Wedding Tasting Weekend

On Saturday, Z and I headed to Mountain View Grand Resort for our wedding tasting. I was almost just as excited for this day as I am for our wedding day.

Since we did a private tasting (read: all vegetarian), we could only try two entrees as well as several different kinds of cakes. The entrees we tried were the Baked Mushroom Strudel with Balsamic Reduction and Goat Cheese, as well as the Stuffed Eggplant Towers with Ricotta, Parmesan, and Spinach Filling with a Vodka Cream Sauce.

The cakes we sampled were a chocolate cake with orange buttercream; carrot cake with cream cheese icing; and two vanilla cakes, one with vanilla buttercream and one with a cream and fruit filling.

Since a lot of our wedding guests read this blog, I can't disclose which dishes we liked best, but I can tell you the tasting has helped us come to several decisions about our menu!

The best part of the tasting: it was held in Mountain View's stunning wine cellar.

We stayed at Mountain View that evening, but we did leave the premises for a few beers before dinner at Italian Oasis Restaurant & Brewery in Littleton (about 10 minutes away from the resort). Italian Oasis brews their own beer, and each brew we tried was pretty tasty. My favorite was the Cleveland Brown, paired with the casual bar's complimentary salty popcorn.

On Sunday, we checked out of the hotel, had breakfast, and made our way to The Basin for some later winter hiking. It ended up being a gorgeous day to hike, despite parts of the trail being too icy to walk on.

As you can see from the photo above, we washed our hike down with a "Sunday Funday" lunch at Woodstock Inn Station and Brewery. We haven't been to this restaurant in over a year, and they have expanded significantly since our last visit.

We started our meal with an order of Pretzel Logic ($6.95), which were cheese-stuffed soft pretzels served with house maple mustard and a creamy garlic sauce.

Although the "cheese" inside the pretzels was neon orange in color and obviously highly processed, the combination - mixed with beer, especially - somehow worked.

For my entree, I went with the Sweet Potato Ravioli appetizer ($8.99).

The five plump raviolis were swimming in a wonderfully sweet and spicy red pepper cream sauce. My only wish was that I had something to sop up the rest of the sauce with (there was almost too much sauce coating the raviolis).

For beers, I enjoyed a Maple Porter (pictured in the collage above) and a Pig's Ear Brown Ale. The Maple Porter only had a hint of maple flavor, which I liked, and I always enjoy Woodstock's Pig's Ear Brown Ale.

We had a fabulous weekend away in the White Mountains, and it was great crossing a few things off our wedding to-do list!

How was your weekend?

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