The Rest of Us

[Behemoth]

Hmm, I wonder if the bread is significantly different. Refrigerating could not possibly hurt, after all at a hütte/refugio they would be made well in advance. Sneak, even the cheap(er) wines in Südtirol are really good. 

[Wilfrid]

Speckknodelen is a great word to say out loud. 

[voyager]

13 hours ago, Sneakeater said:

not remotely retaining their shape as they boiled in the broth

When you cook up the remainder of the now hydrated dough, barely simmer them.    Cook these as you would gnocchi.

[Sneakeater]

Don’t get me wrong, it was a very low gentle boil. 

[voyager]

Sorry.  Misunderstood.   I only recalled my boiled nudi which resulted in green gruel.

[Sneakeater]

Pintade Yassa.

I did it!  I made a Yassa you could almost be served at a Senegalese restaurant (not a good Senegalese restaurant -- but baby steps)!

Steamed Dragon's Tongue beans on the side.

In Senegal, they like to drink Ginger Beer with this.  And I just found a bottle sitting in a remote corner of my fridge!

This is a great pairing!  The ginger in the beverage picked right up on the ginger in the Yassa sauce.  They just mated.

But this is the "Wines and Liquor" board.  After dinner, I'm having a Limoncello.  (Well, maybe not a "a" Limoncello.)  As far as I know, they don't drink this in Senegal.

[Sneakeater]

(This was the drumsticks.  Just wait'll you see what happens to the rest of the Pintade!)

[Sneakeater]

Whole wheat orecchiette with a couple of kinds of squash, sweet and hot pepper, onion, garlic scapes, and tomato.  Ricotta salata on top.

This is the kind of fresh clean dish that @small h and @voyager, and in a certain mood @joethefoodie, make.  Except when I make it, it comes out kind of gross.  Which is fine:  that's the way I like it.

I got the idea that a Verdicchio would be good with this.  Except I had none.  But wait:  I had a wine that for years was thought to be a Verdicchio.

2019 Lazzari Capriano del Colle Bianco "Fausto"

The more I drink this Turbiana di Lugana, the more I like it.

It really isn't exactly like anything else (including its close cousin but not identical twin Verdicchio).  And it really is the finish -- very sharp, pronounced herbs and minerals that last and last -- that makes it different.

This is a great food wine.  It loves food.  It certainly loved this pasta.

I read now that the tiny area in which this wine is produced is in danger of having most of ts vineyards torn up to accommodate a new high-speed train route out of Milan.  I want fast trains as much as the next guy.  But this wine MUST be saved!

[Sneakeater]

1 hour ago, Sneakeater said:

The more I drink this Turbiana di Lugana, the more I like it.

This is why I like to buy more than one bottle of things (at least things I think I'm going to like).

You really get to know a wine by having it more than once, with different foods.

[Sneakeater]

Hmmmm.

I don't know if I knew this before and forgot it, or have just learned it -- an increasingly common circumstance as I enter my sunset years -- but this may be 15% Chardonnay.

That certainly would explain the strong apple taste on the lead-in.

[Sneakeater]

On 9/16/2022 at 11:11 PM, Sneakeater said:

And if you're ever looking for a pairing for extremely highly flavored fatty pot roast in a sandwich, it's really just the ticket.

I wasn't going to write this up because it's just a repetition.  BUT:

The end of my leftover Mississippi Roast.  After a week or so of sitting in the refrigerator, it got to the point where it was so good it wanted to jump back and kiss itself.  Over more PA Dutch noodles:  this time not Pot Pie Squares but thin broad noodles (think of small jumbo shrimp).

Some steamed sprouting cauliflower on the side.  I didn't want to be overly repetitive so I didn't roast it with Nonnata di Pesce, my absolute ATF fave preparation.  But I couldn't resist drizzling it with some Ramp/Green Chili Hot Sauce.  Yum.

2021 Niepoort Drink Me Nat Cool

This comes in a 1 L bottle, and I just didn't finish it last time.

Now there's no particular reason to think that a glou-glou wine is going to improve sitting around a few days, even vacuum pumped and sealed.

So I'm not gonna claim that this was better than my first shot at this bottle in any objective sense.  Maybe it was just my mood tonight, I dunno.

But it seemed better.

The fruit, sharp as it was first go-round, seemed even sharper. There isn't a lot else here, to be honest, so that's the determinent.  It just seems lip-smacking tonight.  Tart berries and lots of em, and boy do they taste good.

This really is a wine a Mississippi Roast wants.

[Sneakeater]

Peverada is an ancient liver sauce from Treviso that is peppery and a-little-sweet-and-a-lot-sour (to be sure, once you say it's from the Veneto, saying it's sour is like saying the Pope is Catholic).  In the Middle Ages, nobles would have it on game; and peasants, who weren't permitted to hunt, had it on Guinea Fowl.

Faraola con Peverada (Guinea Fowl in Peverada Sauce)

Let me get this out of the way at the outset:  the sauce is supposed to be kind of a paste; mine wasn't.  I guess I didn't mince the liver enough (none of the recipes are very explicit about that).  But it tasted so fantastically good -- I mean fantastically good -- it didn't matter.

And one other thing:  Ada Boni, whose recipe was the primary one (but not the only one) I used, advises you to serve it on a heated plate, with the sauce boiling hot.  I served the sauce boiling hot, but I didn't bother to heat my plate.  I see now why she tells you to.  As the sauce cooled, it got worse:  oilier.  A word to the wise.

But, again, this was fantastic.  Fantastic.

(Farmer Abra, who sold me this wonderful Guinea Fowl -- her product really is first rate -- doesn't sell them with the giblets inside [although she does leave the neck on, thank God].  So I had to buy a bag of Guinea Fowl livers from her separately.  Farmer Abra is not being taken advantage of by the City Slickers.)

Steamed fagiolini on the side.  (I guess the textbook side with this would be Radicchio Treviso.  But that ship sailed here months ago.)

You could -- probably you're supposed to -- drink a red with this.  But with all the liver in the rich sauce, I really felt like I wanted a white.  Once I made that decision, the choice of pairing was obvious.

2019 Corte Gardoni Custoza "Greoto"

Custoza is to Soave what Bardolino is to Valpolicella:  essentially the same grape blend, but grown and made in Bardolino instead of Valpolicella.  It effectively tastes the same.

To me -- even apart from geographic determinism-- this was a near-perfect pairing.  The wine had the sharp acid to cut through that very very rich sauce.  But it had some roundness to stand up to the flavors, both of the sauce and the bird (while not rich and flavorful like game, Guinea Fowls are richer and more flavorful than chicken).  (Corte Gardoni makes a white called "Mael" that has some Riesling blended in. Now THAT would have been a pairing tonight!  If only I had any on hand.)

This wine has nothing notable about it -- except how well-made it is.  Every decision made seems to have been correct:  there is nothing whatsoever wrong with it.  That might seem like, at best, a negative virtue.  But in a relatively inexpensive everyday drink, it's actually saying something.

Like the Faraona con Peverada, it just tastes really good.

[Sneakeater]

Between this and the Yassa I made with its legs earlier in the week, this Guinea Fowl has yielded two of the best things I've ever cooked.

I can only await the hash I'm going to make from the remainder (the extra peverada I have -- in which the leftover Fowl is being stored -- could potentially make that like the best hash of all time).

[Sneakeater]

I mean, that peverada is SO good you can see why the Trevisans, having invented it in the Middle Ages, would just keep on making it.

[Sneakeater]

OK, since you're probably wondering, the components are:  the liver of whatever you're putting the sauce on; salami (should be Trevisan Sopressa -- but not so easy to come by near me); anchovy; lemon; garlic; parsley; vinegar; salt; PEPPER (shout-out once more to Burlap & Barrel Fermented White Pepper:  the BEST).

YUM fucking MO.