I’m a sucker for multimedia. In fact, I haven’t switched my television on in months and ordinarily get my dose of audio-visual online. Video content is one of my favourite things about food blogging, and a site that really packs it in is Savory, with Savory San Francisco, Savory New York and Savory Chicago being the first of their installments and many more to come. Food journalism has never been so uninhibited. Unique video content allows shots of food, a taste of ambience and samples of the Chef’s opinions, and with this type of site becoming the industry norm, we can look forward to a lot more local restaurants who significantly raise their standards to match up. It’s a win/ win situation for food journalists and restaurants all round, but if only there were a way to bring food and wine more comprehensively together, as certain chefs are undoubtedly inspired by certain wines whilst wines are often made to compliment the flavours produced by local chefs. And as far as the writers go, they partake in both. Grapethinking aims to be the link..com/

Foodist Colony despite the great name has really got something going with their ‘build your own restaurant guide’ function. My god mother has shelves of binder files with holiday ideas, recipes and restaurant reviews all clipped from magazines and put into folders for later use. Just clicking on my Bookmarks, I have over 220 bookmarked sites, and with so much more information I seldom have time to go back, and by the time I do, I can’t remember why I had bookmarked it in the first place. This kind of personalizable wiki which allows readers to share reviews as well as build up a list of places they’ve been to and places they still want to go has huge potential to catch on to everything from novels (creating a virtual book club) to wines, recipes and restaurants. It’d be like an online experience journal, and ultimately recipes, restaurant recommendations, lent books and wine are the currency of any great social circle, where there’s free trade of all. I would never be as disciplined as my god mother as to cut out and catalog physical articles, but with the ability to do it online I think we’ll all start. We want to make this our newest feature at Tastevine so people looking to organize and keep track of their recipes can do so. 

Having just checked back in at Khymos’ site - I realize that I missed the boat for TGRWT #1 by somehow having thought that the deadline was tomorrow when it was actually May 1st. Anyhow - I’m going to have to go for it as a late entry!

The idea of tuna steaks was a little crazy, and it tasted crazier. I thought of creating a mocha sauce for a tuna steak based on a meal I’d had at a very eccentric restaurant some time ago in Cape Town. However - although it was palatable, it had far more of a novelty effect than anything else.

However, last night, with some advice from my mother, I think I managed to crack the formula. My mother reminded me that garlic, like onion, became sweet when it was roasted. My mistake with the Garlic, Chocolate and Coffee sauce was that I didn’t roast the garlic first.

So based on a recipe for chocolate covered strawberries on my resource for any recipe, www.AllRecipes.com, I set to work on the TGWRT #1 challenge.

The amazing thing about this recipe is how quick it is. Roasting the garlic takes around 15 minutes, and while its roasting the sauce can be made just as easily.

I grated 80% cocoa Green and Blacks into a double boiler along with 2 spoons of shortening. Once the chocolate had melted I added a teaspoon of roast Kenyan coffee beans into the mixture; and then proceeded to take each clove of garlic, skewered on a cocktail stick, and dip them into the mixture and setting it down on plate. All in all I had ten dipped cloves, which I put in the fridge.

In an effort to do a double duty we had the mocha-cloves as an after dinner sweet, together with the General Billy’s Syrah Grenache. The entire General Billy’s concept is great, but as this blog tries to stay faithful to small, country specific producers, it can’t win by ultimate pick for WBW.

However, the Gaullist undergrowth aromas and red berry flavours were a perfect accomplice to the mocha-dipped cloves. Altogether, although late, the TGRWT #1 challenge has been great fun, and really challenged my limited culinary faculties. The opportunity to combine it with Wine Blogger Wednesday has also been great. I wonder if Khymos could help us finding chemically related food pairings.

Who would’ve thought that a Languedoc Syrah/Grenache and a skewered clove of roasted garlic dipped in coffee and chocolate sauce would be such fine companions - bring on the White Chocolate and Caviar challenge, I think it’d go really well with Sancerre Rose.

I’ve never been so endeared to food writing in as much as I have the past two years. When I get the Wine Spectator, I read the feature articles and then simply skip the restaurant reviews. Purely because it’s a little out of my league, and I don’t always want to wonder if I should be wearing a tie or if my pants are good enough when I go out. The Girl Who Ate Everything is the perfect remedy to such snobbery and pretension, because unlike the Vegas super-chef restaurant reviews in Spectator, I can actually use her advice on a real life budget on just about any day of the week. The key to the success of blogs is that they’re practical. Recently she’s covered a quest for macaroons, sidewalk dining in Paris, takeout burgers in NYC all the way through to Thai and Indian, it’s a blog for the cosmopolitan realist. Robyn, the author, is a junior at New York University majoring in Food Studies.

Our friend Phil Bilodeau over at Sonoma Wine gave us the following info to share about the Showcase coming up in July.

Event: Sonoma County Showcase Weekend of Wine & Food

Dates: July 12-15, 2007

Description: Don’t miss the 28th annual Sonoma County Showcase Weekend of Wine & Food, the ultimate Wine Country experience, held July 12-15. This gala event features four days of fantastic wine and food presented by world-renowned winemakers and Sonoma’s top chefs. Indulge in exclusive all-access luxury packages of spa, golf, and wine safari experiences, or enjoy events a la carte, including private winery lunches and dinners, an extraordinary Sonoma Family Style gala dinner, and Taste of Sonoma, a two day grand tasting with over 100 wineries, 50 chefs, wine seminars, chef competitions, and more. For more information or reservations, visit www.sonomawine.com/showcase or call 800-939-7666.

Of course it’s a bit pricey, but top chefs and wine safaris… what could be better? We understand the difficulties of sharing event information and getting people buzzed about an exciting event that you’re putting together, whether it’s a small local get-together or a big extravaganza like the Showcase. Tastevine, which we keep talking about and is looking to drop May 28th, will have an event calendar / bulletin built into it’s community structure so that all the winos and novices alike can know what’s going on and know the cool events they and their friends should attend. We’ll have to watch for spam though… maybe we can use a “digg and bury” style system so the events that people don’t care about will get canned. Cool wine & food events are a must if you’re living a chill lifestyle, and having a simple method to plan your outings only makes the tastevine experience better.