The Rest of Us (cont.)

[Sneakeater]

Hmmmm.

[Wilfrid]

I actually do buy and cook pig anus. Sorry. It can be good. I have not seen cow anus but if it’s on the scale of bull penis it may be a bit too much.

[Sneakeater]

I'm almost certain I've had pig anus somewhere.

I wish I could remember where.

[Sneakeater]

A kind of Creole Cassoulet with andouille and shrimp.

You would not believe how good this was.

Fried okra on the side.

It just seemed obvious to me that I'd want a Bordeaux Blanc with this.

2019 Chateau Turcaud "Cuvée Majeur"

I think this Entre Deux Mers estate's entry-level white is one of the great wine bargains in the world:  a truly excellent Bordeaux Blanc for less than $20 (the last time I looked).  So I was eager to try their senior white cuvée.  Which, as I previously reported, I have found disappointing:  not bad, but a little worse than the cadet cuvée.  It was another case of a winemaker's seeking refinement and losing the guts of the wine.  Or, as Little Richard put it, "he got what he wanted but lost what he had."

With a dish as assertively flavored as that cassoulet, quibbles about the wine evaporate.  Who can taste them?  True, the gutsier junior cuvée would have been better, as it could have duked it out with the deeply flavorful cassoulet.  But this tasted good enough.

Drinking the dregs by themselves, does seem a wee bit wan.

Edited October 1, 2023 by Sneakeater

[Sneakeater]

Best deployment of Ghost Pepper yet!

[Sneakeater]

Interestingly, I committed a fuck-up in cooking the cassoulet that ended up more than doubling the cooking time.

But, for obvious reasons, I'm positive it made the cassoulet come out better.

While I wasn't really planning to eat way past midnight tonight, it was actually kind of worth it.

Edited October 1, 2023 by Sneakeater

[Sneakeater]

This will be insanely good left over.  As long as the shrimp doesn't go toxic.

[Sneakeater]

The fuck-up also made a total mess of my stovetop.

Soft Scrub is so good at cleaning up messes, I can only guess at the toxic shit that must be in it.

[Sneakeater]

Fried blowfish tails with Comeback Sauce.

Comeback Sauce is great stuff!  And I'd set mine against anybody's from actual Mississippi.

Blowfish tails are, of course, delicious when fried.  The problem is the bone you have to eat around.  But in compensation, nature gave them a handle!

On the side, some green beans sautéed with onion and tomato.

What would have been really good with the blowfish tails, is peas.  But I couldn't see taking vegetables from the freezer when I have so many in the crisper.

Another wine pairing that essentially made itself.

2017 Domaine Barmès-Buecher Crémant d'Alsace

With all that FRY you want bubbles.

As far as I can tell, this is a blend of Pinot Blanc and Chardonnay -- two grapes that are so similar you wonder why you'd bother.

Can't argue with the results, though.  Bone dry.  Tart.  Very luscious.  Pretty persistent, too.

Good backstory:  Barmès-Buecher was formed when someone from the Barmès family married someone from the Buecher family 40 years or so ago, leading to the consolidation of the two competing families' 17th-Century holdings.  Now it's run by their son.

Another example of how not all biodynamic wines are Natural.

This is quite elegant, and very obviously expertly made:  everything is in place.

This cost just south of $30, if I remember correctly.  Worth every penny.

Edited October 2, 2023 by Sneakeater

[Sneakeater]

About those green beans.

I saw some recent Jacques Pepin video where Jacques expresses confusion at how green beans no longer have strings.  I've been wondering about that myself.  When did that change?  What caused it?  (Breeding, I imagine.)

So there is no longer such a thing as string beans.

Don't get me wrong:  I don't miss stringing them.

(Jacques also expressed his pique at how people these days tend to undercook their green beans.  To which I can only say, "YES!")

Edited October 2, 2023 by Sneakeater

[Sneakeater]

On 9/30/2023 at 6:52 PM, Sneakeater said:

I'm almost certain I've had pig anus somewhere.

I wish I could remember where.

It's called "bung", right?

[Sneakeater]

You'd think eating pig anus is something you'd REMEMBER.

[Sneakeater]

The key characteristic of a good Crémant d'Alsace is a very full flavor with a very thin texture.  You can see why that would be appealing.

This wine certainly does that.

[Sneakeater]

This wine is just so APPEALING.

[MitchW]

On 10/1/2023 at 1:49 AM, Sneakeater said:

Soft Scrub is so good at cleaning up messes, I can only guess at the toxic shit that must be in it.

I think it's much less bad than you think.

[Wilfrid]

9 hours ago, Sneakeater said:

It's called "bung", right?

It is. Bayard Meat Market always has some. I guess technically its really the whole rectum rather than just the anus. 

[Sneakeater]

I happily eat intestines.  So why should the anus bother me?

Edited October 3, 2023 by Sneakeater

[Sneakeater]

Sometimes you get ideas.

When I went to the fishmonger a couple of days ago to pick up the shrimp (fresh and dried) for my Creole Cassoulet, they had this red grouper that looked just gorgeous.  I had a dinner slot still open over the week, and I just couldn't resist getting some.

I had gotten some fresh ginger at the Greenmarket that morning.  So I quickly formed the idea of pan roasting the grouper and having it with a lemon-ginger pan sauce.

This turned out better than I could have hoped.

Grouper is pretty full-flavored.  It didn't bow to the sauce.

On the side, some more green beans, simply steamed this time.  With butter duh.

The wine was also an "idea".  Sometime this morning it struck me that the lemon-ginger sauce would enjoy interacting with a sweet Chenin Blanc.  Not a Demi-Sec; a full Moelleux.  I figured that the honey that inflects even dry Chenin Blancs would compliment lemon and ginger; and I figured that the tartness of that unsweetened sauce (well except for the Vermouth blanc I put into it) (and all that mellowing butter . . . ) (I had toyed with the idea of making it a cream sauce -- but I wanted to be able to taste what the grouper was like) (and I knew by the time of cooking I'd be having this sweet wine with it), with its sharp ginger flavor, would be complemented by a sweet wine.

1985 Domaine Huet Vouvray Moelleux "Le Mont"

This, too, worked even better than I had hoped.  So well that I have to wonder why this isn't a famous pairing.

It doesn't hurt, of course, that this is simply a splendid wine.  The interplay between the sweet honey and the tart fruit elements, overlaid with more exotic fruit flavors, is um profound.  And it tastes like it has another century ahead of it.

When you open a Grand Old Bottle like this, you hope the food will live up to it.  So it's a good thing that fish turned out so well.

Edited October 4, 2023 by Sneakeater

[Sneakeater]

One other idea I had was that the sauce would be improved by -- that the lemon and ginger would welcome -- having slices of celery cooked into it (with the leaves than being used as garnish).

Remarkably, that seems to have turned out to have been the case.

Edited October 3, 2023 by Sneakeater

[Sneakeater]

Roasted saddle of rabbit with roasted maitake.  Spaghetti alla Chitarra with goat cheese goop.  Sautéed broccolini.

A simple roast really cries out for a Grand Old Wine.  And the rabbit and mushrooms kind of wanted a Pinot Noir (if they weren't getting a Chardonnay, which tonight they weren't).

1999 Bouchard Père & Fils Grand Vin de Beaune Grèves Vigne de L'Enfant Jésus

I don't drink a lot of wines like this.  I drink plenty of unNatural wine, sure, but it tends to be of the low-cost-high-typicity kind (which I find to supply some of the best values in Wineworld).  I don't drink a whole lot of Great Mainstream Bottles.  I think they turn me off the same way Big Mainstream Opera Stars do:  I just like things that are more unassuming.

But I took my first sip of this and I was like, wow.

It's smooth.  But it's DEEP.

First off, how can a nearly 25-year-old wine have so much fruit?  And not just fruit, but really flavorful fruit.  Age has robbed it of its brightness -- but that's the point of wines like this.  The fruit is there.  It's intense.  But it's smooth.

Then you get a cascade of flavors afterward.  Everything you'd find on the floor of a forest except shit.  And you taste each of these accents individually:  this wine is amazingly precise.  Then at the end, something reminiscent of Coca-Cola I swear to God.  But it takes you a real long time to get to that end.

This wine is definitely in its window.  You don't feel bad about drinking it.  But I wouldn't be surprised if it were going to keep on improving for almost the same amount of time its been in existence already.

Edited October 4, 2023 by Sneakeater

[Sneakeater]

I tempered my expectations of this because, 1re Cru or not, it's just a Côte de Beaune.  But this could be a Nuits-Saint-Georges or something for the way it drinks.

(I guess the price factor of its being "just" a Côtes de Beaune has something to do with why I came to have it.)

Edited October 4, 2023 by Sneakeater

[Sneakeater]

Guess what I steeped in the broccolini's olive oil before sauteing?

[relbbaddoof]

7 minutes ago, Sneakeater said:

Guess what I steeped in the broccolini's olive oil before sauteing?

Ghostly weed?

Edited October 4, 2023 by relbbaddoof

[Sneakeater]

Ghost Pepper!

[relbbaddoof]

8 minutes ago, Sneakeater said:

Ghost Pepper!

See, I was right on the ghost, but I do think weed has something to do with your overall exuberance.

I say this as a longtime fan of this thread. Along with stone's "shooting a deer" thread from days past -- eerily reminiscent of Orwell's shooting an elephant essay -- your thread provides backbone to what's often flab

 

Edited October 4, 2023 by relbbaddoof