Honey burned my ham!

Literally.

The entire top of the roasting bag melted onto my ham as I warmed it up with a sweet honey-orange glaze. Here are the pictures to prove it.

Thank goodness I had plenty of wine to recover and keep the guests occupied while I carved the top of my ham off.

Burned the rolls too.

Blasted high-altitude cooking with a 1960s oven!

Organic Mulled Wine

My favorite drink after a nice, long day out in the cold.

1 bottle of dry, organic red wine

2 cups of hot water

a few big pinches of brown sugar

1 pinch of nutmeg

Juice and rind of 1 lemon or orange

1 stick of cinnamon

2 cloves

LEED and follow

There’s been and continues to be a lot of talk about LEED Certified wineries.

To start, a LEED Certified anything means that the building in which a business is housed has passed criteria in energy savings, water efficiency, CO2 emissions reduction, improved indoor environmental quality, and stewardship of resources and sensitivity to their impacts. LEED, after all stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design. The US Green Building Council created LEED certification in 1998 and it has been THE acronym ever since.

Stoller Winery in Oregon became the first US LEED Certified winery in 2006. Hall Wines of St. Helena became the first winery in California to achieve LEED certification from the U.S. Green Building Council. Cade Wines were the first organic winery to be awarded in Napa Valley. Goldeneye Winery became the third LEED certified winery in CA this year.

This looks like a great trend to keep watching. In the mean time, take a look at these sites for information about what a LEED winery does differently. Gravity flow anyone?

Stoller

Hall

Cade

Goldeneye

Green Frog

Drinking Green can be a lot of fun. No, I don’t mean exclusively drinking Vinho Verde.

By fun, I mean drinking wine that you know something special is going on. Take this great wine for example: Frog’s Leap 2007 Cabernet Sauvignon.

Besides being a delicious, can’t wait to have more, bottle of wine, there’s another side to this bottle. The outside. If the inside is the juice you quoff, the outside is the winery which equals the business, the environment and the people that make the inside possible.

Here’s the outside scoop on Frog's Leap and why they are one of my favorite brands (both inside and out).

Frog’s Leap is an organic winery in Napa, CA. I had the pleasure of visiting the winery years ago. I grabbed a bottle of Chardonnay on a beautiful summer day and hung out in the hammock with friends. The gardens were beautiful and with the help of friends and butterflies, it quickly became an exquisite day. Although moved by so many variables, I still wanted to learn about the winery.

Frog’s Leap is not organic to be trendy. They believe in health and sustainable farming as the mechanism for ensuring a healthy environment. Their mantra is Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Renew, Retain and Revere.

Organic and Biodynamic Farming methods are not only used in the vineyards but flow into the gardens. Everything you see is buzzing with the life of the season. The true life of Frog’s Leap is exactly where it is at that moment, surrounded in the harmony of nature.