August 31, 2019 Lunch – Salt and Board NM Wine Society Wine Festival Dinner – Chicken Mole with steamed broccoli

August 31, 2019 Lunch – Salt and Board   NM Wine Society Wine Festival   Dinner – Chicken Mole with steamed broccoli

I ate a large breakfast of sausage and eggs.  

Then Suzette and I worked on re-upholstering chair seats in the morning.

At noon Dan and Cyndy came by and we drove to Salt and Board for lunch.

I ordered the large charcuterie board with two salamis, a prosciutto and three kinds of cheese, a semi firm Drunken goat, a wedge of brie and an aged Manchego, plus buttered toast points, homemade mustard, fig preserves, a lovely apricot chutney, and a pile of bacon fig preserve mixture.  I also ordered a side of chevere to try it. We did not want to destroy our capacity to drink at the Wine Festival, so we each drank only ½ glass of Loire Atlantique rose.  Although there was not a lot of food it was lovely and we were all satisfied, which is saying something favorable about Salt and Board as you will see below.

At 1:30 we returned home to meet Suzette and we all drove to Balloon Fiesta Park for the big NM Wine Society tasting.  There were approximately thirty booths of the NM wine producers plus food purveyors in attendance inside of two large tents. We tried a number of wines and the only ones that made an impression on us were Gruet’s wines, Casa Abril’s wines, and Amaro Winery’s Chenin Blanc.  There were problems with the wines from all the other wineries for Dan and Cyndy.  In fairness to the New Mexico producers, Dan and Cyndy recently returned from a trip to Gigondas and Lyon, France to drink wine and eat wonderful food, so their standard of excellence is exceedingly high. For example, Dan showed me a photo of their dinner of charcuterie and cheeses at their favorite small café in Gigondas that served two large platters, one filled with charcuterie and one with cheese.  Each held about five times as much food as we received at Salt and Board.  And as Dan said, “All the cheeses were local.”  The food choices at the festival were decidedly local also, such as nachos and turkey legs.  That kind of stuff.

We said goodbye to Dan and Cyndy at around 3:30 after we had tried many of the wines.

We then drove to Costco to fill Suzette’s Highlander with gas and we each ate a hot dog and we shared a cup of soft yogurt.

When we returned home, we rested until 8:30 when I became hungry and we heated the PPI Chicken Mole and steamed a head of broccoli for dinner. Here are pictures.

It was a lovely dinner and I slept well until 4:00 am.

Bon Appetit