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Newsletter for November 2006 Your source for what’s cooking at OBW
25 South Indian Alley Winchester VA, 22601 540-662-1455 |
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I’d like to welcome everyone, especially our more than 100 new readers, to this edition of the newsletter. It’s a bit longer than usual because I missed doing one in October, but, darn it, sometimes I’d just rather spend my Sunday afternoons with my children before they are off to the wind. The most difficult part of writing this newsletter is choosing topics. You can help me by sending me a list of topics you’d like to know about.
This month, I announce the schedule for the remaining wine and beer dinners for the rest of this year and for the first quarter of next year. And I talk about some fall topics: pawpaws, wild mushrooms, mustard, and tuna. You might not get those last two as fall topics. Mustard seeds ripen in the fall and the new batch of prepared mustard starts rolling out; also fall = brats = mustard. And tuna has been fattening up all summer and is at its peak of flavor in the fall.
I’m pleased to announce that we are working with a new goat cheese dairy called Iron Rod Chèvre out of Earlysville, where I lived as a kid. To celebrate their wonderful fresh goat cheese, I have included a very simple recipe for goat cheese roasted with honey and pine nuts.
Thanks for all your business. Come on in to the restaurant and let me do the cooking.
All my best,
Ed Matthews, Chef/Owner
Many of you readers are new to the restaurant and this newsletter, so I thought I’d spend a few minutes describing our special dinner program. Each month about the third Thursday, we host a special dinner with a special menu paired with wines or beers. The currently scheduled events are always listed in the Upcoming Events section of this newsletter and also on our web site.
Our November dinner is a Daring Dinner, in which I am going to prepare dishes that might challenge your palate (such as sweetbreads and veal cheeks) but which are thoroughly delicious. I’m not going to present a menu until after you’ve eaten. In December, we have our fourth annual Greatest Hits menu, a menu of our customer favorites from 2006. Next year should see a New Mexican dinner (as in the US state, not modern Mexican cooking), a dinner with White Hall Vineyards, our spring beer dinner, and certainly a reprise of our thoroughly raucous garlic dinner in April.
Although we do not take general reservations more than 30 days in advance, we start taking reservations for our special dinners as soon as they are announced. With a limit of only thirty people, these dinners fill very quickly, often weeks in advance. If you’re interested in a dinner, call us quickly with a credit card to hold your spot. You can cancel up to a week before without penalty. If you cancel within a week, we’ll only charge your credit card if we cannot fill your seats off the waiting list.
The menu is rarely set for a given dinner more than about three days in advance, and we still tinker with it up until nearly the last moment. If you’re willing to trust me, I promise that the food will be unique and delicious. Everyone who has ever come to these dinners has had a blast; many of our regular customers attend several of these dinners a year.
Here’s the menu from last week’s dinner featuring the wines and food of Burgundy.
“Matelote Bourguignonne” Poached Trout with Bacon, Pearl Onions, and Mushrooms in a White Wine Sauce Domaine Bachelier Chablis 2005 ab “Lapin à la Moutarde” Roasted Rabbit Sausage with Mustard Sauce Domaine du Château de Chorey Pernand-Vergelesses “Les Combottes” 2004 ab “Jambon Persillé” Individual Ham and Parsley Terrines Enrobed in Ham Domaine Didier Desvignes Fleurie 2005 ab “Canard aux Navets” Pulled Braised Duck on Turnip-Bacon Purée with Baby Turnips and Chanterelle Mushrooms Domaine Chevrot Maranges “Sur le Chêne” 2004 ab Salade Verte
Cheese and Confit de Poires Asiatiques Domaine Pascal et Reyane Bouley Pommard 2002
And if you can’t make one of our special dinners, just call me, give me a budget, and let me create a special dinner just for you.
Every Wednesday is Tapas Night Each Wednesday night, we serve tapas from 5:00pm to 9:00pm. Tapas are small, fun dishes, designed so that you can try a range of foods. Last week we featured 30 dishes, of which 14 were vegetarian. My favorite tapa was Sun-Dried Tomato Cake with Herbed Iron Rod Chèvre.
Thursday, November 16, Daring Dinner—Are You Brave Enough? I’m designing a menu for chefs. These are dishes we chefs would order if we had the time to go out, dishes such as Prosciutto-Wrapped Sweetbreads and Braised Veal Cheeks, things are perfectly delicious, but which most people don’t have the guts to try. Do you?
Saturday, November 25, 10am-2pm, Wild Things Demonstration at Freight Station Farmers’ Market I’ll be at the Farmers’ Market across from Handley High School demonstrating how to cook venison and fish from 10 to 2. Plus I will gladly show you how to prepare anything else you can purchase at the market. Don’t know how to prep a winter squash? Come find out how.
Thursday, December 21, Annual Greatest Hits Dinner For our annual Greatest Hits dinner, we will be combing through the thousands of dishes that we have done in 2006 and designing a five-course menu of our customers' favorite dishes, paired with wines. As in prior years, One Block West Rewards members receive a 10% discount.
Thursday, January 18, All About Lamb Dinner Special guests Corey and Janet Childs from Virginia Lamb in Berryville will host this dinner featuring the products of their hard work. I’m excited because I get to create lamb dishes that you wouldn’t normally find on a restaurant menu. And this is the best lamb I’ve ever tasted.
Thursday, February 22, White Hall Vineyards Dinner Vintage after vintage, the wines from White Hall Vineyards, just west of Charlottesville, keep impressing me. Later this winter, we’ll pick the wines to feature and I’ll build a sumptuous menu around them.
Thursday, March 22, Annual Spring Beer Dinner Featuring the Foods of New Mexico Northern Sonoran Desert cuisine is incredible: if you’ve eaten in New Mexico, you know what I’m talking about. It’s not Tex and it’s not Mex: it’s a whole other beast. And, there’s nothing better to wash down New Mexican cooking than a good cold beer.
Here’s a tidbit for you. At the restaurant, we use Maille brand mustard from the old Dijon firm. It’s been a reliably consistent product for my entire life. It’s no surprise to me that for years, the mustard crop in France has been shrinking to the point where it is now rare to see a field of the beautiful yellow flowers in the spring. In 2004, France’s production of mustard seeds amounted to less than 1% of the world’s production. The bulk of mustard farming has migrated to the dry western prairies of Canada, especially Saskatchewan, and somewhat less in Alberta and Manitoba. What surprised me, however, is that our last gallon jar was labeled “Produit du Canada.” Now even the manufacturing has left France. It appears that in the city that gave its name to mustard, there is precious little homegrown product.
There’s a good bit of confusion about tuna, specifically about Ahi. Many people think that Ahi is a style of preparation, specifically raw or extra rare tuna. Actually, Ahi is the Hawaiian name for the species of tuna that we haoles call Big Eye. Ahi is also used somewhat interchangeably for Yellowfin.
Of all the tuna species, the best in order of taste and texture for sushi and sashimi preparations are Bluefin, Big Eye, and Yellowfin. At retail, Bluefin is largely non-existent and unaffordable when it is available: virtually all the catch is spoken for in Japan where they revere Bluefin and are willing to pay any price for it. In fact, the last Bluefin I had was one that I caught about 50 miles off Ocean City, MD about five years ago. Big Eye is rare on the East Coast, but we do get a little. So, we mainly serve Yellowfin. There’s nothing wrong with Yellowfin: it’s a fantastic fish. There are other species, but they mostly go into cans.
Tuna is graded, although you probably don’t know it because stores rarely get good tuna and less rarely tell you the grade. The grades are #1, #2, #3, and #4, with + and – between grades. Most tuna sold in US restaurants and sushi bars is #2. We generally buy #2+, although sometimes we luck into #2++ or #1-. The higher grades (#1, #1+, and #1++) are not available to or affordable by mere mortals. The lower grades go to grocery stores and canners. The description of #1++ tells it all: Japan Export Sashimi—almost none of it comes to the US.
Ever since Vicki Dunaway of Ladybug Creamery decided to stop producing her phenomenal goat cheese, I’ve been searching high and low for a supplier of good goat cheese. I always have had the option of serving Firefly Farms chèvre from western Maryland or the ever dependable Laura Chenel cheese from Sonoma (at 2 millions pounds a year, not exactly artisanal any longer, and just sold to a French company), but my mission is to support our Virginia dairies. Over the past couple of years, I had been hearing the occasional rumor on the chef grapevine about goat cheese from near Charlottesville. It took me a long time to run the rumor to ground and when I did, I found Iron Rod Chèvre of Earlysville, where I lived as a kid. It took a bit of persuading the owners, who market their product exclusively at farmer’s markets, to ship to me. And am I ever happy that I did. The product is superb.
In addition to Iron Rod, our roster also includes sheep’s milk cheeses from Everona Dairy in Rappahannock County, English-style cow’s milk cheeses from Oak Spring Dairy in Upperville, and cow’s milk cheeses from Meadow Creek Dairy in Galax.
Each year when the nights turn crisp and then ease into warm days, my mind turns the flavors of fall: game and game birds, winter squash, apples, and above all, wild mushrooms. Although we have wild mushrooms on the menu every day of the year (except for February in exceptionally cold years), from now until the end of the year is when they are at their peak. In the last few weeks, we have featured chanterelles, cauliflower mushrooms, lobster mushrooms, chicken of the woods, maitake (hen of the woods) and black trumpets. The first hedgehogs are starting to trickle in and we will feature them in our colorful mix with black trumpets as soon as the price moderates. And of course, we always have domesticated shiitakes (locally grown) and the mature cremini known as portobellos.
If you would like to see pictures of these mushrooms, there are two pretty good resources out on the web at MushroomExpert.com and Roger’s Mushrooms.
Back in January, thanks to an article in The Winchester Star, I learned of Neal Peterson who raises pawpaw nursery stock near Harper’s Ferry. I contacted Neal about getting some fruit and he sent me to Jim Davis of Deep Run Pawpaw Orchard in Westminster, MD. I was already working to get fruit directly from Jim when my produce specialty buyer called to tell me that she had done all the leg work for me. And thus, we had pawpaws on the menu at One Block West in October. Look for them again next year.
Though you probably don’t know it, the pawpaw (Asimina triloba) is the largest edible fruit native to the US, indigenous to the eastern US and growing most frequently near riverbanks. I most often have encountered pawpaws on the C&O Canal towpath along the Potomac. It’s more of a bush than a tree, but will grow to upwards of 20 feet in a sunny location, but in the wild, I see it mostly in the understory of rich woods.
The fossil record shows that pawpaws and their predecessors have been in North America eons before the arrival of humans. American Indians harvested pawpaws and are very likely to have spread pawpaws westward into the central US. They certainly introduced it to European colonists who enjoyed it enough to name towns after it—witness nearby Paw Paw, WV. Here’s what William Clark had to say in his journal on September 18, 1806: at 10 oClock we came too and gathered pottows [pawpaws] to eate we have nothing but a fiew Buisquit to eate and are partly compelled to eate poppows ... our party entirely out of provisions subsisting on poppaws. we divide[d] the buiskit which amounted to nearly one buisket per man, this in addition to the poppaws is to last us down to the Settlement's which is 150 miles the party appear perfectly contented and tell us that they can live very well on the pappaws. ... What these men liked was the creamy, custard-like flesh with a decidedly tropical flavor, which I think of as a combination of mango with a hint of pineapple and banana. Each cultivar tastes different and some I have tasted have melon overtones as well. With all this tropical flavor, it should come as no surprise that the pawpaw is a member of the mostly tropical custard apple family, Annonaceae, which includes the Cherimoya (Annona cherimola), the fruit that in my experience is closest to the pawpaw. (I should mention that there are scores of tropical fruits of which I know nothing).
In my experience, pawpaws often fruit in clusters of five to seven fruits. The fruits of the various cultivars vary in shape and size, but most resemble mangos. Some of the smaller fruits are elongated and weigh in at five to six ounces, while the larger ones are more oval and weigh about a pound. Inside the fruit, if you split it in half, you will see the light custardy pulp (ranging from lemon yellow to apricot) surrounding two rows of black, butterbean-shaped seeds. The skins are very thin. My favorite thing to do with a pawpaw is to sit down with a spoon and eat it. In a very ripe pawpaw, the pulp will resemble yogurt in texture. Others are firmer and resemble mango flesh.
While the pawpaw has a lot going for it, it is not widely known even here where it is native. This is largely because it is difficult to grow commerically. The fruit is not long lasting, has very thin skin, and is prone to damage easily. Moreover, the tree has a very long taproot that makes it difficult to transplant, limiting commercial plantation. But, thanks to efforts by people such as Neal Peterson and Jim Davis, we are starting to see more and more pawpaws on the commercial market.
For more information and great photos, please see Neal’s web site at petersonspawpaws.com.
Recipe: Roasted Goat Cheese with Honey and Pine Nuts
Here’s a dish that I came up with years ago for a different spin on goat cheese. This dish sells well every time that we put it on the tapas menu. And it is a favorite of mine for dessert.
Fresh goat cheese Honey Toasted pine nuts Salt and pepper
Using a length of dental floss, cut a log of goat cheese into ¼” thick rounds. Lay the rounds in a shallow baking dish in a single layer. Drizzle honey over them and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Place in a very hot oven for 3-4 minutes, until the cheese is soft. I like to serve this with bread, an arugula salad, and a glass of Sauvignon Blanc.
Sadly, it’s time to say goodbye to sous chef Danny Robayo who has headed back to Richmond to become chef de cuisine for the Richmond Restaurant Group. This is a great promotion and opportunity for Danny and I wish him all the best. When you next come in to the restaurant, the new face you see in the kitchen belongs to Chas Ebeling, newly arrived from the Culinary Institute of America. You can already see his changes in the dessert menu.
When you come into the restaurant and ask me what my favorite dish on the menu is. And I quite frequently refrain from answering, asking “Which of your children is your favorite?” I finally found a kindred spirit out there in Laura Chenel, cheesemaker, who replied to the question of her favorite cheese thus, “I love each of them for their own being . . . it's like having children." And so it is.
All my best and come see us when you can,
Ed
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