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.

Limoncello

Preparation

Apparently I had a lot of catching up to do on the food blog, posting a few times this week should catch me up to where I am right now.  I’ve experimented with a lot of things that I’d been wanting to try and finally got to a lot of them.  Hopefully later this week or next week I’ll cover a cool lamb dinner I made a couple of weeks ago because it was fantastic and because I’ve got more things I’ll be making in the coming weeks and don’t want to fall so far behind again!  So the next post will definitely be the lamb dish I made (especially since I’ve been asked by a lot of people for the recipe).

5 weeks in the jar

So here’s a brief post on something I make at the onset of the cooler months - which for us here in New York, is around October.  Citrus fruits are good in the cooler months.  And I love limoncello.  Not that stuff you find in liquor stores that’s bright yellow and gooey and thick - personally I think that’s gross.  To me, a proper limoncello is the kind you make at home.  And everyone always sounds so impressed when I saw I make it at home, but the truth is, it’s really easy to do.

I have a large jar, I’m not exactly sure how large it is but it’s very large.  To make the limoncello, I peel 12 lemons - and I only use the peel, no pith (the white part - it tastes bitter).  I place the peels in the jar and then add 2 liters of vodka.  It doesn’t have to be expensive vodka - Absolut or Iceberg will do.  I seal the jar and let it sit for 5 weeks.  I shake it once a day and keep it out of the sunlight.

The finished product!

At the end of the 5 weeks, I decant it (and it smells amazing) into a large bowl or pot, and in a medium sized pan, I make a simple syrup of 6 cups sugar and 3 cups water.  Simple syrup is easy to make - swirl the pan around but don’t stir it - that might make it grainy instead of clear and smooth.  Once the syrup cools, I add it to the lemon infused vodka, stir it, and put it in bottles (usually a few empty vodka bottles) and it’ll last in the freezer for about a year (if you can prevent yourself from drinking it all in under a year!).

Sounds really easy, right?  That’s because it is.

There are also 2 variations on limoncello, which I’ve made a bunch of times as well.  One is mandarino - I peel 9 mandarin oranges (I’ve used tangerines instead) and use the same amount of vodka and simple syrup.  The other is zenzerino - that’s the peels of 7 naval oranges and 1/2 lb fresh grated ginger and the same amount of vodka and simple syrup.  (At least that’s what the recipe calls for - I prefer finely chopped ginger as it doesn’t just turn to sediment instead and the drink remains clear once decanted.)

Enjoy limoncello after dinner, or use it as an ingredient in some really fun cocktails!

Venison, More Homemade Bread, and Madiran

Here’s something interesting I had been wanting to work on for quite some time - venison.  I enjoyed it in restaurants and I just really wanted to attempt it at home.  And my first observation is that venison apparently is far easier to find in a market than quail is.  Go figure.

Anyway, I heard that juniper pairs particularly well with venison.  It kind of does, except that I like the flavors of meats, especially game type meats.  So both gin marinade and crushed juniper berries for a crust were recommended to me, and I did try both.  It worked of course but next time I’d go without so much juniper.  The meat certainly is delicious though.  So all I really did was buy venison tenderloin (d’Artagnan product) and marinate it briefly in some Tanqueray (just a very small amount), and then crust it with crushed dry juniper berries.  I cooked it at probably around 350F.

The sauce on the venison was a drizzle of cooked blackberries with wildflower honey, sugar, and apple cider vinegar (with a sprig of rosemary) which after it cooked and cooled, I put it through a sieve.  It was good.

The side dish I made was another homemade loaf of bread which was fun and it seemed so much easier than the first time.  (See my quail dinner post for the first loaf of bread.)  This time I sauteed a small amount of finely chopped onion and added it to the bread dough, along with finely chopped fresh sage from my rooftop garden, and the crust was topped with grated Swiss cheese.  The bread, I think, was amazing.  I’d do that one again in a heartbeat, and of course I’ll keep learning new flavors too.

The wine I chose to pair was a Madiran - the 2008 Chateau Peyros Vieilles Vignes.  I love Madiran - they’re so wonderfully dry and rustic and expressive, and made of mostly Tannat, often with some Cabernet Franc.  It’s a very honest wine (with nutritional benefits - read up on Tannat and resveratrol!) - and it’s a great pairing with something gamey like venison.  (I like Tannat paired with lots of things actually, and regularly make excuses to do so.)

Anyway it was quite a learning experience and delicious.

Autumn Appetizer - Goat Cheese Stuffed Figs

I’m a summer sort of person - I love the hot weather, I love drinking rose’ on the porch or dock, I love watching baseball, I just prefer summer over any other time of the year.  But when it comes to recipes and cool flavors and aromas, few things can top autumn.

I’ve got so many food related posts to work on as I’ve been experimenting quite a lot in the kitchen these days, but something I’d like to share this weekend is my favorite autumn appetizer.  It’s easy and fairly quick to make and very seasonal, and I’ve been making it for a few years and each time I enjoy it more.

Basically, they’re goat cheese stuffed figs.  Simple enough, right?

We have fig trees in our yard but they’re easy enough to find in a store at this time of the year, and I mean fresh figs, not the dried kind, as they’re easier to stuff when they’re fresh, as opposed to reconstituted.  Anyway, I recommend black mission figs.  And you can buy the small log of fresh plain goat cheese or you can buy the crumbled kind (which is actually a lot easier when stuffing, but it’s up to you and depends on what you can find, obviously).

I begin by cutting the stem plus a bit of the top off the fig, and then I clean some of the inside out of the fig - leave some but clean some out.  When you’ve cleaned out all the figs, begin stuffing them with goat cheese.  Once they’re all stuffed and on a platter, sprinkle them (and be conservative) with ground nutmeg, and drizzle with fresh lemon juice (again, be conservative) and honey.  It’s to die for.

I’d recommend some prosciutto di Parma on the side - the delicate meat and saltiness is perfect alongside the sweet fig and tangy goat cheese.  And I’d also recommend a sparkling wine - I almost always go with a sparkling rose’ when pairing with this appetizer.

Sounds easy and delicious?  That’s because it is!

Goulash & Blaufrankisch

Being a sales representative for a company that imports and distributes mostly French wine and having a name like Jacqueline, often people assume I’m French until they find out otherwise.  And generally, I identify myself as a Sicilian American, since that’s pretty much how I was raised.  But I’m also Hungarian and Slovakian (or, as I’d like to call my Hungarian heritage, Magyar).  And what I’ve noticed in the past few years is that while it’s quite common to be of Italian, Irish, German, Polish, etc. heritage, being Hungarian is a little less common and lately there have been quite a few Hungarians and Hungarian Americans coming out of the woodwork - it’s like we find each other somehow and embrace the common thread.

But Hungarian or not, I’m sure you’ve all heard of goulash.  It’s a delicious Hungarian stew or soup, and I’ve been enjoying making that, even a little more often now.  It’s generally served over egg noodles (that have bee lightly buttered and sprinkled with parsley).  The stew itself consists of vegetables, beef, wine (of course), and it would hardly be Hungarian without paprika.

How about I just tell you how it’s done?  It’s a little time consuming as I’ve clocked it even when I’m moving as quickly as if I were making marinara sauce, and prep time and cook time combined, it gets to somewhere between 2 and 3 hours.  Anyway, I use about a pound and a half of stewing meat (but I still cut away any fat) and cut it into fairly small pieces.  Some say to toss them in flour, but since my dad doesn’t care much for flour in most dishes, I tend to avoid the flour.  And it doesn’t seem necessary anyway.  I heat a bit of olive oil in the large round Le Creuset Dutch oven and brown the meat, seasoning it with kosher salt and fresh ground black pepper.  Once the meat is cooked, I remove the meat to a separate bowl but keep the juices left behind.  In the juices, I cook 3 medium sized yellow onions cut into thin rings, roughly a dozen garlic cloves peeled and cut in half, and one of those packages of baby portobello mushrooms (I believe that’s about 8 oz), which I cut into quarters.  I add a bit more olive oil and cover the pot, cooking on med-high heat until the vegetables are softened but have not browned.  I then deglaze the pot with some red wine (some recipes call for sweet red wine but I prefer a good quality dry red with some fruit characteristics).  After letting it cook a bit longer, I add about 2 cups of beef stock and I put the meat back in, as well as a small jar (drained) of roasted red peppers which I love (and I cut them into fairly small pieces), and a quarter of a cup of paprika.  Stir it all together and cover and cook on simmer-low for somewhere around an hour and a half.  The meat will be a lot softer and the stew will have thickened a bit and reduced somewhat.  Once it cools a bit, I add a cup of sour cream and stir it in, and heat it up again and serve it over the noodles.

It’s really easy, just a little time consuming, like I said.

My favorite pairing is currently Blaufrankisch, from Austria.  I’m a sucker for Austrian wines, both red and white, as I mentioned in my last blog post.  But something about the dry, spicy, earthy, and somewhat tart red wine like Blaufrankisch just seems so perfect with the goulash.  Eventually I’ll try a Hungarian red with it, but for now, Blaufrankisch suits me just fine (and as in the case of Zweigelt and how I like saying the word, it’s the same thing with Blaufrankisch, I like saying it).

So, in 3 days, I’ll be sitting in a Guild of Sommeliers master class on Austrian wine - while I’ve got a cool new blog post coming on this blog about a great experiment I did this week, my next blog post will probably be on the Austrian class, and it’ll appear on my other blog, Champagne Taste, so please be sure to check it out!