Last night, we had a hankering for fish tacos.  I remembered seeing an incredible looking fish taco recipe on BrokeAss Gourmet and decided to give it a go!

Gabi’s creation called for the following ingredients:

• 1/2 lb red snapper fillets (2-3 small fillets)
• 1/2 cup i.p.a. beer (I like Big Daddy or Lagunitas)
• 2/3 cup flour plus more for dusting fish
• salt
• vegetable oil for frying
• 1 avocado, diced
• 1/2 red onion, diced
• juice of 1/2 lime
• 1 mango, diced
• 2 Roma tomatoes, diced
• 1 small bunch cilantro, chopped
• 1/2 jalapeño, seeded and diced finely
• 6 corn tortillas
• 2 tbsp crumbled cotija cheese

Unfortunately I didn’t have some of the key ingredients, so I decided to use her original recipe as inspiration and create a fish taco recipe of my own.

I substituted the red snapper in this case with a 1-1/2lb slab of fresh Atlantic Salmon (price: $11.10).  I also couldn’t find cotija cheese, so I substituted with crumbled Greek feta cheese (price: $2.49/ 4-oz container) and crumbled Gorgonzola cheese (price: $2.49/ 4-oz container).

Next, rather than battering the fish and frying it up as Gabi’s recipe called for, I instead opted for a different method of cooking the salmon.  I first heated up about 2 TBS. of olive oil in a large pan.  I then placed the slab of salmon into the pan and seasoned it with Chef Paul Prudhomme’s Magic Salmon Seasoning, which I already had in my spice cabinet.  You can use a simple combination of salt and pepper and fresh lemon as an alternative to the seasoning mix.  I seared the seasoned portion of salmon (skin side down) for about 3-4 minutes on the stove top.  I then moved the pan into a pre-heated oven and cooked it for about 10-11 minutes at 380°F.

The result is a perfectly moist salmon fillet ready for a taco party!

While the salmon is cooking in the oven, cut up your avocado, mango, onion, lime, jalapeño, cilantro, tomato and a pinch of salt ( *I added a hefty squeeze of fresh lemon and lime juice to mine).  Combine in a large bowl and toss together.

Time to EAT

To assemble the tacos:  top each softshell tortilla with a few pieces of seared salmon, a couple of large spoonfuls of the homemade salsa, and a sprinkle of either of the crumbled cheeses over top.

Perfect Wine Pairing 

Oregon Pinot Gris.  They’re usually very clean, crisp, and possess racy citrus qualities that pair perfectly with these (salmon) fish tacos – and Oregon definitely knows a thing or two about Salmon.  Consider trying King Estate Pinot Gris or Willamette Valley Vineyards Pinot Gris.

If you’re looking for a terrific and easy summer meal to feed 4 hungry adults, this one is sure to be a big hit with everyone!

Bon Appétit!

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Luckily, I did not give up on this tasty dish even after having less than stellar results using their instructions.  I think that I may have struck gold, though, by using a combination of both suggested methods with my own little spin on them!

First, poke a few holes in the plastic and cook it in the microwave for about six minutes.  This will thaw it out a bit and get it ready for oven cooking.

I have 2 different recommendations for completion:

1.  Pan sear it a bit on the stovetop and then finish it off by placing it in a 385 degree oven for about 12 minutes.

 -OR-

2.  After taking it out of the microwave, cook it up on a medium/high heat stovetop for about 2 minutes on each side.

Either way works perfectly and yields the warm, white, flaky decadence that’s pictured on the packaging label.  Just remember, with either option, to coat your pan with plenty of olive oil to keep the fish from becoming permanently affixed to it forever!

Finally, to give this dish the Love TKO, serve this up on a dinner plate over an arugula salad.  While you’re at Trader Joe’s pick up a bag of baby arugula.  In a mixing bowl – Add olive oil, lemon juice, salt –n- pepper, and the arugula.  Mix together.

On a dinner plate, place a portion of the “arugula salad” down first.  Then top it with the Tilapia Citronette.  Pair it with an Argentinean Torrontes like the 2009 Alamos Torrontes and you’ve got a party!  If you want a little something extra, you can also add your choice of steamed vegetables.

Salud!

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By: P. Collins

If you’ve ever uttered anything like - “I can’t cook”, “Cooking takes so long”, “Cooking is so hard”, then I’ve got an easy recipe for you to try at home.  This meal idea takes less than 15 minutes to prepare – tastes GREAT and is healthy too!  That’s right – Less than 15 minutes from start to your plate… tastes great …and…and…and – it’s good for you! 

Yep, this “you can have it all meal” from Health.com is called Garlic Ginger Shrimp, and it left everyone begging for more.

Here are the ingredients that you’ll need:

• 2 tablespoons vegetable oil (use olive oil, bit better for you)
• 2 tablespoons grated or minced peeled fresh ginger  (the dry stuff is fine, find it in the spice aisle)
• 3 garlic cloves, minced (buy the already chopped stuff in the produce area)
• 1 pound medium shrimp, thawed, peeled, and deveined (buy a bag of frozen, COOKED shrimp) 
• 1/4 cup rice wine or dry white wine
• 1/2 cup chopped scallions
• 2 cups hot cooked brown rice (use Success boil in bag brown rice – throw in the microwave, takes 10 minutes)

Okay, pay close attention now, this is where it gets really tricky… – first, throw the first 6 ingredients listed above into a warm/heated pan and cook them up.  Next, cook rice in microwave.  Third, put a cup of cooked rice onto a plate.  Lastly, spoon shrimp mixture over top of cooked rice and Eat.

“Teachable moments”

1) Start the cooking when you are ready to eat – if having salad or something, eat that first then do the cooking – this meal is best served up as soon as its done, reheating or keeping it warm isn’t so great. 

2) Notice that ingredient #5 is rice wine…not rice wine vinegar which I somehow got in my head.  My version turned out great, but I lost sleep imagining just how AWESOME it could have been had I read that ingredient right.

3) Recipe calls for medium shrimp (might be labeled as 41/50 in your store), but my shrimps were scrimps (i.e. – tiny runt shrimps) – so you might want to go for medium large (labeled as 36/40) or maybe even large (labeled as 31/35).

In summary, if you try to cook this recipe and can’t: A). you fall into the category “moronic human”; B). all eating privileges should be taken from you.

What’s a good wine pairing to go with this dish?   I paired it with a white blend from California’s Clayhouse Wines, called “Adobe White”.  This 2008 Central Coast White wine packs an interesting blend of 22% Viognier, 18% Sauvignon Blanc, 17% Grenache Blanc, 16% Roussanne, 6% Chardonnay and 5% Chenin Blanc – Shew, what a mouthful!  But, trust me – this perfectly allocated white wine will do right by this tasty shrimp dish.  For another take on this very different California white wine, here’s what the folks at Clayhouse have to say:

“The Adobe White is a blend created for that passionate, adventurous white wine lover inside you, elemental like the adobe but elegant with exotic floral and fruit aroma and flavors”.

There you have it, an easy, affordable and healthy supper with a rather usual California white wine to boot. 

Bon Appetite!

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Once a year I am compelled, by my desire to share good food and wine with friends, to prepare a four course lunch for 24 people, at a beautiful outdoor venue, out of a small kitchen.  These are friends I go camping with every year.  Putting on a great meal is one of the small ways I can contribute to the camping experience.  Knowing I must manage my time efficiently putting out so many courses, and wanting to enjoy the meal myself along with the guests, I look for recipes that don’t require an inordinate amount of labor, but which will make a stunning visual and taste impression, while making it look like I slaved in the kitchen for much longer than I really did.

Each of these luncheons has been made much more fun and interesting by my recruitment of a winemaker to attend with his wines, building a menu of dishes that pair well with those wines.

In 2007, for the first seated course after hors d’oeuvres, I prepared a chilled cucumber soup garnished with tuna tartare.  It was a big hit with the crowd, paired with a luscious Burgundian styled Chardonnay from the Russian River Valley made by Deerfield Ranch Winery.

The soup is easy, as most of the prep work is handled by a blender.  It can be made the day before and chilled in the refrigerator until serving time.  The tuna tartare just required a bunch of slicing and dicing about an hour before service. 

The color contrast in the soup plates was wonderful.  With two dishes in one, guests can use their spoons to sample each part separately, or in a combined spoonful.  I garnished with all of the optional ingredients listed at the end of the list, making a dazzling dish.  Also for my presentation, I used a cookie cutter to mold the tartare portion into a cylindrical shape centered in the soup bowl, adding the garnishes just after removing the mold and ladling the soup around the tuna tower.

The appetizer that day was shrimp and scallop ceviche, served in martini glasses, paired with a Sauvignon Blanc.  The main course was pheasant risotto, served with a Ladi’s Vineyard Syrah.  Dessert was lemon thyme pannacotta with thinly sliced, fresh macerated Sonoma County peaches, served with a botrytised Semillon-Sauvignon Blanc blend, ‘Gold.’  All the wines were from Deerfield Ranch of Sonoma County.

For some reason, I was invited back to cook lunch again in 2008 and 2009.

Cheers!
Scott 

_______________________________________________________________________________

The recipe for the Cucumber Soup with Seared Tuna Tartare can be found on the Food & Wine website.  Please note that Scott suggested the following optional items:

• Cilantro and mint leaves, fresh grated ginger, orange zest
• Toasted sesame seeds
• Mix equal parts Wasabi Tobiko Caviar and Extra Virgin Olive Oil, and drizzle over the tartare

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It all started about 15 years or so ago when I first used the phrase “Germans Are The Best” in a conversation with a friend of mine.  (Please note: I have no clue where this phrase came from, but I’m fairly certain that I heard it somewhere.)  You see, I’m German.  I mean – I was literally born in Germany.  Then there’s my very dear friend on the other hand, who is Irish.  She’s really an American though – since she was actually born in the United States and not Ireland.  Nonetheless, she’s convinced that she’s a true Irish gal.  If you live in the United States, then you’re probably well aware that folks of the Irish persuasion are a very proud bunch of people and want the whole world to know that they’re Irish.  My good friend is no exception to this “Irish rule”.  She embraces her family’s Irish heritage and celebrates it every day of the year – not just on St. Patrick’s Day. 

Being proud of my own heritage, I thought that it would be great to share with her all of the wonderful things about being German – such as “being the first people to do anything and everything first”.  Over the years, she and I have watched several programs together about historical inventions or things that mankind couldn’t live without, had it not been for the divine intervention of German ingenuity.  Upon being made aware of each of these history making factoids, I without fail turn to my proud Irish pal and mutter these familiar words to her every single time, “But of course, that’s because Germans are the best…”  A simple phrase that is derived from the idea that Germans have had a lot of “firsts” throughout history and that right about now friend, you should be thanking your Irish arse for those German pioneers that have made your life today so much frickin’ better.

One day, having heard enough of my “Germans are the best” rants, she called me out on one very important fact.  She asked me this simple question, “If Germans are the best and were the first people to do everything…then why don’t you drink any German wines??? – You “deutsch” bag!”   Ouch!  The truth sometimes hurts.  But, she made a valid point that made me think long and hard about the silly little expression that I often rammed down her throat like a plate of leftover sauerkraut and bratwurst in the middle of October.  Up until that very moment, I rarely drank German wines.  I conceded to her point, but I also told her that I would be up for a little wine challenge to set the record straight.  We both agreed that the only way that this German craziness would be put to rest, would be through a series of taste challenges that would pit Germany’s finest liquid gold against “The Rest Of The World”.  In this winner takes all wine challenge, it would prove or disprove once and for all whether or not “Germans are the Best!” – or at least in this case, at winemaking than the rest of the world.  We thought that we’d raise the stakes and only use the mighty Riesling grape in our taste challenge in order to give “the Germans” a fighting chance at winning.  Plus, the bonus in all of this craziness is that we both love – I mean really love the mouthfuls of gold known as Riesling.  Furthermore, Germany is the ancestral homeland of Riesling – just sayin’…  Historically, the Mosel, Rheingau and Rheinhessen have been recognized as the largest and premiere growing regions in Germany, while Pfalz and Nahe make up a smaller share of Germany’s overall production of Riesling.

Here were the rules that we established for our little taste off in a nutshell:

1.                  We would plan out several dinner parties maybe 10, 20, 30…to who knows how many.  At each one of these dinner parties, we would take one German made Riesling and put it up against another Riesling made from somewhere else on the planet besides Germany and let the guests attending the party pick their favorite based only on taste.

2.                  Next, so that we could keep track of who was winning and who was losing in these taste challenges, we knew that it would be imperative to keep score.  We decided on simplicity:

3.                  At some point in all of this madness, we would call, “Game Over!” and count up the score.

4.                  If in the end, the Germans had an overall higher score then “The Rest of the World”, it would earn me bragging rights forever.  But if the Germans lost, then my Irish friend would have the opportunity to hold this shameful defeat over my big fat bratwurst filled head for as long as we both shall live.  In other words, she would have an all-inclusive pass to make like Michael Flatley and give my German groin a River Dance that it wished it never had.

Like they say at the start of the Olympic Games – “LET THE GAMES BEGIN”!

They began…fast forward 10 years later mind you.

Believe it or not, it took us like 10 years to finally make this first ever Germans VS. “The Rest of the World” one for the history books.

So without further adieu, let’s get this party started and first meet the judges that will be scoring this first ever challenge.

Judge 1: 

This is my sister-in-law.  While at a bar one evening, a gentleman tried picking her up with the line, “Hey baby – Did anyone ever tell you that you look just like Khloe ‘I’m in Miami trick’ Kardashian?”  She also goes by the nickname “Hottie”.  Khloe, I mean my sister-in-law, has confessed her love for white wine time and time again.  But, the red stuff is still one big mystery to her.

Judge 2:

This is my brother.  My bro is definitely proud of his “motherland”.  He’s even got some fine body paint to prove it.  My big brother answers to several names like “Gunther”, “Sausage Man”, “Butcher Boy”, “Kaiser” or just plain old Larry.  The liquid beverage that speaks to him, even in his sleep, is Wawa’s diet lemon-flavored iced tea.  To sum it up, he doesn’t give two squats about wine, but throw a plate of grilled brats in front of him, and he’ll drink just about anything.

Judge 3:

That’s a picture of me – Mr.WineLife365.  I also keep several other aliases such as “Das Fish”, “Stephan”, “Marky” and “Pie Face”.  My oldest son believes that I’m secretly the 80’s pop music star Falco after he watched the video “Der Kommissar”.  I vow to do my very best to be impartial throughout this entire competition, even though deep down inside, I know that the German Rieslings will be better.

Judge 4:

This is Mrs.WineLife365.  She’s been told on more than one occasion that she looks like Bridgette Wilson, who is best known for playing the role of the hot school teacher in the Adam Sandler movie Billy Madison.  These days in her circle of comrades she’s affectionately referred to as a “Cougar”, in spite of recently being linked to Chef George Perrier.  Her tastes for wine are just as varied:  She loves both red and white wines equally, and is definitely on board the Riesling Rules fan club.

Before beginning the wine challenge, we all thought that it might be a good idea to warm up our palates with a good old German inspired cocktail called a “German Bight”.

Follow this link to find out how to make a German Bight Cocktail.

We were all wondering the same thing about this strange concoction – “What the hell am I about to drink”!  As it turned out, a German Bight cocktail is actually pretty damn good.  Try one for yourself.

After knocking back a few German Bights, our palates were definitely cleansed and we were ready to turn our attention to both the grill and the stove to prepare some German cuisine.

On the grill as you can see, we’ve got the brats cooking.

While on the side burner, big brother is preparing some delicious looking German-style potato pancakes that he injected with diced japenpeno peppers.  Click here for the recipe.

In the kitchen, “Khloe” and “Bridgette” were busy preparing a German Zwiebelkuchen (Onion Pie) along with Gurkensalat (Cucumber Salad).

Now that our German meal is cooking, it’s time to introduce to you the two Rieslings that will be competing head-to-head against one another.  Again, their sole purpose in this challenge is to receive a vote from one of the judges as being their favorite tasting wine – nothing more, nothing less.

As you can see in the picture, the German Riesling has a distinct height advantage over it’s US competitor from Oregon.  But would that 1 -1/4” difference in bottle height equate to it tasting better than the noticeably shorter American Riesling?  We’ll soon find out!

In this corner, is the German.  Our German competitor is a 2007 St. Urbans-Hof Riesling.  St. Urbans-Hof Winery is located in the village of Leiwen, Germany which is in the heart of Germany’s renowned Mosel Valley.  Many wine experts believe that the Mosel produces Germany’s finest wines and is portrayed as the country’s benchmark for outstanding Riesling.

In the other corner, is the challenger – 2007 Edgefield Winery White Riesling.  Prior to this taste challenge, I had personally never heard of this winery before.  I received this wine as a gift from my good friend Bruce during a recent trip that he took to Oregon.  Bruce loved this wine so much when he drank it in Oregon, that he was kind enough to bring one back to feed my ever growing Riesling addiction.  I would pretty much pour an awesome tasting Riesling over my honeycombs cereal and have it for breakfast.  Needless to say, I’m pretty excited about putting this lesser known Oregon produced Riesling up against what should prove to be a very good German, based on it’s pedigree.

Judges have you made your decision?

Judge #1 Khloe :

“This German is subtle, tasting orangey to me, man is this wine asleep.  It’s like drinking lemon water with a packet of sweet –n- low or Splenda in it”.

What did you think about the 2007 Edgefield?

“Much more powerful and intense than the German. It’s nice, syrupy-sweetness is talkin’ to me”.

So after tasting both Rieslings, “Are Germans The Best!?” 

“Not today Marky Mark.  My vote goes to the 2007 Edgefield White Riesling as my favorite of the two.”

Judge #2 Gunther, how did you score it? 

“The 2007 St. Urbans-Hoff Riesling is an Eye biter!  This wine has a tart bite to it.” 

Do these descriptors mean that you liked the German? 

“Yes, I do like this German Riesling.  It’s good”.

What did you think about the 2007 Edgefield Riesling? 

“I thought that this wine was much more mellow than the German one.  There’s no real bite to it”.

Do you have a favorite? 

“Yes.  I preferred the German in this case”.

Judge #3 Falco have you made up your mind yet?

“I’m not sure.  I kind of like both actually”.  “I like the fresh and clean sweet apple and pear taste of the German.  But, I too am drawn to the bigger, higher acidity and more notably heavier US made Riesling.”

“Would you just make up your freakin’ mind Das Fish!”, cried out Judge #4.  “I would like your answer before you put me to sleep”!

“I’m going to give my vote the German in this particular case.  It just seemed better suited with food than the heavier tasting Edgefield Riesling. But, the Edgefield is very good though…”

Judge #4 asked, “Is that your final answer, Judge #3?”

“Yes, I’ve made my decision and I’m sticking with it – I think…”

Judge #4 Bridgette:

“Ok then.  Here’s what I think about the German – “I don’t …(long pause) care for this Riesling.  It’s ok, but nothing to write home about”.

How about the 2007 Edgefield Riesling? 

“I like this Riesling much more than the German one. It’s bigger in flavors and I also liked that this Riesling had more acidity and sweetness to it than the German Riesling”.

So, are you saying that you reject this German? 

“That’s what I’m saying.  I reject this German and prefer to drink the 2007 Edgefield Riesling”. 

There you have it folks, what an amazing finish in our first ever Germans VS. “The Rest Of The World” challenge – The two German born guys give a nod to the German Riesling, while the American born woman preferred the taste of the American Riesling.

Go figure…It’s a tie!

Join us again next time, when I will again do my very best to prove without a shadow of a doubt that “German Are The Best!” when it comes to making Riesling better than anybody else!

Cheers and Auf Wiedersehen!

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