Memorial Day Weekend 2016

Memorial Day is the day when Americans honor the fallen, and it’s also the unofficial beginning of Summer here. This year, as usual at our house, it was a weekend of cooking outside.

On Friday evening, we had some friends over and I cooked New York Strip steaks, baked potatoes and roasted asparagus on the Weber Genesis. For an appetizer, I baked a wheel of Brie with herbs and a wedge of Havarti with Blackberry Jam on a cedar plank.

Saturday we took a break from cooking and cleared out some of the delicious leftovers. Sunday morning, we drove down to Friends Creek Cemetery where my parents are buried, leaving some flowers. It was nice to see that the place is still well kept.

Sunday afternoon Claudia’s folks joined us for dinner. I used the rotisserie on the Weber Kettle for the first time this year to roast a chicken. It turned out tasty and perfect, with lots of hickory smoke flavor. The drip pan potatoes were a hit, as always, and I also grilled some roastin’ ears on the Genesis.

Monday, it was cowboy cooking. First, there was my wife’s favorite baked beans from her Aunt Nancy’s recipe. Wolfe Pit cole slaw and Hidden Valley potato wedges cooked on the plancha rounded out the side dishes. The more I cook on the plancha, the more I like it. It adds a crispy crust to everything from potatoes to burgers, and it helps to hold the heat steady on the Genesis which is great when you’re using it as an oven.

The star of the show was Grownup Sloppy Joes from Weber’s Big Book of Grilling by Jamie Purviance. This time, I seared then smoked the roast with Cherry and Hickory on the Kettle, and did the braising in a Lodge cast iron dutch oven over on the Genesis.

By the time everything was finished, I’d been on my feet all day and was pretty beat, but a nice glass of Petite Sirah from Lodi served as a fine restorative. The bold flavor was a perfect match to all the smoke and char of the barbecue. The folks joined us again and we had a lovely time. We’d been expecting my sons to join us as well, but they weren’t able to make it. I wish I could have emailed the smoky smell of the patio while the roast was on the Kettle.

The only dish from the entire weekend that needs work is the cole slaw. We eventually added some additional cider vinegar and sugar, because it ended up a little flat and salty tasting. I doubt that it’s the fault of the recipe. I cut it in half, and may have screwed up the proportions along the way.

It’s one of the joys of life to turn out a decent meal to share with people you love, and cooking outdoors is a feast for the senses from start to finish. I can’t think of any way I’d rather spend a long weekend.

Turkey Lohr

seven-oaks-cab-sauvWhen planning a wine pairing for Thanksgiving Dinner, I’ve always heard of the ABC rule: anything but Cabernet Sauvignon. This year, I’m breaking the rule.

The issue is that turkey is not thought to contain enough fat or flavor to balance against the tannins of the Cab Sauv. By smoking the turkey on the Weber kettle grill, we ought to have the flavor part of the equation covered. I also plan to make gravy from the drippings, which should add some richness at table.

The wine will be a 2010 Seven Oaks from J. Lohr, splash decanted to soften the tannins a bit, a trick I learned to tame Malbec that grips so hard it pulls your tonsils out.

We’ll report back later in the week.

2015 Kettle Rotisserie Inaugural

Yesterday for Sunday Dinner I cooked on the Weber Kettle rotisserie for the first time this year. I didn’t allow for the cooler ambient temperature, so I had to move the chicken and drip pan potatoes over to the Genesis gas grill for about ten minutes at the end to finish them, but everything turned out great.

We especially enjoyed the appetizer: some mini peppers stuffed with cream cheese, herbs de provence and shredded parm that I grilled for a few minutes on the Genesis, using a pepper rack.

We had a bottle of Charles Smith Columbia Valley Chardonnay with the peppers, and a Chilean Chardonnay with the meal. Claudia made crescent rolls and her famous Wulff Salad, and also served corn with the chicken and potatoes. It was cherry pie for dessert.

This rotisserie chicken with drip pan potatoes is one of our favorite meals. I was happy that even though I ran into difficulty because of the weather, I knew how to recover and turn out a decent plate.

En Vino Veritas

en-vino-veritas

Over the past few years I’ve been drinking more wine. Over the past few months, I’ve been learning to enjoy it. Here’s the story of my wine education.

I grew up in a home where alcoholic beverages were not a part of daily life. My mother and father may have drank when they were young, but by the time I came along they had joined a church that frowned on it, and it wasn’t kept around our house, except for a single bottle of whiskey to help with my father’s heart congestion from time to time. I can’t recall ever seeing him take a drink of it.

When I was a teenager, I remember my mother taking an occasional short glass of Mogen David mixed with 7-Up, and when we would get together with her siblings, some of them would have a beer or two – but opening a bottle of wine to go with a meal wasn’t something anyone in my family did.

One of my sisters kept a small rack of wine in her home. She was also a fairly serious “foodie” in the 1960s, decades before anybody used that word. Where my mother’s cooking (though delicious) was fairly typical Midwestern meat-and-potatoes fare, my sister would serve interesting dishes she learned about on ski trips, or on travels to other places that seemed exotic and distant to me. The first time I ever tasted ripe olives, it was in her kitchen.

I don’t remember her serving the wine, but the presence of that wine rack over in the corner seemed a mark of sophistication and worldliness.

In my twenties, I joined a wine club. For about $30 each month, they would send me two bottles of the same variety of wine from different wineries, along with a sheet of information about the wine and some recipes for dishes that were supposed to be good pairings. This was my first introduction to the idea that certain foods and certain wines went together, beyond the old saw of “white wine with fish, red wine with steak.”

Wine still didn’t become a habit with me. I considered it too expensive, but also felt that I didn’t know enough about it to truly appreciate it. It was too much bother. Much easier to grab a six pack of Budweiser to drink with the pizza or burgers that were staples of my diet at the time.

Thirty years later, as I gradually became a more serious cook, I became more curious about wine as well. My wife bought me a wine guide book as a gift, and I started learning, but still only opened a bottle once in a great while, with special meals or on special occasions.

When we moved into our home a few years ago, I discovered a wine cellar that had been built in the basement by the previous owners. It had little wooden plaques for each row of bottles, labeled “Burgundy” and “Bordeaux” and “Côtes du Rhône.” I still knew next to nothing about wine, so I removed the plaques. I didn’t want to feel intimidated in my own basement. But I did set about filling the cellar with wine.

I bought mixed cases from an online wine club to get a wider variety than I might choose in a shop. Picking a wine for Sunday Dinner each week (when my wife’s parents join us) became the foundation of my wine education. Through research on the Web combined with trial and error, I began to get a sense of which wines paired best with various dishes, and also started to note which wines we most enjoy. The process of trying to please others with a choice of wine pushed me to try ideas and suggestions that I wouldn’t as likely have picked for myself, and this has been significant. For instance, there are more white wines in the cellar now than there were in the past, and lo and behold, I like them.

My wine education continues, and I do spend (probably too much) time reading about it, watching video courses and such. That knowledge has certainly helped me to better appreciate and enjoy wine. Learning how to actually “taste” wine rather than just drink it, learning how to describe what I taste, learning how to compare one wine to another – all of these skills are useful. The more I learn, the more enjoyment and fun there is. The most important lesson, however, is that “good wine” is whatever tastes good to me and to the people with whom I share it. Although this should have been obvious all along, I wasted years thinking that people couldn’t truly enjoy wine unless they knew enough to pass some sort of wine exam. How silly.

From time to time, you may find more posts here about wines that we like, good pairings we find, links to cool wine resources and the like. I’d also love to hear what you’re drinking and to learn from you. Let’s take the compulsion and muddlement out of wine and simply enjoy it, shall we?

Cheers!