Julie's Birthday dinner

Tomorrow is my wife's birthday, and I've agreed to cook a nice (5-course) dinner for us, including having Julie decide ahead of time what she wants for each course (I have done surprises before, but this way, she gets more or less exactly what she wants). I've been working since Saturday to get the pieces of it done--from shopping at the farmer's market, to prep and early cooking. So, here's the menu:

Appetizer: Mac and Cheese Croquettes

L. Mawby Blancs de Blancs Michigan Sparkling wine

Soup: Thai Curry Squash Soup

Lucien Albrecht 2006 Gewurztraminer

Intermezzo: Pear-honey sorbet

Meat: Beef Wellington, scalloped potatoes, and roasted Brussels sprouts

Rex Hill 2000 Seven Springs Pinot Noir

Dessert: Tres Leches cake

Since I work all day, and Julie's birthday is on a Tuesday... as in tomorrow... most of this is already made at least in some form. The mac and cheese is made, just needs to be cut into little shapes, breaded and fried. The soup needs to be warmed, have some coconut milk, fish sauce, and lime juice added, garnished with some fried ginger, and served. The sorbet simply needs frozen, scooped, maybe garnished with a slice of pear and drizzle of 18-year-old balsamic vinegar. The cake is baked, but needs the milk added, then the topping on. And, of course, the main mostly requires me to work on it tomorrow. Not bad, though--I should be able to manage that without too much trouble.

The thing about this menu is that most of it is really easy cooking, in spite of the fancy names and so on... Mac 'n cheese from scratch is easy--boil water, cook the pasta, make a roux (butter, flour in equal portions), add dairy, add seasoning, add cheese. Combine, bake for ~ 30 minutes. Sorbet is simple, too. Peel and chop pears, add to mix of sugar and liquid--in this case, a mix of white wine, brandy, water, and honey. Puree, chill, then freeze. The soup is bit more complicated, but not much. I wanted extra "squash" flavor, so I roasted the squash before adding to the soup. But the soup started as a typical base--a couple onions, sweated in butter and oil, added carrots, finely chopped. Then, the Thai take--a mix of Thai Red Curry paste (yes, from a jar), and a spice paste I made from ginger, garlic, galangal, turmeric, lime zest (just the outsize green stuff), and palm sugar. These are added to the butter adn veggies and cooked a bit. Then, in goes the squash, then a few cups of stock, a can of coconut milk, and cook for a while. Puree with a stick blender to desired texture. Finish with more coconut milk, fish sauce, and lime juice; garnish with fried slices of ginger, if you like. Dessert starts with a pretty typical cake--flour, sugar, eggs, baking powder, vanilla... Then add the "tres leches"--or three milks--condensed, evaporated, and cream, let it soak into the cake for a few hours. Then frost/glaze the cake with a powdered sugar frosting. Not so bad, eh?

The tricky part will be the main. Of course, scalloped potatoes are easy--slice the taters, add some onion and garlic to cream, and scald it, pour it over the layered potatoes and cheese. Bake for an hour or so. The Brussels sprouts should be easy--cut in half, coat in olive oil, season, and bake. Add ground nuts if desired. But Beef Wellington is, well, futzy. It's a hunk of tenderloin, coated in a pate of foie gras and mushrooms, wrapped in puff pastry. You have to brown the meat before wrapping, and then finish it to desired doneness in an oven. Not terribly hard, but futzy, and challenging to make it look right and have good texture. Getting those, and hte veggies, all done at the same time--that iwll be the one real challenge, other than doing the copious dishes resulting from such a project.

I'm drowning in zucchini...

Not really. But we got a couple big ones in the farmers market, and had some left from a past week that weren't great, but needed used soon. So... what to do? Why, zucchini soup, of course. This made a wonderful lunch, paired with goat cheese and a baguette, and a gorgeous pinot blanc from Michigan.

The soup was uber-simple. Basically, dice up an onion (or 2-3, depending on how much soup you're making), some garlic. Sweat them down in butter and olive oil for about 5-10 minutes. Add coarsely chopped zukes--about 4X more in volume than onions, I'd say. Maybe a bit of celery, though that's optional. Sweat that all down for another 5-10 minutes. Salt and pepper to taste. Add some wine (white) if you want, and some chicken stock (homemade if you can; it's SO worth it). How much? Well, that depends on what you like your soup to be like. This chiefly determines whether you will have a thick, almost porridge-like soup, or a thinner item. More fluid = thinner soup. I like it thick and hearty. So I only did enough fluid to cover the zukes by maybe 1/2 inch. after 15-20 minutes in the fluid, take a stick blender to it (or puree it in batches in a blender, or whatever you like). Blend to a level you like for texture. Add cream to taste and health desires. If you really don't want to spend hte money, calories, and fat content on putting real cream in, you can get alot of the same effect by cooking a couple of potatoes into the soup at the start (add at the same time as zukes--and use starchy potatoes, not more waxy ones.) Adjust salt and pepper, and add some heat if you like from hot pepper flakes. At the end, I added a couple eggs, tempered in to prevent curdling. This helps hte texture, and thickens things up a bit. Yum!

with a soup like this, a baguette is almost a requirement. TOday, we added some goat cheese from a producer at the Farmer's Market. We get our goat yogurt from them, too. It's so good and fresh. Yum.

Finally, the wine... Left Foot Charley's 2008 Pinot Blanc. This is perhaps the most exceptional PB I've ever tasted. It outshines most from Alsace; it outshines most from Oregon. It's got a beautiful floral, minerally nose, with clover honey notes, an acidic palate, and an immense, mineral finish. There's more complexity and more beauty in this than you could ever expect, and the price is right at $18. Very deservedly, this wine won a double gold at the Michigan Wine competition, and sadly, the winery is virtually out of it. We've got 4 more bottles of it, and I intend to drink at least two more this year, and perhaps keep one for next year, and for grins, age one for a few years. I love its youthful fresh beauty, so I am reticent to age it, but I sense it's got the acid, minerals, and fruit to hold for a few years and perhaps become a real wonderful nutty aged white. So, we shall see.

The Germans were here

Today was the annual Taster's Guild German wine tasting. Two and a half hours, 89 amazing wines--Rieslings of all levels, from QbA to Auslese and eiswein. Several gewurztraminers, five mineral-laden sylvaners, pinot noir of several styles--with and without oak, and even two sweet ones! I like pinots, but those sweet ones were definitely a unique experience, even if not something I'd actually buy to drink at home. Many of the rieslings, though, just blew me away. Fitz-Ritter, Fischer, Dr. Heyden, among others, make killer rieslings. The 2007's, in particular, were really beautiful, although many need more age.

Many of the wines were represented by either the winemaker from the estates or others close to the production, so we could get a real sense of where the wines came from, both in terms of the land, and the philosophy of the winemakers. That's an extraordinary experience, any way you cut it. But even better, our Wednesday group hosted a post-party for the winemakers. We each brought a bottle (or several) of wine, and some food to share. In all, there were over 40 more wines, all higher end stuff, to share. There were probably 10 or 15 burgundies, some dating back to the early 1990's. The Germans brought along some of their well-aged library wines--one dating back 40 years to 1969. To think that we were drinking wine that was produced the year that man landed on the moon, and five years before I was born--pretty cool. It was a beautifully honeyed, slightly nutty Auslese Riesling.

There was a lot of good food, as usual at these things. Homemade venison sausage was good. A great potatoes gratin. Pork in cherries, chicken satay. Homebaked bread, made by the host. I cooked up a lentil stew, which was very well received by the group. It's amazing how easy it is to cook that, though. Fry up some diced bacon, brown off some sausages. Cook onions, celery, carrots, leeks, and a bit of garlic in the leftover fat. Add in a pound or so of dried, rinsed lentils (they come in a bag at the grocery for about a dollar). In this case, I added liquid in three forms--a bit of white wine, which I cooked down a bit, then added a bunch of stock and enough water to top it off. Seasoned it with a mix of salt, pepper, and a premade "Bavarian spice blend" of mustard seed, rosemary, thyme. Cooked for about 45 minutes, it was done. It was a great, tasty, easy thing to cook, and enough to feed a large group cost about $12.