When I am low on ingredients to make a meal that will last me days, I love to get creative with what I have in the fridge. I had mini-tortillas, cooked shrimp, roasted red bell peppers, spinach and shallots. I hit the quick meal jackpot, since these ingredients made for one delicious healthy gourmet burrito!

Saute’ the shallots in a either a tablespoon of grapeseed or olive oil. Add the shrimp, peppers and then dust Old Bay seasoning as it sautes. I had some Goats Do Roam Rose’ in the fridge, so why not? Instead of water, I poured about 1-2 tablespoons in the saute’ pan and then added the spinach to cook down. Let the spinach cook down though be sure it is still a bright green color. 

Once done, scoop up some onto a tortilla, roll and enjoy! This type of burrito can be modified so many ways depending on what you have in your own fridge or what you are in the mood for. By the way, this Rose’ was better to cook with than sip, just sayin’... 

I mentioned that different people will have different sensitivity to tastes based on the number of taste buds that they have. In order to help us make sense of this, we will assign people to one of four groups but because we are dealing with humans, it won’t be a perfect logical ordering. The four groups are sensitive, hypersensitive, tolerant and sweet.

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My last post was concerning the mouth and how it is put together. The next thing we want to look at is what does that particular configuration does. The taste buds themselves send information about what they are interacting with to the brain which then interprets the signal. Here’s the funky part, there are really only five different tastes that humans can perceive.

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In order to understand the interaction between food and wine, we need to begin at the beginning. For the purposes of this discussion, the beginning is your mouth. Aside from being a big gaping hole in our head through which we shovel energy into the system via food and liquids and an exit point for most of the thoughts and facts that our friends told us to keep secret but we just can’t help ourselves from uttering, it is also a place filled with tactile sensations. The large muscle in the middle of the hole, otherwise known as the tongue, is covered with nerve endings commonly known as taste buds. These taste buds can also be found on the inside of our mouths to a lesser degree.

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Up until this point, I’ve been happily chatting away about food and my journey in learning to cook or wines I’ve found and what I think about them. Personally, I think there’s a lot of really good information in those posts, especially if one takes the time to read all the stuff, not just the recipes or reviews. Today though, we’re going to make a bit of a change and begin talking about food and wine together.

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