Eight Essential Pantry Items for the Home Cook

Herdy gerdy flurdy… oh sorry, wrong chef. So you cook at home quite a bit: you’re always making fresh pies for when your family comes to dinner, crafting soups out of odds and ends you found in your vegetable crisper, and entertaining friends with your artful grilling techniques. But if…

It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown!

Happy Halloween! And what are you supposed to be? You may have noticed this week has been heavy on the booze. Well, I thought I’d keep that theme going with a post on one of my favorite drinks, the Charlie Brown. It’s basically a Black and Tan, only instead of…

The Great Voodoo Tiki Tequila Taste Test

Two frosty bottles of Voodoo Tiki. Drink up. We have a tradition around the New Times offices called Beer Fridays, where we basically reserve the last two hours of a workweek to drink in excess. It’s a good tradition, as you might imagine, and it was upheld this past Friday…

A lot of beer and nobody to drink it: Bayfront Oktoberfest

Ah, Oktoberfest: beer, greasy food, and brawny men in tight overalls dancing the higglety pigglety. We had a few local fest options this weekend, but we went with beer company Hoffbrau’s Bayfront Park shindig because its website has tinny accordion music and many typos, thereby convincing us of its authenticity…

Booze Hound – BYOBooze

I know it’s been awhile since you BYOBed -– like in high school, back when you used to sneak-sip Special Brews on some public beach on Key Biscayne while discussing the ever-important topic of whether to get a belly-ring, a fairy tattooed on your lower back, or just blow all…

Friday Wine Flights at Josef’s

We have more reason than ever to get our drunk on this weekend, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it with a little class. Josef’s in Plantation, New Times’ favorite Austro-Italian restaurant, debuts its Friday night wine flights this evening, with tastings of Austrian, Spanish, and Italian wines and…

Grateful Garden Grand Opening Party

The hippest little wine bar in this wicked little town. The Grateful Garden has been flitting around like a psychedelic butterfly for the last couple of years in search of a permanent home. Gayle Coursol and friends have been trying to get this market/cafe/meeting place/music venue/spiritual retreat a place large…

Good Things in Personalized Packages: Mason Jar Pies

Single serving pies, ready to go. And check out the nifty pie caddy! Recently I remembered how much I love pie. It happened at a tasting for Purple Pie Company, the cutest little independent pie company ever to come out of Miami. Alex Van Clief, the PPC’s Chief Officer of…

No More Martinis!

The simple art of boozing at The Field. God, we’re sick of martinis. September was a martini month. Maybe it was an instinctive reaction to the credit crisis; maybe some eternally blotto neuron in our brains forced us to drain our checking accounts while the draining was good, and re-invest…

Fort Lauderdale Food and Wine Events Tonight

Wine Warehouse Thursday Night Wine Tasting From 6:00 – 8:00PM Free Wine Warehouse of Fort Lauderdale invites you to a free wine tasting tonight to sample six new wines: * Villa Maria Sauvignon Blanc from New Zealand, 2007 (a bottle retail for $14.99, on sale at the Warehouse for $11.99)…

Bushmills Rocks

At Miami New Times HQ, the newspaper’s editorial staff convened in a conference room to conduct some serious investigative journalism. For 400 years, the region of Bushmills in Ireland has been distilling Irish whiskey for the masses to enjoy. So to celebrate King James 1608 decree granting the company a…

SAS Serves Satay

SAS has a rockin’ bar menu. Here’s something you didn’t know. Jimmy Sklaventis, a former owner of the very-good Universe Café, one of Hollywood Boulevard’s chiller establishments, is now the dude running the SAS Martini Lounge on Harrison Street. SAS is chic and reliably packed — reserving a table wouldn’t…

Booze Hound – Boteco

Ten things I really hate: 1) The insanity-evoking act of sitting in rush hour traffic 2) The Abelam Tribe of New Guinea (screw you and your giant, painted yams!) 3) The smell of chicken on my fingers 4) The Hills 5) Eating after midnight (because if I do, I tend…

Screw the Corkscrew

Baby, we’re through. Yeah, so, there’s Wall Street. There’s Sarah Palin. Hurricane Ike. The potential collapse of WaMu, the bank that controls my entire, very meager life savings. But then there are those little things that just make my wretched human existence feel soooooo worthwhile. I’m talking about my iGoogle…

Booze Hound – Scully’s Tavern

Elyse Wanshel I’ve always felt like Kendall is a Chinese finger cuff of a suburb. It isn’t particularly interesting (other than some dude who drives around with a weather vane and a toilet seat glued to his car), it’s swarmed with identical peach colored strip malls pumped full of Staples…

Booze Hound – San Juan and Halo

Julie Thomson Halo Lounge on Lincoln Road. Perhaps you didn’t notice, but last Friday Booze Hound was M.I.A. — or more specifically, was in MIA, checking a $15 bag (damn you, American Airlines!), getting bumped up to first class (thank you, American Airlines!), receiving a 6 a.m. buzz courtesy of…

10 Wines You Can Afford to Love

Above: And ten reasons to love Publix Yes, you too can be a wine connoisseur on your minimalist 30K a year salary. I’ve just finished reading The Wine Trials by Robin Goldstein, a scrappy little tome about the 6,000 wines he arranged to have blind tasted over the course of…

Wednesday Wine Tastings

I don’t know about you, but I need a mid-week break, and a wine tasting sounds like the best way to get my drunk on while pretending that I’m A) continuing my gastronomic education and B) being all sophisticated and stuff. Here are three grape-flavored blowouts going on tonight that…

How to Make a Hurricane

above: Hurricane preparedness kit I’ve pretty much come to the conclusion that there are two types of Floridians. The first has stockpiled enough bottled water, canned chili con carne, sterno, matches stored in waterproof bags, and flashlight batteries to survive a nuclear holocaust followed by an invasion of cranky aliens…