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Three Foody Achievements!
Feb. 16th, 2011 09:50 pmDISCLAIMER: This blog post does not really stray off-topic at all (oh man, so amazing and strange, what's come over me), and also, it will probably be immensely boring except to other foodies who have way too much time on their hands.
ANYWAYS
Today I accomplished THREE (yes, three!) food-related adventurous achievements! Oh boy, oh man, I am just so proud of myself.
I mean. I had this really intense to-do list of things I was supposed to do today, and I didn't get most of it done - but INSTEAD I did food things so I feel accomplished anyways.
THE FIRST: a rather minor-seeming achievement perhaps but still something. I was eating some black Russian bread (I think it's rye?) with pieces of Empire Jack cheese on top, and thinking that, man, this cheese was too bland to go with the bread's flavor. Normally you need something sharp to bring out the bread's sharper qualities in proper harmony.
That was when my eye fell on this large bag of dried apricots I have been very slowly making my way through.
I don't know what made me do it, but without really even thinking about it, I just took some dried apricots and put them on top of the bread-and-cheese open-faced sandwich and took a bite and OH MY GOD instead of bringing out the bread's sharper qualities, it brought out the bread's tangy qualities, and it was SO GOOD and SO DELICIOUS and also really kind of weird to be eating a bread-and-cheese sandwich with, like... apricots.
BUT IT WORKED SO WELL. I bet that if I had a copy of the Flavor Bible, I'd find some entry in it describing my experience in great detail. The flavors just melded incredibly well and I had another similar sandwich right after because it was that tasty.
I am very proud of myself for having invented this sandwich! With my luck, it's probably a totally common type of thing eaten all over the place in some province of some country whose language I don't speak, but whatever, I FEEL LIKE COLUMBUS TODAY.
So okay, send food-related adventure! I BAKED A FUCKIN PECAN PIE fuck yeah. It's my first pie EVER. The only thing I have ever baked before were butter biscuits. I do not have much baking experience. And I went out and baked a PECAN PIE and it is so delicious and amazing that I had to tell my cousins (I'm staying with my upstate-NY cousins at the moment, have I mentioned that? Woo woo traveling around a lot this past week) that if they ate it before it finished cooling and setting, the boogey-man will get them and gnaw off their toes and they'll have trouble walking and will keep falling over and falling flat on their faces.
My cousins are all very youngish in age and thus amusingly gullible.
Anyways yeah, this pie is so badass, it has pecans all over the place, but it ALSO contains Frangelico hazelnut liquor - which, if you are not as curiously interested in random fancy alcohol as I have become in the past few months, is a fairly high-end liquor that by itself is quite tasty but also adds delightful flavors to the pie when added to the mixture. It's the magic ingredient that makes the pie feel like creating a special potion instead of just mixing a pie. Also, it has a bed of chocolate chips oh man.
The pie is one of those things where you make a gloppy mixture, pour it into the pie crust, bake it, and then it sets and hardens into a forkable consistency and is delicious. The original recipe called for corn syrup and coffee liquor, but my ingenious sister instantly replaced the corn syrup with maple syrup, and the coffee liquor with hazelnut liquor, and it just makes it taste that much more amazing. She tried making the original version later, and we all agreed that her invention was just SO GOOD and a lot better than the original recipe, and it is her delicious amazing recipe that I made. Maybe I will post the recipe online after trying it out a few more times to make sure it's a-okay. OR MAYBE NOT perhaps I will hoard it and have it be my Family Secret, because my family does not have any family legacies or secrets (perhaps because most of them all died during WWI and WWII so we've got just the core family members left), and really, we should GET some.
And ok. The third thing food-related adventure is related to the Frangelico liquor. You see, the little co-op grocery store right next to my cousins is also, very conveniently enough, located in the same plaza as this small but extremely classy wine-and-alcohol shop. That was where I picked up the Frangelico, and I also decided to get myself some fancy dessert wines for my upcoming term at college, which starts in about a week. My college town is tiny and really dead - there are no Borders, Barnes & Nobles, Starbucks, or Target stores within miles and miles, and the only clothing stores are the Goodwill and Ross. Oh and Walmart, I forget that counts as a clothing shop most of the time. But yeah. A very dead little town where the most life is the isolated highly liberal college campus, which does not get along with the town at all because the town is the proverbial old-fashioned farmer with a shotgun sitting in the back of his truck staring at a hay bale, and my college is the proverbial lesbian couple making out in the hay bale without really noticing there's a guy with a shot gun staring menacingly at them.
But yeah, the gist of this is that the local wine store has a really small and insignificant selection of dessert wines, which I have become strangely fascinated with over the past wine. I swear, I've become obsessed - I want to try EVERY DESSERT WINE I SEE and then I try one and it's AMAZING and alas also quite pricey, but I believe that alcohol should be quality alcohol or it's just not worth it. The people who buy plastic jugs of vodka for ten bucks a pop can enjoy themselves for all I care, but I've tried that vodka, and let me tell you, there is not much of a difference between that stuff and rubbing alcohol. It quite literally felt like the roof of my mouth and the top three layers of my tongue had been dissolved in acid.
Also, I discovered pretty quickly that I did not really enjoy getting drunk just for the sake of getting drunk (though, as I think I've mentioned earlier, I do like getting slightly tipsy off of really tasty wine or liquor while having a fun silly fireside chat with friends). So popping off twenty dollars for a 500 mL bottle of high-end dessert wine is not that unreasonable to me, considering it will probably last me longer than that plastic jug of vodka will last the other type of drinkin' folk. Especially at college, where I'll be super busy all the time and won't have the hours to spare enjoying a bottle of deliciousness.
Still, good to be prepared for those moments when I DO have the time. So I bought three bottles. One is a winery I know and really like called Quady Wineries - their muscato is kind of amazing. I was actually hoping to get a bottle of their black muscato, which I tried a week ago with a friend and found to be even more amazing than the orange muscato (which was what originally hooked me on them). But this amazing store did not have the black muscato, alas, so I settled for another bottle of the orange, which is like settling for a mansion in the south of France instead of, like, one floating in the clouds and drawn by winged horses. So, still pretty awesome.
Also I got this ice wine, because I'm really fascinated by ice wines as a specific type of dessert wine, and the alcohol content is not that high but it looks like it will be amazing and delicious. It's a riesling wine, from Germany, which is supposed to be the most amazing place for rieslings to come from. I've had quite a few rieslings before this one and found them totally delicious, but never one from the hometown of Germany, and never an ICE WINE version, so I'm really looking forward to trying this one! The bottle is a dark green and very slim and fancy, oh man.
And the third bottle, the creme de la creme, is a trebbiano blend dessert wine from Italy that comes in this custom-made bottle that looks somewhat like a very large and elongated modernish perfume bottle - I am without a doubt keeping the bottle for this one and using it as a vase. Also, this wine is apparently from 2001, which makes it the first wine I'll be trying that is actually more then just a couple of years old - this is from a vintage ten years ago!
Clearly, yes, I am like an overexcited puppy let loose in a room full of squeaky things, because even describing all these wine details makes me realize that though I am so interested in all of it, it must be immensely boring to anyone reading this. Also, describing the wine is pretty boring - it's much more interesting to look at the bottles, pick them up and rotate them in your hands, examine the beautiful labels and so on and consider the potential evenings they contain, of adventurous cork-popping and wine-sampling!
I really did not think I'd turn into a potential wine snob because I just could not find anything about wine that particularly appealed to me, but of course, that was because no one I knew was serving delicious dessert wines in tantalizingly beautiful bottles that are like small works of art in themselves.
I am a total sucker for good packaging.
ANYWAYS
Today I accomplished THREE (yes, three!) food-related adventurous achievements! Oh boy, oh man, I am just so proud of myself.
I mean. I had this really intense to-do list of things I was supposed to do today, and I didn't get most of it done - but INSTEAD I did food things so I feel accomplished anyways.
THE FIRST: a rather minor-seeming achievement perhaps but still something. I was eating some black Russian bread (I think it's rye?) with pieces of Empire Jack cheese on top, and thinking that, man, this cheese was too bland to go with the bread's flavor. Normally you need something sharp to bring out the bread's sharper qualities in proper harmony.
That was when my eye fell on this large bag of dried apricots I have been very slowly making my way through.
I don't know what made me do it, but without really even thinking about it, I just took some dried apricots and put them on top of the bread-and-cheese open-faced sandwich and took a bite and OH MY GOD instead of bringing out the bread's sharper qualities, it brought out the bread's tangy qualities, and it was SO GOOD and SO DELICIOUS and also really kind of weird to be eating a bread-and-cheese sandwich with, like... apricots.
BUT IT WORKED SO WELL. I bet that if I had a copy of the Flavor Bible, I'd find some entry in it describing my experience in great detail. The flavors just melded incredibly well and I had another similar sandwich right after because it was that tasty.
I am very proud of myself for having invented this sandwich! With my luck, it's probably a totally common type of thing eaten all over the place in some province of some country whose language I don't speak, but whatever, I FEEL LIKE COLUMBUS TODAY.
So okay, send food-related adventure! I BAKED A FUCKIN PECAN PIE fuck yeah. It's my first pie EVER. The only thing I have ever baked before were butter biscuits. I do not have much baking experience. And I went out and baked a PECAN PIE and it is so delicious and amazing that I had to tell my cousins (I'm staying with my upstate-NY cousins at the moment, have I mentioned that? Woo woo traveling around a lot this past week) that if they ate it before it finished cooling and setting, the boogey-man will get them and gnaw off their toes and they'll have trouble walking and will keep falling over and falling flat on their faces.
My cousins are all very youngish in age and thus amusingly gullible.
Anyways yeah, this pie is so badass, it has pecans all over the place, but it ALSO contains Frangelico hazelnut liquor - which, if you are not as curiously interested in random fancy alcohol as I have become in the past few months, is a fairly high-end liquor that by itself is quite tasty but also adds delightful flavors to the pie when added to the mixture. It's the magic ingredient that makes the pie feel like creating a special potion instead of just mixing a pie. Also, it has a bed of chocolate chips oh man.
The pie is one of those things where you make a gloppy mixture, pour it into the pie crust, bake it, and then it sets and hardens into a forkable consistency and is delicious. The original recipe called for corn syrup and coffee liquor, but my ingenious sister instantly replaced the corn syrup with maple syrup, and the coffee liquor with hazelnut liquor, and it just makes it taste that much more amazing. She tried making the original version later, and we all agreed that her invention was just SO GOOD and a lot better than the original recipe, and it is her delicious amazing recipe that I made. Maybe I will post the recipe online after trying it out a few more times to make sure it's a-okay. OR MAYBE NOT perhaps I will hoard it and have it be my Family Secret, because my family does not have any family legacies or secrets (perhaps because most of them all died during WWI and WWII so we've got just the core family members left), and really, we should GET some.
And ok. The third thing food-related adventure is related to the Frangelico liquor. You see, the little co-op grocery store right next to my cousins is also, very conveniently enough, located in the same plaza as this small but extremely classy wine-and-alcohol shop. That was where I picked up the Frangelico, and I also decided to get myself some fancy dessert wines for my upcoming term at college, which starts in about a week. My college town is tiny and really dead - there are no Borders, Barnes & Nobles, Starbucks, or Target stores within miles and miles, and the only clothing stores are the Goodwill and Ross. Oh and Walmart, I forget that counts as a clothing shop most of the time. But yeah. A very dead little town where the most life is the isolated highly liberal college campus, which does not get along with the town at all because the town is the proverbial old-fashioned farmer with a shotgun sitting in the back of his truck staring at a hay bale, and my college is the proverbial lesbian couple making out in the hay bale without really noticing there's a guy with a shot gun staring menacingly at them.
But yeah, the gist of this is that the local wine store has a really small and insignificant selection of dessert wines, which I have become strangely fascinated with over the past wine. I swear, I've become obsessed - I want to try EVERY DESSERT WINE I SEE and then I try one and it's AMAZING and alas also quite pricey, but I believe that alcohol should be quality alcohol or it's just not worth it. The people who buy plastic jugs of vodka for ten bucks a pop can enjoy themselves for all I care, but I've tried that vodka, and let me tell you, there is not much of a difference between that stuff and rubbing alcohol. It quite literally felt like the roof of my mouth and the top three layers of my tongue had been dissolved in acid.
Also, I discovered pretty quickly that I did not really enjoy getting drunk just for the sake of getting drunk (though, as I think I've mentioned earlier, I do like getting slightly tipsy off of really tasty wine or liquor while having a fun silly fireside chat with friends). So popping off twenty dollars for a 500 mL bottle of high-end dessert wine is not that unreasonable to me, considering it will probably last me longer than that plastic jug of vodka will last the other type of drinkin' folk. Especially at college, where I'll be super busy all the time and won't have the hours to spare enjoying a bottle of deliciousness.
Still, good to be prepared for those moments when I DO have the time. So I bought three bottles. One is a winery I know and really like called Quady Wineries - their muscato is kind of amazing. I was actually hoping to get a bottle of their black muscato, which I tried a week ago with a friend and found to be even more amazing than the orange muscato (which was what originally hooked me on them). But this amazing store did not have the black muscato, alas, so I settled for another bottle of the orange, which is like settling for a mansion in the south of France instead of, like, one floating in the clouds and drawn by winged horses. So, still pretty awesome.
Also I got this ice wine, because I'm really fascinated by ice wines as a specific type of dessert wine, and the alcohol content is not that high but it looks like it will be amazing and delicious. It's a riesling wine, from Germany, which is supposed to be the most amazing place for rieslings to come from. I've had quite a few rieslings before this one and found them totally delicious, but never one from the hometown of Germany, and never an ICE WINE version, so I'm really looking forward to trying this one! The bottle is a dark green and very slim and fancy, oh man.
And the third bottle, the creme de la creme, is a trebbiano blend dessert wine from Italy that comes in this custom-made bottle that looks somewhat like a very large and elongated modernish perfume bottle - I am without a doubt keeping the bottle for this one and using it as a vase. Also, this wine is apparently from 2001, which makes it the first wine I'll be trying that is actually more then just a couple of years old - this is from a vintage ten years ago!
Clearly, yes, I am like an overexcited puppy let loose in a room full of squeaky things, because even describing all these wine details makes me realize that though I am so interested in all of it, it must be immensely boring to anyone reading this. Also, describing the wine is pretty boring - it's much more interesting to look at the bottles, pick them up and rotate them in your hands, examine the beautiful labels and so on and consider the potential evenings they contain, of adventurous cork-popping and wine-sampling!
I really did not think I'd turn into a potential wine snob because I just could not find anything about wine that particularly appealed to me, but of course, that was because no one I knew was serving delicious dessert wines in tantalizingly beautiful bottles that are like small works of art in themselves.
I am a total sucker for good packaging.
