Pizza is haunting me.

So this girl at work today decides that she needs to have pizza for lunch, so she heads off to Famous Pizza. Great little New York style slice joint at Broadway and Bayaud in Denver that I used to eat at when I was in high school. My brain got hungry so I decide I should eat lunch.

Then, I walk down the hall to go warm up my lunch and the training that is taking place in the building ordered pizza for their group from Cosmo's. Also on Broadway, but in Boulder across campus from CU-Boulder, they now have a location on Grant and 6th next to Yogurtland. 

So there I am with these bastards bringing up pizza and making me smell pizza all around. And soon enough I was dieing to have a pizza. Uggh! 

Then I mentioned it to the husband, and so then he had it in his head that we were going to have pizza for dinner. But he didn't want the same pizza company that I wanted. So my mind started going through all the ways that we could compromise on pizza and I came up with this little baby: A few weeks ago I bought some flat bread wrap things from Costco because they looked like a healthy alternative to sliced bread. One of the things advertised on the packaging for this product is that it makes amazing pizza on THE GRILL! 

Then I started going through a checklist in my head of what we would need to make some

 grilled pizzas. I started finding things in my fridge memory. We had mozzarella, pepperoni, bell peppers... all the starting of a great pizza. So here you have the final product, bell pepper and pepperoni pizza with fresh tomatoes and basil.

Are you hungry now? Doesn't this just look delicious. The grill makes the flat bread nice and crispy on the edges and leaves little grill marks. And after prep time of about 10 minutes chopping everything up and grilling the peppers (must be done beforehand or they will be raw), it took 4 minutes for these to cook up on the grill. And yes, I own a pizza paddle.

Roero - Matteo Correggia

Alright. Here we go with post one of my new theme. I got carried away, so it took me longer to get this up than I thought it would.

One of my all time favorite restaurants in Boulder is Laudisio. This restaurant is located at the south end of 29th St mall. It's a higher end Italian restaurant, but the prices are still accessible for most people, they even have a specific wine list of bottles under $35. It's a particularly special place for my husband and I. It is where we had our first date on April 9, 2008. It was an amazing first date and I don't even want to know how much he spent on that meal but I think we had more than one bottle of wine and a lot of food.

We try to go every year to commemorate our anniversary of that first date but missed it this year because I gave up wine for lent (terrible idea, but I made it all 40 days). We finally made it in July and had an amazing bottle of wine. Here are the details about it:

This is the 2008 Matteo Correggia Roero. The grapes for this wine are grown in the western part of northern Italy right up near France. Check out this map:

Wines from this region are VERY affected by the terroir of the area and most of them are listed as DOCG wines. You can see this on the label where it says its denomination, and the bottle also had a label at the top to tell us this as well. I really enjoyed this wine it was great with our pasta dishes and heavier food that we ordered that night. It was very rich, fleshy wine with a great balance of woodsy oak, smoke, vanilla, and not too much tannin.

Name: Roero
Vineyard/Winery: Matteo Correggia
Grape: Nebbiolo
Vintage: 2008
Dominant notes: cherry, woody oak, chocolate
Would drink it again: Yes
Cost: $42 (at restaurant)

Another attempt at the blog

Hello my friends and possibly strangers,

Quite some time ago I opened this blog in hopes that I would be able to showcase my cooking and awesome restaurants that I have been to. This plan quickly failed when we moved into the "kitchen from tiny town". Our previous apartment had the smallest kitchen and my husband and I couldn't even be in there at the same time. Now that we are in our new digs, I'd like to give this a try again. This time, I'm taking on a different twist. I'm going to be posting about food, wine (and other spirits), and my adventures around Colorado and the world.

I'm so blessed to live in one of the greatest culinary zones in the US. I'm stuffed right in the middle of suburban hell between delicious Denver and divine Boulder. I say suburban hell because I had never lived in the suburbs until after college (its the only place we could afford) and I never realized how invaluable living in the city is when it comes to being able to decide on where you want to eat. The suburbs are filled with the dusty menus of chain restaurants. You can find some variation of the same thing on each restaurant's menu. This being said, my husband and I venture into Denver and Boulder as often as we can to escape the monotony of dining in the suburbs. While there are a few good places to eat around here (Proto's Pizza, Original Pizza, and Zen Bistro) it's imperative that we go into "town" to eat at least once a week. I'm hoping to head out to a good place tonight, as soon as the hubby stops working. Thank goodness for that highway, it doesn't take long to get to either place.

Eating around town will be the majority of the posts on this blog. I'm most looking forward to providing a posting about every wine, microbrew, or special cocktail that I consume. For wines, I'll be posting an image of the label, the restaurant, bar, or liquor store it was purchased at, and my opinion of the wine. (Check out the post just newer to this one for our first real stamp on the blog.)

The other parts of this blog will be about my travel around the world, including planning for these trips. You will see a lot of stuff in the next 60 days of my planning for my trip to Walt Disney World/Universal Studios that we will be taking this fall. I'm overly excited about this trip. I mean OVERLY excited. I've been up until 2 in the morning for several nights over the last two weeks researching endlessly to decide on where we will sleep, what we will eat, and what we will do each day. I used to work there in 2005, so I'm really looking forward to being able to see it for a whole week from the eyes of a tourist.

I think this launch of the blog is going to actually be successful with it's new name and new focus. I hope that you enjoy reading.... until later - Heather