Veritasty: Truthfully Delicious

Who doesn't love a good grilled cheese sandwich?  Two slices of Wonder Bread with a Kraft Singles melted in the middle...mmm, talk about #throwbacktuesday!  Of course nowadays, you can get much more creative with grilled cheese sandwiches, as we've seen at outdoor BBQs , The Melt Shop , and even Beauty & Essex .   The pinnacle of delectable grilled cheese sandwiches is The Big Cheesy, a friendly neighborhood grilled cheese competition happening this weekend.  The contenders include Songs of Essex, Hudson Common, Eggs Travaganza, Twist and Smash'd, Mrs. Dorsey's Kitch, and Fame by Alex Mitow.  Undoubtedly, we're going to be seeing some unique and mouth-watering combinations of bread + cheese + miscellany + beer.  Yes, importantly, beer by Goose Island will be flowing too. Here are the deets! Who: you and me What: The Big Cheesy Where: Openhouse Gallery, 201 Mulberry Street When: Saturday, January 24 and Sunday, January 25 from 12:00pm...

This weekend, beer fanatics and Veritasty flocked to Coney Island's MCU Park for Coney Island On Tap Craft Beer Festival!  Dozens of nearby and faraway breweries served up more than 100 craft beers.  Each guest gets a 5oz glass to proffer to the volunteers pulling the oft-decorated taps, built into blue plastic coolers (still trying to figure out how those worked).  Although neither of us are huge beer fanatics, we definitely appreciate a cold one now and then, and I know I definitely learned a lot about beer and what types of beer I prefer at Coney Island On Tap! Preface: we are not beer experts, but we dabbled at our homemade beer tasting and this discussion of SixPoint beer by my friend Charlie .  I think I shall divide this post into three categories: beer, cider, and other.  Also...while I tried to take notes on the checklist they provided, it got harder and harder to annotate after five, ten, fifteen different drinks...so here are the highlights! ...

The 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi is upon us!  The reporters and guests may not be enjoying their hotel accommodations, but let's hope they're at least enjoying the food there! My boss is Russian and I've been practicing my " zdravstvujte !" a lot.  It comes in handy when I go to my local Net Cost Market, a small but very popular chain of Russian supermarkets in New York City.  Net Cost Market has a salad/hot food bar with pay-by-weight goodies, in addition to regular packaged familiar and unfamiliar goods.  For a more professional outlook, see my friend Arthur's Yelp review .  He lends better Russian insight. In a typical Net Cost shopping trip, my basket will contain the following items: . plain Lifeway kefir -- Kefir is a runny yogurt drink popular with Eastern Europeans.  It's supposed to be good for your every digestive need, and the flavored ones taste pretty good (strawberries & bananas?  cappuccino?  practically decaden...

This week, the Food Film Festival comes to New York City!  Do you love food?  Do you love films?  Do you love festivals?  I mean, you can't possibly answer "no" to any of these. http://thefoodfilmfestival.com/about/ Last year, we had the incomparable experience of having dinner in a movie theater at the " I ♥ Japan " night.  The Food Film Festival allows filmmakers to create food-related shorts and then serve the foods featured in their films to the moviegoers.  This is like Smell-O-Vision to the n-th degree!  I had some chicken wings and ramen that I still dream about today.... This year's events are: Wednesday, October 23 - KINGS OF BBQ Barbecue is one of the most beloved, food-porn-worthy, yet hotly contested segments of American cuisine.  The films that will be shown talk about mixing diversity into barbecue styles, as well as bringing barbecue abroad to diverse places to satisfy American tastes. Thursday, October...

I kind of wish I'd done that college-dorm-thing where you put a Kraft Single between two slices of white bread, wrap it in aluminum foil, and then heat the baby up with an iron.  But then again, I didn't live in a college dorm, and knowing me, I would have just eaten that slice of cheese straight up before I got around to melting it. There is a fantastic little joint in the city called The Melt Shop that serves a vast array of grilled cheese sandwiches that'll give you a pleasant throwback of sorts.  Sure, you can get a plain white bread grilled cheese with tater tots and a milkshake, but then there are also some creative combinations like pulled pork, wild mushroom, tuna melt, buffalo-wing-fried-chicken, meatball parmesan, bacon and cheese and...cranberry chutney?  Sure enough, The Melt Shop won this year's The Big Cheese competition for the second time in a row with just that sandwich.  They took it off their menu by the time I went so I didn't get a c...