Ireland is the only other country I know of that has any special food for Halloween. There’s a famous dish made with potatoes. Dawdling along through my treasured Irish cookbook by the doyenne of Irish cookery, Theodora Fitzgibbon, I came upon some recipes and lore about my favorite Irish dish: colcannon.
Wine labels are highly regulated by the federal government, more methodically even than food labels. It is mandatory to identify in some detail at least seven items, some so boring that it led to the invention of a second label on the back of the bottle to split the tedium and give us a bit of relief and respite while reading the primary label.
My major point in a recent column about storing wines was that there is a difference between keeping wines for up to a few years in a condition where they are ready to drink and aging important wines for the future. Even if you are doing both, serving wines correctly is at least as important as how they were stored.
The rugged canyons and sprawling ranches around Penjamo in the central Mexican state of Guanajuato are haunted with stories of hidden treasure, Catholics fleeing persecution by the Spanish crown, and of revolutionaries like Pancho Villa, who rode through this territory in the early 20th century. Along with these tales, which straddle the line between the historic and the fantastic, are the extraordinary stories of ordinary people who went “al otro lado,” as the people in Penjamo say — to the other side, the United States.
