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!):