Always Ravenous

Chasing the winter blues away with a bowl of Turkey Sweet Potato Chili paired with Côte de Brouilly Beaujolais. It’s that time of year when I step outside and exclaim, “Baby, it’s so cold out here!” I just want to hibernate inside and cook up some comforting food. So how do you get the “comfort” without the heavy, weighty feeling of comfort food? Turkey Sweet Potato Chili is a lighter version of a traditional chili, substituting ground turkey for beef and adding good-for-you ingredients like sweet potatoes, quinoa, cilantro, and black beans. What better wine to pair this lightened-up chili than a low-tannin, fruity, and spicy Beaujolais Cru like Château Thivin Côte de Brouilly.  As Karen MacNeil says, ” Beaujolais is fruit and joy.”…

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Sometimes, but not always, I lean more toward drinking white wine. Lately, a glass of white wine is in my hand. Maybe it’s the sweltering temperatures many of us are coming off of from the month of July. When Robin of Crushed Grape Chronicles challenged the Wine Pairing Weekend group of writers to create “Unexpected White Wine Pairings,” I was ready to mix up my go-to white wine and food pairings with something more unexpected.
Curry Lamb paired with Viognier makes perfect sense as a food and wine pairing. At first thought, lamb would suggest a red wine pairing—something like a Syrah. As the wine pairing “experts” say, it’s not just the ingredients in a dish that drives the pairing, but also cooking methods and sauces….

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