Dgourmac's Blog

My passion du moment is roasting vegetables, and this time of year there are so many good choices.  Last night’s dinner was a medley of some of my favorites:

• baked russet potato
• baked sweet potato
• roasted small onions in their skins (from Chocolate and Zucchini)
• roasted Provençal carrots (from Patricia Wells)
• roasted organic Maitake mushrooms
• roasted sweet red and orange peppers

OK, so I wilted the spinach in a sauté pan; sue me!

Here is my dinner plate; I took the sweet potato, Barbara, the russet, with sour cream and scallions.

The potatoes, the peppers, onions, and mushrooms were oven-roasted at 400º F.  The carrots were pan roasted with olive oil, garlic and Niçoise olives.  The most ingenious technique is the one for the onions, which I picked up from Clotide Dusoulier, who, in turn, learned it from Katie Quinn Davies.  I purposely bought a bag of small onions (but not cippolini for this), and they were perfect.

As you know by now, I am more of an adapter than an inventor.  The votes for easiest dish go the the roasted peppers:

• take one red and one orange pepper
• cut in half lengthwise
• remove stem and seeds
• place cut side down on a roasting pan
• roast at 400º until soft and the skin starts to pull away
• place peppers in a plastic bag to steam themselves
• peel off the skin, slice in strips
• rehydrate a small handful of salt-preserved capers from Puglia, add to peppers
• drizzle with olive oil, sprinkle with sea salt
• enjoy!

I opened a bag of organic baby spinach, and added a small amount of olive oil to the pan from the carrots.  Cover and sauté/steam until just wilted.  Serve.

I feel these vegetables were indicative of the south of France or a good bit of Italy.  So for a wine, I decided to go with a bottle 0f 2012 Grêle, from Château de Roquefort in France. Please read the back label for the remarkable story of this wine.  Oh, yes, it was delicious.  And will never be replicated, because — due to its origins — no one knows the actual blend of grapes that made it.

Back in May I discovered a marvelous, healthful legume — Chana Dal — and made a fine meal with it.  Tonight I made it again, with three new twists:

• served the dal on top of a mixture of brown rice and sprouted barley
• accompanied the dish with the remainder of an Alsatian wine from our wine event last week — a 1987 Zind Humbrecht Gewürztraminer
• preceded the meal with an appetizer of Herbed Butternut Squash Chips

Here’s the recipe for the Butternut Squash Chips from Food52, and the photo of mine:

A word of warning: I found that the chips needed a lot less time in the oven than called for in the recipe.  They were slightly overdone at 1 hour and 45 minutes, so be careful when you make it.  I used fresh Provencal thyme and sage from my garden, plus some Italian dried oregano for the herbs.

The Chana Dal followed the recipe in the video from Mark Bittman and Julie Sahni, and it worked beautifully.  I added more water than called for, so the dish was a little soupy, but that was no problem.  The silky texture of the cooked dal with the tarka added is evident in this closeup of the pot:

One other addition was some steamed baby spinach, which added rich color contrast and good vegetable flavors.  Here are the servings (Barbara chose to make a moat of the rice and barley).

The Gewürztraminer was a spicy, rich, unctuous partner to the meal — befitting its stature as a very fine 26-year old wine.  I have a few more in the cellar, and I believe they will last as least as long as I do.

One of my favorite food blogs is Italicious.  She has a nice touch of showing the blog post she did a year ago, and I always find it intriguing.

And so it was that almost exactly a year to the day, tonight we decided to have the same Ligurian vegetable soup we had a year ago.  Same deal: I picked the recipe, and Barbara executed it to perfection.  There were four minor variations: (1) she was too lazy to add the porcini mushrooms and soaking liquid for the extra depth of flavor, (2) we did not bother to make croutons, (3) we used Swiss chard instead of kale, and (4) I was in possession of two superb Ligurian wines to accompany the dish, thanks to my recent association with Social Wines of South Boston.  The net effect was still a very satisfying dinner, supplemented ever so slightly by a small quantity of Spaghetti with Onion Confit with Rosemary and Walnuts Sauce, from a New York Times recipe by Molly O’Neill in 1996.  I provide both recipes for you below for convenience.  The photo of the soup is last year’s version, with peas and croutons, but this year’s was almost as good, and featured Ligurian olive oil, too.

The first wine was the rose, Ciliegiolo, followed by the Bruna Rosso 2012, mostly Garnaccia, with some Rossesse, Cinsault and who knows?  Both were so well suited to the dish that I was transported to Genova, Portofino, and Recco in a brief moment.