What I Learned Last Night. Chicks Like Rosé Wine.

12 Occasions to drink Rosé and defy the Wine snobs:
~1. To get non-wine drinkers into wine
~2. To get soda drinkers off the corn syrup and onto something real.
~3. When she's having fish and he's having red meat.
~4. On warm summer evenings. In your California backyard. With your high school boyfriend Matt.
~5. With grilled cheese sandwiches, or hamburgers, or pork dishes.
~6. When you feel like putting ice cubes in your wine.
~7. On Valentine’s Day.
~8. During a Burlesque show.
~9. When red wine seems too heavy. Like at La Gourmond restaurant on your birthday with your parents, brenda dear, and smoking chef who is probably nervous because he's out with your parents.
~10.With your chickie girlfriends. Especially Madeline and Christine and Brenda and probably Jen and Casey and Sarah and Alyssa, and your best high school girlfriend Kristin and her mother, who love to have a good time no matter what.
~11. When you are male, and you want to get your chickie, Mustang Sally-type, girlfriend drunk and maybe try to get some.
~12. Especially when smoking pot at Christine’s house... last night...eating Beechers Flagship Cheese. And doing a sing along. Ride Sally Ride.

What I learned Last Night. A commentary on Pink Wine and the Chicks who Like'em.
1. Girls like Rosé wine. We girls admit it. I admit it. Yes, a pink wine. Chicks like it. Especially Mustang Sally type chicks. Pink wine tastes good damn it. Madeline says so. My foodie friend Christine admits to it. Even my friend Brenda, who has a fab wine palate, likes it. And so do I! Dry or sweet. It’s just fun. It's crisp and acidic. It's fruity, like strawberries and grapefruit. It's thirst quenching. It only has like 120 calories a glass. It’s all good. French or California. Rosé , Blush, or “White Zin”. It’s usually pretty good. Umm, there are exceptions. But we will pretend the expectations do not exist. Rosé wines: Nothin but fun. And Girls just wanna have fun.
2. Beginner wine drinker chicks (has to be a chick specifically) will like the California ones the best, especially the White Zin pink stuff. I'm getting around to telling you more about this.
3. The Rosé wine experience is heighten when paired with the sun brightly shining. In your California backyard. Grilling. With family, with friends. Summer time…. Ahh nostalgia… With your old boyfriend Matt, who loved you silly and thought you were beautiful. And for you two the world was your oyster. The Rosé makes you feel the zeal for life and and the simplicity of young love and like you don’t have a care in the world or that anything has to be done today. It can all be done tomorrow. No urgency with Rose, no Carpe Diem. Instead: Savor the Rosé moment while it lasts….
4. A good Rosé will defy the wine snobs. The pretentious palate will zeal over the Rosé too. Especially those dry French grenache rosés.
5. Rosé wines are… well, they’re pink. They can be called “Rosé ”, “Blush”, or when made specifically from Zinfandel grapes, they are called “White Zinfandel" or “White Zin”. Side note: Zinfandle grapes make loucious wines, both red and "white". omg yes!) This is Lorraine's personal Fav of the Rosés and the Reds. A pinkie, fairly sweet wine. This is why chicks like ‘em. But some Rosé, usually the ones from France are dry, meaning not sweet. There’s your wine terminology for the day. You’ll know it’s French when the label is written in French. And has words like Château or Cote d’Or or Vin de Pays written across it. It’s not difficult.
6. So how are they pink?! What are they made from!? Here’s the deal with Rosé wines ya’ll. A little wine tech speak comin’ at you: Rosé wines are made from Red Grapes. Wine gets its color from the grape's skin. To get Rosé, the red grape skins are taken out of the vat before the wine gets too red. This also early removal of the skins also affects the taste, in a yummy kind of way. The skin is also where the tannin, the bitterwine flavor, comes from. Witht hte early skin removal, Rosé wines absorb very little tannin, so it’s light in flavor, no bitterness, so, yeah, chicks think they taste good. And it’s all good.
7. Rosé can be a single red grape variety or blends of multiple grape varieties (sometimes both red and white grapes). The typical grapes used are Grenache or Zinfandel aka “Zin”. The “White Zin” will be from California. “White Zin”, as anyone who can see will see, is not white, it’s pink. White Zin is sweet. The Grenache ones will usually be from France. These are the more dry Rosés. The Grenaches, whether from France or the USA, will often be blended with other grapes. Most of the American Rosé or Blushes are blends of multiple grapes. White Zin is just the zin grape only though, no blending. Just drink it.
8. Lorraine, moi, who is very much a chick, her favorite Rosé is the White Zin from Beringer winery in Napa Valley. Num! Yes, I admit it. I have a have favorite white zin. And it retails for like a mere $6.99 a bottle. And it’s good. Yes, wine snobs, it’s good. And, to the white zin's cred, is responsible for getting many non-wine drinking chicks to drink wine. And drink too much wine. And therefore probably responsible for many nights of men gettin' some (reproductive success). Beringer is also the wineery credited with making White Zin famous, but also gave it the cheap reputation. But as far as I'm concerned, Thank god for Beringer!! Beringer is like the Disneyland of wineries ya’ll. It's the tourist trap of napa. Which goes perfectly with the White Zin theme moi thinks. And while Beringer White Zin retails these days for a whooping $6.99 a bottle, I remember buying it for $4.99 which makes me feel really old School cool. Cheap! Cheap and good! Just the way I like my wine. But not my men. Someone buy me a bottle immediately. Especially someone who wants me to drink too much wine and subsequently take “advantage of me”.
10. Another good Rosé that really brings back the memories of learning to like wine is the “Fun and Yummy” from Charles Spinetta Winery somewhere in Amador Wine Country in Cali. But don’t bother looking. It now exists as chenin blanc version... Wait...maybe I’m remembering this as white zin and it was chenin blanc, a white white…. Regardless, who cares, it was faboo, so on with story…. I tasted (and bought) it at the winery in like 1997 while being forced, yet again, to wine taste, yet again, with my parents. I drank it at the tasting bar in the Spinetta winery. I liked it. I loved it. Succulent and sweet. Like honeysuckle and candy. It was a defining moment for me. First wine I liked. Haven't complained about wine tasting with my parents since (I'm an ungrateful daughter).
11. Lesson learned: Girlfriends (or even boys - I'll make it a personal goal) who don’t like wine, serve them a Rosé. They’ll drink it and like it. As evidenced by Madeline. And you’ll have a drunken chick on your hands. Excellent…

What I learned last night March 17, Seattle

What I Learned Last Night: How to Bake Your Own Bread and acknowledging your scarred heart.

To Bake your own Bread
1) Mix:
2 cups flour
1 cup water
1 packet yeast
2 teaspoons salt
2) Knead. Knead the dough. Need the dough. Knead the dough only by hand. Appreciate the feeling of making something by hand, something real, something that can be more easily made with a machine but won't taste or feel nearly as good. Knead the dough like you’re making love for your last time. Don’t be intimated. Knead it some more and remember what it felt like to make love your first time, but this time don’t hold back. Own it. Knead it... turn it... press it until your muscles ache with soreness.

While kneading remeber the time you beat those eggwhites by hand with the wire whisk into stiff gleaming peaks, and then gently folded into your souffle base, hoping your signif other will appreciate the graceful dish and effort and savor your souffle, beautifully risen, then falling into its inevitable decline. But this is another story.

Continuing kneading your dough. Cry into your dough. Cry into your dough, remembering what it feels like to touch someone you love. And remember what it feels like to touch someone you love where few touch them. Knead it.
Cry salty tears. Your bread will taste better.

3) Knead into a ball.
4) Place in bowl. Cover with a fresh kitchen towel. A kitchen towel from the set your mother gave you and your ex-fiancé as a gift. This is pronounced “i-ro-ny”.
5) Rise. Allow dough to raise to double its volume.
Knead it again. Allow your cried, salty, ironic bread, and your heart to double in volume again.
6) Set oven to 350 degrees. While oven warms shape your dough into something beautifully simple. Maybe just a round ball. When oven is nice and hot, take a sharp blade, and gash your irony dough across the top as many times as your therapist recommends. A Crisscross does nicely, and is a doughy scar that, with a caring hand, will bake into something lovely and tasty.
7) Place dough into oven upon a well-oiled pan. Don’t want irony bread to stick.
8) Bake for half an hour.
While your irony bread goes about its business of baking and driving you mad with its wonderfully warming and intoxicating aroma, and while your new boy toy (smoking chef) drives you insane with his wonderfully warming and intoxicating pheromones, think about all the ways you want to eat your bread... and new boy toy. Tearing it apart, piece by piece. Ravishing it... with crumbs flying. Or eat it slowly acknowledging that both good bread and new relationships take time to rise into beauty, require a slow gentle hand, that takes the time to knead it and need it and both taste better and are more satisfying when given time to rise and develop.
9) Take bread out. Eat your bread. Enjoy. Relish your new boy toy and new feelings. I mean bread…. Savor. Savor its humbleness. Savor its whimsy. Stretch it out. Make it last. Cover it in butter that melts warmed against fresh new bread. Savor that this doesn’t happen often. Appreciate that it is rare in life to find such beauty. I mean bread. Appreciate it is rare you make bread and appreciate that it’s rare you find something so simple and easy to be around. Something you can just sit and be still with. Something gentle. Something kind. I mean it’s rare you make your own bread.