Happy Holidays

I'm entering this Thanksgiving in my Book of Great Surprises, subtitled Ridiculous Successes. And, oh my god, it was a ridiculous success.

Ben and I

I started planning for Thanksgiving in oh, September, and as I started to get more and more neurotic over who was cooking what, it started to snowball into a giant messy planning ball that couldn't be untangled. At one point two people were making mashed potatoes, two people were making stuffing, two people were making yams, and two people were making cranberry sauce. The only thing we'd figured out was that the turkey wouldn't be cooked in our oven, but at a friend's parents' house, and brought down to our house just before dinner. And then the turkey wasn't being cooked there anymore. It was being cooked in our tiny, dirty, old, and horribly inefficient oven. And it needed 8 hours to cook.

 

And then we didn't have baking pans, or enough plates for 10 people, or enough wine glasses, or any matching forks, or serving utensils, or oven space because of the eight hour turkey.

 

And then we didn't have enough couch space to house three people's families for a night.

Or enough chairs.


 

Or a long enough table.

 

 

But then, in that miraculous way that is only present during the holidays: everything came together. Someone picked up three extra chairs from work. We found an extra table (and washed the fall leaves and spiders off of it). I bought some extra wine glasses and someone got a set of 10 red plates. And we sat down together and made place cards, and put on our skirts and dresses. And Ben's tie was miraculously where it should be in the closet.

 

On top of it all, the turkey was done on time, freeing up the oven for the other dishes, which also were done on time, everything was hot and fresh and we ate at 4:00 p.m. on the dot. Everyone was agast (though their expressions that looked like awe, may have been hunger).

But enough gushing and on to the wine: We started our dinner off with a toast. Not being the greatest fan of champagne (especially cheap champagne), I decided to go the route of sparkling Italian white: Prosecco. I bought two Zardetto Prosecco Bruts from the Metropolitan Market ($13.99). The wine was light, crisp, and fresh, in a nice preparation for a very savory and hearty meal. It helped me cleanse my pallatte from the mid-morning mimosas and cheese nibblings we'd had to celebrate the Thanksgiving festivities. I'd thoroughly recommend this as an excellent alternative to champagne, and it's definitely much prettier in the glass. It added a lightness to the meal and the wine selection that would have been otherwise lacking.

The rest of the dinner wine was a wash of Pinot Noir, from Sonoma county through to the Willamette Valley. I can't remember many of the specific bottles or wines as the evening was too hectic and enjoyable for me to pull out a tasting notebook and sit off to the side with a water cracker and my senses heigtened. We finished the evening off with a paired orange muscat dessert wine that was tangy and deliciously different and lots of pie.

After three hours of mixed-family charades and about 10 empty bottles of wine, we called it a night. And I'm confident in saying that it was quite possibly the best orchestrated college house (my housemates are finishing their undergrad) Thanksgiving... ever.

What are you drinking for the holidays?

This year will mark my fifth Thanksgiving away from home, my second with Ben's family, and my first Thanksgiving (ever) cooking. This year has been a monumental one, of great and small changes, and it seems only fitting that I'll be starting my own Thanksgiving traditions for it. I started 2011 as a senior in college. In this past year, I graduated from college, attended a graduate program in Denver, was both unemployed and then got a temporary job back at my alma mater. And despite the brief bouts of unemployed panic, and crazy summer budgeting, I'm going to end 2012 employed, with a brand new apartment, and a cat, and enough money saved up to actually pay a few student loan payments before they reposses all of my work clothing as collateral.

 

I expect that 2012 will bring with it even greater changes, but that's a month away and for now, I'm focusing on the holidays. I'm not necessarily a big Thanksgiving person, possibly because I don't eat turkey, don't like green bean casserole, hate yams, and don't care for cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie, and pecan pie... but it marks the onset of my absolute favorite season, holiday, and event of the year: Christmas. So I usually fill my plate with mashed potatoes and stuffing and get ready to dive headfirst into Christmas.

 

 

 

This year, I was unable to restrain myself until the day after Thanksgiving, and so I've already started my decorating and Christmas present shopping. It might be that I have too much free time on the weekends when Ben is studying... but the house looks lovely, cozy and warm and everyone seems to be curling up in the living room more. The house is done up in white lights, wrapped around the french door frame and the curtain rod at the front window. My mantlepiece is covered in vases of different sizes and shapes full of glittery pinecones and Christmas balls. I've already created a centerpiece for the dining room table that will be lovely for Thanskgiving as well - it's a copper wire Christmas tree with little white pearls weaved into the wire intersections, surrounded by gold flecked, antique tea lights. I promise that my Christmas music albums have been left untouched and will only be broken out as soon as I am done with dinner. I can hear Charlie Brown's Christmas in my head, already.

To complete the holiday scene, I've started looking for and buying my Thanksgiving wines. There will be 10 people at our dinner on Thursday afternoon and everyone is bringing a wine to the table which should offer some interesting, if not delicious, picks. Relinquishing control of the wine purchases has been difficult, but I'm trying to let people bring what they like to drink and hope for the best. Safeway currently has an amazing sale on Joel Gott 815 Cabernet Sauvignon (I wrote about it here) marked down from $20 to $13.99. They have all bottles over $20 marked off 30% at our Safeway making everything I usually want to drink for special occassions, very reasonably priced. I bought two bottles of the Joel Gott for the table, as it's one of the best Cabernets I've ever had and is neither too hearty or heavy so as to ruin the palatte for dinner or dessert. I know that cabernets are not often on the Thanksgiving wine list, but I think the cabernet is delicate enough to pair with some of the heartier stuffings and yams on the table. Ben's mom will be bringing up a Pinot Noir from Oregon as well as a local Eugene Riesling (Sweet Cheeks Riesling) for his brother who isn't big into alcohol of any sort unless it tastes like candy. I am going to look for a Prosecco to start the dinner off with (a toasting wine) as I'm not a big fan of champagne. Prosecco is an Italian dry or extra dry sparkling white wine that serves as a great alternative to champagne (especially in quality to price comparisons).

 

What are you drinking for the holidays?

Cooking time and wine

The best part about graduating from college and getting a full time job, is that I have the time, energy, and money to do things I’d never been able to do before. I’m speaking specifically about cooking, but other things like doing laundry also apply.

I’ve never been a cook. I baked sporadically with my Mom in high school, and I used to make myself a fried egg once every six months just to prove to myself that I had it in me… but other than that, I let my boyfriend do the cooking. I did the dishes. I blame my parents. They raised me with absolutely amazing food. When I woke up in the morning, there were eggs and toast (or sourdough pancakes) being made for breakfast. And for dinner, my Mom always had a recipe book open, making something elaborate and delicious (like hand-wrapped Chinese dumpling soup). The lesson I took away was: why cook something mediocre myself, when I can ask Mom or Dad to cook something delicious.

And then magically, a few weeks ago, I decided that I wanted to bake cookies. Which turned into me deciding I wanted to bake another batch. Which morphed into two Sundays spent making stacked roasted vegetable enchiladas for dinner. Which turned into me spending most of my Sundays baking and cooking. It feels really good. I like moving about the kitchen by myself, surrounded by flour and food, the great smells coming out of the oven... and most of all, the happy faces that peer in waiting for the food to be finished (the cat and Ben).

This weekend was a great weekend for kitchen-y activities. This Friday, my friends and I had our weekly Friday night potluck dinners. We started this week with a heritage/ethnicity-based theme. Maria made blinis, which are like thin pancakes or fat crepes. We stuffed them with everything we could think of: sweet meats, sautéed vegetables, cooked mushrooms, sour cream, and finally jams and condensed milks. We had a great time, and while everyone else drowned themselves in White Russians, I jumped off of the Asian continent and headed back down to Chile for a Pinot Noir.

I drank a 2010 Cono Sur Pinot Noir, Adolfo Hurtado winemaker ($8.99) from Chile. The wine went surprisingly well with the medley of flavors in the blinis. I think a Pinot is versatile enough to compliment a heavy meal with its spicy bouquet and yet light enough to pair well with fillings like jam and sour cream. The nose was extremely acidic and I was worried that it was a bit young, but it turned out to be exceptionally smooth. The high acidity was nowhere to be found when I tasted it. I found it to be light and spicy on the first sip, with the lightest hint of fruit (maybe cherries). It finished with smooth tannins that melted away. This is the best Pinot Noir I’ve had under $15 and I’d definitely recommend giving it a try.

We finished the weekend off with a trip to the Farmer’s Market where we picked up delicious in-season fruit. Then I did a whole bunch of cooking (I made pink Japanese chi chi mochi, spam musubi for the house to try, and a haupia macnut dessert). It feels good to have the time and energy to cook, and it makes the house smell delicious. 

Happy Hour: Wine Edition

I think that the worst part about being under 21 is that you don't know about, can't enjoy, and aren't invited to happy hour. I think it just might be the holy grail of the twenties. I've certainly spent enough time pursuing half-off appetizers and dirt cheap well drinks, that it could be some sort of religious calling for me. 

Not only have they occupied many a weeknight, happy hours have ruined the full-price dinner for me completely. I find it increasingly difficult to eat at regular restaurants (why are these fries $7 and not $3.50? why are these sliders $3 a piece instead of $1?). And bar drinks are a similar story. It's just not worth it to go out to drink when a mojito costs $9-11 dollars and contains somewhere between half a shot and one ounce of rum. It's even harder when you order a glass of wine, at $8-$12 a glass, you might as well go buy the bottle of wine for $7.99 at a Safeway down the street and drink it in the parking lot. It'd probably save time and money. Wine is the last thing I would order out at a bar and it also seems to be the one thing Happy Hour still can't knock down to a reasonable price. 

I was reading an article in the Wall Street Journal about demystifying the exorbitant mark-ups of wine in restaurants and I feel a bit more clued in about the insane mark-up for glasses of wine. Bottles are another story. The article reasoned that, based on a host of restaurants around New York, that the average restaurant marks up their bottles of wine 300%. Read: a jug of Yellow Tail Chardonnay would be $24 in a restaurant. Yellow Tail aside, it makes great, affordable wines, completely ridiculous to purchase ($30+ for a Chateau Ste. Michelle Pinot Gris? Not tonight). And that's just the bottle price. That same Yellow Tail Chardonnay, in a glass instead of a bottle, would cost $6-$7... or, the exact price of a jug of that wine in grocery stores. 

It upsets me to say this, but this price insanity is actually driven by logic. When a customer orders that glass of Yellow Tail Chardonnay, the bottle must be opened and a small amount of the wine poured out. Once opened, the wine's shelf life drops rapidly (two to three days, at the most). If no one else walks into that restaurant and also orders a glass of that white wine, then the bottle is ruined and the restaurant will immediately face a loss. Hence the mark-up. That one glass had better at least help the restauranteer break even...

With this all being said, I was skeptical when a colleague at work suggested a place that had half-off bottles of wine on Tuesday and Thursday nights. Without a wine list and wine prices published online (this helps restaurants protect themselves from snooping customers looking to determine which wines are marked up the most, as well as snooping competitors gauging how much they can sell their wine for), and never having ordered a bottle of wine at a restaurant, I decided to try it out. When I arrived there for a late-night happy hour with friends, the place (Maxwell's) looked closed, but pushing open the door, we were greeted by an intimate restaurant with a glittering chandelier and a crackling fire. The bar was small and though it wasn't crowded, almost everyone had a bottle of wine at their table and a whole host of the appetizers that were also half-off. The wine list was large and exciting. Most of the bottles were ones I hadn't heard of and hadn't seen in store. Even better... they had bottles of wine under $30. And at the happy hour special, those wines were half-off. Such a major discount actually brought the marked-up wines down to a reasonable price, normally a dollar or two over the price in stores.

I ordered a 2010 Leyda Pinot Noir Classic from Chile ($13.99 retail, $15 with the happy hour discount at Maxwells). The wine was absolutely beautiful in color, a sparkling bright burgundy that was so clear that you could see the light reflecting in and out of the glass. It was very full of berry notes for a Pinot Noir, but it maintained the softness and lightness of some of the great Willamette Valley Pinot Noirs. The bouquet was sweet and reminded me of a Riesling or a sweeter white wine. The front notes were of berries, notably blackberries and strawberry and the sweetness developed into a smooth and minerally finish, with a hint of spice. The wine lingered, but only delicately, and it showed no heaviness or jammy-ness of some of the other less expensive Pinot Noirs I've tried. I would definitely recommend this wine and the restaurant (and I suppose the entire notion of happy hour) for both beating my expectations and god-awful wine list mark-ups.

Mutiny on the Bounty - The Pinot Noir Edition

This summer it became generally decided in the house that Pinot Noir was the thing to drink, no matter the weather or the occasion, and it would be drunk no matter who (me) didn't care for the varietal. My opposition and my wallet had blocked a large amount of the Pinot purchasing, but when I left for Denver, it was a mutinous scene. I suppose that it makes sense, as we were in Oregon, smack dab in the Willamette Valley, and hence in the center of the Pinot Noir world. And against my preconcieved notions about the grape (I'll just say it: jammy, unbalanced, etc.), five bottles of Pinot Noir later, and I'm happy to announce that I'm a Pinot Noir convert.

I think that the epiphany moment, and I know it doesn't fit the cheap motif of this blog, occurred when I had a $32 2009 Bethel Heights Estate Grown Pinot Noir. It was a summer weight Pinot Noir, thereby unconvincing me of the jammy and overdone notes I'd tasted in some of previous wines. The Bethel Heights Pinot Noir, grown near Salem, Oregon, was and will probably remain, my favorite Pinot Noir. It was so perfectly balanced, with a hint of cherries and plum on the nose that drew lightly along my tongue. It finished with perfect smoothness, the taste of raspberries and soft tannins.

Excited by this Pinot Noir, I both searched for and stumbled upon some great, cheap Pinot Noirs. Though it's a commonly held belief in Oregon that buying a Pinot under $20 is a great travesty, I beg to differ. I actually think that it's one of the wines that isn't terrible at a cheap price. Without heavy tannins like a Cabernet, there is little risk of uncomfortable sharpness to the wine, and without a tendency toward sweetness (like some Merlots), the wine doesn't ever verge into being sickly sweet. Because I have tried so many and I have also misplaced my tasting notebook in the move from Oregon to Washington, I will briefly go over some of the more affordable glasses I had. If you're not in the mood for shelling out $30+ for a bottle of wine, then read on. If you are... you've got my recommendation already.

2009 Robert Mondavi Private Selection Pinot Noir (California)- I had this wine on two occasions and on one, I absolutely loved it. On the second, I thought that it lacked some balance and some of the finesse of other Pinot Noirs I'd tried. Ben, however, loves this one. I think this Pinot might be the heaviest Pinot Noir I tried, thick with berries and spice throughout the glass. If you're looking for a cheap table wine and you like Pinot Noir, this is a good deal. You can find it for $8-$10.

2009 Eola Hills Pinot Noir (Willamette Valley) - Not only does this bottle look rather snazzy, the wine inside is excellent. This is certainly my favorite Pinot Noir of the cheap list. It's a bit more expensive than the rest, but with the extra few dollars comes a great flavor and balance. Notes of cherry and berries with soft tannins on the finish. This wine captured the best elements of a Pinot Noir. $15-$20.

2009 Lindeman's Bin 99 Pinot Noir (Australia) - For the price, $6.99-7.99, this wine was a great deal. It was light and drinkable, with soft fruit and spice notes complimenting each other, this Pinot Noir wasn't overwhelming. Ben felt it was a bit minerally for him, but I enjoyed it better than the Mondavi when I first tried them side to side. For $6.99, though, it's hard to regret the purchase.

 

 

2009 Castle Rock Pinot Noir (Bottled in California, sourced in the Columbia Valley) - Though the bouquet was sweet and jammy, the wine definitely was not. Notes of cherry and currant, followed by a smooth finish with subtle tannins. A full-bodied Pinot Noir that was an entirely drinkable, food wine. It lacked the balance of a more expensive bottle, as the front end was light and the back end heavy. A great deal! On sale for $7.99 though listed at $11.99.