Bottles at 57

We have yet to try it, but according to our wine instructor the Taittinger Comtes de Champagne is among the very best. It’s pretty hard to find, let alone find at a reasonable price, but on a recent trip to Costco they had a four bottles of the stuff. What makes this an even better find is that they were all 1996, which was one of the best years in history for Champagne. While you’re there, you might also see the 1996 Veuve Clicquot Grande Dame, another one of our favorites. All right, so they’re still pretty expensive, but isn’t it worth it to try each of the world’s best at least once?

Wine: 2001 Castello Di Volpaia Chianti Classico Riserva
We have no idea how this made it into our wine fridge, so thanks to whomever gave it to us. If we bought it, we knew all along it would be great. This was the best Chianti George and I could remember having in a long time - smooth and complex with plenty of backbone. It blew us away. We’re so used to having cheap Chianti in Italian restaurants or from Trader Joe’s that we forgot just how good this can be. We highly recommend you pick some up.

I really like Alton Brown’s show on Food Network, Good Eats. Each show provides just enough scientific background that I feel confident I can reproduce his dishes. I’m not just following a recipe; I understand it. The show on angel food cake had George and me so fired up we bought ourselves a pan and got to work. Angel food requires you to work with egg whites, which I’ve done successfully several times before. Since the cake has very little structure, it must cool upside down in its pan or it will collapse under its own weight

Our first pan, being non-stick, was not up to this task. The cake immediately fell from the pan and collapsed into a pile of goo. Lesson learned. The next day I went to Crate and Barrel to get a proper brushed aluminum pan - half melted butter should stick to this thing. To be safe I also got superfine sugar (grinding sugar in the Cuisinart was messy) and cake flour (maybe it’s not the same as pastry flour).

Somehow, I screwed up the eggs. Maybe I was too excited when I folded in the flour, or maybe the oil in the lemon extract bound to the egg proteins. Whatever the case, this one collapsed in the oven long before it was time to cool.

All told I wasted 25 eggs, several cups of sugar and flour, one tube cake pan, and my confidence has been shaken. I needed a drink. I whipped out this Clos Du Bois Chardonnay and prepared to drown my sorrows, and - cork taint. I powered through one glass thinking it would take the edge off, but I couldn’t drink any more. George thinks the wine is fine - maybe it was the cake that left a bad taste in my mouth. Oh well, I guess it’s a perfect compliment to my angel food brick.

Wine: 2004 David Noyes Pinot Noir
Food: Houston’s prime rib with baked potato

We don’t go that often, but we really do like Houston’s. They make decent drinks, the steak is hard to beat at home, and the staff doesn’t have the typical LA attitude. We’d probably go more if it were a mom and pop restaurant. It’s funny how a restaurant automatically loses points when we know it’s a chain. The first time we went to Gaucho Grill, we thought we’d made a great discovery. Food, drinks, and atmosphere - what a find! Days later we realized we’d discovered but one of several, and it lost some of its luster. I guess we’re just shallow that way.

In any case, that’s really just a long way of saying we didn’t cook this meal. It’s supposed to be a wine blog, so get over it. One day we’re going to drink five bottles of wine paired with nothing more than our glasses, and we’re fine with that.

The wine in question was a 2004 Dave Noyes Pinot Noir. George thought it was earthy and tasted of wood - good things for a pinot. I found it well balanced; the tannins, acid, and alcohol all worked together. We both felt it could have used more time in the bottle. We tend to think that a lot. Recently we’ve been buying two of everything just in case.

Wine: Sake - clear and unfiltered
Food: Miso-marinated broiled salmon (1), soy-braised hijiki and carrots (2), tosa sea salad (3), miso soup (4), field greens with ginger dressing (5), and rice.

We know nothing about sake, but it hardly seemed appropriate to have regular wine with this dinner. We remembered liking the cloudy, unfiltered sake when we tried it with Margo, but we picked up some clear stuff to be safe. It’s a good thing too; George liked her unfiltered so much that I had to drink it for her. Actually, she didn’t finish her clear sake either. Poor me. The unfiltered was noticeably sweeter than the clear, and that’s pretty much the limit of my ability to characterize it. Apparently you can’t just grab two random bottles of sake from the shelf. I’ll just have to “study” more.

The food was a far greater success. We stuck to a traditional Japanese theme: several small, artfully prepared dishes centered around fish and sea vegetables. If we wanted to be truly authentic we would have used only seasonal ingredients. Here in SoCal, everything is always in season. The salmon, which marinated in miso and mirin, was pleasently sweet and salty, and charred just enough to caramelize. The hijiki (some sort of sea vegetable popular in Japan) was the most time consuming thing to prepare, but it was the most Japanese tasting dish on the table. The tosa sea salad consisted of Japanese cucumber, wakame (sea alga), radish sprouts, and homemade Japanese vinagrette. We livened up the miso soup with some tofu, enoki mushrooms, wakame, and a Japanese fish sauce.

If you’re interested in making this kind of food, we highly recommend the book Washoku: Recipes from the Japanese Home Kitchen. It explains everything in great detail. The first section of the book familiarizes you with the ingredients used in the recipes, so cooking is more than just blindly following directions. In that sense, it’s somewhat like I’m Just Here for the Food, another fantastic book to have in the kitchen.

Wine: 2003 Rosenblum Zinfandel.
Food: Argentinean style flank steak with oven baked chili fries.

I always thought you had to marinate flank steak overnight. Apparently all you have to do is rub it with salt and pepper and throw it in a skillet. That’s easy. It helps if you use strange salts in different colors - this time we chose some trendy black salt from Hawaii (thanks Lisa). The parsley/oregano/garlic sauce was a good excuse to use our Cuisinart, which is an impressive if dangerous machine. I cut my finger on the blade, but I think it adds to the flavor of the meat. Since we got drunk last night and ate McDonald’s (we were inspired by Super Size Me), we were in the mood for more fries. These were brushed with oil and baked, so let’s just agree to call them healthy, OK?

The wine, courtesy of Mimi and Todd, started off very impressive - just tannic enough to give it some bite but still well balanced. After sitting out it lost some of its character and started to take on a more fruity tone. Oh well. By that time we were pretty drunk. Gotta have a cocktail before you can start dinner right?