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Newsletter for January 2008 Your source for what’s cooking at OBW
25 South Indian Alley Winchester VA, 22601 540-662-1455 |
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Serendipity or Diano d’Alba DOC |
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The holidays really flew by and it’s hard to believe that I am buried doing year-end bookkeeping, reporting, and taxes.
On January 24th, we are hosting a fantastic game dinner featuring wines of the Rhône Valley. If you are going to attend, we need you to book right now. Once we order the game, we will freeze reservations. This is not a dinner that you can book at the last minute because of the lead time we need in ordering.
I started writing a segment on wine and food pairing back in December, but it has turned into a magnum opus and I will hopefully get it distilled to the fundamentals for the February newsletter. In the mean time, there’s plenty to read in this edition.
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 and your friends can try and share a range of foods.
Thursday, Jan 24, Rhône Wines and Game Dinner This could be the most spectacular dinner that we put on in 2008. Five courses of outstanding wines from the Rhône Valley in the south of France, paired with game. Details below.
Tuesday, Feb 5, 6th Annual Mardi Gras Dinner Longtime customers know that I am an old hand with Cajun and Creole dishes and that I use Mardi Gras as an excuse to get in the kitchen and do my thing. In addition to our regular dinner menu, we’ll offer a very reasonably priced prix fixe Mardi Gras menu for those in the spirit.
Thursday, Feb 14, Valentine’s Prix Fixe Dinner Four spectacular courses for $60. By reservation with a credit card only. Call today if you are planning to dine with us; the best tables are going very quickly.
On Thursday the 24th of this month, we’re holding a tasting of Rhône wines paired with game dishes. Fran Kysela, Master Sommelier and principal of importer/distributor Kysela Père et Fils, will host the dinner and discuss the wines. This will probably be the most sumptuous of all the dinners we host this year. Because of the lead time required to source all the necessary game, I ask that you please reserve your seats as early as possible, by the 18th or 19th. Once I purchase the game for this dinner, I will not be able to get more in time for the dinner. Also, because game is not a commodity, I cannot give you a whole lot of insight into the menu this far in advance. I am hoping to do a hare or rabbit dish, a game bird, and caribou/elk/antelope. We’ll certainly do something with wild boar, which is readily available as those tuskers are hunted as nuisances in our National Parks. Once again, if you plan to attend, please pick up the phone right now and book at 662-1455. Pricing is $90 per person before tax and gratuity.
In my late teens, I first encountered Surry Sausages, but I had forgotten about them until about a year ago while collaborating with another chef from Charlottesville at a charity event. He cooked a dish that reminded me that I hadn’t had Surry Sausages in decades and reminded me how much I love them. I made a mental note to feature them on our menu—after all, what a great Virginia product to showcase! When I got back to the restaurant, call after call to distributor after distributor yielded the same result: “Huh?” So I called the other chef and he gave me the name of the sales rep at his distributor, who was kind enough to tell me that the product was really called smoked sausage and it was produced by Edwards in Surry, Virginia. He also told me that he couldn’t sell me any nor did he know of anyone to sell it to me. But, that was enough. I called Edwards and they told me that there was no distributor for our part of Virginia, but not to worry, they would sell it to me direct. It’s been a happy relationship and I buy outstanding slab bacon and hams from them too. And now that we have a steady supply, we feature Surry Sausages on the menu in all kinds of appetizers and entrées, including what I call Crab Virginia, basically a Crab Imperial with baby leeks and Surry Sausage. I wrote to Edwards for some details for this article and Sam Edwards, the president of S. Wallace Edwards & Sons, was kind enough to reply to me immediately: “Sometime soon after starting the "ham" business in the 20's my Grandfather began making bacon and sausage like he learned how on the farm growing up. Those recipes and techniques were handed down for who knows how long ago are the same ones we use today with the same ingredients. In the beginning and really up through the 80's the left over not sold fresh sausage was stuffed on Friday and smoked Sunday night for the following week. We still follow that same pattern but need to make it intentionally each week rather than rely on it as a byproduct of the fresh sausage production run. The ingredients that I think make the biggest difference are the real sage we use (not flavors or oil of sage) and we rotate the peppers and we buy in small quantities to keep them as fresh as possible. In addition the smoked sausage is fermented a little to give it that country twang that comes from the "good bacteria" found in our smokehouses that make our flavor unique.” Edwards products are available for retail sale at www.virginiatraditions.com.
Each winter when local vegetables are in short supply, we are forced to rely on vegetables from warmer climates and right now, white asparagus from South America is particularly nice. White asparagus comes from the same plant as green asparagus, except that the white stalks are grown entirely underground in huge hilled rows so that they never see the sunlight and thus they never develop the green chlorophyll of green asparagus. Moreover, they never develop that “asparagus” flavor. But they are very good. I’ll never forget an excellent dinner in Bavaria in which my entire dinner consisted of at least 500 grams of huge white local Spargel (3 centimeters in diameter), yellow new potatoes from Italy, lots of butter, a sprinkle of parsley, and a bottle of the local Kerner wine. Just as the flavor differs between the two colors of asparagus, so does preparation. The skin of the white stalks is bitter in the extreme (it may be that only some of us can taste this bitterness—if so, I got it bad) and you should peel it all away. White asparagus is fragile, so the best way to peel it is to lay it flat on a cutting board and peel it lying down. And where green asparagus is wonderful and tasty just barely blanched, white asparagus is not. It is best cooked all the way through, something that I have to stress repeatedly to my new cooks who have never worked with it before.
Serendipity or Diano d’Alba DOC It might just be coincidence that I was reading a book on wine making in Barbaresco (and Angelo Gaja’s role in turning it around) when a friend gave me a bottle of red wine from the nearby town of Diano. This wine was notable because I had never heard of it. You might think that after nearly 30 years of seriously tasting wine that finding an unknown wine such as Diano d’Alba would be becoming rarer, but that’s not so. In reality, the older I get, the more frequently it happens. It’s not because I’m killing all my brain cells and forgetting, but because there are so many importers bringing in wines that were consumed historically in situ and not exported. Knowing nothing about the wine, I guessed it was probably Barbera or Dolcetto. My dictionary said “See Dolcetto di Diano d’Alba” and that answered that question. And by the way, Dolcetto is a delicious medium-bodied red. All this is by way of encouraging you to push your boundaries a bit and pick a wine from our list that you have never heard of. Rather than approaching it as “I might not like it,” come at it from the point of view that you might just find a gem and a new favorite—there are bunches of fantastic wines on our list that people rarely order, without my urging them to. I owe thanks to Pres and Myret for the book in question, Edward Steinberg’s The Vines of San Lorenzo. It’s a phenomenal piece of prose and I recommend it to you. And to Mike for the Dolcetto. The two were remarkably complementary.
I was making my weekly run through Costco when I spotted several cases of lime green, softball-sized citrus fruits labeled Jaffa Sweetie. Always game for something new, I grabbed a case. A couple of other customers and the cashier asked me what they were. I replied honestly that I had no clue, but that I was going to find out. A quick Google later, I found that Jaffa is an Israeli shipper and Sweetie is its trade name for a cross between a pomelo and a grapefruit, Citrus x paradisi ‘Oro Blanco.’ I was led to believe that the fruit was special, very sweet and tasty. What I found in reality was a thick-skinned fruit that yielded a seedless white sphere of fruit the size of a peeled orange. The Oro Blanco is marketed as a sweet fruit because it has very low acid and so tastes sweeter than a grapefruit, even though it contains no more sugar. What I tasted was boring and one dimensional, with none of the charm of either of its parents. Give me a big pink Texas grapefruit any time. In my fruit as in my wine, acid is king.
Recipe: Potato and Caramelized Onion Cakes
One of my favorites as a child was my mother’s mashed potato cakes. Nothing can top her version for sheer comfort, but I think I have one-upped the flavor in these cakes, which were a big hit on early December menus.
I’m not going to insult your intelligence by telling you how to make mashed potatoes, but I will tell you that when I make these cakes, after mashing the potatoes, I split the batch in two, half for potato cakes and half for mash. To the mash I add butter and cream; to the potato cakes, much less of each. For potato cakes, the potatoes want to be fairly starchy and stiff so that they are easier to handle and don’t fall apart.
Also for ease of handling, it helps to refrigerate the potato cakes before you crust and cook them. My standard operating procedure is to form the potato cakes from leftover mashed potatoes after dinner and then crust and cook the potato cakes the next day.
This recipe makes about six potato cakes.
Mashed potatoes from two average russet potatoes 4 cloves garlic, roasted [how to roast garlic] 1 medium onion 2 T vegetable oil 2 T minced chives or sliced green onions ½ c grated pecorino cheese Salt and pepper to taste 2 eggs 2 T heavy cream or milk Panko or other breadcrumbs
Dice the onion and caramelize it in the vegetable oil over a slow flame until brown—this will take around twenty minutes. Mash the roasted garlic into a paste. Mince the chives or slice the green onions. Add the onions, garlic, chives, and cheese to the potatoes and mix well. Season to taste. Form into six patties and refrigerate, if you have the time.
Beat the eggs and cream with a pinch of salt and pepper. Dip each patty into the egg wash and then into the panko. Fry over moderate heat with a fair coat of oil in the bottom of the pan. If you don’t have a good coat of oil, the bottom will brown unevenly.
OK, now here’s the good part: all the tips that I can pass on to you from having made thousands of these cakes.
Tip 1, Mashing roasted garlic. Squeeze the garlic from the skins onto a cutting board. With the side of your knife, drag the garlic a few times back and forth across the board until you have a smooth paste.
Tip 2, Forming cakes. If you wet your hands between cakes, the potatoes won’t stick to your hands nearly so much.
Tip 3, Do ahead. You can make these cakes in advance and leave them either cooked or uncooked in the refrigerator. If you pre-cook them, re-warm the cakes in a moderate oven until they are warmed through.
Tip 4, Relax. Do you really think that we measure any of this?
Each year in January I look back to the year past and forward to the year present. Looking back helps me see how far we’ve come—and in 2007, we came a long way—yet looking ahead keeps me grounded by reminding me how much more we have to do. Come see us when you can in 2008 and help us grow. And if there is anything special that we can ever do for you, please do not hesitate to let me know.
Ed
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