These recipes were the two most requested at our last wine club event … Porcini dust popcorn … what exactly is porcini dust? It’s magical … it’s wonderful to use to add flavor to anything. I add it to butter, potatoes, gravy and now popcorn. Legend has it that for years people were throwing out the dust at the bottom of the dried porcini mushroom bags … then someone decided to use it and WHAMO! The industry was hooked. You can find it online, and sometimes you can find a ‘version’ of it in the spice section called umami seasoning. Making it yourself in a food processor with dried porcini can be a very loud and long process … I usually don’t like to do a namedrop of a brand unless it’s Roche products, but I have tried other garlic salts for this popcorn, and they just don’t work. I don’t know what Lawry’s does but it’s magical. This popcorn is wonderful with white and red wines, and with these storms it has been a favorite snack in my house. You can use butter on the popcorn, but I really like our estate olive oil on mine … the spicy flavors are really highlighted with the warm popcorn. If you are too scared to use a pot to pop the popcorn, an air-popper is just as fine and a bit quicker. My mother used both … when the electricity was out, she’d always use the stovetop with the corn oil. She believed, and I do as well, that you have better tasting popcorn when it was popped in corn oil versus other oils. Tomato and camembert puff pastry … the easiest and swankiest recipe you can make … and all you need it to be able to slice, chop and pinch things before baking. We paired this with the Tipperary pinot at the event. Pinots tend to, in my opinion, have a little bit of a dusty flavor, just like your average tomato … I also wanted to highlight the brightness that the wine had … this is the main reason why I used the Roche balsamic vinegar. It’s a very fruit-forward vinegar, but I needed to cancel its acidity so it wouldn’t over-power the wine … that’s why I used puff pastry and the camembert. The butter in the puff pastry and the fat in the cheese would balance the acidity of the vinegar so it wouldn’t overpower the pinot. Then to give a bit of earthy-smokiness I chopped up some fresh rosemary leaves to add to the vinegar. I like to call this type of recipe a ‘pantry’ recipe. Where I always have a package of puff pastry in my freezer, rosemary in my garden, and Roche balsamic vinegar in my pantry. Which means I only need to shop for tomatoes and cheese. I like to use a pizza cutter to cut the puff pastry just for ease and quickness. Pro-tip: before you put the appetizers in the oven … make sure you pinch flat the corners of the pastry, so it doesn’t puff up too much and scoot the tomato and cheese off.