Rosé

Kara and I are not really wine connoisseurs. We understand the basic differences between varietals, enjoy wine tastings, and can recognize a really good wine, but for our tastebuds, it can often boil down to red, white, and her favorite… ROSÉ.

When we saw an episode of Ayesha Curry’s show that was based all around rosé wine and featured lemon, raspberries, and capers—many of Kara’s faves—I had to do the whole menu.

An interesting tidbit about rosé is that it is most likely the earliest type of wine ever made (the earliest evidence is from around 7000 BCE). I’m paraphrasing here, but aside from the type of grape, wine gets much of its color and flavor from the amount of time it spends with the skins of the grapes. Pull the skins out early and you have a white, leave them in and you get a rosé, use darker grapes and other processes with the skins to get a red. In the early days, they didn’t quite have the techniques down well enough to make what we now consider red or white, so the first wines were probably rosés. It’s a much different process now, and that was a very basic overview, but I find it interesting.

Roasted Pepper and Goat Cheese Bruschetta

A fantastic appetizer—and one we plan to keep in the books—the name pretty much describes it, but the bell peppers are marinated in a simple but tasty sauce. These things are good!

Rosé Lemon Caper Salmon + Cauliflower Rice

You guys know I've got my salmon cooking technique on lock, and this is just a new treatment with the herb sauce- reduced rosé wine with capers and parsley. The cauliflower “rice” consists of cauliflower that has been pulsed in a food processor until it’s about the same size as rice, then sautéed with green onions and thyme and other spices. It doesn’t really taste like rice, but it is very good.

Lemon Olive Oil Cake

I am not a dessert guy, but this just sounded too much up Kara’s alley to pass on. Yellow cake with lots of lemon zest, using olive oil instead of vegetable, and for the frosting, which is usually confectioner’s sugar and water, I subbed fresh lemon juice rather than water. Topped with raspberries. Pretty yummy, even for a guy who doesn’t like desserts.

Rosé Spritzer

And of course you have to have rosé wine with the meal. We mostly drank plain rosé, but we tried this spritzer which is half rosé and half sparkling lemon water, garnished with raspberries and a gently rubbed sprig of thyme. It’s a unique experience when you catch the thyme in the aftertaste of this beverage.

Kara-licious

Another meal prepared one-and-a-half-handed. I saw Bobby Flay cook this a couple weeks ago on TV and knew it was right up Kara’s alley because, you know, mushrooms, grits, eggs, and lots of cheese... a few of her favorite things. It was a hit.

Mushroom and Grits Quiche with Kale Pesto

Four types of sautéed mushrooms (cremini, portobello, shiitake, and oyster), slow-cooked stone-ground grits, four types of cheese (sharp Cheddar, Parmesan, Asiago, and Romano), baked in a casserole dish with beaten eggs, and topped with some lemon zest for serving. The pesto was made with baby kale, walnuts, Parmesan, and of course, olive oil. Kara is not a fan of kale or pesto in general, but even she went for it in this dish. It looked kind of simple, and on TV it took 8 minutes, though in real life it’s more like 2 1/2 hours in the kitchen. But I like cooking on a Saturday, so it was fun. I spent quite some time trying to elegantly plate this kind of sloppy but very comforting dish.

Left-Handed Blade Skills

For anyone who doesn’t know already, I recently broke a very important bone in a fall on a dog walk a few weeks ago. No opposable thumb on my dominant (right) hand for a couple months, ugh. As the Eastern European woman in the grocery store so eloquently put it today when she saw my cast, “You have big OUCH!” She’s right, but it won’t stop me from cooking!!

Surf and Turf Skewers with Bourbon Teriyaki Sauce

You know I love surf and turf. Here’s strip steak and gigantic “four-bite” shrimp (I mean BIG) grilled on a skewer, marinated and basted with a sauce based on soy, bourbon, buckwheat honey, Sriracha, mirin, lime, etc. On the side is orzo and grilled red onion, baby bella mushrooms, and a slice of grilled orange to splash over it all. The sauce has a dozen ingredients and two of them are MINCED aromatics, and given my condition, I’m proud I pulled it off. Very delicious!

This classic clip from The Princess Bride sums up how I feel toward cooking right now and, better yet, how I hope to sound in a couple weeks: 

St. Patrick's Day Redux

I realize this email is two weeks late, but...

A couple years ago, I wrote about the traditional Irish-American version of St. Patrick’s Day food and made corned beef and cabbage and it was very tasty.

I’ve got more Irish than anything in me, so this year I researched what the Irish REALLY eat on this holiday and there’s no clear answer other than “BEER!" I then looked into traditional Irish food. Much of it is seafood (lobster, salmon, etc), which makes sense if you look at the Emerald Isle on a map. Next is lamb. Lots and lots of lamb (leg of lamb, shepherd’s pie, etc). I love lamb, but the people I was cooking for do not. So here’s our traditional Irish meal:

Pan-Fried Salmon with Citrus Viniagrette and Asparagus

Pan-fried salmon* topped with an intense citrus vinaigrette made from a combination of fresh orange, lemon and lime juices, served with steamed asparagus. I invented that schlocky shamrock garnish (patting self on back).

Colcannon

This is a fantastic blend of what we think of Irish food and what Irish food actually is. It’s basically mashed potatoes with cabbage stirred in. Just delicious and comforting. It’s named for cál ceannann, meaning "white-headed cabbage.” There’s even an old folk song about it.

Soda Bread

A traditional classic on this side of the pond or the other. I make it every year. Just delicious homemade bread where baking soda is the leavening agent rather than yeast. So good.

* Final note for those still reading (and I’ve probably said this before): The easiest way to cook salmon is to place the skin (or skinned) side up filet in a hot skillet for 2 minutes, flip and put in a preheated 450º oven for about 3 minutes. There are variations on this technique which all work, but this is the simplest I’ve found. I still love cedar plank grilling and poaching and many other methods, but this 5 minute plan is PERFECT when you want it perfect in 5 minutes.

I Told You So

When I suggested this dish for my mother’s recent visit, she said, “I'll eat it, but tuna casserole is not my favorite,” but after one bite said, “Oh wow, this is soooo good!”

Tuna + Buckwheat Pasta Gratin

This is a high-end spin on classic tuna casserole from Gjelina I’d been wanting to make for a long time, but needed a crowd to do it- thanks family! Homemade pasta (couldn’t find buckwheat, so it’s actually spelt), fresh ahi tuna slowly poached in olive oil with fennel, guajillo chiles, bay leaves, and thyme, stirred into red onions, garlic, celery, and cabbage, using copious amounts of Gruyère and crème fraîche as the sauce, topped with homemade crushed garlic croutons and Parmesan cheese. Served with a rustic mixed greens salad, and the fig newtons I make with red wine and anise for dessert.

This is the picture from the book. Casseroles are tricky to photograph anyway, and I had hungry people ready for a late dinner, so I skipped my own pics.

Cast Iron

This email is about a utensil, not a meal, and I know several of my friends on this list have heard me yammer about this already, but for those who haven’t…

I inherited a cast iron skillet from Kara’s late Aunt Bert that I was able to research and identify as a collectible, being cast anywhere from 1922 to 1959. That’s a wide spread but we don’t know if Kara's grandmother bought it in the 20s or if Bert received it as a wedding gift or just purchased it in the 40s or 50s. No matter what, it has some history. It also was made using an older method that provides a smooth cooking surface rather than the slightly pebbled ones from cheaper processes that are what you buy today.

However, it was caked in grease. That’s good for non-stick and shows lots of history, but it’s also a bit gross. Long story short, I did my research and wound up spending a month cleaning the thing. Every other day I’d put on rubber gloves and scrub it vigorously with a wire brush, spray it with a lye-based cleaner and seal it in a bag and then repeat.

I don’t have a good “before" picture because I didn’t expect to get this obsessed or to get it this clean from the beginning. Here, the black gunk you see on the side was so thick all over the pan you literally could not see the brand name, which in this shot is now clear. It took two weeks to get to this point, and two more to finish.

After a full month of scrubbing, I had this:

It’s still in the process of being re-seasoned which will just take more time, but that will thankfully be achieved mostly through usage. Here’s how it looks after a few passes of being oiled and placed in my 700º grill for an hour or so.

If you’re interested to read more about this stuff, this site is very thorough: http://www.castironcollector.com/collecting.php 

 

Spectacular

Here’s Christmas cookbook email #2: Simple to Spectacular, by Jean-Georges Vongerichten and Mark Bittman, gifted by my mother on Kara’s advice from my wishlist. The concept is great- take 50 recipes and then make 5 increasingly sophisticated versions of each of them. Even the most intricate ones are a welcome change from all the complex restaurant cookbooks I have. So, for instance, you start with simple homemade chicken broth, but by the 5th iteration you have consommé. A fairly simple "Sea Bass Seviche" evolves into “Nearly Raw Lobster with Miso, Mustard, and Caviar.” 4 ingredients and simple techniques turn into over a dozen ingredients with advanced techniques.

For my first run, I went for the most advanced version for halibut. Their recipes in increasing sophistication are:

Halibut with white wine and shallots

Provençal halibut

Halibut with mustard-nut crust

Three-fennel halibut

and then we had…

Halibut Braised in Red Wine

This one was actually a little challenging. I screwed up a few basic parts a couple times and had to start over, but none of the things that really need love were messed up (I’m looking at you, expensive halibut). Kara said it was a very Xandiferous treatment of fish. Not delicate, but bold and full of umami. Heavily reduced red wine combined with reduced fish stock from scratch—very concentrated flavors—used to braise the halibut with pearl onions and mushrooms, topped with bacon, then broiled to crisp it up. Served with French bread to sop up the velvety sauce. I even busted out the kitchen torch to add some char and crust on the top of the dish that the broiler couldn’t quite complete.

Hard to photograph, but I think this shot looks edible, and it was damn tasty.