Month: August 2013

On Tasting Notes (In The Kitchen Series)

2 Comments

Wines I drank.

From April 2011 through February 2012, I had a wine column in a local publication, In the Kitchen Magazine entitled “Beneath the Cork“.  It was a fun project and my first published work.  I have often said I’m going to repost all those articles here on my blog and thus far, have only done so with one, in June of last year.  I’m fixing that with this article, originally published in April of 2011.

The idea behind the column was that I write about wine simply, making it accessible to people who might like wine, but didn’t necessarily know all the wine speak.  It was the roots of my semi-infrequent wine posts that I do in this space.  For more of my wine writing, you can always take a glance at my Wine tab across the top of the page. 

I once tried a wine simply because on the back label, it told me that it had “classic notes of apple, pear and pineapple and a delightful hint of crème brûlée”.    That hint of crème brûlée captured my interest to the point that I had to try it, even if it was a varietal that I’m generally not a fan of.  It did indeed have that hint, so much so that I think we may have noticed it without the tasting notes, but it may have taken us longer to pin down exactly what it was we tasted.

Continue reading →

Call and Answer.

6 Comments

The other day as I was out running errands, I felt the call of the thrift.   If you’ve never felt that call before, it’s hard to describe.  It’s a gut feeling that if you don’t go to the thrift store right there and then, you will miss out on something that needs to come home with you.  I have a love/hate thing for the SPCA Rummage Sale Store, but I found myself pulling into the parking lot Wednesday afternoon just as a parking space magically opened up.  Clearly, the fates were aligned.

Continue reading →

It’s not just me apparently.

3 Comments

After doing some reading as well as talking to some of my chef friends, I made an adjustment to my pickled peaches recipe in that I cut the processing time by half to 10 minutes for a pint.  Most pickle recipes have a 10 minute processing time, some as short as 5 minutes.  In reading every pickled peach recipe I have been able to track down, I’ve seen a wide range of processing times.   In comparing them all, I looked at the amount of vinegar used.  I found recipes similar to mine had a shorter processing time, so I tried it out.  The resulting pickles have been much firmer, as you can see in the pie I made with them. Continue reading →

Pickle Fest.

4 Comments

DSCN3704The idea of having everyone over to sample my vast inventory of pickles one evening came out of the girls night I had a few weeks ago with what I refer to as the PTO crowd.  I’m not entirely sure why I refer to this group of women that way – perhaps because we are all the sort of women who step up and run things and at least a little bit of our friendship is based on strategizing who’s running what – school events, girl scouts, soccer car pools and the like.  At least, that’s how I began to get to know them and then we realized that we all like wine.  Also, our kids are friends and it would appear we are all the sort of moms who like to be friends with the parents of our kid’s friends.  As we sat there on the patio at Bang! that evening, we locked in a date on our calendars for an evening where they’d come over, see the finished dining room that I’d been whining about for months, I’d break out all my pickles for sampling – and we’d include our husbands.  Along the way, it was decided that everyone would bring wine & something to eat as well because by now they know the standard Calvert family entertaining mode is that everyone is welcome at any time, as long as you bring your own food & beverages.   We had a party once where we tried to supply all this ourselves and our guests, so used to our mode, went ahead and brought tons of things anyway, so I’ve just thrown my hands up in the air and decided to own it.

Honestly, it makes entertaining far easier.

Continue reading →