Happy Happy Happy Dec. 5

Good morning all, and happy December 5th... which of course (!) is the anniversary of the Repeal of Prohibition! (In fact, this Dec 5th is the 75th anniversary.)

That's right: 75 years ago today the 21st Amendment to the Constitution became ratified, thereby repealing the 18th Amendment which had, nationwide, prohibition the making, sale, or drinking of alcohol.

So tonight, lift a glass of beer or wine or champagne and give a toast to our Constitution that allows us life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness...and to drink!

(Interesting side note: The 21st Amendment is the only Amendment repealing an earlier amendment.)

My Wine Holy Grail

I've been fortunate this year to drink some fabulous wine both at wineries and at different meals. I had some awesome Ghost Horse Vineyards cab sauvignon ($500 per bottle, thank you very much); I'm a huge Nord Vineyards fan (note--they have a new web site coming soon, I promise); and recently I disovered a Napa Valley up-and-comer that I'll talk more about shortly.

I love great wine. However, it's difficult to drink great wine every night with meals. So I'm continually trying and experimenting with what I call "everyday" wines--those in the $8.00 - $15.00 range that can be enjoyed with everything from pizza to hamburgers. It's tough, because after drinking great wine, it's difficult to drink lesser wine.

But now I've found what I consider the "Holy Grail" of everyday wines: Frontier Red from the Fess Parker Winery. Most of you know who Fess Parker was: Daniel Boone! For the past 15 years, he's had a winery down in Santa Maria, in southern California. Anyway, I believe his Frontier Red is the best $9.99 bottle of wine I've ever had. It has a great nose, great flavor, but most of all, it has great FEEL -- it feels good in your mouth. It has character and taste and doesn't feel "transparent", and by that I mean that there's nothing left in your mouth once you swallow. Anyway, if you're in the market for a great everyday wine, I suggest you check out some Frontier Red. Yes, Daniel Boone was a man (theme song, folks), and yes, Fess Parker knows how to make a great $9.99 bottle of wine.

BE CREATIVE!!!

COSTA MESA - Still in So Cal, and have noticed two things:

1. O.K., I love the all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet (see my earlier post), but please, kitchen people: AFTER FOUR OR FIVE DAYS OF THE EXACT SAME FOOD, THE BUFFET LOOSES ITS APPEAL. Can you mix it up? Please? Pretty please? Would it hurt you to make some custom-ordered omelette's, or throw some Canadian bacon out there?? I mean, come on, be creative.

2. Avoid ordering calamari at a fast food restaurant (Daphne's). It's NOT GOING TO BE THE SAME AS FISHERMAN'S WHARF OR THAT REALLY COOL RESTAURANT IN NY CITY WHOSE NAME HAS JUST SLIPPED ME. (It won't even be close!!!!)

Rantings from the road.

Made in America

COSTA MESA -- In Orange County CA on a business trip for several days, and this morning partook of something quintessentially AMERICAN---the $10.95 all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet. There is nothing better, IMHO, to start a long and when-will-I-have-time-to-eat day than with a huge breakfast spread: coffee, juice, pastry, scrambled eggs, fried potatoes, pancakes, and yes, a couple (O.K., THREE) strips of bacon. I'm good now till 3 or 4:00 p.m. easy. Really, you load up on the morning buffet and you don't NEED lunch. It's a great deal, a nice splurge, and yes, I'll walk off all the calories and such throughout the rest of the day. Life in Costa Mesa, at the Orange County Hilton, is very good today.

Wood-Fired Cooking

In my previous post, I shared my Food Fantasy about purchasing a wood-fired oven. I got the idea for this by attending a couple of months ago a "Wood-Fired Cooking" class through Healdsburg's Relish Cooking School.

The class was awesome. It was hosted by Andrea Mugnaini, whose Mugnaini company has helped re-introduce to the U.S. authentic Italian wood-fired ovens. Andrea cooked all kinds of goodies (see pics below) as well as went over the highlights of wood-fired cooking. Here are some of the tid-bits I took away from her class:

* Wood-fired ovens don't use gas or electricity, and have no moving parts

* You don't use a thermometer to cook: you look at the various colors of the charcoal and use your hand

* When the oven is fully heated, food cooks FAST (pizzas take about 3 minutes)

* While the floors are the thickest part of the oven (cause that's where the fire is), once the oven has heated, the TOP of the oven is actually hotter than the floor

Andrea prepping:

Pizza!

Simple:

Even desserts!

O.K., and if you really want to dream, how about this: every year Andrea leads a week-long "Art of Wood-Fired Cooking" class in...Tuscany. Now THAT would be cool.

My Food Fantasy

O.K., I’ve shared with Frequent Readers of This Blog (FROTB) a food confession, I introduced you to the Meat Monkey, and I’ve gone on and on about the Land Lobster. Now it’s time to take this one step further: I want to share a Food Fantasy.

And no, my food fantasy does not have to do with celebrity wonder chef Giada De Laurentiis and tomato sauce.

(No, you see, my fantasy about Giada goes like this. She makes me one of her special gourmet breakfasts, and serves it to me in bed. And because my hands are bandaged from some sort of non-lethal accident, she has to feed me the breakfast. And then afterwards, again because my hands are bandaged, she—wait! Whoa. Sorry about that—I started to get a little carried away!)

My food fantasy is this: I want to have in my backyard one of those big old wood-burning pizza/bread ovens. Then I could make really cool wood-fired pizzas and roasted veggies and awesome breads, and invite all my cool friends over and have great backyard parties drinking awesome Napa Valley or Sonoma County wine and playing bocce ball and so on and so on. Wouldn’t that be cool? You know, crank up the oven to 900 degrees or so and just go at it.

Here’s what I want:


Here’s what I have:


I even have the perfect spot in my backyard. You see, we had this old gazebo which began to rot away. So I knocked the darn thing down! All I need to do is knock out the deck and presto!—wood-fire oven spot.

Gazebo, eight minutes later (well, maybe 10-12 minutes later):

So what do you think? The ovens only cost about $5-$8K… plus delivery… and custom installation… and of course the cooking classes… and you need a couple-three cords of wood. I mean, that’s not a lot, is it?

Let me know what you think.

And stay tuned for my next post, when I talk about the wood-fire oven class I recently attended put on by Andrea Mugaini whose company re-established wood-fired ovens in the U.S.

Olive Ole'

Yes, the 2007 Napa Valley grape harvest has come and gone, as has the 2007 Sonoma County grape harvest. But there's another harvest going on right now still: olives!

I was hanging out with my friend Maury recently, who's the groundskeeper at The Wine Country Inn in St. Helena, and he stepped me through the process they go through to harvest and cure the olives from the 25+ olive trees on the Inn's property. I found it fascinating! Hope you do too.

First, the olives are picked green. (Apparently, if they have any color at all, they're "too far gone".) Next, the olives, which are very toxic, are soaked in huge plastic garbage cans in LYE. That's right, bleach, lye, the bad stuff (the Inn uses Red Devil Drain Opener). According to Maury, you mix 8 oz. of lye per five gallons of water. The olives soak for six to eight hours in this lye/water mixture, until they turn a straw color all the way to the pit.

Next, the olives are then soaked in water for six to eight DAYS to get all the lye out. These olives need to be stirred every hour, and the water changed every four hours.

So how do you know if you've soaked out all the lye? Someone (!) has to taste them! Yes: If they burn your lips, they need more soakin!

Anyway, I found it quite fascinating. And once the olives have soaked thoroughly, they are then put into a brine/lemon juice solution and canned. And of course, you can add goodies to impart onto the olives other great flavors, such as rosemary and garlic (my personal favorite).

Needless to say, it's a pretty labor-intensive process. But Maury says these Wine Country Inn olives are the best he's ever had. And I have to agree.

BTW: Maury has his own blog about the various garden goings-on at the Inn. If you're interested, check it out.