Black and White Wednesdays: Bread

Amazing whole grain bread in Ireland, 2011

Submitted to Black and White Wednesdays


I hope you have a great Thanksgiving and that you have a chance to catch your breath and reflect on all the things to be thankful for this year.

Black and White Wednesdays: Sail Away

Sailing out of New York on the QM2, 2011


Submitted to Black and White Wednesdays.  Go check out all the other fun black and white photographs!

Kapalua Wine and Food Festival

For thirty years, Master Sommeliers have descended on Maui and in conjunction with local chefs, beverage distributors, and the Kapalu Resort have hosted a four day weekend wine and food extravaganza.  If you are contemplating a visit to Maui during the early summer and would like to enjoy a fun weekend of tasting amazing wines and good food, plan your trip to include the Kapalua Wine and Food Festival.

This year was the Thirty Year Celebration of the festival!  We've been talking to our friends about the festival for several years-I think we've been four times to some or all of it-and finally convinced four of them from SF to come over.    They are already asking when we can register for 2012!

We rented a house up in Kapalua.  It was perfect.  We're all good friends and the house was certainly big enough for all of us, plus it had a pool, and gourmet kitchen (not that we did any "real" cooking).  The resort shuttle picked us up and brought us back so no one had to worry about spitting out rather than swallowing the wine during the tastings (who really does that?) and there was no need for a designated driver for the evening events.

View from the pool over golf course to ocean.

The format is fairly straightforward, you can buy a ticket for the whole weekend (which is what we did) or you can pick specific events/tastings you want to try and pay for individually.  Each day has several organized tastings hosted throughout the day.  There is a welcome reception with heavy pupu (appetizers) and wine the first night, a Grand Tasting where they pull out all the stops-hundreds of top rated wines to try with good nibbles to go along-this year focused on Farm to Table and paired a local farmer and chef to create wonderful small plates for us to enjoy.  One evening is open which is a great night to enjoy one of the local restaurants (we dined at Lahaina Grill-fabulous). The final night is the Seafood Festival featuring, you guessed it, local seafood treats along with hundreds more wines.  The Grand Tasting and the Seafood Festival are held outside on the Ritz Carlton property so the scenery is amazing!

I hope you enjoy this photo tour through this year's festival.  And, come over for 2012!
(All photos taken with my camera phone so, you know, it is what it is).

One of many tables of wines at the opening reception.

My favorite tasting each year is the one featuring cheeses from
The Cheese Shop in Carmel

Another tasting featured wines from along Hwy 101 in California.

For the thirty year celebration we were treated to three decades
of reserve Cabs from four premium producers-oh my!

A little bubbly to start off the Grand Tasting.

The Grand Tasting

Desserts at the Grand Tasting.

More dessert!

Another favorite: Chef Peter Merriman cooking demo and wine tasting.
Ceviche of local fish.

Local greens, Surfing Goat Dairy goat's cheese,
local strawberry vinaigrette.

Maui Cattle Company Beef Filet

Merrriman's Chocolate Creme Pie

Just another beautiful Maui sunset in Lahaina

Walking down the Ritz Carlton lawn to the Seafood Festival.

Bubbly to start the evening?  Why, yes, I believe I will.

Wine in every direction.

Local fish tempura.

Perfect bites and cup of soup.  Love the presentation.

Sushi lollipops.

Fancy freeze dried presentations-I think this was the
Maui Culinary Academy station.

Wonderful sushi rolls featuring fresh island fish.

Ahi tuna tacos.

Well I've really just scratched the surface.  Not that you ever need a reason to come to Maui, but add this to your list.  Aloha!

Greenwich Village Food Tour

As I mentioned a few weeks ago in my post about Eataly, we had some amazing food experiences on a trip to the mainland earlier this year. One wonderful day was spent experiencing all things food related (well, not ALL, but many) in Greenwich Village, New York.

This was an organized food tour, led by an amazing, funny, well-informed guide.  We met up with our friends from Maui and about 8 others at Murray's Cheese Shop on Bleecker St. in The Village.  Waters were distributed and we were quickly on our way. First stop-Pizza!

I'm sure there is a big debate whether this is "the Best of New York" but it was a very simple and delicious slice of pizza-nothing too fancy-thin crust, sauce, cheese, salt.

How good does that look?  Not as good as it looked in person or as it tasted!  At each stop on the tour, our guide gave us the history of the place, the food, the architecture, and the area.  So in addition to feeding our stomachs, we got to feed our minds too.  After a leisurely stop to eat a slice, look around inside and hear about Joe's we were off to our next stop.

At O. and Co. we tasted several olive oils as well as honey.  I love the beautiful cans the oil comes in.

And, I was very taken with this display!

Some of the streets in the Village are just full of little restaurants and historic buildings.  We didn't go in all of them of course, but we were fortunate to get a bit of history of the places we went by like Little Havana...

or Pó,  Mario Batali's first endeavor in NY and home to the first off-off Broadway theater.

Time for more food to nosh on!  Back to Murray's for cheese and olives.  I could have spent the whole day in there looking at all the cheeses and other goodies!

At Faicco's Italian Specialties shop, we were treated to the most wonderful arancini (rice balls).

And they had cases full of house-made sausages. Mmmmm.

On the tour, there is always one sit down course about half way through.  You can get a glass of wine with the course and use the facilities, both most appreciated! Our stop was at Centro Vinoteca, an Italian restaurant and wine bar.  We had a nice mushroom risotto (and glass of wine).

After our stop, we walked around several blocks and different areas of the residential portion of The Village.  Historical buildings were pointed out, architecture discussed, and famous landmarks identified.  Recognize this?

I really enjoyed our stroll through the charming side streets.

As we headed back to the more commercial streets, we passed many small and large restaurants and food shops.  I never realized what a food-centric area this was!

To round out our tour (and ourselves!) we enjoyed a divine chocolate chip cookie from Milk and Cookies.

Boy did it smell good in there.

I was tempted to buy the cookbook but knew that would be trouble!  Here's why:

The tour was just about three hours in length and thank goodness we did a lot of walking!  I would definitely recommend this to anyone visiting NY who would like to experience a neighborhood close up through its food, restaurants and shops.

Oh, that landmark building?  The fascade of the building used in the TV show "Friends".

Food of NY Tours
Murray's Cheese Shop

Joe's Pizza

O. and Co.

Pó

Centro Vinoteca

Milk and Cookies