breakfast first

Miss V, please take note

With a blog name like "Breakfast First", I feel obligated to report on innovation as it relates to the most important meal of the day. So behold this wonderful contraption: a toaster, capable of handling bagels, that can also cook an egg and breakfast meat for you. Not a bad design, either, and it looks like cleaning -- normally the big "gotcha!" with food prep products -- won't be too difficult. The site says it's available in September; expect a full review here shortly thereafter.

(via linkmonger)

This Modern World

Here's a tip I've been meaning to post for a while: When you move to a new city, one thing that always takes a while to figure out is where to order good delivery from. If you're not willing to just accept the menus shoved under your door, there is a better way -- provided you live in Boston, Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, or DC: Just decide on the type of cuisine you'd like, search for it on local.google, then search for the restaurant's menu on Amazon's restaurant service. (Confidential to Jeff B. in Seattle: I absolutely love you for providing this service.)

This works surprisingly well and takes no time at all, especially since I have a firefox quicksearch set up for local.google searches near my home address. For example, if I feel like having Korean, I just type "loc korean food" in my browser, check out the results and pick an interesting name, and look up the menu on Amazon. Fabulous!

I'm sure it would be easy to tie these two things together with a bookmarklet or other device, but it's so handy that it would be far better for Google and Amazon to work it out together properly.

Amuse-bouche

Wonderful! Miss Sabine, a serious food lover and an incredible cook, has decided to start blogging about dining around San Francisco (and the occasional jaunt up to Napa). This will be a great new addition to my food-related feeds (although it does make me pine for San Francisco).

Innovative

Can running cheap vodka through a Brita filter make it taste as good as premium vodka? I see independent analysis in my future. This is a serious question, given the ungodly price of alcohol in Washington, where hard liquor is sold only through state-run stores. This is especially hard for Miss J, who comes from the land of the drive-through daiquiri.

Must remember to avoid

Over Thanksgiving dinner last night, someone jokingly remarked how the gravy was good enough to drink straight. This steered the discussion to a local Seattle soda company, Jones Soda, and more specifically to their Turkey and Gravy flavor soda. Well, if that ain't science for ya!

Disgusting though it was, it did remind me of the book Little America which I read when I was about thirteen or so. (God bless my brother-in-law for recommending (and lending me) books that were far too mature for my age.) At some point in the novel, the main character tries to boost sales of his not-good-tasting salad dressing by lacing it with cocaine; later, people are chugging bottles of the dressing in the supermarket aisles. I really enjoy that imagery.

When they offer you water from Wales, you take it!

Co-worker and major food lover KM managed to score dinner at The French Laundry for her birthday. A friend of KM's wrote about their dinner here. It sounds truly amazing.

I would like to make it to the FL one day, although there are so many other top-notch restaurants that I have yet to make it to (like Boulevard, Fifth Floor, Gary Danko, Aqua, Chez Panisse), despite some of them being in my immediate neighborhood! Fortunately I did manage to get to Fleur de Lys once, which was quite definitely the best meal of my life, easily beating the previous record holder, the Commander's Palace. (Which is not to say that CP does not have some damn fine food -- it's excellent.)

Roxanne's is cooked

Sorry for the bad pun. Roxanne's, the groundbreaking, gourmet raw-food in Larkspur (near San Francisco) restaurant, closed last week. It turns out that the business from their recently-opened take-out restaurant was cutting deeply into the main restaurants revenue. The take-out restaurant will remain open.