melkor

Copper pots/lids can be cleaned easily by soaking them in vinegar. You can make the burning feeling from hot peppers on your hands go away by dipping your fingers in lemon juice. Use the garden hose to fill the water pan in your webber bullet. Bamix makes the best stick blender on the planet. Roast your own coffee, any idiot can roast coffee.

steak + fire = yum

My current favorite place to eat (aside from tfl) is the martini house in St Helena, Terra is also outstanding. ZuZu is good, and if your staying down valley in the city of Napa it's likely to be close to your hotel. For your day of wine tasting/tours I'd agree with russ on a large winery tour for the basics, St Supery is nice for that since they have an informative tour without being as packed full of tourists as mondavi/beringer/etc are. I'd stop there in the morning before lunch, continue up 29 until you get to St Helena, either have lunch at taylors or pick up picnic supplies at Dean and Deluca and head up the hill to Pride for a picnic and some of their wine (the viogner is seriously good) or just a tasting. After lunch and a visit to Pride come back down into the valley, go across to the silverado trail and do the patio tasting at Phelps. The wine, the view, and the people at phelps are all great. You'll need to call and get reservations for Pride and for Joseph Phelps, and it never hurts to call ahead at St Supery, PM me if you need the numbers.

If you can give us a little more info it would make it a lot easier to provide recomendations. Are you driving up the same day or are you staying in the valley the night before? Do you need ideas for where to have lunch?

Lunch is in the oven now, the leftover turkey from dinner the other night will be a pot pie in a few more minutes.

They do smell pretty good when they are roasting. Just don't bother eating them.

If they were a pain in the ass but the end result tasted good that would be one thing, but they have very little flavor and their texture is nasty. You might as well throw some gummybears in your stuffing, that'll give you a similar result without all the shelling and peeling.

You could do what I've done in the past, leave them in a plastic bag in the fridge, wait for them to get absolutely gross looking and throw them out. If you do use them for thanksgiving they are a total pain in the ass to shell, but at least they look like tiny little brains when you've got them out of the shells.

It's hard to believe that two buck chuck is significantly worse than Napa Gamay.

I've had no problem finding excellent german wines here in CA, I buy most of them at Premier Cru. I've been able to find JJ Prum, Muller Catoir, Dr Loosen, Dr Thanisch, Maximin Grunhauser, Schloss Saarstein, Carl Loewen, Selbach Oster, and a few others.

Last years thanksgiving turkey we spatchcocked, it worked well, but I don't think we'll do that again this year. So far the best turkey we've made has been a whole bird, brined, with herb/garlic/butter paste spread under the skin and on the inside of the cavity, smoked for around an hour over hickory at 250*F then roasted in a 400 degree oven for another few hours in a roasting pan lined with carrots/celery/onions.

In a large drawer with labels on the tops of each jar.

Their claim is supported by countless industry experts, visit any winery with too much money on their hands - they are pouring their wines into Riedel glasses, none of them are duct-taping magnets to the bottles and waving incense around.

I own Riedel (Vinum and Vinum Extreme), Spiegelau (Authentis and Vino Grande), Schott (distributed by Onida in the US), as well as dozens of different shaped glasses from tasting rooms around the valley and restaurant supply stores. If anyone is interested in doing a wine glass comparison tasting let me know, I've done several in the past and they have always had consistent results - people prefer the Riedel stems over the others. More disturbing to me, since it means I need to buy more glasses, is the fact that almost everyone is able to identify the correct Riedel glass for each wine. For example if I pour a shiraz into a chianti glass, a bordeaux glass and a syrah glass, most everyone selects the syrah glass independently (without being told the wine or which glass is recommended for which wine).

What distributors are you buying from? Do they have a catalog online?

It is if you call it the house sparkling wine Yep, I did mean Qba.

I took a look at your menu, I'm assuming you want the wine list to be reasonably priced so people will be comfortable buying wine without trippling the cost of their meal. Here's what I'd do Whites Col Vetoraz Brut (Italy - prosecco - $15 retail) - $30 bottleDr Loosen QmP Riesling (Germany ~10 retail) - $20 bottleKim Crawford Sauvignon Blanc (New Zealand - $15 retail) - 30 bottleTrimbach Gewurztraminer (Alsace France - $15) - $30 bottleSome nasty chard for cheap, any Mondavi is likely to sell well Reds Familia Cassone Malbec (Argentina ~ $13 retail) - $24 bottlePhelps Pastiche Red (California ~ 13 retail) - $24 bottlePenfolds Shiraz/Cabernet Rawsons Retreat (Australia - $8 retail) - $20 bottleQuivera Cuveee Zinfandel Blend (California - $14 retail) - $28 bottleSome Pinot, (I'm not a big fan, don't have a bunch of ideas)Same for Merlot, Mondavi or some such would workNotes: Use Zardetto Prosecco brut if you can't get Col Vetoraz (its also a few bucks cheaper) Terrazas Malbec would be my backup plan for the Cassone, which you may have trouble finding. I'd serve the sparkler, the gewurz, and the chard by the glass and the malbec, zin, and merlot for the reds by the glass.

The easiest thing to remember is to put your reds in the fridge for 20 minutes before serving, and take the whites out of the fridge for 20 minutes before serving.

It's much easier to build a bong with a squash than with a book.

Actually, I don't. Every crackpot doesn't deserve the ability to waste the time of professionals. But as long as people are interested and willing to give this an objective test, I'm interested in the results. I think we can expand on this test to make better use of our tasters time, we should address all the accessible crackpot wine solutions at once. Two regularly mocked solutions to making a tight wine more drinkable are easy enough to test. One is to microwave a glass of wine for a few seconds, and the other is to toss a glass in a blender for a few seconds to aerate it. Who knows – the blender thing seems more likely to work than a magnet.

I'd make coq au vin

If it does indeed get more tannic then maybe we can use it to revive wine which is over the hill. Think of the possibilities! That case of 1985 nouveau you've got in the cellar could be drinking like the day it was bottled!

I think no-one has mentioned Barneys because Barneys burgers aren't very good The best burger I've had at barneys was drowned in bbq sauce. They do make good shakes though - and their curly frys are pretty good also. Your better off going up the road a few blocks and getting some beef from ver brugga and making your burgers at home. In summary: coffee milkshake - yes, burgers - no.

One can of skipjack tuna in oil, one can of skipjack in water - drain both and toss in a bowl. Add a minced shallot, a minced garlic clove, a bit of mustard, a bit of mayo, some dill, lemon juice, salt and pepper. Mix and serve on slices of toasted sourdough.

You'll need to put some sort of non-stick mat on top of the glass board for the wooden board not to slide around.