The Rest of Us

[Sneakeater]

I woke up this morning with a tremendous craving for chili crisp noodles.  So you can imagine my joy when it gradually dawned on me that I have everything I (thought I would) need to make them right here already.

(It's remarkable, BTW, how much Scialatielli resemble hand-pulled noodles.)

I'm sure they woudn't have a fennel salad (much less one doused with saba) with this in Guizhou.  But I'm not in Guizhou.  Indeed, don't tell anyone, but since I was home alone with nobody looking, I ate the noodles with a fork and spoon.  It kept my table a lot cleaner than using chopsticks would have done.

I had another (extremely) superannuated Viennese Gemischter Satz lying around.  I figured that this would be a good dinner to hide its flaws.

2016 Weinbau Jutta Ambrositch Gemischter Satz "Glockenturm"

This wasn't as "still there" as my last one -- but it was pretty "still there".

Maybe my belief that Viennese Gemischter Satz must be drunk young is wrong.

This evidently has some Gewürtztraminer (or a Gewürtztraminer relative) in it, and the lychee with the acid (there's evidently also some Grüner Veltliner in this) kind of loved those noodles.

[Sneakeater]

Having a direct comparison, I can say with some confidence that the Chinese Tough Old Lady brand of chili crisp is better than NYC's Milu.

I haven't even bothered with Momofuku's.

[Wilfrid]

1 hour ago, Sneakeater said:

I woke up this morning with a tremendous craving for chili crisp noodles.  So you can imagine my joy when it gradually dawned on me that I have everything I (thought I would) need to make them right here already.

Some breakfast.👏

[Sneakeater]

I waited till dinner.

[Wilfrid]

Steely resolve.

[joethefoodie]

8 hours ago, Sneakeater said:

Chinese Tough Old Lady brand of chili crisp

This one?

 

It's a personal fave.

[Sneakeater]

That very one!

[Evelyn]

Mine too! One of my favorite "different" things to do with it is to put it on top of chocolate ice cream 😋

[Sneakeater]

My upstairs neighbor, who could not have been much over 50 (if that), dropped dead last week.  If the building is in shock, you can imagine how his wife and two fresh college freshman children are.

Tonight was their Shiva here in the building.  Probably since he was Irish (his wife is Jewish), this wasn't a typical Shiva, where there is so much Ashkenazic food laid out you begin to think the decedent had the right idea.  There were light snacks.  I came home hungry.

But there was no way I was going to cook anything.  I was BUMMED.  (The fact that it's a couple of days before my own wedding anniversary didn't help:  we'd have made it to 20 if my wife didn't inconsiderately die the preceding August; this year would have been 37.)

Leftover slices of pork brisket on a roll, dressed with mustard and cooked milk nubbins.  (Pork cooked in milk:  NOT an Ashkenazic dish.)  The end of my Cajun cole slaw on the side.

When I picked the wine, I forgot about that cole slaw.

2016 Domaine Finot Étraire de la Dhuy

Étraire de la Dhuy is a rare red grape from Isère.  (One wine wag has pointed out that obscure as Étraire is, it is actually one of the better-known of the rare Isére red grapes.)  And Thomas Finot is, of course, one of the finest of the winemakers attempting to revive Isère's wine industry.

Étraire is related to another, very slightly less obsure Isère grape called Persan (nobody knows which is the parent and which is the child).  Which explains why Étraire is likened to a grape Persan also resembles (and might be related to), Syrah.  Now that's true as far as it goes -- but don't go expecting this to taste like Syrah.  It isn't meaty, and it's considerably less complex.

It is one of those wines that pulls off the trick of being light and bold at the same time.  (I even had it at cellar temp -- although I can see a decant wouldn't have been amiss.)

Lotta plums here.  Not much to say about what comes after but "savory".  Well, short:  it doesn't linger.

So yeah, the kind of thing you want with a pork sandwich.

The problem is that this is not a particularly low-tannin wine.  No prob (quite the opposite) with the fatty sandwich.  But that Cajun cole slaw was spicy, and the tannnins didn't like that.

I like this wine.  I have a dim recollection of liking Persan a little bit more.  But I'd have to drink the two of them near in time to really know.

[Sneakeater]

I went pretty deep on Isère wines six or so years ago, thinking that a mountain region nestled between Savoie and the Northern Rhône would be just what I like.

Now that the wines are coming of age, I'm being proven right.

[hollywood]

2019 Simi Sonoma County Pinot Noir.  This is a Goldilocks treat, not too heavy, not too light.  Just tasty right now.

[Sneakeater]

Purloo, where have you been all my life?

Purloo is a Low Country rice dish.  It is one of a cluster that are all derived from the West African jollof family of dishes (gee, wonder how West African food got to the Low Country?).

The recipe comes from someone who cooks at Husk.  Although there are a lot of different proteins you can use in Purloo, this recipe uses dried shrimp (I'm not counting bacon as a protein).

I've never had dried shrimp before (except as something lost among the ingredients in dishes from Singapore, Malaysia, and around there).   This shrimp came from Louisiana.  Every recipe using it I've seen cautions you how pungent it is, and warns you to use it sparingly.  Advice like that is like waving a red flag in front of me.  I always think, "hell, I want to taste that ingredient!"  I almost always regret it.  (It was just this season that I learned how to regulate my hot pepper usage.)*

I could feel that old mistake coming on when I ground the dried shrimp for this dish:  I ground much more than recipe called for.  What's more, I soaked several more and put them in whole, which this recipe didn't call for.

To my surprise, it may be that I didn't put in enough dried shrimp for my taste.  Now maybe this Husk chef is a wimp, or maybe I got some inferior dried shrimp lacking flavor.  Or maybe the accent-but-nothing-more of the salty flavor of the Gulf was perfect, I dunno.  I mean, this dish sure was delicious as it was.

This was one of those times when I looked at the leftovers and, rather than thinking, "how am I gonna eat all that?", I thought "when am I gonna heat up the next batch?"

Speaking of "how am I gonna eat all that?", the side was another iteration of that vegetable equivalent of a lasts-forever ham, cabbage.  This batch was grilled.   Something else I'd never had before.  It's another good way to cook cabbage.  And the char was pretty.

I formed one of those solid convictions that the pairing for the Purloo should be a Bordeaux Blanc.  I figured that the richness provided by the Semillon would take on the pungent flavors of the dish, while the sharp acidic fruit would handle the spice.

I was totally right.

2019 Château Turcaud "Cuvée Majeure"

You've heard me say countless times what an overperforming bargain this Entre Deux Mers producer's junior cuvée is.  This is their senior cuvée.  It's a little more expensive, and a little better.  So while it doesn't seem the stunning value its younger sibling is -- it's not a reasonably complex, totally well put together wine for less than $20 -- it's still a solid value:  a very good wine at a very fair price.  (I mean, it was less than $25.)

There's just more here here than in Turcaud's entry-level.  More grapefruit at the front.  More savory herbs and damp minerals behind.  More -- like in the junior cuvée there isn't any -- pepper lingering at the end (and boy did the Purloo like THAT!).
____________________________________________________________________
* Like tonight, for example (don't tell @Evelyn, but I habitually substitute a hot pepper for the bell pepper in The Trinity) (in a world where there are hot peppers, I kind of think bell peppers are a waste).**

** (Don't get me wrong:  I LOVE sweet hot peppers, like Jimmy Nardellos.)

[Sneakeater]

I'm not gonna say this Purloo was great because I cooked a lot of Crystal into it.  But the fact is, I cooked a lot of Crystal into it.

[Evelyn]

Using the crystal makes your sin of messing with The Trinity a little less egregious 😵

[Sneakeater]

On 11/22/2022 at 7:26 AM, joethefoodie said:

This one?

 

It's a personal fave.

You know how Tough she is?

When her son took over the business from her several years ago, he changed the recipe to use a cheaper, less flavorful chili.  There was a consumer uproar.  So she threw him out, took the company back over, and reinstated the original chili.