Personally, I am addicted to Pumpkin Seed Oil.  Available at Wegmans & Garden Of Eden.

JA

• 

• FOOD & DRINK
• JULY 30, 2011

Consider This

Sometimes You Feel Like A Nut Oil

These artisanal products add earthy flavor, but it's good to know which is best for what

By SARA DICKERMAN

Photographs by F. Martin Ramin for The Wall Street Journal, Styling by Anne Cardenas

DRIZZLE ME THIS | Pistachio oil lends a nutty note to vanilla ice cream.

It can be hard to buy artisanal nut oils for yourself. They are a bit like fine fragrances: sensual, not entirely necessary and packed in an elegant little bottle. It's the kind of present you might hope to receive from a lover.

But high-quality nut and seed oils are a relatively affordable indulgence and unlike perfume, they taste as delicious as they smell. The oils are cold-pressed directly from the seeds themselves, extracting an essence that is an uncanny echo of its source. French oils set the standard for makers around the world: The best huileries are wildly picky about the variety and the quality of nuts they use, which are ground, toasted gently before a slow-speed pressing and then minimally handled before bottling to preserve the rich character of the oil. That relatively low-yield process explains, in part, the dearness of the result. (Other, usually less pricy, flavored oils—such as those tinged with truffles, rosemary or lemon—are created by adding aromatics to an oil.)

Once you've invested in an artisanal nut or seed oil, treat it well. Use it as you would a fancier olive oil, for finishing dishes—a drizzle on pasta here, a swirl atop a bowl of soup there—but, with a few exceptions, like argan oil, never for sauteing. High cooking temperatures would damage the delicate aromatics. It's also a good idea to keep these oils in the refrigerator to further protect those redolent qualities.

Beyond that, though, working with nut oils can be blissfully uncomplicated. One of my favorite tricks is to drizzle one on fresh popcorn in lieu of melted butter. Warmed by the popcorn, the oil is at its most fragrant.

Photographs by F. Martin Ramin for The Wall Street Journal, Styling by Anne Cardenas

WALNUT

If you are going to experiment with just one oil, walnut is a smart start—it's flavor is at once familiar and startling in its depth. It is also widely adaptable, lending warmth to vinaigrettes (especially ones with a dash of mustard), new life to pureed vegetable soups and a toasty presence to baked goods. The exceptional walnut oil from Huilerie Beaujolaise has a robust nutty tone that is tempered by a buttery sweetness ($17, gigachef.com).

Photographs by F. Martin Ramin for The Wall Street Journal, Styling by Anne Cardenas

PISTACHIO

Every nut brings different qualities to the table. Pistachio oil, for instance, tastes great drizzled atop roasted beets or over vanilla ice cream. J. LeBlanc's absinthe-green version has a heady, almost candied-nut quality ($48, markethallfoods.com).

Photographs by F. Martin Ramin for The Wall Street Journal, Styling by Anne Cardenas

PINE NUT

Few flavors conjure the Mediterranean coast better than pine nuts. Huilerie Beaujolaise's pine nut oil, evocative of sun-baked conifers, would be splendid as the backbone of a deconstructed pesto: hot pasta mixed with the oil, a bit of fresh garlic, fresh basil leaves and grated parmesan ($35, gigachef.com).

Photographs by F. Martin Ramin for The Wall Street Journal, Styling by Anne Cardenas

ARGAN

Less familiar but no less delicious, argan oil is pressed from the nut of a Moroccan tree and has a nutty brown-butter flavor with a hint of musky herbaciousness. The organic version available from Mustapha's adds a voluptuousness to salads and soups ($39, mustaphas.com).

Photographs by F. Martin Ramin for The Wall Street Journal, Styling by Anne Cardenas

PECAN

Pecan oil conjures all-American fantasies. Tossed with freshly toasted croutons, La Tourangelle's light-bodied oil brings a little bit of praline goodness to a salad or a soup ($20, latourangelle.com).

Photographs by F. Martin Ramin for The Wall Street Journal, Styling by Anne Cardenas

BUTTERNUT SQUASH SEED

With a haunting and hard-to place taste—hints of apricot, chanterelles, a soupcon of peanut butter—a finishing swirl of this domestic oil can be just the thing to make vegetables like roasted cauliflower and Brussels sprouts a little more provocative. Stony Brook WholeHearted Foods, in upstate New York, produces the lush oil using toasted seeds from the local squash crop ($20, zingermans.com).

Media

Netflix is for Movies, Hulu is for TV Shows. Neither Is for Your iPad or Your iPhone.

Published on July 27, 2011 
by Peter Kafka

Lots of you are using your phones to watch YouTube. But Netflix and Hulu? Not so much.

That's one of the take-aways from a new Nielsen report about viewing habits on the two online video services. Just 3 percent of Netflix users say they watch the service on a mobile phone or an iPad (Netflix on Android tablets has just barely moved beyond the theoretical stage). Hulu's numbers are even smaller.

That's not a huge surprise for a couple reasons:

• Netflix CEO Reed Hastings has downplayed the effect that mobile phones and the iPad have had on his business. What's most important to his company, he's said, are ways that his customers can get their video onto TVs, whether its via game consoles like Microsoft's Xbox 360 or via Internet-connected TVs.
• Meanwhile, the only way Hulu users can watch on a phone or an iPad is by paying for the Hulu Plus subscription service. And while that service may have a million or so customers, that's a small fraction of the free site's overall user base. (Nielsen says it didn't distinguish between free and paid Hulu users in its most recent survey).

Still, the data is worth pointing out, as video makers and distributors are trying to get their heads around the way people consume their stuff on the go. Of course, even "on the go" can mean different things to different users — yesterday we noted that much of a music video site's "mobile" usage was actually taking place in bedrooms and living rooms.

Nielsen also reports, not surprisingly, that Hulu viewers are primarily using the service to watch TV shows. And that while Netflix users watch more movies than TV shows, they're watching a lot of both. That also makes sense, given the increasing importance that Netflix has placed on getting its hands on shows like "Mad Men."

NYC EATS: Grilled Cheese for Grownups

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• 
  
• 
  
• NY LUNCHBOX
• JULY 11, 2011

THE QUEENS KICKSHAW

Grilled Cheese for Grownups

Grilled cheese seems to be all the rage now with the Twitter and Facebook crowd.  This is a natural outgrowth.

JA

By WILLA PLANK

A new restaurant in Astoria serves up gourmet grilled cheese for grownups. The Queens Kickshaw infuses flavors found locally in ethnic cuisine—Brazilian, Greek, Italian—to shake up the childhood staple.

View Full Image

Ramsay de Give for The Wall Street Journal

A co-owner's favorite: the Gruyère sandwich on rye bread.

Co-owner Ben Sandler said the Gruyère sandwich with pickled and caramelized onions on rye bread is his favorite because it is similar to the open-face Swiss sandwiches he ate when he was a child. It comes with Napa cabbage-caraway slaw for $8.

Customer favorites include the original cheddar-and-mozzarella grilled cheese with tomato soup ($8) and the Gouda grilled cheese with black bean hummus, guava jam, pickled jalapeños on brioche with green salad and jalapeño vinaigrette ($10). The guava jam comes from a local Brazilian market.

Mr. Sandler said he focuses on cheese also because it's great to pair with beer. The restaurant has an extensive list of choices customers won't find in the supermarket.

The Queens Kickshaw, 40-17 Broadway between Steinway and 41st streets in Astoria, is open 7:30 a.m. to 1 a.m. weekdays and 9 a.m. to 1 a.m. weekends; 718-777-0913

"33" Rolling Rock Beer

Rolling Rock is a great, inexpensive summer beer.  Small Brewery Godzilla crusher, Budweiser the Hun, bought it a few years ago and moved production to St Louis. 

But, fortunately, kept the mineral salt formulation of the Latrobe water.  Result, it still tastes like the refreshing East Coast brew that it was, a good post-softball beer.  Not Hoppy or Malty, but competes favorably with a Heineken, supporting a US product on a hot summer day.  See below for the mystery of the famous "33."

JA

CATEGORIES: Autos Business Cokelore College Computers   Crime Critter Country Disney Embarrassments Fauxtography   Food Glurge Gallery History Holidays Horrors   Humor Inboxer Rebellion Language Legal Lost Legends   Love Luck Media Matters Medical Military   Movies Music Old Wives' Tales Politics Pregnancy   Quotes Racial Rumors Radio & TV Religion Risqué Business   Science September 11 Sports Travel Weddings  E-mail this                                                        Mystery 33 Claim:   The '33' on the Rolling Rock label stands for 1933, the year Prohibition was repealed.  UNDETERMINED Origins:   Rolling Rock is a well-loved gentle-spirited beer produced by a small Pennsylvania brewery that survived for a very long time as an independent before being bought out by Labatts in 1987. Over the years, this brew has gained widespread acceptance, becoming one of the few regional beers to carve a niche in the nationwide market. As it spread to new markets, the mystery surrounding the appearance of a cryptic '33' on its label spread with it.  The mysterious '33' has been on the Rolling Rock label since the beer's debut in 1939. One would think finding out where the '33' came from would amount to little more than a bit of digging in the file room of that brewery. Unfortunately, if the real reason for the name was at one time set down in the records of the company, it's long gone now.  In common with any bit of lore worth theorizing about over a brew, a number of "explanations" for that mysterious '33' have sprung up over the years, including: It refers to 1933, the year Prohibition was repealed. (The 21st Amendment abolished Prohibition on 5 December 1933.) It took 33 steps to get from the brewmaster's office to the brewing floor. The number of words in the brewing pledge on the back of the bottle total33 words. ("Rolling Rock, from the glass lined tanks of Old Latrobe we tender this premium beer for your enjoyment as a tribute to your good taste. It comes from the mountain springs to you.") It's the number of the racing horse pictured on the label. The owner bet $33 on a horse (#33, of course) and bought the brewery with the proceeds in 1933. There are 33 streams feeding into the reservoir from which the brewery draws its water. Groundhog Day is the 33rd day of the year, and they make a big fuss over that holiday in Pennsylvania. The number of letters in Rolling Rock's ingredients - water, malt, rice, hops, corn, brewer's yeast - adds up to 33. Beer tastes best at 33 degrees. (It's just above the freezing point of water.) 33 is journalism jargon for "end of copy." (Actually 30 is the term for this, not 33.) Rolling Rock was brewed at 33 degrees. It's related to the highest level status (33rd degree) attained by Freemasons. The workers at the brewery belonged to union local number 33. (Many of these same reasons have been offered to explain why Walt Disney's private club at Disneyland was named Club 33.)  Though the Prohibition explanation does at first blush appear the most likely, it's possible the 33 sneaked onto the label purely by happenstance.  The family of James Tito, one-time chief executive officer of Latrobe Brewing (makers of Rolling Rock beer) owned the brewery from the end of Prohibition until the company was sold in 1987. Based on notes and discussions with family members now dead, James Tito believes the mysterious '33' got there by accident when family members couldn't agree on the wording of a slogan to be printed on the bottle, or even whether the slogan should be long or short. Someone eventually came up with the 33-word pledge now in use, and to emphasize its brevity, he drew a large '33' on the paper. The printer to whom this wording was sent mistakenly thought the '33' was part of the copy and included it on the labels. By the time the mistake was discovered, so many labels had been printed and affixed to bottles that it would have been prohibitively expensive to scrap and replace them, therefore the mistake was retained as a permanent feature of the label. Thus every Rolling Rock bottle now sports the following pledge: Rolling Rock. From the glass lined tanks of Old Latrobe we tender this premium beer for your enjoyment, as a tribute to your good taste. It comes from the mountain springs to you. "33" The "mistake" explanation doesn't sound terribly convincing since the printer who sets and runs off thousands of labels before providing the customer with a proof copy to approve does so at his own risk. And even if someone from Rolling Rock had mistakenly approved the label design, error and all, there was no good reason why the errant '33' couldn't have been removed from the copy before the next printing.  So, the only real answer here is that no one knows the real answer. And perhaps thatis the answer — after all, nothing helps sell a product like a little mystery.  Barbara "prohibition superstition" Mikkelson  Last updated:   3 May 2011  Urban Legends Reference Pages © 1995-2011 by Barbara and David P. Mikkelson.  This material may not be reproduced without permission.  snopes and the snopes.com logo are registered service marks of snopes.com. Sources:     Potter, Chris.   "You Had to Ask: What Does the 33 on the Rolling Rock Label Stand For?"     Pittsburgh City Paper.   19 August 1998   (p. 7).     The Boston Globe.   "Ask the Globe."     3 February 1991   (p. 8).     [Minneapolis] Star Tribune   "What's the 33 on the Rolling Rock Beer Label?"     3 November 1991   (p. E15).