Cooking with wine.

Cooking with wine is just one of those ideas that sounds absolutely awesome to me.  And there's something to be said for serving the same wine you made your dish with alongside it - I don't think food/wine pairings get any simpler than that.

That said, the difficult part comes with picking the right wine to cook with.  This is the area in which I am still experimenting, but I think I'm getting the hang of it.  The trouble I've run into, it seems, is misjudging the acidity of the wine, and as a result, how much I put in.

This tends to be less of a problem with red wines - I've dumped entire bottles of Syrah into a coq au vin, for example, and come out with something with only a slight hint of acidity.  On the other hand, a decent splash of California Chardonnay today in my mixed mushroom linguine was too much, and ended up making the sauce a bit more tangy than one would expect a white sauce to be.  Of course, there is the issue of relative volume - the entire bottle of Syrah in the coq au vin was accompanied by a good quart or so of chicken broth, which would have diluted the wine flavor.  On the other hand, the amount of mushroom juices in my mixed mushroom linguine was clearly not enough to mask the acidity of the Chardonnay.  Fortunately, the mushrooms themselves had a strong enough flavor to avoid the same fate as the pasta.  Previously, I've had greater success with a mild Pinot Gris, so in the future I'll probably stick with that.

At the very least, the pasta sure looked pretty (And cost a pretty penny too - while the cremini mushrooms were cheap and the oyster mushrooms were manageable, the chanterelle mushrooms went for a rather exorbitant $29.95/lb.  And the crafty store managers listed the price at $7.49 per quarter pound!):

Sear-sizzling your way to perfection!

For no reason I can fathom, I've been on a McDonald's craving recently.  This is still somewhat of a shock to me, since I've always sworn by Burger King.

I've held no real interest in fast food for years, having grown out of the McDonald's Happy Meal phase somewhere along the lines of high school.  It was because I had learned to appreciate good food, and cheap McDonald's burgers weren't gonna cut it anymore.

As far as I can tell, I blame my renewed interest on two things: First, my friend Ellis and our late night McDonald's trips as graduate students; second, the movie Harold and Kumar go to White Castle.

Because of Harold and Kumar, I'm no longer snobby about good food - don't get me wrong, I still love a good burger (Goodburger in NYC does a pretty good one, as does Shake Shack, and 67 Burger in Brooklyn), but let's be honest, cheap mass-produced goodness is its own brand of goodness.  It was Ellis' fault that I got hooked, though.

But why, oh why, do I now shun the flame-broiled patties from Burger King that I used to champion?  I'm honestly still not quite sure - all I know is, I am now a McDonald's double cheeseburger kind of guy.  (The Burger King stackers are decent, but the lack of pickles, onions, and ketchup are serious flaws.)  The whole flame-broiled flavor just seems like it tries too hard to be a proper burger.  If I wanted one of those, I would actually go and spend the money for one.  And the whole thing rather loses its appeal when you watch your whopper get prepared by tossing everything together from pre-cooked ingredients and watching it get tossed in the microwave for a spin.

On the other hand, I'm not sure WHAT exactly McDonald's actually does with its patties.  On the carton for the double quarter pounder I got today (because I wanted to see what the difference between the double quarter pounder and the double cheeseburger was - turns out, it's bigger, and has red onions), the claim was that the two quarter pound patties were "sear-sizzled" to perfection.  That sounds pretty awesome!  I mean, everyone (or maybe it's just me) loves searing (remember those steaks?), and I sure enjoy the sound of things sizzling.  But how does one actually go about "sizzling" something?  Sizzling is one of those things that just happens - like getting wet.  People don't wake up one day thinking, "Hmmm, I think I'm gonna get wet today!"  They might wake up and think, "Hmmm, I'm gonna dump two gallons of chicken noodle soup on my head today!" in which case, getting wet happens as a result - just like if you were to sear something, sizzling would happen as a result.  So sear-sizzling?  That's about as absurd as friendleaders orderequesting you to dump chicken soup on your noggin.