2 Vintage Virginia Wine Festival

This past week has been nothing last than intense for me. Work was rather busy, so I didn't have a large amount of spare time this week to write blog posts. But, now its the weekend! And time to share an experience that I am hoping will become a tradition with a subset of my friends: the Vintage Virginia Wine festival.

This is the second year that we attended the Vintage Virginia Wine Festival in Centreville, Virginia. My friends and I love this festival because it celebrates not only local wines, but various other local craft businesses with stunning product (more on that later).

Tents filled with tons of wineries

Last year when we went, it was the first time any of us went to a wine festival, so we weren't sure what the experience would be like. Last year we spent the day going around whatever wineries we saw, and didn't have any real goals of what tastes we wanted to find.

In contrast, this year we scoped out the wineries we wanted to go to first, and then went to a few wineries we had not experienced yet. 

Orange Blackberry Chicken

My major revelation half way through the day was that I love fruit wines. The difference between regular wines and fruit wines is that instead of using grapes to produce the wine, some other fruit is the star of the show. What I love about a good fruit wine is that it captures the sensory essence of the base fruit. For example, we came across some Horton cranberry wine and fell in love with its bold cranberry flavors. The other core reason I love fruit wine is that a good fruit wine gives me inspiration to cook. I love the challenge of taking a fruit wine and figuring out a good pairing of proteins and vegetables to produce a delicious dish. My Orange Blackberry Chicken is an awesome example of this.

The other amazing part of the festival were the displays of local artisans. Our unanimous favorite was Topix Crystal, which has a showcase in Vienna, VA. All of the crystal is handmade. The glass artist blows all of the crystal, and uses his own techniques to create stunning raised panels. Even after he explained to us how he created his art, I have no idea how someone could create art this beautiful by hand.

At this point in my post, I wanted to share with you all some of the Virginia wineries we loved. I'd love to hear responses back from y'all about which wines/wineries are your favorites as well!

Favorite Wineries:
Hill Top Berry Farm & Winery - Loved all of it, especially the Nectarine
Cooper Winery - If you enjoy dessert wine, I recommend Vida
Horton Winery - Loved their Cranberry and Dio Wines
AmRhein's - I recommend their Petit Verdot

0 Sun Dried Tomato Chicken and Quinoa

I love experimenting with various ingredients that I probably wouldn't have tried before I discovered my allergy. Quinoa looks similar to couscous, but has a bit of a stronger taste and bite to it. I've found out that its a great gluten-free substitute for any recipe that calls for couscous. I hope yall enjoy this recipe!

Prep Time: 10 minutes
Cook Time: 20 minutes
Serves: 3-4 people

Ingredients:
1 cup quinoa
1 1/4 cup water
juice of 1 lemon
1 lb chicken
2 bay leaves
6-8 leaves of basil, diced (about 1-2 tbsp)
6-8 sundried tomatoes, diced
1 tbsp paprika
3 cloves garlic, diced
a handful of Feta cheese
dash salt and pepper

Steps:
1. In a medium saucepan, boil the water and lemon, and then add the quinoa. Reduce the heat, cover, and simmer for 13 minutes. Remove from the heat and let sit for 5 minutes.

2. Cube the chicken, and add to a pan over medium heat. Add salt and pepper with the bay leaves. Let the chicken cook until you can no longer see any pink.
3. Add the tomato, basil, paprika, and garlic. Cook for another 5-10 minutes or until chicken is done throughout.

4. Fluff the quinoa with a fork, and spoon onto a plate or platter. Top with the chicken, and enjoy!

Steaming hot!

0 Gluten Free Stuffed Fudge

A few weeks ago, one of my friends sent me a link to a recipe for cookies stuffed with Oreos. She wanted me to make a gluten free variety of them, so instead I decided to come up with a fun variation on it. After experimenting a bit, I adapted a fudge recipe from Alton Brown and stuffed it with egg-free gluten-free cookie dough.

Ingredients:

Fudge Recipe Ingredients

2 tbsp brown sugar

4 tbsp butter, room temperature

4 tbsp brown rice flour

2 tbsp almond flour

Steps:

1. In a small bowl, mix together the sugar, butter, and flours until a dough forms. Roll into small balls of dough.

2. Follow the recipe for the fudge. Once the fudge has cooled to 130F, pour the fudge onto a silicone mat or a large board. Fold the chocolate from the outside into the middle. This will cool the chocolate and create a nice texture. 

3. Once the fudge is room temperature, pour into a rectangular dish lined with parchment paper. Push the cookie dough into the fudge, and cover the dough with chocolate. Cover and let it set at room temperature.

0 Quick and Easy: Gluten Free Beef Wraps

Some days I really can't spend too much time making dinner. Nine to eleven hour work days can really sap the time you can spend creating home meals, making take-out all the more tempting. Here's an easy gluten free wrap recipe that you can use with any type of meat or vegetables. The ingredients here reflect what I had in my fridge the day I made it, so feel free to make it your own.

Yields: 2 wraps
Prep Time: 10 minutes
Cook Time:  10 minutes

Ingredients:
gluten free rice tortillas
3/5 pound thin beef, sliced
1/4 cup soy sauce
2 tbsp fish sauce
1 tsp sugar
1 tsp lemon juice
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 cup cooked brown rice

Steps:
1. In a medium bowl, let the beef sit in a few tablespoons of soy sauce while a pan heats over medium heat. In another bowl, mix all ingredients other than the rice, tortillas, and beef.
2. Cook the meat over medium heat until the meat is cooked and no longer pink.
3. Scoops a couple spoonfuls of rice onto 1/3 of the tortilla. Pile some beef on top and drizzle some of the prepared sauce over top.

4. Fold the flaps over, and then tightly roll up the tortilla until a wrap has formed.

I hope you enjoy, and have a happy Wednesday!

0 Backyard Garden: Part 3

It is amazing how fast our garden has grown, and how many lessons we've learned so far. It surprises me how plants can grow so fast from seed to jungle in the course of just a few months. In early March we planted seeds indoors, which you can read more about in this post. After the seedlings grew a bit more and the last frost ended, we decided to move them out into the backyard.

Beautiful little pepper plants

The squirrels really loved these...

The squash as of May 8...

About two weeks after we planted them in the backyard, the plants were already starting to explode in size, best reflected in the squash. One thing I was concerned about with the squash was the possibility of overcrowding, but halfway through May I figured my worries would end up being waisted.

AMAZINGLY HUGE SQUASH as of late May.

...And by the end of May overcrowding was a HUGE problem. Thanks to the squash. Beautiful squash, but monstrous and huge plants. Needless to say we ended up placing the squash way to close together. After getting this far into the backyard garden my largest advice to those starting a garden is make sure that you give plants plenty of room. This especially applies to wide plants such as squash. We don't even have any produce yet and we already had overcrowding.

Because of this, one of my roommates thinned out some of the smaller plants this weekend in order to reduce the crowding and give all the vegetables a chance. 

We've had beans already this season, I'm excited to see what we get next!