Food and Wine from Saturday

All righty.

I've spent all day doing gloriously nothing. Well, not nothing, but a great deal of nothing interspersed with trying to sort through my 989 pictures I took while in Italia. So, I've not had much chance to even think on this!

Dinner on Saturday, as mentioned before, was lovely. We went with the 2006 Sangiovese from Coates, a local Humboldt County winery — it was organic and vegan, though my lovely friend and I showed some concern when we (both wine aficionados) failed to see any sign of good legs on the wine. We're wondering if it's a lack of filtering (which it mentioned) or a lack of sulfites (only naturally occurring sulfites) or what.

In the picture, the glass has the Sangiovese, the Tobin James bottle is the late-harvest Zin that we were going to crack with the chocolate cake, but opted out of. The cake was quite something on its own.

We had the Summer Salmon with Peach-Apricot Salsa as mentioned before, though we did a white rice (which we have a huge bag of) rather than go purchase the brown rice recommended. Tasted just as good, though not quite as good-for-you.

Delicious though, eh? It was. For full recipe, go here.

In addition, we had a lovely home-grown lettuce and tomato salad, with Trader Joe's "Goddess" dressing. Practically divine.

I over-dressed the salad initially (a glassful of wine will do that on an empty belly) but I rescued it with another handful of lettuce from the garden :)

The real kicker to this meal was the finish. We made a Vegan Chocolate Avocado Cake with Avocado Buttercream Frosting. If you can get past the fact the frosting looks kind of like a two-year-old (or the Hulk) emptied their green goo from their nose...

It was really quite excellent.

Definitely a different frosting flavor, but the cake was rich and moist and good — my helper (my lovely friend) did an excellent job "super mashing" the avocado (a step that's critical to avoiding avocado bits floating around the batter).

So tell me, as I am too tired to continue tonight...WHAT ARE SOME ODD RECIPES THAT YOU LOVE AND TASTE BETTER THAN THEY SOUND?

Ciao,
kc