Tag: Bobolink Dairy

Portuguese pork, wax beans 09/26/10

We may have thought a bit more than usual in choosing an appropriate wine for this meal.  An Alentejo would have been appropriate, and probably super, but we didn’t have a Portuguese red in our rack.  We ended up opening this Crianza from Bierzo, an area of Spain just 50 miles north and east of its Iberian neighbor, although I think we chose it mostly because, having had it before, we knew it was very good.

Also, the pairing of the rich, peppery pork and the faintly-crunchy wax beans, which were rendered even sweeter by my serendipitous addition of the ground cherries and lovage I had on hand, was a match made in heaven, if not actually in either Portugal or Spain.

  • Roberto grissini, spicy red radishes from the Greenmarket
  • Portuguese-style cheese-stuffed pork tenderloin, here meaning a tenderloin purchased from Eataly and prepared according to a recipe in David Leite’s beautiful and scrumptious “The New Portuguese Table“, where the small loin is stuffed with grated Parmesan cheese, coated in a classic “Amped-up Red Pepper Paste” (with a few substitutions), left to marinate in the refrigerator for six hours, browned in duck fat ten minutes or so, and roasted in the oven for ten more, finished with a sauce made by deglazing the browning pan with white wine and some good beef stock (as well as a dollop of duck demi-glaze, left over from the same recent meal from which the duck fat was salvaged) the liquid then reduced, and finished with a generous garnish of chopped Titan parsley (Italian-type, but dark-green and more bushy-looking, with leaves slightly curled on the edges), from the Greenmarket’s adventurous Paffenroth Gardens; accompanied by par-boiled wax beans briefly reheated in oil and then tossed with halved ground cherries and shredded lovage leaves (the beans and “cherries” from Berried Treasures Farm, the lovage from another farmer, both stalls in the Greenmarket);  and slices of a very sturdy ciabatta, made with unbleached whole-grain wheat flower, bread from Bobolink Dairy, also in the Greenmarket (the bread is from their brand-new oven)
  • wine:  Spanish, Leon, Flavium Crianza Bierzo 2006, from from Phillipe Wine
  • (because we had neither Aguardente nor Bagaço, yet some kind of “digestivo” seemed like a very appropriate followup to this course) grappa, here a golden form (aged 12 months in French oak), Grappa Velia, from Mastroberardino, a surprising survivor from a trip we made to Naples too many years ago

of red food, and dinner, December 12, 2009

Japanese_sweet_potatoes_Lani

Is it just me, or are there for sure a lot of pink-to-red-to-purple foods around at this time of year?

Over the last several weeks I’ve recently seen, prepared and served at home, in addition to tuna, of course, the usual meat suspects (including the smoked or cured) and the red or purple berries and fruit now only a memory, red beets, red chard, red mustard and kale, the red stems of beet greens, radicchio, pink, red or purple radishes, red onions, purple tomatoes and red potatoes, red sweet potatoes [see the Japanese sweets above, from Lani’s Farm] red cabbage, purple cauliflower and purple broccoli, and even purple kohlrabi.   And then there was also the bounty of the season just past:  tomatoes (red and sometimes even purple) available much later this year than in others, purple lettuces, red or purple bell peppers, and both purple string beans and purple okra.

I only became consciously aware of the red thing going on after plating several meals this fall.  The color scheme of last night’s dinner was similar to many of them, although, as with most, I managed also to include at least some green.