HistoricOmaha

This is the first post in a new category: Food & Wine. Look for a new post every Friday. I will use this to share recipes, restaurant reviews, food snob stories, wine tasting events, wine recommendations, and more.

I was inspired to write about food & wine by a recent conversation with my wife. She concluded that we are “food snobs.” By that she meant that we enjoy cooking and eating, we are adventurous, we often cook from scratch, and we avoid prepared foods.

I am guessing that a lot of Dundee residents are also “food snobs.” How do you know if you are? Here are some of the criteria:

• You eat bologna less than once a year.
• You consume more red wine than soda.
• You would rather drink water than White Zinfendel.
• You prefer microbrew beers to Bud, Miller, or Coors.
• You often buy wine by the case.
• You avoid recipes whose main ingrediant is a can of Cream of _______ Soup.
• You never prepare Hamburger Helper (aka Vomit Helper).
• You cook with stainless steel All Clad pans.
• You have a pot rack in the kitchen.
• You keep multiple olive oils and vinegars on hand for different uses. And you can tell the difference.
• You prefer (gruyere, brie, gouda, …) to (velveeta, american, cheez whiz, …).
• You know the personalities on the Food Network.
• Your children eat what you eat. They enjoy hummus, pesto, asparagus, salmon, …

Food snobs of Dundee & beyond, unite!

Food: Cook’s Illustrated and America’s Test Kitchen

Last week, the Omaha World Herald ran a review of the new book Cooking at Home With America’s Test Kitchen. This got me thinking.

One of our favorite cooking resources is Cook’s Illustrated magazine. The premise of the magazine is the authors try several versions and variations of a recipe to come up with the best recipe. They will vary the ingredients, the amounts, cooking temperature, cooking time, etc. The write up the experimentation process and provide the best recipe. This gives you tremendous confidence that the recipe will work when you try it at home. You also learn a lot about ingredients, cooking methods, and the chemistry of cooking. The magazine also reviews products and cooking equipment. The magazine has no advertising.

The magazine editor also produces a show on PBS called America’s Test Kitchen. The show follows the same format: experimenting to find the best way to prepare a recipe. [Find the NETV broadcast schedule here.] Our new favorite cookbook is Best Recipes. Every recipe we have made has turned out great. Here you can find the other books by the editors of Cook’s Illustrated.

Wine

I think I should give you a disclaimer about the wine section. I am no wine expert & am learning new things all the time. My main qualification is that I drink a lot of it: my wife and I finish a bottle about every other night. The wine we drink is mainly in the $5 - $10 range. I won’t be waxing eloquent over a $150 bottle of wine; my tastes are much more everyday.

My first wine recommendation is 47 Pound Rooster. This is a great wine label for under $10. Most recently we had the Pinot Noir. WineLoversPage has a short article about Pinot Noir and recommends it. A couple of years ago, my mother-in-law had a blind wine tasting of merlots. The 47 Pound Rooster Merlot was the clear winner. Buy it, drink it, enjoy it.

UPDATE: My wife referred me to Confessions of a Food Snob by Sarah Pomish.

These symptoms vary from one afflicted individual to another, however, some common symptoms include an aversion to any and all of the following (with apologies to a few members of my immediate family):

• Iceberg lettuce
• Margarine, “light” butter, I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter, “spray butter,” or any derivation thereof
• Garlic salt
• Parmesan “cheese” in a green can
• Mashed potatoes from a box
• Pasteurized, processed “cheese food”
• Fruit cocktail (it is barely fruit, and definitely not a cocktail)
• Any “recipe” that calls for canned cream of mushroom soup and/or French fried onions
• Any “salad” whose primary ingredients include marshmallows and/or Jell-O

I also have issues with Cool Whip, Miracle Whip, any salad dressing made by Kraft or Wish-Bone, and pre-packaged lunchmeat. (Then there’s white zinfandel “wine” and “light” beer … but we can save those for the “beverage snob” discussion.)