A few days ago, I was using up stuff in the refrigerator and decided to make a chopped salad for lunch. Initial reaction is, What kind of meal is that?? The answer is, a very good one. This is a short post. But I got two delicious lunches out of it.
Ingredients:
The Lunch Bowl:
The Wine:
The Verdict:
Being vegan is marvelous — healthy and delicious. But sometimes we just need a little salmon, especially if it is wild Copper River Sockeye Salmon. I went to the Quarterdeck seafood market the other day and came home with less than 1/2 lb. of this lovely fish. It provided the colorful center of a vegetable meal, and Barbara and I both enjoyed it.
I’ve been in a use-up-leftovers mood, and that includes stuff that needs cooking soon, because we buy so many good veggies at farmers markets. That night I found a sorry looking yellow squash, for example, but when I cut off the bad part and made a small dice of the center, it was perfect for frying. I also had some pea pods needing to be used. Remembering how good they are when caramelized a bit in a hot skillet, I added them to the squash and had a nice side dish for starters.
We had lots of green beans, the regular straight ones and Romano beans, too. So I cooked them briefly in boiling water until barely done and put them aside, while I cut thin slices of half a small cabbage, to roast at 400º F. In the meantime I boiled five small Satina waxy potatoes, peeled and cooled them, then sliced them and added to a nonstick pan with olive oil on medium low heat.
The richly-colored salmon fillet needed only to be seared in a hot skillet with a little olive oil (it was first rubbed with a bit of lemon juice, salt, pepper, and ground dried lemon). I turned the filet over so it was skin-side down, and I put the skillet in the oven to finish cooking, reheating the beans at the same time. Finger pressure is the only way to test for doneness, so I leave that to my co-chef, since she likes it slightly firmer than I do. The final plate came together beautifully.
The biggest surprise of the evening was the wine. I often like Pinot Noir with salmon, so I pulled three bottles out of the cellar to consider. The first was a 1995 Lynmar Russian River Valley, which I and obtained many years ago from the winery owner who was a business associate. It had been in a remote section of the cellar until recently, so I feared it was long past its prime, which is why I picked two other bottles (one California, the other from Burgundy) as backup. There was no need. After I mangled the cork, which disintegrated under the corkscrew, I eventually got it opened and strained out the cork pieces. Much to my astonishment the wine was alive and well, full of charming fruit and elegance. I enjoyed it and the salmon together. Compliments to the winemaker.
A long weekend is always an invitation for us to cook. This time Barbara was particularly inspired by the Oct/Nov 2014 issue of Fine Cooking, a magazine we had discontinued some time back but to which we recently re-subscribed. So we invited five of our very good friends over for dinner on Labor Day to share the food and wine. Here’s the menu:
We split the cooking, but Barbara outdid herself, choosing four of the recipes from the magazine, all new to her. I, on the other hand, did the other half of the dishes, all of which I had made before, and many which could be prepared ahead of time. Everything was ready when the guests arrived, so we could schmooze with mezze and wine first.
before dinner discussion
roasted mushroom, radishes, and Jerusalem artichokes
Here are some of the main dishes and ingredients in prep.
marinated heirloom tomatoes
Yu Choy with Preserved Lemon and Shoyu
frittata
I did not take photos of all the wines, but here were two. There was also a 2002 Italian white wine, uncovered in the cellar reorganization, but unfortunately that had gone by, so we poured it out. The Villa Creek Rousanne was marvelous, as was the the 2005 Sancerre Rouge from Lucien Crochet.
Lastly, I attach for your reading pleasure the recipes from Fine Cooking. Barbara made adjustments, of course, some for vegan reasons and some for artistic ones. We’ll let you make your own versions, as desired. Buon appetito!
With Farmers Markets on both Saturday and Sunday, the end of August was an opportunity to indulge in our favorite adventures — a meal replete with pasta and great vegetables one day, and Sarah and the family the next day for homemade pizzas. I won’t bury you with details. The pasta dish contained fresh green beans and zucchini, onions and garlic, cherry tomatoes and black olives, a top-notch Italian spaghetti, and a bottle of 2011 Michele Chiarlo Barbera d’Asti Le Orme, which was featured at a very good price at Panzano Market in Southboro. This is a wine which I had once before, three years ago, on a visit to see Connie in Connecticut (see my blog for July 2011). That one was vintage 2006, and I thought it was an exceptional value and quite delightful, so I had been on the lookout for it since then.
We had a good visit here with Sarah and the whole family, doing the usual pizza dinner with the oven at full blast. What was notable, though, for me was the pizza I made for myself. No tomato sauce. Instead, I chose to make one with:
I loved it!
potato, red onion and pecorino pizza
closeup of pizza topping
At the end of the month I drove down to The City (NY) for a 24-hour visit for food, wine, and friends. I had not seen Jan for nearly five months, and this would be my last chance until year end to do so. In addition to having dinner with him near his office in Brooklyn (at Almar, a very good, casual restaurant owned by a chef from Puglia, and a friend of Jan), I did a few other food and wine things over the two days there. We had mostly pasta and vegetable dishes, but I could not resist a plate of grilled octopus, and it was superb.
Naturally, Jan’s wines were on the bill, and I brought a modest bottle of the Vestini Campagnano Kajanero, which I had searched for vigorously since last year in San Francisco at A16. It was a great feast and a fine chance to catch up.
old Western movie on the wall at Almar during dinner
smiling Renaissance man
In addition to traveling to the far reaches of Brooklyn on the subway to get the Kajanero, the next day I went to Garnet Wines on Lexington Ave. in Manhattan to meet Martin and to explore their excellent selection of Italian wines, including several of Jan’s good ones.
Two other stops and I was ready to drive home. One was a short visit to Paul Stuart to see their current selection of fine men’s clothing. I resisted the urge to buy anything, given that I really have no specific unfilled needs in that department currently. The other was a brief lunch nearby, at La Fonda del Sol at Grand Central Terminal. It’s a tapas place I usually enjoy for lunch. Very attractive room, good bar, and a few tasty choices. I had three dishes: the Pan con Tomat, Patatas Bravas, and Pan-Roasted Shishito Peppers, along with a glass of Txakoli. Standard fare, but enjoyable, especially the Bravas.
Bravas, Pan con Tomat, and Shishito Peppers
dining room and bar
Shishito, not Padron Peppers
Late August means lots of wonderful ripe local tomatoes and the end of the best corn of the season. One meal I really enjoyed couple of weeks ago was on a Sunday when I made bread again. It consisted of a corn, black bean and cherry tomato salad with some slices of freshly-baked bread.
I was especially ambitious that weekend; since I had no more of my whole grain breads in the freezer, I decided to make a double recipe — 4 loaves — with two different formulations. One recipe was the 75% whole grain levain which has become my mainstay. The other was a variation in which I substituted 16% fresh-milled durum flour for an equivalent amount of sprouted organic whole wheat from the same home mill. Both wholesome and delicious.
black bean tomato corn salad and bread
all four whole grain loaves
Last night I still had the cooking duty (joy?), so I asked Barbara what she wanted for dinner. “Something with a lot of beans!”, was her unexpected reply. So I perused Zuppa! by the Romagnolis, and used the inspiration to come up with my own version of this cross between a bean and cabbage soup and stew. Recently, I am making the dish first and then jotting down notes of what and how I did it:
I had already made a pot of the famous red beans of Tolosa, so some of those were left and ready to go. I then cooked a pot of Vallarta beans from Rancho Gordo, a small, greenish-yellow dried bean which is smooth and sumptuous, to which I could add half a can of the black beans we always have in the cupboard. The fourth bean is less available, but Idylwilde has some delicious fresh flat Romano beans right now, so I cut up some and added them to the mix.
The sofrito (as shown above) formed the flavor base of the soup. Thinly sliced red cabbage from Lynn’s garden, plus corn kernels, canned Italian tomatoes, and herbs were all the other elements need for vegetables. Cooked some sprouted brown rice and added that halfway through cooking the soup. Sautéed croutons from a loaf of Tuscan pane provided a little more protein and a lot of crunchiness.
The wine turned out to be something really special. It was a 2011 Linne Calodo Problem Child, my first ZSM (Zinfandel, Syrah, Mourvedre). Here are Matt Trevisan’s tasting notes from the website:
If you are expecting loads of fruit, mind boggling aromatics and a deft balance, then look no further. This is your wine. It really has never been a problem, just a fascinating trip of fruit, acid, judicious barrel use with quest of balance. (PS: I found it.).
Release Date: Winter 2013, SOLD OUT
I loved it, and so did Hank on Thursday night, when he came over to taste with me. Too bad there is no more available of any vintage of this wine. Buy more next year is the solution.
Salmagundi is a hodgepodge dish of all kinds of things — apparently from the French word ‘salmagondis‘. It’s the only way I can describe what I had for lunch today.
I started by going through the refrigerator with these questions in mind:
Here’s what I found and how I prepared the items:
I sautéed the first four ingredients in 2 Tbs. of olive oil, then added the mushrooms and tofu, followed by something I forgot to write on the list above — several spoonsful of cooked Rancho Gordo Vallarta beans with some of their liquid. At this point I added salt, pepper and some pimenton, for depth of flavor.
I was nervous about putting any cooked beets into the dish, since they tend to turn everything within the nearest 1/4-mile a deep crimson color. However, I took a chance, cubed a very large beet, and added it to the pan, along with the fava beans, and — a little later — the remaining 1/2 pint of a delicious farro and vegetable dish I made a few nights ago.
Finally, for savoriness I added a few pitted Ligurian olives and some chopped pickle that I have been enjoying the past few days, too. The results were delightful, and I ate two full pasta bowls of this very unlikely combination.
What wine would you serve with this concoction? Something equally arcane, of course. In this instance it was a 2010 Argyros Atlantis Red from Santorini, 90% Mandilaria and 10% Mavrotragano grapes.
Without a doubt no one will ever make this dish again (including me), but I do have a simple, four-step, more generic version of the recipe to offer you:
Enjoy!
I do enjoy lunches so much. Here are two of my recent favorites.
Birthday Lunch. The first was to celebrate my birthday a few days ago. I had gone to the North End the previous week to replenish my supply of the best dried porcini (1/2 kilo bag and a small bank loan). The grocer I rely on there is Salumeria Italiana, and I also picked up a package that looked intriguing: pasta with truffle, a tagliolini by Morelli. I decided that this would be stupendous with Tartufata, a mixture of cooked porcini, black olives and truffles, also from Italy. It was easy to do: boil the pasta (which cooked very quickly), toss with tartufata and reserved pasta water, add some chopped up marinated tomatoes, a few basil leaves, salt and pepper and a drizzle of olive oil. Pair it with a bottle of 2011 Riecine Chianti Classico, a stunning raw and natural wine from John at Social Wines, and be very happy that you are alive on your birthday to enjoy it all.
White Eggplant and Tomato in the Style of Santorini. Today was a quiet Sunday. At the farmers market in West Acton I bought a few things, and the most interesting was a white eggplant variety, similar to one I had in Santorini. So I made a late lunch with this, and some of my other favorite items of the week — new red potatoes, and cooked red Tolosa beans from the Basque country of Spain. This eggplant was quite firm, with very few seeds, so it took quite awhile to soften and be fully cooked, using a non-stick skillet and several glugs of olive oil from Puglia and lemon thyme from our garden.
I removed the cooked eggplant to a serving platter, then heated some more olive oil (first flavored with three cloves of garlic) and made a rich, thick tomato sauce with peeled chopped fresh tomatoes (2), canned Italian tomatoes (3) and juice, and 2 tablespoons of double-concentrated tomato paste from Santorini. The sauce was cooled and then layered atop each slice of eggplant, and topped with salt-packed Spanish capers which had been rinsed and drained a few times.
The Tolosa beans had been cooked the day before, so they just needed to be heated up with finely diced red onion and olive oil, and the potatoes were simply boiled until tender, peeled, and seasoned generously with olive oil, salt and pepper. The wine was perfect for it — the rest of the bottle of Riecine Chianti.
One of the big events this summer was the reorganization of my wine cellar. The prime mover on this was my friend David, who was aghast back in May when he looked at the over-crowding and lack of any semblance of date control in the temperature-controlled room I’ve used for years to stock wines, extra provisions, and pots that Barbara won’t let me put in the kitchen. I actually knew where some wines were located, but he correctly assessed that there were wines buried in the racks that should be drunk soon, or they would be no longer palatable, let alone at their prime.
David volunteered to donate a weekend to this effort, so he came over one Saturday afternoon. We had dinner and did some wine sampling (since no one was driving anywhere afterward), and we slept soundly overnight. Since I had done a couple of hours of pre-work earlier that week to remove non-wine items so we could get access, we were able to work together Sunday to complete the reorganization, assess the contents, discard the stuff that needed to go, and celebrate the victory. There were some very fine surprises in there, principally some older Bordeaux vintages that called out for attention. Best of all, we found space so I could buy some new wines to drink, as well.
Earlier that Saturday, I was graced by a visit for lunch from my good friend, Stacy. The menu was simple: my go-to salad Kachumber, and a non-vegan but vegetarian frittata, made with sautéed zucchini and fresh pecorino cheese. As always, we had lots of fun.
The rest of late July, as I was wrapping up my summer course, featured more vegetables and grains, plus some delicious organic ravioli made by a couple in NH, Valicenti Organico. The one I tried first was Pea and Olive Oil ravioli, with a simple sauce of toasted walnuts, fresh basil from the garden, and lots of Italian olive oil.
Another day I went to an old favorite, Lulu’s Provencal Table, by Richard Olney to make a richly-flavored tapenade to go with a new loaf of my whole grain levain. This was augmented with heirloom tomatoes, thinly-sliced red onions marinated with sumac and lime juice, colorful roasted sweet peppers, one very good dill pickle, roasted beets and cauliflower, black olives, pan-roasted shitakes, plus cucumbers, guacamole, and lots more basil. Favored wine bottles included a Spanish Samsó (Clos de Noi) and a white Rioja (Lopez de Heredia Tondonia). I still didn’t gain any weight, but I had fun trying.
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