food

Colorful Wine

/ wvfurandroot / 5 Comments

Minoan Blue Monkey Fresco

It’s been suggested that most folk choose their wine based on the bottle. While I’m not immune to the charms of a nice bottle, all other factors being equal, I am usually more interested in what’s in the bottle. I veer towards the Chileans. You can’t buy a bad bottle of Chilean wine. The price is beginning to reflect that, but it used to be you could have a damn fine wine dirt cheap. Most of the Australians are good as are most of the South Americans if you’re looking for affordable yet decent wine.

With all that said, my palate is not that sophisticated. I’d recognize the label, but I’ve become partial to a wine sold at the Kroger – a nice cabernet IN A BOX with an 87 rating from Wine Spectator. It’s hard to burn a candle in that puppy once I’ve drained the last glass of wine, but I buy the stuff to drink – not to decorate.

Tom Robbins Wine

Or at least that’s mostly true. I do have some wine bottles scattered about the house because I like them. My favorite is a long, lithe cobalt blue one that used to house a crisp pinot grigio. And then there’s the Tom Robbins bottle. (I’ve also got a tequila bottle that HMOKeefe drained on the Mexico trip – tequila? I don’t touch the stuff. But that bottle sure is pretty and HMOKeefe buzzed on the worm was a sight to see.)

Those of us of a certain age will remember chianti bottle candle holders. In fact, I used to buy chianti just for the bottle because all the cool girls had candles and, well, I couldn’t be left out could I?

That color!

As I perused wine at the Drug Emporium (no kidding – one of the best selections around), I was dumbstruck in the Italian section.

I’ve been in the throes of painting and as I finally whittle down the number of rooms in need of painting, my thoughts turn to the dreaded hall that houses the stairs. This area is going to be horrible to paint and I have to get the color right the first time. If I manage to complete the stairwell in my lifetime, it will be the last time that area is painted. The color choice is complicated by the open floor plan and getting the exact right color is critical. Critical, I tell you. The fate of the free world hangs in balance.

Isn't that just luscious?

I’ve been flirting with the idea of a pinky peach – or peachy pink – that color where fuchsia and tangerine run away to Morocco for illicit sex under a slow-turning ceiling fan. The color your eyelids turn after two strawberry daiquiris on a beach blanket. The color that is the sound of passion. You know. That color.

So. There I am in the Drug Emporium choosing a wine when this chianti bottle leaps off the shelf and into my basket. I’m not really a huge fan of chianti, but this bottle is kicker. The straw casing weaves fuschia and tangerine together and produces that color. While that hallway will most likely end up a matronly forest green, I do now possess a retro-trendy chianti candle holder for my soon to be completed study.

Blue Monkey

And if the chianti bottle wasn’t exciting enough, I was stopped dead in my tracks at the clearance shelf. Indeed, I gaped in astonishment.

Most folk don’t know it, but at one time I was the world’s foremost expert on Minoan blue monkey frescoes. Really. For all I know, I still am. I haven’t kept up with the research. But I wrote the best research paper of my life on the mystery of why the Minoans, living on an island in the Mediterranean, were provoked to draw blue monkeys on their walls. I didn’t actually answer the question, but I had a lot of fun ruminating. You may, as I did, find it curious that people have been including photos of the blue monkey frescoes in anthropology, history, and art books for decades and decades without ever addressing the question as to why a bunch of proto-Greeks were decorating with a monkey motif.

The no-longer-lonely other blue monkey decorative item.

So, I’m admiring my chianti bottle and considering taking it to the paint aisle at the Lowe’s, when I discover the blue monkey wine. It’s a zinfandel and I’m not a huge fan, but, really people, it’s in a BLUE MONKEY bottle. Serious. How could I not buy it?

So. I now have two bottles of wine I bought simply for the bottles and which will become decorative items in my study. God help me, I’m decorating with wine bottles plus I’ve spent $30 on wine that I don’t particularly like. It’s a big old goofy world and I’m the leading lady.

Solitary, Hard Labor and a Cold Beer

/ wvfurandroot / 8 Comments

La Cerveza Mas Fina

I’m not much of a beer drinker – never was – not even when The Ex and I were home-brewing. I do enjoy a beer now and again and I particularly enjoy a nice bock. If I’m in the mood, Guinness is good. When in London, I fell in love with dogbolter.

Tonight, it’s Corona Extra. The label tells me it is la cerveza mas fina. Perhaps. Personally, I think Negra Modelo es la cerveza mas fina. But I’m not going to quibble when Corona is the only beer in the house.

There’s nothing like hard labor to bring on the desire for a beer.

Normally, wine is my drug of choice. And tonight, while painting and planning the celebratory beer, I puzzled over why it is that collapsing in a chair, grungy and exhausted after hard labor, my first thought is to grab a beer and not a nice malbec. It’s a testament to my normal slothdom that the only beer in the house is two bottles of Corona left by a dear friend following my birthday bacchanal. I don’t collapse grungy and exhausted from hard labor nearly enough.

People don’t crawl out from underneath a car after an oil change and grab a pinot grigio. Nope. Beer is for manual labor. [If I tell the story about taking apart the carburetor, washing it in Joy dishwashing liquid and reassembling it while sipping a fine merlot, I will contradict myself so that story will have to wait.] Cleaning out the gutters doesn’t provoke a German white or a cheeky sauvignon blanc. Nor does housecleaning, dog bathing, raking, or car washing. Beer is to manual labor what champagne is to New Year’s Eve.

While embroiled in the bowels of home maintenance, the evening has also been one of comfortable solitude.

Just about this time of year, five years ago, I became the only human living in this house. Having always been one who required more than the average amounts of alone time, the specter of living alone was a friendly ghost. I craved solitude. And quiet. Dear God, I needed quiet. My life was noisy and frenzied and stressful. Solitude sounded like a wonderful thing.

I have a decent stereo system, but I don’t believe in music as background noise. If I’m going to listen to music, I’m going to sit and intently listen to music. I do, however, tend to listen to music while attending to mindless tasks – tasks like painting. Tonight, though, I wanted the quiet. I painted and listened, intently, to the quiet. I heard the roller’s slight squeak as the paint spread over the wall and I heard the squeak of the floorboards. They were nice sounds.

Even after 5 years, I enjoy the quiet and I enjoy the solitude. My life is still noisy and frenzied and stressful, but the house is as calm and quiet as I choose to make it. Right now the house is quiet and the tapping of the computer keys sounds especially loud. There’s a train off in the distance and its faint noise highlights the quiet. It’s nice. I’m a fan of quiet (and trains).

The beer is about gone and I should go to bed – I’m tired, but I’m loathe to go. I’m enjoying my thoughts and the quiet as well as feeling virtuous that I’ve finally applied a fair amount of paint to the study walls. There’s something to be said for solitary, hard labor and a cold beer.

My Super Secret Smoothie Recipe

/ wvfurandroot / 8 Comments

More than likely, you already have what you need.

The teenagers (and staff) at the shelter never cease to amaze me.

We have one who is pregnant and she mentioned tonight that she’d love to have a smoothie. I said, “So, let’s go make you a smoothie.”

She said, “But we don’t have any smoothie mix.”

“I said,” “Smoothie mix?”

One thing led to another and it was revealed that she had no idea you could just make a smoothie. I assured her that provided one had a blender, ice, milk or yogurt, and fruit, one could make a smoothie better and healthier than anything coming out of a packet. (Truth to tell, I didn’t know they had smoothie mix.)

Fruit

So, I dragged out the blender. Then I hear another staff person holler, “Wait! I want to watch.”

It seems I was surrounded by people who hadn’t a clue you could just make a smoothie.

So. In the interest of nutrition and spreading important knowledge, I’m sharing my super secret (it appears) smoothie recipe.

Here it is:

Dump a cup of ice in the blender. Dump a cup of milk or yogurt in a blender. Toss in bananas, strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, mango or any other fruit (or combination thereof) you think will rock your boat and hit the crush ice button. (Make sure you remember to put the top on the blender. It’s a fearsome mess to clean up if you don’t.) Let it whirl a bit. Open the top, dip out a spoonful and taste for flavor and texture.)

Ice

If it’s not thick enough, add more fruit. If it’s not fruity enough add more fruit. If it’s too thick or too fruity, add more milk or yogurt. Whirl it around some more and pour into glasses.

Ms. Pregnant wanted a banana-chocolate smoothie, so I tossed in milk, ice, bananas, and Hershey’s syrup in the blender and let it whirl and poured it into a glass. Dubious, she took a small taste and declared it, with some amazement, better than smoothie mix. (No shit, I thought.)

If you’re of a mind too, you can sneak stuff in there that you don’t like, but are persuaded you need – ground flax seed, protein powder, calcium (take it out of the capsule), etc. You can also use ice cream or sherbet. In the off-season, I find the unsweetened, unprocessed frozen fruit to work just peachy (lose the ice, in such cases).

I hate milk, but it's not bad this way. Plain yogurt is better.

I’ve been known to doctor frozen baby carrots with a ton of fruit and fruit juice (no milk, no yogurt). I like carrots, but I really like them this way.

It’s like making soup. Any combination of anything will work as long as it sounds good to you.

So, there you have it – my public service message of the day.

Bonus info: If you dump a jigger or two of vodka into the blender, hot summer evenings are greatly enhanced.

I had to jumpstart the coffee pot.

/ wvfurandroot / 19 Comments

As my dad once said, It’s so cold out there, I had to jumpstart the coffee pot.

I’ve been known to say that sometimes coffee is just a caffeine delivery system and sometimes it’s a spiritual experience. Some days, it is both.

Coffee, is, and has been, my favorite beverage for decades. I drink it hot year-round. I drink a whole pot by myself before I ever step foot out of the door in the morning.

I cannot, and do not wish to ever, live without coffee. I even bought a gas grill for the primary purpose of being able to make coffee during power outages. I bought lots of BTU power, but it still takes forever to heat water.

I even have a spare coffee-maker to throw in the trunk on road trips. Those puny things in motels are all but useless not to mention the two little packets of coffee provided (1 regular, 1 decaffeinated). The travel pot also serves as the backup pot. This is how much I want and need coffee. There are always two.

I drink it black in a mug that is small by other coffeeholics’ standards. Like good whiskey, I sip my coffee. With a big mug, it’s cold before I get to the bottom.

Each night, I set up coffee for the morning, hit the timer button and toddle off to bed. This insures that the coffee is raring and ready-to-go when I stumble down the stairs trying to orient body and mind to an existence that seems more dream-like at 6 a.m. than my dreams.

Yesterday, on Facebook, a friend happened to mention that she’d gotten a brand new Cuisinart coffee pot and did I want her old one which was a snazzy red. I told her no, because I have a snazzy white Cuisinart albeit an older model.

Her original status update had to do with why she poured in 12 cups of water, but the reservoir only showed 10. We also discussed why, even after topping off the reservoir, 12 cups of coffee only produced 10 cups.  (Presumably, if we didn’t top off the reservoir, the brewed amount would be 8 cups.)

It’s one of the mysteries of the universe. It’s not just this particular brand of coffee-maker, but all of them.. I’ve never had one that produces the same amount of brewed coffee as water I pour in.

The immediate supposition is that two cups are lost as steam during brewing. Two cups is a lot of water. Really, I think I would notice two cups of steam collecting under my kitchen cabinets. I mean, really, wouldn’t it drip from the cabinets?

I have no suppositions about the reservoir.

Another mystery is why every single coffee-maker carafe dribbles. ‘Tis near impossible to pour a cup without having to immediately grab paper towel and wipe up the mess on the counter. I do pour carefully. I pour slow; I pour fast; I pour medium. I pour from great heights and I pour with the lip of the carafe touching the cup – there’s always that dribble.

For a long, long time, I was uncommonly fond of, and unapologetic of, Maxwell House French Roast coffee. All that fancy, schmancy stuff in coffee shops was wasted on me. And don’t even get me started on Starbucks. The first time I had it, I gave the cup back to them and told them they needed to make another pot because that one had gone bad. They did. The second cup was worse.

I did develop a fondness for Columbian coffee (though not Starbucks’). However, with the quantities I drink, it was hard on my stomach. I returned to Maxwell House French Roast.

And then they new-and-improved it to the point where it was undrinkable (unless that was the only coffee I had). I fumbled around in the coffee aisle at the grocery and eventually switched to Folgers.

With a twist of fate, I discovered Tanzanian Peaberry. Now there’s a coffee bean a girl could love. I bought 5 lbs of beans from a mailorder place and reached coffee nirvana.

At times I would run out of the Tanzanian and at other times I just couldn’t afford it. Folgers was the old standby.

During the course of yesterday’s Facebook conversation, we discussed the penchant for Cuisinart’s built-in grinders to gum up. Mine will be fine for weeks and weeks. Then, one morning, I will wake to half-a-pot of semi-brewed coffee and half-ground beans all over the countertop. This is not an event that provokes a good morning.

Wouldn’t you know it – shortly after closing Facebook, I made a new pot and the damned thing gummed up, overflowed, and thoroughly messed up the counter I had just cleaned.

So cursing and stomping (and calling my friend names because she jinxed it), I cleaned up the mess. I unplugged the pot and began cleaning out half-ground beans. There was one spot near the top of the brewer that I couldn’t get to. I turned that baby upside down and used the sink sprayer attachment.

Since I had the damn thing all torn apart, I decided to clean it. I poured in vinegar and I poured in water and I turned the pot on to brew. Nothing. No lights, no camera, no action.

I checked the breaker box – fine. I plugged the coffee-maker into another outlet just to be sure. Nothing.

Sigh.

I dragged out the backup coffee-maker – a Melitta that never did grind right – and got out the Folgers. All was more or less well, though I was still mad.

This morning, I stumbled down the stairs and realized I’d forgotten to set up coffee last night in the excitement of Chef Boy ‘R Mine’s 10 p.m. arrival. It took a minute to register and without thinking, I hit the power button even though the Melitta was sitting next to the Cuisinart. (Neither maker is particularly small and only an early-morning fog explains this.) The Cuisinart saluted, slipped into gear, and brewed me a nice pot of vinegared water.  The supposition here is that the electronic parts had gotten wet and just needed drying time.

Sigh.

I poured water and Folgers into the Melitta and hit brew.

The Folgers is right tasty this morning. I only got 10 cups and there’s coffee dribbles on the counter, but still I have cup of coffee and all is right with the world. Sometimes coffee is just a caffeine delivery system and sometimes it is a spiritual experience. Today it is both.

Good thing. It is so cold out there, I had to jumpstart the coffee pot.