A few weeks ago I visited a little resort town called Hailey, Idaho. I was in a biker bar, and by biker bar I mean place where mountain bikers go to tune their bikes and drink glass steins of beer with shots of Jaegermeister dropped inside. In this bar it was obvious that the focus was more on shot-taking and gear-tuning and less on quality control. The first thing that clued me in to this fact was the menu. They had what I must assume is Ketel One on offer in half a dozen of their specialty cocktails. The only reason I can’t be completely sure is because one place it was written “Kettle on” whereas a second drink had it listed as “ketle One” and yet a third cocktail boasted mixing “Ketil One” with “rootbear”. Never once was it written as its creators intended, and I had a great fear of ordering it mixed with “rootbear” not knowing if it would arrive tasting like sarsaparilla or if a bear attached to some tree roots swilling vodka might jump out at me from the bottom of the glass.

Many of us like to play the “spot the typo on the menu” game, and generally we don’t blame the restaurant for dropping an “I” here or there. This menu was different. In two pages I spotted 47 errors after a cursory, three minute perusal. I know because it was so glaring I had to take out my pen and start correcting. A slightly more obsessive grammarian than I would surely have run to the nearest bike spoke and poked his own eyes out in horror. Read more

*post updated to include watermelon ketchup recipe- sorry, didn’t realize you’d lynch me if I didn’t share.

About six months ago the phrase “duck nuggets” entered my cerebrum and it hasn’t left since. These words have haunted me like many others that spring from the fecund ether that is my unconscious mind, and I’ve finally chosen to make something of them, Urban Dictionary be damned. No, really, you don’t want to know how the Urban Dictionary defines duck nuggets, it will spoil your ability to embrace the rest of this post. So don’t look. At the Urban Dictionary. Definition. Of duck nuggets.

And if you did, if you just couldn’t resist and you clicked over there like the hopelessly-curious cat that you are, just think of them as duck balls instead for the rest of this post. Surely no one has written anything appetite-thwarting about duck balls.

The reason duck nuggets bounced around my brain like wayward pinballs for so long before I did anything about them was because I had to absolutely nail them. You know, balls-to-the-walls perfection. So I masticated on the thought of balls for a good long while until I devised a way to pay homage to the classically-controversial Chicken McNugget in a way that would squash it firmly beneath the webs of a duck’s feet. Read more

If you know me at all by now, you know that I love turning classics into cornets. I did it a few months ago with eggs benedict and just recently with sea urchin and squid ink, which isn’t really a classic, but it made for a classically good cornet nonetheless. This time I decided to tackle buckwheat blini, crème fraiche and caviar- the staid staple of the Russian cocktail party set. Aside from learning which parts of my forearm are perpetually destined to stick to the oven door when forming cornets, I also learned that blini is plural for blintz. I had always assumed they were two different things, despite them looking similar on the page, so I was happy to glean that little knowledge nugget. Blini and crepes are very similar, however the primary difference is that blini tend to be yeasted whereas crepes are not. While various flours are used to make blini all over the world (and especially in Central and Eastern Europe), Russians often use buckwheat. Read more