The Rest of Us (cont.)

[Sneakeater]

Next you're going to tell me that Eggplant Rollatini doesn't actually exist in Italy.

[Anthony Bonner]

7 hours ago, Sneakeater said:

My first cooked meal here that wasn't an imitation of something, but just something I'd cook.

Wild Coho salmon, butter roasted with Bernaise seasonings.

On the side, some broccoli rabe that escaped from a Jersey farm a century or so ago and now blankets the countryside wild.  (You'd think it would be cheaper.)  Sautéed with (lots of) garlic.

I formed an opinion long ago that Viognier goes with tarragon (having some tarragon accents itself).

2022 Echeverría Viognier "¡No es Pituko!"

It's from Chile.  But it's one of those post-Luyt Natural Wines from there, so that's alright.

When I sipped some of this by itself while waiting for the salmon to finish roasting, I wondered if it would pair.  It certainly doesn't taste like any Rhône Viognier.  By itself, it's disjunct:  you get some weird cutting fruit at the front, with none of the roundness you expect from this grape, and then, without a transition, punishing acidity.

But you have it with food (maybe especially food that was roasted in butter) and BAM:  it all comes together.  The fat in the food (and aside from the butter let's not forget all that healthful fishfat built into the salmon) binds the elements of the wine that seemed disjunct when the wine was drunk by itself.

And the wine, meanwhile, has what it takes (a lot of acid, mainly) to cut through all that fat in the food.

Even better, I'm now tasting some of that tarragon in the Viognier.

weird. I don't think of Viognier as having punishing acidity, but I also don't think of chile has having underripeness issues.

[Wilfrid]

9 hours ago, Sneakeater said:

Wait are you saying there are Irish people in Ireland?

There are. What there is not is corned beef (unless they are now following the American fashion).

[Sneakeater]

3 hours ago, Anthony Bonner said:

weird. I don't think of Viognier as having punishing acidity, but I also don't think of chile has having underripeness issues.

I attribute all that to its being Natural, not to its being Viognier or from Chile.

As I tried to convey (I guess not directly enough), at first approach it didn't remotely taste like Viognier.  (And the Natural Chilean wines certainly don't taste like standard-practice Chilean wines.)

Edited March 19 by Sneakeater

[Sneakeater]

1 hour ago, Wilfrid said:

There are. What there is not is corned beef (unless they are now following the American fashion).

Yeah I've read they discovered it in America at Jewish and German delis.  Which I guess makes my dinner 100% authentic:   bought at a German butcher, cooked by a Jew.

[Sneakeater]

34 minutes ago, Sneakeater said:

I attribute all that to its being Natural, not to its being Viognier or from Chile.

As I tried to convey (I guess not directly enough), at first approach it didn't remotely taste like Viognier.  (And the Natural Chilean wines certainly don't taste like standard-practice Chilean wines.)

You know, the way a lot of Natural Wines taste more like "Natural Wine" than whatever grape they're made from.

[Wilfrid]

1 hour ago, Sneakeater said:

Yeah I've read they discovered it in America at Jewish and German delis.  Which I guess makes my dinner 100% authentic:   bought at a German butcher, cooked by a Jew.

Makes sense, of course, because when I was growing up in the UK corned beef was only available in Jewish delis, where it was called "salt beef." I loved salt beef sandwiches. Corned beef sandwiches, in the UK and Ireland, would have meant:

 

[backyardchef]

1 hour ago, Wilfrid said:

 

 

This should have had a trigger warning

[Sneakeater]

I'll be honest:  I love that stuff.

[Wilfrid]

Me too, but see the confusion? 

[Sneakeater]

In my American ignorance, I always figured that canned corn beef was what would happen if you took regular corned beef and compressed it into a block for canning.

[Sneakeater]

Seared Crescent duck breast with Five Spice powder under a sort of lazybones mushroom civet.  On rice.

Sautéed wild broccoli rabe with garlic on the side.

There's one wine grape that's a slam dunk with Five Spice Powder.

2021 Rémi Poujol Le Temps fait Tout

And this wine is 50% that grape, Carignan.  Then there's 30% Grenache and 20% Syrah.

And in this natural wine some of that Carignan mild-spice flavor comes through.  Other than that, there's a great general vivaciousness -- this is one of those wines that POP -- ending in puckering sour finish.  Now you either like that finish or you don't -- that's why some people just don't like Natural wine -- but with a nicely fatty duck breast (nobody’s ever going to accuse Crescent’s ducks of being too lean) it was very welcome to me.

Edited March 22 by Sneakeater

[Sneakeater]

Purim is the most festive day on the Jewish calendar.  The main traditional stricture is that you get blind drunk.  Perhaps for that reason, there are few traditional foods for the holiday -- even though a celebration is very much enjoined.

Sure, there are hamantaschen, as everybody knows.  But that's a dessert snack treat, not a meal.  And by analogy to hamantaschen, you're traditionally supposed to have savory filled dumplings.  But what about the rest of the meal?  I mean, you've got to sop up all that mandatory alcohol with something.

There's a recent trend of having Persian food, since the (totally fictional) Purim story takes place in Persia.  I object to this on every intellectual level:  as a fairly committed atheist, I observe Jewish holidays to connect with my ancestors, not to engage in role-play commemorating total historical fictions (especially since this particular fiction, if you read it to the very end, reflects a mindset that, while understandable in an oppressed marginalized population, leads demonstrably to unspeakable evil when that population gets power).  And I can tell you pretty definitively that, whatever my great-grandparents might have eaten on Purim in the Shetl, it wasn't Persian food.

Nevertheless, for want of a better idea, I ended up making a Persian style braised lamb shank* to follow my bowl of mushroom-sauerkraut pierogi (savory filled dumplings are not a problem in my new neighborhood) tossed in butter and scallion (we're counting sauerkraut and maybe scallion as the green vegetables in this dinner).  This lamb was another dish that amazingly came out just the way I intended.  I'm especially relieved as the spice blend I came up with was a lot more elaborate than what I'd usually try, so I was really risking an unbalanced mess.

I had the lamb shank and its supernal gravy over basmati rice.  Usually, I wouldn't have rice and dumplings in the same meal. But hey, it's the most festive night on the Jewish calendar.

Hamantaschen for dessert.  I get what @backyardchef means when he says he respects Rudy's Bakery & Cafe but doesn't love it -- but they nail hamantaschen.  Except for their only making prune and apricot and not mohn.  Maybe if I whine enough.  (Not that my whining has had them having chocolate chip cookie dough cake as anything more than an occasional special.)

Of course you'd have a Moravian wine with all this.

2020 Milan Nestarec Nach

Kidding aside, a blend of Blaufränkisch, Pinot Noir, and St. Laurent would seem like a promising pairing for lamb shanks braised in, among other things, pomegranate nectar (hell, I threw in some Grenadine).  Also, its 1L bottle size permitted me to pour some wine into the braising liquid (something they'd never do in Iran -- but the last I checked, Queens isn't in Iran) while still leaving enough to insure my compliance with drunkenness mitzvah.

Yeah, this WAS a perfect pairing.    Bright tart fruit -- REALLY tart -- that even tasted a bit like pomegranate.  Plentiful acid to cut through the fat (these are lamb shanks, after all) and also to match the black limes I put into the supernal gravy.

A different kind of pairing would have had some serious tannins to bond with all the fat in this dish.  But on this particularly festive night, I wanted something that brooded less.  (A LOT less, as it turned out:  this wine is expressly made for quaffing.)

___________________________________________________________-

* My initial thought for the main dish was a sort of pomegranate-glazed lamb ribs:  that seemed to nod to Persia without putting on a costume.  The counterguy at the Ridgewood Pork Store informed me that they didn't have lamb ribs this week, as they were saving their lamb onslaught for Easter next week.

ME:  I'm more concerned with Purim, which is TOMORROW.

ALL THREE GUYS BEHIND THE COUNTER, IN UNISON:  For Purim you want a lamb shank.

ME:  I should have known that you guys would know more about Purim dinner than I do.

Edited March 25 by Sneakeater

[MitchW]

6 hours ago, Sneakeater said:

ME:  I'm more concerned with Purim, which is TOMORROW.

ALL THREE GUYS BEHIND THE COUNTER, IN UNISON:  For Purim you want a lamb shank.

ME:  I should have known that you guys would know more about Purim dinner than I do.

Wait'll you get to Passover!

[Sneakeater]

I've not been well for a few days.  So this was the first non-sick-food dinner I've had in a minute.

It was also the first smoking I've done in my new apartment.  A big day here.

Smoked (Crescent) duck breast.  On fried rice.

Aside from some greens (overwintered spinach -- YUM -- and wild broccoli rabe), garlic, and scallion, the fried rice contained some pineberries (strawberries that are somehow cultivated to taste heavily of pineapple):  a pretty great idea, if I say so myself.  I used the basmati rice left over from my Purim dinner (my rice cooker won't make less than a full cup of it) -- which meant it had a sizeable glob of the pomegranate-based gravy from that dinner on it (great with duck, and a wonderful foil for the pineberries).  And in place of an egg, I fried in some duck blood.  This worked so well that I'm afraid of what the reason is you never hear of its being done.

It seemed to me that a tart light Beaujolais would work here.

2022 Elisa Guerin Beaujolais Villages

Elisa Guerin is new Beaujolais producer who's getting a lot of love from Beaujie crowd.

Well new in a way.  She comes from an established family in Moulin a Vent, albeit not in the very very front rank.  Nevertheless, her childhood playmates were Jean Foillard's son and Jean-Louis Dutraive's daughter.  She originally had thought she'd do something other than winemaking with her life, but the family vines called.  After a very short apprenticeship, she was handed her family's properties a few years ago.

This label, however, comes from purchased grapes.  Guerin intends to buy a (high altitude) Beaujolais Villages vineyard when an appropriate one comes available, but for now she's sourcing her Village grapes from others (all high altitude).

While Guerin's excellent Moulins are clearly meant for aging, this wine just as clearly isn't.  It's her FUN cuvée.  It snaps.  It crackles.  It POPS.

This is very evidently a Natural wine -- and not one that will appeal to people who don't like that style.  It has a sour finish, and the fruit is underlain with funk.

But there's TONS of that fruit, and it vibrates.  Yet you can tell this wine comes from the environs of Moulin a Vent:  it's not all THAT light.  Which, despite my intentions in selecting it, worked very nicely with the full-flavored smoked duck (there's a reason that smoking duck is one of Mrs. Donabe's favorite uses of the Ibushi Gin).

Still, don't drink this a degree above cellar temp.

Edited March 30 by Sneakeater

[Sneakeater]

On 3/24/2024 at 7:10 AM, MitchW said:

Wait'll you get to Passover!

I'm sure they'll be giving me their favored Matzoh Ball recipe.

[Sneakeater]

Pineberries are pretty great, BTW, if you're ever able to get some.

[Sneakeater]

If there's any Other People's Holiday that bodes ill for My Own People, it's Easter.  But I'm not gonna let a chance to have a holiday dinner pass me by.  So I put on some blatantly anti-Semitic Bach (the Saint John Passion) (and then some more sublime, and less anti-Semitic, Bach [the Saint Matthew Passion], this one in the great newish recording by Rafaël Pichon and Pygmalian) and away I went.

I'm not here to tell other people how to interpret their traditions.  But at least in Anglo-America, the trad Easter dinner main dishes are lamb or ham.  So when I saw that the Ridgewood Pork Store had made a ham out of lamb, I saw exactly what they were doing.  I made a maple-mustard glaze for it, and roasted some potatoes along with it.

No white asparagus yet.  I had the rattiest supermarket Mexican green asparagus you could imagine.  It was not a treat.

Ham made from lamb called for either a Burgundy or a heavier Beaujolais.  You can guess which I chose.

2022 Domaine du Bon Pas "Derrière les Fagots"

This is labeled a Vin de France, but it's made from Gamay in Beaujolais.  I guess the producer is another maverick who can't be arsed.

This is very much a Natural wine:  more funk than fruit, and mucky funk at that.  If, like me, you like that style, you'll like this.  But I wouldn't blame anyone for not liking it.

 

Edited April 1 by Sneakeater

[Sneakeater]

Speaking of Rafaël Pichon and Pygmalian, their recording from last year of the Monteverdi Vespers is spectacular.  I urge you to check it out.

Edited April 1 by Sneakeater

[Sneakeater]

And their Saint Matthew Passion really IS good.

[backyardchef]

13 hours ago, Sneakeater said:

 

No white asparagus yet.  I had the rattiest supermarket Mexican green asparagus you could imagine.  It was not a treat.

 

 

Valentino's on Fresh Pond Road has nice produce. Not super exotic, but generally a nice selection. They also have a decent cheese counter and butcher shop nestled inside. 

https://valentinofoodmarketridgewood.com/

[Sneakeater]

I’ve been!  It was too out of my way for Sunday though. 

[Sneakeater]

Lobster ravioli (not made by me duh) with a tree tomato cream sauce and RAAAAAAAAAAAAMMMMMMMPPPPPPPSSSSSSSSSS!!!!!!!!!!!

The idea behind the tree tomatoes was that their citrusy tang would be good with lobster.  Seemed to work.  I didn't really expect the tropical fruit accents — but they were not unwelcome.

Flame-roasted asparagus from the Kazmatik (where I'd previously roasted the tree tomatoes) (need to get their bitter skin off!) on the side.

2022 Vini Rabasco Cancellino

Trebbiano is far from my favorite grrape.  But they can seemingly do no wrong in Abruzzo these days (if you're careful about the producer).  And this Trebbianno d'Abruzzo is a clear winner.

It's grown just inland from the Adriatic, and it has a salinity that's really good with seafood.  While not remotely off-dry, it lands between tart and round:  great for a cream sauce.  The only thing missing is exotic fruit to go with the tree tomato -- but it'll live.

 

Edited April 10 by Sneakeater