Sneakeater

What you might not know, though, is that fried okra and fried green tomatoes are made differently. They both are coated with cornmeal. But fried okra is made in what I've come to think of this Summer as the Ligurian manner:* you just dredge it in cornmeal and throw it into the oil (in Liguria it would just be flour you dredge it in). Fried green tomatoes, OTOH, get a batter: you dredge them in flour, then dip them in an egg/buttermilk mixture, then coat them with cornmeal. (Which means I got to make myself some Special Treat Fritters, an artifact of my childhood.) _________________________________________________ * The Ligurian manner arose because Ligurian fishermen would get home from fishing quite late. They were hungry. Their wives were hungry. Their children were hungry. So their wives developed a cooking method for the day's catch with as few steps as possible, to get dinner right on the table.

FUN WITH MENU PLANNING See, my original plan was to make some roasted okra and tomato to have with the burger. But then, today, it occurred to me that fried okra would go better with a burger than roasted. But what about the tomato? I had planned to use a tomato up tonight. I don't want any of my gorgeous tomatoes bought for this week to go bad and get wasted. Then it hit me: FRIED GREEN TOMATO! Not just a dish, but a famous one!

The next time you're having a hamburger with alpine-style cheese and mushrooms, think hard about this.

Cheeseburger with an alpine-style cheese, mushrooms (Chantarelles -- or Citronellas, as the counterperson called them as she rang them up -- yo), PA Dutch onion relish, and brown sauce. (I know this seems repetitive of last night's dinner. But holiday conventions impose limitations.) A grilled ear of corn. (That's something I'm HAPPY to repeat.) In order to finish up my garlic chives, I made another garlic chive butter to slather on the corn. (The dinner I have planned for tomorrow -- if I have room left after Carnival -- wouldn't accommodate such frippery.) Fried okra and green tomatoes. (Doing some research before this first attempt ever at making fried green tomatoes, I was pleasantly shocked to learn that this dish was probably introduced to the U.S. -- as it turns out, it really originated in the Midwest, not the South -- by Jews.) My overly literal geographic specificity went off the charts tonight. 2006 Caves Cooperatives de Donnas "Donnas" So I used an alpine style cheese. Originally, I was gonna use Gruyere, until I realized I had this old chunk of something more obscure and unfortunately less melty sitting around waiting to start rotting. Now the Vallée d'Aoste borders on Switzerland, and isn't even that far from Gruyere. And, of course, Nebbiolo loves mushrooms. And for all its seeming lightness, it has plenty of tannins to bond with the fat in a burger. And a soft red like this one is perfect for the whole gestalt (Merlot would be the classic pairing for Swiss cheese and mushrooms). Caves Cooperatives de Donnas is one of those Italian coops that unexpectedly make some of the finest wine in their appellation. (The Produttori del Barbaresco are everybody's key example.) This wine is kind of inarguable. It's mostly Picotendro (a grape that you and I would call Nebbiolo) with some Freisa and a very local grape called Neyret (which doesn't have some other name that you and I would know better). It would be a prototypical Atlo Piemonte, if it weren't so Alto that it's no longer Piemonte. Meaning it's a very soft Nebbiolo, both on account of the softening blending grapes and the higher altitude reached in what are more hills than foothills. Most people would say you shouldn't keep a wine like this for as long as I did. Most people are wrong. This still has a good deal of cherry/cranberry fruit. But it also has an extremely integration, where the primary flavors flow into the secondaries -- some smoke, some herbs, some forest -- with no perceptible break. And where the whole thing goes down rico suave. You don't get that without years in the cellar. Even a $20 wine can benefit from that -- if, like this one, it's got the stuff.

Doing some research, I see that in Macedonia Negroska is kind of Merlot to Xinomavro's Cabernet Sauvignon (even if Xinomavro tastes more like Syrah).

(And then a week later you can have a day where you bum yourself out over what a horrible person you've been, but if you get bummed enough all your defalcations melt away.) (These ideas might really have staying power!)

Hey I've got an idea! Let's have a big harvest festival and pretend it's the anniversary of when the world was created! Oh wait, somebody already thought of that.

I have so much produce in my crisper that I almost can't close it. And that's not counting all the stuff that doesn't get refrigerated. It's hard to believe that in a few months there'll be like nothing.

I'm happy to be here helping, though.

Lamb burger with Bulgarian-style feta (creamier than Greek), olives, a very grilled (and very old) garlic scape, and some sweet pepper/rosemary sauce. On a Lost Bread Co. sesame milk bun, BTW: those are crazy good. A grilled cob of corn on the side. I made some garlic chive butter (using garlic chives -- not garlic AND chives) to put on it. I never thought I'd be the kind of person who made garlic chive butter to put on corn, but here I am. And a treviso salad with an anchovy vinaigrette. Tonight my mania for geographic specificity in wine pairings went beyond the pale. 2017 Domaine Tatsis Young Vines From Macedonia -- which would border Bulgaria if Macedonia weren't split into two polities. Indeed, I just learned that the Tatsis family came to Greek Macedonia from what is now Bulgaria as part of the forced population exchanges following the fall of the Ottoman Empire at the end of WWI. As the name suggests, this is Tatsis's cadet cuvée, as you'd want with a burger. It's a blend of Xinomavro, which you (by which I mean I) know, and Negroska (whatever that is). I've found just about every Greek Natural wine I've tried to be terrific. This one wasn't an outlier. This was pretty much perfect with that burger. Violets on the nose, lots of crunch (VERY tangy berry fruit), some olive(!), a bit of salt. It tasted like the burger! Lots and lots of acid to cut the fat in both the meat and the cheese -- and the Xinomavro tannins, while deemphasized in this young fresh cuvée, are still there, to meld with that fat. Perfect. I only wish I'd drunk it at cellar temp rather than bringing it up. This is the kind of wine that almost drinks itself.

I don't think many would disagree that Basquiat has aged much better than Haring.

I'm sure they don't have a dinner special like that.

Oh I didn't catch that was LUNCH.

As Diancecht said, its placement on the menu makes it look like it's permanent (and he had it after the end of Restaurant Week, so we know it wasn't that).

Is that restaurant week or some end-of-summer-nobody's-around thing, or do they always have it? I've always thought of Koloman as pretty expensive.

And to think their brother wrote "Strawberry Fields Forever"!

Probably they do, but you have to go to markets in Queens to find it.

That corn is called Choclo. It originated in the Andes. I wish someone would grow it here.

As much as I want to like Dirt Candy, I always find that there's too much going on in each dish in terms of flavoring. As if they're trying to compensate for the absence of something. I've never interacted with anyone who worked there who wasn't just nice, but SUPERnice.

I was going to post about that in the tech section. Then I noticed there WAS no tech section. (ETA: Not that I care.)

Maybe I should have let them combine to form a new life form. Maybe it would've cleaned the interior of my refrigerator.

Jacques's recipe has you using only parsley in the sauce. But I threw in all the herbal odds and ends that were sitting around in my crisper, on the cusp of combining to form a new life form. The flavor accents were actually pretty interesting. I'm sure Jacques would approve.

The Puerto Rican steak recipe Jacques Pepin got from Gloria's mother that he calls Steak Grandma. I used an Oyster Steak. As soon as I saw it in the butcher case, I knew I had an occasion to try out this recipe. I commend Oyster Steak cooked this way to all of you. This is from Jacques Pepin: Cooking at Home. I have to say that series has my favorite, or at least most used, Pepin recipes. These are things you'd actually make, using techniques (and ingredients) you actually have. It's all really simple stuff that's absolutely delicious. This is where the greatest asparagus recipe in the whole world comes from. (Really, seriously: show me a better one.) (Thanks again, @joethefoodie !) And this steak. Practically no work. Fab result. Some roasted broccolini on the side. And bread and butter, for sopping up the scrumptious pan sauce. A few nights ago I ran aground on a meat-with-lime Gamay pairing. Tonight I was confident I had a way around the problem. 2015 Domaine Ricard Le Clos de Vauriou Vincent Ricard two nights in a row. Fine with me! This is around 60% Gamay, 40% Cabernet Franc (some years there's some Cot in it, but I'm pretty sure this vintage didn't have any). My thought was that the herby Cab Franc would help the Gamay make friends with the pungent citrus. It seems to have worked. This is a very nice wine. Putting the food aside (which I think is a big mistake when you're talking about wine, but let's pretend we're Oxford analytic philosophers and do a thought experiment), the Cab Franc lends a bit of heft to the Gamay -- and the aforementioned herby undercurrent the Cab Franc supplies is a delicious counterpoint to the Gamay's racy fruit. (I'm not tasting any Cab Franc bell peppers.) People tell you to drink this wine young. But I put this bottle away, because (as I said about the Sauvignon Blanc yesterday) to my mind the secret of Ricard's wines is that they age beautifully. I don't mean Barolo/Bordeaux put-them-away-forever aging, of course. I mean aging in the near term. This 9-year-old bottle was/is scrumptious.

Pilar in Bed-Stuy. The best Cuban food I've ever had.

I was thinking of not finishing this bottle tonight. It would probably benefit from a day or two's airing. But when you have something as nice as this is already, it's hard not to keep pouring.