​As we wrap the week, Clean Plate Charlie wants to call your attention to a few things elsewhere on the site.

We broke the news that Michelle Bernstein is leaving the Omphoy. Our new news guy Rich Abdill follows up on the "terrifying" Omphoy owner, Jeff Greene.

Don't forget to check out the first Skillet Sunday at The Bubble, a joint project between DJs Mig and Andie Sweetswirl, the folks behind Green Room.  Unlimited brunch buffet and  drinks are only $15 between 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. Skip the food and show up later to drink with abandon for $10.

Don't miss the inimitable Alex Rendon, who posted on homebrewing 101 at The Funky Buddha Lounge and Brewery, where teacher and brewmaster Ryan Sentz leads class on brewing Hefeweizen. During the course of the night Rendon fixates on malt over hops, asking to snort it and making jokes about malt sacks. Check out the post here.

Speaking of beer: we're wrapping up South Florida Beer Week, which closes with the epic beer event in Jupiter, The 6th Annual Craft Brewers Festival, from 1 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. Saturday at Roger Dean Stadium. Tickets cost $31 online and $35 at the door. Arrive early to avoid sellout.

And that's a wrap. Hope you, too, are drinking a PBR (or Dogfish Head) as you read.

Avinashkunnath via Flickr Creative Commons

Football. That's the one with the baskets, right?

​During a recent lunch meeting over tacos, the Clean Plate Charlie crew debated the relative merits of the entertainment juggernaut known as the Super Bowl. While some looked at the sporting extravaganza as a sort of second Thanksgiving -- wake up late, start drinking early, and stuff yourself silly with fattening foods and unchecked levels of bacon-stuffed appetizers -- others were pretty "meh" on the whole affair. More >>

Timpano in Fort Lauderdale is expanding its wine menu.

​Timpano Italian Chophouse has updated and expanded its wine list to include more by-the-glass selections, featuring high-end wines.

All in all, Timpano will feature more than 50 wines by the glass, including some from boutique vineyards like David Ramey, who's Cabernet Sauvignon will be available by the glass ($18) or bottle ($67). 
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Paula Deen eats a burger...you can too!

​Paula Deen might have thought she would be able to enjoy a nice, relaxing week on the Deen Friends and Family cruise she's currently on. But you can't really get away from cameras -- even at sea -- as evidenced by the video we found on Huffington Post Food of Paula eating a cheeseburger.

Now, we think filming Deen on a cruise ship is a tad bit mean. You know the phrase "What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas"? 

Well, the same could be said of cruise ships, only it would go more like, "I'm on a boat, and I'm going to eat seven-course meals every night, raid the buffet like I was just rescued from some deserted island, and we'll never speak of this behavior once we set foot on dry land."

Truthfully, watching Paula eat her burger with so much gusto and relish (not to mention ketchup and onions) makes us hungry for one ourselves. With that in mind, here's a list of our favorite places to grab one. Bon appetit, y'all!
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Turn a shelf of your refrigerator into a fish file.

​Storing fish you've bought from the fish market in a refrigerator that's set at the standard 40 degrees is a sure way to reduce the shelf life of that fish, says fish expert and chef Dean Max of 3030 Ocean. "Every two degrees above 32 Fahrenheit takes a day off the fish's shelf life," he told Clean Plate Charlie yesterday.

The chef who won a Great American Seafood Cook-Off says how to store fish is a topic of discussion at conferences and schools and among chefs. His suggestion? Make a fish file in your refrigerator. Here's the how-to after the jump.

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A light bite at Grateful Palate.

​As tiresome as the prevalence of small plates may be, it seems they're in response to a downsizing trend. In the past year, more people are cutting back on going out to dinner or are cutting out dinner entirely, reports Small Business Trendcast.

Restaurant News reports that 40 percent of consumers cut have cut back on dinners out. And if they're going out, more report to hitting up happy-hour deals. Seventy-one percent report skipping dinners altogether because of late lunches or lack of hunger.

The result, says Technomic's Dinner and Late Night Consumer Trend Report, is that restaurants are accommodating changing patterns by offering smaller plates, lower-cost ingredients, and late-night grazing items.

These stats contrast with this year's Zagat report that suggests diners' appetites for dinner out is healthy, with South Floridians to eat out 3.4 times a week, compared to Boston, where residents eat out 2.5 times a week, or New York, which is listed at three times a week. Perhaps this is because Zagat is reader-generated rather than a representative sample of a population.

After the jump, five happy-hour deals -- with small plates for grazing -- to save you weekend dough.

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Bright green valley.

​Two summers ago I accompanied my friend James "The Amazing" Randi on a speaking tour of northern Europe. We visited Scandinavia and the Baltics, and enjoyed a quick southerly jaunt to the Netherlands. Our final engagement was in Reykjavik, Iceland, in the middle of the Atlantic.

Reykjavik is a modest city, a little more populous than Fort Lauderdale. (Iceland is the size of Kentucky with roughly one tenth the population.) Its architecture is lovely but spare -- far sparer than that of any mainland European capitol. Iceland needn't rely on manmade monuments to impress, for the Icelandic landmass itself is more dramatic than anything made by human hands, and it monumentalizes concerns far grander and less temporal than our own. On the drive from the Keflavik airport to Reykjavik, you encounter a shallow but endlessly long ravine which is actually the point of departure for the Mid-Atlantic and Eurasian tectonic plates, which move apart at a rate of about a meter per year, pulling with them the two halves of the ocean as well as the continents of Europe and North America. Nearby, you find vast fields of rough volcanic rock, covered in low sulfuric mists ejected from boiling pools just below (and occasionally atop) the soil. Elsewhere, you drive over a ridge and come face-to-face with a bright green valley that seems all out of proportion to the ordinary rules of human sight-lines. Your eyes follow distant rivers for what seem like ten, twenty miles, until the rivers open up into far-distant marshlands and shallows. Never has your eye captured so much territory at a glance, and the astounding quantity of earth arrayed before you is made harder to contextualize because of the near total absence of trees, which would otherwise be a handy indicator of size. The soil of Iceland is too new to facilitate much vegetation, beyond the occasional shrub and the ubiquitous coating of pillowy moss.

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Follow Me Foodie

Oh, the shit foodies say....

​There are about a gazillion different Shit (Fill in the Blanks) Girls Say videos. I love 'em all, especially Shit Miami Girls Say.

Anything that pokes harmless fun at our neighbors south of the border (and by border, we mean the Miami-Dade/Broward county line), because it really applies to all of South Florida. Who among us hasn't said the word irregardless at some point in their lives?


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​One of my favorite food and music sites, Turntable Kitchen, features the second Sleigh Bells' track released from their forthcoming album, Reign of Terror. Check out "Comeback Kid" released this week and get excited for Sleigh Bells in Fort Lauderdale February 11 and in Miami February 14, if you're lucky enough to have tickets .

Turntable Kitchen is the creation of a San Francisco couple that feature recipes, cooking stories, music selections, and album reviews. The most fun thing about the site is Turntable Kitchen Pairings Box, "a food and music experience delivered to your mailbox on a monthly basis." Each box is $25 a month and features vinyl tunes, a curated mixtape, dried ingredients, recipes, and tasting notes.

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Keepingbeautiful.com

Haagen Daz is introducing four new ice creams.

​Ice cream giant Häagen-Dazs is announcing four new worldly flavors to its roster. The collection, called Global Creations, features ice creams made with globally sourced ingredients like coconut, vanilla bean, espresso, and imported cookies. 

Pints of the new flavors are being rolled out slowly, by region. So far, they're available in the Washington, D.C., area and are expected to make it to South Florida by spring. 

Häagen-Dazs stores in South Florida will have the new ice creams much sooner. Starting this week, Häagen-Dazs ice cream stores will introduce South Floridians to a new Global Creations sundae per week. 

The flavors are:
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