Sneakeater

Quail is a lot easier.

I now have to redefine the way I conceive of myself from someone who does not spatchcock to someone who spatchcoks whenever he needs to.

For the first time ever!

I spatchcocked a bird!

Braised lamb shank with peppers. Like many of us, apparently, I am now looking for recipes that use up stuff I have sitting in my refrigerator and freezer. (Tomorrow's dinner hits like the Trifecta in that regard.) This is an adaptation of an adaptation of a recipe of FloFab's mom, purportedly combining Middle Eastern and East European elements. Whatevs to that. But FloFab's mom appears to have been a really good cook, cuz this was a really good dish. On orzo. On the side, the leftover remainder of my Greek eggplant/tomato/Feta. Which actually was kinda appropriate. This seemed to call for a Grenache-dominated Southern Rhône. 2016 Xavier Vignon Gigondas This is the kind of wine I hate. Big, spoofy, hedonistic, highly alcoholic. But while I worried about the way the high alcohol would interplay with the (still not very) spicier of the two peppers I put into the lamb shank dish, I reasoned that its exaggerated flavor and mouthfeel would be a decent foil for this extremely highly flavored (especially the way I make it) dish. And it kind of worked that way. One way to put it is, you could still taste this wine with the flavor-forward lamb. This wine is 85-some% Grenache and 15-some% Mourverdre -- and that's what it taste like. It really tastes mainly of Grenache, Somewhat blowsy red berry fruit -- and lots of it. Chocolate, all that other International Style stuff coming up behind it. But the fruit lasts. The Mourverdre is there providing some meatiness in the background. And the high ABV worked because for once I wasn't resentful of pouring a good wine into the gravy. To the contrary, I was releived at not having to drink the whole bottle. Drinking down the bottle by itself after dinner, I'm thinking, this really isn't what I like. But with the food, it was fine. More than fine.

Oh God, so now we have to hate it? I don't want to hate Single Thread. They use an Ibushi Gin Donabe!

Serve at about 10º above cellar temp, BTW. (I mean the wine.)

Creole Cassoulet. This has reached such a height of integration that I can only fear that the next batch will be septic. And there will be a next batch. I had resolved to finish this tonight -- even I acknowledge that cooked shrimp doesn't stay good forever -- but there was just too much of it. But God this has now gotten so good that whatever my fate may be, it will have been worth it. The side dish, though, was a failed experiment. I got a kind of radicchio at the Greenmarket over the weekend that is new to me: Galileo. It looks like a cabbage. So when I was thinking what my side dish would be with this Creole Cassoulet, I thought, butter-braised cabbage goes well with OG Cassoulet, so for this sharper, spicier Cassoulet why not swap in the Galileo radicchio? If I had been thinking straight I would have realized that butter-braised cabbage is so good because the mellow cabbage melds with the sweet butter. The bitter radicchio, on the other hand, warred with the butter. Even the carrots i sautéed it with -- great with cabbage -- attained a candy-like sweetness after absorbing the butter that didn't like being with the radicchio at all. What I should have done was saute the radicchio in oil and dressed it with Balsamic or Saba. Lesson learned. (What will probably be my next use of this radicchio is pretty sure-fire, though. Stay tuned.) The wine, OTOH, was an experiment that succeeded. 2013 Brunori Lacrima di Morro d'Alba "Alborada" It occurred to me that if you have a sausage 'n' seafood dish in Portugal -- as you frequently do -- you invariably drink a red wine with it. Of course there's nothing in Portuguese cuisine that's as spicy as this Creole Cassoulet is (or was: refrigerator age has really mellowed it). So the Dourox or even Barraida Bagas you'd have with a dish like this in Portugal weren't going to cut it: too tannic to drink with the spice. Young Riojas work well with spice. But all the Riojas I have at hand are old. (Everybody should have that problem.) Then I thought of this odd bottle I have laying around. Odd in more ways than one. This is most certainly a bin-end that's laid around for a long while both because I didn't previously much like its predecessors and because this wine is so odd that I have trouble pairing it. But tonight's dinner seemed promising. This is a dark purple wine with a light flavor profile. Indeed, my past bottles have been almost all nose and no palate: just an unpleasant bitter aftertaste. (The highly floral nose, though, was delightful.) Despite that bitterness, though, there was not a lot of tannin. But plenty of acid. So this as a pairing for a spicy dish seemed like a good idea. It was a better idea than I knew. Cuz while Lacrima Morro d'Alba (it's from Abruzzo, BTW) doesn't have a reputation for being particularly ageworthy, this now-10-year-olld bottle was much better than any of its predecessors. What's happened is that the palate has developed. There's now some blackberry fruit -- and you can taste the flowers as well as smell them. What had been a vaguely unpleasant wine is now an intriguing one. Moreover, the flavor profile -- there's still plenty of acid at the end -- worked very nicely with the shrimp 'n' sausage 'n' pepper stew. I can't take credit for the success of this pairing, because I didn't know how this wine had developed, that it now has a flavor to go along with its fragrance -- and that the flavor is very good with spices (well that I would have figured). So no "yay me". "Yay" the bottle.

Wow. I'm shocked.

Wait they didn't allow smoking indoors in restaurants in 2000.

It turns out that Phyllis Coates's real name was Gypsie Ann Stell. If your name was Gypsie Ann Stell, could you imagine replacing it?

A report: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/15/arts/television/phyllis-coates-dead.html

Fish kidneys.

I mean, there's a reason I've been drinking oceans of Beaujolais for more than 50 years. I just LOVE this stuff.

My most erotic Erotic Beef yet! I had to freestyle. I never bothered to bookmark the recipe, naïvely assuming I'd always be able to access it through the link in one of @Orik's posts. But this isn't a very complicated recipe: it's sort of like losing the recipe for a Last Word. And anyway, what's erotic is personal to each person, isn't it? This freed me to change up the recipe a little (as best as I can remember it), to play to my erotic preferences. Garnished with scallions, with some of those Japanese beach plums or whatever sitting next to the highly erotic beef. One the side, some Tokyo Bekana dressed with sesame oil and a little togorashi. I'm sure I tried this wine pairing before, but I can't remember it. It occurred to me because I remembered Fiona Beckett once saying that Beaujolais was a red wine that goes well with Chinese food, meaning presumably (among other things) that it could take soy sauce. 2018 Domaine de Robert (Patrick Brunet) Fleurie "Cuvée Tradition" It can't. Throughout the meal, this just tasted weird. The soy sauce in the sauce (I'll admit I put in a touch too much) kind of obliterated any independent flavor of the wine. The wine seemed to taste like salt. I know this was a fault of the pairing, and not the wine, because now, after dinner, the wine is its usual wonderful self. I adore Patrick Brunet's Beaujolais. Year in, year out, it's the same. Absolute typicity: it just tastes like a Beaujolais. Flawless craftsmanship. But still in a modest wine: the won't blow you away, like the best Beaujolais. What this is instead is sort of like the Platonic ideal of an everyday Beaujolais: everything precisely in place, everything you like about this kind of wine is there and it's near-perfect. That there's no idiosyncrasy is a flaw. But it's also a virtue: this wine is what it is, to the highest degree. It will only surprise you to the extent of surprising you how well it embodies its type. Which in my case is a type I love. If you love Beaujolais, you'll love this.

Christianity kind of has this thing about pregnancies' occurring when you'd think they couldn't.

It's not clear that actually happened?

What's wrong with this sentence?

Apples along with the grapefruit, I'm now tasting, as the wine opens up. And herbs along with the slatey minerals. I'm flattering myself that they mimic La Boite's Chios.

Someone was talking about Doc and Merle Watson here recently. By now, the Tennessee Stud and the Tennessee Mare must have great-grandchildren. Even great-great.

I like this more, for example, than the considerably more expensive Assyrtiko I had a few weeks ago.

I'm really liking this. I'ma have to explore this producer's other offerings.

Wait! This doesn't come from Santorini. It's from Thessaly, from the foothills of Mount Olympus. I don't care: I STILL taste salt.

This wine drinks particularly good on its own, I have to say.

The whole purpose of this dinner was to use up some feta that I had lying around. And I didn't even use it up. A fairly genuine Greek fish dish, striped bass (OK that isn't Greek) baked with citrus and olives. OK, Greeks would have used a sweet red pepper in this instead of a hot one. But I'm not Greek. Also, in the absence of anything Greek to serve the fish on top of, I served it on cous cous. I put in a lot of La Boite Chios blend to season (and color!) the cous cous, though. On the side, this dinner's raison d'être (well other than to take advantage of the continuing availability of striped bass): Melitzanes Me Feta. No question that that's OG Greek. In a normal climatic year, I wouldn't be eating eggplant and tomato in mid-October. The saving grace is that these were clearly end-of-the-line eggplant and tomato: if there are any more next week, they won't be worth eating. These were close. The only Greek white I had around. 2022 Domaine Zafeirakis Assyrtiko This is a relatively inexpensive Assyrtiko. But don't take that to mean it's one of the watery plonks that flood the market. This is a good, serious wine. Grapefruit up front, pretty intense. Lots of salt: this tastes like it was grown on a smallish island (even if wine flavors don't actually work that way). This was actually particularly good with the eggplant. Which I wouldn't have predicted. With its sharp acid, it also was good with the hot pepper I snuck in. It's nice that you can get a wine with this much going on in it for less than $20, when potato chips, ice cream, cookies, Mexican soda, and beer cost north of $40.