R emember the old Chianti wine bottles from Italy that came with a wicker basket woven around the bulbous bottom part of the bottle? Well, w...

Moving to Virginia has meant longer car trips to visit family and friends. Although we like to think of ourselves as the kind of people wh...

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Here's a California Chardonnay that won't suck green out of your wallet. It's bright color is almost as golden-yellow as the car...

Shiraz is what the Aussies call their syrah grapes and wine. When you live down under, you can flip anything around and call it what you lik...

Whether they know it or not, most people have probably had ratatouille, the French dish of cooked vegetables. In the cartoon movie " Ra...

We have a few wines from Portugal in our cellar, but we don't know much about wines from the sliver of land on the western edge of Spain...

From the time that we spent in California wine country we learned a lot about Sonoma, Napa, Central Coast, Valley of the Moon and all of the...

We're mystified by how many people use mixes to make cornbread when it is almost as easy and fast, and much cheaper, to make it from scr...

Everybody is familiar with the four basic flavors—sweet, salty, bitter, and sour—but there's an elusive fifth flavor known as " uma...

This is a lighter red than a typical Cotes du Rhone, but that makes it the kind of red wine that goes with everything from pizza to pork. ...

Given our pleasure finding and drinking Chilean wines over the last five years, we couldn't let Wine Week pass without including a wine ...

This Hogue red is not as good as the Hogue Chardonnay we reviewed earlier in the week, especially given that good $10 whites are a lot hard...

Spanish wines continue to be an amazing value. If you are looking for a red wine, pick what you like but don't buy before checking out t...

Washington State's Columbia Valley looks more like a desert than a lush wine region. Unlike the other (western) side of the Cascade Moun...

Finding a 90-point wine at your local store's Saturday free tasting is a very pleasant surprise. Finding it at $10 is even more pleasant...

This is Wine Week. You might ask, isn't every week? Well, somebody designated this wine week somewhere, so we're going to review a d...

One of the tricks of merchandising and marketing is to use leftovers to produce a product similar to the main brand. Thus, every drug store ...

We'll admit it—the first time we donned our Orka oven mitts , we found them stiff and unwieldy. And the first time we used them to reach...

This photo of the fried queso fresco does not do the dish justice. It is a delicious crispy treat made even better by the homemade salsa we ...

One of the great advantages of writing a blog about wines that cost $10 or less is that guests often bring such wines to dinner parties and ...

We're eating up our curried vegetables and the black-bean chili we made for the Superbowl as well as the chocolate chip cookies, the ric...

We're big fans of Cook's Illustrated and its TV show, America's Test Kitchen. We were charter subscribers to the original Cook...

We got about 30 inches, and yes the electricity did go out. Fortunately it waited until after we had made the curried vegetables and the spi...

We thought that the big snowstorm before Christmas was the big one for the year — and significantly deeper than normal for the mid-Atlantic ...

A blend of toasted sesame seeds and sea salt, gomasio is a condiment that adds flavor and texture without delivering too much sodium. You ma...

As previously explained, we avoid a lot of waste and save a lot of money by shaking up those big clamshell packages of prewashed salad mi...