Even in Louisville, Ky., a betting town where success is measured in wins, places and shows, few gamblers would have bet that master sommelier study partners Brett Davis and Scott Harper would pass their diploma exam on the same day.
The local boys defied the odds by becoming the only two test-takers out of 38 to pass the prestigious test last month, making them the first master sommeliers in the state of Kentucky. Harper's workplace, the Bristol Bar and Grille, will fete their achievement at a wine dinner next week.
With fewer than 200 wine professionals worldwide having earned the master sommelier title since it was established 30 years ago, two friends holding matching diplomas counts as a curiosity. Earning those diplomas at the same time is considered extraordinary.
"It's very unusual, very rare," confirms Davis, who's in the wine import business.
Hawk on chicken, New York City. Photo: D.Billy of I Am Not Lying
New Yorkers tend to throw fits about wildlife showing up in odd parts of their city. So we're unsurprised to hear that a local man was flustered when a large hawk flew into the restaurant where he was eating last week and perched on his lunch.
It'd be cruel to steal the story away from its hilarious original teller, whose best line was "I turned around to see it standing on my two-piece-with-side-and-soda combo, just chilling and looking out the window wistfully, as though a Sarah McLachlan song were playing in its head."
A phone call to the restaurant confirmed the tale, including the tidbit that a cook, Manoli (in the style of a true superhero, no one at the eatery knew his last name), whom a waitress describes as "pretty fearless," caught the thing in his bare hands when it flew into the kitchen. Said hawk was sent to the vet, who reportedly turned him over to a wildlife refuge.
Our pockets empty while our bellies fill with booze: "Canadians boosted alcohol sales by 4.3 percent [this year], funnelling more than $18.8 billion into the economy."
SeaChoice now offers a downloadable sushi guide about locating sustainably sourced fish, but brace yourself -- the beloved unagi and hamachi are on the list.
Laiterie Charlevoix's Le 1608 cheese -- the "pleasant tang of the long finish clinches this cheese's spot as a new Canadian favourite."
Miga restaurant in Mississauga, Ontario, a favorite due to "wannabe luxe comforts."
Rishi took home seven first place awards at the recent World Tea Expo. They are definitely doing something right, and I personally recommend their Jade Cloud tea.
It turns out that the flavinoids in tea may actually help ease symptoms of neurodegenerative diseases, and there seems to the possibility that flavinoids in tea may help repair the damage, not just stop it.
Teaware geeks will enjoy this write up by MattCha about Korean style gimhae tea bowls, complete with a brief history of this teaware style and several pictures of some very nice bowls.
This is a great article on gongfu tea tables, with in-depth comparisons that you really won't find anywhere else. It's very cool of the author to share all the info collected while on his own quest for hte perfect gongfu tea table. Bookmark this one if you ever want to get into gongfu tea preparation!
Last week CNN reported (and we posted about it) that food vendors in Bejing, China were selling steamed buns filled with a combination of "chopped cardboard, softened with an industrial chemical and flavored with fatty pork and powdered seasoning."
On the heels of reports of contaminated toothpaste, dog food and frozen fish from China, news agencies from around the world were willing to believe these reports of tainted street food. However, it seems now that the story was fabricated by an employee at Bejing TV in order to get a ratings boost. I've heard of folks in the TV world taking extreme measures for ratings, but this seems to be a bit much.
Hey, we're not just talking about that take-out chow mein from the hole-in-the-wall on the corner that just tastes like cardboard.
Apparently, small, usually illegally-run operations across China have been cutting costs by using cheap ingredients, and in State TV's undercover investigation, sometimes substituting with things that aren't even food. In the Chaoyang district of Beijing, steamed buns called bao were filled with cardboard that had been softened with an industrial chemical and flavored with fatty pork and powdered seasoning. The article over at CNN has more graphic details of how the cardboard is collected from the ground and "made" into the bao's filling.
Kind of makes you thankful for the regulations we have here in the US, huh?
Rui Daniel Faria Velosa, the owner of the Portuguese restaurant, was fined April on April 12 for an incident that occurred back in May 2005. A server brought the appetizer in the ceramic dish to the table. The food was already flaming, but the server returned with more rum to top off the dish. The rum spilled all over the woman, leaving her with burns on her face and hands. She spent two weeks in the hospital and still suffers from flashbacks, panic attacks, and anxiety.
If that happened to me, I'd probably eat raw food for the rest of my life.
In the past, we've posted about several social bookmarking and networking sites that focus on food, such as FoodCandy and Cork'd. Today Slashfood received a heads up about thisjustbrewed.com, a Digg-like site that describes itself as "social news for social beverages." True to its description, thisjustbrewed is a place where users can submit and vote for various news stories or sites that pertain to social beverages like coffee, tea, wine or beer. Scanning the site this evening, recent posts included a story about a type of bio-diesel fuel derived from beer by-products, news of $11,000 coffee machines, and a link to Bottletalk, another site where users can trade their own wine reviews. Most of the posts on thisjustbrewed are only getting a few votes each and none look to be more than a month old, so perhaps the site is still a bit new. With any luck, it will take on more users (I just joined), and become another good source for beverage-related news on the web.
Oats are a great source of soluble fiber, and as the specific fiber contained in whole oats, beta-glucan soluble fiber, has been shown to help control cholesterol, some oat products are allowed to claim that they reduce the risk of coronary heart disease. These products include oat bran, rolled oats or whole oat flour, and they also must meet the FDA's standard for "low fat" foods. The Quaker Oat company has requested - and temporarily received (pdf) - an exemption to the "low fat" standard for some of their other oat products, like instant oatmeal. The exemption allows qualifying products to make the claim that they coronary heart disease right on the packaging by allowing them to increase their oat content to acceptable levels, even if by doing so they surpass the federal maximum for low fat products. Not all oat products will be eligible, but Quaker's reduced sugar instant oatmeal products would qualify under the new plan.
I'm beginning to get the impression that writing about Trader Joe's is some sort of fall-back for food writers who don't have any other good ideas. On the surface, this seems like a good idea. There are plenty of good things to say about it and they come out with newthings frequently, most of which are worth a mention. Unfortunately, the new things - products, store locations, etc - aren't what seem to attract the press. They seem to enjoy writing about how they are or are not impressed with the store and why it is popular.
Here is yet another article from an east coast paper where the author wondered why Trader Joe's was so popular, tried it and decided that it was a store worth visiting, at least from time to time. The problem with the piece is that the Washington DC area already has several Trader Joe's locations, so the chance that this revelation is actually news to residents, or to anyone else who has shopped at Trader Joe's, is slight.
Two men, Giles Charle and David Siller, took 5 cucumbers, 4 apricots, 2 bundles of asparagus spears and a handful of cherries from a garbage dumpster behind the Sweet Pea Produce Market in Steamboat Springs, Colorado on their way to the city's annual family gathering. Tey will be spending six months in jail.
July is National Hot Dog month and summer is certainly an appropriate choice, as Americans eat 7 billion hot dogs during the summer (from Memorial Day to Labor Day), cooking up two thirds of them in the backyard or at home, and a total of 20 billion every year. On the 4th of July alone, 150 million hot dogs will be eaten in the US and most will be grilled, since 60% of Americans say that they prefer to eat them that way.
Want to test your hot dog trivia knowledge? Take the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council's online quiz and see if you have the goods on one of America's favorite foods. I have to admit that I only got 7 out of 10. What are you waiting for? Test the test and let us know how you scored in the comments!
Recognizing that television is not the sole media source that children are exposed to, British ministers are wondering whether a proposal that bans junk food ads on television will be effective. As a result, they are now considering whether to add restrictions to the ad content of websites, computer games, cinemas and packaging, as well as corporate school sponsorships. Such measures "could be voluntary or compulsory depending on the response of the food industry." Strict measures like these are being supported by the Labour Party and various parent groups.
The Food Standards Agency, backing the ban, has devised a "nutrient profiling system" to identify "junk foods" according to their nutritional information. It could be used to determine whether or not a food product could be advertised if a ban becomes legislation.
Ofcom, a television regular, thinks that measures like this seem too strict. A pre-9pm television ban alone would cost networks and advertisers at least £141 million, but there is not telling what the cost of essentially prohibiting "junk food" ads would be.
The 2006 All Candy Expo is on right now in Chicago. It started yesterday and goes though tomorrow and it is the biggest confectionary show in the country. There are tons of vendors, both well-established companies and upstarts with innovative new products, that are sampling their product lines at the show, as well as lots of people interested in buying the candy for retail at stores and other venues. The show is closed to anyone who isn't in the candy trade or the press, but luckily, there is already some information spilling out about what we can expect to see in stores in the coming year.
The Chicago Sun Times gives us a heads-up to watch out for candies that are fortified, which look to be one of the hot new trends in the market this year. There will be gum with Vitamin C and chocolates with calcium and omega-3s.
On another healthy note, the Chicago Tribune mentions that portion and calorie controlled candies are a huge hit, too, despite the fact that a huge number of snacks (like Hershey's Kisses) have been available in small sizes for years. Perhaps people just need to be told about portion control.
Candyblog blogger, Cybele, is at the show and is blogging from the floor. You can read all about her experiences here and there is no doubt that she will have lots of great reviews coming up in the next week or so.
Among the products launching are dark chocolate M&Ms (non limited edition), Snickers with Almonds Dark, Starburst Berries and Cream flavors and Tung-Toos.
It's important to drink responsibly, so those who have been using diet sodas as mixers to cut calories in drinks might be interested to know the results of a new study. Australian scientists compared the rate of absorption for sugar-sweetened alcoholic drinks to artificially-sweetened drinks (like vodka and coke versus vodka and diet coke, for example). They found that artificial sweeteners led to a higher rate of alcohol absorption by the body, meaning that drinkers felt the effects of the alcohol more quickly and more strongly than those who used sugar-sweetened mixers. Drinkers who had "diet" mixers had a greater concentration of alcohol in their bloodstream and would feel more drink, even if they had consumed the same amount of alcohol with a sweetened mixer.
Scientists worry about people's health because of this finding. When the mixers used to make drinks are "diet," people tend to drink more because they know that the calorie count is lower. When drinking, it is better to try to keep track of how you're feeling than simply the number of drinks you've had. And if you want to watch calories, try following every drink with a large glass of water. It's calorie free and will probably have you feeling much better in the morning.
Last week
Hey, we're not just talking about that take-out chow mein from the hole-in-the-wall on the corner that just tastes like cardboard.
If ever you plan to grab dinner at Sporting Clube de Londres in West London, 
Oats are a great source of soluble fiber, and as the specific fiber contained in whole oats, beta-glucan soluble fiber, has been shown to help control cholesterol, some oat products are allowed to claim that they reduce the risk of coronary heart disease. These products include oat bran, rolled oats or whole oat flour, and they also must meet the FDA's standard for "low fat" foods. The Quaker Oat company has 
At least, in Colorado. And that's if you happen to be 
July is National Hot Dog month and summer is certainly an appropriate choice, as Americans eat 
Recognizing that television is not the sole media source that children are exposed to, British ministers are wondering whether a proposal that 
The 
It's important to drink responsibly, so those who have been using diet sodas as mixers to cut calories in drinks might be interested to know 
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