My wife started back to work on Monday. In preparation, she and her mother worked on a bunch of meals we could freeze so dinner would be easy until we got the logistics sorted out. I work from home and we have a slow cooker. I could easily put pre-chopped ingredients into the cooker while I was in the kitchen getting my lunch. They prepped some beef stew; the beef got frozen in one bag, the vegetables in a second bag, the flour and seasoning in a third. They even wrote out the instructions for me and stapled all the bags together. Last night, we transferred a bag bundle from the freezer to the fridge. I just had to cut open the bags, pour in some liquid and start the cooker; we'd have a tasty dinner all of hard work for which had already been done.
The beef hadn't entirely thawed, so I had to work to separate the pieces and get them coated with the flour mixture. I then had to add some liquid after combining the beef and the flour/seasoning. The instructions called for chicken stock, which my wife helpfully left out on the counter, and Worcestershire sauce, which I knew was in the fridge.
It was the third liquid that caused my brain to shut down: red wine. My preference is for sweet white wines, so I know very little about reds. We don't usually drink wine at home; we mostly have it for cooking, and I'm never the one doing the cooking. I opened the refrigerator and grabbed the first bottle I saw. I read the printed text on the label, and it wasn't enough for me to figure out what kind of wine it was. I poured it into the measuring cup anyway. It clearly didn't look like a white wine, the label didn't say "Marsala" anywhere, so I figured it was safe.
At this point, my wife and I were already texting back and forth about the stew, so I could have asked her about the wine in the fridge. I also could have easily used my phone to search the web for the words on the bottle. Either would have been smart. No such luck!
The mystery wine didn't measure out to be quite enough, though, and that's when I remembered that we had individual-serving bottles of wine on top of the fridge. Ah, there were some tiny Merlot bottles. Merlot is a red; I know that much! Do I pour the mystery wine back into its bottle? The whole little bottle was more than what the recipe called for, but I found an open one in the fridge. I poured it into the measuring cup with the mystery wine and the combo was precisely the amount of red called for in the instructions. Score!
When my wife got home, she was confused to find two empty wine bottles on the counter. Turns out that mystery wine was sherry. Now that I was looking at the label from afar, I could read the giant, script "sherry" that I'd previously dismissed from up close as graphic designer whimsy. TIL Sherry is a fortified wine made from white grapes. [Headdesk]. This particular sherry was a "blend of amontillado", which is one of the darker formulations of sherry, but it's still not a red wine.
Already tired and hungry after a long day of meetings, my wife was beside herself. She was furious that I had possibly ruined our dinner by mixing two different wines when we had plenty of the correct wine. She was equally mad that in so doing I had finished off what little sherry we had left. She probably won't be able to go grocery shopping until Sunday, and sherry is good to have on hand for cooking.
TL;DR: Sherry is not a red wine, and can ruin your dinner if you try to use it as one in a recipe.
Submitted March 26, 2015 at 08:22AM by tfofurn http://ift.tt/1Ix4va9 tifu
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