Strange Pairings: Gołąbki & Absinthe

Gołąbki

My homeland is famous for bread, sausage and vodka. But those do not make for a cuisine of world renown.

A signature Polish food is (or more correctly, “are“) Gołąbki (go-WOHMB-kee). It literally means “little pigeons”. A good synopsis of the history of these little cabbage rolls is found here.

This sturdy farm food is both satisfying and very tasty. The variations are mostly in the stuffing but consist of a grain (typically barley, but also rice) and a meat or mushrooms. The sauces are either tomato- or mushroom based. In either case, the cabbage is a prominent component in the dish.

Poland, being considerably to the north of the 45th parallel is not wine country (with a few tiny exceptions). We grew grains and potatoes and found that those make a fine base for distilling liquor. And so, the culture of imbibing is very different. The average family (at least when I was growing up) would not have alcoholic beverages at the dinner table. Vodka is not part of every meal, but a bottle could liven up an evening when company was over, gathered around a nice spread on the coffee table. 50 ml shot glasses are raised in toast every so often – in between bites of cold cuts, bread, bigos, and pickled foods.

Vessia Ristorante, Irvine.

Vessia

Being as we’re not long for this part of California (we’re moving 50 miles to the north in a few weeks), we wanted to take advantage of a little time and visit one of our favorite restaurants: Vessia, in Irvine. We go often enough to be regulars but don’t get a “Hi Norm!”, nor does the staff chatter excitedly in hushed voices: “THEY‘re here” when we walk in. I am totally fine with that.

I do not intend to start writing restaurant reviews. And this is not meant to be a review of Vessia, but we are fond of the place. It’s big, but cozy feeling and the food is great. The wine list emphasizes Italian wines and is pretty nice for a bedroom community.

L.A. Wine – the concept.

Hi Folks

My idea for this site stems from the LA Times ditching regular local wine coverage.

One thing I was thinking about doing is a hybrid site like http://foodandwineblog.com/ that covers wine and food in LA but looks at the more obscure or atypical angle: a-la Tony Bourdain meets “Bizarre Foods” with Andrew Zimmern.

We could cover wine events, restaurants, tastings bars, etc – whatever we define as the format of the site.

Let’s use the comments section below to talk about ideas and possibilities.

This site can be reached with these URLs:

www.wine-la.com and www.la-wine.com

Whatever the format of this site will be (as a product of our collaboration) I would like this site to fill the void in food and wine writing that the LA Times recently created.

Another point I’d like to bring up is what to we want to accomplish with this site?

• Do we want a casual community blog that chronicles our experiences and foibles in wine and offers opinion-driven content from enthusiast-authors?

• Do we want something with a journalistic culture, an editorial direction and with potential permanence – a journalistic serious player that follows these principles: http://www.redwinebuzz.com/faq.htm#wiaip?

Let’s see where we go with this.