cazalea[Seiko Moderator]
16935
Wine + mushrooms + onions + chicken + bacon = coq au vin
Oct 06, 2018,12:37 PM
The other evening I was enjoying a beautiful day outside while fearing my evening at a giant dinner organized by my wife and a group of charitably-minded women. I'm sure you have been to such things in a hotel room with speakers, lots of strangers wearing name badges, and recalcitrant overhead projectors and feedback-plagued sound systems. Plus a pledge envelope at the end.
The good thing about this event was we were chosen to sample the food and wine, and voted on the final selections. You may have read about it in July, when I reported on helping with this assignment.
One bad thing about a banquet is the high prices necessary to cover all the room cost, servers, etc.
In this case, our frugal ladies struck a deal that allowed them to bring in the wine, and take the extras home. We had to pay for corkage fee for every bottle opened - which of course is NOT the same as every bottle consumed. So after the dinner a small team of us went around and poured out the low bottles to happy guests, and carried the full-but-open bottles back to our "take it home" case. Which was given to me.
Don't you hate this sort of thing?
We had 7 full Cotes du Rhone and 5 full Chardonnay, with corks pulled. And a case or so of red and white still unopened. We made a deal with the ladies - if they bought 2 pristine bottles for $10 each, we gave them one of the "slightly opened" bottles too. That worked to sell off 3/4 of the wine.
Now we still have 4 reds and 3 whites, so I have put out a plea to friends and we will do our best to consume this immediately, before it "goes bad". A thoughtful suggestion from TimJ resulted in my French wine-consuming recipe for today, coq au vin.
I don't care for onions so I used garlic cloves instead. It smells wonderful in here!
Now to find some crusty French bread and we'll be all set.
Cazalea