What to eat during a snow storm - Part 1

December 20, 2008

Last week was supposed to be our annual snow storm here in Portland, but it turned out to only be the precursor for the real storm which is going on right now. They’re predicting 6-10 inches of snow in Portland before it switches over to freezing rain and finally rain sometime late tomorrow. Lovely.

We were supposed to have friends over for dinner tonight but they cancelled because of the weather. I sort of expected that to happen but figured I’d better buy the food just in case. Of course I hadn’t actually finalized a menu, and had figured on something sort of Spanish inspired and likely served as tapas or small plates. So I have mushrooms, shrimp, a pork tenderloin, potatoes, spinach, goat cheese, some red peppers and a package of Serrano ham courtesy of my brewing partner. I’ll likely spend the day cooking a variety of tapas. Nothing better than eating great food when there’s a blizzard outside.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any adequate bread so I made some bread earlier and it’s rising now. I make adequate, but not great, bread. It’s one thing I wish I did a lot better. One problem is I don’t do it enough. Oh, and I don’t really follow recipes. I have a basic recipe that I use that can work for anything from focaccia to pizza dough to actual bread. It's roughly three cups of flour, a teaspon of salt, a teaspoon or more of yeast, and 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 cups of water. I just kind of vary the types of flour and add more or less water depending on what I’m making. Sometimes I add olive oil as well (particularly if I'm making pizza dough). Today’s is 1/3 spelt and 2/3 white bread flour plus water, salt and yeast.

All I’ve decided so far is that I’ll start with sautéed mushrooms with olive oil, garlic, sherry, and rosemary (I'm using rosemary since the snow has pretty much buried and likely killed my parsley). But I can’t do that until the bread is baked because eating sautéed mushrooms without bread on the side just seems wrong.

At this point all I have are ideas for the other dishes: olive oil roasted potatoes with a spicy tomato and pepper sauce on the side (kind of like the sauce that’s used for potatoes brava), shrimp escabeche served at room temperature, chicken thighs wrapped in Serrano ham braised in a sherry and garlic sauce, spinach and goat cheese empanadillas.

Drinking a lovely home made lambic right now but I’ll need to decide what to drink with everything else later. Stay tuned.