Food & Footy

This Tokaji made from 100% Furmint grapes is one of the best value for money wines I have come across in a really long time. I made my wife try the wine and asked her what she thought this wine cost and her estimate was $30, which is more than double the $13 it actually cost me. This wine can easily be mistaken for a $30 wine as it is a very well made wine with a strong acidic core that leaves you salivating and wanting more and more and more. The acidity also brings some nice lemon/lime flavors for the ride with some stony and mineral notes which finally give way to a very light floral aroma. The only thing I can possibly complain about is that the length of the wine isn’t as long as some of the more expensive wines out there, but like I said, this wine is hard to put down and you always want more. So I guess technically you can say that the length of the wine is as long as the bottle, which between 2 people we finished in 15 minutes with supper and at a bone dry 11.5% you don’t get light headed to quickly either. This wine is a great summer wine and will pair beautifully with almost everything. My P2Q rating for the Pajzos Tokaji Furmint is 4.55/5.

You must be thinking WTF is this guy saying??? Here’s the scoop, first off Ravioli, this time they are spinach, ricotta and truffle oil ravioli with my aunts meat sauce which includes meatballs, sausage, beef cubes, chicken legs, rabbit, and lamb. Yes that’s how we roll in my family. No vegans here. This sauce is cooked for 4-6 hours and on a very low temperature so the meat has time to absorb the juices from the and beocme very tender while also infusing the sauce with its meaty goodness. The ravioli’s are made from half semolina and half white flour, a couple of eggs, a pinch of salt and love. I really enjoy making them, it brings me back to my youth when I would help my nonna make them, and in the process score some ricotta and fresh pasta, and several stories about such and such who did this or that and is “maleducato”, their children are “zingari” and their mother is a “puttana lorda”, and the inevitable talk of “malocchio”.  Not to mention the millions of times my nonna called me a rimbambito. Great family moments . My nonna always used white flour for her pasta and a simple ricotta and parsley filling, but there was something magical about them. They were fantastic, the texture, the filling, the way they sopped up the sauce….in a nutshell they were everyone’s nonna’s ravioli’s, and that means they were perfect and the benchmark for any other ravioli that would ever cross my palate, even my own. I am by nature someone who likes to experiment and come up with my own recipes, so I modified the recipe a little to include the aforementioned semolina for the pasta, and spinach and truffle oil for the filling. I was nervous to have my nonna taste them for fear that she would say I brought shame to her and all those hours spent helping her were all lost. But upon presenting my version of my nonna’s ravioli’s I got the nod of approval. My family doesn’t talk very much and she didn’t need to say anything. I knew I passed the nonna test. I saw in the look that she gave me that she was proud that I was carrying on the tradition and that I actually learned something from her. That and her plate looked like she licked the bowl clean. This gives me a great amount of confidence for my next pasta test in a couple of weeks, I am getting truffles straight from Italy and will be cooking for my wife and her entire family. And they don’t love me like my nonna, so I better bring my A game!

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Well its been a while since I posted about food, so todays post will be dedicated to food. Forza Azzurri!! 2 nice performances this past week. Looks like Cesare Prandelli is building a nice little squad. Sorry had to get that out. Ok now its about food. Well in the last couple of weeks I’ve prepared bavette or flank steak a couple of times. Bavette is the piece that comes from the the abdominal muscles of the cow, which means that it is generally a tougher cut of meat. What it lacks in tenderness it more than makes up for with flavour. It can be prepared in many different ways. You can braise it slowly which will give you almost like a pulled pork style of meat with strings of beef easily peeling off of each other, you can put it in a stew, you can grill it on high heat on your bbq or you can pan sear it. The last 2 methods require the piece of meat to be served rare to a maximum of medium rare, otherwise it is very tough…like chewing rubber. It is also advised to cut it against the grain so that the fibres are smaller and easier to chew. One of my favorite preparations to prepare bavette is to marinate it in Coke with some spicy smoked spanish paprika and just a little olive oil for 1 hour and to grill it on high heat until rare. I really liked this method because the coke did 2 important jobs, 1) the acidity in the coke helped breakdown and tenderize the meat and 2) it balanced the spicy spanish paprika with some caramel sweetness. Before putting it on the grill, pat it dry, add some salt and pepper and grill the sucker. The 2nd perparation was even simpler…..salt, pepper, my secret ingredient: profumo del chianti, and a hint of chipotle. I also added butter (butter makes everything better) to the skillet and sear that bad boy on high heat. Both were great ways to have this cut of meat, and I think next time I will combine the spices/coke I used and braise the bavette and make pulled bavette sandwiches with a sweet and spicy bbq sauce! Cheers!

Todays post is about a wine that I was interested in trying for some time. I won’t lie, the label of this wine is what drew me to it. A wild boar in a sharp sports coat holding a bunch of grapes is a great label, I don’t care what anyone says! But more important than the label is what’s inside the bottle, and the product itself was not bad at all. This bottle should sell at retail for around $12-14 (it is a private import in Quebec). I found it by chance on a menu of a pizzeria in Laval with a decent sized wine list that has many of the rockstars of Italian wine on it. I don’t usually enjoy buying expensive wines in restaurants, the mark-up is just to much for me, instead I look for the bargains or something new that I can’t find easily, and that is where Cingalino came in. With a french blend of Merlot (65%) and Cabernet Franc (35%) and with American owners you would expect it to be a fruit bomb, but that isn’t actually the case. Instead, what you get is a wine with blueberries and cherries upfront with earthy, herbal and oak tones that you will find in more expensive IGT’s from Tuscany. This wine has nice soft tannins and good acidity that will make it ideal for many dishes from pasta and pizza to steak. I can’t say that this is a great or even a very good wine, because it is a little lean on the palate and it does not have the length of a very good wine, but at the retail price that it should sell at, it’s a good everyday drinking wine that is enjoyable, easy drinking, and will also be a conversation starter with that label that I love so much. All in all I am glad I was able to try Cingalino and if I came across it in a shop I would buy a few bottles and keep them around for when the black hole of alcohol that is my friends come over for supper. P2Q 4.4/5.

The last 2 weeks have been horrible for all of the Juventini out there. As a footy fan, I have never gone through such an experience with my team. This is one of the worst runs I have seen for Juventus in all of my years, and I am not just talking about the last 2 games. I am talking about the last year and a half! This year’s problems….are many. The biggest problem I see is the lack of quality all over the pitch. I would much rather see a Giovinco on the team than a Martinez, Simone Pepe is not a player of Juventus quality, Traore, Motta, & Rinaudo neither. And don’t event get me started on Storari, I can fill a whole page about how much I hate his frigging hair not to mention the fact that he looks lost in his box. But I believe the biggest blame lies with the manager, Del Neri’s team all play with his personality, which is, they don’t have a personality. They are lacking ideas, fluidity, compactness, and most of all the heart that characterized the Juventus teams of the 90′s and early 2000′s. Time for a change, hopefully this time a manager who has a pair of Size 5  Nike T90 Tracer.

And now on to todays big Serie Fixture between the top 2 teams going in to this week, Milan Vs. Napoli. The match was a somewhat balanced affair up until Ibrahimovic’s PK goal. After the PK Milan put it in cruise control and dominated the rest of the game. Milan’s most important acquisition in the January transfer window was not Antonio Cassano, it was Mark Van Bommel. He’s one of those players that you hate to play against but you love having him on your team. He is a hard c*nt and he has already made Milan’s midfield his own. As for the league, Inter are making a charge up the table but with Milan 5 points up on Inter, I think they will win the Scudetto this season, which is good for them, because I don’t think they will pass the first knockout round of the Champions League. But good luck to them and the rest of the Italian teams left in the Champions League, I hope they can overturn their first leg results…except for Inter….I hope Bayern kills them!

So the last couple of weeks have been busy! I wrote and tasted my way through the WSET Level 3 Advanced Certificate exam, made a tasty Superbowl edition of chili, some candied bacon chocolate chip cookies, which were probably the best thing I have ever baked in my life, and had a smoked meat & wine feast with my buddies while playing Fifa11 on PS3, awesome night, felt like I was 16 again…but legally drinking alcohol. Tonight, I had a Valentine’s dinner with my wife. Yes, it’s February 15th, but my wife had class last night and she got home late. So tonight I made some whole heat Pasta with a crispy prosciutto in Panna (cream sauce) with lemon zest and peas. I paired this dish with Pieropan’s Soave Classico Calvarino. The pasta was very good, but the wine stole the show. This wine comes from the single cru Calvarino vineyard, and I was caught by surprise by what this wine offered. Both the aromas and the taste of this wine reminded me of a well made Riesling, offering a lot of minerality, citrus, and white flowers, with just a hint of some nuttiness and tropical fruit. The Calvarino had a nice vein of acidity running through it, which was the backbone of this wine, especially with the creaminess of the sauce and the fat from the prosciutto in the pasta. This was the best Soave I have ever tasted by a wide margin. At $24, I am giving this a solid 4.65/5 on my P2Q scale. This is a wine I would recommend to everyone.

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As Mase once said “Welcome back welcome back welcome back” (I know the original version is from Welcome Back Kotter). It feels good to be back after the holiday hangover…literally. I know I’ve neglected the blog over the last couple of weeks, but between making ravioli, eating, drinking Sassicaia Grappa, getting together with friends and family, eating, drinking Johnny Walker Green Label, eating, and drinking countless bottles of wine from just about every continent in the world, I’ve been a little busy. But now its back to business. I have been studying hard for my WSET Advanced Certificate exam which is coming up soon and tasting as much as I can. And today we will review the Kim Crawford Central Otago Pinot Noir, which is fruit picked from a small parcel vineyard.

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This was my first time drinking a "Gruner" and I must admit I was pleasantly surprised by it.  It had a pale straw colour to it with a stony, lime/citrus and green apple aroma to it. It reminded me of a young inexpensive German Riesling in its aromas but was much more balanced on the palate and was completely dry. The Stadt Krems had a nice core of acidity, while the aroma characteristics and flavour characteristics were almost exactly the same. The only difference for me was that the the lime flavours were a little more pronounced. There was also a hint of carbonation, which with the acidity, made this wine extremely refreshing and thrist quenching.

I had this wine with a fresh mozzarella and 6 year old Cheddar grilled cheese sandwich with some homemade dried sausage sott'olio that was typically laced with fennel and was I would say half spicy. The Stadt Krems did a good job of refreshing the palate and muting the spicyness while complimenting the fennel notes. At $13.70, this is a very good wine for every day drinking and would most certainly be a crowd pleaser, due to it being a well balanced wine, with nice flavours with an ability to refresh and quench the palate. I will definetely stock up on some bottles for the holidays and for some dinner party's. I also liked the added touch of the Austrian flag on the bottle cap. P2Q = 4.5/5.

If you were wondering why I haven't posted anything in a while, it's because mother nature has been having some crazy mood swings and dumped a $hitload of snow and freezing rain on us in the last week or so and I have been shoveling out my backyard, my driveway, steps, walkway and the driveway of the old man next door who is alway crunked (because my tempo drops some snow on his side). Luckily I am in decent shape so i wasn't sore, but I was tired as hell, and my brain just didn't want to think of anything to type up. I think mother nature was hungover from her Christmas party, where Jack Frost kept sending her drinks, because after all of this snow, Mother Nature finally woke up and shook off her Grey Gooseitis and decided that she had been a bi*ch with us all week and decided to give us temperatures ranging around zero degrees celsius for the next 2 days....which made all of the snow melt and the street slushy during the day and icy at night. Awesome.Anways, this weekend was still a pretty cool weekend. I had 8 of my friends including their wags over for supper, where I made some homemade pappardelle with my wife and some slow cooked bbq ribs, ya that's right I went outside and stayed by my charcoal bbq for 7 hours with snow up to my knees. Read the rest of this entry »