Tuesday, April 19, 2005

Tasting Results


This morning I decided to taste test the 5 honeys on toast--Ed's Bread Multigrain, with, as you can see, scads of unsalted butter. I used black coffee as a palate cleanser (thanks to Myra for the suggestion).

My reactions:
Orange Blossom: zippy, acidic bite particularly in the aftertaste
Wildflower: not much character--just sweet with no hints of anything else
Catclaw: tangy at first taste but mild aftertaste
Mesquite: strong flavor--not exactly tangy like the catclaw, but like SuperHoney, however not much aftertaste
Sourwood: zingiest of the lot, sort of like Orange Blossom on steroids

The Ed's Bread was NOT an ideal tasting medium since its flavor got in the way of the honey. I think they use molasses in the bread. I need to get something super plain (probably tasteless white bread) and do another test. The black coffee worked great in between tastes. If anyone local wants to come over and join me for a tasting, I'd love to hear what another set of taste buds can pick up.

On the reading front: I have a new love of the recumbent bike at the gym--I can get half an hour of reading in while riding it which makes exercise feel like a super-treat rather than a chore. Unfortunately I get queasy when trying to read on any other piece of exercise equipment. Yesterday I read a big chunk of Marilynne Robinson's second novel Gilead which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It has been a long time coming for Robinson fans--she published Housekeeping and won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1982. She hasn't been idle since then, but she hasn't been publishing fiction. Does anyone remember where she published an excerpt of Gilead maybe about a year ago? I recognized the part where the narrator and his father go to look for and tend his grandfather's grave.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Maybe it was excerpted in The New Yorker? A father & boy going to tend a grave sounds like a fiction piece that was in it sometime within the last year, and I know that they have been publishing a lot of excerpts from full-length novels.

Kate said...

I bet you are right because now that I think of it, The New Yorker is the only periodical I've read regularly in the last year! For some reason when I read the excerpted piece the author's name didn't register (which is kind of strange given that we named our dog, Sylvie, after the main character in her first novel!) and it also felt complete--like a full short story rather than an excerpt. But hey, that's probably just good writing!

Kate said...
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Anonymous said...

I see a screenplay. 'Sideways' with honey, and genders reversed.

A friend of my used to only buy Pepperidge Farm "Toasting White Bread". it was so good and evil at the same time. I remember it to be a good substrate for honeys and jams....

Anonymous said...

Ack, I can't edit my comments like I can with Flickr...