Tuesday, January 06, 2009

In Which I Prove Just How Pathetic I Am

I got this fabulous recipe for a beef dish, and my whole family loves it. So I froze the leftover Christmas roast beef and saved it for tonight.

The only problem was the 1/2 cup red wine.

We don't drink alcohol; we keep Jack Daniels in the house to make the Christmas cookies, and until recently I had been using that swill supermarket cooking wine for recipes.

Then at Wegmans I found Inglenook Alcohol-Removed Wine. It's about $6 a bottle but I figure it has to be better than the Holland House stuff. So I keep a bottle of Cabernet and one of Chardonnay around to use in recipes. If only they made sherry and marsala, I'd be all set.

But unlike the Holland House "wine," this stuff comes with a big stumbling block: a cork.

The only corkscrew I have is on my Swiss Army Knife. It's fairly useless as a corkscrew. It took me ten minutes to remove the cork from this bottle of Cabernet, and I wound up with three pieces (not including the little divot that got stuck in the Swiss Army Knife and wouldn't let the corkscrew close until I pulled out the little white toothpick and pried it out.

Help! I'm corkscrew-impaired!

I do, however, have this nifty little thing that plugs up the top of the wine bottle and allows me to pour or close the bottle. But I think I might need to invest in a Real Corkscrew.

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