New stuff for the weekend

Besides the previously mentioned cask wine, we’ve got a bunch of interesting things on the menu right now:

* In honor of the Democratic Nat’l Convention, Avery Brewing in Boulder CO recently released “Ale to the Chief”, a Presidential Pale Ale as it were. We have it in bottles right now and the proclamation on the label is as good as the beer itself.

* Now that we’ve settled into the new space somewhat, I’ve been freed up to get back into the kitchen and our curing room to work on our house-cured meats. You’ll see them sprinkled throughout the menu right now. Country ham, lamb belly confit (!), pancetta, bacon, to name a few. We also just finished curing another batch of our smoky pepperoni stix, this time made with our grass-fed beef from Spanish Oaks Ranch. Jay will be visiting Larry at Spanish oaks in the next couple days on his way to/from the Cal game, so hopefully we’ll get another blog post about that in the near future.

* The cured meat plate continues to evolve as well. Right now we’re featuring three meats that really emphasize the diversity of our library. The mortadella is an emulsified pork sausage, subtly seasoned with a creamy texture and lots of big chunks of diced pork fat (or lardelli) sprinkled throughout. The bresaola, a northern italian-style air dried meat, is a whole muscle, seasoned and cured, and then sliced thin. Usually made from beef, we used pastured bison from Wild Wind Farm for this. Finally, our newest offering, the thuringer. Named after the region in Germany where this sausage originated, it’s a heavily smoked pork link that is cold-cured several days before smoking. It’s got the characteristic tang and smokiness that many of us remember from our childhoods, minus the commodity meat. We used our finest pork from B&B Farms for this and the mortadella.

* Finally, and I’m so excited I don’t even know where to begin, FOOTBALL SEASON IS UPON US! AJ has just finished installing our projection TV, which we can use to show games on the weekends during lunch (basically for the noon game), so with the two bar TV’s we could theoretically have three different day games on. This is great since there always seems to be an occasion when Jay has the Cal game on, I have Ohio State on, and someone else wants to watch a lesser school compete.

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