Bistro Seafood

We had a friend over for dinner lat night to celebrate her birthday which was actually a couple of days ago. We asked her what she wanted for dinner and she said she didn’t know. When we said if you could go to dinner anywhere where would you go she said Southpark, which is a Portland restaurant and wine bar that does a lot of Mediterranean seafood. Mediterranean food is probably the most solid cuisine I know so this actually worked out well for me. What I decided to do was a bistro inspired meal, which is something that I love, and something that I do better than haute cuisine. I like the homey honesty of good bistro food and it’s fun food to share with friends.

I thought about different ideas, but finally decided to do an appetizer with clams and a main course of tuna steaks. For the clams, I went with a Basque influenced base. I sautéed some shallots, garlic and tomato in a little olive oil and then added the flesh of two dried New Mexico chiles that I had soaked in hot water for about 30 minutes. I split the chiles open, removed the seeds and veins and then scraped the thin amount of flesh from off the skins. This was minced and added to the pot. I let all of this cook down a little and then deglazed it with white wine. When we were ready to eat, I threw the clams in turned the heat up high and waited for them to open which took about three minutes. I served the clams in individual soup bowls with some parmesan toasts on the side that could be used to soak up the juices. I sprinkled some chopped parsley over the entire thing right before serving.

To keep the whole bistro like effect I was looking for, I served an inexpensive chardonnay in tumblers as opposed to stem ware. This was a meal about the food, and I wanted softer, easy drinking wines to go with it. The sauce had a little bit of chile bite, nothing too extreme, but still enough to kill an expensive bottle of wine. An easy drinking fruity white like this was perfect and it captured the easy going nature of a great bistro meal.

For the main course, I thought about ideas all day long but had a hard time focusing on a single idea. I knew the tuna steaks would be seared quickly on both sides but hadn’t really come up with any thing definitive. I finally decided to make a white bean puree, with just a little olive oil, garlic, and lemon juice and then serve the tuna steaks on top of the puree. I found some beautiful orange, red and yellow peppers and decided to sauté those with garlic and a little tomato to serve on top of the steaks, which is a rough adaptation of traditional Basquaise preparations from traditional French cooking. Instead of deglazing the peppers and tomatoes with white wine, I opted instead to use sherry because I thought the more intense nutty flavor would work well with the tuna.

I debated the wine choice for a long time, because I wanted to serve a red, but this needed a light, fruity red. I had looked for a gamay or Beaujolais, but the place where I was looking had a limited import section. Most of the field blends I found where a little too robust. What I needed was gamay or a soft grenache, and finally settled on a Cotes du Rhone, which although it had some nice spice, also had good fruit and was soft enough to not overpower anything. It worked well and there was a good bistro sensibility to the match.

For dessert we had a spice pound cake and vanilla ice cream. My wife had made the cake and it was moist, intense and very rich, with a deep brown sugar intensity. It was so good, that it was very hard not to eat too much of it, so we did. After all it was a birthday celebration.