Chico, CA

Now that I've got the car, I'm moving around rather more often than previously, and so these blogs will become a little bit more frequent for a while. Enjoy it while it lasts.

Chico is a small and unremarkable town in northern California. (If anybody saw the title of this blog and thought "It's Chico Time!" then please do me a favour and never, ever speak to me again.) The reason I'm here is that it's host to the Sierra Nevada Brewing Company.

In my eyes Sierra Nevada comes second - an increasingly close second - to the Brooklyn Brewing Company in the ranks of the best purveyors of top-notch beers in America, and perhaps the world. It's now the seventh-largest brewing company in the USA, but it's still independent, being 100% owned by the founder, Ken Grossman. Every dish in the Taproom restaurant contains at least one ingredient home-grown in the Sierra Nevada Estate Garden. And the 90-minute brewery tour is free of charge.

I realise that most of my readers are not beer nerds like me, so I'll leave it there for today. All I'll say is that you can buy Sierra Nevada's Pale Ale and Torpedo IPA beers in any full-size Tesco; and that if you haven't already done so, well, you should. You'll never settle for Carling again. Life's too short for cheap beer.

Heaven is a place on earth

You know how there are some gift shops where you walk in...
...and it's not a question of finding something you'll want to buy...
...but more a question of finding something you'll not want to buy?

Edd vs Food #27
10oz bone-in wood oven pork chop, with parmesan and potato gratin,
Lacinato kale, estate carrots and apple cider reduction.
Washed down with Sierra Nevada Kellerweis. I've had this in the UK, in bottles.
It's available on tap here and, I imagine, in Heaven.

Edd vs Food #28 (next day)
Braised Sierra Nevada beef with San Marzano tomatoes, ricotta gnocchi and parmesan.
I think this is the grand champion of the Edd vs Food series so far.
From now on, I need all my tomatoes to be San Marzano tomatoes.

There's that rental car again!
(The disabled sign is for the next space along, OK?)
The motel put me in room 101. I hope they didn't mean anything by it.