Dandan noodles and wine?

Poderi Colla Dardi le Rose Bussia Barolo 2004

Dried flower, black fruit, mint and tar.
Tannin was there but soft.
There was depth, but I felt it was more like subtle than obviously powerful.
Great wine with balance and complexity.

JC gave me this as a blind tasting. I got the variety and the region right.
With the fruit, herb, tar and the pale brick color, it wasn't hard to deduce.

We were to have this wine with tomato sauce pasta, but JC suddenly got a new idea and cooked Tomato Dandan noodles.

He didn't use chili because I couldn't take the heat, but used sansho instead and it gave enough spiciness.

The pairing wasn't success. The spiciness collided with the wine.
We should have stuck to pasta for the wine, but Dandan noodle itself was good and we just enjoyed the wine after the meal.

Italian Wine Tasting at a wine shop

There was a tasting event of Italian wines from three wineries at a wine shop Vintage Berkeley.

La Staffa from Marche.

Verdicchio dei Castelli di Jesi DOC Classico Superiore 2015
Good acidity. Aromas and flavors of acacia, pear, apple and almond.
Very good wine and would go well with seafood.

Balgera from Valtellina, Lombardia.

Rosso di Valtellina
Inferno Reserva 2010
Valgella 2002
These wines are Nebbiolo from Alps.

I had their wine last year and loved them.
In fact, I was hooked by Nebbiolo from this region and have been trying wines of Valtellina from other makers like Ar. Pe. Pe.
What it would be like to revisit my first Valtellina?
Roundness from the ageing yet there were still fresh flowers and fruits...I still loved them!

Grifalco from Basilicata.

Aglianico del Vulture Gricos This is made of grapes from young vines.
Aglianico del Vulture Grifalco Older vines.
Aglianico del Vulture Daginestra Grapes are from single vineyard.

Dried purple flower and a lot of black fruits. Tannin was high but not aggressive.
Very good wine!

Aglianoco has been a kind of "it wine" to us since last year.
We are glad to find another good producer.

Preserved lemon

The weather here is suitable to grow citrus trees. We have lemon, yuzu, kumquat and lime trees in our garden.
I always want to have fruit trees which I can eat, but end up with planting citrus trees because they are so easy to grow!

It's lemon season now and our generous tree produced a lot of lemons as it does every year.
It's handy to have lemons and we squeeze lemon juice on top of everything, but lemon is a kind of fruit which you don't consume a lot, and the pile of lemons in a kitchen keeps growing.

I found a recipe of preserved lemon when I was at a loss what to do with the pile of lemons some years ago.
It is to simply marinate lemon in salt.

My version is quite simple: cut lemons into thick slices. Sprinkle salt on the bottom of a glass jar, add one slice of lemon, sprinkle salt on top of it, add another slice of lemon...

You need to measure and use more salt if you want to make it real preserved food, but I keep the amount of salt low and use up within several months.

It's ready when lemons become soft (about 3~4 weeks).
I discard pulp because they are bitter, and use skins.
Skins are chopped small and used for potato salad, tuna salad or salad dressing. It's good to eat with curry too.
JC eats just by itself like pickles. That's why I have to keep this low sodium.

The pile is much smaller now but I still have some lemons left.
Can I freeze them?
Is it possible to freeze the whole lemon and still keep the freshness?
There is only one way to find out...

Cooking with cocktail

I had a sudden craving for Oinarisan.
Oinarisan is Tofu skin stuffed with sushi rice.

Age (Tofu skin)

Tofu skin is cut into half and cooked in dashi, soy sauce, sake, mirin.
While Tofu skin is cooled down, prepare sushi rice.
Mix vinegar, sugar and salt. Pour the mixture over rice and mix.
You can add  fillings of your choice. I like to mix in Hijiki (seaweed).
Fill the Tofu skin with sushi rice.
Be careful not to break the Tofu skin.
If you break, that's okay. It still tastes good.

To show his appreciation (he loves Oinarisan), JC made me a cocktail while I cooked.
The numbers of liquors on hand were low, so JC had to be creative.

This is JC's original cocktail with no name yet.

The ingredients are:
B ＆ B
Orange dry curacao
Orange bitter
Lemon
Lime
Blackberry
Egg white

Fruity cocktail. I liked this a lot! I should find very cool name for this...

Oinarisan is ready, and JC opened Suigei Tokubetsu Junmai.
Fruity aroma and Umami flavor.
This sake can be better with saltier food (Oinarisan has sweetness).

Suigei might not have been the best choice for the food, but JC seemed to enjoy a lot and that's most important.

Oyster Nabe and wine

I mentioned that we hadn't had California Chardonnay for a while, and JC brought back home this wine.
Baxter Chardonnay Mendocino Oppenlander Vineyard 2014

Sweet white flower and citrus. Refreshing sharp acid.
It was a little like Chablis with less ocean elements.

We had this wine with Oyster Nabe (oyster and green onion are cooked in sake, dashi, miso and ginger) and Shungiku Salada (dressing: salt, powdered Chinese stock and sesami oil).

We brought in a rival: Printz Riesling Auslese Rheingau 1999
Beautiful Riesling. It was sweet but not luscious. Acid gave good balance.

Riesling was the better choice for the Nabe: the bitterness in chardonnay collided with the delicate flavor of oyster.

Shungiku is the vegetable with distinct bitterness, and it was good with Chardonnay.

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Chopping off a Bag

This is a bag I made a couple years ago when I went to a Craft Fair. I planned to do a lot of shopping so made a big bag for that.

It didn't take long to realize that if I filled such a big bag, it would become too heavy to carry.
Besides, the height was too long and I couldn't reach the bottom of the bag. It was inconvenient.
I never used this bag since.

Then I thought "why wouldn't I chop off the bottom of the bag to make it smaller!?"

I wasn't using it anyway so I didn't need to be afraid of failure.

I reused the bottom part of the bag with plastic board attached.
Cut it into the size so that it would fit to the body.

Turn the body of the bag inside out and sew that bottom to the body.
It wasn't easy to sew with the plastic board. This is the hard part about recycle sewing.

Attach the bottom to the lining in a same way.
Wrap the seam allowance with bias tape.

Now I can reach the bottom of the bag.

Still big enough for shopping, but small enough for the daily use.

Tasting of California wine

There was a tasting of wines made by a winemaker Kenny Likitprakong.
Wines are made by grapes purchased from all over California, so this was a good opportunity to find the diversity of California grapes.

Folk Machine Chenin Blanc Alexander Valley 2016
Refreshing high acid.
This had stronger impression of herbs than fruits.

Ghostwriter Chardonnay Santa Cruz Mountains 2013

This wine had more herbs than fruits, too.
Some complexity from lees stirring.

Banyan Gewurtstraminer Monterey County 2016
Orange skin and kumquat. Very floral.

Ghostwriter Pinot Noir Santa Cruz Mountains 2015
Tart and ripe red fruit and coffee.

Folk Machine Parts and Labor 2016
This is a red blend wine of mostly Carignan.
Nuts and tart fruit.

Hobo Zinfandel Dry Creek Valley 2015
Ripe fruit, almost jammy.
There could have been brett although it's not necessarily a fault, and even preferable for some people.

Ghostwriter Syrah Santa Cruz Mountains 2014
This is Ghostwriter's 1st vintage Syrah.
Ripe fruit but not overripe. Incense and pepper.

Hobo Grenache Alexander Valley 2014
Ripe fruit. Fennel. Coffee. Strong tannin.

If I talk about my personal preference these wines were not my favorite style, but they were good wines especially Syrah and Grenache.

Foamy Bellini

JC brought home Iron Horse Joy magnum.
I like bubbly especially in summer but this wine didn't feel "summer drink," so JC made it into Bellini.

Bellini is a cocktail made with sparkling wine and peach juice.
Since it was peach season, he used puree from fresh peach.

It had beautiful pink color but became very foamy!
Maybe because of the pectin in the peach.
It tasted good, but I found the texture a little challenging to be easy-to-drink summer cocktail.

Fresh ingredients make the quality of the most of the things better, but not always, I guess.

Recycle gardening

Even if I try to keep things fresh, I sometimes find vegetables which are rotten or moldy in my kitchen.
They become compost but I still feel bad.

Last year, we found moldy garlic and  instead of throwing into a compost bin, planted it in a pot.
We didn't know how to grow garlic or even if it would ever grow, so watered occasionally and just waited.
It started to sprout in spring.
After the plant died down, JC dug out the garlic last week.

It was small, but pungent, real garlic!

We have other recycle vegetable plants in our garden.
I never planted tomato. Some of the tomatoes fall on the ground, and grow back again by themselves every year.

This is potato.
It started to grow in a compost bin, so I replanted to the garden.
This happens often, and they produce small potatoes in autumn.

I planted pumpkin seeds, too.
I didn't know if it was possible to grow pumpkin by just sowing seeds on the ground, but they sprouted and it looked promising; however, one day some unknown bugs annihilated them (therefore I still don't know if I can grow pumpkin this way).

I should be able to produce better result if I google "how to grow" but I kind of like this trial and error gardening. I can afford to make mistakes: this is the good thing about gardening with the recycled stuff.

It's fun to plan meticulously and plant store-bought seedlings, but recycle gardening offers a different kind of pleasure even if it sometimes comes with failure and inferior crops.

Rose with flower

When I choose a bottle of wine at a wine shop randomly, I choose one with a label which is appealing to me. I don't have specific criteria: it can be color, it can be the font of the letters; anyway, it usually works.

JC brought home this wine: Raventos La Rosa Vins de Terrer 2015

Rose wine from Penedes, Spain.
Penedes is known for its Cava production, and one family member of Raventos is said to produce the first Cava in Spain in 1872.

The picture of the flower on the label is beautiful, but this is a kind of design I wouldn't choose, so I didn't have high expectation when I tried it.
It actually was not bad at all.
It had flower like the label, pleasant fruitiness and a little bit of bitterness of grapefruit.
Acid was low but refreshing.
Alcohol is relatively low and easy to drink.

When I have a glass of wine in one hand and any food on the other, I try them together. This day, what I had on my other hand was coffee ice cream.
The pairing was...not that bad.
The flavor somehow reminded me of Champagne.
The wine was made with Pinot Noir, but it can be the reason?

Pairing of cushion and slippers

Summer here is relatively cool, but the sunlight is intense.
The color of the cushion by the window fades quickly, so I made a new cushion cover.

The old cover was made with a simple interior fabric. For new cover, I used two brighter color fabrics: one is striped and the other one is Japanese-style flower design.

The thinner cotton fabric feels good in summer.
I hope it won't get wrinkled too much.

The old cushion cover had faded color but was still in good condition, so I made slippers with it.

The pattern is from a book "Jibun de tsukuru room shoes"
I used the leftover flower design fabric for the instep and the thicker old cushion cover fabric for the rest.
Now the cushion and I have matching design. How romantic.

New Tradition

I don't know when it became widespread, but it seemed like that many of the Mexican restaurants offer special deal for their Tacos on Tuesday night.

I only came to notice this in recent years, but this started in 80s when one Mexican restaurant started this "Taco Tuesday" as a promotion and became popular.

Being a Taco fan, I of course welcome this new tradition and participate often.

This is our Taco Tuesday dish from the neighbor Mexican restaurant.
Fried fish Tacos, my favorite!

Each Taco costs $2.00.
It looks small but the piece of fish is big enough to make me stuffed with 4 of them.
There was a farmer's market on that day so JC made fresh salsa.
Beer is Imperial Red Ale. Rich flavor with some bitterness, like coffee.
Yum.

Vignerons de Buxy Montagny 1er Cru

Vignerons de Buxy Montagny 1er Cru 2013

Chardonnay from Cote Chalonnaise, Burgundy.
Vignerons de Buxy is composed of more than a hundred winegrowers. Like co-op.

Ripe fruit and tropical fruit. There was subtle savoriness, maybe from oak or lees.
Rich mouth feel.

Cote Chalonnaise is lesser known area comparing with the legendary Cote d'Or.
It's located to the south of Cote d'Or: their wines are supposed to be lighter having the aspect of slopes not as ideal as Cote d'Or's.
They sill produce great wines, but the price can be affordable (this wine was $18.99, as it says on the picture).

We had this with Salmon Nabe.

The fruit in the wine could have been a little too ripe for the dish, but it was good dinner.