'The "P" In "Pride" Stands For "Pride"

This is certainly shaping up to be a Long Weekend of Fine Dining!

On Thursday, my recently-graduated sister achieved employment at a local grocery store. Not the most high-falutin' job, but it's beer and pizza money and that's what matters. To celebrate, the Boyfriend and I decided to invite the B's over and cook a big dinner. Planked salmon, grilled asparagus, baked sweet potatoes, and steamed broccoli. The Youngest B provided us with a salted caramel chocolate cake, which was crazy good, and we imbibed copious amounts of Domaine Bellevue Rose that I reviewed last week. Fantastic.

Last night they reciprocated, stating that they wanted to make it back onto the blog (really) and served us a selection of interesting wines along with lemon chicken, fried rice, a type of slaw, and a creamy, pesto-y soup. Mrs. B takes great delight in making people guess what they're eating, and it took several guesses to realize that the slaw was made from broccoli stalks. I normally HATE slaw, nasty, mayonnaise-covered slimy cabbage that it is. But this was crisp and fresh and full of tart dried cherries and blueberries. Crazy good. The soup, it turns out, was a (not quite) vegan cauliflower and pesto soup. No cream, no butter, just cauliflower, pesto, and some toasted pine nuts for garnish. Wonderful.

Mrs. B is the one to introduce me to the joys of dry rose wine, and she loves it even more than I do. For this event, we were treated to the wonderfully named Barnyard Griffin 2010 Rose of Sangiovese. This wine poured a beautiful, deep magenta-pink. It was considerably fuller bodied and sweeter than the Domaine Bellevue, but where the latter is strawberries, the Barnyard Griffin is all sweet cherries. I worried that the intensity of the cherry flavor and the body of the wine would result in a cough-syrupy mess as the wine warmed, but my fears were unfounded. It was certainly sweeter than I usually go for, but it finished clean and bright, without any of the cloyingness that some people associate with pink wine. It is a fabulous pre-dinner drink.

With dinner we had several bottles of riff pinot grigio terra alpina 2009. The bottle doesn't capitalize so I don't see any reason why I should either. This wine smells a bit yeasty and minerally, and it is just a bit prickly on the mouth, but smooth flavored with just a hint of citrus on top of the slate and earth that kept it from being stodgy. I liked it considerably better when I was eating salty food as opposed to just sipping it on its own, but it's a lovely white.

Eventually the Children (I'm 24 but I'm still Children when I go to the B's house) were banished to the basement while the Adults played bridge or something. However, since the Children are now all (except for Youngest B) above the age of 21, Oldest B brought a bottle of Nocello down with him. I was not familiar with Nocello, but anything that comes in a fancy bottle with a figurine on top can't be all bad!

Nocello, as I found out, is a walnut liqueur from Italy. I am generally suspicious of nut liqueurs because I hate amaretto. The intensity of almond liqueurs sets off a part of my brain saying "WHOOP WHOOP THIS IS NOT FOOD WHOOP WHOOP PROBABLY ARSENIC" which is a really retarded response to have when you are not living in ancient Rome. Nocello sets of no such alarms. It is glazed walnuts. Sweet-sweet but nutty and and delightful. I couldn't drink much more than a sip because I was driving, but this was superb.

As I write this, my family is buzzing about in preparation to go to Charlottesville to see my cousin's play. He is an extremely talented singer, and this show should be excellent!

It's like the damn alps out there

Holy science, this snow is going to be here until May. It snowed again yesterday, but luckily there was no accumulation in our area. Still, driving is kind of terrifying. Most two lane roads are reduced to one-and-a-half lanes, and I live in a suburb overly fond of SUVs. The snow banks on the sides of the road are around 5 to 6 feet high and about as hard as concrete, and cause a constant disturbance in the peripheral vision.

Basically what I'm saying is to hell with this.

The B's only recently got their street plowed after our SECOND blizzard of the week, so we grabbed them and dragged them over here for choucroute night. For those of you that don't know, choucroute is French peasant food, basically what you have when you've got 1) a dead pig and 2) an old cabbage. It's sauerkraut and pig parts. It is also so freaking huge that it was a two-night deal. The first night I ended up skipping out on due to an invite to Max's Tap House from BeerSnob.

Naturally, Max's Tap House was preparing for their BelgianFest and the vast majority of their taps were being kept empty. LAME. I ended up with a Noble Pils. BeerSnob (shown below) ordered his usual range of stouts, and the rest of us sort of fiddled around. DesignBroad (shown below, looking highly displeased) got the Three Philosophers, the one that involves more yeast than a whore at a french bakery.

 

Don't be fooled by that wine glass. That's beer she's drinking. Max's often serves its higher-end beers in wine glasses, I suppose as a combination of better surface area and lower cost to the bar. Still, it makes one feel particularly silly, as Wellington TNT gladly shows.

PINKY OUT, DAMMIT.

It was quite fun, though the beers were disappointing, so there will be no beer report. Later in the week The Boyfriend showed up for some snowboarding! I love mountains and skiing and pretty much everything about it, and this time I did notice some actual improvement in my technique. I'm not exaggerating my movements enough. You'll notice that the downhill pro's look like they're leaning impossibly far over when they turn, that's because it's the most efficient way to do it. Long story short, The Boyfriend managed to get down a slightly more advanced green run without injuring himself! Hooray!

 ...And then he became the Snow Ninja. That's what happens when you are forced to sneak schnapps into dry counties. Snow Ninjas appear to avenge their beer.

That night was Choucroute II: Choupocalypse, also known as MOAR PORK. Before dinner, we had a sort of bastardized kir royal, made with the really delicious Rondel Pura Raza Cava and my raspberry liqueur. They blended really nicely, the dry Cava and the bubbles neutralizing the super sweetness of the liqueur. It was also pink, which was fitting because Valentines was the next day. I highly recommend that Cava to anyone looking for a nice sparkling wine on the cheap, which probably goes to prove my intense love for Spanish wines.

With dinner we had WILLM Pinot Gris. I may be in love with this wine. It is nice and pleasantly fruity up front, but the aftertaste is... well... fishy. In a good way, mind. It's like the aftertaste you get after eating a really, really nice piece of sashimi. I need to get a bottle of it next time I make Spicy Death Salmon.

Cookies, wine, and Top Gear!

Oh, what a lovely evening!

It's been snowing steadily all day, leaving us with somewhere between five and six inches of the white stuff. On the Eastern Shore where the Boyfriend lives they got around eight inches, which is huge for that part of the state.

The results are in for my wine vs. beer. From my Real Life friends the vote was pretty solidly Beer, except for CollegeMinx who voted for wine on its alcohol content. On the other hand, the delightful folks at the Google coffee shop forum nearly unanimously voted for hard liquor, ranging from vodka belly shots to a G&T. Two votes for wine came in and one for beer... bringing the Wine vs Beer ratio to... 4 votes each (including my own for wine.) Clearly, I am a less competant shit-stirrer than I had previously thought. I really ought to have phrased things better. Perhaps I will try again in a few months.

Mmmmm cookies. I'm drinking a glass of Columbia Crest Horse Heaven Hills Merlot (C2H3M) while they are in the oven, filling the house with their delightful aroma of chocolate and sugar. It's not a good cookie wine, being dry and heavy and full of fruits. I'm getting red delicious apples out of this one, which is strange because I love this wine and I hate red delicious apples (they are not delicious at all).

The B's are coming over with chinese food, and have actually just walked in the door! Time to drink unwise amounts of wine and eat large quantities of MSG!

Big Post! Many pictures!

I have been procrastinating updating this blog because I have been pretending to study for the GREs. There is something really peculiar about a single exam that may determine the next three to six years of my future. I do not like it one bit.

So lets start with the oldest news! It is MetalChef's birthday party this coming Friday, so I made him a present! 

Yes, that is the apple-botulism infusion. It does not actually have any botulism in it.

Check out those tasty, vodka-filled apples! They look tasty to me! But I nibbled one and wanted to die, and that was my lesson in "looks are deceivingly full of vodka."

Next I put the apples in some cheesecloth and squeezed them like they owed me money, or perhaps were dating my younger sister.

Now for some cinnamon simple syrup! which is made exactly like the regular type of simple syrup, except you throw a stick of cinnamon in there.

All together now! I'm still trying to find a good way to bottle it for gift-giving purposes, so it looks less like moonshine and more like the tasty apple pie schnapps that it is. we shall see, we shall see.

I also checked out my other infusions and decided that the pomegranite one wasn't looking too good after about a week, so obviously it needed to have the berries swapped.

                                     

See how the berries are all white and pale? The liquid looks a lot darker in that picture than it was. It was a very pale pink, not anywhere near the deep red I wanted for my Pama knockoff. So obviously it was time for a new pomegranite.

This pomegranite was about twice the size of the first one and had twice the berries. Cutting open pomegranites is always kind of fun because you can pretend to be sacraficing hearts on an alter. Or maybe that's just me, I don't know.

That is MUCH nicer, isn't it? Now, this was some time last week. I can't quite recall. I *believe* it was before Texas showed up. hopefully these things will be all nice and tasty for my Halloween Party.

Now I could start talking about Pub Dog, but that's BeerSnob's schtick and I'll let him have it. Suffice it to say that I got a Blonde Dog beer and it was tasty, refreshing, and four dollars.

The more interesting news is that I went over to the B's house last night. I've known these people for pretty much my entire conscious lifetime. They are good people and dangerously fun to drink with. By the time I came over they and my parents had already finished off the better part of two bottles of wine, though I got the last glass of a pretty unspectacular muscadet. The one we have at work is honey sweet and kind of super gross. This one tasted like lemons. It was tart and kind of nice for that, but it had a completely different flavor profile than I was expecting. It was okay with the foie gras (they left me a piece, thank god. I was both starving and REALLY looking forward to eating that stuff), but not as good as the vouvray they had before I showed up. I love vouvray even though I normally avoid sweet whites.

With dinner, which was some sort of delicious Indian-inspired roll-up, there was a tasty cotes du rhone. Cotes du Rhone always makes me want lamb or rib eye or some other super flavorful red-meat.

I brought with me a bottle of that Marques de Caceres rose, because Mrs. B introduced me to the joys of dry rose wine and she loves it probably more than I do. Everyone loved it. I'm going to have to go to Corridor and find out how much it is a case. It is extremely flavorful for a pink wine and is liked by pretty much everyone I've given it to.

So tomorrow I've got these GREs, so I'm going to pop off and study for those. Tomorrow expect to hear a complete rant about how much I loathe them and why I think I should have gotten a higher score.