Umami Mart

  Today is St. Patrick’s Day, which along with Cinco de Mayo, make two of the year’s best excuses to get hammered early. Like other revelers, I’m looking forward to a day filled with shots of Irish whiskey and pints of Guinness, and harassing whoever dares walk into the bar without sporting any green. This […]

This morning I left the house without a coat, beanie, or scarf.  While savoring the fresh air and sunshine I realized Spring had arrived early to the party, and DJ Mother Nature (who’s the one throwing the shindig) was shouting, “Let’s get this party started!”  Well Big Mama, I thought you’d never ask. A party […]

In the world of mixology, there aren’t many cocktails based on Cognac relative to the other spirits.  I can count less than twenty old recipes off the top of my head, which is really not much, considering a quarter are mere variations of each other, and another quarter or so share the stage with other […]

So the Saints finally won a Super Bowl, and while many of you surely pounded Hurricanes to celebrate, here in the Eastern Seaboard, the weather conditions don’t quite call out for something so tropical.  In other words, there’s a blizzard happening right outside my door.  Of course when it comes to celebrating the storied American […]

We’re back!  If you’ve made it here then you already know that what you’re seeing is the new, faster, stronger, hotter, umami-er, relaunched Umamimart, and that the old UM has been forever cast off into Blogger oblivion (or Bolivian, as Mike Tyson would say). To the loyal readers who patiently waited for our return to glory, I have nothing […]

It’s mid-January and by this point many of you are off to the races as far as your resolutions are concerned. You’ve detoxed, cleaned up your diet, and are hitting the gym as frequently as a Playboy bunny who’s about to be cut from the squad. However if you’re like me, 2010 didn’t really start […]

So you say it was a tough year, huh? Well, look at it this way: you’ve almost made it out of this Millenium’s first decade. And what a decade it’s been. I mean, this was the decade that the internet hit puberty and really came into its own; the decade that gave birth to Google—do […]

Christmas is nearly upon us, and while most folks are building jolly snowmen and merrily singing carols, every year there are those who wake on Christmas morning to the sad realization that they had been placed on the naughty list, with only a few lumps of coal in their stockings as their best hope of […]

At some point very soon you’ll feel like you’ve filled your noggin with too much nog from all the holiday parties throughout the month. Before you reach the point where the three letter word ‘egg’ begins to conjure four letter word thoughts, I’d like to share with you a few recipes for delicious egg-based relatives […]

While he ate his sandwich and sipped his beer, a bit of conversation came back to him. Blaisedell, the poet, had said to him, “You love beer so much, I’ll bet someday you’ll go in and order a beer milk shake.” It was a simple piece of foolery but it had bothered Doc ever since. […]