teamEggers

M’s Birthday, Part 3

Hello Team!

After wino-tasty-happiness-time, we came back home and drank…. some wine. Not just any wine, my friends, tasty pink bubbles from our friends at Mumm in Napa Valley. Sparkling wines fall into two categories: masculine and feminine. Masculine sparklings are those bready, yeasty, kind of intense wines, and their Feminine counterparts are more floral, strawberry, fruity, happytime. This rosé was fabulous – like the androgynous men that live in my neighborhood.

I think that we made a bigger deal out of my birthday this year than I have since I turned 21. I opened a couple gifts; a *fantastic* handmade iphone case from Elizabeth, and an iPod from jon’s mom and dad. I’ve been looking at these iPod shuffles for some time, and was convinced that it would be a really odd decision to get something that looked so easy to lose or accidental throw in the washing machine. Since I started running again, it seems like such a spectacular idea. I’m really excited to start using it!

I love thematic things. Because we were going to an Italian wine class in the afternoon, I thought it would be an awesome opportunity to check out the new Italian restaurant on the hill that’s been getting such great reviews.

The chef is always on the “chef’s to watch” list, and their food usually gets great reviews.

I started with anchovies in a parsley sauce with egg yolks. I asked the server to choose a wine that would go well, and she gave me something that vaguely resembled a citrusy chardonnay. The acid cut through the subtle fishiness of the fish, but the creaminess paired with it perfectly. It rocked.

One of the things they do best is handmade pasta. I were so excited to try it, that I managed to get myself a pasta-maker for Christmas so we can try again later.

Whenever the tv’s on, i can’t look away. It doesn’t matter if it’s a good show, a bad show, or a commercial. I hate that.

As it turns out, I don’t have very much intelligent to say. I drank a *lot* that day. Had a lot of great food. Remembered that I have a fantastic life. All in all, a great birthday.

M’s birthday, part 2

After a quick trip to “The Good Marshalls”, where we were trying to find some replacement luggage for jon (don’t get me started on how much I hate TSA and how un-empowered air travel makes me feel), we hurried back to the city for a wine tasting.

Jon’s utterly fantastic. I talk about this fairly often, but I want to say again how happy I am with the person I chose to spend the rest of my life with. Here’s today’s reason: a few months back, I had found this Italian wine class, offered by a wine bar downtown. After working at Le Central & Poco, and drinking a fair amount in Seattle, I believe that I have a pretty solid base of knowledge for both French and northwest wines. I’ve always shied away from Italian wines because, quite honestly, they intimidate me. They are a mystery which I have yet to unravel. So I see this wine class, then see the price, and decide that I’ll file that away in the “boy that’s never going to happen” category.

A few months back, jon finds a good deal on wine classes at a wine bar downtown. Knowing that I have a giant hole in my wine knowledge when it comes to Italian wines, he signs us up. It was his intention to keep it a surprise, and I’m not sure that he knew I had seen it in my own wanderings around the Internet, so he was a little disappointed when I meekly suggested it.

Oh my, I can’t even describe how happy I was. Surprise or not, I was *stoked* and really anticipating the event. I heart jon for having stumbled upon the exact same thing as I had, and thinking it’d be something rad to do on my birthday.

They tasted us on 3 whites and 3 reds from Italy. The class, led by the sommelier, talked a little bit about a lot of things, answering questions as we went along. A few things that I realized:

1. Italian wines are crazy confusing because they sometimes have multiple names for the same grape
2. Italians grow a LOT of different grapes.
3. I’m not sure that you could ever have a complete understanding if Italian wines
4. If I learned anything, I learned that I know nothing at all.
5. Italian wines all tend to have a lot of acidity.  He talked about how this makes them especially good for pairing with foods – a lot of the wines from Italy taste rather flat when drunk by themselves, but as soon as you pair them with something, they often open up really well. like a flavour explosion in your mouth!

The three whites were;

1. a pinot grigio from the northern region: the sommelier said that because it was so close to the border, this tasted much like a German pinot grigio. He called it a picnic wine that goes well with everything, very user friendly, orange zest, pale colour slightly pink, VERY acidic. Because the climate is cooler than Oregon, the pinot grigios will tend to be a lot more green fruit-driven: unripened pears, green apple, etc. Oregon pinot gris tend to be much more full body, lower acidity, ripe, etc.
2. a vermentino: very sauv-blanc like but without the pink-grapefruit notes, grassy, buttery, malo but very light, citrus, slightly creamy.
3. falanghina from Campagna: (favourite) duller, more “new world” in character, very subtle, toffee, balanced with good acidity which will help the wine cut though cheese like mozzarella.

On a side note, when the heat turns on in our apartment, it sounds like there are people in the walls trying to escape. Every apartment/condo I’ve had in the past 5 years has had hot-water heating, so I should be used to this, but it still startles me. (ohmygodwhosinthere?)

The three reds were:

1. a grenache from Sardenia (but they don’t call it grenache there, they call it cannonau: if you took a bucket of cherries, buried them in the dirt, and sniffed them, that’s what this wine tasted like. tremendously earthy and musty. this was my second favourite red, and the one we ended up coming home with a bottle of.
2. a chianti classico, which was 80% sangiovese and 20% merlot.
3. oh, barolo.  Barolo is to Italy, what Bordeaux is to France. They’re the Big Boy Wines of the region.  They get a lot of the fame, and justifiably so since they taste so darn good, age really well, and command a huge price.  This wine was three times as expensive as all the others that we tasted that day. I had heard about barolos before, but knew next to nothing about them.  They’re made from the nebbiolo grape, are very tannic, brick red in colour, it really reminded me of a cab/cab franc kind of deal, the tannins softened up a lot by the end of the glass. Barolos tend to have herbal (sage) and anise notes.

So here’s an unanswered question:  do all nebbiolos taste like this? or is it just the barolos?

He talked about how wine naturally pairs well with the food that’s made in the region. Pairing soft cheese with whites and firm cheese with tanic wines. Sangiovese goes really well with the tomato-based dishes from southern Italy (the acidity matches and the fat from the cheese will help to cut the tannins of the wine).

We also talked about Amarone: a style of wine making in Valpolicella, where the grapes are allowed to shrivel before pressing. This allows higher sugar content (read: higher alcohol content), and really intense flavouring: cocoa, fig, raisin, dates, etc. He said they really need food or they just a bit too intense.

okay. that’s enough. Thanks for hangin in there.

M’s birthday, part 1

Tilth is a term that refers to soil having the proper nutrients to grow crops. Connotatively, it means that a restaurant or company cares about the land in which their products were grown.  I understand it as the the reuniting of merchant and farmer, the consciousness and care that goes into a chef’s decision to source their food from local farmers that respect the earth.

Tilth is also a Seattle restaurant that jon and I have been intending to go to for (literally) two years. Now renowned chef, Maria Hines, puts an emphasis on local, sustainable, and organic foods in her innovative and flavour-forward cooking.

Jon’s been on a biscuits-and-gravy kick lately, and we only go out to breakfast restaurants that offer it. We’re unofficially starting a “best in Seattle” race. So the b&g got us in the door to Tilth, but boy am I glad we stayed for the rest.

Starving, we started out with a fig and hazelnut scone, which was served with a spiced butter. Two things:
1. Scones are rarely scones. You know those triangle muffins you get at starbucks? not a scone. Scones are dense, dry, and are much improved by jam. Tilth gave us an awesome cross between the lifeless wedge of flour that I think of as a traditional scone, and the super-moist sbux-scone. It was rather lovely.
2. Spiced butter tastes like Christmas to me. Jon would probably prefer regular anything over its holiday-spiced counterpart.
3. (bonus!) This stuff made me wonder why I don’t keep compound butters around the house. They’re so easy to make, but add such a burst of flavour to ordinary things.

The salt (in back) and sugar that are on the table:

Tilth make this thing called the “perfect egg”, also called “eggs sous vide”. When you cook an egg at a really low temperature for a really long time (an hour), it turns into this creamy, juicy goodness. Jon mentioned that it was similar enough to a soft-boiled egg, so maybe all the extra time isn’t worth it. I thought the yolk was creamier than any egg I’ve ever had. (this may have had to do with the quality of the egg as well.)

As I’ve mentioned before, I lose all cognitive reasoning abilities when I’m hungry. Coupling that with the fact that jon *always* chooses better things than I do, we’ve fallen into a habit of him picking his top two or three choices on a menu, and then I’ll get one of those. He picked out the Pumpkin Cardamom French Toast with candied pumpkin, rum syrup, black tea chantilly. Oh, it was fantastic. We decided that it must have been baked (a technique we’ll have to try!) because the pieces were so thick, yet it was cooked all the way through.

And then there was the main event, the biscuits and gravy. The biscuits were so cheddary that they made me forget what I was eating. The smoked pulled chicken gravy was much lighter than the traditional, and the addition of preserved lemon brightened the whole dish up. It was well balanced and well prepared. I’d say for a “non tradition” b&g, it takes the cake.

All things considered, I can’t imagine why we’ve waited so long to check Tilth out. We’ll definitely have to go back for dinner at some point.

Mushroom’ing

A few weeks back, I met a guy that mentioned he was planning to take a group out to forage for mushrooms. It turns out, it’s exactly chanterelle season in the rainy northwest.

Three emails later, I find myself 30 miles east of the city with a group of people hoping to pick dinner from the ground. Jaxon (our guide/friend) asked us to each bring a basket, a knife, and a brush for cleaning dirt off your shrooms. He gave us a rundown on what we were looking for (and what we were NOT looking for!) and we all decided to meet up about four hours later.

He had scouted out a chanterelle for us, told us the general direction, and asked us to try and find it.

After we were ALL stumped, he pointed it out. Boy. this was going to be tricky.

As it turns out, I found a LOT of types of mushrooms, but not many chanterelles. It sounds like of the 30 of us that were there, only about two people really scored.

I landed in Lobster Mushroom town. While I didn’t end up keeping most of what I found because they were pretty water-logged, I did take home a big fatty that we ended up cooking for dinner. Can you spot the lobster?

These lobster mushrooms are really interesting. They’re about the same price as chanterelles in the store (not super common and I’d probably not be able to afford a 1lb piece for dinner!) but have a cooler back story.

So a lobster mushroom isn’t really a mushroom and it doesn’t really taste like lobsters. They get their name from the bright red hue that they take on, and some say they taste vaguely like seafood. I think there might be a citrusy tang, but to say they taste like crustacean is quite the stretch. What’s MORE interesting is that “lobster mushroom” is a bit of a misnomer. See, there’s this parasite that attaches itself to unsuspecting and otherwise inedible shrooms, like the one below. After the parasite fully takes hold, it’s transformed into what we know as a Lobster Mushroom. Totally fascinating. They’re very dense and kind of starchy. More on how to eat them later.

Oh! I found another thing during my exploratory trip to nature. Check this out, it’s a hobo’s home! Nicely disguised. I’m just happy he wasn’t home.

Good Eats

Hi Blog.

You’re neglected more than inner-city youth. And for that, I’m sorry.
Not sorry enough to really do anything about it, you know, but if there were a social reform initiative on the ballot, I would totally support it.

Anyhow. I just took my office plant to be re-potted (above) and picked up a new friend while I was there (below). I’m pretty excited about it. I’m not the best at keeping them alive all the time, but I really like having plants around.

Tonight j and i are going to the Sunset Supper at the Pike Place market. We’ve gone a couple times now, and we always have a spectacular time. After the market shuts down for the day, and the fruit and flower vendors pack up their wares, local restaurants and wine distributors take over. For one night, you have the opportunity to taste and sip among the swanky spots in town, in one spot.

The first year we went as budding culinarians, learning about things like Manchego and Dry Sodas. I love jon for his love of trying new things. The second year I may have stopped by the Champagne booth a few too many times, as I remember Perrier Jouet most clearly.

I look back at what I knew when I moved here and the things that I now hold most dear, and realize that I’ve been shaped pretty significantly by Seattle. Or perhaps that’s just a matter of “growing up”.