teamEggers

Cheese, Wine, and Sunshine

Hi all!

Jon and I are finally getting a little bit more settled in to our new house. It’s fantastic to see our stuff starting to take shape into a home.

We took a break from the chaos to check out the Cheese Fest this weekend and had a really good time! Less cheese than last year, though that translated into less crowds. It was so sunny. Just a really great day to be out at the market with friends.

This pic is from last year, and the crowds weren’t as intense, but at least it gives you a little bit of an idea of what the event looked like:

Around noonish, we (heather, steven, yelena, ben, jon and I) had eaten enough cheese to give us bellyaches, and did what all reasonable people would have: decided it was time for wine.

If you’re in belltown and in need of a bottle of wine, I definitely recommend stopping into Seattle Cellars. The guy that was working (owner?) recommended three fantastic and vastly different bottles all in the 10-15$ range. They were perfect for the afternoon. The wine shop has a cooler with about 20 chilled bottles of white, rosé and sparkling, which is important to know if you’re looking for something to drink right away.

Onward and upward. Literally. Today’s adventure takes us to Steven & Yelena’s rooftop deck, with a fantastic view of the city, the sound, and the mountains.

…and our new house!

…which is incredibly close to quite a few friends. How cool is that?

We live on the west side of lower queen anne.  For any non-seattleites out there, that’s midway between the sound picture above (we’re really close to the “coast”) and the space needle.

What’s that in the backround? The seaplane! Are you listening, mom?

As we settled in to our afternoon of sunburn fruit and wine…

…we noticed that the sky was doing a weird apocalyptic sort of thing. How odd is this? Anyone ever seen the ring around the sun like that before?

Is it the end of the world? Perhaps. Or maybe it’s just time for another glass of wine. Pass the rosé please!

VD & The Escoffier Dinner

Jon’s really good at gifting. He always knows exactly what I will love, usually before I even see it. He finds experiences – wine dinners, weekend trips, concerts. Despite my best intentions, and the fact that I really really love him, I am a terrible gifter. I always go way too overboard (the flying-themed birthday?), or completely space out and don’t do anything (every valentines day / anniversary). Sometimes I just grumble and moan about how much I hate the holiday (christmas) instead of using it as an opportunity to spout my undying love in the form of presents. Whatever. Jon’s a good gifter.

I really wish there were a good, unobtrusive way to take restaurant photos. There’s usually terrible lighting, and you don’t want to be that asshole with the flash before every plate. So you point, shoot, and hope that you can colour correct enough later to be able to make out the image. Why bother? Because this goldfish can’t remember anything otherwise.

1. Lobster Salad with Avocado, Ikura and Fresh Tarragon, Served with Yuzu Vinaigrette w/ sparkling wine. This was cool. They took a half avocado and stuffed the middle of it with lobster. It started my main complaint for the evening though: portion control. Avocados are filling and you want me to get through 8 course?! Also, what the heck is that creamy yellow stuff? Last time I checked, a vinaigrette was supposed to be light.

2. Vichyssoise soup w/ crab meat

3. Puff Pastry Filled with a Fillet of Dover Sole and Layered with Fresh Spinach and Sea Scallops, Baked to a Golden Brown and Served with Sea Urchin Butter Sauce & sauv blanc. I didn’t know how much I loved uni until we got out here. Uni is sea urchin gonads, and every time I’ve had them stateside, they’ve always been fishy and quite unpleasant. Here, they’re melt-in-your mouth buttery lovely happiness.

4. Fresh Pasta Filled with a Savory Mixture of Duck, Shitake Mushrooms and Foie Gras, Served with Pancetta Champagne Sauce and a Borolo Demi Glace & Sangiovese Grosso. oh. my. goodness. This was the show stopper, folks. both sauces were excellent. the fresh pasta was excellent. the duck breast (though it could have been more rare) was excellent. My only wish is that you could taste the elements in the duck filling more. Foie gras is spectacular by itself. why hide it?

5. sakura sorbet The entire purpose of the sorbet course is to clean your palate. So why on earth would you make the sorbet taste like cotton candy?! Just because you can? Daft.

Midway through dinner, the live jazz band takes a break and they bring out the line of chefs. It’s really neat to consider all that goes into banquet serving, and a little part of me was longing for the days when I got to carry a crumber of my own. I mean, being a grownup is good too, but I do miss waitressing somtimes.

6. The entree. We’ve already had duck and sole and now we’re just getting to the entree. I think my stomach has adapted to the lighter japanese foods and the throwback to french-french was a system shock! And again, the portions were out of control. Scaloppini of Veal Served with Twin Sauces of Creole Mustard Butter and a Marsala Demi Glace, Garnished with Smoked Salmon Risotto Cake, Sautéed spinach and Rissole Potatoes w/ a hefty Merlot. I think this was my least favourite course. Despite how beautiful it was, the veal was just a bit too much. There were too many different flavours going on and… well, I just don’t love veal.

7. Japanese Musk Melon Accompanied with a Sun Dried Mascarpone Cheese Torte, Served with Garlic Bread Sticks. Can you call a slice of cantaloupe, a wedge of cheese and a strawberry a salad? I think not, people. The melon was downright delicious though, I tell you what.

8. Mille-Feuille Filled with Sweet Spring Berries and Topped with a Chocolate Cherry Wafer, Paired with Homemade Cherry Ice Cream & Gewurztraminer Ending strong here. Cherry ice cream was spectacular. The mille-feuille isn’t usually my favourite dessert because they’re nearly impossible to eat gracefully, but it was still really tasty! My belly was yelling “I’m full! no more!” but my head was about to steal more ice cream from the table next to us.

Boy, I love eating.  And tell you about what I eat.  I hope you don’t mind.

Japanese Wine Country

I miss you when you don’t comment. Just so you know.

In this episode, teamEggers runs out of money. Really. For about 12 hours, I only had six cents in my possession.

Jon had to give up his reserve $20 bill. The rare 2000 Yen note, only created in the year 2000. It was… depressing. We’ve never not had any money before.

But. I’m getting ahead of myself. We put our j-girls (emi and Mao) in charge of find out hotel for the night. They called random numbers from the Internet for a while, and eventually told us that we had some rooms for $40 per person. Hurray! I’m SO much more okay with winging it when Emi’s around.

Later that night, we find ourselves at the Suzuki En. (Suzuki is kind of like Smith. Really common last name.)

The Suzuki En was nice! And charming. And had all kinds of really perfect things going on. I couldn’t have picked a better place if I researched and really, really tried. They had vineyards in the backyard, made their own wine, and had a whole wine-theme going on. It wasn’t kitchy at all, just really… charming. Here’s the courtyard:

We stayed in Room 5.

And spent some time hanging out in the chilly courtyard before turning in early. This may have been the first Saturday in existence that Brian Reece & I went to bed at the same hour.

I love the detail of this hotel.

There was a collection of antique wine openers. Look at that red and white one. They’re pantaloons. The corkscrew is, ahem…

And this is the same wood-burning oven that the Eggers have up north!

…see!!

So the hotel was $40. No one in our group thought to go to the ATM before leaving for this remote mountain town, and Will didn’t even come with enough money for the train ride. We decided to scround together our last dollars and cents for breakfast in the morning. I’m glad we did – it was really good!

Our plans for the morning: 1. find money. 2. find the farmers market.

Here’s the thing. I’ve never *not* had money before. I’ve never had six cents to my name. Without Emi & Mao, we certainly would have been lost. Or rather, we would have found our way with much less efficiency than we did.

The hills of Katsunuma:

Koshu. The local grape. It grows differently than any other grape I’ve ever seen. The vineyards look… incredibly different. And they’re plentiful – nearly all the houses in the area had vines in their driveway.

Because of its thick, bitter skin, one of the best ways to cultivate it is to allow it to be far from the ground, but not in direct sunlight. What do you do? Make a canopy.

About 6 feet from the ground, they’d lay wire nets, and the grapes hang from the bottom. Boy, i wish we had come in fall when the fruit was hanging. This valley is probably incredibly.

This vending machine is exciting only for its rarity. I wish there were more beer machines on the streets, or that i didn’t find this one at 10am.

Eventually we made it to our farmers market. I had incredibly low expectations and was really surprised at its awesomeness. It’s no West Allis farmer’s market. And it’s no Seattle farmer’s market, but it was way better than I expected.

First order of business: find the guy with the beans. There’s always one.

After some shopping about (I bought some greens and jon bought some fresh pasta!), we stopped by a tasting room and did a quick wine tasting. I came home with a bottle of rosé.

I love how thoroughly ingrained the grapes are into the culture here. I love wine country. It’s just so… perfect. For a weekend.

***

Japanese Wine Country – The Wine Cave

We spent the weekend with some friends up in Japanese wine country. Tucked into the foothills of the Alps, you’ll find a little town called Katsunuma, and in it – a lot of Koshu grape vines. You’ll also find the cave at Budo no Oka (Grape Hill), where you can sample 150 Japanese wines for just over $10.

Even though our enthusiasm was not matched by the quality of wine, we managed to have a pretty great time. I was feeling rather inspired by some of the wine labels, and I’ve decided to make a professional goal: Someday, I want to design a wine label! How cool would that be?

The format of Budo no Oka was really cool – the wine was set out on the tops of barrels for you to sample. It was organized in the same order you should drink it: dry whites > sweet whites, roses, light reds > full-bodied reds. You get a little cup when you go in, and you’re welcome to stay as long as you want. Sip, sip, sip. I wish they had crackers or water around.

I’ve joked about how it’s easy to speak Japanese; just add an “u” to the end of any word. What does it say when the winemaker apologizes for their wine before you try it?

Yeah. It was about as good as you’d expect. Actually, a lot of the wines weren’t very good. Koshu is a tough grape to do well.

Here’s what we learned: None of the reds were good. None of them. Some were less-terrible than others, but we didn’t have a single red wine that we would have been happy with purchasing in a restaurant. Koshu is best if made in off-dry white style, when they take on the stonefruit-and-mineral characteristics of viognier. When they’re made too dry, they get super acidic and the lime & grapefruit flavours dominate. When they’re made too sweet Koshu turns into a cloying buckets of nectariney goo.

Don’t let me fool you though – we still had a great time. (below is me with Emi & Mao)

Outside the wine cave, we strained to see the ever-illusive Mt. Fuji (it was too cloudy), and commented on how we all love to visit the countryside.

Tune in next time: finding a place to sleep, farmers market, and green curry ramen!

Wine Dinner Weekend, Part 2

After Hopworks, we headed down the highway to the Willamette Valley. I was a little miffed that Lady G (our gps) took a different way than I was used to, but in the end it all worked out. On the way down, we noticed that Eggers Acres was open – turns out it was nut season!

We stayed at the McMenamin’s Hotel Oregon, which is just down the block from Bistro Maison (the restaurant we ate at after the wedding). It’s so charming. There was a weird secret-garden type of a patio outside of our hotel room:

I wish there were more hotels like this around the country – I would only stay in them! There’s so much character and they’re not expensive, and who cares if you have to share a bathroom with everyone on your floor.

Before the wine dinner on Saturday night, we wandered around downtown McMinnville for a bit. There are the cutest shops – I almost wish we had picked this spot for our home base on the wedding weekend!

By now, you may have guessed that the weekend was planned around Elk Cove’s fall wine dinner, which (in addition to drinking spectacular wine for free) ended up being wildly entertaining in unexpected ways. I wish I had pictures of our table mates, but i thought taking them may embarrass jon, and I was already doing a pretty good job of that without the camera. I try *so* hard to behave, but after a few glasses of wine it’s usually all downhill. I remember one time a few years ago he said “when we started dating you were a lady. (implying otherwise for the present tense. hah.)

Elk Cove set up a tasting station at the bar, and let all the wine club members taste the fancy stuff that they don’t always have in the tasting room. While we’ve had all of these bottles singularly, we’ve never gotten to taste them all side by side and see which was our favourite. Turns out, jon and I have different favourites!

The room got a little crazy around the wine-and-appetizer section:

I would have never guessed that a pinot noir inspired fall wine dinner would have moroccan food. Somehow, it all worked out. I can’t wait to go back next year and see what they cook up.