Wine-Marinated Grapes

Menu planning is difficult. Every weekend, I look through my cookbooks and notebooks to decide what I'm going to make for the week ahead. But even with the hundreds of recipes available, sometimes I want to change things up a bit.

I follow about a hundred food blogs so you can imagine how inundated I am with recipes every day. When I see a particular recipe I love, I email myself a link to that blog post. Then I tag it with "Recipes" in my Gmail. So anytime I feel dissatisfied with all the books and all the ripped-out magazine pages (I know, poor me, right?), I turn to my email. Which is how I discovered this gem: Wine-Marinated Grapes, which I virtually dog-eared from the blog Thursday Night Smackdown. I dog-eared it in 2008.

I was looking for inspiration this past Saturday. Adam was out of town, visiting his own Soul Twin (husband to my own Soul Twin), and Bug was wiped out from a 3-day camping trip. Which is code for she-was-going-to-sleep-a-lot-and-watch-lots-of-TV. So what to do with all that free time? Make drunk grapes!

Michelle at Thursday Night Smackdown got the recipe from Bon Appetit...and aptly, brilliantly named the post "The Snozzberries Taste Like Snozzberries". Come on, children's literature folks, you know where that line is from. God, the parallels of food and kids' lit never cease to amaze me.

ANYWAY, the recipe is ridonkulously easy. Click the Bon Appetit link above - you'll see. And here's where I might scare away potential dinner guests (and maybe even the ones in current rotation): the recipe requires a bottle of dry white wine and I used a bottle of white Zin that a guest had brought over for dinner. White. Zin. I am not drinking that. Ever. And this is the moment where everyone who ever comes over to my house for dinner (and reads this blog) panics. So, for that, I am sorry.

One thing that Michelle mentions is that you can strain the marinating liquid and save it for wine spritzers. I was skeptical. I mean, wine spritzers? With white Zin? A little froofy, right? Oh, no. This was soooo good:

The wine, the grape juice, and the lemon zest are rather sublime. Add a splash of seltzer and a couple of lime slices and you have the perfect summer apertif. Really wonderful.

This is a ridiculously long blog post about drunk grapes but I can't resist. What a fun way to spend my Saturday afternoon while Bug was watching Wizards of Waverly Place.

Eat, drink, and snozz some berries.

Thanksgiving: In Photos

Lest you read my previous post and think that I didn't document everything about Thanksgiving, I am here to reassure you that I took LOTS of pictures (or Adam did).  Here was our menu:

- Pork Loin Roast with Chestnuts (from The French Kitchen)

- Apple-Turnip Mashed Potatoes (from Southern Living)

- Wild Rice with Roasted Grapes and Walnuts (from Bon Appétit)

- Blackberry Crisp (the Soul Twin brought frozen wild blackberries

 that she gathered herself and used them in place of the apples in Ina Garten's recipe from Barefoot Contessa's Parties)

Now I'm going to let the photos speak for themselves:

For goodness sake, I have the most ridiculous hair!

"Would you like some fresh ground pepper with that?"

"Oh, honey, I think we could ALL use some fresh pepper."

(My eternal love if you know where this line is from)

The finished product.  Think we're a fancy schmancy family?  Check out the plastic wine glass with water for Kiddo.  You gotta agree that un-glams the table a bit!

I swear, this looked much more beautiful in person!

The motley crew (bottom left, clockwise): my other husband, the Soul Twin, Kiddo, yours truly, and the Husband.

Eat, drink, and happy holidays!

Grape, Ricotta, Rosemary Pizza recipe

As I mentioned earlier, I recently bought Jamie's Italy by Jamie Oliver. I already thought I was in love with Cook with Jamie but, alas, that affair wasn't meant to me. It's all about me, Jamie, and Italy.

So the cookbook has a whole section on pizzas, and I want to try every one of them; truly, that's how good they sound. So this is my first go. Jamie, naturally, has a recipe for homemade pizza crust. That's all well and good, but here are my problems with that: 1) I've had horrific luck in the past using fresh pizza dough, 2) I don't have time on the weeknights to make fresh pizza dough, and 3) I have yet to find time on a weekend to make fresh dough and freeze it. So we're left with naan, thanks to Nigella Lawson's recommendation. I know naan may be difficult for some to find - I think you can easily try pita bread and/or flatbread instead. Hell, Giada De Laurentiis made something similar to this on her show*, except that she pressed the grapes into foccacia bread, sprinkled rosemary and pine nuts on top, and omitted the ricotta. So feel free to experiment, people!

So I used naan. And Jamie asks for a handful of green and red grapes, but I could only find red and black. Halve them. Put them in a medium bowl with 1 tbsp. pine nuts, "small handful of fresh rosemary", and 1 tbsp. white wine. Allow it to sit for a few minutes. Now I went renegade here: Jamie also asks for 2 tbsp. of vanilla sugar and suggests this dish as a breakfast or dessert with vanilla ice cream. Give that a try, if you'd like. But I made this savory. I added salt and pepper to the bowl of marinating grapes.

I then scattered the mixture over two naan, including the sweet juices. I added fresh, crumbly ricotta on top. Put it on a pizza stone in a 400 degree oven for about 12 minutes. When it was done, I drizzled extra-virgin olive oil over the top, and served it with a salad on the side. We drank a Spanish Rueda with this, 2006 Las Brisas, which was the same wine I used for the marinade. The label describes the ripe flavors as "racy". Indeed!

Shazam! A weeknight dinner that took me just under a half-hour to make. Take that, Rachael Ray!

Eat, drink, and don't sweat it on the weekdays.


*I tried to look up Giada's recipe for all of you, but Food Network won't give it up.