Jura Wine Dinner

Last night we hosted a dinner at 1508 with Tom Calder, a wine broker from Paris and Tom Kiska, a wine importer who regularly helps us with our wine pairings at dinners.

All 11 of the wines were from the Jura region in France, 2 from the 1950's!!

Tom and Tom's combined knowledge is astounding, a wonderful group attended– a memorable night.

Passing

Rabbit with Apple on Carrot

Kobacha Squash Puree

Brussel Sprout with Pickled Ginger

Celery Root with Lemon and Argon Oil

Eggs with Jowl Bacon

(Caves Jean Bourdy) Cremant du Jura Brut NV

(Tissot) Cremant du Jura Brut Rose NV

Foie Gras Terrine on Brioche

(Tissot) Vin de Paille 2004

Seated

Cornmeal Soup with Parsnip and  Sorrel

(Tissot) Arbois Chardonnay "Classique" 2009

Scallops with Cauliflower and Vanilla, Salty Oat Bread

(Caves Jean Bourdy) Cotes du Jura Blanc 1992

Sweetbreads and Figs, Farm Bread

(Caves Jean Bourdy) Cotes du Jura Blanc 1953

Guinea Hen with Olive Oil Mashed Potatoes and Burgundy Truffles and Collard Green Sprouts, Multi-Grain Roll

(Caves Jean Bourdy) Cotes du Jura Rouge 1959

Lamb Leg with Chanterelle Mushroom and Wilted Romaine, Spelt Olive Oil Focaccia

(Caves Jean Bourdy) Cotes du Jura Rouge 1990

Franche Comte Cheese and Cracker

(Caves Jean Bourdy) Arbois Vin Jaune 2001

Chocolate Pudding with Chocolate Cookie

(Tissot) Trousseau Arbois 2009

Roasted Pear and Almond Sorbet

(Tissot) Cremant du Jura Brut NV

Cardoons

Cardoons from Path Valley Cooperative in Pennsylvania. To cook– slice (some varieties have sharp edges so take care when handling raw), bring salted water to a boil, add cardoons, return to a boil, drain.  Repeat this process until the cardoons are tender but not mushy, this usually takes 5 or 6 times.

At our last Home restaurant we made a salad with the cooked cardoons, wild capers, golden raisins, picholine olives, fresh parsley, lemon juice, olive oil, salt and pepper– and served the salad passed on a warm corncake.

Bandol paired with Lamb, Basil Mashed Potatoes and Cipolline Onion

I often mention Tom a local wine importer who looks at each of our menus and helps us pair our food with wines from his fabulous cellar of small vineyard, primarily European wines. Last Friday night we served a dish of Whitmore Farms Lamb Chop, Leg and Sausage with Basil Mashed Potatoes, Braised Cipolline Onion and Chard from our backyard...with Chateau Pradeaux Bandol Rouge 2003...the pairing was memorable.

More about the wine from Rosenthal the exporter of this Bandol...

There is the appellation of Bandol with its plethora of producers, some good, some mediocre; and then there is Chateau Pradeaux, the unique, inimitable, standard bearer for this ancient wine-growing district. The Chateau Pradeaux is situated on the outskirts of the town of St. Cyr Sur Mer which lies directly on the Mediterranean Ocean between Toulon and Marseilles. The estate is owned by the Portalis family which has owned this property since before the French Revolution. The domaine is currently under the direction of Cyrille Portalis, who continues to maintain the great traditions of this estate.

The vineyards are cultivated in as natural a manner as possible with reliance on organic methods. In fact, during the spring months sheep are permitted to graze in the vineyards thereby eliminating any need to use herbicides and at the same time providing a natural compost.

The wines of Pradeaux are brooding and difficult. Produced on the back of the noble Mourvedre, Pradeaux in its youthful stages is tannic, backward, and sometimes ornery. The wines are not destemmed; "elevage" in large oak foudres can last as long as four years; the essential blend is at least 95% Mourvedre; vines of less than 25 years of age are not used for the reds.

September 2011 Home Restaurant

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo Kate Headley

Friday night we had an open Home Restaurant, fabulous group!

This is what we ate and drank–

PASSING

Whitmore Bacon and Eggs on Buckwheat Toast

Cardoon, Golden Raisin, Young Olive, Fennel and Caper

Rabbit and Rhubarb Ketchup with French Breakfast Radish

Stuffed Squash Blossoms 

Roasted Shishito Peppers

Cold Beet Soup with Grain Yogurt

Scallop on Cucumber with Sesame and Ginger

Basil Lime Vodka Cocktail

(Chateau de Roquefort) Cotes de Provence ROSE 'Corail' 2010  

 SEATED 

Black Cod with Butterhead, Okra and Shallot Dressing

48 Hour Bread

(Tenuta Roveglia) Lugana Classico 2010    

 Baby Lima Beans, Green Tomatoes, Eggplant and Spaghetti Squash and Baby Collard Greens

Garlic Bread

(Villargeau) Coteaux du Giennois Sauvignon Blanc 2010

 Lamb Chop, Loin and Sausage with Basil Mashed Potatoes, Cipollini and Chard

Spelt Olive Oil Bread

(Ch. Pradeaux) Bandol Rouge 2003

 Mayor of Nye Beach Cheese and Cracker

 Zucchini Cake with Frozen Winter Squash and Candied Walnuts

(Tissot) Cremant du Jura "Indigene" NV  

Bites: Warm Chocolate Chocolate Chip Cookies, Celeste Fig

Take Home: Sesame Bread, Salty Rosemary Walnut Biscotti, Fresh Bay Leaves

A La Mode Dahlias

Maybe it is the name that attracts me...personally I like ice cream and I like baked goods but I have always been partial to any baked good served with ice cream– a la mode... Dahlias do not travel well.  I only use them when they are available locally, most years they are at their best in the DC area from August through mid October.  Most of the dahlias I use are from Wollam Gardens.  I use as many as possible, especially these bi-color white and orange a la modes, while they are available.

Mash Celery Root

For the last five nights mashed celery root has been part of our dinner. This is not the first time that we have gotten stuck on a particular food and it often happens at the beginning of the season when the food is available for the first time after it has been out of season for awhile...I assume that once we tire of the mash we will move on to roasting, marinating...

Mash Celery Root

Celery Root

Favorite Olive Oil (we used Tuscan Laudemio)

Favorite Salt (we cooked with a fine ground French sea salt and finished with pink Himalayan)

Freshly Ground Black Pepper (we used tellicherry)

Peel the celery root and chop into roughly 1 inch cubes, the pieces need to be more or less uniform so they can cook evenly.  Place in a pot, cover with water, season with salt and bring to a boil.  Cook until celery root is tender when pierced with a fork. Drain the celery root, place in a high speed blender,  add olive oil, salt and pepper to taste and process until very smooth. Serve hot.

A few of my favorite things...in Paris

I just put a list together for a friend going to Paris later this month.

He has been there many times, knows the city well and has friends to visit and events to attend...I made this list of some of my favorite in between places...in any case making this list has made me desperate for a trip to Paris...

Here is the list–

...First of all you may already do this but last trip to Paris was the first time I used my iphone to map from destination to destination, since Paris is all about walking ...it was especially helpful in the old neighborhoods when streets tend to go in circles and having a sense of direction basically does not help at all!

Neighborhood Canal St-Martin

This is where that Tete dans L'Olives store is...about a 10-15 minute walk from most other stuff in the neighborhood, they do have a tiny 8 seat restaurant but meal or no meal I think it is worth a visit just because it is truly one of a kind place.

Le Verre Vole (food and drink), eat, drink or food to take away.

Maybe my favorite bakery in Paris...but that would be hard to say, Du Pain et Des Idees

Specific streets to wander, some independent retail mixed with stores like APC– Rue Marseille, Quai de Valmy, Quai de Jemmapes...

Neighborhood North Marais

Leave some time to wander, there are people making things mixed in with an overwhelming amount of restaurants, cafe, retail...after awhile you might say...not another $2000 robot in an old refrigerator being used as a display case, next to a hand printed tee-shirt, next to a set of pencils I cannot live without, next to the coolest jacket I have ever seen...you get the idea– jewelry, vintage, young designers, food...

wander the streets of – Rue du Vieille du Temple, Rue Charlot, Rue de Poitou, Rue Debelleyme and all the little streets near by

a new favorite clothes line discovered on last trip is Venus et Judes 22 rue Debelleyme (wearing their jeans this second)

Merci, 111 Bd Beaumarchais ( a little walk from above streets...could be a combination or a separate destination), Not only is it a solidly good store in a very thought out way...100% of profit goes to charity!!

Two of my favorite farmers markets

Bastille Market open Sunday and Thursday, Lebanese guy makes these sandwiches on dough that he rolls out on this thing that looks like a gigantic pasta maker and then cooks on metal drums, soap maker, salt guy, where I always buy Salt Gris to take home (all three of these spots are closer to the Bastille end of the market)

Marché des Enfants Rouges, not open Mondays and closes mid-day, Small semi covered market I adore, good to get lunch, picnic tables available for eating

A Museum...again there are so many but this is one you might miss...

Musee Carnavalet, Most random Paris history museum.  Kind of like someones basement that happens to be filled with random old stuff from Paris...I expect at some point it will be redone but it is beautifully not put together right now.  Located in a fantastic building with memorable garden.

Object Oriented Cookery, Collapse Journal

John had his first article published in a philosophical journal, Collapse...exciting!  His piece deals with practices he has been contemplating for years, molecular gastronomy and slow food– and his studies at European Graduate School and  Object Oriented Ontology of Levi Bryants, Larval Subjects.

- In Object Oriented Cookery, Chef John Cochran proposes a culinary practice that opens itself to non-human participants. Chefs, like philosophers, have "ontological commitments" determined by their praxis, and which distort the objects they work with. Cochran critiques the radical claims of contemporary food movements that claim to break out of normative models of cookery - Molecular Gastronomy and Slow Food - and asks what a "flat cookery" could be.

An excerpt from the article–

Therefore, cookery becomes an elegant configuration of entities in a feed-forward-feed-back clumsily-woven web of objects interacting on equal footing. If we do not know what a specific food can do, and this food is interacting with all sorts of other objects at a specific instant, then even in a radically closed environment, cookery becomes a lot like surfing. It consists of a series of tiny adjustments, prompted by anticipations and responses from an openness to utterances from all human and non-human actants entangled. Of course, in order to prevent short circuits, a chef must allow herself to be translated by other objects. In feeling her way through, aesthetics forms a new epistemology where the abundance of local manifestations forms a meal. Keeping in mind that the entanglement that constitutes this meal does not begin or end with this specific event of eating – objects stretch out through other objects. Anticipating objects’ behaviours and responding to both expected and unexpected acts, even the most experienced chef benefits by adopting the disposition of an amateur home cook. A disposition which is simply a commitment to objects being out of phase.

For the rest of the article you can purchase the journal through Urbanomics, or let us know and we will pass it along.

Slovenian Salt

On a recent trip to San Francisco we discovered Piran Salt from Slovenia at one of our favorite spots Boulettes Larder.

A little research uncovered that the salt has been around for a long time and is still harvested using techniques that are more than 700 years old.   The salt is actually scraped by hand from the salt basins in Secovlje Salina Nature Park on the Adriatic coast.

– our new favorite finishing salt...last night we used it to season roasted green tomatoes.

Watsonville California, Beach and Endless Strawberry Fields Side by Side

I talk a lot about knowing where your food comes from...I have visited many farms near and far, watched animals being slaughtered, I know many of the people that grow the food I eat and I grow as much as I can in my urban yard...but, when I arrived at a friends beach house it made me realize that there is lots that I am eating that I know nothing about!

I had never seen large scale strawberry production...  The house we were so fortunate to visit looked out over the ocean in one direction where sea otters played  just yards from the shore.  However, I was just as intrigued by the view out the kitchen window which was of strawberry fields as far as the eye could see.  Sitting at the kitchen table you could watch the fields being watered, tended to by man and machine and observe the systematic picking of strawberries.

The agriculture in the entire region is intense.  We were one stop north of Gilroy the garlic capital, and very close to Castroville, the artichoke capital, small and large farms carpeted the area.  Although seduced by the fertility of the area I also know that year round food production on this magnitude requires pesticides.  In any case I will never look at a strawberry exactly the same way again.   Next time you are in the supermarket check it out– much of the year the strawberries being sold are very likely from Watsonville, California.

I am happy to of witnessed this large scale agriculture production up close.