Craziness, Redux

I last posted about the semi-lunacy of taking in bushels and bushels of local produce and lots of local meats and in under 48 hours, concocting a menu using all those ingredients and serving it to 60+ people (see "Craziness"). It's not really as crazy an endeavor as it sounds: it is in larger scale what we do every day here at the restaurant—react to the fresh, local products coming in the door to create the dinner menu for the day.

Before I get started, I have to give a big thanks to the ladies from Preserve Frederick for all their help in coordinating logistics: amazing job! And both the front of the house crew and back of the house crew did fantastic jobs, letting me move from the kitchen to the dining room at will and greet and mingle with our guests. Great job everyone! Service was amazingly smooth!

To recap, last evening we held a sold-out farm-to-table dinner for the benefit of Preserve Frederick in conjunction with the Piedmont Environmental Council. The net proceeds will go to Preserve Frederick for the publication of next year's edition of the Buy Fresh-Buy Local guide, that connects local producers and consumers of agricultural products.

From the restaurant perspective, I've been leading the fresh-local parade for the past seven years and I am happy to have been able to help raise funds to publish a guide that might help our local producers connect with other restaurants and the general public. Who knows? Maybe we can convince other restaurants to keep their money here in our local economy.

After triaging all the food that came in the door, the cooks and I started sketching out ideas for using the products and dealing with issues such as feeding 60+ people with 7 pounds of pork. Here's the final menu that we ended up with after receiving the final donations at around 2:30pm before the dinner:

Gazpacho with Crispy Squash Cake

Gratin of Natural Chicken in Mustard Sauce

Thai Beef Salad

Puerco con Mojo on Corn Cake with Tomato, Tomatillo, and Groundcherry Salsa

Irish Stew with Butternut Squash Purée

White Chocolate, Pecan, and Roasted Apple Bread Pudding with Crème Anglaise

Gazpacho with Crispy Squash Cake. We made a fairly traditional tomato gazpacho with lots of diced vegetables for garnish, including yellow, red and green peppers, beets, and corn. If the beets are very young and sweet, you can use a lot; if they are very earthy, they will dominate. These were very earthy so we had to use restraint. We flavored the soup with lots of sherry vinegar and a healthy dose of Tabasco.

With the soup, we served one of our famous squash cakes: yellow squash grated and cooked for three hours in heavy cream with garlic and basil and bound with pecorino romano and bread crumbs, chilled, formed into cakes, and fried.

Gratin of Natural Chicken in Mustard Sauce. Needing to feed 60 people from 5 chickens (albeit huge ones), we had to take the chicken off the bone and stretch it. We poached the huge Corn Rock Cross chickens; poached a traditional mirepoix of leeks, carrots, and celery in the chicken stock to further flavor it; then reduced the stock with heavy cream and added a final liaison of Dijon mustard. After mixing the chicken, vegetables, and sauce, we baked it under an herbed breadcrumb crust. This is one of the key tricks of the professional kitchen: cook everything separately to the point where it is perfectly cooked and then combine all the ingredients. I wouldn't expect home cooks to do this (and dirty that many pans) but this is how we get our chicken perfectly tender and our vegetables just done.

Thai Beef Salad. What to do with chuck and sirloin steaks and how to stretch a small amount for a crowd? With chuck, you either have to cook it a little or a lot. We went for a little, first marinating the beef in a touch of the salad dressing, then grilling it to medium rare, chilling it, then slicing it and removing the nasty bits. This we mixed with a julienne of carrots, sliced green onions, mounds of Thai basil, cilantro, a few cherry tomatoes and lots of dressing. The dressing is lime juice, brown sugar, kaffir lime, fish sauce, and local first-pressing canola oil. We served this over some impeccable baby greens that were picked just before the dinner. Kaffir lime is not typical in this salad, but I have a lot on hand that I need to use.

Puerco con Mojo on Corn Cake with Tomato, Tomatillo, and Groundcherry Salsa. We had only 7 pounds of shoulder, bone-in at that, to feed a crowd, so we knew we were going to braise the pork and pull it. We braised the pork in a classic Cuban mojo of sour orange juice, cilantro, oregano, garlic, and cumin, then shredded it and mixed it with a Cuban-style arroz verde (green rice) and a salsa of cherry tomatoes, peppers, local tomatillos, and local groundcherries.

We shaved a lot of fresh corn, just picked in the afternoon, mixed it with local poblanos (these were way spicy!), garlic, and Virginia cornmeal from which we made delicious little pancakes on which to serve the pork.

Irish Stew with Butternut Squash Purée. I cubed four legs of lamb and stewed them in Petit Verdot from Jefferson Cellars as the base for this "stew." It was non-traditional in that while I did stew the lamb, I sautéed the accompanying carrots, celery, and onions, and roasted local Yukon Gold and Kennebec potatoes with rosemary. After straining and reducing the lamb stock, I bound it with a classic beurre manié, and mixed it into the meat and vegetables just before service.

For the butternut purée we peeled, cubed, and roasted the first butternut squash of the season. We then mashed them and seasoned with a touch of butter, nutmeg, salt, and white pepper. Roasting small cubes of squash to the point of slight caramelization yields a depth of flavor that you cannot get by other means.

White Chocolate, Pecan, and Roasted Apple Bread Pudding with Crème Anglaise. I think that everyone who ate this bread pudding will all agree that it was the best that I have ever made; it was pure money! The key is using premium products: our fantastic baguettes, local Jonagold and Empire apples roasted with cinnamon and local honey, white chocolate, toasted pecan halves, a little (about two gallons) 40+% heavy cream, a couple vanilla beans, and dozens of local Rhode Island Red eggs. Besides using the best quality ingredients possible, the other trick with bread pudding is knowing when to take it out of the oven. If you let it set up totally in the oven, it's overcooked, still good, but not money!

Thanks to the following farmers for their kind support of this event:

Echo Ridge Farm
Freight Station Farmers Market
Hardin Natural Chicken
Hedgebrook Farm
Linda's Mercantile
Marker-Miller Orchards
North Branch Farm
Richard's Fruit Market
Virginia Lamb

Not All Beef is Created Equal

Yesterday, I attended the second beef tasting at Ayrshire Farm, a blind tasting of New York strips of 10 steers of differing breeds. I rarely eat beef (it's nothing political: carbs, vegetables, and seafood keep distracting me) but we serve a lot here at the restaurant and I want to serve the best that we can. Many many years ago I became disillusioned with the USDA grading system and went with small producers who don't grade their beef but who produce top-quality meat. In the last year, I have been buying from Ayrshire Farm and filling in with other grass-fed beef as necessary. Ayrshire is still ramping their production. I am hopeful that we may be able to source all our beef from them in the next two years.

Although I hear from customers routinely that our beef is very good to the best that they have ever tasted, I wanted to take advantage of this tasting to put the beef that we are serving in perspective with a lot of other solid breeds.

The ten steers in the tasting were either raised at Ayrshire or purchased from nearby farms. All were finished identically at Ayrshire and all the strips were cooked identically. We tasted the numbered samples blind and rated them on flavor and texture. After that, we tallied our scores and then among the 80 or so tasters, we determined which breed rated highest on our collective scorecards.

The ten breeds were Angus, Dexter, Galloway, Belted Galloway, Hereford, Highland, Piney Woods, Red Poll, Shorthorn, and White Park.

I have to say that all the samples I tasted were excellent and I would not have been disappointed to receive a steak from any one of these steers at a restaurant. But about halfway through the tasting, there was one sample that was so clearly good that it blew all the others away. In fact, I have only had one steak better than this in my entire life and that was in 1981. What I learned from the previous chicken tasting is that my palate often seeks different textures and flavors from others, so I wasn't at all confident that the steak I rated the highest would find favor with the other tasters.

When we got to voting, however, it was clear that the steak that I liked the best was the overwhelming favorite of everyone there, getting more than double the first place votes of the nearest competitor. And the winner? You see it in the photo above, courtesy of wikipedia.org, the Scottish Highland, the very same beef that we serve here at the restaurant. And now, I think I have our beef in pretty good perspective.

Burning Questions: Meat

This whole series of "Burning Questions" posts originated as a somewhat amusing troll through the One Block West Restaurant web site server logs, to see what search phrases were bringing people to the web site. As I went through the logs, the search topics seemed to fall into several broad categories, each dealt with in a separate post in this series. This post deals with meats.

How to Cook Surry Sausage/What is Surry Sausage. First things first. Surry Sausage is a smoked pork sausage from Surry, Virginia-based S. Wallace Edwards & Sons. It's formed into small links and has a remarkable smoky flavor that some people mistake for country ham. Follow the link above for purchase and background information on this one of a kind sausage.

Cooking Surry Sausage is not much different from other smoked pork sausages. We dice it and add it to sautées; we grill it and slice it for appetizers and our popular Surry Sausage lunch salad. You should make sure that you cook the sausage to 165F/75C.

Non-Pork Substitute for Prosciutto. For those of you who cannot eat pork, I suggest that you use a similarly cured beef called Bresaola. A similar Swiss product is called Bünderfleisch. You may also see it labeled as beef prosciutto.

Andouille Sausage Substitute. Andouille as we think of it here in the US is a firm sausage stuffed with chunks of pork shoulder and seasoned with a good helping of cayenne pepper. You could substitute tasso or a firm city ham such as Hormel Cure 81 and some cayenne. Tasso or ham would have the closest texture to andouille. Or you could substitute another smoked pork sausage such as kielbasa and some cayenne. Kielbasa's texture will be wrong because it is made from a ground forcemeat. Me, I'd just go to Comeaux's web site and order the real andouille. I've been buying from Ray Comeaux since the early 1990's. The photo shows a link of Comeaux's andouille (top) and two links of Edwards' Surry Sausage (bottom).

Tasso vs Andouille. They're similar in flavor and yet they're dissimilar in appearance. Andouille is a sausage described just above. Tasso is made from pork shoulder too, only it is made from cross-grain chunks of shoulder that have been lightly cured, spiced, and smoked. Tasso will be a bit leaner than andouille, but they have the same basic flavor. For diced meat to add flavor to a jambalaya or gumbo, I use them interchangeably. If I want those nice andouille rounds, nothing else will do.

Spanish Word for Sausages. That would be chorizo, although specific sausages have their own names. There are basically two types of chorizo with which I am familiar: Spanish and Mexican. Spanish chorizo are small, firm (like pepperoni), cured sausages seasoned primarily with pimentón. Mexican chorizo, the kind I feasted on when I lived in Texas, tends to be a loose, fresh sausage seasoned with mild chile powder and a fair amount of vinegar. I have also seen it stuffed into casings.

What is Paleron? Funny you should ask, it's my favorite cut of beef and I wrote extensively on it in another post.

On Cooking Steaks

I just walked into the One Block West kitchen after having been away on vacation for seven days. Have you ever noticed that sometimes when you're away from something for a while, when you return, you see things in a different way?

The first thing I saw upon entering the kitchen was this poster directly opposite the kitchen door. I have seen this poster so many times that I no longer pay attention to it. Being away from the kitchen got me to focus on it once again, so I thought that I'd share it with you. I got this poster many years ago, probably as part of a ServSafe (food safety training) class. It was so hilarious that we had to post it on the wall of our kitchen. You'll need to click on the thumbnail provided here to read the words on the large photo.

This poster, from the National Cattlemen's Beef Association and others, strikes us as very funny because it is yet another attempt by the government to protect us from us by trying to keep us from eating rare and raw meats. On this poster, the authors associated the common names that we use for doneness of meat (e.g., "rare" and "medium") with temperatures that a meat thermometer will read when the steak is cooked to this doneness. What's really crafty and Big Brotherish about this is that they have slid the temperature scale about 30 degrees Fahrenheit so that anyone cooking a steak according to this guide will overcook it by 30 degrees such that the final temperature of the steak ends up where the government wants it to be, in their so-called safe zone.

This is so absurd that I would immediately fire any grill cook who followed this scale. Why? Because the steak would be coming back from the dining room just as soon as the customer who ordered it cut into it and found it overcooked.

We don't generally use meat thermometers to determine doneness of our steaks—any grill cook who has cooked more than about three shifts in a restaurant can determine doneness by feel—but if we were to use meat thermometers on steaks, here is the scale that we would use:

XR, extra rare, 110 F, just barely warm blue center
R, rare, 115 F, blue with red around the edges
MR, medium rare, 120-125 F, warm and red in center
M, medium, 130-135 F, pink in the center
MW, medium well, 145 F, slightly pink in the center
W, well, 155 F, brown to barely pink in the center

As you can see, our "friends" would have us cook your medium rare steak to the degree of doneness that you associate with a medium well steak. Tell me, would you be happy if I did this to you?

June Wine Dinner: Linden Vineyards

Last night, we put on our monthly wine dinner, this month featuring the wines of Linden Vineyards, with special guests Jim Law and Shari Avenius. This is the fourth or fifth year in a row that Jim has been with us in June. I always look forward to this dinner because the wines are so great. I sincerely believe that Jim makes the best wines in Virginia and among the best in the country. It's always a pleasure to see if my food stands up to the test of his wines.

I'm very happy with the way that the dinner came off, the way the staff handled the dining room, the wine and food pairings, and especially the portion sizes. I think we finally managed to get them right. As chefs, we like to feed people and in multi-course dinners, we are sorely tempted to put way too much food on the plate. I would say that we put exactly enough food out last night and no more. It is always good to go away from a meal satisfied, but not bloated.

Here's the menu from the dinner. Discussion of how we arrived at the menu and notes on the individual dishes and wine pairings follow.

Grilled Prosciutto-Wrapped Hawaiian King Prawns
Lemon Balm Beurre Blanc
Sauvignon Blanc “Avenius” 2007

Caramelized Sea Scallop on Potato-Bacon Chowder
Chardonnay “Hardscrabble” 2005

Roulade of Lamb Tenderloin, Spinach, and Goat Cheese
Grilled Vegetable Hummus
Petit Verdot 2005

Grilled Bison Flat-Iron
White Corn Salad; Hardscrabble Red Demiglace
Red “Hardscrabble” 2005

Cherry-Chile Compote on Torched Pineapple
Late Harvest Vidal 2004


Menu Development
Some menus just fly off my pen and onto paper (yes, I write them out longhand), but this was not one of them. I started thinking about the menu some months ago, but nothing really came to me and so I put it off until Sunday, at which point I really couldn't put it off too much longer, to be able to order center of the plate proteins to arrive by Thursday.

I sketched out a very rough menu on Sunday, just trying to make some basic decisions about which proteins to order. At that point, I had some kind of ravioli with braised duck (either stuffed with duck or sauced with a duck Bolognese) paired with the Petit Verdot and veal brisket paired with the Hardscrabble red.

I wasn't happy with these because it put two braised dishes back to back in a summer menu and the pairing of veal and a big Bordeaux-style red would be a stretch. I could make it work, but the sauce I would have had to put with the veal would have obscured its delicate flavor.

Come Monday, I was so wrapped up in filming my forthcoming PBS shows that I forgot to call my meat and game broker to find out what he had on hand that might spark a creative idea for my menu.

Tuesday morning, because I had forgotten on Monday, I rushed to get an order in before the 9:30am cutoff for next day delivery. I managed to order the prawns and some rabbits and bison palerons for my weekend menus. At that point, I wasn't planning to serve bison for the wine dinner.

Tuesday afternoon, once we got the line set up for dinner service, it was do or die for this menu. Brandon and I went out on the deck and started sketching ideas out, but nothing was coming, so we went in and tasted the wines for the dinner. Back out on the deck, we started hashing out the menu again.

I decided while tasting to put the bison on with the Hardscrabble red and I knew that I wanted prawns to go with the Sauvignon Blanc. I drink a lot of the Hardscrabble Chardonnay, so I knew as far back as Sunday that I was going to do some kind of scallop chowder with it.

That left us to find a basic direction for the Petit Verdot course and the Late Harvest course. My initial idea of duck (or perhaps wild boar) was based on my tasting of the 2002 Petit Verdot, the last bottling prior to 2005. I am really happy that I tasted the 2005 rather than relying on my memory of the 2002, because the 2005 fairly screamed "lamb!" at me.

For the dessert course, Brandon thought cherries and I thought raspberries, mainly because I have a cooler full of raspberries. There was never any doubt that we would do fruit. I let him sway me to cherries and was intrigued by the possibilities of his idea of putting chiles in the cherries as a counterpoint to the residual sugar in the wine. I lobbied strongly for dried red chiles because I didn't want any vegetal character from a green chile coming through in the dessert. I pushed for some pineapple to bring the cherries back towards the tropical flavors in the wine. Then Brandon had the idea of torching the pineapple like a crème brûlée and we were about done. I tossed some candied pineapple into the mix. This is a good example of how dishes come together.

At this point, the hard work was over and all we needed to do was to figure out the cuts of meat, cooking methods, garnishes, and plate presentations. That really is the easy work and we knocked that out in about 10 minutes. Once the primary component of the dish is set, the rest is just tweaking the dish to work with the wine. Because Jim's wines are so good, I always want to let them take center stage. Keeping this in mind, we worked to keep the food very simple and the flavorings fairly muted.

Grilled Prosciutto-Wrapped Hawaiian King Prawns
This is a straightforward dish to go with the classically Sancerre-styled Avenius Sauvignon Blanc. Because this SB is very ripe with a full mid-palate, I wanted a bit more substance to the dish so we brought the saltiness of the ham into play. These prawns are naturally very sweet, so the salty ham is an excellent counterpoint. Shrimp, for all its virtues, has very little fat and the one thing that a high acid wine needs as a foil is some fat. So, we provided our own with a simple beurre blanc made from the very floral lemon balm growing in the planter just outside the front door.

Caramelized Sea Scallop on Potato-Bacon Chowder
This Chard could easily be a white Burgundy. It's got a lot of well integrated oak that gives it vanilla and caramel flavors, but it's also got enough acidity to stay pretty well balanced. If ever a wine screamed out for a cream sauce, this is it. I love the interplay of smoked foods with oaked Chardonnays, so with smoke and cream on the brain, a bacon-laced chowder came right to me. I reduced the cream in the chowder to a very thick sauce and plated the chowder right under the caramelized scallop. I toyed with smoking the scallop or putting the scallop in the chowder, but I wanted the drama of sitting the scallop on top of the chowder and I also wanted that lovely layer of caramel on the scallop to play with the caramel notes in the wine.

Roulade of Lamb Tenderloin, Spinach, and Goat Cheese
I did it again! I made myself say "Wow!" I hate it when I do that! This was an amazing dish and one that I need to remember to keep in the repertoire. Butterflying the tiny tenderloins and stuffing and rolling them was a bear, but it was so worth it.

Once I decided to put lamb with the Petit Verdot, we arrived quickly at a roulade of tenderloin. I love spinach and goat cheese with lamb, so that was a no-brainer for a stuffing: all three ingredients have an essential earthy character in common. This Petit Verdot, for the same reason that it wants lamb, wants grilled vegetables: the grill smoke and roasted flavors work well with the earthy, leathery, dark fruit. It was an instant leap from grilled vegetables to grilled vegetable hummus as a garnish. I'm not conscious of the thought process in this transition; I merely wrote "grilled vegetable hummus" on the menu next to the lamb and that was that.

The hummus was in itself outstanding. I grilled and finely diced yellow squash, green squash, and eggplant. Then I slowly cooked a lot of garlic in extra virgin olive oil and added that the vegetables. Next, I made three different batches of hummus in three different flavors and consistencies: a very smooth lemony one, a medium smooth pimentón one, and a chunky tapenade one. I mixed all three with the vegetables for a variety of flavors and textures.

Grilled Bison Flat-Iron
This was a really simple grilled meat dish designed as a foil for the delicious Hardscrabble Red Bordeaux-style blend. I seamed out the flat-iron steaks from the bison palerons (this was not a happy experience and is not something I am likely to ever do again!) and marinated them for 24 hours in extra virgin olive oil, garlic, black pepper, and soy sauce. Then we grilled them and served them over a fresh corn salad of grilled white corn, raw white corn, tomatoes, onions, and parsley.

I originally thought of putting the bison on polenta cakes, but because it was so warm out, we went with Brandon's idea of a cool and fresh corn salad. In hot weather, I find that a temperature contrast is always welcome.

Cherry-Chile Compote on Torched Pineapple
When pairing desserts with dessert wines such as the Linden Late Harvest Vidal, you must always keep the sweetness of the dessert less than that of the wine, or the wine will taste sour in comparison to the dessert. A great way to work with the fruitiness of dessert wines and avoid a lot of sugar is to use really ripe fruit with little or no added sugar.

For this dish, we sprinkled vanilla sugar (we store vanilla beans in fine sugar) over the pineapple, hit it with the torch à la crème brûlée for a glossy caramel layer, topped it with the compote of fresh cherries cooked down with arbol chiles, and put a few slivers of candied pineapple over the top.

The chiles added an interesting dimension to the dessert. The little bit of heat that they added to the cherries gave the cool, sweet wine a little fire to put out, making the wine seem all the more refreshing, an interesting trick if you ever need to pair food with sweet wine.

Hartley, you're right. A crisp cookie or tuile would have been appropriate here, but the humidity got the best of us. I made tuiles last week in similar humidity and they did not last an hour before they went soggy. I wanted to do a shortbread biscuit, but shortbread is impossible to do under humid conditions. So, I threw in the towel. In retrospect, I should have made some almond biscotti, but I had enough on my plate already in pulling off this dinner.

Enough. Off to break down the rabbits for tonight's menu....

Paleron, My Favorite Cut of Beef

In going through my web site statistics this morning, I saw that already this month, several people have found my site by searching for "what is paleron", "paleron" and "paleron recipes". No wonder: my site is ranked number one on Google when searching for "paleron". Who knew?

The best cut of beef for braising (besides the shin) is a small (about 4 pound, 2 kg) roast from the shoulder. It sits between the shoulder blade and the neck and is called variously upper blade roast or top blade roast. My butcher calls it by the French name paleron. By whatever name, it has outstanding flavor.

In the trade, specify NAMP 114D. This brochure shows the full shoulder clod broken down into primals: the paleron is the roast labeled 'c' in the photo.

The roast comprises two long, flat steaks sandwiching a layer of connective tissue. Generally in grocery stores, the roast will be skinned and split horizontally (removing the cartilage) into what are called flat-iron steaks or upper blade steaks. These flat steaks are best grilled like any other steak.

Sometimes the roast will be sliced vertically into small steaks (often called petite steaks) with the connective tissue in the center. Although you can grill these, this is really a braising cut. What makes this cut ideal is that with long, slow braising, the connective tissue melts into unctuousness.

Back in 2005, I published a recipe on the restaurant web site for braising these petite steaks.

Rappahannock Cellars Wine Dinner

Last evening we hosted our latest monthly wine dinner featuring the wines of Rappahannock Cellars. John Hagarty from Rappahannock was our amiable host and introduced each of the five wines in our six-course dinner. Here's the menu:

Salpicón de Gambas; Stuffed Mussels
Seyval Blanc 2006

Tatsoi Salad with Toasted Almonds, White Raisins, and Sautéed Goat Cheese
Caramelized Onion and Curry Vinaigrette
Viognier Reserve 2006

Seared Tuna
Chickpeas, Olives, and Tapenade Vinaigrette
Claret 2005

Panisse with Grilled Mediterranean Vegetables
Baked Chickpea Cake with Grilled Red Peppers, Cipollini Onions, and Fennel
Cabernet Franc 2006

“French Onion Soup”
Croustade Topped with Braised Beef Shin, Caramelized Onions, and Local Gouda
Surrounded by French Onion Soup
Meritage 2005

Caramel Ice Cream with Chocolate-Dipped Dried Pear

I devised this menu blind, meaning that I had not tasted the wines before. I relied on the wines being typical of the grapes from which they were made and they were. I believe the pairings worked extremely well and customer feedback was very positive. Here are my pairing notes.

Salpicón de Gambas; Stuffed Mussels/Seyval Blanc 2006

Seyval as it is grown here in Virginia is a crisp white, a classic seafood wine. The two tapas that we served show the two opposite approaches to pairing wines with food. The salpicón was made from shrimp that we poached in court bouillion and marinated in a classic red wine vinaigrette augmented with parsley, minced cornichons, and minced capers. This pairing matches the acid of the vinaigrette to the acid of the wine. The mussels take the contrary approach. We minced steamed mussels and bound them with a béchamel flavored with mussel stock and pimentón. The richness of the cream-based béchamel gave the acid in the wine a backdrop against which to play.

Tatsoi Salad with Toasted Almonds, White Raisins, and Sautéed Goat Cheese;Caramelized Onion and Curry Vinaigrette/Viognier Reserve 2006

With this course, I was out to demonstrate that Viognier—Virginia's premier white grape—can indeed stand up to bold flavors. I was once told by a winery owner around here that I would kill her Viognier with bold flavors. I didn't. This dish is a result of asking myself the question, "Self, what kind of dish would you pair a big, fruity white with?" Among the answers was a mild curry. Given the wine's position on the menu, I decided that a salad with curry flavors might be just the thing. And it was an excellent pairing.

Tatsoi is a Brassica with dark green, spoon-shaped leaves that have a slight cabbage flavor and is an ideal green for pairing with bold flavors. I suspected that the wine had been through full malolactic fermentation (and I was right) so I added the goat cheese to give the dish a bit of acid to play against the creaminess of the wine. The dressing is made from caramelized onions, a bit of Madras curry powder, rice wine vinegar, and pure olive oil.

Seared Tuna Chickpeas, Olives, and Tapenade Vinaigrette/Claret 2005

This claret is a very light red, a blend in fact of both red and white grapes. This seems to be a common trend at local wineries as a way to induce white wine drinkers to taste reds. The result is always an inexpensive, light-bodied quaffing wine. I happen to love light-bodied reds with tuna. For myself, I will pick a Pinot Noir or Sangiovese with tuna, if I'm not drinking beer or sake. I also wanted to get people a bit out of their comfort zone by pairing red wine with fish.

The trick here was to reinforce the red theme with the accompanying chickpea salad. I think of chickpeas as red-wine food because of their earthiness and I reinforced that with olives, diced red onion, garlic, and smoky pimentón. The salad was dressed in a vinaigrette made from classic tapenade ingredients: anchovy-stuffed olives, thyme, parsley, garlic, red wine vinegar, and extra virgin olive oil.

Panisse with Grilled Mediterranean Vegetables: Baked Chickpea Cake with Grilled Red Peppers, Cipollini Onions, and Fennel/Cabernet Franc 2006

Cabernet Franc always speaks to me of grilled vegetables, especially red peppers and eggplant. I would have paired these vegetables with grilled leg of lamb except that our guests included several who eat no red meat. Instead, I opted to make a classic panisse: chickpea flour cooked just like polenta, spread to solidify on a sheet tray, cut into circles with a ring mold, and crisped in olive oil.

I flavored the panisse with garlic and a good bit of pimentón (what can I say? I was in a pimentón mood yesterday) to give what is a very bland starch some character. We charred the sweet red peppers on the grill, peeled and julienned them. We roasted the cipollini in the oven until just done and cut the fennel into wedges and grilled them. The fennel went into a marinade of olive oil, garlic, and herbs. Then we formed a salad by mixing all the vegetables with some of the fennel marinade and served it on top of warm circles of panisse, a nice contrast of temperatures.

“French Onion Soup:” Crouston Topped with Braised Beef Shin, Caramelized Onions, and Local Gouda Surrounded by French Onion Soup/Meritage 2005

This is a dish I thought of a couple weeks ago and we just happened to have a big red wine to pair it with at this dinner. A big Bordeaux blend needs something substantial and this re-imagining of classic onion soup is nothing if not substantial.

To start, we had our butcher in Philly cut ossobuco of beef for us, which we then braised in lots of red wine. Once the beef was cooked, the braising liquids and more red wine went into the soup pot with 20lbs of caramelized onions (eight hours it took to caramelize them) for a classic onion soup base.

To re-imagine the dish, we toasted rounds of herbed focaccia and topped them with shredded beef, caramelized onions, and slabs of local Gouda-style cheese from our friend Allen Bassler at Oak Spring Dairy. We placed these in the oven until the cheese melted and then placed them into oval gratins of the soup for service. By the time they were at the table, the crouton had absorbed the majority of the soup.

Our forthcoming wine dinners are always listed on the Events Calendar on the restaurant web site.