Food, Wine, Good (and Evil) Spirits

Tired of being the host and the bartender at your party?  This is the perfect solution...a festive drink your guests can serve themselves.

When's the last time you brought out the punch bowl?  They are hip now and back in style....very retro and not to mention look beautiful on a table.  If you don't have one, get yourself over to Goodwill...they have shelves and shelves of vintage ones they are dying for you to take home.

This drink is a very fun way to start of your party.  This punch along with some bottles of wine will keep you concentrating on the meal while your guests help themselves to some cheer!

There is no better way to celebrate a special event than with a glass of sparkling wine. All across the world people turn to sparkling wine in moments of great celebration, be it holidays, birthdays, or any momentous occasion. The French have Champagne, which is named after the region in which it is made. The Spanish have cava, which is named after the natural caves in which the wine ferments. Anywhere else we call wine that bubbles sparkling wine. Italy's version is Prosecco or what I like to call the wine of sheer joy.

Prosecco is a white wine made from grapes of the same name. It is one of the most armoatic wines that you will ever try. And its taste and finish are crisp, clean, and refreshing. This year I'm drinking Prosecco for New Year's Eve and I have many reasons why. It is affordable, extremely flavorful, very elegant, and it's easily a crowd-pleasing drink. Prosecco is a wine that not everyone is familiar with, but it is a wine that is easy to adore.

Prosecco is produced in the Veneto region of Italy, of which Venice is the capital. It originally was produced as a still wine, but somewhere along the way fermentation was introduced into the process, and a sparkling wine was created. Today we would not recognize the original Prosecco as a sparkling wine, because the bubbles were very soft and delicate. Many Prosecco wines produced today have vigorous bubbles. The lightly sparkling version is called frizzante and the fully sparkling version is called spumante. Either is very nice. It's personal preference that dictates which you choose.

I am not a big drinker. It’s rare that I finish a glass a wine at dinner and I rarely order a “cocktail”. With that said, when I do invite friends over for dinner, I like to have a little cocktail on hand for those that simply want one.

Seeing a lot of fruit infused vodka on Pinterest sparked my interest to create a red, white, and blue cocktail for the 4th of July. Seeping the blueberries in the vodka for 36 hours, creates the most amazing scent. For lack of a better word, the smell was intoxicating.

When I do indulge in a cocktail (I much prefer to eat my calories), it’s generally something slushy, fruity, and not overly alcoholic. Grabbing the last of the Meyer lemons from my tree, I made a huge batch of Molly’s raw honey lemonade. Making something slushy was what I was craving. Tossing the lemonade and some ice in the blender, this frozen lemonade and blueberry cocktail was created.

I wanted to use the blueberries as garnish, but didn’t want them simply floating in the glass. Grabbing a handful of small wooden sticks, I skewered them and then put them in the freezer for about an hour. After the fact, I thought how yummy these would have been if I would have sugar coated them.

Freezing fresh, organic, summer berries and fruit from the farmers market is my newest obsession. I see many more fruit and vodka combos in my future.

The email was very cryptic: “The Blindfold Dinner, April 24, 2012, at Osteria Mamma”. There wasn’t even a time, let alone an explanation. But still, how could we resist? After all, Osteria Mamma is our favorite Italian restaurant and the email is from Filippo, one of Mamma’s two sons who I became friends with first while taking an Italian Wine Specialist course and then from endless dinners at their restaurant. I hit the “reply” key on the email and write “Peggy and I will be there. What time?”

As the dinner approaches, we start to wonder exactly what will happen. The questions we keep coming back to are: (i) will it just feel silly to be blindfolded while sitting in the middle of a restaurant? (ii) will the blindfold really affect the flavor of food and our experience of it?, and most importantly, (iii) how do we avoid spilling our wine all over the people next to us? We find out that this is to be Osteria Mamma’s second Blindfold Dinner, so Peggy looks up the first on the internet and discovers that after a course is served and been experienced blindfolded, you can finish the dish with your sense of sight. (That’s when we decide to just not drink anything until we can see so our fellow dinners will all be safe.)

We get to the restaurant and are led to the back room that has a long table set for about fifteen guests. In addition to Filippo, our other host for the night is Giammario Villa, a wine educator who was one of the teachers at my wine class. Giammario is also an Italian wine importer and he is pairing the wine for the night. (At this point Peggy and I quickly reconsider and decide Giammario’s wines will be more than worth any possible risk to the clothes of those sitting next to us.)