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.

saving room for rhubarb crisp

The rhubarb in the garden is coming along beautifully, and we’ve been hankering for a pie or crisp. I finally had time to make our first crisp of the season - just enough for the two of us.

I kept dinner really simple: some steamed asparagus with olive oil and salt, and a halibut fillet sauteed in a little butter, with a glass of verdejo. I was mostly looking to eat something light so as to save room for dessert, but this actually turned out fantastic - the halibut was incredibly tender and flavorful, like crab claw meat, and the verdejo matched perfectly. It was so good.

But then we got to eat rhubarb crisp!

in the garden: snow and primroses

It snowed all night here, not sticking too much but flattening the daffodils. What kind of April is this, anyway? Fortunately, primroses can put up with almost anything. This one, Mahogany Sunrise, has always been one of my favorites.

It’s been so cold this month that everything in the garden is late - the lilacs haven’t even begun to bloom yet, which is very unusual for this area. The tulips are just coming into bloom this week (if the snow doesn’t flatten them, as well).

Sitka & Spruce

After months of seeing Sitka & Spruce praised to the skies on discussion boards and the local food media, we finally made it! And darned if it wasn’t as great as everyone said it would be. The owner, Matt Dillon, is doing a wonderful job of featuring local, seasonal foods on a constantly rotating menu, in a space with a comfortable, casual feel. Very cool.

I am glad I’d looked up the address, otherwise we might have driven right by - it’s tucked unobtrusively into a small Eastlake strip mall between a Subway and a pho place. We got there half an hour before opening, so we took a scenic walk around Eastlake through gusty winds and occasional squalls. When we got back there were people waiting at the door, so we prudently got in line behind them, and three other couples immediately got out of their cars and got behind us - apparently this place, like Elemental, is the kind of place you show up early for. When the door opened we found out why.

The first two couples in the door each get a two-top. Everyone who comes in after that gets seated at one of a variety of communal tables, so you get to meet someone new at dinner. We got a two-top, and felt a little left out of the party that ensued at the eight-top next to us. However, the food was so amazing that we didn’t feel too bad about anything.

spiced sweet potato wedges

We had already decided to have hamburgers for dinner, one night last week. The plan was to get some sort of interesting cheese and a big salad, and some form of roasted sweet potatoes, which we love. At the last minute I remembered a post I’d seen on Smitten Kitchen a little while back, for sweet potato wedges tossed with an interesting sweet and hot spice mix. The premise was almost identical to my usual approach, which is to toss sweet potato chunks with olive oil, coarse salt, pepper and sometimes paprika or cumin. However, I adore coriander and fennel, so when I saw this recipe I was sold. I pulled up the post from work and read the recipe to J over the phone, and he got the spices ground up and the oven hot (to 425°) before I got home.

on the Big Island: Waimea, Kailua Kona and back to Seattle

One more Hawaii post, then it’s back to our regularly scheduled programming.

On our last full day on the island we drove up the Saddle Road to Mauna Kea, which was very cool. We got to see a silver sword plant, saw a truly great warning sign, and used what was possibly the worst bathroom on the island (in Mauna Kea State park - consider yourself warned). We just went as far as the Mauna Kea Observatories visitor’s center at 9000 feet elevation - the road up to the summit looked kinda nasty. Besides, it was time for lunch.

When we came down we went straight into Waimea for lunch, at the Hawaiian Style Cafe. This was our chance to experience a real plate lunch. The menu at this place has it all: plate lunch, loco moco, pancakes substantially bigger than your head, spam, sausages, eggs, oxtail stew…I considered getting a basic loco moco (rice, two hamburger patties, eggs, gravy) but decided that it might actually kill me, so I went with plate lunch, which I figured had a half-and-half chance of killing me.