A Summer Dinner with Friends

It's been a few weeks that we haven't seen Rob and Dyce as both our schedules have been a bit busy this summer. We (well, Ann and Dyce are the planners) decided to have dinner Saturday night and invited them over to our house. In part, we wanted to make a nice dinner to thank them for their hospitality during our recent trip to McMinnville and wine country. But we also wanted to drink a little wine and sit out in our courtyard and have a pleasant evening, the recent wildfire smoke having abated somewhat.

Dinner would be on me. Ann stated that she would make her summer pudding for dessert, which is a good thing, because I don't eat sweets, don't care about dessert, and wouldn't have even thought about making any.

I'm the breed of chef that needs to be hands-on with foodstuffs in order to pull together a menu. That is, seeing and touching food starts my mind cranking through the endless possibilities to arrive at a menu. Without that input, I really don't get anywhere. I find it hard to create a menu in a vacuum. My menus have always been a response to what is fresh, what is best, and what is seasonal: the menus at my restaurant changed every day of the 15-plus years that I owned it.

My menu was informed by two shopping trips : Wednesday to the local Bend Farmers Market and Friday to Costco, still, believe it or not, one of the best places to secure center-of-the-plate proteins in Bend. It's not like the restaurant where I had access to anything and everything you could imagine, but it is what we have to work with out here in the high desert.

Wednesday at the farmers market, I saw just one pint of Padrón peppers and into my bag they went. When Ann asked me why I bought them, I answered, "to have another weapon in my arsenal." I didn't buy them with a plan to use them in Saturday's dinner, rather to have them on hand for whatever use because I am not going to pass up an opportunity to buy and eat one of the world's most delicious peppers.

That happy accident behind us, we went to Costco on Friday, primarily to secure new eyeglasses for me, my first in 15 years and sorely needed at that, but also to look around for interesting proteins. For me, interesting does not mean expensive. It merely means something that looks really good and which piques my chef-interest. We added a tray of tremendous looking and highly marbled USDA Prime tri-tip slices and a container of tiny Oregon pink shrimp, for a quasi-surf-n-turf dinner menu.

We're not big beef eaters (I might eat steak once per year) but it seemed like the safest bet. Dyce isn't a big fan of oily or fishy fish (the kind that we really love) or lamb, both of which looked really good, so we opted for beef. My preference would have been a nice cut of pork, but there wasn't anything on offer other than some rather ordinary and very lean top loin.

By the way, I have never worked with tri-tip, which when I was growing up was called bottom sirloin. I believe the name tri-tip originated in California long after I grew up. In any case, at my restaurant, weekly, I shared a local 180-day corn-fed Angus steer with several other restaurants and my share consisted of short ribs and skirt steak. Somebody else got the sirloin. Moreover, in a very high-end restaurant, it is hard to get customers, who walk in the door salivating for tenderloin or strip steaks, both fairly uninteresting cuts from a chef's perspective, to order more prosaic cuts such as tri-tip. Fortunately, I could move my skirts and ribs on the nightly tasting menu.

Gorgeous Tri-Tip (Bottom Sirloin) Slices

Reflecting on the menu and remembering the padrones that I bought at the farmers market, my mind turned a bit towards Iberia when planning dinner. And in a back-and-forth with Ann about menu ideas, she mentioned that she might like some Israeli couscous. This reminded me that at the restaurant, we often made Israeli couscous in the style of paella and I was off to the races with a plan for dinner.

Tri-Tip Marinating in Pimentόn, Olive Oil, and Garlic

First thing on Saturday, I mixed up a marinade of smoked paprika (Pimentόn de la Vera), garlic, olive oil, salt, and pepper and slathered it on the tri-tip slices. Into the refrigerator they went to await their turn on the grill just before dinner.

After this, I turned my mind to the tiny pink shrimp that I planned to use for an appetizer. Again, I took my cue from Ann. As we were kicking ideas around and after I had rejected a bunch of more usual ideas, she asked, "Why not shrimp cakes?" I loved that idea for ease of preparation and ease of eating. I can make cakes of pretty near anything and I have during my restaurant career. But never shrimp, however.

While I drained the shrimp (already pre-cooked and shelled, if you have never worked with these tiny so-called bay shrimp that actually come from the ocean off the Oregon coast), I got busy chopping fines herbes: tarragon, dill, Italian parsley, and chives. I mixed the tiny drained shrimp with these herbs, a tiny amount salt (they are naturally fairly salty), white pepper, one egg (for two pounds of shrimp), and just enough mayo and panko to hold them together. Ann and I tasted the mix and I adjusted it by adding more parsley and dill. Into the fridge the mix went for several hours. This achieves two goals: it stiffens the mix as the panko starts to do its binding trick and the herb flavors bloom into the mix. 

After this, I made a quick lemon and chive aïoli using a single clove of garlic that I pounded to a paste with a touch of salt in my big green granite mortar. You have to be really careful with garlic paste in an aïoli because the garlic flavor will bloom in the sauce over time and can get really out of hand. One garlic clove is sufficient to make a cup of sauce. After mixing in finely minced chives and the zest of a lemon, I put the resulting aïoli in the fridge. All the flavors bloom (get stronger) and come together over the course of a couple hours.

An hour or so before Rob and Dyce were to arrive, I pattied out two-ounce cakes and pan-fried them. A trick with a really loose cake-mix like this is to lower the heat a touch and let the cakes really brown well. The crust will help them hold together.

Pink Shrimp Cakes

Shrimp Cakes in the Courtyard with Lemon-Chive Aïoli

Premier Cru Champagne with our Shrimp Cakes

After yakking and eating our fill of shrimp cakes (plus boiled peanuts that Rob and Dyce cooked and brought over) on the patio in the courtyard, it was time to grill some steaks in the gathering dusk. Grilling steaks, I'm an old hand at, having run the broiler station at the restaurant for years. Ordinarily, I grill steaks with two turns on each side to get beautiful crisscross grill marks, but these large, chunky steaks being square in profile, I cooked with one turn on each of the four sides, to a rosy medium rare by feel. Years of experience on the broiler means that I can pretty much tell temperatures of steaks just by looking at them.

Pimentón-Marinated Tri-Tip Grilled to Medium Rare

The steaks having been grilled and it getting dark outside, we moved our show into the kitchen. The steaks rested on the counter while I made the Israeli couscous and seared the peppers. Earlier in the day, I had prepped my sofrito just like I would have for paella: finely diced poblanos, red peppers, red onion, and green onion, along with minced garlic. These veg went into a pan with some saffron and pimentón to cook and then I added Israeli couscous and water (for paella, I spend a lot of time making a great stock). When the couscous was just tender but still had a bit of remaining bite, in a twist, I stirred in four ounces of softened goat cheese. This has a similar enriching effect to stirring butter and cheese (mantecare) into risotto.

Israeli Couscous Cooked à la Paella, Finished with Goat Cheese

Padrones Seared with Olive Oil and Salt

Plate Up: Couscous, Sliced Tri-Tip, Padrones, Pimentón Sauce Drizzle

Along with dinner, we opened a couple of bottles of Barbaresco, one of our favorite beef wines. Dinner was admittedly rich yet quite flavorful and so we wanted a wine that would help cut the richness (tannic or acidic) but not hide the myriad of flavors in the couscous (lighter bodied), so we chose a youngish Barbaresco. We just love the tannins and flavors along with the light body of the Nebbiolo grape.

So many sommeliers would have paired this with a bigger bolder wine such as a Cab, Cab-forward Bordeaux, or big Syrah such as Côte-Rôtie. To my palate, those big fruity wines hide all the nuance of the dish. What do I pair with Cabernet? I don't. To my palate, pairing Cab with food is akin to using a sledgehammer to nail in a tack.

And now we come to the highlight of our meal, Ann's summer pudding. None of us are dessert eaters, but she insisted. Her summer pudding starts with briefly cooking strawberries, blueberries, and raspberries in a scant amount of sugar. Then she lines a trifle mold with challah or brioche and then fills the mold with alternating layers of fruit and bread until the mold is filled. It sets in the refrigerator (blueberries in particular have a lot of natural pectin) and then is unmolded. She served it with a touch of cream whipped with dark rum.

Ann's Outstanding Summer Pudding

Ann served Dyce and Rob first and I asked her for a third of what she served them, not really wanting dessert and already very full from dinner. Not one to listen to me, she passed me an entire serving telling me to eat what I wanted and she would finish the rest. I took one bite and told her that she better make her own plate. It was so delicious that I ate the entire thing! We all did. This is one of those dishes that is so much more than the sum of its parts. Brava Annie!

All our Dessert Plates Looked Just Like This!

Monday Afternoon Tapas

It's not much of a secret that Ann and I hang out at Two Dogs Taphouse in downtown McMinnville on a fairly regular basis. We've become friendly with most of the staff there and recently, we found out that three of them are moving away to Bend in mid-September to see a different part of Oregon. We made plans to get together as a last hurrah and I decided to make some tapas that we could graze on. Hanging out with younger folks helps keep us young.

Ann asked me why I chose tapas and honestly, I don't know what got me going down that path except for perhaps the vast quantity of padrón peppers in the farmers market recently. I do know that tapas are the kind of party food that I prefer: finger food that doesn't require much in the way of silverware or tableware as well as being food that I can set out beforehand so I can socialize and not have to cook during the event.

White Bean-Stuffed Piquillos

Stuffing piquillos is always a no-brainer tapa. I blitzed up a bunch of cannellini with garlic and pimentón then spooned the mix into the peppers. I was feeling lazy; ordinarily, I'd put the bean paste in a pastry bag with no tip and squirt the peppers full. One less thing to clean up, I guess. Two other great stuffings that I have done: paella-style rice for one and mashed potatoes with home-salted cod for another.

Grilled Shrimp and Olive Skewers

The flavor of olives and shrimp when grilled together is one of those one-plus-one-equals-three dishes. The sweetness of the shrimp meshes well with the slight saltiness of the olives (though these olives were not very salty). To amplify the grill char (hard to get a lot of char on small shrimp before they overcook), I made a bit of smoky pimentón sauce to garnish the skewers with. I made plenty of that sauce, put it in a squirt bottle, and I noticed everyone was squirting it on everything: it is that good!

Pork Pinchitos Morunos

Skewers (pinchos, pintxos, pinchitos) are a classic tapa and I decided to go with pork pinchitos morunos, literally little Moorish skewers. Although the Arabs (the Moors) who brought the skewers across from North Africa would not use pork for religious reasons, the dish is most commonly made with pork in modern-day Spain. The Moorish influence is honored today by marinating the pork in ras el hanout, a batch of which I made for this party. Ras el hanout is a North African all-purpose spice mix.

Searing Padrón Peppers for the Tortilla

Tortilla of Padrones and Onions

Tortillas, the Spanish egg dish similar to Italian frittatas, is another common and easy-to-make tapa. I seared padrón peppers in a hot pan with olive oil. We could have eaten them just like that in their traditional fashion, but I like their flavor with eggs, so I destemmed and deseeded them. Then I caramelized a couple large onions with fresh thyme and garlic. To assemble the tortilla, I layered the peppers and onions in a skillet and poured a dozen beaten eggs over. This went into a slow oven and baked, about an hour, until the eggs were set all the way through.

Chipotle Chicken with Grilled Vegetable Salad

We had a bunch of things in the refrigerator that needed to be eaten and so I set about turning them into a delicious meal. I really succeeded with this grilled dinner of chicken and vegetables. The aim was to keep the fat to a minimum, so I deboned and skinned the chicken thighs. And the grilled vegetables were so tasty on their own that they needed no dressing. The only fat was a touch of pan spray on the vegetables to promote their charring.

Chipotle Chicken with Grilled Vegetable Salad

Chicken Thighs in Chipotle-Lime-Agave Marinade

When I buy chicken thighs, I buy an entire tray of 8 of them. After boning them out, I use the bones and skin to make chicken stock for the refrigerator. I'm always using chicken stock for all kinds of things, at least a quart a week.

These thighs went into a seal-top bag with a chipotle marinade and into the refrigerator for a few hours before grilling. To make the marinade, I blended three chipotles, a tablespoon of chipotle adobo, the juice of one lime, and three tablespoons of agave syrup.

Salad Vegetables, Ready to Cook

For vegetables for the salad, I scavenged the refrigerator and came up with a zucchini, two ears of corn, a big handful of green beans, and five nice Padrón peppers. Add to this a big onion from the pantry. My intent was to grill everything, chop it, and mix it with chipotle-roasted garlic salsa.

Vegetables on the Grill

Once the grill got blazing hot, I started by grilling the vegetables and getting them really charred. Charring gives them great flavor. After the vegetables came off, I put on the chicken. While the chicken was cooking, I assembled the grilled vegetable salad by chopping all the vegetables and slicing the charred corn kernels off the cobs. I mixed the grilled vegetables with a diced tomato and that was it.

With just a touch of salt, the mixed vegetables were so tasty on their own that I scrapped the idea of dressing them with anything. The salad was as delicious as it was beautiful.

Chipotle-Lime-Agave Chicken Grilling

For twenty minutes of prep time, we thoroughly enjoyed a delicious summer dinner that did not heat up the kitchen at all, a great return on my minimal investment of time. This was the first time that I have ever grilled green beans, believe it or not. We love to roast pans of haricots filets; they're a favorite snack, so I knew that grilling green beans would be delicious. Top top it off, a quart and a half of fresh chicken stock in the refrigerator was bonus!

Roasted Garlic-Chipotle Salsa

I've made a lot of salsas in my life, with nary a recipe. Most of my salsas are chunky and tend to follow the basic formula of a fruit (yes, tomatoes are fruits), an onion, cilantro, salt, a source of heat, and lime juice. It's a bit more unusual for me to make a smooth salsa such as this one with roasted garlic and chipotle. It's extremely versatile, as you will see below, and worth keeping in the refrigerator.

Roasted Garlic-Chipotle Salsa

This salsa that I recently made is so easy and so delicious that I decided to record it here. I will forget it otherwise.

1 28-ounce can of diced tomatoes
1 chipotle, or to taste (I also added a tablespoon of the adobo for more spice)
1 head of garlic, roasted
salt to taste

Put all the ingredients in the blender and blend until smooth. Adjust seasoning to your taste. 

Ready for Avocado Tacos

Avocado Tacos

We decided to have vegetarian tacos last week to take advantage of the inexpensive and ripe avocados on the counter. When serving tacos, I like to put out all the ingredients and let each person assemble tacos to his or her (call me a dinosaur: I cannot bear to use "their" as a singular pronoun) liking. For these tacos, I put out all the ingredients that I would use for guacamole (avocado, tomato and cilantro mixed, jalapeños en escabeche) plus roasted garlic-chipotle salsa and cotija cheese.

Scrambled Eggs with Padrón Peppers and Tortilla Strips

And for brunch one day last week, I made us some scrambled eggs with Padrón peppers, avocado, tomato, cilantro, roasted garlic-chipotle salsa, cotija, and fried strips of tortillas left from dinner the night before.

As you can see, this salsa is extraordinarily easy to make, delicious, and versatile.

Leek, Guanciale, and Goat Cheese Risotto

I've expressed before that when I want comfort food, I want rice. It features often on the blog: fried rice, arroz con pollo, jook, and paella. But of all the rice dishes, risotto for me is the ultimate in rich comfort, something that we sorely need right now.

On top of our concerns about our kids and their safety during this pandemic, Ann's mother is in the ICU and not likely to survive. Our inability to travel to the East Coast and visit with her has turned us inside out. We want comfort food now more than ever.

That was the genesis of this risotto: coping with our depressing world by making something comforting out of whatever was in the refrigerator.

This is a post on risotto technique. I diverge only from classic technique at the end during the mantecatura by adding goat cheese rather than butter and Pecorino or Parmigiano. My stomach cannot tolerate a lot of cow's milk products, so I use goat cheese instead. The technique remains the same.

Isn't it wonderful that the Italians have a verb, mantecare, for the final stage in making a dish unctuous and creamy by stirring in butter, cheese, or both?

Leek, Guanciale, and Goat Cheese Risotto
with Poached Eggs, Padrón Peppers, and Chipotle Aïoli

I scrounged the refrigerator and found a couple of leeks, a piece of guanciale, a bit of goat cheese, an open can of chipotles, and a few padrón peppers.

Guanciale is cured hog jowl, one of the best bits on the hog and similar in many respects to pancetta, which is made from pork belly. I used to cure both at the restaurant. Now I can buy guanciale at the grocery store where it is labelled jowl bacon.

For this risotto, I was looking for maximum comfort and in my culinary lexicon, that often means including poached eggs in dishes. There is something über-sexy about breaking open a just-poached egg and stirring the yolk into a dish. I topped each plate of rice with two poached eggs. I should do a post on how to poach eggs; they're so simple to do and so rewarding.

To finish gilding this lily, I made a quick chipotle aïoli (mayo, garlic, chipotle, salt, water) and blistered a few Padrón peppers for garnish.

Comfort mission accomplished!

Risotto Technique

No matter how risotti are flavored, the basic technique is the same. The photos below illustrate the various steps.

Rendering the Guanciale

The first step is almost every risotto is to cook finely diced onion (say a medium onion for this pan of risotto) in olive oil. I opted instead to use leeks, so I started the guanciale to render some fat in which to cook the leeks. It is not necessary to cook the leeks fully at this point because they will cook for another 20 minutes or so in the rice. Onions should be translucent, but have no color.

 

Coat the Rice in Fat Until the Edges Go Translucent

When the onions or leeks are done, add the rice and stir while coating it in fat. Use the best Arborio or other Italian short grain rice that you can find. There are several kinds that are as good or better than Arborio. Quality matters and good rice is relatively expensive. This 10" pan holds 250 grams of rice, comfortably. I buy Arborio in vacuum-sealed kilo bricks. A brick makes four nice pans of risotto.

Once the rice is coated in fat and its edges go translucent, add a glass of dry white wine and stir the rice. Adjust the heat so that the liquid just bubbles: risotto is not a dish to cook over high heat. Stir frequently. Once the wine has nearly evaporated, add stock or broth to cover the rice as you see in the picture just below. This is the only time that you will add this much stock to the pan at once. I used chicken stock that I made from the bones and skin after boning out chicken thighs.

For a red-wine based risotto, such as risotto al barolo, you'll want to use red wine and perhaps a darker stock, such as beef stock. Still, the technique is identical.

First Broth Addition

Stir every little while as the first addition of broth is absorbed into the rice. Stirring knocks the rice about and knocks little bits into the broth, helping to thicken it. Moderate the flame so that you are not boiling off the broth rapidly. When the liquid level drops below the surface of the rice, add more broth in small quantities such as 2-4 ounces for each addition. I find it helpful to use a professional 2-ounce ladle, available at any restaurant supply house.

Second and Subsequent Broth Additions

After you have added your two ounces or so of broth, the rice will resemble that above. That's how little additional broth you are adding. Keep adding broth in these tiny quantities, stirring frequently, until the rice is cooked. In my experience, it's going to take on the order of 20 minutes for the rice to cook, but that will vary with the freshness, dryness, and variety of the rice.

You'll want to taste the rice to assess whether it is done. Different people have different ideas about how done risotto rice should be cooked. Some like a distinct bite in the rice, some like it softer. I fall in the middle, but my full-blooded Italian wife likes it a bit softer than do I.

I have found that I can actively cook the rice until it just has the tiniest bite in the center, then turn off the flame and let the rice rest for two or three minutes. It will continue cooking to perfection.

Rice, Just Done

When you're happy with the rice, it needs to be finished and served immediately. Traditionally, you would stir in a couple tablespoons of butter and say 3/4 of a cup of grated cheese (Pecorino or similar). My stomach isn't happy with butter, so I stirred in roughly two, maybe three, ounces of fresh goat cheese.

Adjust the consistency if you need to with a splash of broth. Risotto shouldn't be runny or stiff, but pleasantly creamy.

Padrón Peppers

Many, many years ago, I remember being excited by mentions in high-end food blogs about a pepper that was extremely rare, the padrón, which was just being planted by a handful of small growers in the US. Padrón peppers come from the town of the same name in Galicia, in the far northwest of Spain where they are often seared in a pan, sprinkled with salt, and served as a tapa. Galicia, home to both padrones and world-class Albariño wine, must be a very special place.

Padrón peppers' reputation is that fruits on the same plant have random levels of spiciness. The vast majority are mild, but every now and again, a small fraction of the peppers will be really spicy. I love really spicy food, so I was attracted quite naturally to padrón peppers. I used to put them on the menu at the restaurant as an appetizer, but they never gained any traction with guests. That was a real shame, but my restaurant was probably a couple of decades ahead of the curve.

Padrón Peppers

Flash forward to 2020 and it's hard to go to a farmers market and not find padrón peppers or shishitos, their mild Asian cousins. They are just coming into season now and I have been buying them for a couple of weeks at our local farmers market, where several vendors offer them for sale. Before COVID, we could find plates of them at local restaurants. Sadly, one of our favorites which featured them has closed permanently thanks to this epidemic.

Of the many hundreds of padrón peppers or so-called padrón peppers that I have dined on, I have never encountered a spicy one. There, I've said it. Not quite true: just this week, I had two that could be called spicy, but they were far less spicy than a decent jalapeño. But it is overwhelmingly true to say that I have never had a padrón that lived up to its Russian roulette reputation.

Some that I have eaten, sad to say, were mild shishitos that restaurants were selling as padrón peppers. I like to think that this was because of confusion in the produce trade about the two very similar (and yet distinct) looking peppers. Unfortunately, I am afraid that because certain restaurants had padrón peppers on their fixed menus, they substituted shishitos when padrón peppers were not available. Misleading and too common, I am afraid. It is so disappointing to order one thing and be served another, best or worst of intentions aside.

But all the rest of the real padrón peppers that I have eaten were mild, a function of climate, I am convinced. After decades of growing and eating peppers of all sorts, I believe in my heart that like wine grapes, peppers which are coddled yield fruit that is nothing special. My experience is that the hotter and more arid the climate, the spicier and tastier the peppers. No wonder then that all the locally grown (in Virginia and now Oregon) padrón peppers have been mild. We don't the climate that best suits them.

That said, even without the spice, they are delicious and blistered padrón peppers or shishitos are one of my favorite tapas. I like to use them to garnish other dishes as well.

Blistering Padrón Peppers

Blistering peppers is trivial. Heat a pan over a medium high flame, add a bit of olive oil, then add the peppers in a single layer. As the peppers blister on each side, turn them to another side. When each pepper is blistered around, remove it to a plate. Sprinkle with really good coarse salt.

A Tapa of Blistered Padrón Peppers

You can see above a tapa-sized portion of peppers. While they are wonderful to eat just like this, I think they make great garnishes for other dishes, especially egg dishes. Below, I used them to garnish a plate of sliced tomatoes topped with bacon scrambled eggs. This dish screams summer at me. What a fine brunch dish that was!

Tomatoes, Bacon Scrambled Eggs, and Padrón Peppers

Isabella's, Frederick

We made a foray into downtown Frederick, Maryland to check out the tapas at Isabella's, after hearing about them for years. Friday during lunch, the downtown was hopping and there were lots and lots of people at restaurants everywhere you turned. I wish Old Town Winchester had that vibe.

The restaurant doesn't look much from the outside, but inside it is quite spacious with a double-sided bar running down the center. It is certainly nicely appointed and comfortable, a bit rustic with exposed brick, stained wainscoting, and a tin ceiling. I had a lot of photos of the interior and the food, but the lighting was just too dim: few are worth seeing.

I started by running through the wine list to find something for lunch. The list is substantial but totally disorganized. In fact, it seemed pretty random. Consequently it took five times as long as it should to narrow down on a bottle of Spanish red because Spanish reds were scattered over every page of the list.

Following the bottle of Cline Mourvèdre that we drank on Wednesday, it somehow seemed fitting to order the Spanish equivalent called Monastrell (aka Mataró) for lunch today. The 2009 Hécula Monastrell from Yecla showed the same jammy earthy fruit and same lack of acid as the Cline.

For our first round of tapas we ordered albóndigas en salsa de ajo, queso frito con almendras y vinagreta, and Isabella's signature tapa, fried asparagus with aïoli.

The meatballs (albóndigas) were really lame and lacked any seasoning to speak of. The garlic sauce was like so much brown gravy. Ann put it best when she said that they taste like Salisbury steak, an uncharacteristically very polite way of saying they sucked. We ate one each and sent the rest off with the busser. I didn't take a photo of the meatballs; I don't want to remember them.

But what an awesome presentation for the asparagus! The kitchen put the aïoli in the bottom of a Champagne flute and stood three asparagus spears in that. As beautiful as it was, the asparagus needed salt and I wanted a little more character from the aïoli. I would love to reprise this dish at the restaurant by wrapping the asparagus in jamón serrano before breading and frying it. Sorry, the photo of the only dish that I wanted to remember was too blurred to post.

Goat Cheese Croquetas, in an Oil Slick

The slightly smaller than golf ball-sized goat cheese fritters were good, but where were the almonds? Absent to my palate. It was something of a travesty to plop these nice croquetas unceremoniously into the so-called vinaigrette, which was mostly an unappealing oil slick. No doubt the vinaigrette separated in the kitchen and was never remixed thoroughly. Even were the vinaigrette still emulsified, I don't think it would have added a thing to the dish.

Good Chorizo, Great Mash, Disgusting Brown Gravy

For the second round, we tried the chorizo which had really good flavor and was sitting on some pretty decent mash. But then it was drowned in some terrible brown gravy. Such a pity to spoil an otherwise good dish.

We also had the octopus styled as pulpo en salsa picante, which was pretty good but not so picante. I would have preferred some texture in the dish; it was all soft. And frankly, the octopus was lost. Ann thought it was roasted garlic at first.

"Padrón" Peppers

Next up was a plate of pimientas de Padrón. Well, not really. They were shishito peppers, none of them spicy, and they had been cooked in too much oil so that the effect was greasy. The peppers from Padrón are a thing of sublime beauty; these were not.

Octopus?

By this point we had figured out that we weren't going to have the experience we were hoping for, so we decided to wrap up lunch with another order of asparagus and the Spanish cheese plate. We reasoned that the kitchen couldn't screw up cheese. The cheese plate was really skimpy with less than one-ounce portions of four cheeses: Idiazabal, Manchego, Majorero, and Cabrales. As a restaurant owner, I will rarely complain about prices or portion size, but I did not find $13 value in less than four ounces of cold cheeses of average quality. If the cheeses had been of really great quality, there would have been no issue.

I'd go back but I'm not in a hurry to do so. I don't regret lunch there because we had a great time as we always do. But I was hoping for just a little more savvy in the dishes from what has become an institution in downtown Frederick.