Chinese New Year is a time of parades and festivals, a Nian Ye Fan (reunion dinner), a time of feasting and celebrating, a communal hot pot to signify togetherness, cleaning the house and “sweeping” away the bad of the previous year in order to start fresh, and gathering families to honor deities and ancestors. Although…
A wine’s smell or overall aroma is also called the “nose” of the wine, and this “nose” is the second stage in wine tasting, after evaluating by sight. The nose is a fascinating organ, capable of differentiating between thousands of unique scents. This makes it a great tool in evaluating wine, because it is able…
Mardi Gras is French for “Fat Tuesday” and refers to the carnival celebrations leading up to Ash Wednesday, the day the fasting season of Lent begins. It is celebrated throughout the world, but in the United States the party tends to focus in New Orleans, where for a period of two weeks you can find…
In 1926 Carter G. Woodson, a Harvard-trained historian, conceived of and announced Negro History Week, carefully chosen to coincide with the birthdays of Frederick Douglass—an escaped slave and leader of the abolitionist movement—and Abraham Lincoln, the President of the United States of America responsible for the Emancipation Proclamation which made freeing the slaves an explicit…
This year Valentine’s Day falls on a Saturday creating a perfect storm for restaurant operators, with the opportunity to make the entire weekend a financial windstorm for many establishments. While not necessarily a “holiday,” the day of celebration generates $10 billion nationwide, and a night out tops the list of how shoppers spend that money.…
Without even taking a sniff or sip of wine, we can get an overall idea about what we are about to enjoy. The first step in the tasting process is to look at the wine in our glass in order to evaluate its appearance. The color can give you hints about the approximate age, what…
Ginger, long a popular spice and herbal medicine, is fast becoming the latest mania, reaching into the depths of culinary corners near and far. Its clean taste makes it a desired ingredient for many dishes, but it is a flavor that easily matches with any fare, from sweet to savory and everywhere in between. So…
Food halls are the latest culinary movement spreading across the United States. In a sense, food halls take us back to a time before there were supermarkets, before there were convenience stores and drive-thrus, back to a time when locally sourced, artisanally crafted was the prime way to buy and consume. So what, you may…
At its most basic, wine can be described as the “juice from fermented grapes…and usually having an alcoholic content of 14 percent or less.” But the definition doesn’t do well to describe the many complexities of a tantalizing wine, nor the rich history of the origin of wine-making. Evidence of early wine-making reaches back to…
Did you know that Super Bowl Sunday is the second largest food consumption day of the year? True fact! The infamous sporting event is second only to Thanksgiving. And now that we know that the Seattle Seahawks and New England Patriots will be facing off in Super Bowl XLIX, on February 1st, many of us…