I mentioned on Friday that I was thinking about pre-race meals and how to give myself the fuel I needed for the Emerald Point Triathlon that was coming up on Sunday.
Well, the good news is that I followed through on the Friday night meal. As I was thinking, I went with a meal of hand-made fettucine, a great 15 minutes fresh tomato sauce, and an arugula salad with feta and a poached pear viniagrette.
Sounds fresh, tasty, and full of the carbs I need, right? Well that brings me to the bad news. I had Nuevo Laredo for lunch on Friday AND dinner on Saturday. Chips, salsa, queso fundido, beans, rice, chicken mole, and a cheese enchilada. Everything an athlete needs, right?
Oh, and I had three Sierra Nevada’s at the Georgia Tech game and two Margaritas with dinner. So, not exactly what I had been planning. I did better in the race than I could have expected, so it makes me wonder, what if I actually layed off the booze and Mexican food for a few days before a race? How much better would I do? These questions may never be answered.
Results from the race are here. I won’t bring it up again, but I am very happy with my results, and am excited to see that all the hard work in the gym and out on the trail has paid off.
Back to Friday dinner. I have some pics of the salad and pasta prep, though no pictures of the finished product. I got stressed out because I didn’t flour the cut pasta properly and while it was sitting out it stuck to itself and we had to do an emergency seperation procedure to salvage what pasta hadn’t turned into one massive clump of dough. I will be sure to chronicle the pasta making in more detail some time in the future. Maybe next time I will try ravioli! Oh man, and how about using some extra ravioli for fried ravioli. Sold.
Trying out some King Arthur Flour, which I heard about from Jeff Varasano’s site. It was more expensive, and I am not sure I could taste any difference. Maybe for bread/pizza dough it is easier to distinguish better results. I don’t have a pic of the initial dough prep, but I (gasp!) did it all in a food processor. Egg, flour, salt, and a little bit of water, processed with the dough hook until a ball formed.
Then I kneaded it by hand for 7-8 minutes and wrapped it up and let it sit for 45 minutes.
While the dough was hanging out I poached the pears in some white wine. They probably cooked for up to 10 minutes on medium-low.
As the pears cooked, I put the rest of the ingredients in the food processor – dijon, rice vinegar, garlic, etc. After that I added the pears and processed it until the mixture was pureed. Lastly, I turned it on and poured the olive oil in slowly until the resulting dressing was creamy and smooth.
Then we rolled out the dough. The mixture was sticky (maybe I used too much water) so I had to use a lot of flour to keep it from sticking. After all the sheets were rolled out we ran it through the pasta roller again with the cutting attachment hooked on. The resulting pasta looked good, but as mentioned, we should have dusted it with some flour so it wouldn’t stick together as we piled the cut pasta on a tray.
Regardless, we obviously had fun.
I didn’t take a single picture of the sauce, but that was quite good too. Pim’s method of cooking the pulp with the juice, then removing the pulp with a slotted spoon and reducing the resulting juice was simple yet very effective. As she discusses, using fresh tomatoes can often result in a soggy sauce due to the water content of the tomato which is released as it cooks, but her methodology churned out a sauce with perfect consistency in less than 15 minutes.
Paired this dinner with the 2005 Delas Frères Côtes du Rhône Saint-Esprit. As you may know, 2005 in France (especially Bordeaux) blew everyone away, and even at $11 this wine isn’t any different. For the price, this wine offered exceptional quality and had some really interesting characteristics. I actually opened it on Thursday night and then decanted on Friday. It opened up considerably overnight and was more enjoyable on Friday. It had a fragrant, flowery bouquet and delicous fruit that finishes somewhat long with a minerality and hot/peppery taste. If you want to taste complex wine, France will never let you down.
I have a bunch more wine shipping to me now that the fall shipping season is here (shipping in the summer can result in cooked wine). If you are interested in finding some unique and interesting wines from all over the world, I recommend checking out Garagiste. Hopefully I will be doing more wine reviews as they come in; I have been slack in that department.