A virtual wine tasting

Tuesday night, Kent and I attended a virtual wine tasting hosted by a local restaurant. We’d gone to an in-person wine tasting there the day after the election and enjoyed it a lot so jumped at the chance to do this. We also decided this would be lieu of any New Year's Eve celebration, both because of COVID and (more honestly) we never stay up until midnight anyway. Oh who am I kidding, we rarely stay up until 9PM.

One of the perks of the in-person event were the appetizers they served with each of the wines. I decided I would make some of our own (vegan) appetizers, and hopefully they would pair OK with the wine. 

So here are the photos of all the goodies.

This is the box from the restaurant. Inside were five small bottles plus a biscotti and of course the list of wines. 

Here's the box unpacked. You can see each bottle has a number on it. 

We got out several types of glasses but ended up putting the flutes away.

These are spicy nuts, the recipe is from Bon Appetit and they are dangerously addictive. Unfortunately they didn't pair all that well with anything, mostly because they're spicy hot. If I were to make these again for a wine tasting, I would omit the red pepper flakes. But only for that situation, truly these are quite good.

The red shoe box over by the toaster is what I put my laptop on once the video conference started.

I had to include this. See the red topped plastic dome thing? That's for our microwave only we also use it every night to keep Wally's food safe from the rest of the cats until he either decides to come out and eat or we dump it out as we head to bed. You can also see the potato latkes on the plate just above that dome. Those were OK, we did them in the air fryer but the texture turned out a little odd.

These are mini tofu quiches and I liked them a lot. I think they are best served quite warm. They cooled off really fast so I ended up microwaving mine. And they worked with the first wine, a Pinot Grigio.

This was the unexpected hit and hero of our event: smoked Gouda "cheese" which I made that same morning. It was super easy to make and it's quite good. The recipe says this is also meltable so we're going to give that a try this weekend.

We uh did some damage.

And of course we had to have dessert and boy these were amazing. They're pecan bars and may be even better than the sticky toffee pudding.

You can see our Zoom screen through my wine glass.

A vegan Thanksgiving

 I wanted to capture what we had for my first vegan Thanksgiving—honestly, this was Kent’s too although he isn’t vegan. And I did tell him he was welcome to prepare dishes with animal products in them (thinking of the green bean casserole, or turkey, stuffing and gravy). He said he didn’t want to, that he wanted to try what I was going to cook. So it was a vegan meal all the way around.

I’d found some Thanksgiving recipes for two from the New York Times that weren’t vegan, but I was pretty sure I could make them vegan. I won't bother linking to the NYT recipes because if you don't have a full subscription, you won't be able to access them. 

From the NYT, we had Maple Roasted Squash with Sage and Lime:

And Caramelized Brussels sprouts with vegan bacon. We will reduce the amount of apple cider vinegar the next time we make this and use a whole grain mustard instead of the Dijon we used:

Kent made the vegan bacon (or phacon as I called it) the night before Thanksgiving. It's made with coconut flakes and is quite good.

And Roasted Carrots, Faro and Lentils with *Cashew Sauce, which we've had before. This recipe is similar; I used one from a vegan cookbook my mother passed along to me.

We enjoyed this wine (even though we ate at noon and boy, drinking during the day sure makes me snoozy for the rest of the day.

Dessert was this very decadent NYT Pumpkin Sticky Toffee pudding with the most amazing sauce. This has what’s described as a soft cake-like texture. I thought it was similar to pumpkin bread only even better. We very briefly considered splitting one but didn't. And wouldn't in the future and agreed it was a Very Good Thing the recipe made two servings or we would have eaten it all.

*I’m so impressed with the sauces we can make with cashews. Those form the basis of the vegan Alfredo sauce we use on our pizza, with scalloped potatoes and of course with fettucine.