Category Archives: Wine

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Recipe: A new twist on Pizza

I love making pizzas with my family. I say pizza with an “S” because I end up making individual pizzas for each of us… I halve, double, or make regular portions of my version of a Weight Watchers whole wheat pizza dough recipe and go from there, depending on who’s having dinner with us that evening. For M, it’s ham and pepperoni… for D, it’s a cheese pizza… if we’re including E for dinner, it’s just pepperoni… but for me, it’s a special black bean and corn salsa pizza. Doesn’t this look delicious?

Here’s how I start. The pizza dough recipe is supposed to make eight servings. After trying to make individual pizzas from this single recipe, I’ve learned that I need to either make 1.5 recipes or double to make four large enough pizzas to feed my guys… it takes A LOT to fill them up… but I digress. Here are the directions to make my pizza dough:

WW Whole Wheat Pizza Dough

Makes 8 servings

Sponge:

2 t active dry yeast

¼ cup lukewarm water

¼ cup all-purpose flour

Pizza Dough:

½ cup fat-free milk

1 1/3 cups all-purpose flour

½ cup whole-wheat flour

¼ t salt

2 pkt equal

1. To prepare sponge, in a large bowl, sprinkle yeast over the water; when the yeast looks wet, add flour and stir hard. Cover loosely with plastic wrap or a damp towel and let stand at room temperature for about 40 minutes.

2. To make the dough, stir the milk into the sponge. In a medium bowl, combine the all-purpose flour, whole-wheat flour, salt and equal. Add to the sponge and stir to blend.

3. Lightly sprinkle work surface with flour. Turn out the dough; knead until it become elastic and resilient, 10-12 minutes. *This is important… dough needs to be kneaded thoroughly for this to work.

4. Spray a large bowl with Pam, place dough in bowl and cover loosely with plastic wrap or damp towel and let rise in a warm, draft-free place until doubled in volume, 45-60 minutes.

5. Preheat oven to 450 degrees. Punch down dough, lightly sprinkle the work surface with flour and roll out dough to a 14” circle. Transfer dough to a baking sheet, arrange toppings and bake until lightly browned, about 10 minutes.

Per serving: 3 PointsPlus (1/8)

My NOTE: I make this dough into four individual pizzas that are rectangular and approximately 7”x14” (?). The pizzas are very thin, but I can cut them into 6-8 individual slices and be able to have my own pizza using 6 points for the dough. Totally worth it, imho…

Once the dough is done, I form each person’s pizza. For mine, I roll it into a rectangle (as noted above) and then spray with Pam and sprinkle garlic powder on top. I’m now ready to mix up my version of black bean and corn salsa. Using The Force, I mix a can of drained/rinsed black beans, an equal amount of fresh corn off the cob (or a can, drained and rinsed), mild salsa, some taco seasonings and some Cabernet Sauvignon. I like to also add a spoonful of pesto to add some depth to the taste and use about 1 cup of this mixture to top my pizza. The pesto recipe that I like best is one that my niece created and posted on her blog, PB Fingers and called Sunflower Seed and Walnut Pesto (http://www.pbfingers.com/2012/06/26/sunflower-seed-and-walnut-pesto/). If you want to read her blog, Peanut Butter Fingers, use this link and follow her for some terrific new recipes and great fitness ideas (http://www.pbfingers.com/). I would read this blog every day even if she wasn’t my niece!

After topping the pizza with your salsa, add your favorite cheese blend and follow the cooking directions as noted above. I used a blend of Asiago and Parmesan cheeses in the pizza I made the other night. Here’s how yummy it looked when I pulled it out of the oven.

I like to cut my pizza into 8 pieces and eat it with a knife and fork. There’s so much on top of this pizza crust that it’s just impossible to pick up and eat any other way. I hope you’ll try this pizza dough recipe sometime and play around with different toppings on your own pizza. There are franchises out there that make big money creating bizarre blends for pizzas… take a chance and create something that’s totally yours. You might be stunned at how well it all turns out!

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Recipe: Mexican taco cheese dip

I had to bring an appetizer to work… and I work at a winery…. so I needed to come up with something yummy. I also needed to come up with a dish that could be made quickly and warmed up later. Jeez…. So many parameters within which to work. Could I do it??

Over the years, I have found that people who love wine seem to also be people who appreciate tasty food, so sharing something with them needed to be great. My darling hubby had pulled a package of ground turkey out of the freezer earlier, so that’s where I started.

I browned the package of ground turkey until it was toasty brown. I could have added onion and garlic, but I was a bit pressed for time this morning. Once the meat was thoroughly cooked, I liberally spread taco seasoning on top and then added the quarter bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon that was resting in my fridge. A few more minutes in the pan was all it took to turn plain turkey into a spicy concoction worthy of a finicky foodie, such as myself.

My next step was to add some salsa. I poured from the jug (yes, generic and mild, I admit it) and mixed until well incorporated. The last addition was a package of Velveeta cheese. This stuff melts extremely well and handles reheating beautifully, so it was the perfect “go to” for this treat. I popped my dish into the microwave and heated it up, minute by minute, until all the cheese was melted.

Tasting it was a delight… Unfortunately, it was only 11am and I wasn’t going to serve this until after 6pm. Thankfully, the ingredients I used here are very forgiving. My dish warmed up well in the winery’s microwave, I served it with some scoop able tortilla chips, and had nothing left to bring home.

There’s something so satisfying about bringing home an empty dish. Try this recipe for your next get together and see if you don’t have the same great result!

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A Recipe Redux: a new twist on leftovers

A “redux”, by definition, means of a topic, restored, brought back, revisited.  This recipe is my way of showing you, dear reader, how to take something that clearly isn’t going to work in its present state and turn it into something that has your family and friends saying “wow.. what is this?”  I had the opportunity to make a totally new recipe from some leftovers and was so thrilled with the results that I simply had to share them.

Every so often, there is leftover food from an event at our winery.  Caterers don’t want to take cooked food home and not everyone thinks about bringing food storage bags to take away the excess, so the employees and volunteers become the willing recipients of this cooked bounty.   This happened recently and I was very excited to try my hand at creating something totally new and different from the plate of food I had to bring home.

What did I have to start?  The caterer had made a beef tenderloin with a tasty brown sauce, scalloped potatoes, crab cakes with a mango salsa, and a great green salad.  There was enough left over that plates were made up for the three staff members working the event (I love when caterers think of this, since I feel funny traipsing into someone else’s event and grabbing some of their food) that included individual portions of each item.  Since I knew the salad wouldn’t make it home (and it wouldn’t be enough to feed M and myself), I ate that while still at work.  I now had three slices of cooked beef tenderloin with sauce, a serving of scalloped potatoes, and two small crab cakes (with that yummy salsa) to take home for dinner.  The crux of the problem was that this wasn’t going to feed both my husband and myself… oh, what to do… what to do…

My Redux:  Once I got home, I sliced the beef into thin strips and removed the salsa topped crab cakes to a separate plate.  I decided to simply warm up the crab cakes, which was the best solution for us… we love crab cakes!  I then proceeded to make dinner.  Using 1T butter and 1T of flour, I made a roux, allowing the mixture to bubble a bit to cook out the flour taste.  Next came some wine, to extend the sauce.  In this case, I used a nice amount of Cabernet Sauvignon (that I already had open in the fridge) and about 3/4 of the same amount of Reserve Chardonnay (that I also had open in the fridge).  The sauce now was slightly pink and needed a bit of seasoning… some simple salt and pepper worked nicely.

I now had a sauce but felt that it wasn’t quite enough.  I added the serving of scalloped potatoes to the mixture and squished it down (great cooking term, eh?) to allow the butter and cheese in the potatoes to add some richness to the sauce while the potatoes (when smashed) added depth.  After stirring the mixture a bit, I added the beef strips and sauce to finish the dish.  For leftovers, this was looking pretty amazing!  I did add some more Chardonnay to thin out the sauce, since the potatoes had cooked a bit and added a little too much depth.  Once everything tasted “right”, I plated this over some brown rice and added the warmed crab cakes on the side.  It was a perfect amount for two and my husband’s question of “what is this?” was just the line I needed to feel fabulous when I replied:

“Oh, it’s just leftovers”

See if you can come up with a way to use your leftovers in your own version of a Recipe Redux… you might be pleasantly surprised with what you create if you just think outside the box!

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Recipe: Chicken Cassoulet

Here’s an easy recipe for Cassoulet that I’ve adapted from Weight Watchers… and included wine.  This was our dinner last night and it got rave reviews from my favorite taste testers (my family).  Since I use The Force when I cook (do I sound like a broken record, warning everyone about this?), the amounts are approximate and will vary depending on the foods you prefer and what you have on hand. 

Start by preheating your oven to 350 degrees.  You’ll start this recipe on the stove top and then allow it to cook for about 30 minutes or so in the oven, so go ahead and get this ready.  If you’re doing the first part early in the day and planning to cook it in the oven just before eating, the only thing I would change would be to add an extra 15 minutes to the baking time before you serve it.  Mine baked a little too long, so it’s pretty dry, but that’s the way my guys like it.

In a Dutch oven (or large skillet with a lid), brown 8 boneless, skinless chicken thighs.  The original recipe calls for bone-in thighs, but my family prefers to not deal with bones whenever possible.  I do this in two stages and remove them to a plate as they brown.

Add diced Canadian bacon and saute until browned and crispy.   Add sliced baby carrots (I used about 2 cups), sliced celery stalks (I had some celery sticks that needed to be used, so I went a little overboard on this one, but I don’t believe it hurt the dish at all), and a diced onion (the recipe actually calls for leeks, but I forgot to get this at the store and I always have onion on hand), and cook until the veggies are soft and a little toasty, stirring frequently to distribute the small amount of fat left from the bacon.  Add 2 cans of cannellini (white kidney) beans (drained slightly), a half bottle of James River Cellars Pinot Gris  (I had this on hand… next time I’ll use James River Cellars Reserve Chardonnay), a packet of chicken broth seasoning, water (I used a coffee cup’s worth), 3 bay leaves, and some lemon thyme (from my friend’s garden).  I then allowed all the flavors to combine and brought the dish to a slow simmer.  Return the chicken thighs (and collected juices) to the pan and nestle the meat among the vegetables.

Baking your dish: Here’s where you can take a break, if needed.  I actually put the lid on the Dutch oven and let it rest on the stove top for about an hour at this point.  M wasn’t due home for a bit and I knew dinner wasn’t going to need to be ready for a few hours.  If you’re making this immediately, pop the Dutch oven (with lid on) into your hot oven and allow to cook for an hour.  Since you’re not using bone-in chicken, you can decrease the baking time a little.  Do realize that if you’re making this using bone-in chicken, you should bake it for 1 hour and 30 minutes.  If you’ve taken a break and are bringing it back from “cool”, I would bake for 1 hour and 15 minutes, but this part isn’t exact.  Check your dinner and decide for yourself when the meal is cooked… the meat will be falling apart and the sauce will be thickened to your liking.

Remove the pan from the oven and discard the bay leaves.  If you so desire, take a coffee cup’s worth of sauce (without meat) and process it in a blender until smooth, then return to the dish and stir.  I totally skipped this part because my guys were “starving”, but this is a nice touch.  You can also use a stick blender and just pulse it a few times near the bottom of the pan, staying away from any of the chicken.

Remember to always use a wine that you would drink… there are tons out there that don’t cost a small fortune and are worthy of cooking.  I always have James River Cellars wines on hand, so I tend to lean toward using those.    This is one of my favorite cold-weather dishes and I hope it will become one of yours as well.

Cheers!

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Recipe: Chicken Prosciutto Roll

Pairing a cheese and a wine can sometimes be tricky, but it can be a really beautiful thing if you pair Bourcin’s garlic and herb cheese with James River Cellars’ Gewurztraminer white wine. This particular Gewurztraminer is done Alsatian-Style… off-dry and floral but with a slight citrus taste. It’s great with Szechuan foods and tastes fabulous in/with this recipe.

Again, this is a Use-The-Force recipe. For each serving, use a very thin chicken breast (or a thin piece of veal), lay a piece of prosciutto on the chicken and top with Bourcin cheese (be as liberal as you’d like… this is why I say you’re using The Force). Roll the breast, secure with a toothpick, and sear the roll in olive oil on all sides until nicely browned.

At this point, put the lid on the pan and allow the meat to cook thoroughly. While your dinner is cooking, pop a package of brown rice into the microwave (use whichever brand you like best) and cook according to package directions. When meal is almost completely cooked, remove the lid and add Gewurztraminer to the pan to lift up bits of the cooked cheese and turn it into a sauce. If the sauce seems a little thin, feel free to add a bit of flour or a spoonful of cheese and cook until it thickens to your liking. You can also add a small amount of butter to add some gloss to the sauce.

You’ll want to serve this over the brown rice, with a simple green salad and a glass of Gewurztraminer. I added green beans, wrapped in the remaining prosciutto, and roasted until just cooked. Simple, yet elegant… especially if you love the Gewurztraminer from James River Cellars!

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Recipe: Shrimp Stir Fry

Dinner tonight was one of those “I’ve got 15 minutes to make dinner… let’s go!” meals and it was fabulous, if I do say so myself.  You should try this recipe and use The Force to make your own amazing 15 minute dinner.

I started with a pound of frozen shrimp (the bagged stuff from my local grocery store that is usually on sale), a bag of broccoli slaw, and a sauce mixture of hoisin sauce, James River Chardonnay, spoonful of flour, a thumb-size amount of lemongrass and a thumb-size amount of garlic.  When I walked in the door, I started peeling the shrimp that my husband had pulled out of the freezer and put in water.

 

Once the shrimp were peeled, I put some good olive oil in a large skillet and sauteed the shrimp until they were pink and a little toasty.  I then added half the bag of broccoli slaw and sauteed everything together.  Once the vegetables were slightly softened, I added the sauce and gave the entire meal a moment in the pan to allow the flour to cook a bit and thicken.  I had popped some brown rice into the microwave just as I added the vegetables, so dinner was ready in just about 15 minutes.

Dinner was served over brown rice and it was amazing…. so simple and quick, yet the flavors melded together nicely and made for a great meal.  Try playing with wine when making dinner.  It can be fun to come up with different ways to utilize wine in place of chicken stock.

There’s something so wonderful about creating a dinner that makes your loved ones happy…  wishing you a lovely evening and a grand meal!

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Drinking wine can be beneficial

beatitudesofmylife's avatarBeatitudes of my life

I read the coolest article recently, relating alcohol intake to bone density in women over 50.  Seriously… there’s actual scientific info to back this up.  Check out the following article (http://www.lifeslittlemysteries.com/2665-alcohol-bone-health.html) and read the specifics for yourself. 

While I’m not saying that everyone should go out and chug down two glasses of wine a day, I do like the idea that there are positive benefits to partaking in something I already enjoy.  Granted, I’m not quite in the article’s target demographic yet, but I’ll be there at some point and I might as well start learning all I can about how to increase or maintain bone density as I get older.  My family history allows for this to be fairly important, so I’ll be paying closer attention than I might have otherwise.

Hopefully you find this article to be as helpful as I did.

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Recipe: Wine Cupcakes

Thanks to the glory that is (can be) Facebook, I found a simple cupcake recipe this morning on a friend’s page.  It’s made with Cake Mix, Greek Yogurt, and Water… only I decided to try making it with wine.

I started with a generic Devil’s food cake mix and added a cup (8oz) of nonfat plain Greek yogurt.  I was trying with the idea of using a flavored yogurt but, well, I didn’t have any in the fridge.  I then added a cup of wine… I used James River Cellars Rad Red.  I mixed everything well and then poured the mixture into cupcake tins.  I used mini Bundt pans (pictured) and a tin of mini muffin tins.  After baking for 20 minutes at 375 degrees, they looked so fun!  I added a dollop of chocolate frosting on top of the mini cakes and called it dessert.  YUM!

Have you tried substituting red wine in your chocolate baked good products?  It’s amazing to see what you can create with some great wine and a little ingenuity.  Try it and make your own new creations… your family and friends will be so happy you did!

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The funny side of wine

There are always days in our lives that make you search for the obscure and the silly… those days when you need to have a place where you can escape the concerns and frustrations that are making you crazy and allow the comical to take over.  Yesterday was one of those days.

So to that end, I went looking for some fun (and funny) wine quotes to use at the winery where I work.   I found a grouping, posted together originally (as far as I can tell) by a website called iloveindia (http://lifestyle.iloveindia.com/lounge/funny-wine-quotes-2953.html) that I thought fit the bill… I hope you enjoy them as much as I did.

  • Wine is constant proof that God loves us and loves to see us happy. – Benjamin Franklin
  • What is the definition of a good wine? It should start and end with a smile. – William Sokolin
  • Wine is bottled poetry. – Robert Louis Stevenson
  • Wine gives a man nothing… it only puts in motion what had been locked up in frost. – Samuel Johnson
  • Wine gives courage and makes men more apt for passion. – Ovid
  • The vine bears three kinds of grapes: the first of pleasure, the second of intoxication, the third of disgust. – Diogenes
  • Wine is a turncoat; first a friend and then an enemy. – Henry Fielding
  • This is one of the disadvantages of wine; it makes a man mistake words for thoughts. – Samuel Johnson
  • Wine is a peep-hole on a man. – Alcaeus
  • Wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging: and whosoever is deceived thereby is not wise. – Bible quotes
  • Good wine is a good familiar creature if it be well used. – William Shakespeare
  • Wine makes every meal an occasion, every table more elegant, every day more civilized. – Andre Simon
  • A mind of the caliber of mine cannot derive its nutriment from cows. – George Bernard Shaw on wine
  • Sweetness belongs in the Mosel wine like the bubbles belong in the Champagne. – Nik Weiss
  • Appreciating old wine is like making love to a very old lady. It is possible. It can even be enjoyable. But it requires a bit of imagination. – Andre Tchelistcheff
  • Blind tastings are to wine what strip poker is to love. – Kermit Lynch
  • The discovery of a wine is of greater moment than the discovery of a constellation. The universe is too full of stars. – Benjamin Franklin
  • What is better than to sit at the end of the day and drink wine with friends, or substitutes for friends! – James Joyce
  • If God forbade drinking, would He have made wine so good! – Cardinal Richelieu
  • Wine improves with age. The older I get, the better I like it. – Anonymous
  • Where there is plenty of wine, sorrow and worry take wing. – Anonymous
  • I have enjoyed great health at a great age because everyday since I can remember I have consumed a bottle of wine except when I have not felt well. Then I have consumed two bottles. – Bishop of Seville
  • Compromises are for relationships, not wine. – Sir Robert Scott Caywood
  • Beer is made by men, wine by God! – Martin Luther
  • Men are like wine – some turn to vinegar, but the best improve with age. – Pope John XXIII
  • Life is too short to drink bad wine. – Anonymous
  • If food is the body of good living, wine is its soul. – Clifton Fadiman
  • I made wine out of raisins so I wouldn’t have to wait for it to age. – Steven Wright

Remember… wine doesn’t have to be part of every day in your life, but it can certainly make every day of your life a little sweeter, a little brighter, and a little lighter.   And with that, I’ll leave you with one of my favorite quotes, which I found on Pinterest.

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Recipe: Chicken Noodle Soup… with wine

I don’t know of any other food that has such an amazing ability to evoke memories of  “home” to me than Chicken Noodle Soup.   I adore the combination of the broth, vegetables, and chicken that can conjure up visions of snowy stay-at-home days or lazy fall lay-around days.  It’s getting to be about that time of the year when my crock pot and my soup pot both get a workout… when dinners are made the night before and the house seems steeped in the fragrant mirepoix of celery, carrots, and onion.

Today was one of those days when I just needed to make Chicken Noodle Soup.  M is home sick and wants to eat soup… so, of course, I wanted to make it from scratch.  He will agree when I say that he makes a lousy patient.  He doesn’t like to be sick and hates not having enough energy to do much of anything, so my thought is to make something that tastes good and has wonderful healing properties (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_soup) to make M feel better as soon as possible.

As with most of my recipes, this is definitely a “Use The Force” recipe.  I start with my big soup pot.  This thing can easily hold an entire cooked chicken (picked up cold from the local grocery store) and enough water to cover it… so that’s where I start.  I cook the chicken in the water until the chicken is almost ready to fall apart.  Remove the chicken to a strainer and allow to cool before picking all the meat off the bones.  You now have a very light stock to start your soup.

I finely dice carrots and celery and add to the soup.  Today, I used a few hands full of baby carrots and the inside pieces of a stalk of celery as my mirepoix… M’s not a big fan of onion, so I didn’t include it today.  I then diced some of the chicken breast into fairly small pieces.  I saved most of the chicken for other uses but a total of one breast, sliced and diced, was enough for this entire pot of soup.  I allowed the vegetables to cook for awhile and then adjusted the seasonings… adding salt/pepper, a little parsley and lemon thyme, and then included four packets of G. Washington Golden Bouillon (my favorite from childhood).  Since M wanted “noodle soup”, I broke up about an inch-width of linguine into four pieces to simulate the name brand’s noodles… now it just needed to cook the noodles.

Once everything was incorporated and the noodles had plumped up, I added about a half cup of Reserve Chardonnay from James River Cellars Winery.  I could have used any white wine, but I really like the way Chardonnay cooks and it adds a really lovely back note to the broth.   This made my chicken noodle soup taste amazing.

I hope you’ll try your hand at making your own version of Chicken Noodle Soup, especially if someone you love isn’t feeling up to par.  It might be just what the Doctor ordered!