Tag: Food

These will be the BEST NACHOS of your life! Topped with everyone’s favorite Korean beef, caramelized kimchi + a Sriracha mayo drizzle!

This is why September is one of my favorite months.

Nope, it’s not because it’s the start of the Fall season, the cooler weather, or the pumpkin spice lattes at Starbucks.

No, it’s because, hello, it’s GAME DAY season! Which means we have every excuse to have nachos all day everyday. I mean, there’s college football Saturdays, NFL football Sundays, and some other games on Monday and Thursday nights. It’s basically on all the time.

Hence. We need nachos all the time.

And what better way to have nachos than when it’s smothered in melted cheese, everyone’s favorite Korean beef, caramelized kimchi, and a Sriracha mayo drizzle.

Nope, there’s no better way.

The post Korean Beef Nachos appeared first on Damn Delicious.

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A selection of shoots from Brittany Wright’s book “Feast your Eyes”, that celebrate the beauty of food in a colourful way.

How to travel to Yosemite with your pets! Plus, some very helpful tips including dog-friendly trails at the park!

Yes, you can bring your dog to Yosemite! We brought Butters all the way from Los Angeles, and it was the most amazing experience. However, we weren’t fully prepared for this trip so I hope some of our tips will be helpful for you guys!

Be prepared to drive. A lot.

First and foremost, I should tell you that a lot of driving is involved.

We flew from LA to SF, then drove from SF to Yosemite, hitting the road at 3:45am.

It took about 3-4 hours to get to the entrance of the park, which isn’t too bad. Except what we didn’t know was that it took 1-2 hours just to get to Glacier Point!

So again, be prepared for a lot of driving, time and patience as you will run into some beautiful sights unexpectedly where you may want to pull over and take pictures.

The early bird gets the worm.

Start your day early! We got to the park around 7-8am so parking was very easy and there weren’t too many people around. But as we were leaving the park around 11-12 pm, it was so packed, it was impossible to get any pictures at certain places!

Dogs are not allowed everywhere.

There are only a handful of trails that are dog-friendly.

• Bridalveil Fall
• Cook’s Meadow Loop
• Glacier Point
• Lower Yosemite Fall
• Mirror Lake Trail
• Tunnel View

Dogs must be on a leash (or you will be cited) and must be cleaned up after. They are not allowed on shuttles, lodging areas, unpaved trails and undeveloped areas (such as wilderness areas).

Don’t forget snacks and water for both yourself and your dog.

There are certainly shops in the park for water/snacks but I prefer to pack all of my own water and nuts/trail mix/PB&J sandwiches as well as other various snacks for Butters.

But most importantly, be prepared to invest in a travel water bowl for your dog. We always carry this one around and it is a God-send! Especially with the elevation, everyone should stay hydrated at all times.

 

Get that Christmas card shot.

Take as many pictures as you can because you never know – that shot just may end up on your Christmas card for 2018.

The post Traveling to Yosemite with a Dog appeared first on Damn Delicious.

From 6 October the heady scents of the world famous truffles will fill the air in this north Italian town, with over a month of festivities planned.

A guide to cooking spices you can’t miss: stock your pantry with these versatile fall spices and you’ll be ready to add a dash of flavour to any dish.

OpenTable have released their list of top 100 restaurants boasting wine lists as robust as the food menu. Can you guess which state came out top?

The Texas High Plains has the potential to be a grapegrower’s paradise. This plateau near the New Mexico border is now home to nearly 5,000 acres planted to wine grapes. Summer delivers warm days and cool nights, and dry winds make fungal diseases a non-issue.

This is traditionally cotton country, yet with recent drought conditions and a growing recognition of the economic possibilities of wine, vine plantings in the region have exploded over the past 10 years. The second-largest appellation in the state, the Texas High Plains AVA supplies approximately 80 percent of the grapes used by Texas wineries.

But now there’s a conflict between cotton and grapes. Many Texas High Plains growers say they’ve been hit by “pesticide drift”—strong chemicals are being sprayed on neighbors’ cotton fields, then carried by wind into their vineyards. The resulting damage can be devastating. According to Pierre Helwi, Texas A&M University AgriLife viticulture specialist, farmers are experiencing deformed leaves, reduced crop yield and even dying vines.

“It’s huge,” said Bobby Cox, vineyard consultant and winegrower at Pheasant Ridge Winery in Lubbock. “It’s the biggest threat that I’ve seen and I’ve been farming grapes here for over 40 years.”

Drifting trouble

The conflict between cotton and wine is rooted in current conventional cotton farming methods. Monsanto and Dow AgroSciences have developed pesticide-resistant corn and cotton seeds that farmers purchase in tandem with very heavy-duty chemicals such as Monsanto’s Roundup. The idea is that farmers can plant resistant crop varieties and then spray their fields with the appropriate chemicals, killing all troublesome weeds and insects, but sparing the resistant plants.

Unfortunately, the weeds have grown resistant to Roundup and other sprays. Agricultural companies have responded with herbicides that pack a bigger punch, including Monsanto’s Dicamba and Dow’s 2,4-D. But those more powerful sprays appear to be impacting vines too, drifting into neighboring fields. Numerous grapegrowers have reported damaged vines. Dicamba makes leaves curl up, while 2,4-D makes leaves fan out at an awkward angle and develop odd bumps. Either way, it saps the plant and the ripening fruit of needed energy.

“Dicamba damage even affects fermentation and the way the wines taste,” said Cox, who had many vines damaged from pesticide drift in 2016. “They’re not exactly bad, they are just different in a very definitive way. All of the winemakers I’ve worked with could easily make that identification. It doesn’t take a supertaster to recognize them.”

Pesticide drift is by no means confined to Texas. In 2004, California vintners Chuck McMinn of Vineyard 29 and Larry Turley of Turley Wine Cellars claimed that sprays being used in a state park caused widespread damage to their vineyards, killing vines and spoiling fruit, and ultimately causing as much as $500,000 in loss of small-production wines. Turley claimed that “drift from the spray came down the highway, obliterated fruit from my vines and nuked the crop off my olive trees. It killed the vegetable garden at my house, my hydrangeas, privet, roses and anything that’s fast-growing.”

While state parks officials admitted to a massive spraying, they denied any wrongdoing, claiming that park employees applied the product strictly according to instructions on the product label. Ultimately the Napa County Department of Agriculture levied a $4,000 fine upon the California State Department of Parks and Recreation and recommended that Turley and McMinn “drop fruit and seek compensation,” which amounted to pennies on the dollar.

A report published last month by the University of Missouri, suggests that drift of Dicamba this year has damaged over 1 million acres of vulnerable crops across the country. When asked how big a threat pesticide drift is to wine grapes in Texas, Helwi, who monitors vineyards throughout the region, says he’s seen drift damage in 90 percent to 95 percent of the vineyards in the region.

Collaboration over confrontation

Katy Jane Seaton is executive director of the High Plains Winegrape Growers Association, and like many grape growers in the region, she also grows cotton. She says that this is “not necessarily a farmer-on-farmer issue. The railroad and the Texas State Department of Transportation regularly spray 2,4-D, as do private venues, city and county agencies, and landscape companies to name a few. We haven’t had a chemical inspector in Terry County for more than a year.”

Culpability in pesticide drift cases is often hard to prove. “We’ve got 5 million acres of cotton and just 5,000 acres of grapes,” said Seaton. “Chemical companies have us outgunned financially, legally and legislatively. I think they have a responsibility in this that they aren’t quite claiming yet. We need to encourage discussion about how we’re gonna make it work for all of us.”

Some authorities believe that the problem lies not so much with the pesticides themselves, but in improper application methods. “Texas A&M has done many trainings in the proper application of herbicides,” said Helwi. “We’ve got high winds here, so it’s especially important to observe label directions when applying pesticides.” Texas A&M’s “Hit the Target” program allows farmers to register the location of their fields, the type of crops being grown in them, and any particular pesticide sensitivities so that others can avoid accidentally damaging a neighbor’s crops while spraying.

“We are all trying to be the best stewards that we can,” said Seaton. “Nobody gets up in the morning wanting to harm their own crop, their neighbor’s crop or make a negative impact on the environment.”

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Note: This interview has been updated from its original version, which appeared in the Oct. 15 & 31, 2017, issue of Wine Spectator, “New York City: A Wine Lover’s Guide.”

With worldwide album sales surpassing 30 million copies, four Grammy nominations and consistently sold-out shows on some of the world’s biggest stages, Josh Groban has been a star vocalist since his teens, with singles like “You Raise Me Up” making him a household name. Since then, he’s been adding even more titles to his impressive résumé, including actor, philanthropist … and vintner.

Groban’s big wine break came in 2017 when he met Sonoma boutique winery owner Ross Halleck, who offered to make a limited-edition wine to benefit Groban’s arts-education charity, the Find Your Light Foundation. Since then, the original 2014 vintage and current 2015 vintage of the Find Your Light Pinot Noir have together raised $125,000 from 250 cases produced.

Groban, 37, now regularly visits Halleck’s Sebastopol, Calif., winery himself to learn more about winemaking—and make his wine. In May, he was on hand to help assemble the 2017 Find Your Light blend, made primarily with grapes from the Haas Vineyard in the Sonoma Mountain AVA.

With his new album, Bridges, and Netflix show with Tony Danza, The Good Cop, both set to come out Sept. 21, Groban spoke with assistant editor Lexi Williams about learning the tricks of blending after a few vintages’ experience, how he caught the wine bug, and what wine and food sacrifices he has to make on tour.

Wine Spectator: When did you first get into wine?
Josh Groban: Uh, when I was 16 years old—is that illegal? No, I’m just kidding. I guess in my mid-20s. I had a lot of people around me, people that I worked with, that were really knowledgeable about wine. I enjoyed hanging with sommeliers and asking them endless questions.

WS: How did you become more deeply involved to the point where you wanted to try actually making wine?
JG: There are a lot of parallels between the wine community and the music community—the attention to detail, the importance of the craft of it and the way in which it’s made. I started to connect with [the wine] world just as an amateur wine-loving fan. I would drive up to Napa with my dog and meet with people who were, at the time, [starting] new wineries. And it’s fun, because those wineries wind up becoming, you know, Hourglass and D.R. Stephens, and a lot of other places. It’s been a lot of fun to learn about wine, to collect, to get involved. It’s a passion.

[The Find Your Light collaboration] happened as sometimes the most serendipitous things happen. My manager was talking to a friend, and that person mentioned Ross and his winery. We found out that he was an amazing guy and that he shared a passion for arts education. We reached out to him and asked if there was any way he’d like to collaborate, and he stepped up.

WS: Now that you’ve had two blending sessions under your belt for the 2016 and ’17, do you feel like your winemaking know-how is improving?
JG: The blending this time around was quicker, because we went through such an exhausting blend the first time around, where we had 15 glasses laid out, and we really tried so many different percentages and so many different types of barrels and different vineyards and different lots. I was so interested, [and] because it was my first time doing it, I think I kind of exhausted myself in the process. I was trying to drink it all in, literally and figuratively.

This time around, because of the experience that I’ve had with Ross and [winemaker] Rick Davis doing it the last time, [we knew] what we wanted it to taste like. [My] palate is a little more knowledgeable. You kind of know what you want to achieve, and you also know what it is you’re tasting for—not just what you’re tasting in that moment right out of the barrels, but what you’re tasting for two years from now.

WS: You’re about to embark on an international arena tour in October. Will you have wine stocked on your tour bus?
JG: Right now I’m dreaming of wine and not drinking a whole lot of it. Alcohol just dries out your vocal cords. Cheese is another one! I love cheese, but I can’t really eat it while I’m on tour. You kind of have to shelve some of your food and drink loves in order to do your job the best that you possibly can. And then when the tour’s over, you go buy as much wine as you want. I think when you give it up for a minute, it makes it that much more enjoyable when you finally get to open that bottle that you’ve been saving.

WS: Do you plan to pursue wine any further?
JG: That is definitely a goal. One thing that I’ve learned from working with Ross and meeting so many incredible winemakers and proprietors around the country, specifically around the area where we have made Find Your Light, is that so much goes into it. You need to have not just an excitement for wine—there’s an expertise and a passion that takes so much energy to really make great wine.

My quick answer would be yes, it has been a dream of mine to continue to collaborate with great winemakers and continue to learn more … That would be a great way to continue my journey through this love of wine that I have. But it takes a lot of work. So right now, I’m very happy doing this for the foundation and fulfilling a lot of the checkmarks I have inside for the things that I love.

We’ve seen some pretty unique techniques for cooking steak but steak slathered in Mayonnaise? That’s a new one for us.