Spring is in the air. . . sort of. . .

We have been having some beautiful sunny days here in Walla Walla (thanks to all our friends on the East Coast who are taking one for the team this year). And with those sunny days we are seeing our shelves fill back up once again. There is lots to tell so I'll just jump right in.

The newest edition of Culture Magazine arrived Thursday and I have to say, best issue yet! Really loaded with tons of great information, this really is a MUST for the cheese enthusiast.

The latest issue of Imbibe also just arrived and it too is jam packed with some great articles and reviews. If you haven't picked up either of these you need to, they are truly great publications by people who know and care.

We have several new cheeses that just arrived, the most important being BUFFALO MILK MOZZARELLA! Yes, I have brought it in early this year and we will continue to carry this year round as long as there is demand. I know many of you like making homemade pizzas and you have been asking so here you go. I do what I can for my peeps. Chimay Grand Cru and Biere cheese has arrived as well. For those of you not familiar with these come in and try them, they are fantastic and especially so with a great Belgian beer, more on that later. Fromager des Clarines is back too for those of you who have missed it. Abbey de Belloc is a beer washed, firm sheep's milk cheese that will renew your love of cheese. A beautiful pale ivory paste, with a delicate sweet flavour, almost makes you think it is cows milk. We continue to source amazing cheese from all over the globe and if you have found something you love and must have let us know, we'll try to track it down for you.

Beer! Our latest GUSTIAMO! event was held last night, a tasting of Trappist Beers. We had a great turnout, thank you to all who attended, everyone had the opportunity to taste and buy from a very comprehensive line up of 5 of the 7 Trappist breweries
and everyone got to take home a glass too! We still have many of these beers available for those of you who want to do your own tasting from the comfort of your own home or even sit here at the store and drink one, or two...We can even pair up the beers with some cheese and charcuterie too.

For those of you that haven't yet heard we are also selling great hot dogs and sausages made by Zenner's of Portland. Zenner's has been rockin' P-Town with great sausages for almost 100 years. They have a strong commitment to quality, just like us. So we are selling their sausages by the pound to take home and try AND we are also serving them up in the store for lunch too (all day actually). We even have a special knockwurst sandwich that is getting some great response locally. Come in and take some home or try one here, we think you'll love them as much as we do. We also have our corned beef and hot ham and cheese everyday too!

Speaking of corned beef, St. Patricks Day is just around the corner and we have put up a few extra pounds of our famous house made corned beef just because. We'll have the corned beef sammy's available all the time but we'll also have corned beef that you can purchase by the pound. As an added bonus we'll also be serving our famous corned beef and cabbage in store the week of March 15. Ours is the BEST you'll ever have. Trust us.

That about wraps up the latest news. Come in and try something new and tasty today, you just might find something you love. Cheers.

Hot Dog . . .seriously.

The hot dog is one of the most maligned of all American foods, and probably with good reason. The Jungle, probably scared most of us off at one time from eating doggies. Although a trip to the ball park is hardly the same without one. Call it a guilty pleasure if you will, but I enjoy a good dog from time to time, that was until I started reading the ingredient list on my favorite brand:

INGREDIENTS: Beef, Water, Contains 2% or less of: Salt, Sodium Lactate, Spice, Hydrolyzed Soy Protein, Paprika, Sodium Diacetate, Garlic Powder, Sodium Erythorbate, Sodium Nitrite, Flavorings. CONTAINS: Soy

Seriously? Soy? And Hydrolyzed soy protein? Is that necessary? All I want is a good honest hot dog. And I think I have found it. Zenner's of Portland has been making quality sausages for 83 years. When I was looking for a good producer of bangers, I went to Zenners. Having a reputation for quality ingredients and craftsmanship I tried a few of their other products. I was impressed. For those of you that tasted the bratwurst we served last winter and spring you know how good they were. Now we are stocking their hot dogs and knockwurst.

We believe that these are better tasting and better for you than any other doggie out there. We will have these available for eat in or take out for the next few weeks and we'll also have them available to take home by the pound to try out for yourself. The all beef hot dogs are $6 /lb and the knockwurst are $7 /lb. Now that's a good doggie. Cheers.

A few things you might be looking for . . .or not.

The most recent issue of Bon Appetit arrived recently and with this usually come the folks perusing the recipes and looking for required ingredients. Two very nice customers came in yesterday looking for manchego cheese for a dates and manchego recipe. This prompted me to go through this issue for other items people might be looking for and/or be in need of. My research was rewarded with the following recipe that I think many might over look simply because they aren't familiar with the ingredients. We have piment d'Espelette, marcona almonds and THE BEST popcorn around. So if you are looking for something unique, strange or unfamiliar, come see us, we just might have it AND we probably know what to do with it too. Cheers.

http://www.bonappetit.com/recipes/2010/02/spicy_popcorn_with_piment_despelette_and_marcona_almonds

Boeuf Bourguignon (or as my mom calls it beef burgundy. . . )

We are serving our rendition of Boeuf Bourguignon. Which is just as good as the classic recipe, but a little less involved and bit tastier, we think. We are serving this over our house made mashed potatoes, don't even ASK about the use of butter or cream-when it comes to mash just accept it. Suffice it to say that it's pretty tasty. We top it with a drizzle of truffle oil and some crispy lardoons (everything is better with bacon) and voila! Lunch! If you are getting hungry we'll have this all day today and all weekend assuming it lasts that long. . .Cheers.

Its time to open this can. . .

I have been saving a can of WHOOP ASS! for a while, just because I was a bit hesitant to use it (with great power comes great responsibility). But I think the time is right as many of my fellow citizens have just started beating the drum for Trader Joe's here in Walla Walla. The problem is no one realizes that slick marketing is the tacky veneer that is covering an ugly truth about many "specialty markets".

Super stores have stripped away the old ways. The term Super Market, we have forgotten the root words here, literally was a SUPER-market with your butcher, baker, green grocer, general store all under one roof. This changed the way we all shopped, and related to our food. As more and more Super Markets were added, prices became competitive. Cheaper food was needed, so the food industry responded with cheaper food. There are only a few ways to make things cheaper, reducing the quality and increasing the quantity is the easiest. This is also a great way to reduce hunger, making food cheaper, that is the upside.

The downside is that in order to compete, companies that produced food needed to make it EVEN MORE cheaper. How do you reduce the cost, spend less. Feed cows, corn (which is cheap and increases weight quickly) or even better, use the leftovers from other slaughtered cows! Yes, this was being done until the "outbreak" of mad cow disease just a few years ago. Go figure, feeding cow brains to other cows might be bad (remembering that cows are herbivores). Hmmm, who would have thunk it? And when you can't make it cheaper by feeding them poorly, export, export, export, or as the new term goes, outsource.

There is a new program that is airing on the PlanetGreen channel. Now I am not one to suggest ANY TV to anyone, but this is something we all should watch. Six young adults from the UK are sent abroad to various places to learn about where our food comes from. This is MUST SEE TV. Monday nights at 7P, PlanetGreen channel. Learn about what it takes to produce food cheaply. What the human cost is. Your $.99 Big Mac is so cheap because it is made with cheap labor and inferior ingredients. Ever wonder why Americans have such a high obesity rate?

Most of the food production in the US is done by under skilled and poorly educated workers who's lives are regularly in danger every day. Don't take my word for it, read Fast Food nation and Pig Perfect. These two books are as seminal as the Jungle was. The facts have not changed, the system is still broken. Almost every day there are meat recalls in the US and almost every day a worker is injured or killed in an accident that could have been prevented.

I will not eat "factory" pork, or what you find at the grocery store and you shouldn't either. On these "family" pig farms, they are more covered stalls (10,000 pigs under a roof) where the pigs are fattened. They are kept in horrid conditions, and no pigs do not like being dirty. They like mud, because they do not sweat, but no animal likes to be in their own filth, it's not natural. Disease is rampant. Urine and feces are dozed into "evaporating" pods that leach ammonia into the atmosphere and poison the local water supply. Many streams and rivers in the mid Atlantic states regularly experience a mass death of fish, whole populations just die over a week. Because the water is poisoned from the hog farms. And there are companies trying to sell you this stuff and you are eating it. For information on food recalls please see this link:
http://www.fsis.usda.gov/Fsis_Recalls/Open_Federal_Cases/index.asp
This is something that should be checked weekly, it will scare you. Oh and remember product recall is voluntary, stores don't HAVE to pull product. . .

Big companies, global companies care about profit margins not people. Did you know that Trader Joe's is owned by a German company so cheap that Wal Mart can't compete with them! Seriously. Read this:
http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/19/do-you-know-who-owns-trader-joes/
and this:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123180518793975423.html

Think Whole Foods is looking out for you and providing better food? Think again:
http://www.slate.com/id/2138176/

There are many many things we need to realize about our food chain. The first is that in order to make things cheap, sacrifices will be made. Sacrifices that could be increased use of antibiotics because animals are kept so close together that disease is inevitable. Sacrifices like using genetically modified, disease and pestilence resistant seeds to grow larger yield crops. Sacrifices that could lead to possible health risks, like ecoli, cancer, heart disease and diabetes.

Now, having said that, I am also going to say that "perfection is not the enemy of the good" (see here: http://www.latimes.com/features/food/la-fo-calcook6-2010jan06,0,6888223.story) I think that sums up my thoughts on things pretty well.

Bigger is not always better. Cheaper is not always better. Quantity is not better than quantity. These are the basic fundamentals that need to be fixed in the system, and WE are the ones that need to be fixed. Whole foods is not as wholesome as it seems. Trader Joe's is NOT your neighborhood grocery store, at least it shouldn't be. Do your own research. Find out where your food comes from and at what cost. Unless you don't care about what you put into your body. But don't ask me to do the same. Cheers.

The facts about food and farming - latimes.com

The facts about food and farming - latimes.com

Posted using ShareThis

Happy New Year. . .Now bring on the heat!

Many of you may not know this but I like spicy food. Eggs are not breakfast without hot sauce. Tacos, be they west Texas style or traditional al carbon, cannot be truly savored without the appropriate condiment, hot sauce.

So a friend and customer recently brought me a bottle of hot sauce. Not the kind I usually enjoy but one of the fancier, home made type hot sauce in a bottle. Chunky and kinda reddish brown. This usually means over the top, garlicky flavour, with very little heat and an upset tummy later on. Read, disappointment.

So when I opened this bottle, I was instantly amazed at the smoky spicy aromas. Ok, so it smells pretty good, I still have doubts. Well long story short this stuff rocked. REALLY ROCKED. Flavour was complex and deep. Rich and flavourful with a great balance. Mikey likes it. This is THE best bottled sauce of this type I have ever tasted, and believe me I have tasted a lot.

So we are proud to announce that we will soon be receiving our first shipment of Boulder Hot Sauce Company's Smoky Serrano and Harry's Habanero hot sauces. They are making a fresh batch this Friday so it will be shipping to us next week. Samples will be available to those who are brave enough. If you like spice like I do, you'll want to get a bottle of each, one for the kids, one for you. Cheers.