hangover/hungover note

Yesterday, I had a hangover. Whenever I’m hungover I take a moment to think about how I got there. Because there is a bad physical feeling, like a headache, associated with a hangover, getting to the bottom of it is part of my current hangover ritual. Like maybe if I did get to the bottom of it I *could* have the wine and *not* ever feel bad ever again. But I get older every day and the bad feeling seems to be promised now in so many ways.

It’s futile so you have to move on and accept the situation. Well, you could fight it with like “hangover cures” and I certainly recommend a Coca Cola (and not drinking any coffee whatsoever) if you’re having a hard time getting your feet on the ground. But everyone has their own thing that works for them and much of that is defined by time and place. When I worked at Dove’s, I would have a paper cup with just pozole broth in it by the line, haven’t done it since. Anyway, it’s just going to be your day and you can make it bad by hating it or you can meet yourself where you are. Which is what basically everyone I talked to does.

Everyone has their little food thing but also this easy approach to themselves. Finding a little more sleep where they can or just laying down time even in public. I love to rest my head on the bus window while I’m off to somewhere that I apparently need to be. Ari says that she can usually find laughter in her day, adding levity that balances the suspended feeling. Sammie says the hangover feels like her secret and can be kind of fun. And I know what she means, there is like a strong sensation of snapping back into yourself. Drinking can feel like joining a social body, made up of however many people but the hangover can be the reconstruction of boundaries and in a very private and personal way. Time to yourself even when you have to be in public. 

We use hangover in a larger sense, which I think is one reason why I’m interested in pushing on it. The word is also used to describe “a thing that has survived from the past”. Which made me laugh so hard with how vague that is, like the potential for hangover is almost constant. The feeling after a night of crying hard reminds me of the alienation that comes with an alcohol hangover. Or something longer, a lingering unsettled feeling that you’ve done everything wrong by yourself and everyone you know. I think there’s something to be taken with the lessons of the more direct alcohol-related hangover. The slowness, quiet, sleeping, these are all useful too in approaching the things that are not as easy to pin down. Maybe I just like to think that nothing is a waste of time but I do like to think nothing is a waste of time.

La Pasta

One of the most memorable dinners I’ve cooked in the past year, both for myself and the person eating it was a single dish of pasta. My friend Sofia was moving out of town and burning the candle at every end, trying to see everyone she knew and honor the quality and depth of relationship with everyone in Chicago in like a week. Or two. The amount of time that you have after reality sets in. So she was hungover for our plan to have dinner on my back porch. In the interest of making the most out of our time I put myself in her shoes and made the pasta. Rigatoni with guanciale and kale sauce, basically like a green gricia. I thought, if I were her I would want something with carbs, fat (like pork fat, cheese, and olive oil), and minerals. It was fun! And the embrace of her state by letting it guide our dinner made it memorable in a way that other dinners that have been maybe higher concept, have not been. I think it works for the life hangover too.

Kale & guanciale pasta for 2 people

This requires more kitchen equipment than pasta I make usually does. I’m sorry I think it’s for when you’re caring for a hungover person or are simply moving through life.

half pound of short pasta (or the amount you want)

1/4 cup olive oil

2 cloves of smashed garlic

bunch of kale, ribs removed

the amount of guanciale you want to eat cut into manageable cubes

parmesan

salt

pepper

1. Boil a pot of water and add salt once it’s rolling. While you’re waiting for the water to boil heat the olive oil and garlic gently together in a pan. The garlic should become slightly golden but really you’re looking to soften it.

2. Blanch the kale and add the leaves, garlic, and oil to a blender. Blend until smooth adding salt and pepper to taste, keeping in mind that you are combining the sauce with salty pork and cheese.

3. Add the guanciale to the already warm pan and pasta to the already boiling water.

4. Once the pasta is a satisfactory done-ness add it to the pan (I like to just move it from pot to pan which gets some pasta water in it too but if you’re a drainer reserve some water to add to the pan) and toss to combine. Add the kale sauce and grate the amount of parmesan cheese that you want. Mix until glossy and fully combined.

5. Serve with more cheese and a drizzle of nicer olive oil on top.

Sofia made us a painting that we printed on some t shirts last year which are now back in stock, some size large available for Chicago delivery.

Thank you to Cub, Dario, Ari, Sammie, Riley, Sofia and Mac for talking with me about hangovers.

lemon: seasoning as gesture

 

Sour things have a high concentration of protons, the active particles with a positive electrical charge. When protons move around freely, they attach themselves quickly to nearby molecules and immediately change them. The sensation of sourness comes from protons hitting your tongue. 

There are some interesting similarities and differences in growing wine grapes and growing lemons. Unlike grapes on a vine, lemons on a tree thrive in near-constant humidity. Like grapes, they develop acidity and color when they get cold (ideally as low as fifty degrees fahrenheit, from time to time, for lemons). A major challenge in lemon farming is achieving this cold temperature without freezing - lemons, like grapes, are very sensitive to frost. 

I’m writing about lemons this week because, at some point, I stopped seasoning my cooking with acidity. We most often think of salt as seasoning, which, when correctly used, brings out the flavor of the other ingredients, rather than registering as salt on your palate. Acidity can be seasoning in the same way. Lemons were my favorite tool to achieve this. 

I learned to season food with acidity originally from my Mom, a lover of lemons, a cook with great finesse. She squeezes a little lemon on most things right before eating or serving them - from pasta to mushrooms to scrambled eggs. I was reminded of this when I worked with a chef who emphasized acidity and salinity in his cooking. This chef was particularly aggressive on seasoning - like a lot of chefs he seasoned all garnishes as well - this meant tossing your cilantro or whatever you have in lemon and oil and salt. It sounds smart but in practice usually winds up with some beaten and bruised greens propped up on the plate. It can be done well, but it’s really difficult to calibrate your hand at seasoning to such a small amount of delicate leaves. Seasoning started to feel like a force of destruction, of degradation, putting down instead of lifting up. 

Another reason I’ve moved away from lemon is my sensitivity to the fact that they don’t grow around here. I have tried, as I know many other cooks have, to deploy vinegar in its place. You can make vinegar, get it locally, and it is historically Midwestern, part of the pickling and preserving culture we have here, in part due to the Scandinavian influence. My greatest success with this has been in soup. I’m sure there’s chemistry at work I have yet to understand - heating the vinegar seems to release some of its own edge and sink it into the other flavors in the pot. You might try this with a lentil soup or tofu soup or tomato soup even. Seasoning a cooked plate with vinegar is more challenging. The fruitiness of lemon melds with other flavors more cohesively. I’ve been denying this because this knobby yellow fruit can feel so out of place in my Illinois kitchen. 

And, in place of lemon, I've been relying on wine as the seasoning for food. I’ve cooked a few dinners with so much acidity on the plate that, when you drink a wine that is also high in acidity you can’t really taste anything besides sourness. So then I framed a choice between lemons and wine, and I chose wine. 

What’s changed is I learned you can layer acidity, even as a seasoning. A few weeks ago my friends made steak au poivre, and swirled a round slice of lemon in the creamy sauce as it was finishing cooking. It added a fruitiness and lightness to the meal that was delicious. We drank Nuit d’Orage from Clos Fantine - which was also bright and brought good acidity. There was room for both with the creamy, spicy sauce, beef fat and salt. Lemon is a specific flavor to me, it is not just sourness. It has to be dosed carefully. When I season things right, they don’t taste like lemon, they taste like themselves. The au poivre tasted like black pepper and cream and brandy, but with a special quality. 

The round of lemon represented a greater sensitivity to the addition of lemon - drawing out not just juice but citrus oil and a little bitterness. A lot of attention is paid to the gesture of seasoning with salt (Salt Bae represents the vile peak of this). As overplayed as it is,  to season from a height above your food, or low to the surface makes a big difference. One of my friends who cooked the steak au poivre is a chef. His gesture of cutting this slice of citrus and gently steering it around the skillet inspired me. Seasoning is about gesture, and lemon is no exception. 

Having digested this idea, last week I made a lamb tagine. I put it in the oven and took a nap and overslept, and the tagine braised a little too long. It got a little jammy, the dried and rehydrated apricots had melted. It was delicious but rich. A generous squeeze of lemon made it much more palatable. Diced preserved lemon would have also been nice. With the tagine, I drank a bottle of Malas Uvas from La Perdida. This wine makes you salivate as soon as you smell it. It is very salty and enticing and smells very bright and sharp. In concert with the lemon juice, it livened the dinner and made the tagine feel complete. 

When I told her about this blog idea, Em lent me a book called Much Depends on Dinner by Margaret Visser. I recommend it. There’s a chapter on lemons. Visser includes an adage from the 19-century British doctor/reverend/wit Sydney Smith. It reminded me of both feeling far from where lemons grow here in Chicago, and yet of course they are easy to find and relatively affordable. “Life is a difficult thing in the country, and it requires a good deal of forethought to steer the ship, when you live twelve miles from a lemon.” I once received advice from Em that I’ll share with you – always pick up a lemon when you’re at the store, even if you don’t need it right away. You wind up wanting one more often than you realize. 

We have lots of new wines in store, particularly from a winery in Alsace called Kumpf & Meyer. This is a new winery to us, and we’ve been enjoying all the wines so far. As always, please let us know if you have any questions or curiosities - you can email us rainbowwinechi@gmail.com or DM @rainbow_wines. 

february beans

 The other day my mom looked at me and said something to the effect of you look like you need a Coke (and offered me a tiny can of Coke). Which was her way of saying I looked tired.

The other other day in the car Cub and I were talking about dining for health, not so intentionally but we usually talk about dining for pleasure so it stuck with me. While these things aren’t at odds necessarily I take it a bit like Luce Giard, sailing between “the Lake of Fondness and the Ocean of Reason” in a third, unnamed body of water where the two mingle. Potentially that body of water is made of bean pot liquor. The rich health elixir of olive oil, starch, and whatever else you ended up putting in the pot. 

So with this Coke I had a bowl of beans and it wasn’t magic but it did feel like a solution. It was the last of a pot I had made in mid-January, I’ve made two pots since actually. All different beans. These were cranberries that I stuck in the freezer. The next pot was for a friend, not that they asked for beans. Again, beans feel like a solution  to the fact that it’s February and nothing is fresh in Chicago, to the fact that it’s too cold to walk to the store, to my desire to cook something lovingly while working two jobs.

To cook beans I put olive oil in a pot followed by an onion and celery. You could put carrots too but I don’t. As those loosen up I add spices and dried herbs. Like white pepper, coriander, oregano, thyme, rosemary, crushed red pepper like for pizza. Sometimes a charred lemon goes in, colatura di alici/fish sauce or white wine, I like a parmesan rind from time to time. Twice as many greens as beans or some prosciutto ends. Those things I don’t always have. But it’s nice because it helps you learn to pay more attention to what you do have, how it shapes its companions in the pot/they shape it back. Because you can also make beans with just beans and water, if you want. Anyway, you put in the beans and water to cover, the beans are soaked if you have time. Also I salt them while they’re cooking. I've never really noticed a difference. They stay on the stovetop until they’re finished because I like different textures but if you like a more even cook in the oven that’s fine. I usually also do something else during this time.

While the act of cooking beans is perhaps a solution, the finished pot also feels like a celebration. The pot stretches so far for one or two people especially, it’s like you’ve cooked to never cook again. Trish, who lives in a region known for their beans, eats them many times a week but also will take a glass of the cooking liquid next to her water and wine with dinner. I think about her when I stand over the stove drinking the pot liquor. The beans themselves can then become pasta e fagioli, beans on toast, bean & clam soup, a condiment for another soup like cabbage soup once the pork has gone.

My favorite, the one that takes a little more effort and the outcome of the third pot of beans, is an homage to the antipasti plate at one of America’s great restaurants, Ops. At Ops they offer a plate of white beans, marinated beets, and feta with a sidecar of bread as a prelude to pizza. A recent small survey of people (women) suggests that this itself is actually the perfect meal. Especially with the addition of some greens cooked in Cub’s lid style. Freshness this time of year is found in wines and the cookedness of this meal plays into that nicely. The ones that I am craving have a lot of acidity, density and earthliness that match the dish, wines that you can feel in not just your mouth and head but the rest of your body too; Malas Uvas from La Perdida, A Flor de Piel from Vigna Flor, and Bessons from Toni Sanchez Ortiz. Or the explosive pet nat Waterfly from Celler Ca Foracaime or perennially in the shop favorite Coule de Source from Jerome Lambert. I think the Chenin thing has to do with Anjou native Rabelais and Pantagruel infected daydreams.

Back to the pot, you can freeze what you can’t eat now (Georgian winemaker Ének Peterson just captioned an Instagram “freezers are amazing”, so true). And pick this back up when you are down again. Baby steps back with some easy food and some wine.

p'tit poussot & pizza, wist, whim and whimsy

     The past few weeks, I haven't been connecting with wine as much as I usually do. Things just haven’t been clicking a lot, wine wise. Sometimes in our circle of natural wine loving friends we say, ‘wine is tasting really good right now,’ because it will feel over the span of a few days or weeks that all wine everywhere in town is tasting delicious. I went for about two weeks of missing this feeling and sought to change it.  

Last week I had a night to myself and ordered pizza from Jimmy’s Pizza Cafe, which I recommend for a new york slice style. I wasn’t sure about opening P’tit Poussot, a Chardonnay from one of Alice’s own vines. it’s on the spendier side for one of our wines, i didn’t think i’d finish the whole bottle to myself, and it doesn’t register for me as a ‘pizza wine,’ i.e. it's not sangiovese. On the other hand, it’s a winery that really gets at me, and it’s a wine that isn’t very high in alcohol, so I felt like if I did drink a lot of the wine, it would be less detrimental to the next morning. Now, in recounting this for the blog, I also remember drinking a 2014 bottle of Corvee de Trousseau from Octavin that was 9% alcohol by myself on a Monday night at Red & White, the wine shop where I used to work, and having a great time. I poured some for a person who came in to the shop and they also bought a bottle, even though it wasn’t what they had planned to get. It was spendy then too, and I felt my whim was rewarded. It was an interesting, engaging and perfect wine to drink alone, you didn’t feel alone but rather in the company of this wine as it shifted in your glass. It was a chatty wine, and we had a nice conversation.      

I have been enjoying the wines for about seven years or so. I fell for her wines pretty hard. They showed me something unique about wine at a certain point in my career when I was ready to discover more. After drinking them for this time, and generally being into wines of nature, I have disabused myself of the notion of having an expectation of them. My expectation is, this is going to be different. 

Alice Bouvot is a vanguard vigneronne working in the Jura mountains, in the capital of this beloved region, a town called Arbois. It’s easy to be obsessed with Alice. I’ve never met her but she seems passionate, intelligent with an amazing sense of whimsy based on how she labels and calls her wines, many illustrated with gnomes. My impressions are based on second-hand stories, and from this one video on her american importer's website, Zev Rovine Selections. She seems to be popular since she has a lot of winemaker friends to harvest fruit with when her vintage is low-yielding, as it has unfortunately been a lot in recent years. She travels to the languedoc, to Alsace, to Beaujolais to harvest fruit with these colleagues that she brings back with her to vinify at her winery. 

Alice's wines are beautiful and totally inimitable. She is adept at many techniques of winemaking, displaying skill with carbonic maceration, petillant naturel, direct press and macerated wines. One thing that helped me understand her project is when I called up Zev Rovine to talk about the wines he had started importing from Domaine de la Pinte. Pinte is a more traditional Jura winery. It is much, much bigger, an organic farming enterprise in comparison to Alice's small shop. Zev was describing Domaine de la Pinte, and I asked, so how would you compare these wines to Alice Bouvot’s, and he didn’t really know where to start. Something interesting came up which is - that he said Alice doesn’t like very extracted wines, her emphasis is on brief macerations and concise fermentations. She also harvests on the earlier side, she’s not going for big ripeness. The wines are ready to age relatively quickly. I thought about how especially true this is in comparison to Domaine de La Pinte, whose craft is focused more on the structure of tannin and acidity. Alice seems to be  working with something beyond the traditional expression of wine (of bitterness and brightness as the building blocks of weight and texture). Her building blocks are maybe not blocks at all, she seems to find ways in, out and through grapes that render you wordless. I probably have to go visit the winery to understand how she achieves the range of textures she does without leaning on ripeness and tannin, I’m sure it’s in how she does everything, from how she moves the juice to when she bottles, and more.  

Sometimes I forget how important it is to listen to a lot of music at a loud volume, then I listen to music loud and find it so much better. The wine analogy for me is that sometimes I forget to drink the wine in my glass. When I am cooking I get my hands dirty and get busy and distracted, then it’s a rush to get food to the table, then I am hungry and just want to eat, and while eating I sip some wine but don’t really just drink. or don’t really get into the wine somehow, I’m too busy unpacking what I cooked, considering it from several angles. 

Before I had my pizza I made sure to drink a glass of this wine. easy to do, as it was seriously delicious. Sometimes it’s nice to get a little drunk. To me, alcohol is an important part of a wine’s expression. 

In other vintages P’tit Poussot has been so light and even lower in alcohol that you can’t quite catch it, trying to grab a fish from a stream. The last bottle I'd had was also lightly fizzy, floating up and away, even more elusive. I remember the wine being closer to green in color. I thought of Australian Semillon or some Riesling or something. 

I was a little surprised and delighted at how this vintage of P’tit Poussot was. It feels airy yet also grounded. It turned out to be a perfectly great drink with pizza, it had enough body and acidity. Most of all, while not an intuitive pairing, what makes it work is that relationship of time and energy. I had space to be with the wine because someone else made the pizza. 

So I recommend you try some pizza and P’tit Poussot. Or just drink P’tit Poussot, or any wine. I hope that, for you as it is for me, spending some time trying to dialogue with a wine will make for a nice night. We have an embarrassment of riches in terms of interesting and tasty things in the shop, including a rainbow of bottles from a new winery, Vigna Flor, from the Veneto, in Italy. Lots to explore and discover. As always, please let us know if you have any questions or curiosities, you can email rainbowwinechi@gmail.com or dm @rainbowwine. Cheers.