Tonight, Ben and I had a fantastic date night. A year ago my name was selected in a drawing for a free night's stay at the Hotel Monaco, Downtown Seattle. That is the same hotel we stayed at on our wedding night and our first anniversary. How very cool! Anyway, we had to use the gift certificate by the end of this month. It's January 28th. Yes, it was time to use it or lose it. Thankfully Ben's brother, Spencer, was willing and available to stay with Katie while we took a night off.
After getting Katie and Spencer settled, I took the bus into Seattle to meet Ben. We checked into the hotel and went out in search of food. We ended up being able to get a table quite quickly at the Purple Cafe and Wine Bar. What a great meal! Here's what we ate:
Appetizers
I had the pork and chicken sausage with cranberry-apricot chutney and pecorino sardo gran cru cheese. Ben had lamb chili with polenta croutons and rogue smokey blue cheese. The cheeses were served with a fig jam which was delicious.
Drinks
We each enjoyed a flight of wine--four wines to sample. I had the red wine flight from Italy with these wines:
- cabanon ‘augurio’ . provincia di pavia . 09
- fattoria pogni . chianti . 08
- il trullo . primitivo del salento . 08
- vinosia aglianico . irpinia aglianico . 08
Ben had the red wine flight from Washington with these wines:
- substance merlot . washington . 08
- l’ecole syrah . columbia valley . 07
- gamache ‘boulder red’ . columbia valley . 07
- brand cabernet sauvignon . columbia valley . 08
The Substance merlot in Ben's flight was fantastic. We each had a glass of that with our entree. It was divine.
Entree
We shared the artisan cured meat pizza with soppresata, coppa, spanish chorizo, mozzarella, fresh oregano and tomato sauce. The flavor of the meats took us back to our vacation in Italy. On that trip, we purchased a variety of cured meats in Greve and ate them with cheese, bread, and wine for a meal at our bed and breakfast. Who would have thought this meal would take us back to that wonderful vacation. Here's a photo of that picnic meal for fun:)
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Dessert
The desserts were perfectly sized--small:) I had the ruby port chocolate torte with cocoa nib whipped cream and port fudge sauce. Ben chose the bittersweet espresso truffles. He said the truffles were good, but mine was definitely the better of the two desserts. Yum!!!
After dinner we saw Black Swan. I'm so glad we saw it in the theater. There were parts of the movie that just needed to be presented in a bigger scale than our TV would have. While it was definitely a disturbing movie, it was beautifully acted and had amazing cinematography.
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