Do you all believe in comebacks? I hope so. If pixels on a computer screen are as binding as ink on paper then consider this my signature. I am back in the blogosphere.
Blogging isn’t easy, you know. You have to have something on your mind you think is worthwhile. You have to think it’s so worthwhile, in fact, that you squeeze to carve out some scrawny portion of your day so you can endure additional computer-eye strain and punch away at a keyboard only to see that thing you were thinking staring right back at you as if to say, Really? You think someone wants to read this? Well I’ve got something to write tonight, and it’s worth reading. It’s called Chaos Pasta!
What is Chaos Pasta, you ask? It’s exactly what it sounds like. It is a whole lot of pasta. And a whole lot of other stuff. And it is amazing. It is perfect for the hunger induced by an existential crisis, or just a cold winter night on the couch in front of a movie. And I invented it with my girlfriend, Jess. Here’s how it goes (with a picture for proof!):
INGREDIENTS:
- 1 Box Cavatelli or Campanelle
- Italian Sweet Sausage (2)
- Zucchini (2)
- Mushrooms (quantity to taste)
- Orange Bell Pepper (1 diced)
- Cannellini Beans (1 can)
- Cherry or Grape Tomatoes (half red; half yellow)
- Fresh Ricotta Cheese (2 table spoons)
- Fresh Chopped Basil (quantity to taste)
- Garlic (3 cloves)
- Salt, Pepper, Pepperoncini
- Olive Oil (2 table spoons)
- Chicken Stock (1/2 cup)
- Dry Riesling Wine (1 cup)
Brown sausage first. Remove fat. Clean pan. Add olive oil and brown the garlic. Meanwhile roast the halved tomatoes in the oven and begin boiling water for pasta. Remove garlic from the oil once golden on all sides and discard. Add mushrooms to oil and brown. When mushrooms begin to brown add sliced zucchini and orange bell pepper. Remove tomatoes from oven and add to saucepan. Add sausage to saucepan; let mixture cook for 5 minutes. Add cannellini beans and chicken stock to saucepan and let simmer for 10 minutes until liquid has cooked down. Pasta water should be boiling at this point; add the pasta. Once chicken stock has cooked to thick sauce, add wine and raise heat allowing wine to simmer and sauce to thicken again. Strain pasta and let rest in strainer. Add ricotta to sauce and stir. Add half of the chopped basil to the plain pasta in the strainer and toss. Add pasta to saucepan and stir for 5 minutes until sauce and pasta are well incorporated. Add remaining chopped basil and stir. Remove to a large bowl and serve. Should be topped with shaved Ricotta Salata and or grated Pecorino.
Prepare for Chaos… and enjoy!!!
September. Say it’s not so! The days of 95 degree heat and 100% humidity are now numbered. The girlfriend is back to her teaching job (sigh), and I am back to my WSET classes—this fall attempting to extract everything there could possibly be to know about sparkling and fortified wines from Jancis Robinson’s (extremely British) Oxford Companion to Wine. Back to the books; back to the grind!
But summer was not without its (10) finer moments.
They were:
1. Visit state of Wisconsin to attend brother’s graduation. Share hotel room with parents.
2. Return from Wisconsin!
3. Attend the wedding of a very dear friend.
4. Make plans with girlfriend for long weekend in Martha’s Vineyard.
5. Find out all ferries are booked, but luck out with walk-on space.
6. Rest and relaxation!
7. Back at work, BMX street bikers do photo shoot outside office and jump over things. Very sweet.
8. Lots of HEAT.
9. Watch new Sicilian movie downtown. Play darts. Visit park. Drive to beach.
10. See friends. Wear shorts. Love the summer.
I can hardly wait until next summer.
It’s 11 o’clock at night and still 80 degrees outside. But you’d never know it from in here.
Last Friday my building’s super came through on the installation of a long-awaited new air conditioning unit for my apartment. Out with the old and in with the new. I couldn’t have been happier to bid farewell to the ancient, yellowed by time, metal and plastic contraption that stuck out of my second story window like a mechanical tumor occasionally wheezing some (arguably) luke-warm air from the outside world into my living space. Good riddance!
I’m listening to the feline purr of the stealth new model pumping away now as I write. With advanced remote control action, I can now control the comfort of my climate to the degree with ease from all of my 200 square feet.
Once bound by the whimsy of the seasons, now I laugh in the face of Mother Nature. Ha!
This evening as I left the apartment to take my garbage downstairs, I thrived on the thickness of air that hung on the opposite side of my door. I chuckled at the humidity that fell over me while stepping outside toward the trashcans neatly lined in my building’s front court. I nearly felt pity for the beads of sweat that had formed along my neck by the time I had climbed the stairs back to my abode. For I knew that on the other side of that brown, metal door touting a half-proud looking 2A awaited a paradise of glacial bliss. The fabled New York City summer is no match for my new air conditioner!
Ok, so I don’t have Final Cut or anything, but this clumsily cut together clip gives a fairly good idea of what it was like to sit in the audience as three sommeliers competed in a foreign (to them) language in the practical round of the World’s Best Sommelier competition.
Ever go to a restaurant and have a guy in a dark suite with a goofy-looking pin on the lapel give you the wine list separately?
That guy would be the restaurant’s resident sommelier (frequently confused by friends of mine for Somalian).
The majority of sommeliers are not from Somalia. Instead, they are people who work in restaurants spending long hours on their feet for little recognition (especially since their job title is so hard pronounce). They spend their days climbing stairs between the restaurant’s wine storage, where their job is to unload and stock case after 40 pound case of wine bottles, and the restaurant’s dining room where the stories are told, the bottles are uncorked, and the customers are rarely satisfied. In their off time, they are required to devoutly study the endlessly detail-filled world of wine and spirits.
Once in a while, though, sommeliers do get recognized. Every three years a French organization for the trade hosts an international competition in a different location around the globe to find out which nation employs the sharpest and most well-rounded trickster in the trade.
So 2010 happened to be a competition year, and the competition happened to be in Chile. In fact, that happens to have had a lot to do with the dates of the trip I went on. Lucky me.
The competition started with 55 entrants. It ended with one winner. None of the competitors were from the USA (I heard a lot of speculation as to why this was, but nothing concrete). Most of it occured behind closed doors over the course of two days.
The last round, though, was live. Starting mid-afternoon at Santiago’s W Hotel, three finalists took the stage, one at a time. They were from France, Switzerland, and England (the English contestant was French-born, but a British citizen).
The stage supported three linen-clad tables around which were seated the judges. The surviving sommeliers would have to treat the stage as though it were a restaurant and the judges like customers while tackling a series of challenges that included mixing cocktails to specification, properly serving champagne, decanting an oversized bottle of red wine, devising dishes that would match well with a chosen series of wines, correcting a wine list riddled with errors, identifying vineyards around the world from photographs, and yes, sipping wines and guessing where and what year they were from.
French-born British Citizen, Gerard Basset won. He was really good.
Valparaiso, for all of its color, chaos, and corrosion draping the pacific-facing hills, stood out to me more for its sounds than anything else. At night, after parting with my group, I would stand outside on the balcony that reached from my room into the air over steeply falling streets and staircases just to listen. The stop-and-start cowl of roosters, the rhytmic yelp of stray dogs, mopeds grinding up and down hills, electricity and brass from punk rock garage bands, sirens. It was a sound stew that was cacophonous and unmistakeably distinc at the same time. It was those nights standing in the cool dusk, watching the hillsides twinkle with streetlights and listening to those sounds that I felt the most in Chile and away from home.
The harvesters were elusive. But with miles of land under vine and hundreds of tons of grapes being shipped and pressed all across central Chile, we knew they must be there. Time after time, though, we would pile into a winery representative’s not-so-roomy Subaru, climbing and conquering the dirt pathways that crisscross the yellowing rows of vines, determined to find the people responsible for the grape’s journey from farm to factory— all to no avail. Finally, however, we came upon them.
There were men and women. They were young and old. I didn’t know as much about them as I wanted to. Where did they live? Where were they from? What did they do for the other 3/4 of the year? Were they settled or transient? Were they Chilean? Was this work a step in the ladder of socio-economic ascension, or were these people born of generations of harvesters? Did they even drink the wines their hands were responsible for?
One thing was sure: they were lightning fast. I was told that pay was doled to the workers in the form of tokens, one for each plastic tub of grapes deposited in the cavernous, gray receptacles waiting on tractor bed to be sped to the winery for conversion to liquid. I didn’t find out exactly what each token translated to in terms of currency, but there was a general consensus that each token yielded about 80 cents (US). At the prospect of earning a few extra tokens, a not-insignificant number of the harvesters would actually sprint from the edge of the vineyard up the chalky path to deposit their grapes, only to run full-throttle back to their work clipping.
Of course, as quickly as they were darting to and fro, up and down the rows of grapevines, in their flurry of leaves, sprigs, and clippers, the harvesters were actually fairly easy to keep track of—now that we had left the confines of our Subaru, that is. Apparently, they liked Bon Jovi. A portable radio, pumping out the 80’s dive-bar classic, Livin’ On a Prayer, followed their course through the foliage. Up the hill, down the hill, back and forth along the planted rows; where the clippers went, so too did John Bon Jovi’s Jersey-bred, life-loving, big-hair howl.
And thus even on a bucolic hillside moving tranquilly into the sleepiness of autumn, New Jersey was there, making noise and keeping spirits high.
It was slightly disorienting to step off a 13 hour flight and find myself at the opposite end of summer. New York’s annual thaw had really just gotten underway— the sidewalks were filled with strollers and an absence of NY winter’s ubiquitous black wool uniforms. The flecks of green spattered along my neighborhood’s branches were growing deeper and fuller each day; from yellowy lemongrass to key lime— still months of sunshine away from the broad, avocado-skin toned leaves of August.
But Chile’s August had already passed and the sun was throwing out its last douses of golden heat when I first arrived. Gradually, though, the longer I was there, autumn’s perfume of dried out foliage, mineral smokiness, and dust began to saturate the air. And in the evening the chilly promise of winter and rain settled in, replacing the flawless sunshine of the daytime.
It was time for the harvest. Just about everywhere I went the vines were heavy with deep blue clusters of fully ripened wine grapes. I’ve read on the subject of the harvest/winemaking process until my eyes lost their ability to focus, but I (like most people) had never had the ability to see these processes in action before my time in Chile this April.
Well you know how the rest of that one goes… and if you don’t, you probably grew up someplace other than Montclair.
What you’re looking at below is a grape called Alicante Bouschet. Jancis Robinson’s Oxford Companion to Wine (which is one of the heaviest books I own) tells me that Alicante Bouschet has declined in importance over the 20th century, although it is still one of the most widely planted grape varieties in all of France.
We found it growing in Vina Carmen’s ‘varietal garden’— a small organically farmed plot behind their winery in which they alternate grape varieties by row, and where nearly every grape you could think of—including the Alicante Bouschet—were found hanging on vine.
Alicante Bouschet is primarily used as a coloring agent in blends— just look at the color that shows when Alpana pulled back the skin! By the way, her nail-polish is black…
ARIEL LACAYO:
Serviceman extrodinaire. Ariel buys for the Havana Alma de Cuba restaurant group in NY and has built a career out of opening restaurants in Manhattan and the Hamptons. Ariel’s eagle eye for detail in the arena of fine dining service was a source of group bonding during the Concours du Meilleur Sommelier du Monde as we struggled to suppress violent laughter while Ariel mercilessly cited each service faux-pas committed by the competitors during their live-audience practical.
ALPANA SINGH, M.S.:
Master Sommelier. Native Californian. Pug owner. “Dynamo” strikes me as the most appropriate.. nay.. the only word to describe Alpana Singh. One of the few women worldwide to boast the title, Master Sommelier, Alpana was not only tremendously accomplished but endlessly enthusiastic, proud wife of a novelist, ultimate authority on all things Chicago, and owner of one very hip puppy (http://alturl.com/ah6r).
She blogs at http://whatwouldalpanadrink.blogspot.com/
RUTH TOBIAS:
Journalist. Film buff. Diet Coca Cola enthusiast. Ruth joined us on behalf of the Sommelier Journal (http://www.sommelierjournal.com/), a tremendous resource for both the trade professional and the serious oenophile, written (well) by people who work in, or are highly familiar with, the wine industry. The winery visits for Ruth were a flurry of notebook scribbling, inquisitive conversations with winemakers, and the occasional pit-stop for a diet soda along the way.
See how all the elements came together in Ruth’s blog: http://www.denveater.com/
