Urban Honking

SLO Chai Cream Ale Our last run-in with a botanical infused beer wasn’t pretty, so it was with great skepticism and courage that we plucked this San Louis Obispo Chai Cream Ale off the shelf. One of us was on vacation up the Central Coast and it just seemed wrong not to sample the local […]

Oregon Blue In mapping the human genome, scientists have yet to uncover why humans like smoked foods so damn much. Smoked almonds, barbecue sauce, bacon bits. It’s primordial. We like fire. This partly explains why whenever one of us makes a trip to Northern California we have to buy a hunk of Rogue Creamery’s Oregon […]

This post is the first in an on-going series we’ll be doing on some of our favorite beermongers in the L.A. area. These stores include everything from a 100-year-old mom and pop grocer to a high-end wine and spirit purveyor and even a diamond-in-the-rough 7-11. They service distant zip codes (that we plan on exploring […]

Our first kitchen mentor, a bear of a man named Joe Parks who instructed us in the college mess hall, used to describe any sub par ingredient from the freezer saying ‘Not bad… for a frozen product.” It’s a mantra we’ll always remember. Consequently, this site has possibly never championed a frozen, dried, or freeze-dried […]

In Creole cuisine, Remoulade is the pride of the Po’Boy: a veritable catch-all sauce of ketchup, mayo, mustard, Louisiana Mirepoix, and spices. In France, the sauce is a bit more refined, and its classic accompaniment is celery root. The basic formula for a remoulade in both the motherland and southland milieu is: mayo, something pickled, […]

Leeks aren’t onions, but they’re in the onion family. Their tough-ass stocks are great for braising. After playing with leek rings, we’ve decided they’re great for frying too. Usually when we cook with much of the green part (further up the stock) we opt for methods that will help wilt it, here we tried to […]

Lagunitas Lucky 13 Slipping this beer into a pint glass sounded a lot like two-inch fingernails — painted precisely a deep crimson red — clicking on a car door. It felt like wind and someone nibbling our ears. Half a bottle got us buzzed like we can only imagine you get when removing miniscule black […]

The last of our posts about leprecon days long gone concerns the culinary treats made by Irelands finest livestock: cheeses. Most people’s minds stop at cheddar when thinking about any cheese from the U.K. and Ireland. Then again most people think the 600 different cheeses from France taste like Brie… These two gems came from […]

Some recipes take longer than others; this one lingered so long we started referring to it as “the beast.” The goal was to deconstruct the Irish car bomb — that lovably irresponsible drink special that says “I throw caution to the wind like a Mick throws a Molotov cocktail in a bobby’s face — and […]

A good Catholic son named Matthew wrote us last month asking for St. Patrick’s Day recipes. Mathew — we haven’t forsaken you, dude, we’re still working on it. But just in case, come tomorrow, someone tries to pinch our weblog for a lack of green, we’re digging up something from the archives: We call it […]