Some are Boojums--

It's been a good month for recipe tryouts from Cooks Illustrated. Last night I made their incredibly simple recipe for roasted cauliflower. Even Sarah liked it, and she doesn't like cooked cauliflower. The only drawback is that it required a 475 F oven, which is not such a good thing in Houston during the Summer.

A while back Sarah and I signed up as recipe tasters for Cook's Illustrated. So far we've tested recipes for pound cake and tonight's herb-crusted port roast. I usually claim that I don't do "big meat", but pork roasts are reasonably inexpensive, and Sarah loves pork, so I was willing to give it a try. I started working on it about 4:45pm or so, and we had dinner about 8pm, and I think the time was well worth it. We'll almost certainly make this recipe again.

Last Thursday we attended the second annual Woodlands wine walk. It was a tad less well organized than last year, but still lots of fun. We were able to sample over 50 wines, so I'm listing some of the wines that we liked best:

• Dog House chardonnay & cabernet -- Cheap and good
• Rosemount Estate shiraz grenache
• Little Penguin shiraz and white shiraz (for Mom)
• Palmeri syrah
• Messina Hof papa paulo port (private reserve)
• Toasted Head viognier
• Texas Hills orange moscato (like a port)
• Banfi chianti classico docg
• Franciscan Oakville Estate chardonnay
• Chateau Souverain chardonnay & cabernet
• Beaulieu Vineyard cabernet
• Georges Dabceuf beaujolais reserve
• Hogue cabernet
• Kumala shiraz
• Robert Mondavi pinot noir private selection
• Genesis syrah & cabernet
• Xplorador chardonnay (cheap)

We should have others that were recorded in the wine walk "personal wine celler", but we haven't figured out how to extract them yet.