Inauguration Day Cocktails and Cheese Puffs

Our heads are still reeling from the rabid mobs swarming and wreaking havoc on the Capitol on the 6th and the fact that our president incited that riot. Ann and I are fed up with such shameful behavior and were so looking forward to the inauguration of a new president yesterday, that we decided to have cocktails and hors d'oeuvres to celebrate what hopefully will be a transition back to more sane behavior in the White House.

Cheese Puffs and Passion for Whiskey Cocktail

Earlier in the week, I had made chicken pot pie and had some leftover pie crust. I knew that I was going to use the pie crust to make an hors d'oeuvre for our little celebration. Then it dawned on me to convert that pie crust to a laminated pastry (puff pastry) with cheddar cheese to bake into cheese puffs to accompany our cocktails.

Cheese Puffs

Although I never went to culinary school, I taught myself everything (and a lot more) that these schools have to teach, including pastry basics. Throughout my chef career, I made a lot of puff pastry (though you can buy it frozen easily in the trade). There's not a whole lot of difference between my pie crust and puff pastry, except that the pie crust is not laminated.

Lamination is the key to puff pastry: folding and refolding it into layers upon layers as you can see in the photo above. Generally, you start with a basic pastry and seal that around a hunk of butter (the process called beurrage). Then you roll the dough out, trifold it, rotate it 90 degrees, roll it out, trifold it again, then let it rest in the refrigerator for 45 minutes to an hour. You do this once or twice more, building layers and layers.

I decided to put a mound of shredded cheddar cheese (rather than butter) in the middle of my pie crust and treat it just like puff pastry. I went through the rolling and folding process three times.

Final Sheet of Puff Pastry, Ready to Cut

I sliced the sheet of pastry down the center and then cut each half into fingers. I put the fingers on a sheet tray, spritzed them with pan spray, sprinkled on sel gris (French gray sea salt), and put them into a hot oven (425F) for 20 minutes.

Passion for Whiskey Cocktail

In addition to being known for a menu of local cuisine that changed nightly, my restaurant was way in the craft cocktail vanguard. I created all the cocktail recipes, using my chef's palate to ensure that they were refreshing and balanced. One huge customer favorite was a drink that I called Passion for Whiskey, basically a passionfruit whiskey sour. It's a great drink and what we had last night.

1 1/2 ounces bourbon

3/4 ounce St. Germain

3/4 ounce lemon juice

3/4 ounce passionfruit syrup

4 dashes old fashioned bitters

Swirl all ingredients in a shaker full of ice. Strain into a coupe or martini glass. Serve up with a wild cherry for garnish.

Cheeburger!

Monday was a glorious day—the most glorious of the year so far. Ann and I both got home in the late afternoon and just before 5:00 she said, "Make us a cocktail and let's go outside on the patio and listen to music!" And so I rummaged the liquor cabinet (almost never used) and the refrigerator and came up with a pretty decent tangy cocktail made from freshly squeezed clementines and limes, agave nectar, Campari, St. Germain, Absolut Citron, and the tail end of some girly bottle of mango-blood orange flavored cordial called X-Rated.

Clementine, Campari, St. Germain, and Vodka

We had planned to have burgers on Sunday after visiting Linden, but through a miscommunication, I thought Ann was getting the burger and she thought I was getting the burger. OK, so I f*cked up. No burger in the house on Sunday, but rectified on Monday.

Yes! Jimmy Buffet: Eat Your Heart Out!

This burger was really, really good and perfectly cooked, I might add. These are two things that don't seem to coincide when going out for burgers: good burger and good cooking. My only regret is that it is not tomato season.

Chief Burgermeister!

What to Drink with Burgers

Date Night

This winter has been pretty devastating for restaurant business and as a result, money is super scarce right now so Ann and I haven't really been able to dine out for a while. With the weather turning nice, though, we needed to get out and spend some adult time together and so Monday night, we decided to go get some sushi.

Ann likes a cocktail before dinner, so I decided to surprise her with one of my newest creations called "A Passion for Whiskey" made from Maker's Mark bourbon, St. Germain, passionfruit syrup, lemon juice, and Old Fashioned bitters. This is probably the best cocktail I have ever devised!


Here's to Spring!

The sushi restaurant that we decided to go to is just a few hundred yards from our restaurant, so we parked at the restaurant, where our dishwasher and some of his friends were scrubbing the deck and getting it ready to open for the season. While Ann was chit-chatting with everyone outside, I nipped in and made us cocktails. It was way too nice, the first nice day of spring, to sit inside and after yesterday's snow showers, a glorious, glorious opportunity to take in some warmth outside, so I brought the cocktails outside. All the deck furniture was in the parking lot, so we sat in the parking lot and toasted the season!

Cocktails over, we moved on to Awabi where friend, owner, and sushi chef Marcus Doe made us some of his delights.


Random Rolls Ann Ordered; I'm More of a Nigiri Fan

Neat Little Wasabi Dishes with Chop Stick Rests; Fresh Frozen Wasabi

Whelk and Squid: Best Bites of the Night

Toro Maguro

Honeymoon: Thistle Restaurant, McMinnville OR

Before we left Virginia, Ann had booked us for the Chef's Whim tasting at Thistle in downtown McMinnville. Chef Eric Bechard, sadly, has done a lot of damage to his reputation locally and many, many of the locals were warning us off the place because of Eric's allegedly hotheaded, confrontational nature. Being a chef myself, I wasn't deterred and I am glad we went: this food is very similar to what I make and so I felt right at home.

We never got to experience Eric because he is off in Portland at his newest restaurant The Kingdom of Roosevelt, so his understudy Kyle was in the tiny open kitchen, but I can say that Eric's partner Emily is quite the charming hostess, sommelier, and orchestrator of the tiny dining room that might seat 24. And of all the many wonderful meals we ate in Oregon, this was the one that pleased us the most and the one that is most on par with the food we produce at One Block West.


Cognac Crusta Cocktail

Our reservation was for 7:00 and we arrived at 6:30 to sample the much lauded drink mixing prowess of bartender Patrick. Emily immediately showed us to the bar which is a side room just off to the right of the entrance. Ann's first drink was a Cognac Crusta, a classic cocktail and progenitor of the Sidecar made from Cognac, Cointreau, lemon juice, simple syrup, and Fee's old fashioned bitters poured into an old coupe rimmed with orange and sugar. For me, he mixed a Brooklyn, which is similar to a Manhattan and made from rye, vermouth, Luxardo maraschino, and Amer Picon.

The two things that I noticed were that there were no mixers on his bar, just piles of lemons, limes, and oranges. And second, I noted that that Patrick always uses a jigger for his drinks, so "if you come back in a year, you get the exact same cocktail." In between his running back and forth to the dining room to serve tables, we got to chatting about cocktails and talking about St. Germain in particular, which prompted him to make a mixture of lime juice, gin, simple syrup, St. Germaine, sparkling wine, and a shot of Fee Brothers celery bitters for Ann's second cocktail, which tasted a lot like grapefruit juice. My second cocktail was made from Dewar's and something with a clove flavor, possibly Becherovka.


Brooklyn Cocktail

Because we booked a tasting menu, we didn't need to order off the nightly menu which is written on a large chalkboard in the dining room. Depending on where you're seated you might not be able to see the chalkboard and might have to get up from your seat to go look at it, something that has caused the restaurant endless grief on TripAdvisor and Yelp. I'm just going to say this once: you people need to relax and get over yourselves or just start going to chain restaurants where everything is predictable. So you have to remove your precious behind from a chair to go look at the menu. BFD! Grow up.

We didn't order wine either, leaving ourselves in Emily's capable hands and she made great use of their extensive half-bottle selection to provide wines for our dinner. I didn't have the energy to wade through what looked like a deep, well thought out, and most reasonably priced wine list, though I could knock it for being a bit heavy on French wines where it could have been a touch heavier on local wines to go with the cuisine. But frankly, I was on vacation and didn't really want to think about the choice of wines. Besides, although I know my own list, I have no clue about other restaurants' lists and though I can make educated guesses about wines, I always ask for help in making my selections, when help is available.

For our first course, Emily brought us glasses of Blanquette de Limoux, a delightful sparkling wine from the southwest of France, typically made from the Mauzac grape. This was paired with a plate of delightful Kumamoto oysters with mignonette. I love these small oysters with the intricate shells, oysters of Japanese origin which were introduced to American Pacific waters in the last century.

Kumamoto Oysters, a Rare Treat for East Coasters

Click to See the Awesome Detail on This Shell

After clearing the oysters, Emily brought a half bottle of Domaine Huet Vouvray Sec "Clos du Bourg" 2010 that we drank with our next two courses. First up, a course of two salads: mustard greens and chard with radishes and a yogurt dressing and an arugula salad with candied hazelnuts with preserved lemon and herb vinaigrette.

Arugula, Candied Walnuts, Preserved Lemon Vinaigrette

Mustard, Chard, Radishes and Yogurt Dressing

One of the two standout dishes of the night was the plate of tiny radishes, split in half, and tossed in warm butter, then sprinkled with sea salt. This is a dish a chef can love. It just says "Spring is here!" in a perfect way and it takes a confident chef to let the ingredients do the talking, which is why I like this restaurant so much. It's about the ingredients more than it is about the chef, just like my restaurant is. Some people don't get that and I am sure that Thistle could take a lot of heat for this dish from customers claiming that they didn't do anything, that anyone could make this dish. Those people just don't get it and never will.

Radishes, Butter, Salt: Sublime

It was about now that Emily brought a half bottle of Chehalem Pinot Noir 2007 Reserve to the table for the next two cold courses, pork rillettes and steak tartare. The rillettes were great and as good as the ones that we serve at the restaurant. The steak tartare Ann loved better than the one we do at the restaurant. I prefer more texture in the meat, she prefers less: this was very soft. In any case, it is splitting hairs. This tartare was great.

Nice to Get an Older Vintage

Delicious Rillettes, as Good as my Own

Splendid Steak Tartare

Then it was on to two warm courses: a saffron yellow omelette filled with spinach, goat cheese, and what looked to be rapini tips, followed by a bowl of stinging nettle gnocchi. The omelette was workmanlike but not particularly memorable. On the other hand, the gnocchi were fantastic, the best dish of a stellar line up and the single best dish of our entire trip.

Omelette Stuffed with Rapini, Goat Cheese, and Spinach

Stinging Nettle Gnocchi: Best Dish of the Trip

And finally on to the hot meat courses, the first of which was pan-roasted ling cod steak on a sauté of morels, asparagus, and fiddleheads, well seasoned with super crispy skin that I stole without Ann seeing. This fish was in sharp contrast to that which we had the evening before at the Irish Table. The vegetable sauté is one that we do frequently in the spring and is a classic with fish.



Delicious and Perfectly Cooked Ling Cod

You can see from the photo of the fish that the sun is setting fast and we're just about out of light for photos, so this will be the end of the photos, even though we had two more dishes in our dinner. It was at this point on one of her forays to the ladies room that Ann picked up Tony, a 75-year old bar rat who joined us at Ann's invitation (Emily rolled her eyes at me) and regaled us with tales of his Navy days. I might have preferred to have been on a solo date with my wife, but what is a guy to do? Anns are going to be Anns. Speaking of restrooms, just to the right of the bar is a door labeled "Yes!" and when Ann asked Patrick if they had a restroom, he pointed and theatrically trilled "Yes!"

Patrick's Prop

After the fish plate was cleared away, Emily brought us each a glass of Chinon to go with the beef, our next course. I just loved her wine choices of underappreciated French appellations that most Americans don't know, wines on which I cut my proverbial wine drinking teeth. We were served a combo plate of medium rare beef hanger steak with a big chunk of spare rib as well. The hanger in particular had super flavor.

Our dessert was a lemon panna cotta with rhubarb compote, which I have gleefully stolen for my own restaurant now that rhubarb is coming out of our ears. Because it was served in an 8-ounce canning jar, they didn't have to use as much gelatin as for a panna cotta that has to stand on its own after being unmolded, so the texture was very light and silky, softer than crème brûlée.

The whole experience was relaxed, fun, and refreshingly non-pretentious. The best way for me to sum up this meal is that it was in the top five restaurant meals I have ever had and that the food could have passed for my own at my restaurant. I would be a regular at Thistle if I were in McMinnville and not cooking for a living!

Seís de Mayo: Quesadillas Etc.

This is the third post of four on our Seís de Mayo party.


Sangria

To warm everyone up when they arrived, I made two big pitchers of so-called sangria from Pinotage (a South African grape that is the scion of two French grapes, Pinot Noir and Cinsault). This is not really sangria so much as it is a berry wine punch, but I was under orders. ;) I mixed the wine with tequila and St. Germain and then added mixed berries, fresh pineapple, lemon slices, lime slices, and agave nectar.

Pinotage: Fruity and Inexpensive, Just Right for Sangria

Quinoa Salad with Black Beans, Avocados, and Lime-Cumin Vinaigrette

Ann makes a delicious salad of quinoa, black beans, red onions, avocados, tomatoes, garlic, cilantro and whatever else she feels like putting in it, all dressed with a simple vinaigrette flavored with lime juice and cumin. It's just a wonderful side dish (or even a great vegetarian summer main dish).

Quinoa Salad

Quesadillas with Chorizo, Bison Skirt Steak, Poblanos and Onions

Quesadillas are fun to make for a crowd, either on a grill or as I did it, in a pan on the stove. You can put just about anything you want in them, but I was in the mood for chorizo. The cheese we used was some generic pre-shredded white cheese from the grocery labeled "Queso para Pupusas," cheese for pupusas, that amazing Salvadoran stuffed tortilla. Any melting cheese will do.

And what better to go with sausage than peppers and onions? The five pounds of onions and peppers that I started with cooked down by at least half. I was planning for leftovers anyway, because how useful is it to have onions and peppers in the fridge?

We also had a tiny bit of bison skirt steak leftover, so I cooked that too.

Bison Skirt Steak, Nice and Rare

And I leave you with two parting shots.

I can feel your jealousy from here, dear reader.

Stay tuned for the final episode in which dessert gets made!

The Rendezvous Cocktail

This time last year we were at the Hôtel Esplanade in Grand Case, St. Martin, hanging at the pool drinking wickedly deceptive cocktails called Rendezvous, made by bartender and raconteur extraordinaire Alain. Because of our finances, we can't afford to go anywhere this year, so we decided to reprise the cocktails at home and pretend we were away.

After a week of drinking them and watching three bartenders make them, I figured out how to reverse engineer the drink and have since gone on to do my version of it:

The Rendezvous Cocktail

   3 parts Grey Goose
   1 part St. Germain
   1/2 part pastis
   4 parts guava nectar

The St. Germain is my addition. For pastis, if you are lucky enough to have brought some back from France, use that. The cheap stuff available in every supermarché is perfect. Otherwise you can use ouzo or raki or the expensive Ricard or even Pernod in a pinch. We have a bottle of Pastis de Marseille that we picked up for next to nothing (1000ml for 6€) in St. Martin.

Cocktails, Anyone?

Kelley came over this weekend and what better opportunity to craft a new cocktail from the bottle of St. Germain that I just got? Over the last year, I've been reading a lot about St. Germain, an elderberry flower liqueur just launched in 2007.

I had no clue what elderberry flower liqueur might taste like. I was imagining something kind of floral and lilac-like, something that I might not like. Wow, was I wrong! This liqueur has a gorgeous perfume of passion fruit, pears, dried peaches, and dried apricots, but mainly of passion fruit.

I can see lots of dessert and sauce applications for this liqueur. How about a splash of it in a fruit salsa, or crème anglaise, or crème brûlée? But mostly I can see excellent cocktails and I devised one that is still unnamed.

1-1/2 parts vodka
1-1/2 parts St. Germain
1/4 part Campari
2 dashes orange bitters
1/2 part fresh lemon juice
1/2 part simple syrup
Float of prosecco

Rim a chilled martini glass with colored sugar (this cocktail is tart). Shake all ingredients except the prosecco and strain into the glass. Float prosecco on top. Cheers!

Finally, I was taking some bottle photos for the restaurant blog with one of my trusty assistants. Have you ever had just too much help with something? Here then is Martini in action.