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Cooking From The Heart

Healthy Eating & Living Guide

Category: Wine

Light Summer Meals Your Family Will Love

Cooking from the heartCooking, Healthy Eating, Wine

The outside temperature can be a deciding factor in the recipes you look for, the food you eat, and even the wine you drink. The warmer it is, the more you seek out light summer meals your family will love.

As the mercury rises, it’s time to get creative in the kitchen. Here are some standout dishes that are light, delicious, and affordable.

Rice Paper Rolls

You often find that many summer recipes are salads. Not everyone wants to eat a salad every day of the week, which means that rice paper rolls can be a refreshing change. You can add all manner of salad ingredients and sauces, not to mention delectable prawns. Prepare them fresh for lunch or dinner, and enjoy how easy they are to make for everyone in the family.

Corn Fritters

Corn fritters, with delicious cheese, like feta, can be a light and tasty meal option for busy families. You can pair them with a side salad and dressing or eat them on their own as a snack with dipping sauce. Corn fritters are also easy to prepare and affordable.

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Shrimp and Wine

Serving Up Shrimp – Which Wine Works Well?

Cooking from the heartHealthy Eating, Wine

As with any seafood, tasting that beautiful ‘sea’ flavour is essential. However, if you go and pair it with a glass of heavy, oaky wine you bought from an online wine retailer, or at a restaurant, you run the risk of merely feeling the food in your mouth. You will lose all connection with the subtle delicacies of the flesh and how the flavour dances on your palate.

Therefore, when it comes to pairing shrimp with wine, you want to treat it like a complex surgery. Every ingredient of your shrimp dish must work well with each undertone of the wine, which can often seem like a challenging and impossible task. Even though it is difficult, it’s certainly not impossible. We aim to offer some classic pairing combinations from your kitchen below.

Vinho Verde

Any Vinho Verde lover will tell you that you don’t need food to drink it because it’s fabulous on its own. While that’s undoubtedly true, this particular wine is a match made in heaven with most shrimp dishes. The best part is – because it’s available in red, white, or rose, you are bound to find one you like – from the first sip to the very last.

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Sauvignon Blanc

What to Serve with Sauvignon Blanc

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Finding wine, either in a restaurant, a bottle store, or online wine provider that you can pair with almost anything is a challenge. Even if you “know” your wines and consider yourself a connoisseur, there is going to be that one time where you made the wrong choice of wine to go with that fish, steak, or a cheeseboard.

Given that Sauvignon Blanc is an exceptionally versatile, far-reaching white wine that’s quite lean in flavour, it becomes most people’s “go to” beverage for a natural pairing. We’ve included a few of the many things you can eat with it below.

Cheese

If you’ve gathered the girls for a night out, a staple of that night out is undoubtedly wine and cheese. However, if you’re not usually one to dabble in cheeseboards, you may have trouble deciding which wine to pair with it. Even if you have help from a shop assistant, or descriptions on an online wine website, it’s not easy. Sauvignon Blanc is the best answer. Because of its crispness, it matches beautifully with all manner of cheese, making it a great option to serve to your guests. Goats cheese is also one of the best options, as are cheese balls of different varieties.

Green Vegetables

If summer has arrived and you’re at your local restaurant for a meal, or you’re whipping up something at home, you will find salads are a big hit on the menu. Bitter greens, fresh peas, and all manner of salad ingredients work beautifully with a glass of Sauvignon Blanc. What’s more, it may have you reaching for that second glass as well…

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The Great Decider

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My first experience with cider is one that will most likely be shared by many others. It involves being underage, overzealous and out of my depth. ‘Tis the reason I avoided it at all costs…until recently when a friend of mine was diagnosed with coeliac disease. Unable to imbibe his preferred tipple of beer (coeliacs are intolerant to gluten, a protein found in some components of beer such as barley malt and wheat starch), he turned to cider to keep his whistle wet. Any time he joins us for a bbq I case out bottle shops for less lackluster offerings than the one I’d had the misfortune of overindulging in all those years ago. And yes, I’d end up partaking in a glass or two as an act of comraderie for my friend who would otherwise be the only one drinking cider. And I have been enjoying it immensely.

It’s quite apparent that cider has undergone a revival of sorts over the last few years, with growing numbers of cider labels popping up in bottleshops and cideries opening in many regions of Australia. Particularly in the Yarra Valley, Adelaide Hills and south of Perth. While the varieties of cider apples grown in Australia is considerably less than in the UK and Europe, this hasn’t stopped cider being made from more widely available eating varieties such as Granny Smiths, Pink Ladies and Galas.

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