Lime. My #2 favorite smell and my #4 favorite taste. Here’s something about my favorite two limey and ready products:

How To Prevent Scurvy and Get a Buzz
in this issue of the Seattle Weekly

Incidentally, my other top four smells are: violets, cardamom, Bailey’s and coffee, and pho. And yes, every one of these smells is grafted with a thick coat of memories. We are mammals. It makes perfect sense that we are able to have such visceral, vivid memories, triggered by the whiff of a perfume or a certain pipe tobacco. Remembering bad smells keeps us alive, but remembering good smells and having feelings about them makes us more than Cro-Magnon.

Smell is such a personal thing. It’s the way our monkey brain inspects food; it’s the we attract each other; it’s pleasure, memory, nature and nurture. So I don’t know whether it’s my Mediterranean genes that make me love the smell of marzipan, or whether it’s the memory I have of stealing a log of it from the store as a kid and eating the entire log while watching the movie Transylvania 6500.

Orgeat: More Than Almond Syrup
in this issue of the Seattle Weekly

Orgeat syrup was a specialty ingredient akin to bitters back in the day. The proper mai tai employs it, but there’s oh so much more you can do with it.

All modesty shot out the window, I started my day late with a message from my editor that I’d won an American Food Journalism (AFJ) Award. My Seattle Weekly column, “Search & Distill,” is up for best newspaper column alongside:

Leah Eskin, Home on the Range in the Chicago Tribune
Jason Wilson, spirits columnist for The Washington Post

I’m just now digging Leah’s column; I don’t keep up with my hometown as much as I should. But I’ve been a fan of Jason’s column for a while. Check it out. I’m hoping to rope him into a cocktail-off when he’s in town next month. I’m very flattered to be mentioned alongside both of these writers.

Who wins, places, and shows will be announced at the AFJ conference in Houston in October. I don’t know what that process involves, but I’m sure it’s far less ugly and mud slingy than the dem fight right now.

I’m not gonna be shy, this is a big deal for me. The Seattle Weekly (and Laura Cassidy) took a chance on me, when I was just a drunk, angry wine blogger. I will forever be loyal to SW as long as I live and can drink, and write about it. Besides, I’m an instigator, not a fighter.

When I officially took over the strip next to the food review (I’m now on the next page), the Seattle Weekly even asked me if I’d like to rename it, hence the rip off of the famous punk magazine, Search & Destroy. But I think that the title fits my mission. Nothing alcoholic is so precious or complicated that it can’t be distilled down to 600 words or less. (Yeah, I’m talking about you wine.)

But my ace in the hole is definitely Jonathan Kauffman, my editor and also one of the country’s finest food critics. I’ve learned so much from working with him on a regular basis, and we share a magnetic attraction to taco buses. Sometimes I get to go on reviews with him. I am very lucky, and I know it. I also get to work with the hilarious Mike Seely, and the ridiculously smart and scrupulous Mark Fefer (Seattle Weekly EIC), whose ever poignant idea-bounced check “Why do I care?” now haunts me at the computer.

And for this, I get an award? Sweet.

I’m celebrating with a bitter brandy (brandy, Averno, and orgeat–I just made that up), and I’m going to go eat the food of one of my favorite chefs.

And I’m eating one of these: A lemon cupcake from Trophy Cupcakes and Party, where I’ve been helping run operations since October. Maybe you’ve seen us on Martha…..

Hey, don’t step on any of these names…

Yeah, that’s right, I make my living from booze and cupcakes. Fuck you and take that, Carrie Bradshaw.

I repeat myself often. One of the things I like to say about foodies and people who are way too in to wine is that they are often worse than a ComiCon geek off debating Picard v. Kirk. But no foodie or winie could ever be as geeked as this:

Star Trek Cake Upsets Nerds
via io9, the bestest website ever

Congratulations Trekkies,

You’re the nerdiest!

So much quotable meat in that very long comment sandwich. Go to the original post for the full hilarity.

(And nuqneH? It’s no contest. The answer is Jean Luc, of course. peDoghQo’)

Oh, and fondant is for pussies.

It’s a sad story about a good drink gone bad…

Rehabbing the Whiskey Sour
in this issue of the Seattle Weekly

Too bad, it’s a good drink.

About every two weeks I open a bottle of wine for dinner that tastes nothing like I expected. One sentence summaries of my recent wine picking failures:

1.) Nero d’Avola with enough oak it tasted like jerky…
2.) A perfect, light salmon colored rose tasting like Jolly Ranchers in Zima…
3.) A cheap white that was supposed to be dry but was soooo banana I’d swear someone Robot Couped circus peanuts into some Gallo Mountain Chablis.

And that was just last month. No one’s immune to choosing a bad bottle, even moi. Knowing something about wine is kinda like knowing something about Blackjack. You win more, because you end up on the right side of the odds. But the odds still catch up to you every once and a while. So whether you chose poorly or you’re left with half drunk swill the morning after a bar-b-que…

When life gives you swill, make vinegar.

Reduce, Reuse, Drizzle
in this issue of the Seattle Weekly

I’m not the only beer lover who gets frustrated by the opposite of choice provided by most bars offering the same, trite shade of blonde. You know what I’m talking about, the bars that offer 15 lagers or pilsners, or light see-thru whatever. Do you really need Heineken, Becks, Stella, Pilsner Urquell, Bud, Miller, High Life, Corona, PBR, Rainier and their corresponding lights/lites all on the same menu? That’s not exactly choice.

It’s that supermarket mentality. Gotta have every brand. Shit, any one of those appropriately chilled is the same damn thing to me. A guzzler. Can’t you just pick a couple of the above and give your customers a chance to make a real choice? And one token IPA isn’t really what I’m talking about. Not a giant leap, just a baby step will do…

Maibock: One Small Step From Lager
in this issue of the Seattle Weekly

Maybe you’re customers aren’t as boring as you think they are.

…except their QVC is called Christie’s.

Maybe we don’t all shop QVC, but we’ve all been taken by a deal that seemed to good to be true. But instead of a crappy $30 cubic zirconium ring that turns your finger green, this is a story about a rich guy who paid $156,000 too much for a bottle of wine. The Billionaire’s Vinegar by Benjamin Wallace ($24.95 Crown) is not just a great story about wine, it’s like a really, really great New Yorker article that goes on for 300 extra pages.

The scene: The year was 1985. The venerable Christie’s auction house (the epicenter for old, rare, drool-worthy wines in the world) had procured a most unusual bottle of 1787 Chateau Lafite Bordeaux. The grand sir of priceless vino himself and Christie’s auctioneer, Michael Broadbent oversaw the investigation into the authenticity of the bottle before bringing it to auction. Hardly given by a charlatan, the item was presented by a well-known collector by the name of Hardy Rodenstock (you can’t make names like that up) who had sourced many bottles of incredibly rare, highly desirable wines. Writer Wallace sets the scene in the book with tension and a dash of incredulity, detailing the auction that saw the allegedly priceless bottle sold for a record sum to Kip Forbes, son of billionaire publisher Malcom and hence the name of the book.

As if a 1787 Chateau Lafite up for auction wasn’t sexy enough, on this particular bottle a mysterious inscription (Th. J) was noted and attributed to Thomas Jefferson. Now maybe I’m just too poor for my own good, but that right there would have me shouting from the peanut gallery, “You crazy Mr. Forbes, don’t do it!” The world of rarified wines is truly as strange as any pastime that manifests into full-blown fetish, be it Star Trek, baseball cards, beanie babies, or expensive art. (Wanna bet? William Shatner’s kidney stone sold to a collector for $75,000. ) Like any market, forgeries are possible. Wallace examines the world of liquid auctions, and its components, much like you’d pick apart a fine wine. What unfolds is a fantastic tale much greater than the auction itself, like the introduction of a Bill Koch, another rich guy who would outspend Kip Forbes’ purchase trying to debunk Hardy Rodenstock’s find.

Benjamin Wallace’s writing style shows his magazine past, and since reading this book I have gathered everything I can from him. Wallace has a way with the declarative sentence that allows the reader to fully imagine the scene, without over sharing. Wallace doesn’t have to, because the characters of this true tale are so rich they need no embellishment; they are already the stuff of great fiction. Greater still that they all actually exist. Wallace also has a way of describing a character through action, as maybe only an also journalist can, that leaves the judgment up to you. He likes his characters, and he likes writing about them. I only wish (and I bet he does too) that they’d reunite for another ridiculous adventure. Oh…give it time.

Jonathan Kauffman went to visit Pietown and eat Frito Pie, so I get to (gulp) hold down the food review fort. The topic: the organized and potentially delightful frivolity that is afternoon tea.

A Tea Two-fer: Taking on the tradition of afternoon tea
in this issue of the Seattle Weekly

Yes…and no. So beware over-fancification of your martini basic and don’t get too cute.

Concerning the Olive
in this issue of the Seattle Weekly

Can’t blame a girl for trying.