J Reilly

What’s In My Journal

While other folks may be pouring their hearts out and expressing their inner-most thoughts and feelings in their journals, I’m recording what I eat and drink every day.

Even Boozy People Need To Eat: Fast and Easy

Before Rachael Ray had her 30 Minute Meals show on the Food Network, I was becoming well-practiced in the art of a quick and semi-nutritious meal. Out of necessity, I prepared meals with limited time and budget because, after all, even boozy people need to eat.

Tales of the Liquor Store: Getting To Know Your Customers

After several weeks of selling Yellow Tail, Cupcake, and Sutter Home, I had all but given on being able to sell the Cakebread Chardonnay and the Masi Amarone. Then along came a young, well-dressed man looking for a holiday gift for his boss.

Tales of the Liquor Store: Friendly Advice

In the process of becoming new business owners, the previous proprietors endowed us with three parting pearls of wisdom including, 1) “Don’t let people see into the windows”, 2) “You can’t make any money on beer”, and 3) “Concentrate on selling the high-end wines”.

What 3 Things Do You Value Most?

As a teenager, valuing truth sounded like something biblical; be honest and don’t lie to your parents. For older me, truth represents reality. It’s a lifelong learning process to perceive facts without bias. The chaotic din of social media and pundits makes us more prone to falsehoods and propaganda and less able to distinguish factual reality. I didn’t realize how much I valued truth and integrity until I saw so little of them displayed in public.

Instant Pot Jambalaya With Chicken and Sausage

Instant Pot Jambalaya With Chicken and Sausage #easyrecipes

Boozy Beginnings

In the beginning, there was beer. As a rebellious, newly legal-age drinker, I refused to drink the brand of beer my father drank. In my young mind, it carried the stigma of dad beer; budget-friendly, old-fashioned swill drunk by pot-bellied, blue-collar, middle-aged men. Instead I headed out to the local store to buy my own six-pack.

How I Spent My Summer

Labor Day weekend reminds me of going back to school and the inevitable assignment of writing an essay about how I spent my summer. If I were writing about our first two summers in South Jersey, I’d be telling you about lots of great beaches and beach towns with different vibes, from the Victorian charmContinueContinue reading “How I Spent My Summer”

Pairing Food and Wine, or Not

The Boozy Lifestyle goal is to avoid gastronomic catastrophe. There are some excellent books on pairing if you’re interested in a painstaking journey into balancing the flavors of food with the perfect wine

Recommending Wines

A lady walks into a liquor store and asks for a bottle of wine with a dog on the label. No, this isn’t the beginning of a “girl walks into a bar” joke. A customer asked us to find this bottle amidst the 1200 wines in the store. After a bit of sleuthing (white or red helped narrow the field) and realizing that the dog was actually a fox, we identified her Foxhorn Merlot.