I was going through our wine selection trying to find a wine that I could find a great pairing to go with. So I went through our Tablas Creek Wines. The great thing about Tablas is that they set you up for a great wine pairing.  They have a vintage chart on their site, so you can see which wines are ready to drink. Tablas Creek does mostly Rhone varieties in the French style, so most of their wines are meant to age. I found a 2012 Patelin de Tablas in the rack in the dining room that was ready to drink and found a recipe and pairing ideas on the Tablas site (yep, they usually have one or 2 recipes to pair with each of their wines, as well as some additional suggestions…it’s really foodie heaven).

There was a fish with fennel recipe and suggestions for citrus avocado salad, fish with tropical salsa and Mussels or clams cooked in butter and wine. We determined we would do the citrus avocado salad, fish with tropical salsa and the clams. We thought we would go to whole foods for a good citrus selection, but since I wanted clams and I wanted them to be easy, we stopped first at Trader Joes.

Foodies might be appalled, but while I wanted clams, I didn’t want the worry of cleaning them, so we picked up a box of TJ’s steamer clams, which are frozen and have an herb butter sauce already. We picked up some frozen Alaskan Cod, a mango, limes, a red bell pepper, a red onion, Meyer lemons, blood oranges, a Minneola, arugula and mint. I had an avocado at home from the farmers market. This was probably a Zutano or a Pinkerton avocado and it was a little different from the well-known Haas. It was smooth skinned and green with a pear like shape with a smooth light flesh.

Cooking

So now it was time to cook. We started by making the salsa, dicing ½ of the red pepper, the mango and ½ of the onion then squeezing the juice of 1 lime over it and seasoning with salt and pepper. Mix this up early if you want and toss it in the fridge to let all those flavors meld.