Days of Rest

Sunday is the Sabbath day. I grew up being taught this and practiced it to the fullest at one Christian point in my past. Since my spiritual exploration in eastern religions, a theology minor, and a job in the restaurant industry, I’m not such a stickler about Sundays being a day of rest. Years of brunches later, I may have gotten enough seniority to have some Sundays off but somehow I still say yes to work. Even though I’ve had the past three Sundays to catch some rest, I will admit that they weren’t spent dogmatically. Of course, this doesn’t mean I haven’t enjoyed myself and maybe so with sinfully good food and libations. 

Day of Rest #1- Our kitchen at Fino was one man down serving up some paella at Green Corn Project’s annual Fall Festival at Boggy Creek Farm so I happily obliged. Green Corn Project is a Central Texas non-profit that promotes education and growing of organic produce and gardens. Every year restaurants and small businesses in the Austin area set up a small shop to satiate the donors. Fino put up some vegetable paella, meaty paella, and this tortilla espanola- a traditional Spanish omelette made with chicken eggs straight from our chef de cuisine’s farm.

Boggy Creek was gorgeous on an autumn day to walk around and taste savory pumpkin cheesecake from Barley Swine, wood-fired pizza from Bola, and Balcones whiskey- all for free and all in one afternoon.

Day of Rest #2- The Austin Sustainable Food Center here in Austin held a seven-course dinner at La Condesa where seven different restaurants from Austin, San Antonio, and Houston each took one course. The chefs at Fino, Jason Donaho and Andrew Macarthur, contributed a quail dish to the dinner which was paired with a locally-sourced cocktail from our bar manager, Josh Loving. I had the fruitful opportunity to play his punchy pour partner and scored a behind-the-scenes pictures of Balcones Baby Blue whiskey, Real Ale Pale Moon Rye, Earl Grey tea steeped in Richard’s Rainwater, lemon, Round Rock honey, and nutmeg. 

Even though we didn’t get to enjoy the food on the plates, we did reap benefits of lots of leftover punch and exciting moments in the kitchen watching Andrew Weissman and Tyson Cole hurriedly plating their courses.

Day of Rest #3- Digestible Feats is a part of the annual Fusebox Festival that brings together, food, drink, and the arts. Peche held a Rum Challenge to raise money for the cause with bartenders from Contigo, Peche, Fino, and Bar Congress. I always have fun watching any of these guys make drinks especially when it’s under a 15-minute time constraint, a mandatory use of the Virtuoso rum portfolio, and a citrus restriction. Oh the drama. I was on the side of Fino and Bar Congress- literally as that’s where my seats were and managed to sip on both of their quick concoctions.

Adam and Brian of Bar Congress created an egg white drink with Rhum J.M, Lemon Hart 151, strawberry vinegar, and grapefruit rinds soaked in angostura. Fino’s Josh and Andy and their wittily named “Occupy Peche” contained Smith & Cross navy-strength rum, La Favorite rhum agricole, La Favorite aged rhum agricole, Sloe Gin, oleo-saccharum (a blend of lemon oil and sugar), homemade five-spice bitters, and nutmeg. Good times with good drinks although I wish there could have been a way to taste them all or maybe there have been a winner with judges. I like a little competition so maybe I’ll put my name in for next year.

Lord knows I have been busy on my Sundays off. Spending this day of the week with buckets of punch, massive amounts of food, and sugarcane spirits may seem sacrilegious but they help to fill my quota on my sacrifices to Dionysus. That’s one divine relationship I don’t want to mess with.

Terroir Tastings

If you read my lovely About Me section, you’d learn that I worked at a tea house before I came out to Austin. One love I had working at a tea shop was well, tea. It was my first experience with the art of the beverage. It was my first experience in understanding that location, climate, and topography can affect the taste of your drink (India or Sri Lanka, China or Japan?) or that the production processes affect its weight and color (black, green, or white tea, anyone?).

It was my first time understanding that depending on where that tea came from and how it was processed, cooked, stored, or added to (genmaicha or lapsang souchong?) could affect the experience that you have in your cute, little vintage teacup.

Leaving New York and after conquering every tea on the Alice’s Tea Cup tea list, I was ready for the next thing. I didn’t realize it at the time but landing my job at Fino led me to the next great step: wine.  Conquering wine has been one daunting task. It went right over my head. Was Arbois a vineyard, appellation, or an importer? Or none of the above? How does one ever learn the weather of every European country in every year since 1960 and what does that even mean for a grape? Those pencil shavings and forest floor aromas? Nope, don’t smell it. Dried apricot and gasoline flavor? Nope, tastes like alcohol.  Windows on the World? No, it’s all French names. Wine Bible? Nope, it’s still French.

I bring my troubles up to my lovely wine director and was recommended Alice’s Feiring’s The Battle For Wine and Love. With this book, my mind was officially blown and not with overly academic articles but with passionate memoirs about the state of the wine world. It was a realization that the wine world was not as big of a beast as I was making it out to be. My biggest epiphany of all was that not all wine is worth knowing about.

Even this prestigious world of wine can be tainted with over-processing and questionable farming practices. I narrowed down my scope and wanted to bring it back to the idea that where your wine is from, its climate and topography, storing and processing has a direct effect on what ends up in your wine glass.

Terroir- “This French word means the total impact of any given site-soil, slope, orientation to the sun, and elevation, plus every nuance of climate including rainfall, wind velocity, frequency of fog, cumulative hours of sunshine, average high temperature, average low temperature, and so forth. There is no single word in English that means quite the same thing.”- Wine Bible

Along with terroir, the processes of fermentation, storing, filtering, and etc. all affect what ends up in your wine glass. If all that means so much, I want a pure and untainted connection to the place where my drink is from or else wine is nothing but grape juice.

From this comes a new appreciation for the Fino wine list and its dedication to small producers, organic practices, and a true representation of Old World terroir. Why not begin my wine conquering here?  It’s also easy when you get paid to taste them on Wednesdays:

This Wednesday starts with D. Ventura. This producer is located in the Ribeira Sacra region in Galicia in Northwest Spain. Run by Ramon Losada and his family, two of the three vineyards lay on the banks of the Sil River. These happen to be the two that we carry at Fino- the ’09 Vina Caneiro and the ’09 Pena do Lobo. The Caneiro is strictly slate, the Pena do Lobo is a mix of slate and granite. Both have steep terraces that run along the bank of the river which cool the vines from this specific soil. It’s not called the “Sacred Shores” for nothing.

These regions of Spain only carry the Mencia grape. This varietal only coming into the limelight quite recently known for its currant red and pomegranate flavors. It’s very Pinot Noir-esque but the more exotic and lesser known version. The producers at D. Ventura take an organic approach to their 80+ year vines by fermenting with only indigenous yeast and storing in stainless steel barrels allowing very little of its terroir to be tampered with.

The ’09 Vina Caneiro is a little meatier, gamier with dark fruit and tannins. The ’09 Pena do Lobo holds a more musty quality but also more delicate with fresher fruit tastes of raspberry and strawberry.

See, it’s not so bad and scary after all. Conquering the huge world of wine might just be starting small.

Blind Dating

I’ve never been on a blind date. This is probably because physical attraction is important to me. I’d hate to come off shallow but I’ve always been a big believer that physical chemistry is an important aspect of any relationship- one lasting for years and one just beginning. This doesn’t at all mean that relationships should be based on looks alone. Sometimes attraction comes along over a few months of dates, sometimes it just takes a look across a wine bar. What I learned at a blind wine tasting is that first sight is not something to be ignored.

Appearance: garnet, purple, bloody red, shallow, pink-silver rim, nice legs.

Shallow you say? You can describe a wine’s appearance in depth by tilting it back to have a center line of vision. Does the wine change color the farther back you look? If it does, it has depth. If not, it’s “shallow”.

Pink-silver rim? This is obviously a red wine and more of a brown or orange color at the rim can be a sign of oxidization or age. Pink-silver? We’ve still got something young on our hands.

After you swirl your wine around, there is a ring of liquid near the top of the glass and droplets which fall back into the wine. These are called “legs” or “tears”. It occurs because of the differences in surface tension and evaporation rates of water versus alcohol but to get to the point, visible legs mean a higher alcohol content. We all show a little more leg with a higher alcohol content.

Nose: alcohol (I know but some burn more than others), cherry, jammy, oak, baking spice.

Mm, baking spice. Did you know that the baking spice in an Old World wine means it’s been in aged in oak for an amount of time. Another sign that this wine is young but yet older than probably two years.

Taste: quartz, chalk, rock, high alcohol, savory, herbaceous, green pepper, fruit and wood tannin, medium acidity, concord grape, salty, dusty, salami, white pepper.

So depth, age, and the sight of visible legs and a higher alcohol content can all be told before the wine is even tasted or your date even seen. As our date was revealed, it happened to be this:

Neipoort is a producer in the Douro region of Portugal run by Dirk Neipoort and has been family-owned since 1842. The Douro region of Portugal is known for its schist "soil", a metamorphic rock known to “split” and flake because of its mineral consistency- this includes quartz and graphite, two things that you can taste in the wine. The Douro is mainly known for its Port-making abilities but because of economic tax breaks in the early 1900’s, table wine began to make much more sense. The Douro is also known for its tough terroir and high temperatures which make winemaking here extremely difficult and its resulting wine that much more appreciated.

The Vertente is a blend of Touriga Nacional, Tinta Roriz (aka Tempranillo), Touriga Franca, Tinta Amarela. All of these grapes are red grapes that are used in making Port. The grapes come from 20-year old vines, are then fermented in stainless steel tanks, and aged in French oak for 18 months.

So we deduced a somewhat higher alcohol content of 13%, aging in oak, a rocky terroir, and a young age but yet older than two years (2007) all without knowing what we were drinking. The only reason why I say you should maybe give your blind date a second chance is because I thought this was a French Syrah and Grenache blend. Portuguese? Really? 

So I guess what I’m saying is that it’s okay to make some physical judgments but keep an open mind until your wine or date really let you know they’re one-note and don't last that long.  

Austin Autumn

I miss Fall. I hail from the Northeastern half of the country, a Yankee if you will. I never knew a life without the changing of the seasons. September meant leaves changing color, December meant White Christmases, and April meant the emergence of flower buds. When I moved to New York, my new favorite season became Fall. Fall in New York meant going back to school, getting back to my job at the tea house, pots of my autumnal favorites like Apricot Cinnamon Tisane or Lapsang Souchong, and a closet of heavy sweaters, scarves, and knee-high boots.

I have come down with a heavy case of homesickness in the month of October dreaming of these blustery New York days in said boots and sweaters with hot to-go cups of said teas. Then I take a walk with friends through Central Park, red and orange leaves on the trees, ending up on the cobblestone sidewalks of Museum Mile, paying a measly dollar donation in order to browse the 19th century section of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Now being in Texas, I have to acclimate to new seasons and new fall fantasies. Luckily, for me, Texas has cooled down and New York is blanketed in snow for Halloween and I get to enjoy sweater weather and knee-high boots at the perfect time of year. Unfortunately, my current job at Fino cannot provide me with huge pots of smokey tea leaves but it does offer some new concoctions from our lovely bartender, Josh Loving, with a bit more burn, bite, and spice. So I have revised a set of new fall fantasies that include some lapsang souchong-infused mezcal and apricot liqueurs- just so not to move too far away from my comfort zone.

Pim-Pim Pot-still

+  pimm’s no. 1

+  smith & cross pot-still rum

+  allspice dram

+  allspice syrup

+  chinese five-spice bitters

Maple Leaf

+  maker’s mark bourbon

+  maple syrup

+  lemon

+  cinnamon

Ghost of the Pine

+  nux alpina walnut liqueur

+  rittenhouse rye whiskey

+  zirbenz stone pine liqueur

+  del maguey chichicapa mezcal

+  lapsang souchong

+  orange bitters

Millionaire Cocktail

+  smith & cross pot-still rum

+  plymouth sloe gin

+  orchard apricot

+  lime

Autumn Toddy

+  blume-marillen apricot eau-de-vie

+  laird’s apple brandy

+  honey

+  angostura bitters

+ orange

+ clove

  

After a Saturday afternoon tasting all of these, you end up in a nice Autumn haze to forget all about your homesickness.

Amaro Amore

One year ago, I had just been in Austin for one (mild) summer. I was just starting to train as a server at Fino and I think it may have been when I heard the word "Averna" for the first time. I was also fresh off of a long-term relationship, wondering why the hell I had packed my car and drove cross-country, and trying to figure out what my life plan was going to be if it didn't involve a guitar.

One year later, I'm still serving at Fino, I'm still single, still kind of wondering why the hell I packed my car and drove cross-country, and well, still trying to figure out the life plan. One thing I do know is that I've had my fair share of Averna- a long way from first hearing the word "amaro." Well, actually, I've also fallen in love... with my amaro amore.

Fino recently did a bitter bartender's evening hosting Bobby Heugel from Anvil Bar and Refuge in Houston, Texas. If you have been reading my blog, you may have seen me back in Houston in a winged hat with a sprained ankle and a massive hangover. From what I can recall, our beloved bartender from Fino helped takeover Anvil and now it was Bobby's turn to pay us back and pay us a visit.

Our amaro-based menu, thank you:

I had the pleasure of working the event. In addition to getting my ass kicked that night, it was an honor to prep and be a part of it. Amaro affairs are always bittersweet.

The affair continued at Second Bar and Kitchen.

London's Culling:

• Averna
• Carpano Antica
• Lemon
• Orgeat
• Sea Salt

Later that week... at The Esquire Tavern, San Antonio:

Now this bar has been around since 1933 and opened to celebrate the end of Prohibition. It closed for a little while and just opened back up again in 2011 with a vengeance as well as a new and progressive direction.

Smokey Tiny Dancer: 

• Mezcal
• Tequila
• Lime
• Honey syrup
• Framboise
• Egg white

Ender's Game:

• Rye whiskey
• Grapefruit
• Lemon
• Honey syrup
• Carbonated Carpano Antica

Zhara Moon: 

• Gin
• Allspice
• Cucumber
• Lemon
• Saffron

Oh wait. Okay, sorry, Amaro, but gin, rye whiskey, and mezcal are my other three spirit loves. 

But hey, I'm single. Who said I couldn't sleep around in a different zip code? No exclusivity established and I'm really not ready to settle down or sober up. 

Maybe I'm in the right place of my life more than I realize. 

Olive Garden

I spent the past week on the East Coast. I had a dear friend’s graduation in Washington, DC, spent time with friends in New York, and spent quality time with family while home in New Jersey. In this particular entry, I’m not going to write about Italian food or pizza. I’m not going to write about my favorite Italian place in Hillsborough, NJ, Café Graziella’s and their fantastic pastas and bruschetta. I'm not going to talk about the amazing prosciutto pizza I had at Angelo’s in New York. Nor will I talk about the hole-in-the wall on 84^th and 3^rdAvenue and their pasta fagiole and caprese salad. I’m going to talk about the Olive Garden… and spinach dip.

I spent the weeks before my trip out east with the intention of enjoying some famous eateries and cocktail bars. I had lavish ideas of John Dory Oyster Bar, Spotted Pig, Les Halles, Dutch Kills, and Little Branch. I didn’t end up at any of these places or really anything else with a following. What I did do is eat a lot of food that felt good and not because of what was in it or how it was cooked or because it had a “name". It made me feel good because it was home and because I was with family. Shall I dare say it's what a true New Jersey-Italian experience is about?

My mom’s spinach dip. I am a sucker for this stuff. I don’t know what kind of crack is in it. Since I was 18 and I’ve come home to visit New Jersey from college in New York, my mother has always made sure that this dip was made for me to indulge into every single time. I don’t think she’s ever missed a trip. She also never fails to provide the ever-so-perfect pairing of Diet Coke. She didn’t miss this trip either. If heaven existed for me, it would consist of my family’s pool, 80 degree weather, Diet Coke, and dish of spinach dip. It would look something like this:

My grandparents used to live outside of Ft. Lauderdale, Florida and we visited a lot when I was in the range of maybe 8-15 years old. Ft. Lauderdale sure as hell is not a culinary capital of the country and well, for my Italian grandfather, the Olive Garden was the best he could get. I always remembered his order of pasta pomodoro. The man never fails with pasta and red sauce. As a young girl, I loved the experience of being with my grandparents and eating ravioli no matter what place it happened to be- Olive Garden or otherwise. So now as a 25-year-old lady, my grandfather still insists that the Olive Garden is one of MY favorite restaurants. No matter what, he has to make sure that we go to my “favorite” restaurant- the Olive Garden. Now, I don’t have the heart to explain to my grandfather how I don’t appreciate Italian chains so much these days but that kind of concern is no matter. I go because he makes me laugh every time he talks about my favorite place in every phone call and every visit. I go because it’s going to be something I smile about for many days ahead. I go to enjoy my meal at the Olive Garden with my family as long as I have the opportunity.

These are my sweet, sweet grandparents:

 My mom's spinach dip:

• 2 cups part-skim mozzarella cheese, shredded
• ½ cup sour cream
• ¼ cup grated fresh parmesan cheese
• ¼ tsp black pepper
• 3 garlic cloves, crushed
• 2 blocks cream cheese, softened
• 10 oz. packaged frozen chopped spinach, drained and squeezed dry

• tortilla chips

Drain and squeeze dry spinach. Add about 2 tablespoons of the parmesan and mix. In a separate bowl, mix 1 1/2 cups mozzarella, sour cream, black pepper, garlic, and cream cheese. Then add spinach and parmesan mixture. Spread into pan and top with the rest of parmesan and mozzarella. Bake at 350 degrees for 1/2 hour. 

If you can, add a Diet Coke, a great family, and a pool in New Jersey.

Calamari, Caprese, and Couture

"Pairing" is a common occurrence in many fields such as accessories with dresses, wine with food, curtains with bedspreads, songs with dances, but not many people mix-and-match. I find a good and complete experience to come with combinations of happy experiences- certain music with the perfect snack or a pot of tea with reruns of your favorite show. Why can't a perfect pair involve clothes and food? Or wine with earrings? Bedspreads and dances? Curtains and songs?  My day wouldn't have been the same without hitting the spot with a perfect dress and just the right food.

South Congress is pretty much the perfect place to satisfy any kind of food and vintage shopping pairing needs. This time Jackie and I were in the mood for some light fare at South Congress Cafe. It was exactly what we wanted: two cups of coffee, a calamari appetizer, and two caprese salads.

This was probably my favorite. They use calamari steaks- nice, thick, meaty pieces fried and served with an Asian sauce of orange and ginger. It was light and bright.

Then comes another light and bright and pretty caprese. The proportions were perfect of heirloom, mozzarella, a thick balsamic glaze, and a garlic and basil puree. I thought I was thoroughly satisfied until Jackie found this little number for me:

Ah- vintage finds are so satisfying and this one also quite pretty and light and bright. It all rounded each other out and I don't think one would have been perfect without the other.