Well-dressed preserves

In my own preserving, I've used Kerr jars, the kind that are available at supermarkets and hardware stores. Unlike most products, preserving jars, at least in the United States, appear to have no 'bargain' version and 'luxury' version; there's just the standard utilitarian Kerr/Ball jar, unchanged for decades. 

But on a recent trip to Sur La Table, I spotted a curious little cardboard flat of jars that I didn't recognize. I bent over to inspect them, and found that yes, someone had come up with a cleverly designed and fashionable alternative. No metal rings, no razor-sharp metal discs, just a glass jar, a glass lid, and a rubber gasket. I looked up this company, called Weck, and kept their name in my mind, intending to call upon them when my current stash of glass runs out, or when I decide my preserves have become gift-worthy. 

Now I see that Pim, of the venerable Chez Pim blog, has also discovered these photogenic cute little German jars. She's filled them with candied kumquats, and they look positively charming.

Ramos, Please Rid Us Of Your Fizz

It's called a Ramos Fizz. This little relic of a cocktail reared its ugly Victorian head during a otherwise pleasant sunny brunch this weekend at The Ramp in San Francisco, where a friend of mine spotted it on the menu and made the ill-advised decision to summon one from the bar.

It's gin, lemon and lime juice, sugar, orange flower water, cream and egg white, all together in filthy blended foamy matrimony, a grisly, tart, sweet and eggy marriage made in cocktail hell.

Everyone at the table had a brief sip, then my friend choked through a couple more sips, before it was finally relegated to the far end of the table. It sat alone scowling and festering in the sun and, in a fleeting bit of disgusting protest, curdled and separated into a two distinct foamy white and greenish clear layers. Ugh.

Breakfast sausage in High Definition

"Ignorance is like a delicate fruit; touch it, and the bloom is gone." - Oscar Wilde

Flavor is a lot like TV. In isolation and in the warm glow of ignorance, a normal CRT television portrays an acceptably faithful depiction of the world. Greens look green, reds look red, and everything is perfectly unremarkably nice. But take a journey out into the world and glimpse an HD television, and suddenly the universe is a different place. After you've witnessed the raw,visceral screamingly bright pore-level detail oozing from a wall-sized HD demi-god, your rounded glass simulacrum will never elicit anything but ennui.

I have tasted HD breakfast sausage, and until I took it out of the package, I didn't realize the depth of my own ignorance of this morning staple.

The packaging was already promising. I'm a sucker for compelling typography, so the blood red block characters on plain straw-colored background betold authentic meaty goodness before I grabbed it eagerly from the cooler case. Those big letters spelled Boccalone, which means 'big mouth' in colloquial Italian. It's the most recent project of Chris Cosentino (of my neighborhood's Incanto and Iron Chef America fame) and his business partner Mark Pastore. Boccalone first came to my attention a few months ago when, walking past Incanto, I saw a little sign touting something about a CSA for meat. Meat, delivered on a weekly basis - it's a brilliant triumph of civilization, and I'm amazed it hadn't been thought of earlier.

The Boccalone project has now expanded past the signup list of initial members into a full-on brand of delicious meat products, both fresh and cured, available from grocery stores and markets like Avedano's Holly Park Market in Bernal Heights here in San Francisco, where I got my mitts on some. It's all done correctly, using natural methods, humanely-sourced meat, and the flavors are so real that it makes Jimmy Dean taste like a sage-flavored sponge.

I could tell of the tales of pancetta or guanciale or salted pork liver, but this particular morning's foray into Boccalone's world came from their Easton Breakfast Sausage. Why Easton? Apparently it was famous for a time on the east coast between the Civil and Second World Wars, when Cosentino's English-descended kin produced Easton's Newport Sausage in Rhode Island. The inclusion of adventurous and fashionable bitter orange zest among the other potent herbs makes me wonder whether the original recipe has been updated since those early days, but regardless, this is a sausage that makes its presence known in the kitchen. I opened the package and immediately encountered an earthy and tart aroma, a more powerfully..well, meaty note than accompanies most grocery-standard meat products.


After a visit to the cast-iron frying pan in a little oil, the little Eastons joined the plate with a couple of slices of toast and another citrus diva, my own homemade marmalade, to bring me breakfast in breathtaking high fidelity.