How to Become a Beer Snob

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And proud of it!

When I was little, my dad drank Busch. He called it his “skunk juice,” which made six-year-old me giggle, because it did, indeed, smell awful. This is also the man who once told me he got drunk on orange juice, a claim I shared with my third grade teacher — her expression was concerned in a way I didn’t understand till many years later. By the time I had my first (and only) can of Busch, I accepted it with a smile I hoped was gracious and sipped on it as convincingly as I could. How did this happen to me? And more importantly, how can you, too, become a beer snob?

One) Make your early experiences with skunky beer as unpleasant as possible. Drink as many green bottles of Rolling Rock or Heineken as you can in a tiny, stinky dorm room with a bunch of other nerds who haven’t yet learned how to drink. You’ll never drink beer in green bottles again.

Two) Set your own low standards slightly higher than others’. When you go out to bars order Killian’s or Labatt, and scoff quietly at your compatriots buying pitchers of Bud and shots with names like “buttery nipple.” Continue reading →

Community News: You Don’t Bring Me Bananas Anymore

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Recently, our friend Eve mentioned in an offhand way that the banana as we know it is dying out. In addition to a wave of banana grief that washed over me, I also felt a small measure of relief; this was one of those news stories that I had heard a few years ago but from which I retained almost none of the scientific detail, and I had begun to think that I dreamed it. But no! The banana horror story is real, and I have collected some of its finer points here.

Black Sigatoka

Yikes! Black Sigatoka! (courtesy of APSnet)

The tragic end of the banana was built into its genes from almost the very beginning, or at least its lucrative economic beginning. In a quest to get more uniform, shippable and still edible fruit, the banana plant was made into a seedless version of its formerly wild self. That means that they are sterile and have to be grafted onto stems by human hands in order to survive. And the variety of bananas was drastically reduced as tropical nations made room for whole plantations of the anointed breed favored by the banana companies, called the Gros Michel.

But raising an army of sterile mutants has its drawbacks. For instance, they can’t naturally evolve to ward off disease, which is exactly what happened to the Gros Michel in the 1960s when it was wiped out by a fungus called Panama disease. This, of course, sent banana scions scurrying for a replacement, and they found a lesser but viable alternative in the Cavendish banana, the variety that currently graces your supermarket shelves. But—egad!—banana lightning does strike twice, and now the Cavendish is being ravaged by a fungus called Black Sigatoka (I am not making these names up, I swear). No adequate fungicide has been found. The prognosis for the Cavendish is bleak. Continue reading →

Lunch at the End of the Line: Love Is Grand in Inwood

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szechuan tofuWe aspire to honesty on this blog, dear readers, so I might as well reveal that I landed at the northern end of the A line, at 207th Street in Inwood, a touch hungover and in a mood that was verging on surly. Manhattan, with its gritted teeth and fake-it-‘til-you-make-it attitude, is usually a marvelous place for a hangover, so I was taken unawares by the blinding good cheer of Inwood. I wandered the streets in a daze, nursing a cup of coffee and trying to take it all in. Birds sang. Trees blew in the breeze. Even the streets themselves had a jaunty roll to them. Outside a mental health facility, the residents parked their wheelchairs and turned their palms and faces to the sun, slight smiles pulling at the corners of their lips. Was I still in New York?

On 207th, street vendors hawked their goods, but rather than the large established halal and pretzel carts of midtown, it looked like someone’s grandfather had wheeled his aging charcoal grill onto the sidewalk and decided to cook you a hot dog. One couple had piled a stolen shopping cart with plastic containers of fruit salad and was doing a brisk business.

There were plenty of restaurants here to choose from, most of them Mexican and Dominican, but I was drawn to a Chinese restaurant called Amy’s, where a man and woman about my age were poring over a menu hanging in the window. They paused every so often to happily embrace, almost sloshing coffee onto each other in their enthusiasm.

“Do you know this place?” I asked.

“No,” the woman answered, gracing me with a beatific smile. “But doesn’t it look amazing?” Continue reading →

Baggin’ It: A Lunch-Packing Challenge

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brownbagWith fall in full effect, it’s the perfect time for some work/school resolutions like “I will never again eat from that taco truck that gives me indigestion,” or “I will rise above the vending machines in the school cafeteria.” But even true food enthusiasts might be confounded by how to pack a punch with a packed lunch.

My mom hated packing my lunch when I was a kid. It wasn’t that she disliked feeding us—quite the contrary, actually—but the sameness of the old sandwich/apple/cookie routine bored her. She once schemed that if she packed a thermos of boiling soup in my brother’s lunchbox that it would slowly cook a hot dog that she nestled next to it. Unfortunately, the thermos was too well insulated and my brother ended up with molten soup and a still-chill dog.

Though the experiment failed, I continue to admire the innovative spirit involved in that endeavor, and we’ve decided to celebrate it here with a little contest. We’re calling on our readers to reveal their best lunch-packing secrets. How do you build a killer sandwich? How do you liven up those leftovers? How do you tell your kid “I love you” with only a banana and a toothpick to work with?

The readers with the best brown bag tips will not only achieve instant fame by having their ideas appear here on the blog, but will also win a special PitchKnives prize! Yes! So send your stories to submissions@pitchknives.com by next Wednesday, October 3. As always, creativity and taste both matter, so go ahead…make our lunch.

Single Ladies: There is a Recipe at the End of This Post

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Single ladies eat

Click to see how much Beyonce loves Tanya's tahini tacos.

I’m a single lady. I live in a small New York apartment with a kitchen the size of a deluxe port-a-potty. I have to move furniture to use the oven. I don’t really cook so much as get in, prep something, and get out. Recently my diet’s been mostly raw, and that’s mostly due to laziness. Spend hours sweating over a roast of some kind, only to watch it decompose next to the dwindling six-pack in my fridge? Not so much. But chop fruit and vegetables? Sure, I’ll chop shit all day long. I even have one of those fancy knives with the air pockets, and a miniature cutting board that’s just the right size for my 8×10” counter. You wouldn’t think I make very good-tasting meals using this method, and you’re usually right. But sometimes I manage to surprise myself. The key to my success lies in employing the same approach I’ve used for online dating: keep expectations low and an alcoholic beverage on hand, and if things go sour, eat quickly.

I’ll often look in my fridge and wonder what can be done with what’s there. The aptly named myfridgefood.com is good for helping with that. But the other day I made something delicious on my own that I’d like to share with you if I haven’t already scared you off. It’s light and simple and can be put together in the amount of time it takes to call your mother and complain about your dating life. (How many chick lit clichés can I inject into a single post?) Continue reading →

A Book Fest Reading with Debut Lit: A Cambodian Thanksgiving

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Last night, Shannon and I had the privilege of co-hosting a Brooklyn Book Fest Bookends event with Debut Lit, an organization that showcases writers whose first books have just been published.  Pacific Standard bar hosted, so beer and food were the themes.  Consequently, we broke out the following tale of our first makeshift Thanksgiving in Cambodia.

Special thanks to Rebekah Anderson, the energy behind Debut Lit, as well as the other readers: Greg Gerke, Austin LaGrone, Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan, Laren McClung, Ralph Sassone, and Hugh Sheehy.  It was a pleasure to hear what everyone brought to the table.

 

Suzie Homemaker

Shannon

I’ve never been particularly fond of Thanksgiving, and so it is Jason who begins inviting people over to give them a taste of the quintessentially American ritual. Some Khmer friends, some lonely American expats…who am I to complain? It isn’t until he comes home one day listing people I’ve never heard of (“The Norwegian girl just looked so sad,” he explains) that I do some tallying and realize that we’ve committed to cook for over twenty people with a two-burner stove and a single toaster oven.

In a panic, we hitch a ride to Psah Leu and while Jason scours the market for matching forks, I attempt to convey to the proprietors of a kitchen supply stall that I need a potato masher. Unfortunately, I have not yet learned the Khmer word for potato, but I try to compensate by making a series of vigorous mashing motions. The entire family (confused patriarch, earnest daughters, delighted baby) gathers around, wide-eyed, and we continue this game of charades until the eldest daughter gives me a pad of paper. When she looks at my sketch on the pad, her face clears with understanding, and she runs to the messy tower of supplies stuffed into the back of the stall. “At last!” I think, and then she comes back with a toilet plunger. Continue reading →

Rauchbier: the Vegetarian’s Bacon

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Ben, doubling up on the smokiness

“Are you one of those vegetarians that likes bacon?” I get this question a lot, and no, I am not, and I remind you that those “vegetarians” are not real. However, I do go a bit wobbly in the knees when a slice of smoked gouda is waved beneath my nose. (This does not happen nearly as often as I wish it did.) Smoke is delicious. Fires in the hearth, late summer bonfires, my fiancé’s breath… So it is no surprise that I find rauchbier, or smoke beer, delectable.

Rauchbier is a German style of beer created by drying green malts over an open fire of beech wood, imbuing them with a thick smokiness similar to what you find in smoked meats and cheeses. Beer Advocate reminds us not to confuse this with smoke beer, which uses peat smoked malt. The taste of rauchbier is bold and not for the faint of heart. It’s big and assertive, like you always wished you were. This is an acquired taste that demands commitment to each glass. It tastes like a beer hall with massive, hand-hewn benches. It tastes like the dark chairs and old books of your English professor’s den. And okay, maybe it tastes a little like bacon. Continue reading →

The Stillness before Second Crack: Adventures in Coffee Roasting

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coffee plant

Coffee is actually the seed of this fruit, not a bean at all...

I read recently that Honoré de Balzac took his coffee very seriously. He made his own special blend from three specific beans that could only be found in separate neighborhoods of Paris, necessitating a journey that took no less than half a day every time he needed to concoct a new batch. He eschewed common preparation methods in favor of the complex Chaptal-style coffeemaker, and during periods when he was actively writing, he lived on little more than fruit and coffee. Balzac said, of coffee’s influence, “Ideas swing into action like battalions in the Great Army on a battlefield…Memories enlist at the double…and flashes of inspiration join the skirmish; faces take form; the paper is soon covered in ink.”*

You might think that the attention Balzac paid to coffee sounds so extreme that it has the ring of fiction, that it can be easily dismissed as no more real than the obsessive attributes of his characters. At some point, I probably would have agreed with you. And then I started working at Solid State.

Ask anyone at the small IT firm and they will stridently claim that they are not coffee experts, merely hobbyists, but they will say it in the same breath as they deride the tobacco undertones to the most recent inferior cup they happened upon. Continue reading →

Dead Man Gnawing: Rock n Roll Dinner Demise II (1972)

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Last week I wrote about Duane Allman’s death and the lore surrounding the band’s subsequent album, Eat a Peach.  Now on to Mama Cass.

Long before I knew who Duane Allman was, I knew that Mama Cass died from choking on a ham sandwich.  I don’t know why I knew about Cass and not Duane, except maybe that my mother would have appreciated the Mamas and the Papas’ harmonies and have had no idea whatsoever of what to do with the Allman Brothers.  As I type this, though, I now recall a Scooby Doo episode with the Mamas and the Papas.  I never dug Scooby Doo that much, except for those celebrity guest stars.  Hello, Laurel and Hardy.  And didn’t Don Knotts and the Apple Dumpling Gang make an appearance?  Am I making this up?  Somebody help me out.

Anyway, word was that Cass choked to death on her sandwich in a London flat.  This word was passed because the doctor who pronounced her dead on the scene reported to The Daily Express, “She appeared to have been eating a ham sandwich and drinking a Coca-Cola while lying down – a very dangerous thing to do.”

Firstly, why is the combo of sandwich and soda dangerous?  The implication is that drinking, say, water would be better if lying down.  Is there a similarity here to the stone-cold fact that you should never mix carbonated beverages with Pop Rocks?” Continue reading →