Category Archives: Food

Food

Italian Beer Artisans

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The Italian beers have arrived:

“I think this will go well, because it matches the sweetness of the pumpkin,” he said, setting down a glass not of wine, but of a slightly oxidized golden ale, which, he explained, had been fermented with wine yeast and had spent four years aging in the bottle.

Mmmm, pumpkin.

Around Italy, a craft beer scene has sprung up, bringing well-made specialty brews into haute cuisine dining rooms and elevating the fare served in brew pubs, creating an attractive destination for beer lovers who also love great food.

“Italian brewers have done a wonderful job of making it clear that they are the same sort of artisans as chefs and others involved in food,” said Stan Hieronymus, the author of “Brew Like a Monk,” who is making his own trip to the region this fall. “That makes a trip to Italy to find more of these beers and to experience them, along with local cuisine, particularly appealing.”

As if people needed another reason to visit Italy.

I like that they call it “craft beer”. It sounds much better than “micro brew”, which always made me think of automated and computerized beer rather than hand made or small batches.

Today I tasted watermelon beer from San Francisco and it was actually quite good. Don’t get me wrong, I love Italy, but sometimes one only has to look in the back yard to find something equally appealing.

Food, Poetry

I taste a liquor never brewed

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by emily dickinson

I taste a liquor never brewed,
From tankards scooped in pearl;
Not all the vats upon the Rhine
Yield such an alcohol!

Inebriate of air am I,
And debauchee of dew,
Reeling, through endless summer days,
From inns of molten blue.

When landlords turn the drunken bee
Out of the foxglove’s door,
When butterflies renounce their drams,
I shall but drink the more!

Till seraphs swing their snowy hats,
And saints to windows run,
To see the little tippler
Leaning against the sun!

It seems so few learn to drink from nature, and yet it is the most precious liquor…

Food, History, Poetry, Security

Bread, Hashish and Moon

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by Nizar Qabbani

When the moon is born in the east,
And the white rooftops drift asleep
Under the heaped-up light,
People leave their shops and march forth in groups
To meet the moon
Carrying bread, and a radio, to the mountaintops,
And their narcotics.
There they buy and sell fantasies
And images,
And die – as the moon comes to life.
What does that luminous disc
Do to my homeland?
The land of the prophets,
The land of the simple,
The chewers of tobacco, the dealers in drug?
What does the moon do to us,
That we squander our valor
And live only to beg from Heaven?
What has the heaven
For the lazy and the weak?
When the moon comes to life they are changed to
corpses,
And shake the tombs of the saints,
Hoping to be granted some rice, some children…
They spread out their fine and elegant rugs,
And console themselves with an opium we call fate
And destiny.
In my land, the land of the simple
What weakness and decay
Lay hold of us, when the light streams forth!
Rugs, thousands of baskets,
Glasses of tea and children swarn over the hills.
In my land,
where the simple weep,
And live in the light they cannot perceive;
In my land,
Where people live without eyes,
And pray,
And fornicate,
And live in resignation,
As they always have,
Calling on the crescent moon:
” O Crescent Moon!
O suspended God of Marble!
O unbelievable object!
Always you have been for the east, for us,
A cluster of diamonds,
For the millions whose senses are numbed”

On those eastern nights when
The moon waxes full,
The east divests itself of all honor
And vigor.
The millions who go barefoot,
Who believe in four wives
And the day of judgment;
The millions who encounter bread
Only in their dreams;
Who spend the night in houses
Built of coughs;
Who have never set eyes on medicine;
Fall down like corpses beneath the light.

In my land,
where the stupid weep
And die weeping
Whenever the crescent moon appears
And their tears increase;
Whenever some wretched lute moves them…
or the song to “night”
In my land,
In the land of the simple,
where we slowly chew on our unending songs-
A form of consumption destroying the east-
Our east chewing on its history,
its lethargic dreams,
Its empty legends,
Our east that sees the sum of all heroism
In Picaresque Abu Zayd al Hilali.