Even after last week’s Thanksgiving wine extravaganza, I hadn’t had enough so I decided to do, not one, but two winesdays this week! You know how whenever you visit Mom’s house, you always come back with stuff? On Thanksgiving, I came home with a bunch of yarn and my mom’s old pizza stone and paddle. I make pizza fairly often so I was really excited to what kind of difference cooking them on a baking stone would make. I wanted to keep things nice and simple for my first time using the stone so I went with Pizza Margherita. A classic! Nothing more than tomatoes (or an extremely basic tomato sauce), fresh mozzarella and chopped basil. For the crust, I followed this recipe which is originally from Cooks Illustrated magazine. You can always trust those folks at Cooks Illustrated. Interestingly, this recipe calls for some cake flour which is lower in protein than all-purpose or bread flour and is usually considered to be a poor choice for breads. I think that the cake flour helps to make thin crusted pizzas softer or something. Or maybe it makes them crisper. Whatever the reason, the crust was excellent! Beautifully browned and crisp. It was really fun sliding the pizzas from the paddle onto the hot stone like a real Italian baker. I think some of the Italian I learned in college even starting coming back to me. My wine choice for that evening was Bolla 2005 Valpolicella. Valpolicella hails from the Veneto region of Italy, also home to Soave, Barolo and Amarone wines. The wine was decent and easy to drink, although I thought it was much better with the pizza than on its own. It was a little on the tart side to be considered a good sipping wine, I thought.

Last night, for my second winesday of the week, I made Spicy Mussels with Ginger and Lemongrass and paired them with a New Zealand wine: Matua 2005 Sauvignon Blanc. New Zealand is very well known for its Sauvignon Blancs and Matua was the very first winery in New Zealand to make one. The wine was delicious! Zingy and limey with just enough tropical fruit flavor to round it out. The mussels were also really good. Although the broth was rather spicy thanks to an abnormally hot jalapeno, the fresh, oceany flavor of the mussels really came through. I’ve had bad luck with mussels in the past so I was relieved that these ones were so good (especially since I had to walk down to Pike Place Market in freezing temperatures in order to get them. At least I pretty much had the market to myself. The poor vendors all looked so sad and cold, though!) The mussels recipe comes from the Food & Wine website. This website has a lot of suggestions for food-wine pairings so you should definitely check it out if you are interested in wine (or food.) I’ve been getting a lot of good ideas from them.

I can’t believe it! It’s actually snowing right now…and sticking! It hardly ever snows where I live and certainly never in November. This is so great. I just put up my Christmas tree yesterday and, between that and the snow, I am completely in the holiday spirit. I’ve been thinking of things that I could do to maintain this cheerful mood throughout the month of December. Aside from the obvious family get togethers, work parties and gift giving, my holiday traditions include watching the movie Elf and all of the old TV specials (Peanuts, Rudolph, Grinch), going somewhere fancy for a holiday cocktail with Robert, and reading/listening to Santaland Diaries, preferably while sipping on some sort of hot chocolate or mulled wine. Another big tradition for me is taking a day off of work for shopping, lunch and Christmas dinner planning with my mom and sister. We always have lots of fun.  This year, my goals are to do a lot of baking and to try making homemade eggnog for the first time (the perilous alcohol and raw egg kind, not the teetotaling cooked custard variety).  What things do you all do to get yourselves into the holiday spirit?

I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday. Ours was lots of fun and, as usual, the food turned out great. Here is the menu:

Roasted Turkey with Gravy
Stuffing
Mashed Potatoes with Red Chili
Homemade Cranberry Sauce
Butternut Squash Puree
Oven-Roasted Fennel, Cauliflower, Carrots and Shiitake Mushrooms
Green Salad with Red Pears, Pomegranate Seeds and Hazelnuts
Sauteed Brussels Sprout Leaves with Caraway
Sweet Potato Pie
Pear Galete with Almonds

Two of these dishes were new this year: the very yummy pear galete that my sister made and the sauteed brussels sprouts. The brussels sprouts recipe was from a Sunset magazine which basically just says to strip the leaves off of the sprouts and then saute them with butter, bacon, onion and caraway seeds. We skipped the bacon but it still turned out delicious. The little hint of caraway was great. The magazine also has a variation that calls for sauteeing the leaves with butter, shallot, ginger and lemon zest. I made that version last week and it was also good. The smell of the ginger and lemon zest when it hits the pan is amazing.

We sampled a number of good wines:

Brooks 2005 Amycas White (Oregon)
Dona Paula 2005 Chardonnay (Argentina)
2006 Pierre-Marie Chermette Beaujolais Vieilles Vignes Cuvee (France)
Erath 2005 Pinot Noir (Oregon)

All of the wines were very tasty but, if I had to pick a favorite, I think I would choose the Brooks White. It was similar to an Alsatian riesling or gewurtztraminer, a tiny bit sweet at first but with a nice, crisp finish.

Since tomorrow is a big food holiday, I wanted to keep tonight’s dinner simple: veggie burgers and oven fries. But…since I never seem to be able to completely keep things simple, I decided to make my own hamburger buns from scratch. I’m just get so tired of buying packages of 8, using 2 or maybe 4, and throwing the rest out. Sure, the freegans might love me but I still feel guilty over the waste.

I used the first recipe that popped up on a google search for hamburger buns. As usual, I did a couple of things differently. First, I scaled the recipe from 25 servings to 4. The website actually has a handy calculator that lets you scale recipes however you want. The other thing that I did differently was make the dough before work. I left it covered in a bowl in the refrigerator and then, when I came home from work, I formed the balls and let them rise for a couple of hours (instead of the 20 minutes that the recipe calls for.) For some reason, I ended up only getting 2 buns from my dough instead of 4 but that was all I needed anyway.

After 15 minutes in the oven, my buns came out golden and dome-shaped. They were crisp on the outside and soft on the inside. I think that they were actually the perfect texture; firmer than commercial buns, which can sometimes be way too soft, but softer than a kaiser roll. The flavor was buttery and slightly sweet just like a good hamburger bun should be. These buns were so good, I wish I had paired them with something more interesting than a plain old veggie patty. A grilled portabello mushroom with basil mayonnaise would be ideal (or a juicy hamburger, of course!)

Robert and I just got back from a quick trip to Vegas! I didn’t win but I didn’t lose too much either and I had a lot of fun playing. We mostly played blackjack at Four Queens because, apparently, grimy tables, mathematically-challenged dealers and obscure ’80’s tunes are our idea of a good time. We’re real high rollers! We didn’t see too many new things since our last visit. We usually stay downtown which doesn’t change nearly as often as the strip. The Golden Nugget, however, is almost done installing a shark tank in the middle of their pool which will give you the illusion that you are swimming around with sharks and other fish. The tank has a clear water slide running right through it which I’m sure the fish are really going to enjoy when it opens.

On to the food. The first night, we ate at Rosemary’s restaurant. Rosemary’s always get rave reviews and high ratings so I was really looking forward to it. It is a 15 minute cab ride west from the strip and is actually located in a strip mall of all places! Once you are inside, however, you would have no idea. The food is eclectic with a strong Southern bent. One thing that I noticed right away was that each menu item comes with a wine suggestion and a beer suggestion. We were given a complimentary amuse bouche to start, a tiny square of mushroom bread pudding with goat cheese. This cracked us up a little because we had just watched the episode of Top Chef where the chefs struggle to create delicious little amuse bouche dishes using items bought from a vending machine. This one tasted better than theirs, I’m sure. We were given two types of rolls, a potato roll and a rosemary-honey roll. Next, the sommelier brought us our wine choice, 2004 Vacheron Sancerre. It was a delicious wine! I love sancerre wines for their clean, crisp flavor and complete lack of oak. For our meals, we both went with Rosemary’s prix fixe dinner which, unlike at most restaurants, allowed you to simply select any three items from the main menu. For our appetizers, Robert had the salmon tartar with saffron sauce and I had Hugo’s Texas BBQ shrimp with maytag blue cheese slaw, Rosemary’s signature appetizer. Then, we each had a green salad with onion vinaigrette and rosemary crackers. My entree choice was the Halibut Linquist: halibut with a buttermilk onion crust, chive muscadet butter sauce, garlic spinach and topped with a tower of crisp onion rings. Robert had the crispy skin striped bass over andouille, rock shrimp and fingerling potato hash with a creole sauce and cornmeal hush puppies. He also ordered the suggested beer, Maudite, a strong, red beer from Quebec. It went wonderfully with the creole sauce. We were too full for dessert but they gave us a couple of little sweets to end our meal anyway. There was a peanut butter and rice krispy ball, a lemon square and a chocolate ganache ball.

It was a really great dining experience overall. One thing that Robert and I rarely get in Seattle is great service in restaurants. As is the case with most restaurants in Las Vegas, the waiting “team” at Rosemary’s had their act together. Dishes were served with perfect synchronization, wine glasses were refilled promptly and we got our check right away. I really recommend Rosemary’s, although the cab ride there and back certainly adds to the bill. Fortunately for me, Wednesdays are ladies night so my meal was half off!

The next evening, we went out for tapas at Firefly restaurant on Paradise road. This place had also come highly recommended and was supposedly very popular with the locals. It was only after I had made reservations that I learned that it had been featured on Rachel Ray’s $40 a day (I just needed to make it clear that that is not why I chose to go there.) Upon arrival, it seemed just like the kind of place that Rachel Ray would like, very loud and crowded and kind of zany. We shared a pitcher of sangria which, as the menu claimed, was marinated for 3 days. It was pretty tasty. Then we ordered a plethora of tapas. Most were pretty standard. The shrimp ceviche was delicious, very limey and served with crisp corn chips. The marinated olives and the clams were also good. Other than that, I don’t think it was worth all the hype. On the way back, our hilarious cabbie recommended Battista’s Hole in the Wall so we might need to check that out next time we go. I hear they have free wine! Or, if I finally win that million dollars, we will go out for caviar and premium vodka at Red Square!

My computer started acting up recently so, last weekend, Robert and I put on our geek shoes and performed a few upgrades (new motherboard, processor, etc.) I also used this as an opportunity to try out a new operating system: Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy Eft. So far, I am in love with this OS! Other linux distros that I have used in the past include Red Hat 8 and Suse 8.2 Pro. They both pale in comparison. Ubuntu lets me do cool things that I couldn’t do in linux before such as sync up my music player with my iPod. And, it’s completely free! If you’re looking for a way to save some money or just want to stick it to the man by switching to an alternative OS, give Ubuntu a try.

The word Ubuntu hails from sub-Saharan Africa and, in celebration of my new operating system, I decided to go with an African theme for this week’s winesday. My menu was pretty simple: Prawns Peri Peri, South African yellow rice and a mixed green salad. Peri Peri (or Piri Piri in Portuguese) is a name used to describe the hot African birdseye chili and also a popular sauce made from those chilies. This sauce was brought to Mozambique by Portuguese settlers in the 15th century and is now popular all over Southern Africa. The recipe that I used called for crushed garlic, chopped red chilies and lemon peel to be combined with olive oil and left overnight to allow the flavors to meld. The prawns are marinated in this mixture and then gently cooked with butter and lemon juice. The lemon flavor was nice but the dish could have easily been spicier.

My wine of choice was also from South Africa: Spice Route 2003 Chenin Blanc. The man at the wine store told me it was like Sauvignon Blanc but with a bit more palette. I think it was actually much heavier than he indicated. I don’t usually pay too much attention to “legs” when drinking wine but I couldn’t help noticing that the legs of this wine seemed to stick to the glass for an unusually long time, almost like a thin syrup. The flavor of the wine was very complex. It kept changing as I drank it making it difficult to describe but I finally decided that it had very autumnal flavors; apples, pear, toasted nuts. It had a bit more oak than I prefer but I still really liked it. Unfortunately, my prawns were too light and subtle for this wine. I think this wine would go well with spicy squash soup or even a light meat dish. I have a fuyu persimmon that’s been sitting on my counter for weeks; maybe I’ll slice it up and add it to a green salad with some toasted hazelnuts and eat that while I sip the leftover wine. That sounds like a much better match.

Check the gross yet delicious eyeballs I made for my company’s Halloween potluck. I stuffed sweet cherry peppers with toasted hazelnuts and goat cheese and then I cut circles out of basil leaves for the irises and used flattened currants for the pupils. Everyone at the party was impressed. Some people were too freaked out to try them but, those that did, thought they tasted great!