Eddie's FAVORITE Wine & Cuisine Sites
Gilt Taste (Epicurean Delights)
Gilt Taste is an online food and wine magazine and marketing emporium featuring a delectable and tempting array of meats, sweets, wine, cheese, prepared foods, seafood and classy cookware and bake ware. Here you'll also find daily news stories from the chatty worlds of food and wine, as well as recipes and opinions from chefs, wine experts and food experts.
Truth be told, Gilt Taste is more than a food emporium and online food and wine magazine—it's actually a rich repository of food and wine "thought leadership," a kind of Oxford library of recipes and epicurean wisdom that you'll want to return to again and again.
On one occasion, for example, when I visited the site, I wandered for more than a half-hour through a dazzling array of dessert recipes, all colorfully illustrated with beautiful and tempting photographs of the finished products. Yum! It proved to me that Gilt Taste has one of the most photogenic foodie websites I've ever come across.
Farm-2-Market (Seafood)
For fresh seafood, I can't think of a better online food purveyor than Farm-2-Market, a Web-based seafood market that provides you with extremely fresh seafood within 24 hours of you ordering it online. Farm-2-Market boast that their business bypasses traditional intermediaries, wholesalers, and food brokers to bring you seafood that is custom harvested and then delivered to your door via FedEx.
From Farm-2-Market you can order caviar, crab, crawfish, Maine Lobster, mussels, clams, oysters, scallops, shrimp, and much more. And, if you want to know how best to prepare such seafood delights, Farm-2-Market's website also contains recipes for everything from pan sautéed sea scallops and poached salmon to lobster bisque, Maryland she crab soup, crawfish and sausage gumbo, Alaskan halibut cheeks and more.
Farm-2-Market's seafood quality is unmatched in my experience. Even in many gourmet food shops and high-end grocery stores, the seafood in stock is as much as a week old. Farm-2Market works with local fishermen to bring you seafood that couldn't be any fresher unless you caught it yourself!
La Tienda (Spanish Cuisine)
Looking for the very best cuisine that Spain has to offer? Then I strongly suggest you check out La Tienda. This family-run company based in Williamsburg, Virginia and Alicante, Spain, has been doing business online since 1996 and works with a network of artisanal and small family businesses in Spain to bring online customers the best of Spanish cuisine and other culinary products. On La Tienda's website you can browse and buy from an extensive online grocery store that features the finest in Spanish food, including jamon iberico de bellota (Spanish acorn-fed ham), Ventresca tuna, and mantecados and polvorones (Spanish shortbreads).
My very favorite La Tienda food item is jamon iberico. This scrumptious and very unusual ham (Which I mention in my book) is produced only in Spain and is made from a type of pig called cerdo iberico or pata negra, which lives only on the Iberian Peninsula. These pigs, supposedly descended from an ancient species of roaming Mediterranean boar, are notable for their black hooves and ability to store great amounts of fat. This enables the ham from these pigs to be cured for very long periods of time, giving it an intensely sweet and complex flavor.
D'Artagnan Natural and Organic Meats (French Cuisine)
Like La Tienda, D'Artagnan is an online purveyor of gourmet foods, both to individual foodies and to upscale restaurants. The company's website offers a vast inventory of products that include game meats (rabbit, venison, and wild boar), gourmet poultry (goose, pheasant, duck, capon, guinea hen and my favorite–Scottish game birds), and pate de foie gras, duck mousse, and terrines.
D'Artagnan is committed to natural and sustainable food production and has been on the forefront of the organic food movements in the United States. Besides its extensive inventory of food items for sale, the D'Artagnan website also includes tasty and memorable recipes for dishes such as veal osso bucco, spice-infused duck tacos, Anasazi cowboy chili with buffalo and nopales (fleshy green leaves), cassoulet D'Artagnan, and black truffle ice cream, among other things!