Rounding Out the 2012 Eater Louisville Year-End Review

I present the final four posts in Eater Louisville's 2012 year-end review. 

My biggest dining surprise of this past year?  Finding drop-dead amazing food at a place dedicated to a beverage I am not even a huge fan of.

I believe in the "When Everything's Right" Quotient - as Tom and Lorenzo call it, WERQ.  They use it to describe the way someone is WERQ-ing an ensemble of clothing, but to me, it can also apply to an experience Wherin Everything's Right.  Such was the case during the night of My Single Best Meal of 2012.

Now here's a saddie.  We each had to give a restaurant we broke up with this year.  I think the one I describe is super cool and fun to hang out at, but I just don't love the food.  I predict, however, that it won't be a clean break.

And finally, we predict restaurant trends for 2013.   I actually went serious on this one.  My other prediction would have been "dinner for breakfast."

It's been fun looking back on 2012.  Now that we've done this most important of duties, we can with clear heads and hearts look forward to 2013.  Happy weekend, fellow Vampers.  I hope you eat something crazy delicious, whether it's made by you, a friend, or a complete stranger.

Best Restaurant Neighborhood and Biggest Dining Surprise of 2012

Today on Eater Louisville's year-end review, you can hear what we had to say about the best restaurant neighborhood in Louisville for 2012.  I don't necessarily think it's the best all-time restaurant area in Louisville - only will tell.  But I sure have had some slammin' meals there this year.

We also talk about our biggest dining surprise of the year.  In retrospect, a shameless plug for APRON, Inc., an organization I'm active with, might have been in order.  I have been very pleasantly surprised by the outpouring of support from the dining community for our fledgling organization.  Our mission is to provide temporary relief to folks in need who are employed by our local restaurants.  We held a very successful fundraising event, done a "dine out" night at area restaurants, and received many individual donations, enabling us to make grants to a number of people already.

Newcomers, and 2012 in One Word

Next up in Eater Louisville's 2012 year-end review, we name the
Top Newcomers of 2012

and
Sum up 2012 in One Word.

I've written about one of my top newcomers of 2012, and I probably should write about the other.  The slow-braised beef cheek I had there nearly inspired me to compose a symphony.

My one word maybe isn't technically one word, but if I say it fast enough, I can almost justify it.

Vampin' on Eater Louisville

Eater Louisville asked me for my thoughts on the Louisville restaurant scene in 2012.  You know I gots lots of thoughts. 

Check out Industry Experts on the Top Restaurant Standbys of 2012.  Me and a bunch of other cool folks talk about which restaurants we returned to time and again over the past year.

This post is the first in a series of posts for EL's 2012 year in review.  Stay tuned... my answers to more burning questions are on the way through the end of the week.

Hot Brown Bar

Genius can spring from necessity, as was the case during a recent home-cooked dinner with friends. That Vampin' Lady went on location to the home of great friends the Gidge and the Gidgestress to help them plow through the mountain of leftover Thanksgiving turkey that was occupying their freezer.

It all started innocently enough. One evening, the Gidgestress and I were enjoying a cocktail at a favorite haunt, and she lamented that she felt buried in turkey. I wondered aloud if she had made hot browns with any of it. She thought maybe that would be a good thing to have people over and make. I blurted out "hot brown bar!" and the rest is history.

The framework for the recipe came from the classic recipe for The Brown Hotel's hot brown.

Proper Mornay sauce takes lots and lots of whisking.

The idea was for all the ingredients to be set out on the counter, and each person would assemble their own personal hot brown.

The Mornay sauce was the cause of some angst for the Gidgestress. It became clumpy right away, and so the first batch was abandoned, left for dead (see bonus photo at the end of this post.) Gidge took the wheel this time, as he is particularly adept at making béchamel sauces. Don't you wish you had a husband who could rock a béchamel? In retrospect, both decided that had they continued on with the rest of the ingredients, the first batch likely would have been salvageable.

 Gidge makes his own bread, so thick slices of it formed the foundation of the dish.  Way better than Texas Toast, whatever that is.

•  Vampin Lady True Confession: In a surprise blog twist, TVL did zero cooking for this meal.  I sliced the little tomatoes I brought over, sipped wine, offered helpful commentary on how great the Mornay sauce was looking, ate the burnt black bits off the edges of the bacon, etc. 

On went the turkey and tomatoes, and then the mornay got slathered on top, followed by a dump of pecorino romano cheese. 

 

The sandwiches went under the broiler for a few minutes, and once the cheese began to bubble up, out they came.  

Peek into the broiler... almost ready.

Two slices of bacon went on top, along with a dusting of paprika and some minced fresh parsley.  Lydio, another friend bellying up to the hot brown bar, assembled the first one.  As you can see, the gods of cholesterol and triglycerides were smiling on us this night.  This thing was prettier than a new set of snow tires.

So beautiful, it hurts to look at it.

Without a doubt, we have discovered the best thing to do with leftover Thanksgiving turkey.  These hot browns looked and tasted spectacular. 

This party also had nog.  Lydio is a champion nogmaker.  You see, we all have our talents.

Nog... with bourbon and grated nutmeg.

•  Vampin' Lady UnTrue Confession: After all that Mornay sauce, bacon and eggnog, we all rushed ourselves to the hospital for emergency angioplasties.

Happy Hot Brown Days, y'all!

Bonus photo of the bad Mornay batch:

Clumpy Mornay sauce bound for the trash.

Bean, Kale, & White Sweet Potato Soup, w/Special Guest: a Ham Hock!

The genesis of this soup was the discovery of a bag of Great Northern beans in the pantry. I didn't really remember buying them, which meant it was probably time to put them to use. I'd never worked with dry beans before; I'd always just credited the can opener with providing the soft, chewy beans for all my soups and other dishes. Readying these beans for use involved soaking them in a big bowl of water overnight. I loved how, by the next morning, they had slurped up a good deal of the water and expanded in size.

A couple days before, I had ventured out in search of a ham hock - yet another item I'd never cooked with.

...the ham hock.

• Vampin' Lady True Confession: I have no idea what a ham hock is. It's clearly a ham-based organism that presumably was once part of a pig, but beyond that, I'm stumped. Do I as a human have a hock? This and other questions do not keep me up at night.

I wasn't able to visit any of the farmer's markets due to my work schedule, but I remembered a little place called The Root Cellar, which is, according to their website:

"...a free-standing, retail produce store that sells local, farm-raised produce of all varieties, including value-added products like meats, cheeses, dairy, eggs, honey and maple syrup.
The core principle that guides the management philosophy of The Root Cellar is the simple focus on the food products. Food is the only focus of The Root Cellar. Good-tasting, high-quality, local and fresh — The Root Cellar is your Kentucky Proud retail market."

White sweet potatoes. I'd never heard of them either.

I went to the one that just opened at the corner of Kentucky and Swan Streets. Just so you know, the place is a dream. It's like a farmer's market, open all day, 5 days a week. Not only did I obtain my locally-produced ham hock, but the owner drew my attention to a gorgeous bunch of kale and a box of small white sweet potatoes, both of which were going to work perfectly with the soup I envisioned.

I loosely based my recipe off of this one from Yummly. Emphasis on the "loosely" - I pretty much just used the ingredients list as a starting point and then sort of went off the rails. Here's what I ended up using:

Ingredients

1/2 yellow onion (diced)
at least 4 good-sized garlic cloves (minced)
olive oil
approx. 10 white sweet potatoes (skin on, diced)
1 bunch of fresh kale (stems removed, torn into pieces)
1 ham hock
1 1/2 quarts chicken stock
6+ cups water
1 tbsp italian seasoning (I made my own - see below)
13 ozs dry Great Northern beans (not quite the whole bag)
2 14.5 oz. cans of diced tomatoes + the juice
black pepper
salt, to taste
white wine for deglazing

I sauteed the onions in the oil for a bit, till they started to get translucent, and then added the garlic and cooked it for just about a minute or so - very quickly so it didn't burn. Then I added the potatoes. For awhile, as I cooked them, it looked like I was just making a delicious batch of hash browns. It got even more hash browny when I added the Italian seasoning.

• Vampin' Lady True Confession: I don't keep Italian seasoning around... because I have all the ingredients to make it myself. I mixed together equal parts basil, oregano, thyme, marjoram, and rosemary and then pulverized it all together with my mortar and pestle. I'm all frugal and stuff!

After the potatoes/onions/garlic had cooked with the seasoning, I dumped them all into the stockpot.

The ham hock went into the pan along with a bit more oil, and cooked on its own a minute or two on each side.

The pan looked like it could use a serious deglazing, so I sloshed some wine in, scraped up the crispy bits and threw them in the stockpot, too.

I added a bit more oil and cooked the kale along with the ham hock, just until the leaves darkened and wilted a bit. Then the kale and ham hock joined the others in the stockpot.

Next, I added the beans. I didn't use the whole bag. That would have been one ton of beans.

Then I added the liquids. And I kept adding. More stock, more water... oh what the hell, how about a can of tomatoes and their juice? Why not another? That's really how it went for awhile.

I thought for sure that with the ham hock and all that chicken stock, I wouldn't need any salt. Wrong. I added several large pinches.

As you can tell from the amount of liquid I used, this soup got big. Real big. Filled my stockpot almost to the brim. I love a brothy soup, and I had added so many beans, kale pieces and diced potatoes that I had to dump in lots and lots of liquid to make it sufficiently brothy.

Making a small batch of soup is impossible. It's a scientific fact.

This monster took quite awhile to come to a simmer, and once it did, I let it go for a little over an hour. The beans needed that long to reach the consistency I wanted, and of course the ham hock needed plenty of time to infuse its heavenly hamminess into the soup.

This one was a real winner. I loved all the local ingredients I was able to use. And it got serious thumbs-up from Mr. Hits. More thumbs-ups appeared while enjoying the soup
                                                                                                           a few days after I made it, once it 
                                                                                                           had really settled into itself.

I made this soup while Mr. Hits was at work, so I had to be my own DJ. I kept it simple.

Bruce Springsteen: The River
all 4 sides

Que Viva La Bodega

La Bodega has long been one of my favorite spots, and we stop in periodically.  I finally got tired of cooking and decided to venture out.  Friday night in this gorgeous autumn weather demanded that we hoof it through the Highlands and up Bardstown Road for dinner.

We were greeted at the door by a sandwich board advertising their Spanish rosé for six bucks a glass.  I had bid a fond farewell to rosé about a month or so ago, but here it was again.  The day was warm, so what the hey; welcome back, rosé.  This one was of a darker color and fuller flavor, more suitable for early autumn than the lighter shades of rosé preferred on the dog days of summer.

Mr. Hits opted for a cocktail sporting his favorite booze + flavor combination: bourbon and ginger.  The Ginger Snap combines Old Forester and Domaine de Canton Liqueur and was served on the rocks.

Tapas-wise, we typically order a showcase of our favorite tapas and audition a couple of newbies.

M1
From the Montaditos list.  Montaditos are small bites served on a slice of baguette.

Chorizo, serrano ham, goat cheese, dollop of mayonnaise and topped with a fried quail egg.
Just let that sink in for a mo.
I always order this right off the bat.  I cited it as my favorite tapa in town for the Best of Louisville Critics Panel.  The fun part of this trip was now that Mr. Hits is eating a bit of meat here and there, he could try his first M1...and his second.  Yes.  He ordered another, later in the meal.  They're that good, I tell you.  It's the richest, most decadent little bite of food there is.

Endive Salad
Yet another item I order without fail.  Crisp, bitter endive, crunchy walnuts and a light, tart blue cheese vinaigrette.  A super salad.

Patatas Bravas
These are boiled potato chunks that are then lightly sauteed.  This current version is quite different from the one we'd had many times in the past. Previously, they had been served in a cream sauce - this time, they were flavored with something spicier and drier.  We loved the old version, but didn't miss it at all.  This incarnation gets two thumbs up. 

Grilled Scallops with Romesco Sauce
This we didn't love.  Something sharp in the sauce just turned me off.  I rarely run into something I actually dislike at La Bodega - I guess I was due.

P6
From the Pintxos list.  They're called pintxos because they are stabbed with a toothpick, or literally, a spike.
Spanish tuna, boiled egg, anchovy, and piquillo pepper.
It's actually all that stuff piled onto a hard boiled egg.  A fishy, funky, salty explosion - totally up my alley.

Shrimp Sauteed in Olive Oil and Garlic
This newbie may just have landed itself a spot in our rotation.  The shrimp was served in a little crockery full of a highly garlicky and spicy olive oil.  Suspended in the oil were slices of garlic and flecks of red pepper. 

• Vampin' Lady True Confession: I don't like shrimp.  I have tried and tried and tried for years to like it, but I can't make it work.  They remain in the small category of foods I actively do not like but fervently wish I did.

I valianty tried these shrimp, and actually found them to be pretty nice (for shrimp).  Mr. Hits has always loved shrimp, so he devoured them.  The real winner for me was the garlic-red-pepper-olive-oil shrimp bath.  Another basket of bread was procured and promptly used to sop up as much of the oil as polite society allowed. I want a bottle of it to use at home.  I'd use it as a pasta sauce, drizzle it on steamed vegetables, brush it onto pieces of lavash before baking them into crispy snacks, perhaps even take a bath in it myself.

We left tapas-ed out and glowing with an olive oil sheen.  Until next time...

Adventures in Squash Part I: Introducing... The Squiche

I celebrate the unique characteristics of my favorite vegetables, sometimes to the point of endowing them with personalities. Leeks, for example, are hilarious. They're a national emblem of Wales, and they're full of sand. I adore the things.

Stuff me!

Pattypan squash are adorable. From their precious name - pattypan! - to their scalloped, top-like appearance, they are a delight.

Pattypans beg to be stuffed with things. I've stuffed them with a mixture of sauteed shallot, corn, and the squash innards I'd dug out to hollow them. Parmigiano reggiano cheese and parsley completed the filling nicely, and then a little bit of a very light custard-y mixture of egg, milk and salt topped off the little pretties before going into the oven.

I found a great recipe (and some gorgeous porny food photos) on My Pet Chicken Blog for my next foray into stuffing the pattypan.  Essentially, you're filling your hollowed out pattypans with a basic quiche + whatever you like in your quiche. And squash filled with quiche is... squiche! 

Here's how I made The Squiche:

Ingredients

Pattypan squash
Onion, sliced
Olive Oil
Quiche filling (whatever you like/have fresh in the house)
Egg mixture

• Eggs (about 1 per squash)
• A little milk
• Pinch of Nutmeg
• Salt, to taste

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

I decided to make my quiche filling with cherry tomatoes, since I had lovely sweet ones fresh from the garden.  I also had some cheddar cheese to add.

I started out by hollowing out my pattypans with a spoon, reserving the guts for later.  I ended up using the guts for vegetable enchiladas a couple days later.

• Tip: The hollowed out pattypans should be placed into the dish you're going to bake them in, because it won't be easy to move them once you've gotten them all filled with the stuffing. 

Next, I caramelized the sliced onion in olive oil.

Into the hollowed out pattypans went a layer of caramelized onions and the halved cherry tomatoes. 






On top of that went shreds of sharp cheddar cheese.

• Vampin' Lady True Confession: I keep pre-shredded cheese around.  I mostly do this with cheddar, but sometimes with mozzarella for pizzas, and very occasionally with parmigiano-reggiano for easy risottos.

On went another layer of caramelized onions, and then the egg mixture (I'd whisked all the ingredients together in a bowl) to fill out the inside of the squash.  You want them to be full but not overflowing.

• Tip: From previous experience stuffing squash, I knew to add about a quarter-inch-high layer of water to the dish.  The water helps to tenderize the little creatures while they bake. 

And they are damn cute.

20 minutes, give or take, in the oven (or until the tops are golden brown) and your little squiche are ready to devour. 











My husband, Mr. Hits, DJs my cooking. This recipe was accompanied by

The Damned: Neat Neat Neat
Daft Punk: Human After All

Vampin' Lady Bits

Here are a couple links to some other bits of food writing I've done:

A new restaurant specializing in grilled cheese sanwiches and soups opened in the Highlands, and I covered their preview night.
Tom + Chee and Goetta Makes Three


St. Charles Exchange is a swanky new "1900's hotel lobby bar" styled joint downtown, and I covered their grand opening.
Go West... to St. Charles Exchange


And I participated in a Critics' Panel for Louisville Magazine.

Louisville Magazine Best of Louisvlle Food Panel

Vampin' Up a Storm

We in Louisville have a loving, give-and-take sort of relationship with New Orleans. We have many things in common - French names, for starters, as well as similar architecture. We share things, such our symbol (the fleur de lis) and they send us hurricanes when they are done with them.

So while we enjoyed the remnants of Hurricane Isaac this past weekend, I decided to go full metal NOLA and throw together some gumbo. I was inspired by this lovely purple okra I had picked up at the Phoenix Hill Farmers Market. It was just screaming to be seared and thrown into a pot.

I began with my traditional method of looking at several different recipes, choosing what I liked from each, and then fashioning my own unique creation.

My recipe consisted of

• Two chicken sausages (I love Aidells)
• Some fresh okra (about a pint sized basket full)
• Butter
• The holy trinity (onion, green bell pepper and celery)
• Two tablespoons of flour
• A can of diced tomatoes (and their juice)
• About a cup and a half of broth (chicken is fine but I used veg. because that's what I had open in the fridge)
• Crabmeat (don't freak out, but I used canned. On a whim, I picked it up while I was at our little neighborhood market getting other ingredients.)
• A bay leaf
• Hot paprika
• Tony Chachere's seasoning (the extra spicy kind)
• White rice

Mark Bittman's right; you need to sear the okra before starting on the rest of the ingredients. You'll get the best and least slimy texture that way. I had started by slicing the sausage and cooking it up in the skillet, and it left behind such tasty drippings that I popped the okra in right after it. That method is a two-fer: one less pan to clean up, and extra tasty okra. Just for good measure, I sloshed in a bit of the bourbon I was nursing, to deglaze the pan and get all those yummy bits up of the bottom. I'm a big fan of deglazing the pan with whatever I happen to be drinking while I'm cooking.

After the sausage and okra have been cooked and set aside, you start in on the holy trinity. Once again, same pan, duh. Cook the onion first (in the butter), till it's translucent, and then pop the pepper and celery in for several minutes.

Once the vegetables are cooked, you add in the flour and make your roux. That takes about two minutes. Next go the spices - and this is where you can follow your own preferences. I like things super spicy, so I use the spicy Chachere's and the hot paprika. Next time, I'll probably add in some cayenne, because this batch could've used a higher octane level.

Stir that around till everything's coated, and then dump in your can of tomatoes, your broth and your bay leaf. Simmer for awhile - 15-20 minutes - to incorporate all the flavors and tenderize the vegetables even further. Add in the okra and sausage, give them a few minutes to settle in - et voila! Gumbo.

Ideally, while all this has been going on, you've been preparing some white rice to ladle over your helping of gumbo. Spoon you some gumbo into your bowl, serve with rice, and enjoy.

My husband, Mr. Hits, DJs my cooking. This recipe was accompanied by

T. Rex: The Slider
Holy Ghost!: I Know, I Hear (single + remixes)
Rolling Stones: Let it Bleed

Happy Hour at Hillbilly Tea

Drop yourself somewhere between the downtown arena and the downtown White Castle, and you'll end up at Hillbilly Tea: a disarmingly charming spot for food, tea, and for a little while now, booze.








Via their website, I discovered they had a happy hour.  The site says only "tea and hooch - happy hour - wed thru sun - 4pm-6pm!"  With that scant description, we were left to trundle on down there to see about the offerings. 

I settled on a tea-infused vodka flight to start.  With help from our server, I chose my three:

• Smoked, 
• The Good Earth, and 
• Big Earl's. 

      I hardly need to describe to you what smoked tea vodka tastes like.  It tastes, you know, like smoke.  Smoke that gets you drunk.  Smoked tea vodka was definitely worth a try, but it wasn't something I truly savored. 

The Big Earl's was a nice, easy drinking infusion.  It obviously resembled Earl Grey tea in its flavor profile.  The aroma was flowery and the taste mild.

The Good Earth, quite simply, must have been what the fairies in A Midsummer Night's Dream mixed their cocktails with.  (The vodka may have gone to my head a bit by the time I had this revelation.  You'll have to just go with me.)  To the nose, it was slightly minty, and it tasted like nectar in vodka form.

Speaking of going to my head: let's get some snacks.



We tried the white bean and sage fritters and the corn fried tofu; both were delicious.  The fritters were creamy and chewy, perfectly round fried balls of richness.  Reminiscent of hush puppies.  The tofu was a completely different texture: firm on the inside, slightly crisp on the outside.  The BBQ sauce that came with the tofu was divinely sweet and smoky.

A couple of cocktail offerings tickled my fancy, but with my fancy tickled enough already by the vodka flight, saving them for our next visit seemed appropriate.  The Big Early (Big Earl's vodka, soda and lemony syrup) sounded tailor-made to sip on one's front porch.  The Old Rose (bourbon and house made tea bitters, muddled with orange and a moonshine cherry) had me picturing myself draped in a shawl, winding a Victrola and tugging on the drink in my etched glass tumbler.

Hillbilly Tea serves up consistently great and creative food in a casually funky atmosphere.  The service is always friendly and chill, but very competent.  Their Happy Hour is yet another reason to stop in.

Vampin' on BourbonBlog

Thanks to BourbonBlog for picking up my story about Majid's Miracle Berry Feast.

Tripping the Berry Fantastic at Majid's St. Matthews, Louisville

"Hey there!" to anyone visiting from BourbonBlog.

Lonely bourbon? Pair with pear.

Finding myself with two lovely Bartlett pears, ripe and ready to roll, I hit the Google for some ideas on what to do with them. In particular, I thought they might be nice in a cocktail. Pear puree shaken with vodka sounded novel.

Well, that got derailed. I ended up aggregating some ideas I found, as is my way, and in the process, learning that pears taste really good with bourbon. Inspired by Make It Naked, I set out to create a pear vanilla simple syrup to pair with it.

I peeled, then quartered (or maybe eighthed?) the pears. My intention was to pop all of the fruit into the mix, but upon peeling them, the pears exploded with so much juice and fragrance, I was rendered helpless. A couple of the eighths went down right the hatch. Plenty of fruit left for the syrup, I figured.  My kitchen philosphy is one that eschews exact science. (Notice how little I bake.)

Beginning with the typical base for a simple syrup, I combined one part sugar and one part water in a pot and boiled it till the sugar dissolved. Next, I added the pear eighths and the peels. Some grated ginger. Then, the vanilla bean... Have you ever started a recipe just sure that you had a certain ingredient in your armory, only to get mid recipe, pot of stuff boiling on the stove, and find you don't actually have said ingredient? So it was with the vanilla bean. Luckily, we had just enough vanilla extract to approximate a vanilla bean (about a teaspoon of vanilla extract = one a half of a bean) so that went into the pot, too. Then I simmered the mixture for 10 minutes or so.

After that, the peels were removed, and the pear eighths were blended into the syrup with my immersion blender, and then the whole thing was sent through a strainer to smooth it out a bit more. The pear-vanilla simple syrup now complete, all that was left was to cool it down, so into the fridge it went, for about a half hour.

Old B-town, current staple for mixin'. Regan's Orange Bitters.

Meanwhile, I assembled the ingredients for the cocktail. Just bourbon and bitters. I used a two-to-one syrup-to-bourbon ratio, added a few dashes of bitters and shook it all together with a heaping helping of ice. Lots of ice seemed necessary as I couldn't quite wait for the syrup to cool all the way down.









What poured from the shaker was nothing less than a preview of autumn in liquid form. Spicy orange bitters conjure a gust of bracing November wind, swirling leaves, sweaters, boots... Slàinte!


I ended up with quite a lot of extra simple syrup. So I poured it into an ice cube tray for safekeeping. I'll throw one into a bourbon on the rocks, just to amp it up a bit, and a cube recently made its way into one of my husband's smoothies.

Handy little buggers to have around.

Tripping the Berry Fantastic at Majid's

Majid’s hosted The Miracle Feast this past Thursday evening, serving a tasting menu and various cocktails in order to illustrate nature’s power to alter how flavors are received. Four cocktails and nine food tastings... twice. A gastronomical "Groundhog Day.” Except in this case, the second time around, things didn't taste the same as they did the first. I would have the Miracle Berry Tablet to blame for the transformation. For the uninitiated, the Miracle Berry tablet’s active ingredient is miraculin, a glycoprotein that causes sour foods to be perceived as sweet.

It all started out innocently enough. We began with the Violet Hour and a tasting of The Countess, a special cocktail prepared by our guide for the evening, bartender Stephen Dennison. The Countess, he explained, was a great way to get an aperitif into our bellies in advance of the oncoming barrage of flavors and richness. A divine starter, it was comprised of the ingredients for a Negroni dry shaken with black peppercorns, thereby infusing the drink with essential oils.

Nine dishes were served via a combination of family style and waiter presentation: Portuguese kale salpicon, kimchi Brussels sprouts, chimichurri flank steak rouladen, double-fried chicken wings, duck bruschetta, cucumber strata with pimento goat cheese, braised pork belly, calamari ceviche, and whiskey sour bread pudding.

Four beverages were in place when we sat down - three artisan cocktails and a glass of pinot grigio. My favorite of the mixed drinks was the Thanks for the Memories, aptly described by Dennison as a cross between a mint julep and a champagne cocktail. Two of my favorite drinks melded into one.

After the first tastings were concluded, we received our assignment: eat the tablet provided and allow it to transform our conceptions of taste. Each of us was given a spoon (all the better to scrape the surface of our tongues, so as to help the miracle tablet work its magic) and one Miracle Berry Tablet. The trick was to make sure it coated the tongue as it dissolved, so as to thoroughly confuse the taste buds.

The test was a lemon wedge; if tasting it felt like you were licking the sugar rim of a lemon drop martini, you were in business. I was off and running. For the remainder of the evening, I continued to use the lemon as a barometer, checking periodically to make sure the miraculin was still working.

Not much of a pinot grigio fan in general, I had sipped the wine after first sitting down to get my initial impression: kind of flat and not much to it, said my taste buds. However, post-miracle berry, it assumed the flavor profile of a semi-sweet Riesling.

Some of the food tastings didn’t change on my palate: the kale salpicon was just as creamy and the pork belly just as smoky and delicious as they were the first time around.

Others, however, changed dramatically. The kimchi Brussels sprouts were stripped of all their acidity, leaving only sweet, earthy sprouts behind. The chimichurri on the flank steak paired with the daikon inside the roulade were sugary. Even the fruity-hot chicken wings, with their fresh lime juice coating, gave off waves of extra sweetness. The Kool-Aid explosion came from the likely suspect: the ceviche. The calamari tasted like it had been marinating for days in a Skittles vinaigrette.

The night concluded with Dennison handing everybody one more spoon, this one containing a couple mouthfuls of hibiscus granita - yet another welcome aperitif. I took a final hit of lemon wedge, only to find that the miracle berry's effect was, by that time, at about 50%. The pinot was starting to taste like pinot again. “Lick a snozzbery; it tastes like a snozzberry,” I thought. The Miracle Berry trip nearing its conclusion, I realized the ride I had just been on wasn’t a dinner at all. It was a mouth-watering science experiment.