The olive recipe

Do you love olives?

I love olives.

There used to be a great restaurant on the West side of mid-town Manhattan- La Locanda- and when you sat down Pep,e 'the proprietor', would bring you a marinated small plate of black olives and lentils. I could eat just that dish for the rest of my life.

What I now know, but never saw, was the intense marinade that those simple olives and lentils under went in order to bring them to that higher place. So, now I'm going to pass on what I consider to be one of the great antipasto dishes of all time...

Buy some olives that you like...maybe some big green Sicilians, some Kalamatas, some Nicoise, etc...

Rinse them thoroughly with water to get as much of the salt and vinegar out.

Put them in a large bowl.

Take 5-8 large garlic cloves. Crush them and peel the skin off. Put them in the same bowl.

Crack some large pepper chunks into the bowl. Sea salt into the bowl as well.

If you want, maybe add some lemon peel to the bowl.

Throw in some earthy aromatic herbs like thyme, sage, rosemary into the bowl. If you only have dried- so be it.

Add like a little tiny dollop of cumin to the bowl. This is important! Don't forget the cumin- a little more is safer than a little less.

Get some decent olive oil and almost cover all the ingredients.

Mix well.

Let stand for a day.

You now have one of the best dipping olive oils on the planet. And the olives are delicious as well...

In an ideal world, go to a good wine shop and buy a nice $14.99 bottle of Friulian Tocai of get Bisol Prosecco. If they're trying to sell you on something they recommend that's a couple of dollars more...go for it. You only live once.

Sante!

Alfredo

Cheap and easy I say...(and the kid will scarf it down)...

Cook some pasta (rigatoni if you got it).

In a separate large casserole dish, melt some butter (a good amount) and cream and milk together. Salt and pepper. Don't boil but make sure the butter is melted and the mixture is integrated. Add pasta. Stir to coat. Cook together for like 5 minutes. Add a cup of finely grated Parmesan cheese, a teeny dash of nutmeg, and a little more milk (if needed). Finely chop up some parsley and add it.

Serve. I all but guarantee that your spouse and your child will scarf this down.

Recommended wines:

Italian Barbera d'Alba or Barbera d'Asti. Aglianico from outside of Naples, or Lagrein from the Alto Adige. Whatever it is...make sure you're drinking something Italian with this and that it's red and big.

A Rule

It's never been a better time to be a wine consumer. Right now you will start to see deals like you've never seen before. You'll walk in to shops and see some wines advertised at 50% off. You'll enter restaurants on off nights and maybe see the same too (for the winelist)!? But, this doesn't mean buy away and expect the wine to taste the way you want it. Case in point...

I am a lover of Cornas. Cornas is a brash little village in the Southern section of the Northern Rhone that produces only Syrah grown on hillsides of granite. When young, the wines are rugged, tough, and intensely minerally. And yet the wines age for a few years and you receive grace but with interesting nooks so to speak. So here I am in a wine shop and there is a Cornas formally $56bt, now being marked down to $20bt. WOW! Yes, head turning. I turned the label around to check the quality of the importer: Weygandt-Metzler, an excellent importer. 1999- an excellent year in the Northern Rhone. OK, what the heck and bought two. I didn't know the wine, but I knew that Weygandt's wines usually had a dark earthy mid-core, the vintage was fantastic, and it was from a village I loved.

Well, turns out the wine was what I would call a Parker wine- big fruit and lots of oak- almost Californian when young. It was interesting, and I find myself muscling threw the first bottle. It's just too much. Too much caramel and coffee from the oak. Too much gloppiness from the over extraction. Too much. And there troubles the style of the high flying 90+pt styled wines- great to taste, bad to drink. Now, the wine's not horrible and I'm thrifty so I'm going back to this bottle trying to find some light, but I wouldn't have pulled it had I known it was a "Parker" style.

And therein lies my point. If you are knew to the wine game- cellaring wines or buying older wines. Against what may seem to be safe judgment throw your vintage charts away, don't look at your ratings when you buy wine, and definitely, definitely know the great classical producers in the regions you are buying. If the wine I bought was a Clape, Allemande, Michel, or Paris I would have been in good hands (and I would have bought a case at that price..'cause that price doesn't exist with those wines). I would have tasted the fruit taken to another place with age- and not the plastic surgery that was done during birth to help win a tasting and sell more wine.

I'm hopeful for my last bottle of this Cornas. I'm going to simply forget about it and hopefully it will evolve past it's medical woes and spring a new life (with wine you never know?). But, I will always buy with my new rule in mind: If cellaring or buying older wine- buy the traditionalists.