Vermont Craft and Cuisine - Day 4, Part 2: The rest of our day
Originally published at BlackTabi Blog. You can comment here or there.
After our hours at the Shelburne museum, we met up with our group in the parking lot. Alanna, our fearless guide, had made a side trip to the hardware store while we toured the museum, and greeted us with a very welcome spray bottle filled with cold water as we loaded back into the van. From there, we drove over to New Haven, VT to visit the Lincoln Peak Vineyard and Winery for a wine tasting.
vineyards from the winery porch
The free wine tasting allowed us to sample the Black Sparrow, LaCrescent, LaCrescent Late Harvest, Marquette and Starlight. I think the Marquette and LaCrescent Late Harvest were two of the most popular amongst our group. Matt and I decided to bring home a few bottles of the Late Harvest ourselves.
Lincoln Peak Winery
Next, for a fee, we got to taste both ice wine options: Silk and Nightfires. Of the two, I actually preferred the cheaper Silk wine, but both were quite good (as ice wines usually are). One member of our troupe compared the taste experience to the heady scent of late summer afternoons walking along the vineyards full of ripe grapes.
vineyards across the lake
After our wine tasting, we hurried back to the hotel because several of us were registered for a cooking class in one of the resort teaching kitchens. After dropping our day bags in our room and grabbing a cookie and lemonade from the lobby, we donned aprons and became chefs for the afternoon.
Alanna snagged this photo of our group through the classroom window
The class we’d registered for was summer salsas and corn tortillas. We learned to made two kinds of salsa as well as corn tortillas from scratch. The first salsa was centered around roasted tomatoes and garlic, so we set those to roast in the oven while we concentrated on the other dishes.
roasted tomato salsa
The next salsa was cilantro based (two whole bunches!), and also included coconut and honey. This marked the first occasion on which I’d tasted a dish that was chock-full of cilantro and actually liked it!
cilantro coconut lime salsa
Next, we set out rolling the tortilla dough into balls, squashing them flat in the tortilla press (my new favorite kitchen gadget), and cooking them on an ungreased but well-seasoned griddle.
Matt mans the tortilla griddle
I can't believe it's tortillas!
As the final part of our class, we sat down to enjoy the fruits of the afternoon’s labor. We’d been a little concerned about never having gotten around to eating lunch that afternoon, but it turned out to be a good thing as three of us tucked away a couple dozen tortillas with fresh salsa and grilled meats, peppers and onions that our teacher chef had prepared to accompany our tortillas while we’d been making salsa.
mmmm, fresh tortillas!
We were pleased to have all of the recipes typed up for us in packets to take home, as we all planned to make all of them again soon. The biggest thing I learned in the class was that tortillas are not at all hard to make, and very much worth having fresh.
After our class, we had a little bit of down time to freshen up and relax before heading to the dining room where we’d had dinner on Monday for one last dinner as a group. Alanna mentioned to us that she’d asked the Essex staff why they didn’t carry any Lincoln Peak wines, and on her advice they’d started to carry a few of the wines. We decided to order a bottle of the peppery red Marquette for the table, using our new thorough knowledge of the winery’s offerings. The service in the room seemed incredibly slow to us, but we reasoned that the staff seemed somewhat shorthanded that evening as they ran back and forth between the few tables of people in the dining room and the packed tavern that’s adjacent to the dining room. All in all, between our table conversation and the leisure pace to the meal, dinner ended up taking a full three hours!
Matt and I each had a delicious caesar salad as our first course, and I shared a wedge of deliciously fuzzy looking bleu cheese that had come on another person’s salad. The waitress assured me that the evening’s special, a pasta carbonara, could be made in a vegetarian version so I enjoyed the smokey creamy dish as my entree. Matt ordered one of the “spa dishes,” the spirolina pasta dish, which turned out to be green noodles in a garlicky broth. We rounded out the meal with dessert: blueberry cobbler for Matt, and coffee creme brulee for myself.
coffee creme brulee
It’s worth noting Alanna’s dessert as well: the Key Lime Tart. So inspired by the presentation, our entire table started taking iPhone photos of our desserts, declaring them “tweet-worthy” and posting the photos to twitter for our friends to drool over.
Key Lime Tart at The Essex, photo by Alanna
After dinner, we wished our dining partners good night and headed back to the room to begin the process of packing all of the stuff we’d brought, along with our food and craft inspired purchases of the week into our suitcase since check-out was early the next morning.