cooking class: sweet and savory bites

A number of years ago, J worked for a summer as a delivery driver for a wonderful local bakery called La Vie En Rose. It meant that he had to leave for work at 1 am, which wasn’t so great; on the other hand, we ate a lot of really great bread that summer. The owner of the bakery occasionally gives cooking classes at Gretchens, and we finally got around to volunteering for one of these, which featured both sweet and savory bites and appetizers.

The philosophy of the class seemed to be, “life is short, eat dessert first.” So the first course included a puff pastry “daisy” filled with lemon cream, plus a fried wonton full of chocolate and banana. I particularly liked the daisy, because I am a sucker for lemon curd in most circumstances.

Cru

It’s a quandary. Every time we go into Vancouver or Seattle to eat we face the decision: try somewhere new, or go back to a restaurant that we know we love? We frequently opt for a new place, so as to expand our repertoire of great standbys for times when we just don’t want a challenge (like right after a long airplane flight). But some places are so great you just have to go back, if only to make sure they’re just as good as you remember.

We went to Cru a couple of years ago. The small plates/wine bar phenomenon hadn’t gotten nearly as widespread as it is now, and there was still a novelty factor in getting to choose a bunch of different dishes to share. We walked in off the street (through a very nondescript entrance), sat at the bar and proceeded to have one of the best dinners ever - all the more appreciated because we didn’t know what to expect. We’ve since eaten our way through a bunch of other great Vancouver restaurants, but Cru has remained our fondest memory, and we’ve always intended to go back.

So, we were in Vancouver last weekend, doing some damage at Barbara-Jo’s Books to Cooks (a dangerous shop if there ever was one), and decided that it was as good a time as any to check out Cru again. This time, of course, we made a reservation - but we made sure to sit at the bar again. It’s a great way of doing a small plates dinner, because the bartender is always handy to take your next order (although from what we’ve seen, Cru has great waitstaff). We started out with cocktails and a plate of bruschetta.

butter lettuce with garlicky prawns and avocado

One of the joys of Sunday is doing our weekly grocery run and picking up something fresh for a quick but fun lunch at home - in other words, Not Leftovers! This salad is one of my favorites for a fast home lunch: butter lettuce dressed with a simple vinaigrette, split onto plates and topped with avocado slices and prawns cooked with garlic and spices. With this one we drank a Falanghina that was seriously on sale at the grocery store - it was lovely.

Prawns for salad

1/2 pound fresh large prawns, shelled
2 cloves garlic, coarsely chopped
cumin
paprika
kosher salt

Dress your salad greens and arrange them on plates. Heat a goodly amount of olive oil in a saute pan. As it gets hot, add the garlic; when it just starts to sizzle, add the prawns. Give them a good shake of salt, cumin and paprika, and stir them around. When the shrimp are pink and curled up on themselves, dump them and their juices out onto the prepared salads.

in the garden: dwarf iris

I am such a sucker for iris, especially miniature dwarf iris. It’s probably just as well that they’re not real easy to find, although I’ve done quite a bit of damage through Monument Iris Gardens in Nebraska - he grows tons of great varieties. But they’re sturdy and early blooming, and they come in a wonderful range of jewel tones that really perk up the May garden. This one is called “Being Busy” - I love the bright blue beard.

scallop crêpes

I love scallops, and I love crêpes. When I saw a recipe in the April 2007 issue of Saveur magazine for buckwheat crêpes with scallops and scallop cream sauce, I knew I would have to make it at some point. We got around to it last week, on a rare sunny evening. We sat by the stove drinking white wine, frying scallops and eating them rolled in hot crêpes as they came out of the pan. Bliss!

We never remember which buckwheat crêpe recipe we like best, so this time J used Mark Bittman’s version from The Best Recipes in the World. The scallop sauce recipe was written to feed a vast number of people, so I edited it heavily to suit myself. The result was delicious, to say the least, but I’m not sure I would make it quite this way again. I’d rather eat my scallops whole and make a shallot-cream sauce to go on them, instead of using any of them in the actual sauce. But that’s just me - the pureed scallop did have a wonderful sweet flavor, and it’s definitely worth trying.

Scallops with Scallop Cream Sauce
adapted from Saveur magazine

• 3/4 pound large sea scallops
• 1/4 cup cream
• 1/2 cup chicken broth
• 1/2 cup white wine

Select a third of the scallops (I picked out the ugliest ones for this part). Pat them dry and season with salt and pepper. Fry them in a bit of butter until golden brown, then puree them in a heatproof container with the broth, wine and cream. Pour back into the pan and simmer until thickened. Salt to taste.

Cut the remaining scallops in half and fry as you go - two pieces per crêpe works well. Cook a crêpe, lay it on a plate and arrange the scallops on it, then spoon a good glop of the sauce on top. Asparagus is a good addition; leeks might be tasty as well. Roll up the crepe and eat.

a few Washington wines

There was a nice little wine tasting at Gretchens last week, led by Noble Wines rep Renee Stark and featuring wines from Washington State. It was nice and relaxing for us (the kitchen help), since there were only two food platings and most of the cooking was either done ahead or very simple. Some of the wine highlights:

Novelty Hill Sauvignon Blanc 2005: Very drinkable, with good body. Not terribly acidic, but pleasant with the food.

Whidbey Island Lemberger 2006: I find straight Lembergers to be a bit one-dimensional, with very little body to the wine, but this had a nice flavor. Might be a good summer red, since it had a very clean finish.

Tamarack Cellars Merlot 2005: The star of the show. I’m not generally a big merlot drinker, but this was astonishing.

Bergevin Lane Calico Red 2005: A soft, rich, comfortable red blend from Walla Walla. Nice.

beets & goat cheese

 

It seems like this has become such a hackneyed combination of late - in the past year it seemed like every restaurant we’ve visited has had a beet/goat cheese salad on their menu. But you know what? That’s because the flavors are PERFECT together.

Oddly enough, though, I don’t think I had ever combined them at home. We eat beets fairly frequently, since I discovered the glory of roasting them in olive oil until they get soft and caramelized, but we usually just eat them straight and blazingly hot, or mix them with other roasted vegetables. I also once made a beet salad from the Zuni Cafe Cookbook where they were marinated in black currant vinegar and mixed gently with walnuts and watercress, but somehow beet salad never made it into the regular home repertoire.

A few days ago, though, I was shopping for something to go with a steak from our freezer, and I noticed bunches of baby beets from one of the local farms. As I was picking out a bunch, I suddenly remembered the half-round of Bucherondin chevre lurking in our fridge - we had eaten some of it along with good bread and the shrimp gratin earlier in the week, but then run out of bread - and it’s much too good of a cheese to allow to spoil. So I picked up a head of redleaf lettuce as well, hauled my goodies up the hill and plopped the beets into a pan of water to simmer. Once they were fork-tender, I ran cold water over them and slipped the skins off, cut up the beets into thick slices and drizzled a little walnut oil over them. The chevre I cut into small chunks, which went into the bowl with the beets. Then I tossed the lettuce with a dressing of olive oil, Dijon mustard and red wine vinegar, and took it all to the table so we could compose our own salads.

It was a thing of beauty alongside the steak, with an Oregon Bordeaux-style wine (Cana’s Feast Bricco Two Rivers - delicious) and a good pan sauce. Why don’t I do this more often?

in the garden: the tulips are here!

It’s taken much longer than usual, but the tulips are finally in bloom! The local tulip festival had to extend festivities for a week to catch up with the late blooms. Most of the tulips I grow myself are fairly late-blooming anyway, and they’re just coloring up this week. I particularly like Spring Green, and a little apricot species tulip whose name I’ve forgotten.

Indian Feast 2008

Back when I was a freshman in college, I took a class on the history of India. Partway through the term, our professor hosted a dinner party at her house, featuring traditional Indian foods. I volunteered to be part of the cooking team, and learned how to make chai, pop mustard seeds and fry potatoes. The rest of the class arrived later, ate a vast quantity of everything, drank chai and all fell asleep on the professor’s living room floor. I think some of us had to be carried back to our dorms.

Inspired by that experience, for a number of years now we’ve hosted an event at our house, formally dubbed the Quasi-Annual Skagit County Indian Feast & Hike (QASCIFH?) As you might expect from the name, it involves a hike followed by a lot of home cooked Indian food. We’ve found that a brisk walk in chilly weather helps work up a good appetite and keeps us awake longer. We don’t usually go far - maybe 2 to 4 miles - but it’s a fun outing, with the prospect of good food at the end.

We usually hold this event early in the year, when weather is uncertain, but usually it works out pretty well - we’d never had to cancel on account of weather. Enter spring 2008. The day of the party it snowed. And hailed. And rained. And snowed some more. We all stood inside staring out at the ice pellets as they poured down and skittered across the sidewalk, and decided that drinking wine and eating pappadums was the better part of valor. So no hike this year, save for a small excursion around the block during a sunbreak.

shrimp gratin

It’s a strange thing that sometimes, when you first glance through a new cookbook, one particular recipe catches your eye. You make it, and like it, then never make any other recipe out of that book - you just keep making that first recipe over and over again. Or maybe that’s just me.

This recipe is out of a library book, Jacques Pépin’s Fast Food My Way, which I checked out when I was feeling particularly crunched for time and wanted some quick dinner ideas. I was thrilled when I discovered this gratin, which is quick to assemble, even quicker to bake, and doesn’t taste quite like anything else I make. And it’s very easy to make just enough for two people - no messy leftovers. The shrimp both bake and steam in the moisture from the wine and vegetables and are beautifully crisp and tender, with the nice crunchy breadcrumb topping over all.

Because of the basic perfection of the original recipe, I’ve not played around with it at all, except to get rather casual about quantities - except that this time I decided to gather a few leaves of fresh rainbow chard from my tiny backyard plot, shred them and scatter them into the gratin.