Insignia -- for a significant fee

Behold. A glass of the 2002 Joseph Phelps Insignia -- Wine Spectator's top wine of 2005. I drank the highly touted wine as part of a $20 five-wine flight at the winery back in December. Twenty dollars is a high tasting fee, but it's not a bad deal at all when you consider that a bottle of the almost-full Bordeaux blend (cabernet sauvignon, merlot, malbec, and petit verdot, but no cabernet franc) goes for a whopping $150 retail. Was the Insignia an excellent, boisterous wine? Yes. Was it worth $150 a bottle? No. The cost-to-quality ratio was way out of whack. (Though it was a steal at $4 for the glass.) Is any wine worth $150 a bottle? $75? $50? 

This dish reminds me of my childhood

Last night, Amy took me to the always tasty Firefly for dinner. After splitting a raw tuna appetizer spiked with jalapenos and paired with crunchy, matchsticked jicama, we dived into some hearty winter fare on what was, after all, a very cold night. Amy opted for the lamb stew. I went for the mushroom cassoulet. (We drank a delightful bottle of 2002 Chambolle-Musigny with our food, but that's another story for another day.)

The last time I'd eaten cassoulet was last winter in Quebec City, when my father and I stopped for lunch at the tiny Café Le Saint Malo inside the old town's walls. That sausage cassoulet went down like creamy insulation, which was ideal given that the temperature was nearly 35 degrees below zero. Firefly's cassoulet was significantly lighter and far heavier on breadcrumbs, though replete with the requisite white beans.

The cassoulet got me and Amy thinking about casseroles, and I told Amy that one of my favorite dishes as a very little kid was my grandmother's tuna casserole. The meal -- which screams '50s housewife to some -- was extremely simple: canned tuna, cream of mushroom soup, elbow macaroni, frozen peas and carrots, a sprinkle of Parmesan cheese, and perhaps a little milk for creaminess -- all mixed up and baked in a casserole dish. What I liked best about the finished product was how the elbows browned and hardened, allowing the pasta to do for the tuna mixture what the jicama did for the raw tuna at Firefly -- provide a textural contrast. My grandmother died when I was 10, and I haven't had a very basic casserole since.

I decided to change that tonight by recreating almost exactly my grandmother's casserole -- in part to remind me of what she used to make, and in part as a test run for future casseroles. While I boiled three-quarters of a box of Barilla elbow macaroni, I thawed a half-pound of frozen peas and carrots. Into my trusty metal mixing bowl, I poured a can of Campbell's lowfat cream of mushroom soup and a little under a pound of canned chicken. (Amy had picked up some at Target this week, and it substitutes nicely for canned tuna.) In went the thawed vegetables and the just-undercooked pasta (so as to allow the pasta to suck up some of the soup's flavor) and a bit of grated Parmesan cheese. I mixed the ingredients and poured the resulting goop into a Pyrex baking dish. Over the top, I sprinkled some fresh bread crumbs and a little more Parmesan. The whole thing went uncovered into a 400-degree oven for almost 25 minutes; really, I just wanted to ensure that the top got nice and crusty, how I like it.

And I ate the casserole Paula Deen-style -- right out of the oven. Just like Grandma used to make.