The Eve of Thanksgiving

Can you believe how frightfully cold it is outside?!? The weather is certainly all the small talk anyone is having this week. Of course this weather is happening right now when everyone's about to start running around for the holidays... ALL I WANT FOR THANKSGIVING IS TO NOT HAVE TO GO OUTSIDE! Sunday during the few minutes I dared go outside I stumbled upon this sight in Logan Square on the Parkway:

Being in the cafe all day means I drink warm beverages all day. Besides La Columbe coffee, which probably is a large portion of the liquid weight in my body I also enjoy our delicious Hot Cider.  We get it from Beiler Orchard in Gap, PA because of course we get the best our locality has to offer.  Some whipped cream and cinnamon makes it extra extra special.

Right now, I am all snug at home making my grandmother's extra special pumpkin pie. The oven on all evening with pie inside makes for a great smell and aids my somewhat sluggish heating system.  My spouse and kitty are sitting on the couch reading books. We at Capogiro hope you're snug with your loved ones this Thanksgiving Eve.  Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Turkey Week!!

Can you smell the turkey yet?  Happy almost thanksgiving everyone.  NOTE:  We are closed on thanksgiving, so be sure to purchase your pints ahead of time instead of on the way to your thanksgiving festivities.  The capo staff will be with their family and friends!!

Now the big question, what flavors should you bring home to chill with the turkey?

My first choice is Cranberry e Mele sorbetto. This is truly a thanksgiving flavor.  It’s crisp, refreshing, and totally vegan!!  Another awesome sorbetto in the case right now is Pear.  If you aren’t craving sorbetto, then there is one clear and total winner, sweet potato pecan praline!  It’s finally here! I’ve waited a whole year and it’s finally back.  I know it sounds even more unusual than our avocado flavor, but it is just as good if not better.

Keep in mind that your guests have just been stuffing themselves with turkey, cranberry sauce, and mashed potatoes, so they might not be in the mood for more cranberry or potatoey things.  Think about how our gelato and sorbetto can best accompany your pies, cookies, and fruit that you are serving for dessert!!

Seriously, though. Pot Roast.

It can't really be that Thanksgiving's in one week, right? Nono, I'm sure that it's still at least a month away. Labor Day was just yesterday, right? Right?!

Naw, we actually are pretty well into the holiday season, whether or not any of us want to acknowledge it. They do seem to creep up earlier every year, and I don't actually mean in the sense of vapid "you don't really love someone if you don't get them a Mercedes for Christmas" ads which already seem to have been running since the last Phillies home game.

The upshot is that it's the time of year for serious indoor cooking. But not serious cooking in terms of stretching the boundaries of our respective culinary skill--what I mean is that the holidays are when we all get down to making comfort staples really, really well. All of which is a roundabout way of humblebragging that I made pot roast this weekend for friends:

And it was GOOD. Oh man. So good. Totally one of those dishes that's not really that complicated as long you make sure to hit a couple of fundamental steps. (As in: brown the beef HARD on all sides and, when everything's put together and at the right simmer and all, make sure someone drags you away from the stove for a couple of hours lest you keep futzing with it unnecessarily.) And the carrots. The carrots! 

I don't get to cook much at my own place, so when I do get a chance to make a meal I try really hard to do something that's going to be great, though for sure there have been some mixed results lately. At the official last cook-out of the year, I took a stab at grilled chicken thighs. It turned into one of those times when cooking with unfamiliar equipment can yield less than perfect results--the coals were ferociously hot and I burned off all the awesome sauce I'd made. The thighs were still pretty tasty (generally pretty hard to go wildly wrong with meat cooked over charcoal), and the rapidity with which they disappeared into the crowd's slavering maw leaves me thinking that people were eating them with something more than just dutiful civility. 

And now it's turkey time. People obsess over Thanksgiving! I've cooked the whole meal for a sizable crowd more than once and it's left me thinking that it's not THAT hard. Certainly it takes a fair bit of game-planning and a kitchen of a certain size, but I think it's the pressure of having to cook such a traditionally fraught meal for in-laws and guests and who-all is what stresses everyone out. So...don't stress! Plan. Have a strategy and a drink, make a nephew peel the requisite pounds and pounds and pounds of potatoes, and everything'll be fine. 

Rare Flavor Alert!

This week in rare flavor sightings, the ever-elusive Espresso Sorbetto made an appearance at 20th Capogiro.  Word is out that it'll be back a couple of times in the next week or so. 

Espresso Sorbetto in it's natural habitat

In other Capogiro happenings, this is happening in 2014 and we are all so excited --

http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/the-insider/Capogiro-plans-cafe-in-Old-City.html

In my opinion, winter is too cold for fun.  I dislike grey chilliness and being shut indoors.  Interestingly enough, our customers here at Capogiro come in for frozen treats even when they, themselves are half frozen to death.  Our gelato is just that good!  Alright, I admit I have some fun when its cold out because it means we have our winter wonderland of seasonal gelato and sorbetto. Cranberry sorbetto, mint chocolate, king leo stracciatella, and the best of them all, my ABSOLUTE FAVORITE in the Capogiro arsenal...... SWEET POTATO PRALINE.
 


People, this gelato is the best in the world.  If you don't believe National Geographic then believe me.  And if you don't believe me then come in on a day that we have sweet potato praline and believe your mouth.  It's simply the best thing to ever exist.  And I personally saw the kitchen stocking the ingredients to make it.  Have no doubt that it is coming soon.


<3 Tori Styner

Persimmons: not tomatoes

I mean, they really do LOOK an awful lot like tomatoes. Maybe even more tomatillos, but that's getting pretty far afield.

Doesn't it look like a tomato, though? Sort of like an under-ripe roma tomato with a fancy hat? No? Just me? I'd never seen a whole persimmon before I started working here, so it was something of a revelation.

Do you feel like you're not getting your daily allowance of manganese? We can help you with that, because our persimmon sorbetto is full of persimmons and persimmons themselves are full of the stuff. We are trafficking mostly in hachiya persimmons, but trust that we're pretty good at ripening fruit. We don't want you to end up with a fuzzy-feeling tongue from an unready, super-astringent berry. Yes, a berry! Just like tomatoes.

We're always your place for trying new flavors, and, along with persimmons, the rambutans are back in the house. I've had my struggles with the rambutan in the past (delicious but terrifying), but given my tenure here I've finally made peace with them. To a degree. As in I'll now approach within three feet of them while they're still whole because evidence to date suggests they're not likely to caress me menacingly with their weird hairy tendrils. But I'm not convinced and, like a fairly neurotic Australian Shepherd, will remain constantly vigilant. (Any peace I've made with the rambutans is clearly uneasy and fragile.)

It's for sure gotten somewhat chilly these days, for which I'm more grateful than most. It's hot chocolate season! You probably didn't need me to point any of that out, given the frequency with which y'all are ordering hot chocolates of your own accord. And can you believe that Thanksgiving's only two weeks away? Crazy. The time, it flies.

 

Rambutan

These furry weird red guy have arrived again and are as tasty as ever.

Rambutan are relatives of the Lychee which if you are a fan of asian cuisine you may be a little more familiar with.  They have a similar soft fleshy edible inside but on the outside they have this soft bristly red shell.  They come from Indonesia and Malaysia and have to be picked when they are already bright red and ripe as they are a non-climacteric fruit meaning they will not ripen further after being picked.

Though native to Asia they are now grown in many tropical regions including India, the Caribbean islands, Costa Rica, Ecuador, and even Hawaii where it has been one of their top 3 produced fruits.

If you are buying Rambutan for yourselves you should look for them still attached to their branches as this keeps them healthy and fresh for much longer.  Also if the Maharlika variety are available to you I would try to pick them over other varieties as the seeds of other varieties are much more difficult to remove from the delicate tasty fruit that surrounds it.

I watched our kitchen turn a batch into delicious sorbetto yesterday.  Keep checking our flavor listing online and come by and try it.

Movin' on up!

After nearly two years at the flagship store, I've left Midtown Village for our store in Rittenhouse. I’ll miss all the staff, neighbors and regulars at 13^th Street but am excited to meet all new friends. One thing that Capo Rittenhouse has that the other stores don’t is Gelato Cakes! I've enjoyed learning about these beauties and even sat down with two different customers today and chatted about their customized cake orders in a sort-of cake consultation. Where’s my TLC reality show? It’s could be called “Gelato Cake Queen” and I’m sure I could invent lots of drama that would make for very riveting television. Anyways, don’t forget about us when you’re thinking of a unique and fabulous dessert idea.  

More to come on my adventures at Capogiro 20th Street but it’s getting very hard to type anymore….

brrr

Our Passyunk location is now closed Monday-Wednesday.. 

BUT! We are open 11am-10pm Thursday-Sunday to pack up your take home pints and make you a great cup of coffee. 

Not quite like attached video, though. 

Coffee Snobs - watch more funny videos

preach

Ohmanohmanohman this might be bad...

Just...just hold on with me here, okay? We can get through this if we're together. It's going to be scary and uncomfortable and it's going to make everything worse for a while, but. But. We're gonna be okay. Right?!

We're staring down the barrel of a global wine shortage.

Ok, breathe with me! C'mon, in through your nose, out through your mouth! Stay with me.

It's completely true, though. Demand for wine is outpacing production, and there are a few different things making it worse. 2011 was a crap year for growing wine grapes, for one thing. For another, you sots are drinking greedily of what IS available! American wine consumption has been skyrocketing for the last decade or so. I blame Thomas Haden Church, naturally. It's been blowing up in China too, but I don't have any ready cultural references to arbitrarily back that up, so let's move on.

Sounds like 2013 has been a much better harvest year so far, so we'll probably settle out over the next year or so. That's some comfort, which is good...because you should brace yourself again. There's more bad news coming.

We may have reached peak wine.

Breathe. BREATHE! You're getting pale. I know, it's scary! But we have to face the reality that everything might change. Will Two Buck Chuck stay two bucks?!?! Mr. Two Buck Chuck says yes. California is, apparently, okay to go for the foreseeable future.

But production is trending down in France, Italy, and Spain, which seems like a bad signal. But then again there are even more conflicting rumors that winemakers do this to us every few years so that they can terrify us into accepting higher prices. Who do we believe?!

I dunno. What I DO know is that I'm going to fill my underground bunker with box wine and corner the inevitable post-wino apocalypse market. Courage.

Winter Hours!!

I know it's still technically fall but as of this past weekend we have switched to our winter hours.   We open at the same time every day we just close one hour earlier than we do for the majority of the year.

Capo13's winter hours are as follow:
Mon through Thurs- 7:30AM - 10:30PM
Friday- 7:30AM - 12AM
Saturday- 9AM - 12AM
Sunday- 10AM - 10:30PM