Thursday, October 15, 2009

Local Brews



When I first moved to Palm Beach, I complained that there weren't any locally brewed beers worth mentioning. I was wrong, and soon found the delicious Monk in a Trunk created by the Inlet Brewing Company in Jupiter, FL.

Now, West Palm Beach isn't horrible as far as cities go, but it is one of the more "plastic", superficial places to exist anywhere on the planet. Even so, it is a "real city", and I was worried that I wouldn't find any good microbrews after moving to Oberlin this summer.

I am optimistic, however. Let's face it: if a delicious, Belgian-style beer could be found in this soulless, plastic burg, there is bound to be a decent brewery around Oberlin, Ohio. A quick Google search confirmed this heady (for me) optimism, yielding both the Great Lakes Brewing Company and Fat Head's Brewery and Saloon, among many others.

Reviews coming soon, people. Stay tuned.

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Chichi Wang : a new find





It has certainly been a long time since I've posted anything on this little blog.

I won't be shamed, mostly because no one reads this, and also because I've been busy settling down in Ohio, working my way up the corporate restaurant ladder, and writing random articles for really random websites.

I've committed an hour or two a day to reading about restaurants and food as part of my road to restaurant management. That basically means I visit Nation's Restaurant News online every day and read about food trends and the state of the restaurant industry in general. Once in a while I visit food blogs and dedicated foodie websites like Endless Simmer or Chow Hound. These offer very good articles, but I hadn't noticed a creative spark, an interesting brain, if you will, until today.

Chichi Wang (what a great last name!) is a food writer on Serious Eats who has brought back damned fond memories and desires that I had buried long ago.

Her blog posts and articles remind me of why I like writing, and why I love food. She's an amazingly thorough, sensualist, detailed, somewhat pretentious, and passionate writer and an all-around food lover. And I do mean "all-around"- she could rival Andrew Zimmern in her search for delicious "nasty bits".

Check this out:

For lovers of the delicacy, the question as to what makes the organ so prized is a no-brainer. Surrounded by a faint hint of meat and papery thin layers of cartilage, duck tongue is predominately a vehicle for juicy pockets of fat. At barely two inches in length, the tongue is small and flimsy, yet its taste is intensely ducklike. When freshly fried, duck tongues are positively addicting with a crisp surface and a creamy, slightly fatty interior that melts in your mouth. Like potato chips or pork cracklings, one tongue is never enough.


She's talking about duck tongues, there. And yes, she maintains that level of detail in all of her posts.

Reading her reminds me of lovely lazy days spent with an aspiring chef-boyfriend cooking recipes from Culinaria Spain and books on Mediterranean and Spanish cooking by Paula Wolfert and Penelope Casas. We spent what little money we had on saffron, jamon iberico, good Spanish olive oil, piquillo peppers, and Calasparra rice.

I miss that.

Wang and I have had similar experiences as daughters of immigrants, but she has shared her experiences in her beautiful articles in a more reverent and eloquent way than I have.

Being inelegant is totally a choice. : P