Dinner Menu

After much feedback and very little internal monologue, I've finalized the menu for dinner. as it stands, it's somewhere between 13-15 courses. I haven't had a large dinner in a while so there were some courses that I couldn't bear not to cook. Now the dilemma is serving the food so that everyone gets to eat everything and can finish the meal without exploding all over my house.

Below is the proposed menu. In order to make this post a little less self indulgent, I've also included a little dialoogue on my drink pairing ideas for each course. Enjoy!


Appetizers:

French baguettes, ricotta with pugliese olive oil and mixed herbs

Roasted pears, tallegio, prosciutto and balsamic vinegar

Bellinis and Mimosas. Who doesn’t love Bellini’s and Mimosas? A great appertif drink

Ceviche, tangerine, red onion, peach, habanero

Muscadet, I think the clean crisp taste of muscadet will help calm the heat of the habanero and accentuate the fresh fruit flavors of the dish

Raw scallops, mango horseradish puree, edamame, black salt

I have 2 bottles of the Highfield Sauvignon blanc from New Zealand. The wine has really strong tropical fruit and papaya flavors and goes really well with the mango horseradish puree

Lightly cured hamachi, black sesame, ginger scallion sake

I’d like to come up with a sake to go with this dish. I really like the idea of exploring sake, but it’s a drink I do not know much about. I’ll probably have the trusted folks at Chambers Street Wines help me out with this one

Fennel crusted halibut sweet corn, pesto, spicy tomato
Or
Cod, pea shoots, pine nuts, golden raisins, sherry ginger broth

I combined these two dishes into one course because I really like them both and couldn’t decide which one to choose. They can’t, however be two separate courses because the process of sautéing the fish for a crispy crust is very similar.

I’m thinking white Rioja here. I’m not really sure why, but it feels right. I also don’t have any wines from spain here yet.


Braised pork belly, 30 minute scrambled eggs, chives.

I think a german Riesling would be an interesting choice for this course. The eggs and belly will be incredibly rich and Riesling is a wine with enough acidity to cut the richness and add a nice little element of sweet to boot.

Herb gnocchi, sweetbreads, sage, butternut squash, brown butter

This dish has fall written all over it and I want to find a lighter, possibly smoky red wine to go with it. I had a great Temperanillo, Cabernet, Merlot blend the other night and I think I’ll be looking for something similar with this.

Duck breast, parsnips, hazelnuts, truffle honey

Pinot noir and duck is a favorite combination of mine.

Lamb chops, Israeli couscous, Japanese eggplant, port wine and cherries

Braised short ribs, potato beet puree, roasted carrots, radish greens

By this point in the dinner guests have usually had enough to drink and cant handle much more red wine. I think I’ll pick a heavier red to go with both the lamb and the short ribs simply so everyone can make it through dinner. I’m thinking Zinfandel or Cabernet from California for these two.

Frangelico strawberries, fried pound cake, espresso ganache

Apple cider donuts, praline butter, maple ice cream

Vanilla ice cream, sparkling chocolate

I don’t think there is any wine pairing that will stand up well to the frangelico strawberries, but I think I would like to serve a dessert wine. I’ll probably buy a couple of bottles of a Muscat Beaumes de Venise to go well with the donuts and the vanilla and chocolate and call it a night.

I think at this point everyone will have had the type of special meal with good friends, good food and a lot of good wine that gets imprinted in the mind and brings a smile to the face when remembered.

BYOB

Ever since my trip to California my taste buds have been the pleasures of fine wine. I haven’t been looking to drink loads of it, but every night around dinner time I find myself not only thinking about what I’m going to eat for dinner (a daily, soul tormenting struggle) but if I’m going to be able to enjoy a nice glass of wine with my meal.

If I’m not eating at home, which has been the case every night this week, the wine decision becomes a difficult one. I don’t really drink wine by itself, nor do I go to restaurants and eat food without drinking wine. I’m a firm believer in the mutualistic relationship between wine and food and try to combine the two (in moderation) whenever possible.

For someone like me (a young teacher) the pleasure in a bottle of fine wine can become a pricey one. Almost all restaurants mark up wine by at least 100% and sometimes even more than that. This means that if I want to enjoy a $20-25 dollar bottle of wine, about the median price of the wines I have at home; it will often be $50 to $60 dollars. I like wine, but I like eating more and I’m really not into dropping $60 dollars on a bottle I already have at home, something that is essentially free for me if I consider it a sunk cost once it enters my closet.

This brings me to the joys of BYOB. I love going to a restaurant and being able to eat someone else’s cooking and enjoying a bottle of good wine to go with it. I went to Lamb and Jaffy with a friend last night and had some simple, yet delicious bacon wrapped dates, duck breast, summer risotto with black truffles, and molten chocolate cake, all paired with an uplifting fruity Barbera D’Alba (total cost approximately $25 a person with tax and tip ). The company, the pleasant late summer night in an outdoor garden, the good food and the relaxed pricing made this one of the more enjoyable meals that I’ve had in the last month.

I eat so much of my own cooking these days and usually drink from my wine collection with it. The combination is enjoyable, but I find it much more relaxing to drink with someone else’s food. Regardless of how tasty the meal is, I always enjoy when someone else cooks for me. And I think that in my more relaxed state I can enjoy my wine better too.

Wine Country

The winemakers at Opus One will take the juice of these grapes, ferment it, place it in a corked bottle, and sell that bottle for $165 dollars. Yummy?

While the food in San Francisco was good, the real reason to go west is not to eat, but to drink. There are great restaurants in New York and San Francisco, I hear that there are even some great places to eat in Chicago and Philadelphia as well. However, only in California can you get a real oenological experience. “I’m Going to Long Island for some food and wine tasting” doesn’t nearly as appealing as going to say, Napa.

Our plan was to go to Sonoma one day for some of the more wallet friendly wineries and then to Napa to visit some of the nicer, more expensive ones. Over the course of the trip we visited eight wineries and tried nearly 40 wines (small sips) over the course of two days. I njoyed all the wine so much, I even purchased a lot more than I probably should have, something I felt bad about until I went to the wine store and saw a bottle I purchased in Sonoma selling for twice as much as I bought it for.

Here are a couple of things I learned while tasting.


--If possible, start out with champagne. The idea of drinking a heavy cabernet at 10 in the morning under the hot, California sun doesn’t sound that appealing does it? Our first destination was Iron Horse, an off the beaten path winery specializing in champagne. If I have to drink early in the AM, it might as well be something nice and cool and bubbly, and there are worse views than the one at Iron Horse. I purchased a bottle of their ‘Wedding Cuvee’, something I’m told is a perfect bottle for a first date.

--Pace yourself. It’s ok to pour. At first I thought I might be offending the winemakers by not drinking my full samples but I soon realized that a combination of not having easy access to water and being in the heat means that pouring (your wine) at wine tastings is absolutely necessary if you hope to make it through the day. I learned this for the Napa trip (the second day of tasting) and, unlike our day in Sonoma, I completely dehydrated and tired at lunchtime. Note: I still can't bring myself to consider spitting wine. Watching peope spew a stream of bublly red is completely unappealing, and I have a ton of insecurites about what might happen after the wine leaves my mouth...What if I miss the bucket? What if theres one of those dryish saliva strings still attached to my mouth? I would rather not deal with any of this.
--When visiting Cakebread Cellars, we were escorted into a private tasting room with a bunch of middle aged Waspy Midwestern types (they were pretty much everywhere in Napa though completely absent from Sonoma) and learned something unbeknownst to me about smelling wine. We were told that if you tilt the glass towards you while sniffing, there will be three different scent regions. If you smell the wine with your nose as close to the back rim of the glass as possible (think the rim on the side of the glass that you wouldn’t be drinking from) you will smell the floral qualities of the wine you will be tasting. If you sniff in the middle of the glass you will smell the fruit, and if you bring your nose to the part of the rim closest to you, you will get a sense of the alcohol level of the wine. I spent the rest of the day practicing and recieving odd looks from all those around me.

--Don’t mention the movie Sideways (especially if you really enjoyed it.) Winemakers really don’t like this movie (it caused the sales of Merlot, a perfectly respectable wine, to drop precpitously and led to too many people growing crappy Pinot Noir) and if you know anything about wine you will also being to realize that there are a TON of factual inaccuracies in this film. If you want to get in good with the person pouring from you its best to distance yourself from this movie as much as possible. You’ll also find that if you’re honest about how much, or little you know about wine, your pourer will be extremely informative and friendly.

The coolest moment of the trip was visiting Dutcher-Crossing and having them direct us toward their garden to pick a fresh strawberry to have with our taste of Sauvignon Blanc.

The best (my favorite) wine that I tasted was the Dutton-Goldfield Chardonnay, fresh, citrusy, tart and creamy all at the same time.

The most over the top wine moment involved visiting Opus One, a completely over-extravagant winery (in comparison to some of the nicer, more rustic places we visited.)We had to pay $25.00 to split one glass of their most recent vintage, the only wine they have available to taste, from an incredibly frantic, German, French speaking pourer. Them and their $165 dollar a wine imparted a "you're lucky to even be here drinking our godly nectar" kind of feeling. The wine was good but not great, I thought it was too chewy.


If you’re into wine, tasting in California is one of the most enjoyable ways to learn more. Pretty much everyone in both Napa and Sonoma was incredibly enthusiastic about their wine and more than happy to answer every question I had, regardless of how silly it might have sounded to them. The food in both areas is also fantastic! I’m looking forward to my next trip out west, until then though I might have to settle for some fall tasting on the island.

California!!!

I’m taking a little trip to California this weekend to see some friends and family and enjoy as much of California’s food and wine as I can in five days. That means that while everyone back home is suffering through this current cold and rainy spell, I will be in Sonoma, sitting here:



and sipping on a nice Cabernet. I also have plans to visit my first ever two star Michelin restaurant (what else are vacations for?) and cook a multi course meal based on what I can find in the San Francisco markets.

Should be fun, I’ll post about it when I get back.