I’ve posted my one-dish menu for Burundian food here. It was an unsuccesful dinner, with a dish that was very unflavorful.
Anyone who wants to comment about it can do so here.
Author: marga (Page 73 of 111)
Two-bucks chuck chardonnay just won some award at some fair, and thus I wanted to try it. I read that sweet wine went well with spicy food, so I had it with the balti lamb tikka I made today for dinner. It was not a good combination. The lamb made the wine taste too sweet, an assault to my palate.
I tried it hours later and liked it more. It now tasted like semi-sweet white grape juice, with a sharp, bitter finish. It’s still a bit too sweet to sip much of, but it is a sipping wine. For $2, it’s very good.
Mike, however, didn’t like it.
That’s it! I can’t cook Indian food. No matter how much I try, I always seem to fail. It’s a pity because I love Indian food, specially the one served at restaurants in California. I could eat the food from Favorite India every day.
This time I made balti lamb tikka, lamb marinated on yogurt with chili powder, cumin, coriander, garam masala, garlic, cilantro and tomato paste. It was a failure. Edible, don’t get me wrong, but in no way good. The recipe came from the Best Ever Indian Cookbook, which my brother and sister in law got me for Xmas a couple of years ago. I don’t think I’d used it more than once before.
Perhaps it’s my choice of recipes, perhaps it’s my technique, perhaps I’m just doomed. But I think I will keep trying.
Tonight we had pork chops with a white wine-dijon sauce from the Les Halles Cookbook, which once again I borrowed from the library. It looked like a relatively simple recipe and it turned out to be delicious – though I had to make a couple of substitutions. I served it just with peas – the only veggie I had at home – and unfortunately one of the kids ate just peas, while the other one had only a couple of bites of plain pork. They don’t know what they are missing. The following is my version of the recipe (which doesn’t differ that much from the original). I used gherkins instead of cornichons as I couldn’t find the latter at the supermarket, and instead of a high quality concentrated chicken or veal stock, I used “better than bouillon” chicken base. I also omitted the single chopped sprig of parsley that the recipe asked for (to add with the cornichons) because I wasn’t going to buy a whole bunch of parsley to just use one sprig.
Cote de porc a la charcutiere
-1 tbsp oil
-1 tbsp unsalted butter
-4 rib chops of pork
-salt & pepper to taste
-1 small yellow onion, finely chopped
-1 tsp all purpose flour
-1/2 cup white wine
-1 cup chicken stock
-2 tsp Dijon mustard
-10 cornichons or 5 gherkins thinly sliced
Preheat oven to 375. Add a tablespoon of oil to a large, oven proof sauté pan and heat. Add the butter and melt. Add the pork and cook on high until golden brown, about 4 minutes. Turn and brown the other side. Remove the pan from the heat, and place it in the oven. Cook for about 8 minutes, until done.
Remove the chops from the pan, put in a platter and cover loosely with aluminum foil to keep warm. Make the sauce.
Return the pan to the heat and add the chopped onion. Sauté until golden. Add the flour and stir for one minute. Add the wine and deglace, scrapping all the brown bits at the bottom of the pan. Add the chicken stock, mix well and reduce the liquid by half.
Remove the pan from the heat and whisk in the mustard. Add the gherkins and any juice remaining from the pork chops. Mix well and serve the sauce over the pork chops.
I bought this wine because “Katz” is Mike’s name, not knowing absolutely anything about it, not even what kind it was. I wasn’t planning on drinking it tonight, but I realized at a late hour that the recipe I was making called for white wine, and I had this one already chilling. Alas, only later I found out that many Qualitatswein are late harvest wines, more fit to be served as dessert than with a meal. Indeed, my first thought when I started sipping it is that this would make a good dessert wine.
The bottle does not indicate what type of Qualitatswein but it’s not terribly sweet. Or rather, I thought it was very sweet when I opened it, but it mellowed out after dinner. It’s very floral, with strong fruit overtones – peaches and apricots – and a very smooth finish. It’s pretty good as an after dinner drink and I’d have it again.
Mike, OTOH, thought it almost tasted like a Chardonnay and he did not think it tasted like a dessert wine at all. Granted it was considerably less sweet that the majority of these. He thought it was easy drinking, and not that sweet.
I bought it at TJ’s, and I *think* I paid $7-8 for the bottle.
The Easy Bake Oven I bought Mika for Christmas has been recalled for the second time – this time permanently. Soon they will send me a box to send it back to them in exchange for some amount of credit on Hasbro products. Problem is, I have a bunch of mixes that came with the oven plus a couple of more they sent me when they sent the “fix” for the problem. They are really expensive – $7-$11! -, and I want to use them up. So, I suspect in the next couple of weeks I’ll be doing quite a bit of “easy baking” with the girls (don’t worry, I don’t let them anywhere near the oven by themselves).
Today we baked the yellow cake with chocolate frosting, pictured in the left. You can see below how the cake actually turned out. It didn’t rise very much (surprise, surprise), but the chocolate frosting was yummy and the two went well together. My little girls were happy with it. They decorated with a cat cookie and pretended it was a birthday cake.
We had that for dinner. Mike liked it, so did Camila. I thought the seasoning was too salty, but I’d buy it again. I served Mika plain mahi mahi, she has a problem with anything that’s in the least spicy (read “seasoned”). It was a struggle to get her to eat the fish – she had to really understand that that was all there was for dinner – but she finally did it and did not complain she didn’t like it.
I served the fish with steamed broccoli and it was wonderful to hear Camila repeating “I want more broccoli”. Mika used to like it too at that age, but she stopped liking it with age 🙁
If you are not convinced I’m not really into wine, you’ll probably be after looking at my poor wine “collection”. It’s not really a collection as such, just a bunch of wines meant to be drank. I figured I’d blog about them here, so that I can remember how much I paid for each one of them and where I got it, so I can know which ones deserve a special occasion. And for me a $20 wine is a special occasion wine.
Cheap TJ wines
2005 Les Caves Joseph Bordeaux (bought ’cause it’s similar to my last name)
2005 Black Mountain Malbec, Wastson’s Grove
2005 Zarafa Pinotage
2005 Gladiatore Frascati (liked the bottle)
Zonin Proseco Brut
Villar Carlotti Prosecco
Piper Sonoma Brut (got as gift, $11)
Better wines
2000 Atlas Peak Vineyards Sangiovese, Napa Valley
2002 Casola Lopez Malbec (my cousin Betiana Lopez gifted it to me in Argentina)
2004 DeLoach Sonoma County Zinfandel ($35 or so, bought at winery)
2003 BV Rutherford Cabernet Sauvignon (I think $20, Mike likes it)
2003 Chateau Souverain Dry Creek Valley (was 50% off at Safeway, $20 original)
2001 Yorkville Cellars Cabernet Sauvignon (bought at winery)
A syrah we bought at Roederer and that’s too high up in the closet for me to look at.
2001 Fife Meritage (was $15 at Safeway off $32)
1999 Roederer L’Ermitage Brut ($45 bought at winery)
Sweet wines
Westover Port (someone must have gifted it to us, doesn’t say which kind, must be around $20)
2005 V. Sattui Muscat (bought @ winery >$20)
2005 Navarro White Riesling ($29 small bottle)
Lustau Dry Amontillado Los Arcos Sherry
My friends Lotty, Regina and Vienna (and occasionally our friend Frank) and I get together monthly for tea. Sometimes we go out and sometimes we do it at our homes. As many places as we try, however, we always end up going back to Lovejoy’s.
There are many reasons for this. One of them is that Lovejoy’s is the most comfortable tea room we’ve found. It looks like your quirky grandmother’s living room, and the place invites you to stay and linger for a long time. Another is that the service is superb, a little bit contrived in that they are super-friendly, but your tea is topped and your requests are quickly fulfilled. But probably the main reason we keep going back to Lovejoy’s is that the food is superb. Their scones are always warm and fresh and just fluffy enough. Their chicken salad sandwiches are even better than mine. And their tea – I always get the English Breakfast – is quite good as well.
Today was not different than usual. We went at 3 and stayed until they closed (must have been around 6), talking and enjoying the food, the ambiance and each other. We’ll probably be back soon.
March 2010 Update
Once again, Vienna, Lotty and I went to Lovejoy’s for tea. Yummm. The tea (English breakfast) was excellent, and the large, warm scones with double Devon cream and strawberry preserves, are out of this world. Indeed, I ordered the cream tea so that I could get two scones 🙂
The tea services are pretty expensive, in particular after you compare them to The Golden Tea Garden in Hayward, my new tea hang out, but the atmosphere is so relaxing, and the scones so good, that it’s definitely worth going there as an occasional treat. Still, given the limitation of their menu, I think the Golden Tea Garden is a better choice for little girls (who love cake), so I probably wouldn’t bother taking Mika there.
Lovejoy’s Tea Room
1351 Church Street
San Francisco CA
P: 415.648.5895
http://www.lovejoystearoom.com/
Original Review
As you probably know, I love to cook international foods, and one of the places where I get recipes, in addition to invaluable information about how and what people eat is the Cultural Profile Project from Citizenship and Immigration Canada. The project provides a myriad of information about the cultures of each of very many countries. Included here is information about their food, what they eat, when and so forth. It’s definitely worth checking out if you are interested in what others eat – and those others, of course, can be your neighbors.
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