I’m at sitting at the end of a long, elegantly attired communal table eating dinner with my fingers and drinking some very good Mumm champagne. What’s more, I am sitting in a Jewish delicatessen just north of Manhattan’s Lower East Side eating an assortment of shellfish dishes from oysters on the half shell and pickled shrimp to lobster salad and beet cured scallop. So trés treif! So deliciously decadent with all the slurping, sipping and licking of the fingers after each course without the structure of forks, knives and spoons. And so thankful the organizers gave us all hot towels to […]
Read more →With Thanksgiving season upon us, many tend to stress out over the elaborate meal about to be consumed – “Do I wet-brine or dry-brine the turkey? Do I brine the turkey at all? How big a turkey? What sides should I serve? What’s a Parsnip, and who named it that? In what grocery store aisle does one actually find those little fried onion pieces that get sprinkled over the green bean casserole? What exactly IS a green bean casserole? And then there’s the wine selection. The last thing one really needs to worry about when heading to town to buy […]
Read more →“There is a place in the middle of the wine-dark sea called Crete, a lovely, fruitful land… “ So wrote Homer in The Odyssey when tasked with describing the Mediterranean island that is home to a civilization that dates back longer than any other in Europe. And while it is unknown as to whether Homer, who was from the Island of Chios in the eastern Aegean, ever set foot on Crete, his description at least is accurate when linking the island with the words “fruitful” and “wine.” For Crete is indeed a fruitful place, with vast tracts of agricultural […]
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