes makes around 700-750 bottles of wine. That puts the cost of the juice itself at less than $4.00. But then factor in labor and rent and supplies and the general cost of doing business in an area like the Napa Valley, and charging $20.00 for a bottle of wine doesn't put a lot of money back in the winemaker's pocket. Winemakers in regions like Napa simply have to charge more for their wine to survive. In comparison, if a winemaker in Washington State wants to buy Cabernet grapes, Wine Press says it will cost them only about $1,261 per ton. In Sonoma County, Pinot Noir grapes cost $2,507 per ton. In Oregon, on average, it costs around $2,130. Now, Pinot Noir grapes from Washington State cost a measly $910 per ton, but this doesn't mean you should run out and stock up on Washington Pinots (if you’re actually able to find any). Washington has a hard time growing a good Pinot grape, so buying a bottle of Washington Pinot is likely to be more of a mistake than a bargain. Like all purchases, educate yourself first and if a deal seems too good to be true, it usually is.
Continue to buy Napa Valley wines: there are some truly delicious wines made in Northern California that don’t cost an arm and a leg.(Joel Gott is one to check out) But in comparison, wines from the Northwest often give you more for your dollar. This might not be the case for much longer. So get in, while the gettin’s good.