Food & Beer

Toronado Blunch 2011 Recap

April 16, 2011

Last Sunday, the annual Toronado Belgian Beer Lunch took place, with the food again being done by Sean Paxton, the Homebrew Chef. The Belgian lunch — or Blunch, as I’ve taken to calling it — began promptly at 11:30 a.m. and went until nearly 5:30 p.m. Now that’s slow food, but really with twelve courses [...]

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Beer In Ads #347: Our Third President Was Our First Spaghetti Maker

April 13, 2011

Wednesday’s ad is a 1948 ad for Budweiser featuring our third President, Thomas Jefferson, whose birthday is also today. He was born April 13, 1743. According to the Bud ad, he also introduced spaghetti to America. Let’s say I’m skeptical. Here’s the text: From Naples he got a mould to form spaghetti and introduced what [...]

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Announcing Session #51: The Great Online Beer & Cheese-Off

April 8, 2011

Our 51st Session is the third of our run at nostalgia, albeit a mere four years worth of it. Stan Hieronymus first proposed the Session four years ago, and was the first host, too, followed by Alan (from A Good Beer Blog) and then I hosted the third outing. So here I am venturing into [...]

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Specialty Foods Trending Up, Paralleling Craft Beer

April 7, 2011

Seems like it’s a food sort of day. There was an interesting press release from the National Association for the Specialty Food Trade (or NASFT) — the folks that put on the various Fancy Food Shows — entitled Specialty Food Industry Shows Renewed Strength. It’s a teaser for the actual report, The State of the [...]

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Toronado Belgian Beer Lunch This Sunday

April 7, 2011

I just learned that there are a few seats left for the annual Toronado Belgian Beer Lunch taking place this Sunday, April 10. For the third year — or is that fourth? — the food is being done by Sean Paxton, the Homebrew Chef. If you love Belgian beer, good food and especially pairing the [...]

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The Calorie Mix From The 1970s To Today

April 7, 2011

This is not a beer post, but we gotta eat, too. Tom Philpott, at Grist, details an interesting interactive chart created by Andrea Jezovit at Civil Eats. Using USDA data for “average daily calories available per capita, adjusted for spoilage and waste,” it tracks our eating habits since 1970, separating our foodstuffs into basic categories: [...]

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Drunken Carrot

April 5, 2011

On Sunday, my wife and I indulged our inner geeks by attending WonderCon at Moscone Center in San Francisco. It’s an orgy of comic books, cartoons, science fiction and fantasy, art, toys, film, television and all manner of mainstream and non-mainstream entertainment. It was a fun day, and we picked up some cool stuff for [...]

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Food & Drink’s 50 Most Important Discoveries & Inventions

March 17, 2011

The Daily Meal, a food-oriented website, has come up with a list of The 50 Most Important Inventions (and Discoveries) in Food and Drink. It’s a pretty interesting list, and at the very least got me thinking about how much we take for granted and how important so many of those simple items are to [...]

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Guinness Chocolate Cheesecake

March 13, 2011

My sister-in-law sent me this delicious looking recipe for a chocolate cheesecake made with Guinness, though I suspect any Irish dry stout would work. The recipe comes from Closet Cooking, a food blog by a man named Kevin in Ontario, Canada. This recipe for the Guinness chocolate cheesecake is a pretty basic chocolate cheesecake recipe [...]

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Celebrate Triple Rock’s 25th Anniversary Monday

March 11, 2011

Geez has time flown. Twenty-five plus years ago you weren’t even allowed to operate a brewpub in the State of California. Finally in 1983 that finally changed, thanks to some hard work and a lot of meetings. Shortly thereafter, the first two brewpubs in California opened, Mendocino Brewing and Buffalo Bill’s. The third opened 25 [...]

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The Impact Of Texture On Taste Perception

March 8, 2011

On Food Navigator, there was an interesting short interview with Matthew Patrick, VP of R&D for TIC Gums where he suggests that “food and beverage product developers spend a shockingly low amount of time examining how texture may impact a finished product.” In beer, of course, texture is more often referred to as “mouthfeel.” And [...]

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SF Beer Week On ABC 7 TV

February 16, 2011

On Monday, Rich Higgins (Director of SF Beer Week) and I went on the local ABC affiliate’s afternoon show, 7 Live, to promote SF Beer Week. Rich brought two of his beers from Social Kitchen & Brewery. First, his White Thai Affair (9.5% a.b.v., an imperial Rapscallion with galangal and lemongrass) was paired with a [...]

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Wisconsin Food Pyramid

February 6, 2011

I imagine the “Wisconsin Food Pyramid” was originally meant to be derogatory, but what could be a better meal for a football game than sausages (cooked in beer), cheese and beer? That’s what I’m having at my Super Bowl party, along with chips, pretzels and more cheese. And Sean Paxton, the Homebrew Chef, has promised [...]

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Thoughts On The New Dietary Guidelines From Beer Business Daily

February 3, 2011

You most likely hard that the USDA released the quinquennial Dietary Guidelines for Americans at the end of last month. The 2010 version made a number of small, but significant changes with regard to food, such as “make half your plate fruits and vegetables” and “drink water instead of sugary drinks.” In Chapter 3, they [...]

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Grilling With Beer: Fanning The Flames Of A New Edition

January 30, 2011

The beer cook, Lucy Saunders, published a great book five years ago called Grilling with Beer. I must confess I’m a little biased, because I contributed a short chapter to it on Oyster BBQ. The book is now out of print, though there’s still great demand for it. So Lucy’s planning on “putting together new [...]

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SF Beer Week One Month Away

January 11, 2011

In exactly one month, SF Beer Week will start up again. For ten days beginning on February 11, beer in the Bay Area will be front and center. Last year we had over 225 diverse events and this year promises to have even more beer-centric events throughout the Bay Area. In a couple of hours [...]

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