Recently in Food & Wine Category

A favorite Mexican sauce of mine is made from tomatillos and chilies.

Remove the dry outer husks from approximately one-half pound of fresh tomatillos. Bring a pot of water to a boil and cook the tomatillos for five minutes. Drain, then put the blanched tomatillos into the blender with two dried chilies (seeds removed; I had Chihuacle and Chipotle chilies lying around, but use whatever mildly or moderately-hot chili that you may have ). Add a pinch of salt, and two small crushed cloves of garlic. Blend on the puree setting for about two minutes. Strain the sauce into a bowl, and then transfer to a squeeze bottle. The sauce seems to last two or three weeks if kept refrigerated.

I love putting this on grilled chicken breasts, steaks, and scrambled eggs, but intend to continue experimentation to find other yummy uses.

Summer must be here... STONEFRUIT!

As I previously reported, Manresa will be celebrating the Iron Chef America victory by offering the winning dishes with a six-course Iron Chef menu for $135 per person. The menu will be available on three consecutive Sundays, May 10, 17, and 24. This is a special menu, so if you want it, please request it when you make your reservation.

More information is available here on the Manresa blog.

Manresa
320 Village Lane
Los Gatos, CA 95030
+1 (408) 354-4330

An occasional feature:

Food scientist works alongside chefs to dream up new ideas [LA Times]
Peet's attempts to eliminate weak coffee from the world [Atlantic Food Blog]
How I learned to love goat meat [NYT] [Ed: not me!]
California Spice Firm Recalls (Salmonella) [Chron]
SF Weekly Foodie Blog Pans San Francisco Foie Gras resolution [SFoodie]
Mr. Know-it-All mistakes Copain Syrah for a Pinot Noir [NYT]

Gerald Hiragoyen had a book release party Saturday, March 15, for his new book, Pintxos: Small Plates in the Basque Tradition at his Bocadillos restaurant. The event was held as a fund raiser with book sale proceeds going to Food Runners, a San Francisco charity that picks up excess perishable food from businesses and delivers it to shelters and neighborhood programs that feed the hungry.

All of the tables had been removed and guests were treated to wine and an endless supply of fresh tapas, presumably from recipes in the book.

Since Bocadillos is my favorite Basque place in the city I bought a copy of the book and had it autographed. (Note: do not call Bocadillos a "Spanish" restaurant within earshot of Chef Hiragoyen. You will be corrected!). I've been going through it and trying things out. This is my favorite recipe so far...

I grew up with Lipton tea bags and percolator coffee. For some reason, my parents thought tea was okay for a child, but coffee was not. I'm not sure if they were more concerned with a threat to my moral well being or to my health. As soon as I got a taste of the two beverages, I thought their choice was the correct one, though I think my conclusion might have been influenced by the quality of that 1950's cup of coffee.

It wasn't until many years later, when I started collecting Chinese oolongs and practicing traditional brewing techniques, that I finally learned what fine tea was. Former tea bag users are always delighted to learn that fine tea is given multiple infusions and carefully noting the changes in the beverage for three or four steepings with the same leaves. Of course, you use more tea than you would for a single cup, and you steep for a shorter time.

Finally not being able to take the nonsense any longer, Incanto owner Mark Pastore has published a thoughtful and reasoned essay on why Incanto, an Italian restaurant with no obvious reason to serve foie gras, decided to offer it on the menu. They did so to weigh in on "whether or not as a society we will permit the views of a vocal minority to trample our personal right to choose what we will and will not eat."

He also makes that point that the campaign against foie gras is an opportunistic and cynical ploy using anti-elitist and demagogic populist rhetoric to allow folks to feel they are morally superior and helping to make the world a better place, when they aren't doing any thing of the kind.

He also provides a link to the recent Village Voice article: "Is Foie Gras Torture?" where the initially morally superior reporter, after doing some research isn't so sure any more.

Pastore also makes the argument that passing foie gras legislation while the State of California hurtles towards insolvency is the height of stupidity and arrogance.

Human beings are at the top of the food chain. They got there by eating protein. You need to kill things to harvest protein. There is no way the current human population can be supported without a food industry. The anti foie gras movement and its cynical followers would enslave us and lead us back to the dark ages.

POULARD MADO (Roast Chicken Mado)

Madame Marie-Louise Point, whom her husband affectionately called "Mado," is the inspiration for this recipe. When Fernand Point wrote it out in his notebook, he also wrote the following in a corner of the page: "I dedicate this dish to the most beautiful woman in the world, my wife."

Stuff a fat young roasting chicken from Bresse with truffles and roast it slowly. Make a little bit of sauce from the pan juices. Arrange the bird on a heated platter surrounded by ortolans and some slices of foie gras quickly heated in butter. Pour over the pan juices and serve with a bottle of Romanée-Conti from a happy year.

From: Ma Gastromonie by Fernand Point

The notion of terroir, which originated in France and was first applied mostly to wine, is that the special qualities of the land and climate in any given location affect and distinguish the taste and quality of the food grown on it. Potatoes can be spoken of in terms of terroir, too. A specific variety will not taste or cook up the same if it is grown in Lyon instead of the island of Norimoutier. The island's sandy soil and muck impart a special flavor. The ratte from Touquet has its devoted disciples, as does the ratte of Lyon, which is also called a "quenelle."

From The Complete Robuchon.

On this day in 1943 an order of Federal Government banned the sale of sliced bread as an economy measure to free up resources and assure the winning of World War II.

No, I'm not kidding. Wikipedia has the story here, and they reference this fine article about other edicts that came out of Washington during the war.

Rubber and gasoline rationing lasted the entire war, but the ban on sliced bread was both resented and ridiculed so it only lasted about two months before being rescinded.

Now things have come full circle and here in food-obsessed Northern California no one would dream of getting their Acme, Boudin, or Tartine bread sliced. Oh, the horror!

Update: for trvia fans here is a good blog post about the history of sliced bread.

An amusing anecdote on the Guardian Dining and Food blog "Word of Mouth."

The Szechuan-trained English chef Fuchsia Dunlop asked (on BBC Radio Four last night) whether Asian and European cuisines could fairly be judged side-by-side: Chinese cooking being about some very different things - not least with its interest in texture.

Dunlop told how she once took three top chefs from Szechuan province to eat at the Californian shrine-restaurant Chez Panisse. They were "baffled and disturbed " by the food. "It's interesting," said one of them, "but I don't know if it's good or bad."

Aha! It's not just me! I've been tagging some posts here as "post-modern cuisine," should I be tagging Chez Panisse posts "pre-modern"?

The official cultivar for this miniature pumpkin is "Jack be Little" but Lou from Iacopi Farms alliteringly calls it a "Munchkin Pumpkin."

Though the most popular use for these is for centerpieces and fall decorations, they have a sweet winter-squash flesh with a thin skin—meaning that you can eat the whole thing (minus the bottom, the stem, and the seeds).

The first time I saw one of these at dinner was when I had Daniel Humm's tasting menu at Campton Place. The pumpkin had the seeds scooped out and was filled with the most delicious pumpkin soup imaginable. (Just thinking about this meal makes me jealous of all the New Yorkers who can now go to Eleven Madison Park where Daniel moved in January 2006). If you want to do something special with these Lilliputian pumpkins, The New York Times recently published a recipe for Baby Pumpkins With Seafood which filled the hollowed-out and roasted pumpkin with a rich scallop-cheese sauce. I think that's what I am going to do with mine. It will give me an excuse to open one of my bottles of Aubert chardonnay. (Not that I normally need an excuse.)

P.S. The real Farmer's Market Product(s) of the Week were strawberries (Catalán Family Farm), Italian basil (Chue's Farm), and tomatoes (Balakian Farms). Normally, these things aren't unusual in the least, but to find them fresh and from the field on November 29th strikes me as highly unusual. Alas, though I had my camera with me, the battery was dead and you are going to have to take my word that California is truly an agricultural paradise.

Just as there is an unexpected aviation tie-in to the current economic crises and efforts to deal with it, there also is a wine tie-in.

The aviation tie-in was the badgering of the auto executives by Rep. Gary Ackerman (D, NY) for flying to Washington on their corporate jets while pleading poverty and asking for a government loan. Indeed, the resulting media echo-chamber cacophony was enough to get General Motors to announce that they were selling their corporate jets. I really do think that executives of large corporations should have their own aircraft, as it saves a lot of time which is important for guys who work 80-hour weeks. But, if you are weeks away from bankruptcy and you are begging for a loan, I guess you have to wear the sackcloth.

However, CNN is also beating the demagogic populist drum over the fact that the White House served world leaders 2003 Shafer Hillside Select at a state dinner: (a wine "worth $500 per bottle!") World leaders dine in style as they discuss financial crisis. This really seems like grasping at grape-stems. Besides the fact that the current Wine-Bid average price for this wine is $205, not $500, would it have been better to serve Two-Buck Chuck?

This is just silly.

The Alinea Cookbook has landed! And I can barely pick it up again because it's a damn big and heavy book! This is the perfect coffee table book, as it is full of gorgeous photographs of amazing objects, which also have the wonderful characteristic of being edible. For many owners of this book, it is likely to remain an object of display rather than becoming stained with grease, as the recipes are seriously intimidating.

Of course, this is exactly my kind of cookbook! Almost all of the recipes require a new ingredient or a new cooking device. Despite what you might think, this is no bad thing. As is well-known, the healthy American male looks upon every project as an excuse to buy a new tool, and if the end result of the project is food then it is even better. All of those barbeque grills in American back yards are only tangentially related to feeding the family.

If you don't work at Alinea or WD-50 you can't just open to a random page of this book and start cooking. Most of us need to answer three questions: 1) Do I have the ingredients? 2) Do I have the time? -- and 3) Do I have the equipment? Since my answer was "no" to at least one of these questions for almost every recipe in the book, I had to fall back to a more abstract method for deciding where to start. I looked for a recipe that produced something extremely neat, and which seemed at least theoretically possible to pull off. After closely examining every picture in the book and imaging what it might taste like, I decided to make what is prosaically described in the book as bacon powder, wrapped in pineapple glass.

From the VeryGoodTaste Blog who reports that over 500 blogs have posted the list and commented. Someone should do some statistics to find out what the mean and median score is. It's a fun exercise, I scored 71 out of 100. They did forget bacon and olive oil ice cream though:

Here's a chance for a little interactivity for all the bloggers out there. Below is a list of 100 things that I think every good omnivore should have tried at least once in their life. The list includes fine food, strange food, everyday food and even some pretty bad food - but a good omnivore should really try it all. Don't worry if you haven't, mind you; neither have I, though I'll be sure to work on it. Don't worry if you don't recognise everything in the hundred, either; Wikipedia has the answers.

Here's what I want you to do:

1) Copy this list into your blog or journal, including these instructions.
2) Bold all the items you've eaten.
3) Cross out any items that you would never consider eating.
4) Optional extra: Post a comment here at www.verygoodtaste.co.uk linking to your results.

The VGT Omnivore's Hundred: