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Newsletter for January 2007 Your source for what’s cooking at OBW
25 South Indian Alley Winchester VA, 22601 540-662-1455 |
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It’s New Years Day as I sit here writing this welcome to the first newsletter of 2007. I want to thank all of you eating with us in 2006. Although it was a very tough year, thanks to you, we survived it and we’re off and running on our fifth year. May 2007 be better for all of us.
As long time readers know, this newsletter is for people who appreciate food and learning about food. This month, I take a look at three uncommon foods that I dearly love: hominy, parsnips, and hamachi. And for those of you with venison overflowing your freezer, here’s a delicious recipe for venison burgers. No venison: no worries; just substitute ground lamb.
And, if you like lamb, don’t forget our lamb dinner on the 18th with Corey and Janet Childs of Virginia Lamb in Berryville. We only have room left for perhaps six or eight more people.
Now remember, in the South at the new year, you must eat your black-eyed peas for good luck. If you don’t have any, I bought 20 pounds of fresh peas that I will be serving this week. Good luck for 2007!
All my best,
Ed Matthews, Chef/Owner
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, 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.
Thursday, April 26, Annual Spring Garlic Dinner It wouldn’t be One Block West cooking without garlic and at this dinner, we celebrate garlic in all its glory. Last year’s dinner was the first and was so popular that we’re doing it all over again. Book early. We’ll have a blast, guaranteed.
As a kid, one of my very favorite foods was hominy and it remains so today. Until recently, I have not featured it on the menu at the restaurant because I hadn’t been able to find a good supply. That has changed as our Latino community expands by leaps and bounds.
Growing up, I thought that hominy was a product of our local Scots-Irish Appalachian culture: it was rare, but not unheard of, to see a lye hopper outside a mountain cabin. Hominy is dried corn kernels soaked in a basic solution such as lye until the hard outer hull and germ come off the kernels. The kernels are rinsed thoroughly and cooked until soft. It was a do-it-yourself, poor man’s Appalachian foodstuff, or so I thought until I moved to Texas in my early 20s.
Once in Texas, partly because I was flat broke and partly because I love simple food, I discovered as many back-alley taquerias and bodegas as possible. Many was the morning that I would start my day at the local taqueria where Abuelita Gomez would always make sure that there were an extra two or three tortillas in my docena (dozen). Sometimes, when I had the money, I would eat dinner at one of these joints, sitting among the Mexican laborers and listening to, but not comprehending, their chatter. It was there that I discovered both menudo and posole, two of my favorite foods to this day (and one of which I will have for lunch today like many Sundays at Perlita’s on Weems Lane). Subsequent trips to Sandia National Labs in Albuquerque showed me yet another form of posole, one that we will celebrate in our March beer dinner.
Menudo is tripe soup, the traditional Northern Mexican hangover food. Although hominy in menudo is optional, it is the sine qua non of posole, a pork, red chile, and hominy stew of Sonoran origin. Posole is sometimes spelled pozole. Eating these two dishes caused me to realize that perhaps hominy was a lot more widespread than I grew up understanding.
As I started to research corn and corn products in Mexico, one resource was very wonderful set of regional cookbooks put out by the Mexican government and written by very well-educated authors. Occasionally I would come across the phrase maíz nixtamalado. You recognize the tamal root, especially in its plural form tamales. Since I don’t speak Spanish, it took me a long time to understand that they were talking about hominy, which if dried and ground fine enough makes the masa dough from which we make both tortillas and tamales. I finally clued in that nixtamal means hominy.
The word nixtamal is clearly not of Spanish origin. Rather, it’s an indigenous term, telling me that hominy is an ancient food. And in fact, it is. Researchers have determined that peoples in Mesoamerica have been making hominy for around 10,000 years. Back to our Appalachian settlers: they learned about corn and how to make hominy from the local peoples: hominy is an Algonquin word.
Now I come to find out that we have also assimilated the word nixtamal into English: nixtamalization is the process of making hominy from dried corn kernels. (Who knew there were cereal scientists that studied such things?) While our early settlers used lye (sodium hydroxide), derived from soaking wood ashes in water, Mexicans used lime-water (calcium hydroxide) to the same effect. This process also converts some of the B vitamins in corn to a form that can be more readily absorbed by the body. So, not only is hominy more flavorful and easier to eat than dried corn, it’s healthier too.
Once the husk and the germ of the corn kernel are gone, the remainder is cooked until tender. The grains of hominy fluff out a bit, reminding me of solid popcorn. Of course, hominy can be white, blue, yellow, or pinkish, depending on the color of corn used. Once soft, hominy is canned or dried. Dried hominy, often called posole in the Sonoran desert (part of both US and Mexico: cuisine knows no political boundaries), can either be cooked to soften it or ground. Ground hominy is called, in increasing levels of fineness, coarse grits, grits, and masa harina (or corn flour).
Finding hominy at retail has been challenging until recently. In the mercados and bodegas, the challenge is language. I would wager that the majority of Latinos have never heard of hominy by any name. Those that have call it variously: posole, mote (as in mote blanco), maíz en estilo mexicano, and by other names. Some American grocery stores carry American brands such as Bush’s (acceptable) and Manning’s (not so good) and sometimes the pan-Latino Goya brand (good but expensive). Now, Wal-Mart has started carrying the excellent Juanita’s brand in their Latino section (in the aisle labeled, ignorantly, Mexican). It even comes in restaurant-sized #10 cans (108 oz.), which makes me happy. And, now my specialty goods supplier sells me cases (six cans) of #10 cans, which makes me happier still.
The simplest way to cook hominy is to sauté it in bacon grease, with salt and liberal quantities of black pepper. This to me is outstanding breakfast food, but we use it in the restaurant as a base for ossobuco of pork as well. I also love to use hominy in a mix I’ve started calling sofrito: poblanos, onions, plátanos or hominy, cumin, garlic, green onions, tomatoes, cilantro, all fried in achiote oil, with some chiffonaded collards thrown in at the last minute. This makes an outstanding accompaniment to pan-Caribbean cooking, and it wasn’t terrible when we served sliced, grilled bison ribeye over it recently, as many customers will attest. And of course, hominy is de rigueur in any pork-based, red chile stew.
Now that the weather has turned cold, it’s parsnip season and I’m on a one-man crusade to show my customers how good they are. Response in the dining room has been overwhelmingly positive, even in the initial doubters. If the servers can talk a guest into trying them, the battle is over: the guest loves them. I never asked the servers to try to convince guests to try them: the servers are doing it of their own will. They see customers’ faces as they take the first timid bite and then go right back for more.
“What is a parsnip?” you’re asking. It’s an ivory colored root vegetable that’s related to a carrot. As for cooking, think potatoes or carrots. Anything you can do with either of those root vegetables, you can do with parsnips. And mashed parsnips make mashed potatoes pale in comparison. I’ve started using mashed parsnips instead of mashed potatoes to top my shepherd’s pies: it’s an inspired combination.
“What does a parsnip taste like?” I can hear you thinking. Well, to be frank, a parsnip tastes exactly like a parsnip; that is, it is its own flavor unto itself. It is a very haunting, herbal, sophisticated, and elusive flavor. You can taste notes of carrot, but more herbal, more like crushed carrot greens, and there’s also a starchy background with honeyed notes.
As for home gardening, parsnips are one of those vegetables that I deem better to buy than to plant. They have a very long growing season (they need frost to convert starch to sugar) and thus occupy space in the garden in which you could grow two or three other crops. Moreover, they need sandy, loamy soil (just like carrots do) to develop nice straight roots, and sandy, loamy soil is not something we have around here. Worse, besides being slow to germinate, the seeds have almost no viability after the first year: you must buy fresh seeds each year.
Parsnips have been cultivated for eons—they were one of Roman Emperor Tiberius’ favorites—and were brought to the US soon after Europeans first landed here, but they don’t seem to have ever caught on. Maybe they will become part of your winter repertoire. Remember, you already know how to prepare parsnips. Peel like a carrot and use in any application where you would use a potato. Now it’s up to you to try them.
I love sushi and sashimi and last week, I found myself in the exceptionally lucky circumstances of being offered some hamachi from the wholesale fish market in Jessup, Maryland! Though little known in the US except to us sushi-hounds, hamachi is wildly popular in Japan, where it is farm raised specifically for the sashimi market.
Hamachi is the Japanese name for a young yellowtail, an amberjack usually called Japanese amberjack, which is commonly farmed in Japan for the sashimi market. When older, the jack is called Buri. When translated on sushi menus, it’s generally called yellowtail. But sushi people just call it hamachi.
Hamachi is one of those very few fish that is much better raw than cooked. In fact, if you cook it, don’t serve it to me, because you’ve just ruined it.
In the best of times, hamachi is wildly expensive, yet the price I was quoted was way too low to be believed. I had to make several phone calls to assure myself that the fish was indeed hamachi and very fresh. Although I was highly skeptical (too good to be true), when the fish arrived, it was pristine.
As soon as the fish came out of the ice, I broke it down and made myself a sashimi plate, complete with a bowl of very clear shiroshoyu, top grade Japanese soy sauce. Fearing that the fish wouldn’t live up to my expectations, I slowly dipped the first piece in the soy sauce and then ate it. It was, not to put too fine a point on it, sublime and exceptional, smooth in texture, buttery in flavor, and lightly golden in color.
My fears that the fish wouldn’t be good enough to serve to customers were immediately allayed and on the menu it went. We didn’t sell much of it (Winchester is not a sushi eating town), but those who ate it were blown away. One customer told me that it was the best that he had ever had and all I could say was, “I know. Me too.”
I cannot promise any more hamachi, but if you ever see it on the menu, order it.
Recipe: Venison Burgers
Beth Nowak invited me to do a demonstration at the Freight Station Farmer’s Market on Saturday, November 25th and she provided me with Alaskan fish from her brother Jim and venison from her farm, where the deer are a major nuisance. I really didn’t know what I was going to make in advance of arriving, so I came prepared with a lot of herbs and spices. This venison burger recipe came to me fairly spontaneously and is a natural spin off of how I would spice lamb meatballs (albóndigas) for tapas. To say that it was a great hit would be a vast understatement: the burgers disappeared in a hurry and there were lots of silly grins on faces all around. Try this at home.
1# venison burger (or lamb or beef) 2 cloves garlic, minced 2 sprigs of oregano, leaves minced, about 1 T 1 T heavy cream 1 T extra virgin olive oil ¼ c crumbled feta cheese 2 T toasted pine nuts ½ t salt ¼ t black pepper ½ t pimentón (smoked paprika) pinch of crushed red pepper flakes
Mix all ingredients well. If your venison is very lean, consider adding more cream or olive oil. Patty out and grill to medium rare. Do not overcook venison: it has no fat to speak of and becomes tough quickly.
2006 was a year of great progress for the restaurant. With the acquisition of some Grand Cru Bordeaux and Bourgogne, we finally completed our wine list to the breadth and depth of my original plan when opening the restaurant. In continuing to spend our money locally where possible, we added wonderful new local suppliers for lamb, honey, goat cheese, Surry sausages, and maple syrup. And after much pleading with our supplier, we finally got our olive oil and balsamic vinegar packaged for retail sale. And not least, we upgraded our already beautiful wine glasses to gorgeous Italian Bormioli crystal—not cheap, but definitely worth it. And finally, this month marks the end of the first year of our Wednesday night tapas menu, the menu that lets the kitchen crew play and experiment. Who knows what this coming year will bring? I hope you’ll come along for the ride.
All my best and come see us when you can,
Ed
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