In fact, most American households serve red wine too chambré (the snooty word for “room temperature.”) Usually, you want them at around 55F - 60F, with the lower range going to lighter reds like beaujolais and the higher end to cabs, pinot noirs, and the like. Also, white wines are often served too cold – they should be in the 45F-50F range, not the 35F-40F of refrigerators.
Let’s see, my culinary preferences that run counter to tradition:
I’m one of those who will mix fish and seafood in a pasta dish. I usually try to avoid it, but the other week I was making seared scallops and shrimp with risotto, and I really, really wanted a risotto milanese under it, which is made with saffron and quite a bit of parmesan. It was fine.
I prefer certain vegetables in their “overcooked” form. For example, green beans. Though I enjoy quickly stir-fried green beans, I much prefer the southern or Greek styles of beans that are slow cooked for hours in a Dutch oven so they melt away and develop a completely different flavor from their rawer counterpart.
I’m sure there’s others, but that’s all I can think of for now.
Some treat their grits like mashed potatoes, and eat them with butter and salt.
Some treat their grits like cereal, and eat them with cream and sugar.
Each group thinks that the others are a bunch of deviants, heretics, and closet yankees, whose ancestors are no doubt responsible for the South losing the War.
I get a lot of strange looks when I ask for honey or maple syrup for my grits.
When my dinner companions are crowing about how tender their steaks are, I am usually thinking that mine is too mushy. And I prefer it cooked a bit more than the foodies think is proper.
Scrambled eggs should not be slimy. They should be fully cooked.
Cereal: With milk if it’s breakfast, without if it’s a midnight snack.
Hotdogs: Heinz 57 and lots of relish.
Pasta: Just past al dente. Not crunchy but not mushy either.
Red Wine: Room temp but I have recently discovered Beringer’s White Merlot which is quite exceptional when chilled in the fridge. Cheap and yummy!
Beer: As cold as possible without becoming a beer Icee. Except Corona. There is nothing more refreshing than a slushy Corona on a hot day at the beach!
As far as general cooking practices, I maintain that there is no food that can’t be improved by adding either cheese or chocolate!
I love adding soy sauce to Indian food (curries, masalas, etc). It’s for this reason that I prefer to order out and bring home, instead of eating at the establishments. If only they would stock soy sauce at the tables…
It is good. Just sprinkle a very little bit - it’ll actually make the watermelon sweeter.
Also, lump me in with the ketchup-on-hot-dogs (though it must be a kosher dog), cold-pizza-and-cold-Chinese, steak-cooked-all-the-way-through heathens.
I will put my hand up to liking mushy cereal, especially Raisin Bran. Cereal shouldn’t crunch.
Also - and Yankees, please take note - you cannot make sweet tea by adding sugar to unsweetened tea. The sugar will not dissolve, and you’ll end up with a glass of unsweet tea with a furious saccharine slug of sugar at the end. The sugar must be added while the tea is still warm. Don’t know why that is so hard to grasp.
I like cream cheese on potato chips. Love it. Pretty sure it’s not healthy. Yes, it’s a little too thick and breaks the chips a bunch - best to buy thick ridged chips and leave the cream cheese sitting out at room temperaure for awhile first. Mmmmm
When I started visiting a friend in NC, which eventually led to me moving down here, I mentioned that I already had a taste for grits, which I’d developed in past trips to the South. She then asked me, “What do you put on your grits? The future of our relationship depends on your answer.” Fortunately, I was correct when I replied, “Butter and sugar, of course. Grits is cereal.” (apparently, butter, at least to her, was an acceptable substitute for cream)
Cereal are always advertised as staying crispy in milk, if I wanted it crispy I would not put the milk in. I let the cereal sit in the milk for a minute or two until soggy.
I gave my father-in-law a gift bottle of 12 year old Wiser’s some time ago, which he liberally diluted with no-name cola before slugging it back. Does ANYONE here think that was a good thing? Or am I too being smug?
Of course; port needs to be served colder than most red wines, at about 55˚F. The maximum tippy-top serving temperature for red wine is 65˚, and that’s only for the richest varietals, especially those expensive bottles where you don’t want to miss a thing. Port – and I’ll admit I’m breaking “the rules” with respect to “vintage port” – is way too sweet and generally not of a quality to serve at such temperatures. Most should be served around 60˚, and all wines should be stored well below that – around 50˚ for reds.
And I like mustard AND ketchup on my hot dogs – yellow mustard, not the brown stone-ground mustard with horseradish that I put on everything else.
Classy really doesn’t have anything to do with it.
It’s a case of why spend the money on a good Scotch when you get the same results from a cheap scotch?
The ice will both chill it to the point that a lot of the complexity of flavor won’t come out and water it down so a lot of the complexity of flavor is lost. Might as well go with something that lacks the complexity in the first place. You can get more of it for the money.
That’s true for just about any darker liquor, not just Scotch and Cognac.
Save yourself some money and try the cheaper stuff, unless you really like the expensive stuff chilled. You can still taste the difference, but unless you really want to be overpaying for that difference, you’ll get considerably more bang for your buck.
Of course, pretty much any “silver/white” alcohol has to be chilled. Because it’s just vile otherwise. (Even chilled it’s usually vile.)
Blasphemy! Dogs, franks, brats, weiners, wursts, sausages, etc. were ordained to be eaten with onions, neon green relish, mustard, period. No one, I mean no one, has ever said it was okay to put ketchup, catsup, or any other tomato based corn syrup concotion on the holiest of holy ballpark foods.
I thought the Bovine Liberation Front was responsible for that. And that they duped some Irish farmer into helping them and having them taking the fall.
from the menu: All our burgers…Black Angus Beef topped w/ lettuce, tomato, mayo, red onion and a dill pickle spear.
W/Cheese (American, cheddar, swiss or pepper jack) .50
Add Bacon 1.25
Add Peanut butter (Mayo…Yes?No? let us know!) .60
Now, I had never before tried peanut butter on a burger, but honestly it was a really good addition. Not something I would opt for very often, but certainly better than it sounds.
I have not yet tried their “Boogie Monster”
Two 1/3 lb. patties stacked extra high w/ onion rings, grilled pastrami, 2 slices cheddar cheese, fried egg and bacon. “ask for a knife & fork”
Somehow that doesn’t all match my guess of delicious combinations.
