WineLife365

Posts Tagged ‘Guest Post’

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!

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 

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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

Do you have an interesting wine related experience or story that you would like to share?  If so, I‘d love to hear about it!

I’m looking for guest writers to share with other readers their own personal “WineLife“ experiences.  Your stories can be about anything from art to winemaking, or anything in between - just as long as it relates to wine.  So sharpen up your pencils and send me an email at mark@winelife365.com if you are interested in sharing your story.  I look forward to posting them.

One of the great things about wine and writing this blog is meeting other people with the same passion for wine that I have.  I met “Scott from Arizona” (pictured below) through a mutual acquaintance – Mr. Bruce Patch aka “The Wine Guerilla”.  Scott has shared with me several great wine reviews as well as some truly delicious looking recipes.  I asked him if he would be interested in being a guest writer and sharing some of his wonderful food and wine experiences, and he generously accepted.

Take it away Scott…

I work out of a home office.  On any given day, I make a handful of trips to the kitchen for a break and something to eat or drink.  While there, I usually check to see what’s going on the Food Network.  Recently I happened to catch Tyler Florence creating a main dish that looked elegant, yet simple and tasty, while destroying my childhood hatred of the dreaded ratatouille.

Ratatouille is a very traditional dish from Provence, with familiar variations from Croatia that add anchovies.  It is basically a sauté of mixed vegetables, featuring eggplant, zucchini and tomato, finished in the oven.  All my previous encounters have been presentations of soggy messes, with unpleasant use of overcooked eggplant dragging the whole experience down.

Tyler’s version aroused my interest, with some key modifications so that my teenage children might actually eat it.

I loved the idea that this could be a one dish meal, easy to prepare and finish, and not very expensive.  Hot and hearty, yet not too heavy, it offers flexibility for a lot of interesting wine pairings.  Suggestions would include Pinot Noir, lighter Burgundies, Cru Beaujolais, White Rhone styles, and, way out there, perhaps a rich Slovenian Sauvignon.

Ingredients

Extra-virgin olive oil (EVOO)

Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper

1 large zucchini, cut crosswise into thin (¼ inch or less) slices

1-3 anchovy fillets, to taste, smashed (this is optional, or use anchovy paste)

1 onion, sliced into elegant slivers from the top down; each piece a “new moon” curved sliver

2-3 garlic cloves, to taste, finely chopped

1-2 bulbs fennel, thinly sliced vertically, similar to the onions (remove tops and the hard center core first)

1 red bell pepper, cut into matchstick slices about 1 ½ long

A handful of cherry tomatoes, or one large, diced heirloom tomato

A Pinch red pepper flakes

Panko bread crumbs

1 side of salmon filet (a boned tail piece, skin on)

1 large bunch of fresh basil

1 stick unsalted butter, best if at room temperature

Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper

Directions

Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.

Begin by preparing the vegetable base for the fish. Heat 1/4 cup or less of olive oil in a large oven safe frying (or heavy rectangular roasting) pan over medium heat.  I use cast iron, the bigger the better, as it needs to be wide enough to hold as much of the salmon in one piece as possible.

Add the aromatics (onions, fennel and garlic), season with salt and pepper and cook for 5-10 minutes, stirring occasionally, until beginning to soften.  Add the zucchini and red peppers to the pan and cook in the same way until just tender.   Add the anchovies, if using them.  Then add the tomatoes, salt, pepper and red pepper flakes, and stir.  You are ready to add the fish and go to the oven. 

While the vegetables are being sautéed, prepare the fish.

The fish should come from the grocer cleaned and boned, and ready to go when you get home. Begin by vertically scoring the fish, skin side up so the cuts pierce the skin and reveal the flesh; each score should look like a fish gill.  To make the scores, lay the filet skin side up on the counter.  Pinch the side edges toward one another to bend the skin into a rolled appearance.  Make a crosswise cut with the knife blade angled 45 degrees about 1 inch into the flesh, through the skin.   Make these cuts at intervals of about 3 inches down the length of the filet. 

Prepare the basil compound butter by tearing the stems from the bunch of basil in one bulk maneuver.  Place the leaves and the stick of butter into a food processor and blend until you have a creamy textured green spread, seasoning with salt and pepper.

Using a spoon or small spatula, push a dollop of the basil butter into each of the score cuts on the fish.  Then, using the remaining basil butter, spread a ¼ inch or less coating, like cake frosting, over the entire skin of the fish.  Season with salt and pepper and then take the whole fish and transfer to the pan on top of the bed of vegetables.  If the filet is too long for the length or width of the pan, cut it to fit and place the cut pieces to one side of the main filet in the pan. 

Sprinkle the buttered fish with the bread crumb mixture.

Place in hot oven and roast for 15-20 minutes. Do not overcook, otherwise the fish will be dry.

To serve, portion the fish along the score marks, cutting down through the fish with a sturdy metal spatula, scooping the vegetables out with the piece of fish so that it can be laid on the plate with the fish on top of the vegetables.

Notes and Comments

Tyler’s presentation used the eggplant and some tomato paste, but I wanted to skip that.  I was also careful not to overcook the vegetables before the oven time, as the oven itself would do much of the softening.  Starting the vegetable sauté while preparing the fish kept the total preparation time short.

Cleanup is minimal, other than wiping the butcher block counter where the prep took place, and cleaning out the single roasting/frying pan, and the food processor. I only needed one knife.

My kids did not complain about the vegetables (I attribute that to the eggplant deletion), but two of them complained about eating skin-on salmon.  That is a concession I will resist, as the visuals from the skin are terrific, and help make the dish appear much more traditional, even if there is no salmon in Provencal or Croatian waters.

Other herbs could be added to the mix, and variations on the vegetable content would be interesting to explore.