zen.org Communal Weblog

The other night I got to visit a wine bar in Dublin with our friend Dolores, where we were joined by a couple of her workmates. I’d been really busy with work lately and had to go up into town that afternoon to a meeting. Dolores had stopped by our house for a cup of tea, and my wife Elana was a sweetheart and encouraged us to go to the wine bar after my meeting. E had been there before with her and really enjoyed it.

When Elana and I visited Florence a few years ago, we saw a traditional wine bar complete with Italian art, food, wine, and most importantly, character. This wine bar in Ireland sure looks the part. It’s called Enoteca Delle Langhe , and is set up in parts of two small buildings looking out on a wide open courtyard between them. The location is called Blooms Lane (ala Joyce in Ulysses) in the center of Dublin near Temple Bar and the new Millennium Bridge. During dry weather, you can sit outside at long wooden tables and enjoy overlapping conversations with new acquaintances, the stars shining down from the night sky. On one outer wall is a really large version of The Last Supper, but with faces replaced to be those of various people found from a walk through Dublin.

With the recast apostles gazing in on us, we enjoyed a red Italian wine that was a Montepulciano/Sangiovese blend, but I can’t for the life of me remember the vineyard. (And a few pages into a Google search for it, I have to admit defeat.) I remember the rather long words describing it because Dolores and I had just been talking about not having confidence in our pronounciation of “Montepulciano”. Our theory, which Elana later concurred: mawn-tay-pool-chee-ahh-no.

When the first bottle arrived, I asked the waitress for her opinion. (The theory being that this Italian wine bar has probably been asked the same thing by other newbie customers plenty of times.) She looked at me in confusion, and started to explain in broken English that it had to do with the kind of grape used in making the wine. Dolores and I both tried to more clearly ask the question, pointing at the word on the bottle’s label, but it only got the waitress more flustered. Then she announced to us, “Um, I don’t know any Italian.” Oh.

She went to another customer, and we sipped and chatted about editing the Innocent Joy story to try to submit to a magazine. The wine was inexpensive and absolutely delicious. The inside walls across from the large windows were covered top-to-bottom with wooden cubby-holes holding a wide variety of wines, undoubtedly all bottles for sale. When we first arrived, the various wooden tables were mostly empty. Within the next hour, every table was full, as was the bar across from us.

Dolores got a call on her mobile (cell phone), and told me that her friend from work was on her way to join us. We poured some wine into a third glass and set it down on the table in the spot next to me so we could secure her seat (one of four square wooden stools around our wooden table). Our attempt to create the image of a third person at our table who’d just stepped away for a moment didn’t seem to combat rudeness: a few minutes later a guy showed up to join the table behind us and pulled over the stool. He was of much bigger build than me, and neither Dolores nor I felt like raising a fuss. Luckily the other free seat at our table was protected by her coat, so when her friend arrived Dolores could give her a stool to sit on. A bit later, another coworker (a guy) appeared and joined us.

A fresh bottle of wine was opened, and we made two orders of munchies. The first was a meat and cheese plate carrying some amazing salami, sausage, parma ham, all sorts of goodies. We also had this neat crostini (little toasted bread) plate where each of nine toasted pieces of crostini had a different topping. A pesto, some cheese, an olive pate, you name it. The creativity used in its creation was impressive. And the food was SO good!

The crowd around the bar started to sing “Happy Birthday” and quickly everyone else joined in. Dolores said it was the owner’s birthday today. The target of the singing became more obvious as he ran his hands through his wild Billy Connolly grey hair. When the song ended, he made some wisecrack that earned some applause and plenty of laughter, then the room returned to its normal murmur.

Dolores’s female friend was explaining the rampant corruption of the Garda (police) in Ireland; her passion about the topic grew as the wine disappeared from her glass. Suddenly there was a strange resounding thud behind me. The lady on the stool behind me had fallen off her stool, to her embarrassment and the attention of everyone else in the wine bar. I offered my hand to help her, but she took this as a suggestion that she wasn’t “in full control of her faculties,” shall we say, and pulled herself back up on her own. She continued to apologize profusely with a silly grin on her face. Interestingly, her stool-thief friend had already slipped out before this happened.

Dolores picked up her mobile as it began to ring again, then passed it over to me. E was calling, asking why my phone was turned off and was I okay? I’d absentmindedly put my mobile into my jacket on the floor, and never heard its cries as E first sent me a text message then called 3 times. How can you effectively convey sheepish embarrassment over the phone? Hopefully enough apologies along with gratitude at having had the opportunity to go out saved me from any trouble. (I’ve heard “in the doghouse” three or four times on the radio or TV in the last couple of days, which is a really silly phrase. But nothing bugs me more than hearing people who should definitely know better use poor grammar. Too many shows have characters saying “she did a real good job,” not to mention reporters. Thank god for copy editors.) After I-love-yous I hung up and went back inside, passing people smoking their cigarettes outside in the cold. I quit about 7 years ago after smoking for nearly 15 years, and was relieved when I didn’t find myself tempted to bum one from them (wine or beer can seriously reduce the ability to resist the urge).

We’d only intended to stay there for a little while, but when it was finally time for us to go home (the majority of the four of us were now yawning regularly) approximately six hours had passed. But lots of good conversation, great wine and food, and an amazing atmosphere sure made the time speed by. Can’t wait to go there with Elana.

I’ve been trying to avoid high fructose corn syrup, and I was picking from the vending machine, and decided that Nabisco’s Ritz Bits sandwitches, made with real Kraft cheese would not have high fructose corn syrup. After inserting the ¢65 I had my Ritz Bits, and there is was on the ingredients right after sugar, high fructose corn syrup, they arn’t even sweet. Well, paying more attention to the flavor then normal they do have a sweatiness, but its the part of the flavor I dislike the most.

I was surfing for local farms stuff, and encountered two interesting sites, first the Northeast Organic Farming Association of New Jersey. I was surprised by several local organic farms and restaurants. I hope to visit some of them in the spring.

Linked from that page, was The Meatrix, a play on The Matrix movie but about the source of meat in these United States. It is very cute. I’ve been making meat buying decisions based on what they are trying to say for years.

Tonight we had a meal that has been a useful fall-back for us if we don’t manage to plan ahead (or, in this case, put off doing recipes and realized we’d done everything we picked in advance). We made lemon chicken with a tasty rice pilaf and a random vegetable choice (this time, spinach).

Normally, we’ve got about a week’s worth of recipes figured out, selecting specific dishes for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Food allergies have made throwing together dishes a little more difficult, so if we work out the week’s recipes in advance we alleviate some of the stress that would manifest itself when we’re picking what to eat. It also puts all of the shopping into one trip, so we’ve managed to ease both demand for supplies (one big shopping trip with a carefully-composed shopping list) and what do to each time we have to cook (look at the menu list for the week). Another handy side-effect is that we can go back a few months and pick dishes we’ve not made in a while to speed up the process of putting together the week’s menus—then we can flesh out the remaining spots with new ideas. At least one dish a day is something we’ve done before.

Alton Brown, host of Good Eats on the Food Network, has done a bunch of cool books which tend to include great recipes. We’ve made a wide variety of his recipes (another side-effect of food allergies: you cook just about every single meal, and don’t eat out much), and like just about all of them. This time, it was his rice pilaf that’s incredibly easy. I’m including a link to his book at the bottom of this post because no-one has risked trying copyright attribution to post his recipe publicly. (Nope, I’m not going to try either, at least in any detail.) Anyway, it’s a simple process of melting some butter, toss in diced onions and garlic, then rice for a few minutes, then a whole bunch of water (or stock, or in this case we did 2/3 veggie stock and 1/3 white wine), and cover it and stick it in the oven for about 20 minutes. Out it comes, sits for a minute uncovered, then gets fluffed up. The end result is an awesome rice pilaf that goes with a wide variety of recipes.

My choice was a Lemon Chicken recipe that appears in the first of Susan Branch’s great set of cookbooks. It’s some flour-dressed pounded chicken breasts put into oil & butter for only a few minutes; having bashed it into a thinner piece of chicken, it accelerates the cooking time. Once the chicken’s done, you take it out and make a nice sauce with some more butter, some fresh chopped parsley, and a bit of lemon juice.

It’s all effortless, and dee-lish. Our son Patrick has consistently liked it, particularly the rice. We find the rice pilaf absolutely addictive. It goes well both with white wine and, of course, a wee pint of Guinness. 🙂

Sources: I’m Just Here for the Food by Alton Brown, and Heart of the Home by Susan Branch.

Our friend Dolores introduced us to an inexpensive Merlot from Stimson Estate Cellars. It’s 10 Euro when it’s not on sale (approx $12.30) and is drinkable from the moment you open it. Delicious, but I won’t try fake you out claiming I found hints of black current and a certain kind of oak or other wine expert tips; I’ll just encourage you to try it since we are really enjoying it. On the bottle (and at their site) is a fun parallel drawn between their region of northern Washington State in the US and the Loire/Burgundy/Bordeaux regions of France. They claim 300 days of sun in Washington, which is odd if you believe what Meg Ryan told us about it raining 9 months of the year in Seattle (a bit north of this wine’s vineyards).

I was reading news and I stumbles on the article Delhi tastes ‘slow food’ revolution, and I wondered what slow food was. Two seconds later Google showed me Slow Food® and Slow Food USA® web
sites. Though not really online, I’ve been on about eating locally grown food for years! I was also excited when a Whole Foods Market® recently moved in and actually labeled where all there produce comes from. All I need is a couple local Slow Food® restaurants and I’ll be all set.

Every Memorial Day when it’s not too rainy a parade marches past my front door. This year, my parents, brother, close friend Chris Quanstrom and his fiancée stopped by. After the parade I served some Belgium waffles. I got a Belgium waffle press as a wedding gift, so whenever waffles are made in this house they are always of the Belgian variety.

To go with the waffles, I got some bacon from Ely Pork Products. I cooked them according to Alton Brown‘s Scrap Iron Chef’s Bacon recipe. Well, to be precise, I only used the last paragraph of the recipe, the entire recipe makes bacon from scratch. The last paragraph says:

Place the strips of bacon onto a sheet pan fitted with a rack and place into a cold oven. Turn the oven to 400°F and cook for about 12 to 15 minutes, depending on how crispy you like your bacon. Remove from rack and drain on paper towels. Enjoy.

It worked out great! everybody loved them, I just didn’t get enough. So thank you Mr. Brown. Later this day I got a copy of your book I’m Just Here for the Food to give as a gift to somebody (I don’t think anybody reads my blog, so I’m not to worried about that person guessing it’s for him). I already have my own copy.

A lot of things happened at work last week and I needed a drink. So, yesterday, on the way home I asked 余艾蕾 if she would like a Hong Kong martini when we get home. A Hong Kong martini is just a regular martini with a 甜話梅 in lieu of the traditional olive. She said she didn’t want something that strong, and I wanted something with dry vermouth. Consulting my copy of Cocktail: The Drinks Bible for the 21st Century I came across a good candidate. The vermouth cassis has 1½ ounces of dry vermouth and a ½ ounce of créme de cassis, stired with ice, strained into a chilled wine glass, and topped with soda water. While I didn’t have any créme de cassis in the house, I did have a half bottle of grand marnier. So I dub the drink the vermouth marnier, just like a vermouth cassis but with grand marnier instead of créme de cassis. 余艾蕾, who usually doesn’t like grand marnier, thought this was a good drink. I’ll try it out on my mother during tomorrows Eagles game.