Monthly Archives: February 2011

Food Gal Giveaway — BlackboardEats Memberships

Your chance to win a membership to access dining deals. (Image courtesy of BlackboardEats)

When perusing restaurant reviews, do you find yourself smacking your lips, eager to try the dishes described in such tantalizing detail?

Now, BlackboardEats makes it not only easy to do so, but friendlier on the wallet, too.

The new Web site and e-newsletter features restaurant reviews written by professionals, including the ever-popular Marcia Gagliardi at Tablehopper. Reviewers pay for their meals; they are not comped by restaurants.

Each review sent to subscribers via email is accompanied by a promotional offer such as 30 percent off your tab or a $30 prix fixe meal. When you see an offer that tempts, you have 24 hours to log into the site to receive a special passcode to access that specific offer. Once you do, you have 30 days to use it at the specific restaurant.

Recent restaurants featured include Etoile at Domain Chandon in Yountville, SPQR in San Francisco, and Baker & Banker in San Francisco.

The Food Gal will be giving away three annual memberships (valued at $20 each) to BlackboardEats so that you can check out the deals yourself.

Contest: Because BlackboardEats operates right now only in San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York City, entries should be limited to those who live in those areas. Enter now through midnight PST Feb. 19. The three winners will be announced on Feb. 21.

How to win?

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Gingery Sips

Three new ginger ales by former Bay Area chef, Bruce Cost.

Long-time Bay Area foodies probably remember the addicting fresh ginger ale served at the now-shuttered restaurants, Monsoon in San Francisco, Ginger Island in Berkeley and Ginger Club in Palo Alto.

Now, Bruce Cost, the chef and proprietor of those restaurants, has finally bottled that fizzy goodness. His “Fresh Ginger, Ginger Ale by Bruce Cost” says it all. The soda is made with cane sugar and fresh, whole ginger. In fact, you can see bits of actual ginger root floating in the soda, which is left unfiltered.

Cost, who went on to start the Big Bowl and Wow Bao restaurants in Chicago, brews and bottles the ginger ale in Brooklyn.

The ginger ale comes in three varieties: “Original,” “Pomegranate with Hibiscus,” and “Jasmine Green Tea.” A 12-ounce bottle has 160 calories.

The "Original'' with lovely bits of ginger floating in it.

The “Origiinal” has nice heat with balanced sweetness. There’s a real purity of ginger flavor here. The “Pomegrantate with Hibiscus” has the most subtle ginger flavor of the three varieties. It’s a beautiful ruby color, too. My favorite was the “Jasmine Green Tea,” which is infused with whole leaf green jasmine tea from Taiwan. The warm spiciness of the ginger is a wonderful match for the floral, slightly tannic notes. It’s a memorable sip, indeed.

It’s now being served at restaurants such as the Slanted Door in San Francisco, and is available for about $2 per 12-ounce bottle at select Bay Area Whole Foods, Bi-Rite Market in San Francisco, Rainbow Grocery in San Francisco, and the Pasta Shop in Oakland and Berkeley, where I bought a bottle of each to try recently.

Another refreshing ginger beverage is Fentiman’s Ginger Beer. Made with ginger root extract, it has a more medicinal taste than the Bruce Cost beverage, as well as a faint citrus note.

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Fermenting a New Approach to Sauerkraut

 Kathryn Lukas, who wants to change the way you think of sauerkraut.

As a young girl, Kathryn Lukas remembers her Irish grandfather serving her hot dogs piled high with sauerkraut, just the way he liked it. And each time, she would push the shreds of pungent, fermented cabbage off to the side, trying hard not to make a face.

She may not have been a kraut fan then. But now, with more than 25 years in the restaurant industry, Lukas has grown into a kraut evangelist, bent on a mission to change the perception most of us have of the age-old condiment.

In 2008 in downtown Santa Cruz, she started her own business, Farmhouse Culture, which specializes in artisan contemporary kraut — made with local, organic and sustainable ingredients in intriguing, seasonal flavors such as Smoked Jalapeno, Apple Fennel, and Horseradish Leek.

Her raw, uncooked sauerkrauts can be found at nine Bay Area farmers markets, as well as local retail stores such as select Whole Foods, where they sell for about $7 for a 1-pound jar. For those outside the Bay Area, you’ll be glad to know that you also can buy the krauts on Foodzie.

Horseradish Leek sauerkraut.

Lukas knows sauerkraut may not be an easy sell to some palates, but she’s been pleasantly surprised by all the old-timers who come up to her to tell her they remember their grandparents making kraut or by the college students who have become regular customers at her farmers market stands after developing a new-found addiction to the stuff.

“I can’t tell you how many times a day people walk by our farmers market stands and say, ‘Sauerkraut? Ewwww…,’ ” Lukas says. “We talk them into trying a taste. I’d say 75 percent get converted. They tell us they hated sauerkraut their whole lives, but love ours.”

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Fancying a Fancy Cookie

Homemade cookies that looked like they came from a fancy bakery.

You will be after getting a gander at these beauties.

But trust me, they only look fancy as if they came fresh from some chic bakery, where you must have paid a fortune for them.

They’re actually quite easy to make in your home kitchen.

“Walnut Acorn Cookies” is from the new “The Gourmet Cookie Book” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), of which I recently received a review copy. The wonderful book spotlights the best cookie recipe of each year, spanning from 1941 through 2009. for a total of 68 recipes in all.

This particular recipe hails from the December 2000 issue of the new defunct magazine. These buttery cookies with a tender, crumbly texture from finely chopped walnuts in the dough, are formed into an acorn-like shape.

Decorate them with just finely chopped walnuts, if you like.

Although the recipe says it makes 4 dozen cookies, I found it made more like 2 1/2 dozen.

Once baked and cooled, one end of each cookie is dipped into melted chocolate, then finely chopped walnuts for a beautiful presentation. Take care when dipping the cookies; a gentle hand is needed or else they may break.

Instead of walnuts for a few of the cookies, I decorated them instead with nifty Callebaut Pearls, which come in both dark chocolate and white chocolate. These are small, crunchy spheres that resemble individual Rice Krispies coated in chocolate.  Use them to decorate cakes, cupcakes, cookies and donuts.  Though, truth be told, they’re pretty darn tasty just eaten by the handful straight from the bag.

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Chocolate on the Half Shell?

A white chocolate truffle infused with oysters. I kid you not.

It’s not every box of chocolates that comes bearing a label that reads: Contains milk, soy, pistachios, shellfish.

Uh, say what?

Leave it to Vosges, the cutting-edge chocolatier of Chicago, to come up with a truffle made with cream that’s been infused with Kumamoto oysters.

After all, this is the same chocolate-maker that’s found a way to incorporate bacon, Hungarian paprika, dried Kalamata olives, and Taleggio cheese into confections in the past.

And what could be more perfect for Valentine’s Day than a truffle that is flavored with what’s considered one of the most potent aphrodisiacs around?

Recently, I had a chance to try a sample.

A truffle rolled in dried rose petals.

I’ll use my patented scale of 1 to 10 lip-smackers, with 1 being the “Bleh, save your money” far end of the spectrum; 5 being the “I’m not sure I’d buy it, but if it was just there, I might nibble some” middle-of-the-road response; and 10 being the “My gawd, I could die now and never be happier, because this is the best thing I’ve ever put in my mouth” supreme ranking.

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