Gastonomical Cooking: Brisket Breakthrough!

I'm not going to claim that I'm a Certified Barbecue Expert, but I've smoked my share of meat over the years -- mostly of the porcine variety. I've smoked pork butt several different ways, including traditional pulled pork and an Italian porchetta, all to rave reviews. I've also had good luck with ribs. But the one time I did brisket was several years ago, and it was, well, disappointing. It was okay (it was barbecued brisket!), but it was on the dry side, and compared with the excellence I'd been able to produce from Our Friend the Pig, it led me to relegate brisket to something I get in restaurants rather than try myself.

October 6-12 is Regional Wine Week -- Support Your Local Grape!

Dave McIntyre, in his WineLine blog, posted about October 6-12 being Regional Wine Week. It's the sixth annual celebration of wine made throughout the country and not just on the West Coast, according to McIntyre, who actually started the recognition as part of the drinklocalwine.com blog and along with Jeff Siegel, The Wine Crumudgeon. The focus was to encourage wine writers, bloggers and tweeters to focus on their local wine, wherever that happened to be.

Time for Lunch

Well, so far it's been Matt driving this blog. And I appreciate the time and energy he's put it into it. But pretty much since he established the blog, he's been on me to post something.

"What on earth would I blog about?"
"I dunno. You could blog about what you ate at lunch."
"Yogurt and a diet shake?"

OK I made that part up.

I really SHOULD be eating yogurt and drinking diet shakes for lunch. But instead, I get tempted...

September at Del Ray Farmers Market

The Del Ray Farmer's Market is still bringing it in a big way! In fact, there's a cross-section of still-coming-in summer produce and the beginning of the fall stuff rolling in. As a result, we ended up with some heavily laden bags of corn and tomatoes, as well as apples (that I'm hoping will end up in a pie!), cider and various other goodies. Now we're sitting at home watching the leaves fall and the rain start, which may put a damper on our plan to do grilled pizza. But while we were at the market, we caught some impressive colors:

Because the world needs another food and drink blog...

...we're here to fill the void! Of course that's not the case, and that was one thing that kept us from trying this for a while. But eating and drinking is so much a part of our lives -- we spend most of our spare time at restaurants, farmers markets, wineries, breweries and in the kitchen that we figured we're as qualified as anyone. So here we are!
Who are we?
We live in the Washington DC area, the inner Northern Virginia suburbs, to be specific.