July 5 and 6, 2014 Two full days of food and wine

July 5 and 6, 2014 Two full days of food and wine

Saturday Vine and Wine Society Tasting at Las Golandrinas and Birthday Dinner at Cynthia and Ricardo’s house  

Sunday Lunch Anchovy butter toast points, Boiled shrimp and Gazpacho   Dinner Party at Turner’s

We planned to process the garlic we had grown in our garden and had invited Max
Aragon and Jane Phillips to join us on Sunday at noon for the harvest as we did last year.   

Suzette decided to make her favorite summer meal of shrimp and gazpacho.  So on Saturday morning around 8:30 a.m. we drove to the Farmer’s Market and Suzette purchased several pounds of lovely fresh cucumbers from East Mountain organics and we bought a loaf of French Sourdough bread ($6.00) from the French bakery and two baguettes from Bosque Bakery ($3.00/loaf).

Then we drove to Talin Market and bought 2 lbs. of large heads off 16-20 count shrimp ($14.99/lb.) and vine ripe tomatoes ($1.98/lb.) and shallots ($1.49/lb.), red bell peppers, catsup and a bottle of Major Grey’s Sweet Mango Chutney.  After we dropped off our empty bottles and got our tandem bike fixed, we drove home to put the food in the fridge and then to Las Golondrinas, just south of Santa Fe.  Las Golondrinas was a Spanish hacienda that served as the last stop on the Camino Real.  It is located just west of the race track in La Cienega about ten miles south of Santa Fe.  It has been bought and re-constructed by the Santa Fe 

Historical Society and is now an outdoor museum.  It is used by many groups for festivals and events. Every year, on the July 4^th weekend, Las Golondrinas hosts an annual Vine and Wine Society tasting.  The Vine and Wine Society is the organization that includes, as its members, all of the New Mexico wine producers, of which there are about 60.  There are usually three or four tastings per year.  One is always held at the Balloon Park on Memorial Day weekend, one in Bernalillo on Labor Day weekend and there is a quilt Fair in Corrales usually every year, also.  Not all small producers sell their wine at the tastings, but it seems that many of the smaller and larger producers do.

We love the Santa Fe event at Las Golondrinas, because it usually is cooler than Albuquerque or Bernalillo (it actually sprinkled on us during the afternoon) and is not as crowded, so you do not need to wait very long to get a taste of wine and you usually can try more than two or three wines once you get to the tasting counter.  Even the smallest wineries make at least four or five wines and the larger ones have dozens of wines to try, because they have several year’s vintages and often dry and sweet varieties of some grapes like Riesling and they use the same type of grape to bottle both 100% varietals and blends of several grapes.

We really enjoyed the Vigil’s wines of Casa Avril, Tularosa and the Gruet Wineries’ offerings this year.  Casa Avril raises mainly tempranillo and Malbec and makes great deep luscious yet elegantly smooth reds and a killer tempranillo rosé.  Gruet is New Mexico’s best champagne producer and its new Zia offering can be had in either a brut, which is 100% chardonnay or rosé, which is 100% pinot noir.

The biggest surprise of this year was Tularosa Vineyard’s wines.  Many of its wines were delicious and of high quality.  See http://www.tularosavineyards.com/History.html for the history of Tularosa Vineyards.   I also really liked Tularosa’s Mission grape wine that uses the historic Mission Grape that was introduced by the original Spanish missionaries in the 1600’s.

We had been invited to Cynthia and Ricardo’s house for dinner of shrimp scampi, so we bought a bottle of dry Riesling from Tularosa Vineyard ($12.00).  We also bought a bottle each of the two new Gruet Zia offerings, because they were on special at $11.00 each.   

We arrived around 1:30 p.m. and by 3:30 we had sampled all the wines and had a snack of onion rings with a bit of wine, so we hit the trail back to Albuquerque. 

We arrived at Cynthia and Ricardo’s house by 4:30 or 5:00 and first took a tour of their garden and the new tea house Ricardo is making in their garden.  The Shrimp scampi was delicious; two lbs. of shrimp cooked in olive oil and 4 ounces of butter with shallots, parsley and the zest of one lemon and ½ cup of lemon juice with one lb. of spaghetti cooked to al dente, and was served with a fresh salad.  For dessert Cynthia made a lovely panna cotta (cream and milk and egg yolks and gelatin) flavored with a leaf of lemon verbena from their garden.  We drank the Tularosa dry Riesling, but after an afternoon of tasting wines, my wine taste buds were saturated and I lost most of the complex interaction of wine and food.  

After dinner we sat and talked and Ricardo described his new project, which is a prequel to “Breaking Bad” now in production in Albuquerque called “Better Call Saul” about a lawyer named Saul Goodman who helps Walter White set up his business in “Breaking Bad” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaking_Bad).  Ricardo is a trained architect, whose main business activity is designing sets and architectural elements of sets for films and TV series shot in New Mexico.

Finally after a very satisfying meal and pleasant conversation, at around 9:30 we said goodnight and went home and fell into bed.  

Sunday, July 6, 2014

We started cooking around 9:30.  While I went to Pro’s Ranch Market to buy carrots and Vanilla Ice Cream and three ears of corn and some limes and then Lowe’s for Club Soda, Suzette made her gazpacho with fresh local cucumbers, some of our garlic, onions, tomatoes, celery, parsley, lovage, catsup, red bell pepper, and olive oil blended in the Cuisinart.  We chilled the gazpacho and then Suzette boiled the shrimp in a large pot with Zatarain’s crab boil and chilled them.  Suzette them made her famous anchovy/basil butter with a dash of salt in the Waring blender and chilled that.  At around 11:30 Suzette sautéed slices of Sourdough French bread in butter in a skillet on the stove and I sliced slices of pecorino Romano cheese for toast points and fetched the bottle of 2013 Bourgrier Anjou rosé (Total Wine $12.99?). 

Suzette made a cocktail sauce with catsup, horseradish and lemon and I picked dill and made a bowl of:

Recipe: mayonnaise/mignonette sauce:

2/3 to 1 cup of mayonnaise,

1 Tbsp. of White Vermouth,

1 Tbsp. of white wine vinegar

2 medium shallots, minced

2 Tbsps. of tarragon

A dash of salt (to taste)

A dash of white pepper (to taste)

1 tsp. of olive oil

I love this creamy tart sauce with seafood.

We also made coleslaw for the Turner’s dinner party with one head of cabbage, ½ of a medium jicama, and three or four carrots and shallots and dill and lovage and parsley.  We combined the shallots, dill and lovage and chives with a sugar and vinegar dressing at chilled it in the fridge.

Then I squeezed fresh limes for mojitos and Suzette picked mint.  We made a pitcher full of mojito mix with 1/3 mint flavored simple syrup, 1/3 rum and 1/3 fresh lime juice and Suzette cut slices of the anchovy basil butter and put them on a plate.

   

Suzette then made a simple apricot and blueberry cobbler and put in into the oven around 12:00 noon.

When Max and Jane arrived at 12:30 we were ready with the toasted bread points and anchovy/basil butter.  Suzette made mojitos and we smeared the anchovy/basil butter on ate them with mojitos on the back patio.  We then served the gazpacho and the shrimp and  Cocktail and Mayonnaise/Migonette sauces.  We poured Anjou rosé and drank and ate to satiation. Then we cleaned garlic by cutting off the stalks and the roots, leaving only a bit of stem and the pods. We were pretty quick this year and by 3:30 we had finished and Suzette served bowls of apricot and blueberry cobbler with vanilla ice cream.  We said goodbye to Max and Jane around 4:00 and took showers got ready for the Turner’s party. 

We combined the dressing with the coleslaw ingredients and tossed them and we saw that there was not enough coverage of dressing to the large bowl of coleslaw, so Suzette made more dressing with sugar and vinegar and salt and then I thought the flavor was more in balance and I could taste the flavor of the herbs more clearly and the coleslaw seemed moister in texture.

We went to the Turners at 5:00 and met many of their neighbors and friends.  Bill had made pulled pork.  Doug had made the rub for the pork butt with red chili, cayenne, salt, pepper and sugar.  Bill had rubbed the rub into the 15 pound pork butt and Bill had slow roasted the pork butt in indirect heat in a charcoal grill over pans of water with fifteen pounds of charcoal for six hours adding more charcoal after three hours. 

Margaritas and beers were served in abundance and then the table was set with all the salads that folks brought.  There was an asparagus salad, a corn and black bean salad, our coleslaw, and several other salads.

After dinner Regina brought out vanilla ice cream and two raspberry and blueberry pies and their neighbor, Kaitlin, brought fresh white figs.   

Finally, Regina gave us each a Haagen Daz ice cream sandwich coated with nuts and chocolate.

We felt like we had had the ultimate July 4^th weekend meal by the time we went home around 8:30 with a pan full of figs from Kaitlin’s bush from next door.

Bon Appétit