This routine happened to us at a restaurant last night. It’s becoming a common occurrence. This is one of those steak and chop houses where a strip steak is $39 and a rib-eye is $42 and everything else is a la carte.

We’re seated at the table. One waiter brings water and says, “You’re waiter will be here in a moment.” So the official waiter comes, says hello, my name is whatever and I’ll be taking care of you tonight — taking care of us? — hands each of us a menu and puts the wine list on the table.

“May I start you off with a cocktail or a glass of wine?” he asks.

I say, “No, we’ll look at the wine list and the menu.”

So he ambles off and we look at the menu, compare ideas about what we might order and what kind of wine we’re in the mood for. Usually LL and I order either fish or red meat so one bottle of white or red wine will do. So we’re mulling these things over, and I’m looking at the wine list, and the moments flee by, and LL says, “We haven’t gotten any bread.” Indeed, we have not. And she adds, “I wonder if there are any specials we should know about.” Indeed, we have not been told about any specials.

The waiter shows up finally and asks, “Have you had a chance to select your wine?”

I say, “Well, yes, but could we have some bread?”

He looks amazed. “Well,” he says, “don’t you want to order the wine first?”

And I say, “No, the wine is to go with dinner, and when the wine comes we’ll want some bread to go with it.” So off he goes to bring us some bread.

Which he does, and then we order the wine, and then he has to go get the wine and then he opens the wine and goes through all the folderol and THEN we get around to the matter of reciting the specials and ordering dinner.

By now, a time zone has slipped away to the east. Friends, life is too short to sit in restaurants where the preferred method of business is to get the cocktails and wine on the table as fast as possible and get patrons good and oiled before allowing them to decide what they want to eat or even bringing them some bread with which to buffer their stomachs.

It’s not — to be fair — the waiter’s fault. He was only doing what management tells him to do. But, lord love a duck, isn’t it enough that we’re paying $60 or so each for dinner? Must we be led down the path of inebriation too?

Waiter image from images.inmagine.com.

Sorry, but I’ve been chortling all week about The Grapes of Galilee (little trademark sign), a line of wines produced in Israel’s Galilee region and intended for the Christian audience, though I would bet that Christians haven’t exactly been waiting around all this time to drink wine for a product that will provide “a physical connection with their spiritual homeland.” (Quoting an email press release that a thoughtful reader passed on to me.) Well, at least not the Roman Catholics and Episcopals and a few Presbyterians. And let’s not forget that at least two other major world religions claim (violently) the geography of Israel as a spiritual homeland.

The Grapes of Galilee (little trademark sign) wines are available in chardonnay, cabernet sauvignon and merlot and cost about $14.

The press release goes on: “It was at a wedding in Galilee where, 2,000 years ago, Jesus is said to have turned water into wine.” Is said to? One would think that people either believe that yes, Jesus definitely turned water into wine at the vinously-challenged Wedding at Cana or else the whole thing is urban legend. It’s not as if people are walking around Galilee today saying, “You know, my grandmother said that over there is where Jesus is said to have turned water into wine.” “Getoutahere!”

And it’s not that I’m opposed to exploiting Jesus of Nazareth to market Israeli wine to American Christians (an interesting global concept itself since most wine made in Israel is kosher and is aimed at the American Jewish market.) What is one to say of religion at all when 150 years after Nietzsche declared god dead Morgan Freeman has a franchise playing him in Hollywood movies? No, I’m a firm believer in that bumper sticker you see so frequently: “WWJD.” I mean, “What Would Jesus Drink” is a subject far too rarely addressed in the popular media.

(BTW, for reactions to using the image and idea of Jesus to sell wine, see this page on www.luxist.com, where the posts range from sanctimonious to daffy to downright scary.)

Really, then, what I object to in this press release is lousy history and manipulative language used in bad faith. The email says: “Grown by the Sea of Galilee and watered by the Jordan River, the Grapes of Galilee wines are ideal for celebrations such as wedding receptions and communions, or any festive occasions where Christians seek a physical connection with their spiritual homeland.” The implication is clear: Grapes of Galilee (little trademark sign) wines are special not because they’re particularly good — and they may be sensational for all I know — but because they originate near the sea where Jesus performed miracles and are irrigated by the river whose waters John used to baptize the prophet, according to the New Testament. The owners of the label, the American Adam Haroz and his father Pini H. Haroz, seem specifically to deprecate the truest and best use of wine, at dinner with family and friends in favor of using it only for occasions that carry religious intentions or overtones. Perhaps the garish label is too embarrassing for the domestic dinner table.

Haroz pere et fils take the concept of terroir to zany heights in this incoherent, if not hysteria-tinged, paragraph about The Grapes of Galilee (little trademark sign) from their website (www.haroz.com):

“This series of wines awakens the senses, taking you on a sensual journey from the Sea of Galilee to the slopes of Mount Tabor, characterized by the rare close proximity to chalk, volcanic and Terra Rosa soils and bubbling natural springs form the Jordan River, that supply water to the vineyard. Grown in soil deemed most-suited, each variety of grape milks the land for the best it has to offer, ripening into a dream vintage. Each sip bestows upon the palate a taste of the morning dew, the basalt firmness, the element of chalk, and the red tinted soil, creating a unique ‘taste of Israel’ mosaic of flavors.”

Please, let me taste your morning dew and basalt firmness, as the bride said on the night after her Christian wedding ceremony and joyous reception, lubricated, no doubt, by bottles of The Grapes of Galilee (little trademark sign).

AND, what fries me in addition to this meretricious nonsense, is the way that various print and online media outlets in this country blithely and blandly reproduce the release from which I have quoted and perhaps add a cute comment as if it is their responsibility merely to announce this line of wines without investigating the implications or looking beneath the surface. Business as usual in the wine press. Only Michael Y. Park, on epicurious.com mentions The Grapes of Galilee (blah blah) with a slight smirk: “Double points for anyone who can come up with a joke involving the Grapes of Galilee back office, Jesus Christ, and a garden hose dripping with tap water.” Thanks for that refreshing touch of skepticism, Michael.

I’m not usually a connect-the-dots kind of guy, you know, one of those globalizing futurists who can see the correlation between a one-dollar a month rise in the wages of shoe factories in Indonesia and the after-school mortality rate in the playgrounds of Detroit, but still, I think that there could be a connection between these two news items.

First, we all know that there’s a glut of cheap and not very good wine in Europe, that huge quantities of wine fuel the vinegar manufacturies of the continent and that small-time grape-growers in France revolt against governmental agricultural regulations and the devastating downturn in prices by making the next logical step and burning down their local McDonald’s. “Take zat, you damned imperialist golden arches!”

An article in The New York Times last week confirmed the worst of all these notions, namely that the European Commission is proposing to rip out 500,000 acres of vineyards on the continent, generally in France, Spain and Italy, and to cease paying subsidies for distilling unsold wine into industrial alcohol. “Instead,” wrote Stephen Castle, “it would make payments directly to farmers, encouraging them to diversify into other crops, rather than continue to over-produce sometimes poor-quality wine.”

On the other hand, the restrictions would be relaxed after 2014 on “successful vineyards,” which would allow “the most efficient producers to optimize the size of their holdings and to operate at the most convenient production scale.”

Big Uh-Oh there. The definition of “most efficient producer” and the phrase “optimize their holdings” means the guy who grows the most grapes and makes the most wine, which is exactly what the French, at least, don’t need, because they have been taking a beating in the reliable cheap wine department, being overtaken by the Australians, the Argentines and Chileans and their neighbors, the Spanish and Italians. (Well, Australia is problematic; since Penfolds, Lindemans and Rosemount are all owned by the giant Fosters company, their inexpensive wines mainly taste the same.)

Anyway, the second point. An email bulletin I received a few days ago from Global Wines and Spirits, “The E-News Weekly Portal for Wine Professionals” — a fascinating brokering function for agents, wholesalers and retailers — says this: “In the past few months, Global Wine & Spirits has noticed a rapidly increasing demand for bulk organic wine. Requests have been coming in from every continent, but very few producers are currently able to supply this product.” Everybody wants cheap organic wine! Imagine that!

Now, if I’m not mistaken, it wouldn’t take Malcolm ‘Made Ya Blink!’ Gladwell to figure out that what the European governments need to do is not persuade farmers to grow pears or artichokes but to sink those subsidies into educating grape-growers in methods of organic farming, helping them shift their vineyards to organic practices and getting the word out to the world’s wine consumers, who are obviously keenly attuned to eco-issues and want organic products to consume in their daily lives. The demand is clearly there; the European wine-producing countries (and principally the French) have to take advantage of the situation.

Then maybe the disgruntled farmers can stop bull-dozing and burning McDonald’s. Or is that the bright side of globalization?

I have in my hand a menu from The Grill Room, a chain of high-end bar-and-grill style restaurants — a filet mignon is $42.95 — that started in Los Angeles. In the upper left hand corner of the menu is a list titled “Martinis,” and on that list you will find the Negroni, the Sidecar and the Cosmopolitan as well as various concoctions made primarily from vodka.

Now, let’s get something straight here. The Negroni and the Sidecar, noble drinks in the 20th Century’s bright chronicle of alcoholic beverages, and the Cosmopolitan, that fey, starry-eyed newcomer, are not martinis. In fact only the Martini is a martini: four parts gin, one part dry vermouth, stir — please! — with ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with a lemon twist. Sorry, I’m not an olive man.

Notice that I wrote “cocktail glass.” That shallow, inverted cone-shaped vessel resting on a medium-length stem on a fairly wide base — don’t want the thing to tump over — is now almost universally and mistaken referred to as a “martini glass;” even bartenders commit this error, certainly because of the wide popularity of “martinis” and “martini bars” in the 1990s and early 2000s. By what linguists call “back-formation” — “the creation by analogy of a new word in the false assumption that the existing word is a derivation of the new word, i.e., ‘to burgle’ from ‘burglar’” — the glass once known as cocktail, because cocktails were served in it, became tagged by its ubiquitous and multiplying contents. And in a further eroding of authenticity and integrity, all the drinks served in a “martini” glass are now, at least in some quarters, called “martinis.”

Woe is me.

Kids, language counts. In the beginning was the word, and if we don’t take care of words they will get all rubbed together, and jumbled together, and what we use them to name — the most important function of language — will be lost in the mists of far-off last year, poured out like dregs by marketers and flacks whose sole employ is altering what we name and what we know for commercial purposes. (Governments do this too; have you noticed?)

Hark to the poor Patagonian toothfish, an ugly and humble but useful fish for the kitchens of a million North American restaurants. “We’ll never sell a creature called the Patagonian toothfish,” some marketer said back in the late 1980s, and lo and behold, a new fish was born, the Chilean sea bass, and if you’ve eaten one of them, you’ve eaten a thousand. Didn’t know that the Chilean sea bass was actually the Patagonian toothfish? Pretty soon no one will.

Or take the lordly Portobello mushroom. Compare it to the smaller and more common button or Cremini mushroom in the grocery store produce aisle. Did you know that a Portobello, so prized for its flavor and meatiness, is simply a button (or Cremini) mushroom allowed to grow bigger? Or, to reverse the order, a Cremini is an immature Portobello? And by the way, Portobello is the correct spelling, ever though on the packaging and on restaurant menus we see the name spelled “portobella,” “portabello” and “portabella.” Hence (and awfully) button mushrooms are now marketed (at your market) as — “Baby Bellas”!

Enough. Let’s return to cocktails.

Here’s what I want you to remember:

1. Cocktails are alcoholic drinks, best consumed before dinner and usually composed of a base, a modifier and an accent. (The terminology comes from my favorite cocktail book, Cocktail: The Drinks Bible for the 21st Century, by Paul Harrington and Laura Moorhead. Viking, 1998)

2. Cocktails are served in cocktail glasses.

3. A Martini is a cocktail, as is a Cosmopolitan, a Sidecar, a Negroni and several hundred (or thousand) of examples, many invented only yesterday in the increasing drive for splashy signature drinks in bars and restaurants.

4. Cocktails should be served very cold, very very cold.

5. Generally speaking, cocktails with fruit juices should be shaken and all others should be stirred, but it’s really a question of the crystalline clarity of the result that matters. A Martini of course should be stirred, so it reveals no trace of cloudiness whatever. We’re talking about elegance.

And now, here are recipes for a Sidecar and a Negroni, also from Cocktail: The Drinks Bible for the 21st Century.

Sidecar
1 and a half ounces cognac

Three-quarters ounce Cointreau

Three-quarters ounce lemon juice

Shake with cracked ice; strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with a lemon wheel.

Negroni
1 ounce gin

1 ounce sweet vermouth

1 ounce Campari

Shake with cracked ice; strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with an orange wheel.

The image of the cocktail glass is from acemart.com.

The image of the Sidecar is from epicurious.com.

The image of the Negroni is from drinkalizer.com.

* Saw this on a menu recently, in the appetizer list: “Toasted bread topped with bruschetta.”

No, people, bruschetta isn’t the topping, tomato/basil (though that has become the cliche) or not; bruschetta is the whole thing, the piece of grilled — not toasted — bread, preferably smeared with olive oil and garlic, mounted by any number of toppings, tomato and basil, certainly, or roasted peppers and eggplant or cheeses or strips of meat or  chopped shrimp and octopus, pretty much anything that makes a savory few bites to whet the diner’s appetite and go well with a glass of simple wine.

Now we’re even seeing in grocery stores, in the refrigerator case, little plastic containers labeled “Bruschetta” that hold chopped tomatoes and basil in olive oil with a few herbs. No, sorry, you can use that stuff to make bruschetta, but it’s not the thing itself.

* This happened at a restaurant last night, a warm night, suitable for sitting outside, which we did, and ordering a bottle of Taltarni Sauvignon Blanc 2005 and by the way I hate the new label. Anyway, the waiter brought the wine, we went through the tasting ritual, it’s quite lovely but not really cold enough; I mean, this is a sauvignon blanc. So I ask for an ice bucket, “Yes sir,” and she brings the bucket, which is filled with ice, and she tries to jam the bottle down in there. Of course it won’t go; the thing is packed with almost solid ice. So she gives up and leaves the bottle sort of perched on top of the ice with a white cloth wrapped around it.

If you took physics in high school, you know that a bottle of wine sitting on top of a mass of ice cubes is not going to get chilled; there’s no conductivity; it needs water so the cold can circulate, so, of course, I pour my glass of water in the bucket to try and get the ice loosened up a little. It takes several glasses of water. Three, actually.

The point here is that no one trained this waiter that an ice bucket needs to be filled with half ice and half water in order to chill a white wine or keep it cold; the bottle needs to be down in there. And it’s amazing how often this situation occurs, even in fine dining restaurants with great wine lists where you would think they know better. And you hate to be a smart-ass and pull rank and say to the waiter, “Look here, I’m a wine writer and I need to tell you how to handle the ice bucket problem,” because then they turn on you and say something like, “There’s no problem, sir, this is how we do it,” and there you sit with your bottle of white wine or champagne perched on top of the ice and everybody sort of pissed off. At least me.

Guess where San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom is after admitting to and apologizing for having an affair with his re-election campaign manager’s wife, Ruby Rippey-Tourk?
In alcoholic rehab, of course!

“Demon Rum Made Me Do It” has become the “Twinkie Defense” of the 21st Century.

What about former U.S. Representative Mark Foley (R., Fla.), who resigned at the end of September after admitting to exchanging sexually explicit email messages with former Congressional pages?

You guessed it: straight to rehab, and not just any rehab but Sierra Tucson, which costs more than $40,000 a month. A week after he signed up for the clinic, where horseback-riding and mountain hiking are agenda items, Foley’s family told the Palm Beach Post that “he appears to be recovering.”

Actor and film director Mel Gibson, who spewed anti-Semitic comments to a police office who pulled him over for driving erratically last July? Right again, rehab for that potty-mouth. Gibson promised that he wasn’t an anti-Semite, that “I’m not that person.” Who, then, was that Mr. Hyde? Why of course, an alter-ego created by alcohol.
At least Joe Biden didn’t step up to the mike and say, “I was drunk when I called Barack Obama articulate.”

Now it’s true that Newsom, well-known as the founder of Plumpjack winery in Napa Valley and a stable of successful restaurants, said that “my problems with alcohol are not an excuse for my personal lapses in judgment,” which comes about as close to owning up to responsibility as any errant politicians and celebrities do these days. Usually they admit to no more than making a mistake, the definition of “mistake” being “something I did wrong and got caught at.”

Let’s admit that one of the points of alcoholic beverages is that they are intoxicating; being a little high, getting a little buzz can be pleasant. Getting knee-walking drunk and plunging your car through the window of a convenience store and taking out all the snack shelves is not pleasant. Nor is getting drunk and beating up your spouse or cheating on your spouse. Alcohol abuse, as we all should know, can exact a terrible price on individuals, families and communities. But the number of people (outside of the Super Bowl) who, it seems to me, consume wine, beer and spirits moderately — and this conclusion is based only on my own decades of experience, observation and reading — far outnumber those who abuse alcoholic beverages.

Alcohol is such an easy target. Even after the heady freedoms of the 1960s and the prosperity of the ’80s and the indulgences of the ’90s, we still teeter (and perhaps titter) at the squalid boundaries of puritan guilt. The forces that brought the notorious decade and more of Prohibition, that disaster, to America still hover in the background. We are still not a nation of naturally accepting wine-drinkers and perhaps never will be. Alcohol may be (mainly) legal, but it carries woeful baggage, and The Culture of Blame and Apology recognizes how convenient a punching-bag alcohol is.

Wouldn’t it be refreshing if some sinning politician or celebrity stood before us and instead of saying, to the phalanx of light and cameras, “I’m sorry if I brought disgrace to my family, my friends and many fans, and I’m checking into an alcohol rehab center to evaluate my life and learn to be more positive about myself and my future,” said, “Look, she was a babe, I was hotter’n a pepper sprout and when I did what I did I was stone-cold sober.”

Image credit: geocities.com

I’m a great admirer of wine importer and food entrepreneur Dan Philips, whose The Grateful Palate in Oxnard , California — http://www.gratefulpalate.com — is a trove of edible treasures, including the well-known Bacon of the Month Club. Philips is one of the best American importers of Australian wines, specializing in small producers with big aspirations; among several dozen labels he imports are Burge Family, Hazy Blur, Henry’s Drive, Kay Brothers, Lengs & Cooter, Lillypilly, Trevor Jones and The Willows. Philips was also partner with Sparky Marquis in the widely acclaimed Marquis Philips label, an enterprise that broke up last year.

So I was enthusiastic when a clerk in a local retail store recommended the 3 Rings Shiraz 2005 from Australia’s Barossa Valley (about $16 to $20). The label is another Philips partnership, this time with grower David Hickinbotham and winemaker Chris Ringland. I assumed that this would be a pretty bold expression of the shiraz grape; I didn’t expect a travesty.

Five or six years ago, I was in Los Angeles for a comprehensive tasting of Penfolds Grange — yes, it was an extraordinary event — and before the tasting began, Australian writer and wine-maker James Halliday rose to his feet to say a few words, and the first sentence he uttered has stayed with me: “The three most important elements of wine are balance, balance and balance.” I think this aphorism should be tattooed on the backs of the hands of every wine-maker and producer in the world as well as hung, in the form of embroidered samplers, in every winery, chai and chateau.

Halliday was not calling for well-mannered, wimpy wines, holding little fingers a-curl as they sip milky tea. He was asserting the fact that the greatest wines, at every price range, should reflect harmony and integration in all their components: fruit, acid, tannin, alcohol and — the most dangerous factor — oak. (Well, alcohol level has become a vital issue too.) Even deep, large-framed young wines intended for aging, Bordeaux classified growths, California cult cabernets, Barolos and so on, however tannic they may be in infancy, should display a sense of innate balance and order; the balance may shift and change over the years, but it’s always there.

Which brings us back to the 3 Rings Shiraz 2005.

This opens with a super-ripe, fleshy, meaty bouquet that teems with scents of macerated and roasted blackberries and blueberries as well as a touch of zinfandel-like boysenberry. In the mouth, the wine is exceedingly plush, velvety and voluptuous and, at 15.5 percent alcohol, offers a considerable amount of that high-alcohol raisiny plumminess and jamminess. The wine is starting to taste, in fact, like something you might rather spread on toast than drink with a meal with the other grown-ups. The spicy factors increase as the wine slides over the tongue, becoming not only dominant but strident and austere, and the wine concludes unpleasantly in a welter of incoherence.

My palate was not grateful.

I single this wine out, because of its origins, as a prominent example of what happens when producers value power, intensity and simple-minded texture over wines that balance feeling good and tasting good. It is not, I assure you, the only example.

If music be the food of love, by all means, play on, but in restaurants, when food is paramount, silence is the best sound of all.

In other words, I hate music in restaurants.

This statement is inspired by a piece about music sound tracks in Manhattan restaurants in yesterday’s New York Times written by Peter Meehan, who also writes the “$25 and Under” dining reviews, the point being that the vast majority of restaurant owners and managers don’t even consider not having a musical backdrop in their dining rooms. The main questions are what kind of music to provide and who will compile the selections, the owner or manager, the staff, or an outside company like the famed Muzak or some other company with a younger, hipper focus.

Nobody brought up the crucial issue of how loud, I mean how LOUD the music should be played.

Here’s an example. We went to The Mermaid Inn (96 Second Ave in Manhattan.) not long after it opened and found the food OK — the restaurant was slammed — but not as good as The Red Cat or The Harrison, which are under the same ownership. The chief problem wasn’t the food, however, but the music, downtown alt rock, that was played so loudly that waiters had to shout at diners, diners had to shout back at waiters and nobody at the table could have a conversation or even say “Pass the bread” without bellowing or writing a note. It was like being in a club, not a restaurant. Restaurant owners may think that’s cool, but it ain’t.
In fact, I find this experience not merely irritating or off-putting but deadly. Playing music — any kind of music — in a restaurant so loudly that the sound dominates the room, calls attention to itself and shatters the concentration that should be centered on the food and wine ruins dining out for me, and I would bet that I’m not alone in this reaction. It seems counter-intuitive to me that restaurants would continue, actually aggressively continue, in a practice that can alienate diners. Isn’t the idea in business to cater to customers?

Equally bad is inappropriate music in restaurants. I can’t tell you the times I have sat in a fine-dining establishment, trying to enjoy some splendid dish, while Tony Bennett practically stands next to the table leaving his heart in San Francisco or Frank Sinatra has a very good year or reggae throbs through the dining room. Or hits of the Eighties! Do we have to be reminded?

No, my friends, if there must be music, let it be almost subliminal, a sound that stays so firmly in the background that we perceive it only when there’s a lull in the activity.
Even better, let there be no music at all except for the sounds that should be music to all our ears: The mild clatter of cutlery, the low murmur or conversation, the sigh of enjoyment and pleasure.

Let’s nip this little trend in the bud right now.

Our January issue of Food & Wine magazine arrived Saturday. The main feature is “100 Tastes You Must Try in 2007,” an extension of the magazine’s annual attempt at “hip and happening” that’s so pathetic it’s almost cute. They actually write about “groovy” restaurants and “power couples” and “the next baby lettuce.”

I couldn’t help focusing, however, on Trend No. 14: “House-Infused Bourbon.” The writer says: “Bartenders have been infusing vodka for years; now they’re joyfully” — joyfully? — “infusing bourbon with everything from black cherries to bacon. Chris Beveridge from 12 Baltimore in Kansas City, Missouri, favors apples, cinnamon and vanilla.”

I guess everything’s up-to-date in Kansas City.

The recipe that follows calls for “3 cored and quartered medium Granny Smith apples, 4 cinnamon sticks and 2 whole vanilla beans.” The bourbon? A bottle of Woodford Reserve. That’s where I say, “Say what???”
There’s a reason why vodka manufacturers create and sell millions of cases of fruit or spice or herb-infused vodka. The whole point of vodka is that it possesses no distinguishing quality except pure, glacial characterlessness. You can distill vodka seven times if you want, make it from the finest mountain waters never lapped by humans or animals and filter it through an Escalade packed with diamond dust and it will reflect nothing except high alcohol and formidable neutrality. So sure, hell yeah, go ahead, stuff it with rose petals, mangos and truffles for all I care.

But Woodford Reserve is one of the finest of the hand-crafted bourbons that appeared on the market over the past 10 or 15 years. Reading this squib in Food & Wine led me to break out my bottle, pour out a couple of fingers of the golden-amber ambrosia and have a few sips of smooth, mellow, sweet liquid naturally tinged with wood, orange rind, toffee and allspice from its time spend meditating in oak barrels; it rolled over the tongue and down the throat like warm money.

O.K., infuse a bottle of Heaven Hill if you want, but the last thing my Woodford Reserve needed was a soul-destroying infusion of apples and cinnamon and vanilla. I mean, we’re not talking about a Thanksgiving pie here.

I will say, just to be nice, that we use recipes from Food & Wine constantly, often going back to favorite dishes we cooked from the magazine years ago.