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They've got good snack stuff... but they pale in comparison to Patel's over on 309 in Montgomeryville. Perhaps they're feeling out what sells well in their neighborhood... but for produce and frozen stuff, Patel's has them beat.

In the US "raw bar" usually means at the very least they have somebody who opens clams and oysters for an "on the half shell" presentation. Generally, don't expect much more.

The weather here has really not been conducive to drinking hot tea lately, but there is more to be said about these two teas... so I've decided to try them out iced. I went with the Nepal first... 3g of tea, 300ml water off the boil, 4 minutes, then poured into a pint glass filled with ice. This style changes the profile in interesting ways. The bitter astringency comes forward, presenting in a way a lot like walnut skins feel on the tongue. The fruity/malty balance then shifts very much toward the fruity side... the bitterness is a little too dominant in the cold presentation here... perhaps a bit less time in the next brew to see if that can be contained.

Getting ready to give the Yunnana brew now. The dry aroma rich and spicy with a little bit of a cocoa undertone. 2g to 300ml of water off the boil results in a rich malty aroma from the leaves, which are much more uniformly brown, rather than patchy like the Nepal tea. 3.5 minutes of steeping yields a continuing rich malty aroma and a heavy bodied brew. Flavor starts out with a vegetal edge that quickly mellows into a malty-sweetness. That is followed by a long rich aftertaste that I'm having trouble describing at the moment... (sourness from a recent glass of kefir is clinging to my palate and making picking out the tea's flavors difficult right now).

Coconut oil makes a great sub for the butter...

Have done a first brew of the Nepal tea and find it fascinating. 2g to 300ml of water off the boil for 3.5 minutes. Dry leaves have a fruity papery darjeeling nose and appearance. Wet the leaves gain a malty note, though look very darj style, with a melange of green and brown spots. The flavor is an interesting cross between the malty assam style and the dryer fruitier darj style. Very interesting. More later after another couple of brews.

The samples have arrived... Will start brewing in the next couple of days. Am quite interested to try the Nepal tea... that will be a new experience for me.

Smelling the food in front of you sort of happens passively to everybody with a working nose if the food is at all aromatic... sniffing is the more active verb here... are you asking if we sniff our food before consuming it? I don't.

For what it's worth, I'm still grinding the beans and using a Gaggia myself... the Nespresso my old friend swears by is still OK when I visit, but I'm still happier doing it myself when I'm at home.

Just make sure that your fear of "Fat" does not drive you into the arms of extra unexpected sugar. I'd much rather find myself with high cholesterol than diabetic. I'd imagine you would too.

Sounds like a call for: 3/4 oz Bourbon/Rye 3/4 oz Gran Marnier 3/4 oz sweet vermouth

Oh, please... cherry pits keep their cyanide well wrapped up in woody shell. If one were to swallow them, it is very unlikely that any of the poison would get out and do any harm. All this concern is like warning people against hiking because there is a chance they might cross paths with a rattlesnake.

Agreed, thayes1c! They're all a little different stylistically... some come across as pure sour, some are sweet and sour, e.g. Lindeman's fruit enhanced beers... Vichtenaar is sweet, though sour in an acetic way, unlike most other sour beers. Here in the Philadelphia market, we've got our own Monk's Cafe Flemish sour, custom brewed and imported for us... I think it came on the market during the time Rodenbach was unavailable during their ownership shake up when Palm took them over. Another fairly widely distributed one is Liefman's Goundenband, which is a classic Oud Bruin...

I throw frozen fruit in after the primary fermentation is done... counting on the time in the freezer and the booze in the beer to keep it from getting funky.

So? The guy has set himself up as an oracle. Harold McGee he is not. Indeed, my fantasy of a GE episode is AB pontificating away and McGee walking on set, backhanding him and telling him he is wrong, wrong, wrong and then explaining why. Sort of a riff on Woody Allen having Marshall McCluan (sp) step out of the crowd in Annie Hall to correct some pretentious know-it-all. And that...makes no sense. Agreed. He's not the oracle... content-wise he's the Reader's Digest of cookery information. He covers a broad range, hits the high points, leaves plenty of room for exploration beyond what he covers, though shows a lot of good tips and tricks. Style-wise, he built himself a great little world to explore the topics he covers, and it gave the show a fun personality.

There were significant errors, both factual and in technique. As examples easily pulled from the first 12 minutes: He demonstrates boiling the steeping grains, which are going to release lots of tannins and is not a good technique. In the hop intro where he says the only 2 hop additions are flavoring and aroma he completely ignores the bittering hop addition... maybe he's counting on the grain tannins for that... That said, he does a fine job for the most part, but there are vital details he just didn't communicate.

Yup... he was really wrong a lot on that one... It does make me wonder if his skill at quickly studying and assimilating info about a new subject and turning it into a show were as off on other subjects I don't know so well. That said, I still really enjoyed his show and will miss it. I hope his new "good" stuff is indeed good... but perhaps he really has jumped the proverbial shark and would be better left to fade away into the realm of reruns.

Keep trying them... maybe you'll find something that resonates... maybe not. Since you wander the world some, take a few with with you next time you're away and try them with the new location's water... water chemistry makes an amazing difference in how some teas behave. And sample broadly. Assam black teas are night and day different from any Japanese green... and even amongst those, there is an incredible breadth of flavor. Just because one sencha tasted of lawn clippings does not mean that you won't find completely different flavors in teas made just down the road. If you find a style you like, then go for some depth and experiment with the different variations that are made... A good start is to go into a well run tea shop and ask for an ounce or two of something that will blow your mind. Be prepared to pay. But it should give you an idea of what tea can be. For me, that moment was an ounce of Jade Oolong that cost me like $20... but wow... just wow.

OK. So the basis of his theory is just a guess? Is there any agreement amongst scientists that the fructose => liver fat deposits => insulin resistant cells chain of causation really exists? Or is this just one guy's crazy out-of-context theory that gets him news coverage? Seems the NYT has a reserve of "Will X kill you" stories built up, as they're also running one now asking Is Sitting a Lethal Activity?

Actually, one thing Taubes points out in the article is that from a nutritional standpoint, there's virtually no difference between sugar and high fructose corn syrup. The logic here seems to imply that we're uncritically accepting the risible assertion that sugars are toxic as a premise... from which the logic that a 55% fructose 45% glucose compound is equivalent to a 50% 50% compound. The same logic would support a statement that cyanide and strychnine "are effectively identical" in their lethal effects. 10% more of the problematic molecule in HFCS vs sugar seems to say they're not equivalent, and there is more problematic fructose in it than in cane sugar. I still read this article as a reason to avoid HFCS.

Interesting article... I'd be interested in reading more on the fructose=>liver fat=>insulin resistance hypothesis. Yet another reason to avoid the high fructose corn syrup... I also like the differentiation between "isocaloric" and "isometabolic" equivalences in dietary analysis. It has always been an intuition of mine that the energy expended cracking the energy out of food had to be considered.

Ugh. Was so looking forward to it, and had gotten a glimpse of the place under construction and it looked so promising. I hope things can get sorted out... but that foobooz thread makes things look dire.

Not exactly sure I understand this. I'm not suggesting that a privatly owned liquor store can't make a profit in Ridgway or Dushore, but to think the selection or service would be better than exists now I do doubt I'd still question whether there'd be a store there at all. Doing the math based on my understanding of what's been proposed, they expect to pull in $1.5 Billion from selling 750 licenses to operate liquor stores throughout the commonwealth. That comes out to $2M per license. I'd wager that there are large swaths of PA where the profits from liquor sales would have trouble getting a shop owner to breaking even after financing a $2M license and all the standard business overhead.

There are plenty of things to complain about with regard to the PLCB. BUT we've seen right here on eG's old PA booze thread that when the right guy is running it, it can do great work and provide great values. Not every chairman of the Board is a Jonathan Newman, however. The way things are set up, all of Pennsylvania's boozy eggs are in one basket, and when a chairman doesn't do a great job of making the system work, it starts to annoy everybody everywhere. If we go ahead and privatize, I hope it gets done right. I worry a bit about the far reaches of the state, as an unfettered market with an artificial cap on the number of retail outlets, as seems to be the current idea in the legislature, creates a huge economic incentive to cluster all of the outlets in the densely populated areas of the state, leaving the rural folks with long trips to potentially indifferently run stores that might be worse than what we've got today.

This rainy day inspired me to break out some black teas, and one worth a mention is the Keemun Special Grade I got from the Specialteas clearance sale. Smoky aroma when the bag is opened, with cocoa notes. Brewed with water fresh off the boil, it has a lovely rich body and carries through with a solid malty flavor with hints of smoke and cocoa. A really lovely Keemun! Perfect for a rainy afternoon.