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

chocolate chili with homemade polenta crisps

Consider yourself warned: my inner foodie snoot may rear her ugly head in this post; I’ll try and keep her at bay but she’s a fierce bitch when she wants to be unleashed so just ignore her puzza sotto il naso banter. 

I don’t typically participate in hyper-American activities such as super bowl parties.  What’s so super about it besides the billion-dollar commercials advertising products you’ll rarely find in my kitchen, anyway? I know, I know, there are countless hundreds of you who will argue with me ‘til you’re blue in the face about the merits of the game diminutively referred to by the rest of the planet as “American football.”  I prefer proper football myself, and have been justly rewarded by the fact that Seattle now proudly boasts a football franchise known as the Seattle Sounders Football Club.  The games are not quite up to the snuff of Juventus games back in the motherland, but give us trailblazing pioneers a few years and we’ll elevate the Americas to global standards. 

piloncillo cane sugar boiling down for chili

That being said, as most of you know this super bowl is historic for good reason. The New Orleans Saints have not been to the super bowl, and this is a success story most of our country wants to get behind, football or no football.  It’s as if the Saints embody the phoenix rising from the ashes of Katrina and for the first time since the disaster the city is rallying with the fervor of its original spirit.  It’s an infectious spirit, since the rest of the country seems to have caught it as well.  I couldn’t just blatantly ignore it and attend super bowl deep discount shopping events all day, so I decided to buck up, rsvp to a super bowl party and make something worthy of the occasion: chocolate chili over polenta crisps.  Not sure what that means? In layman’s terms, frito pie.  If you’re still not sure what that is you’re probably a Northerner or from outside the boundaries of our fair country, so let me break it down.  You put some fritos in a bowl, smother them in chili and top the whole shebang with a generous lot of shredded cheese. 

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