Cuisine Capers

You are browsing the archives of 2007 October.

I’ve made a beef roast or two in my time.  My repertoire ranges from a quick yet elegant tenderloin to an extremely slow roasted brisket, braised in a tangy liquidy base.
This weekend I was in the mood for a slow roasted cut of beef.  Not a stringier brisket, and yet not a fattier prime rib.  [...]

How many of you grew up absolutely hating brussel sprouts?  I know I did.  I’ll preface this post by saying that I hope my mother isn’t reading this blog as of late, and Mom, if you are, please stop reading now.  Thanks.
Now I’ll continue on…
Brussel sprouts for dinner were one of those traumatic events of my [...]

The Madison Food and Wine Show took place this weekend.  An annual event, this show features food, wine, demonstrations, exhibits, and other food and beverage related items.  Perhaps one of the more entertaining aspects of this show is the Dueling Chef Competition.
Chefs representing Madison Originals restaurants compete ala Iron Chef for the title of Madison’s [...]

Day One, Winery #7: It was getting a bit late in the day by the time we made it to Kunde Estate Winery. (We found out that Kunde rhymes with Sunday.  Who knew?) The grounds of this winery are very picturesque (which explains why there were so many pictures that I took there). I am [...]

Day One, Winery #5:  By the time we hit Kenwood, our main focus was on lunch, not wine.  We called ahead to find out if they had food that could be purchased at the winery, and we were told that they had some sausage and crackers.  This worked for us, and so we left Ravenswood [...]

The title of this post is a bit misleading.  I haven’t, unfortunately, gone on a health kick and started to eat apples for lunch.  No fear of that.  Instead, I and some cohorts in crime ate lunch at Apple today.  We were in Cupertino, CA visiting the Apple campus on business.  We were treated to [...]

Day One, Winery #4: You might be able to guess from the above images snagged off of the Ravenswood website that this is absolutely our type of wine.  We drink Ravenswood often.  They sell a terrific Zin for around $10 a bottle, and it is a staple in our cellar.  We’ve also enjoyed their Merlot, [...]

Day One, Winery #3: Sebastiani is one of those solid, standby wine producers which we turn to often when in a pinch.  We honed in on their limited production, Reserve wines.  Solid and dependable, we will be more willing to order these wines in restaurants more often when seeking out a wine to go with our [...]

Day One, Winery #2: I’ll preface this by saying that we love Cline Cellars wines.  Reasonably priced, you can find many of them anywhere.  We are particularly fond of the deep, rich “Ancient Vine” varieties we’ve found locally - we’ve found the Zinfandel, Carignane and Mourvedre Ancient Vines here at our local liquor store for [...]

Day One, Winery #1:  Matanzas Creek winery has traditionally produced one of our favorite Merlots.  We were pretty excited to find out that this winery was very near our hotel, and so we planned on making this the first stop of our winery tour, on the very first day. 
We were so eager, in fact, that we [...]