Amazing Leftovers and Wine.

This weekend was busy. In a good way.

But prior to the weekend we enjoyed a week of good food- courtesy of my parents visit the weekend before. My favorite leftover was ham and bean soup with pea greens. I love soup. And the only thing I like better than eating soup is making it, this is no lie- it's my favorite food to cook. Besides the soup we enjoyed several ham sandwiches (which were amazing with the extra hot horseradish), and spent the whole week rationing out kelly's amazing lemon brownie cheesecake.

Lucky for us, when we finished it, we got another- kelly brought a new variation to the party we had after the Weaver Street wine tasting/sale on saturday. This time- Oreo, and just as rich and smooth as her previous one. As you can see, we've restocked our wine for the next few months and it was about time. We were down to 2 bottles,embarassing.

So the deal with the whole sale is that you pay $5, get a glass to take with you and can taste 40 different wines...as many times as you want. Plus they have really good bread and cheese. The big draw is that each wine is on sale (20-50% off) and if you buy a case you get an additional 10%. With savings like that and tasting what you are buying- it's hard to say no to a case...or two. We have a set routine at this point, get to weaver street around 12:30- eat lunch( where we inevitably run into my boss because he lives there on saturdays)and then get right on to wine tasting- with a cheese/bread break in between tables- and extensive note taking (scale 1-5 with increments of .25). After we get through them all we have a long discussion about which wines are going to make the cut. After last weekend's significant tasting of broadbent with Mom ( the count was by linda's account "at least 5 bottles") we decided to definitly get some more (its a 5.0). After the sale we head back to our place and have a friends over for more wine and food. It's a bi-annual thing and this is our 3rd party. This year we did grilled chicken sandwiches (marinated in a combo of garlic, olive oil, some salad dressing and other spices- courtesy of HT's fantastic sale and Dad's mission to get propane- thanks!), oreo cheesecake, tortolini spinach salad, fruit salad, oven roasted potatoes with rosemary and some other snacks. All in all it went well despite 3 other events going on, so the attendance was much lower than the last two times...and we didnt burn the house down with the bonfire- which in retrospect was pretty amazing.

(dried christmas tree branches plus lots of wine = mildly hazardous, and about as big of a blaze as when we set the beer-can chicken on fire last october)

That's about it, I've got a busy week of work ahead of me- but am glad that the trees now officially have all of their leaves and it feels completely like spring.

I am also glad that it's soon monday since we FAILED at getting the garbage out in time last week and let me tell you those crabs do not smell nice- I'm pretty sure our neighbors hate us and we're going to have to lysol out the can like WHOA.