Pesto and White Wine

The one lovely thing about living away from ones parents is the sudden ability to cook exactly what you are craving at any given moment. The one problem about living away from my parents in particular is that my father is such a stunning cook that everything I make by comparison is bland and unfortunate.

Of course, he has a lifetime of experience more than I have, and he probably has the sense not to use homemade pesto on rotini of all things. What was I thinking?

For those of you who don't know (and those of you who should but are just ignorant doofuses, and I'm looking at you here, BeerSnob), there is actually a very good reason for the wealth of different shapes for pasta. Each shape is designed to be a very specific sauce-delivery mechanism. Rotini is good for creamy sauces that would fall off of spaghetti, but terrible for thicker sauces like this particular pesto I made. The Pasta to sauce ratio is sadly lacking. Also? It needs more garlic.

Though, I will say, the sardine toasts I made taste AWESOME with a spread of this pesto. I know what I'm having for lunch tomorrow!

With this pesto and sardine-toast monstrosity, I am drinking Picpoul de Pinet Couteaux de Languedoc. If you're looking for a cheap, dry white that won't scare the neighbors, this is it. When you open the bottle (a screw cap, which honestly I'm starting to like more and more) you are instantly hit with the aroma of apple cider. The apple sweetness on the nose is not indicative of sweetness in the bottle: it is quite tart, blood oranges up front with a touch of that yeasty flavor you get from a particularly good bottle of champagne on the finish, which is not particularly long or complex, but smooth and pleasant. It has a very prickley mouthfeel. It makes the finish cleaner, the flavors crisp where they could have gotten stodgy. It handily brings out the garlic in the pesto I'm eating, which is really useful, since it lacks flavor.

Oh well, nothing for it but to try again. Luckily, basil is cheap at this time of year, and the Boyfriend's basil plant is freaking HUGE. No, that's not a euphemism. The basil and pineapple sage in his garden are merging into one massive plant of deliciousness. I am so jealous, since my basil plant died a spindley death.

I will try this recipe again, probably with better nuts (oh yeah, did I mention that I used walnuts too? yeah pine nuts are expensive and I'm a graduate student). The wine, on the other hand, will remain the same. This is a fabulous house white, and I would recommend it to anyone.

Okay, this is getting silly.

So, Stark. Why haven't you been blogging?

Well, Internet, I've been kind of busy. In the past few months I've been moving in to an apartment in Baltimore, in a neighborhood called Bolton Hill. If you're a Baltimore person, it's right next to MICA. This past weekend was Artscape, and thusly my neighborhood was flooded with hippies of all stripes and colors. Most memorable was the homeless dude who decided to do some late-night yoga in front of our fence. Better than peeing on it, I suppose.

I've also had the opportunity to go back to Centro Tapas Bar, a narrow place in Federal Hill with astoundingly reasonable prices and absolutely amazing food. The only problem with this place is that whenever I try to get there, I end up lost and in the ghetto. This time my epic travel fail involved screwing up the light rail system and ending up in Sandtown. THAT WAS AWESOME.

Stark, you may well ask, how the hell did you end up in Sandtown trying to get from Bolton Hill to Federal Hill? I HAVE NO IDEA. I AM REALLY BAD AT THIS SORT OF THING. IT IS A SERIOUS PROBLEM.

Anyway. By the time we got to the restaurant, it was still totally worth it. The tapas at this place range from 3 dollars to 12 dollars, most of them capping out at about 8 bucks. Whenever I go, I make sure to get a plate of cabrales, a delightfully stinky blue cheese, and some boquerones, pickled and marinated white anchovies. Fabulous. The bread that comes out as an appetizer is wonderfully crusty and flaky, and it comes with a pimento and smoked-paprika olive oil for dipping, which pairs beautifully with a glass of Dibon Brut Reserves sparkling wine.

We also ordered approximately seven buckets full of red sangria. We never got water, an oversight by a frantic waitress, and so I ended up drinking sangria every time I wanted something to cool my mouth off with. I regretted this the next morning, but man, that was some good sangria. With my dinner (mussles and lamb meatball skewers, shared with Mr. India) I ordered a glass of peppery viognier, which paired fabulously with the mussels. At the end of the meal, the Boyfriend ordered a little caramel custard. It was good on its own, but if you took a bite with a mint leaf and washed it down with a spicy ale, it became the Best Desert Ever.

I recommend this place highly, the wait staff is fun, the prices reasonable (dinner and extraordinary amounts of wine for myself and the boyfriend came out to just under 75 bucks), and the food is amazing beyond belief. I recommend the Arepa Mechada, a corn cake topped with oxtail, avocado and fried egg.

In other Drink With Stark adventures, I found a liquor store on North Charles called SPIRITS and I am in love. It is full of wine, cheap wine, cheap and delicious imported wine. I got a bottle of French sparkling rose (still not champagne) and a bottle of cava, both for under 13 dollars. JACKPOT. It's not a difficult walk from the house, either, though the streets may become a little harder to cross when they're not barricaded for Artscape.

Also distracting me from updating this blog is the fact that I am engaged in writing Rising Mind again. This version is significantly darker than the NaNo. I will probably post excerpts, because I can.

Sofia blanc de blancs

Many wine bars/restaurants in my area end up feeling stodgy, aiming at a middle-aged upper-middle class clientelle. I can't really blame them, that's the group that has all the money. Still, my early-twenties broke-ass self would really appreciate a place that takes itself less seriously. Of course, that can be another trap for wine bars: becoming so trendy that they drive away older patrons.

Victoria Gastro Pub has all of the trimmings of a proper, high class wine bar and restaurant. It looks rich, but there's something about it that puts you at ease. After a while I realized that it was the radio. They were not playing the standard "top hits from the 1820's 30's and 40's" like many upscale places seem to do. It was playing alt rock intermixed with some top 40s, which took the edge off of the pretension.

One of the best things about Victoria is the food. And I am not just saying that because my direct supervisor is married to the chef. Okay, maybe that's a part of it, but not a big part. The duck fat fries specifically are the tastiest things I have ever put into my mouth, being smothered in duck gravy, gruyere cheese, and little awesome bits of ducky goodness. The tuna tartare is fabulous, with delightfully rich tuna and little pieces of apple that provide a really interesting contrast. The Boyfriend was a big fan of the banana chips that came on the side, but I am still convinced that all bananas contain spider eggs, and will not eat them.

We also had a bowl of asparagus, lemon and goat cheese soup which was possibly the best thing ever on a spring night, and a plate of frogs legs. I'm not a huge fan of frogs legs, I think they're too fiddly and the taste vs texture thing throws me a bit. Of course I won't turn up my nose at the little amphibians, but They're not my fave.

What really stole the show for me was the wine, which you knew I had to get to at some point. I was craving bubbles, so I ordered whatever sparkling came by the glass without really paying attention to it. It turned out to be Francis Coppola Sofia Blanc de Blanc, a California sparkling wine that comes in a can.

You heard me.

In a can.

With a straw.

This really blew my mind for some reason, and I was barely able to focus for long enough to actually taste the wine inside. It was sweet, with apricot notes on the nose, but tart, with a bit more lemon than apple and very little of the yeasty flavor that one finds in some sparkling wines. I blame the Muscat. Still, it was not cloyingly sweet nor was it aggressively tart. It was clean, bright, and balanced, and it went REALLY well with that asparagus soup I mentioned earlier. I would definitely order it again.

The can, though. I still have it because it was kind of adorable. It really didn't change the taste of the wine at all, and, as the Boyfriend pointed out, it is a brilliant marketing strategy. It's a perfect club sparkling, light, easy to drink, and more important for bartenders, easy to store and easy to open. In a restaurant it's lacking a bit, I kind of like the pomp of the wine opening display, but you usually don't get that when ordering by the glass anyway. I recommend this highly!

The Lord is Risen! Now Let's Drink! Hallelujah!

Easter was... epic this year. Truly epic. It was a feast of gigantic proportions, and I am larger for it. Our menu was as follows:

Chili sambal shrimp, made by The Boyfriend
Jalepeno Popper Dip, made by The Smalls
Raw Oysters, served by Dad, The Boyfriend, and Mr. Small
Grilled Foie Gras, made by Dad and Mr. B
Antipasta Salad, made by The Smalls
Grilled/Smoked lamb, Small Potatoes, and Asparagus with Hollandaise, made by Dad
Cheeses selected by Me
Irish Cake Bombs, made by Me.

Oh god. So much food. The Boyfriend is a mighty fine cook, which is part of why I like him so much. Unfortunately, he also has the tendency to say things like "Hey, you know what would taste great with this? CAIPIRINHAS."

A capirinha is a wonderfully refreshing drink made with cachacas, a sort of un-clarified sugarcane rum from Brazil. The recipe on the back of the bottle calls for using raw sugar, but we substituted simple syrup, because we didn't want to spill a crapton of sugar all over the floor. Our recipe was as follows

3-4 pieces of lime
1 measure cachaca
simple syrup
lime wedge garnish
sugarcane juice (optional)

Muddle the lime in a lowball glass. Fill with ice. Add cachaca and syrup. If using it, splash a bit of sugarcane juice in. Stir. Taste. Decide it's too strong and squeeze your garnish into it. Realize that you can no longer taste the alcohol. Drink three. Make a bad decision.

You don't *need* the sugarcane juice, which really just tastes like sweetened hearts of palm, but it adds a really nice green aroma to the drink that makes it especially nice on a hot day. I'd caution against using more than a splash, though, as you want the cachaca flavor to come through too.

After a caipirinha, I had a glass of sparkling Merlot. You heard me right. The Pugliese Vinyards 2003 Sparkling Merlot, hailing from the North Fork of Long Island. It is a deep purple-red sparkling wine, that fizzed up in a way that reminded me of that scene in Fantasia where Bacchus visits the centaurs and gets everyone drunk and wine gets sloshed about pinkly. It was actually pretty good, very different. Sparkling wine is such a pleasure, and when you get something that weird that tastes that good, you've just got to go for it. I recommend it highly.

There were other wines, but I found that after a few handfulls of shrimp, a dozen oysters, a caipirinha and a few flutes of sparkling wine that I could not recall much about any of them. In all honesty though, the rum drinks and sparkling Merlot were the highlights of the alcoholic reverie. I cannot recommend these enough. Seriously, go out and get yourself some cachaca and some limes and make yourself one of these, because it's The Best.

A More Different Rose

Sometimes I drink rose wines that are NOT Marques de Caceres! I know, crazy, right?

To begin with, today is the perfect pink wine day. It's sunny, warm, light breeze... and it's been a miserable ass winter. A month ago our lawn was butt deep in snow. Right now our tulip tree is in bloom and the grass is getting taller than I think I can really conscience, despite my totally reasonable hatred of mowing the lawn.

Work was delightful, just enough tables to make money and keep busy, and all of them disappeared exactly at 2:00. So much win. While resetting the dining room, one of the managers asked me if I wanted to try some tongue.

Now, my first thought was "why Jessica, are you coming on to me?" but I don't say things like that at work, because I'm kind of a goodie-two-shoes when I'm not swearing my head off. I had never eaten beef tongue before, offal just rarely shows up on my table. My other coworkers had refused to eat it, and the fact that I agreed to try it made Chef laugh. "Stark will eat ANYTHING!" It's true. I'll pretty much eat anything he puts in front of me. Except tomatoes. I freaking hate tomatoes.

This was nothing like tomatoes, however. It was sliced very thin and served with a really great gravy and little pickles. The texture is kind of weird, it being a totally different type of muscle than regular type beef. It's grainy and... stretchy. But it tastes like good lunchmeat, and with the tart little pickles it was awesome. I'm down with tongue.

Speaking of offal... I also had the opportunity to taste Chef's faux fois gras. He handed me this bread with stuff on it and said "TRY EET." I really didn't know what else to do. It had the silky texture of foie gras, but there was something... off. It didn't taste livery. It didn't taste like meat. It was also very pale. After I finished he told me that it was Monkfish liver.  Huh. How about that? I really didn't even ever think of Monkfish as having livers, but I guess they'd have to have them. Learn something new every day.

Moving on. After work today I bought a bottle of Mouton Cadet rose. Mouton Cadet is the "affordable" wing of Baron de Rothschild wineries, the oldest brand name in wine. I really love Bordeauxs, apparently. Red, white, or pink, they're all delicious. Normally these bottles retail for somewhere between 13 and 15 bucks, which make them a great wine for the broke-ass wine drinker. The rose has a really lovely sweet raspberry nose, and when it hits the tongue it's like a squeeze of fresh lemon juice. It mellows into a light, early summer fresh berry taste that makes it a perfect wine to sip on a warm day. It is quite dry, and not heavily tannic, and is a great idea next time you're at the liquor store.

OH GOD THERE IS SNOW WHAT DO WE DO

OH GOD IT WILL SNOW HERE

IT IS TIME FOR PANIC!

Seriously, ladies. There might be two feet of snow. It will get plowed, don't worry. You don't need to buy out the entire Cost-Co of bread and toilet paper. It will be okay.

...That said I'm planning on going out tomorrow and acquiring the important things in life. Since I am not living in a den of heathens prone to panic attacks, we are adequately stocked on all the little things, and will be able to eat and poop without fear. No, I am thinking of something much more important.

Alcohol.

Yes, we are tragically low at the moment on wine. The Boyfriend and I did pick up a twelve pack of Sam Adams Winter Ale and a six of the Noble Pils after skiing left us a deep craving for beer. I've got to say, the Noble Pils is really worth it. It's light and citrusy, very limey without that bitter fake taste that the +LIME lite beers tend to get. It's not what I really want in the winter, though maybe I don't know WHAT I want, because I sucked down three bottles of it within two hours of buying the six pack, leaving The Boyfriend and Mother to fight for the other three. The Boyfriend won by distracting Mother with a Sarah Palin book.

I have also had the opportunity to taste a really great Sauvignon Blanc. I've been hating on Sauvignon Blanc a fair bit on this blog. There's a taste in the grape, sort of ammoniac, that I'm just not digging. This wine, called Angelique or something equally precious, did not have that "off" taste at all. It was very good, very refreshing. I intend to buy a couple bottles of that on Operation: PANIC BUY, along with the C2H3M.

Tonight, while watching Iron Chef (Top Gear wasn't on), I was drinking Chateau L'Ermitage, a red rhone wine comprised of Syrah, Mourvedre and Grenache. It's a toasty wine, if that makes sense. It has an almost burned smell and taste to it that I really kind of like.

It was not the best thing to pair with my re-heated leek and potato soup, which was a disaster in its own right. I (and Bitches) LOVE soup, I love making it and I love eating it, and I usually do an okay job at vegetable soups. However, I made the mistake every novice cook makes when they do potato soup: I put the damn thing through a blender.

For some SCIENCE here: putting taters and other starchy things through a blender, especially the crazy rocket-powered one my dad bought, crushes the cell walls and releases a lot of water. What you end up with is a gooey mess flavored vaguely like watered-down potato. I knew this, but thought "oh how bad can it be?" and went ahead and did it anyway. This is why I'm an idiot and Chef doesn't allow me to do anything in the kitchen. This failure was only heightened by my complete lack of leek knowledge. I had never worked with this particular oniony thing before and had no idea what the right sizes were, so I ended up buy a bunch of *really tiny* leeks and not using all of them that I could, since I had no idea where to stop chopping them.

 It was the worst kind of cooking failure: the edible kind. No, seriously put that eyebrow down. When you truly cock something up in the kitchen, you can at least throw your hands in the air dramatically while pitching it into the woods and call out for pizza. When it's edible, just not good... you feel almost obligated to eat it. Luckily, the Boyfriend swooped in and saved the mess with some Old Bay, which is a staple of every Maryland kitchen.

Cooks Illustrated Magazine solved the science struggle of leek and potato soup in a recent issue. They also have a recipe for brownies with the texture of box mix and the flavor of homemade. My god. It's the best magazine ever.