Our Kentuckiana Adventure

Last weekend, Joe and I made plans to travel up to the Louisville area to visit his good friend from med school, Angela, and her husband. When they matched at Louisville and we matched in Nashville, we were so excited that we were in the same region of the country and made plans to visit each other all the time. Well, reality set in, and a year passed without us visiting them, though they did make it down to Nashville once.

We arrived at their house (just across the bridge in Southern Indiana) by about 10:30 pm with a time change. We had to make a stop in Bowling Green, KY at Culver's for some Butterburgers and custard. Then we headed down to Bardstown to meet up with some of Angela's friends at a bar. The bar was loud and crowded, and I was a little tired and grumpy, but it was fun.

The next morning, we awoke to unseasonably cool weather around mid-morning. After breakfasting on blueberry muffins and sausage, we just sat around and sipped coffee on their lovely deck. We made plans to go to the Huber winery/orchard/petting farm/pick-your-own farm/restaurant in Starlight, Indiana. Before trying the wine, we thought picking peaches sounded like fun. I think we may have been the oldest people without children on the tractor that pulled us out to the orchard.

If you picked two boxes of peaches to the brim, they were $.79 a pound, so we decided it was a good idea for each couple to pick a box. We ate a few ripe ones in the orchard and marveled at the beauty and amount of peaches.

Joe may have gotten a little carried away. Our box weighed in at 27 pounds. We gave some to my parents, but mostly we've just been eating them! I have plans for some peach muffins this weekend. The peaches are really tasty. In their country store, we bought some wasabi soynuts, recommended by Angela, and some jalapeno cheese bread to have later and moved on to the wine tasting.

One of the things I enjoyed about the Huber property was that all of the vines were labeled so you could tell which grapes were the cabernet franc, etc. They also have a variety of tasting "packages". We decided to do the comparative package, where we would select either dry of sweet/semi-sweet and taste two wines side-by-side comparing for different qualities like minerality, skin contact, etc. It ended up being 12 pretty significant pours. The tasting occurred in the upstairs of a beautifully restored barn. It was busy but not crowded, and we met a few other transplanted Texans.

Without much food in my stomach, I was tipsy pretty quickly. We enjoyed several of the wines and came home with a bottle of their Chardonel and some Blueberry Port. Our server was a lot of fun and was very friendly and helpful. We needed a bit of food, and the jalapeno cheese bread coupled with some summer sausage and cheeses available for purchase did the trick as a complement to the bottle of Vignoles that we all shared.

There was live music out on the patio, and this was the absolute perfect day to enjoy it. The Huber property would make a great trip for a family as well since there are plenty of things for kids to enjoy. We saw many children enjoying picking blueberries and blackberries, as well as feeding llamas and other animals in the petting zoo.

That night we went back to Bardstown in Louisville and ate at Ramsi's Cafe On the World. The menu was so creative and different that I could hardly decide what to eat. I settled on the roasted vegetable masala. Joe got the East Meets South fajitas, fajita meat that you wrapped in Indiana paranatha bread. Cory ordered the Egyptian Kitchen, and then ate it so fast that none of us got to try it. Ramsi's offers many vegetarian and vegan friendly dishes. We returned to Cory and Angela's house and drank port and smoked cigars on their deck.

The next morning, we slept in again and ate some delicious strawberry breakfast bread from Huber's. After relaxing out on the deck, we took Cory and Angela's dog, Gracie, to a nearby monastery that had beautiful trails. Joe and I decided that we wanted to stop at the Maker's Mark distillery on our way home, so we said good-bye to Cory and Angela and hit the road. Joe has liked whisky for a while, but I have only recently began to enjoy it, thanks in large part to The Patterson House.

The Maker's Mark distillery is one of the more difficult distilleries on the Bourbon Trail to get to, as it is located quite a ways outside of Bardstown and about 2 hours from Louisville. But it is a beautiful setting and very quiet. Just outside of Loretto, KY, we began to see big black barrel houses where all of the whisky is aged. We made the last tour of the day at 3:30 pm, and the tour took longer than anticipated because it was a fairly large group that seemingly kept growing. The tours are free, and you get a ticket for the tasting if you are 21 and up.

My favorite part of the tour was the fermenting vats. There were about 9 9600 gallon vats where the yeast was eating up all of the sugars. The mash ferments for 3 days, and our tourguide encouraged us to try the difference in taste between Day 2 and Day 3 (there were no Day 1 vats at the time). So now, if you ever buy Maker's Mark, just imagine all the people dipping their hands into the fermenting vats!

The tour ended with a tasting. One of the glasses contains White Dog, the pre-aging mixture. It's essentially moonshine, and I could feel the burn all the way into my chest. The actual Maker's Mark is on the right and is aged in charred oak barrels for 5-7 years. They bottle by taste rather than aging time. The sweetness in Maker's Mark is due to their use of soft red winter wheat. There are 7 other distilleries on the Bourbon Trail, and Joe and I hope to continue to fill out our "passports"!

Viognier and Spaghetti Carbonara

Last March, Joe and I took a weekend trip to Fredericksburg, TX where we stayed in a wonderful little B&B and spent most of Saturday going to nearby wineries on the Texas Wine Trail. Now, neither Joe nor I are big wine snobs, but I was prepared to be slightly underwhelmed and that was not the case at all. We had a wonderful time and fell in love with several wines, but none could compare to the Becker Vineyards Viognier. This is even more notable because both Joe and I prefer red wines. Above is a picture of the tasting room at Becker Vineyards. They also have a B&B on the property. We sat out on the porch with our glasses of wine, enjoyed the gorgeous weather, and listened to the live music they had.

When we returned to Houston after our trip, we were pleased to discover that the Viognier could be found in our grocery store, and so we took its presence for granted. Then we moved to Tennessee, where the Baptists have instituted arcane liquor laws and "sin taxes" (sign up at Red White and Food to lobby to change this), and discovered that, not only was our marvelous Viognier nowhere to be found, but we couldn't even have any shipped to us. So, when Joe's friend came to visit us last month from Houston, our sole request was to have her bring us some Becker Vineyards Viognier.

We've had it sitting in our hot little hands for over a month, and I wanted to drink it on a special night and make a dinner to go with it so we could really savor all of the flavors. I decided on spaghetti carbonara with steamed broccoli and focaccia. Sure enough, after blessing the food and clinking glasses, the first thing Joe and I did was stick our noses in our wineglasses and then take a big sip of the viognier. Oh, and the pasta was really good too. Joe said, "Why even bother to go out when we can eat like this at home and have wonderful wine?" I'm highly inclined to agree.

Spaghetti Carbonara
(source: The Pioneer Woman Cooks)

Ingredients
1 lb spaghetti or other thin pasta
4 eggs
1 lb bacon
1 1/2 cups parmesan cheese
8-12 cloves of garlic, sliced or chopped (Mine were enormous, so I only used 4.)
1 large onion, chopped
1 cup chicken stock
1 cup white wine (I didn't want to cook with our precious viognier, so I used 1/2 cup chicken stock and 1/2 cup dry vermouth.)
1/2 stick of butter
1 handful of parsley
1-2 tbsp fresh ground black pepper

Preparation

First, slice up the bacon in to pieces about an inch thick. Then toss them into a heated stainless steel pan (I used my cast iron pan since all the others are non-stick.) Cook until browned and crisp.

While the bacon cooks, put on water to boil for the pasta and add the pasta once the water has reached a rolling boil and cook to al dente. When the bacon is cooked, remove from the pan with a slotted spoon, leaving the renderings. Cook the chopped onion in the renderings for a few minutes and then add the garlic.

Once the onion and garlic have cooked for a few minutes, remove from the pan with a slotted spoon. Discard the leftover renderings. Place the pan back on high heat until it starts to smoke a little. Then pour in the white wine and deglaze the pan. Add one cup of chicken stock. Return bacon, onion, and garlic to the pan and let simmer over medium heat.

Crack four eggs into a large bowl. Chop up most of the parsley and add it to the bowl along with most of the parmesan cheese. Mix well with a fork.

Drain the water from the pasta and add the very hot pasta to the egg mixture. The heat from the pasta will partially cook the eggs. Then add the bacon mixture and toss to combine. Finally, throw a 1/2 stick of butter in. Pepper to taste. Garnish with parsley and parmesan cheese and serve immediately.