Vive la Limonade!

Country Gay! Welcome back to our online home! Please see my email regarding our plans for world domination and cooking challenges. Meanwhile, feast your eyes on this bad boy:


Rième Blood Orange Limonade Artisanale

I had seen these fantastic bottles of Frenchy beverage in Metropolitan Market for two or three weeks before finally caving. I don't know what the hell took me so long. I'm a sucker for fancy bottles and an even bigger sucker for Frenchy things.

There was a choice of classic limonade, pamplemousse (grapefruit) and blood orange. I know it seems like blasphemy that I didn't get the pamplemousse (to two of you reading at least), but I ended up walking away with the blood orange instead. Mostly because it seemed more exotic and I liked the color.

I'm trying to give up soda (and have been mostly successful for a month now) and I think I may have found a beautiful, fizzy replacement in the Rième. The tiny bubbles are delightful. Don Ho would be pleased. The flavor is subtle and not too sweet. It's a great summer drink in a delicate glass chock full of ice. But, most excitingly, the cap makes a big POPPING sound when you open it like a bottle of champagne. And not just the first time. EVERY time!

It's good on its own, but it's fantastic with pasta or rice dishes on days when you don't feel like drinking wine with dinner. I'm not sure what days those would be, but you get the idea.

If you want to try a bottle of your very own and you don't have a retailer that will deliver the goods, you can buy it online from some place called Bavaria Sausage. Or you can suck up to me and I'll send you a bottle.



DRINK UP!

- City Gay

Pasta with a woman who smells naturally of roses

Dear City Gay,

Here is my first recipe/meal from the country. When I have a hankering for pasta, or when I'm at an Italian restaurant, I often go for the fettuccine alfredo. I know it is less than healthy, but I can't help loving the richness and creaminess of a good alfredo.

I've stolen my recipe from a Barnes and Noble cookbook that contains recipes that only require four ingredients. In my fast-paced country gay life, I don't have time for a lot of ingredients in recipes, but I also want to be able to do more than open up a jar of alfredo sauce when I make pasta. With the few ingredients in the recipe (heavy cream, butter, parmesan cheese, and pasta), I can make a fast dinner without needing to rely on fast food.


The sauce is quite easy. One only needs to melt 1/4 cup of butter then add one cup of heavy cream. When the cream and butter comes to a boil, reduce and simmer for five minutes stirring constantly. This is where I learned how tricky it can be to stir boiling milk and take pictures at the same time. (You are lucky, City Gay, to have Gus be your hand model in pictures!)


After simmering for five minutes, stir in 2/3 cup of parmesan cheese, add salt and pepper to taste, and turn off the heat. In the meantime, of course, you by now have boiling water and can add your pasta. I used non-dried fettuccine to make the cooking go faster, but you do whatever you want. I did have a problem here. I started boiling water too soon, and by the time I got to it, the water had boiled down. However, I pulled through, and the pasta was done in only five minutes.

One could stop there, drain the pasta, and mix in the sauce and serve. I decided to add a bit of shrimp to shake it up a bit. Again to save time, I bought pre-cooked shrimp, and tossed it with a bit of lemon juice and wine while warming it up before adding it to the alfredo sauce. To plate the dish, simply toss the pasta and sauce together and then serve with grated parmesan cheese.


Part of the reason for cooking alfredo tonight was to try a bottle of wine I bought while wandering through Oregon wine country last week. I stopped at the Montazi vineyard where I tried several wines, but the one that I bought was the Maysara Roseena, an Oregon rose wine. I don't often go for pink wines, even though they are du jour, but I couldn't resist the cold, fruity, crispness. According to the label, roseena is an "ancient Persian term for 'a woman who smells naturally of roses.'" I don't know much about how women smell, and usually women who smell like roses are old, but I thought this pink wine would be a nice complement to a shrimp alfredo sauce.


The fettuccine was creamy and rich, and the extra parmesan added an earthy flavor that made me want to gnaw on chunks of parmesan cheese. The wine's sweetness helped tone down the richness of the pasta, and after two servings of pasta, and two glasses of wine, I feel like I could probably bathe in both.

One downside to this recipe is that it is kind of a pain to make when the house is hot. Standing over the stove for 15 minutes doesn't sound like much, but I was pouring sweat, which I hope didn't make it into the sauce.

(Brad stole the camera for a self portrait.)

So, City Gay, if you feel like having a pasta that is fat enough to clog your arteries immediately, go with the homemade alfredo. And, in your search for good wines, I found it's good to not snub the pinks. Pink wines help create la vie en rose.

Cheap wine for poor snobs: 2004 Michele Chiarlo - Barbera D'Asti

Welcome back, Country Gay!

Let's get this party started up again with some fermented grape juice, shall we?

I'm constantly on the lookout for great deals on delicious wine because I'm always poor and slightly alcoholic.

My goal, usually, is to keep the price to ten dollars and score a label I've never tried. When it comes to preference, I'll always seek out a dry, earthy European red with just a hint of fruit to make it "accessible." It could very well be in my head, but I feel like I can taste the history of the grape in those wines, you know?

Anyway, I HATE really sweet wines for the most part, but occasionally I'll have one that isn't offensive, so I'm never going to say never when it comes to wine. I do LOVE wine that's versatile enough for sipping amongst friends or pairing with any damned thing I feel like cooking.

So that's easy enough on ten bucks, right? Not usually. Usually I end up with a bottle of sludge that I drink anyway because, again, slightly alcoholic.

But tonight I got LUCKY! (not the dirty kind of lucky. yet.)



Michele Chiarlo - Barbera D'Asti 2004

Now the grocery store I hit up tonight (QFC) claims this is a $17 bottle of wine, but gave it to me for $10.99 out of the kindness of their hearts and because I have a QFC Advantage Card. But after a bit of Internet research, I discovered it's typically ten bucks anyway, so I'VE GOT YOUR NUMBER QFC!!!

But that doesn't detract from the fact that this is a fantastic bottle of wine for the price. Barbera, by the way, is a varietal of grape from Italy and Asti is the city within the Piedmont region of Italy in which these particular grapes were grown.

I found this wine to be an awesome sipping wine and went well with our salmon dinner tonight, but I've read it's real strength is when it's paired with strong flavors such as a hearty marinara sauce (it is from Italy after all). Order a bottle of Barbera instead of Chianti in Little Italy and I bet you'll sound less of an ignorant American for your efforts. Not talking about you, Country Gay. The others.

Wine Spectator apparently rated it an 86, but those numbers never mean anything to me anyway. I just want it to taste good and cost about the same as two value meals at Wendy's.

So, if you can't find it in any of your local stores, give Wine.com a try because the wine and the site both kick major tokhes.

- City Gay out

No food. Just beer and women.

City Gay is going country this weekend, so we'll be quiet here for a few days. I'll be camping in a field with 500 of my closest lesbian friends and four toilets. It's some big softball tournament (I don't play) that they call LCP. I'm not sure anyone knows what LCP stands for, but I think I've got the first letter nailed down.

I'm thinking my culinary experiences there will be of little interest to anyone, but I can tell you that there's a case full of this waiting for me:



Camping and I don't mix. I'm also not best friends with softball. In other words, please pray for me.

Soda: Evil-doer?

Country Gay's on vacation this week, so I'll just write to the other four of you who read this.

That joke's only funny when it's an exaggeration.

So, after reading this article about the harmful effects of the preservative sodium benzoate commonly found in sodas, I think I may break the hold the carbonated sugar has on my soul. I did, for several months, live a soda-free lifestyle. But something happened and I can't remember what because I think sodium benzoate is erasing my memory.

Getting back to the article, there's strong evidence that sodium benzoate damages vital portions of your DNA and could lead to Parkinson's or cirrhosis of the liver.

The problem - more usually associated with ageing and alcohol abuse - can eventually lead to cirrhosis of the liver and degenerative diseases such as Parkinson's.

But here's my hang-up. I frequently abuse alcohol anyway and I'm most certainly ageing, so... what's there to lose exactly? But I suppose the point is that it makes it happen faster and I've been drinking soda since I was wee, so I think it's time I cut it out.

"These chemicals have the ability to cause severe damage to DNA in the mitochondria to the point that they totally inactivate it: they knock it out altogether.

"The mitochondria consumes the oxygen to give you energy and if you damage it - as happens in a number if diseased states - then the cell starts to malfunction very seriously. And there is a whole array of diseases that are now being tied to damage to this DNA - Parkinson's and quite a lot of neuro-degenerative diseases, but above all the whole process of ageing."

I'll just stick with coffee for my caffeine intake because I hear it improves your skin. I also hear it won't work if you don't exercise, so I'm screwed any way you look at it.

Take That, Seattle

Dear City Gay,

For my first official post on our new blog, I decided to go with a topic near and dear to your city's heart: coffee. While coffee certainly isn't unique to your city, it seems to have a stronghold on the drink, and many people automatically associate Seattle with coffee. However, I sometimes find Seattle coffee to be a bit too stout. (Yes, stout as if it were an ale.) I'm sure this is because most of the country coffee shops I am used to overdo the chocolate aspect of a mocha or avoid using espresso that is too strong. However, one coffee drink choice that cannot seem to be replicated in your big city is the Bowl of Soul.

While Java has shops in bigger cities, it is a mainstay of coffee social life in Twin, and one of the most popular drinks, as you know, is the Bowl. While other coffee shops simply offer mochas, the Bowl of Soul steps up the basic mocha by incorporating coffee with the espresso and Mexican hot chocolate. The bitterness of the coffee is a nice complement to the espresso, and the sweetness of the Mexican hot chocolate provides a balance to the bitterness. When one is lucky to get a talented barista who knows the perfect amount of coffee to use, the end result is perfection. Often, the sweetest part (literally and figuratively) is the whipped cream and sprinkles (chocolate sprinkles and cinnamon), and the crunchiness of these crystals works nicely with the homemade whipped cream. (This certainly is a good thing compared to the sugar crystals formed with the meringue of your lemon tartlette.)

Coffee is an integral part of my trips to Seattle, but I will always look forward to getting home to a hot Bowl of Soul, even on a day when the temperature is nearing 100 degrees.

Love,
Country Gay

*I apologize for the ridiculous size of the picture of coffee. I am lacking in some photo shrinkage software.