I hate Mondays. It doesn’t matter how much we party and we don’t sleep or if we rest for the whole weekend. Every MON morning is tough to wake up at 7:30am. The rest of the day I usually act like a zombie. Yesterday was no difference. Perhaps with more work than usual.
So going home after 7:30pm was a relief. Just to feel better I decided to eat something light and easy to cook. So here it is: green salad with shrimp, goat cheese and olives. It is a very light dish and you don’t spend more than 10-15 mins cooking it. Wash the shrimps and keep only the tales. Mix black balsamic vinegar with honey and put the shrimps there for 1-2 mins. Put the shrimps on some sticks and BBQ them on any device you may have at home. Make sure to wash from time to time the shrimps with some of that sauce. Cook til they get a crust. The rest is simple: green salad, olives: I had some olives left from our last trip to Greece from 2009, but try to use the red ones you can find in the store as they have more flavors, some green or red onion, freshly crushed pepper, goat cheese(it can also be any other salty cheese you have) and salt if necessary. Put the cooked shrimps on top of it, add olive oil and that’s it. You got yourself a very fresh and tasty salad. If you have followed the proper steps you should end up with something like this:
The wine that I had was a nice bottle of Riesling from Wachau, a region close to Wien, in Austria: Weingut KNOLL – Loibner Riesling Smaragd 2008. Knoll is one the best producers of Riesling and Gruner Veltliner in the Wachau region. Austria is famous for its white wines made of Riesling and Gruner Veltliner grapes. This was a dry Riesling.
The “Vinea Wachau Nobilis Districtus” has three categories, all for dry wines: Steinfeder (‘Stone feather’) maximum 11.5% alcohol, mostly for local quaffing; Federspiel (named after a falconry device) – 11.5% to 12.5% alcohol, roughly equivalent to Kabinett; Smaragd (named after an ’emerald’ lizard that lives in the vineyards) – minimum 12.5% alcohol, with a maximum 9g/litre residual sugar, some of the best dry whites in Austria. My bottle, good homework before buying is mandatory, was a Smaragd. Some members of the wine community think that Riesling is not only the best white wine, but also the best wine, period. There is even an International Riesling Foundation, with worldwide membership.
The wine has a strong yellow color and from the get go you can see that the wine has a serious concentration as it slowly comes down from the walls after spinning the glass. The nose is not a bomb but shows discreet mineral notes, honey, herbs and a hint of spice. In the mouth the whine is nicely balanced with high acidity which I like, mineral, tropical fruits, some type of oil character, citrus and apples. The aftertaste was nice some 10-15 s. A wine that went very well with the salad and the honey-balsamic vinegar mix from the shrimps.
If only the rest of the week would go as smooth as my last night meal. We can at least hope, can’t we ?