Thai style curry

Tonight, I improvised a Thai-styled curry. Had some beef that needed used up (a sirloin roast), so cut it into nice strips. Browned it with Thai Red Curry paste, added onions, red bell peppers, garlic, and a sweet potato cut into thin slices. After sweating the veggies with the curry and beef, I added a mix of coconut milk, beef stock, fish sauce, lemon juice. Then, added some green beans (terribly non-Thai, but tasty in the mix). All this cooked, and was paired with simply cooked long grain Basmati brown rice. It was pretty good--not too hot, but good flavor. With a Brooklyn East India Pale Ale, yum!

Pork Ribs

Tonight was a "comfort food" dinner. Picked up some pork spareribs from the farmers market, gave 'em a good rub with a coffee barbeque rub, and then braised 'em "low and slow" for about 4 hours in a white wine-garlic sauce. It was all quite tasty, and, paired with a market barbecue sauce (maple based--yum!) made for a nice dinner. Not quite smoked ribs or anything, but darned good, for easy, home cooking.

Italian Style pork chops

I had about half the bottle of wine left from last night, so I figured some additional Italian styling could be good. As it happened, I had thawed out some pork chops. So, I figured, well, how about some Italian style chops? And, thankfully, it worked. I started out browning off the chops. Then, sweated some onion and garlic, added drained whole tomatoes, then deglazed with some white wine. Added in the juice from the tomatoes, some caper berries, and tossed the chops back in to braise for a bit. Meanwhile, I cooked some orzo, and asparagus to accompany. Once the chops were cooked, I pulled them, and cooked down the cooking liquid to make a thick, dense sauce to go with the chops and orzo. In all, very yummy.

Also, a bit about butter. We'd recently bought some Tillamook butter from Village Corner through our wine program for $2.50/lb., which is competitive with store brand butter. I knew it was good, sweet, and tasty, but I didn't realize just how amazing until tongiht, when I used some of the other butter to season the asparagus. It tasted industrial, sharp, bitter, and thoroughly revolting after being used to the "good stuff". I'm hoping Dick has some more Tillamook at the good price, because I'm officially addicted.

Spaghetti

Tonight was a late night, so I cooked simply--spaghetti with red sauce. But it wasn't ragu in a bottle. I browned up some hot Italian sausage, deglazed with some red wine, and added in some of my frozen home-made tomato sauce. At the end of last fall's tomato season, we bought probably 50-100 lbs of "seconds" tomatoes, and cooked them down into a sauce. We froze it up in our deep freeze, and have been enjoying it throughout the winter. The up-shot is two-fold. First, the taste is so much better than the jarred stuff. I get to decide what is in it, what it tastes like, how salty it is, and so on. That's huge. Second, it's actually cheaper to do that, by quite a bit, than to buy even moderate quality bottled sauce.

I chose to make it a very basic sauce that I could then add flavors to as I saw fit per individual container. That means I can use the same sauce for a garlic sauce, another with basil, a third with cheese, and so on. That's another big bonus. I'm not restricted to whatever the producer throws in the sauce. Finally, I'm just plain thrilled to be supporting local producers, even if I'm buying tomatoes at a dirt cheap price. They're unloading product that is not necessarily beautiful, but tasty and useful.

Rack of Lamb, Cairanne

To celebrate Memorial Day, the completion of hauling out our plants for the summer (no small feat), and the publication of one of my papers in Science, we decided to celebrate with a rather nice meal on Monday night. I roasted up a (half) rack of lamb, paired with orzo and sauted spinach. Now, I love lamb almost any way you can get it. But a rack of rib chops is something for a real special occasion. First, I trimmed it down--cutting off some of the extra fat, and "frenching" the chops--that is, cutting off the fat between the boney part of the chop. I rubbed the cut down with a mix of rosemary, garlic, salt, pepper and olive oil, and roasted it for a short time in a very hot oven, just to a nice medium rare. The flavor was great, and the fat crisped nicely. The meat came from Hanewaald lamb, our farmers market lamb specialist--and it was just spectacular. It was from a young (or small) critter, so was both tender and mild flavored. My cooking did justice to the cut, if I may ignore false modesty. And the goat yogurt sauce with garlic (from the farmers market again) was a great, earthy, acidic pairing. The orzo was nice, and the spinach, sauteed in olive oil with a bit of garlic for about 30 seconds was nice and still a bit "al dente".

But the meal was really brought to fruition by the wine--a Domaine de Boisson Cairanne cotes-du-rhone Villages. I may have mentioned this wine--tasted as part of our Wednesday group--a few weeks back. It's a real southern Rhone beauty. We loved it so much (OK-I loved it) at the tasting that we split a case with a friend-getting it at a per bottle under $15. Now, I am a big fan of the "biggies" of the southern Rhone--notably, Chateauneuf du Papes. These are immense, earthy wines with a great blend of elegance and rusticity. To be truly appreciated, they need years, even decades, of bottle aging. Many also require a small fortune to purchase--top estates sell bottles well into 3 figures. This Cairanne has a lot of those same notes--not surprising, since the region is only a few miles from CdP. It's got a ton of minerality--hot rocks, slate--and a good fruit up front. But it also has the tarry, herbal, tobacco, garrigue-y notes that give southern Rhones so much complexity. By itself, this is a wonderful wine, though, as Julie reminds me, it is definitely better with food--as is virtually any well-made wine.

But, for me, the real beauty was the combination of food, wine, and of course, the reason for celebration. The fruit brought out the sweetness of the lamb, the tannins cut the fat, and the herb rub combined exquisitely with the herbal, garrigue notes in the wine. In short, this was a match made in heaven, or at least in the southern Rhone. The entirety of the meal was so much more than the sum of its parts, thanks to that wonderful synergy. It is not that hard to come up with decent, even good, wine and food pairings. Every so often, you bring together that magical combination of food and wine that is just transcendental. And, when you do, you'll never forget the experience.

Catching up again; Asparagus is here

It's been too long since I've blogged. Way, way too long. Last few weeks have been very busy in the garden as well as at work. So, first of all, there hasn't been as much time to write, or for that matter, to cook a lot. So, we've eaten a lot of takeout. But I've also cooked a fair bit, and have neglected to tell you a bit about it.

The last few weeks, asparagus has been in season at the farmer's market. I think we've eaten asparagus in every imagineable form, many times. Cream of asparagus soup (twice), asparagus risotto, steamed, boiled asparagus, grilled asparagus, roasted asparagus. As a side, as an appetizer, as a main in bigger dishes. And, I'm still hungry for more. Now, if all you've ever eaten is supermarket bundled asparagus imported from California or South America or some other distant place, or, worse, from a can or freezer bag, you probably don't get what I'm saying. In season, locally grown, fresh picked asparagus is simply the most flavorful, tender-textured, beautiful thing you can imagine. Not much in the way of tough, fibrous woody pieces. No dried out, wilted looking spears. Of course, they're also not all the exact same size or shape.

So far, the only approach that I wasn't hugely enamored with was grilled--with steaks and potatoes on the grill. And that was my fault--I slightly overcooked it, and the flare up from the steaks created a bit more burn than desired. Ah, well, those that were good were very concentrated, so I'll try that again if I can.

Now, wine and asparagus are a notorious challenge, so you might think I'd be in trouble. But no, not so much. Sauvignon blanc is arguably the grape that pairs most beautifully with asparagus. I'm personally partial to sancerre, which produces these wonderfully minerally, gooseberry, chive and sometimes bell-pepper flavored wines (from the sauvignon blanc grape). This appellation within the Loire Valley of France is just amazing. Another decent pairing was chablis--a region of Burgundy that produces steely, minerally unoaked chardonnay. For me, that was a bit less lovely, still nice, but not great, with asparagus.

More soon on some food and wine encounters.

Southern Rhone, and Illinois wines

Missed y'all... for two whole weeks of no blogging. Jeff is a bad blogger. :-( In my defense, I was in Fort Madison for a few days of family time, but still, I've been back for over a week.

So, I have some catching up to do.

Last Wednesday, I had the great joy of meeting the owner and winemaker from Domaine du Vieux Chene, a moderate sized producer from the Southern Rhone Valley of France. He, along with his son and importer, joined our wine group to taste through much of his product line up. All his wines range in price from $10-18, so are quite affordable. And not one is a dud; each is a beautiful reflection of the combination of terroir (the "land" piece) and cepage (the grapes used). While there is unquestionably a "house style" of sorts that is the stamp of the winemaker, it is a gentle stamp indeed.

So, let me tell you a bit more about these wines:
First, there were four white wines--1. a blend of southern rhone classic grapes (grenache blanc and the likes), which was nicely minerally and good fruit, hints of "green" in it, as it was a relatively cool vintage (2008); 2. a 100% viognier wine (a grape more known from the Northern Rhone), this was somewhat less elegant than the much pricier no- Rhone wines from Condrieu, but a nice example of what you can do in the south. It was much less of the quasi-sweet fruit bombs that we see in California viogniers, in particular. 3 and 4. The 2007 and 2008 vintages of a cotes du Rhone that saw a bit of oak. The 07 was beautifully complex and elegant, while the 08 was still a bit unsettled. Nice wines.

Then, 2 roses, from two different regions: The first, from a lower quality classification, was a bit thin and green for my taste, but reflected the cool vintage and the grapes well. the 2nd was clearly riper (from a somewhat hotter site overlooking the river), more fruit driven, with a lot of complexity and nice minerality.

Finally, the highlight of about 10 reds. These are mostly grenache-syrah blends, and ranged from relatively simple, fruit-laden vin de pays to exquisite 2006 and 2007 vintage wines from specific vineyards with unique characteristics. The two sites that provided a lot of the grapes are from river bluffs and from a plain (plan de dieu, or Plains of God) with a lot of hot stones in it. The first produces a more elegant wine with a good blend of fruit and minerals, while the 2nd produces a bigger wine with tons of garrigue (some weedy herbs of Provence) and minerals. Then, the vintages showed so differently-0-the 06's are more elegant, reserved, and pretty, while the 07's have more complexity and heft. I'd say the 07's have more aging potnetial overall, but both are nice.

While no single wine was awful, nor did any just jump out as an "oh my God" moment--each was very nice and interesting. But, the tasting as a whole far exceeded the sum of the individual wines. It was perhaps the best opportunity I've had to look within a single producer, single wine region, to explore simultaneously the blend of grapes, vintages, and specific site to see their impact on the final product. In addition, it is a great chance to talk to the producer and see how he thinks about wine and his grapes. Truly, if you ever get a chance to do something like this, you absolutely MUST take advantage of it. It's an experience second to none.

While in Iowa, I also visited Nauvoo (Illinois, just across the Mississippi from my hometown). There is an old winery there with a variety of grapes and resulting wines. Now, vinifera wines (those we associate with Europe and the West Coast of the US, for example) do not tend to do well in the climate of the Midwest. So, the grapes are usually either American varieties or hybrids between American and vinifera grapes. This means getting out of your usual mindset of what a wine should be, and thinking instead about what _IS_ in the glass. I decided to taste through a few of their dry wines (I find sweet wines, except for great European dessert wines, to usually be cloying and just downright disturbing). I must say, I was pleasantly surprised by some of their wines.

Perhaps the best surprise was the quality of their red wines. The Norton grape showed remarkably well with judicious use of oak for aging, while a blend of chambourcin and Chancellor was also interesting, if rather fruit driven. Their dry concord basically tasted like slightly less sweet Welch's grape juice--not a pleasant taste, and I cannot begin to think what to eat with it. But I think it was well-made; just not my style. Their whites were a bit vegetal and harsh, and not pleasing to my palate, at least at the time of my visit. Nonetheless, it was a pleasant surprise to see what was clearly a good attention to detail in a very honest effort at making wine the right way in a challenging environment.