Dining in Alsace

Sometimes an opportunity comes along, that you just cannot pass up. In this case it was an opportunity to stay in Alsace, in a small town called Andlau. Let’s just say when I hear Alsace, I think Alsace wine…. If you have read this blog, you might realize, we like wine. We were able to make use of a friend’s apartment, so this sounds like a wonderful trip. Our trio and our friend Cate met in Strasbourg, rented a car and off we drove to our new home for the week. Andlau is a lovely little town with a dozen wineries. The apartment was roomy and airy, with a lovely view of the Ill river, and the Andlau Abbey.

I swear everytime I looked out this window, at the Abbey, it looked fake, like a beautiful painting. This is what we have to look at all week…. We are so lucky.  Although this was a vacation, when our trio is together, and we have a kitchen…. let’s have a MondayNightDining experience.  I will post some pics from a few of our meals, but on the Wednesday, when the weather was threatening, we explored the town and paid a visit to Jean Wach winery. The coolest thing for me, was to try the same wines, from the same place, grown on 2 different type of soil and from the same soil, but different ages of vines.  We tasted wines and brought some lovely selections back for dinner.

Tonight’s dinner started with Shawn’s now signature salad, with lettuces that we bought from the local farm stand.  Funny story… when we bought a bunch of veggies, from the farm stand, the farmer told me the price, I honestly thought that I did not understand his French, because it could not be three Euros for all of this….  He looked at me and pointed in my wallet, to just give him a five. I did understand his French, but not how inexpensive it was.  Now back to that salad and the caprese salad.

Fresh is the key here… We just love taking local produce and letting it shine in a dish. We paired this with a Jean Wach Sylvaner. This is wine that I was not familiar with. It is a very light wine, that you would greet guests with.

While looking in the cupboards, we found a nice supply of Marsala wine. Since this day was not the best for Barbecuing, we decided on a veal Marsala. With all of the fresh produce from the market, we accompanied this with a vegetable tian and paired that with a lovely Grand Cru Riesling, from Wach wineries, that we sampled earlier.

Fresh local produce, wine from just down the road and some found items in the cupboard…. This is just a fun way to cook, and so tasty.

We had a little impromptu dessert of some sweets that we had bought along the way and sampled some of the local eau de vie, flavoured with our new favorite fruit Mirabelle. Mirabelle is a blush coloured plum only grown in France and one region of Quebec. I found the eau de vie quite strong, but the flavour was really quite nice. We still have some, if you want to pop over to sample it. For a rainy day in Andlau, we had the most lovely time… and that fake looking view. WOW

So to close, I just wanted to add a very few images, from our trip, to give a bit of the flavour of the places we visited. It’s a rather cool area in France. French language mostly, with lots of German architecture and names. It is a rather unique experience.