#305 - Five Spice-Rubbed "Hanging Tenders" & Sweet Potato Fries With '10 Owen Roe Lady Rosa Syrah

During a wine tasting at Owen Roe last May, as we became a lil tipsy and frolicked in the joy of the wine we were tasting, a flurry of box-checking next to the wines we loved and wanted to purchase left us in a state of confusion afterwards.

"What in the heck did we just buy?"

It wasn't until a couple of weeks later, when we received the wine, that we saw what happened that day.

All we know is that we bought three of the Lady Rosa Syrah so...we must have liked it. Right?

That question was answered last night and, while this one still needs some time, happy smoky loveliness in the glass was the result, something that played into the five spice-rubbed meat and sweet potato goodness to a point of pretty enough pairing pleasure, if not perfection.

Food: Five-spice "hanging tenders" with sweet potato fries and adobo-orange zest mayo for dipping

#304 - Cacio E Pepe With '11 Vera Alvarinho

The biggest reason I continue to do this weird little blog is because there's no end to it.

There's no end to food. No end to wine. No end to pairings.

You can eat and drink everyday from birth to death and not even touch the tip of everything offered by this strange world. It just keeps going! Just abide by a few simple pairing rules and lunch or dinner jettisons itself out of merely lunch or dinner into a pause, a moment, a suspension of the normal flow of the day where the clock, the to-do list and the usual life annoyances no longer register.

Done well and they're tiny vacations.

Every. Day.

Food: Cacio e pepe pasta with arugula salad

Recipe from Saveur. Two alterations. Oregano added and Sardinian pecorino fioretto used in addition to pecorino romano.

Less is more with Italian pasta and that's why it's good. Get too cute, think you're all that, and you've ruined the joy of its simplicity.

And watch how cheap mini-vacation joy can be.

#303 - Borlotti Bean & Blue Cheese Fregola Risotto With '07 Sanguis Oracle Of Delphi

15.3% alcohol in a wine is quite a lot.

But when done well with particular attention paid to a refreshing acid lift on the finish, you've got wine that is rather friendly and inviting instead of tongue-killing and port-like.

That's what we got last night from this 2007 Sanguis offering comprising of 96% syrah and 4% viognier.

Put into a food world like borlotti bean and blue cheese fregola risotto with a little Cleveland bacon to match the meaty notes in the wine and you've got a winner.

Many wine types poo-poo such largesse in a wine. They say to keep your reds under 14% and your whites under 13%. Admirable goal, that. Under 15% is commonplace in our house, but keeping your reds under 14% excludes so much freakin' great wine.

The world is big. The wine world is big. Big wines made well can and do have a place. Just like large food flavors - bacon as an ingredient in virtually everything, BBQ, whole roasted pig's sticky-sweet goodness, spicy Thai, etc. - large wines on occasion can be the truth. So let's stop saying wines HAVE to be one certain way. It works the other way as well.

Yes, Parker's love of the big-boy bombs has had a detrimental effect on the emphasis of subtlety, grace and finesse in wine. But isn't the wine world pulling the same philosophical jujitsu when it comes to diversity by outright dismissing higher alcohol wines? Getting down and dirty with a plate of food chockablock with massive flavors necessitates a wine that can keep up. That's gonna mean a bit more alcohol that many may want. But made well and it's happy-slappy stuff.

Dismiss higher-alcohol wines whole-hog and you dismiss the food pairing joy that can come with such things.

So let's make that distinction. Higher alcohol in and of itself isn't a terrible thing. It's bad winemakers that patently refuse to do a good job of integrating it into a larger picture in the glass.

#302 - Anniversary Roasted Chicken With '03 Dom Pérignon

Every once in awhile, my curiosity piques over the ridiculously extravagant.

Over the stupid stuff, the silly things in life made strictly to say, "I am lavish. I am ornate. I harken back to the spirit of rococo, the baroque. By possessing me, you are saying something about what you are, how you live and most importantly, what you're not. And you're going to pay a hefty sum for me...to keep out the riff-raff."

Wine is not immune. Not even close. In fact, the wine world may be one of the last of the supposed luxury worlds that, in some circles, is still meticulously protecting their exclusivity with ever-increasing gateway prices that would feed a Guatemalan village for a month.

For juice. I don't become curious over the status-chasing stupidity of it all. I just sometimes wonder, "What does it taste like?"

With all that said, that's not really Dom Pérignon. Their release prices have held rather steady and, in a relative high-end wine sense, reasonable over the years. You can get a cuvée for about a C-note and a half upon release. It starts to go up from there as demand begins to outpace supply and $150 is nothing to sneeze at for sure.

But we'd never had a Dom Pérignon and an anniversary dinner to celebrate number eight was coming up. We could go out into the world and continue our streak of being let down by anniversary/birthday-type dinners (long, uninterrupted stretch there - and my Thanksgiving crappy movie streak is prodigious) or we could stay in, eat a favorite meal and drink fancy-pants wine for half the price. Even think about following said fancy-pants wine every anniversary and watch it evolve.

The end result was delicious, enormous, chickeny chicken, fancy French Basque cheese (hey, we were just on the other side of that border) and a Champagne that tasted of fancy vanilla bean, butter and not much else.

This Dom Pérignon (I refuse to call it Dom) is just a baby but that was the idea. Start it out early and see where it goes over the years. After having it, we were left with a palpable sense of "keep it." Nice to have, now know what it is in a sense, beautiful texture worth every bit of its price tag but we'd take an Egly-Ouriet at half the price any day of the week.

#301 - Cleveland Followed By A Cleveland Meal

31 hours out our door and back through it.

That was our trip to Cleveland to stock up at West Side Market, eat at Lolita and see Louis C.K. kick off his current tour.

Big stock-up at West Side Market with all the Cleveland goodness now in our freezer. Pierogis, gnocchi, bacon, jerky, sausages, stuff that tastes like Cleveland and only Cleveland. We've tried Chicago pierogis. They're not Cleveland pierogis.

Meal at Lolita. Bruschetta and bone marrow to start. Chicken and duck confit as entrées. Bottle of 2008 McCrea Yakima Valley mourvèdre-forward blend to drink. I have a thing for Lolita - the atmosphere, the portions, the flavors, the Tremont neighborhood, our waitress, the lighting, how laid-back it is, how delicious the food is, the honesty of it all after all these years, the totality of the experience. It's just good in every way.

I won't give a review of Louis C.K.'s show. I'll just say it's the best thing I've seen on stage in my life (small batch, to be fair). I saw Carlin a couple of times. This was better. I've never laughed that hard, that long, that thoroughly.

So...took off at 7:30am on Wednesday, got into Cleveland at 2:30pm, went to West Side Market, dumped stuff at our hotel, got to Lolita at 5pm, ate, went to Severance Hall at 7:30 to see Louis C.K., done by 9:30, went to sleep and left the next morning, back by 2:30pm.

Seemingly tight schedule but it wasn't. Because everything in Cleveland is ten minutes away with no traffic. And from the time we sat down at Lolita to the time we left Severance Hall was the most entertaining "dinner and a show" I've ever had in my life.

Not too shabby.

So to celebrate the greatness and ease of such a Cleveland trip, a Cleveland meal to finish the day.

#300 - Romanian Skirt Steak, Spring Onions & Scallion Sauce With '07 Twisted Oak The Spaniard

Hey...we made it to 300 pairings.

Or 300 posts with probably 450 pairings.

I guess, given the societal significance attached to numbers ending to double zeros, I should sum up what we've learned lo these last almost three years.

Learned...? Hmm. I guess that is the word here. Because we have learned, while it's always been a rather organic process dictated entirely by our own random curiosity.

In many ways, food with wine has become what we love, what we do, it's our hobby, the thing we find infinitely interesting and...fun. Finding that in our 30's was something unexpected and joyful.

We knew all that when I started this blog but it's become a little more entrenched, more of a love I would say, more essential and true when talking about what we like in life. Because it's good.

So good.

Like this.