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.