March 9, 2009. Aligot –At long last, I am about to make aligot (pronounced ah-lee-GO), thanks to my friend Linda who makes her own cheese. Last night she came over bearing a chunk of some one-day old cheese. And guess what? Aligot is (traditionally) made using two-day old Cantal cheese. So while we ate a bunch of her young fromage last night (it was a ‘release’ party for our Spudders Crest, 2007 Red Mountain Cab/Merlot), there was enough left-over to make aligot tonight –while the cheese is still two-days old.

Aligot is a fairly obscure concoction, native to the Auvergne region in southern France. My first encounter with it was last year in Paris on rue Mouffetard, and its daily market. One of the cheese shops was making a big pot of aligot out on the sidewalk. I got to taste a bit, and then bought a small tub of it.

Aligot is somewhere between mashed potatoes and a cheese spread. Most of the recipes I’ve encountered are similar. Steamed or boiled potatoes are combined at a ratio of two to one with cheese. A bit of garlic, salt, pepper, butter, and milk are added. All of this is stirred together in a double-boiler until you get a nice smooth, thick consistency, almost to saltwater taffy. It’s most often served as a side dish with meats, though it’s not bad on bread.

So anyway, tonight I will make my first aligot and report back

March 10, 2009. ‘So, Bob, how’d the aligot go (pronounced ah-lee GO-GO)?’ Well, I didn’t get that taffy-like stretchiness I was hoping for, but otherwise, it tastes wonderful. I used David Rosengarten’s recipe. Only problem, with an improvised and rather clumsy double-boiler, my hand slipped at one point, and a bunch of boiling water dribbled into the pot. Took a lot of stirring to burn that off.

My guess is, you really need to use two-day-old Cantal to get the right consistency. By the way, I asked (back on rue Mouffetard) the old fellar stirring the aligot pot if they sold the 2-day-old Cantal by itself, and he shook his head, ‘o non, non, you crazy little American.’ So I don’t know where a home cook would find it.

I do have some store-bought raw milk Cantal (probably aged to around 6 months), which is awesome. Similar to gruyere and tomme de Savoie. Maybe next time I’ll pass on tradition and try making aligot with an aged cheese.

The Third Annual Awbbies

The envelope please. And the wiener is…

Did you know there are awards given to wine bloggers? Neither did I. Not only that, the AWBAs (American Wine Bloggers Awards) are already in their third year. Wow. What’s more shocking, I wasn’t even nominated. What’s up with that?

The gent behind these awards is Tom Wark, and you can visit him, and vote at his Website. Although, the deadline is tonight. But even if you’re too late to vote, it’s a good site for one stop blog shopping (I mean, you’ve already got this one, why go anywhere else, but…).

The site gave me a chance to catch up on other blogs, for, y’know, contrast, compare, see where I stand in relationship with all the other losers who can’t find a job…errr, I mean, with other like-minded, really intelligent people, who just want so much to share their tremendous wealth of information.

One thing I notice is I really suck at graphics. Well, more to the point, I don’t have graphics.

There’s one weird site for instance, that’s all images. Instead of reviewing wines with words, they just have an image, usually provocative, expressive of a particular wine. It reminded me of my late, and widely lamented newsletter, the Wine Iconoclast, where once I did wine reviews in Interpretive Dance. That went over really well.

So I’m going to start cooking up some graphics.

In the meantime, I’ll have to rely on words. I have in front of me a lovely little wine, the Francois Chidaine, 2007 Val de Loire Touraine Sauvignon, $13 (Whole Foods). Wonderfully, classic, French Sauvignon Blanc. Grapefruit nose, bit grassy, great whistle-clean texture, lean, crisp, and a great food wine, especially with…

But wait, you know how us SOWWs (Society Of Wine Writers) are always going on about great food/wine matches. Well, what about the opposite? The nightmare matches. For instance, I’m drinking this lovely wine, and I decide to have a couple bites of the luscious, decadent, triple cream Castello Blue, and ick! It was like sucking on month-old garbage.

How can two things, lovely by themselves, be so hideous together? A match made in Hell.

But the good news is, if such bad matches do exist, then -applying the rule of inversion- great matches must also exist, and it therefore falls to us SOWWs to steer readers, not always towards, but occasionally away from certain food wine matches.

A task which should certainly earn me an Awbby next year.

Bad News, Bad News

We're riding the dinosaurs right into the La Brea Tar Pits. I'm talking about newspapers. Today, The Oregonian announced it's reducing the number of comics it carries from 33 to 23. At the same time, Doonesbury is re-running the segment where Rick Redfern is downsized from his newspaper job, and starts a...check it out...blog! Does that sound familiar?

Right now, it takes me approximately 20 minutes, or a cup of coffee, to get through The Oregonian. I used to finish a whole pot before getting to the comics page. The paper's looking more and more like the wafer chip that is replacing it.

One of the few reasons I even keep the paper is because of the comics section. Now I might have to rethink my strategy. I have tried to sign up to Comics.com, but I keep getting that 'invalid username' thing, so I gave up.

Still and all, The Oregonian manages to run some interesting tidbits. Today there was a story about the legislature trying to make the marionberry the official state berry. But guess what? The blueberry and raspberry contingency got in a hissy fit, and not wanting to hurt anyone's feelings, the lawmakers backed off.

But the line that grabbed my attention came when, in its defense, one of the backers of the marionberry called it the 'Cabernet of berries.'

Cabernet? Hey, bonehead, you're in the Willamette Valley, where some 90% of all marionberries are grown. And we don't grow Cabernet in the Willamette Valley. The grape is Pinot Noir. Marionberry is the Pinot Noir of berries. See, I can get in a hissy fit, too.

So it looks like the future belongs to us loser bloggers. In fact, I'm taking it so serioulsy I've started another one. I may end up with a dozen blogs (somehow the Springsteen song '57 Channels and Nothing On' comes to mind).

I'm not sure I want to live in a world without Luann or Wizard of Id, but if I must, the least I can do is blog about it.

Great Appts

The greatest appetizer in Clark County?

Considering I haven’t had every single appetizer in every single restaurant in our fair county, it’s safe to assume not –but it would be equally dangerous to dismiss it altogether.

The first time I had La Bottega’s Gorgonzola Cheesecake it was a revelation. In part, because I was working on a cookbook (‘A Seriously Cheesy Cookbook’ to be published next fall –if I can find a publisher), and in part because it was fantastic.

I immediately ran home (no, I didn’t, I took the car), and found on the Internet several recipes close to La Bottega’s, right down to the polenta crust. I tried a couple, and found one that was quite good, but the result was a little too dense, almost like a brick. Another recipe was even better, the main difference being the La Bottega version uses roasted garlic cloves around the edge of the cake. But even so, it wasn't quite what I remembered.

So I went back to La Bottega recently, to try it again, and sure enough, their version is light and fluffy, creamy, almost to the consistency of ricotta cheese. It’s easy on the gorgonzola, so if you’re not a huge fan of blue cheese, it’s not in your face. On the other hand, if you love blue cheese, there’s enough gorgonzola flavor to please.

It’s served in a light marinara sauce, with crusty smoky, grilled bread, adding complexity and depth of flavor to the whole dish. It gets two Yums Up.

While there, I decided I’d better find a wine to go with it, and the most obvious choice on the ‘by the glass’ list was the Pravis, 2007 Vignetti Delle Dolomiti Pinot Grigio, $18. Perfect match. The marinara sauce threw it off a bit, but it’s easy to avoid that.

May not be best, but until I try every appetizer in Clark County, I wouldn’t count it out.

Now if I can just duplicate it at home, so I can finish my cookbook.

Crossed the Swiss border into France at Grinwald. When I peered at the border guard for directions, or some kind of sign, like, ‘hey, dude, you’re in France,’ he turned away, more like, ‘dude, don’t bug me.’

Yup, we were in France, alright.

With LB riding shot-gun, navigating us up through the incredible slopes, our black Passat crammed with five of us, plus luggage, we went whizzing past thousands upon thousands of acres of vineyards, on steep slopes facing -it appeared- due east (may have been a bit of a southern cut), trying not to take my eye off the road, but could not believe all the vines. We got off the autostrasse onto Hwy. 21 heading for Evian-les-Bains. You guessed it, that’s where Evian (water) comes from.

But I wasn’t interested in water, I wanted to know what wine was being grown on those slopes.

That night at dinner, a funky outdoor restaurant (after Champagne), I asked our waiter what the local wine was. He brought us out a bottle of Apremont, a bright, refreshing white wine. Had to be from those vines lining the road.

Very tasty, and fantastic with my duck salad.

And as far as I was concerned, that was that. A nice obscure local wine, never see it again. Wrong-o!

Back in the states, the first wine tasting I went to at Mt. Tabor Fine Wines, I was leaning on a shelf, and looked down to see Pierre Boniface, 2007 Vin de Savoie Apremont, $13. No way!

Obviously snatched it up, and well, you know how sometimes you have a wine at some little Tuscan roadside cafe overlooking a vineyard, with a plate of proscuitto and cantelope, and you think, my god, that’s the best wine I’ve ever had, so you buy a couple bottles, get it home, and it tastes like crap? It’s called the ambiance fallacy.

So did I fall into the same trap? No, in fact Apremont remains one of my favorite white wines. Made from the Jacquere grape, its bright, lemony, crisp, refreshing, with all sorts of nice floral notes. And it’s an excellent seafood wine.

It’s readily available in the Portland market, but up in my neck of the woods, Clark County, it’s not. So if you happen to be down across the border (at Grinwald, for instance), look it up.

Contrarian Chardonnay

What, no oak?

What, no sugar?

And you call yourself a California wine maker. Shame, shame, shame.

Right in the middle of my recent snit over sweet, oaky California Chardonnay, what should slip over the transom, but a nice under-oaked Chardonnay, completely screwing up my tirade.

Now let’s be clear about this, we all know California leads the American wine market (mostly by the nose), and so when the Golden State dictates sweet, over-oaked Chardonnay, the U.S. consumer salutes, and cries, ‘bring it on.’

So, I was surprised, if not shocked, when I received a bottle of this Festival ’34, 2007 Central Coast Chardonnay, $13, which (back label) describes itself as ‘crisp… with hints of refreshing citrus.’ Key words for –no oak. By the way, keep an eye on back label descriptors. If you see words like buttery, vanilla, toasty, you know you’re in for an oak ride.

And did this one live up to its self description?

Sure enough, despite fairly high alcohol (13.5) it is crisp. And yes, there are citrus notes. Very aromatic with hints of peach and apple. It’s lean, with intense flavors of green apple, lemon, and a slight grassiness, almost like a sauvignon blanc. Almost.

In other words, a fruit driven, wonderfully tasty Chard.

I gather from the accompanying (vague) notes, this a new winery (or label), so not sure about distribution, but if you want to support the effort to trim excessively oaky wines –look for it.

Rooted in a Sea of Purple and Red

I circled the parking lot three times before finding a parking place. Whassup with that?

After all, this a brand new restaurant. Couldn’t have been open more than a month. I thought only us die-hard foodies had heard of it.

So I pushed in the door, and uh-o. The place was packed. It wasn’t even noon yet.

“Table for two?”

Maitress d’ looked worried. “Have reservations?”

“No.”

She bit her lip, ran her finger up and down the seating chart, then, ah-hah. “Follow me.”

Phew. She led me past the bar, stacks of logs, the enormous wood-fire grill, wooden slats of the partition, turned a corner, and Holy Schmoly! A sea of purple and red. There, taking up virtually the entire dining room was –you guessed it, the Red Hat Society. I thought they were some urban myth. A crock. But o no, some 25 elderly ladies, all in purple dresses and brilliant red hats.

We doggie-paddled past and around the society, where a tiny table for two sat lonely and waiting. The maitress d’ told me it was one of only two tables left in the whole restaurant. Her eyeballs rolled to the sea of purple and red.

I waited while LeAnne circled the lot four times, before finding a place, and joining me.

We ordered a glass of wine (her, proseco; I, pinot gris), and then we perused the menu.

It was our first chance to sample the fare of Brad Root’s new venture, Lapellah. Ever since opening Roots, his first sleek and elegant Clark County restaurant, Brad Root has proven the adage; ‘if you build it, they will come.’

Or more precisely, if you put something of quality in the oft maligned market of Vancouver, Wa., people will come. Even dressed in purple and red. Across the parking lot from Roots, next came the superb 360 Pizzeria, an adventurous, ‘trattoria’.

And now, Lapellah, in the Grand Central complex near downtown Vancouver.

Onto the food. While the lunch menu is rife with ‘comfort food’; pot pies, steak and fries, meatloaf sandwich, tuna melt, fish and chips, mac and cheese, there is also a definite nod to N’Orleans cuisine, with Fried Oyster Po’ Boy, Jambalaya, beignets, and gumbo.

LeAnne settled on the cornmeal roasted trout, which was excellent. I had two starters, Oysters Rockefeller and Savory Shrimp Beignets in a red pepper remoulade. Both wonderful.

The prices are more than reasonable, with nothing on the lunch menu over $12.

The wine list is brief, but more than sufficient. I finished up with a glass of Barnard Griffin Syrah, which to my palate is over-oaked (but don’t listen to me, I’ve become a no-oak snob).

Meanwhile, the Red Hat Society finished up their meal, and the leader stood and led them all in bizarre ‘whoosh’ and ‘oooo’ chant. Beats me.

At least they found Lapellah.