East by Northeast

A play on the inspiration for dinner tonight.  Started with flank steak--simple prep of salt, pepper, medium rare on a grill pan.   It's peak produce season (or a good time, anyway), so we have a ton of good fruit and veggies.  Decided first to do a blueberry sauce for the steak.  I ended up adding  fresh garlic, wine, and butter, along with dark (read slightly sweet, viscous) soy sauce and cinnamon.  It made for a slightly Asian flavored sauce that had nice balance of sweet, salty, and acidity.  For starch, I parboiled some new potatoes and two Hakerai turnips right out of our garden, and then roasted them with a few spring onions and some chopped garlic.  And the veggies--that was the best--green beans, blanched, and then sauteed with shiitake mushrooms and more young garlic, and finished with a touch of regular soy sauce.  One of the best (and most complex) things I've cooked lately.

Goat

Yes, Goat meat.  It's what was for dinner tonight.  Goat shanks, to be exact.  A lot like lamb shanks in texture and flavor, but a bit sweeter, a bit leaner, and overall, maybe even better.  Or at least, different.  We cooked them in a long low braise, a Jamaican curry.  That meant curry powder, some jerk powder, a ton of allspice, some coconut milk, thyme, honey, and of course, some hot pepper.  It came out remarkably well, paired with fingerling potatoes and Christmas Lima beans.  Yummy.  I want to cook more goat.

Cassoulet

Tonight was a classic "duck dinner"--as in, cassoulet. Seven of us got together for a fun dinner and wines. We started with some vintage champagne from 1998 and 2000 vintages. We then shared in this beautiful dish, paired with 1998 and 2004 Rhone wines, and a 2005 Madiran. We followed this with a salad course (very European), paired with a 1999 German Riesling Kabinett. Dessert was a chess pie, paired with an AMAZING 1969 Tokaji Aszu. What a dinner! And great company. I gained a number of fascinating insights tonight from all of this.

First, duck confit, pork belly, and sausage, paired with beans, baked for a couple hours with copious duck fat is downright amazing. And, perhaps, requiring some statins... :-) It pairs extraordinarily with a 2005 Madiran, which is still a baby. The 2004 Ste. Anne CDR-St. Gervais was beautiful, lighter, more acidic, and rather "feminine", if you can really use that to describe a wine. The 1998 Cotes du Rhone shows that a good vintage and a good producer (Grand Prieur) can lead to amazing aging on an inexpensive wine such as this.

Second, this riesling was amazing--it had such a nose of petrol/gasoline (in a very good way), and a crisp, acidic cut, with a long mineral finish. This blew me away.

Third, drinking a 43 year old sweet wine is an experience of unforgettable proportions. This goes down as a 10 most memorable wines of life. This Hungarian wine had incredible acid (STILL), great minerals, a somewhat oxidative note of good dry sherry or Madeira, nutty, sweet, mild fruit, and an ongoing finish.

I am fortunate enough to get to taste and drink a lot of good wine--even quite a bit that borders on great. But I am seldom so surprised by so many bottles in one setting; I seldom learn as much in one setting; and, rare indeed is a bottle that I will be remembering for years to come. To find two of those in an evening--that is extraordinary. Now, most of my favorite wines come from France, as do virtually all of my most memorable wines. So, to have two in a row that were NOT from France--surprising as can be.

Lamb Cheeks

Last night, I managed to cook up a meal that is near the top of all time in my view. Now, my wife was not a fan of this for flavor and texture reasons, so universal praise was not part of the picture here... But here's the scoop:

Sparrow Market, an Ann Arbor classic grocery and meat market, had lamb cheeks on sale. Now, who has ever eaten lamb cheeks? Well, I've had pork and beef cheeks, and I find the texture and strong flavors enticing, so I figured, what the heck, let's try this out. I didn't come home with any particular plan, other than figuring I needed to braise them for a couple hours. A classic sauce with a variety of lamb dishes is a Provencal style sauce--so I built on that theme. After browning the cheeks stove-top, I sweated mirepoix (onion, carrot, celery) plus garlic, added a couple tablespoons of tomato paste, and cooked that for maybe 5 minutes. I deglazed with white wine, added some lamb stock tossed in a bay leaf, a few sprigs of thyme and rosemary, supplemented with a dash of Aleppo Pepper. After bringing to a boil, the cheeks went back in, and the whole cast iron Le Creuset business went into a 325 degree oven for 2 hours.

Meanwhile, I needed a side dish--and risotto seemed the perfect choice. So, out came some chicken stock, some Arborio rice, a bit of butter and shallot and Parmesan cheese. This is such a yummy, but easy, rice dish, I don't know why people are so afraid of it. Yes, you spend 20 minutes stirring a lot. Yes, you add stock gradually, deciding when the rice is at a doneness you like. Is it technically hard? Not at all. No fancy knife skills. No balancing 8 pots cooking at once. Just a bit of patience and attention to what you're doing.

As the risotto finished up, I removed the cheeks from the cast iron, strained the sauce to remove veggies and herbs, and reduced it by about half. I finished it off with a pat of butter, rewarmed the cheeks in the sauce, and sat down to a delicious dinner. I got out a 2006 Tourade Vacqueyras to accompany. It worked pretty well, although I think the wine is in a bit of a closed, awkward phase right now--there's still a lot of structure, fruit buried under it, and I think it'll be a very pretty bottle in a couple years. Right now, it's not bad at all, but not showing gorgeously yet. So, 5 more bottles to watch over 3-8 years.

The Brinery

It's been WAY too long... Ann Arbor's "The Brinery" deserves a shout-out. These guys make naturally fermented products--sauerkrauts, kimchis, pickles, and the like. Each batch is unique based on inputs and conditions--and I love that about it. It's much like fine wine--not a mass-produced, factory processes food intended for uniformity above all else. Now, these are not $2 jars of pickles--if you want that--well, Meijer or Wal-Mart or your local mega-mart will take care of you. But the product is worth every $.

Today's newest offering is called "Mountain Elder"--a locally grown, locally fermented red cabbage with a nice seasoning of ajowain. It's got a citric, umami, smoky note that is unbelievable. It would be classic with Mediterranean and middle eastern yogurt sauces with grilled meats, I think--we'll know more later in the week. But more broadly, the krauts (at least 3 or 4 types most weeks--some green and some red) are all pretty amazing. The owner and fermentation master, David, adds various appropriate flavors--caraway, juniper berry, and so on--to varying types of cabbage. The creativity is amazing, and I've not had one bad offering.

The pickles are what good fermented deli pickles SHOULD be, but so often fail at. The texture varies from crisp to a bit softer, the flavors vary a bit each time, but the dill and the garlic and the salt always make for a wonderful experience. The pickled turnips are also a good standby.

For me, the kimchis are often hotter than I personally care for--but then again, so is most Korean kimchi. David often has one or more milder offerings in that realm too. The hotter varieties seem remarkably authentic, complete with the fermented fish sauce.

So, next time you get a chance--check out Ann Arbor's best fermented, pickled products--all from The Brinery