Coconut Nectarine White Wine Spritzers

Summer's not over yet! Sherrie & Renee are hosting a bubbly, sparkly, boozy, fresh, fruity virtual cocktail party, #drinkthesummer! Scroll to the bottom for a complete list of fun summery drinks by other awesome food bloggers! Get your summer drank on!

Wine Country or Bust: Sonoma

We went to wine country last weekend for Amanda's big dirty 30 birthday. Can I just move to Sonoma like, right now? 

It was so beautiful there, the people are super friendly, and the food and wine... yep. Loved it. A lot. 

The eight of us (Sonomaballin' Crew 2013...classy as always) rode bikes down little dusty backroads between vineyards, drank a ton of wine (maybe a little too much wine, but who's counting), tasted all kinds of cheese, ate a ton of good food, and went a little crazy in the swimming pool at our rental house. 

Highlights: riding bikes through the most beautiful country side ever, the wine and pizza at Benziger Family Winery, the scenery at Ravenswood, the artwork at Imagery, the picnic we had at Bartholomew Park Winery, the brunch at Girl and the Fig (seriously, get the fried green tomatoes, you won't regret it...and the chorizo, holy hell that chorizo...), Jim from Jacuzzi Winery (he asked if we have "YOLO" in Seattle), and the all around good timing friends I was there with. PS. A few photos here are from Dee, Evan, or Amanda, the rest are mine. 

Sexy Ladies Cooking Club

I love to read, and so does my friend and old college roommate Tasha. We both read a variety of books, but I always preferred best-seller type fiction and the kind of books they assign in college English classes, true crime novels, books by cooks, and, I won’t lie… I’ve read a little (ok, a lot) of Stephen King in my day. Tasha, on the other hand, can’t get enough young adult fiction (as in, Twilight), romance, and chick-lit. She once tried to win me over to books with titles like ‘Running in Heels’ and ‘French Kissing’ with a book that talked about food…mixed in with all the cheesy romance. It was called “Spooning, the Cooking Club Divas Turn up the Heat.” The book didn’t get me into chick-lit (sorry, Tash) but it did give me a great idea…cooking club! And thus, Sexy Ladies Cooking Club was born.

Throughout our last few years in college, about 10 of us ladies met up on Thursdays for huge, crazy dinner parties. The girls that hosted would make the main dish, and the rest of the girls would bring appetizers, wine, side dishes, and dessert. The food was always delicious and creative, and the wine was plentiful (hey, we were newly 21). The best part of cooking club, however, was spending time in the kitchen with best friends. The year after college, we tried to maintain weekly dinners, and then monthly dinners, and eventually girls moved away and our schedules all became so different that we were unable to find the time as a group to make cooking club happen. Occasionally, one of us will get a wild hair and send out an invite for an impromptu, scaled down cooking club dinner…which is exactly what happened last week.

Tasha and V are taking cooking classes to ‘master the basics,’ and invited friends over to put their lessons to a test. They prepared an amazing jambalaya recipe from the class—full of smoky ham, sweet shrimp, veggies, and creamy Cajun spiced rice. We devoured it with Lindsey’s spinach bacon salad (also from the cooking class), bread, chocolate chip cookies, and lots of wine.

Nowadays we have jobs, live-in boyfriends, and we’re spread out all across Seattle, but when we get together for cooking club, we still down the wine and laugh hysterically just like we did when we were crazy college kids. Only now, we go to bed earlier…and the food is better. That class must be paying off, because those ladies were chopping and dicing like pros. Move over Cat Cora, the Sexy Ladies are back!