Casual Kitchen: March 2009

Cookbook Exploitation Month is Here Again!

Readers! April is right around the corner, and that means it's time to celebrate Cookbook Exploitation Month!

For those readers new to Casual Kitchen, April is the month for where you dig out your most underused and forgotten cookbooks and start putting them to work.

Remember, the 80/20 Rule tells us that 80% of your meals likely come from just 20% of your recipes. It also tells us that you only really use 20% of your cookbooks--the other 80% of them just sit on your shelf, collecting dust.

What does this mean? It means that there's a gold mine of recipes waiting for you in your very own kitchen, in cookbooks you already own. Therefore, the purpose of Cookbook Exploitation Month is to break out one or two of your underused, unloved cookbooks, flip through them, and then systematically exploit them for all they're worth.

"Cookbook exploitation is a barbaric practice and must be stopped."
--an email from a Casual Kitchen reader

Why spend money on new cookbooks when there's an enormous repository of great recipes waiting for you in your very own kitchen? Use our essay on How to Tell if a Recipe is Worth Cooking with Five Easy Questions if you need some extra help in picking something out.

Which of your underused cookbooks will you break out and exploit this month? Tell us about it!

Related Posts:
How to Modify a Recipe: The Six Rules
Mastering Kitchen Setup Costs
The Favorite Cookbooks of My Favorite Bloggers
How to Apply the 80/20 Rule to Cooking
More Applications of the 80/20 Rule to Cooking

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by linking to me, subscribing to my RSS feed, or submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon.

CK Food Links--Friday March 27, 2009

Here's yet another selection of particularly interesting food-related links from around the internet. As always, I welcome your thoughts and your feedback!
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Create Dunkin Donut's Next Donut
Could there be any contest that satisfies the soul better than this one? Summon your inner Homer Simpson, enter your best donut idea, and you could win $12,000!

Spanish Recipes Blog
I stumbled onto this blog the other day and thought it must be shared with readers. If you are at all interested in Spanish food, go to this blog. Blogger Nuria gives you step by step directions and great instructive photos for making simple, traditional Spanish dishes. Definitely worth adding to your feedreader. A few choices recipes to check out: Garbanzos con Chorizo, Oven Rice (Arroz al Horno) and a personal favorite Spanish dish of mine, Fideua.

Extreme Frugality at Gourmet Magazine
A must-read series at over at Gourmet Magazine. Author Hodding Carter has a Trent at The Simple Dollar-type moment and decides he must live within his means. It's funny, touching and educational all at the same time. Two of the best posts: his introduction, and a particularly endearing post on tapping maple trees and teaching his children life lessons. Do you get the feeling that this whole inexpensive eating and home cooking thing is catching on lately?

Eating Food That's Better for You, Organic or Not from the New York Times
Mark Bittman weighs in on organic foods. Money quote: The word organic "is not synonymous with 'safe,' 'healthy,' 'fair' or even necessarily 'good.'" Yep. And sometimes it merely means more cost to you and more profit for the food manufacturer.

Taco Baking Rack at For the Love of Cooking
I didn't even see the recipe in this post--I was too busy worshiping the fact that you can buy a special baking rack that bakes corn tortillas into the shape of a taco. Must. Have. One. By the way, you can get reasonably priced ones on Amazon.

Spiced Nut Mix at Beach Eats
A simple and delicious homemade mixed nut recipe with a really spicy coating. Definitely worth a try.

Pork Medallions with Chili-Maple Sauce from Eats Well With Others
One of the easiest recipes I've ever found. Can be made in under 15 minutes from beginning to end. Perfect for Casual Kitchen readers.

Skinny Omeletes from 101 Cookbooks
Another idea for jazzing up your morning eggs from 101Cookbooks. You'll need to break out your largest nonstick pan for these.

Minimize Food Waste by Thinking Like a Kitchen Manager at Home Ec 101
Great thoughts here on organizing your refrigerator, using the FIFO rule (eeek! I had a flashback to accounting class there for a second) and planning your meals around knowing what's in your fridge.

Adventures in Fermentation at Just Braise
A new fermentation adventure a month in this series at Just Braise. Stacy starts off with yogurt, but look for everything from beer to kimchi in the coming months! A brilliant idea for a series.

Cinnamon Cocoa Quick Bread from Health Nut
An easy-to-make bread recipe that looks absolutely decadent. Plus you get a free explanation of the differences between the two main types of cinnamon.

The Best Dive Bars in America at Details Magazine online
This article will either a) annoy you, because your favorite dive bar wasn't listed; or b) please you, because it gives you 15 new places to go bend an elbow. See also the amusing mis-communication in the comments section.

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by linking to me, subscribing to my RSS feed, or submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon.

CK Food Links--Friday March 20, 2009

Here's yet another selection of particularly interesting food-related links from around the internet. As always, I welcome your thoughts and your feedback!
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Food and Wine Matching Rules at Stonesoup
Six great rules to live by when pairing wine and food. Jules had me at rule #1: There Are No Rules. This is a person with the right kind of attitude about wine!

Potato Chip Cookies at Palate to Pen
A fun blog I've just recently discovered posts one of the weirdest cookie recipes in the entire history of cookie recipes.

Rap and Name-Checking: The Secret Sauce to Selling Vino! at Good Grape
Since writing my wine series here at CK, I've found a few really good wine-related blogs. Here's one of them with an amusing article about the blessings (and curses) of your wine being referenced in a rap song.

Are You Still Willing to Pay? at Noble Pig
Has the economy caused you to cut back on expensive organic produce? Are they the first thing to go when times get tough? Noble Pig asks some great questions here.

Pineapple Macadamia Nut Granola Bars at Just a Taste
I only wish I had seen this recipe before I created my granola blogroll! One of the most creative granola recipes I've seen in a long time, and perfect for shaking off the winter blues.

Reducing Food Costs: Cooking With a Friend at Serious Eats
There is lots of great advice in this post, and the basic idea is brilliant. It's more fun to cook with a friend, you get benefits of scale, and you can get help with prep work.

Beer. Make Your Own! at Scottish Cow
What better way to celebrate St. Patrick's day than to learn to make your own beer? Andrew at the Scottish Cow shows us how.

Lemon and Rosemary Chicken Thighs at Stacy Snacks
I wish I'd come up with this recipe myself--it's the kind of meal we love here at Casual Kitchen: it's easy to make, it only has six ingredients, and best of all, it's laughably cheap.

Margarita Jello Recipe at Use Real Butter
Could there be any more perfect food than a margarita jello shot? Um, no. And as usual, Jen's photography dazzles.

Hunger and Appetite at Voltaire's Garden
Thought provoking insights and advice on how we as a country are in need of an attitude adjustment about food.

Recession Special Hobo Mondays at Thursday Night Smackdown
Looking for some spectacularly cheap meal ideas? TNS runs a series called Hobo Mondays that features reader-submitted recipes that cost $2.50 or less per serving. Now that's the way to beat a recession!

Start Cooking!
Looking to learn some of the basics of cooking? Kathy Maister has the site for you. Great instructionals on practically every cooking subject you could possibly want to learn. A few notable posts: a great instructional on how to make pomegranate juice, how to roast chestnuts, and how to mince, dice and chop an onion.

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by linking to me, subscribing to my RSS feed, or submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon.

The Problem with Government Food Safety Regulation

We all have a vested interest in making sure that our country's food supply is as safe as it can possibly be.

And we have an enormous and powerful federal regulatory body, the FDA, which regulates food safety in this country. And yet our regulators failed to prevent the recent rash of food contamination problems (raspberries? peanut butter? spinach? jalapenos?) that we've faced here in the USA. In fact, some have even made the argument that our food regulators have lost the confidence of the American people.

How did we get here?

This article will try to frame up some of the issues that come up when the government tries to regulate the food industry and prevent lapses in food safety. As always, I'd love to hear input from my readers, who in my opinion are some of the most insightful out there, so please share your thoughts below in the comments section.

The Lifecycle of a Government Regulator
There's a rhythm to the birth, life (and in rare cases, the death) of a governmental regulatory agency. It all starts when there's enough of a groundswell of popular opinion to regulate a given industry in the first place. And in the food industry in the late 1800s and early 1900s, we got exactly that, as the uproar following a wide range of egregious behavior by food and beverage makers drove the creation of a federal agency to regulate food and drug products (for a textbook expose of nasty food processing practices from that era, see Upton Sinclair's The Jungle).

Once the regulatory body gets established, things typically improve, often markedly. If all goes well, then new standards get set, enforcement procedures get put into place, bad guys get caught and put out of business, and the industry slowly but surely adjusts to improved standards.

Everybody wins during this stage: consumers get safer food, companies that are good actors gain market share as the bad guys leave the business, and the regulators (as well as the politicians who put them into place) get immense political capital for helping the industry improve its standards and practices.

Symbiosis
However, things don't always remain quite so perfect. Often the regulatory agency and the industry it regulates begin to develop a symbiosis that hampers the agency's ability to objectively regulate the very industry it was created for.

One of the key sources of this symbiosis comes from the fact that the regulator and the industry typically hire from the same talent pool. The regulators need people with industry knowledge so they can put reasonable regulations into place. Likewise, the industry needs people with regulatory knowledge so they can competently follow the regulations.

Often, a great way to enter the food or drug industry and secure a high-paying job is to first spend a few years working for government pay at the FDA. And what better way is there to show the world that your company is carefully following federal regulations than to hire a key regulator as a senior person in your company?

For better or for worse, a symbiotic--some might say a parasitic--relationship gradually begins between the regulator and the industry it regulates. They hire the same people, they all know each other, and in some instances, they gradually grow to need each other.

In a worst-case scenario, the regulatory agency gets bigger and bigger, gets staffed with more and more people from the industry, and slowly but surely, the organization's mandate begins to change from regulating to feeding its own budget and bureaucracy. We've just seen a classic example of this worst kind of symbiosis in my former profession, as the SEC and other regulatory bureaucracies utterly failed in their mandate to regulate the securities industry, despite having enormous staffs and huge budgets.

Throw Money at the Problem
Ironically, whenever a big problem slips by the regulators, say a peanut butter recall or e. coli contamination at a large beef processing plant, the initial reaction is often to increase the budget for the regulatory agency. This gives rise to a powerful, if counterintuitive, irony: the regulatory agency actually benefits by failing to do its job!

Political Grandstanding
Any of you who have watched a Senate hearing on TV will agree that our congressional leaders, from both parties, just love to grandstand. Whenever there's a hearing broadcast on CNN, whether it's about food safety, steroids in baseball or overpaid Wall Street executives, believe me, every congressperson sitting in on those hearings wants to make the most of their three minutes of speaking time on national TV.

This happens in print media too: witness this zinger of a quote at the end of a New York Times article on food safety where Michigan Representative John Dingell says, “as a result of the failure of giving Food and Drug the resources it needs, people are dying.” Is that a constructive comment, or is it needlessly inflammatory? The FDA already has an enormous budget--will giving it still more money really help it become a more effective regulatory body?

I guess it depends on your perspective. The thing is, there is just too much political capital to be earned in situations like this for our legislators to resist dropping inflammatory quotes like this. Of course, it is another matter entirely whether this actually helps solve the issue at hand.

In no way am I making the argument that we should eliminate regulation, nor do I claim regulators are universally incompetent. In fact, if there's any conclusion to be made from the recent rash of food contamination problems we've had in the US, we need more and better regulation.

My goal for this post is to illustrate some of the common issues and problems that emerge when our government tries to regulate something as enormous and as complex as our country's food industry. Many of the issues I've discussed are predictable and they've happened in many other industries over the course of our nation's history.

What You Can Do To Help
Most importantly, you can help by being watchful and involved citizens and voters. The next time there's a major food or drug recall, watch out for the political grandstanding. Watch the ensuing budget process and see where your tax dollars go. Observe the media with a critical eye, and note which of your congressional leaders are more interested in appearing to help solve the problem (while getting maximum media airtime, naturally), and which of your leaders are actually interested in solving the problem. And if you see your congressman or senator being a demagogue or playing games with public opinion, call them or write them and make sure they know you are watching. And voting.

Readers, what are your thoughts?

A big thank you to Accidental Hedonist for writing a series of articles on this subject and prompting me to think about these issues!

For Further Reading:
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair: This book, published in 1906, was famous for exposing horrendous food safety practices in the meat processing industry. Its publication was one of the key forces behind the passage of the 1906 Food and Drug Act.
The 1906 Food and Drug Act and the History of the FDA From the FDA's own website.
FDA Finalizes Report on 2006 Spinach Outbreak You can see your tax dollars at work right here in this report. I think.

Related Posts:
A Recession-Proof Guide to Saving Money on Food
Stacked Costs and Second-Order Foods: A New Way to Think About Rising Food Costs
41 Ways You Can Help the Environment From Your Kitchen
How to Live Forever in Ten Easy Steps
A Rebuttal of "The Last Bite"
How to Handle Raw Chicken So That You'll NEVER Get Food Poisoning

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by linking to me, subscribing to my RSS feed, or submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon.

What to Eat When You're Sick as a Dog

I've been sick for the past two weeks or so with adult-onset chicken pox, and if there's anything that I've learned during this awful, awful time, it's how critical it is to eat well and treat your body right so that it can get as much help as it needs to fight off illness.

After all, if there's ever a time when you want to make sure that your body gets exactly the fuel it needs, it's while you're sick, right?

Sounds logical. Except for the unfortunate fact that my body and my appetite simply wouldn't cooperate with this logic. At all.

This experience brought me face to face with a new issue that I'd like to help sort out for the benefit of my readers. What do you do when you know you need to eat food to help your body, but just you're too sick to really eat?

This is a subject that I haven't yet seen addressed in any food blogs. And if nothing else, the singularly awful experience of contracting adult-onset chicken pox at least gave me time to think about the subject quite a lot. I suppose that's as good a reason as any for me to start up a discussion, and today's post is my effort to share some insights on the subject.

When you're really sick, knowing you need to eat and actually bringing yourself to eat can be two entirely different things. After reading today's post, I hope you'll be able to put some of these strategies and tactics to work so even if you're really sick, you'll still be sure your body gets sufficiently fueled up.

Let's get started with some terms and definitions. In my opinion, the best foods for your body during times of moderate to serious illness will meet some or all of the following four criteria:

They need to be:
1) energy-dense,
2) comfort foods,
3) easy on your stomach, and
4) laughably easy to make.

1) Energy-Dense Foods
Certain foods simply contain more energy than others. Foods that are high in fat and protein (polish sausage, for example) tend to contain much more fuel per unit of volume. Result: you can get more fuel into your body without overtaxing a weaker than normal appetite.

2) Comfort Foods
Any foods that are fun to eat and bring about good associations. When I was sick as a kid, my Mom used to make tapioca as a treat for me--I used to take rainbow sprinkles and shake them on top and eat the whole thing with delight. It was the only redeeming thing about being sick! Think back to the types of foods that bring back comforting memories from childhood, and stock your pantry with a few of them for the next time you're really sick.

3) Easy on Your Stomach Foods
You'll want to make sure that the foods you eat are gentle on your mouth, throat, stomach and digestive tract, which means that spicy foods, as well as acidic foods like citrus juices and fresh fruits, are best avoided for the time being.

4) Laughably Easy to Make Foods
When you are feeling under the weather, choose from only the very easiest recipes in your collection. Or better still, consider taking a break from cooking entirely. Now is a better time to focus on your health and strength rather than on the cost of the meal.

Foods that meet all four of these criteria will get much needed fuel into your body with a minimum of preparation, a minimum of nausea, and a minimum of effort. And this will give your body extra energy that it can use to get healthy. We will shortly go over ideas for foods that you can eat that will satisfy two, three and even all four of these categories.

You'll also notice some conspicuous--and counterintuitive--omissions from this list. I made no mention of high-fiber foods, vegetables, antioxidants or vitamins in any of these four categories. And I also specifically left out important foods like fresh fruits and juices.

Why would I do this? First, keep in mind that we're not talking about foods to eat when you're only slightly sick. When you're only a little bit sick, you still can eat most anything you want anyway, and obviously you should emphasize nutritious, healthy eating with lots of fresh fruits, juices and vegetables. I'm quite confident that Casual Kitchen readers already know to do this.

Today's article is meant for more serious health circumstances than a run-of-the-mill cold or virus. Remember, the title of this post is "What to Eat When You're Sick as a Dog" after all! Perhaps you're dealing with severe nausea, or you're taking meds that play havoc with your digestive tract and your appetite. Your body just isn't hungry at all, and yet you know you have to eat something if only to try to help your body not get sicker still.

When you're feeling this sick, there is no point in fantasizing about an idealized meal of fruits and veggies. Your body probably wouldn't be able to hold that kind of a meal down anyway.

Instead, I believe it's more healthy to focus on getting a realistic dose of energy-dense fuel into your body--and have it stay there. That way, your body gets some fuel rather than none.

Let's go over a few specific examples. I'll start with my favorite childhood comfort food, tapioca. It may not be the healthiest food on earth, but it's energy-dense, easy to make and gentle on the stomach.

Some background on my recent illness: when I started taking Vicodin, on about day five of my chicken pox experience, eating (and more importantly, holding down) a balanced meal was becoming more and more inconceivable. About every four hours or so, I would have a 30-to 60-minute window between Vicodin pills where the pain from the chicken pox and the nausea from the meds would offset each other just enough so that I could consider the idea of eating some food (did I tell you that getting adult onset chicken pox sucks?).

During this brief window, a quick batch of tapioca could have put an extra 300-400 calories into me with minimal fuss. Plus, the comfort food factor would have cheered me up too. That's a dose of precious fuel and positive energy that my body really could have used.

If I'd had a so-called "healthy" meal instead, bursting with well-intentioned vitamins and antioxidants, it would have been a waste of precious appetite. It never would have stayed down.

Obviously, you can't eat tapioca and nothing else every four hours for a week straight and expect your health to improve. I'm not suggesting you do that. However, I am making the case that you should bias your diet towards foods that give you comfort as well as an efficient burst of fuel, so you can store up some energy for your body to keep fighting and keep the food down too.

Let's consider some other great examples of foods that will satisfy our four criteria above and can help you endure those darkest days of illness:

Ice Cream
Perhaps everyone's favorite comfort food, ice cream has the singular benefit of satisfying all four of our criteria above. That's why I eat ice cream nearly every single day whenever I'm sick. Hey, it's the one time in life you can really get away with it.

Brown Rice with an Egg
One of my favorite foods at times like these is brown rice with a boiled egg. I make a batch of brown rice according to my personal recipe, but then about 8-10 minutes before the rice is ready, I crack an egg into the saucepan, generously seasoning the egg with black pepper or chili powder (I go milder on the spicing based on what my stomach is telling me). Then, I just re-cover the pan, wait ten minutes, and then serve and eat, starting with the egg.

This preposterously easy, yet mild and comforting recipe gives you a balanced mix of protein, fiber, fat and energy that you can get down in just a few bites. Plus you'll have easy-to-reheat leftovers for future meals. And those 400 or so calories you just slipped into your body will be extremely valuable fuel for your immune system.

Protein Powder
This a food that I wasn't able to eat during my peak periods of nausea last week, but as the nausea lifted during week two, I was able to take more advantage of this idea. My protein powder of choice is whey isolate powder from Prolab (I've also tried GNC's brand but I find it too sickly sweet). The beauty of this "food" is that it needs to be dissolved in water or milk (or a smoothie, see below), so you also get the secondary benefit of encouraging your body to take in more fluids. That's always a good thing when you're feeling under the weather.

Smoothies
The degree to which you'll want to include fresh fruits, especially high-acid fruits, may vary depending on your health level and how your stomach feels, but there is no easier way to get a balanced meal into your body quickly and efficiently than by mixing up a quick smoothie made of fruits and veggies on hand. Heck, the blender does all the work--you don't even need to waste any effort chewing. You just drink, and then sit back and let your body extract the nutrients.

I hope to get a bit deeper into the subject of smoothies in the coming weeks here at Casual Kitchen.

Final Thoughts
Don't force yourself to eat. It goes without saying that you want the foods that you put into your body to stay in your body, so you can extract energy from them. There is nothing more wasteful (and more miserable) than to force down a meal only to have it not stay down.

Pay attention to the brief windows of hunger (or perhaps, better-phrased: windows of non-nausea) you have during each day that you're ill. Each "window" is an opportunity to get just a bit more fuel into your body to help it fight your illness.

One final semi-serious warning: Foods like ice cream, Haagen Dazs bars, tapioca, or any of your personal favorite energy-dense comfort foods that satisfy all four of our criteria above (comforting, energy-dense, easy to make and easy on your stomach) are in many ways the best kinds of foods to emphasize when you are sickest. But keep in mind that no single food can fuel you indefinitely. As much as you might love to live by Ben & Jerry's alone, you obviously will want to hold as an important medium-term goal the intention to get your health back to a stage where you can eat other foods too. Don't misread this article as a license to eat junk food until you fall into a death spiral.

Last, a disclaimer: Obviously, I am not a doctor. I don't even play one in the blogosphere. If you are suffering from a serious illness and don't know what to do, consult with a real doctor. And please don't tell him I told you to eat only tapioca until you get better. If you think that was the point of this article, I encourage you to re-read it.

Readers, what are the favorite foods you like to eat when you are sick as a dog? I'd love to get more input and feedback on my arguments here.

Related Posts:
How to Live Forever in Ten Easy Steps
Eat Right to See Right: Foods for Better Eye Health
When High-Carb Diets Don't Work
Seven Ways to Get Faster at Cooking

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by linking to me, subscribing to my RSS feed, or submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon.

27 Themes and Ideas for Wine Tasting Club Meetings

Welcome to the final post of Casual Kitchen's series on wines! Please be sure to look at the prior articles: Open That Bottle Night (Part 1), How to Enjoy Wine on a Budget (Part 2) and How to Start a Casual Wine Tasting Club (Part 3).
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We've already talked about tips and strategies to enjoy wine without spending a fortune, and we've dedicated an entire article to the most enjoyable of all wine activities, the winetasting group. Today's post is a simple list of twenty-seven ideas and themes you can consider for your wine-tasting group meetings once you've started your own club.

Be sure to bounce these ideas around with the members of your group--I'm sure it will spur even more great ideas from them.

Local Flavor
1) Taste a series of wines from wineries that are local to your community or to your state.
2) Taste (preferably blind taste) local wines against supposedly higher quality wines of the same kind from a better known region (eg: Reislings from Upstate New York against Reislings from Germany or New Zealand)
3) Try regular versus reserve wines from a local winery and see if you can discern the difference.

International Flavour
4) Try a tasting of wines from a country no one has tried wines from before (Slovenia? Poland? Latvia? etc).
5) Taste varieties of wine from one country against a similar variety from another country (Australian cabernet against California against Argentina or Chile), and rank the countries in order of your preference.

Varietals
6) Systematically work your way through every variety of wine you and your group want to learn about. Test Chardonnays one week, Reislings the next, Pinot Grigio the next, etc. Then switch to reds: Merlots, Cabernets, Chiantis, etc.
7) You can also taste similar varietals against each other (merlots against pinot noirs, or rieslings against white zinfandels, etc) to see if members can differentiate between similar, yet different wines.
8) Finally, you can blind taste wildly different varietals that all have similar sugar content (for example, Merlot, Pino Grigio, Chablis and Pinot Noir). It should at least be easy to tell the reds apart from the whites, but then again, maybe it won't be as easy as you think!

I Never Heard of THAT Wine Before
9) Organize a tasting solely around wines no one in the group has even heard of before. There doesn't have to be any rhyme or reason or systematic nature to this tasting theme--you just have to bring your curiosity and interest in trying something new.

Blends
10) Many wines are blends of different types of wines (eg, 85% Cabernet, 15% Merlot, etc). Try different types of blends and see if you can appreciate why the vintner chose the specific blend he or she chose.

Champagnes
11) Taste real Champagne (that is, sparkling wine made in the Champagne region of France) against sparkling wines made elsewhere. See which ones you prefer and why.
12) Try a blind tasting of sparkling wines for under $15 and see if there are any that the group particularly likes.
13) Try a blind tasting of bottles of inexpensive sparkling wines against bottles of the expensive stuff, and have your members rank them.

Sweet Wines
14) Have an entire tasting consisting of dessert wines, ice wines or other sweet wines.
15) Try famous dessert wines against each other, for example, a Tokaj from Hungary against a Sauternes from France, against a Recioto from Italy, against an Auslese from Germany. Again, a blind tasting likely works best here and will generate the most fun for everyone!

Low Cost
16) Set arbitrarily low price limits for one or more of your tasting club meetings, say $5.00 or $7.50. Make it a bit of a challenge so that your members will need to be creative to find a wine within the price limit.

Low vs. High
17) Taste test low-priced bottles of a certain kind of wine against higher priced ones (again, a blind test will likely be the most fun here). Example: a Chardonnay for less than $15 against a Chardonnay for $40. Have your members rank the bottles.
18) You can even stretch this comparison and blind taste an inexpensive type of wine against a very expensive bottle of the same type (a $15 Chardonnay against, say, a $100 Chardonnay). You can have several members split the cost of the expensive wine if you like. It could be shocking to try this comparison--perhaps you'll find that there's an enormous difference, or perhaps you'll find yourself quite neutral about the difference between the types.

Vintages
19) Blind taste test the same wines from the same vineyard but from different years. For example, you can try the 2002, 2003 and 2004 vintages of chianti from Ruffino Reserva Ducale. Larger wine shops will carry multiple vintages of the same wine. Have your members rank the years in order of their preference. Afterward, it might be fun to find out what year the so-called "experts" thought was the best and compare that to your group's opinion.
20) Try an amusing variation of the "blind vintage" test: include more than one sample from one of the years. Much hilarity will ensue when more than a few of your members will think the identical samples are actually different wines!
21) Blind taste the "reserve wine" versus a regular wine of the same year, type and winery (recall that this was the taste that 80% of people failed at in our How to Enjoy Wine On A Budget post. See if you're in that top 20%!)

Why Stop at Wine?
22) You can also taste test beers, distilled wines like brandies (cognac, armagnac, etc) or fortified wines like Port, Madeira or Sherry.
23) Taste test favorite hard liquors, like rums, tequilas, whiskeys, etc. This could of course get dangerous, so be sure everybody gets home safely!

Finally, For Those Not on a Budget
24) Taste various Sauternes against each other. This delicious sweet wine can be bought in decent quality by the half bottle at prices ranging from $35-50, and you can blind taste these against very expensive Sauternes (at prices in the hundreds of dollars per bottle or *gulp* even higher). Needless to say, a tasting like this will have to be a vicarious experience for me, but if your group tries something like this, please email me your thoughts on the experience! I'd love to know how it goes.
25) Try tastings of Bourdeaux. Again, just for fun, you can put very expensive bottles up against more reasonably priced ones.
26) Try tastings of extremely high-end Champagnes to see if they are worth the extra expense.
27) Also, you don't have to limit your tastings to just wine: You can also do tastings of single malt scotches, high-end bourbons, designer tequilas, etc.

Remember, for each and every type of alcohol, there is always a brazenly expensive premium brand out there just waiting to separate you from your money. There's no better way to learn if it's worth the extra expense than to do an honest blind tasting.

Readers, go on and get started with your wine-tasting club! What are you waiting for?
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Stay tuned for one final post in our series on wine: Recommended Reading for a Good Wine Education.

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How to Start a Casual and Inexpensive Wine Tasting Club

Welcome to Part 3 of Casual Kitchen's series on wines. Please be sure to look at the prior articles: Open That Bottle Night (Part 1) and How to Enjoy Wine on a Budget (Part 2)!
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If you've always wanted to learn about wines but you are put off by the expense, starting a wine tasting group with a small group of friends is a great way to try lots of wines at a significant savings.

Not only will you be able to share the burden of wine purchases with others, but as we'll see shortly, starting your own wine tasting club is possibly the most cost-effective and time-efficient way to learn about wines.

But best of all, your wine tasting group will give you the opportunity to try new wines in the company of friends. Wine has always been a more intimidating subject than it should be, and there's nothing that cancels out wine intimidation quite like enjoying it with a small, comfortable group of like-minded people. I can't think of a better way to enjoy wine.

Today's post will cover the basic details of starting a wine group. Our next (and final) post on wines will include a list of possible wine tasting themes and ideas you can try once you get your wine tasting group up and running.

Pick the Right People
One of the most important elements of a successful wine tasting club is finding other members who are not only interested in learning about wine, but who are also reliable enough to attend monthly or twice-monthly meetings.

You may also want to look for members who are all at a similar level of wine expertise. While having one member who knows a lot more about wine than the rest of the group can, in theory, present an opportunity for the rest of the members to learn, I don't recommend pursuing this option. It's too easy for this member to dominate both the agenda and the conversation of each meeting.

And of course it goes without saying that you should try and limit blowhards and know-it-alls from joining your group.

Size Matters
A few thoughts on the optimal size for a wine tasting club. Initially, I would recommend staying small and nimble. It's a lot easier to coordinate a wine-tasting date with four, five or six people than with fifteen or twenty. You can always add members if you want to grow your group in the future.

Starting with five or six members will still offer you scale in the sense that you'll be able to try many kinds of wines and distribute the cost of those wines over a reasonably large group of people. Also, if one or two members can't make a particular meeting, you'll still have enough other members attending to make the meeting worthwhile.

There are certainly successful large wine clubs out there--some with 20 or 30 or even more members--but in my opinion the logistics of managing and organizing a group of that kind of size, not to mention hosting the event itself, tend to overwhelm the scale benefits of group wine buying.

Ground Rules
You should dedicate a good portion of your first meeting to setting ground rules for the club. Have the group decide what kinds of wine spending limits to set, how much wine each member should bring to each meeting, what the meeting schedule will be, whether you want the group to meet at the same person's home each time or rotate meetings through each member's home, etc. Establishing some of these rules up front will save you from confusion down the road. However, be sure to keep the ground rules flexible, just in case a change to the rules meets the group's needs at some point in the future.

How to Start
What should you drink at your first meeting? I suggest you start out as casually as possible, perhaps by requesting that each member bring to the first meeting a bottle of any kind of wine for under $20. It doesn't matter whether it's white or red, sweet or dry. At the first meeting, open and enjoy them all, and spend the time working out your agenda and ground rules for the club.

You'll have months, if not years, of meetings in the future to get as specific as you like with the wines you try. The purpose of the first meeting is simply to get comfortable, get to know everyone and set a few ground rules.

Remember, this entire process is supposed to be fun. Take things slow at first. Later, when your members start to discover wines they like or don't like, and as everyone's collective expertise on wine begins to grow, you can be much more specific about the wines your group tastes.

Taking Notes and Grading Your Wines
I strongly encourage you and everyone in your group to keep brief notes on the wines you try, even if you're at a stage where you have no idea what you're doing and know next to nothing about wine. Just keep a small notebook and a pen and jot down the date, the type of wine you've tasted, the winery and its location and the vintage year. And last but certainly not least, jot down a few words on what the wine tastes like and why you liked it or not.

If you or members in your wine tasting club want to get more formal with your evaluations and note-taking, try using these wine scoring forms, which are free for the taking.

Why take notes at all? You certainly don't have to. But taking notes on the wines you drink can make the process of exploring wines even more fun. You'll better remember the wines you've tried, you'll accelerate your learning process, and in future years you'll have a blast looking back at your early note-taking attempts!

Rotate Hosting, And Don't Get Carried Away
Just as it's important to share the burden of buying the wine by having each member bring a bottle of wine to each meeting, it's also important to share the burden of hosting wine club meetings. Consider a routine for rotating hosting responsibilities, and also set a few ground rules for what the host should do.

Once again, simpler is usually better. You don't need to do anything fancy when you are the host. Just setting out some cheese, crackers and water will suffice. Remember, the whole point of establishing a winetasting club in the first place is to make it easy and affordable for group members to try lots of different wines. There's no need to make hosting the meeting into a complicated or expensive venture.

Set Up A Wine Queue
One of the more difficult aspects of wine tasting clubs is deciding how to choose what wines to try. You don't want one person dictating the agenda; everyone should have input into what the group drinks. However, it can be time-consuming to be too democratic when choosing what wines to taste. If you take too much time to listen to each member make their suggestion for next month's tasting idea, and then take still more time to vote on which idea is best, before you know it, your meeting's half over and you still haven't tried any wine yet!

With that in mind, here's an idea that I learned a few years ago (in a book club, ironically) that I think translates perfectly to a wine tasting club: Set up a queue of tasting themes for the next several meetings.

Decide The Next Five Meetings Up Front
Our book group used to spend as much as 15-25% of our time at each meeting trying to decide what book to read next, as each person made an impassioned case for their choice for the next book. Finally, one member suggested using one meeting to choose books for the next five or six meetings, so we could get those decisions out of the way all at once.

When we chose five or so books at once, everybody could see that, eventually, they would get a turn for their book idea--it might be two or three months from now, but their book choice was still on the list to be read. Suddenly, the decision-making process for the group became a lot easier. Instead of taking fifteen minutes to decide on one book, we were choosing five books in fifteen minutes. People are a lot more willing to defer if it's clear up front that everyone will get their turn.

Try this approach with your wine club and see how much time it saves. And if you're looking for suggestions of potential themes for your group to consider for your wine club, stay tuned: I'll run a list of ideas for winetasting themes in my next post.

The Wines Really Add Up
Let me wrap up this post by going over the math of why wine tasting clubs are so cost effective. Let's say you start a simple wine group with five members that meets monthly, and each member brings one bottle of wine per meeting.

After just one year, you will have sampled a staggering 60 wines at a cost to you of only one bottle of wine per month. Depending on the price constraints your group chooses, this could be as little as $15-$25 per month, or just a fraction of the cost of a single dinner out at a nice restaurant. And that laughable $15-$25 monthly cost is just for a small, simple group. With a few extra members, the number of wines you'll get to try will be even larger, yet the cost per member will stay roughly the same.

You would be hard-pressed to find a better or less expensive way to try that many wines. Why should enjoying wine hurt you in the wallet?

Readers, what experiences have you had tasting wines in a wine club setting? What advice would you share with the rest of us?
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Stay tuned for the next installment of Casual Kitchen's series on wine: 27 Themes and Ideas for Wine Tasting Club Meetings.

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How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by linking to me, subscribing to my RSS feed, or submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon.

Our New Zealand Travel Blog

Just a quick off-topic post today for any readers who are interested in travel, and specifically interested in traveling to New Zealand.

As many long-time Casual Kitchen readers know, I'm currently taking a bit of a break from the work world. And on January 1st, Laura joined me and began a six-month sabbatical from her job. And the very first big trip we took together was a four-week tour of New Zealand.

We've dreamed of visiting New Zealand for years and we were not disappointed. It was an amazing place, full of friendly people and stunning natural beauty. We can't wait to go back.

For any readers here who are curious about this incredible country, please feel free to take a look at the full index of posts from our New Zealand Travel Blog. And for those of you who just want a quick taste of some of the highlights, here are--in our opinion--some of the best entries:

Why I Ate All the Chocolate Before We Left
The Acclimation Drive
A Stunning Drive on the Otago Peninsula
Cropdusting with Alistair and Louise
Milford Sound: Breathtaking Beauty in Fiordland
Abel Tasman National Park
The Boiling Mud Pools of Waiotapu
Warkworth and Tawharanui, and How Sidetrips Are Richly Rewarded in New Zealand
Recommended Reading for YOUR Trip to New Zealand
11 Things We'd Do Differently on our Next Trip to New Zealand

Enjoy! Over the next few weeks and months, look for more photos and posts on our trips to Guatemala as well as Hawaii on this same site.

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by linking to me, subscribing to my RSS feed, or submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon.

A Pox on Our 2009 Open That Bottle Night

I hope you took the opportunity to celebrate Open That Bottle Night on Saturday! What wine did you open and what did you celebrate?

Today I'll share with you our OTBN celebration, which, for reasons I'll need to explain, actually happened one day later than the official February 28th date.

You see, a little over a week ago, I had the singularly bad luck of coming down with a case of the chicken pox. At age 39. And no, I never caught it as a kid.

This is a vile disease to get at any age. But if you have the unique misfortune of contracting it as an adult, what's most shocking about the chicken pox is how painful it can be. I graduated from Ibuprofen to Tylenol to Tylenol with Codeine and then to Vicodin in a matter of just three days. And I don't even like to take painkillers. At least, I didn't until this pox made me see the light.

And I've always had a great knack for timing too. You see, last week, Laura and I were supposed to relocate, temporarily, to Hawaii for a four month break. Yep. Last week. But getting on a plane in a state of peak pox contagion would have been unthinkable (and, not to mention, bad for my karma for a million generations hence). So, we rescheduled our flights for two weeks later. I'll probably look horribly pock-marked and scarier than ever, but by then I'll no longer be a health threat to my fellow passengers. But please, no jokes about restarting the leper colony on Molokai.

Unfortunately, when OTBN rolled around this past Saturday, I wasn't healthy enough to really enjoy a glass of wine. So, instead of pouring wine, Laura doled out more pain meds for me to take. And we waited.

Fortunately, the next day--Sunday--was a bit of a different story. For the first time I felt better than the day before, not worse. So Laura and I celebrated by reheating some take-out Chinese food and opening our OTBN wine just a day behind schedule: a half-bottle of Sauternes that Laura got me for Christmas.

As for how much this wine costs, Laura won't even tell me. Fortunately, Laura is more generous to me than I am to myself.

And what did we drink to? We drank to the traveling we've been lucky enough to do lately, including a recent one-month trip we took to New Zealand (more on that tomorrow), as well as a recent trip we made with a team of eye doctors to do eye exams in Guatemala.

We also toasted our upcoming trip to Hawaii, and to the sabbaticals we are both taking from the work world right now that will enable us to live in Hawaii until the end of June.

And we toasted to the glories of Vicodin and the fact that I'm at last starting to feel a little bit better.

Last but not least, let me make a final toast to you--my growing number of readers here at Casual Kitchen. I'm grateful to have you, and it's been an absolute pleasure writing for you for the past two-plus years!

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Countdown: The Top Ten Alcoholic Drinks of Summer
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How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by linking to me, subscribing to my RSS feed, or submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon.

Casual Kitchen's Top Five of the Month: February 2009

This once-a-month post is for those readers who may not get a chance to read everything here at CK, but who still want to keep up with the best and most widely read articles. With one glance, you'll be able to see what your fellow readers have been focusing on over the past month.
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Top Five of the Month for February 2009:

1) 11 Really Easy Rice Side Dishes

2) Smoky Brazilian Black Bean Soup

3) Easy Sopa de Lima

4) 41 Ways You Can Help the Environment From Your Kitchen

5) The Muffin Blogroll: 12 Great Muffin Recipes You'll Love to Bake

From the Vault: Top Five Posts from One Year Ago:

1) The Favorite Cookbooks of My Favorite Bloggers

2) How to Apply the 80/20 Rule to Cooking

3) How to Make a Mole Sauce: Intense, Exotic and Surprisingly Easy to Make

4) The Bhut Jolokia Pepper--The World's Hottest Chili

5) How to Write an Effective Complaint Letter

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by linking to me, subscribing to my RSS feed, or submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon.

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27 Themes and Ideas for Wine Tasting Club Meetings

How to Start a Casual and Inexpensive Wine Tasting Club

Our New Zealand Travel Blog

A Pox on Our 2009 Open That Bottle Night

Casual Kitchen's Top Five of the Month: February 2009

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