Author Archives: Justin Thorp

The Full Italian Meal at Osteria Uvaspina in Montevarchi, Italy

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Before going to Italy, a couple of my best friends said that while I was in Italy we had to go to a restaurant and have the full Italian meal.   I needed to have all the courses.

So let’s review, what are all the courses in the full Italian meal? I’ve heard different versions but there’s Antipasto, Primo (Pasta), Secondo (Meat), Dolce (Dessert), Espresso, and then after dinner alcohol like limoncella.

Well, one night while in Montevarchi a city in Tuscany, we were looking for some food.  One of the local shop owners recommended Osteria Uvaspina.  We walked by.  It looked like a cute place.  Had a nice modern interior, which was different in ancient Montevarchi.  We decided to go in.

After a quick chat with the waitress, who also may have been the chef (it was a slow night), we decided… what the heck! Let’s get the tasting menu with all the all courses.

Let me walk you through what we had.   First, let me warn you.   This will be a food porn heavy blog post…

This was just a quick bite to start things off.  It’s a sardine in a cucumber foam.   Definitely don’t eat a lot of sardines but this was deliciousness.

We had two antipastos.  I don’t remember what this one was called exactly but it had ham, mozzarella, basil with some balsamic vinegar, in between two flaky pastry sheets.  It was delicious.

The second antipasto was  a carpaccio of horse meat.  Yep horse… like Wilber.  It’s the meat raw and cut really thin and pounded out.  I think there was basil under it.  Had some type of cheese shaved on it with a drizzle of olive oil.

The pasta course was house made tagliatelle with a pea puree and bacon.  It was one of my favorite courses.  Of course, it was a play off of the classic of peas & bacon.   And… as they say, a meal without pasta is a sin against god & man.

Next was some kind of pork medallion deliciousness with a puree of something that looks like mashed potatoes but it wasn’t .  It could have been polenta.

Next was dessert.  I had some sort of peach thing with a flaky cookie thing and peach juice.

Lauren had some sort of multen chocolate cake.   It oozed chocolate in the middle in a very sexy way.

By the time we were done, it hardly felt like we were there for 2 1/2 hours but we were.  You really got to see eating as something more than this utility that you do to give yourself nutrition.   Eating is an experience.  It’s an experience that you share with your friends & family.

The Little Sandwiches

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Little french bread sandwich with jamon

One of my favorite discoveries in Europe was these little French bread sandwiches that had either jamón or prosciutto on them.   They were typically just a couple of euros and absolutely delicious.

We first discovered them during a layover in the Madrid airport but we also saw them all over Germany and Italy.

When I had it in Madrid, it was around breakfast time and it seemed like what everyone was eating.   Why can’t we bring this to the USA?  Instead of the Egg McMuffin, why can’t McDonalds serve this?

Using CSA Kale for Kale Chips

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Kale Chips

As we talked about before, for the last few weeks, Lauren and I have been getting our CSA half shares.  We go to a local church, which hosts the CSA pickup in a fellowship hall, and pick up the fresh veggies.

It’s super interesting.  We totally end up getting a bunch of stuff where we have to figure out what exactly it is and how we’re going to use it.

While I’d heard of kale before, it’s definitely not anything that we had bought before.  Here we were with multiple bunches sitting before us.

A few of our friends had talked about kale chips before.  After a quick Google search, Lauren found a recipe and had a few batches ready to try. And yes, they were delicious.  They’re super light and airy but quite tasty.

I could totally see someone taking a bag of baked kale chips to a movie or sporting event.

What else would you make with kale?  What are fun things that you’ve gotten in your CSA?

(Photo by Joyosity)

New Belgium Brewing Co. & Fat Tire Comes to DC August 22

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Fat Tire Beer

On this blog, I’m really trying to have to make it more than the rehashing of news that’s already been posted elsewhere but… I’m so pumped about this news that I just had to share.

New Belgium Brewing Company and their fan favorite beer Fat Tire will start being available in Washington DC bars on top as soon as August 22nd.

According to Washington City Paper…

Following up on its announcement in January, New Belgium said Wednesday that the company has signed contractual agreements with 17 distributors in Maryland, Virginia and Washington. The Ft. Collins brewery will be working with D.C.’s Premium Distributors, which carries American macros Miller and Coors, as well as large craft brands including Sam Adams and Sierra Nevada. After picking up New Belgium, Premium now distributes six of the top seven U.S. breweries based on sales by volume.

You can expect to see Fat Tire Amber Ale, the 20-year-old brewing company’s flagship beer, Ranger IPA and the fall seasonal, Hoptober Ale available in 22-ounce bottles as soon as August 22.

I fell in love with New Belgium’s Fat Tire on one of my many trips to the West Coast and was pretty devastated when I found out that I couldn’t get it back home.

So who’s up for a Fat Tire Welcome to DC party on August 22nd?

(Photo by BetsyWeber)

 

Five Things Different About Food in Italy

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Montepulcino

Sorry for my absence.  Got married and whisked my bride off to a honeymoon of a week and a half in Italy.  It was AMAZING.  If you’ve never gotten lost in Central Italy, I’d highly recommend it.  Now, I’m back and I’m ready to write a lot.

Being that it was my first time in Italy (and really Europe), my eyes were opened to all kinds of funny differences in our food cultures.  Here are just a few that I noticed…

Espresso & pastries EVERYWHERE.

There’s good espresso and pastries everywhere.  You could go into a gas station on the side of the highway and they probably have an espresso machine on par with a lot of coffee shops in America.  Plus everywhere you go there are folks selling really good pastries.  Do people really eat these every day?  If so, how do they stay so thin?

Give me some of that orange Fanta

I never thought of Fanta orange soda as something that was that big of  a deal.   Their wacky commercials are the kind of thing that get seared into the back of your head but… Yeah, so Fanta is HUGE in Italy and it seemed like in Spain and Germany too where we had brief stops.   You could find it everywhere.  (Hmmm now I’m craving Fanta.)

No fountain soda

Speaking of soda… one thing that you didn’t find very much was fountain soda.   Just about everywhere you went you were served cans or bottles.  No refills for you!  Maybe this is one reason why obesity & diabetes are such a big issue in America. We’re all running around with our Super size me big gulp sodas.

Uncut Pizza

We stopped by a few pizza places and noticed that the pie wasn’t cut into slices.  Nothing too life changing about this.  It was just funny and didn’t match our expectations when the pizza was served to us.   This was actually kind of nice because you cut better control your portions based on how hungry you were.

Gelato… so much better and healthier than Ice cream

Seriously, why don’t we eat more gelato in the states?  It’s so much better than ice cream.  In Italy, I think we had gelato everyday.  It was glorious.  Like ice cream, it comes in all kinds of flavors.   And… it’s actually healthier than ice cream.  It contains less butterfat.

That’s all for now.  Will have more photos and updates soon.

Is The Web Making Cookbooks Unnecessary?

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One of my favorite things is go into a Barnes & Noble, wander into the cookbook section, and start filling my head with all different types of food, dishes, and recipes that I could make from various famous chefs around the world.   Every Christmas, I’ll put a handful of these books on my Christmas list with hopes that Santa maybe my friends or family will get me one.

Over the years, I’ve been able to collect a few great cookbooks but I’ve found that I spend less & less time actually looking at them when I want to cook something.   The Web is my go to place for recipes.

For example, we got some Bok Choy as part of our CSA last week.  We wanted to make something with it last night.  I don’t even know where I’d start with my cookbooks.  We just went straight to the Web.

With online recipes, I can organize them all together, no matter what site they’re on.  I’ve found visual bookmarking tool Pinterest to be incredibly useful for something like this.  With a physical cookbook, there’s no way to organize or get a really good sense of what you get across all the books that you have.  There’s no search.

A lot of celebrity chefs have made speciality iPhone or iPad apps which are supposed to help bridge this cookbook to Web divide.  But these apps are just as much of a pain.  I can’t search across them.  I have to remember what recipes are in what apps and remember to go back to them.   I bought the Mario Batali iPhone app long long ago and don’t think that I’ve touched it since.  The one app that’s proved useful is Michael Ruhlman’s Ratio App but then it’s more of a utility  for measuring ratios than a eCookbook.

The price is right with online recipes.  It’s free.  I can go to something like All Recipes or Cooking Light and get tons and tons of field tested recipes with reviews for no cost at all.  Or… I could go to a store and pay $20, $30, or even $45 for the dead tree edition that has a fraction of the recipes in it.

So what is a budding cookbook author to do?  Well, is it about seeing your name on a book in a book store or is it about distribution?  If you’re going for distribution… if your’e going for getting the most people to make your recipe, I’d imagine the Web is the best avenue.   If I was someone making a cookbook, I’d put the recipe online and then sell access to some kind of premium video content that showed step by step  how to make something.

Gwyneth Paltrow’s cookbook is the most notable one of recent to have launched. I wonder what her  expectations are.  How do you differentiate and move units?

What do you think?

Impressions of Shake Shack DC

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Lauren and I had some errands to run in NW DC on Sunday.  Around 11, we were starting to get hungry and were trying to figure out what to do for lunch.   We weren’t horribly far from Dupont Circle so we thought it’d be fun to check out Shake Shack, which has JUST opened up in DC.

A lot of my NYC friends rave about how great the burgers are, so much so that they wait in line for sometimes an hour plus just to get a burger or a shake.  Plus with all the hubbub that it’s been getting on the area food blogs, figured we’d have to see if it lives up to the hype.

In short, it was a darn good burger but it didn’t change my life.  With all the hype that it’s been getting, it was really excepting for it to redefine the way that I understand the American cheeseburger.  When it actuality, it was just a damn good burger.  I don’t think it’s worth waiting in line for more than 15 minutes.

We were pretty stoked because when we got there today the line was maybe 5 or 6 people.  It probably helped that we were there around 11:30 and it was Sunday.

We both got the Shack burgers.  We split some cheese fries.  She got the chocolate milk shake and I got the red velvet custard.  It was all SUPER delicious.  I like that their fries are the crinkle cut fries.  I like fries that have some heft to them.

It’ll be interested to see how Shake Shack fairs in the long-term.  Have you been there?  What do you think?

Also… are heading towards a burger bubble in Washington DC?  It seems like we have SOOOOO many specialty burger places in Washington, DC.

In DC, Five Guys is everywhere.   Spike Mendelson has Good Stuff Eatery.  BGR is starting to grow in popularity.   Didn’t I hear that Bobby Flay was opening a burger place in DC sometime soon?  When is it just too much for the market to bare?  Then again I didn’t think that Georgetown could support 3 different high-end cupcake shops and yet it does.

Well, till the next blog post.  Toodles…

(Photo by Scaredy kat)

Coffee & How It’s Becoming Something Bigger Than Just a Source of Caffeine

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There’s a trend that I’ve noticed over the last couple of years.  As a culture, the way that we related to coffee is changing.  It’s slowly no longer just a source of caffeine in the morning.

Coffee is becoming more like wine or beer.  People are recognizing that there are different coffee beans that come from different parts of the world that taste differently and invoke different characteristics.  There are also different brewing techniques that also change your coffee experience.

One example is from last weekend, Lauren and I stopped by Starbucks on Capitol Hill, Washington, DC.   This is one of the first Starbucks in the area to be sporting one of their Clover Coffee Machines.   The Clover is one of the $11k coffee machines, whose company was recently acquired by Starbucks.

The Clover is special because it allows you to set all the variables that you have when brewing coffee.  Each coffee has different ideal temperatures and what not.  This machine allows you to dial into a coffee’s specific characteristics.

It’d be fun to sit down with a few different types of coffee all brewed on the Clover and see if you can more easily start to pick out how they’re different.  They’re slowly rolling these out to more and more stores.  If you love coffee, its definitely something worth keeping an eye out for.

BTW – there’s a great profile of the Clover Coffee Machines and their story in Wired Magazine that I’d HIGHLY recommend reading.  It’s pretty interesting.

Another neat and helpful trend as you continue on your coffee journey is coffee places offering multiple types of beans that you can get for your coffee.   At my favorite coffee shop, Peregrine Espresso, they offer a coffee menu, similar to the way that a beer bar would offer you a tap list.  Once you make your selection, your coffee is individually brewed for you.

Just like you’d get a wine tasting at a wine bar, lots of coffee places in DC offer the equivalent for coffee.  It’s called a cupping.  If you live in DC, Peregrine was doing them for a while with Hill’s Kitchen but I’m not sure if they do them any more.  Plus, Chinatown Coffee did them from time to time.

Once I was at Chinatown Coffee for a cupping and they were doing tastings of a particularly sought after coffee, Hacienda La Esmeralda.  I think I ended up paying $18 for a half a pound of beans but dang it was delicious.  It was a coffee where you could especially tell the differences in what you were tasting.

And with all this, we haven’t talked about anything except drip coffee.  With latte’s and such, it’s neat how baristas are able to turn drinking coffee into an experience by painting me a beautiful picture with the mixture of steamed milk & espresso.  Don’t believe, me?  Check out the tumblr blog: Art in my Coffee.

With all of this, don’t get me wrong.  Sometime’s its nice to not have to think about your coffee.  When it’s 6am and I need to get up, I just want something that’s going to inject caffeine as quickly into my blood stream as I possibly can.

I guess what I’m saying is that when I’m in the mood, it’s fun to learn more about what this little bean can offer me.

(Photo by Jennie Faber)

Go Find Magnum Ice Cream Bars.

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Saw a movie with Lauren last night. During the commercials before the movie, there was an ad for Magnum Ice Cream bars.

Lauren told me about how she had had Magnum bars when she traveled abroad, that they were amazing, and had recently come to the United States.

So… We went the store and sought them out. It was just our luck.  Harris Teeter just started stocking them. They were $4.99 for 3 bars which is kind of expensive but it was a special treat.

We ended up getting the double caramel bars. They were super rich and oh oh so good.

These are definitely not your everyday ice cream bar. When you’re done eating it, you feel kind of guilty.

Would be interesting to see how the bars compare to other high-end chocolate bars like Dove or Haagen Dazs.

Have you had them? What do you think?

Is it me or does the summer make ice cream just always sound good?

(Photo by Like_The_Grand_Canyon.)

Drink More Bubbly!

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It’s such a shame that people don’t drink more sparking wine.   It tastes so good yet it’s relegated to only being consumed on New Year’s Eve.

Today, I espouse a philosophy that I learned from a wine professor that I had in college.  Drink sparkling wine often.  Use it as an opportunity to celebrate something that recently happened in your life.  We are so very blessed.  We have so much to be thankful for.

The next time you have a dinner party, bring a bottle of bubbly and take 5 mins to go around the table and talk about something awesome that’s happened during the week.