Ponte Family Estate Winery, Temecula, Calif.

About a month ago, Jeff and I flew out to California for a wedding. The wedding was in Laguna Beach, but we were lucky enough to have a little extra time to spend in Temecula with my aunt and uncle and cousin before driving out to the wedding.

Temecula is known for its vineyards (I'd actually gone to a few several years ago), and my aunt asked if we wanted to have dinner at one of the wineries while we were in town. It turned out that the best day for dinner with our schedules was Valentine's Day. As my aunt and I checked menus, we realized that a lot of the wineries were hosting formal Valentine's dinners with set menus, and that wasn't what we were looking for. So we changed our plan to a late lunch.

My aunt suggested Ponte Winery, and I loved the menu there, so she made a reservation. The day we went there, it was sunny and around 70 degrees, which was wonderful since all the seating is outside.

Visiting Cape Cod During The Off-Season, Part 2

After my mom and I tasted wines at Truro Vineyards, it was finally time for our picnic lunch on the beach. We got to Herring Cove and learned that the wind had other plans for us though.

We sat in the car, watched the ocean and the seagulls, and enjoyed the sunshine while we snacked on the goodies we'd purchased at Main Street Wine & Gourmet and Truro Vineyards. We had Wensleydale Cheese with Cranberries, Robinson Farm Hardwick Stone (a tangy, semisoft cheese made in Hardwick, Mass.), Moser Buure Weichkasli (a soft, buttery cheese), Fastachi mixed nuts, Iggy's cranberry pecan and olive rolls, and a couple of kinds of crackers. It was quite the spread. The Moser cheese was amazing on the olive rolls.

Visiting Cape Cod During The Off-Season, Part 1

I've long thought of Cape Cod as my home away from home. I've gone year after year for many, many years now. While I love spending a summer week on the beach, I most appreciate Cape Cod during the quieter, milder off-season. My family usually spends Columbus Day Weekend there, but, well, someone (no names) decided to get married last Columbus Day Weekend, so my whole family was otherwise occupied.

Instead, my mom and I managed to sneak in a getaway one weekend last November. (Jeff and I had just found out that our house closing was once again delayed, and I just needed to escape and not think about it.) We booked a room at The Whale Walk Inn & Spa in Eastham and hit the road on Friday after I got out of work.

White Chicken Chili Bar, Palomas, And Mazola Corn Oil

We had been trying for about a month to have a couple of friends over to see our new house. They had just bought a house and were spending their weekends doing renovations and we were running around with various house errands every weekend ourselves, so we finally realized a weekday, after-work get-together would be best. We went back and forth over whether to just pick up a pizza or some other takeout for dinner or to cook, and finally I decided I'd find an easy one-pot dish that I could prepare after work.

After thumbing through cookbooks and flipping through magazines, I finally decided to make the white chicken chili from The Cook's Illustrated Cookbook. The recipe requires chopping peppers and onions, browning chicken, throwing some ingredients in the food processor, simmering everything together in a Dutch oven, and shredding the chicken and reincorporating it with the rest of the chili. And the cooking time was short enough that I knew I could have dinner on the table by about 7:30.

Re-Creating The Olive Oil Coppetta At Otto

One of the last most memorable desserts I've had -- besides all six courses at Harvest and the affogato at Steel & Rye -- was the olive oil coppetta at Otto Enoteca Pizzeria in New York. The coppetta or "cup" offered a balance of creamy, savory olive oil gelato; fresh, bright tangerine sorbet; tangy-sweet candied kumquats; and vibrant blood oranges. Upon finishing the last bites of the dessert, I knew I wanted to re-create it at home, and I knew I wanted to do it when winter citrus was still abundant.