The Fuzzy Chef & Friends

For my and Lisa's birthdays (they're about a week apart) we took off Memorial Day for a weekend in the California Gold Country.  This weekend was the Rocks & Rhones event at some of the wineries there, plus we thought we'd get some hiking and other fun in.

First thing: Snow?  In May?  In California?  This Global Climate Thrash thing is getting out of hand.

We did get to go wine tasting though, even though the hiking didn't happen.  Click through for a review of some of the wineries you probably haven't heard of before ... 

Ages ago I posted an article on how to do home tastings.  I thought I'd show you putting my comestibles where my dentition is, from a recent tasting at our apartment.  We threw this little party because we had too much fine wine around, and too much chocolate, and our local grocer (Haight Street Market) had just broadened his cheese stock.

We invited over our upstairs neighbors plus five friends who had all worked at the same businesses at different times, but had not yet met each other. Continue reading for tasting notes.

I recently won the Pacific Wine Club's "Cooking With Wine" recipe contest.  My submission was an original recipe of "Smoked Steelhead and Mushroom Risotto", which you'll now have to get the PWC newsletter to read.

If you're coming here from that newsletter, welcome!  I don't post that frequently these days, due to working way too hard, but there's a pretty hefty post archive and the bulletin board has a lot of very friendly, very gourmet, people on it.

Other than that, I thought I'd take this chance to give you some tips on how to cook with wine.  Click "more" to read the tips.

While my wife got her spa treatment, I indulged in my own relaxation exercise: I went wine-tasting.  If you have a chance to go out wine tasting from Calistoga, I recommend that you do it the way I did: on a "cruiser" bicycle rented from the Calistoga Bikeshop.  They'll even call ahead and make appointments at the "appointment only" wineries for you.  There's little traffic in the farm country around Calistoga, and on a bike you don't have to worry that much about how much wine you're consuming.  Also, the scenery is incredibly beautiful (above, cherry trees back a field of trimmed grape vines swimming in wild mustard).