A Food, Spirits & Wine Blog

In this two-part spring edition of my restaurant review series, I have an eclectic mix of offerings for you! They include reviews of three new restaurants, an ice cream shop, a bourbon distillery/restaurant, an upscale bistro, an old school waterside fish house, a Latin bistro in a strip mall, a chain restaurant with over 670 restaurants nationwide, and a revisit and update of a small family-owned Italian restaurant. How’s that for variety? Let’s get started!! enRich Bistro  

Once every week or so Laurie and I troll our pantry and refrigerator for leftovers that we can turn into a meal for two. This week we discovered we had (almost) all the fixings for a homemade pork stir fry, so we made a quick trip to the grocery store to buy our missing item and created a delicious dinner – for $2 a serving! Here’s how we did it! Laurie and I used to throw away a lot of food that had gone bad because we didn’t get around to eating it. Spoiled fruits and veget

Santa was very good to me this past Christmas. It’s hard to pick my favorite gift, but if forced to do so, I’d have to choose the vertical wine tasting kit that Laurie got me, along with a full bottle of the same wine from Daou Vineyards. Here’s a quick recap of my tasting of these beautiful wines! There are many different ways to taste wines, but one of my favorite options is to conduct what’s known as a vertical tasting. These tastings include samples of the same wine from

I’m the first to admit that I often reach for store-bought pre-made and packaged items I could otherwise easily make, usually because I’m feeling lazy and don’t want to spend time in the kitchen doing it myself. It’s a loser move though, because it’s almost always more expensive, and it never tastes as good as the homemade version. It makes even less sense if the dish is a simple one that requires only a handful of ingredients and can be made in a few minutes – like homemade

Winter is the perfect season to settle in with a nice dram of whiskey for the evening! For me, that means taking my glass out on the lanai to enjoy the cool, humidity-free evenings of winter in a sweatshirt and sipping my whiskey slowly to warm me up a bit. OK, it’s still usually in the low 60’s or upper 50’s but definitely cool enough for the whiskey to take off the chill! Here are four my favorite whiskeys I’m drinking now! I’m using the same approach to learn about whiskey