My homecoming was celebrated with a dinner featuring one of my favorite pasta dishes: a pasta al pesto. But it did not stop there. The basilico for the pesto sauce was grown on our terrace. Freshly harvested the leaves were processed with pine nuts and the best olive oil we could get hold of in Bangkok. The pictures below shows the different stages of the pesto-making process.
Basilico leaves
Healthy leaves of home grown Basilico
Pesto in the making
The fresh pesto sauce
I tell you this pasta was worth killing for. What ‘profumo’, goodness me, it filled our kitchen, the living room and transcended to the terrace where it filled my nostrils long before the dish arrived. We treasured every bite.
If you think that in the 1760s French cultural supremacy was so dominant that Italian cooking was considered totally inferior even by Italians. Local cooking had to have the coda, “”perfected in Paris” to be taken seriously. Today, every second top restaurant in Bangkok and indeed in all cosmopolitan world cities is Italian. That’s just amazing!
Linguine with pesto
We celebrated the reunion with a French Riesling from Alsace, a ‘2006 Les Princes Abbes, Domaines Schlumberger, Riesling’. The price was a bit on the high end for us. TBH 1,600, about 32 Euro (or US $ 48), from our local super market is quite some money. That it sells for about US $ 20 in California somehow consoled me. We thought that life is just too short to waste it with drinking cheap wine and the occasion warranted something special, and special this Alsatian Riesling was.
This wine is just a wonderful specimen of Alsatian Riesling and it went very well with the pesto pasta. The fresh and fruity wine with aromas of citrus, lime and lemon and some floral notes, opened our taste buds wide. The wine has character and shows its typical Alsatian traits with some refined and not overpowering petrol notes. Alcohol is 12%, and just right. The finish is pleasantly vibrant but not overly long.
The Man from Mosel River 