Dgourmac's Blog

This has been a good week for food and wine.  No spectacular events, just little treasures. I continue to try the various wines in my mixed case from Social Wines, and each one has been delightful.

Tuesday lunch featured farmers market wonders such as heirloom tomatoes and fresh goat cheese, topped with red pepper purée on open-faced sandwiches on my whole grain toast.  A touch of pimenton, along with the oil and vinegar, salt and pepper livened up the tomatoes.

The next highlight was another find in Marcella Cucina, a Celery Root and Olive Tapenade purée.  It was very simple:

• peel or trim a celery root, then cut in quarters
• boil celery root until very tender, at least 30 minutes
• drain and put back in hot pot for a minute to dry out
• place celery root pieces in food processor, along with 2-3 tablespoons of Kalamata olive paste and a few tablespoons of olive oil
• salt and pepper to taste
• process until smooth
• serve on chips, toast, celery sticks, inner tubes — almost anything

This paired very well with another wine from Mallorca, a 2010 Anima Negra ÀN/2.  I love it that the grapes are totally new to me:

This is a blend of the most important varieties of the island of Mallorca; callet, mantonegre and fogoneu, which make up 80% of the wine’s composition. 

Finally, today’s lunch was an amalgam of vegetables, some leftover, some freshly made…plus another new wine.  It started with a small, oval French casserole — a copper pot I bought 21 years ago at Dehillerin in Paris.  Sometimes I pick the pot I want to cook in and then decide what to cook.  I had one good sized leek in the refrigerator that I wanted to use before we take off for Arizona soon.  I cut the leek lengthwise in quarters and then crosswise in 3/4″ slices.  Then I sliced up a special shallot from Maine, and sautéed both alliums slowly in olive oil in that pot with the cover on.  After they were almost fully tender, I added 1/4 cup of white wine and cooked that quickly until the alcohol had dissipated, then continued stewing the leek for another 10 minutes.

The next step was to use one large, leftover cooked beet.  This one was the size of a large russet potato when Lynn dug it out of her garden and bestowed it on us, along with a couple of smaller ones.  It was so big that I needed to use a 4-quart pot to cook it and keep it under water.  Anyway, I recently read a cookbook in which the author cut thick slices of beet, coated with bread crumbs and fried it like a cutlet.  So I cut 3/4″ slices, coated with salt, pepper and olive oil, dipped in bread crumbs and sautéed the slices — sort of filets de Beet (as opposed to Boeuf).  Then I added some of the leeks, several pieces of leftover carrots I had braised in olive oil and herbs the night before, one filleted salt-packed Sicilian anchovy dissolved in warm olive oil, and the last special ingredient.

Yesterday, at the last local farmers market of the season, I met Smoky Joe, who grew a wide variety of chile peppers in his garden.  Joe was at the market with neat contraption: an open steel cage mounted on an axle, next to a gas burner, so that he could turn and fire-roast the peppers on the spot.  I bought a bunch of red and green Anaheim chiles, moderately hot, and he roasted and bagged them for me right there.  Yesterday, I rubbed off the roasted skins and seeded the peppers, and I sliced up part of one of the red peppers for lunch today with the beet, leek, carrot dish.  Three small pieces of my Field #2 Blend bread were toasted and used to sop up all the tasty olive oil.

This richly-flavored dish deserved a robust red wine, and I found one up to the task: a 2008 Domaine du Traginer Collioure from the South of France (by way of Social Wines, of course).  It was absolutely delicious.

I’m looking forward to dinner!

I have a small, raised-bed garden behind the garage, designed mainly to grow vegetables for our pizzas.  It hasn’t worked out well yet.  Three years ago, the critters ate all the produce.  Last year our electric fence kept the critters out, but a dry summer and my absenteeism during vacation wiped out the crop again.  This year the fence worked; I was home most of the summer, so I could water when needed.  But something is still wrong: our crop yield is minuscule:

What you see above is one of about 10 zucchini we grew this year, plus our entire crop of Bietole and Padron Peppers.  And that was a few weeks ago.

Today I decided to turn the fence off for a few minutes and check the current situation.  I was able to return to the kitchen with three perfect 4-5″ baby zucchini and a handful of Provencal thyme, which I grew successfully from seed three years ago.  This was a fine opportunity to experiment for lunch.

Real, natural baby zucchini have always fascinated me, so I took out my favorite sauteuse and began by sautéeing a crushed clove of garlic plus all the thyme with three small rehydrated sun-dried tomatoes from Campania.  Then I added the baby zucchini and continued to cook on medium high heat.  When the zucchini had a little color and the garlic was getting brown, I added 1 small fresh tomato, seeded and diced, and cooked two more minutes.  Add some sea salt and pepper.

Now for some white wine (~1/3 cup), boiled off the alcohol, reduced the heat, covered the pan and braised until the tomatoes were melting into the olive oil and the zucchini were nice and tender.  Meanwhile, I toasted a slice of my Field Blend #2 Forkish whole grain bread, cut it in half and when the pieces were ready, a dredged them in the pan — scooping up the olive oil and crushed garlic.  A little more cooking on high heat to remove any remaining liquid, and then I placed the little babies in a pasta plate with a bit of sauce.

I remembered that I had some fresh goat cheese from the farmers market yesterday, so I added that to the bread and served lunch.

I don’t know if you can feel the umami from the last picture, but I must tell you that after the braise, the mouth feel of the olive oil, garlic, two kinds of tomato, and traces of the white wine was amazing.  What white wine?  It was a 2011 AN Quíbia from Mallorca (Spain), which I had purchased last week at Social Wines in South Boston.  Made of indigenous grapes that you and I have never heard of before, it is delicious — yet another of those unknown wines which I have come to relish.

I was still a little hungry, so I toasted another piece of the bread, sopped up all the remaining sauce, spread on some Kalamata tapenade and the goat cheese, poured the rest of the wine, and decided that — for a Monday — it was a good lunch.