Dgourmac's Blog

This was a relatively traditional dinner: fish, noodles, and asparagus. The first two items were old favorite recipes, and the last one is brand new.

I had purchased one small black sea bass fillet last Sunday at Eataly Boston. After carefully extracting all of the small, sharp pin bones with strong food tweezers, I cooked it with one of my favorite recipes. It was by Pierre Franey, in his cookbook Cuisine Rapide. The fish is first bathed in milk (rice milk for us), then dredged lightly in flour, and sautéed in safflower oil until browned on both sides. It’s finished with a peeled, seeded, chopped plum tomato, and chopped scallions.

The starch was provided by Barbara, who was eager to make one of her standby dishes — Kugel, using egg noodles, almond milk ricotta cheese, apples, raisins, and apple juice. It roasts in the oven for a long time and crisps up nicely when the foil is removed.

I had a small bunch of plump Peruvian asparagus I wanted to eat, so I decided to try something new. I grabbed a Patricia Wells cookbook, Vegetable Harvest, to see what she had to offer. Bingo! I was intrigued by her recipe for Braised Asparagus, and it turned out to be a winner — and a new favorite.

The meal was essentially all French. However, in a bold departure from tradition, I decided to go with an open bottle of Italian wine — a Pecorino from Abruzzo. It was perfectly fine.

But not the usual stuff. My wife makes superb composed salads, and then matches them with a simple, elegant, and delicious tomato soup, as shown below. The soup was a Marcella Hazan recipe, with just tomatoes and butter. These were well-matched with a biodynamic Montepulciano d’Abruzzo.

In 1984 Joyce Goldstein launched one of my favorite restaurants, Square One, in San Francisco. That was a decade when I was frequently in the Bay Area, for both business and pleasure, and I enjoyed her cooking and the style of her place as often as possible. (To get a flavor of the Chef and her philosophies, you can peruse this article from the Christian Science Monitor, written in 1990.)

Since those golden days, Joyce has written a number of excellent cookbooks. One of those is Italian Slow and Savory, a tribute to slow cooking which brings out the rich, full flavors of Italy. Today’s post is about Le Virtu, the Farro and Bean Soup from Abruzzo which I made for dinner last night.

I followed this recipe pretty closely, and it seemed to work out well.

The wine recommendation was a Montepulciano d’Abruzzo, naturally. Fortunately, the biodynamic 2019 bottle by Cirelli, which I got from Eataly NYC last Fall, fit the bill perfectly.

The warm, rich colors and flavors of this Sunday night soup provided a comforting contrast to the six inches of snow and bright, cold sunshine Friday and Saturday.

the meadow at sunset