Wine and Snacks

This past Sunday was full of fun and food. We started off the day with a 2.5 mile run on the beach in the strong, beautiful autumn sun, and followed that with multigrain pancakes topped with mascarpone cheese and maple syrup. Our afternoon activity was one of my favorite new ways to spend a Sunday afternoon, tasting wine at the Bin Ends fine wine flea market. We ended up ordering a few bottles, and I will be writing about those once they arrive in. We tasted a good deal of wine, maybe a dozen or so reds and four or five whites. I was tasting for three; I told our friends, who are getting married in the Berkshires next summer, that we would be on the lookout for good deals for their reception. After all of that wine tasting, we were a bit hungry, so we headed into Quincy center to Alba, a spacious Italian trattoria with an extensive wine list and really great appetizers!

I started with a glass of bubbly. Sometimes the tiny sips of wine at tastings just makes me want a good glass.

We ended up sharing oysters with mignonette and cocktail sauce, antipasto with roasted veggies, mozzarella cheese, gorgonzola cheese, and Italian meats drizzled in olive oil, and the fried calamari which came topped with jalapenos and pepper strips and an aioli for dipping.

I don’t often eat fried calamari, but this was SO good, lightly breaded and crispy with the perfect accompaniment of the spicy peppers and creamy aioli. I love a good mayonnaise-based sauce. I just can’t help it! The oysters were plump and briny and the mignonette was something I would definitely like to learn to make myself. I could seriously live on oysters and champagne alone 🙂 The antipasto was also delish, everything fresh and flavorful, especially the crumbly stinky blue cheese. Alba is a little out of the way if you live in Boston but still conveniently located on the Red Line via the Quincy Center T stop. I will definitely be returning; there are nights we just don’t feel like going into the city but would like a really nice meal in beautiful atmosphere. Believe it or not, hubs and I dropped our friends off and went immediately out to eat AGAIN! More on that later. Today was long, dark, and cold, but at the end I received my wine club shipment from Gundlach Bundschu, a surprising and wonderful mix of three 2007 Pinot Noirs and a 2003 Tempranillo. Thanks GunBun!