Cocoposts

Sweet Champagne

So I'm busy, busy, busy celebrating the season with gifts of the bubbly and a book about the bubbly called,  The Widow Clicquot; The Story of a Champagne Empire and the Woman Who Ruled It, by Tilar J. Mazzeo.  I should be packing.  Whatever. 

The history of French women and how the French Revolution and industrialization changed their cottage industries is pretty interesting.  Wine making remained a process that required hand labor while others, like textile production, did not. 

The book is full of interesting little tid bits like how champagne used to be much sweeter - ten times sweeter than the demi sec we drink today.  And early French glass bottles were crappy so the fizz was limited to keep bottles from exploding.  Oh, and the invention of champagne had little to do with Dom Perignon and everything to do with the Brits who had a market going for sparkling wines by 1660.  They would import kegs casks of French wine and rebottle it - dosing it with brandy as a preservative which starts the process of secondary fermentation. 

Nice stuff.

Champagne! In victory one deserves it; in defeat one needs it. Napoleon Bonaparte

UPDATE:  Salon has a wine topics post by Thomas Rogers about various restaurants' percentage markup on bottles of Clicqout yellow label champagne. 

Eating Out

Zinc, Yanni's, JB's, Ezra's and El Pinto this week.  Continual winter lunching at locations "in town" and in the North Valley.  The setting becomes almost as important as the food when the days are short and the dollars dear.  No rag tag service and dirty forks here.   Zinc has a nice table in a sunny window against the wall.  I also like sitting at the Zinc bar - which is actually zinc.  It feels nice and warm and zinc has clear health benefits.   Whether or not these can be imparted transdermally, I like to rub against the bar for luck when I'm there. 

I Like Beer

In Welsh:  Dw i 'n licio cwrw.

Instead of packing or preparing for Christmas or cleaning or doing laundry I'm drinking in bed listening to Welsh language clips.  This summer, after building a tiny house, downsizing and moving twice, I'm going to Wales to the fathers' home - a modest two story stone structure turned Esso station sometime before 1957 when my father took a trip there himself.

Following my  grandmother's handwritten directions he took a train from London to Swansea and a bus to the town.  In a letter back to her he described walking to the site of the old colliery in the rain along the narrow road.   From the doorway of a tiny cottage a familiar face looked back at him.   In this moment of mutual recognition he found a cousin who later drove him around.

They visited the ancestors' chapel and cemetery,  the family home turned gas station and the nearby woolen mill where he bought a blanket I still have.  They visited the River Towy where Reinalt and Douglas fish, in season and out!  They visited multiple pubs and talked of Welsh Nationalism and the "Welsh National Party."   My father told his mom: 

As a foreigner, I took no sides, but it seemed to me that they have so much to argue with, all the way from the true presentation of a unique culture, to the manifest exploitation of natural resources.  This, I might, explain, has to do with the establishment of a dam somewhere in Northern Wales, flooding certain sections (including villages) to provide hydroelectric power for England's Midlands.

He concluded the letter saying:

The land is beautiful and green and enchanting and I felt like home.  Not as a stranger at all, and that is strange. 

Manure War

New Mexico is the focus of NPR Morning Edition story about dairy operations.  It is enough to put you off your cheese, milk and butter.   The tone was optimistic on the potential for change but they note a new statewide PR campaign by the dairy industry.  The billboard looks a lot like a SunCal ad, with cows. (Photo: John Burnett/NPR)

A homemaker named Jana Hughes, who lives next to a dairy near Hobbs, N.M., recently formed a group called Citizens for Dairy Reform, was shown a photo of that billboard.

"False advertisement," Hughes says. "I mean, as someone who lives around dairies and knows dairies, that is not how it is. We're talking 2,000 cows confined in a small area, living in their own feces and urine."...

Among state regulators, there's no question who's to blame for fouling the groundwater in Dexter. The water table is shallow in this part of the state, and monitoring wells downgradient of the dairies all clearly show excess nitrates. The dairies are under state abatement plans to control manure runoff.

New Mexico's dairy industry denies the New Mexico Environment Department's figure that two-thirds of its farms are polluting groundwater. Robert Hagevoort, a dairy extension specialist and industry spokesman suggests critics are too quick to blame dairies.

"They may have a septic tank that's leaking. That is the number one reason why domestic wells in New Mexico are contaminated," Hagevoort says.

Coco Loco

That's what they call a chocolate martini at The Parkside Rotisserie and Bar in Providence.  It was a bit too Bailey's but the Long Island rotisserie duck special was exceptional. 

The Chef is a 1983 graduate of the culinary program at Rhode Island School of Design and he opened this Manhattan-style bistro in 1997.  It's in a nice old part of the center city full of 18th century buildings and renovated waterfronts (thus the name of another popular restaurant in the vicinity - New Rivers.)*  

Now I'm all loco about rotisserie.   I turned on the TV last night  and there was young Julia Childs trussing up a chicken with twine for the rotisserie.  The constant turning distributes the juice through the meat evenly, you see. 

Historian Marc Simmons says Indians trained their dogs to turn meat over open fires.  Big Dog could do it I'm certain.  Bon Appetit! 

*This may be the good part of former Mayor Buddy Cianci's legacy or it might have happened in spite of him. He got out of prison in 2007 and now has a radio show on WPRO Newstalk 630.  You can listen online, but I haven't yet.

Pomegranate Cocktail Saturday

Prolific pomegranates next door - neighborly offered and full of busting ripe fruit that makes a gorgeous fluorescent pink cocktail.  Minding the spiders that inhabit the tops of each pomegranate - adding a little seasonal touch -  the seeds get blended and sieved to get a shot glass of the juice.  Add juice of one lime, simple syrup, vodka (Hanger One raspberry), and a little St Germaine.  Mmmmm.

Rio Chama Wobbles

Say that fast a few times after five or six cocktails.

Albuquerque Journal Mark Oswald raises the question about why Gerald Peter's Rio Chama didn't get fingered in the Fierro vehicular homicide case - to which we give a big collective Duh.  

Fierro and his pal, Alfred Lovato — at the time of the crash, a State Police sergeant and a member of Gov. Bill Richardson's security detail — socialized at two places the night of the crash. The first was Rio Chama Steakhouse, the upscale political hangout near the Roundhouse owned by prominent businessman Gerald Peters, who's also been a big supporter of Richardson.

The second was the much more downscale and now-defunct WilLee's Blues Club. It was WilLee's that the state dinged for overserving after the fatal crash. A Department of Public Safety news release in April said its Special Investigations Division had "determined Mr. Fierro was overserved alcoholic beverages at WilLee's." Rio Chama was not cited.

Oswald then gets all first-persony:

But my reaction all along has been that there was no intentional cover-up to protect Rio Chama or Peters — a cover-up would have been carried out with more finesse.

Burn.  People with money and power don't get treated like the rest of us and they're not even being cool about it. 

I like this digestif:

(DPS spokesman) Olson said the Santa Fe Police Department, which investigated the Fierro crash, asked the Special Investigations Division not to interview anyone who'd been at the Rio Chama that night besides the single witness who drank with Fierro and Lovato. He didn't know why.

Apropos of nothing, I channel Mom here.  Doing the wrong thing never got less wrong by acting like you didn't know it was wrong.  Or by saying everybody else does it when they really don't or can't or wouldn't if they could because their mama taught 'em better.    :slap upside head:  

Big Corn

The health risks of sugar and its links to obesity are the subject of this San Francisco Chronicle story.  Enjoying my croissant stuffed with almond paste and a double spoon of the sweet stuff in my espresso, I note overuse of the word and that everything is sugar.  Cane sugar, beet sugar, honey, any form of fructose and sugars from complex carbohydrates - all of it is included in an overgeneralizing rambling indictment of sugar. 

But here is the gooey nougat: 

"The average American caloric intake has increased by about 150 to 300 (daily) calories in the last 30 years. That's huge. And it's coming from processed foods, half of it from sugared beverages."

The type of sugar or the kind of sugared beverage is not a focus.  Sodas with high fructose corn syrup are the same as tea with honey.   Sugar is sugar is sugar.  In fact, the word is used over 37 times by my lazy count.   The words high fructose corn syrup are used exactly twice.  Two.  Times.

I'll bet you a five pound bag of granulated that Big Corn had something to do with that.  The same guys produced a commercial for high fructose corn syrup awhile back.  The Corn Refiners Association looms looking over the shoulders of the American Heart Association representatives and this author, I'm wagering. 

Sweet.

Update:  Here's a post about HFCS lobbying from a health blog and a great anti-HRCS video here.

Perugia Kitchen

How I Became a Foodie. 

Her kitchen outside of Perugia was old, old, old.  But not her.   She still danced through her hillside groves and vineyards and to distant deserts leaving traces of her wild rich life in the rental apartment we repeatedly visited. 

On our last weekend in Italy the land lady  invited us to help rake olives from the trees on the steep hillside beneath her villa.  Afterwards she served us breakfast of fried fresh eggs from her hens and thin slices of delicious ham.  Toasted thick crusted bread was rubbed with garlic and drenched in olive oil - her olive oil. We sat in the sun drinking wine until it was time to go.  Then we trundled back to town and up the many steep steps carrying 10 liters of that oil between us. 

I've only recently finished the last of it.  No other olive oil measures up and I long to go back for more. 

(While packing I found the camera disk with my Italy photos that I thought I'd completely lost in the great MacCrash of 09.)

Live Blogging Retirement

There are killer cocktails made with Belle de Brillet pear cognac and Hanger One vodka infused with raspberries.  Such a cocktail can make TV a little more bearable in the time it takes to finish one. 

I persist in the illusion that sitting down to watch television is relaxing and entertaining.  But sadly, no.   I watched Oprah yesterday.  It was a little early for cocktail hour but the drink helped.   Mackenzie Phillips was discussing incest with her father, the late Jon Phillips of the Mamas and Papas.  She has written a book.  I could have gone the rest of my life not hearing about that but I would have seen it in Salon anyway.

Then there is this commercial for Marshalls and TJ Max played over and over.   It supposes an "intervention" on a woman who spends too much money on designer clothes.   Her friends jump her after a shopping spree telling her you can be beautiful and smart!"  Nice.  I suppose this makes me a freaking genius for shopping Goodwill.

UPDATE:  I know it isn't really live-blogging unless it is going on now.  Right now I'm going to get my trash bin out of the street and walk Big Dog.  No, I'm not making cocktails right now. But I may very well go thrift shopping soon.