The imagery here...I will say it sounds like a lot of action going on there. I might have to try that sometime then, and yes my tacos are spicy. Home grown jalapenos also tend to lend a hand, huge difference between those and storebought.
I made fish tacos earlier this week, with a mango salsa and chipotle-lime creama. They were deeeeeeeeelicious! Tonight I am taking it easy on the alcohol as the hubby and I are running a big 5K race super early tomorrow morning. We have to get up at 4am, be out of the house by 5, parked at the event by 6 and running promptly at 7:15. It'll be in the high 60's/low 70's at race time, but it will rapidly heat up to almost 90 so dehydration's not in the cards. But hey, we do both get a free beer after!
Fuck yeah. Mango salsa with jalapenos on some blackened swordfish. Pair that with some Vermintino or even some white Bordeaux. Crap... now I'm getting aroused.
Tonight I am making teriyaki pork burgers topped with homemade Asian slaw and pineapple ketchup, with wasabi french fries on the side. I'm pairing it with a Pinot Gris 2014 from A to Z Wineworks that I got for a steal (it was $3 off and there also was a $2.50 in-store instant rebate). It's both smooth and juicy - sometimes Pinot Gris has a little bit of a bite to it that's somewhat astringent at first, but this one is quite lovely and will pair with dinner quite well I think.
Yummers. Not a huge fan of Pinot Gris/Grigio myself--too light for my taste, though it's so damn hot here a light white might be the way to go.
Same here, which is kind of weird when you think about it being in the -20s three months ago. And you guys get even colder out there, I think.
Speaking of hot outside, it's going to be fucking 116 degrees a week from tomorrow here (supposedly). That's too hot to even drink beer around the pool. Anyone got some recommendations for a good Sauv Blanc or anything else that's good for warm weather?
Kim Crawford is kind of got-to sauv blanc for a lot of people and it tends to be readily available. I prefer a French Sancerre (same thing, pretty much) if you can find it, or an Austrian Gruner Veltliner... Landhaus Meyer for the latter if you can find it. 116 is stupid. Do you have to wear driving gloves to keep from torching your hands when you first grab the steering wheel? A buddy of mine who lived out there said he needed em.
116 IS stupid as fuck, but its a trade off. I tried that Kim Crawford stuff a few weeks ago - wasn't a big fan of it. Can't remember why at the moment. I'll give those other suggestions a shot. As for the driving gloves - no. It's hotter than the sun's asshole, for sure, but when you live here, you learn to just deal with it. Since I have a young baby, when I leave the house with her, I start the car and get the AC blowing before I go out there, anyway. It'd be pretty fucked up to put a six month old stuck in a hotbox car seat into an even hotter car.
I love Kim Crawford, but New Zealand Sauvignon Blancs have a very distinctive quality that's off putting to some. There are some very nice California ones that are a little less acidic/citrusy. Dark Horse is suprisingly good for its price point (under $10), and very refreshing. My daughter just got back from a week in Vegas where it was 105 - 116 is INSANE.
A bottle of Rose to the face tonight. No effect. Too hot. I'd smoke some weed but that would only make me thirstier. I have these crazy, arrow-slit, vertical-axis-opening windows that make air conditioners problematic to install without some serious improvisation, which normally isn't a problem because the valley doesn't usually heat up for long. But when it does... guh. Maybe a second bottle of Rose will do the trick. I stuck em in the freezer to get em as close to frozen as possible. Look at me: a burly, bearded, hard-drinking mountain man swilling Rose like there's no tomorrow... I should punch myself. (aight, maybe the wine is working)
Haha yeah, I think it took effect. Don't worry, Rose is nothing...real men drink appletinis. I can't wait till this weekend, I might be able to procure some wine, and now for the first time in almost a year I actually do have some smoke to go with it - straight outta Eugene, baby. Some can't handle the combination, but for those of us that can it's an experience all of its own. When it gets hot around here, shit gets real. Maybe not the crazy temps that some places get, but the humidity is what kills you. Once it gets up to 95 degrees, whether it's rained or not, the moisture in every living thing gets sucked out into the air and then redistributed to your forehead, underarms and places where the sun don't shine. I was out in it for 10 minutes yesterday, after taking a shower, and smelled so bad when I got in my girl couldn't stand it, and neither could I really. A second shower was in order. My neighbor has a couple screws loose though, he loves the heat and practically basks in it, spent half the day out working on his jeep.
So tonight I'm going to try cooking with wine for the first time. haha Portobello and button mushrooms with a cheese tortellini. Garlic, butter, dried basil and wine for seasonings. I'm tempted to add spinach but not sure how it would jive with the rest of it, and I'll probably add a little red pepper.
GO EASY ON THE WINE... it will dominate if you're not careful. No fresh basil? Be careful with that too. It will also dominate the other flavors. Spinach would work just fine so long as you don't use too much of it. Spinach doesn't dominate but it does eat up real estate and steal taste-bud-time from other things you might like to taste. And make sure you smash your garlic to release the oils before you slice it. And I recommend baking the water out of the portabellos before they are sauteed unless they've been sliced already... mushrooms are like sponges. (Sorry, you probably know what you're doing but I can't help it.)
Thankfully I have a recipe to follow with this one, but I appreciate the insight, I won't be winging it too much. I'm not much of a measuring cup guy, but with the wine I will definitely be using one. Dried basil is what it calls for, and while I like fresh basil, I don't use it enough to keep any around, plus my gal doesn't like basil too much so I'll only be putting a dash of it in (as long as I don't tell her it's in there she'll never be able to tell the difference, but the moment I say something...it's suddenly "too much basil"). The mushrooms though, I got them whole, but I've heard that Alton Brown debunked the mushroom/water sponge theory? From what I remember at least, he explained that while it will absorb a little, it won't be a great deal and will cook off rather quick. It won't hurt so long as you cook them immediately. I only use enough water to clean them off, but normally I use mushrooms in soups anyway...since this is a non-soup dish, I am wanting to make sure I prepare them right. How long do you suggest baking them? There's two portobellos and a half pound of button mushrooms.
Yeah, you're probably fine. It's not such that they absorb sauce like a sponge but that they're full of water like a sponge before they're cooked. What would worry me is all that water being transferred into the sauce. At the restaurant we bake them off for probably 20 mins before stuffing them and then baking them another 10-15 or so, but that's only for stuffed portabellos, which are obviously huge and require a bit of love to have that "cooked" feeling. I never sautee ports though. I much prefer the buttons, shittakes, and the local morel, chantrelle, and oyster shrooms which are FUCKING AWESOME for the six or so weeks they are available. They look like brains: We live in a mycology paradise up here. Dudes come in from all over New England to harvest shrooms in the summer. There's a bunch of rare species that only grown in the White Mountains at specific altitudes under just the right amount of canopy cover. Or so I hear. Some of the mycologists look like they've inhaled a little too much of their own product. I waited on a "club" of them last summer. Had to have been seven or eight of them. You'd have thought the Merry Prankster's bus had broken down in the parking lot:
I might look into mushrooms a bit more before I start cooking though, I like to do things properly if I can. Bought a Beringer Pinot Grigio on the cheap for this dish, very dry as I'm sure you know, should do the trick. I'm almost afraid to try tasting it though, a 6-7$ bottle of white, mass produced wine can't be good for the palette...but when it comes to alcohol, I can't resist having a glass. Yeah, it looks like they've been dabbling in the more magical side of mushrooms...psilocybin anyone? I'm literally too afraid to try those kind of shrooms, I know how I am, and any trip I have is probably going to end badly, so I just never mustered the courage. Now that I'm thirty almost in just a few months, the chance of me trying anything stronger than alcohol and herb is zero to none. lol They say that if you're going to do it, then most people do so by 25 at least. I'm inclined to believe that because I've lost all the interest I had in it previously.
Beringer? Oof, don't drink it, but it'll do well for cooking. The cheaper the better. I always use a salted cooking wine expressly designed for deglazing fatty deposits, which won't come up in your dish. The key to making a great tomato sauce is always the base (the "red lead"). You want to take your sausage or pork butt and practically burn them onto the bottom of a cast iron skillet, then add the wine and scrape all those little burned bits up into the base, transfer that to your previously sauteed oil, onion, and garlic, add your veal bones if you have them and a bit more wine and then reduce that shit until it looks like salted crude oil. Takes about an hour or so until you add your tomatoes and meatballs, which are always best prepared independently of the sauce. (maybe one day I'll share my meatball recipe... I used to trade them for clams, oysters, fish, and lobsters with dudes back home that were into that... they'll blow your ass up!)
I know I probably shouldn't even try drinking it, probably tastes like watered down rubbing alcohol, but my curiosity is much stronger...plus, I've probably had a lot worse, I may or may not have tasted actual rubbing alcohol in a drink someone made me at one time in the now distant past. When you've gotten drunk off of Kentucky Gentleman bourbon and climbed Mount Everest's whiskey bottle, and had literally some of the worst vodka ever, then a cheap bottle of wine is hardly intimidating. lol I will leave my report later on. That sounds really interesting. I personally do not eat pork, and usually try to avoid meat altogether except for the occasional burger or steak etc, but the meatball recipe would be cool to try...I'll trade you a very good ramen recipe I sorta came up with. haha (real ramen, not packaged shit, and probably as close to authentic as I personally may ever get). Of course, there's probably very little, if anything at all, about cooking that I can teach to a restaurant professional such as yourself...
The Beringer isn't bad at all, actually better than my expectations, but certainly not something I would ever consider "good" in any form of the word. Now to get started on this meal. Edit: We have a winner, that dish just got put on the menu. It has to be good for that to happen, trust me.
So I picked up three Italian reds. Cantele Salice Salentino Riserva 2011, Leone de Castris Salice Salentino 2010, and then finally this one: (On my phone so if that image is huge I apologize.) Looking forward to this weekend...
The Montalcino is nice... not sure about the other ones. On a related note, I have some good news and bad news regarding wine and alcohol in general. The bad news: I have recently, ah, put on a pound or 30. I had to put a suit on this week and, uh, none of my suits fit. This is unfortunate because I have some sick linen suits (with matching fedoras, silks, pocket watches, etc) that cost quite a bit of money. Needless to say, I have to stop drinking beer for awhile so Good news: I have to drink more wine. Woo-hoo! (seriously, nothing fits me, which normally isn't a problem until I need to stop looking a bum)
Ohhh, those are Negroamaros from Puglia. Those are tannic as hell! Prepare to get your ass blown up....
