Tag Archives: omnivore 100

Food and Drink, The DC 100, The Features
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DC Omni 100: #20 Pistachio Ice Cream

courtesy of flickr user StudioGabe

It’s time for another item on the DC Omnivore 100 list of the top one hundred foods every good omnivore should try at least once in their lives.

I’m a pistachio ice cream lover, but I haven’t always been. As a kid I was a Mint Chocolate Chip (MCC) ice cream party hack.  I subscribed to the theories that MCC had to have a vibrant green hue, was it the only green ice cream allowed, that pistachio was simply some sort of mutant flavored only eaten by weirdo adults and that I would never dare to taste pistachio ice cream because that would have been the ultimate slap in the face to MCC. I also had no idea what a pistachio nut was, because what 7 year old  has a distinguished enough palate to explore beyond peanuts–more likely peanut butter. As far as I was concerned almonds were pushing the nut frontier. However, now at the ripe age of 28, pistachio has become a regular to go at the ice cream parlor and lucky for me, it’s a regular offering at most establishments.

According to the interwebz, the creation of pistachio ice cream is attributed to James W. Parkinson of Philadelphia, who was the son of George and Eleanor Parkinson, a couple that made Philadelphia ice cream famous in  the nineteenth century. As a professionally trained chef, Mr. Parkinson was exposed to a widening variety of cooking techniques and international spices, from which he probably developed the idea to make a pistachio nut flavored ice cream.  And what a fantastic idea it was. Continue reading →

Food and Drink, Night Life, The DC 100, The Features
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DC Omnivore 100: #58, Beer above 8% ABV

Photo courtesy of
‘the cask’
courtesy of ‘volcanojw’

It’s time for another item from the DC Omnivore 100 list of the top one hundred foods every good omnivore should try at least once in their lives.

Finding a beer above 8% alcohol by volume isn’t the challenge that it once was.  The emergence of the craft beer movement in the past few decades and American beer aficionados unquenchable thirst for unique and challenging brews has caused the market for strong beer to explode.  This is not to say that highly alcoholic beers are something new. In nearly every, beer-drinking country aside from the US, breweries and monasteries have been crafting batches of potent beer for centuries.  It’s only in America that the trend has recently come into vogue.

If you’ve graduated from the typical grocery store, great American swill, you recognize that not all beer is created equal.  There are full bodied beers, crisp and refreshing beers, fruity beers, darker beers, and so on and so forth.  Each has something special that makes it unique, but each still has the same basic ingredients (barley, hops, water, and yeast) and each is created with variations on the same, basic brewing process.

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Food and Drink, The DC 100, The Features
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DC Omnivore 100: #55 Big Mac

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‘Big Mac and fries for lunch’ courtesy of ‘slworking2’

Frankly, I’m surprised it took us this long to gobble this entry right up on the Omnivore’s list.

Ok, I’ll admit it right off – I love comfort food. I don’t like the massive amount of exercise I need to conduct to burn off one of these babies (540 kcals in the burger alone), but sometimes? Totally worth it.

With me having extra time at home lately, I decided recently I needed some alone time with one of my favorite lunchtime pleasures. Don’t dis me – it’s not as expensive as a Ray’s Hell Burger and more convenient for me than a Five Guys. It’s a childhood thing, I think.

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