The Unreal Meal

For so many of us, food and wine are a natural complement.  Hell, it’s so natural that there’s a magazine with that name.  So it shouldn’t really have been much of a surprise to me when I got an e-mail this morning from Tasting Table sharing knowledge of a new wine club with a new twist (more on that in a minute).

Wine clubs are a dime a dozen these days (or, more likely, about $45 a two-pack of bottles).  Various vineyards have their own clubs, lots of resellers have them, it’s a fairly common way to introduce myriad selections to people who might be regular wine drinkers who like a little variety.  I, myself, have been a wine.com subscriber for a couple years.  Sometimes they send good things, sometimes it’s average.  My problem with wine.com is that they tend to overcharge for things, and their customer service is not always the best.  Plus, they sell out of popular things way too fast.

Keeping that in mind, I haven’t actively been looking for a new wine club, but Mama always taught me to keep my options open and be receptive to things that might cross my path.  Enter in this morning’s Tasting Table e-mail that talked of a new joint venture between Cookstr and Pasanella & Sons Vintners.

Cookstr is a fantastically well designed recipe database that features recipes from a lot of famous chefs and cookbook authors in one handy website.  Pasanella & Sons (I really need to stop resisting the urge to type panzanella – also delicious, but totally different) is a local wine shop here in NYC in, I believe, what used to be the old South Street fish market.  Combine the two, and you obviously have food and wine, but you get something more with their new service: a wine club plus a book club — a cookbook club, to be precise.  You get a bottle of red, a bottle of white, and (apologies to Billy Joel), a book with which to cook tonight.

I was so enamored of this idea (I’m a bit of a sucker for cookbooks, which is ironic since I don’t use them that often) that I immediately went to the site in the hopes of signing up for a new ongoing membership that could replace my wine.com shipment.  When I got there, they had a few options: a one-time month-only choice for $49.99, a 3-month option for $149.99, 6 months for $299.99, and 12 months for $599.99.  What was missing was a month-by-month option where I could subscribe on an ongoing basis, but without having to shell out six hundred smackeroos.

Doing what any enterprising woman might, I clicked the link associated with questions and comments, and e-mailed asking if this was an option or if it might become an option in the future.  I sent my e-mail at 12:50 this afternoon.  Ten minutes later, Will Schwalbe, the CEO and founder of Cookstr, responded to say that they didn’t have the ability quite yet, but would likely figure it out soon, and that he’d follow up with another e-mail once they did.

I was tickled and, quite frankly, a little stunned to have such a fast and amiable response!  Then I got sucked into various work duties (after all, I can’t spend every minute of my workday on fun stuff!), and before I knew it, I had another e-mail from Marco Pasanella thanking me for such a great idea and letting me know that he’d added that option to their website.

Let me tell you guys, I’ve worked in some sort of service industry (either food or customer) for my entire adult life, and I know two definitive things about it:  First, it’s incredibly easy to provide great service to customers if you’re simply responsive.  Second, in spite of that fact, it’s something that very very very many people neglect.  I don’t know if it’s because they’re just lazy or careless or what the story is, but more and more, I find that people are clueless about what constitutes good service.

Happily, Will and Marco do not fall into that second category!  I was so thrilled by their nearly immediate responses and actions, that I instantly signed up for the shiny new month-by-month program.  I cannot wait for the first shipment, and my first cookbook!

The practical upshot is this: food and wine are delicious, but there’s no substitute for great service.  And since they so willingly accommodated my wishes, I felt that I should do my part to get their name out there to more people that might be interested in the Vino & Cookbook of the Month Club.  You don’t have to be a New Yorker to join!

Once I have my first shipment, I’ll have to find something delectable from the cookbook that will go nicely with the wine they send.  Perhaps a nice bread salad would do.

It’s been a while since I posted, and much of that has been due to the fact that I swear to you that I’ve been sick for the entire month of July, so it’s been sapping my creativity a bit.  For someone who doesn’t get sick very often (usually once a year or so), when I do get hit, I get really whiny and it’s just not fun for anyone (me included).

Anyway, I’m not here to cull sympathy from the masses, but instead to talk about food!  A friend of mine tells me that today is National Lasagna Day, and a quick Google search confirms this for me.  I wish that I’d known this before this morning, or I’d have planned some kind of lasagna dinner for this evening.  Instead, we’ll be having moo shu beef lettuce cups (a Weight Watcher’s recipe), as we’re all trying to be more healthful in our house.

Nonetheless, I’m still inspired by the thought of lasagna!  I love Italian food, and lasagna is one of the best comfort foods there is, I think.  Heck, for me, pasta of any sort is just happy and delicious.  It’s one of those things that I know how to make fresh, but I never do because I don’t have a pasta roller (and rolling it by hand is seriously exhausting – or at least it is with my little rolling pin).  I keep meaning to get myself a pasta roller, but I keep not doing it for some reason.

This morning I was reading my e-mail, and one of the various newsletters/mailing lists that I receive is from a site called Groupon.  Groupon is a site that offers cool things in various major cities across the US at a group discount.  They work with companies to provide a daily offer of something cool to do.  Today’s (NYC) offer was for one of four classes at New York Vintners (a local wine shop here in Manhattan) that does short food and wine classes.  The classes are normally $45, but today’s Groupon price was $20 per ticket, so I snatched up some tickets.

The classes available are Sake and Cheese, Wine 101, Pinot Noir from Around the World, and the one that I really want to try most: Interactive Pasta Class with Italian Wines.  The pasta class is described as “Join us for a Sunday afternoon tasting of six Italian wines while Chef shows us how to make several different pastas, and then demonstrates how to make some of our favorite pasta dishes.”  Aside from an extraneous comma, that synopsis sounds perfect to me.  Like I said, it’s not that I don’t know how to make fresh pasta, but I’m also of a firm belief that you can never stop learning, and there’s always something to be gained from those more experienced.

So in honor of National Lasagna Day, I am going to learn some more about Italian Wines and making pasta.  Of course, today’s Groupon offering was so popular that I may never be able to find an open class, but we’ll see!  Hopefully it doesn’t take me until National Lasagna Day next year to get there!

I’m always interested in seminars and classes like these around the city, especially if they’re not terribly expensive.  I can’t afford culinary school at the moment, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t learn via other avenues, right?  It’s all in a quest to make every meal unreal!