When you go to Chinatown, you're morally obligated to buy strange and unfamiliar goods, then decipher (and eat) them back home. It's Chinatown Roulette!

Ended up spending a lot of time in Chinatown shopping for my Thai Cooking Workshop this weekend, and it was about ten billion °F out there, so we needed some drinks.

This is in millions of degrees

First up was 100plus Lemon-Lime from Asia Market Corp.

It looks very Olympian.

...

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If there's one thing Homemade Root Beer, Soda & Pop and Fix the Pumps neglected to tell me in their deep dark secret-revealing takes on root beer and soda, it's that sarsaparilla is totally a thing in Asia.

I'd thought it was just for olden days cowboys and specialty soda producers, but I was w-r-o-n-g. It shows up all over the place sporting the name sarsi.

While we in the Western hemisphere have condensed all our herb-y, root-y...

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Last night I sat in on our Sour Beer class. You might've had a lambic before, or seen them sitting around at a bodega around you - fancy half-wine-looking contraptions full of corks and wire and a comparatively hefty price tag. Although there are a ton of types of sour beer, lambics are probably the most easily found.

Preface: Sour beer is a traditionally Belgian brew made in an unsterile environment, which lets all kinds of crazy yeasts and...

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My favorite fact from last night's Coffee: Comparative Brewing Methods wasn't about brewing methods at all, but about the coffee beans themselves: Coffee is seasonal. Just like anything you pick up at the farmers market waxes and wanes over the year, coffee beans are the same way.

Let's take Guatemalan coffee as an example. It's harvested between December and March, but there's about a 3-month lag between harvesting and shipping, so you...

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First up, we've got three new classes starting in the next couple of weeks. We're keeping them all on the small side, so sign up fast and check out the course descriptions for all the details. 

World Dumplings - Three weeks of pierogis, empanadas, and every other filled foodstuff you can think of. Sign up for one session or all three!

Hot Drinks - from hot chocolate to hot toddies, everything you need to survive until...

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