Tonight, I was on my own for dinner. I still don't have a handle on Houston restaurants that are cheap, close, and do takeout, so on nights like this I head to the grocery store with sybaritic abandon. I ended up with about five pounds of grapefruit (sale!), blackberries, gnocchi, sauce, potato chips, wine, and chocolate.
For dinner, I cooked the gnocchi and topped it with Cento's arrabiata sauce, then had a glass of wine, some blackberries and chocolate, and some potato chips. The gnocchi was ok. I bought a different brand than I usually do, and it was a little gluey. Good pasta sauce makes anything better (although I've been known to eat good pasta sauce as a meal in itself); the Cento is hard to find, but really good and spicy. I can taste each ingredient, but it's still integrated into a cohesive sauce rather than tasting like a bunch of chopped veggies. The wine was "Notorious" Nero d'Avola. I suppose the name is a takeoff on the Mafia's strong presence in Sicily, where Nero comes from. I LOVE the grape. This particular wine is dark and tannic, with really full berry and pepper flavors, and is a good, but not amazing, example of what I like in Nero d'Avola.
I also had some pre-dinner potato chips, in which I was pretty disappointed. I usually completely avoid the snack food aisle, but I wanted something to munch on tonight. I really like Boulder Canyon Potato Chip Co's garlic parm chips, so I was intrigued by their crinkle-cut sour cream and onion chips, which I'd never seen before. Ick. I like their other chip varieties for their minimal ingredients and lack of weird fake seasonings, but apparently sour cream flavor is hard to execute without them. They taste papery and flat; I'm not sure I could distinguish them from something Frito Lay made in a blind taste test. Dessert was much better- very ripe blackberries and some chocolate.
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