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Newsletter for October 2005 Your source for what’s cooking at OBW
25 South Indian Alley Winchester VA, 22601 540-662-1455 |
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Thanks to all of you who came out on September 13th for our fundraiser for the Red Cross. In conjunction with Kysela Père et Fils, Winchester-based wine distributor, and Murphy Beverage Company, wine retailer, we raised nearly $3000. For those of you that reserved and no-showed, a pox on you!
Here we are, in the 40s at night, in the low 80s during the day! Fall. It’s my favorite season. Despite my love of wine, deep down, I’m a brats and beer guy and this weather just makes me want to cook some Kraut! Not a refined choucroute garni with a nice glass of Pinot Blanc from Alsace, but gut old Bavarian-style Sauerkraut! The choucroute garni garnished with smoked duck breast and foie gras comes later in November, when I get the brats out of my system. Read on for details on our beer dinner later this month. Alas all the details are not quite firm.
I’m really happy that fall is here—can you imagine punishing nights in a 130-degree kitchen in August?—but I’m sad that tomatoes, corn, and basil, those glories of summer, are largely behind us. I created a real winner for the lunch menu—four-cheese tortellini in a cream sauce with tomatoes, corn, and basil—and I am sorry to see it behind us. Corn is still very much day-to-day in the market and starting to look pretty ragged. I fear that this week is the last week we can offer this dish.
I hope you enjoy this edition of the newsletter and please come see us when you can. I’d love to cook for you.
Ed Matthews, Chef/Owner
Sunday October 9th, Cooking at Blandy Farm I’ll be doing a cooking demonstration as part of ArborFest at Blandy Farm, in the courtyard at 3pm. The event is free; parking is $5. This is one of your best chances this year to pick my brain! Come help FOSA raise money to support the Arboretum.
Wednesday October ???, Beer Dinner with Murphy Beverage Charlie and JP at Murphy Beverage and all of us at OBW are going to reprise our highly successful beer dinner from last year. This year, rather than invite a specific Braumeister, we’re putting our heads together and pouring some of our favorite beers. We already have a killer pour for dessert! I am so looking forward to doing some sausages: after an entire year of cooking nothing but restaurant food, I am looking forward to throwing some brats on the grill! The date and the lineup are not quite settled yet. Call OBW at 540-662-1455. Seats are very limited (24) and must be reserved with a credit card.
One thing that distinguishes good cooking is use of fresh herbs. Whenever I do public demonstrations and cooking classes, people always want to know what to do with herbs. Here is a basic primer on the herbs that I use most frequently.
Couscous is unnecessarily scary to many Americans. But, hopefully I can convince you to keep a few boxes in your pantry because it is so easy to prepare that you are going to wonder why you never used it before.
Traditional couscous is a very tiny durum semolina pasta from western north Africa (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, etc.) where it is the staple starch that serves as the base for lamb, goat, and vegetable stews. While technically a pasta, couscous is treated like a grain in cooking.
Traditionally, couscous is steamed two or three times in a special two-part pot called, naturally, a couscousière. The stew is cooked in the lower pot, while the couscous steams in the upper pot. But, that was then and this is now.
Modern couscous is pre-steamed and dried, so cooking it is a matter of ignoring whatever directions are on the package and pouring an equal volume of warm water over the couscous, covering, and letting it stand for five minutes. Then you fluff it with a fork and use it. I do not know of anything that is as simple to use as couscous.
And it is a wonderful blank canvas awaiting your creativity. I often make a salad like tabouleh from couscous—it has all the wonderful tabouleh flavors without the bulkiness of the bulgur. I like to flavor it with orange juice, orange rind, mint, garlic, green onions, and pine nuts to serve with lamb. Friday night, we paired a lemon-dill version with our fish entrées, while the remains went into an ersatz five-minute paella Saturday night for staff meals.
There is another pasta by the name of Israeli couscous that started to trickle onto the American market in the mid ‘90s, a round pea-size pasta. It’s a lot of fun as well, but the cooking methods are different and that’s a subject for another newsletter.
I don’t know if you noticed or not (you might have if you come eat tapas with us with any regularity), but pimentón, a type of paprika, is a signature spice at One Block West. I learned of it more than ten years ago and bought a bit from Zingerman’s in Ann Arbor to play with. I have since become hooked and pimentón is one of my go-to spices. (Psst. If you’re a foodie, you want Zingerman’s catalog. The prices, they hurt, just like Wegman’s, but the quality is unmatched.)
The pimentón that I am talking about is Pimentón de la Vera and the brand is La Chinata. La Vera is a small region in western Spain. Here, the peppers ripen until late in the season and then after picking, they are left to dry slowly in the sun. Then the peppers are smoked and ground into a powder. Pimentón comes in three types: dulce, agridulce, and picante—sweet, bittersweet, and spicy. We always use agridulce, bittersweet, at the restaurant.
It is this smoking that gives Pimentón de la Vera its wonderful flavor, unmatched by any other paprika in the world. It is the basis for the dressing for our Smoked Chicken Salad (my daughter Lillie’s favorite) and is a key component in our paellas and our mussels in the Spanish style. I love to rub pimentón on pork loins and chickens before roasting. Pimentón is one of those spices that the more I use, the more reasons I find to use it.
In addition to Zingerman’s, you can find pimentón at La Tienda in Williamsburg.
Recipes: Cooking with Herbs
On Sunday, September 18, 2005, I demonstrated cooking with herbs at Blandy Farm on a spectacular fall day, along with my able assistant, daughter Eleanor. I remarked that asking me to cook with fresh herbs is simply to ask me to cook. I have never thought about cooking without herbs—they are that intrinsic to cooking well.
Here are recipes for nine dishes, highlighting a variety of herbs, foodstuffs, and cooking techniques.
How To Make Roasted Red Pepper Oil
Each week I get emails asking me about various cooking techniques and/or using ingredients. Every month in the newsletter, I will publish one or two interesting topics. Feel free to send email if there is some technique or ingredient that you need help with.
Our summer lunch menu (sadly behind us now) featured a grilled vegetable plate. We always drizzle our vegetable plates with rosemary and red pepper oils, both for color and for flavor. A customer wanted to know last week where she could buy red pepper oil. That I am not sure about, but it is very easy to make. This is a two-for-one how to in that to make red pepper oil, you must first roast red peppers (or you could just buy them pre-roasted).
At the restaurant, we throw whole peppers on the grill and leave them until they blacken, then we rotate them, and continue the process until they are blackened all the way around. We then drop them into a plastic shopping bag, seal the top, and leave them to steam and cool for 15-20 minutes, at which point, we peel and seed them. At home, I put peppers on a sheet pan under the broiler. Or if doing just one, I throw the pepper on one of the burners of my gas range and rotate it as it blackens. However you do it, it’s just a process of putting intense heat on the pepper to blacken the skin, then steaming to loosen the skin. There are pros and cons to each method, but in the end, they’re all fairly effective.
To make the oil, place several roasted red peppers in a blender. Cover with oil. Your choice as to whether you use extra virgin olive oil or not. I think red peppers are so assertive that you can use a neutral oil, although using extra virgin oil lends a bit more complexity to the finished product. However, a neutral oil is not going to solidify as much in the refrigerator and that is better for speeding the decanting process. Then you blend the red peppers into oblivion, as fine as you can get them.
Now here comes the hard part: anticipation! Transfer the oil to a container—a glass one is helpful in this case—and refrigerate. In a few days, remove the oil and let it warm up, if it has solidified. Decant the mostly clear oil from the top into a clean container, discarding the water and pepper solids from the bottom, and repeat the process until you have a clear, red oil. It generally takes at least a week to get a clear oil (but early stage cloudy oil tastes just fine, so use it if you need to).
The same thing technique works for chive and basil oils. Blanch the herbs for a second and transfer to an ice bath to set the color. Squeeze dry, rough chop, and follow the process above. Rosemary oil is a different beast. We shove a squeeze bottle full of rosemary, fill it with extra virgin oil, and set it on the shelf above the stove to gently warm and infuse.
Please enjoy the fall. Remember, October is wine month in Virginia, so if you get a chance to make it to a local vineyard, please do so. They’ll be tired from the harvest and crush, but they’ll be happy to welcome you.
If you’re a wino, we’ve added about 30 new wines recently, including a vertical of Octagon from Barboursville. The older wines such as Octagon III and IV are not available anywhere else. We’ve added Pinot Noir from Oregon, Vouvray from the Loire, Cabs from California, Cab-Shiraz blends from Australia, and a lot more. There will be more choice than ever when you come visit us next, all with our very reasonable markups. I want you to enjoy wine with your dinner and I hope you will take advantage of all our hard work in building the finest cellar in this region.
All my best and come see us when you can,
Ed
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Copyright © 2005 Shenandoah Food and Beverage Holdings, LLC sensational seasonal cuisine and the W logo are trademarks of Shenandoah Food and Beverage Holdings, LLC. |
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