Rowley's Whiskey Forge: Kitchen Kwento

Tuesday, July 13, 2010

Kitchen Kwento

In the space of two days — during the windup to Tales of the Cocktail next week — this week has gone from normal-busy to crazy-busy. For good measure, dozens of liquor PR reps from LA to London have been calling with invitations to parties, launches, after-hour shindigs, and meetings with various distillers, spirits brand reps, burlesque artists, and...I...I think one pitch today had me meeting Bruce Willis in Los Angeles. It's all a bit of a fog. Friends are visiting with four kids (or is it five? I lose count), and several interviews, including one with a film crew here at the house doing a piece on home distilling, have me feeling like a need a drink and a home-cooked meal.

Yes, things are moving briskly here at the Whiskey Forge.

My usual practice of juggling 5-7 books at once and devouring all the blog I can is on hold. But one new blog did catch my eye: Kitchen Kwento. Subtitled Recipes & Stories from a Pinay Kitchen, the blog is written by Aileen Suzara, a San Francisco Bay-area Filipina American who tackles — as she puts it — "connections between food, memory and place through a Filipina/American lens."

Growing up in the American Midwest, my exposure to Filipino food was limited to a few family friends. I got more of a taste for it in Philadelphia and once had a wild ride in London after being rescued from a predatory drag queen by a trio of Pinoy sailors who adopted me for the night and hauled me from restaurant to restaurant feeding me the food of their youth. Settled now in California, I have the great fortune to have become close with a few groups of Filipino friends. I have learned never to say no to lumpia and that Filipino bartenders make some of the best tropical drinks out there.

So I was happy to run across Aileen's site. I'll continue to check in now and then, but as I ready myself for the boozefest that is Tales of the Cocktail, I'll be mulling over one of her lines: "When was the last person in your family a farmer?"

I have no idea. But now I'm curious.

Goes well with:

Kitchen Kwetno

Aileen on Twitter

(Me on Twitter for that matter)

Tales of the Cocktail

1 comment:

Unknown said...: That's one way to simultaneously discover London and Filipino cuisine...sounds like one long night. As the years go by, food IS memory.

There is a very good upscale Filipino restaurant in Amsterdam (or at least there was when I lived there two years ago), which left me wondering why the cuisine hasn't made greater inroads.; July 18, 2010 at 4:34 AM

Rowley Who?

I'm Matthew Rowley. I wrote the book on moonshine. No, for real.

I'm a contributor to Whisky Advocate, contributing editor for Distiller magazine, a former board member of the Southern Foodways Alliance, and an erstwhile museum curator. After a life of living in bitterly cold and unspeakably hot places, I'm lucky enough to be working my tail off in southern California. Can't beat that with a stick.

Email me: moonshinearchives (at) gmail (dot) com

My day job is freelance writing for business, government, and academic clients. When I’m not helping others get their stories out, I’m eating and drinking, planning to eat and drink, or, relying on my training as an anthropologist and museum curator to reflect on what I’ve eaten and drunk. I travel whenever I can, visiting distillers, artisan food producers, secondhand bookstores, and farmers’ markets. Sometimes I manage to write about it here.

Since 2001, I've traveled around the world interviewing extra-legal distillers to debunk the notion that moonshining is a dead or dying craft. You can check out the results in my 2007 book Moonshine. For fun, there are plugs and interviews at the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Publishers Weekly, the Los Angeles Times, and Wired.

It's warmed my heart that modern "very small batch" distillers, far from being a dying breed, continue to send and bring me bottles and jars of hand-cranked whiskeys and brandies.

Click here for my disclosure statements and directions for sending samples.