Thursday Wine and Food Pairing

Two weeks in a row! I did miss posting my normal Wednesday Wine and Food Pairing yesterday because I really wanted to share all of my photos from Taste of the South End. It was a great event, and I wanted to strike while the iron was hot!

This week’s wine and food pairing is actually from last Friday. I worked from home which is one of my favorite things ever. Without having to waste the time of a commute, I got SO much done and was able to throw together an easy spinach lasagna.

I started out with about 4 cups of fresh baby spinach.

And a 14 ounce can of Trader Joe’s marinara sauce, which I doctored up with extra garlic, basil, oregano, and a teeny glug of olive oil.

The filling was a large container of part-skim ricotta, one whole egg, a handful of nutty, salty parmesan, and a cup of part-skim mozzarella.

I used the “no boil” lasagna noodles. Starting with a layer of sauce in the bottom of a glass baking dish, I layered sauce and spinach, noodles, cheese filling, sauce, etc. The recipe I was roughly following called for another cup of mozzarella sprinkled on top, but we really didn’t need it.

Cover tightly with foil and bake at 375 for about 40 minutes. For the last 4 minutes, I put the broiler on which resulted in bubbly brown deliciousness.

For the wine pairing, I broke into the latest wine that we bought at the Bin Ends fine wine flea market. We tasted a few Sicilian wines there and decided to add a few bottles to our rack.

On this particular evening, we opened a Cossentin Nero d’Avola. This Sicilian wine was a perfect match. Dark red and tasting of dark berries and a little bit of anise, this wine worked well with the richness of the cheese as well as the acidity of the tomato sauce. We have another bottle of this Nero d’Avola left as well as a bottle of Francesco Nicosia Nero d’Avola waiting for us at Bin Ends. I love trying new grapes! The Nicosia wine that we ordered has the perfect blend of fruit with a hint of black pepper which I LOVE in a wine, so I will definitely be giving that its own post once we go pick it up!

Are you ready for the weekend?! I am so happy its almost here and more than looking forward to getting my 21 mile run. . . and my longest pre-Boston Marathon run over and done with!

What are you doing this weekend? Does it involve wine? 😉