A Quick and Easy Dinner with Friends

There are different ways to plan for dinners and it depends on the type of cook you are and the type of friends you have invited for dinner. This past Saturday, I'd invited good friends over for dinner, but was handicapped with a hangover. After a rough night out the previous night, a long day of preparing elaborate food for dinner was not on the cards.

I started shopping at about 5pm and by 8pm I had prepped most everything for dinner. Here's the menu:

Hors d'Ouevres 

- smoked salmon on buttered brown bread with lemon and cayenne pepper 

- smoked anchovies
- marinated anchovies (boquerones) 

Entree 
- roasted chicken thighs with thyme
- broccoli gratinata
- mixed mushroom and pea risotto

Dessert
- apple and blackberry crumble with vanilla gelato

Wine

- Luneau-Papin 2005 Muscadet Sevre et Maine L D'Or
- Zarrak-Berri 2008 La Costa Guipuzcoana
- Produttori del Barbaresco 2008 Langhe Nebbiolo

The Last Days of Gourmet

I always loved Gourmet magazine for its photography and overall style.  Kevin Demaria, Gourmet magazine's former art director, documented, in a haunting fashion, the sad last days at the Gourmet office and published the pictures in this blog: www.lastdaysofgourmet.com.

How To Open A Wine Bottle Without a Corkscrew

Thanks to Dr. Vino for putting this on his blog. It's a fascinating show of how far someone will go to open another bottle of wine (or anything for that matter) when he's already had a few too many. On the other hand, it's a new approach that I have never seen before, so aside from the total drunkenness of the situation, it is actually quite educational.

Whole Turbot - What A Fish

The Lobster Place at Chelsea Market just started selling whole turbots from the cold shallow waters around Greenland. After eating at Elkano in Getaria, Spain and having Aitor explain the parts and textures and flavors of the fish in detail while he's filleting it at your table, it's hard not to have a new found appreciation for the fish. I wish I could say that I did it as much justice as Elkano did, but then again, I don't have a grill outside and I haven't acquired the skills from grilling and filleting local fish for decades.

What I did have was the gorgeous looking fish from the fish guys and a simple recipe from the London Times. I actually kept it even more simple than the recipe by omitting the hollandaise sauce.

Ingredients:

- one whole turbot (about 3lbs), gutted

- salt and pepper
- 2 tablespoons butter
- fresh parsley (small handful)
- 5 to 6 slices of lemon
- 1/2 cup dry white wine

Preparation:
Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Season the turbot with salt and pepper on both sides and add parsley and 2 to 3 slices of lemon in the cavity.  Grease a large roasting pan with butter and add the turbot with the dark skin side upwards. Pour the wine over the fish and dot the top of the fish with knobs of butter, slices of lemon, and some sprigs of parsley. Cover the fish with aluminum foil and bake in the oven for 25 minutes (at least that's what the recipe says). After 25 minutes, check the fish, because the middle of the fish was still cool when I checked on it. It ended up need about 35 to 40 minutes for it to be cooked through.

Fillet the fish in the roasting pan. Make sure you portion out meat from the dark skinned side and the light skinned side so that you can taste the difference between the two. But don't forget the other parts since you have the whole fish. Dig out the cheeks, pick out the bits of gelatinous fish around the fins, basically make sure there is no flesh left at all. You'll find you just can't stop eating it.


Side Dishes:
Simple boiled potatoes with butter and fresh parsley and a green vegetable such as beans work really well. Just keep it simple, the emphasis is really on the fish.


Wine Pairing:

Domaine de la Bongran (E J Thevenet) 2002 Cuvee Tradition Quintaine.  A great price at my old stomping grounds, Chambers Street Wines. A wonderful French chardonnay with some residual sugar, rich, creamy, honey, good balancing acidity, tropical fruit, lovely texture. Excellent with the turbot.

Scotch: Ledaig 1997 11 Year Bottled By WM Cadenhead

It was about a year ago that I was walking around Covent Garden looking for the old Cadenhead shop. I discovered they had just moved (to 26 Chiltern Street in the West End). I found it and was welcomed with the warming sight of whisky.

WM Cadenhead is Scotland's oldest independent bottler (established in 1842).  They've been doing this for long enough and have survived the ups and downs in scotch popularity that they don't chill-filter or add colorings.  Independent bottlers buy casks from the distilleries and other sources.  They have control how to finish and bottle the whisky. They often also buy stores from distilleries which have been mothballed which enables consumers to try an varied selection of whiskies. The bottles sold by independent bottlers (such as Cadenhead, but also Adelphi, Duncan Taylor, Gordon & McPhail, Signatory to name a few) will include pertinent information about the whisky: distillation date, bottling date, distillery, cask type, bottle number, number of bottles in release.  Many are bottled at cask strength.

I could only buy a couple of small bottles, but fortunately the shop has a great selection various sized smaller bottles. After a long day working on the new site (www.findeatdrink.com) the other day, I thought a little sip of Ledaig would be ideal.

It's from their authentic collection and was distilled at the Ledaig distillery. Ledaig is the only whisky distillery on the island of Mull and is now Tobermory.

The whisky is 57.7% alcohol and is very light colored that belies the actual taste. Peaty, briny, sweet, caramel. Lovely.

Gourmet's Braised Chicken with Tomatoes & Olives (Poulet Provencal)

There's something about olives. I enjoy them in the odd martini, although I generally prefer a lemon twist. I enjoy them on the side, marinated or cured, along with a cocktail. But I rarely cook recipes or even order dishes in restaurants with whole olives in them. In dishes, there is something about the dominating flavor that I just don't enjoy.

So, it was a rare occasion when I was looking for a roasted chicken recipe that I found this recipe on epicurious.com for chicken with tomatoes and olives. I felt like doing something simple and easy to prepare, but also a little different from the stand-by basic olive oil, salt, pepper. This recipe jumped out at me for it simplicity and it's comfort.

The whole chicken turned out spectacularly. The skin was crisp, the meat was moist, the flavors were exciting, the olives didn't bother me (I actually didn't eat many of them, but they added to the dishes complexity).

In making the dish, I didn't stray too far from the recipe. I didn't have herbes de provence, but made my own impromptu version using dried herbs (thanks to wikipedia) with fennel seeds (ground), basil, thyme, lavender flowers. I ended up grinding the fennel seeds myself, because that's all I had. Everyone's oven cooks things differently - but the timing in the recipe also was spot on.

This is a great dish to have with couscous, because there are fantastic pan juices from the tomatoes and the chicken that can be drizzled on top of the couscous. It was one of those simple meals, that didn't taste simple and everything came together.

Wine Pairing

Gonon is one of my favorite producers of Rhone wines and the inexpensive Gonon 2007 VdP de l'Ardeche Les Iles Feray was a delightful pairing to the provence style chicken. It's made from young vine Syrah in Saint-Joseph and older vine Syrah on the plateau in Ardeche. The smoky bacon characteristics came out beautifully with the roasted chicken. It's soft (don't be confused with new world soft though), but has lovely minerality, red fruits, and some worthwhile acidity to finish.

A Simple Lunch

Just a simple lunch, but even the simplest things can be tasty and look good.  Leftover noodles (Mee Siam), Amy's Cream of Tomato soup with white truffle oil, and a grilled cheese sandwich made with pita bread, cheddar cheese, fontina, truffle salt and pepper.