Tonight I did a variation of coq au vin... pork au vin. I marinated pork rib chops in red wine(Fat Bastard Cabernet Sauvignon 2004), tomatoes, carrots, & green onions. I did a fairly typical coq au vin recipe and the sauce was quite good, but I think I would have preferred to cook the pork longer. I had marinated the pork for 2 days and cooking time was only an hour. My bad... but I guess I felt a little rushed with hungry people to feed. I served smashed potatoes with my spinach dip mixed in.

My spinach dip is just the typical cream cheese and frozen spinach, but I carmelize the onions instead of using onion soup mix. It adds a sweetness to the dish, but keeps it savoury.

Tonight we had soup and cheesy toast. The soup was a Pumpkin Black Bean Chipotle Soup with a dollop of yogurt(Whole Foods 365 Whole Milk Plain Yogurt).

It was super quick and easy to make. I thawed some chicken stock that I keep handy in the freezer for such occasions and used canned pureed pumpkin and canned black beans.

Ingredients:
1 L Chicken Stock - homemade
1 can of pureed pumpkin (365 Brand)
2 cans of black beans (365 Brand Organic)
2 tbsp of dried morel mushrooms(rehydrated with boiling water)
1/2 large yellow onion
1 can(28oz) of fire roasted crushed tomatoes (Muir Glen Organic)
2 chipotle peppers(canned w/ adobo sauce)
1 tbsp of adobo sauce
1 tbsp of corriander seeds
2 tsp of dried thyme
1 tsp of dried basil
salt and black pepper to taste
olive oil

1) Heat stock, pumpkin, drained black beans, and tomatoes in pot over medium heat. Stirring occasionally.
2) Fry diced onions w/ olive oil in pan till translucent. Add coriander. Add re-hydrated morel mushrooms.
3) Add onion, coriander, mushroom mixture to liquids in pot.
4) Add chipotle peppers, adobo sauce, thyme, basil to pot. Stir. Let simmer for 1 hour, till soup is thicker.
5) Using an immersion blender, blend soup to attain desired thickness. You can use a regular blender, but it's messy and possibly dangerous. :-)
6) Continue to simmer for 10-20 mins.
7) Serve with dollop of yogurt.

So an interesting thing I've noticed is the refinement of the bottled water industry, where they are trying to follow the success of wine. I know that spirits is currently attempting to follow wine as well. Now everyone has vodka or more traditionally scotch tastings. I guess I've seen tea try to go down this direction as well.

There definitely is something to it. I'm fairly picky about water, though I will settle for municipal tap. Pittsburgh's municipal tap is less than desirable. We stopped drinking it after we started noticing how it never made us feel better. Drinking water should make you feel hydrated, able to concentrate. I always felt just blah. So now we have a fridge w/ a built in filter. I've noticed a marked difference.

I've always preferred Volvic over Evian. Evian has this soft mouth feel that makes me feel like I'm drinking plastic. Dasani in Edmonton was always better IMHO. I've noticed that bottled mineral water in Pittsburgh is much more expensive than Canada. I can usually buy a large bottle of San Benedetto for a $1 CDN at Superstore in Toronto while I noticed at Penn Mac, it's $2.99 USD. I'm not sure why that is. So I usually just buy seltzer instead. Oh for Italian bubbles...

http://www.finewaters.com

I haven't been really keeping up. Two nights ago we went to Caribou Coffee. I think I like their coffee better that Starbucks. And of course I like it infinitely more than Kiva Han. People think they are being subversive and practicing some sort of guerilla consumerism by choosing Kiva Han over Starbucks. I think they are just choosing to have bad coffee. Apologies to those non-Pittsburghers. Kiva Han is the local scourge of Oakland. At any rate, I didn't even have coffee at Caribou. I had their tea. Their tea is much better that Starbucks tea or Kiva Han. I'm not sure if I think it's better than the tea at Barnes and Noble. However the common thread amongst the tea at both places is that it's bagged loose tea, not tea bags of tea crumbs, which is more typical.

After tea and books, we went to Tesaro's for dinner. Tesaro has extremely good burgers. The key to their burgers is their onsite butchering. There was a butcher shop in Bloomfield where they got their meat, but when the butcher closed shop they couldn't find anything comparable. So they decided to build their own butchering facilities and hired one of the former employees of the butcher shop to come in part time. He's employed full time as a firefighter.

So usually you can get their rare burger rare, but that night it was overcooked. We ordered it with "country fries" which I usually interpret as potato wedges. However, at Tesaro's it's basically cubed fried potato, which can sometimes be called "country hashbrowns." It really doesn't matter though. The burger is the only important thing on that plate. We split a large chef's salad. I wouldn't recommend it. It was iceberg lettuce with large irregularly cut slabs of turkey meat and ham. They took stacks of sliced marble and mozzerella cutting them into strips. However the the slices never separated. It was one of the more puzzling things I've seen.
We weren't really disappointed by the meal. Everything tasted good, minus the weird cheese. I didn't finish the cheese.