Sunday, April 10, 2011

Wine Tasting 101

The tasting turned out to be a lot of fun! The company, PRP Wines, has been around for quite awhile, and they specialize in wines from Germany, Hungary, Italy, France and California. The wines don't contain sulphites, which really seems to allow a cleaner, fresher taste than we were all used to! We talked Jack and Jeff into staying for the demonstration, and we all learned some great stuff: the 5 "S"s of tasting (sight, swirl, smell, sip, savor), that a later harvest makes a sweeter wine (Becky already knew that!), and that "varietal" means grape! (Duh! He probably thought I was an idiot. So much for my great knowledge...) Anyway, my dream job now is to be a PRP wine salesperson! Peter (our wine expert) got to DRINK everything he was demonstrating! Then he had a nice plate of food with a glass of his choice wine for the night! Pinch me, I must be dreaming! I WANT THAT JOB!

The pictures I planned to take of the tasting, our group, etc, didn't really happen. But, since we're now clients (cool, huh?) of PRP, we can have a tasting whenever we like, so I'll do better next time. But here are pictures of the food, along with the recipe links. They were all quite good! Enjoy!




This is Martha's Whole Living Shrimp & Avocado Salad. The link isn't working right now, but try Googling it later. NO mayo, just a few simple, fresh ingredients. The leftover was a hit with Jackson today (he doesn't like mayo) but loved this because of the avocado.



You can make this with your fave antipastis!


 

These were so easy. I used Butoni tortellini. (side note: I added the fresh sugar peas to the boiling pasta for the last 3 minutes instead of using frozen and nuking them) Mmmmm!


 

This is LITERALLY heaven on earth! Thanks, Annie for the fabulous recipe! (and thanks Pete, for picking up the very resonably priced fontina for me!) (note again: the recipe calls for 1/4 cup of olive oil, but I only drizzled, and it was wonderful) We all loved this so much, we stood and ate it from the dish!!!


 

I will make these many more times. Starbucks coffee, chocolate and cinnamon. What else could you possibly want in a muffin?! (third note: I used a non-stick muffin pan, so I didn't need cupcake papers. There's enough butter to pop them right out of the pan. The icing would be overkill, these things are sweet and perfect by themselves. Also, I used decaf Via coffee since we were going to be eating them in the evening. The caffeinated would keep me up for DAYS!)



Who knew wine tasting could be so fattening?!

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