Wine Dinner

My interest in wine has been constantly growing over the last year or so. At first I was completely clueless. I knew a couple of wines that I liked but other than that I was completely in the dark. Then, as my interest and knowledge of food began to grow, so did my understanding of wine. I started to better understand regions and vintages, and even a little of the winemaking process. All of this new found knowledge was incredibly helpful when it came to ordering a bottle in a restaurant or pairing drinks with my own food. However, until recently, I never really had much to do with wine unless food was involved as well (except for my summer excursion to Napa and Sonoma, but that was vacation.)

This past Sunday was the first time I ever cooked something to pair with wine and not the other way around. A friend of mine who works in a wine shop recently decided to purchase a bottle of 1998 Chateau Margaux Margaux (Cost=Much more than I can afford.) and asked me if I could make an appropriate dish to eat with it. I was truly honored and decided to make a dinner of it by bringing one of the harder to find bottles from my cellar, (the closest in my room) a 1981 Kartauserhofsberg Riesling.

I wanted to pick a somewhat elegant red meat to go with the Margaux and also find a suitably luxurious appetizer to come before the Margaux and pair with Riesling.

I thought foie gras was a logical choice as an appetizer and a great pairing with an acidic , barely sweet (Riesling loses a lot of its sweetness as it ages) wine. While lamb chops would be a logical choice for the Margaux.

The end results ended up being seared foie gras over brioche with grapes, hazelnuts and Bartlett pears and lamb chops and lamb meatballs over Israeli couscous with swiss chard, pine nuts, dried cherries, crispy mint and a cherry port wine sauce. (I actually meant to buy rib chops because they look nicer but was given shoulder chops. Either way, the taste was good.)

We also ended up having a delicious dessert blend made in the
port style from California to go with chocolates from around the world and some Non Vintage Perrier Jouet Champagne to go with some cheeses.

In the end both of the main wines we had were delicious and worked really well with the food. The Riesling was a nice foil to the rich foie gras but also complimented the grape and pear flavors. It was also light and a relatively low alcohol content so as not to spoil us for the next bottle. I thought the Margaux was really high quality wine, very full and with nice structure that gave the wine a powerful mouth feel while lacking the harshness of strong tannins. (That’s the best I can do.)

Was it worth the price? Not at my income level. But I do know that creating a meal around a bottle of wine certainly makes it memorable and I was more than happy to have my first delicious sip of a Chateau Margaux.

Ever since seeing Ratatouille about a week and a half ago I’ve been in full on cooking mode. The day after seeing the movie we had our sausage BBQ where we cooked at least seven different kinds of sausage (the duck, duck liver and pork from Dean & Deluca and the lamb and sage from the Union Square Farmer’s Market being the favorites.) After the BBQ I had a couple of friends suggest to me that I should throw another dinner party, something I had not really wanted to do during the summer. The appetite reducing heat and the fact that most people have plans on summer weekends were two factors contributing to my apprehension. However, my enthusiasm for eating and cooking won out and I decided to press on.

My challenge now is to create some dishes that incorporate summer ingredients and be light enough so that guests don’t feel gross after a big meal. Here are a couple of pictures of things I’ve made in the last week that I might or might not use later on.

Seared Sockeye Salmon with crispy Bluefoot mushrooms, milk braised baby zucchini, microgreens and truffle oil. This was a fairly simple dish and tasted good (mostly thanks to the quality of the salmon) but not great. I thought the Bluefoot mushrooms were a nice accompaniment and microgreens always make a plate look nice but the braised baby zucchini was a pretty big miscalculation on my part. I thought braising it in milk would give it a creamy flavor to go with the creamy texture of the salmon but instead the zucchini was just plain bad. I will never braise baby zucchini's in milk ever again. I liked the dish (minus the zucchini) but its not one I would serve if I was trying to impress people.

Crispy soft shell crabs with fennel apple salad, fennel pollen, sweet and sour pickled ramps and sweet and sour reduction. This was the first time I had ever cooked a soft shell crab. It was really easy to do and pretty fantastic tasting. I love the flavor of crab and the contrast of the crispy shell to the soft interior is amazing. I was happy with the fennel apple combination although I might lightly pickle the fennel to ease the texture a little. I also really enjoyed the pickled ramps (which I was excited to even be able to use in something) and the sauce that resulted from using the pickling liquid. If i served this as part of a menu i would probably count on two people splitting one crab and serving them on a platter. I'm still not completely sure how to plate soft shell crabs but I'm sure I'll figure it out.


Tuna Sashimi with pickled jalapeno, Chilean Carica and black Hawaiian sea salt. I liked some of the aspects of this dish but thought that they didn't really come together as a whole. I liked the Carica, a fruit that I found while perusing the jarred luxury items at Murray's Cheeses. It has the flavor profile of a peach crossed with a pineapple and a texture that's a cross between a canned peach and a poached pear. I just thought it didn't pair particularly well with the tuna. I also love to use sea salt with fish as well as peppers--I feel that the salt brings out the flavors of the fish while the heat from the peppers gets the mouth watering. The jalapenos were probably a little too distinct and didn't mesh well with the tuna, I think they probably need to be involved with more complex preparation involving a whiter fish so that they don't dominate as much.





Lamb loin chops with yellow bean, sugar snaps, golden raisins topped with a salad of mint, summer savory and lemon thyme. I sauteed the yellow beans and sugar snaps and then added the golden raisins and tossed the mixture with hot pepper flakes and parmigiano reggiano. The salad was simply shredded herbs briefly sauteed in butter to make them crispy. The lamb chop was simply crusted in salt and pepper and seared (because I have no grill.) I was pleased with the flavors of the dish and i thought that the spiciness of the vegetables brought out some of the flavor of the lamb and the herb salad helped cool down the spice a little (the mint) and complimented the lamb chop texturally. Sadly the price of lamb chops keeps me from buying 16 again to cook for people but I'll store this one in the memory bank.

There are also a couple of other things that I made on Sunday night but in the interests of your time, I'll write about them later.