Food and wine update

November 5, 2007
Peoria, AZ

I'm a little behind in posting about our recent food and wine selections, so I'll do a quick update. We're actually doing pretty well with two "resolutions" we made when we got back home. First, we're working hard at shopping every few days in order to have fresher ingredients and (more important) to avoid having to throw things out after they start turning to compost in the kitchen. Second, we decided that it's OK to make recipes that call for 4 servings (instead of trying to scale them down or -- worse -- overeating) and planning to get two meals out of them. By shopping more frequently, we seem to be getting more fish (buy it today and cook it tonight) and are definitely not wasting much. By planning better, we're also avoiding those "what are we having tonight?" conversations. So far, so good.

An unexpected side effect of all this is that we're trying more new recipes out this year. Of course, some of them are "impulse buys" after seeing something on the Food Network that looks tasty, but we're cracking the cookbooks as well.

Sometimes, we work with base recipes and improvise or merge. I made Gnocchi with a vodka cream sauce the other night and added chicken-parmesan sausage to the mix and it came out pretty well. We paired it with a Poggio Antico 1999 Altero Brunello di Montalcino from the wine box. I think the '99s may need a little more cellaring, but it was good to try one out.

On Saturday, we made one old and one new recipe, as our friends Ana and Larry were coming over for dinner. We hadn't made Geri's "tuna tower" (diced raw tuna dressed with wasabi topped with avocado and julienned pepper strips, done in a ring mold) for a while, so that was the appetizer. For the entree, I merged several recipes for a chicken roulade, using proscuitto, toasted pine nuts, basil leaves, and Fontina cheese. The sauce was a stock reduction with tomato puree and demi-glace that came out pretty good. We had a Mount Veeder 2002 Cabernet Sauvignon (thanks to Ana and Larry for that one) and two wines from the Piedmont region in Italy from an obscure producer (G. D. Vajra), both 2003s. The Dolcetto d'Alba was very good, but the Langhe Nebbiolo was slightly corked. Since we're a long way from Moore Brothers Wines in NJ, there's not much that can be done about that. We started out with Al-tinis, so maybe I'm the only one who noticed...

We also found a couple of "value wines" that we've had in the past at the local Costco. Both are from Chile and are blends based primarily on Cabernet Sauvignon. The 2004 Aureus Gran Reserva is a little tight and not quite as good as the 2003 we got last year. The 2003 Escudo Rojo is excellent (I think I hear a bottle calling our name for tonight's leftovers).

Well, gotta go walk the pups. The temperature is dropping a bit when the sun goes down, but we're still supposed to have a few more days of record breaking temperatures over the next few days. It's in the mid-90s when it's supposed to be in the upper-70s at this time of year.