Water into Wine(flavored)

We live in exciting times, as far as food goes. Or, more correctly, as far as "food" goes, as I'm not sure some of the things I am often excited about in the grocery store actually qualify as "food", technically. I'm not talking about things like exotic fruit from the far side of the world or a soup you've never tried or a new sauce for chicken. I'm talking about things like Peeps milk, or Cheelows, or the return to popularity of exotic Jello molds and desserts. And, yes, I'm also talking about Wal-Mart's wine-flavored water enhancers.

Earlier this week a friend posted an article about them on Facebook, but the article didn't seem to know that Rose Wine isn't the only flavor. When I made an actual trip to Walmart on Friday night (because that's the kind of fun we get into around here on a Friday night), I discovered that they also make a Berry Sangria flavor. As a person who drinks water all day long at my desk, and a person who likes wine, I decided that I needed to try these.

But also that I needed some actual wine to compare them to, in order to properly evaluate the flavor.

I'm told that day drinking wine alone in your apartment on the weekend is a sign of several different but severe problems, so I immediately rationalized two good excuses:

1) I have to drink this in order to properly blog about it. I am performing a service for my few dozen readers. Taking one for the team. Some kind of sports metaphor. I'm not day drinking alone on the couch. I'm [SPORTS METAPHOR HERE] for my friends and readers.

2) If you have wine with a cheese plate, you're not drinking; you're fancy. The $5 and under cheese bin at Kroger was happy to help me with this, so I assembled a cheese plate with some crackers and accompaniments (by which I mean jelly, to keep the cheese from sliding off the cracker) and prepared for my taste test.



Said preparation consisted of letting the cheese sit out for an hour and getting out two glasses.

Like I said, fancy.

I decided to start with the Rose Wine flavor, as that was the one discussed in the article.



(If you're wondering why the wine glass has a bicentennial design on it, all of my barware comes from a matched set that was in my Nanny Maggie's house. No one else wanted it, and I have successfully move it three times now without breaking any.)

I wasn't sure how much flavoring to add to just one glass of water (at work I have a water bottle, so I'm flavoring a much larger quantity), so I figured for a proper test I would go ahead and add flavoring until it was about the same color as the actual rose wine spritzer I bought at Walmart.

(Yes, I bought wine at Walmart. As I said, fancy.)



Before sipping, I attempted to savor the bouquet, but the rose-flavored water had no smell at all. It really did taste like wine, although without the noticeable bite/sting of alcohol. I'm not saying it tasted like good wine, mind you. It tasted more like I imagine the wine that Schmendrick makes in "The Last Unicorn" tastes; weak, non-offensive, but definitely something wine-flavored. If you were blindfolded and given a glass of this, I'm fairly confident you'd be able to guess "wine" as the flavor, but not a specific kind of wine.

Satisfied that I had properly evaluated the rose flavor, I slammed the remainder of the glass of rose and cleansed my pallet with several bites of cheese and crackers. Then we moved on to the Berry Sangria flavor:



Like the first test, I added enough until the colors matched:



and then sipped the actual wine, and then the water, to compare.

The berry sangria water has a faint smell of berries. I wondered if maybe I hadn't added enough flavor to the first one, or if maybe I was tipsy from the first round. (Confession: I drank all the wine from the first round, but only a couple sips of the water.) Even more importantly, though, it definitely tasted like the sangria. Out of the two flavors, I would say this one is definitely the better choice if you want to sit at your desk and pretend that you are slowly drinking your day away.

Or if you just like the taste of wine.

It's also good for that.

A Special Occasion

I had this bottle of wine sitting around my apartment:



It's been sitting around since I moved here, because I haven't really had an occasion to drink it. I've had lots of occasions to drink wine, and have consumed a lot of wine in my apartment in glasses and in food, but I haven't had occasion to drink that specific bottle of wine because I was waiting for a special occasion. Back when I was moving from Albany to Tennessee my non-boyfriend boyfriend gave me this bottle of wine as a going away present.

"This is really good wine, and I want you to save this bottle until you have something really good to celebrate, like you win the lottery, or you and a guy move in together, or you get your next promotion, and then you go ahead and drink this wine to celebrate."

When I moved here, my friend Tiffany kept it in her car on the passenger seat for the entire ride down, so that it would stay in the air conditioning and not get broken in the U-Haul truck. I've had that bottle sitting in my wine rack since 2006.

This is not to say that I haven't had special occasions. I've gotten raises and reclassifications. I got a new car. I went on some dates. A whole bunch of stuff has happened, but every time something came up and I thought about opening the wine, I thought, "Well, is this special enough? Is this worth my special bottle of special wine, or will something even better happen and then I'll feel bad about drinking this?"

I kind of forgot something important, though: You will never appreciate the things that you have if you are too busy waiting for something better.

Devaluing my special occasions in the hope that some other, more special occasion will happen in the future is stupid.

So is saving this bottle of wine.

I was thinking about that the other day when I was cleaning the kitchen and my eyes fell upon the special bottle of special wine and I thought, "How special is that, anyway?" It turns out that it's not actually that special. Being the sensitive, kind, thoughtful person that he was, my non-boyfriend boyfriend left the price tag on the back of the bottle, and I discovered that not only is his special wine not all that special, but it has actually depreciated in value since he bought it. I laughed and laughed and laughed, because it turns out that he knew as much about wine as he did about anything, really, and then I thought, "Well, shit, I might as well just go ahead and drink this."

I didn't want to just pop the cork and drink it at the kitchen counter (actually, I kind of did, but I decided to be a civilized person), so I decided to pick up some crackers and cheese, and have a wine night. While I was buying the cheese, though, a terrible thought occurred to me:

Wasn't there a cheese recipe in the Jello book?

You bet there was.

Friday night I got started on the Bleu Cheese Salad Mold, which the Jell-O book suggests is appropriate for special occasions, including weddings. Since that book was published around the time of my parents' wedding, and my parents had a pot-luck wedding reception, I texted my mom to ask, "Hey, did anyone serve anything at your wedding made of Jello?"

It's been over an hour, and she has not responded.

The Bleu Cheese mold started by adding salt to two boxes of lemon Jell-O prepared according to package directions and then putting the gelatin in the refrigerator until it was slightly thickened. While that was happening, I blended a softened block of cream cheese, various spices, and a half cup of crumbled bleu cheese together:



Then I removed the partially thickened gelatin from the refrigerator:



and blended them together:



It looks about how you would think it would look, but it's not even close to done. After mixing the gelatin and cheese, you have to gently fold in an entire tub of whipped topping:



Once that's done:



I poured it into my Bundt cake pan, since I don't own any molds big enough to handle seven cups of salad, covered the top in plastic wrap, and put it in the refrigerator overnight to firm up.

Then, last night, I went ahead and opened the wine. As if a metaphor for the entire relationship that spawned the gift of the wine bottle to begin with, the cork broke while I was uncorking it:



The bottom of the cork also crumbled into the wine, but I figured I could skim the pieces of cork off of the top and try it anyway, and while the wine was breathing, I could unmold the gelatin:



Unmolding Jell-O can be tricky, and I dipped this mold a little too long, so it came out a little wet but mostly serviceable:



The only thing left to do was taste it:



It didn't taste like bleu cheese at all. It didn't taste like lemon, either, which is a plus. It tasted sort of like cheese, but with a really light texture. I ended up eating quite a bit of it before I remembered that I was supposed to be eating the cheese and crackers with the wine:



The wine was terrible.

I poured it down the drain.

Apple Barn

Thursday night a group of ten of us went out to dinner at The Apple Barn in Pigeon Forge, a local restaurant, cider mill, and winery. I’ve heard good things about it ever since I moved here, and never got around to going, so I was very excited.

Pigeon Forge is Tennessee’s Branson. The main road is a continuous strip of hotels, pancake houses (dozens of them; there has to be something I’m not getting about it, but there are Oldtime Pancake Houses, Grizzly Pancake Houses, Hillbilly Pancake Houses, but bizarrely enough no International House of Pancakes), mini-golf places, outlet malls, theaters, and restaurants. It’s the home of the theater that took out the advertisement in USA Today to protest Kathy Griffin, although I can’t get anyone to go there with me, and also the place where we went to that retreat in August. In short, it’s like a tiny Vegas, but without sin.

Ginger, TW, and I drove down early because they wanted to hit the outlets. Ginger was looking for a specific ornament for her boyfriend’s mom at the Waterford Crystal outfit, TW was looking for assorted Christmas gifts, and I was along for the ride. TW didn’t find what he wanted, Ginger found her ornament, and I saw this disturbing Santa ornament at the Waterford store:



If you don’t want to click and can’t tell at that size, that’s a Santa Claus holding Halloween jack o’ lanterns. What the hell? Is he coming a wassailing or is he going trick or treating? I realize Hallowthankmas is just one big season now, as far as the stores are concerned, but couldn’t we at least pretend they’re separate? And why isn’t there a Thanksgiving Santa? My calendar has a whole other month between October and December, and there’s a holiday in there. Two, if you count my birthday.

While outlet shopping I also accidentally gave a lady at one of the Christmas stores a mini-breakdown. Ginger was buying two large angels that the cashier had to carefully wrap up and bag, and I got curious about what it must be like to spend every minute of every day immersed in Christmas.

“Do you get tired of Christmas, working here?” I asked, smiling. She smiled back, and I thought we might be ok.

“This is just my part time job. I work forty hours somewhere else and then come here for a little extra.”

“Cool. So you’re not really here enough to get tired of it,” I concluded, but this apparently opened some sort of floodgate for her.

She leaned across the register, still bagging Ginger’s angels, and burst.

“It all looks like junk! There’s just, there’s so much of it! Every day another truck comes in, and there’s just more stuff!”

Ginger grabbed her bag of holiday junk and we fled before the lady could snap and kill everyone in the store. All the way to the Old Navy outlet (where everything was at regular prices; does “outlet store” not mean what I think it means?) TW and Ginger were like, “What did you do to her?” and I was protesting, “All I did was ask a question!”

When we finally got to dinner, it was everything I’d heard. The best part, better than my turkey even, was the apple fritters.



They keep the basket filled, and you dip them in the apple butter, and they’re just to die for. It was like having dessert all the way through dinner, and everyone enjoyed it.



See? We’re all smiling, and we hadn’t even started drinking yet. We saved that for after dinner, when we walked around the barn and over to the winery.



They give out free tastings (you have to tip), and unlike professional wine tasters we swallowed, rather than spit. Most of the wines were blends, traditional wines with apple wine mixed in, so they tended to be on the sweet side. I’ve had hard cider, but never apple wine, and it was good, so I bought the three bottle bargain pack, as did a couple of the others. I picked up a merlot, an applewood white (very sweet), and a cranberry wine, which was very tart but very good.

All in all, it was a pretty good night.