weekend review: gourmands dream

This weekend I ate. I think that's actually all I did. Tuesday I picked up my CSA and just eat vegetables for the rest of the week. Until this weekend's Italian Fest. I think I may be in love with Richmond.

I started off Friday evening early with the Olio Wine Dinner. It was even better than the first one I attended. This month the wine was selected by Jason, the owner of Olio, and the pours were nearly full glasses. Broadbent Vinho Verde, a wine I have enjoyed in the past, was featured and comes from, it turns out, a Richmond importer so that's neat (even if it's not actually grown and produced locally.) The food was excellent, my only complaint was the cheese on top of the gazpacho. Somehow it just felt like the wrong texture, I wanted something more creamy/ crumbly but I'm not a big cheese fan so not really the one to judge. The 'grown up' mac and cheese with crab and truffles was heavenly (and luckily being added to the regular rotation!)

After that I headed to First Fridays, where I didn't actually make it inside any galleries, but did see some sweet bellydancing and fire-breathing.

Saturday I headed to Greek Fest. Richmond's Greek Festival is legit enough to own the rights to www.greekfestival.com and is in it's 34th year. Sure, it was hot and crowded but a bottle of decent (and authentically Greek) wine was $15 and you could carry it around. Long lines were made short by a bottle of wine and friendly line companions.


My friend and I split all the basics- pork souvlaki, rice pilaf, dolmades, pastichio (my new favorite), and spanakopita. We also bought a to-go pack of assorted pastries and one just of baklava. There wasn't much reason to stick around so after eating we took our pastries to enjoy someplace air conditioned.

Sunday was full of even more eating. I headed with a group to Broad Appetit in 90 some degree heat. The basics of Broad Appetit- restaurants from around town set up booths and offer typically one sweet and one savory dish. Each sample-size dish is $3 or a combined plate is $5.

I definitely ate less because of the heat but got around to a number of vendors. I started off with the pork belly from Six Burner. I love pork belly and with a side of asian slaw, this did not disappoint. It definitely piqued my interest, so I may have to try Six Burner soon. I followed it up with Olio round two, mostly to make all my friends try it. It definitely wasn't as amazing as Friday night (some in the Twitter-verse called it too oily), but outside on a 90 degree day is no way to enjoy creamy, cheesy dishes. I'm glad it'll be on the regular menu there soon. Acacia was serving a soft shell crab that I didn't try, though my friend Brandon raved about it and he has some high standards for seafood.

[Acacia's softshell slider]

Other favorites included Comfort's fried green tomatoes, which were slightly overly salty but solid. Stronghill had a sausage with brie and maple-bacon ice cream over pancakes. The breakfast-y theme wasn't overly cutesy and I loved the sausage. The ice cream was also good, my first taste of the bacon-dessert trend and they did it well. (Though quick shout out to Bricktop's in Charlotte for their sugared bacon that came with Daddy's deviled eggs. Yum!) Stronghill's ice cream was not overpoweringly bacon-y, just a hint of salt and smoke. Definitely want to have a meal or two at Stronghill now.

[Mezzanine's lamb pop]

My favorite of the day was Mezzanine's lamb with watermelon salad. The lamb was excellently prepared, which is difficult when churning out hundreds of pieces of meat outside and the pairing was well done. Also one of the best values of the day for $3, though bargains abounded.

It's amazing I still wanted dinner but I had managed to work up an appetite by 7pm when an old friend came through town on his way home to Charlotte from New York. Since he had just made it past the 'sweet tea line' we decided to go get barbecue. He ordered the pulled pork sandwich (I think, unless it was chicken) and I had a half-rack of ribs. A small plate comes with two sides and I opted for potato salad and coleslaw. I've gotten into slaw lately and this did not disappoint, but the potato salad was amazing! Creamy and tangy, it had huge chunks of potato. I love potato salad and had to keep myself from ordering extra to take home. The ribs were great and I still have a quarter rack in my fridge.

And now I'm posting this on Thursday because I've been a food coma since Sunday night!

weekend review: part one, the city

Wine dinner at Olio. $30 for four courses, each with a perfectly-paired half glass of wine. I had the pleasure of dining with RVAnews.com's own Holly Gordon and we were seated at the largest table, with six others. I believe, there were about four tables in all, most seating six though there was mention of other wine dinners being larger.

Course one, grilled vegetables and flatbread.
Paired with .A. Prum "Essence" Riesling, Germany
Possibly my favorite course because I had just not expected to love this course so much. The vegetables had a great smokey flavor that I don't think I've ever experienced with vegetables.
I loved this wine and bought a bottle for myself, along with the second course's wine. Partially due to the low cost of the dinner, it was nice to have such excellent wines to taste but to have those be ones that I could still afford to bring home.

Course two, Vegetable/Potato Samosa Dumpling and Tamarind Chutney Sauce
Paired with J. Lohr Vineyards "Wildflower" Monterey County, CA
While the puff pastry isn't 'traditional' the samosa was still delicious and the filling was very complex. I don't know much about wine, but the Valdiguie grape that composes most of this wine is apparently less common. I liked the 'softness' of this wine and am looking foward to sharing the bottle with friends tonight.

Course three, Chicken Tikka Masala and Naan
Paired with Edmeades Zinfandel, Mendocino County, CA
A great, flavorful dish with a good amount of spice but it didn't completely overpower the wine.

Course four, Green Tea Cheesecake with Fortune Cookie Crust
Paired with Michele Chiarlo "Nivole" Moscato d'Asti, Italy
Holly and I were relieved that fortunes did come with out fortune cookie crust and I loved my fortune. (Can you read it in the photo?) Moscato is definitely a dessert wine and I wouldn't drink it other times but this choice was the perfect way to finish our meal, particularly with the slightly-savory dessert.

After the dinner, we met up with more friends and did some bar hopping in the fan. This is how the night ended:

"Lime Birdies"

Makes a PBR taste like a Corona.
Whether that is good or bad depends on your feelings about PBR and Corona.

women wine wednesdays

A group of amazing women from college and I would get together in DC on Wednesdays and drink wine and chat. I hosted this past Wednesday since it was my last week in DC and last minute I decided to go a little fancier than just a bottle of wine and made mango bellinis. I will definitely miss those nights now that I'm in Richmond.

Mango Bellini
1 bottle sparkling white wine
1 8 oz bottle mango juice (100% juice)
1 ripe mango

Chop half the mango into small cubes. Place in a pitcher and pour in the sparkling wine and mango juice. Slice the rest of the mango and use as a garnish.



I also made guacamole and spinach dip. The spinach dip I didn't actually make, I bought it in a can, put in an oven-safe dish, put grated Parmesan-Asiago cheese on top and baked it.

My guac I just approximate. This time my recipe was roughly:
2 avocados
quarter of a red onion
big fist-full of cilantro
1 lime

Chop the avocado, red onion and cilantro. Put in a bowl. Squeeze the juice of 1 lime over the mixture. Stir, squishing slightly.


I love guacamole so much that after making it Wednesday, I was craving it on Saturday and bought another avocado to make more. I went overboard on the red onion though. You need less than a quarter an onion per avocado, unless you really love onion. But that's not what guac is about.

I also love putting some tomato into it and while I used to mash the avocado more to make a smoother guacamole, I really like the texture of the chopped style. I think it lets the avocados shine through more. How do you like yours?

the ethics of drinking

As someone who tries, often unsuccessfully, to be mindful of my impact on the Earth and as someone who enjoys a glass of wine or two in the evening, I have debated the merits of various types of wines.

There are a few issues to wine, namely the grapes, how it is stored and how it is shipped. Here are my opinions on those issues. Like most things in our society, it's a balance that we all have to make for ourselves. In college, these choices were easy. I love white wine and was living in the Fingerlakes area of New York, an area with great white wine. I would buy wine for $9 at the farmers market and could feel great that my wine was grown and produced locally and I was buying directly from the family producer. Now in DC, Virginia wine country isn't so far but Virginia wines aren't really stocked in the wine stores and are much more expensive than the NY wines I loved.

Grapes (organic vs. non-organic):
The obvious choice is organic is better. However, organic wines are rare and picking only organic wines when at a random shop is probably a risky choice. Sample them and find some favorites but many small local wineries- like small farms- may not have bothered being certified. Two cases where organic makes a bigger difference- with imported wines and with large wineries. Organic vs. not is most important for chemical residue and less so for the carbon footprint.

Re-Nest wrote recently about the "Dirty Dozen," the fruits and vegetables you absolutely should buy organic and imported grapes were on the list. For this, I'd worry more about wines from South America than European (or even US) wines. The EU has very strict standards for pesticide use, and the US has lower but still fairly tight standards. In addition, if you are buying domestically from a small winery, they may have lower pesticide use, but this is not always true.

Container (bottle vs. box):
Wine in a bottle has two basic part- the bottle and the cork or metal top. Glass is a very heavy material and that increases the amount of energy used to transport the wine. According to the New York Times, the weight of wine bottles has actually been increasing. The article didn't go into specifics but it claims the increase is due to trying to increase the impressiveness of the bottle, so perhaps this is more true for expensive bottles (note: not the bottles I buy.) One good thing is that much of the glass* that goes into the bottles is recycled and is recyclable. Glass is domestically recycled so the energy into transporting it to the recycling center is manageable and unlike many products is not downcycled. Many glass bottles are melted down and reformed into new bottles or are upcycled into jewelry or furnishings.

*One note on recycling wine bottles- blue bottles are often not accepted at local recycling center. Buy blue glass sparingly and save those to be pretty vases. In some communities, this is true of all colors of wine bottles, so if recycling is important to you, find out what your regulations are and buy accordingly.

In case you need a reason to biggie-size your bottle, "Shipping premium wine, bottled at the winery, around the world mostly involves shipping glass with some wine in it. In this regard, drinking wine from a magnum is the more carbon-friendly choice since the glass-to-wine ratio is less. Half-bottles, by contrast, worsen the ratio."

The cork can be either real cork or that fake plastic stuff. My pocketbook limits my wine to $12 a bottle unless I'm out for a special meal, but I've found that inexpensive wines are often have real cork. (Though sometimes, cough-Jazz-in-the-Sculpture-Garden, I purposefully choose the metal twists off tops.) Wine corks are recyclable through Recork America.

In contrast, you can buy your wine in a box. This seriously cuts down on the weight of the packaging, thus shipping is much more efficient. Boxes are often larger servings and they stay fresh longer, so you are less likely to have to toss your wine before you finish it. (If your wine does start to turn, think about using it in some cooking- maybe risotto for white wine or a beef stew for red wine?) Many boxes are composites though, so may not be recyclable, a serious downside.

Travel (local vs. truck vs. boat):
Local wine has the smallest carbon footprint (duh) plus you are keeping your spending dollars in the community.

Many people think being California wines is better than buying European wines, but that depends on where in the US you are and how the wine is transported. Trucking is very energy intensive and, with the weight of bottles, is a poor way to transport wine. So if you are on the West Coast, West Coast wines are a great choice. On the East Coast, European wines have been shipped by container ships and then trucked only a short distance. According to Dr. Vino, there is a split is the US around Ohio where east of the line "it’s more efficient to consume the same sized bottle of wine from Bordeaux, which has had benefited from the efficiencies of container shipping, followed by a shorter truck trip" and those west of the line should buy Californian. Of course, east of the line there are several smaller wine producing areas to taste as well.

Taste Test
So, having all these thoughts in my head, I stumbled across Yellow + Blue (um, cause it equals Green, duh.) Yellow + Blue is an Argentinian wine that claims to have a carbon footprint 54% smaller than the traditional process. They buy the wine before it is bottles and "ship it in bulk via insulated steel tanks to North America, where the cartons are filled and then distributed." On their website they don't specify if 'ship' means on a ship or by plane, or how distributed the filling centers are in the US. Still, bulk transport and lighter packaging substantially cut down the carbon emissions of transporting the wine.

Yellow + Blue is very proud of their Tetra Pak, which allows the wine to last longer (and gives you a slightly larger bottle of wine!) but one major question I have is- is the packaging recyclable? I would think that for a company that sells itself on sustainability, it would be but I didn't see anything on the package or their website, so I had to chuck my empty in the trash.

But, what really matters is, how is the wine? I sampled their white wine, a 2008 Torrontes, I found the wine pleasant but rather bland. My roommate agreed and while we enjoyed sitting and drinking the wine, neither of us was hoping to crack into a second bottle. Y+B suggests pairing it with smoked meat, mild-medium cheese and spicy food. I am doubtful that this wine would really stand up to spicy food but it went well with the warm potato salad I had for dinner that night.

While this foray into boxed wine was lackluster, I hope to find boxed wine (maybe domestic boxed? East Coast?) that has the spicy, mineral, crisp tastes I love but stays light on its feet.