Month: August 2010

 It’s getting hot in here. And we’re not just talking summer heat­—we’re talking fire. Last week’s blaze at Wild Wing Café, which is still being investigated, temporarily shut down the restaurant. And, while the eatery at the Amtrak station reopened this week, the patio where the fire originated remained closed at press time. General Manager Kiersten Kaufman says they hope to have the patio refurbished by this weekend.

Since this is such a hot topic, Restaurantarama wonders: What can other restaurants do to ensure this sort of thing doesn’t happen to them?

Says Assistant Fire Marshal Steve Walton, be prepared. The city fire department offers training to restaurant staff about fire safety and evacuation procedures, should there be an incident. Most restaurant fires start in the kitchen, he says, igniting from grease buildup in the hood system. Walton advises that the hood system be cleaned every six months. 

That doesn’t explain what happened at Wild Wing, where the fire was confined to the patio, away from restaurant equipment. Walton says they’re still figuring it out. Kaufman says it’s suspected the fire started from a cigarette that was left in one of the planters, but Walton says the fire department is also exploring the possibility of faulty electrical work. “[The fire at Wild Wing] was quite unusual,” he says, “being on the decking.”

Beer here

In July, Restaurantarama reported that four local breweries—Starr Hill, Devils Backbone, Blue Mountain and South Street —were gearing up to collaborate on a new beer. We’re here to tell you: They’ll preview The Brew Ridge Collaboration Ale this Sunday from noon until 5pm at Starr Hill’s facility in Crozet. If you miss it, you’ll have a few more opportunities for a taste test before the official unveiling at the Brew Ridge Trail Music Festival on August 21.

Can’t get enough of beer fests? Visit the Charlottesville Pavilion on September 11 for a Starr Hill and Beer Run co-sponsored event that will feature microbrewers from up and down the coast. More on that in the coming weeks.

In other beer (and wine) news, Brixx Wood Fired Pizza—located in the former Boston Market space at Barracks Road—has applied for an ABC license.

Ten after dark

Good news, late-night snacksters: Ten recently joined the list of available after-dark eateries Downtown. In addition to places like C&O Restaurant, Christian’s Pizza and Miller’s, the restaurant above Blue Light Grill will offer yummies like Yakitori and the Raspberry Walu Roll until 1am on Fridays and Saturdays.

Time to bookmark your page in the Twilight saga. We’re back for the second installment of my wine basics tutorial that will keep your vinous vocabulary savvy and your palate sharp during the summer break. So, now that we’ve rewritten our definitions of sweet, dry, and fruity after last week’s lesson, we are ready to tackle another wine component that leads to its overall balance: acidity.

In most cases, acid isn’t a good thing. Acid reflux, acid rain, and acid-washed jeans are all the pits, but in wine and food, we want it. Acidity is the thing that keeps us coming back for more. It’s what makes lemonade so refreshing, tomatoes so delicious, and Sour Patch Kids so addictive (even after you’ve burned sores in your mouth). Acidity also contributes to the aging capability of a wine, preserving both color and flavor. Acid receptors are located on the outer sides of our tongues and, when heavily stimulated, cause our cheeks to pucker, our eyes to twitch, and our mouths to water.

The easiest way to understand acidity in wine is to start from the very beginning of a grape’s life. Just like any unripe fruit, a wine grape starts its life as a bud full of acid compounds. As it sits in the sun, its acids convert to sugars, ripening into an edible fruit. The more sunshine the grape sees in its life on the vine, the sweeter it will be. Soil composition, grape varietal, and microclimate breezes also play an important part in the retention of acidity. But generally, grapes grown in cooler climates (Austria, Northern France, New Zealand, etc.) retain more acidity than the sun-soaked grapes grown in warmer climates (Australia, Southern Italy, Napa Valley, etc.). 

In very warm regions where overripe grapes are a problem, wine can be chemically acidified with a dose of tartaric acid. A common prescription for an overly acidic wine is malolactic fermentation (MLF), when a second fermentation is incited to convert the green-apple tasting malic acid into the buttery-tasting lactic acid. MLF is often used in reds to “smooth out” any sharp edges, but is also a favorite treatment for New World Chardonnay aiming to taste of buttered popcorn.

A dry wine without acidity is dull and lifeless. Dubbed “flabby” in wine speak, it clumsily flops around in your mouth until you manage to choke it down. A sweet wine without acidity would be as sickeningly sweet as a shot of maple syrup. 

When pairing wine with food, acidity serves as a necessary palate cleanser for the fats and proteins in food that coat your tongue. The New World tendency to drink wine on its own has conditioned our palates to prefer wines with less acidity, but more New World producers are taking cues from the Old World and making wines with crisp levels of acidity to complement our meals.

Each person’s palate detects a wine’s components in varying levels of intensity, so if a wine is too acidic for you at first sip, try it with food and notice how the acidity mellows and the flavors of the food intensify. For acid fiends, try Chenin Blanc, Riesling, and Sauvignon Blanc in white, and Pinot Noir, Sangiovese, and Barbera in red. Not down with the pucker? Go for Chardonnay, Marsanne, and Viognier in white, and Malbec, Merlot, and Tempranillo in red.

Acidity, along with the other components of wine, should meld seamlessly like instruments in an orchestra. At moments, one may play a solo, but in the end, they should all be in perfect harmony. 

 If you’re like a lot of homeowners these days, you’d probably love to go green. Energy efficiency retrofits, high-efficiency furnaces and solar panels are home improvements that can save thousands and thousands of dollars in energy bills over the years. But high upfront costs have so far kept many folks from adopting practical energy saving improvements—it costs $25,000 to install a solar panel system on a typical residential property, which is out of reach for most homeowners. 

Helping homeowners make those investments is the main mission behind an effort gaining momentum around the country called Property Assessed Clean Energy, or PACE. Nineteen states (at last count), including Virginia, have passed legislation that would allow municipalities to establish PACE programs. The Obama administration has dedicated more than $100 million in stimulus money to fund them. California’s pilot program, like others, has become quite popular. 

PACE works by allowing people to borrow money from municipalities for energy efficiency upgrades and pay it back over 15 to 20 years through a special assessment added to their property tax bill. What this means: Your property taxes will go up but are offset by lower monthly utility bills. So your property tax bill might increase by $100 or so, but your energy bills may drop by $200-$300. In some instances, like with the installation of solar panels, the utility bill becomes fixed. As conventional energy costs continue to rise, the use of solar panels allows you to pay the same amount for energy for the next 20, 30, or 40 years, which is a huge savings over the course of a lifetime. 

The problem with PACE is that the loan is technically a property tax assessment and is therefore regarded as a lien—it must be paid back before existing mortgage debt. So if the homeowner goes into foreclosure—not all that uncommon these days—the energy loan would have to be repaid before the lender gets any money. 

This is why PACE loans are really only an option for people who have equity in their homes, great credit or no mortgage.

Recently, there has been pushback from mortgage insurers Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, who—perhaps rightly so—don’t want to be on the hook if green-minded homeowners default on their mortgages. The two lending giants have sent letters to local governments across the country, causing many to suspend their PACE programs.

It’s unclear how this will all play out since Fannie and Freddie are owned by the government, which supports the PACE initiative. For now, the Energy Department released guidelines for pilot PACE financing programs that urge municipalities to conduct energy audits to ensure homeowners will see reduced energy costs as a result of upgrades, and that assessments should be limited to 10 percent of the property value.

 Though it sounds like a dating device, the stud finder has nothing to do with landing a man, unless you’re planning to hang him on your wall from a picture hook. This small, handheld tool ensures that your trophies, whatever they may be, stay safely in place by identifying where the wooden supports run behind your walls. You’ll need to hammer your nails or screws into the wood if you want to keep the artwork or window shades you hang from pulling out.  

There are two types of stud finders, both typically powered by batteries. Electronic stud finders use electronic sensors to distinguish differences in the wall’s density, thereby distinguishing the wooden beams from the dry wall. Magnetic stud finders use magnets to identify metal beams or pick up on the metal nails and screws already embedded in the wooden beams behind the wall. When a stud is found, the finder beeps or registers the reading on an electronic screen. 

Without a stud finder, you can either use trial and error to find the studs in your wall (making many useless nail holes in the process) or do that wall “whisperer” thing where you knock on it and try to distinguish the dull sound of a stud from the hollow sound where there is no stud. I do this rap-a-tap-tap bit just to use my stud finder more efficiently, but I don’t suggest you rely on this technique when you’re hanging anything heavy, unless you want to wear your new plasma TV on your head.—Katherine Ludwig

 “Everything’s a work in progress,” says Leni Sorensen about the home and acreage she shares with her husband Kip in White Hall. Transplants (as of 1982) from South Dakota, the couple have long had their hands in rural pursuits, from growing vegetables to raising pigs and cows. 

Kip, a master carpenter, is building them a new dwelling after their farmhouse burned down in 2000; for the moment, they live in an apartment over their garage. Meanwhile, other projects bubble along: an outdoor oven, a big beautiful garden, a flock of laying hens and an even bigger flock of broilers. 

The latest addition: 10 ducks that will provide meat for the fall and winter months. Leni, a passionate cook and a culinary historian (who also works as an African-American research historian at Monticello), already has plenty of ideas about what she’ll do with that homegrown duck meat. 

“I’m fascinated by recipes for Peking duck, Chinese style,” she says. “I’ll probably try anything that has to do with fruity, plumy, apricoty, winey sauce that goes well with duck.”—Erika Howsare

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Kip: “You’re the one who suggested the ducks. We have this pond, and it seems to scream out for ducks.”

Leni: “I like to eat duck. Last fall I went to a party at Live Arts, and the food was fabulous. One of the things was rare sliced duck breast. I literally had to take myself away from the table. I thought, I would like to eat duck now and then. I had raised ducks; that’s not that hard. Then the challenge was, if they were going to have access to this pond, where would they then live?”

Kip: “We just enclosed these steps leading up to [the apartment door]. I needed a window in it, and happened to have the right number of glass blocks, so I built them into it.”

Leni: “They’re messy, messy, messy. They take their food, put it in their mouths, go right over to the water and use it to get the food wet. So the water gets messy.” 

Kip: “They like grass and insects. Insects are nailed as soon as they fly in there. But what they really love is a dirty old pond bottom, to muck in the mud.”

Leni: “They are Pekin ducks—white with longish necks. Like Ping—when I was a child that was a children’s book. There were these beautiful lithographs—these ducks lived on a boat in China. They would get to the rice paddy, go down a gangplank, and spend the day eating the bugs and manuring the rice paddy. There were these illustrations of the ducks going up the gangplank to their home at night.” 

Kip: “I have to make them a beach—their own little yellow-sand beach.”

Leni: “So they can go in and out easily when they’re young. With 10 ducks, we might have enough meat not to have to have ducks next year. I’m also trying to see if we can eat just our own chicken. And we have eggs. 

“I’ll probably give a few away as presents. They’re quite juicy because they’ve got so much fat in their skin. Probably the duck fat would make a wonderful savory pie crust—for pot pies and savory appetizers. It’ll take a lot of flour. That’s what gives it that grainy mouthfeel, that melt-in-your-mouth feel. And it goes well with savory or very rich fruity [fillings]…real venison mincemeat, you’d want a pie crust that could stand up to that flavor. 

“And aside from that, they’re just such fun animals.”

Kip: “Chickens are awful sweet, but these guys are just adorable.”