Stories

"You've never had good Champagne." That was response I gave to someone who told me they didn't like Champagne. Because there's a big difference between low end sparkling wine and decent sparkling wine and Champagne. Sure enough, once he had a glass of lovely Nicholas Feuillatte bubbly he changed his mind.

Typically I can find good Champagne and sparkling wines in the $30 - 50 range, retail. But this is not about good sparkling wines or Champagne, this is about outstanding Champagne, namely Krug.

At a recent tasting and lunch hosted by Krug, I got a chance to try various offerings including their non-vintage Grand Cuvee and their lovely Rosé, but there was one Champagne that really stood apart from the rest and that was the Krug Collection 1989. It has haunted me ever since. If you read reviews of this Champagne here are some of the flavors that are used to describe it:

cardamom, tea rose, freshly ground coffee, honeycomb, kumquat, oyster shell, dried apricot, chalk, truffle, brioche, spice, tropical fruit, honey, white fruits, slightly browned apples, high-toned flowers, yeast, nuttiness, pear, green apple, citrus fruit marmalade, fresh figs, mineral

Two weeks ago, I swallowed my shock at spending over six dollars for a newspaper, and bought a  Sunday New York Times. It was a revelation, a joy and so completely absorbing that I periodically had to remind myself to stop reading, and do something useful. Comparisons are odious and all, but since I started reading the Times, I am feeling the pain and guilt of finding a new love and leaving the old one with great relief and not much of a parting glance. Our local paper, despite being the only offering in this state’s capital, has lost all of its charm. It was purchased by some national publishing conglomerate which clearly labors under the impression that, because we live in Flyover,  even the goings-on under the Capital dome do not require an experienced and intelligent writing staff. Wire service reports are good enough for us, sometimes about events that occur within 50 miles of our circulation area.

Aside from the odd story about local high school sports heroes or a 1 – inch report on a local crime, the vast majority of our paper is compiled from wire stories, and many of the photographs are either file photos or pictures of folks in some other state getting ready to storm Wal-Mart or protesting taxes. Sometimes, a story about, say, preparations for Hanukkah will be written by a local reporter,  and feature one photograph from a nearby temple and one photograph of Jewish families in Rye or Austin spinning their dreidls.  Nice people, I have no doubt, but part of the joy of a local paper is finding a friend or neighbor captured on newsprint. There is no cutting out and saving these photos of strangers, or attaching them to the refrigerator with magnets.

I’m a looky-loo. I real estate dream shop online, a lot!!!! Late one night when my husband was safely sleeping,  I forwarded a photo of a house on a lake I had found and the subject said, “Lets buy this instead of doing an addition to our house.  It’s MUCH cheaper.”

So, instead of doing construction , we bought a house online in Quebec.  Doesn’t everyone in L.A. do that?  Come on.  You know you do.

Well, we did.

So, there we were that first week, enjoying our pristine lake when we got our first and possibly only visitor.  It was our neighbor, the retired judge who lives up the road on our quiet lake.

He was there to inform us about ecology and keeping the lake from getting that nasty blue algae that was killing a lot of the other lakes.  First we heard of that.  Perhaps we didn’t research enough.

I grew up eating my fair share of great Chicago pizza. My family made the drive from St. Paul to Chicago a few times each year to visit all the relatives living there. Laden with spicy Italian sausage and creamy cheese that stretched in long strings as I pulled the slice away from my mouth, I thought Chicago pizza was the best food in the world.

With that in mind, I feel a little silly calling this concoction of mine a pizza. It’s nothing like the Chicago pizza I grew up on. But it is on a flat piece of dough with several ingredients piled on top along with mozzarella cheese.

Arugula on my pizza was only a thought after I’d prepared an Arugula Salad for this week’s newspaper column. I had a small amount of the green ingredients left from the salad — arugula, spinach and tiny fresh green peas. Along with a few other little odds and ends from my refrigerator, I decided to create a pizza.