A Little Cheese, a Little Sausage, Some Crackers, Some Wine...Wonderful

I have to be in the right mood for the kind of meal my wife and I had tonight. I must be in that mood. It's was very, very simple meal, with no time spent in preparation. This afternoon, we wandered through a gourmet market that happens to be inside an upscale liquor store where we had stopped to get some rum...I thought I was in the mood for a Cuba libre and we did not have any rum in the house. I hadn't had any rum since our trip to Mexico last December.

As we were wandering through the market, my wife noticed that there were several cheeses available for tasting, so she tried a few...so did I. They were tiny nibbles, but tasty enough to leave me wanting more. She had the same idea. We talked briefly about what we would have for dinner and decided wine and cheese would be just the ticket for our evening meal. We'd had a sizable lunch at one of our 'old standby' Mexican restaurants, where I had guiso de nopalitos (a really nice pork stew heavily flavored with a thick chile de arbol sauce and laced with lots of nopalitos [strips of prickly pear cactus] and potatoes) and my wife had enchiladas verdes. It was a lot of food for lunch. So, a smaller meal for dinner made good sense.

We bought a wedge of Double Glouchester (rich, crumbly, delicious), a wedge of Golden Cheshire, and a wedge of Pyranees with green peppercorns [for me...my wife did not like it at all]. We also bought Hot Fennel Salame (a very, very spicy French-style sausage [I didn't know the French made spicy-hot foods!] made in San Francisco by a company called Columbus Salame Company) and some sweet pepper & basil crackers. To complement the meal, we bought a bottle of André Brunel Grenache Vin de Pays de Vaucluse 2004, a very inexpensive (less that $10) French Red Rhone Wine. We'd had the wine before, as the store had hawked it recently as a good, inexpensive wine and we thought it was worth trying. It was, so my wife decided she wanted to get it again.

My favorites were the Hot Fennel Salame, the Pyranees, and the Golden Cheshire. But I really liked everything else, as well. Even though all that may sound like a lot of food, it wasn't...it was a very small meal, in fact, but it hit the spot.

What a wonderful dinner! I'm documenting it in this blog for my sake...I want to remember what to get next time I'm in the mood for a small wine, cheese, sausage, and cracker dinner.