Dancing Spoon

Make Your Own Wine

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You Even Design the Label

If you thought making wine in your kitchen was exciting (see Is it Wine Yet?) how about becoming a real winemaker without the fuss of actually having a vineyard. There’s a company in California called Crushpad, located in the heart of San Francisco, where you can do just that.

While making your own wine will be fun and exciting, at Crushpad it's also serious business. You won't be alone when you set out to create that perfect cult wine: Crushpad provides grapes from California's top vineyards, they have their own winemaking team, and a state-of-the-art winery. You choose your level of involvement and they “do the rest.” Their very robust web site is great at getting the juices flowing (sorry, couldn’t resist that one), whether you’re a new winemaker or an experienced one. They tell us:

Weigh In

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No, no, don’t use your measuring cup to scoop your flour! You need to pour the flour into your measuring cup so it doesn’t compress. Then be sure to take the back of a knife and level the cup. Oh, by the way, you probably should take that knife and stir up all the flour before you start scooping; it settles during shipping. And yeah, you need to do this whole procedure with each cup you measure out.

Or, you could use a scale.

While the rest of the world weighs most ingredients, we, here in the States, measure them. And measuring is not especially accurate. Is a cup of bran the same as a cup of whole-wheat flour? Not by weight. In fact, a cup of unsifted white flour will weigh five ounces, while a cup of sifted flour will weigh only four ounces. And if you’re baking bread that uses eight cups of flour, then you’ve just added one full cup of flour. In baking that leads to disaster.

PB & J Updated

Good Simply

I still like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I've just updated mine a bit. Here's how I make 'em now:

I toast a couple of slices of good bakery sour dough bread. I smear one slice with high quality chunky, salted peanut butter. Then instead of the little kid's grape jelly, I use orange marmalade. I sprinkle some dried cranberries on top, and then just a bit of honey to temper down the bitterness of the marmalade and cranberries. Pop on the top slice and you're good to go.

Use good ingredients. For years I've enjoyed Dundee Orange Marmalade, the original orange marmalade made entirely of the bitter Seville Orange.

Buy some Dundee Orange Marmalade.

The Artisan

Artisan The Craft of the

An Artisan Baker Talks of his Craft

As the mass-marketing of the word “artisan” begins to pick up speed – see Friendly’s new menu, if you’re not convinced of that – scratch bakers once again have the chance to mull over what it means to call a particular bread or bakery just that. There are those who don’t really care how their product is classified; there are others who classify themselves “artisan” under only the loosest of definitions. And there are bakers like my wife and me, who put the word “artisan” right in the name of their bakery.

Is It Wine Yet?

Stuff Cool

Winepod: Wine Geek Meets, Well, Geek
Forget the bucolic scene of the wizened old French winemaker with his dusty beret, stubble on his chin, and a cigarette plugged into the corner of his mouth. Think of what a child of R2D2 and your Sub-Zero refrigerator would be like. Well, it would be like a WinePod.

The Wine Geek Part
The WinePod people tell us that, “The WinePod is a state-of-the-art tool for small lot artisan winemaking. The WinePod integrates fermentation, pressing, and ageing in one elegant unit yet it is simple and easy to use. The WinePod controls the heat of fermentation and maintains appropriate ageing temperature using electronically controlled thermoelectric heating and cooling. Your wine ferments and ages in a variable-capacity stainless steel tank with an integrated wine press.”

Hair Tip: EVOO

Eating Beautiful

From Salad Dressing to Hair Dressing
You don’t really need to use Extra Virgin Olive Oil for this simple dressing, but warm oil treatments massaged into your hair and scalp will help perk up your locks. After harsh winter weather and dry indoor heat your hair may need nourishment. This treatment will leave your hair and scalp feeling softer, looking shinier, and be revitalized for spring.

Toss olive oil with an essential oil like chamomile or rosemary and use it as a nourishing hair wrap!

Made by Hand

Hand Made by

In our fast-paced-world there exists slow-paced-food, artisan, farmstead, traditional, local; food made by hand. It looks different. It tastes different. It is different. Seek it out.

But how do you tell, for instance, a true artisan cheese from the artisan labeled cheese?