InterWined.com supports the concept of buying local as much as possible. It is a trend that is gaining momentum, especially in the United States, and we hope it’s here to stay. Better for the economy, better for the environment.
So, when we received an e-mail this moring for consultancy firm Weber Shandwick, we thought it proper […]

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Each week, InterWined.com pairs one great wine with one great meal and publishes the results along with the recipe in a little feature it likes to call ‘Blow the Bank’.

This week, ‘Blow the Bank’ brings you the cure for the summertime blues with Pork Burgers with Summer Salad and Honey-Glazed Parsnip Chips.

Each summer, people throughout the UK bet on how much or how little sun they’ll see. With the global economy is full slowdown and British politicians espousing the joys of holidaying in the UK as opposed to travelling to the US or the Continent, this year thus far has proven decidedly overcast. So when — and if — the sun shines, why not make the most of it with a good old burger and bottle of wine?

South African blogger, winemaker, and Web site Stormhoek officially launches launched its new Couture Rosé today a year ago today, August 15th, for sale exclusively at Threshers wine shops in the UK. And, as Peter May of the Pinotage Club, aka Pinotage.org noted it’s pretty risky “launching a wine…in one of the most miserable Julys on record, when sales of other hot weather items have plummeted” — especially one as gimmicky as Couture Rosé with its super stylish bottle and label, complete with cartoon and “freshness indicator”. The thing is, gimmick or no, this wine — if Threshers does its job — is going to sell (by the truckloads)!

Why? For one simple reason (Sublimelle take note!), this is a wine marketed to the most casual and easygoing of wine drinkers. The bottle reveals nothing of interest for the connoisseur. Outside of disclosing the year of production and the alcohol content (12% if you were curious), it says nothing about the grape varieties, percentages, and growing region (hell, you’d have to know that Stormhoek is a South African wine company to even know the country of origin). Instead, the bottle screams the tagline “Best Served on Ice”. Could anything be a surer sign that this wine is probably not produced with the finest grapes available? Yes, it could have no particular smell, like this wine. If nothing else, it must surely account for the wine’s unbelievably sugary flavour, mustn’t it?

Yet, for all of these things and the great many style points that it share with Bill Rolfe’s Pink Elephant, this is a wine designed for sunny days and simple pleasures (if slightly pretentious ones — the kind you’d see on a Channel 4cooking programme’s picnic or beach episode, all soft focus, smiles, and precocious children under 10 prancing about in and out of shot). And, why not? We deserve it, Britain, what with the spectre of negative equity, record foreclosures, global recession, and the veritable threat of another series of Celebrity Big Brother lurking around the corner. So what better way to give in than with a bottle of Stormhoek’s Couture Rosé 2007 (12%) and InterWined’s Own Pork Burgers with Summer Salad and Honey-Glazed Parsnip Chips?

The two are perfect partners: the high sugar, sweet taste of the undefined Rosé pairing brilliantly with the honeyed parsnip chips as well as soft, milder flavour of the pork burger and summer salad. In pairing wines with food, sweet foods prefer sweet wines. Now, this wine isn’t sweet in the sense of desert wine sweetness, it probably wouldn’t brilliantly with a pudding or desert. Instead, it sweetness is sugary — like a pixie stick. Also, because the pork mince used is quite lean and not terribly fatty, it doesn’t struggle or overpower the wine. It doesn’t require anything tannic the way that a beef or lamb burger would do.

Granted, all of the above, sounds pretty insulting — especially the pixie stick remark. However, like pixie sticks, it has its place. It’s fun. It’s throw away. It’s vaguely reminiscent of Kool Aid. It’s also pretty perfect for summer. But too much of it will probably make you sick. 7.7 points in summer with food; much, much less in winter, like 5.

InterWined’s Own Recipe in Full

Pork Burgers with Summer Salad and Honey-Glazed Parsnip Chips

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InterWined met last week with the owners of the excellent wine shop, Organico, located in the Lake District to talk about organic wine. Like InterWined, Organico, closely follows developments in organic viticulture (ALL of their wines are organic) as well as other green issues related to the industry, such as the transportation of wine in […]

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Each week, InterWined.com pairs one great wine with one great meal and publishes the results along with the recipe in a little feature it likes to call ‘Blow the Bank’.

This week, ‘Blow the Bank’ brings you a simple Chicken Liver Salad to see us through the summer.

Like other forms of offal, chicken livers languish on supermarket shelves largely ignored by soccer moms and dads doing the weekly shop and chosen only by the frugal pensioner and the odd foodie. (After all, we can’t eat at St. John’s every night or drag ourselves to Smithfield’s each morning.)

It’s a shame too, really; because far more than most any other offal, chicken livers are both delectable and versatile. Consider this: in the past four years, I’ve managed to have chicken livers on lemongrass skewers in a restaurant on the Kowloon peninsula of Hong Kong, in pasta at a little Italian eatery hidden on the first floor of a rather non-descript Melbourne side street, as chopped liver served al fresco at a kosher trattoria in the Jewish quarter of Rome, and with salad in a Spanish tapas bar in London’s Piccadilly Circus.

While my favourite method of preparation would most certainly fresh from the pan with a touch of salt and gently fried in olive oil, they are remarkably good served with a slice of orange or Mandarin and few choice leaves of salad, making them perfect for a light summer luncheon.

Most often, people will recommend pairing liver with a big tannic red wine, the tannins serving as a safe partner for the savour flavour of the offal; however, an occasionally considered alternative — especially in the case of foie gras — is Sauternes, a sweet and acidic French dessert wine made of botrytised white wine grapes.

As with the French Sauternes, the Hungarian Tokaji Aszú is another well known wine made of botrytised wine grapes occasionally matched with foie gras to excellent affect. Given Hungary’s culinary acuity when it comes to all things liver (many consider the country’s foie gras among the best in the world — even France imports it), I decided to pair the Simple Chicken Liver Summer Salad with its dry Tokaji Furmint cousin, hoping that the drier wine would better suit the flavours chicken livers and salad.

Although, not quite the perfect match that I had hoped, but still a very good one all the same, the 2004 Oremus Tokaji Mandolas Dry Furmint (13%), £13.50 from Planet of the Grapes, is honeyed and buttery with an strong citric edge and a bit too much of an oak-y aftertaste that clashes slightly with the strongly textured flavour of the liver. This is a very impressive wine, nonetheless, and a rarity to find most places outside of Hungary to boot. Those seeking a white wine outside the realm of the overfamiliar Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc could do a lot worse than this. It would pair nicely with soft, flakey fish and seafood or make an excellent wine to enjoy on its own. It also maintains its form once openned, its oak-y aftertaste only marginally increasing over a few days.

Now, because InterWined is sometimes asked to ascribe numerical value to the wines it tries like judges at a sporting competition, let’s give this one some sort of score that suggests an excellent near miss, close the bullseye — something like 8.whatever.

(For more on InterWined’s complex ratings system, be sure to visit the Ratings page.)

InterWined’s Own Recipe in Full

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Each week, InterWined.com pairs one great wine with one great meal and publishes the results along with the recipe in a little feature it likes to call ‘Blow the Bank’.

Sticking with the bread theme from yesterday, why not start the week right with some Sun-blushed Tomato & Goat’s Cheese Rolls?

Sun-blushed tomatoes and goat’s cheese make another great match for the the 2005 Remole Frescobaldi (12.5%), £7.49 from Oddbins, made from a blend of 85% Sangiovese/15% Cabernet Sauvignon. The tomatoes and cheese provide a slightly savoury balance to the tannins of the Remole (especially if opened the previous day with InterWined’s Olive & Parma Bread).

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Each week, InterWined.com pairs one great wine with one great meal and publishes the results along with the recipe in a little feature it likes to call ‘Blow the Bank’.

There are few things nicer than a warm slice of bread and a good glass of wine. So, this week, ‘Blow the Bank’ brings you both with its very own Olive & Parma Bread.

I’ve made this bread several times and in many different ways, as a bâtard, as a baguette, and as a kind of stromboli. This recipe makes the stromboli-style.

Accompanying the stromboli is a simple glass of Italian wine in the form of the 2005 Remole Frescobaldi (12.5%), £7.49 from Oddbins, made from a blend of 85% Sangiovese/15% Cabernet Sauvignon. Oddbins describes the wine as a mini-Super Tuscan and it’s hard to disagree. The flavour is earthy and tannic with a nose that smells of cherries and summer fruits. Together, the two work well and find balance — the bread with its strong olive, salt, and cheese flavours smoothing the tannins found in the wine.

InterWined’s Own Recipe in Full

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InterWined once starred in a production at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival…back in 2002.
The Scotsman actually reviewed the show, “Chekhov for Breakfast,” and I still remember the opening line of the text: “There is something rotten at the heart of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and Chekhow for Breakfast is the perfect example…”
I’d tell you more, but […]

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Each week, InterWined.com pairs one great wine with one great meal and publishes the results along with the recipe in a little feature it likes to call ‘Blow the Bank’.

Yesterday, it was Gingerbread; and today it’s Champagne-Vanilla Ice Cream, as ‘Blow the Bank’ returns a touch of class to the 4^th of July.

Sometime toward the end of last year, the great and always entertaining Rowena of Rubber Slippers in Italy and I were discussing the pleasures of foods and wines, when Rowena suggested wine ice cream. It had never occurred to me to add wine to ice cream, even though I had tried all sorts of other concoctions, from the very good addition of balsamic vinegar to the very bad addition of Tabasco sauce.

Why Tabasco sauce? Well, I love it — almost as much as I love ice cream. I’ve even been to the McIlhenny family’s Avery Island in Louisiana where it’s manufactured (with InterWined’s Jacob Gaffney, in fact). Seen the Buddha; seen the alligators; bought a t-shirt that was ruined when the city of New Orleans and my ground-floor apartment were flooded in the summer of 1994. So, why shouldn’t I add between 20 and 30 drops of Tabasco to my ice cream? Because the fiery flavour of each drop intensifies as it cuts straight through the ice cream like a blade through butter, that’s why.

Frankly, I blame all of it on those Tabasco adverts that ran on American television in the early 1990s with the likes of Dan Ackroyd daring you try Tabasco sauce with all of your favourite foods. “So what do you put it on?” Not ICE CREAM! Not ice cream…

So what about wine and ice cream? After all, alcohol and ice cream really isn’t anything new. There are many ice cream cocktails and several alcohol ice creams. But wine ice creams? Admittedly even though I was wary of a Tabasco-like fiasco, I was intrigued and found myself agreeing to make wine ice cream as soon as I purchased an ice cream maker.

Well, I bought an ice cream maker last week. And true to my word, one of the very first ice creams I made was Champagne-Vanilla with a bottle of Bricout Premier Cru Cuvee Prestige Brut, £13.30 per bottle from Tesco (available online by the case).

Unlike with the ice cream Tabasco sauce, this was a perfect match. The champagne works to enhance and sharpen the flavour of the ice cream, while the vanilla keeps the balance and helps prevent the champagne from becoming too strong or overbearing.
InterWined’s Own Recipe in Full

Champagne-Vanilla Ice Cream

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Each week, InterWined.com pairs one great wine with one great meal and publishes the results along with the recipe in a little feature it likes to call ‘Blow the Bank’.

This week as part of a two-day 4^th of July spectacular, ‘Blow the Bank’ brings you a bucket of Mostly-Organic Gingerbread Ice Cream.

“I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream”. Sure, it’s a cliché; but one look in my freezer will prove that at least the first part’s true. Regardless of the weather or season, when it comes to my culinary affections, ice cream always reigns supreme and leaves me wanting more.

Need proof: on a recent trip to visit my sister in Rome, what was top of my list of things to do? See the Trevi Fountain? Tour the Vatican? Nope; it was find a gelateria. And, yes, I did see the Trevi Fountain and tour the Vatican, lest you think I’m some sort of cultural heathen. It’s just that I did both with a cono of gelato in my hand. (In fact, the best gelato in Rome comes from a gelateria very close the Vatican. Seek it out.)

From Japanese Yukimi Daifuku on the streets of London to a single scoop of vanilla pressed into the top of sugar cone and served my grandmother’s kitchen in a scene ripped for the cover of the Saturday Evening Post, I love ice cream. I’ll scream it loud and scream it proud.

The Web is awash with quick and easy recipes for gingerbread ice cream. The problem is most involve simply adding a bit of gingerbread crumbs to some bog-standard brand of ready-made vanilla in a loose and free-wheeling interpretation of the word ‘recipe’ not even worthy of the back of a packet of Hamburger Helper and a Campbell’s Soup tin or whatever other cultural reference implies adding one ready-made food to another and calling it a quick and easy recipe for anything in the name of ‘fast food’. If you really want beef stroganoff and don’t have the time to prepare it, buy it ready made and order it from a restaurant. If that sounds somewhat unforgiving, it’s meant to do.

InterWined is all for quick and easy recipes — few of us have the time for anything else — when quick and easy means simple and straight-forward to prepare. Not fast for the sake of speed. Recipes shouldn’t be fast at the expense of quality or flavour. Without those, there’s little point in following a quick and easy recipe much less eating quick and easy food, outside of staying alive. And I, for one, have never been terribly keen on things that double as songs titles for the Bee Gees. Don’t even get me started on that joke that started the whole world crying. Seriously, how bad did that joke have to be? Can you even call it a joke if all it does it make people cry?

Not-entirely InterWined’s Own Recipe for Mostly-Organic Gingerbread Ice Cream is definitely no joke. Based on a recipe for gingerbread ice cream from KitchenAid, it might not be as fast as some on the Web, but it is certainly quick and easy to prepare without sacrificing flavour or quality. This is premium ice cream made with organic milk and free-range eggs and infused with freshly-baked gingerbread cookies from the start to ensure that the ice cream, not only took on the colour of the cookies, but evenly absorbed the full, rich flavour of the gingerbread. One bite of this and you’ll never do quick and easy ice cream for the sake of quick and easy again.

Not-entirely InterWined’s Own Recipe in Full*

Gingerbread Ice Cream

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Each Friday, InterWined.com pairs one great wine with one great meal and publishes the results along with the recipe in a little feature it likes to call ‘Blow the Bank’.

Just because UK food prices are their highest in more than a decade doesn’t mean that we can’t eat well. In fact, in some ways, it might mean just the opposite.

Here’s how: we all know that necessity is the mother of something, be it outright invention or the simply act of taking chances, as a quick search of Google will assure Mark Twain once apparently said; and when it comes to the kitchen that something is prized as culinary inspiration.

For most, if not all, of the world’s great culinary achievements – those techniques that transform ingredients into dishes that speak to our hearts as much as to our stomachs – were born of a necessary kind of culinary inspiration. From salting to smoking to pickling to stewing and offal to sausages to bean curd to…you get the picture…necessity has given us some of our most popular dishes and culinary techniques to help us see out the lean weeks and wait for the happy return of opulence and excess and imported non-seasonal fruits and vegetables.

So, in the spirit of the credit crunch, put down the ready-meal, unplug the microwave, and learn to re-embrace one-pot dinners and the hasty return of leftovers, as ‘Blow the Bank’ brings you its Slow-cooked Pork Tacos à la Olla Podrida.

And, sure it might cost more than a fiver (No offense Jamie; I’m sure shopping for spaghetti with you is very rewarding.), but it’ll definitely last a couple of meals.

Pork is a staple of the Spanish and Latin American diet, which dates back at least to the reconquista of Al-Andalus in 1492 — the year ol’ Cristóbal Colón went sailing to India and landed on the island of Hispaniola (the island divided by the nations of Haiti and the Dominican Republic).

The history of this dish isn’t that old, but it’s close. In Spanish, the words Olla Podrida literally refer to a rotten pot of meat. But names can be deceiving — especially when it comes to foodstuffs — because this dish is anything but rotten.

Cooked in a large earthenware pot, the loin of pork is slow-cooked for a couple of hours in a mix of water, roughly chopped onions, cut bulbs of garlic, and a touch of salt and pepper. Later, the pork is removed and the remaining water and ingredients discarded. In the same pot, mustard seeds, paprika, and cumin are heated in olive oil with onion. The pork loin is shredded and returned to the pot, along with a simple vegetable or wine stock, followed by red kidney beans, cannellini beans, and calasparra rice. Once the stock has evaporated, the pot is removed from the heat, re-seasoned and served on warm corn tortillas to become Slow-cooked Pork Tacos à la Olla Podrida.

A bottle of the 2006 Val do Sosego Albariño (12.5%), from Rias Baixas in Spain, available at Oddbins for £8.49, makes a wondrous pairing to this white-meat stew, its mix of apples and pears complimenting the pork as well as the corn tortilla. Pork and apples, like apples and maize are excellent pairing partners; and although there is a tad more of a floral sense on the nose and woodiness in the mouth than I would have liked, it remains light and well-balanced with a crispness that helps further perpetuate the sense of apple. That gives it a score of 8.3, based on the complicated but 100%-accurate ratings system outlined on InterWined.com’s Ratings page. Thing is, it was so close to 8.6.

(As most readers will know, InterWined’s rating system is somewhat arbitrary and largely tongue-in-cheek.)

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