Thursday, January 31, 2008

January 30th - Chicken Rice Pilaf

January 30th – Chicken Rice Pilaf

We’ve been trying to save money so I’ve been splurging less on food and I’ve been making a concerted effort to clear out the freezer and fridge to make more space. So I was rooting around for something to make and came upon various sundry items, including a small petit sirloin steak, a lone boneless chicken thigh, and a few other odds and ends that wouldn’t really make a meal. How do I end up with this stuff? I also had no potatoes, and not in the mood for pasta. However, we still do have about 15 pounds of basmati rice so I started thinking about a pilaf. We had used the last of the homemade chicken stock for the dogs (the dogs think that the stock is actually theirs and give me dirty looks when I use it), but I did have some canned stock that we keep around just in case.
I decided to make a rice pilaf with the lone chicken thigh and hoped I could find enough other things to make it a real meal. I started by sautéing a couple of finely chopped onions in a combination of olive oil and butter. When they were translucent, I added some garlic and the cut up chicken. I didn’t have any fresh ginger so I added some dried ginger, cardamom pods, saffron, cinnamon, cloves, rose water to the pan and let the spices cook to lose their raw flavor. Next I added a cup and a half of washed basmati rice and let it cook in the oil for a few minutes before adding a handful of raisins and about three cups of stock. I brought it to a boil and then covered it and lowered it to a simmer.

While it cooked, I toasted some shelled pistachios in a small fry pan which I figured I would add and stir in at the end. I normally add nuts last in a pilaf because I want the crunch and don’t want them to get soggy. A lot of pilafs that I’ve made have been flat tasting because I always underestimate how much flavor rice absorbs. This time I made sure that I added a lot of salt and enough spices to carry through the whole dish. I plated it and added a small spoon full of yogurt on the side as a contrast. The coolness and tang of the yogurt was a good foil to spicy richness of the pilaf. The raisins and spices gave a nice sweetness and the pistachios gave just enough crunch and texture.

I had a pint of the spiced tripel with it which went surprisingly well. Maybe it’s the fact that they both have some ginger, plus the tripel has a lot of fruit notes form the hops and the yeast. Considering that this beer overwhelms most food, it was nice to find something that it really worked with.

January 29th - More Indian Food and Brown Ale

January 29th – More Indian Food

So I appear to be on the ground beef roll here. It’s been three nights in a row where ground beef is the cornerstone of the meal. I still had some cabbage and carrots leftover from last Sunday and needed to use them so I decided to make some keema, the ground meat Indian dish, to go with it and to make a meal out of it.

I started by sautéing onions in oil until they were browned and then added ginger, garlic, ground coriander, cumin, fenugreek, turmeric, green chili, dried red chili and garam masala. Once all of the spices had cooked a little, I added the meat and browned it. I added some water and turned it down to a simmer. The dish smelled great but was a little bland looking. I wished I had some peas to add to give it some color but only had some spinach on hand. It’s not traditional, but there are keema saag dishes, so I figured it would work and it did add a nice note of color to the food. I served the keema, the reheated cabbage and the carrots (which I served room temperature) with some rice and pulled a pint of Brown ale, which has turned out to be a great beer with spicy food. Quick and it helped me clear out the fridge.

January 28th - Spaghetti and Meat Sauce

January 28th – Spaghetti and Meat Sauce
I like meat sauce but don’t seem to make it much. It doesn’t take much time, but I still don’t always do it and don’t really have a good answer as to why. Every time I do make it and eat it, I wonder why don’t do more often. I’ll never figure it out. My stomach was still a little uneasy, and despite the acid in the tomatoes, spaghetti and meat sauce is comfort food.

Everyone has their own version of making meat sauce and I’m no different. Mine isn’t complicated and I think what makes it so good is that it’s so basic. I learned how to make it from my mother and while we’re not Italian, my mother learned it from a friend who was Sicilian, and, from what we’ve been told, it’s a typical Sicilian sauce. My sauce uses ground beef, canned tomatoes, tomato paste, olive oil, garlic, basil, oregano, and a pinch of sugar. Pretty basic. It’s not a Bolognese sauce, it’s just plain meat sauce. In fact if you’ve seen the Godfather, you’ve pretty much seen this sauce being made. In one scene during the gang war, the men are all hiding out in an apartment and Clemenza is cooking. He says to Michael:

“Hey, come over here, kid, learn something. You never know, you might have to cook for 20 guys someday. You see, you start out with a little bit of oil. Then you fry some garlic. Then you throw in some tomatoes, tomato paste, you fry it; ya make sure it doesn't stick. You get it to a boil; you shove in all your sausage and your meatballs. And a little bit o' wine. An' a little bit o' sugar, and that's my trick."

I normally don’t add the wine, and I brown the meat in the pan as opposed to adding meatballs and sausages, but that’s it. (If I did use meatballs and sausages I’d do it like he said. Like most braises and stews, this improves with time, but it can be a great sauce even if you only simmer it for an hour, which is what I did this time because I was pressed for time.
I love inexpensive red wine with spaghetti and meat sauce but had none in the house and didn’t feel like pulling a big gun. So I went with the spiced tripel instead. Not a great substitute and not a great match, but it has the brawn of a rustic style of red wine and that was a s close as I was going to get. And as I sat there eating the pasta and sauce I wondered why I don’t make it more often.

January 27th - Mince

January 27th – Mince
I was feeling under the weather today with some kind of stomach flu. I wanted some kind of comfort food and fell back on making mince and mashed potatoes which I hoped would sit well in my stomach. Mince, a stew of ground beef, onions, carrots, and Worcestershire sauce, is ultimate comfort food to me (right up there with plain roasted chicken) and it’s hard to think of something that screams comfort food more than mashed potatoes. Normally I would have chosen brown ale or Scottish ale with mince, but beer didn’t sound good. Red wine is actually good at fighting some stomach bugs (it’s the tannins and anthocyans I think), so I opened a 1996 Condada de Haza to have with it. It was an unlikely pairing but very good. The Haza had round fruit flavors with a wonderful spiciness. The flavors of mince are very basic but rich, and the wine played into it and made me feel somewhat better.

January 26th - Pork Chops with Apple Gingere Chutney and Sweet Potatoe Puree

January 26th – Pork Chops with Apple Ginger Chutney and a Sweet Potato Puree
Even though I like a lot of fusion food, I can be a little iffy on some of it because I think that a lot of fusion food isn’t well thought out and combines flavors that don’t’ work well. Ming Tsai, the host of PBS’s Simply Ming and the owner of Blue Ginger, seems to know how to make East West fusion food work. Along with Jean Georges Vongerichten, Ming Tsai is probably my favorite fusion chef. I’ve been watching the Simply Ming episodes on DVD and decided to make a Ming-inspired meal. I was paging through one of his books and came upon his recipe for Apple Ginger chutney and his recipes that use it. I like fruit chutneys and make a fair amount of them when I’m doing more elaborate Indian inspired meals . His recipe was pretty basic: apples, ginger, red onion, rice vinegar, and apple juice. I didn’t have apples juice, so I substituted jiggery and a little water to get the sweetness the juice would have (OK, not the same thing, but sometimes you just work with what you have on hand and make things work.). The rest of the dish is easy. Roast some sweet potatoes until they’re tender, then cut them open and scoop out the flesh. Mash it with salt, pepper and a little maples syrup. Sauté the pork chops (after brining them). Pull the chops from the pan, add the chutney, some stock, and white wine and reduce it. Add the chops back in and turn them to coat them in the sauce. To plate them, mound some of the sweet potatoes on a plate. Lean the pork chop against it and put the sauce over it.
Ming is a big wine guy and has sensible wine choices in his books and on his show, but it was a beer night. I had an excellent Butte Creek Organic Porter while I was cooking (I’ve never had a bad beer from Butte Creeek). It’s a terrific porter. Nice malt sweetness, good hop balance, a little roast and wonderful dark chocolate note. With the meal I had a Dogfish Head 60 Minute IPA, which has hops added to it continuously for 60 minutes. It has a distinct citrus note and although it has great hop flavors, only clocks in at 60 IBU’s (which is still pretty bitter). The malt is solid, but this is a beer about hops. There are citrus and pine notes and a little bit of citrus and orange notes.
Pork has an inherent sweetness, as do the sweet potatoes and the apples. The vinegar in the chutney is a decent foil, but with this many sweet components, it’s nice to have something bitter like IPA to counter it. It was a nice match that was all about contrasts of sweetness and bitterness.

January 25th - Spaghetti with Shrimp

January 25th – Spaghetti with Shrimp

More proof that my cooking goes in cycles. A few days ago I was saying that I hadn’t cooked pasta in a while and now we have two pastas dishes a few nights a part. I had gone into work early and was supposed to get out of work early, but things didn’t work that way. I shouldn’t complain because I was able to scoot out a few hours early last week, but I got home in a crabby mood but still wanted something good to eat, but didn’t want to stop at the store on the way home. I knew I had some shrimp in the freezer and started to thaw them cold water while I came up with a plan. Before you give me grief about using frozen shrimp, be aware that most shrimp that’s sold commercially has been frozen. If you buy it non-frozen at your fish monger, ask if it was previously frozen. Most of it has been. Shrimp doesn’t hold well unfrozen, so unless you live near a shrimp region, chances are you’re paying premium dollars for something that was already frozen. My advice, and also that of such people as Mark Bittman, is to buy shrimp frozen. It’s normally cheaper because you’re not paying someone else to thaw it for you. I normally thaw it in cold water. Sometimes I add some salt to brine it a little, but most times it’s just a quick thaw in plain old water.
I thawed the shrimp and realized that the fastest thing to do was probably to make some pasta. I chopped some garlic and added it to a pan with olive oil and a little bit of crushed red pepper, while I got a pot of water boiling for the pasta. I cut the garlic into large slices so it would have a chance to flavor the oil before it burned. When the garlic was golden brown I pulled the pan form the heat. I added some spaghetti to the boiling water and let it cook until just before it was al dente (since it will cook in the sauce). I grabbed a little bit of the pasta water for the sauce in case I needed some liquid.
While the pasta drained, I threw the thawed shrimp into the pan on high heat so it cooked through in about 1-2 minutes. Then I added the spaghetti and tossed it. It need a little of the pasta water to smooth it out. Then I finished it with some lemon juice and (in a most un-Italian fashion) parmesan cheese. I had more Belgian Golden ale because it has worked so well for the tuna and capers with lemon a few nights before. A quick meal and on the table in the time it took to cook the pasta.

January 24th - Steak and potatoes

January 24th – Steak and Potatoes
I still am very much a steak and potato guy. I can’t eat it every night, but there are times when I still crave them both. I’m also a big fan of hash browns and hashes of various types. One of my favorite ways to cook potatoes is to cube them and then to cook them in oil with garlic, onions, thyme and sometimes red chili. Since the potatoes need the longest time, I usually add them first and cook them most of the way before adding some finely diced onions and garlic. Invariably they take longer than I think they should, but I still enjoy it immensely.
For the steak, I used a petit sirloin that we had. It’s a tough and often inelegant cut of meat, but if you cook it quickly so it gets a good sear but stays rare in the middle, it can be a nice beefy flavored cut. (If you cook I past medium-rare it can be tough and flavorless.) I didn’t do a pan sauce this time because I was hungry and just used salt and pepper before searing the steak in a cast iron pan.
A great steak deserves great red wine, but in this case I decided that a decent steak deserved a great wine. I love syrah and am glad that it’s being grown in more places, but the northern Rhone valley in France is still home to some of the world’s best syrahs. In the fine wine world, there are still some relative bargains to be had there. Crozes Hermitage is such a region. Although the wines don’t have the power of true Hermitage, they can be fantastic wines with a great sense of terroir. I had a 1996 La Guiraud Crozes Hermitage from Alain Graillot which had held up beautifully and was still fairly tannic and rich. It had deep dark berry notes, rich intensity and some earthy notes. It could have used a richer entrée, like a steak with a wild mushroom sauce or something else intense, but it was still fantastic with the beef. Pearls before swine? Maybe but entirely satisfying.

January 23rd - Tempeh in Chile Garlic Tamarind Sauce

January 23rd Tempeh in Chile Ginger Tamarind Sauce
I like tempeh but confess that I don’t know a lot of ways to cook it. Tempeh, for those who don’t know, is a fermented soy product that originated in Indonesia, but doesn’t seem to be used much in many other Asian countries and seems virtually non-existent in traditional cooking from China, Thailand and Japan (as far as I can tell). It comes in small cakes of about 8-10 ounces and seems to be best when it’s sliced and cooked in oil before adding it to anything else. A lot of people say it has a mushroom-like flavor and it’s a good comparison, although it has its own flavor to me.
Because of its obscurity, there don’t seem to be many “authentic” (ie, Indonesian and Malaysian) tempeh recipes around. Most that I’ve seen come out of what I like to call the “hippie vegetarian” school and don’t’ sound very appetizing to me (tempeh-topped pizza or tempeh tacos, anyone?). My tempeh repertoire is pretty straight forward at this point and most of it comes from James Oseland’s Cradle of Flavor, which I’ve written about earlier. The recipes he lists are authentic and delicious.
Like all cooks, I substituted what I had on hand for what I recalled his recipe used. I started by cutting the tempeh into strips and then browned it in oil on both of the cut sides. I pulled it out of the pan, then added some red onion, green chili and ginger and sautéed them. Like many Asian dishes, it has a balance of sweet, sour and hot. To add the sour element, I degalezed the pan with some tamarind paste dissolved in water. Then I added some jiggery to give the contrasting sweet flavor. The original recipe called for galangal root, but I didn’t have any and used ginger (though I will agree with James Oseland that the two are not interchangeable and have very different flavors). I added the tempeh slices back in and let it reduce to a sweet sour syrup.
For a side dish, I stir fried some cabbage with garlic and red pepper and then served everything with basmati rice. I had a pint of the brown ale and it went nicely. The malt sweetness worked well with the chilis and was a nice contrast to the tanginess of the tamarind and the earthy notes of the tempeh. I need to learn to make other tempeh recipes, but so far this one has been a nice addition to my vegetarian repertoire.

Saturday, January 26, 2008

January 22nd - Pasta with Tuna, Capers and Lemon

January 22nd – Pasta with Tuna and Capers

One thing about keeping a food diary like this is that you start to notice certain trends in what you cook. I tend to think that I cook a lot of Mediterranean influenced foods, but of late it seems that I don’t really cook much of it. I’m starting to notice that a lot of my cooking is cyclical. I tend to work certain things in for a few weeks, and then rotate them out for something else that’s catching my interest at the time. I realize I haven’t cooked any pasta in probably more than a month, and for a while it was something that I cooked at least a couple of times a week.

Most of the pastas I do are pretty quick and most don’t require a sauce that takes hours to cook. I like a lot of the Sunday Ragu type of sauces, but don’t make them much. Most of what I do tends to be things that I can sauté in a pan by the time that the pasta cooks, which means something that cooks in less than 20 minutes including prep.

There are actually a fair amount of tuna sauces in traditional Italian cooking. Giuliano Bugialli mentions some in his Fine Art of Italian Cooking but most of those are actually sauces with tuna and tomatoes. One of the dishes I used to make frequently is tuna, capers, lemon juice, olive oil and sometimes olives. Contrary to traditional Italian rules, I also will sprinkle some cheese on it. I normally use canned (actually pouched) tuna for this. Now before you dismiss this as something akin to a 1960’s casserole, you need to realize that cooks throughout Italy and Spain use a fair amount of canned tuna. Much of it is high quality tuna that’s canned with very good olive oil. (Anya von Bremzen talks about this in her excellent book The New Spanish Table.) Tuna canned with oil went out of favor in the US several years ago (even though it’s still available), but most of that (all of that?) didn’t use olive oil. My wife had seen a Cook’s Illustrated tasting a few years ago where they recommended some of the pouched tuna as opposed to canned. We tried it several years ago and agreed and generally keep some of it around for quick meals.

While the water came to a boil and the pasta cooked, I sautéed a little bit of garlic in olive oil on very low heat. I was trying to infuse the oil and wanted to make sure that the garlic didn’t burn. Right before the pasta was done, I added some capers and basil to the pan, and then added the juice of two small lemons. I mixed it together to make an emulsion and then added the tuna. I drained the pasta (keeping some pasta water in case I need to add it to the sauce) and added it to the pan and tossed it together before plating it and adding a little bit of Grana Padano.

It had a little more lemon than I had anticipated, but it wasn’t too much and actually made the dish taste very bright and fresh. I went for a pint of the Belgian golden ale again, because I knew that the citrus notes of the beer would work with the dish and that the dryness of the beer would offset some of the brininess of the capers. The two almost seemed made for each other and went as well as any wine that I could have chosen.

January 21st - Yellow Split Pea Soup

January 21st – Yellow Split Pea Soup

We’ve been having unseasonably cold weather for Portland, which means it’s actually been below freezing. On cold days I crave warming homey kinds of foods. I make a fair amount of yellow split soup now, which is a little strange because I wouldn’t eat it as a kid. Now I love it and split peas cook quick enough that you can make it on a week night. Perhaps one of the reasons I love it now is because I always use bacon when I do. (Bacon really does seem to make everything better.). I still have a little bit of the bacon I made in late November, and used some in the soup for dinner tonight. I used onions, celery, carrots, the bacon, and some home made chicken stock. I sautéed the bacon on low heat to render the fat and then cooked the vegetables in with it on higher heat, which made the bacon slightly crisp. I added the split peas, thyme, a bay leaf and some homemade chicken broth. Once it came to a boil, I turned it down and let it simmer until the peas were tender. Most books and cooking shows probably would have suggested a salad with the soup, but we just had the soup and were satisfied. The smoky undertones of the bacon melted in with the peas and the stock added a much richer flavor than any canned stock could do. I had a pint of the rapidly diminishing Belgian golden ale with it. Its fruit flavors and spice cut nicely through the richness of the soup. Nothing fancy, but a good cold weather meal.

Monday, January 21, 2008

January 20th - Vegetarian Indian Food

January 20th – Vegetarian Indian Food

After eating a fair amount of pork the last two days, I decided I wanted something vegetarian. I still had some of the Palak Paneer from earlier in the week. I wasn’t sure if it was enough for an entire meal but decided to make a few other dishes. I had bought a couple of heads of cabbage because I decided to try and make homemade sauerkraut (much to my wife’s terror). I couldn’t get as much into the bucket I was using as I thought I could, so I had some cabbage to work with.

There is a great cooked cabbage salad recipe in Mangoes and Curry Leaves by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid, which consists of cabbage, shallots, curry leaves, turmeric, cumin seeds, green chilis, coconut and lime juice. It’s easy to make and straight forward, and although it’s spiced, doesn’t mask the naturally sweet flavor of the cabbage. It doesn’t require any sautéing. You cut and wash the cabbage and put it in a pot with the other ingredients (minus the coconut and lime juice) and cook it on high for about 2-3 minutes and then turn it down to a simmer for about 10 minutes. The water that clings to the cabbage is enough to cook the whole dish. At the end you add the flaked coconut which absorbs any liquid left ad then squeeze lime juice over it. You can make it start to finish in about 20 minutes and it’s a great side.

The other dish was a cooked carrot dish from Kerala. For this dish, you sauté cumin seeds, black mustard seeds, onion, garlic, green chili, and curry leaves briefly. When they’ve softened but not browned, you add a bunch of grated carrots and toss it all together. Let it cook for about 30 seconds and then turn the heat off and stir in some yogurt. The carrots should be partly cooked, but not completely. As simple as it is, it’s something that never fails to blow me away. It’s another dish that you can throw together in a few minutes, but is substantial and satisfying.

I made some basmati rice and mounded that in the center of the plate and put a portion of the other dishes around the rice. Between the palak paneer, the cabbage and the carrots, we had an incredibly filling meal. The colors were beautiful as well. The carrots were deep orange, the cabbage yellow from the turmeric, and the palak paneer was a deep bright green.

A couple of the dishes were hot and I was ready to try out my newly kegged brown ale with it, but had picked up a bottle of the Deschutes Buzzsaw Brown Ale and wanted to try that. It’s a very nice brown. It’s 30 IBU’s and only 4.8% alcohol. It’s very clean with a decent malt backbone. It’s a terrific session beer but lacks some of the malty sweetness I like in brown ale. Theirs is a different interpretation of brown ale than mine. Mine is sweeter than Newcastle Brown, but theirs is less sweet. When you bit into the chilis, I preferred the sweet malt of mine instead of the Buzzsaw Brown, but the Buzzsaw Brown is a well made and delicious beer (and probably better with a host of other things where you don’t want or need a sweet malt finish). With the recent hype over Deschutes’s Abyss Barrel Aged Imperial Stout on my brew clubs list serve, the Buzzsaw Brown seems to have gone completely unnoticed, which is a shame because it’s a beer of great subtlety and finesse.

January 19th - Fennel braised pork and polenta

January 19th – Fennel braised pork with polenta

It was a cold day and it was actually pretty chilly when we were brewing in the garage. By the time we were through, I was looking forward to something hardy for dinner. I wanted to braise something and opted to use some pork country ribs which are actually from the shoulder and are great for braising. I love fennel and pork and decided to braise the pork in a combination of onion, carrots, celery, garlic, white wine and fennel seed. The flavors would be fairly simple and straight forward but would also be hardy enough to satisfy my craving for comfort food. I was out of potatoes (how does one run out of potatoes?) so I decided to make some polenta instead.

I used to cook polenta with a lot of butter, cream, and parmesan, or even mascarpone cheese. (I once had a meal with two friends who cook professionally, where they tried to see how much fat they could add to polenta before the emulsion broke. They never hit the breaking point, but the polenta was so rich that it was almost inedible. You could only have tiny spoons of it.) I’ve since gone away from it and prefer the purer flavor you get form cooking it plain, with only water and salt. In a lot of braises, I’ll puree the sauce for a thicker richer sauce, but wanted to keep the chunks of vegetables in this one, both for the texture and their visual appeal.

Since this was an Italian influenced meal, I decided on an Italian wine (why do I almost always drink wine after brewing beer?). I don’t buy a lot of Italian wines but did have a few in my cellar. 1989 was a fantastic year for Barbaresco and I had the good fortune to have bought several single vineyard Barbaresco’s from Produttori del Barbaresco at incorrect prices. There was an old chain of natural supermarkets in Portland that has since gone out of business. I used to buy some wine there and noticed that they kept putting the single vineyard Barbarescos in the slot for the regular Barbaresco. I told the wine stewards several times that they were incorrect, and they always told me I was wrong and that the $19.99 was correct for the single vineyard bottlings. But the same wine was selling for about $30 in other locations. But after I told them it was wrong and they insisted it was OK, I decided to buy a few bottles. They would have a different vineyard each time in the slot, and each time I would try to tell them, and every time they told me it was correct. So each time I bought a bottle or two and stashed them away. I cracked the last bottle of Monte Fico for this meal. Monte Fico was the hardest and most backward of all of Produttori’s offerings that year, but this one was beautifully mature. It took about an hour to open up, and then revealed a rich nose of cherry fruit, some leather and tobacco, and an earthier, tarry note. It wasn’t as full bodied as some Barbarescos I’ve had, but it had impeccable balance and was just plain delicious. It didn’t overwhelm the food and was a nice match, but it was so good it would have gone with pretty much anything. It was a truly memorable bottle.

January 19th - Brown Ale and Brewing Molasses Porter

January 19th –Brewing Molasses Porter

We brewed our brown ale a few weeks ago and it was ready to rack off and keg. Brown ale is a tough sell in the US. It used to be more popular in craft brew circles, but not many breweries are actually brewing one on a regular basis any more. It’s still an incredibly good beer with food, but it’s somehow dropped off most craft beer drinker’s radar screens. I like browns that are malty and slightly sweet and I generally prefer them in a moderate alcohol range. We generally make ours fairly low hopped and use a combo of English pale malt, 55L and 120L caramel malt, and some chocolate malt. We mash it fairly warm, maybe around 152-154, to emphasize the malt body. We tasted it when we racked it and it had a distinct smoky note, although we hadn’t added any smoked malt. Smoky aromas are often caused by phenols, and I was a little worried about the beer because of the phenol level. It appears to be dying down now that it’s kegged, but it’s not as clean as I’d like it. But it does have a faintly fruit estery note that you expect from a good English ale strain. On the palate, it’s got good body and a round sweet caramel character. It tastes bigger than it is (it clocks in around 5% alcohol). If the smoky note dies down, it’ll be a good session beer and a great beer for spicy food, since it’s got that great sweet caramel finish.

The brown ale was the second batch of beer with a London Ale strain that we were using (reputed to be the famous Young’s strain) and decided to repitch the yeast one more time. We were both almost out of stout, so we opted to do porter this time. By the BJCP, porter is broken into Brown Porter vs Robust Porter. The major difference between the two is gravity and roastiness. The brown porters are more English style. They tend to be lighter in alcohol, and have less roasted malt flavors, which tend to add a roasted astringency to the palate. The robust porters are more American in style and tend to be bigger, hoppier, and have more roast intensity. Our beer is kind of in the middle. We did lower hops, and less roast/black malt, but went for a moderately higher gravity that should give us a beer around 6-6.5%. We used a fair amount of crystal and caramel malts as well as chocolate, brown, and black malts, and mashed hotter again to get more body. We also added a couple of cups of molasses at the end of the boil. We’re hoping to get some dark, dried fruit flavors (like a raisiny quality) out of it. Should be ready to package in about two weeks. After that it’ll be time to brew more lambic.

January 18th - Schnitzel

January 18th – Schnitzel

I was over at a client that’s up the hill from the Widmer Brewery and as I was driving over the Freemont Bridge, I could see that they were brewing. I was tempted to stop by for a pint on the way hone since I got done a little early, but we’ve been trying to save money and every pint counts, so I just headed home but was stuck thinking about Widmer and the food at the Gasthaus. When I got home and was trying to think of what to cook, I decided to go the quasi-German route and cook some schnitzel.

I’ve met a lot of people over the years who think that schnitzel is some kind of sausage but it’s really just th4e German phrase for cutlets. The most famous of course are Wiener Schnitzel (Viennese Cutlets) which are just breaded and sautéed veal cutlets. Schnitzel can be pork, veal, or chicken, but pork is still my favorite. I had a couple of loin chops but they were from the end of the loin and looked like they’d be tough to cut in half so I got out a meat mallet and pounded them thin (after a quick brining in salt water). I don’t always use breadcrumbs on them and sometimes just use a quick dusting of flour, which is what I did this time. I sautéed them quickly in a little oil and pulled them out before they were done (since they’ll continue to cook as they sit). I threw some chopped garlic and capers into the pan and let them cook for about 30 seconds before deglazing the pan with white wine. When the wine had reduced I gave them a quick squeeze of lemon juice and then added a small amount of butter to emulsify the sauce. I added the schnitzel back to the pan and tossed them to coat them with the sauce. I had enough potatoes left to make a few potato pancakes on the side and added some applesauce to the plates as well. I had some cornichons and meant to serve a few but forgot about them.

The perfect thing to have with this would have been pilsner. I had looked at the Pilsner Urquell at the supermarket, but saw that they had Skagit River Brewery’s Sculler’s IPA on sale, so I bought one of those instead. (Should have bought the pilsner…) I like Sculler’s a lot but I think this one was on sale because it was getting a little long in the tooth. It was still good, but tired. It still had the great hop profile it generally does and still had the big caramel malt backbone, but because of its age, it was a little lackluster. Should have trusted my instincts and bought the Pilsner Urquell.

Friday, January 18, 2008

January 17th - Omelets

January 17th – Omelets

Eggs have gotten an unfair rap in American cuisine. When “healthy eating” entered the radar screen of most Americans, eggs were one of the first foods to be banished. Maybe that’s not surprising, since most of Americans would likely give up eggs for breakfast as opposed to foregoing steak for dinner. I’m not going to pretend that eggs don’t have cholesterol and that they aren’t generally served with other “bad” foods like butter and bacon, but by themselves, eggs are probably no worse than the large cuts of meat that we consider a standard serving size. (No, I’m not a nutritionist, and you absolutely shouldn’t take any diet or nutrition advice from me. After all, I’m a middle aged fat guy.) But in a lot of parts of the world, eggs aren’t relegated to the breakfast table (or to egg salad sandwiches) and actually are considered more of a lunch or dinner food. But somehow here in the US, eggs are still considered a breakfast item.

I don’t eat a lot of eggs. I love them, but don’t seem to cook them much on their own, but one of my favorite ways to have them is as omelets (as well as poached). I love omelets because they’re real food, don’t take long to make, and can be made with whatever you have leftover in the fridge (assuming of course that you have eggs). I’m much more of a fan of French style omelets as opposed to American ones. American ones typically seem to be overstuffed and are a little overwhelming. French style omelets have less stuffing, and as a result are really quick and easy to prepare. Julia Childe got her start on TV cooking an omelet and if you haven’t seen her omelet show from her classic French Chef series, you should go rent or buy the DVD series of her show.

Omelets should cook quickly. If an omelet takes you more than about a minutes to cook (once the pan is hot), you’re likely not cooking it right. There are new “scientific” methods of cooking eggs that emphasize low heat and long cooking times so that the proteins in the eggs don’t toughen, but you can do the same thing by cooking an omelet quickly on medium high heat. It helps to have a non-stick pan, but if you have a well seasoned, cast iron omelet pan, you’ll do fine as well. I normally stick to two eggs, because three eggs seem too much and increase the cooking time too much. I also stick to small amounts of stuffing.

We needed to go shopping tonight and were a little pressed for time. I didn’t know what to cook, and my wife was ready to just make a sandwich, when I asked her if she wanted an omelet. I took the non-stick pan out and put it on medium high heat. I got the eggs and cracked two of them in a bowl. I wisked them well with a splash of water (I don’t know why but I always have), added salt and pepper and then checked the pan. When it seemed hot I added about a tablespoon of butter. When the butter stops foaming, the pan is ready. Pour the eggs in and tilt the pan to spread it. Don’t move them around with a spatula. Let them start to set which will take about 20 seconds. I added about 1-2 tablespoons of chopped ham and a sprinkling of parmesan (it was the only cheese we had) and let it go for about another 20 seconds, after which it should have very little liquid left (but should have a little). To roll the omelet use a motion like who were trying to flip a pan while sautéing. You shouldn’t have to use a spatula. As you move the pan, the omelet should start to roll on its own and should end up roiled at the far edge of the pan. Drop it on to a plate and you have dinner. To get the technique right, check out Julia. She was a true omelet master.

Start the next omelet and you’ve got two omelets in about two and a half minutes. If you have greens, throw together a salad on the side, but you don’t really need one if all you need is a light supper. Otherwise grab a beer or a lighter wine (red or white) and you’re good to go. I had a pint of Belgian Golden, which was perfect. The alcohol and spice cut thought the richness of the eggs. The ham and parmesan gave nice flavors but were in small enough quantities that you still remembered you were eating eggs. Quick and easy.

Thursday, January 17, 2008

January 16th

January 16th
For a guy who claims he doesn’t make a lot of Chinese food, making it twice in a week is a lot. But I had picked up some tofu at the Asian grocer and didn’t want to let it sit too long (again). I like Chinese food a lot, it’s just that I don’t do a lot of it at home because home stoves don’t get hot enough and I don’t feel like I understand the complexities of the cuisine well enough to cook in the instinctive way (ie, no recipe) that I normally do. I have fallen in love with Szechuan food since first getting Fuschia Dunlop’s Land of Plenty out of the library. It’s an incredibly well researched book written by someone who actually studied Szechuan cooking at a state run school in Szechuan. Most Americans know that there are regional differences in Chinese food (Cantonese, Hunan, Szechuan, etc.), but there aren’t many cookbooks that specifically deal with regional Chinese foods. If you haven’t gotten this book, check it out. It’s eye opening, authentic, and the recipes work.
There is a famous Szechuan dish that loosely translates as the Pock Marked Woman’s Tofu (I believe it is Ma Po tofu in Chinese, but don’t quote me). Not an appetizing name, but a great dish. It’s chunks of tofu in a sauce of chile bean sauce, soy, Szechuan pepper corns, garlic and has a small amount of ground beef added (which becomes part of the sauce). The unusual ingredient in the dish is the beef. In most provinces in China (including Szechuan), pork is king and beef is very unusual, but according to Fuschia Dunlop, beef is the correct ground meat to use in this dish. There are a lot of recipes that call for pork, but I try to stick with beef because of her comments. In any event, it’s about 4 ounces of beef per pound of tofu, and the meat is ground which helps incorporate it into the sauce.
It’s important to sauté the tofu first in a little oil to help give it a little bit of a crust which also firms it up a bit. I normally do that first, then pull it from the pan, and add the beef. Once the beef is browned, add the sauce ingredients, toss it all together and add the tofu back in. I always serve it over steamed rice. Last night’s was a little salty but very good. It’s supposed to be a hot dish but I toned it down a little and relied more on the peppercorns instead of the chiles. The peppercorns also give you a unique numbing that’s different from the heat of chiles, which I also really like. Buy whole Szechuan peppercorns if you can (they were unavailable for a while because if import restrictions but are now available again) and toast them slightly before grinding. It’s another quick and easy meal.
All I had at home was homebrewed beer and opted for the spiced tripel with the food. I thought it was a little too big for the food, but it did have enough residual sweetness to offset the heat and the fruit flavors from the yeast and hops actually were quite nice with the food.

January 15th

January 15th

I went shopping on Sunday and was looking for collard greens, and had to go to my local natural supermarket to find them. I also picked up a few other odds and ends including tempeh (because it’s actually cheaper there than at the Asian grocer). They have a great cheese counter so I decided to look for paneer, the firm and bland Indian cheese. It’s a fairly easy thing to make at home (it’s whole milk that’s curdled with vinegar or lemon juice and then strained and pressed) but we hadn’t had time recently so I looked for some on the off chance that they had it. They did so I picked some up because we love Palak Paneer, which is essentially paneer in a saag-like spinach sauce.

If you have paneer, palak paneer is quick enough to make on a week night. The meat saags benefit from longer braising, but once the spinach sauce is made, the paneer only needs to sit in the sauce long enough to heat through. The beauty of the dish is that the paneer is very mild tasting and offers and excellent rich counterpoint to the spicy spinach. We’d been doing the hot and spicy thing for several nights now and my wife had requested it a little milder than I normally would have made it, but I added a little bit of crushed red chile to mine at the end to get a bigger punch of heat and therefore a better contrast between the paneer and the sauce. The store bought paneer was good, but not as good as homemade, plus it was expensive (about $8 a pound). You can make about a pound of paneer from a gallon of milk, so it’s worth it both from a taste and cost stand point if you give yourself enough time. Paneer can be made in one day, but you need to start it early. Most of the time is spent letting it drain and then pressing it under a weight until it’s firm enough to cut and to hold its own shape. But knowing that you can buy it is a nice backup for the times I’m too lazy to make it.

The palak paneer sauce is made of sautéed browned onions, chiles, ginger, garlic, coriander, cumin, turmeric, and bay leaves. I also add small amounts of clove and cardamom and then give it a little garam masala at the end. I have seen recipes which use fewer spices, but I like complexity of this blend and like the sweeter spices in the mix. The sauce is thickened with yogurt and then pureed (you may need to add a little water to it as well). You can make the sauce in about 30 minutes, including the simmering time, so it’s not too bad. Yes, it could cook longer and would likely be better. Yes, it’s better the next day, but it’s nice to know that I can cook one of my favorite Indian meals on a weeknight. All you really need on the side is some steamed rice, but naan or chapattis would be nice as well. I normally keep a variety of jarred chutneys around for things like this as well.

I wished I had more of the Widmer Crimson Wheat but made due with some homebrewed bitter. I could have done a lot worse.

January 14th

January 14th

I’ve been on the hot and spicy kick and kept it going this evening. We’re lucky to have an amazing Asian grocery nearby and they generally have very good produce. I was there yesterday looking for collard greens for the Ethiopian food I was cooking (which unfortunately they didn’t have) but I did get some baby bok choy, which I like. Most supermarkets have larger bok choy but the baby ones here are always very small, fresh and sweet.

I’m not great at cooking Chinese but I do better than I used to. The biggest problem I used to make was using too many things and muddying up the flavors. I’ve been much more successful at using less ingredients and less flavors and then letting those come through. I opted to make beef and bok choy and wasn’t looking for a particular recipe. I always marinate the meat in soy, sesame oil, Shaoxing rice wine, and conrstarch, and occasionally throw in ginger, although tonight I didn’t. The basic sauce was chile bean paste, ginger, garlic, soy, and a dash of black vinegar.

There are a couple of keys to stir frying. First, get everything prepped. Once you start cooking there’s no time to stop and prep items. Next, use high heat and don’t crowd the pan. I’m a big fan of flat bottom stir fired pans as opposed to traditional round bottom woks. I have a carbon steal one and a non-stick although I seem to go through the non-stick ones in about two years, because the coating doesn’t last well on super high heat. (I buy a couple when I see them on sale because I know I’ll need them).

I cook the meat first, and in batches so it gets a chance to brown and doesn’t stew. If you cook the meat first, don’t cook it all the way through. Use the hottest pan you can to get good color and minimize the amount of time required in the pan. Also, make sure you drain the marinade before you cook it because otherwise the meat will steam in the pan. Once the meet is done, add the vegetables. If you’re doing multiple types, throw in the ones that require longer cooking first. It’s also best to cut things to sizes where they cook in a few minutes. When the vegetables are done, I move them to the side, add the sauce ingredients toss it and then add the meat back in. If you thicken it with cornstarch, throw it in now. Sprinkle some chopped scallions on it, toss it all again and serve it right away with rice.

The dish was moderately spicy but not incendiary. I had a pint of stout with it because the stout has good malt flavors to cut through the spices. The stout is a little drier than I like with spicy food, but still good and low enough alcohol that you can drink a good amount of it. (Hot spices seem to accentuate alcohol flavors in some beers, particularly in lighter bodied beers). Besides I need to drink the stout up since it’s not a long lived style and we’re brewing more porter this weekend. (OK, I know porter and stout aren’t the same, but I don’t drink enough of either one to require one of each on draft at home).

January 13th

January 13th

I tend to get a little obsessive about certain foods, especially when I’m learning how to make something and haven’t mastered it. As a result, it should come as little surprise that I tried to do more Ethiopian food again because I just can’t get the injera correct. The original recipe I tried called for using buckwheat and wheat flour saying that the buckwheat was a decent stand in for teff, but it didn’t cut it and the breads were also too thick. The last two times I tired 75% wheat flour and 25% teff but the batter was very thin and a little tough to work with. I’m waiting for a book on Ethiopian food from the library but did some research on the internet and did find some interesting recipes and resources (including a series of videos on Youtube) and worked a method based upon that.

Injera is a sour dough bread and there’s really no way to duplicate that if you don’t do a sour dough starter. Luckily, I kept a small amount of the last batch I had done about three days ago and let it sit on the counter where it got sufficiently sour. I fed this with some wheat flour and water to increase the size. I did stick to pretty close to a ratio of 75% wheat and 25% teff, because that seemed to give the right flavor before and the teff that I have is whole and needs to be ground which is kind of a pain. I let the dough sit until it was bubbly. I made the dough slightly thicker this time so it was somewhere between crepe and pancake batter. But the real key was reading the directions a little closer in some of the recipes. Injera is always cooked covered, which I had been doing, but it’s not flipped, which I just kind of assumed it was (most pan cooked flat breads, like tortillas and chapattis are flipped). Flipping them had been the issue but if they’re not flipped it’s easy (and has the right texture). It was kind of an embarrassing thing to realize, but it made sense when you think about the texture of proper injera.

This batch turned out fine, but you really need to take care when they’re cooling because they stick to things like plates really easily. If you rest them on a clean towel and move them every 20-30 seconds until they’re cool, they tend to stick less.

I did more chicken wat, but didn’t use a specific recipe as a guideline and just worked with spices that I had seen in other recipes. The sauce was pretty close to the Beef Wat from a few weeks ago and consisted of onions, tomatoes, berbere, ginger, garlic, cardamom and cinnamon. I did more red lentils and also had braised collard greens which were good but had too much ginger, which kind of overwhelmed them. But it was nice knowing that I had kind of mastered a passable injera recipe. I was also smart enough to keep some of the batter in the fridge as a sour starter for next time.

I like malty beers and spicy food and was happy with a few things that I picked up at a local store. The Widmer 08 Brewmaster’s Reserve Crimson Wheat is a lovely beer. Hops are in short supply this year and Widmer cleverly released a lower hopped beer with a great malt backbone and a subtle hop spiciness. It’s another great beer in their Brewmaster’s series and very different from most other beers out there. On their web site they say it goes well with burgers and sandwiches, but it’s malty profile makes it a winner with spicy food as well. I only bought the one bottle but will definitely be buying more. I also like the fact that it’s only 4.1% alcohol so you can actually drink a few of them. I also tried the Anchor Bock which was also a lovely beer. It’s darker than a lot of bocks, but still malty with good body. I preferred the Widmer with the food, but I wouldn’t turn the Anchor down.

While cooking I also tried a Baltika 9 Extra Lager. I like Baltika’s beer but have mostly had their porters. The Baltika 9 is a golden lager at about 8% alcohol. It’s not heavily hopped so there’s a fair amount of malt sweetness to it. It’s not as rich as a Maibock, and seems to fall halfway between malt liquor and maibock. It’s an interesting beer, but a little heady on its own. It’s probably better with food, so I may need to try it that way n the future.

January 12th

January 12th
We went to a friend’s house for dinner and one of the things that struck me as odd was being home on a weekend evening and not cooking. I normally try to save my more labor intensive cooking for weekends so I’m normally cooking by mid afternoon and it just felt strange to not be cooking. It also made me realize how infrequently I eat out or at someone else’s place.
We were invited over by friends and when we asked if we could bring anything they said beer, which is actually pretty easy but puzzled me because I thought that they were both wine drinkers and not really beer drinkers. We brought over a growler of dry stout and one of Belgian golden ale.
Dinner was really good. First was a salad of greens, raisins, cheese and a balsamic vinaigrette (at least I think so). The main course was a stew of buffalo meat and carrots. The stew was fairly spicy and I thought I picked up coriander and allspice, but embarrassingly, was wrong. It had tarragon, thyme, cloves and black pepper. They had added a fair amount of black pepper which gave it a good bite, and I think that and the cloves where what threw me off. In any event, it reminds me why I hate blind tastings, whether it’s food, beer or wine. It’s so easy to get thrown off. (As I always say in my BJCP prep classes, blind tasting are only fun if you’re the one who’s running it.) Next were whipped potatoes and Brussels sprouts cooked with awesome bacon from a place called Otto’s in SE Portland. I had never heard of Otto’s but it’s on my list of places to checkout. It was a delicious meal, and as much as I like cooking, it was nice to have someone else doing the cooking this time.
Both of our friends were beer drinkers which I didn’t remember. I thought they were both wine people, but I was happy to find out that drank beer as well. One of them likes big stouts, so the dry stout was a little light for him. He told me he was a fan of Stone Russian Imperial Stout, so I also recommended Victory Storm King and Widmer KGB to him, but in retrospect, I realized I should have mentioned Hair of the Dog Adam. It’s not stout, but he said he likes big heavy dark beers and Adam is about as good as you get in that vein. Perhaps I’ll get a few bottles of it the next time we have them over. It’s a perfect match with hot spicy food.

Saturday, January 12, 2008

January 11th

January 11th

Even though the stove got fixed two days ago, this was the first day where I felt like I could cook whatever I wanted. I had cooked Doro Wat two days ago, but by the time I had reassembled the stove and had it working, I felt pressured for time so it wasn’t as realizing a meal as I would have liked. I had been dreaming about clams and thought about going to get some even though my last appointment at work was downtown which meant I wouldn’t being passing by the store where I normally by seafood. (I’m very particular about seafood and only trust about two or three places around town.)

Luckily my wife called while I was at my last appointment and asked if I needed anything from. I told her I really wanted clams and she agreed, so she went to go get those and some crusty bread. I got home and started to figure out how I was going to cook them. There seems to be a tradition of using pork in various seafood dishes in Portugal and Spain. I’m not sure if it’s consistent, but there do seem to be a fair amount of seafood dishes that have sausage or ham in them. Although it seems unusual at first, it is a good mix and I’m very fond of it as well. The Iberian Peninsula is not alone in this combo, but seems to have more dishes like this than other areas. Perhaps I’ve simply noticed more in Spanish and Portuguese cookbooks.

So I browned some diced home made pancetta in a pan, and then added some onion and later some garlic. I deglazed the pan with white wine and then added a little tomato paste to give more body to the sauce. I threw in a little thyme, salt and black pepper and let them reduce for a few minutes before adding the clams. I had the heat at medium and the clams steamed open in about three minutes. I would have added some parsley but it was dark and muddy outside and I didn’t feel like grabbing a flashlight to go harvest some, so I just ladled the clams up into bowls and served thick slices of crusty bread on the side. The clams were terrific but the best part is always the broth that you soak up with the bread.

Although it’s not traditional, I opened red wine with it. With the tomato and pancetta, the dish has enough body to match a red wine. A good crisp white would do as well. The wine I chose was a 2005 Step Road Black Wing Shiraz from Australia. Shiraz is the same grape as Syrah and has been grown extensively in Australia for decades. The Australian versions tend to be less austere in their youth than the ones from the Rhone valley in France. (This is a general rule. There are huge, tannic versions from Australia just as there are lighter, easier drinking versions from France.) This one is a medium bodied, with berry notes and some peppery, spicy notes. If the clams had no tomato and pancetta, the wine may have overwhelmed the clams, but the broth was hearty enough to make it all work. The wine is a good value at $10 at the local supermarket and it’s something I’d look for again. The whole meal made me realize how nice it was to have a stove back and be able to cook whatever I wanted.

January 10th

January 10th

The second Thursday of the month is normally the monthly Oregon Brew Crew meeting, which means something quick to eat. The club served food at each meeting to make sure that people aren’t drinking on empty stomachs, but I normally still will eat before I go over. On night’s when I need to make something instant I often just will eat some kind of frozen veggie pattie. My current favorites are the Grillers from Morningstar Farms, but I’ve gone through boxes of Garden Burgers and Boca Burgers as well down through the years. I’m not sure what it is about them, but I’m still a sucker for them. They’re really about the only instant frozen food that I eat.

I brought a bottle of homebrewed gueuze and some of the Triple de Noel to the meeting to share. I’m pleased with the Triple at this point. It still needs to clear out a little more, but the flavors are well integrated and it has a good hop aroma from the American hops, which are atypical for the style. Had several nice homebrews including an interesting and hoppy squash pale ale, a strong saison, and a great fireweed honey mead. I was also lucky enough to taste a 2005 Stone Imperial Stout. I’m not always a huge fan of the style and sometimes Stone’s beers can be a little too “in your face” for my tastes, but this had matured very nicely and had rounded out. It still wasn’t a session beer, but it shows how rounded this beer can get if you give it time.

Next months meeting is in the brewery space of the Green Dragon which should be interesting. Not sure if they’re brewing yet, but I’m looking forward to trying Lolo’s beers.

January 9th

January 9th

I called Sears to check on the part and was told I should get it today or tomorrow. I called my wife to let her know and she called me back about 20 minutes later saying it had arrive. In the back of my head, I was afraid that there was more broken than the broiler element, but threw caution to the wind and decided I would plan a meal that required the stove.

I was able to get out of work a little early, which was good since I knew it would take time to put the element in and put the stove back together. My wife started a new batch of Injera because I was confident they would be easy to make in a pan as opposed to on the griddle. I got some chicken thighs on the way home because I thought I would make some Doro Wat, which is an Ethiopian chicken stew. We still had lentils leftover, so all I’d need to do was make the chicken and the bread.

I got home and went to work on the stove. We got the new element in and turned the stove on. It was still dead. There was much swearing. Not knowing what t do, I did what I did the first time. I stared at the wring on the back and looked at the wiring diagram utterly confused by how to read it and how to test the other components. On a whim, I unplugged the stove, went to the electrical panel and then turned the breaker off and back on. I went up stairs, and plugged the stove in. I turned it on and….IT WENT ON!!!!! Feeling like Man-the-Toolmaker, I went and proclaimed my greatness to my wife. We tested all fo the other components and everything worked. I was about to put the back on and slide it back into place when I realized that we had neglected to put to cover panels into the oven. The broiler element is supposed to slide through them and I had forgotten to put them in.

Now we had to wait until the broiler cooled, remove it, but the plates in and then re-do it. I went and got a pint of the spiced Belgian triple to wait it out, hoping that I could patiently wait it out. I couldn’t and had to check it every few minutes. Finally it was cool enough to handle and we took it out, put the cover plates in and then put the element back in. We reconnected everything and turned the stove on. Dead again. Not knowing what to do, I went and threw the breaker off and on again. Still dead. I jiggle the plug. Still dead. I reattached the broiler element wires and then jiggle the plug and it came back to life. Afraid that I’d lose it again, I put the back panels on and slid it into place. I tested it again and it was fine. We had survived a week without our stove.

I started the chicken and got it going before attempting the breads. I had assumed they would be easier with a non-stick fry pan. I was wrong. Flipping tem proved harder than on the griddle, where I was able to pick them up by hand and flip them. In the fry pan there wasn’t enough room, and flipping them by hand lead to numerous burns and much cursing. I was bale to get a few that were ok and used them to line the plates and out the food on. We also had just a few breads to use to pick up the food. The meal was fabulous (especially with more bitter on the side), even if the breads had been less than successful. It may be time to research them more. I will find a recipe to make them successfully, but I foresee more burns and cursing before I do. At least we have a stove again.

January 8th

January 8th

It’s now been one week since the stove broke. I’m tired of playing Pioneer Kitchen. I opted for another fast and easy one today that could be cooked on the electric griddle. I love potato pancakes but never seem to make them much, which is really foolish since they’re actually easy to make (especially with a food processor to shred the potatoes). My potato pancakes are pretty straight forward: shredded potatoes, grated onion, an egg to help bind it, a tiny amount of flour, salt and pepper. The key is too make sure that you have everything ready to go quickly, because once you peel and shred the potatoes, you have very little time before they turn black.

The potatoes also need to be drained of excess water. I normally shred the potatoes and onion, add then sat and then press as much water out as possible. Some people warp them in a clean dish towel to help compress them. I just use my hands and a stainless steel colander. In any event, get as much water out as possible. In my family the traditional accompaniment was apples sauce, but no sour cream. I like the sour cream though so now I serve them with both apples sauce and sour cream. It was quick and easy and made me wonder why I don’t make them more. They were on the table in about 20-25 minutes.

The perfect thing to have with these would be a good pilsner. I cursed myself for not thinking about this and getting some on the way home. Wrongly, I opened a bottle of cheap syrah with it. I knew it wouldn’t go but I kind of felt like drinking wine. A nice white with good acidity would have been better, but cheap red wine it was. The wine was adequate but had all the hallmarks of cheap, industrially made wine. It was round and soft and had an oakiness to it that seemed to come from oak chips. In fact in tasted like a wine I had made at home several years ago which had seen a little too much time in uncharred oak. There was nothing wrong with the wine, but it was the wrong thing with the food. What it needed was some kind of tough cut of beef that had been braised for hours. It still would have tasted like cheap red wine, but it wouldn’t have seemed out of place.

Perhaps the stove will be fixed tomorrow.

January 7th

January 7th

It was a work day and I was more realistic about finding a quick meal that was actually do-able with our current primitive set up. Once again, I relied on leftovers, but it was satisfying.

We still had the incredibly hot black bean soup, but this time we were able to add a dollop of sour cream to help buffer it. There wasn’t enough leftover for an entire meal, plus I knew that we’d need something to buffer the heat. We had gotten a ham on sale recently and I decided on something incredibly easy: grilled ham and cheese sandwiches. Comfort food of the highest order and a great fatty, rich foil to the heat of the black bean soup. Add a pint of bitter and it’s a satisfying meal that took 15 minutes to make.

New broiler element should be here in a day or two. I’m starting to wonder what I’ll do if there’s more wrong than just the broiler element…

January 6th

January 6th

I had successfully made some Ethiopian food the previous weekend and still had some of the Beef Wat leftover, so I knew I was half way to making a decent meal, assuming I could work a better recipe for Injera. I had looked at a quick Injera recipe from the Flatbreads book, and thought it may work. It calls for 2 cups of wheat flour, but I decided to knock that down to 1 ½ cups and to add a half cup fo teff flour. We (OK, my wife) had found whole teff at New Seasons and I was able to grind it in a spice grinder down to flour. The recipe worked exactly as described and created a thin runny but very bubbly batter.

While the bread was fermenting, I made some more lentils in the crock pot, but didn’t make them as hot, because the beef was fairly spicy. The lentils worked fine and had bright spicy notes that contrasted well against the inherent earthiness of the lentils. The bread is supposed to be cooked in a pan that you can cover the directions say 90 seconds on each side and say that the batter should be fairly runny. All we had was the electric griddle, but we figured we could cook them on that and use pot tops to cover them.

It took some getting used to, but we did manage to somehow or other get the batter to not completely run off the griddle and get the breads into something vaguely resembling a circle. There was much debate and experimentation, but we finally did manage to find a method that allowed us to actually make something that was a pretty close to authentic injera, but was thinner. The flavor and texture was very close, but they need to be a little thicker in my opinion (they were as thin as crepes). They took an inordinate amount of time to make, so we ended up eating fairly late, but were completely satisfied with the mix of the beef wat, the lentils, cottage cheese, and the injera. In fact, the beef wat, being a stew, was better today than the day it was made. This bread recipe was better, but it still needs work. Luckily we were able to bide our time while making the breads with some homebrewed stout and bitter. This meal worked well, but I really want my stove back.

January 5th

January 5th

I normally am good at improvising on meals but unfortunately, most of the things I’ve been craving require either a stove or an oven, so I’ve been feeling a little constrained and thwarted. I’m starting to realize that I may have to start repeating some of the easier meals I’ve been making and luckily I still had some things left over in the fridge to help out on this.

I had cooked a white bean puree on New Years and still had some left over so I opted to do more of the pork chops form the electric griddle, but wanted a sauce of some kind this time, which would be a little more difficult to pull off since most sauces require sautéing or deglazing and neither of those would be possible. I decided to try and emulate this by using the microwave and lower, longer cooking times. I chopped some shallots and tossed them in a small bowl with some olive oil and microwaved them on medium for about 3 minutes and then pulled them out to look at them. They didn’t quite looked sautéed but they were a reasonable facsimile and I figured it would have to do. I added some chopped garlic to it and then put it back in the microwave for about another minute or so. White wine was next with a longer time to burn off the alcohol. Finally I added some Dijon mustard and a drop of cream and then out it back in just long enough to heat it. Was it the best sauce I’d made? Not by a long shot, but it was adequate. The flavors blended well, the shallots weren’t crunchy, and it did vaguely resemble sauce.

I had brined the pork chops again and then cooked them on the electric griddle. They were nicely browned and juicy. I put them on a bed of white bean puree (which had been flavored with garlic, olive oil and lemon juice) and then pout a ribbon of sauce over it, but left enough of it uncovered so it wasn’t drowning in sauce. I had a glass of my Belgian golden ale with it that I’m really starting to like. It’s totally cleared at this point and is brilliant looking. It pours with a thick, billowy head (not as long lasting as Duvel but similar). It has incredible spiciness to it with a subdued undercurrent of orange. It’s a great beer with food and a brilliant match to pork. This meal may have been a repeat but it beat frozen cannelloni.

January 4th

January 4th

The stress of not having a stove or oven was starting to build. My wife and I had started making jokes about it. “Mmmm, some biscuits would be great, if only we had an oven; we should have a roast chicken, oh, wait, we don’t have an oven.” I like to “rough” it without a stove or electricity occasionally (my wife likes to say that I’m playing “Pioneer”), but it gets old pretty quickly. Plus part of the fun of playing Pioneer is telling the neighbors how well you’re eating during a blackout. Without the one-upmanship of bragging, it’s actually not as much fun as I remember it.

I had vowed not to resort to microwaved food but finally did break down. As part of a New Year’s resolution, I had decided to actually write what I eat every day, and, though I am tempted to leave this particular entry out, I can’t because it’s too early in the year to break a resolution (don’t ask about how the dog walking resolution is going). My wife had shown herself to be the imminently more practical of us when it came to the stove/oven fiasco. She had purchased some frozen food for just such an occasion, perhaps knowing what would happen in a weak moment. So instead of some incredibly inventive “I will not be thwarted by the lack of a stove” meal, we had frozen four cheese cannelloni from Trader Joes. Honestly, it was better than I had expected and, sad to say, better than some cannelloni I’ve had at “Italian” restaurants on the west coast.

In order not to give in totally to the circumstances, I did open a 1996 Gigondas Domain du Cayron from Michel Faraud with it. You could argue that it’s casting pearls before swine to open a wine like this with frozen cannelloni, and maybe it is, but maybe it’s what made the cannelloni passable. IN any event, it was a delicious wine. Grenache gets knocked an awful lot as a work horse grape of very little complexity, but it’s an incredibly food friendly grape. When grown in the right areas by growers who care it’s got intense fruit and a wonderful spiciness. It may be my favorite all around grape for food (including some of the amazing and inexpensive Garnachas from Spain). This wine was perfectly mature and tasted like it was at its peak. It had good red fruit notes, a hint of tobacco/smoke and a signature spiciness that seems present in most well made wines from the southern Rhone valley. It made the cannelloni seem OK and it was fantastic on it’s own.

When will the new element for the broiler arrive?

January 3rd

January 3rd

I let the Black Bean soup go in the crock pot over night and tasted it in the morning. The beans were essentially done (I had left it on low heat), but they were incredibly hot. I had added a single chipotle chile, which I had left whole, but it had completely overwhelmed the entire pot. The chipotle was from a small batch I had bought more than a year ago from my local Asian grocery store. I don’t normally see fresh chipotles (which are actually smoked jalapenos), and was surprised to find them at an Asian grocery store, but bought some. They had a great smoky quality and were still fairly pliable. I normally would have used them up by now, but they turned out to be the world’s hottest chipotles. I always assumed they were local, but don’t really know and have started to wonder if they aren’t some type of hotter jalapeno hybrid, because I’ve never had a jalapeno or chipotle that could overwhelm an entire pot of beans. I hoped they would mellow out and the heat would distribute more evenly as the soup sat but when I got home that evening and went to adjust the final seasonings, the soup was just as hot.

I had thought about adding a cubed potato earlier to help soak up some liquid and some of the heat and regretted not doing it now. Don’t get me wrong, I like spicy black beans, but this was towards my upper limit. A little dab of sour cream would have been perfect but I had used the last of it to make the beef saag earlier last week. Luckily we did have some cheddar cheese left over and I hope d that a sprinking of grated cheddar on top would help soothe the burn. It did help, but there was no getting around how hot it all was. We liked it, and the flavors were right (the smoky notes of the chile, a sublte kiss of cumin, the earthiness of the beans) but it was hot. The English bitter helped put out the fire but I really could have used a sweeter, maltier beer.

Thursday, January 3, 2008

January 2nd

January 2nd

I survived day number two of no stove. Both my wife and I were feeling like we’re catching colds, so I opted for entrée salads, which are really easy. I cooked some shrimp on the electric griddle and then tossed them with olive oil and garlic. Threw together some mixed greens, sliced red onion, pine nuts, and four mandarin oranges, with a ginger vinaigrette. Plated it and then put the shrimp on top and gave it a quick grating of parmesan (OK, actually grana padano). My wife had picked up a ciabatta at Trader Joes. It was OK, but nothing special, but was really just a vehicle for more of the Irish butter. The whole thing was quick however and that was a plus.

I had made a spiced Belgian Triple (which I opted to call a Triple de Noel for Christmas) several weeks ago and have been drinking some of it although it still hasn’t cleared completely. It’s the same combination of the La Chouffe and Duvel yeast, but this batch has some orange peel and ginger in it and we used Centennial and Summit hops in it which adds to the fruitiness of the aroma. It’s also a bigger beer than the last one and clocks in a little more than 8% alcohol. Despite this, it’s actually a good beer with a salad (assuming the vinaigrette isn’t too acidic at which point it would seem too big and overly alcoholic). I was a little surprised and had feared that it was too big, but it worked out. Why do we worry that a beer at 8% may be too big when we would serve a 10-11% “light” white wine and think it was fine? I was thinking about doing a bottle of lambic instead, but opted for the triple because the vinaigrette wasn’t too sharp and I was hoping the orange notes on the beer would work with the oranges in the salad. In retrospect, I wonder why I didn’t add black olives to the salad since I love the combination of oranges and black olives. Perhaps next time.

I also started some black bean soup in the crock pot. Added carrots, onions, celery, black beans, a little cumin, a dried chipotle, bay leaf, and chicken stock and let it sit over night. I can doctor it all later and will make for another quick meal.

Wednesday, January 2, 2008

January 1st - New Years

January 1st

I woke up this morning because our St Bernard was making noise and wouldn’t shut up (we call it “wheeking”) . Finally at around 8:30am, it seemed he would no longer keep quiet when I asked him to so I got up and started to make coffee as he went out. Unfortunately, the burners on the stove wouldn’t go on. I tried the oven and the broiler and it was the same thing. The stove wasn’t completely dead because the light for the oven goes on, and even though the burners never get hot, the light indication they’re on goes on.

I hopped onto the internet to investigate how to fix a broken stove and also to look at stove prices in the event we needed to go buy one. I had hoped to cook a bunch of great food today but it looked like this wasn’t going to work out. There wasn’t much online so I decided to just slide the stove out and open up the back and see what I could find. Luckily I actually did find something. It seems the sparks I had seen in the broiler the previous evening weren’t fat from the hot dogs sparking, it was the broiler element sparking as it burned out. With much cursing and work, I got the old element out and and called Sears on the off chance they might be open. I called the number for the parts division and got someone who looked up the part for me. They looked at all of the parts depots in the state and none of them stock this part so it has to be ordered which will take A WEEK!!!. It’s only $50, and I hope that’s all the problem is, but it means that I have no stove for a week. I have an electric griddle, a crock pot, the weber grill, and…. the microwave. Not the situation I was hoping for (especially since we were supposed to have people over on Saturday). I do have the double propane burners I use for making beer, but it being January and all, I’m not too find of the idea of an outdoor kitchen.

I decided I would still cook anyway and opted for something easy. I cooked some white beans in the crock pot, got a baguette from a boulangerie that was down the street from a coffee house where we met a friend, and brined some pork chops. I figured I would make a white bean puree with garlic, olive oil and lemon and then use that as a bed for the pork chops that I would either grill or cook on the electric griddle. I would serve the baguette on the side with some amazing Irish butter my brewing partner had given me (he claimed he had too much of it; life is rough at Casa Brewing Partner). I got started a little late and the beans didn’t get done until 6:30 or so, which is way after it’s dark, so I opted to cook the pork on the griddle instead with just a little salt and pepper.

The pork was perfectly cooked, the white beans were rich and creamy with just a hint of lemon. The baguette from St. Honore (the boulangerie) was actually quite good. The crust was good and the crumb was very nice. The crumb was a little tighter than I see in most baguettes around here, but very nice. The butter is to die for (or to die from if I eat too much of it). My wife had several of their pastries in the past, but I’m more of a bread guy and figure that any bakery calling itself a boulangerie better be able to make good bread. We also got a canelet so she cold try it. It was rich and eggy, not too sweet and had a nice note of vanilla. It got high approval ratings from her.

To show my triumphant spirit over the broken stove, I opened a good bottle of wine. I love Vieux Telegraphe Chateauneuf du Pape and had a bottle of their 1996. I’ve had a fair amount of their wines from the late 80’s and early 90’s and they are one of my favorite wineries. Even in tough years, the wine has great fruit, an amazing spiciness and is versatile with a variety of foods. The 1996 is no slouch, and although it was browning a bit at the edge, it was quite remarkable. The fruit was vibrant and fleshy and it had that perfect spiciness that Vieux Telegraphe always seems to have.

I’m already thinking of other meals I can cook during the week with no stove and will need to do a little more planning. I refuse to give in to microwaving food, but it could be a long week, so that may change. (I do love those Morningstar farm veggie burgers, so who knows.)

December 31st

December 31st

I like to stay at home on New Year’s Eve, because it seems to be amateur night when all the people who don’t normally drink go out. I generally like to sit at home and make a lot of food and do a variety of small dishes. My wife however didn’t think we needed to eat huge amounts of food all night, so I changed my plans.

She had been craving chili dogs for quite some time, but we hadn’t made any, so it seemed like a good opportunity. Chili dogs may not seem like good celebratory food, but a chili dog, like most simple food, can be sublime if done right and prepared correctly with good ingredients. We had a small amount of ground beef, but we made a last minute run to the grocery store for other ingredients, and purchased hot dog rolls, sharp cheddar cheese, and a package of Hebrew national hot dogs, which are the best hot dogs widely available. Unless you have a good butcher nearby who makes his own hot dogs, Hebrew National is the only choice. They’re not cheap, but I don’t eat chili dogs every day.

The chili for chili dogs doesn’t have beans. It’s more like a sauce or condiment. I just used onions, ground beef, cumin, dried red chiles, garlic, tomato paste, chili powder and Mexican oregano. It had a little heat to it but wasn’t too hot, because you don’t want to overwhelm the hot dog. I broiled the hot dog to brown them and get them a little crusty, and then served them on the rolls with the chili, some yellow mustard and shredded Tillamook sharp cheddar on the top. I’m normally a Dijon or brown mustard guy, but yellow mustard just seems to work on a hot dog. The whole thing was a sloppy mess but was a truly sublime chili dog. My only complaint was that I had steamed the buns to make them softer and warmer, like a great NY hot dog. I ate far too many of them.

I had picked up a bottle of Pelican IPA at the store as well. I love Pelican’s beers, but unfortunately, this is the only one that they bottle any longer. It’s expensive at about $6 per 22 oz bottle, but it’s one of the great NW IPAs. It has great hop flavor, aroma and bitterness but still maintains good balance because of its strong malt backbone. What better beer to wash down chili dogs and what a great way to end the year. It’s hard to beat well made “junk” food.

December 30th

December 30th

I got Some Like it Hot by Clifford Wright for Christmas and having been going through it. I’ve always liked his books because they’re incredibly well researched and his recipes work (assuming you actually follow recipes). I love hot food, but can’t eat it as spicy as a lot of people (like my brewing partner who could likely eat lava) and I normally scale things back to more “American” levels of heat. I had initially thought about making some kind of braised pork dish that was vaguely Mexican or Tex/Mex, but changed to something completely new after paging through this book.

I had never made Ethiopian food, but have had it several times at a great restaurant in Portland called Jarra’s. (The food at Jarra’s is amazing, but the service can be terrible since they never seem to have enough waiters. Generally there seems to be one for the entire dining room.) Ethiopian food is very spicy and incredibly hot. It consists mostly of stews and braises that are served on “plates” of injera bread, which is a flat, sourdough bread made from Teff. No utensils are used and more injera is served alongside and you use the injera to scoop up the food. Clifford Wright’s book has a good recipe for Beef Wat, and I used that and also made a red lentil dish from a recipe I adapted off the internet. Not having any teff around the house, I opted to use the “quick” injera recipe that used whesat flour with a small percentage of buckwheat flour. Instead of yeast, it used baking powder and baking soda as leavening.

The Wat and lentils came out very well. I used beef chuck for the wat and the sauce was made up of onions, garlic, ginger, tomatoes, berbere (which is an Ethiopian spice paste that contains, paprika, cayenne, cardamom, cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice and a few other things) and some other assorted spices. The “quick” injera looked right, but the buckwheat flavor was too strong, and the batter wasn’t’ thin enough so the breads themselves were too thick. I think the recipe may work better if I used teff instead of buckwheat and thinned the dough, but I may have get some teff and try to make the breads properly following the recipe in Flatbreads by Naomi Duguid and Jeffrey Alford.

Once again, I stuck with the English bitter I had but the dry Irish stout would also have been good with it. The food was incredibly spicy and overall I thought it was quite good but the injera recipe needs some work. I think I’ll be cooking Ethiopian food again soon.

December 29th

December 29, 2007

I’m a huge fan of Indian food, although you may not realize it from reading this because it seems I don’t cook as much of it as I used to and, except for a few mentions of vindaloo, I haven’t written about any Indian recipes that I’ve made. It seems to me that Indian food isn’t as popular as it used to be and that other SE Asian cuisines, like Thai and Vietnamese, get more attention these days, which is ashamed because Indian cooking is widely varied and dramatically different throughout the various regions of the country.

I had a craving for Beef Saag, which is chunks of Beef braised in a spinach sauce. It’s one of the great dishes of Mogul cooking but if you haven’t had it, it may sound a bit unusual. Like all braises, you need to brown the meat first and then remove it from the pan. This builds up a fond in the pot, which helps to build flavor, and also caramelizes the meat. The sauce is made by sautéing onions, garlic, and ginger until browned and then adding coriander, cumin, turmeric, cardamom, cloves, dried red chile and a few other spices into the pot and then adding some blanched cut-up spinach and a little tomato. Cook the sauce a little bit and then add some yogurt or sour cream and puree the sauce. Turn the heart down low, and add the meat back in and braise it slowly until the meat is tender. At the very end add some garam masala which is an aromatic spice blend, and let it simmer for about another 5-10 minutes.

It’s the type of recipe that works best with a tougher cut of meat, like beef chuck, but all I had was some petit sirloin, which gets incredibly tough if you try to braise it. So I browned the meat, made the sauce and let the sauce cook slowly without the meat and then added the meat to the pot when I added the garam masala. This ensured the meat didn’t overcook and was still red in the middle when I served it. OK, it didn’t stew and add flavor to the sauce, but sometimes we work with what we have. The whole thing was served on steamed basmati rice.

Beer is the obvious choice with Indian food because the amount and types of spices will kill any wine. Although I love Belgian beers, I find most of them aren’t as good with spicier food as a lower alcohol maltier style of beer, like less hoppy pale ales and brown ales. I had brewed a brown ale earlier in the day, but ti wouldn’t be ready for about 10 days so the choice was more of the English bitter I had. It’s fairly malty, but still low in alcohol (about 4.5%). I wish it had a tad more malt to it, but it’s very good, and was made using a London Ale yeast strain (which is purported to be the house yeast of Youngs). The aroma was caramelly with the slight fruity esters you expect in English bitter and a fair hint of Goldings hops. There was also a slightly tea-like note to the aroma as well. Because the beer had a lighter body, it was very refreshing with the food, but ti still had enough to stand up to the onslaught of spices.

Tuesday, January 1, 2008

December 28th

December 28th

I was back to work today and missed lunch so I was hungry when I got home. I really wanted to have some Indian food of some kind, but still had some of the leftover roast beef from Christmas and needed to use it up, so I opted to make roast beef sandwiches and a potato hash on the side.

I like hash of all sorts and did a fairly simple one of potatoes, onions, and some sweet peppers all cooked in olive oil. I normally add the potatoes first, because they need the longest time, then the onions and add the peppers last so they don’t get overcooked. I also added a little bit of crushed red pepper to give it a little spice but nothing too strong.

For the sandwiches, I toasted the rolls, melted a little Swiss cheese on them, and spread some o the leftover horseradish sauce and some mayonnaise. I cut the roast beef thin and added salt and pepper as well and then served them along side the hash.

I had recently kegged some English style pale ale and am very fond of pape, ale and roast beef sandwiches. This pale wasn’t too hoppy, but still had enough bitterness to cut through the richness of the meat and the hash. A simple meal, but good and one that was quick to prepare after missing lunch.

My Wife's Birthday

December 27th

This was my wife’s birthday and the rule in our house is that the on your birthday you get to dictate the activities and meals of the day. She had chosen a fairly simple meal to prepare so that we would have time to go see a movie and watch some other ones at home as well.

For her birthday dinner she chose sautéed scallops, Brussels sprouts cooked with homemade pancetta, shallots, and white wine, and orzo tossed with garlic olive oil, and pine nuts. It was in fact a quick meal to cook, because none of them take very long to do. In fact the Brussels sprouts take the longest. I started those and then got the orzo cooking and sautéed some garlic in olive oil to mix with the orzo. I toasted some pine nuts in a pan and held those to the side. When the orzo was done I drained it and tossed it with the garlic oil and added the toasted pine nuts. I was initially going to add some cheese to it, but I was using the orzo “pilaf” as a bed for the scallops and thought it would interfere with the flavor of the scallops so I decided not to.

I dried the scallops well on paper towels to help them get a god crust and sautéed them quickly in olive oil over high heat. Scallops cook very quickly and generally one minute a side is plenty of time to cook them without letting them get tough. I pulled the scallops form the pan, added some chopped garlic, let it cook briefly before deglazing the pan with white wine and then added some butter to pull the sauce together. I added the scallops back to the pan briefly to coat them in the sauce and then plated everything. I used the orzo as a bed for the scallops and did the Brussels sprouts on the side. The scallops were tender and very sweet and delicious. I would have liked a little better crust on them, but the crust was adequate. I had a glass of inexpensive Viognier with it which went quite well.

For dessert, we had Napoleons form the Beaverton Bakery, which is one of the best bakeries I’ve ever seen. She had chosen these instead of a cake, and although we didn’t add candles, I did sing her “Happy Birthday.” The Napoleons were as perfect as anything else I’d had form them and was a great ending to a great meal.

December 26th

Have eaten the big roast beef dinner the previous evening, I felt guilty and thought I needed to make something that I could pretend was healthier. I love legumes and hadn’t cooked any in a while, so I opted to make some lentil soup. I had just finished smoking some bacon I had cured and cut a small piece off because cured pork is so good with bean soups. This one was fairly simple. I sautéed onions, carrots, celery, and the bacon, added the lentils and then some chicken stock. I added a few sprigs of thyme out of the garden and two bay leaves and turned it down to a simmer. When the lentils were done I served it with some grated grana padano cheese on top.

Even with the bacon and cheese in it, I could pretend it was a healthy meal (even if it might not have been), but. After the excess of Christmas dinner and the great wine, I chose to go with beer instead. I had a homebrewed Belgian Golden ale that was made with a combination of the La Chouffe yeast and the Duvel yeast. It had cleared out and was brilliantly gold with a classic spicy, Duvel like aroma and a hint of orange. It was a little bigger than the soup needed but it was a nice beer that goes well with food. Simple and less extravagant than the night before but satisfying in a way that most simple foods are.

Christmas Dinner

My traditional Christmas Dinner is a rib roast with Yorkshire pudding, potatoes, and some kind of roasted vegetable and a great bottle of wine. I thought about changing it this year, but my wife convinced me not to because she knows how much I enjoy it and I don’t normally make roast beef at any other time in the year.

I picked up a roast that was about 5 pounds and was perfect other than the fact that it had two rib bones and I have three dogs. A good roast beef is something that you don’t really need t mess with. Salt and pepper and proper roasting are all that’s really required. I subscribe to the “start the roast at a high temperature to get a crust and then lower it” school of thought. Opinions vary, but this has always worked well for me so I stick to it. I normally start the roast at about 450 or so for the first 15 minutes and then lower it to about 325 and cook it until it’s rare in the middle. It does need to rest for 20 minutes or so before slicing but this is generally fine since the Yorkshire pudding needs to cook for 20-30 minutes around 400 which requires putting it in after the roast has come out.

I stick with pretty traditional side dishes and don’t generally want anything to steal the thunder form the roast. This year we also had a potato and celery root puree (or mashed potatoes with celery root if you don’t like the fancier name), roasted vegetables which where a mix of parsnips, carrots, onions, and Brussels sprouts, and the Yorkshire pudding. We had a friend over who’s vegetarian but eats fish so I also sautéed some shrimp with olive oil, garlic and white wine. I also made a horseradish sauce with sour cream and a little Dijon mustard and baked some cheddar oat rolls as well.

I still have some 1986 Red Bordeaux from when I worked in the wine business in NY. 1986 was a great year, but the wines were incredibly tannic and most required long aging. It’s tough to beat old Bordeaux and roast beef. In fact old Bordeaux almost demands something rich like a good roast. I pulled my last bottle of Chateau Leoville Barton. My wife and her friend weren’t drinking wine and instead chose to drink some dry Irish stout (proof that women like dark beers and not just fruit beer), so I didn’t have to share the Leoville Barton. It was leaner than other vintages I’ve had, but had rich currant, cassis and dark fruit flavors. There was a very slight cedar note, but it was a classic Bordeaux flavor profile and perfect with the food. It still had some tannin and good acidity to cut through the rich roasted flavors of the meat and the vegetables. It really was an exceptional bottle and was still very vibrant. It was a testament to how well the 86’s have aged. I still have a Gruaud Larose and Lynch Bages and a few others, and will need to drink them soon, but this wine had gone the distance and aged into a beautiful fully mature wine. It was a present to myself.

For dessert we had pumpkin pie that our friend had made and I had some Grahams Six Grapes Port with it. I love good port and am very fond of Grahams although it does tend to be a little sweeter than some of the other well known houses. The Six Grapes is a non-vintage blend but is still a great Port and a great value. It was a little big for the pumpkin pie and perhaps a late harvest white would have been better, but it was still very nice and an excellent end to a great meal.