HAPPINESS DELIVERED IN BITE-SIZE PORTIONS

Nashville’s newest sushi bar opens at Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Center

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (February 11, 2005) – Appropriately named, Wasabi’s sushi bar is making a “spicy” impression on guests at Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Center. Recently opened, Wasabi’s boasts a well-balanced menu of traditional Japanese sushi in a magnificent landscape. Guests are surrounded by the fountain show in the Cascades Atrium while talented sushi chefs delight by serving an array of bright colors, mouthwatering tastes and tingling sensations.

“Gaylord Opryland strives to offer guests innovative regional dining options, in addition to our signature restaurants,” said Arthur Keith, senior vice president and general manager of Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Center. “We feel that Wasabi’s adds a new dimension to our food and beverage offerings. We pride ourselves on offering the best of the best in dining experiences, and Wasabi’s promises to follow in that tradition.”

The sushi at Wasabi’s is not only tantalizing to the taste buds, but each plate is a miniature masterpiece. The lively colors of the fish combined with the traditional garnishes of ginger and Wasabi create a sense of balance and beauty. Sushi is more than a meal -- it is an age-old tradition that over the years has become an art, and the staff at Wasabi’s creates beautiful masterpieces that appeal to even to most novice of sushi fans.

Guests at Wasabi’s can choose from a variety of sushi rolls, nigiri sushi and sashimi, plus traditional sake, sake cocktails, plum wine and Japanese beer.

For more information or reservations, call 615-871-6848. Wasabi’s is open daily from noon until 10 p.m.

      

Tuscan flavors inspire a transformation

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (February 11, 2005)– You find yourself lounging in a fragrant garden while sipping a glass of this year's best Italian vintage while soft music plays in the background as the first bite of tiramisu melts in your mouth …. Think you are only dreaming? This is not a dream – but it could be paradise! Welcome to Ristorante Volare at Gaylord Opryland. Recently the Gaylord Opryland culinary team traveled to Tuscany to seek out the freshest ingredients and study new and innovative cooking styles from some of the leading Tuscan chefs – all to create tempting, authentic Italian menu items at Ristorante Volare. The menu at Ristorante Volare has undergone quite a transformation as a direct result of the skills and knowledge acquired on the voyage across the sea.

Ristorante Volare has fully embraced the warmth and generosity for which the Tuscan region is famous. Impeccable wine and gracious service complete this world-class restaurant. Interpretations of Tuscan flavors result in mouthwatering selections, including specialty dishes sure to delight even the most discerning palate. As one of the 2004 Wine Spectator Award of Excellence winners, Ristorante Volare offers a vast selection of wines hand selected to create perfect synergy with the menus items offered; ideal for any wine aficionado.

During the month of February, Ristorante Volare will offer extraordinary dishes to highlight Fabbri pastas. While in Tuscany, the Gaylord Opryland chefs discovered a family-run pasta factory tucked away in a small village in the heart of Chianti. Manufacturing pasta the same way for four generations, Fabbri Pasta Factory prides itself on using the best hard-grain semolinas and drying their pasta at a low temperature, thus protecting the pasta’s organic richness and increasing the ability of the pasta to absorb all of the subtle flavors of any sauce.

In addition to the historical pasta the chefs also acquired a very special skill in Tuscany — the ability to create Limoncello, a lemon liqueur that is served well chilled in the summer months. It is wonderful as a palate cleanser or as an after dinner drink. This citrus-based liqueur is so popular in Italy that it is considered the national drink, and this specialty drink is available now at Ristorante Volare at Gaylord Opryland.

Make a reservation at Ristorante Volare by calling 615-871-6848 and take a trip to Tuscany without even packing!

About Gaylord Opryland

Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Center – the largest non-gaming hotel facility in the continental U.S. – is known for providing superior products and services to the meetings and convention industry. Winner of numerous prestigious awards including the coveted Gold Key Elite Award in 2002, 2003 & 2004, Gaylord Opryland Nashville is the flagship property of the Gaylord Hotels brand owned by Gaylord Entertainment (NYSE: GET), a leading hospitality and entertainment company based in Nashville, Tenn. For more information, visit www.gaylordentertainment.com or www.gaylordopryland.com.

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Media Relations Contacts:

Kara Norman, (615) 458-2871, knorman@gaylordhotels.com

Jeffrey Zimmer, (615) 458-2873, jzimmer@gaylordhotels.com

Waiting For the Run

Christopher Kimball

This year, the sap didn’t run. It was the Fault of March – a lost month – lost to cold, mud, ice, snow, and rain. March was like a kitchen full of stale smoke, old meat, and the smell of wet wool pants. We wanted to open the windows and let in the spring, but we couldn’t – the cold, damp air flowed down from the woods, across the slush covered upper pond, and poured into the house like a bucket of half frozen sap, yellow from sitting in the sun too long. We were more than ready for a spray of daffodils, the sight of red buds on apple trees, and the faint hum of honeybees stirring from their white winter hives in the weak mid-day sun. We woke up each morning hoping to find 450 gallons of sap in our tank. And we were ready for it, with a big woodpile of well-split hardwood, plenty of kiln-dried maple for a quick, hot start, and lots of cold beer in the house. Once the arch started up, the intense heat would drive out the chill, the sap bucket gray sky, and the storm threatening from the southeast.

If you spend much time in the country you are used to waiting. Each year we wait for the corn to come up, the pigs to put on weight, the potatoes to mature, the river to go down, the ground to thaw out, the rain to come, the rain to stop, and the weather to clear for haying. Nothing is immediate. Everything is in the process of becoming. One older neighbor received a hat for Christmas. When asked why his significant other didn’t also give him a pair of gloves, he remarked, “Well, I’m going to have to wait ‘til next year. She isn’t sure I am going to last.” No point in spending money on a new pair of gloves if you are not going to get some real use out of them.

A few years ago, when my second daughter, Caroline, had just turned nine, I took her up to New Brunswick for a three day salmon fishing trip on the Miramichi River. It was a three family father/daughter affair organized by my fishing buddy Andy, who had made the same trip three earlier with his oldest daughter, Alexandra. (Andy once gave up a promising career in a prestigious Boston law firm to go fishing in New Zealand for six months. He also showed up stark naked- except for a straw boater – at his ex-wife’s door, having been chased by the police. But that’s another story.) After a 10 hour drive we arrived at the camp, just this side of Doake’s fly shop. There was snow on the ground, it was bitter cold, and the wind was up. The ice had just let out and the fish weren’t running.

Anyone who has ever been to a fishing or hunting camp knows the drill. The week before, the fish are jumping, the deer are plentiful, and the grouse are thick as flies. The night you arrive, the water is too low, the moon is wrong, the deer are scarce – in other words you have arrived in limbo. The signs are always encouraging – nobody wants the sports to go home early – but you have to be patient to see what the next day will bring.

The first day of our trip was bitter cold, but Andy’s daughter, Catharine caught a 20-lb salmon on the second cast. For the rest of us it was hard going. In the first two hours, it hailed, snowed, and then rained. The kids were dropped off at midmorning for hot chocolate and cookies, and the dads made their way back to the river. We went to bed early that night, after a heavy camp dinner, and listened to the hollow sound if iced trees rubbing in the wind.

The second day, Caroline hooked a big one, and the guide asked if she wanted to reel it in. I said sure, it was her trip, but she lost it after a couple of minutes. The day was gray, not much warmer, and we spent seven hours on the river. Caroline was a trooper, cold but determined and cheerful enough about the one that got away.

On the last day, the sun came out, and we were headed upstream to a new spot. As we passed Reed, the other father, he hooked into a good 12 pounder and landed it at the same spot that Caroline had lost hers. Now we were down to about an hour of fishing, and we were the only father/ daughter team that had come up empty.

We headed to a point where the river split, anchored and threw a line into a hold right next to a deep cut bank. Caroline stripped out some line, the wet fly (it was a Silver Rat) was swung downstream by the current, and then the salmon hit. The rod bent almost in half, the line stripped out like a shot, and the reel clicked rapid-fire. It took 15 minutes to land it: it was a small 6-pounder, but it fought well. The guide netted it, and my proud nine-year old held up the bright fish in her arms. I still have the photo to prove it.

During the long ride home, I thought about that fish. It was worth waiting for all right, but other memories of the trip burn more brightly: the warm sun on our face on the last day, three canoes on a fast spring water, each with a guide, a father, and a daughter, the look of encouragement Caroline gave me when she thought I might be disappointed by the poor fishing. At other times, though, after a long wait, the fish never takes the fly. I have sat in the woods many November evenings waiting for a buck and he never showed. I have waited for a 12-year old to kiss me goodbye at the bus stop and she never does. I waited for a friend to come home from the war and he didn’t.

We just have to learn to be patient, to know that our time is spent in transition, in waiting rooms of our imagination. And then one day we wake up and realize that the sap isn’t going to run. There will be no boil, no steam, and no syrup. The fish doesn’t rise to the fly, the woods remain cold and empty, and you never see your friend again. I guess we had better learn to enjoy the waiting..

This editorial is dedicated to David Bloom. Reprinted with permission from Cook’s Illustrated Magazine

The Well-Tempered Wok By JULIA MOSKIN    When Grace Young's family went to restaurants, her father always insisted that they sit right next to the swinging door to the kitchen. A liquor salesman who felt at home in every restaurant in San Francisco's Chinatown, her father said food had to be eaten just moments out of the wok, while it is still fresh, hot and exuding wok hay, a Cantonese term, unknown in other parts of China, that translates loosely as "wok energy" or "wok breath."    Wok hay is what happens when excellent ingredients - like ginger, noodles, shrimp, walnuts or Chinese chives - meet a wok crackling with heat. It is both a taste and aroma and something else, too, a lively freshness that prickles your nose and makes you impatient for that first taste, like the smell of steak just off the grill or a tomato right off the vine in August. Food with wok hay tastes intensely of itself.    "Wok hay makes the difference between a good stir-fry and a great one," said Ms. Young, who traveled to China in 2000 and 2002 to study and document wok cooking and traditions. Her book, "The Breath of a Wok" (Simon & Schuster, 2004), is both an attempt to define wok hay and a guide to achieving it in an American kitchen. "It's something that you create with a hot wok," Ms. Young said, "but it's also something you release that is already in the food."    Today is the first day of the Lunar New Year, a 15-day celebration of renewal, which is the most important holiday of the Chinese year: Christmas, New Year's Day, Easter and Yom Kippur all bundled together. It is considered the most auspicious time to buy a new wok or other cooking tools. "The weeks leading up to New Year are our busiest time of the year," said Tanya Leung, an owner of Hung Chong Cookware in Chinatown in Manhattan. This year, she said, many of her customers are buying a new product, an iron adapter for American stovetops that makes it possible to use an authentic Chinese wok without raising it too high above the flames, as wok rings do.    Lang Ching, a New Yorker born in Fujian Province, who was browsing the aisles there last week, said she buys a new wok every year. "Some cooks in China keep their woks for 30 years," she said. "But I like to try the new ones." Cookware centers like Hung Chong and Sunrise, on Main Street in Flushing, Queens, carry both the ancient forms of the wok - southern Chinese cast iron ones with two handles, northern Chinese carbon steel ones with one hollow handle - and popular, more expensive innovations like nonstick and anodized aluminum woks.    But Ms. Young said that just as Western skillets with those surfaces will never produce the kind of browning that cooks dream of, the newfangled woks will never produce wok hay, especially on an American stove. On a typical Chinese stove the wok rests inside the heat source, so that its entire base is bathed in flames. Recreating that embrace of heat through a series of subtle changes to traditional Chinese methods is, she said, the key to stir-fry success.    Missteps that prevent us from achieving wok hay, Ms. Young said, include crowding too much food into the wok, using ingredients that are damp instead of dry, and adding the oil before the wok is heated through. But, she said, "the single most common mistake made in cooking Chinese food on a Western stove is using a wok that is not hot enough."    Residential stoves here produce about 10,000 B.T.U.'s, but restaurant stoves in Hong Kong, where the chefs use compressed gas to create a more intense heat, can produce as much as 200,000. At that level of heat, and with the intense activity of a restaurant kitchen, even top-quality woks warp instantly and have to be hammered back into shape after each night's cooking. While a home wok can last a lifetime, the legendary wok warriors of top Hong Kong restaurants must buy new woks every 7 to 10 days. The best chefs buy their woks from artisans who hammer each one from a single piece of carbon steel, positioning each strike of the hammer to create a perfectly smooth cooking surface.    Those chefs, Ms. Young said, would be mystified by some of the advice she gives to home cooks in the United States. "The flat-bottom wok is totally unknown in China" she said. "But it's absolutely the right choice here." She said that even her grandmother, who immigrated to San Francisco from Hong Kong in 1979, never attempted wok cooking on an American stove. All of the family's recipes were adapted to skillets, Ms. Young said, but the results were never quite satisfactory. "You end up chasing the ingredients around," she explained. "Only the wok shape lets you cook on the bottom and the sides of the pan."    Last week at Hung Chong, Ms. Leung's assistant Meng Chaeng helped a customer choose a new cast-iron wok - thinner than American cast iron and not at all heavy - by gently thumping the sides of several contenders with a gloved finger and listening to the bell-like tones that echoed in the shop. Mr. Chaeng is the shop's resident expert at listening to woks.    "This is the most beautiful one," he said, pointing to a wok with a chipped edge. "It will give you the most wok hay."

Fiddleheads: A New England Delicacy by Marcia Passos Duffy New Englanders are a frugal bunch. Mention “free” and we’ll come - running. Free food falls into this category - as in “free for the picking.” When spring comes to northern New England, the free food abundant in the woods (if you know where to find them) is fiddleheads. While the best fiddleheads spots are often a guarded secret (akin to Provence, France’s delicacy, truffles) - finding them is a special treat. These sprouts, in the shape of the top of a fiddle, are actually the young coiled leaves of shoot of the ostrich fern. While nearly all ferns have “fiddleheads” those of the ostrich fern are unlike any other - they are delicious! According to the University of Maine Cooperative Extension, fiddleheads (which appear during April and May) should be harvested as soon as they appear within an inch or two from the ground. Brush out and remove the brown scales. Wash and cook the “heads” in a small amount of lightly salted boiling water for ten minutes or steam for 20 minutes. Serve at once with melted butter. The quicker they are eaten, the more delicate their flavor. But before you run out to collect these little delicacies, be forewarned that the Center for Disease Control has found a number of outbreaks of food-borne illness associated with fiddleheads (nothing is simple, right?) But the outbreaks occurred when the ferns were eaten raw or lightly cooked (as in sautéed, parboiled or micro-waved). So, cook your fiddlehead thoroughly before eating them... boil them for at least 10 minutes. After than, you can eat them right away, or freeze or pickle them. If you’re unsure of what a fiddlehead looks like (make sure you know what an edible fiddlehead looks like because some ferns can be poisonous) or have no desire to muck through the woods during mud season to pick them, you can sometimes find them in your produce section if you live in New England or Canada. If you can’t find them, ask your grocer (if he or she knows what they are!) and fiddleheads can be special ordered.