An Utterly Haphazard, Completely Unreliable, Probably Not Complete List of Our Favorite Food and Wine Of 2013

Our Best of 2013 list, chronicled by month.

Criteria for this list: Good food, good wine, buggy-bear pairing love, something unique, something we very specifically loved, just whatever struck our fancy and deserved a list-type spot.

In short, some big impressions of the year past.

So...good, very good and great are listed, with the meh, huh?, and terrible not listed. Because who has the time for the bad in life? Just move on.

#31 - Crock Pot Chicken & NV Demi-Sec Sparkling Vouvray

Quick one today.

Took work off last night, making it possible to have a sit-down meal instead of Aldi Cordon Bleu Sunday.

Food: Asian crock pot chicken with mâche and baguette with butter

Quick and easy crock pot chicken cooked with asian flavors of soy, ginger and scallion. Juice from the crock pot on the side for dipping.

For the quickness of the preparation, it turned into a solid little meal. The juice made it by giving everything something to mix and match with: Chicken with a dip, bread with a dip, chicken and bread with a dip, greens with generous amounts of dip splashed over it.

Good stuff.

Wine: Non-Vintage Domaine Vigneau Chevreau Demi-Sec Vouvray ($18 - WDC?)

Chenin blanc-based semi-dry sparkling, blended with grapes from different years (wrong picture to the right - only one I could find).

We liked this one in the past with jerk chicken. More very dry than off-dry with mostly green apple fruit. Notes say beeswax and honey. Yeah, a bit. Not much but it's in the background.

This one's on wine lists all over town, including Blackbird.

Pairing: Wouldn't do it again

Compared to when we had this sparkling Vouvray with jerk chicken, it fell kinda flat.

And that might be because the jerk chicken brought some heat. A little spice probably would have woken up this wine and brought the fruit to life along with a more honey sweetness.

Now we know.

#90 - Jerk Chicken, Hushpuppies & Pineapple With NV Sparkling Vouvray

Quick one today.

We could have gone in a lot of directions with this meal. Zinfandel would have been nice and made it all California-y. Maybe a shiraz would have brought the fruit and let it wander into more big and hearty.

But thinking about other choices and what they would have done only made us think of what it might not have been compared to what it already was. Which was pretty darn solid, tasty, refreshing, oddly light and satisfying.

Plus, jerk and French sparkling feels fancy.

Food: Jerk Chicken with hushpuppies and grilled pineapple

A staple in the Ney house, having last had it in December but with a different jerk recipe. Also, this time cooked under a brick from a recipe by Mark Bittman in the New York Times.

The jerk marinade from Saveur using soy sauce, onion, scallion, chiles, cloves, five-spice, allspice berries, nutmeg, S&P, thyme and veg oil. This will be replacing the jerk in our house from now going forward. Great stuff.

Cooking under a brick made for better chicken as well. The skin fell off a bit but the chicken was insanely moist and all the jerk seeped deep into the bird.

Hushpuppies made at home were a new one for us. Outside of the Long John Silver's fare that creates an instant flashback to mid-80s fancy family meals for me, I haven't had many others. Intense cornbread taste with a crispy outside made for a tasty side that wasn't dense in the least. Served with a spicy tomato chutney found in the freezer. Oddly easy to make according to Mrs. Ney so...yes...more in the future.

Grilled pineapple (another staple) and a bed of pea shoots to round out the meal and topped off with a deliciously boozy walnut-chocolate pie made with Maker's Mark.

Just goshdarn delicious and a great Monday night meal.

Wine: NV Domaine Vigneau-Chevreau Demi-Sec Sparkling Vouvray ($18 - Binny's)

I couldn't find a ton on this wine without the disgorgement date listed on the bottle (similar but wrong label above). All I can say is that we've had this one a few times before and this time, it was most definitely a different batch.

Not as many distinctive chenin blanc notes, missing some of the honey and beeswax notes. This one was more yeasty with more delicate fruit showing mostly green apple notes. Came off more like a solid bargain Champagne than a sparkling Vouvray. Nice balance, though with the bread notes constantly changing, mixing well with the small, vibrant bubbles and a more true medium dry than the very dry last bottle we had.

We keep buying it because it keeps being good.

Pairing: 89 In the end, nothing in the house would have been better in the price range

The spice in the jerk killed the fruit a bit in the wine but we were entirely okay with that. The joy came in its refreshing aspects, helped by the medium dryness and fine bubbles, than any individual bite with wine standing out.

We thought about other pairings during the meal but it always came back to what other wines wouldn't have offered that the sparkling Vouvray did.

Nothing in the meal would have came off heavy with another wine but it might not have so oddly light with, say, a zinfandel or shiraz or even a sauvignon blanc or rosé.

Plus, the belches were awesome.

#135 - Shrimp And Quiche With Stift Göttweig Grüner Veltliner

Or quiche, garlic baguette and arugula salad with a side of shrimp.

The quiche was that good, taking all the focus off the shrimp.

More bald advertising for good cookbooks with today's offering.

Quiche maraîchère from Around My French Table, a cookbook given as a gift that's quickly turning out to be something needed and goshdarn great.

Shrimp from The New Portuguese Table, a cookbook that's proving to us over the last few months that Portuguese food can be a wee bit timid for what we want and like.

Food: Shrimp and quiche with garlic baguette and arugula and basil salad

Shrimp soaked in peri-peri sauce and quickly cast-ironed, seasoned with salt and pepper and topped with lemon juice squeezed on at the table. Fine shrimp, tasty to a point shrimp but we missed what shrimp has meant to us recently, like black garlic shrimp or Spanish shrimp with a big garlic hit or carrot juice/chipotle shrimp like in the recent past. Tasted...too simple...and just shrimp, really.

We aren't quiche people. But this wasn't eggy quiche. Only one whole egg, one egg yolk and supplemented with gouda cheese. Red pepper, carrot, celery and leek quiche that tasted buttery but light. Great balance and utterly delicious, especially once we got into it.

Arugula and basil salad to finish and garlic baguette on the side.

I'll return to an old favorite - movie comparisons. The meal was like Taken. I barely knew anything about the movie when I pushed play. By the time it was over, all I could think was, "That was kinda awesome!" Very little plot, no character development, stupid "American revenge in a post 9/11 world" overtones, but just 90 minutes of brutal and highly entertaining action.

Just a good time, like the meal. And the wine had a place, if only in a supporting actor way.

Wine: 2006 Stift Göttweig Gottschelle Grüner Veltliner ($21 - WDC)

It's simplified since we last had it. Less alive and jumpy, more settled and bordering on one-dimensional. Still exotic fruits floating around and a good acidity still lingers. A pronounced orange peel note shot up on occasion. Even creamy white peach. I've read people found a plum juice note with this one. Maybe. Right now, it tastes like some of the cheaper Hungarian whites we've had. Interesting to a point and exotic enough to be intriguing for a few minutes but definitely settling into the more simple vein.

Pairing: 85 Never offered anything other than being an acid component to the meal

The orange peel notes and cream kicked up with the quiche and garlic baguette but never offered enough to bring a complimentary/original element to the meal.

Served more as an acid counterplay with the quiche/baguette while falling fall with the shrimp, which already had lemon juice.

We needed a wine more guts, maybe a touch of sugar, possibly something more bone-dry, maybe an oily quality, to get it into a realm of a solid pairing. As it was, it was kinda boring.

But that quiche. I heartily endorse such things.

A quick note: Paprika on Lawrence just east of Rockwell pumps out some great Indian food. After Hema's earlier this year, we were hesitant to jump back on the Indian wagon, but this is great stuff, fresh and cheap as all get out. Various naans, chutneys, samosas and a chicken tikka masala eaten with a sparkling Vouvray favorite, NV Domaine Vigneau-Chevreau Demi-Sec Sparkling Vouvray ($18 - Binny's). The refreshment brought on by the sparkling aspect of the wine served as the primary goodness with the food but that was okay with us. Good enough. Check out Paprika. Along with Semiramis, it's a new great BYO option in the neighborhood.