Accidental Hedonist

Wine is sexy. Cheese is sexy. After wine and cheese, maize is sort of a let down. No two ways about it. There are several reasons for this. First and foremost is the name. Corn, for the majority of us North Americans, actually refers to the fruit of any grain of a cereal. Corn is [...]

Here’s a news flash. Italy makes some kickin’ white wines. When I started my reading and research on Italy, I only knew of Chianti, the deep red wine that comes in the bottle with the straw base. I never knew the joys of Italian whites. Verdicchio is another lesson in the Italian Whites syllabus. Verdicchio [...]

Not a bad dish, and a nice way to finish the cheese topic. The walnuts are a little too dark, but it didn’t detract from the taste as the cheese sauce offset it nicely. Two pieces of trivia for this dish. 1) It’s the first one baked in my new oven. 2) The first non-salad [...]

Official Description:A triple-cream, washed-rind, fully-flavored cheese made from organic cow’s milk from the Straus Family Dairy. Aged six weeks and washed with a brine solution that promotes the growth of a bacteria that tints the rind a sunset red-orange, Red Hawk won Best-In-Show at the American Cheese Society’s Annual Conference in 2003. My own notes: [...]

I hesitate to call this even a feature, as I don’t believe it will be useful to anyone but myself. Regardless, regular readers of this site will soon see innocuous posts in which I try to describe what tastes I get when eating certain foods. There are two purposes of this: 1) To develop my [...]

For better enjoyment of your cheese: – Do not freeze your cheese. Do this once and you’ll understand why. – If you’re going to eat the cheese within a day or two, it can be left out at room temperature. However, if your going to have a bite on Monday and not return to it [...]

Welsh Rarebit sounds exotic, but it’s simply a cheese sauce on toast. I don’t mean “simply” as a negative connotation at all, as I’ve discovered that often the simplest recipes are the best. Welsh Rarebit gets its name quite literally from the words rare (meaning very lightly cooked) and bit (a small piece or portion). [...]

All of you regular readers know that I have issues with Kraft foods. The basis of my position is that they often dumb down food, place sales over even the slightest margin of quality, and label foods with descriptors that they are clearly not. Oh… and they are owned by a tobacco corporation. In the [...]

Hmmm…In reading the food timeline site, you’ll find a section that has always garnered my attention, even tho’ it’s one of the smaller entries on the site. It deals with “Official” state foods. For example…did you know that Tomato Juice is the official beverage of Ohio? Or that the Chocolate Chip cookie is the official [...]

The latest Seattlest post is up, in which I try to explain why Copper River Salmon isn’t the penultimate neccessarily the best salmon available.

Y’know those thin plastic gloves that deli workers where to prevent excessive bacterial transmission? Yeah, turns out they actually may increase the odds of bacterial transmission. From the article: It was suggested the apparent failure of gloves to reduce or prevent contamination was due to a tendency of food workers to wear the same pair [...]

If you’re interested in Supermarkets, and the hows and whys of their business, there is an absolute must read in this month’s Gourmet magazine that talks about Wal-Mart and their influence within the Food industry via their supermarket division. It’d be easy for me to slam Wal-Mart and their practices, but I’ll save that for [...]