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.