Ravioli in Houston

For dinner, I had whole wheat cheese and asparagus ravioli with arrabiata sauce and a glass of malbec.

The ravioli was Safeway's/Randall's house brand, with an intriguing, but not quite fearsome, three grams of fiber per serving. As might be expected by the 'asparagus and cheese' description, the filling was very, very strange. Not bad, just not the ideal thing to smush up and put in one's ravioli. It tasted kind of lemon-ey, but not in a good way. Also, the cheese part of the filling was also overly sweet, and the raviolis stuck together annoyingly. The sauce was pretty decent. I am very picky about jarred sauces, and Mezzetta's Napa Valley line is in the middle. I adore arrabiata that makes me cry, and this is definitely not it. It's thicker than most sauces, but is also oddly chunky, and the veggies in the sauce are very crunchy, giving it a pasta-with-veggies feel rather than a pasta-with-sauce feel. That said, the flavor isn't too bad.

The best part of the meal was the wine. Gascon malbec from wonderful Mendoza, Argentina. My loving husband has been on a malbec kick of late, and it's a very good thing. I'd forgotten all about malbecs, having gotten quite distracted with the Iberian Peninsula. Anything from Spain or Portugal is a delicious, amazing value, but the same can be said for most wines from South America. This one is garnet-colored, with smooth berry flavors and nice tannins, and under $10.

For purposes of edification (and because more photos of ravioli would be boring), the graphic is the official flag of Mendoza province.