To temper the heat of the pepper I once again created a sweet sauce, but not like last time’s recipe, as my wife is not a huge fan of cooked peppers.  This time we again started with browned red onions, but instead of filling up the sauce with sweet peppers, we used wonderful mangos!  Yep, we bought a pair of really ripe mangos and cubed them into the pan, followed by garlic.  Instead of cubed fig, we used cubed dates, which worked fine.  Finished the sauce with some white zinfandel and agave.

Mango Madness Sauce
2 or 3 sweet onions
2 ripe mangos
Few cloves of crushed garlic
7 or 8 dates cubed
375 ml of light white or rose wine
2 tbsp of agave nectar

On the previous Sunday we went to local farmer’s market in Los Gatos, and we picked up some lovely fresh yellow and red beets, along with some early yellow and green squash.  We roasted these in the oven along with a bit of garlic and olive oil, and waited till the vegetables caramelized, and we were good to go.  We had some green salad as well.

To pair with these dishes, I went into the cellar to look for something with body, while not being over the top.  I chose a wonderful wine that comes from Portugal; Casa Da Corca Douro.  The funny thing about wines from Portugal is that it all started with the release of the 2003 Terras de Belmonte (Land of Belmonte) that was by the then imported by the Abarbanel Wine Company.  Since that time, Abarbanel has gone out of business, which is a true shame, as they were a solid company with great wines, and a good competition to Royal Wines.  I have nothing against Royal Wines, but every business that is consumer based, needs competition.  Since then, Royal Wines started importing the Casa Da Corca, a still red wine, along with two Port wines.  I found some wonderful articles around the city of Belmonte, but the best one may well be this one.  Even the country is getting behind it, by advertising the fact that kosher wine is back in Portugal.  Portugal has so much more to offer than just Port, and I am happy to see that there is fine kosher wine being made there.  That said, the other two wines produced in Portugal are not being imported to the US, maybe because there is no appetite for them, or maybe because the product is inferior, or maybe because it is too hard to produce, given that there is no fulltime Rabbi in Portugal, that can manage the process.  Either way, I hope we will see more coming from this region in the future.

The wine note follows below: