Meet The Team / Michael B. Dougherty

With the Manhattan gripped by frigid temps, it seemed like an appropriate day to sample Fresco by Scotto's new frozen dishes for Midwest delivery giant Schwan's.

Back in 2009, Schwan's approached the telegenic cooking family about replicating dishes from their Midtown eatery for its customers. "So the conversation starts, 'We could really use a Fresco in Minnesota.' And we're like, no way, too cold for us," Elaina Scotto explained, perhaps eating her words a bit today. "So they said, 'What about doing your great dishes, in a frozen food format, and we can ship it anywhere in the United States?'"

We review the Fresco by Scotto dishes after the jump.

With temps in the teens, and some unexpected snow on the ground, Knob Creek introduced the world to its first single-barrel reserve bottling right at the source, the Jim Beam distillery in Clermont, Kentucky.

A group gathered around seven-generation master distiller, Fred Noe, in one of the distillery's barrel houses, a plank-and-beam structure notable for its 20,000 casks of quietly aging bourbon, and on this particular morning, a distinct lack of heating or insulation. Noe, who traces his lineage back to Colonel Jim Beam himself (the man wasn't a marketing invention), carefully siphoned liquid out of several individually selected American white-oak casks to illustrate the distinction between Knob Creek and Knob Creek Single Barrel. Whereas the former is a blend and bottled at 100 proof, the latter is bottled directly from a single, "sweet" barrel, after being cut down to 120 proof (cask strength is around 130). The effect is an intriguing inconsistency in style that makes opening a bottle something of a throw at the roulette wheel. Of the four barrels we sampled, each had a distinctive profile that sometimes varied dramatically: Beyond the expected vanilla, wood and sweet notes, one skewed more towards a lighter, floral style while another had an unusually sharp, rye-like bite of spice.

While attending the opening of Johnnie Walker's House of Walker private lounge, in New York's Soho, we were fortunate enough to speak with the evening's luminous hostess, Mad Men's Christina Hendricks. Her visage has become increasingly associated with whiskey (with a name like Hendricks, we'd have guessed she'd be a gin girl), whether due to her hosting another Walker event in Los Angeles this summer or because her character, the comely secretary Joan Harris, pours copious amounts of it for all the well-dressed alcoholics on the show. With that in mind, we wondered how she started her not-so-clandestine love affair with Scotch.

"This happened very naturally," Hendricks explained. "It's very sexy when my husband orders a Scotch." That lucky gentleman, actor Geoffrey Arend, was also on hand, and she credits him with introducing her to the drink. "He enjoys it, my male friends really, really enjoy it, but we're introducing it to our lady friends [too]."

For those still unfamiliar with whiskey, Hendricks recommends a professionally led tasting as the best way to learn about the "process, the aging... it's really interesting." Before leaving Hendricks to her hosting duties, we just had to ask: How does she take hers? "On the rocks."