My 1983-Themed 30th Birthday

http://champagne-taste.blogspot.com/2013/11/my-1983-themed-30th-birthday.html

Posted to my other blog, Champagne Taste - my 30th birthday dinner party - all 1983 wines!

Pumpkin Lasagne, Pinot Noir, & Banana Cream Pie

I can’t think of any better way to work on my food blog than to have Jacques Pepin and Julia Child on dvd in the background - and I’m sipping on a fun Carmenere from Chile.  I’ve never been much of a Carmenere fan, but this one doesn’t have that excessive green bell pepper that happens sometimes (which I don’t like, because it masks the fruit and earthiness).  This one has some pepper but plenty of fruit, and I’m enjoying it.

Anyway, I made something awesome last week - well, two awesome things, but one was from a popular recipe, and the other I hatched from my own imagination.

For dinner, I created a pumpkin lasagne.  And if it sounds delicious, it is.  I boiled 12 pieces of lasagne and laid them out on wax paper.  In the Emile Henry baking dish, I built the lasagne.  In a bowl, I mixed pure pumpkin puree with a pinch each of cinnamon, clove, nutmeg, and ginger.  In another bowl, I mixed ricotta with finely chopped sage and walnuts.  (Ricotta isn’t the only cheese I used - I also used grated parmigiano reggiano, crumbled fresh goat cheese, and small pieces of fontina - how is it that whenever I start creating a dish like this, I end up with four completely different cheeses?)  And finally, I sauteed some chopped crimini mushrooms seasoned with black pepper.  Now it’s time to build the lasagne.  I placed four lasagne pieces, slightly overlapped, at the bottom of the pan.  I then spread 1/3 of the pumpkin over it, topped it with dollops of ricotta, and added goat cheese, fontina, and mushrooms (each I used 1/2 of what I had).  Then I laid another four pieces of lasagne, and again topped with more pumpkin, plus the remainder of the cheeses and mushroom, and then topped with the last four pieces of lasagne, the remainder of the pumpkin, and then sprinkled with the parmigiano reggiano.  Into the oven at 350F for about 40 minutes or until the top is crisp and golden, and the sides are bubbling.  It’s so good (and I was even a little surprised at how good it was, considering there was no recipe).

With it, the pairing was a Pinot Noir from Switzerland, which was excellent and a really good pairing.  I love Pinot Noir, especially the bright, clean feel that cuts through some rich ingredients, and this one also had some complexity heading toward the finish, with dark fruit showing through, followed by mineral, and just delicious overall, especially with the dinner.

One of my favorite pies is banana cream pie, and ever since I was a kid, I wanted to make my own, so I have no idea why I never attempted it until now.  Anyway, I used my sister’s pie crust recipe, except I added about 2 tbsp unsweetened cocoa powder, and that gave it another dimension in terms of flavor.  The pie filling consisted of 4 bananas plus a homemade sort of pudding made from scratch which was quite simple, and then baking it and chilling it, and making fresh homemade whipped cream to top the pie.  It was everything I remembered from when I was a child, only better somehow.

That was a fantastic dinner.  Lots of calories, yes, but completely worth it!

Braised Lamb Shanks, Brunello, & Orange Spice Butter Cookies

I think I’m finally all caught up on blog posts!  The wine blog is a little different these days as it’s less about just tasting notes and more about wine philosophy and new discoveries made by me and cool things that are happening lately with wine and me.  But that’s one of the things I’m enjoying about having this food blog as my secondary blog - it requires a lot less thought as I rarely follow recipes and technicalities (unless I’m working on one of the “classics” like the French mother sauces, those need real recipes as I will not tamper with a classic, and so they take more thought) - everything else I kind of do by the seat of my pants, which is my favorite way to cook.  I think I learn the most that way, and that way no one can say, “oh Jac, you didn’t follow the recipe correctly,” because there is no recipe involved.  That’s why those who know me well, know that I usually refer to my creations as “concepts” - and this is a total run-on sentence.  Anyway, now that it’s a new sentence, I call my creations and experiments “concepts” because that’s exactly what they are to me - ideas that I hatch out of my own imagination, sometimes based on something I’ve had before, sometimes based on something I’ve seen or heard about, and sometimes just because the ingredients seem to make sense to me and so I imagine how they’d be when they’re together, and test it out.  After all, what’s the worst that can happen?  Sometimes the ingredients are already good friends, like pumpkin/goat cheese/walnuts/sage (so yes, that’ll be incorporated into a recipe possibly as early as next week and it’ll be something really awesome so stay tuned please!), or venison and juniper, or things like that.  And sometimes, the ingredients are complete strangers and need to be introduced formally, and then we see how well they work together, sometimes with the help of other ingredients.  An example of this happened several years ago - I had an Australian Pinot Noir open and I was enjoying it on a snowy night alone in my kitchen.  I was making something with chocolate for dessert, and I was making a steak with a bleu cheese sauce for dinner.  Now, I’m not generally an advocate for pairing dry style wines with chocolate, but there was something I simply couldn’t resist - I put the bleu cheese and dark chocolate into my mouth at the same time.  To this day, it’s still one of the most incredible, delicious, and eye-opening things I’ve ever tasted.  And then I had a sip of the Pinot Noir and BOOM - I became a lot more radical in the kitchen from then on.  And if you’ve never tried bleu cheese with dark chocolate, consider this a strong suggestion to do so.  I think the bleu cheese allowed the Pinot to work with the chocolate, and without it, I think the wine and chocolate would have offended each other, but instead, they all worked harmoniously.  So like I said, what’s the worst that can happen?  If two ingredients don’t work well together, there won’t be a costly divorce or nuclear war to remedy the situation.  You just learn from it and try again.

That said, this blog post will describe ingredients that I already knew would work well together.

I love lamb.  I love the flavor, aroma, and texture.  And I’ve loved lamb dishes for as long as I can remember.  I usually make lamb chops, often the small ones, at home.  (I always include rosemary and garlic and lemon, as to me, those are perfect with lamb.)  But this time I wanted to try a more autumnal variation on lamb by braising it, so I went to the local butcher and bought lamb shanks.  In the Le Creuset dutch oven, I heated some extra virgin olive oil until it was smoking, and then added the lamb shanks.  I seasoned them with kosher salt and fresh ground black pepper, and turned them a few times to allow them to brown a bit until they had somewhat of a golden color.  I then deglazed the pan with a good red wine (I’ll tell you about that in a moment because I deviated a little on the wine), and scraped the bottom of the pan with a wooden spoon, lowered the heat, added about a cup or so of beef stock, and some rosemary and finely chopped garlic.  Into the oven for 2 hours at 350F until the meat was pretty much falling off the bone.

Most people love to serve that kind of lamb over potatoes or rice.  I’m sorry but I don’t care much for potatoes unless they’re very seasoned and mashed or they’re turned into gnocchi, and I really don’t like rice unless it’s a good risotto.  So I went into the pantry and voila, there was half a box of orzo left!  I was so happy, because I LOVE orzo.  I cooked and drained the orzo, placed it at the bottom of a fairly deep square Apilco dish, and seasoned the orzo with lemon juice and garlic.  And then I topped it with the lamb shank.  WOW.  It smelled amazing, the texture was perfect, and the flavors?  Well, I was astounded at how well it turned out!

Ok, so about the wine - usually with lamb, depending on how it’s cooked, I usually recommend one of the French reds from Bordeaux (Cabernet/Merlot), Burgundy (generally a Pinot Noir from Cotes de Nuit), or Rhone (either a Chateauneuf-du-Pape of mostly Grenache from Southern Rhone or a Saint-Joseph made of Syrah from Northern Rhone) - those are my favorites with lamb.  This time, I chose a Brunello di Montalcino.  What’s that?  Well, it’s a really good dry red made from Sangiovese in Tuscany.  So I chose a nice Italian wine instead.  And it was a perfect pairing.  The wine had notes of dry earthiness with cherry, rose petals, savory herbs, and barrel, and that’s what I was looking for on an autumn evening.

With it, I made a light salad of baby greens and almonds, with a lemon/wildflower honey/balsamic vinegar/olive oil dressing.  Very clean and simple - I like clean side dishes when the main dish is complex.

On a whim after dinner, I decided I was in the mood for a light and not overly sweet dessert - so I decided within seconds on butter cookies, but I wanted to make something fun with them.  Basically, the recipe called for flour, sugar, salt, butter, egg, and maybe some other ingredients, I don’t remember (because I was ever so slightly tipsy - read SLIGHTLY [oops] - and I picked up my iphone and went online and found a quick butter cookie recipe from scratch so I didn’t save it) - and I added to it some fresh orange zest, cinnamon, and nutmeg.  The dough was soft and dry and easy to work with - I formed it into small balls and pressed them a bit into the cookie sheets, and criss-crossed them with a fork.  Into the oven at 350F for about 10 minutes, and there I had them - perfect orange spice butter cookies.

And soon thereafter, I was really full.