Tag: wine

Books, sweet books

The other night I dreamed that we walked into the new house, and they’d painted every single room beige. I was distraught, crying “Why? We were going to buy it anyway!”

Today I started packing my books. Besides china and extra blankets, they’re the easiest to box up first, yet paradoxically the very items I’m most anxious to have put away afterwards so I can feel truly at home. I’ll never forget having to leave almost all my books behind on vicarage, taking only my “how to raise a baby” type books for my first year with an infant. When Pastor Crown came in to see us for the first time, he announced that he always looks over a family’s bookshelves to get a sense of who they are. I was horrified, but too scared to scream, “This isn’t meeeeeee!”

The books are a decent historical record of all the silly and not-so-silly phases I’ve gone through over the years. One box is full of simple living books like Your Money or Your Life and In Praise of Slowness. A few more hold my ginormous wine tomes, although I finally passed my sommelier flashcards to a friend. There’s a box with my childhood favorites–the Laura Ingalls Wilder series, the Anne of Green Gables series, the Narnia series, and some Madeline L’Engle volumes. All of the books I studied for English lit classes in college, including the odd postmodern Irish literature collection. My Lutheran books, which multiply quarterly now that I’m on the CPH board and get boxes of all the new products. The stacks of law school books and writing books, including one creative book called The Artist’s Way that I almost dumped but then thought better of, because maybe I need a humbling reminder that I once thought some woo-woo “letting go of my childhood and all the people who are holding back my creativity” workbook would make me a bestselling novelist. (To be fair, a lot of my writer friends love Julia Cameron’s books. I am not one of them.)

Lookin' pretty bare in there.

A few of my books are actually my parents’, borrowed from their shelves in college and never returned. (Shhh!) And the rest are my favorite works of fiction, everything from my complete Oscar Wilde collection to Edith Wharton, Chaim Potok and Ernest Hemingway to Anthony Trollope and Henry James.

Is it too soon to already miss them?

Author name:
Publish date:
March 27th, 2012
Discussion:
2 Comments
Tags:



Spring Break

It started off well, with gorgeous weather, a trip to the park, family walks, and baseball in the yard. And then, this morning my CPH cold had turned into a sinus infection, and all our fun break plans went out the window when instead I had to drug myself with ibuprofen and drag all three kids to the doctor and pharmacy. Jonathan was pretty much passed out the whole time–thank goodness for Kate, who carried his sleepy body all over for me.

And, it seems I just signed up to write wine pairings for Cooking Light’s big, bad, benchmark anniversary cookbook. Which is fabulous and a huge honor. But they’re due Friday. And, since my left sinus is throbbing and I can’t even begin to think about wine until this combo antibiotic and decongestant kick in, I’m sitting on the porch swing watching the kids play and thinking how nice my bed would feel if I were curled up in it, but alternately tearing up and laughing at their antics and wishing I could freeze them in time, right now.

And, since it seems I always pick the times when I should definitely be concentrating on all the big life changes and my ginormous to-do list to launch a big old work project, well…I’m launching a big old work project. Maybe it’s an escape mechanism, so I don’t have to think about collecting boxes and packing. Derek hates my timing, but you can’t put a stopper on the Muse.

She will have to go into the holding pen for awhile, though. I have wine pairings to write, parks to explore, playdates to attend, and, unfortunately, boxes to pack.

Author name:
Publish date:
March 19th, 2012
Discussion:
2 Comments
Tags:



It’s all over.

So far this month, we have had

  • Preschool Tree-Trimming Party and Concert
  • Three kids’ birthday parties
  • One grownup birthday party
  • UT graduation/open house
  • LWML cookie exchange
  • Kate’s piano recital/party
  • Campus ministry party
  • K-8 Christmas Concert
  • After which, Derek and I snuck away to go hear a band! In a bar! After 9 p.m.! (Really.)
  • Party/gathering for visiting Principal candidate
  • Bell choir concert (plus extra rehearsals)
  • Church live nativity
  • Kids’ church Christmas program

At these gatherings, I ate approximately

  • 2 pounds of cake
  • 1,600 cookies
  • 5 bags of chips and 2 cartons of dip
  • 4 containers of Chex mix

And drank about

  • 20 bazillion glasses of wine, eggnog, milk punch, and church lemonade

And gained

  • I’m afraid to look, but am definitely going on detox in January

Our counter contains

  • Several packages of fudge
  • Homemade cookies and pumpkin bread
  • Chex mix (which I cannot stop eating)
  • A box of truffles
  • Three boxes of Santa chocolates
  • A large tin of sweets from Swiss Colony
  • And I forget what else, but everything is a lovely, thoughtful gift from our wonderful church members.

Our fridge contains

  • Spinach and balsamic vinaigrette

The kids’ presents are on their way from Amazon.com, I’ve worked out menus for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, my last two mosaics have been grouted and are drying on the counter, and now I can sit back, stop staying out late and reveling, and remember that it’s Advent, and prepare for Christmas like we’re supposed to all along.

Oh, and maybe I can squeeze in some work, too. And a workout or ten.

 

Author name:
Publish date:
December 19th, 2011
Discussion:
5 Comments
Tags:



Wine tasting

Every year, Derek and I donate a wine tasting to the school auction.

The first year I was totally nervous about how it would go off. A wine tasting? Half our students are Baptist. Luckily, the Lutherans stepped up and started a bidding war, and it’s been a popular item ever since.

We like doing it because I get a lot of free wine, and it’s a fun way to use it up. Our school gets money, and we get to have a party. It’s a win-win.

We arrived early and began to set up.

I’m actually much better at cooking than making things pretty. That’s why I made all the food, and Derek laid everything out.

I did come up with one cute idea: olives in martini glasses.

The guests started arriving. It was a home football game. We have some serious UT fans around here.

We tasted 14 wines, including a blind tasting game where I poured two $115 wines and asked people to guess how much they were worth. Then I poured a bottle of Boone’s Farm Sangria, a (gag) gift from our congregational president.

There was lots of swishing, sniffing, and pouring.

I handed out cards for note-taking. Some people took serious notes.

After all that wine, everyone was hungry. We had hummus and pita chips, cashews and almonds, three kinds of olives, apple sausage, pear, and gouda skewers with honey mustard, cranberry chutney on cream cheese, a cheese plate with blue, honey goat, and manchego, pumpkin bread, and chocolate porter cake with chocolate ganache.

And steak. Lots of steak. The steak was a huge hit.

It was a fun night with great wine, food, and fabulous people. Our PTL isn’t doing an auction this year, so this might be our last wine tasting for awhile. If I go to law school and stop writing about wine, the free wine will stop.

Hmm. Maybe we’d better start hoarding.

Author name:
Publish date:
October 20th, 2011
Discussion:
4 Comments
Tags:


Oh, the excess.

So. I don’t want to sound like a whiner, because I’m in Champagne! Drinking Champagne! Tromping through Champagne vineyards, during harvest, visiting with winemakers who have a billion more important things to do, and learning so much. It’s nothing short of amazing.

But. One of my colleagues dubbed this trip the Champagne Death March, because the schedule is brutal. We start at 9 a.m. and go nonstop until after 11 p.m. every single day. There’s barely time to use the bathroom, let alone collect your thoughts or check email. Instead of freshening up for dinner, we all straggle in looking like death warmed over. Any email-checking or thought-gathering or blogging or tweeting has to happen after a full day of Champagne-tasting and running around from House to House until they’re such a blur you can’t even remember which is which or where you were last.

I doubt that the Champagne bureau meant for us to die. They surely just wanted us to visit as many places as possible while we were here. But they’ve decided, next time, to build in a bit of down time. Lucky people on the next trip.

In the meantime, I have tons of great photos, but I’ll just share a few from the past few days.

We’ve been walking and standing non-stop. My feet are killing me, and I’m not even wearing these things.

 

I’m trying to branch out with my eating habits. I don’t know what this was, but it tasted like chicken, and the mushroom sauce was di-vine.

 

Every meal is finished with a cheese course. The middle one was an aged goat cheese. It was incredibly creamy, yet a little hard from aging. Mmmm.

 

We’ve tasted 20+ wines a day, so you have to spit, and leave lots of gorgeous Champagne behind. So sad.

 

Some wines weren’t hard to leave behind. (That said, in Champagne, it’s a matter of degree. At home, I would totally drink these.)

 

Others were so good that I couldn’t spit a single drop. (That’s the winemaker in the background. I’ve already decided to set Kate up with his 16-year-old son so I can be a Champagne MIL.)

 

Here’s a cool exercise we did last night. The winemaker uncorked a series of non-vintage Champagnes. The only difference was the disgorgement date (the date the old yeast is taken out and the wine topped off and sealed with the cork). From oldest to youngest, left to right, the wines tasted like stewed fruit and honey, all the way to fresh and light. The inside of the cork shrinks as the wine is older, too. The lesson: even non-vintage Champagne can age into something spectacular.

Tomorrow is slightly less of a Death March. We get 45 minutes of free time, which will end up being 5 because we’re in Europe, and I will use it to dash to the chocolate shop to get some treats for my girls. For now, I’m off to bed. Good night.

Author name:
Publish date:
August 31st, 2011
Discussion:
2 Comments
Tags:




It takes all kinds

I’m about to head out to explore Reims a bit and then meet everyone for dinner after a nap and a shower (yay! It’s so nice to feel clean and rested again). Pictures TK.

Almost as interesting as the destination itself is the people you travel with. For better or worse, press tours are hotbeds of clashing personalities brought together only by a common profession. Sometimes you get to meet up with someone you know in real life, and you have a blast traveling together. Or you meet someone new who is incredibly cool, and you become instant friends.

Other times, you wonder how these people ended up on the trip with you. Some of the people you might meet on a press tour:

The Snob. This guy is worried when he checks online and some of the menus are offered in English. Clearly, the places we’ll be eating will not be authentically, snobbishly, French. He also wonders why no one handed him a glass of Champagne as he alighted off the plane.

The Name-Dropper. He’s on a first-name basis with every who’s who in the wine world, and he wants you to know it. “Oh, Terry and I….” and “The other day I met with Mike….” pops out of his mouth frequently. Because you also know people in the wine world, you are able to infer whom he’s bragging about, but you think name-dropping is lame so you just nod and smile, even though it means that he thinks you’re not in the know.

The Angry Thin Woman. She has perpetually tight lips and is always unhappy about something happening on the trip. Maybe she’s inconvenienced by having to wait for someone else. Or her dinner didn’t quite come out right. You have to think that if she’s unhappy when she’s being plied with Champagne and amazing food, she must be a blast to live with in real life.

The Couple. This husband-and-wife duo runs their own wine website in some obscure corner of Ohio, and they’ve somehow gotten on the trip as a “journalist” and “photographer” (although in reality, she is on break as an English teacher and he was a sales executive in manufacturing before retiring and starting the blog). Their 12 readers will certainly appreciate their insights.

The Colorful Lady. She wears bright pink clothes and fake-European kisses you even though you’ve never met before, and she’s not European. She’s flamboyant and always trying to get a group of grumpy, jet-lagged writers to have fun. Most of the group wants to throw her over the bus by the second day.

The Frustrated Professional. This guy is a lawyer or software engineer from the Silicon Valley who desperately wishes he could be a wine writer full time, but will never make the leap because he likes his cushy income. He devotes all of his passion towards his avocation rather than his vocation, and he clearly thinks the rest of you are hacks in comparison.

The One-Upper. He has been there, done that, and he wants you to know he’s traveled more miles, seen more sights, drank more wine, and eaten weirder foods than you. As if you care.

The Fun Girl. She’s bouncy and upbeat, not pretentious, and not afraid to show a little wonder at what she’s seeing rather than act bored and jaded. You instantly connect and vow to spend as much of the trip with her as you can. And you thank God that you found someone fun to enjoy your week with.

Author name:
Publish date:
August 28th, 2011
Discussion:
4 Comments
Tags: