We had an old fashioned cookout for Independence Day this year.
Turkish Kebabı
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Sunday Dinner – 1 July 2018
This week we tried our hands at Turkish cuisine.
A co-worker of mine is from Adana, and when I asked her what her favorite dish is, she said “the real kebap like we have back home.”
I did some research and found this video. When I related the recipe to her, she said that it is actually for Beyti Kebap which is popular a bit further east. Adana Kebap, as she describes it, is just the bell pepper, S&P and olive oil with the minced meat. Here’s another vid (sound is in Turkish, but you can see the preparation).
I stuck with the recipe from the first video, as follows.
Food Processor:
1 Red Bell Pepper
2 Red Onions
3 Cloves Garlic
1 Handful Parsley
1 T Sumac
1 T Salt
1 t Paprika
2 T Olive Oil
Mix together with 2 LBS Ground Lamb, place on skewers and cook.
I was able to obtain the sumac online, along with a set of wide skewers from Stephen Raichlen’s collection. Unfortunately, the lamb was difficult to find in our town, so I opted for 85-15 ground beef, which turned out to be a mistake. There simply wasn’t enough fat in the mixture to get it to stick to the skewers. After much cursing and sulking, I formed it into sort of elongated patties and cooked it directly on the grill grates. If I were to ever prepare this again, I would either use lamb, higher-fat beef, perhaps a mixture of beef and pork, or I’d find some other way to remove moisture and increase fat in the mix.
We served the meat with tomatoes and mini peppers (that had been charred on the grill with olive oil and S&P), pita bread (to substitute for lavash), a green salad, yoğurt sosu (a Turkish yogurt sauce) and soğan salatası (a marinated onion salad consisting of 2 julienned white onions, 3 T Sumac, the juice of two lemons, salt, olive oil and fresh parsley). Claudia also made a Turkish rice pudding for dessert.
The wine was a 2016 Paso Robles Malbec from Sharon Weeks, which paired really well.
Everything was tasty, and it was especially interesting to learn the taste of sumac, which was brand new for all of us. By the time we ate, though, I was so tired and disappointed and disgusted with the skewer issues that it was hard for me to really enjoy the meal. I would like to try another run at it using lamb, but probably not any time soon.
Eggplant Parm for Sunday Dinner
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June 24th, 2018
We revisited one of our favorite dishes, Grilled Eggplant Parmigiana, this week. This is a family favorite that we enjoy several times a year. In fact, it’s our daughter’s favorite meal – the one she requests for her birthday.
We had lemons that needed to be used, so Claudia began early in the day baking a lemon cake from scratch, and making lemon curd. She’d gotten blueberries, blackberries and raspberries to go on top, and her mom did a beautiful job arranging them.
Aunt Pat was here early and took on the tedious task of prepping brussels sprouts. She separated each leaf for roasting on a sheet pan with olive oil, salt and pepper. A little grated Parm on top, and they made a crunchy addition to the antipasti. Claudia also prepared a cheese and charcuterie platter, some olives and marinated artichokes.
It took a little while to get the plancha cleaned up for the Weber Genesis, but once it was clean and hot, the eggplant slices only took about twenty minutes for each batch to cook.
Then the pans of the finished dish went back out for another twenty minutes until they were nice and bubbly. In the meantime, Claudia fixed another fresh, vibrant salad with her famous Wulff Family Dressing.
Claudia also boiled the pasta, something I would have forgotten altogether. The final element was garlic bread, again, baked on the plancha. We served a big bottle of Bolla Valpolicella with the meal. It’s one of our favorite table wines, especially with Italian fare, and we don’t really drink it often enough.
This is one of the heartiest dishes I’ve ever tasted. Leave out the coppa and prosciutto from the antipasto platter, and this meal would have been entirely meatless as well. This would be on my short list for last meal at the end of the road.
Casking at Home
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In July of 2012, I was visiting San Francisco for work. I had long wanted to meet a podcasting pal of mine, Tim Morrison (a.k.a. “Mr. Martini”) from Behind the Bar Show, and he was living there at the time. So we got together on a Wednesday evening at Heaven’s Dog (which, sadly, is now closed) for a couple of cocktails, and then walked back up to the Tenderloin (I was staying at hotel just north of Market) for one more. Tim took me into a joint with walls that were filled with small casks from floor to ceiling. He explained that because of the differences in surface area, a few months in a small barrel imparts the same aging characteristics to spirits as years in a large one.
As we sipped some dark rum that had been aged in a cask made from bourbon barrel staves, Tim explained that he casks Manhattans for his annual holiday gatherings. I was intrigued.
Mrs. Noe took note when I mentioned the conversation back home, and bought me a two liter uncharred oak cask for Fathers’ Day of 2015. By October, I decanted the first delicious batch of barrel aged Manhattans.
The staves eventually started to pull apart on that first cask, so I emptied it for the last time earlier this year. I’d intended to just keep it for decoration, and began to research bottle aging oak strips, but while at Amazon added a cask from Golden Oak Barrel to my wishlist on a whim. Lo and behold, it was one of my Fathers’ Day gifts this year.
After rinsing the new cask, adding the spigot and curing it with water, I added nearly two fifths of Old Overholt Rye, 400 ml of Sweet Vermouth, and 200 ml of Orange Curaçao. This final ingredient helps to transform the Manhattan into a very tasty variant called the Fourth Regiment. I wait until tapping to add Angostura Bitters, Orange Bitters and Celery Bitters to the cocktail.
Since the new cask has a medium char, I’m anxious to find out how this batch will taste. According to the Golden Oak website, this barrel ought to last decades instead of years. Fingers crossed on that count.
If you’re interested in learning more about home casking, the folks at Golden Oak have put together a wonderful guide, complete with some recipes, that you can download here. They also have an informative series of videos on their YouTube Channel. Cheers!
Fathers’ Day 2018
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Another Attempt at Chicken-Fried Steak
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- Grampy and His Girls
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- Plate o’ Texas
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- Plate o’ Texas
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- Plate o’ Texas
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- Millier Rosé
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- Cherry Pie
We had the pleasure of another Fathers’ Day with Grampy, and took the occasion to make another attempt at Chicken-Fried Steak.
As mentioned earlier, I became obsessed with this dish after a visit to Horseshoe Hill Cafe in Ft. Worth. This is the fourth time I’ve cooked it in the past couple months, and it was the best batch yet. I used bottom round steaks this time, which had the flavor and slight chewiness that you want. In addition to the beef, I breaded a batch of chicken breasts which turned out really good too. I managed to keep the peanut oil at 350°F in the cast iron Dutch Oven throughout the cook, and finally got a process in place to move from breading to frying to draining to holding in the oven as efficiently as possible. As always, the black pepper gravy was excellent.
Mrs. Noe made the mashed potatoes and steamed some broccoli with lemon butter, and she and Aunt Pat also pulled together a lovely green salad. I grilled some green onions with nice fat bulbs that I’d found at the Kankakee Farmers’ Market on Saturday. We also served some spicy pickled okra. Aunt Pat brought a delicious cherry pie and some soft serve from DQ for dessert.
One of the other little pleasures of the day was serving this meal on the plates that were used for Sunday Dinners at Claudia’s grandma’s. They’re a blue Currier & Ives pattern and, coincidentally, the same as the ones my mother had when I was growing up. So they hit the perfect nostalgic notes for both of us.
The ladies drank a nice California Rosé from F. Stephen Millier. I stuck with Shiners. My toast to Grampy for Fathers’ Day was “Here’s to us, and them like us. Damned few of us left.”
You can find the recipe for Grady Spears’ CFS at Texas Monthly. It calls for “round steak” but there are a lot of cuts that qualify. My best luck was with these bottom rounds, but some of that may have been more experience with prep and cooking. You could also use sirloin, eye of round or top round. Some will need more time with the mallet than others.