A few highlights from 2011!

San Antonio Tex Mex- In March I headed south to San Antonio, birthplace of tex-mex, for my niece Amy’s wedding.  We stayed on the river walk but the best food was at the catered wedding and rehearsal dinners.  The groom’s family, native’s of San Antonio,  treated us to an awesome brunch the following day at La Fonda on Main, the oldest Mexican restaurant in San Antonio opened 1932.

Jura wine dinner-chicken with morels, etc, etc…thanks Beth Baye for the most memorable dinner party, what a line up! Dom Berthet-Bondet, Puffeney, Bourdy, Dom Montborgeau…….

Favorite recipe: Poblanos stuffed with herbed goat cheese with a fresh corn sauce and sliced heirloom tomatoes.  An impromtu summer dinner party with the best of the August farmer’s market…

Meg’s bread-she has been perfecting this recipe for years and swears by the bread bible.  Made with a combination of flours and starter and baked in a regular oven, these loaves come out crusty and rustic.

Book:  Gabrielle Hamilton’s Blood, Bones and Butter – She came in through the back door, one chef who has not sold out to the cult of celebrity.

Cookbook:  Ron Suhanosky, The Italian Table-from the former chef of Sfoglia and now of Nonna’s Table, a small take out establishment in upper Manhattan.  A refreshing update on rustic Italian.

Restaurant: Turkish Kitchen – My friend and fellow Turkeyphile Stacy Greene treated me to a birthday celebration at the Turkish Kitchen.  Haven’t been in years and the joint has gone white tablecloth, French service.  It’s nice to see a NYC Turkish restaurant go beyond Kabobs and play up the elegance of this under-rated cuisine.

Wine:  Anything from Louis Dressner Selections.   Sadly, founder Joe Dressner passed away this year and will be celebrated for his irreverence and herculean efforts to alter the wine landscape .  Thanks for paving the way Joe, now there are many small companies focusing on naturally made terroir driven wines.

Art:  Metropolitan Museum of Art – the met is on a roll with newly designed galleries and excellent shows from Alexander McQueen, Indian miniatures to Italian portraits.  A great way to spend a Friday night with wine, music and art….

From Tex Mex, California burger chains, roadhouse cuisine and the original church of bbq, my recent 4 day sojourn to Dallas was jam packed with tasty vittles.  Thanks to my Texas/Turkish family for all the great suggestions and imbibing in triple digit temps!

Tex-Mex is always the first stop on my food odyssey when I visit the big D.  This trip my niece suggested Gloria’s.  Founded by two Salvadoran Immigrants who took over a relative’s small restaurant in the Oak Cliff area, it now has morphed into 14 locations around the Dallas area.  The menu is classic tex-mex with Salvadoran specialties.  The margaritas are legendary and ceviche awesome!  Gloria’s is a well-oiled machine with excellent service and a corporate feel to the décor.  A great place to bring a large party and the prices are double-dip recession friendly.

Southern food, the ideal marriage of high and low brow is what Texas cuisine does best. Tillman’s Roadhouse in the Bishop’s Arts District is a temple of lone star grub.  This must be the food “Homesick Texan” is talking about.  The specialties of the house are Chicken Fried Steak and Venison Chili Frito Pie.  Locally sourced ingredients are used when possible and my heirloom tomato, arugula salad with blue corn grits was amazing…. The wine list is mostly new world and chosen well to complement the food.  Service was very attentive yet a bit too eager to clear our plates before everyone finished.

The décor is a combination of knotty pine, chandeliers and wooden carved taxidermy heads, recycled chic with an artist’s touch.  A back party room festooned with bare branches and stuffed pheasants backlight with a blue teal light is kitchy and festive.  The high/low theme is carried throughout the restaurant, I love this place!………..hee haw Tillman’s, I’ll be back for some frito pie!

The west coast burger chain IN-N-OUT has just arrived in Dallas and there happens to be one close to my nephew’s apartment minutes from the SMU campus.  Luckily the line was in a lull and we jumped right in to order.  IN-N-OUT is so cheap it’s hard to believe they use all natural ingredients.   A west coast privately owned chain since 1948, IN-N-OUT boasts no microwave, freezer or heat lamps.  Burgers are made to order and real ice cream opposed to soft serve is used in the shakes.  The burgers were the perfect small size with a thin patty, generous tomato, onion and lettuce with thousand island dressing. The fries were cooked at very high temperatures, very crisp and we all agreed a bit bland.  The décor harks back to early McDonalds, spare white, red and yellow with a 50’s classic speedy arrow logo.  As far as fast food burgers go Danny Meyer’s Shake Shack still gets my vote for its excellent ground beef brisket mixture, potato buns and creative soda fountain treats.  But IN-N-OUT is not re-inventing the formula, it is going for simple efficient, fresh food and I’ll definitely come back for a burger and shake……..

Last stop before catching my plane was the original Sonny Bryan’s BBQ in south Dallas.  A museum of BBQ and a step back to the days of the real “pop up” restaurant.   Almost twenty years ago we brought my newborn nephew here and ate bbq on the tree stumps outside.  The stumps are gone but the interior looks the same and my “baby” nephew is sitting next to me having a local brew and brisket sandwich as his father tells stories of how his father met him here during his lunch when he worked down the street at Mobile Oil.  In spite of the drought and the heat wave our appetites survived.  So long pardners….see you next trip!

Cheers!  Carlita

Chuck Yuen, friend, extraordinary painter and host to the stars, threw an impromptu Independence Day grill party.  Something about men and grills……sourcing inspiration from Mark Bittman’s 101 list and a CSA share, Chuck seemed to grill anything that wasn’t bolted down in his groovy Brooklyn pad.  He has the coveted artist space, two floors, balcony and patio complete with a turtle pond to house his 15 year old tortoise friends.   A Hawaii native, Chuck held court in the grill pit with a picnic table of mise en place and sauces.  On the menu, grilled beets with feta, grilled tomatoes with mozzarella, oregano and olive oil, grilled eggplant with Thai peanut sauce, teriyaki chicken, shrimp, brussel sprouts and grilled peaches and plums with yogurt and honey. Oh, and I forgot to mention the corn grilled in the husk served with coconut milk and cilantro dressing and kolorabi with dry spice rub and zucchini grilled with a yogurt lemon dill sauce, tandoori style.

We washed it all down with a variety of beer, rose and white wine.  The bold fruit and spicy notes of the Tavel rose worked especially well.  Who needs fireworks when you have a prolific, jovial, weber wizard!

………………a most enjoyable 4th!

Carlita’s Best of 2010

Boxing Day Piedmont party, bagna cauda with cardoons, beef in Barolo, polenta, escarole and blood orange salad with air dried olives and fennel,  97 Barbaresco and Barolos, massive storm, very interesting people……..

Suzan Frecon at David Zwirner, elegant pared down paintings in red ochres and blues, the surfaces exist in time as they absorb and reflect the natural lighting in the gallery.

Tortilla soup at Ferrings in Dallas, TX.

Mark Olivier of Domaine de la Pepiere red cuvee from Muscadet, naturally made hand harvested wine from the cult Muscadet producer.  He makes a small amount of red wine and the cuvee percentages change slightly year to year with cabernet franc, cot, merlot and cab sauvignon.  I stock up on this as my every day wine, light, fresh with pristine fruit.

German Potato salad and boudin blanc from Schaller and Weber

Rouge Creamery Oregon Smokey Blue, an artisanal cheese producer from Oregon makes a roquefort like blue which is smoked over hazelnut shells.  Pefect with a chenin blanc or reisling.

Cooking my way through River Café Cookbook paying tribute to cooking guru Rose Gray. The pork loin braised in balsamic is inspired and simple, a great dinner party dish.

eggs from Meg’s chickens

Cookbook of the year: Italian Farmer’s Table, Mathew Scialaabba and Melissa Pellegrino, a culinary couple’s travels through the agritourismo’s in northern Italy.  I love the creativity and invention that happens with Italian farmhouse cooking, it doesn’t get any more local than this!  Look for the sequel focusing on southern Italy coming out soon.

Food court at the Brooklyn Flea…

Dylan’s Witmark Demo’s 1962-1964…….

Carlita:

Tomatoes are the crown jewels of the late summer garden and usher in the changing seasons as they turn from bright red juicy soft bombs to mealy light pink solid orbs.  A sad moment it is when fresh tomato season comes to an abrupt halt and it will be another 11 months till the next “real” BLT.  I won’t deny that I am completely envious of Meg and her country/garden life.  No huge crops to deal with here in the city, but I do preserve a few things from the farmer’s market as the days grow shorter.

My Grandmother grew many varieties of tomatoes in her garden.  We didn’t call them “heirloom” at that time, but they came in many different shades of red, yellow and green.  Grandma would simply slice them and eat them with a sprinkling of sugar.  I still think Mid-western tomatoes are the best.  One of the few perks to come out of 100 degree temperatures and high humidity.  Italian tomatoes are a different breed altogether.  In northern and central Italy the tomatoes are usually green, tart and used in salads and the riper red ones used for cooking.  The Mediterranean climate and the mountains in most regions of Italy never quite get the heat needed for big red juicy varieties.  The small plum tomato from San Marzano is the exception and has become a great export for southern Italy.  Canned tomatoes have become an essential part of the post new world Italian pantry.  I have a few favorite brands but nothing compares to making your own sauce with fresh ripe tomatoes.

While tomatoes are at their peak I buy up a bunch of the broken, overripe ones on sale and make sauce.  I drop them in boiling water and skin and seed them.  At this point I sauté a crushed garlic clove in a couple tablespoons of olive oil, just enough to flavor the oil, remove it and add the tomatoes and a few leaves of basil and sea salt.  I cook them down for 2-3 hours, stirring from time to time until they are the consistency of a thick tomato sauce.  At this point you can always add a teaspoon of sugar if needed to coax the sweetness out of the tomatoes.   After the tomatoes cool down I puree them in the food processor.  I then pour the sauce into ice cube trays, freeze it and store the cubes in zip lock plastic bags in the freezer.

The following is my recipe for Amatriaciana where I use my “cubes” of sauce.  This is my “go to” recipe in the colder months when my cupboards are minimal and I have my cubes of tomato sauce and pancetta in the freezer.   I never get tired of this pasta paired with an arugula salad or broccoli rabe.  This is my version of Bucatini All’Amatriciana, the Roman specialty

Carlita’s Bucatini All’Amatriciana

2 servings

pasta for 2 – bucatini or spaghetti, also whole wheat pasta can work with this recipe

4 slices pancetta, cut into ½ inch cubes

1 small onion  cut into ½ inch cubes

1 clove garlic- thin sliced

4 cubes of tomato sauce

1 tea. finely chopped rosemary or sage

pinch red pepper flakes

sea salt

olive oil

Saute the onions in 2 T. olive oil on medium heat until soft but not brown.  Add the pancetta, garlic and rosemary.  When all the fat is rendered from the pancetta add 4 cubes of the tomato sauce.  Salt to taste.  Cook pasta in salted water in large pot, drain, toss with sauce.  This sauce should be silky and just coat the pasta.  Serve with grated pecorino cheese and a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil.

Gastonomeg:

2010 has been the Year of the Tomato. Our usual cool and somewhat wet Vermont summers are, frankly, a bit of a bust for tomatoes. Here, one plants tomatoes with great hope, and often ends up with shelves full of newspaper-wrapped green fruit at the end of the season.

Not so this year. A hot and dry summer certainly had its challenges, but growing tomatoes was not among them! There is a veritable glut of tomatoes going on; no one can really believe HOW MANY TOMATOES there are.

Here is where I have to come right out and say that whatever anyone tries to tell you, tomatoes are just an awful lot of work to put up. You’ve got to peel, seed, and chop them no matter what method you choose, then cook them down to various degrees and only then do you get to canning.

The typical ‘simple’ cut-up-tomato hot pack turns out to be my nemesis. I like the results (oh, how I like the results for winter stews!) but the project itself makes me crazy. No matter how hard I try, I get either too much juice or too many tomatoes in almost every jar. It is the rare jar that comes out perfect, and for that much work, I want them all to be perfect!  And the endless boil for quarts (45 minutes is the current recommendation) is always enough to drive me to drink at the end of a long canning session.

So I avoid the cut-up tomato hot pack as best I can. One way around it, if you have plenty of freezer space, is simply to peel, seed, and quarter tomatoes then freeze them packed tightly into quart bags. Thawed, they are just fine for sauces, and I save all the juice I can from the seeds and freeze it separately to add to soups. If you don’t have so much freezer space (and I don’t, alas! The freezer is packed solid already; we’re going to have to buy a chest freezer if we want to buy in any meat at all this fall), you can add some basil and garlic and cook the tomatoes down into sauce before freezing.  They get much smaller that way! Or, you can just can the sauce in pint and half-pint jars. Canning a finished product is always more simple to my mind, and because of the long cooking, you only have to boil your jars for 15 or 20 minutes (instead of 40 for the hot pack quarts).  And another bonus, in our house, is that our little 1-year-old gastronome just loves her some fresh tomato sauce on pasta. It’s her hands-down favorite dinner. So I get a happy baby into the bargain. Can’t argue with that!

This year there have been so many tomatoes that I have a bit of everything – a few bags stuffed into the freezer, lots of quarts and pints of my imperfectly packed cut-up tomatoes (sigh), and lots and lots of little jars of sauce.  And as sick as I am of dealing with tomato guts (oh, I am sick of tomato guts!), it will be a wonderful winter of eating. Here’s to one or two more canning sessions before it’s all over!

It has been a hot and sticky summer in the big apple, one of the hottest on record.   My beverage of choice this summer is beer.  In fact, anything light and refreshing, pilsners, wheaten ales with the occasional campari and soda.  New food discovery, hagen-daz tart frozen yogurt with Boylans root beer makes an awesome root-beer float.   Yes, this summer is all about simplicity.

June rolled in with two weddings to celebrate.  The first in Texas, my niece/goddaughter tied the knot with a handsome fellow nurse from Seattle.  A big, opulent brisket, tex-mex, margarita, Texas style shin-dig.  We feasted and danced the night away to the sun setting on a 100 degree day.  Of course she was beyond stunning in her lacy strapless gown, tan and golden.

Wedding number two my friend Rebecca who is an artist/teacher at a private school in Boston.  She married the math teacher and the ceremony took place at the high school where they work.  She is an art and craft maniac and made everything from the flowers, table cloths to the groom’s bow-tie.  You can read about the process on her amazing blog…….

I just returned from Gastronmeg’s Vermont homestead.  She has a big garden and over a dozen chickens roaming in a moveable pen in their yard.  We cooked some simple delicious meals with the multitudes of produce from her garden.   Summer in Vermont defines the word “green” in every way.  Charlotte isgrowing and scouching everywhere, next time I see her I’m sure she’ll bebipedal.  Lucky for me the eggs made it home on the bus in one piece.

Stay tuned for some recipes………………………

The rest of the 2010 calendar is available for purchase or to download on our website http://www.vinartculture.com.  This year’s calendar is a smaller more compact version of the 2009 calendar featuring abstract images relating to the seasons.  In addition the wine of the month is featured on our website with Billy Vivos, Gastronomeg and various other wine writers and nerds.

The graphics are by Peter Ferko and the printing by Antoon Taghon of Uptown Fine Arts Printing Studio.  

Carlita

This has been the winter of snow, blankets, gently falling over the New York cityscape.   We are into snow day number two after a series of storms.  Cabin fever is really cabin bliss in my apartment as I have managed to get my spring house cleaning done early along with lots of yummy cooking experiments.

On this rather bleak winter night, February’s wine of the month from the 2010 vinartculture calendar, brachetto, is a perfect excuse for a dinner party.  Brachetto is a red grape from southern Piedmont, usually made into frizzante slightly sweet rose wine and more rarely into dry still reds.   Tom and Andy, friends from the neighborhood joined in the festivities and we started the night with a slightly effervescent semi-dry rose, Bigaro by Elio Perrone.  A mixture of muscato di asti and brachetto with a low alcohol level of 5% and a nose of strawberries, cream and a jolly rancher candied finish.   The bigaro worked well with the sardine spread appetizer and would also complement many cured meats and sausage.

The main course came from my latest cookbook muse, The Italian Farmer’s Table, by Matthew Scialabba and Melissa Pellegrino.  The couple, two culinary grads from New England spent four months traveling through Northern Italy visiting agriturismos and gathering recipes and stories for the book.  Some of the most creative, simple and fresh meals I’ve had have been at agriturismos in various regions of Italy.   The Agriturismo is basically a working farm with food and lodging, subsidized by the Italian government.  The meals are centered around fresh, seasonal produce from the farm and usually served with the wine grown on the estate and cooked with lots of love.

In addition to the book, the authors also have a blog using local produce from New England farms with accompanying recipes.

For dinner I made their four cheese mac and cheese recipe which uses ricotta, fontina, pecorino and goat cheese along with tomatoes.  It was an excellent lighter version of mac and cheese, if there is such a thing.  I also made braised laconato kale and finished with an arugula and radish salad.  With dinner we opened a bottle of dry brachetto, Sottimano, Mate 2008.  Sottimano in Piedmont is one of the few estates making dry, still, brachetto and is practicing organic.  Medium bodied and ruby colored with an earthy nose opening up to cranberry and rhubarb fruit on the palate.   It has good acidity and tannin with a medium finish and started to open up as we were digging into the mac and cheese.   This is definitely a wine that is better paired with food and would also be excellent with most fish and seafood dishes.  I thought it would be better with a little chill but it really opened up as it warmed to room temperature.  For dessert my friend Tom brought a honey cake from our local Russian grocery store.  We consumed it along with the leftover Bigaro just as the snow started to fall once again.

(Gastronomeg)

It’s the first winter I’ve spent back in Vermont for 15 years now… but a couple of nights of howling wind brought it all right back: it gets COLD here! Fortunately, our enormous Vermont Castings ‘Defiant’ wood stove heats the whole house, except around the edges on the windiest nights.  New Years’ Eve was setting up to be one of those nights (after a day of snowfall), and we were glad we had no plans except to sit by the fire and listen to the silence on the baby monitor.

Dinner wasn’t going to be anything fabulous until about mid-day, when our neighbor Dan stopped in. Dan is an experienced and accomplished hunter. He loves the time in the woods alone, and he and his wife enjoy eating the fruits of his fall hobby all winter and spring. This year he’d been lucky enough to bag both a buck, during rifle season, and then a doe, during the muzzle-loader season.

Jason has expressed an interest in going out hunting next year (meat doesn’t get any more local than that, after all) but he’d never eaten what city slickers refer to as ‘venison’ (around here we just call it deer). So Dan brought us some really choice cuts as an introduction. There were two packages: medallions of tenderloin as well as some nice thinly sliced steaks (this was definitely the best return on a plate of Christmas cookies I’ve ever gotten!).  We opted for the medallions for our New Year’s Eve feast.

This cut is incredibly simple to prepare – just pan-sear the meat on both sides, then take it out and start braising some onions in the pan. De-glaze with some red wine, pop the meat back on top for a minute to finish cooking, and it’s done.  Wild deer meat can take some cooking – I like it medium (warm through but still pink in the center). For side dishes, we had  on hand some of the inevitable local winter fare – gilfeather turnips (which I wrote about here) and potatoes. I decided to roast the turnips with herbes de provence to bring out their sweetness, and we’d throw some extra butter in the potatoes to ramp up the richness a tad.

Meanwhile, Carla had just called to suggest Aglianico as the wine of the month for January, and I happened to have two bottles of Ocone’s Taburno Aglianico in the cellar.  The wine pairing was a cinch as well. This was a wine that could handle the deep richness of the meat (wild venison has an almost liver-like quality) and balance the earthy sweetness of the roasted turnips to boot. I love the Ocone for its balance of power and lightness – it is dark and focused, but still has a vibrant acidity and enough restraint that it would marry with, rather than fight the flavors on the table. I can’t think of a better wine pairing for Jason’s first taste of deer than a nice old-school Aglianico like this….

This was one of those meals that just came together with what was on hand (or brought by a generous neighbor). All in all, it was the perfect New Year’s Eve at home!