On my last trip to Italy (November 2003, I’ll be posting the diary of it eventually), I enjoyed a good deal of Vin Santo. It’s this wonderful dessert wine usually served with biscotti. Kind of tastes like raisins. I bought some today at Beverages and More, one bottle for my brother, one bottle for me. BevMo is the only place I’ve seen it sold at a reasonable price. At Whole Foods they were asking $60. At Gene’s Fine Foods they were asking $30. Although I am sure those are of a higher quality, I am perfectly fine with my $10 bottle.

While J. and I were watching Molto Mario last night, they served a sibling of Vin Santo, which got us a-hankering. I think there are a lot of similar raisin-y wines in Italy with different names according to what region from which they hail.

Yay. I’m 24 today. Not feeling great about where I am in life, but that’s not what you all are here for, so on with the food.

I hung out with my brother tonight. We made pizza. I had gotten him a pizza stone and peel for Christmas, and tonight was their christening. We used Alton Brown’s dough recipe. When I’ve used his technique in the past, it has worked well. Tonight, however, it was kind of disastrous. I was bereft of stand mixer and food processor, so I kneaded by hand, and apparently, it wasn’t for long enough. There were many problems with dough ripping. I eventually said, “I’m using a rolling pin, to hell with AB.”

I have to say, although we made a right mess, the pizzas turned out really well. The tomato sauce used was a spicy sausage-mushroom sauce of my brother’s devising, along with some pepperoni, mozzerella cheese, fresh basil, olive oil, and salt. Yummy. I usually don’t put that many toppings on my pizza, but it was damn tasty.

After dinner, we played ping-pong (21-15, he won) and video games (Ratchet & Clank Going Commando and SSX 3), and watched some food programming (Good Eats and Molto Mario) while noshing on cookies (the gialetti from yesterday) and ice cream (Dreamery Coney Island Waffle Cone).

Awesome. Many thanks to my dear SIL for setting this up for me. (She’ll get a name when I think of something appropriately punny.) This was a gift for my 24th birthday, which is tomorrow.

I realize that the name of this blog refers to slow cooking methods, but I’m not going to be limited by that. Especially because the most recent thing I made was cookies (yesterday). Currently, I am keen on baking, since I have a curse I’m trying to break- I’ve inherited inability to bake from both sides of my family. Here is the recipe for the cookies I made. Four out of five people liked them. I think the batter for these is really tasty, and they’re really quite easy to make if you have a stand mixer. I’ve made them once with a mixer and once without, and both times they turned out well, although creaming by hand is a little tiring.