Last night capped off 36 hours of wonderful birthday celebration! Thursday evening my favorite wingman took me and a couple of other friends out to Experience Hendrix, a Jimi Hendrix tribute tour featuring several blues legend performers. It was a great show, covering the entire Hendrix canon. Some notable performers were Dweezil Zappa (son of Frank Zappa), Robby Krieger (of The Doors), Jonny Lang, and Kenny Wayne Shepherd. Awesome!
Then last night Katie put together an exquisite dinner with a few friends. We began the evening with 1998 Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin Champagne Brut La Grande Dame, which went really well with light caviar. This was not your elegant, airy champagne; it was very fruit-forward and dense - delicious!
We served the main courses all at once: zucchini salad, sardines in puff pastry, eggplant pesto on fresh sourdough, and thai beef (although we used grass fed, hormone- and antibiotic-free buffalo instead). Each of the recipes was taken from Cooking With Flo, a cookbook authored by a friend of ours to document the exquisite recipes of Florence, the hotelier we met during our visit to Cognac back in 2008. Scrumptious!
The wines we served weren't those you would classically pair with any of those dishes but hey, it was my birthday and we were going to drink what [the royal] we wanted! The theme of the night was 2001 Brunello di Montalcino, an excellent vintage not just for wine but also the year I met Katie. In fact, exactly 11 years ago yesterday Katie gave me a hug for the first time- and the rest, as they say, is history!
Before we dove into the Brunelli, though, one of our guests brought another wine to celebrate another vintage - 1979, the year I was born! The 1979 M. Chapoutier Côtes du Rhône Belleruche was exquisite, vivacious, and had plenty of life left (as I hope I do!). Our first two Brunelli were 2001 Castello Banfi Poggio alle Mura and 2001 La Poderina. Again, these weren't necessarily natural pairings with our food but they were great on their own and the La Poderina especially went well with the buffalo.
As we moved onto pecorino and gouda cheeses, we brought out the other two Brunelli: 2001 Castelgiocondo and 2001 Casanova di Neri Tenuta Nuova. As you may recall, I've had negative experience with Castelgiocondo in the past but this was my first time actually drinking their wine. It was good, but not good enough to cancel out my grudge from that visit. The Casanova was Wine Spectator's 2006 wine of the year. I'm not sure it's that good, but it was definitely my favorite of the night and will keep getting better over time.
Completely stuffed, we moved on to dessert: homemade blueberry cobbler and chocolate cake (Good thing I was carb loading for Sunday's 10k race!)! For this course we had a Sauternes-like late harvest wine from California. Imagine my surprise then when I took my first sip and it was . . . spicy! It turned out that this was not the dessert wine we thought it was. It was experimental jalapeno wine our friends had made and bottled in a dessert wine bottle! While it certainly wasn't for everyone, I happen to love spicy wine so it was a perfect end to a fabulous evening.
Five hours of wine dinner . . . great company . . . and a spicy surprise . . . what better way to begin my next trip around the sun?
Showing posts with label Jimi Hendrix. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jimi Hendrix. Show all posts
2012-03-24
2009-04-08
A1A
I finished up Jimi Hendrix and have moved onto my favorite discography to work through chronologically: Jimmy Buffett! While I'm working on rewriting some of Poken's legal paperwork I have A1A playing in the background. What an album! Not only does it feature some of my favorite Buffett songs of all time (A Pirate Looks At Forty, Migration), almost every other song on the album is good too: Makin' Music For Money, Life Is Just a Tire Swing, Trying To Reason With Hurricane Season, etc.
Normally (Am I becoming more Swiss?! "Normally" is one of their favorite words!) an artist that peaked in 1974 wouldn't have too much more to recommend him. However, Buffett's subsequent 3.5 decades of music have continued to please through and through (except for a brief dearth in the late 80s) and I look forward to continuing the journey. It does make me miss back home, though. After all, "I've got a Caribbean soul I can barely control and some Texas hidden here in my heart!"
2008-09-15
Interviews
Day 1 of interviews is over and it went pretty well. Before I left my apartment in the morning I was listening to Bob Dylan's discography. The superb quality of his decades of poetry is the subject of another entire post, but this morning I just had him on for background music. When it came to All Along the Watchtower, I was inspired to swap out Dylan for the Jimi Hendrix rendition.
Oh yeah, that was just what I needed to start the morning off right. It took me back to middle school days, working out with my brother Nick, when we had just discovered a different kind of poetry--the electric kind that came out of Jimi's guitar. It put an extra spring in my step, as did the crisp, clear autumn weather en route to campus.
My scheduled interview with the MTS group, an Italian heating system manufacturer that is going green, went well and there could be a fit there. I met GE Energy at the career fair and they were interested enough in my profile to schedule an ad hoc interview. It went well and we identified some positions where there could be a fit.
It was not all sunshine and rainbows, however. After talking with the Amazon rep, it seems that the position I had identified there was not a great match for me. They clearly thought likewise as they declined to interview me, encouraging me to email a CV and cover letter. Perhaps that's what they told everyone who wasn't a German speaker looking for supply chain positions (for which they definitely were interviewing), but I'm less enthused about the opportunity with them regardless.
Tomorrow I interview with Shell, hoping to learn about their commitment to sustainability and demonstrate to them my "capacity, achievement, and relationships ." Then it is time to focus on off-campus recruiting for a couple of days before my interview with British Telecom. Bring it on!
Oh yeah, that was just what I needed to start the morning off right. It took me back to middle school days, working out with my brother Nick, when we had just discovered a different kind of poetry--the electric kind that came out of Jimi's guitar. It put an extra spring in my step, as did the crisp, clear autumn weather en route to campus.
My scheduled interview with the MTS group, an Italian heating system manufacturer that is going green, went well and there could be a fit there. I met GE Energy at the career fair and they were interested enough in my profile to schedule an ad hoc interview. It went well and we identified some positions where there could be a fit.
It was not all sunshine and rainbows, however. After talking with the Amazon rep, it seems that the position I had identified there was not a great match for me. They clearly thought likewise as they declined to interview me, encouraging me to email a CV and cover letter. Perhaps that's what they told everyone who wasn't a German speaker looking for supply chain positions (for which they definitely were interviewing), but I'm less enthused about the opportunity with them regardless.
Tomorrow I interview with Shell, hoping to learn about their commitment to sustainability and demonstrate to them my "capacity, achievement, and relationships ." Then it is time to focus on off-campus recruiting for a couple of days before my interview with British Telecom. Bring it on!
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