Its Been Too Long - Cocktails and Cuisine

I didn’t fall off the face of the Earth, I just feel off of blogger. My hunger for a good time has not decreased as I am still as gastronomically active as ever…I just wasn’t writing about it. I want to make it a habit of one post per week. Lets start from there, shall we?

Last Friday was a Cocktails and Cuisine night at the Scranton Chamber of Commerce. Various sponsors hosted tables with both food and drink from various countries around the world. The event was attended by about 50 people. The food itself was mostly Americanized versions of a stereotype food from a country. Case in point, Mexico was represented by cheese queslidillas with salsa from a bottle and margheritas from a mix. Japan was covered by sushi, Edamame, and seaweed salad from Atami and sake. Poland had holishki and a beef and cabbage stew. The stew was the definition of easy comfort food. Sautéed ground beef and onions with salt and pepper mixed in with tomato soup and cabbage pieces and simmered. Ireland has ham and cabbage and of course, Guiness. Thai Rak Thai gave their pad thai and it was paired with a mai tai and the person serving was wearing a tye-dye tie (okay to that last part isn’t true). Germany has mini wieners with sauerkraut and pretzels dipped in cheese. Italy with pasta and meatballs, America with buffalo bites and hot dogs. Finally Russia took dessert with a variety of Russian cookies and an orange vodka tonic.

The next day, a friend of mine and I drove to Tunkhannuk for the Wings and Wine festival, conveniently located in the back of a Weis grocery. Your $15 entrance fee did not, as one might assume, get you access to any wings at all. Those had to be paid for at $.75 a wing. We stuck with the wine. As with many wines from this area, many were sweet. Juice with a spike of alcohol was the theme of the day. However, Antler Ridge was able to create fruit based wines that still maintained the integrity of the wine itself. The fruit was clear and present, the wine was on the sweeter side, but it didn’t taste like grown-up Kool Aid. The highlight of the day was the roast pig. When speaking with the pit master and discovering, to my dismay, that he had already sold the head for $20, I was given samples of knuckles, skin, and shoulder. All were slow roasted and very flavorful.

Leaving that festival at around 4, we drove across the city to the Vineyards by the Viaduct wine festival, equally conveniently located in a baseball diamond behind a couple houses. The sign might as well have been a piece of notebook paper stapled to a tree with “Wine Festival” written in pencil. Not willing to pay for one hour of a festival, we let ourselves in and claimed our glasses were lost or broken. As the end of the festival was at hand, wineries had no desire to lug home half empty bottles, so the pours were generous. Again, sweet wines dominated and again, the highlight was speaking with the crab cake vendor who was more than happy to let me take a crab cake (done on the grill and not fried or greasy at all) a mound of balsamic marinated mushrooms, and a plate of seafood and vegetable for $2, as it was all getting thrown away anyway.