A conversation I had with a coworker about eating salad for lunch today, after 5 days of eating everything in sight:
Me: “but if we eat salad for lunch, that is going to ruin the 2 million calories a day diet I have been on!”
Lisa: “I have to go. I haven’t eaten in like, 5 minutes”.
Lucky for me, Chris cleaned up at Christmas in terms of gifts of Port. For about the last year and a half, we have been getting “into” Port wine. Which is sort of odd just because we know very little about table wine and don’t seem inclined to learn about it (though we do certainly quaff the stuff by the gallon). Anyway, Port. Oh so tasty: dark, rich, sometimes sweet, complex. We drink it after a meal, or as a nightcap (yes I have some right now) or whenever the mood strikes us.
Some port facts:
Port is supposed to be tasted with chocolate, how cool is that?
There are two kinds of port: tawny and ruby. Tawny means that it was aged in a wood barrel and sometimes turns a brownish color due to oxidation and gets sort of a nutty flavor. It is our favorite. Ruby port has been aged in stainless steel barrels to keep its color. There is lots more info about port over here, which you should read if you want to learn more.
One of the bottles Chris got is fancy. It came from me: when the guy at the wine store showed me the top shelf stuff (upon which were none of our usual port contenders) I thought we should try something more expensive. I got us a LBV (Late Bottle Vintage) which means that it was supposed to be a Vintage but due to the fact the demand was low for this particular year, it was left to age longer than planned. Then it was bottled and has spent at least 3 years in the bottle. Just so you know, real Vintage port is aged a brief time in a wood casket, like, 2 years, and then 10-30 years in the bottle. (This port is the most expensive and has never been tried by this poor state employee). Anyway, the LBV. It was slightly pricey. And very, very good. In fact, it was so good that we may be ruined on cheaper port now.
Our next step will be to attend a port tasting, which our favorite local wine shop usually does annually in the winter.
Here are a few Ports we have tried that we like. In no particular order. They all are under $17 except the LBV. I highly recommend trying a bottle! It makes a great hostess gift, especially if you are coming to my house…..
next on our list to try is Grahams 10 year aged. I will keep you posted on how it tastes!!
I think I may have already mentioned that this fall/winter Chris and I are doing a CSA (community supported agriculture) which means that every week we get a big box of organic veggies from Coon Rock Farm. Lucky for us, this farm also produces free range grass fed meats of all varieties: beef, pork, goat, lamb, duck, etc. The meat is truly fantasic, and we have enjoyed everything we have tried.
As anyone who glances at this blog knows, I love to cook. However, much to Chris’ dismay, I am intimidated by large cuts of beef. They are expensive, for one, big, and, well, meaty. When my folks were here, I managed to totally overcook a roast that a bought from the farm, and though it was still edible I was still disappointed. The internet let me down: for the particular cut I had gotten (eye of round) I read everything from: must be braised to be tasty to roast it normally and all in between. It didn’t help that I got a relatively obscure cut of meat.
So, I think over the next few months I will get in touch with my meaty side and try and get some other cuts that are more common and perhaps easier to find information on and give it a try. My goal is to turn out as good a standing rib roast as my father in law made for Christmas dinner. If you have any comments or suggestions, please let me know!
Off to roast a safe chicken!
This weekend my folks were here, and one of the things we did was tour the NC Governor’s Mansion. The Mansion is open only a few times a year to the general public, and I had never been before. Well, it was really cool. We toured only the first floor (I guess the Easleys were in residence, and didn’t want the riff raff on the second floor) and it was all decked out for Christmas and really quite impressive.
The rooms are large, of course, for entertaining heads of state (and the governor of Maine, when he comes to play basketball, no that is not a lie). There are two parlours, one pinkish and one blue. The pinkish room had an enormous Christmas tree, probably 20 feet high, decorated entirely in fake dogwood blooms (NC state flower) and Northern Cardinal (NC state bird) ornaments. Truly spectacular. The dining room has an enormous mahogany table that seats 24, and there is a music room, morning room, and one other room (that didn’t get to see all of because there was a choir performing in. The house is a Queen Anne Style home made of clay from Anson and Wake counties, and marble steps from Cherokee county.
I had really wanted to tour the gardens: I get just enough of a glimpse of them when I wak past the house and look in the wrought iron gates to know that there is a lot going on in there. I would love to see what the grounds crew has done. I know they have a huge vegetable garden in back.
Interestingly enough, walking around the house on the brick sidewalk, you can see people’s names etched into the bricks. This is become I the bricks were made in a prison, and the prisoners wrote there names on the bricks! Its kind of a neat thing.
The house is haunted of course, by the very first governor to live there, whos lastname was Fowle. He likes to pluck things off the Christmas tree, though the folks I spoke to said they had not seen him.
I am sorry that I have no photos, but I promise you, touring the governors house was really very cool!
Another odd question today at work, from the general public:
“What kind of bird existed in NC 4-6 million years ago?”
I didn’t know, so I had to go bug the paleontologists. The answer, just so you know, is Auks. Not sure what kind of Auk. And a few albatross bones have been found too, and some sort of prehistoric turkey.
Part of my job is to answer questions from the public about birds. People get my number, or they email me, and I give them information. Usually the questions are pretty straight forward, for example: every time Duke Gardens adds a new exotic duck species to its menagerie, the same Durham resident emails me a photo so that I may identify the bird for him(note to Duke Gardens: maybe some signage is a good idea). Anyway, recently I got an interesting request: I got contacted by a Christian Research Investigator asking me to identify feathers that had fallen during a service inside a church, and were believed to be angel feathers.
Now, first I would like to make the disclaimer that there are feather experts in the world, and I am so not one of them. In fact, I am probably at the opposite end of the spectrum of all those folks, but apparently all had said no to his request for identification. However, I agreed to take a look at the feathers because I figured I could at least tell him what they were not.
This made me think, though, about the person’s intention who dropped the feathers in the middle of church. It seems like a cool device to encourage the parishioners to think about God’s ability to do amazing things. If this is the case, it seems sort of like wrecking the moment by spending all this time trying to figure it exactly what happened. Or maybe it is just someone playing a prank?
Anyway, I should say that I am getting feathers to identify in the mail, and that the researcher guy is really very nice.
