Wine of the Week - Corgi wine!

From Carivintas Winery comes this 2011 100% merlot.

Bright and tart, it has traces of cranberry and chocolate. A little dry, but balanced. Nothing complex, but easy to enjoy.

Lavender cookies

I just realized I never shared this recipe before! Shame on me.

Lovely cookies to snack on - not too sweet, and great with a cup of tea! From Food.com.

Rather than eggs, I used ground flax seed. I also used gluten-free flour rather than all-purpose, and they came out just fine.

Wine of the Week - Wiens 2010 Cabernet Sauvignon

Rich, full strawberries and traces of tobacco scents as you sniff. Definite tobacco flavor, as well as a variety of red fruits. This wine is so good! Full bodied, yet balanced. Top notch all the way. Highly recommended.

Wine of the Week - Project Happiness 2009 Syrah

This is a wine with a lot of dark, moody flavors, which is a personal preference of mine.

Black cherry and blackberries on the nose. The taste builds on that fruitiness, adding some lightly burnt toast, leather and a hint of tobacco.

If you like your flavors dark, this is a pretty good basic wine at a very affordable price.

13.8% alcohol

Mexicali Burgers

A friend of mine told me about this recipe years ago, but I never got around to making it until recently. Big mistake. Instead of making sliders, I made big burgers, because I had big burger buns and it just made more sense. And I skipped the Spicy Mango Sauce, because I hate both mangoes and spicy food. And in the salsa I used my new favorite salsa, Trader Joe's Organic Tomatillo & Roasted Yellow Chili Salsa.

Chef Chloe's Mexicali Sliders

Strawberry jam

My first attempt at canning - although I was worried at first, it turned out to be a success!

For my birthday, I received this book and a starter set for canning. My first recipe was a basic one for strawberry.

The recipe came with some tweaks, including adding vanilla bean or balsalmic vinegar. I decided to experiment - yes, without even trying the basic recipe first - and added a vanilla fig balsalmic vinegar to the batch.

In the end, the vanilla flavor is very faint. But the jam is still really tasty!

Wine of the Week - Maurice Car'rie Winery: Cody's Crush

Here's a good example of wine that tastes nothing like how it smells.

On the nose, there's a lot of strawberry and fresh cut grass. There's also a little bit of dirt to go with that grass. And there's a general funk permeating the whole thing - smelly cheese or feet.

But on the tongue, it tastes very jammy. Blackberry jam. Nice and tart, followed up by some heat. Ends with a good, medium finish.

This is a Southern California winery I've only recently discovered, and look forward to trying a lot more.

Fiesta salad

Somewhat similar to my fiest corn salad, here's a tasty sidedish from A Teaspoon of Happiness that's really easy and quick to prepare. No cooking involved!

I cut the recipe in half. That makes more than enough for two people.

Wine of the Week - Carivintas 2008 "Aspen" Syrah

I have to admit I was a little bit disappointed with this one. It was sour, with sort of strawberry and dirt tastes. Overwhelmingly tannic. Maybe in a couple years this will develop into something better; but it's already five years old, and I don't think it was designed for longevity.