Saturday, February 16, 2008

Fogerty Winery

This year's Nu, Nu, & Nu LLP associates' retreat was a Kitchen Challenge at the Thomas Fogarty Winery (no relation to Tom Fogerty of CCR fame). The drive up to the Santa Cruz mountains was rather treacherous. Very very foggy. I wanted to stop and take some photos of the fog, but was too scared to. It lifted when I finally got to the winery, though.

I got to the front door, drove down the drive, and immediately felt very welcomed. I drove past some vines and got to some sort of building. Right about that time, the fog started to roll back in. I parked Dolly.* (eBay was also there!) The others were there already (see Green Thumbs McGillicutty in the middle front in the black sweater and jeans, and Cl. Panic in the back in the blue and grey baseball shirt). The place was decorated with winery decorations, including barrels in the kitchen, old-style grape crushing equipment, and wine and cheese stained glass windows in the bathroom (which included an old-style toilet).

The main ingredient was flank steak and we were given all sorts of other ingredients to work with. I was totally surprised to see all sorts of Asian ingredients, including the world-famous Sriracha. One thing that was missing was Maggi Sauce. Very disappointing. We could have really shined with that one. Anywhoo, we were then split into teams and cooked. Sorry, I don't have photos of that, but I do have a video of Cl. Panic cooking (he was on my team):


In the end, our team won! By that time, the fog had rolled back in. Here's what had happened in only 1 hour:

(before fog)


(after fog)


*Notice the tafoni rock under the sign! That's something we learned about on a previous hike.

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